A while back, when it was "leaked" that the 600th issue of Archie comics would be a wedding announcement, I myself made a modest proposal. Today, the New York Times published an Archie follow that pulls my facetious wishful thinking into the real -- albeit comic -- world. Sometimes, buried sentences such as these just cry out for attention:

"The polls that I've seen ran about 80/20, Betty over Veronica, with Jughead continually coming in a strong third," said Mr. [Michael E.] Uslan, a comic-book historian, a longtime "Archie" fan and a producer of the big-screen "Batman" films.

 

A strong third! Right after Veronica! My felt-capped head is reeling. Did other poll choices include Veronica's tycoon father, Mr. Lodge? (I always thought he was really Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) Mr. Lodge seems quite svelte, and rich: a catch.

"What is now proved was once only imagined." Yes, William Blake is almost always right.

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So who will the wrinkled redhead bring to bed -- assuming he hasn't already?

As a fourth-grade student at Midwood, Brooklyn's P.S. 238, I struggled with my carrot-top best friend, another Jeffrey, over who was Archie and who Reggie. (Jeffrey and I also shared the same weird middle name!) But as any constant Out There reader can anticipate, although I studied those comics hard to see which of the two I wanted to be, I was much more "interested" in the other light-dark pair, sunny blonde Betty and well-born brunette Veronica.

In those dim times, little boys as well as big divided the world of girls (white girls, natch) into blondes, brunettes, and redheads. When we stuffed the corner-grocery cardboard ballot box with our choice for New York's own Miss Rheingold, most of the votes were really for Kodacolor hair.

Miss Rheingold, by the way, was a big deal. In 1959, total votes were over 22 million; only the presidential election drew more. Pre-Birds Tippi Hedren, Hope Lange and even Grace Kelly were sometime candidates. (Grace Kelly was rejected for being "too thin.")

 

Anyway, all the boys divided our little-girl friends into Bettys and Veronicas. (Where is Debby Kinsbrunner now? She and I once had a date our mothers took us to, at the local NBC studio to be audience for the hot new quiz show, Hugh Downs' Concentration. Debby was a definite Betty.)

All these years later, we finally know on whose hand Archie will place that ring. Any guesses? (Careful, spoiler follows.)

Not Betty's!

And not Veronica's!

Yes, turns out that I am Jughead, and Jughead, Archie's betrothed, is happier than he ever thought possible.

Reggie is furious, as I always hoped he would be.

 

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It was 1 a.m., and I was sipping from the ever-full pitcher of That '70s Show, but then a commercial came on that by some bit of late-night laziness I didn't mute:

"Scott, I want you to do something."

"Not doing that again. Got burned."

What!? My cultural gaydar  -- infinitely more accurate than my personal one, and we won't go there -- started the beat beat beat of its tom-tom. Then as I watched, my socks, which were still on, got knocked off, and you will see why when you click on the ad above. Here's the spot's soft-porn dialogue (which I painstakingly copied, but then found already typed on the Seattle food blog The C Is for Cocina, one of two that also picked this up):

Toaster: Scott, I want you to do something.
Scott: Not doing that again. Got burned.
Toaster: We both enjoyed that. Now I want you to introduce my greatest creation: the new Toasty Torpedo.
Scott: The new Toasty Torpedo?
Toaster: Yes, Scott. You make one.
Scott: Me?
Toaster: Put it in me, Scott. It's over a foot of flavor on a slim, sleek ciabatta for only four dollars. Say it, Scott.
Scott: Only four dollars?
Toaster: Say it sexy.
Scott: Only four dollars.
Toaster: Sexier...
Scott (sexy voice): Only four dollars. 

Put it in me, Scott?

My oh my. Beam me up, Scottie!

Nitro Group's Quiznos ads are often what was once called "edgy"; you may remember the lady who devoured the $5 bill. Here, though, we've crossed a more significant line. The oven's Hal voice takes the neurotic, ultimately evil homo vibe between that pre-Stonewall male mainframe and cosmic trade Keir Dullea and inverts it to effective popcult humor without a shred of nasty effeminizing or butch Superbowl payback. 

Of course, queer progress is hard to come by, or even measure. Just yesterday, the governor of Vermont said that he would veto any gay-marriage bill brought to his desk -- let's hope the lame duck is overridden. Yet some of the most optimistic evidence that bigotry is going down can be found not in the courts or even on the streets, but in the common language of commerce.

Now, should I do my duty and buy a Torpedo sub? It's only four bucks, which is less than two new New York subway fares (if that obscene increase goes through). 

Let me see who's selling them....

                             A Hollywood Pastiche

 

Although the event may already seem fossil material, the 2009 Oscars were held Sunday in the bloated Kodak Theater at Hollywood and Highland. I recognized the steroided scene immediately, because it's right around the corner from the deco side-street hotel I stayed at in November, ensconced with that year's USC-Annenberg Getty arts journalism fellows.

