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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 19, 2002)
HUMOR The groove tube WtsTOYER H eights C In praise of Queer as Folk I ’ve reached a milestone or, more accurately, a millstone. A round my neck. I’ve reached that age when I can no longer imagine what it must be like to be young. It’s not like I don’t remember my own mis spent youth— watching television back in the days when you actually had to get up to change the channel— but I can no longer imagine what it must be like to be a kid today or, more specifically, a gay kid today. I can’t imagine what it must be like to come of age in a world in which there are at least 37 gay characters on network television— 39 if you count those nelly Crane brothers on Frasier. We didn’t have any of this when I was kid. Beyond the sexually ambiguous Batman and Robin (and the even more sexually ambiguous Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares), l had no choice but to identify with quirky girl-about- town A nn Marie on That Girl. I wanted nothing more than to go to New York and be an actress and get completely overdressed to fly a kite in C entral Park. So I’m still so delighted to see any gay characters on tele vision, I just can’t get too worked up about whether they’re offensive. Like all this hoopla that Queer as Folk doesn’t accurately portray gay peo ple’s lives, that it perpetuates the stereotype of the promiscu ous, sex-obsessed gay male. OK, first off, Queer as Folk doesn’t accurately represent most of our lives because, hello, most of our lives are boring. As scintillating as you might find your day in the cubicle, it just doesn’t make for good TV. Even reality television isn’t very real. If it were, it would be all about people standing around the water cooler talking about what they watched on television the night before. Anyone who’s ever been to Pittsburgh knows Queer as Folk is an exaggeration. T he street where the boys hang out is so queer it makes the Castro look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. But we’d be lying to ourselves if we said there was no truth on the show. Promiscuity, drug use, gym obsession, sex with minors: It happens. And so does gay-hashing, living with AIDS, coming out at work and raising children, all of which the show has dealt with sensitively, as well. No one piece of art can tell the whole story of who we are. Gay bartender and iiber-cutie Brandon Q uinton says he went on Survivor: Africa just to prove that young gays weren’t promiscuous, drug-taking party hoys. So instead he proved that young gays could also he lazy, hack-stabbing hitches, a hitherto underrepre sented demographic. (I loved every minute of it, incidentally. I think Brandon and Marilyn ffom Survivor. The Australian Outback should get their own talk show. They can call it Mad Dog and Catty Boy.) Most importantly, the creators of Queer as Folk can do what the creators of Will & Grace cannot: show hot, steamy man sex and lots of ’ THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARC by M arc Acito it. Will and Jack are so desexualized it’s as if they’ve been neutered so the American public will have them in their living rooms. Just compare Jack, with his little sweater vests and flannel jammies, to Emmett, with his see-through shirts and full-frontal nude scenes. Do you think there’s some connection between network television actor Sean Hayes denying h e’s gay and cable television actor Peter Paige matter-of-factly discussing his sexuality? Bet your network brass there is. Queer as Folk is like a training film for gay sex, which serves a number of benefits. 1 know a straight couple acquainted with exactly two gay people (me and my partner) and yet, as a result of watching the show, they now know rimming isn’t something you do on the basketball court— it’s something you do in the locker room. And if I were young and gay today (as opposed to middle-aged and bitter), I’d be taking notes. As for role models, while I adore Emmett for following in the grand tradition of Greg Brady and Rhoda Morgenstem by hanging beads across his doorway, there’s still no one gay character on television who speaks for me. No, I still can’t help but identify with another of those quirky girls-about-town: Carrie Brad shaw on Sex and the City. 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