Okay, Maybe Not Actually MARRY, But...

This just in from E in Brooklyn: Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ex-Gay Cowboys

In this review, Dan Savage looks at two movies, Brokeback Mountain (where two straight men play gay male cowboy lovers who married but should not have) and End of the Spear (where one gay male actor plays a heterosexual male missionary).

Savage says:

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.

If anything, supporters of traditional marriage should want gay men out of the heterosexual marriage market entirely. And the best way to do that is to see that we're safely married off — to each other, not to your daughters. Let gay actors like Chad Allen only play it straight in the movies.

While I completely agree with Savage, I wouldn't mind our FYO getting through high school in some modified Grace (of Will and Grace) role: dating gay men. Not MARRYING them, mind you, but DATING them. As I may have mentioned earlier in this Weblog, she has a seemingly hyper vision of gender roles and, as a result, sometimes seems prematurely sexualized, referring to her male classmates as "boyfriends" or saying that she is "in love" despite clearly not understanding the full meaning of those phrases. So, if she could do this within an unusually "safe" context, well, that wouldn't be a bad thing.

It seems, lately, as though our wish may be coming true. During preschool she had a fascination (that was not unrequited) with a young man who, as soon as he'd come over for a play date, would run down and put on all of the FYO's princess dresses and flounce about the house (not that there's anything wrong with that. I recognize that there is a faction of men out there that cross-dres but are not gay. Nor, to be sure, is there anything wrong with being gay, please don't miss my point here. It was just funny to hear them refer to themselves as 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' in that context.). Recently, she's been begging us to let her invite two boys from her class to her birthday party. One mother admitted to BioMom that her boy "has only female friends." The father of the other boy told me that his son wouldn't mind being the only boy at a princess birthday party.

If the FYO plays Grace for a while, let's just say that I'm okay with that!