 

Our small hotel was caught between a tourist behemoth (theater, shopping plaza, lights, lights, lights) and a seedy, winding street abutting rough, treed hills -- forestry so close that I was followed early one evening by a companionable raccoon, who was on his way to the mall's Sunglass Hut for replacements.

 

Every year I vow not to watch the Oscars, and every year I relent, carping and sighing, congratulating myself when I guess right and belittling the whole old-fart shebang when I'm wrong. If you're in the industry, there are occasionally real reasons to be upset, as dapper screenwriter and novelist Howard Rodman wrote (on Facebook, natch) about his Saturday attendance as a Spirit Awards finalist for his fine Savage Grace screenplay. Those awards honor independent film, which category is measured, I suppose, by a scale of money. That night, comeback kid Mickey Rourke did win for his wrestling role -- he lost the less spiritual prize to Sean Penn the next day -- and at the mike the talented tabloid parody of dissolution rambled on, thanking everyone he had ever met, including his dead dog.

 

 

 

Well, almost everyone. I hope Howard doesn't mind if I lift part of his plaint:

If there were one discordant note, it was that neither Mickey Rourke, who won for best actor for The Wrestler, nor Darren Aronofsky, who directed The Wrestler, nor Scott Franklin, who produced The Wrestler, in all of their separate acceptance speeches, ever once uttered the name of Robert D. Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler.

This was a spec script. This was an original.

 

I have been, in my life, saddened and brought low by the death of a dog. I understand, and understand deeply, the grief it can occasion. But it still seems wrong to me that Mickey Rourke's dog, of blessed memory, should have so much acceptance-speech time devoted to him, and the writer of the screenplay without which Mr. Rourke would not be standing there -- None at all.

 

Segue now to a screenwriter who, the next evening, was allowed his place and used it to mark another death and perhaps prevent some more. For a bittersweet Oscar moment, I urge readers to click here.

 

Just in case, I'll add some text:

 

When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.

 

We identify a dance by its choreographer and a dress by its designer, but a screenwriter's name is rarely connected to his or her work, which is surprising for a field that brings compressed creativity so close to so many. Let's give credit, then, where it's due: The soulful young fellow with his heart on his sleeve is Dustin Lance Black, who won his gilded man for his original screenplay Milk. The more familiar Sean Penn won his man for his portrayal of Harvey Milk, the assassinated gay politico. As he introduced finalist Penn, Oscar veteran Robert De Niro quipped, "How for so many years did he get all those jobs playing straight men?" Timid laughter followed, but the sadness of lost opportunity underlying De Niro's compliment was apparent to many gay actors and fans.

 

After the November election,  I joined hundreds of midnight demonstrators who had gathered outside the Kodak to voice their disappointment and fury that California's right of same-sex couples to marry was snatched away. Can you vote on rights the way you vote on films? No, of course not. But to prove how wrong that is, we'd have to pay some attention to our nation's Documentary category -- and we all know how badly those serious people dress.

 

The next month, the day before Pearl Harbor, my longtime guy and I got married, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. We read Walt Whitman poems to each other at the ceremony, ate as many Wellfleet oysters as possible, and a tiny coconut and lime-curd cake declared us "Married at Last." That quiet day was much more moving than we had anticipated and, beyond the politics of equality, was without doubt something worth doing, worth having, worth fighting for.

 

 

 

 

Just a couple of blocks from the Kodak Theater is another Hollywood landmark, less flashy and much more precious. Its early sign read "Musso-Franks Grill" and the present proper name is The Musso & Frank Grill, but everyone who knows "the oldest restaurant in Hollywood -- since 1919" calls it Musso's. The façade is nondescript, but pull open the front door and you enter a ... theater, a theater showing silent pictures.

 

It's really a double bill, because the left room is all tall wooden booths and a long counter, the short grill-man behind it pouring and flipping, while in the bar and supper room on the right, the lights dim to allow an equal flapper sparkle of diamonds and martinis. Yes, movie lovers, this is a place that the genius of cinema created, a Hollywood vault in which time gently rests. That fugitive murmur you hear combines the whine of old clocks with layers of ordinary conversation, and the silvery clink behind it is a sound only a spoon in a glass can make.

 

I sit alone in my booth this Saturday morning waiting for my waiter, who finally brings me the requested pot of coffee. As I sip, immersed in the almost floral staleness of a space that has seen only customers' costumes change, an elderly man walks in from the parking lot's elaborate rear entrance. He moves slowly, relying upon his cane, but glides so easily behind a nearby table that I know he has been here before.

