[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img] On the final night of my visit home last month, two of my dearest relatives — who have not spoken to each other for years — called to invite me to breakfast on Closing Morning. Said they didn’t want me to eat alone.
As explained earlier, we never make peace in my family. Our agenda is different. While thousands of unemployed gay blades are making rhetorical love in San Francisco’s streets this morning, my family is doing what it always does in an hour of crisis. We eat.
At the height of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, when “Make Love Not War” was on everyone else’s lips, my relatives, who thought Vietnam was a new-fangled omelette, inquired, “When do we eat?”
I had to tell Relative No. 2 that Relative No.1 had beaten her to the telephonic punch and already had invited me to breakfast. I quickly added that she was welcome to join us because I was positive I had espied a third chair the last time I was in the restaurant. She demurred.
No Man Shall Go There
My point, however, is not to abstractly reacquaint you with the foibles of my family — they give new meaning to the term consumers’ rights, especially at the table — but to relate where Relative No. 1 and I breakfasted.
During the fore part of my visit, I had developed a taste for a certain restaurant. “We can’t eat there,” Relative No. 1 said firmly. “They don’t hire gays.”
Since it never has been my dining philosophy to buttonhole every single employee and every officer of every eatery I patronize, and idly ask, “What is your sexual orientation?” and “Why aren’t you gay?” I could not prove Relative No. 1 was wrong.
One obvious rejoinder would have been, “How do you know?”
But, as noted earlier, we don’t talk probingly so much in my family as we eat.
A Pickle for Non-Gays
I was divorced a few years from my first wife, who was black, before I came home with my second wife, who was not. Employing the verb in its broadest usage, I was “greeted” by puzzled, gaping, but never-embarrassed, relatives who whispered loudly, “My word. We heard she was…”
I still don’t know whether they were relieved or surprised.
I, however, was determined to soldier on. Disappointed with the slowness with which my social/cultural newsmaking was crawling across the country, I purposely dove deeper into the Divorce Ocean to give my reluctant-to-disclose relatives more experience in spreading the word that Son No. 1 was enduring yet another divorce.
I digress.
Because a teardrop of bashfulness, even discretion, remains in my family, I did not ask Relative No. 1 if she knew about the restaurant’s alleged prohibition through first-person singular or from one of those ever proliferating “victims” of gay discrimination.
The artfully contrived, relentlessly marketed concept of “gay discrimination” probably has been the most bloated cultural staple in America for the past generation.
Ears Are in This Year
Perhaps the ears of the California Supreme Court jurists are burning because as these words are being crafted this morning, they are hearing oral arguments over the challenges to Prop. 8
For sheer cultural blubber, “gay discrimination,” as a significant artifice, is surpassed only by the idol worship of our 6-week-old rabbit-eared President, who was not even a little embarrassed by disclosure of his nutty, Nixonian enemies list.
Unless we are talking about a flaming homosexual wearing a strapless, spackled evening gown, a Rosie O’Donnell fright wig, moustache, purple high heels, kelly green gloves and elongated cigarette holder to a job interview, the most bigoted employer in the community could not divine that an applicant is gay.
But many gays are not to be deterred in their rush to crown themselves with victimhood.
As President Obama, slyly and successfully, hitched his empty resume to the legacies of Lincoln, Reagan and FDR to steal a little of their glow, the worst elements of the I-Am-a-Victim gay community tried, but apparently failed, to link their legions to the civil rights movement.
What is an unmarried gay man to do?
Since President Obama is trying his darnedest to turn faux victimology into a valid art form, the Supreme Court might even take Constitutional mercy and also sanctify a marriage between two left-wingers.
But, dear reader, let us be logical.
