Troublemakers: Adam Lambert and Will Phillips

Will Phillips is ten years old, and he got into trouble. Not unusual for a ten year old, but his act of rebellion drew national media attention in the United States. The fifth grader (he skipped a grade) refused to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance because “I really don’t feel that there’s currently liberty and justice for all.” Will’s family has many gay friends, and Will has come to believe that to say the Pledge would be dishonest, as his gay friends don’t have the same rights as others. Rock on, Little Dude.

(However, it wasn’t refusing to stand that got him sent to the principal’s office. It was telling the substitute teacher who tried to make him stand to go jump off a bridge.)

Will’s caught a lot of crap from some of his classmates for taking a stand, who call him “gaywad” and other homophobic names. You’ve got to respect Will for standing up for what he believes in the face of such hatred; quite a few of the 40-year-olds I know aren’t that committed to their own beliefs.

Adam Lambert got in trouble, too. The 27-year-old American Idol runner-up caused a stir when he kissed his male drummer during a performance on the American Music Awards, an act that had all the sensuality of salmon spawning, but was still met with gasps of horror from Middle America. He also ground his crotch into the face of one his male dancers, which further horrified parents whose children were still up at 11:00PM.

Lambert is right when he says that women have been performing same-sex kisses and raunchy dance routines for years and getting away with it (although, not without the occasional controversy). This isn’t even the first time an awards show has broadcast a male same-sex kiss, as many gay and lesbian winners have kissed their same-sex partners before making their way to the podium. In reality, one can see more salacious TV mid-day on All My Children.

If Lambert got sent to the principal’s office, then the punishment didn’t hurt much. Sure, his appearance on GMA was canceled, but he wound up with more free publicity and interview requests than any artist with a new CD could wish for. It’s not like the people who were complaining about the kiss were going to be first in line to buy his album, anyway. Billboard reported the week after the CD dropped that it was exceeding sales expectations.

Adam Lambert and Will Phillips have a lot in common. Both have publically pushed boundaries of what is deemed socially allowable. But as we know, it is through such individual acts of disorder that social progress eventually comes. The next time a male singer kisses another man in performance, people won’t be quite as shocked. Similarly, the kids at Will’s school might be a little more informed about gay issues and civil disobedience should they encounter it again. Who knows — maybe one of the kids calling Will a “gaywad” might just grow up to engage in a same-sex kiss on TV years from now.

In a time when the gay rights movement in America is taking a beating, such acts announce that we aren’t going away or backing down anytime soon. We stand up and make a scene, do our own thing, or sneak in through the back door and appear on stage — we make ourselves known in some way.

Lambert and Phillips aren’t trend-setters when it comes to taking a stand. Many historians of gay history would point to ACT UP as the predecessor of contemporary in-your-face gay activism, while others would argue that the credit should go to the Stonewall rioters. Both have helped lay a foundation for the gay protest movement, but I would maintain that it was the active lesbians of the ’70s who truly created a standard for pro-active social change.

By integrating themselves into pro-feminist organizations, such as National Organization for Women, these women successfully showed the world that the gay voice could be heard in mainstream and powerful political movements. The advances of women in the last 40 years is due in large part to a motivated group of lesbians who organized, marched, and lobbied alongside straight women. Unfortunately, the hard work of lesbians in the women’s rights movements has frequently been used as far-right wing rationale for not supporting women’s equality.

With Liberty and Justice for All

With Liberty and Justice for All

Toby Keith sings about drag queens. Could a duet with Adam Lambert be next? Redrawing the lines between straight and gay culture has political ramifications.

For years, “gay culture” has contributed to “straight culture” in numerous ways. Most notable and significant is the radical approach that the gay community took in response to the AIDS crisis. As the disease spread throughout the community in the ’80s, LGBT individuals realized that we where medical pariahs. Even some doctors, paramedics, and nurses refused to treat or even touch AIDS patients.

So it was the community that stepped forward, led by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, and in so doing, set a model for medical care that involved family, compassion, and activism. It is a model that is duplicated in AIDS clinics throughout the world today, as well as cancer centers, veteran’s groups, and hospices.

More recognizable are gay contributions to popular culture. Take, for instance, fashion. Oh, certainly, gay designers have had their contributions recognized for years, but gay men have had a dramatic impact on the face of masculinity and its representation in the media. In her series of lectures entitled “Rethinking Masculinity: Men and their Bodies”, London School of Economics and Political Science lecturer Rosalind Gill argues that “the man” presented in the media today is a reflection of “the man” of gay-themed advertising, gay magazines, and gay porn:

It is within the gay media that representations of men as erotic objects to be viewed were first produced, and arguably what has happened over the last decade is the mainstreaming of this genre. If indeed these gay images of men have gone mainstream, then this has been the result of a realisation that representations of men previously confined to gay subcultures were enormously desirable to some heterosexual women. (“Body Talk: Men in the Spotlight”)

Adversely, increased acceptance of effeminate and androgynous men, slow as it may be, owes much to the pop and new wave scenes of the ’80s, when MTV filled our minds with the likes of Boy George, Pete Burns of Dead or Alive, and Mike Score of Flock of Seagulls. Today, even the most macho of heterosexual men can be a metrosexual, with more creams and gels in his cabinet than Saks Fifth Avenue’s Clinique counter.

