There were Lebanese from all regions and all sects, mostly from similar class backgrounds, but on crowded, raucous nights they might come from dissimilar backgrounds. I recall them now as normal, polite, well-mannered people, even unsophisticated, but at the time I experienced them as extraordinary for how liberated and different they were.
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I began to go with them to new bars for middle-class gays and lesbians. I felt as if the weight of tons of boulders had been lifted from my chest and shoulders.Īmer (that was his name) introduced me to his friends, and they in turn introduced me to theirs. I found him and told him “about myself” in a few sentences that I spoke extremely slowly, enunciating the words in a drawl that slurred my speech. I returned to Syria a few months after that dreadful night, and without much thought or reflection (or perhaps after a lifetime’s worth), I took the first opportunity I had to go to Beirut and look for a young Palestinian man I had once met there, and whom I had later heard was openly gay. I hit rock bottom when I swallowed thirty-seven Ambien sleeping pills, before being overcome by the fear of death and the image of my mother hearing that her only son had killed himself at the age of twenty-six in a distant land. I would wake up in the morning wishing I had died in my sleep. Though I’m not the type to need to see myself reflected perfectly back at me in the media, it would be nice to see more complex gay roles, if only to lower the stakes and allow for gay characters-including wonderfully awful ones like Douglas’ Liberace-who can be more individual than symbol.Everything began to lose meaning: I was worn out by lying and loneliness took hold of me, becoming my living nightmare.
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And this dearth is all the more problematic because it encourages the sense that each gay character must serve as a Commentary on the Entire LGBT Community.
Straight acting gay definition series#
Gay representations on mainstream screens are still so limited, mainly a series of variations on “ the nance” (which, don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy), the (often AIDS) tragedy case, or the “post-gay” type who is boringly histrionic in his own “I’m conflicted about gay culture” way. More interesting than the question of whether straight actors should play gay roles is the issue of what kinds of gay roles are being written for anyone to play in the first place. Leaving aside the important issue of homophobia at the level of casting, there is nothing essential about a gay actor that would necessarily make him better at a particular gay role, or, as has been debated elsewhere, worse at playing a straight one. But why? As I gazed out at the diversity of gay male subspecies before me-gym bunnies, eyebrow sculptors, schlumpy comedians, screaming exhibitionists and more-I realized that the answer has something to do with what we mean when we say “gay” in the first place.
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After we’d clarified that I wasn’t talking about gayface as a physical trait (that, incidentally, we all agreed is real), it became clear that straight dudes snatching gay roles didn’t really bother any of us. I recently posed the question to a group of gay friends in one of the gayest places I could think of-Central Park on Memorial Day. (Big names, so far, are always straight.) But that on its own cannot account for how gayface is a treated differently from other touchy identity-based performances. Part of the gay community’s patience with gayface has to do with a kind of representational pragmatism: Many gays are so happy to see a story like Harvey Milk’s told at all that they’re willing to cede the role to Sean Penn, especially considering that without a big name like his attached, the project would almost certainly have never happened.