The Fame Monster

A few months ago there was a gay guy who became a huge celebrity on the Internet because he released a song about liking a guy who didn’t like him back. It’s kind of catchy, but its importance was derived from the fact that it was a pop, love song about being gay.

I found the song entertaining, and when the guy was coming to Chicago to perform, I thought it would be fun to see him. A number of people on the Internet wrote things like, “See him in an intimate setting before he’s too famous!!” Gay men everywhere thought this was our big break. Finally there would be a mainstream singer/songwriter who wasn’t just gay, but WROTE about it and SANG about it. Not only would we be allowed to get married, but the song we homos dance to at the wedding reception would be about being gay!! Lesbians have had Melissa Ethridge for years, but now it was our time!! The guy, Steve Grand, was a hero, a trailblazer for us who have been marginalized and cornered by gender specific pronouns in pop music.

My friend Alex and I went to the concert, which was held at a jazz club in downtown Chicago. The setting was filled with really attractive homosexual men drinking expensive drinks and waiting for Steve to light up the stage.

If I forgot to mention it, Steve Grand is gorgeous. Like carved from marble gorgeous. I got in trouble with my gay friends by referring to him as a butter face, but he is cute, and his cute face sits on top of a thick, carved slab of muscle. In the video he goes after an equally gorgeous guy who is also carved from marble, cute, et. al. 

Alex and I kind of hung around the bar. While the rest of the atmosphere was a buzz of anticipation, we just kind of sat there and talked about what had been going on with our friends. Neither one of us really thought that Steve Grand mattered. He was a guy who sang a song that was kind of catchy and we were gay, so… Why not support him in his quest for crossover Internet to real fame? Our misunderstanding of the greatness of Steve couldn’t have been made any clearer than on my trip to the bathroom.

I open the door and hear this conversation between the bathroom attendant and a young man washing his hands.

“I just feel like if I talk to him… You know, he gets it! He gets what it’s like.”
“Well, you gotta go for it, man. You gotta give it a shot!”

“If I could just meet him! I know -”

It was at this point that Tedd walked between the attendant and the kid and awkwardly washed his hands.

“It could be destiny, right?!” The bathroom attendant stared at me.

My only response was, “Uh… Yeah!”

I don’t really believe in destiny, fate, etc. And I don’t really get starstruck. Maybe by an author, but not by a guy who sings a 6/10 pop song and has a lot of abs. That’s cool and all, but my knees get weak for intellect over brawn.

I also am not of the ilk that believes that true love or magic happens. Yes, I believe I’ll find a great guy, who I have a lot in common with, who I will spend my adult life with, but I don’t believe our coupling is written in the stars. It’s a nice sentiment, but I’ve lived through enough to know that life is generally a crapshoot and you make the most of it.

At a certain point a few months ago, my friend, Paul, asked me and my friend, Jody, if we believed in true love. Our response was to roar with laughter and then, after we composed ourselves enough to wipe the tears from our eyes, ask politely, “Oh… You were serious?”

Upon exiting the bathroom, I met back up with Alex and we got in the queue for the concert. To my surprise the Destiny Guy from the bathroom was behind me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Uh, hey,” I said.

Destiny Guy is adorable: cute face, nice body, well-dressed, amazing smile. He looks at me and says, “Would you guys mind if I snuck into the concert with you?”

Alex and I kind of stared. “That’s fine… It’s not really sneaking in, its open seating.”

“Yeah, but I went to the show before this. I don’t want them to kick me out. Can you tell the bouncer I’m with you?”

Alex and I agreed.

What followed was one of the most bizarre conversations I have ever had with an adult male. Destiny Guy was an engineer. He’d gone to a top 25 university and had recently secured a job with GE in Wisconsin. He had driven 4 hours on a Saturday night to see this Steve Grand concert.

“You know I just feel like he gets me. He knows what it’s like to be in love, you know?”

I’m really glad I couldn’t see my face, because I’m pretty sure it was a mixture of shock, sadness, and confusion. And this look was staring right into Destiny’s Guy face. I couldn’t say ANYTHING to him. I had no words for his blind faith in the gospel of Grand. It was his obsession in light of the following that just confused the hell out of me:

1.     The song is about unrequited love. My first impulse was to ask Destiny Guy if he had ever read…anything. Like… Anything. The Inferno? Rome and Juliet? Homeward Bound? These are all stories of being separated by something that is loved and having to overcome obstacles to get it. Or, of course, not being loved in return. It’s…not…new. Remember Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” music video? It’s about this. This right here. She likes members of the opposite sex but she can’t get him, either.

2.     Destiny Guy was one of the best looking guys in the room. Easy peasy, one of the best looking guys in the room. As I mentioned before, Steve Grand is a handsome individual, but… I mean… Destiny Guy could have picked up almost ANYONE else at the bar. Instead, he chose to stand next to Alex and I and pine for Steve because, “he gets it. We just have this connection.”

3.     Had he talked to 85% of gay guys in the room… We could have shared similar experiences. Growing up gay in a small town sucks. There’s no way to really even know your gay because NO ONE else is. Then, of course, when you get to college all those guys that never had girlfriends come out. But in the meantime, you just kind of stare at each other and pretend to like girls because there are no other options. Stevie boy isn’t the only one to experience this. Gurl, we’ve all been there.

