When I first came out, around age 19 in the mid-1970s, several older gay gentlemen that I knew took it upon themselves to teach me what they called “the ropes.”

“Which woman do you want to be?” they asked me.

My choices were Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Looking back, all these years later, I now see that I was being taught to emulate women–great Hollywood stars to be sure–who had severe substance abuse issues. None of them had ever enjoyed a successful, lasting relationship. Two of them, Marilyn and Judy, are now known to have been mentally ill. Yet my elders insisted that, as gay men, they were what we were “supposed” to be.

If anyone ever asked me to name the most mean spirited “bitchy queen” I ever knew, it would no doubt be Jeffrey, someone I was acquainted with during those early years. Jeffrey’s “hobby,” for lack of a better term, was to break up other people’s relationships, which he did through manipulative lies and vicious gossip mongering–watch any episode of Dynasty and you’ll see Jeffrey’s techniques.

I recall one night, around 1977, when Jeffrey had literally torn a once loving gay couple apart. He sat in his easy chair, smirking joyously over what he had just done. He wasn’t smoking his cigarette, he was posing with it, while his many gay male enablers congratulated him on a job well done. (”Oh, Miss Thing. Aren’t you fabulous!! You sure know how to work it, girl.”)

For the next twenty years, I met one Jeffrey after another. For awhile, I too, was a Jeffrey. It was all I knew. It was what I had been taught.

Around 1999 I began to realize what some of us were turning into. That year I traveled to Crystal City, Virginia, to attend Fanex, an annual convention that celebrated classic horror films, my guilty pleasure. Fanex had nothing to do with gay rights or gay culture, yet many of the gay men I encountered there behaved as though they were at a circuit party. Like Jeffrey, they spread as many vicious, false rumors as they could. They made it clear that it was beneath them to speak to one another, doing everything they could to make a public performance out of their behavior. These actions were unprovoked, yet no less than two gay attendees cited “gay pride” as the reasoning behind the actions. Heterosexual attendees at Fanex, who were there to talk about their favorite horror movies and weren’t even thinking about who was gay and who wasn’t, were appalled.

For the first time in my life, I became acutely aware of how the choices of some of us were making us look to other communities. (Read More)