Gay Post #3 (Don't Worry Mom; I Still Only Love Michael Bywater. I Swear.)

Well, I couldn't be more excited. Headbang8 of the Deutschland űber Elvis (still here) blog blogrolled me after my lauding his witty recounting of an uncomfortable encounter with the Deutschlandisch police. I'm tickled, well, pink, I guess, not only because that's my only chromatic option in that cliche, but also because his blog is by turns very funny and well-thought-out, and he is as gay as my gay exhusband. Which I suppose means nothing other than that if I were gay, we'd have that in common, and that pink is somehow therefore apposite. A tenuous link, but one I'm more than happy to grasp at. Plus, even though he is a devout atheist,

he is not one of those stinky, unthinky kinds who are as dull as their religious-fundamentalist counterparts: he asks questions, as all good believers and non-believers alike should do. (As opposed to just the people in between, who seem to be the only ones consistently and reliably to have no problem doing that!) (Which makes the religion question different from, and in fact less prickly than, the musical theatre one, as there are no agnostics with regard to that particular cultural phenomenon.)

Anyway, I so routinely experience near-meltdowns while tackling technological issues (notice my sorry excuse for an umlauted u above and you'll get the picture; other than the MS Character Set, and pillaging them from other sites, I don't know how to get one up on Blogger) and forget what I am doing halfway through, that I at some point abandoned giving the descriptions of sites I like, or even separating the list into categories. Mr. 8, however, apparently encounters no such difficulties routinely, and therefore appended a brief description of me to his link.

What he put as his description was 'very, very well read,' so I put a different version of the Unamuno header up to substantiate that accusation. Of course, that required some mind-bending, positively deadly HTML, much hand-wringing, and forty-five minutes of crying into the neighbor's cat's fur, not to mention the fact that I destroyed my carefully-crafted color scheme and now have to put the blog name and rotating blog description in black in order that they be seen over the too-variable hues of the picture. I also tried black-and-whiting versions of the previous blue-and-red header so that I wouldn't wreck the color scheme, but it looked wrong with all the colored photos around.

Anyway #2, I don't really know what I think of a complete stranger encapsulating me as 'very well read.' Of course, he is gay, so 'gorgeously well read' is perhaps hoping for a bit much. After all, I look nothing like Celine Dion (I'm sorry, gay people; I know it's a cheap shot, but I can't help it any more than I can tolerate her mincing anorexic-motherhood persona), so what would he know? I am so much more, of course: poor driver, good cook, bad hairstylist, great decorator, inept photographer, skilled volunteer, terrible flyer, cloying writer.

---Nuts! I have to go! I feel a song coming on!

Gaeity Girls and Those Who Love Them

Well, fine, I'm on a (gay) roll with inexplicably yogurt-loving, antisocial lesbians. I came upon this brilliant old (last October) post on Deutschland ȕber Elvis about attempting to teach irony to German police, while looking for something totally different (Schoenberg somethingsomething, if you care). The story is great, it's well told, and I can viscerally relate to odd encounters with traffic cops.

However.

What I want to know is why do The Gay People love the musical theatre? And, once we've figured that out, why don't The Straight People, and why don't The Lesbians (whatever side of the yogurt fence they stand on)?

My exhusband is gay, so rest assured I have even less insight than the straightest of all other straight people. Clearly. All I can tell you is that he seemed ungay enough for me to marry him and, looking back on his lax attitude to home furnishings and clothing, not to mention his complete silence on hot guys and ideal gay vacation spots at the time, the only thing I can look back on with any sort of reasonable self-accusation is his fondness for the musical theatre.

And, boy, did he love it!


Whereas, I and my lesbian and inveterately heterosexual friends will never be persuaded to care at all where precisely it is that the wind (allegedly) goes sweeping down the plains. The less advanced of our two races easily get Lerner and Loewe confused with Leopold and his friend! Apart from a sentimental fondness for Marlene Dietrich resulting in casual knowledge of a few too many 1930s cabaret songs and Holländer riffs, and possibly here and there a cruel delight in the spectacle of Marlon Brando breaking into 'song' with no defensible narrative impetus, we just don't care. And we can't be made to.


Yes, I admit I crank up the Kurt Weill every so often, but it's only ever the Brecht-Weill, and it's never Teresa Stratas; I never forget myself and let things slip into Gilbert and Andrew Lloyd Anything. And if ever there were an argument that from the very start Gays Are Gays and the Rest Is Rest, it is to be found at the crucible of Musical Theatre. If we can have a Nalgene, we can certainly have a Gay Gene, and if little Jake or Tyler or Ronan knows what the Hills Are Alive with, and whether or not there is One Maiden Breast (Oh!) and can sing a musical list of Argentinean place-names before he knows whether to pass the Phillips head or the hex bit when Daddy is again sandwiched between the Ikea sofa and the Crate and Barrel rug, then the fight should be over, the debate won, and all the gay men and their straight female friends should retreat to their corner in victory (and eat celebratory yogurt to the strains of 'Gypsy' or 'Cats,' erroneously convinced that they are too fat).

Meanwhile, we contentededly chunky straight and lesbian people can go out for some pizza and double bock, knowing there is nothing we can do to make ourselves like Broadway or Celine Dion, but feeling a little better knowing we don't even have to try. It's an argument that everyone wins!

'And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.'

Can't Celine Dion just stop? Soon? Now-ish? Can no one make it end? How can this possibly be happening, and why are we all so powerless to stop it?