So you think it’s cool–or even simply acceptable–to call something “gay”? Well, here you go. This sweater certainly is, and you can call it that without argument from anyone.

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Source: Mark Joyella | Standupkid
http://markjoyella.com/the-worlds-first-sweater-that-can-accurately-be-called-so-gay/

There are many of these stele all over the Western World, some half-buried, some fully revealed, some forever lost; they can be found in the bricked up doorways of alleys in East Hollywood, in Hamburg cellars long-ago wiped clean of piss and beer, in New Orleans shotgun shacks where the Gods themselves were treated for cruel Gleet.

This particular stone, our Memphis Stone, has sat in plain sight for 60 years.  It is not so much that the words are unreadable as there are those who refuse to read them; some would say they are heresy, they not only defile the legend of the Poor Truck Driver but they also insult his fans.

The message, so obvious that it has defied revelation, reads like this:

Elvis did not succeed because of the myth that he was the first white boy who sang like a black man.  Elvis succeeded because he was the first white boy singer who looked like a pretty white girl.

In the 60 years (!) since Elvis debuted, we have become so used to the idea that pop stars are pouting man-girls that sexual ambiguity and the idea of rock has become synonymous.  Think of the Rolling Stones’ Lips logo, think of teen doe McCartney, think of all those narrow, serpentine singers pregnant with licked-pussy lips and lissome hips, think of rough-trade aping Jim Morrison virtually begging for a man-fuck, think of Botticellian Bolan or Stipe (and that’s before we ever address the more deliberately ambi-sexualists like Bowie, Dee Snider, power bottom Rob Halford, or Marilyn Manson).

We are so used to all this that it’s a bit hard to believe that the concept once didn’t exist.  Pre-Elvis singers might be handsome, but nobody outside of the eccentricities of vaudeville displayed femininity, or looked pretty and hard. Caucasian male vocalists, band leaders, and pop stars were wiry, beefy, bovine, beaming, brilliantined, priestly, aquiline, avuncular, handsome, lantern-jawed, gawking, agape, owlish, even fey; and in the realm of hillbilly music, they were either doughy or carried the withered, sunken, accusing faces you see in old Civil War photographs.

But none had been pretty like a girl, and certainly none had combined it with an absolutely assured male presence that was virtually palatable in every photo or recorded yelp and hiccup.

By re-inventing the male pop star as half-animal, half-girl (and becoming a unicorn-beautiful Satyr/ louche sex fiend in the process), Elvis Presley not only made the white world safe for his feral (albeit compact) r’n’b/Cajun-Appalachian-Opry crossover, but perhaps more importantly, he spoke to the un-voiced wish of millions of American girls: that their objects of desire did not have to resemble ManBulls like Vic Mature, but rather the ones they wanted to fuck could actually look like the best part of themselves.  The fantasy a young girl saw (or wished she saw) when she looked in a mirror – the heart shaped face, the fucked-to-bliss almond eyes, the wet liver-puff lips – could now be pinned on a Real Boy, and that real boy played real sex music, barely hiding a half-masted woody while drizzling innuendo and cat-in-heat howls over lyrics about trains and milkcows and momma.

Girls could now dream of fucking someone prettier than they were;  girls, many of whom were drawn to that lonely long-lashed angel who promised them a sensitivity the Shop Class boys could never offer, now had someone who embodied their romantic hopes, as opposed to their romantic fears.

The lasting aspect of the cultural tsunami triggered by Elvis the Pretty was threefold:

Elvis made it safe for mainstream American girls to desire the sensitive.  Brando and (to a greater degree) Tony Curtis hinted at this, but Elvis bought it home; he had the same gently sculpted, edgeless face that you saw on the humanized bunny dolls that Sharon, Ruth, Beverly, and Gloria had been snuggling with in their beds since before they could speak (or squeal).  Like McCartney a decade later, his almost unfinished face was only a half-step away from the quickly-drawn hearts a girl might scrawl in the margins of her Social Studies textbooks.  Now, contrast that to Sinatra; Sinatra was very nearly beautiful, but he had a roughly hewn gob that was more Rushmore than David.

Secondly, Elvis cast the template for the look of rock, and by that, I don’t mean the obvious rockabilly rebel pose or ghoulish quiff; by introducing that gender bend, by asserting that the masculine and the feminine, bundled up in one lithe and saucy package, could sell sex and song (and all the ancillary marketing that goes with the exploitation of teens damp and engorged), Elvis announced that the rebellion, the break from the past, would not just be musical, but sexual.

