Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Mande Wilkes, Wordsmithstress

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge once described President Harding's speeches as "a vast army of words crawling across the landscape in search of an idea, and which, upon finding one, bears it triumphantly in their midst until at last it dies from fatigue and overwork."

Here's Anaconda's latest bloviation on gays. Anybody wanna take a crack at what it means?

Anyway, the point of this post is that, now that we’ve seen the rise and fall of the world’s first post-gay couple, maybe homosexuality can finally recede from the cultural foreground.

By “post-gay,” we mean that their union has been widely understood as a pop star’s caprice – a quirk, an idiosyncrasy, an embarrassment of sexual riches which one or the other would eventually come to view as prodigality.

(Greed is unbecoming).

“Lesbian” is not a label anyone ascribed to Lindsay and Sam, because their relationship simply couldn’t bear the weight of the word – there was never enough grit nor enough gumption for the word to apply.

More than that, also absent from the contemporary discussion was the ever-handy “bisexual” tag. That term in particular, with its overt base word, could never describe the utter blandness of the hook-up.

There was nothing “hot” about it . . . it was all lukewarmth and tepidity.

They were a gay couple that was neither gay nor even much of a couple. They were merely a pair – and because they were two-of-a-kind, the whole thing was halfheartedly called a coupling.

At its core, it was more of a companionship thing – which is not so unlike many actual couplings. For the most part, Lindsay and Sam managed to sidestep the raw edges of homosexuality, maintaining a degree of mildness where before there has been none.

Welcome to “post-gay” America.

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