Do You Believe In Fairies?

The Gay and Lesbian Review recently focused on the last century's most important gay and lesbian novels.  And this got into the discussion of what is gay.  Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, has a main character who despite the narrator's insistence that he has had affairs with women, seems to many gays an inherently gay character, and the idea is reinforced with the historical fact that its author was prosecuted for violating England's sodomy laws.  But a lot of people are not sure that Wilde constitutes a gay person, and that's because there's so much debate and confusion over how such a person is categorized.  The same problem was rehearsed in the discussions of the other novels selected until they got to Gore Vidal's first novel in which the protagonist is comfortably or uncomfortably homosexual in his inclinations throughout the narrative.  Vidal himself always insisted that there were no such thing as gays, only homosexual acts.  The authors of the various articles in the Review were all insistent that there is such a phenomenon as a gay person, themselves being as one felt from the reading all self-identified as gay.  As an old man who sex life is definitely a thing of the past I am more or less outside of a need for definition which turns on one's sexual behavior, so I don't have the sense of being "gay" or "straight" or "bi."  I just don't think about it, but I should say that something that used to mark homosexual males was their self-hatred by which they managed to acculturate themselves to the larger heterosexual world.  I always imagined that lay behind Oscar Wilde's surrender to the authorities who judged him and destroyed his life.  Unlike African-American and Jewish children who have a defense against the larger world's hatred of their demographic in their loving accepting families, homosexual boys used to have no such protections.  Now the acceptance and or indifference of the larger world protects them as they were never before.  As to myself, having been in heterosexual marriage relationships for a total of forty five years, I present myself to the world as a conflicted person.  But I wonder now that it is all over if the conflict lies not more in the world than in me.  I am a great believer in the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the so called "normal" world determines the manner and degree that the so called "abnormal" is different.  So it is that I believe that homosexually inclined males as soon as they were perceived as violating the norm had to be categorized and eventually the negotiation settled on the term "gay" associated with certain behaviors, habits of mind, psychological traits, and so on.  Some homosexuals retreated into a "safe" zone where most of their associates were gay, and this aggressive mutual reassurance made for the development of a "gay" sensibility.  But I am not sure that it is really necessary to identify with Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce" as the gay theorist David Halperin insists in his strange book How To Be Gay, just as I think it is a welcome thing and perfectly "normal" that young homosexual males nowadays at least in the United States go out dating before settling into a carnal relationship with another fellow.  I meet a lot of young men who I am told are gay who act and talk exactly like any other guy.  Because I am so old and clearly hors de concours no homosexual male needs to "come on" to me in any sense of the word.  I could be his father or grandfather, more likely.  So more and more gays are guys.  And because it is no big deal in our culture except among seriously religious people and they can be avoided, the Unmarked are not out there Marking.  So, yes, there are fairies and we can enjoy them in our midst whenever they alight near at hand.