The news is so gay

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I read the news today.  And oh boy was it gay.  Too gay, not gay enough, dangerously gay.

What is going on with the cultural consciousness of America that it is so obsessed with all things gay?

It started out with Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir.  Apparently two Canadian journalists called him “too gay for figure skating.”  Hello?  Figure skating?  Gay?  Going on the Joy Behar show, Weir said that he supported “free speech” but asked why commentators never talked about anyone being “too butch” for a sport.  He also pointed out that there are a lot of kids like him and he worried about the effect such comments would have on them.

Over at Fox News, there’s a nice little controversy over whether reality TV starlet Kim Zolciak is “really” a lesbian or whether her relationship with another woman  is a “publicity stunt.”

She may be known for her scandalous relationship with a married man, but word has emerged that “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Kim Zolciak is now batting for the same team.Over the weekend, the 31-year-old divorced mother of two stepped out with DJ Tracy Young, her apparent lesbian lover of three months and the lady behind the remix of her dance single “Tardy for the Party”  at “The Blacks’ Annual Gala” in Miami.

Then of course there’s the ongoing gays in the military controversy.  According to an AP story from earlier today, some Republicans have already dismissed the military’s planned 9-month study of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as “biased” in favor of repealing the policy.

‘Many of us on this committee have serious concerns with putting our men and women in uniform through such a divisive debate while they are fighting two wars,’ said Rep. Buck McKeon of California, the full committee’s top Republican.

McKeon is also unhappy with the selection of the RAND Corp. think tank to do much of the legwork for the study… McKeon told Pentagon officials working on the review that the company had “significant shortcomings” in past work analyzing the issue and partnered with a group advocating repeal last year.

Although all of these stories are fascinating in their own right– especially the one involving reality TV starlets– I think the more interesting trend is the need to mark off spaces and bodies and even sports and soldiers as either “gay” or “straight.”

This need is the result of 150 years of the history of sexuality, but because part of the history of sexuality is to insist that sex is “natural” and does not have a history, we don’t usually think too much about it.

Our current beliefs that there are gay people and there are straight people and that therefore spaces and bodies are easily separated into one or the other began with the Victorians (as most of our culture did).  Victorian sexologists invented the homosexual (and the heterosexual) as stable entities, persons rather than practices, nouns instead of verbs.

As a society, America has been policing the “sexuality line” as carefully as it polices the “color line” ever since.  Indeed, the color line and the sexuality line have always been related projects with the protection of straight white women and men from Black men but also homosexual contagion at the center of much legal and medical intervention.  And, like the color line, the sexuality line is equally unclear, with people passing back and forth and making the inhabitants of either side anxious about identity confusion and monstrous mixtures.

But this has been going on for 150 years.  Why is today’s news so anxious about policing the sexuality line?  What exactly is going on in our culture that the news is so gay?

Perhaps it is the result of economic collapse and military quagmires?  Perhaps the same forces that push Tea Party members to rage against big government push journalists to express anxiety about collapsing sexual borders?  If Olympic athletes can be both amazingly strong and disciplined and gay men, then how do we mark gay men as “weak” and straight men as “strong”?  If soldiers are allowed to have desires for humans rather than for the “opposite” sex, then how can masculinity and femininity be upheld?  After all, when the homosexual was invented, s/he was invented as a gender invert- a feminine man or masculine woman.  What if a soldier can be a masculine man in love with another masculine man?  The entire sex/gender system, what queer theorist Judith Butler calls “the heterosexual matrix,” collapses.  And what if hot starlets have hot female lovers?  How can they be “sexy” and “feminine” and also lesbian if lesbians are imagined as masculine to keep straight women girlie?

Suddenly all the privileges of being straight and white and properly gendered are up for grabs.  White, middle class status is no longer a guarantee of a good future in bed or in business.   What can we do?  Go join a white racist movement like the Tea Party and rage against Obama and social security.  Or write and read stories that reaffirm our sexual status as stable and unassailable.

We tell ourselves that we are either straight or gay, male or female, masculine or feminine.  The lives of ice skaters, starlets and soldiers reassure us that heterosexuality, the last “truth” of modernity and barely contested site of social privilege, will be  left standing.