Last night, while watching Jaws: The Revenge, I realized its risible tagline — “This time, it’s personal” — would also make a great slogan for the YOPD site I developed a couple years ago and still haven’t launched.* It also works as a title for this post, which will cover a hodgepodge of subjects I’ve wanted or pledged to write about here. I’ll get to as much as I can before noon, in between loads of laundry and recesses with Muriel, and that’ll be it for the day. After many stops and starts, this will be the first full week in which writing is eliminated from my evening routine as I experiment with different schedules to see if any improve my sleep.**
To minimize discombobulation for readers and author alike, I’ll put each subject under its own heading so I can avoid contrived segues and you can skip around to what interests you.
Dan Savage Walked So Zillennials Could Run (But They Would Call That Ableist)
This weekend I read a question that, strangely enough, I’d recently asked myself: “Do college kids know who Dan Savage is?”
When I was their age, approximately 600 years ago, he was one of the most prominent gay activists in the country and Savage Love, his syndicated sex advice column, was required reading. (It was one of my first stops in each week’s Village Voice and Crankenstein was similarly enamored.) Now The Voice and The Stranger, the first places you’d look for him back then, limp along irrelevantly, relics of a bygone era. Today’s undergraduates, some of whom don’t believe that adulthood begins until they’re almost 30, would think it’s inappropriate or even predatory for an older columnist to answer their sex questions. (We’ll ignore the troubling likelihood that they see nothing creepy about seeking answers from A.I. chatbots instead.)
On paper, Zoomers and Zillennials should love Savage, or at least grudgingly grant him a modicum of respect. Whether or not they’re familiar with his work — and I’m doubtful most are, unless it’s the It Gets Better Project — most ‘queer’ kids on college campuses have made themselves in his image. He relentlessly badgered Rick Santorum online before the public trolling of high-profile politicians was a daily occurrence on Twitter. He popularized “DTMFA” (short for “Dump the Motherf*cker Already”), the younger generations’ go-to solution for even minor relationship problems. He built an exceptionally successful career explaining and normalizing the unconventional sexual values and interests so many of them purport to share. But what percentage of them, if they scratched beneath the surface of his writings and personal life, would find him problematic?
In practice, Savage is many of the things that students who feign sex-positivity and inclusivity claim to be: gay, male, polyamorous, into BDSM. But few of today’s campus ‘queers’ are gay men in the conventional sense, and it’s unclear whether a majority of them realize that gay BDSM culture is light years removed from Fifty Shades of Grey in leather chaps. They’re young nonbinary and/or trans men of various sexual persuasions, some of whom also identify as aromantic or asexual, and their fascinations with kink and male homosexuality are often informed by the juvenile romanticization of characters in gay fan fiction and other erotica penned by straight women.
The last time I heard about a Savage speaking engagement at a college campus, it was 2014 and he’d angered a trans student in Chicago by using a slur they found offensive. (You can read his take on it here.) The complainant, who went by the name of Hex and whose preferred pronoun was “It,” was mocked in gay circles if the subject came up at all. The prevailing attitude was that they were too transparently shit-stirring and attention-seeking to be taken seriously. Eleven years later, the Hex contingent are now the loudest, most visible representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, irrespective of their contributions to it. And “cis” gays like Savage, who’ve done more for the TQ+ community than it’s ever done for them, live in quiet fear of being canceled by these bullies, who inexplicably wield a disproportionate amount of power they’re happy to unleash on fellow liberals who cross them.^ Maybe we dumped the wrong motherf*cker.
Unleashing the Louis Gossett Jr. Within
As I make another push (against early-onset Parkinson’s, if you’re new here) to sleep more than three or four hours per night and regain a normal schedule, I look for inspiration wherever I find it. On Saturday night, during his character’s hokey death scene in the execrable Jaws 3-D, I thought of his drill sergeant character in An Officer and a Gentleman and imagined him yelling at me, threatening to eat my eyeballs and calling me Miracle Whip (Mayo is reserved for Richard Gere).
“Only two things come out of Oklahoma, steers and queers. Which one are you, girl? I don’t see no horns on you, so that narrows it down!” he’d shout, even though I’m not from Oklahoma. After enough of his verbal abuse about apathy and lack of discipline, I’d shape up and fulfill my potential, make it through training without impregnating anyone, and drop a bomb on EOPD instead of being its target. Maybe I’ll watch that next time I need a kick in the ass, reserving R. Lee Ermey and Full Metal Jacket for situations that are particularly dire.
The Timer Buzzes
Well, that was underwhelming progress and my ‘to-write’ topic list is still a mile long. But we’ll end with a peek inside a book I recently bought (its title is a nod to The Genius of Christianity). The red library stamp, which captures the essence of our current cultural climate, made me laugh. And let us not forget that BHL, as he’s known in France, is married to Arielle Dombasle, who played one of the three “bitches” Phoebe Cates confronted in Lace. Just yesterday I mentioned another, Bess Armstrong, in musings about Jaws: 3-D, which makes me wonder if everything we’ve been told about cotton is a lie. Maybe trashy TV movies are the true fabric of our lives.
* I want a better story to tell before releasing it into the wild, one that won’t heighten or multiply the worries the newly diagnosed (and their loved ones) already have about Parkinson’s.
** Or, if you prefer to read it as if it’s being belted by Cher, “After all the stops and starts.”
^ An obligatory disclaimer for new readers: My exasperation with a lot of this current ‘TQ’ nonsense doesn’t extend to everyone who belongs to those groups. My views on those things are typical of elder Millennial gays and lesbians, which is to say moderate by Hex standards and liberal by most others.