And finally and most importantly, by introducing the feminine into the mainstream cultural vocabulary, Elvis drew the line in the sand that identified the battleground for the future culture wars.  From that moment forward, from the first Wynonie-esque honk that lanced from his lopsided lady-lips, it would be freaks vs. straights.  The spirit of the 1960s, including its fullest blooming in the frippery of Haight Ashbury, the fervor of Stonewall, and the fuming junk-drones of the Velvets, begins when Pretty Elvis bursts on the consciousness of mainstream America in 1954 – 56.  The delineation of the Shirts and the Skins in the Culture Wars would not have been possible without Elvis’s absolutely brilliant and adamantly natural ability to be a true man and a true man-girl.

Now, having said all that, does the music matter?

Of course it does, and much of it is brilliant, but most of us can find more satisfying (and savage) r’n’billy with our eyes closed. Sure, his music was a great ticking-and-shaking shriek across the landscape, but it was the shattering, shuddering specter of the gorgeous man-woman/woman-man shaking his hips like a belly dancer on a State Fair Midway that made America, especially the little girls who had been seeking an ideal companion who shared their curves and kitten-gentle eyes, buy into the revolution.

Now, Elvis isn’t as big as he used to be.  See, if you came of age in the 1970s (or earlier), Elvis was a slurping, onyx-haired Golem of cool and kitsch whose name was synonymous with rock’n’roll.  At one time in the Land of Rock, Elvis Presley was considered the supernova against which no sun block could provide adequate protection.  I am just old enough to remember this time, when all roads led back to Elvis, and no conversation about the history and creative shape of rock music could be had without Elvis being referenced.  A silhouette of Elvis at the microphone (or Elvis holding his guitar, splay-legged, or even merely an un-detailed rendering of his profile) could literally represent the idea of rock’n’roll.  As late as, say, 1979, it was unimaginable that you would have a generation of music fans – knowledgeable or casual — who barely gave a shit about Elvis.

But relatively quickly – by, say, the mid or late 1980s – Elvis’s ubiquity dissipated.  There are a lot of reasons, and we can address those elsewhere.

And I miss him.  And it’s time to reconsider him and honor him for what may have been his greatest achievement:  as the father/mother of the feminine in rock, and it was the gender blend/bend that made rock what is:  the language of the anthem of all outsiders.

Very few eleven year olds are free.  Not only are they almost completely dependent on family and parents, but their worldview is defined by available and accessible media (and their generational peers vomiting up the same).  At that age, in any era (not just the rotary phone/terrestrial television world of the early 1970s), even in this era, young people are a grotesque and addlepated mofungo of their environmental influences; we don’t know who we are, but we try to form an image of ourselves based on the slivers and shards of a thousand funhouse mirrors the world throws all around us.  In fact, virtually none of these mirrors reflect our actual selves in any functional or useful way. Each child is full of great depth, in many ways the same depth they will presume and assume as adults, yet we have to construct a world out of the largely one-dimensional residue of what adults presume to be our usefulness as consumers.

The list of the fears that shadowed my 11 year-old world was long and common:  the end of the world; the mortality of my parents; the thick shadows of the bullies or the lock-jawed disapproval of the teachers; the terror caused by lifts home from Hebrew school that never came; not to mention the foreshadow of sex, mysterious almost to the point of being otherworldly.  Honestly, not a single minute of any television show spoke to any of these issues, yet television was our world, our refuge from screaming families and fall-out drills and all the aforementioned everyday terrors.

I was aware, when I watched anything except for the news (Vietnam!  Spiro Agnew!  John Lindsay!  Mario Biaggi!  The Columbo Family! Joan Whitney Payson!  Aristotle Onassis!) that I was not watching reality; I was not watching anything that told me about who I was and who I might become.

Into this world, this world of fear and fakery, stepped Lance Loud. 

He was light, he was beautiful, he was an angel, he was utterly unlike anyone I had seen on television (and I watched a lot of television, being lonely, strange, and chubby), the world to him seemed to be a suitor to be charmed with a flip of your hair and a sly comment.  Even within the documentary format of the show that featured him, An American Family, he seemed hyper-real, like the birdsong heard for only eight seconds that is more beautiful than any recorded composition.

I immediately fell in love, even though I knew nothing yet of sexual desire, much less the mechanics of homosexuality.  I fell in love with his joy, his lithe, rubbery spirit, this person who seemed free and real and so strange yet so utterly familiar; he was the dreams I had not yet had (but only suspected); and what was most important about Lance Loud wasn’t that he was the first openly gay person on television (more on that in a moment), but he was the first utterly real person on television, the first person who reflected us at our most sensitive, at our most truly silly, at our most casual and cavalier and intense and introspective, at our most flippant or flirtatious; he, alone of anyone on the Empire of Television, seemed to understand that we might dance in front of a mirror and be someone we never could be (or precisely the person we would become!), he alone seemed to understand that while riding a bike down a suburban street we might pretend, for 48 seconds, to be the king of an empire that had the same name as our street.  In other words, he was the first person on television with an interior life.