The more I talked to Destiny Guy, the more I became unsettled, almost to the point of wanting to leave. As we drew closer to the front of the line, I began to get more and more into my own head. Watching other guys around us, I realized that it just wasn’t Destiny Guy that was obsessed with Steve – it was a large number. In the minds of these men, Steve was a chosen one, a messianic figure, rising above heteronormative pop culture and creating a haven of gay, candy-coated, pop music glory.

            I don’t know whether I had never been this close to fame, or just never been in this particular kind of situation, but I had never had it hit so close to home. As we shuffled inside to the small venue, I looked around at the host of gays, staring eagerly at the stage. In my mind, this act of performance, this rise to fame that Steve Grand was on, was best represented by a dual host–parasite relationship.  In a sense the crowd was feeding Steve, adulation and appreciation streaming from his rapt audience to feed his ego, his talent, his performance.

On the other hand, I thought, in a much darker sense, there was something Steve was taking from us, something that had been taken from Destiny Guy. It is amorphous, something I can’t really describe, but if I could say it is anything, it is a sense of self. In his rise, the collective deification of Mr. Grand, people like Destiny Guy suddenly demeaned themselves, became lesser in his presence. Destiny Guy’s strivings and ambitions, turned toward an ideal now represented by a white, heteronormative, man with a perfect body. In a sense, Steve gave gays what perhaps had been lacking in a pop culture sense, a figure, a man who is like them, who represents them. Celebrity, in general, represents an idealization of characteristics that society wants us to have: sex, beauty, strength, ambition.  What saddened me about Steve emerging as a gay icon, however, is that it represents an end to gayness as radical. Whereas mainstream gays may not have had an image in the past, gay culture being relegated to drag, kitsch, and flamboyance, Steve represented to me, the end of the radical era.

The gay men around me had found their mainstream icon, a man who had the ideal body and voice, but who also represented something ultimately very white and normal. While gay culture still celebrates the Ru Paul’s, the Steve Grands are coming to take their place. In a sense this is fantastic: young boys and girls in middle America will have their icons who look and sound like them; in another sense, and I think I represent a slim, radical minority, the demolition of the radicalness of homosexuality abolishes difference and understanding. As white, middle-class gays get their marriage security, the marginalized of the marginalized, the low-income African-American and Latino LGBT populations become a peripheral item. Mainstream culture accepts homosexuality, as long as it fits into boxes that society has decided to accept. Pride weekend becomes a party, a celebration of wearing little clothing and drinking too much. We forget about the Stonewall Riots, we forget where we have come from and that there are others, left behind who need someone to fight for them.

This is perhaps all too much and too theoretical for a concert for a guy who wrote a song that is about a boy liking a boy and drinking whiskey, but in the eyes of Destiny Guy, as he stared up at the stage at the bulging biceps of Steve, I couldn’t help but think the deification of this figure, Destiny Guy’s complete investment of faith in love in this pop singer, was a willing sacrifice of his difference, of his ability to think about his marginalization and his value as an outsider.

“Thank god,” I imagined him saying to himself, “he’s like me. I’m normal. He gets it – this is his life, my life. This is normal.”

And, I know I’m an odd duck, but that statement, that deification of normalcy, in my mind, is monstrous. The striving for complacency, for thoughtlessness, for security in hegemony, frightens and terrifies me. The LGBT community is rapidly moving to the mainstream, but at what cost?

Somehow, Alex, Destiny Guy, and I ended up in the front row, about five feet from Steve. As the show played on, I looked at the men seated. Perfectly manicured and quaffed, they looked up to the stage as Steve, very beautifully, sang a list of covers and new songs.

Steve is just a guy following his own ambition. As he left the stage, he was surrounded by a group of people from the bar. In that tiny venue he was a god. He raised his hands and waived good-bye as the crowd cheered loudly.

I leaned over into Alex’s ear, “I have to get out of here,” I said. “You don’t have to follow.”

As quickly as I could, I followed Steve’s entourage. I squeezed past them, climbed the stairs, and began moving out of the bar. As Alex and I walked past the entrance, a group of women in their fifties were on the dance floor. They didn’t care what people thought, they weren’t thinking about the men and women staring at them as they shook their aged booties to the thump-thump of the Jackson 5.

“We should have just stayed out here with them,” Alex said as we came out of the bar and into the night.

“That one lady was my spirit animal,” I said. Referring to a woman, roughly fifty pounds overweight, and close to forty-five, who had been twerking as we left.

Destiny Guy and the others can have Steve. He’s a talented guy and I hope he does well for himself, but I think I’ll look elsewhere for my hero. Right now I’ll settle for the middle-aged lady with the mean twerk. She wouldn’t call herself normal, and she wasn’t perfect, but she was celebrating that night as if it was her absolute last. I hope in the future she is the deity our collective society chooses – until then, I’ll put on the Jackson 5 and try to be as different as I can. I won’t be Steve’s “All-American Boy” but I’ll try to remember that I’m different – that I’m proud – that those things that separate me from the world around me, make me more valuable to it.