Dog days mean big words

August is truly a terrible month, particularly in the realm of the mass media. Take for instance radio hosts - with the CBC's on-air talent pool already looking a little brackish at the best of times, it only takes a few vacation-motivated desertions for the Mothercorp to start stinking up the airwaves worse than the Long Island Sound during a garbage strike.

But at least the CBC occasionally aspires to quality in broadcasting. Not so CNN, whose descent into a tacky clearinghouse of popular superstitions, right-wing nostrums and trashy inanities has occasionally made even that tedious cesspool that is CTV News look good.

For instance: not only is the "which celebrity is gay?" story about as hackneyed as Reagonomics, but what does it say about the prejudices, vacuity, and sheer unadulterated ignorance of not just the American people but the American journalistic corps when a story that snidely suggests that Rosie O'Donnell "wears her homosexuality like a badge of honour" is worthy of the front page? I suppose that anyone who's gay in America has a big invisible neon sign hanging over their their crotch that only straight people can see? Or is the mere iteration of a sexuality even marginally different from that peddled by the mass-marketed, patriarchal and poisonously consumerist mainstream so threatening to conservative North America that its existence must be qualified, exposed and explained away, archived into a little box of paradoxically ignorant awareness?

In certain circles (the Toronto Star, Fab Magazine and elsewhere) the question has been asked more than once in the past year: why is there such a distressing homogeniety in the characterizations of gays and lesbians on network television, so distinct a lack of original queer stories in the the mainstream cinema (pace, Annie Proulx, Felicity Huffman et. al - last year was a good one, but we still didn't win Best Picture), so few "out" entertainers, and almost no gay politicians at all?

Why? In the minds of some, the only "real" fags are bitchy dykes like Rosie O'Donnell and poncy queens like Lance Bass - people who 'wear the homosexuality like a badge of honour' because the're forced by their overweening "otherness" to explain their deviation from (or conformity to?) societal norms in a way society understands - that deviance can then be seen for what it is believed to be, and treated as such. In the minds of some, to be a homosexual is to be what it has been (at least in the United States cultural mythos) for a hundred years: a failed man and freak if a woman, and a half-woman and clown if a man. And it's not hard to see what's homologous about those two extremes.

I hadn't intended to get quite this involved with something so apparently trivial as an Entertainment Tonight fluff piece; but CNN's boorishness is disturbing precisely because it's so banal, so absent-minded. I was astonishingly lucky, in some respects at least, to grow up in a cocoon of relative sexual isolation. Thanks in part to parental reserve and in part to my own innate reticence, I didn't know much about homosexuality until the Internet revealed to me at around thirteen (one way or another) that my sexuality was neither universal nor unique. If I didn't have any positive gay role models at an early age, I also managed to avoid developing feelings of guilt, anxiety or depression about being a fag - by the time I understood that my crush on a boy in Grade 1 (props to you Mark, if you're out there) or my urge to marry Jonathan Brandis in Grade 4 weren't isolated incidents, I hadn't had to face the kind of white noise of bigotry that so many North American kids still experience in their daily lives.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as mollycoddled as I was. The kids out there who know what a fag is by the age of five (to wit: something you don't want to be) and who grow up listening to a concert of "don't be a fag, man," "dude, that's so gay," and "man, don't be such a pansy," desperately need exposure to queer role models of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of fabulousness. They need exposure to public figures who do "wear their sexuality as a badge of honour" - Ellen DeGeneris is great, but we need about 100 of her ilk, and fast.

Canadians are more fortunate than our southern neighbors (as we are on most queer issues) in that we do have some prominent gays and lesbians to look up to. Look at the Mark Tewskberys and George Smithermans of the world, or the K.D. Langs and Libby Davies'. Yet the fact remains that until the purveyors of our mass culture, the moguls and marketing departments in Burbank and Newark and Denver and Miami , decide it's in their interest to portray queers as they truly are - as diverse and fascinating as ordinary folk - LGBTQ youth in Canada as well as in the United States will continue to lose out on a key weapon in the fight for not just tolerance, but acceptance: to have the public look at a fluff piece about who's gay and who's straight and laugh at it for its anachronism, not its content.