I’ve never needed enemies.

The Right truly craves monsters — Black Gestapos, Feminist Valkyries, Mexican Marauders, and Homo Hoydens — that it can rail against and use as foils to define itself. Good must have an Evil flipside, otherwise everything becomes confoundingly relative. If it can’t find antagonists, it just conjures them up and insists it’s being lied to by a world that can’t be twisted and shaped to meet its needs.

Personally, I can live just fine without an antipode to define myself, and I’d argue that the gay community by and large is happy to be without them, too. When our families prove to be draining on us and remain obdurate to the realities of our lives, we walk away. I’d wager most of us who work in mixed work places are careful how much we reveal about ourselves for fear of running afoul of someone who’s going to make it their personal mission to run us out. If every fire and brimstone televangelist, fat shock jock, and blonde values whore went extinct tomorrow, there would be no retroactive falsification that would kick in and cause us to admit that they weren’t so bad to have around.

They were, and it sucked.

Despite the efforts of the Vatican, NOM, and every other organization with the words “American,” “Family,” “Values,” or “Truth” in their title, the Gay — despite its supposed onslaught upon every good and true American institution — is seeming that much less monstrous as of late when encountered outside the pulpit and the voting booth. The reason? Charles M. Blow‘s New York Times op-ed on the eroding of anti-gay sentiment comes down to one salient and unifying factor: visibility. Gays are no longer the creepy, leering pervs of ’50s scare films or the deluded married men busted in vice stings on the evening news; they’re parents, classmates, siblings, neighbors, and co-workers. Just as vital is the simultaneously hilarious/stomach-turning revolving gamut of Conservative outings that now play like flailing, high-camp ’60s French comedies of manners.

The spectacular fall of George Rekers absolutely thunders with fallout, reverberating out as it not only decimated his career as a burly straightener-out of sissy boys, but also pulled down the curtain on the Prop 8 defense, whose cadre of “experts” are astonishingly credential-free.

If men like Rekers — who either cynically marketed clinical snake oil all these years or just couldn’t make his own program work for himself — are outright fronting to the world, why should anyone bother to take their product seriously? How many Republicans have to pratfall out of the closet before the public at large starts to see being gay as something that can’t be undone by tossing a football around? Will people finally get wise to the fact that there are no ex-gays, only celibate eunuchs? It took all of five seconds for the phrase “lift his luggage” — shades of “wide stance” — to become instant code for closeted sex-trolling, and that’s exemplary of how transparent and self-deluded these types have become.

Representation is key here; it’s the shame of invisibility that breeds the worst contempt. It’s harder to marginalize someone who isn’t a faceless boogeyman, and with increased presence in media in particular, a legitimacy ensues. Consider one of the most problematic of gay figures for hetero culture: the sissy. Mike Albo‘s The Twinkle Takeover from New York Magazine rechristens the nancy boy and redefines him as as a “Twinkle” not so inclined to have his stars dimmed:

“…it seems that, in our world of niche-entertainment marketing, gay boys are becoming a viable demographic, up there with tween girls and security moms. Call them Twinkles: preteen boys who may not know they are gay yet, or may not want to say they are gay yet, but who have a gleam in their eye and a definite sensibility. Twinkles proudly prance, unashamedly emote, high-kick, jazz-hand, belt out “Paparazzi” with piano — everything a gay kid used to do in his bedroom with the door shut.”

Little things I’m noticing are heartening if-not-sweeping in this regard. Not every gay son is destined for the scrap heap when his family throws him way. Some high schools are abiding by popular votes and crowning gay prom kings and queens. Gay teen bloggers are taking overreaching librarians with aversions to gay lit to task in forums they didn’t always have. Even something as innocuous as boys co-opting a girl-marketed site like Disney’s Pixie Hollow that allows them to build their own fairy composite is telling; the boys cobbled together enough gender-neutral characteristics to create their own male avatars, and Disney, sensing it had stumbled upon an untapped consumer base — money’s a helluva equalizer — began adding male variations with a more concrete masculine air.

It’s youth that’s integral in spurring a shift away from the prejudices of yore. Wizened, obsolete members of our population are the most concerned with maintaining “definitions” (code for “boundaries”), and it’s to them I inquire: did you really need separate dining establishments in order to have a stable self-definition? Does using a restroom really have to be a privilege that you lord over someone else so you can feel secure? As younger members of the military seem over the whole DADT debate already, their commanders are the ones hand-wringing over how to implement change. How else do you do it other than implement it? It’s like talking about swimming. At stake here is the Gay/Straight divide itself, and all classist fears essentially come down to the same dread: that established barriers will dissipate if people are allowed to become too familiar (notice how gay sex for Conservatives is always a “slip” à la going off a diet for a tempting dessert). Mark Simpson predicts accordingly:

“After all, it’s the end of the road for that holiest American institution of all: Heterosexuality. Not cross-sex attraction, of course, or reproduction ” but that system of compulsory, full-time, always-asserted straightness for men which straying from momentarily, or even just failing to show sufficient respect towards in the past could cost you your cojones. What, you a FAG?? If metrosexuality is based on vanity, retrosexuality, it needs to be pointed out, was based partly on self-loathing. “Real men’ were supposed to be repulsed by their own bodies at least as much as they were repulsed by other men’s.”

Young straight men in particular are seeming gayer to me than they did even five years ago, and that goes beyond them mirroring our style and cribbing our sex acts. They seem to truly pine for a quasi-flirtatious, rambunctiously touchy contact with each other — one they love to photographically document — and I can say I find it appealing though often infantile. Truth be told, I get the intense urge to wrestle or rough-house with a man who attracts me — wanting it to lead to something sexual — and perhaps that’s where the line overlaps. I’m positing lately that there’s a distinct magnetism between men that can manifest as crude horseplay (it’s an element in any Bromance) and now that men are more cognizant of their bodies as arousing, I think they get off on being objectified and exploited — even at the hands of other men.

A few months ago I was in the back of a car stopped at a light. Some (obviously straight) hot pieces were loitering around the curb, and just for the hell of it, I rolled down the window, pulled out a few bills, and said “Hey! Fifty bucks for the little one!”. The other guys in the car with me looked at me like I was crazy, and I was ready to duck back in if things got physical, but instead the loiterers started laughing, and better yet, began lifting their tanks and arching their asses at me the more I goaded them on and flashed more green. What should’ve led to an all-out tussle between opposing factions culminated with my side driving away and laughing hysterically while the sidewalk studs flexed and teased us in the rear-view.

If Simpson is on to something, then our spectrum of human sexuality may be organically broadening through close contact, with self-identifiers like “mostly straight,” and conversely, “a little gay,” slowly beginning to blur the Great Divide as men become a bit more inclined to cross it without feeling as if they’ve leapt over a point of no return.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com