Pumpkin Face Masks and BoSox Body Wax

I’m totally confused by Americans’ attitude toward gay people. The gay playwright Nicky Silver made a pilot this year for Fox about a kid whose dad left his mom for another guy, and, to his shock, focus groups sympathized with the father. Yet states keep striking down gay marriage propositions.

I, however, am very clear about my feelings toward gay men: I don’t like them. I think they should be allowed to do whatever they want, love whomever they want, and I don’t mind hanging out with them at work, at dinner, or in public steambaths. But I can’t help but feel hostile toward the preening, self-involved drama queens who feel like traitors to the gender and all the toughness we have to struggle to employ.

In fact, the only group of people who make me cringe more than gay people are the Boston Red Sox. That’s mainly because I’ve always hated New England for its cold, insular, arrogant, pedigree-based society. Also, I’m from New Jersey, so I hate just about everything. Partly because everything hates us.

So I got a particular thrill out of watching a screening tape in which the world champion Red Sox on Tuesday’s season premiere of Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” The whole episode feels like a dare, like something frat boys would force a losing team to do: Winner goes to the White House, loser gets depilated. While I was watching, I pictured each snippet of the show on the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium. The crowd would explode at Johnny Damon sitting in the media room at the spring training stadium turned into a salon, his hair wrapped in tinfoil and hands dipped in paraffin, while knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield asks: “How gay do you feel right now?”

They would cheer derisively at catcher Jason Varitek, laying on a table complaining that waxing hurts more than blocking the plate and being told by fellow catcher Doug Mirabelli, “You flew all the way here in a helicopter just to get your back waxed. That’s really gay.”

And, when the Yankees were threatening in the bottom of the ninth, they could project images of Kevin Millar, wearing a spa robe, his feet in a bowl of water with flower petals in it, about to get a pumpkin face mask. The crowd noise would be so intense, even Yankee Jason Giambi’s shriveled body could hit a home run.

But when the Red Sox fans, at a spring training game, cheered for “Queer Eye” host Carson Kressley in a pink, fully bedazzled BoSox uniform with a popped collar, I couldn’t help but like Kressley for his honesty and the crowd for displaying a tolerance I can’t always muster.

And, after a season in which I constantly rooted against him, Damon seemed pretty cool when he asked grooming expert Kyan Douglas if he’d spot him doing naked pull-ups.

I even got a little choked up as Little League players, at the most insecure stage of their masculinity, chanted “Fab Five! Fab Five!” before they played a game with the Red Sox and the “Queer Eye” hosts.

Sure, only the non-Latino, safely married, non-born-again players got “Queered,” and they do play in a liberal state that legalized gay marriage.

But letting gay men take over their locker room to teach us that athletes and gays have more in common than an unnatural love of parades was a brave expenditure of their capital as baseball’s heroes. The Yankees traditionally use their World Series capital for bar fights.

After a lifetime of Red Sox hating, I’m finally able to be happy for New England.

Although people like me are stuck desperately trying to establish my own identity by mocking others, the Red Sox are comfortable enough to spend an afternoon getting micro-dermabrasions and aromatherapy.

If they’re going to be this cool, I guess I can live with them winning a World Series every 86 years.

Meanwhile, I’ve transferred all my disdain onto Jonathan Antin, the straight L.A. hairstylist in “Blowout,” a reality show that follows “Queer Eye.”

He charges $5,000 for a home visit, throws hair product at the wall and makes declarations such as: “Some people say you are not what you do. I am what I do. I am hair.”

I would rather watch a combined Gay Pride/World Series parade in Boston than one guy of any sexuality who happens to be hair.