Gay people are cultivated and nuanced, with a fabulous and indisputable grasp of aesthetics, style, and design. Whether you are gay or straight, a familiarity with the miraculous gay canon is the key to creativity, joie de vivre, and not being a giant bore. The gay canon is not simply full of gay things. The gay canon is a broad cultural smorgasbord that provides a quirky, thought-provoking aesthetic linchpin or reference point for every creative moment. It is a beyond-useful source of inspiration, especially for those overachieving, annoying little straight brats who think they know it all.
In my new book, Gay Men Don't Get Fat, I lay out the essential categories of the gay canon: film, literature, fashion, aesthetic movements, and, perhaps most importantly of all, strange people. The gays have a nose for creative, rule-breaking, taboo-busting eccentrics. If there is an Isabella Blow or a Daphne Guinness in the house, we will find her, pick her up by her Verdura earrings, and put her up where she belongs, which might be on a throne or on the kitchen counter. New names are added to this list of lovely lunatics every day. Boiling this down to 10 names was torture. Et voilà ! The Lady Gagas and Nicki Minajes of yesteryear.
Gay Men Don't Get Fat is now available in bookstores everywhere.
Follow Simon Doonan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SimonDoonan
In her own words: http://youtu.be/GCgp7VL6V8g
She posed for Playboy, appeared in movies and TV shows - all without most people ever knowing that she had been born a boy.
Now, I certainly enjoy culture in the broadest meaning--Early Music, The Mannerists, French 18th Century Drama, and 19th Century novels, poetry, Ingres, Sargeant--the list can go on and on.
However, I'm sitting at work in an old pair of Nikes, black button fly jeans and a very cheap, purple, white and black striped (HORIZONAL STRIPE! OMG) polo that is (gasp) off-brand. This is how I dress more often than not. I lack the design thing--My house is olive #4 (Laura Ashley), a cinnamon accent wall and brown leather furniture...drear, huh?
My senses are geared to live in the world as best I can without all the fabulousness that slows one down--the perfect shoes? can't afford them--especially from Barney's. The best suits? ditto. And at 6am at the gym, trying to cram even an athletic cut suit and a $100 tie is a waste of what a dry cleaner did to make them viable.
We're just not all like you--thank god. There's already quite enough fabulous to go around. I'm glad for who you are--I just don't think you should pull us all into that well-appointed dinghy you're rowing.
By virtue of being "the other" in society, you've had to pay attention to that man behind the curtain. You've been forced to see that we're all -- in some sense -- wearing drag and playing dress-up according to social norms and cultural traditions.
What an utter, absolute, total pile of horse @#$%.
Gay people are every bit as diverse, as conventional, as unorthodox as straight people. Yet here is Doonan trying to pigeonhole us all into his outdated stereotype.
And this notion that we all are (or MUST BE) "cultivated and nuanced, with a fabulous and indisputable grasp of aesthetics, style, and design" IS a stereotype. It's dumb, it's ugly, it's misinformed, dishonest, a sad and sorry relic of 20th century foolishness. As is the idea that there is a "gay canon (that) is the key to creativity, joie de vivre, and not being a giant bore."
Horse @#$%. Doonan, it's 2012 already, not the day before Stonewall. Grow up and leave the fabulous stereotypical attitudes behind.
...in lieu of the Burqa, I'd jog.
I wonder what this article would look like in Tatchells future state?