We have to give the media an A (not the same thing as an A+) on the way they handled the marriage this past Saturday of two Spanish airmen in Seville.

Both Reuters, which specified no author for its report, and Daniel Woolls of the Associated Press did a sober and lively job reporting a historic, but by no means world-ending, event.

If we have any quibble (we are withholding the plus sign on that A — and by the way, the mark will go on their records), it’s with the headline writer for the Reuters piece:

The headline ran: Flamenco Flamboyance at Spain Gay Military Wedding

Of course, everyone knows that gay men are always, by definition, flamboyant. We park our cars flamboyantly, show up at work in velveteen outfits with ruffs, and order coffee at Starbucks with ze little finger crooked just so.

The “Flamenco flamboyance” the headline writer was straining to hype (winking at the yahoos is getting much harder these days) was, in fact, a rather ordinary and traditional feature of weddings in Seville. The lead sentence of the piece tried valiantly — and was probably rewritten at the last minute by the editor — to cover for the headline writer’s exuberance:

Two airmen became the first gay Spanish military couple to marry on Friday, accompanied by a fire-cracker chorus of flamenco clapping, guitars and a crowd of hearty-voiced well-wishers.”

While we love the deft touch of “hearty-voiced well-wishers” to suggest an all-male wedding party and the goofy acuteness of “fire-cracker chorus of flamenco clapping,” it’s a good thing no one cracked a joke, because it surely would have been “camp.”

Actually, the evil twin that lives inside us wished the headline writer had been encouraged to go on. We’re sure we would have gotten such purple titters of anguished male heterosexuality as “slender young men,” “their colorful ilk,” “a meaningful look passed between them,” and perhaps something really dark about secret handshakes.

Makes you kind of hanker for the bad old days when titillating anti-gay vituperatude was in flower, and we had some real poets on the scene.

I’m remembering particularly Miss Anita Byrant, Florida Citrus Girl and proud Christian, who led the first campaign to defeat a modest gay ordinance in 1977 and, in so doing, gave the world a precept still dear to the hearts of the snake-handling, Darwin-denying intelligentsia: the Dracula theory of homosexuality.

“They can’t have children” Bryant explained patiently. “So they have to recruit our children to make more homosexuals.” For some reason, she was passed over by the Nobel Committee that year.

Yes, those were the days, my friend. And the gay vengeance, when it finally came, was thrilling too:

How well I remember one postcard-blue day in June, marching in New York’s Gay Parade with the Queer Nation contingent and right when we got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where a small but depraved group of fanatics could be depended upon to be always waiting behind police barricades, with signs like “Parade of Perverts, Got AIDS Yet” and “Quarantine Them All”, the merry pranksters I was with broke out in their famous chant, but with a new twist:

“We’re Here. We’re Queer. We’ve Come to Get Your Children.”

Ah yes, bricks and bats were hurled over the barricades that day.

You can read the entire Reuters piece here, and the AP piece here. One bit that did catch our attention came at the end of the AP piece:

Besides Spain, the Netherlands, Canada and Belgium have legalized same-sex marriage, while Britain and other European countries have laws that give same-sex couples the right to form legally binding partnerships.

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, only the state of Massachusetts allows gay marriage. Vermont and Connecticut permit civil unions. And 43 other states have explicitly legislated marriage for heterosexual couples only.

That Queen Elizabeth ruff feeling a bit tight, guy?