I saw an online post from a Hollywood person, someone who I absolutely consider an LGBT ally, hanging out at a comic convention with a lady artist and her husband, both publishers of a well known and well loved fantasy comic series, like they were all old friends. It got my hackles up. This particular comic book pair talk a good talk about being supportive of their LGBT fans, but when it comes to their story world they’ve a track record of, at best, gay vague…

Coined by Michael Wilke in 1997, ‘gay vague’ is the appearance of people who are seen by some viewers as gay, without it being explicitly stated or shown. When done intentionally, this allows brands to court two audiences: those longing for representation alongside those who would be put off by it.

–Outvertising – 12 February 2022 “The vague vanguard: The story of one unintentionally groundbreaking 90s TV ad.”

I see these two all the time at Pride events and comic cons, proudly hanging out with gay creators and fans, who I have to assume never ask them where the gay characters are in their world, like I did on a USENET forum once back in the 80s, to which I got the immediate response that “we don’t do pornography”.

Let me be blunt…gay vague is not support, it is erasure. Especially these days, if you are still sticking to gay vague as a way of telling us you’re with us…you aren’t. You’re still deeply uncomfortable with the possibility of our presence in your fantasy world. Because you still really haven’t made that connection that we are people just like you, with the same hopes and dreams of love, and all its joys and happiness, and not some strange and disturbing sexual behavior.

I can see fans of these two and their fantasy world getting a tad pissed off at what I’m saying here. And believe me, I know the feeling of wanting so badly, so very very badly, to see people like myself, see our lives, our hopes and dreams, represented in art, on TV and movies, that I’m willing to accept the occasional nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean know what I mean. But that was a long Long time ago, and now there is a lot of water under the bridge.

No…tears. A lot of tears.

So what made me such an intolerant militant homosexual? I’ll give you the executive summary. In bullet points. In reverse order of importance.

1: Vito Russo’s book, The Celluloid Closet.

You always knew there were the occasional coded homosexuals in the movies. Russo was the first to gather them all up…all the sissies, all the pansies, all the psychos, all the tragically damned…and present them to you all at once in one book. And when you saw it like that, it shocked you, and then it made you angry. Not just because you knew it was what Hollywood was telling everyone, your parents and family, your classmates and friends, how to think of you, but even more because it was how Hollywood told you to think of yourself.

2: In 2005 a 16 year old gay teenager was outed to his parents, who promptly forced him into ex-gay therapy. Before he entered the program, called Love In Action, he put out a cry for help on his MySpace page:

“Somewhat recently, as many of you know, I told my parents I was gay… Well today, my mother, father, and I had a very long “talk” in my room where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist christian program for gays. They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they “raised me wrong.” I’m a big screw up to them, who isn’t on the path God wants me to be on. So I’m sitting here in tears, joing the rest of those kids who complain about their parents on blogs – and I can’t help it.”

Then he did something brilliant. He found the LIA rulebook on the family computer and put the entire thing on his page for the world to see what they were doing to kids in there. And it shocked everyone. I was not alone I later learned, in not being able to sleep for days with worry for this kid. In joining the protests and activism against ex-gay therapy, I met a bunch of people who had been through it…survivors of ex-gay therapy…some who went in of their own accord, others who were forced into it…and through that I came to know them, made a few friends among them, and I listened to their stories.

3: (This could be a subset of #2) The Quiet Room. 

As I began documenting the protests against ex-gay therapy with my cameras, I was generously allowed to document some of the ex-gay survivor’s support group meetings. At one of these I attended, they’d established a “quiet room”. Mind you, these people were among Friends. They were there to tell their stories in a safe setting, and support each other as they tried to get on with their lives and past the trauma they’d experienced. And they still needed a quiet room. A spot where they could go and decompress when it all started getting too much.

And they’d covered one wall of the quiet room with some blank sheets of paper and set some Sharpies out, so the people decompressing could write whatever they needed to just then, to Get It Out…Somehow… on that wall.

I read those words. The writing on the wall. And when the conference was over I photographed it.

4: The night the closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend told me as we were having a quiet moment together, what his father did after he came out to his parents. He had just returned from a tour of duty in a Los Angeles class attack submarine and I guess his military experience had given him the courage and resolve to tell his folks. He sought me out and we had a brief fling. One night in a very quiet voice he told me about coming out to his folks, how they both said they still loved him, and how that night his father went into his office and made himself a small brochure with every biblical condemnation of homosexuality he could dig up, plus a bunch of others from who knows where. Then he printed up a bunch of copies and went around the neighborhood, putting one in the front door of every house for blocks around. Then he went back home and told his son what he did.

