My piece on Project Runway in Go Triad this week got some e-mails today – all nice, but some a little scary.
My favorite was from a 50-year-old gay man from NYC who ran across my piece online while looking for Project Runway news. He grew up in NC and was sort of amazed something like this was running in a Triad publication. A short excerpt from his letter, that made me laugh out loud:
“I thought your article was really good, but it also pointed out one of the problems with Bravo TV’s depiction of non-straight males and what they are like. Sex and the City was guilty of that as well. This is not meant to be offensive at all, I promise, but if I were shown the picture of you on your article and asked what I thought your sexual orientation was, I would definitely say “gay” if asked — I’m just saying how perceptions and media are so often incorrect.
I am glad to see the type article you wrote appearing in a Triad publication. I also didn’t mention until now that I am in my 50s, and when I was growing up in NC, I’d never heard of gay people until I was about 16. I knew from my earliest memories that I was different from other people, but had no vocabulary for it.”
The guy signs himself “John R.” – so I had to call my friend John Russell in NYC to be sure he wasn’t punking me and read the whole letter to him.
“I’m not really in shape enough to be a gay guy,” I told him. “Can you imagine me trying to date as a gay guy? Can you imagine how out classed I’d be?”
“Well, it is just a head-shot,” John said. “But you are bald, you have a handle-bar mustache and kind of look like you could be in your forties, so I could see where he’d get that.”
Is this a gay archetype? Are we talking about like, the leather-bar motorcycle guy from the Village people?
On an episode of the show 30 Days (helmed by Supersize Me star/director Morgan Spurlock) he’s talking about societal stereotypes of gay and straight men before putting a homophobic straight guy in San Francisco’s VERY gay Castro district for 30 Days.
“What would I do if I were gay?” Spurlock asks. “Well, I’d definitely keep this mustache…”
Of course his mustache…
…is much more impressive than mine:
It’s sort of funny how something like a mustache (handle-bar or not) can go from resolutely heterosexual masculine, like those of Wyatt Earp and John L. Sullivan…
…to resolutely…well, not heterosexual masculine, like that guy from the Village People:
2 Comments
August 11, 2006 at 11:33 pm
dude, that picture with your hand on your head? kinda gay. haha.
August 12, 2006 at 12:02 am
For about an hour after I shave my head I can’t stop touching it. And I’ve been shaving it for years.
This was taken maybe ten minutes after I shaved my head.
The one that ran next to the column online was the one with the red tie. Go figure.