When gay lost its outre

In 1988, when Divine showed up at the pop-cultural cocktail party, escorted by John Waters and the cast of “Hairspray” the movie, people were not quite sure what to do with her ... him ... her. Dubbing the film a “cult classic” made things a little easier -- cross-dressers and drag queens were traditional hallmarks of a “cult classic,” along with zombies, incestuous relationships and ax murderers.

Now of course “Hairspray” is a Broadway smash, billed as the Feel-Good Musical of the Century, and Harvey Fierstein reprising Divine’s Edna Turnblad is considered much more charming than avant-garde -- the man served as the unofficial grand marshal at last year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In a big red dress. As Mrs. Claus.

This was probably not the morning in America Ronald Reagan had in mind. Ten years ago, the sight of steely eyed Terence Stamp wearing a big, pink wig-hat and glitter eye shadow, mouthing the words to “Dancing Queen” in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” left middle-of-the-road moviegoers gasping for air.

Since then, gender outrageousness has become more commonplace, sifted and stirred into the mainstream by everyone from Jerry Springer to Oprah to “The Lion King’s” Timon (“Whaddya want me to do, dress up in drag and dance the hula?”). Between Nathan Lane, who voiced Timon as well as Snowbell in “Stuart Little 1” and “Stuart Little 2,” and Eddie Murphy in “Shrek” (“I’m a donkey on the edge!”) many American children will be conversant in camp by the time they’re 6.

The gay aesthetic has long shaped the arts, especially the performing arts. But some within the gay community feel that the mainstreaming of certain aspects of gay culture, including drag and high camp, has come at the cost of its political edge. Outlaws of all sorts define the middle by creating the boundaries; through outrageousness, they tinker with the definitions of acceptable. What will the world have come to if Fierstein, whose 1982 Tony-winning “Torch Song Trilogy” blew the closet to pieces and dumped New York’s bathhouse scene into the laps of theatergoing Middle America, becomes just another portly man in a dress?

Madison Avenue to Main Street

It isn’t just drag and camp that have gone mainstream. Madison Avenue has recently recognized the gay and lesbian market, tailoring same-sex ads first for gay publications, then for billboards on bus stops and along the 405. Thom Filicia of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is shilling for Pier 1, and Grand Marnier has included in its new “conversations that matter” campaign: “Your sister is finally getting remarried. Her fiance’s name is Jill.”

For 15 minutes, thousands of people were actually getting married in San Francisco and now the “gay agenda” is a keystone of the presidential campaign and daily comic strips that are not Doonesbury. “Metrosexual” has become shorthand for straight guys who shop, and decorate, and groom themselves like gay guys; and the word “queer” has been transformed from a pejorative to a semi-snooty school of thought -- in even casual conversation, “queer” is likely to be followed by terms such as “cinema” or “aesthetic” or “studies.”

Such are the manifestations of the much-scrutinized Growing Acceptance of Gays in America. This attitude shift has been obvious in the zeitgeist for several years, keeping the cast of “Will & Grace” in a perpetual state of Emmy nomination, making “The L Word” the new “Knots Landing,” “Queer Eye” the new “Queen for a Day” and recently allowing the butch and smoldering Frank Langella to perfect the art of swish in the just-opened play “Match” without causing little old ladies from Tenafly, N.J., who just loved him in “Dracula,” to faint at the mere prospect.

Gay culture has always been tricky to define, now more than ever. Paul Rudnick was recently taken to task in the New York Observer for littering the New York stage with trashy gay plays in the name of social equality. And Fierstein, who caught flak from gays and straights for “Torch Song’s” premise that gay men might want something like a nuclear family of their own, agrees that much of gay culture seems too concerned with the mainstream and not enough about the quality of the art.

