Talkin’ Sh*t about Sch*tt’s Creek, White Boy Rappers and Black Homophobia

While we’re on the subject of Black oppression,

how ’bout I tell you about some Black-on-gay oppression?

‘Cause one thing that Black hets do that’s just so oppressive to gay dudes is, obviously, not tolerating gay dudes, and in such a sanctimonious way, with such absolute conviction and visceral disgust, I feel like I’ve wandered into a Baptist church just as the old ladies dressed in electric pink suits are cramming their flowered hats back on and getting themselves all gussied up, ready to knock on your door and shove a Jesus Saves! pamphlet in your stupid white face.

I’m reading this critique of “Schitt’s Creek” online and this Black lady intellectual/feminist dude—I call her “dude” because I don’t care how she identifies in real life, she could be five Chinese lesbians in overalls for all I know, but when she wrote this diatribe, she was a straight white man, OK?— she’s on about how it’s not a good show, not funny, not exceptional, no way, and no way of watching it is going to make her get the point.

And she is totally right, because Schitt’s Creek is A GAY SHOW.

Take one look at the handsome, Hot Gay Jew-face of Daniel Levy and tell me it ain’t true. He’s a Hot Gay Jew and Schitt’s Creek is a Hot Gay Jew show, for gays, by a Hot Gay Jew gay.

In this saga of a wealthy family of shallow narcissists getting taken down a peg—how Canadian is that!— we have David Rose, the undeniable focus and star of the show, and a mama’s boy to boot. His ditzy sister Alexis is the totally inane, utterly self-serving disloyal best friend evERRR, Mom is the quintessential wacko Fag Hag and Eugene Levy is just, I dunno, Everydad, wandering around and running the gamut of emotions from bemused to perplexed, which is his shtick.

I personally don’t get the point of Eugene Levy in this show—well, in fact, ever—unless he’s here to disguise the fact that every other character is a gay stock character cliché that we love.

They purport to be a family, but seriously? They are not, they are the old-fashioned constellation of the stock characters in a gay man’s life, and it’s beautiful and comfortable. Fuck it if you don’t get the joke, or the jokes. Fuck it that there’s no tap dancing or blackface so Black feminist academic dude can go off on the show and justify her pearl-clutching, prim distaste by anything except homophobia.

Gay people love love love to see ourselves on TV, recognized as gay, because we spend our lives invisible, and that’s still true, but it was REALLY true when I was growing up. We were the original basket of unmentionables. There was no one to turn to. God knows what drag queens did back then, I imagine they resorted to bales of hay for wigs and tissue paper for their fabulous gowns and the juice from mumbleberries for make up, but somehow they damn well did it.

Drag queens, flamboyant queers, nelly boys. They got reviled and spat on and arrested and beaten up and murdered so the rest of us could one day watch Schitt’s Creek and be proud. That’s why I love and revere every drag queen and every Quentin Crisp in-your-face quasi-drag queen who ever lived, and why I spit on and revile every white bread self-hating “passing” gay who ever said, “I wish THEY (drag queens/leather men) would go away and stop spoiling it for the rest of us.”

That’s not all. Gay people instinctively support BLM. In Toronto, we deferred to them at PRIDE, allowing them to “take over” the parade in a protest against police violence, indifference and systemic racism perpetrated by those charged with serving and protecting.

We support BLM because gay people historically have recognized that you can’t do it alone. The LGBT community (which I say to be inclusive, but it’s really gay men who are the issue, because Queen Victoria) knows about divide and conquer—the strategy instinctive to the ruling class for keeping the rest of us at each other’s throats— and has always recognized intersectionality, those shifting nodes of privilege and disadvantage.

We knew about intersectionality before there was even a word for it, and so did Black people and “women’s libbers” as they were called in those days, the dim distant 60’s and 70’s, by the white male media, but now, perfectly siloed and fed up with stalling progress, every minority waves their own banner.

We, the disadvantaged, the discounted, the hated, suffer from the penis envy of martyrdom: who’s had the biggest, longest, hardest time?

Schitt’s Creek treated being gay as natural—not needing extra explanation or backstory or drama or apologies or consequences; natural like sunshine and rain—though so does South Park, with the Leather Guy turning Paris Hilton into the world’s whiniest sex toy and roiling masses of naked men looking like the balls of victims that the Aztecs rolled down those stairs that you and your mom train to walk up, when you do your all-expenses paid trip to Tsixclkweoiouwejklhfewl, Mexico.

