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!

A Reader's Guide to the Personal Weblog

Since people appear to be reading this, as well as writing to me about what they read, the following are intended to be helpful tips to prevent those people from having difficulty with making either heads or tails - or heads along with tails, if that is their preference - of the contents.

I'd Have to Use Even More Liner. (And driving would be yet more difficult.)

Firstly, take it all with a hearty helping of coarse-grain Himalayan Pink. I have never once, for example, taken an oyster knife, grapefruit spoon, or hydraulic corkscrew to my (gorgeous, seagreen) eyeballs over the sight of Dockers at dinner, despite what might seem to be (glaring and repeated) indications to the contrary.

I'm Not Reuters.

Secondly, the foregoing derives from the fact that this blog is neither a news wire nor a diary. It is not true, in other words, nor does it purport to be. There is truth in it, surely, but that truth, where one can find it, is snuggled up tight with with all kinds of tricks, like exaggeration, sleazy argumentation, grasping at straws to make a point, and lazy recourse to such creatures as litotes, anaphora, paranomasia, syllepsis, paraleipsis, and their wicked, wicked chums, to lend, at times, the sense that I truly do accord the selection of the evening's shoes the same weight as I do truly weighty things. --Or to make things sound more pleasant, or less pleasant, or funnier, than they really are.

I'm Lying.

Thirdly, the same foregoing can be interpreted to mean that some of the details are factually inaccurate. I might say 'Dockers,' for instance, when in fact I was at no point anything like close enough to read the tag inside the pants of the individual in question. In that case, I am extrapolating from: 'chinos of some sort' plus probability, as I learned a few years ago in Harper's Index that about 80 percent of American men own Dockers. Thus, they are indeed likely to be Dockers -- but, again, they might not be. And if it is the case that there was an initial 'd' in the vicinity looking lost and hapless and unbecomingly unadorned, I might say 'Dockers,' anyway, even if the benighted boob under scrutiny was -- as unmistakably as he was inexcusably -- wearing corduroy. The ratio might be close to the following: 15 percent true, 80 percent fic-trutional, and 5 percent abandonedly, recklessly, from-the-gut brutally honest.

Why, Just the Other Day I Ate a Whole Half Rosemary-Roasted Brandywine.

Fourthly, if not all admissions are entirely accurate, so, too, must one be wary of reading too much into omissions. We might take bathing and eating as two obvious examples: I do both so frequently that one could almost consider them 'daily activities,' and yet there is scant mention of either. I have neither the time nor the inclination to make this a minute-by-minute accounting of the day's every activity. I would like to keep work, for example, out of it almost entirely, confining it, if I can manage, to the occasional snarky and quite general aside. Dating, for its part, is poked at only when it can be used to serve as a convenient portal into disquisitions on some of my more general Concerns with Our Decaying Society, or 'make a point' in some way I misguidedly think might be amusing, or open the way for a large-scale rant on a marginally related topic for which I lacked a segue. The blog also features a great many lacunae -- including around dating -- the (non-?) existence of which gaps being attributable in part to a sense of decency and concern for others. I am more than happy, in other words, to prate on at obscene, contrived length about the recurring failures of my structurally-unsound would-be 'hairstyles' and my inability to give a one-word answer to such questions as 'Do you like tomatoes?' while I would hope that I am possessed of sufficient restraint not to catalogue the conversational and sartorial failings of anyone misguided enough to go on a date, or enter into a relationship, with me. This latter is of course true only of the present: my gay exhusband is still gay, and my other exhusband is still welcome to help me find pants whenever he's in town, and anyone base enough to have offended the sensibilities of the Only Perfect Girlfriend in the Free World (TM) may likewise find mention (if little quarter) herein.

I Left My Heart in Ouagadougou.

Which, having covered factuality, intent, scope, omissions, and timbre, leads us to Sixthly, which is the timestamp. And sometimes the date, too, if I, let's say, neglected finishing my birthday greetings to M. Saussure until the day after, in which case I can retroactively date it appropriately and thus save face with the dead. Neither, then, is an entirely accurate gauge of my doings. Six o'clock is six o'clock in Vanuatu, or Yerevan, or the Marianas Trench. Whichever one I had it set to then. Or a different one, as that list above was arbitrary. For the sake of clarity: I am not certain that I have ever set it to any one of those three. Just as geographically savvy alcoholics can always reassure themselves with the fact that the sun's always past the yardarm somewhere and start the day thus with a G & T rather than regret and misgiving, so, too, is it the case that it is frequently oh-six-hundred-hours somewhere -- just not always precisely where I am. Sometimes, frankly, the thing's all written, and I just want to look over it once before work, or upon returning home, which would mean I had 'really' written it before, even though I am pushing send now.

St. Nic

I smoked a bit recently, and more than I would have liked, once I woke up the next morning wishing I were dead. I used to smoke, though, and less than I would have liked at the time, as I would have, were it possible, smoked in class, at yoga, at the symphony, in the shower, and while asleep. Now, by contrast, I smoke perhaps a cigarette or two a month, if the situation presents itself and I feel like it.

