Rodney King

This is an old post from my now-defunct Myspace blog. I'm going to post some of the older postings in reverse chronological order to put a little meat on the bones of this puppy.

Originally posted on Monday, November 20, 2006.

Rodney King--as many of you will remember--was the black gentleman beaten by the LAPD in the 90s, which was caught on videotape by a nearby witness. The acquittal of the officers who had beaten Rodney spawned the LA riots. Rodney appeared before television cameras as the riots were raging--still bearing his bruises--and asked LA and perhaps even America, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"

While I guess we're not beating each other into a pulp, Rodney's plea crosses my mind quite frequently when I go out to the gay bars in Columbus. His words spring to consciousness when I see the anger and sadness in the online profiles of some gay men who are 50 and still single. This isn't to say I want to lock arms and sing kumbaya with all the homos of the world--hell, I don't even like most of them. Nor is it to imply that all older gay men are searching for the love of their lives online--some may be perfectly content finding a new man-of-the-evening every night. But there is a hint of detectable sadness in every combative queen at the club and in every guarded online profile. Civility, it would seem, is a word conspicuously lacking from most of our vocabularies.

My mama raised me to be super nice. Overly nice. Obnoxiously nice. I took that attitude to my first gay bar in Rochester, NY, when I was 18. An older gentleman talked to me at the bar. I was polite and chatted with him for a few minutes. When I tried to politely excuse myself to go find my friends, he grew quite angry. He had mistaken my politeness as overt flirtation and asked why I wasn't coming home with him. Somehow, in his mind, by talking to him for a few minutes, I had agreed to have sex with him that night. That night--during my first trip to a gay bar--I learned to be a jerk. Moderating my generally (I hope) pleasant personality with the demands of gay culture has been a challenge ever since.

There are a million reasons that gay bars are an interesting psychological maze. As gay men, we don't start to date until too late in life. We have fewer people with whom we can share our feelings and learn about love and loss at an appropriately formative age. We deal in a subculture that remains catty for a variety of reasons... although the problem is by no means ours exclusively. My mom told me she was at a hotel bar with some friends of hers a few years back. (She would have been in her early 50s.) A guy approached her. She politely talked to him. He told her she was one of the prettiest women he had ever seen. She thanked him. He asked her to go home and have sex, and she explained that she was married and was just there with female friends. He proceeded to call her a bitch and told her to go to Hell. She marveled that she had gone from one of the prettiest women alive to a bitch in a matter of moments. And why? Because she had--in this man's mind--rejected him.

This sad insecurity is heightened in a stigmatized community such as the homo world. I guess I can see why it happens. I just don't understand why it needs to continue to happen. I'd like to be able to sit down at the bar and smile at the white-haired gentleman on the bar stool next to me and chat about anything or nothing. But far too often that's turned into a sexual proposition. (Mind you, I don't think that I'm "all that and a bag of chips." Nonetheless, because those gentlemen recognize the same lesson I learned in Rochester when I was 18: don't socialize at the bar or guys will mistake it for an invitation to go home with you.) So I stick my nose up a bit and look straight ahead and order my drink. I don't want the hassle, nor do I want to hurt someone's feelings. I don't like it, but it's what we do...

"Can we all get along?" Probably not. But we could be a bit nicer.

Postscript: Reading this now in 2009, I have to laugh, because I'm now in that lovely middle ground: young enough to be considered "young" by the old gays; old enough to be considered "ew" by the young gays. I have seen my own polite smiles and words misconstrued by bright-eyed 21 year-olds as an attempt to pick them up. On my good days, I laugh it off. On my not-so-good days, I'm tempted to say, "Don't flatter yourself, Mary. You won't be that pretty in five years. But I still will be."