Gay is In

I was watching Bravo's latest, The Real Housewives of New York, the other night. To remark, it's okay...not as good as the Californian women, I guess, but still okay. Let's face it: if it's on Bravo, I watch it no matter how crappy it is. It's like Bravo exhumes some sort of gay perfume through the airwaves. None of us can resist! (This may be, in part, because of the inordinate amount of gay people that grace Bravo TV).

Something bothered me though. It actually bothered me a lot; sort of crawled under my skin and stayed there. Which is funny, because it's not like anything I haven't heard before. I don't remember which episode...I think it was the second...but Jill, one of the housewives they follow, is shopping for a dress. Cut to Jill's little taped monologue, and she says something along the lines of: "I need my gay, there." Then cue back to the room where her gay, some New York designer-obsessed monstrosity of a homosexual, starts ordering her around telling her what to wear and how to wear it.

What got under my skin was that phrase: "my gay". Like it was a possession. Now, I know to rich white women in New York pretty much everything is a possession, but I've heard this before in less high circles. "My gay". "My gay went shopping with me." "My gay picked out some great clothes." "My gay decorated my apartment, it looks fabulous!" You get the drift.

Are fashionable gay men the latest craze among heterosexual women. What's in this season? Gucci handbags, black and white dresses, and gay shopping buddies.

The notion was popularized by such TV shows as "Will & Grace" and "Sex & the City", where gay men were seen helping heterosexual women in their quests for material and sexual happiness. Which, to be fair, I don't recall the phrase "my gay" every really being used on the show. The gay men portrayed on those shows and the heterosexual women were just friends, and sure they may shop together but it was strictly because they were friends before.

I think what women want now is some Jack/Stan clone to follow them around and tell them how fabulous they look and how they can look even better. Which is derogatory. It's just plain derogatory. I don't care that the gay men don't seem bothered by it or that the women insist they're friends with their gay shoppers. It's derogatory to be spoken about in terms of possession.

What I think is going on here is a social exchange. In exchange for a gay, someone to shop with and pamper with, these heterosexual woman promote, in part, the homosexual lifestyle. They give security to men whose stability within social circles is often severely lacking, to say the least. They open doors to higher strata of a society that still, as a whole, has not considered the homosexual its friend.

In exchange, they get to use the phrase "my gay".

Whose more to blame? These women or the gays who let them do it? I'm here to tell you, if any of my friends referred to me as "my gay", I would correct them then and there. Not snap at them, or go off on a tangent of equal rights. Just calmly take them aside and explain that I don't appreciate that term, because it devalues my existence as a legitimate person. Yes, it sounds way too heavy. They'd probably say: "don't be so serious". But let's see what they say if I take them to a gay bar and introduce them as "my heterosexual" repeatedly.

Sorry for the vent, but I felt it needed to be said. Respect comes before acceptance.

Sincerely,
Your Spy