I didn't grow up smoking, or even around smokers. The only smokers at boarding school were what seemed to me frighteningly mature European voluptuaries with recklessly free-style hair and a penchant for wool vests, and louche Americans whose older sisters brought them drugs for their birthdays. Later, though, once I was married, I would keep a pack of cigarettes in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer, and once every couple of months take one out and smoke it while cleaning house. Sometimes my husband and I would each have one, walking around the lake or sitting at table after dinner. I didn't know how to inhale, but the act of it was pleasurable, and I liked the smell.

Once my husband turned gay and I moved to Greece, it was a bit different. In Greece, smoking it not merely encouraged, it is nearly enforced. My first memorable Greek smoking experience was being offered a cigarette in a bank by the teller as consolation for a lengthy but inexplicable wait. I gleefully (I'm smoking in a bank! I'm smoking in a bank!) accepted both the cigarette and a light off his Zippo, and felt dangerous and sophisticated and almost truly Hellenic myself. I wished Veronica Lake or Alan Ladd could have been there to see that I now could wait for a train as fashionably as they could.

My brands of choice were Gauloises and Kiretsiler, both very spicy, rich, and aromatic. You can't get Kiretsiler outside Greece, and these days in North America you have to go to Canada to get Gauloises, but those were simpler times, and smokier. I eventually learned to inhale, but I figured it was unlikely I would become addicted, as being attached to, or consumed by, things, was never one of my especial weaknesses. Eventually I did, but it took a long time and I enjoyed both before and after. I never felt much of a 'rush,' but perhaps that was because with not inhaling for so long, the amount of nicotine I was receiving very gradually built up as my smoking expertise developed.

Any arousing aspects seemed more to come from the physicality of smoking, not what was actually being inhaled. I didn't like to feel any kind of intoxication, and would always eschew pain medications after surgeries, so that suited me well. I knew there was nicotine, and nicotine was some kind of mild stimulant, but so was caffeine, and that didn't seem to be a big concern for most of the people who loved coffee, as evidenced by the overall lack of ruined espresso junkies in business suits begging for Change for a Venti Please outside Starbucks.

At the same time, I knew that cigarettes were implicated in heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, high blood pressure, COPD, digestive problems, dental problems, circulation problems, arterial sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, and just about everything else except Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, with regard to which there exists an inverse association. But, we are all going to die of something, and while smoking-related deaths are among the more ghastly and prolonged ways of accomplishing this, I would have no ethical or logistical problem with using my last Social Security check to buy a Glock and avoid Stage Four of anything, particularly since I would be, if not of sound body, at least of sound mind at that point, owing to nicotine's anti-Alzheimer's properties.

So that was fine. I was never a talented smoker, not only remaining ignorant of the arcana of smoke-ring blowing and the esoteric 'French Inhale,' but continuing always to look vaguely ill-at-ease in both embouchure and grip. Nonetheless, I persisted in my hobby, partly because there is nothing like a smoke break when you are going to school 'double full time,' doing an internship, and working thirty hours a week. (And maybe the stimulant action didn't hurt, either, but again, I didn't actually notice it.)

Then, I read about smoking and dopamine. Basically, smoking both inhibits dopamine uptake and promotes the release of more dopamine -just like the clearly psychotropic drugs which had always scared me. Certainly I had heard the oft-recited 'smoking is as/more addictive than heroin/cocaine,' but I didn't think of it as getting me high like that. As I viewed it, I had an addiction to a fairly innocuous drug. There was no euphoria, no distortion of reality, no belief, not even once, that I could fly or pick, unassisted, a good muni fund. Frankly, I didn't even feel more energized after a cigarette. The side effects of the method of delivery, smoking, were odious, to be sure, but the drug itself, nicotine, was not a concern.

Dopamine, by contrast, is a big deal. It is a hormone and a neurotransmitter, and involved in learning, pleasure, reward-oriented behaviors, memory, attention, desire -- in brief, cognition and desire/emotion. As that sunk in, it was patent that I was the same as the cocaine or meth junky. I may not be feeling as high as her or him, but my brain is doing exactly the same things in anticipating and receiving the drug. Studies showed smoker's dopamine levels spike from just seeing a lighter, or even a stepped-on cigarette. Far more so if the smoker's nicotine level is low. Then, when the reward is given, the first puff is smoked, there is another, higher wave of dopamine caressing the smoker's brain.

Which repelled me, so I quit. The first day was hard, because of course you think, Oh, I'm doing X; I should light a cigarette. But then the next day you can look back and see that you survived, and quite handily at that, blow-drying your hair or painting your toenails without one, so it's fine. Moreover, you can answer any momentary But I - with a factual Nooo, you don't, because you don't smoke, darling, because you have proven that you don't, because a smoker would have already had five that day before you started that abortive whinge, so shut up and get on with it, already.