I Wasn't Actually Born That Way, But the Preacher's Boy Was
Jesse Walker | March 14, 2008, 10:44am
Andrew Sullivan
suggests that Carl Bean's "
I Was Born This Way" might be the gayest song ever. I thought the gayest song ever was "
I Love My Fruit," or maybe Tiny Tim's "I'm Gonna Be a Country Queen," but we can set that aside. The interesting thing about "I Was Born This Way" is that it was composed by a heterosexual. As
The Advocate reported in 1978,
[T]he lyric was written by Bunny Jones, a straight black woman with a family. Jones employed gay people in her New York hairstyling salon, and many of them became her close friends. When the gay rights issue got hot and heavy she decided that it was time for a positive statement.
"She is the opposite of Anita Bryant," states Bean.
I found that clip on the
Queer Music Heritage website, which also
informs us that the songwriters Ronnie Wilkins and John Hurley were lovers. Wilkins and Hurley wrote two major hits, one of which was "Son of a Preacher Man," which takes on new dimensions if you imagine it sung by a guy rather than by
Dusty Springfield or
Aretha Franklin. It may well be autobiographical, since Hurley himself is a gospel singer. (As is Carl "I Was Born This Way" Bean. That's
Archbishop Carl Bean to you.) So I take back what I said about Tiny Tim: "Son of a Preacher Man" is the gayest song ever.
The other big hit written by Wilkins and Hurley? It's "Love of the Common People," which is, depending on how you prefer to think of it, a great
country song by Waylon Jennings, a great
soul song by the Winstons, a great
reggae song by Nicky Thomas, or a great
'80s pop song by Paul Young. Also,
this guy plays it on the accordion, which is
totally gay.
GILMORE | March 14, 2008, 8:37pm | #
Rhywun | March 14, 2008, 5:31pm | #
GILMORE
"The "gay" to which I refer is what kids mean when they say, "man, faux-hawk haircuts are so gay"."
A lot of us don't have that definition in their vocabulary
Which, frankly, is pretty gay
I would refer you to a group of gay guys I knew who worked for Fenton Communications ...
[http://www.fenton.com/pages/3_ourwork/1_clients/clients.htm#LGBT]
... who, while we were hanging out at a bar on Christopher street, I heard describing a movie as really "gay". Surprised, I asked if they used that term to mean both, "homosexual" as well as...uh, "wack", (revealing my hip-hop datedness)... they sorta looked at me blankly and were like, "uhh.... Duuhh-uuuhh?! Who doesnt?" I shrugged and said it had never occurred to me that it would be quite so flexible even amongst men-who-prefer-the-company-of-men.
FWIW, one of these gay guys WAS the former president of his fraternity. I dont know how exactly that might connect to your 'troglodyte' comment. He was pretty butch though.
i find people the most priggish about language usage tend to be people with pretty limited contact with the people they're so concerned with offending. Like, liberal arts college kids from the midwest. etc.
A follow up question was, "what term do you personally consider the most derogatory in regards to sexual orientation"... there was then a spirited debate, where none of them could agree on one word without finding an appropriate use of the term amongst different crowds. Like, "queer" was OK in some cases, but demeaning when say someone like WF Buckley would drop it. "Homo" was one they had pretty solid consensus on as being, if not completely offensive, just in poor taste. They tended to find that thuggy guido types or blacks would yell "homo" at them from time to time if they were engaged in PDA on the street. "Fag" was one of the least demeaning. They called each other fags all the time. "Queen" was pretty specific to extremely effeminate gay men, and they'd think it misplaced if used as a derogatory in general for all gay men.
In the end, the conclusion was that the intention was much more important than the word used, and that simply calling something like, the movie "What Women Want" 'totally gay' had nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with a really bad film targeting the Oxygen network demographic.
Then we drank a lot and they tried to explore how straight I really was. They gave up in like 5 minutes. My girlfriend tried to get them started again but they were like, "Waste. Of. Time.". It made her angry for some reason. I dont know why it is girls would find it sexy that their man might have some latent gay-guy lurking deep inside.
So, in short, possibly consider the #2 definition of "gay" another Word of the Day instead of something to sniff at.