When I looked at Bobby Brady, I saw no interior life; and when we are children, when our lives are full of the most beautiful secrets (mostly the secrets of our strangeness, for every child is strange, for one minute an hour, or one hour a day, or for one year of a life, until the strangeness is hyper-normalized out of them!), when our lives are full of the belief that the world is full of infinite possibilities and infinite miracles and a million ghosts and a million stars, we are ALL interior life; and Lance Loud, long and grinning with  lips that split the screen, clearly not only had an interior life, his interior life looked like ours, and he wore it on the outside. 

Now, that’s just my personal perspective.  In a more universal sense, let me state this clearly:  Lance Loud was the first announced gay man on American television.  Do you know how fucking huge that was?  He was Jackie Robinson, he was Louis Armstrong, he was Neil Armstrong, he was Chaplin, he was Crosby, he was that important.  In our revisionist perspective, we see the world of the 1950s and ‘60s as being full of visible gays:  but not only were these gays unannounced, they were often broad caricatures, easily dismissed, objects of fun or ridicule.  Paul Lynde, Liberace, Truman Capote, these gentlemen were caricatures, and deliberately ridiculous, and the source of ridicule, and if they waved any flag, it was the flag that their sexual predilection was like the name of a Hebrew God, not to be spoken aloud, and thereby easily denied and easily mocked.

But here was Lance Loud: Lance Loud might have been gay, but he was also our brothers, our sons, our neighbors, our schoolmates; he was a part of us (and if we were deeply a fantasist, like so many of us were, he was most of us, he was the best part of us!), he was gay, he was on television, he was real, he was not a figure of fun or ridicule, he was gay and the on television and more realistic than any boy next door; which is all to say that Lance Loud wasn’t just the first gay on television, as deeply important, indeed historic, as that is; he was also the first real boy on television. 

He was complicated, shaded, confused, arrogant, funny, tragic, he was everything we suspected a sensitive soul such as ourselves might be, but we had never seen one before outside the shadows of our own hopes!

He also carved the idea, somewhere in the willing, supple, and soft balsa-wood of my brain, that our fantasy self, our fantasy I, so private, so lonely, could one day be a we, we might meet others like him, like us, we might meet Morrissey or Michael Stipe or Dean Johnston, he instilled the idea that we were not overly sensitive, but appropriately sensitive; Not overly artistic, but appropriately artistic; Not overly bookish, but appropriately bookish; Not overly fey, but utterly beautiful in our own true boy skin.

Lance Loud was the first true boy on the sun, which is to say, he was real, he reflected a thousand and eight hopes and flaws and realities and shades of masculinity, and the sun was the television, beaming his brightness all over America.

Individuals from all walks of life came out in large numbers to celebrate. Governor Andrew Cuomo lead the parade followed by many a New York politician. The political tide is turning rapidly on sentiment regarding gay marriage and it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to appreciate that this issue will be significant in upcoming elections especially in New York State.

The latest statistics estimate as many as 70% of individuals 18 to 34 approve of same sex marriage. Enough of the politics, please enjoy my attempt to capture the euphoria associated with this wonderful day in super New York City.

Photo: Brooklyn Borough President's Office

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and local LGBT community members raised the rainbow flag over Borough Hall this afternoon to kick off Pride Week. Brooklyn will host many events including a “Drag Rugby” Saturday, 5pm, at the Old Stone House (JJ Byrne Park, between 3rd and 4th Streets and 4th and 5th Avenues).

Beep Markowitz also took the opportunity of today’s ceremony to make his stand on Marriage Equality, saying, “We are engaged in a fundamental right for equal rights—the right of same-sex couples to enter in legal marriages,” said BP Markowitz. “Now I admit there was a time a few years ago when I was on the wrong side of this issue. But then it became clear to me—as it should be to everyone else—that love is love! It really is that simple.”

Here’s the official press release for Brooklyn Pride:

BROOKLYN PRIDE’S 15TH ANNUAL PRIDE CELEBRATION: “THE MANY FACES OF PRIDE” SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

 

Visit www.brooklynpride.org and www.lgbtbrooklyn.org for updates.

 

MONDAY, JUNE 6

7:00pm Interfaith Service

Union Temple of Brooklyn (17 Eastern Parkway)

A spiritual group comprised of many faiths comes together to a worship service of the LGBT community.