(I also got a copy anonymously in the mail and was pretty sure where it came from)

5: (Remember, these are in reverse order of importance). Listening to my high school crush tell me I should stay away, because the life he’d lived in the closet had so badly damaged him that some days he looked in the bathroom mirror and didn’t know who it was he was looking at.

I had a crush on him back in high school. Before that I didn’t want anything to do with all that dating stuff. But in the late 60s/early 70s, nobody told me that boys could fall in love with other boys or I would have been all about it. Then I met him. He was beautiful, decent, good hearted, outdoorsy, hard working. It wasn’t long before I thought the world revolved around him. I couldn’t take my eyes away. My heart would beat faster, I’d break into a cold sweat, but it felt wonderful. That first time you fall in love. It felt like a Disney movie. The birds sang a little more sweetly, the sky was a tad more blue, the stars shone more brightly, I walked with a lighter step. Everything was wonderful. I was twitterpated. I put him up on a pedestal. I thought he hung the moon and the stars. But it was 1971.

I’m pretty sure now it was when his parents found out he was talking to me that they put a stop to it. We weren’t doing anything…it was 1971. Gay kids didn’t exist in 1971. We’d only just begun flirting a little. But it came to a sudden halt. Then that summer they took him back to their native land and for 30+ years I had no idea what had happened to him, or where he was.

So I got on with my life. And so did the gay rights movement. I became a young adult, made attempts at dating other guys, nothing really worked. Every now and then I’d make an attempt to find him again, usually by looking through different city’s phone directories. When computer bulletin boards became a thing I would occasionally toss a message in a bottle out into the BBS spaces to see if he was there, and did he remember me. After a while I began thinking that if I ever did find him again he’d be settled down with a much better way more handsome guy than me and I’d just have to accept that.

So many years later I still had him up on a pedestal. I knew he would be braver than me. I wasn’t brave, just stubborn. He would be brave.

I got on with my life. I attended the first ever gay rights march on Washington, and the first ever showing of the Names Project Quilt on the Capitol Mall. It was pretty unnerving walking among all those quilt panels with birthdates bracketing my own. But I resolved to do my part to make it a better world for all of us.

That night the nightmares began. I would be walking among the quilt panels, and see one with his name on it. I’d be in the grocery store, or a bookstore, or just walking down a street in DC’s gay neighborhood, and I’d see him, his face covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma scars, his body shriveled. So I kept looking for him. I had to know what had happened to him. I was afraid. I had to know if he was still okay.

I was stubborn. Eventually I found him, married to a woman, and somewhat closeted but at least not in denial. We reconnected for a brief period. He started flirting with me again. We would sit together after hours and talk and talk and talk. We talked on the phone. We tossed each other Christmas cards and emails. And then it suddenly stopped. I’m guessing because the family found out he was talking to me again.

And one evening as the silence descended, at the restaurant where he worked, he basically told me I needed to look elsewhere because living in the closet had damaged him so much. He tossed ex-gay tropes at me…that sex was no more substantial than a fart. That when I was on my deathbed it wouldn’t be all the times I had sex, but all the people I loved that I would be thinking about…as if the venn diagram of those two things had no overlap. And I sat there and listened to him telling me that some days he would look in the bathroom mirror and he didn’t know who it was he was looking at. The guy I put up on a pedestal when I was a teenage boy. The guy I thought hung the moon and stars. The guy who made my heart beat faster. The guy who made me believe that no matter what life did to me, it was worth living.

I kept going back to see him anyway. I figured a relationship between us was off the table…he was married…but I could at least set an example. But it was too much for him, and maybe we were never really all that compatible anyway. He told me one day by email never to contact him again in any way shape or form. I had to sit on my hands to keep from replying How do you contact someone with a shape? Please accept this dodecahedron in reply to your Octahedron of March 6…

I got angry. I said things to him that maybe I shouldn’t have. But I was hurt. I think the only thing that cut me deeper was when mom died. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in eight years. But I don’t blame him. Enough time has passed that I’m not angry anymore, just sad. I’ll never have that wonderful twitterpated body and soul love now…it’s too late. But my generation did what it could to make the world a better place for those who followed. There are others who need to be held accountable for what the hatred of the world has done, and still does, to us. 

And I know what an ally in that fight looks like.

Why I am a militant homosexual…as they say. Five points to hopefully explain myself. Not that I feel like I owe everyone an explanation, but here it is. And I have no fucks to give for anyone who thinks gay vague is enough to make them an ally. I do not care how well liked they are in the community, or who it pisses off. I have read the writing on the wall. I have seen the damage done to beautiful hearts. I have no fucks to give anymore.