Although he was thrilled at the response his Thanksgiving Day appearance evoked --”millions of people just screaming my name, and with the Macy’s parade, millions isn’t even an exaggeration” -- Fierstein was very aware that this was the only way he, an openly gay man and longtime gay rights advocate, was going to get on a float. “Having Edna Turnblad play Mrs. Claus made it safer,” he said in a phone interview from New York, “like we were all in on the joke. But the only real person there was me, a gay man.”

He sees much of the popularization of gay sensibility as “winks to straight people. We used to raise up the nation, now we’re trying to prove that we too can wear T-shirts that say ‘I’m With Stupid.’ ”

The old joke, he says, goes: “What do you get if you put three gay men in a room? A musical”; now “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” essentially a product-driven makeover show, has become emblematic of a community that used to pride itself on its devotion to the high arts. The show is fine for what it is, Fierstein says -- a fashionable security blanket for the straight community. “It’s saying ‘You’re OK, we’re OK, it’s OK, we’re going to get through this,’ which is a necessary step. Not the prettiest step, not the highest we could reach for.”

But progress often has a price. “In our efforts to homogenize,” Fierstein says, “we’ve dumbed down gay culture.”

A window on the world

“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony,” wrote Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.”

Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: “It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

For so long, the queer voice has been an outsider’s voice, outraged and outrageous, keeping tabs on what was really going on at the party, all the undercurrents and hypocrisies, the mysterious exits and rustlings off stage. Tony Kushner did not just deconstruct the impact of AIDS in “Angels in America,” he took on marriage, motherhood, politics, racism, true love, religion and the nature of heaven -- all through the prism of a disparate assortment of people. In the work of Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams, the repression of sexuality is symbolic of the many lies society tells its members and its members tell themselves. The French film “La Cage aux Folles” was not so much about drag diva-dom as it was about the absurdity, and impossibility, of trying to regulate everyone into some sort of gender sameness and about the strange nature of love. (The American remake is a good example of what happens when the gay sensibility is dumbed down.)

Most important, the queer aesthetic provided a necessary alternative to the dominant culture, an insistent reminder that, as Shakespeare was so fond of pointing out through his gender-bending characters, all is not what it seems. “Camp was necessary because it provided a way to take control over the negative images of queer folk in the mainstream culture,” says Thomas King, director of graduate studies at Brandeis University, who has written extensively on gender politics and the history of camp. “In this alternative world, norms of gender, domesticity, privacy and sexuality could all be replayed to new effects. Now, we’re all fighting for privacy, domesticity and marriage at the price of a collective identity.”

What is lost, he says, is the chance to use sexuality as a way to rethink social norms in general, to enrich society beyond the traditional definition of family. “In Provincetown these days you see men taking their babies to Herring Cove Beach,” King says. “You wonder what will happen to cruising when men carry their babies to Herring Cove Beach.”

It’s gone beyond wondering; he has actually seen what will happen. “Men are being asked to police themselves, to keep themselves family-presentable. And there has been very little protest, which is too bad.”

Not bad because King doesn’t like children -- he does and thinks gay parenting is good -- but he worries that the pressure to get married and have children will put many gays and lesbians at odds with their creative desires.

“There can be a lot of homophobia around the investment this culture makes in children as the future,” he says. “That is one way gays were marginalized -- without children, they literally had no future. But that is also one of the reasons they were often so creative, to fight against that, to leave a legacy through the culture. It would be terrible if we lost those alternatives.”

So what happens to the outsider when he’s finally invited in, the sexual outlaw when he’s suddenly made legal?

“One must mourn his passing,” says John Rechy, whose books “City of Night” and “The Sexual Outlaw” were groundbreaking documentaries of gay life on the fringe. “But I hope gay people don’t become so entirely assimilated that our very rich differences are subsumed.”

An abiding believer in the outlaw aesthetic -- “gay men should not adopt the sophomoric model of heterosexual dating; gay men should always have sex first” -- Rechy is thrilled by changes that allow gays and lesbians to enjoy the full rights of society, but less happy about how popular culture has absorbed some aspects of queer culture while ghettoizing others.

