Gay icons and Gay Stereotypes

Last.fm

I'm trying to find a way to tie together two posts I've been pouring over for the past two days: from xoJane Eliot Glazer's The Trouble With Gay Icons and Gawker's Brian Moylan's The Secrets Gay Men Don't Want Straight People to Know.

One of these things is not like the other: the former expresses frustration with straight "gay icons," and the latter plays with a handful of timeworn stereotypes about gay men (some straight out of 1996 -- poppers anyone?).

There's a lot about Glazer's post I was secretly cheering: I hate when celebrities refers to their LGBT fans as "their gays." It's patronizing, infantilizing and forces them into the role of cute pet or fashionable handbag -- a trendy accessory. Unfortunately some of the biggest offenders are often the staunchest allies. He says:

"But the differentiation between representation of and for gay people is a significant one. It’s a problem when entertainers seem to think that allying themselves with the gay community means that they can be excused for nominating themselves as a figurehead for “their gays,” who will be subsequently used as targeted consumers/safety audiences for one-liners about Lindsay Lohan.

This lumps us all together as shrieking gossips who apparently care what other people have to say about Lindsay Lohan. It doesn’t matter how much money you give to GLAAD if you’re targeting and marginalizing the same who pay for your DVDs (and those of them who don’t)."

I'm not entirely comfortable criticizing Moylan's Gawker post. I'm not a gay man, and it was obviously written tongue firmly in cheek. To be honest, I think it fails in the same way a lot of Gawker articles do: assuming everyone in their reading audience is young, single, fairly well-off economically, and preferably coastal, but it's really late in the game for overused stereotypes.