In the pantheon of queer models of femininity, Barbra Streisand looms large — just below the holy trinity of Judy and Liza and Liz, perhaps. For many gay men of a certain age, La Barbra is something akin to a goddess. I’ve never understood the appeal, myself; but with the 3-DVD set Barbra Streisand: The Concerts sitting on my desk and awaiting review, it’s high time I figure it out. Because let’s face it — we are all products of gay culture now.

If that sounds like paranoid heteroseparatist conspiracy theory — fear the day when our gay overlords (David Geffen and Tim Gunn, most likely) force us all into re-education camps, to be released only when we’ve each written a 3,000-word essay on the greatness of the Pet Shop Boys! — the reality is both more mundane and more complex. The fact is that many of us, both gay and straight, could write our Pet Shop Boys essays already; that’s because traditionally-gay perspectives have been thoroughly co-opted by, and absorbed into, the cultural mainstream.

That influence goes beyond the what of popular culture — beyond the eminence of any individual gay artistic figure, beyond the cultural prominence of any gay-identified genre or artform (disco, say, or musical theater), beyond the dominance by gay people of any particular industry or cultural segment (e.g., fashion), even beyond the traditional role of gay people as cultural tastemakers and gatekeepers — and right to the question of how we interact with that culture. Our default modes of engagement with our entertainments derive fundamentally from gay sensibilities. The ironic distance; the half-sincere appreciation; the insider/outsider divide; the knowing wink; the concepts of camp and kitsch and “so bad it’s good”; all trace back to the gay experience, to the profound division of living simultaneously in two worlds, gay and straight. (more…)