As a sop to god knows what, they had to make the character of David polysexual, had to throw in a little interlude of swinging both ways, in case anyone should feel excluded. “Well of course he’s A MAN, he doesn’t care WHAT he sticks it into.” Never mind that no self-respecting straight woman would take one look at David and not instantly know he’s just waiting until the right dick comes along. And by cracker it does, white and soft and unthreatening as a steamed hot dog bun.

Tell me honestly. Is it all about the sex? Does distaste and disgust around gay men come down to that? How can it be? We learned how to do it from straight people! But everyone “knows” that’s the way it is: Straight people fall in love; gay men have sex. Black and white; either or; good-bad.

Come, now.

That’s just clever propaganda from the right. The psychic wall on our bodies’ metaphorical southern border is built from bricks of gender stereotyping and religion.

Why do we laugh at a man in a dress, but when we see Dietrich or Diane Keaton in a “smoking” we declare them a fashion trend setter? No one’s threatened by a woman in a suit; it’s considered a no-brainer that a woman would want to upgrade and wear the trappings of suave manhood. But frail male psyches can’t assimilate a man in a skirt; it’s ludicrous, even dangerous, that a man would lower himself to a woman’s status. Look how hard it is to walk in high heels! How do they manage? Horror!

Christianity is an easier analysis. The bible tells you so, so there.

As an old, white fag—and how dare you call me old—I can’t speak with any authority about ideas of manhood and womanhood in the Black community. I can only tentatively point out what I think I see: the historical importance of religion and all forms of tradition that unite against a threat, whether it’s sin or injustice; the historical importance of playing by the rules, not rocking the boat more than is required; the central position that struggle—real, physical struggle—has always assumed.

What can I report, first hand, about gay men, from a lifetime of observation? What does a gay man take to the second date? goes the set-up. What second date? comes the punchline. But this is equally true: If every man had been a warrior, culture would be a non-starter, the human race, extinct.

Male identity is a fragile thing, in need of constant renewal and revision. Free from the stabilizing, civilizing influence of women, who throw a much-needed anchor to the roving straight male, gay men move through life like explorers without a map, with the danger always present that we’ll use sex as our compass, that we’ll lurch from one encounter to the next with nothing to show for our trouble except alienation and shallow self-absorption, a constant craving for validation by another notch on the bedpost: collect ’em, keep ’em, trade ’em with your friends! This I freely admit.

But what is that your business, you high-minded hets who, excuse me, brought the world Reverse Cow-Girl when we were still working out how to open the jar of petroleum jelly. Sexual practice is an insultingly limited sampling to serve as anyone’s sole identity, unless you’re the Marquis de Sade, Helen Gurley Brown (look it up, baby feminists) or the inventor of the Fleshlight, in which case, congratulations on lifetimes well spent.

Gay men don’t spend our time obsessing about what you do in bed, and it’s time you stopped obsessing about us. Raise your sights a little, sisters and brothers, and admit the very real gift that gay men possess, of helping the human family survive itself. I guarantee you’ve experienced it, whether you’re aware of it or not.

You may think it’s like trying to describe an orange without using the word “orange”, but think what gay men really bring to the table. Fully clothed and at large, at our best, gay men find creative impulses, and nurture them like newborns. A quote I encountered recently, and how I wish it were mine, has it that “Homosexuality is nature’s way of ensuring that the truly gifted aren’t burdened with children.”

We use our greater stores of empathy, our kindness, our wit, our powers of observation that come from our status as outsiders, our instinct to defuse conflict, our emotional intelligence, to build bridges and heal rifts—when everyone stops hyperventilating about our inability to conform.

(Which reminds me of an experiment I’m designing, in which I accost straight couples on the street and ask, “Which one of you is the man?”)

Gay men are indestructible. You may see fluff, but we’re harder than nails. We’ve had to be.

Gay men are eternal. Beat us, mock us, murder us—we’re never going away. You need us so much that every generation gets its 4.5 percent.

We walk through fires that would burn you up and come waltzing out the other side with a new Broadway musical and ten Pantone color schemes. And when our strategy involves a little more mascara,

take it from me—it’s waterproof.

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