RENWL

Ellen Degeneres: The "Gay Normal" White People Really Like

Ahhh…isn’t she just preciously gay normal?

Dallas Voice Newspaper on Ellen Degeneres:

She is happy and successful and famous and — normal. She is what middle America wants to be.

She makes gay marriage and gay rights seem easy to take — and not just easy, but almost as if they are a fait accompli.

Has anybody else besides us read the Dallas Voice piece today on Ellen Degeneres, Ellen: A lovable icon of ‘Gay Normal’? It’s  ah, um…an interesting read. The piece is about Ellen’s role as a judge on the tv show American Icon, and how it seems that middle America has embraced Ellen without issue because she’s “unthreateningly gay.”

The author of the article is particularly impressed with the fact that Ellen seizes every opportunity she can on the show to touch on her sexuality. And yet, “her gayness just doesn’t get in the way of things,” states the writer.  Here’s another  excerpt:

Ellen is America’s sweetheart of the moment — funny, down to earth, a pretty, sparkly woman whom everyone can relate to. And the extraordinary thing is that her gayness doesn’t get in the way of that or hide it — instead, she makes being gay seem to be the absolutely normal thing that it is.

And an icon of Gay Normal is important. All too often — still — anti-gay conservatives point to people on the edges of our community as being representative of all gays and lesbians.

They take images from Pride parades and television and gay circuit parties and try to paint us as social outliers who are strange and frightening (or inappropriate and silly) and thus, a danger to mainstream marriage, work and family.

Being African American, for us there’s something eerily familiar about this kind of praise. Oh shoots, lets quit tiptoeing around it; she’s being described as a “credit to her sexuality.” You know, like the similar term “credit to your race” that was used to pat good harmless Negroes on the head whenever one of the whites bestowed a compliment on them.  The kind of overly assimilative people pleasing always grinnin’ benign kind of negro that dignified white folks can work with on most importantly, count on.

No, the writer of that article is not going that far.  But she sure is cutting it mighty close.

Shockingly, The New York Times doesn’t fare all that much better in its praise of Ellen in its celebrity profile update for the TV star published on April 1st with this quip:

“More than in any other of her ventures, Ms. DeGeneres’ performance on America’s favorite television show suggests how hard she works to seem effortlessly funny and how determined she is to be openly but unthreateningly gay.”

Dianne Carroll as ‘60s TV icon”Julia.”  An unthreatening and very likable credit to her race.  White people loved this show. She made blackness seem so easy —and gosh darn it, normal.

It’s the word “unthreateningly” that makes us cringe—as if it’s a virtue. Who the hell wants to be described in some roundabout fashion as a harmless people pleasing eunuch? We also must highlight the striking similarities here between the acceptance of African Americans into mainstream culture verses the acceptance of gay folks into mainstream culture.  As much as many blacks hate comparisons with gay culture the similarities in the journey for mainstream acceptance are undeniable. And we’re hoping in terms of the future that just as uncompromising as blacks have been at times in not allowing others to define what normalcy looks like for us, LGBT and Same Gender Loving (SGL) folks will vigorously be the same when it comes to defining normalcy for the LGBT community.

Sorry Grace, girl. You just ain’t normal, enough. Wait.  Oh shoots. Grace Jones is straight. Oops. Our bad.

We understand that everyone—even those gays who just beam with the normalcy that this writer gushes on about—-has a place and purpose in the equality journey. It’s just that LGBTs are representational of every aspect of America ethnically, economically and all the above.  Guess it surprises us fter all this time that there’s still this ‘we’re just like you’ endorsement of “normalcy” among LGBTs—like the writer of the Dallas Voice piece—obviously a lesbian who’s very proud of Ellen’s normalness and mainstream appeal.

Sometimes we wish gay people had ethnic cultural characteristics like blacks or Latinos—people of color. Like special gay ethnic foods, you know—-collard greens, yams, mac ‘n’ cheese, barbeque ribs, chitlins—-stuff like that. The kind of ethnic specialty dishes that LGBTs ate every holiday—-food that’s uniquely theirs and everybody in the country knew about good gay food and how you have to go to a gay restaurant to get some good down home gay cookin’ or have to know somebody gay who was a great cook who could whip up somma dat good gay food on the fly. Most certainly the kind of food the “just like youers” folks would be embarrassed about and downplay our tasty gay vittles—cause it wouldn’t seem as normal as hot dogs and apple pie.  Just too ethnic. Possibly even threatening.

Wait. We cook good ethnic food and we’re gay. Lord have mercy, we just described ourselves! Wow. Guess we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at ever being normal, eh. Somehow though, we think we’ll survive just the same.

Dallasvoice.com: Ellen: A lovable icon of ‘Gay Normal’

New York Times: Ellen Degeneres