Speakers: Rabbi Linda Henry Goodman, Revs. Ann Kansfield & Jennifer Aull and Bishop Zachary Jones

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 9

Brooklyn Borough Hall (209 Joralemon Street)

Pride Reception (by invitation only)

LGBT art exhibit, “Lights of Color,” in the Brooklyn Borough Hall Community Room

Hosted by the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office

 

FRIDAY, JUNE 10

PRIDE Fundraising Dance at Langston’s

$10. All door proceeds go to Brooklyn Pride

10:00pm–4:00am

1073 Atlantic Avenue (between Classon and Franklin Avenues).

Sponsored and hosted by Club Langston

Co-Hosted by: GMAD (Gay Men of African Descent), Brooklyn Men (K)onnect and Shades of Lavender

 

SATURDAY, JUNE 11

Pride Day 2011

Prospect Park at Bartel-Pritchard Square

15th Street and Prospect Park West

Pride 5K Fun Run (registration begins at 8:00am)

A fun event for the LGBT community and friends in a festive, healthy and inclusive environment. A portion of the proceeds go to a local LGBT organization.

 

Multicultural Festival (11:00am–6:00pm)

It’s more than your usual street fair! Featuring stage performances, family zone, shopping and great food. Most importantly, it provides opportunities for the community to learn about community organizations, issues and business.

 

Kids Space (12:00pm–4:00pm)

Kids come join the fun at Brooklyn Pride with your own space! We will have sing a song, puppet making workshops, story time, bookmaking and much, much more!

 

Drag Rugby Game (5:00pm)

Old Stone House (JJ Byrne Park, between 3^rd and 4^th Streets and 4^th and 5^th Avenues)

Brooklyn Women’s Rugby and the Gotham Knight’s RFCs have teamed up with Brooklyn Pride to present a Drag Rugby Game at the Old Stone House. The game is free, but donations to Brooklyn Pride are always welcome. Come down for a fun time and a great sport.

 

5^th Avenue Pride Happy Hour (5:00pm–7:00pm)

Brooklyn Pride and the Park Slope 5th Avenue BID are co-sponsoring the first ever 5th Avenue Pride Happy Hour. For two hours, participating bars and restaurants will offer food and drink discounts. Sit and grab a bite to eat while you wait for the parade festivities to start.

 

Night Pride Parade (7:30pm kickoff)

5th Avenue – from 14th Street to Sterling Place

Join the fun with the first “Night Time Parade in the Northeast,” a celebration of our pride and heritage

Grand Marshals: Revs. Ann Kansfield & Jennifer Aull – Greenpoint Reformed Church; Carl Siciliano, executive director, Ali Forney Center

 

 

THE BROOKLYN COMMUNITY PRIDE CENTER WILL BE SPONSORING THE FOLLOWING EVENTS:

 

MONDAY, JUNE 6

8:00pm, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (421 Fifth Avenue)

Benefit reading of “Sorry…” a new play with music by Steve Fisher inspired by the life of Tyler Clementi, the gay 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate live-streamed him having an intimate encounter with another young man. Donation: $50, includes wine and cheese reception with the cast and creative team. Tickets: http://lgbtbrooklyn.givezooks.com/events/benefit-reading-of-sorry

 

7:00-11:00pm, Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture (53 Prospect Park West)

In partnership with and held at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, BCPC will host “Out in Brooklyn,” a teen dance with food, music and safe solidarity for queer and questioning youth. Free.

 

SATURDAY, JUNE 11

Pride Day 2011 (Prospect Park at Bartel-Pritchard Square)

 

11:00am-6:00pm, Brooklyn Community Pride Center at the Festival. Representatives and volunteers from BCPC will be available to answer your questions about the Center and its programs.

 

1:00pm-4:00pm, Family Fun & Frolic in the Park. Join other LGBT families for an array of exciting activities.

 

7:30pm-9:00pm, Pride Parade. Join representatives from the Brooklyn Community Pride Center and partnering organizations as we march down 5th Avenue!

 

9:00pm-2:00am, Brooklyn Lyceum (227 4th Avenue between President and Union Streets)

Post Parade Pride Party. DJ, cash bar, prizes and a live performance by Brooklyn Indie band Tayisha Busay. $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Tickets: http://lgbtbrooklyn.givezooks.com/events/post-parade-pride-party

 

SUNDAY, JUNE 12

11:00am, Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture (53 Prospect Park West)

“Nurturing Pride in Brooklyn.” Brooklyn Community Pride Center Executive Director Marianne Nicolosi will share the growing pains and pleasures of establishing the borough’s first LGBTQ Center.

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 23

7:00am-9:00pm, Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture (53 Prospect Park West)

“Getting the Love You Want,” an introductory couple’s workshop for the Brooklyn LGBT community sponsored by BCPC.  For additional information, contact:jzimmerman@lgbtbrooklyn.org