A recent study even introduced the concept of the metrotextual, straight men who sign text messages to other straight men with “x” for a kiss. Surprisingly, three-fourths of all men between 18 and 24 do it. A third of all men sign off with multiple kisses: “xxxxx”. That little habit didn’t originate with the WWE wrestlers, I can assure you. (“Phone texting reveals sensitive new ‘metrotextual'”, 3 November 2009)

Yet it is not just perceptions of masculinity that have been impacted by LGBT figures in pop culture. Lesbian pulp fiction of the ’50s and ’60s, read by both straight and gay audiences, featured housewives and secretaries as active lesbians, reshaping the idea that to be a lesbian was to be masculine. These novels also helped set a standard for pulp fiction; their popularity caused them to be copied by more mainstream media and is partly responsible for the fact that every straight porn film has an obligatory lesbian scene. (See “Fresh Squeeze with Pulp”, PopMatters, 24 November 2008)

Some artists have been more subtle in their work. Cross-dressing and same-sex flirtation were staples of early Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers cartoons, slyly inserted by the gay writers of the cartoons. There are plenty of websites that argue the idea of whether Bugs himself was gay.

To this day, musicians have been the most creative in hiding their same-sex attraction in their art. Although Lambert and other gay artists have found broad audiences, artists of years past had to be clever in their writing, to hide the nature of the love being sung about. Melissa Etheridge was a master of this in the start of her career. Take her first big hit, “Bring Me Some Water”: “And I know you’re only human/ And I haven’t got talking room/ But tonight while I’m making excuses/ Some other woman is making love to you.” Etheridge doesn’t sing “I know you’re just a man” or something similar; nothing in the song is gender-specific, except the other woman.

Listeners can interpret the song as a “my man done me wrong” song if they are inclined. In the spirit of equity, I frequently reinterpret the lyrics of “straight” songs from a gay perspective. This is somewhat difficult with rap and hip-hop, as they tend to be gender-specific with a lot of “girrrrl” and “boy-ee” in them, but it’s particularly easy to do with country songs. Take “On the Other Hand” by Randy Travis, long rumored to be gay:

But on the other hand, there’s a golden band

To remind me of someone who would not understand

On one hand I could stay and be your lovin’ man

But the reason I must go is on the other hand.

It’s not difficult to imagine exactly what she wouldn’t understand. Far more enjoyable is to reinterpret the songs of redneck country stars, such as Toby Keith. In “I Wanna Talk About Me”, he sings,

We talk about your friends and the places that you’ve been

We talk about your skin and the dimples on your chin

The polish on your toes and the run in your hose

And God knows we’re gonna talk about your clothes

Sounds like every drag queen I know. Plus there’s the bonus of thinking that Toby Keith’s head would explode if he knew people thought he was singing about a drag queen.

Gay men and lesbians have been projecting an underlying gay subtext to TV characters for years. From Batman and Robin to Xena and Gabrielle, even with reality star Brody Jenner’s search for bromance, we can read an untold story of hidden love into just about any storyline we see.

Indeed, the gay community has appropriated much of straight culture as its own, in ways more significantly than the reimagining of songs and TV characters. We’ve adopted suburbia; the white picket fence, two kids and a dog, the mini-SUV, daily trips to Starbucks, and Sunday tailgate parties. While urban “gay meccas” have seen an increase in straight residents and business, so have all other areas seen increases in gay residents and businesses. In most metropolitan areas, most every area of town, from the art districts to the trailer parks, you’ll find “out and proud” residents. As I said before, what was once perceived as aberrant becomes normal through exposure. Just ask Arkansas citizen Will Phillips.

With big losses for GLBT rights in New York, California and Maine, and countless more state and federal battles looming, it is paramount that the LGBT community make its presence known. It need not be with a picket sign; it can be as simple as being out in your community. It’s a little bit more difficult to vote against the nice lesbian couple next door when you still haven’t returned their Tupperware you borrowed and they’re babysitting for you this weekend.

Some people will continue to be shocked by those like Will Phillips and Adam Lambert, but the lines between gay and straight culture will continue to blur. Then one day, hopefully soon, Will can stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands — because he can believe that Pledge holds true to its people.