The Gay Republican #6 - Bad Taste Never Tasted So Great

*** IRRELEVANT PREFACE: My unspoken battle of wills with my landlord ended last night. I wanted him to mow the lawn and he, apparently, did not want to mow it. He won...

His wife told me on Monday night that the lawn mower was broken, which I suppose explains the Amazon growing in my front yard, but doesn’t really excuse it. And after an anonymous benefactor trimmed the hedges this weekend (Is the hedge trimmer broken too, Alex?) I felt compelled to borrow a mower from my neighbor across the street, and spend a cool evening collecting two full yard waste bins of grass clippings from my small front lawn. ***
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A few weeks ago, my department at work relocated from the second floor of our building to the fourth. Not exactly an earth-shattering event, but a good excuse to waste a few hours of company time on a Friday packing outdated documents and personal effects into boxes, so that they can be carefully moved by dedicated relocation professionals, and then unpacked the following Monday to be neglected again in a new location.

Discussing the upcoming move a few days prior while waiting for a meeting to start, several co-workers voiced annoyance at the looming inconvenience. I disagreed, citing the better décor on the fourth floor. “Thank God we’re getting away from the ugly pink carpeting in the lobby on 2. I can’t even bring friends into the office; it’s embarrassing.”

A heterosexual associate voiced his agreement: “Absolutely, it’s classic office-tacky. Mauve, mauve, mauve; what is this, 1986?”

A wave of shame came over me.
SHIT. It IS mauve. What the hell is wrong with me? It’s not pink, that gross old carpeting is MAUVE.

*KA-CHUNK*
Another demerit punch in my gay card.

I watched the Oscars this weekend; all the way through, for the first time ever. And because I was watching them with Leah and Annemarie, we also caught some of the red carpet goings-on leading up to the ceremony.

I suppose it was an OK way to blow five otherwise-idle hours, but nothing really exciting happened. There were no outlandish outfits like Björk’s noteworthy swan gown or any of Bob Mackie’s fetish-esque creations for Cher.
Jon Stewart’s humor was pretty tasteful, nobody said anything offensive in their acceptance speeches, no technical glitches or production mishaps marred the broadcast.
I was praying for somebody to fall on the slick patch of stage floor behind the microphone. Nobody did.

The only thing I’m really *pleased* about is that I’m NOT the only one who found Cate Blanchett’s flat (and transgendered) portrayal of the Bob Dylan-ish Jude Quinn in “I’m Not There” uninspiring (and awkward).

*KA-CHUNK*
Those of you who have full cable service may have run across a channel called LOGO. (Since I don’t, the last time I’d heard about it was when some marketing operatives stuck a LOGO sticker on me at Pride two years ago.) I haven’t seen much of it, but judging by the program lineup, I can say this: If you’re queer, and you’re interested in being patronized to death, watch LOGO.

Over Starbucks a few weeks ago, my friend Leah told me about seeing a music video for a song called “Faggoty Attention” on LOGO. She was laughing so hard about it she could barely speak to describe it. But even more hilarious, according to her, was a show called “Rick and Steve”.

Set in the fictional town of West Lahunga Beach, “Rick and Steve” is a satirical portrayal of West Hollywood life. It’s an animated show, and all the characters are Lego people. Rick is a brainy, Pacific Islander bottom and Steve is a rocks-for-brains, white-bread, gym-rat top and together they compose “the happiest gay couple in all the world”. Their friends Dana and Kirsten are the stereotypical mullet-and-lipstick lesbian couple, and Evan and Chuck fill the roles of young twink-plus-old skeeze. More or less, it’s a gay South Park.

We Netflix’d season one and watched it all the way through last Saturday. She was right when she described pieces of it as fall-on-the-floor funny. There was the episode where Steve’s parents spend a night uninvited with him and Rick after his mother had a vaginal rejuvenation procedure in West Lahunga Beach. Searching for a way to convince Steve’s thick-headed southern parents that he and Rick are in fact a couple, they take their guests to a leather bar, where Steve’s mother dances so hard that she rips her stitches.

There was the episode where Dana and Kirsten decide to have a baby, and in order to secure the necessary turkey-baster effluent from Rick, they enter into a labor-for-semen barter arrangement: Dana fixes their kitchen dimmer switch; Rick gives Kirsten a wine glass full of spooge. (It spills out when they hit a bump on the ride home in their Ford Ranger. Yes, the raunch is hilarious.)

But as the episodes played on, I started feeling dirty. Parody though it may be, “Rick and Steve” offers an unnervingly identifiable and bitingly accurate portrayal of gay life. The very first episode has Rick and Steve, “the happiest gay couple in all the world”, having the “open relationship” conversation, and seeking out a third for a three-way to add excitement back into their bedroom.

In order to prepare for motherhood, Dana and Kirsten babysit another lesbian couple’s baby while her/his mothers attend what appears to be a dyke-nazi retreat. Before leaving, they admonish Dana and Kirsten not to derail their mothering methods, which include ridiculously insular and bigoted practices whose heterosexual inverses would shock the conscience of any West Lahunga Beach denizen.

After Chuck (the old HIV-positive, wheelchair-bound skeeze) asks his “partner” Evan (the ephedrine-addicted, 19-year-old Latino boi-toy) to promise that he wouldn’t have sex with anybody else after Chuck died, Evan responds, “But I have sex with other people NOW!”

Watching the show with Leah was just awkward once the character of Condoleezza the Fag-Hag was introduced. Condi is a tragic, corpulent character who goes to ridiculous, self-deprecating, abuse-inviting lengths in order to acquire and keep the attention of any gay man she sees. She is, in short, a fag-hag.

After becoming acquainted with Condi, Leah turned to me and asked, “I’m not a fag hag, am I?”
From the TV, Condi yelled after her new gay Lego friends, “Do you wanna go out, guys? I’ll drive!!!”

“No,” I replied to Leah, “You have a life.” (And she does.)

What I wanted to say next, though, was, “So why are we still watching this demoralizing show?”

Excepting its moments of quirky hilarity, the program itself is downright depressing.
The show may not actually be an animated parallel to life for all gays, or even a majority of us, but it certainly nails an unflattering bulls-eye on the most visible sector.
Granted, that opinion comes from somebody who doesn’t live in West Hollywood.
But after watching “Rick and Steve”, I’ve never been surer that I don’t want to move there.

*KA-CHUNK*
My card is starting to look like a slice of Swiss cheese. I’d better smoke some pink Nat Sherman Fantasias before the Cabal hunts me down and makes me watch “The Birdcage” again.