The Gay Moment

National Review, July 26, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

It's a pink, pink world.

From time to time, an American minority group enjoys a "moment." Moments can last for decades, at least for a number of years. In its Moment the group takes center stage; its doings, habits, and preoccupations interest the nation. Every headset picks up the frequency. The simplest thing to do is just lie back and listen in quietly; it is impossible not to listen at all.

The moment we are in now is the Gay Moment. The Gay Moment can be explained and defined, though it is easier to describe, and easiest simply to experience. That is the quality of Moments-they are out there, just beyond your eyelids.

Years before the Gay Moment, I shared my freshman suite at college with a kid who is now a famous gay playwright. (I see from Playbill that he lies about his age, so I will suppress his name.) We were the grossest mismatch in the class of '77. He had a camp sensibility; I read Dostoyevsky and taped a picture of Solzhenitsyn to my door. The bath of lukewarm water between us was the son of a dentist. One day I overheard the future playwright murmur, "Lesley Gore: She was a goddess!" Then I had no notion what he meant. But now of course I know. Anyone would know. It's the Gay Moment.

Flash forward to 1999. The last weekend of June was coming up, and my trainer was not happy about it. The source of his funk was the Gay Pride Parade, which takes over Fifth Avenue. He himself is gay, living in Chelsea, weekending on Fire Island. But the parade clogs the sidewalks, and strikes him as too solemn and political. "Why can't it be more like Carnival?" he asked. Thirty years ago, drag queens were rioting in Village bars against police harassment. Now my trainer criticizes the sensibility of one of the city's largest parades. It's the Gay Moment.

Is Jar Jar Binks, a creature in The Phantom Menace, gay? In the wake of Ellen DeGeneres and Tinky Winky the Teletubby, this question has been seriously discussed. The national conversation on sexual orientation has moved from a comedienne to a toddler-surrogate with an antenna on his head to a digitalized monster, long ago and far away. With omnipresence comes triviality. Forget whether Disney gives benefits to the companions of gay employees. In the Gay Moment, it's only a matter of time before the Mouse does a contemporary fairy tale.

Turning to the dead, who has a closet in his coffin this week? Gay polemicists are claiming Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed as an item. It will be the first time Larry Kramer writes for the Southern Partisan. Concerning the Founders, I got one angry letter asking why my book on Washington concealed the fact that he was gay, as evidenced by his friendship with "known gays" like Hamilton and Lafayette. Washington's history of sober flirtations, and Hamilton's history of less sober ones, make this merely absurd. On the other hand, I did a double take when I read this contemporary description of Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention. "From his long continuance in single life, no doubt but he has made the vow of celibacy. He speaks warmly of the Ladies notwithstanding." No one would have given this a second look 20 years ago, or probably 200 years ago. But in the Gay Moment?

There have been two previous Moments in the 20th century. Irish Catholics had one from about 1900 to World War II; Jews followed them, until yesterday. The Irish Moment crystallized around athletes, actors, pols, and cops-tough guys you liked. A typical figure was Fr. Francis P. Duffy, chaplain of the 165th Infantry ("The Fighting Irish") in World War I. There is a statue of him in Times Square.

He grips a Bible; he could knock your block off; he is smiling. The Jewish Moment threw up comics, writers, and intellectuals-wise guys you liked. A typical figure was Saul Bellow, whose style was criticized, when he first appeared, as "Yinglish." But this was in fact its allure, rattling like an express subway train from con men to Nietzsche.

These Moments are over. Here and there you can find stragglers-Irish bond traders in dark downtown restaurants, knocking back scotches and insulting one another and themselves; Jewish psychoanalysts, empathic, critical, and neurotic as their patients. But no one cares. They have lost the ear of America. John F. Kennedy's election in 1960, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in Beyond the Melting Pot, was not the culmination of the Irish Moment, but its tombstone.

When did Jews vanish? When Woody Allen married Soon-Yi? When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated? No matter, they are gone. Jackie Mason tends the cemetery.

What are the common traits of groups in their Moments? Irish, Jews, and gays all have high verbal skills-essential for attracting attention, stimulating and entertaining the national audience. A group in its Moment is one to which, as Arthur Miller put it, attention must be paid. The verbalists occupied similarly oblique positions-accepted enough to be comprehensible, still remote enough to be piquant.