Jacob Gelt Dekker

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What Becomes a Lesbian Most

I was glancing over my weekly "to do" list, when I noticed an item that, as a highly respected gay columnist and pillar of the community, my conscience forced me to delete. The activities read "Hit the Gym Six Times," "Make Vet Appointment for Dog," "Turn Down Carson Kressley’s Marriage Proposal...Again," "Donate Tax Refund to Charity," "Make Fun of Lesbians," and "Write 5,000-Word Essay on Popularity of Radiohead."

How could I have been so socially irresponsible? I could write 20,000 words and still not have a clue as to why Radiohead’s popular. So I smartly scratched that item off the list and decided to allot even more time to the national sport of lesbian-bashing. This was going to be a productive week.

Remember when lesbians were all the rage? It was back in the ’90s, when, if you didn’t have the courage or anatomy to become a lesbian, you had to make one your new best friend (assuming your old best friend hadn’t become one yet). Dykes in the ’90s were like queens in the ’70s - fun, perky accessories that accentuated your party like an Hermes Birkin Bag. Whereas the previous generation of gay men turned up in stereotypical jobs like hairstylist, window designer, and aerobics instructor, girls also fit the "butch" mold: yoga teacher, jewelry maker, your mother. It was the Era of the Rug Muncher, a golden time when men were viewed as mere obstacles to pleasure, like underwear on Sharon Stone. Ellen had Anne, O’Donnell had manners, and Sandra Bernhard had Mariel Hemingway and Morgan Fairchild on "Roseanne."

But something happened on the way to the barn dance, and lesbians became the equivalent of Midwestern voters: bitter, angry, distrustful of outsiders, and clinging on to guns and each other and each other’s exes. Several theories abounded as to why the honeymoon ended: k.d. lang’s declining album sales, Camille Paglia’s declining intelligence, the fact that lesbians won’t spend a cent on honeymoons in the first place.

I have my own theory about why lesbians Choked the Toklas, and it’s far more frightening than watching Jodie Foster kiss Richard Gere in "Sommersby." Despite every denial to the contrary, dykes became their worst enemy - gay men. Once the thrill of girl-on-girl action was reduced to guy-on-hand pleasure ("lesbian" movies like "Showgirls" and "Personal Best" are now bachelor-party musts), gay women realized they were not only being subjected to the same patronization as their male counterparts, they were merely a footnote in gay pride.

Men had big parades, huge gyms, and all-night clubs. Women had band practice. We had glamorous phrases like "fabulous," "girlfriend," "Scientologist"; women had "Arby’s." Men have classic role models - Plato, Michelangelo, "Mama"; women have Mother Superiors. Guys have fun indoor hobbies like water sports; girls have boring outdoor hobbies like water sports. We have martinis, you have Martina. We’re represented by Barney Frank; you’re represented by Mary Cheney. We get to be Queens for a Day; you’re stuck being Billie Jean King for life. We even stole your most obvious anatomy euphemism ("man-pussy") and shamelessly made it our own. Worst of all, we took away the one thing you always had over us, and the one thing that separated the men from the girls...we became society’s bottoms.

"Brokeback Mountain" put ’mos on the movie map, and there was no stopping the continual representation of gay men in film and television. "Desperate Housewives" added gay neighbors, "Brothers and Sisters" has a gay priest (forgive the redundancy), and "Six Feet Under" had male lovers who did nothing but bicker and fight and break up, then get back together by the end of the episode - in other words, a lesbian couple portrayed by men. Gay women are represented in the media by their friends who actually own TVs.

Contrary to homo folklore, "Ellen" isn’t the sitcom counterpart to "Will & Grace"; "Design on a Dime" is. "The L Word" was canceled, and if you ever watched the lesbian lovers on "Queer as Folk," it was like watching black people on "Friends." In between naked men doing drugs, naked men doing each other, and naked men being naked for no particular reason other than to get ratings, they threw in a token lesbian couple to get the HRC from pulling out their support, while the rest of us pulled out during their make-out scenes.

The sad truth is, once you take away the glamour factor of lesbians, you’re left with nothing more than a vicious queen with bad clothes, bad music, and a bad figure. You’re left with Elton John. The worst criticisms I’ve received about my writing have come from lesbians...something tells me that’s not about to change. When I wrote "Gay and Lesbian Weddings," gay women wrote the nastiest comments, one saying I ignored lesbians all together (hence the title), another saying the guide slighted lesbians by having a straight, female co-writer. While I’m sure Heather Leo was stunned by that comment, at least it gave her parents some newfound hope.

I never understood the brouhaha over Anne Heche’s carpet-to-wood conversion, as it describes half the lesbians I know. (If every person is entitled to 15 minutes of fame, Sinead O’Connor is certainly entitled to 3 minutes of dental dam delight.) Unlike gay men, who not only come out of the closet, but go on to decorate it, when a gay woman admits her sexuality, she takes a different, more responsible route. First she informs her nearest and dearest of her lifestyle, including all relatives and everyone in the office mailroom. She then moves in with her lover of three days (and her lover’s illegal-immigrant anarchist ex-girlfriend from Bolivia), where they decorate their 11-by-12-foot apartment with four plants and a Kitty Litter box, and write blogs about discovering true happiness for the first time in decades. (I jest, of course. They don’t have a litter box.)

Six months and seventeen periods later, the only thing left in the apartment is one very frightened cat and an eviction notice. The lesbian who initiated the break up is married to a Wall Street Broker and expecting her first child in June; the other one’s too busy making Amends to even think about romance. When you ask a lesbian about returning to men, she’ll tell you attraction is all about things like "feelings" or "emotions," not looks, and certainly not sex. This will always be the defining difference between gay women and gay men, because even spelled backwards, "gay man" translates to "man on his back." We men are ruled by our penises (well, most of us are; George is ruled by Condoleezza’s). And we gay guys have one word to describe men who call themselves bisexual - Catholic.

The lesbians of today are the radical queers of the last millennium, back when gay men had to prove their worth in a segregated world. Those were the days when a typical night of "fun" consisted of wearing Doc Martins and motorcycle jackets, protesting in the freezing rain, chanting slogans to annoyed passersby, eating health food for the health benefits as opposed to the calorie benefits, listening to dull folk music and watching depressing documentaries at theaters with sticky floors and no popcorn, and dismissing those who enjoyed life as a traitor to the cause. Gay women are going through their own process of independence, the notable difference being eliminating any part of the previous sentence that actually was fun. It’s not that lesbians don’t have a sense of humor; they just believe it’s something you should keep to yourself, like politics or smiling.

The good news is, lesbians are starting to come into their own. The other day I ran into a gay woman who was so pretty and fit and groomed I mistook her for a Chelsea Boy. The last time I stumbled into a lesbian bar, a hot-looking chick shoved me aside so she could get closer to a babe sipping a Cosmo - that’s exactly how gay men treat me at bars! More and more women are being accepted into the clergy, which means sexual appetite is on the rise. Kyle MacLachlin’s a regular on "Desperate Housewives," and, frankly, I think she’s just as sexy any of the series’ straight women. And wouldn’t you know it, the other day I got an e-mail from a lesbian saying I was a shallow, self-absorbed narcissist who was so vapidly infatuated with the male body I could never sustain a serious relationship. The girls, I’m proud to say, have just discovered the Bitch Brunch.