GLBT youth need role models

Just before this year's Oscars ceremony, a writer named Norah Vincent published an impassioned article in the Los Angeles Times, urging gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Hollywood actors and actresses to come out publicly. \nDoing so, she declared, would provide good role models for gay youth, whom she depicted as piteous suicide candidates. In fact, she began her essay by asking the reader to imagine a gay boy preparing the noose he would use to hang himself, a young lesbian inhaling auto exhaust in a sealed garage.\nI wholeheartedly support people coming out, even non-celebrities, but this article disturbed me on two counts. First, it joined the chorus glamorizing suicide among gay youth, treating it as a reasonable response to the discovery that one is a victim of the love that still dare not speak its name.\nSecond, celebrities are not role models. By their very nature they are "Not Like You": they are richer, more talented, more beautiful -- or, failing these, at least more famous. If anything, show business folk have traditionally been anti-role models, notorious for sexual and other "immorality."\nHollywood tried to counter this stigma early, developing a publicity machine to lie about its stars' private lives -- though they really had no private lives, having signed those away to Mr. Mayer or Mr. Warner's publicity departments. \nPart of a star's job was to perform for his or her fans the role of loving husband, devoted wife, doting parent, fervent patriot. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Greta Garbo and many others paid a heavy price for letting that machine define and control their lives to provide role models for America.\nNow we have gay people demanding that some Hollywood stars play the public role of happy, well-adjusted homosexuals -- preferably, I suspect, monogamously partnered, drug and disease-free, no fats, no fems, no freaks. (I'm using the language of personal ads here with malice aforethought.) Vincent wrote that celebrities "know all too well that being a public figure makes everything about them everyone's business," which "seems a fair, if Faustian, bargain." To her, maybe.\nThis raises the crucial question: Who will be empowered to decide what is a positive role model for our tender, suicidal gay teens? After all, if you come out but present a negative image, teenagers around the world will start connecting hoses to the exhaust of dad's Lexus, and it will be all your fault. Consider the fiercely independent singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, many of whose lesbian fans trashed her when she married a man. Does that make her a positive role model or a negative one, and for whom? As far as I know, DiFranco had always made it clear that there had been both women and men in her life, and she refused to let anyone restrict her, even her fans. I got the impression that they were trying to live vicariously, through her, the life they weren't brave enough to live for themselves, but that violated everything DiFranco stands for.\nThink I'm exaggerating? Maybe, but I'm not exaggerating the moral blackmail being attempted by those who tie the absence of celebrity role models to teen suicide. Numerous celebrity GLBT role models are available, from Chastity Bono to k. d. lang, from Wilson Cruz to RuPaul; for gerontophiles, Sir Ian McKellen and Lily Tomlin. How many do we need, exactly? How will it help a kid who's being beaten up every day at school if Ricky Martin comes out as a Log Cabin Republican? (A 2001 study of teen suicide by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health concluded that gay students who attempted suicide were apt to do so because of "victimization by their peers," not because of the selfishness of closeted celebrities.)\nI think Vincent greatly overestimated the power of stars to influence public opinion, perhaps because she's a journalist herself and likes to believe that the public are passive bread dough, to be kneaded and manipulated by compassionate media professionals. As DiFranco could tell you, that's an oversimplification. The fans have minds of their own, and as many stars could tell you, the publicity machine doesn't know what's best for their fans -- or for them.