 

He is carefully dressed: pressed khaki pants, a pearl-colored shirt of what looks to be thin cotton, and a rather dowdy derby-brown cardigan. His shoes, not new, have taken a high polish.

 

After five minutes he's joined by another man, also in his 80s, equally neat though much more spry. And soon after him comes a third, a bit younger and notably winsome. His socks are sky blue, like Fred Astaire's.

 

As I watch, my flannel cakes and bacon arrive. Musso's flannel cakes are a cross between swollen flapjacks and skinny crepes; they carry a toasted, buttery mouthfeel and faint flourish of vanilla. Flannel cakes were once an American-kitchen staple, but soon they will be gone. Flannel cakes. Flannel cakes. This may be my last opportunity to type those words in present tense.

 

The three gentlemen are having flannel cakes, too. They're obviously old friends, close friends, but they speak rarely and without fresh animation -- like a married couple, I think, a married triple.

 

Faint, I take a breath. These cakes are delicious. They are at once the thing, and the memory of the thing.

 

How can all this survive?

 

And then I understand for certain what I should have guessed. These three friends have come to breakfast regularly for years, for decades. They may have, in any combination, been lovers, fought over lovers, mourned lovers, hands on shoulders, in all kinds of weather, for better and for worse.   

 

They are, in fact, part of my family, my historical family -- exactly what the promise of gay love and marriage, in its past and future forms, is destined to fulfill, and just what we writers will inevitably write about. 

 

 

 

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While waiting for embargoed reviews of Milk, you may wish to see my just-posted Obit Mag essay about Harvey Milk and the potential rebirth of present-day gay activism. It's great to have any kind of Obama-esque inspiration, but I am still convinced that solid changes come from real and metaphorical streets.

I ask this leading question because, though we know the answer, we persist in champing at the usual bit. Almost no one running for office will discuss the arts or something as specific as gay rights when business and war put national, even international, livelihood at risk. Yet the health and some of the wealth of civil society depends upon the health of the arts, upon the survival of its small as well as large institutions, and upon the strength of its journalist criticism, now under mindless attack.

Our souls too depend upon the arts, but those balance sheets are harder to tally.

Just as crucial, civil rights define our "our," and they too have not been assured by any candidate. Three states, for example, are voting to forbid same-sex marriage; the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by Bill Clinton, already sends a wide, bigoted signal. Be grateful for a hospital visit, toleration, an invisible "best friend"? Not on your life.  

Some of my spleen comes directly from my memory of the young Matthew Shepard (photo above), who was murdered 10 years ago. One tonic response was The Laramie Project, a play.  

Here's mine.

*  *  *

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...Yesterday's court-tossed wedding bouquet was caught by me and thousands of others who will visit City Halls all over California in a state of "finally" and make it legal. Of course, the decision to allow queer marriage can be reversed by referendumb as soon as November. In the meantime, here's a quasi-update to my very last, coincidental post, "Gay Rice":

So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."  No idea, but I'm relieved the justice system finally caught up with ABC-TV. I've always depended upon what William Blake once wrote: "What is now proved was once only imagin'd" -- even if imagin'd on Brothers and Sisters.

When that happens, I'll take Guess it's time to take a piece of my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Down the Aisle, Slowly

It took the supposedly liberal New York City mayor David Dinkins ages to come to his political and humanistic senses and order City Hall to issue domestic partnership certificates. That was January, 1993, more than 15 years ago, and it seemed late in coming even then. No money for city employee health benefits, previously promised, came with the mingy declaration; Dinkins was and will forever be an accountant. (Sample certificate is above. I don't know who the fine gents on this particular document are, although one is named Jeffrey.)

So, on March 1, the moment we were allowed, my eternally patient partner and I registered. In spite of my constitutional inclination to be first, we let two ladies in Teamster jackets precede us, so our certificate says number 2. We used off-brand chocolate donuts from a cart for our wedding cake.

I wrote about this before it happened for the Village Voice, where I worked, but for the life of me I can't find a copy of the piece anywhere to post and show you. It did include a stock wedding-shot with my very own face pasted over those of both the lacy bride and tuxedoed groom -- nutty, but it attracted attention. I was a restaurant critic at the time and genuinely anonymous, but I couldn't imagine a maitre d' who would rip out that queer item and tape it to his station: a restaurant critic could never be anything but a restaurant critic.

My article mildly scorned the idea of gay marriage. Why duplicate the broken-down, female-as-chattel cornerstone of bourgeois stability? Let my (sorry, our) registration be remonstrance to ...

Well, the piece advertised the political festivities of March 1, and that was that.