“All these mainstream bookstores have their ‘gay studies’ departments and that’s where all the gay writers go automatically,” he says. “Most of my books are not about the gay experience, but that is where you will find them. If Proust were writing today,” he added, “he’d be in the gay studies section.”

Rechy fears gay culture is being neutered to make it more palatable for public consumption. He hates “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” -- “the men are like gay nannies, catering to straight people, trying to make them prettier” -- and “Will & Grace”--”Will never has sex. What kind of a gay man is that?”

Assimilation often courts obliteration and Rechy fears society is headed for a “dull, gray sameness.”

“We are not just like you,” he says, “any more than women are the same as men. If we try to get rid of the differences, we lose the richness of our identity. Liberation is not about sameness.”

Still, it may be dangerous to too closely compare sexual assimilation with race or cultural assimilation.

“The edge between inside and outside has always been weird,” says David Ehrenstein, author of “Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000.” “Gay culture has always existed within straight culture, unlike the blacks or the Jews or the Irish who were literally ‘over there.’ We’ve always been there, just no one’s paid attention.”

Now, he says, straight people have discovered that they need to know who is gay and what that means just to keep the conversation going. “One has to do a lot of reading,” he says, laughing, “get the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall CD and the movie list. It’s a project.”

But in the new world order, will Judy, symbol of the high-wire act between diva-dom and self-destruction, still be necessary? Of course, Ehrenstein says; there will always be drama. “If there isn’t opera involved,” he says, “I for one am not interested.”

At home in the heartland

The biggest change may not be the personalities, but the setting. Until now, much of the art and literature that has come out of gay culture has been urban, the city as a crazy haven, a smorgasbord after the fast. “The gay story was all about getting out of Oshkosh and getting to the San Francisco or New York or L.A., the Emerald City, which is why ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is so resonant,” Ehrenstein says. “Now the story is changing.”

If you don’t have to worry about getting arrested for having a party in your small-town or suburban house, he says, you might actually stay in that small town or suburb, and this will have an impact on your worldview, for good or ill. But even so, Ehrenstein is not worried that gay culture will lose its specialness. Cheever did OK in the suburbs, after all.

“Of course, if you don’t have a giant opposition,” he says, “you can’t sit around and moan. Then it becomes more about how you can increase your fabulousness.”

Fabulousness is, of course, a relative term. James McCourt, author of “Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985,” thinks social justice trumps whatever the perception of queer culture is every time. “All those fabulous queens were, and are a small minority of the queer population,” he said via e-mail. “In the lower-middle and working classes all those queer boys and responsible lesbians look forward to no longer living unfabulous lives of pain and exclusion and readily embrace the unfabulous lives of parents with day jobs who don’t go out dancing at night, don’t take Ecstasy and maybe listen to a little Beethoven.”

In America, he adds, the tension has long been between society and the individual. “The great problem of liberation is how to make a benevolent aggregate out of multiple personalities (often disordered).”

Change also doesn’t happen without, well, change. Outrageous behavior -- that cutting humor, that stinging social deconstruction -- is often a defense mechanism, as every fat girl with a great sense of humor knows, a way to take control of a situation in which you do not have much control.

“I’ve known quite a few fat girls, and they have tended to be gutsy,” McCourt says. “I say be fat and flawless if that’s you, but I’ve also found that when the pounds have come off, it wasn’t. Turns out it was a tax on the heart after all.”

An aesthetic born of oppression remains three-fourths oppression no matter how sophisticated, witty and insightful it might seem. Rechy believes that removing the outsider status will only encourage artists to move past chronicling the gay experience and create a broader canvas.

McCourt is not saying his rosary either. “Of course something is lost,” he says, pointing out that after the French Revolution, the music of Jean Baptiste Lully, the longtime court composer whose work helped create French opera, fell out of favor. “But soon enough,” McCourt said, “there was Berlioz.”

Mary McNamara can be reached at calendar@latimes.com.