Doogie Wowser, or, a two-minute hate crime

From Suri's Burn Book. (It's a kind of Bible of celebrity children.)

Early in your life as a gay man, you get the question--either from people you know or from yourself:

"If you could take a pill that would change you from gay to straight, would you take it?"

I've always said no. I can't imagine being any other way. I am who I am. I like being gay. I feel it gives me a different perspective on life, culture, and society, and I wouldn't change that for the world.

(Plus hairy men are very sexy.)

Perhaps I would have had that worldview regardless--while outwardly conventional, I'm pretty on the inside . . . pretty jaundiced, pretty mistrusting, pretty cynical, pretty questioning authority, pretty nobody's fool.

OK, maybe not all of that is on the inside. Point taken.

I can't help myself from having a strong detector of bullshit, and goodness knows there's tons and hectares and kilos and acres of b to the s in the modern world. I would hope I would be that way, regardless of my sexuality and affectional orientation, but being on the outside looking in at the snowglobe of Western life, how can you be anything else but cautious and caustic? I'm not convinced it's any better in the non-Western world--in fact, I'm fairly sure it's not--but I only know one world, and I'm more than familiar with its problems, quirks, flaws, challenges, and . . . bullshit.

Anyway . . . back to the question at hand: Would I change being gay if I could?

No . . . except when I take a look at the Burtka-Harrises, aka Doogie Wowser and Companion (Vinnie Delpenis?), aka the Omnipresence of Self-Satisfaction that is Neil Patrick Harris and clan.

Oh, I'm impressed. It can't be easy being a child star, turning out to be gay, then forging a successful career in modern America as a fly white guy, a lothario on an incredibly execrable sitcom, a manorexic metrosexual of song-and-dance, non-threatening in a way, yet still able to share pics of your happy gay family with the celebrity-slavish world in which we exist.

But enough is enough. I don't want to be this kind of gay. I couldn't if I tried. And I would prefer no one else be either.

This is . . . not normal. And it's not progress either. It's playing to our stereotypes. We're cute! We're thin! We're family-friendly (in a fashion)! We're safe! We're dress-alike clones, sexless twins rather than same-sex lovers! Please don't think about us having butt sex or sucking each other's cocks!

Yes, I am playing to another stereotype: The gay man who treats other gay men with scorn, probably out of my own fear, loathing, and discomfort of our kind. But it's a chicken-egg scenario here: In a way, isn't NPH and family creating a hostile environment with all this perfection and wealth? Aren't we--the single or those of us in less fabulous relationships, the childless and those of us with "average," less print-model-friendly children, the middle class and poor, the non-white and the white cracker, the non-famous or even just the B, C, and D Listers--being held in a kind of contempt? Aren't we considered loathsome and actively being loathed? "Aspire to us! But you'll never be good enough to aspire to us! So fuck you!"

Fuck you back, Neil and Partner and your A-Gay world.

I'm dating someone right now, and, more or less, I couldn't be happier. We are similar, outwardly conventional, inwardly not willing to accept the status quo. Who knows where it will go or for how long? But I love this man because while we are similar in some ways, we are different from each other, too, physically and culturally. And we are different from the world in which we live, outsiders to our culture, gay or otherwise.

We don't want kids. We talk about living together and even marriage (jokingly), but I don't think either of us is into the ceremony or trappings, just the love and companionship.

More power to you if you want all of that. Clearly culture is on your side at the moment. But give the rest of us some room to breathe, to be ourselves, to be different.

That's the power of gay, the power of "queer," if you will: Being different and flourishing in our difference.

I did not come this far to be like everyone else. Or worse, like some happy freakshow families stereotype of heterosexual life.

/rant off.