Why TV Counts

It's Sunday, Mother's Day, 11 p.m., and I have just watched the season finale of Brothers and Sisters, an ABC series I don't usually sample because my no longer eternally patient partner can't stomach the maudlin Sally Fields (me, I will always see her on a table screaming to organize a downtrodden shop) and wonders how the tremulous Ally McVeal can still make a living.

The episode was constructed around a gay-male wedding. Yes, it's a wedding; no, it's a ceremony; the sympathetic script goes blah blah blah. The main family is all wry and gooey with acceptance and love, while the other dad and mom, in an Arizona tract home, won't be bothered to come. "Try to understand we're not bad people," the distant father says to his son's groom-to-be, before secretly passing to him the Family Wedding Cuff-Links to give to his errant boy. It's a sniffle-evoking gesture, an absent parent's love in the form of two cold pieces of metal.

>

So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."

When that happens, I'll take my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Oh, don't think I didn't pump out real tears when the brothers and sisters toasted and hugged the two gray-suited fellows in love. Those tears aren't frivolous, not at all. They run down my cheeks to mark and anoint every scenario of hope that popular culture offers to my potential sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters. The minor generosity of this workaday script may have earth-shaking results when taken in by just that boy or girl. It will award brave and curious children with the pride of permission.

Even in its twilight, television has spectacular power to free our younger selves. What our parents do or don't do shouldn't concern us at all.

A Gay Marriage Reprint

Although I can't find my 1993 Voice piece, here's something I wrote (published May 23, 2004) for the Op-Ed page of the Philadelphia Inquirer the day after gay weddings began in Massachusetts. Again, TV is central:

Justices of the peace across Massachusetts opened for unusual business Monday at 12:01 a.m., and as is his wont, The Tonight Show's Jay Leno found a joke in it. A government office actually working when you need one, he wondered. Maybe we should all say we're gay.

The startling photos filled the covers of most newspapers the next day: the very first female couples and male couples being married, officially wed, in these United States.

Yes, civil marriages of gay citizens have taken place recently in San Francisco and elsewhere, but these are in legal limbo. There were even the reported half-dozen marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples by Boulder County, Colo., in 1975. But Monday (which also marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education) made history. Now, under law, these Bay State knots are truly tied.

I happen to be a gay man in my 50s. I came out just after Stonewall -- that's June 1969, in case you've forgotten, when furious gay men, drag queens and lesbians told abusive and corrupt police that they wouldn't take it anymore and stormed Greenwich Village streets. For many years I wrote, spoke and marched for what was then called gay liberation and is now called, more quietly, gay rights. My partner and I have been together for 27 years; we were, in fact, the second couple to register in New York's city hall as domestic partners, a concept I may claim some credit for originating.

Yet, when I saw these love-besotted folks and their friends and families grinning, hugging and crying on the network news, I was wonderstruck. The next day, at the newsstand, I was still incredulous. It may sound odd, but in spite of decades of wearing my gay heart and mind on my sleeve, the achievement of legal marriage for the likes of me is something that, until Monday, was literally unimaginable. It was as if I had been jogging along on some interminable gay-rights road and suddenly a bus with thousands of shoes tied to the bumper sped by. Just married. Just amazing.

It seems I am not alone among my gay-pride contemporaries in feeling this way about the reality of same-sex marriage. "It's beyond anything we saw as possible," Peg, from New York, told me. "We were just barely becoming legitimate, and then this... . It's like instead of renting your house, you own it."

My old friend and marching buddy Melvyn, in San Diego, agrees completely: Marriage was never in the cards. That domestic-partnership registration, so long-sought and hard-fought, is now the fallback position for those who previously wouldn't give gay rights the time of day is miraculous. We each recall the many times one or the other of us addressed hostile or queasy groups of students, librarians, police officers, trying to explain the ultimately ordinary facts of gay life, but actually serving as initial real-world exposures to a species our audiences knew only as artistic, pathetic, deviant, criminal.

Yes, weddings aside, much has changed. AIDS decimated the gay body politic and continues to ravage us as well as so many more. (Did the potent cocktail of ACT-UP activism and unavoidable compassion somehow make this marriage moment possible?) Gelded but successful Wills and Graces have opened the mass market to ever-queerer exemplars, finally normalizing - even if into burnished cliches - those previously demonized.

Opinions, apparently, have followed suit. If polls are true, most Americans 25 and under think gay marriage is cool, leading to the astounding conclusion that optioning this most basic family value to all is inevitable.

But a few of those benign teens will, in the next year or two or four, be tossed from their homes for declaring that they can't ignore the same-sex guy or girl next door. Some of them will be beaten or even slain; some will kill themselves. Schools will continue to isolate them, places of worship will exclude them, the military will use them and lose them.

Mr. Leno's writers, as usual, got it backward. Monday was the first time city hall opened to me. When, Sir, does saying I'm gay keep it from closing?

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