Tuesday, March 30, 2010

This Just In: Something You Already Knew Ten Years Ago Reported as "News"...

Ricky Martin is gay.

I would have said that anyone who could use the line "Her hair is the color Mocha..." was pretty much standing atop the tallest building in Gayville, shouting "I'm Queee-eeer! Come Get me, you Sexy Poo-stabbers!".

The only things missing were the feather boa and the martini glass. Any man who can dance that well, and obviously spends that much time and pays that much detail to his appearance, is so obviously gay that it's hard to figure out how anyone missed it.

This reminds me so much of a man I used to know who was so gay that other gay men shook their heads in disbelief about just how gay he was -- they used to refer to him either as "Scary Gay...", or on more than one occasion "Capitol Gay". Capitol Gay? Yes, "gay" in capitol letters; G-A-Y. Only "Tim" (not his real name) was laboring under the misapprehension that no one knew that he was a "secret" Rump Ranger.

I had worked with "Tim" for nearly a decade, when he finally "Came Out" during, of all things, Diversity Class. I guess he was so moved by the experience that he had finally decided to come clean, or more likely, he was just marking his territory as an oppressed minority.

Anyways, he was quite proud of himself at the time, but that pride quickly turned to disappointment when we all told him "No Shit, Tim!". The impeccable dress, the always-shining-like-a mirror shoes, the perfect hair, the lisp, the skipping through the hallways, singing torch songs in the Men's Room, it was all a dead giveaway.

"Tim" was crushed; he thought his little tidbit of news would have caused a stir (in the vein of Oscar Wilde's famous dictum "There is only thing worse than being talked about, and that is NOT being talked about...), and would have made him an office celebrity. Instead, life went on much as it had for the ten years prior. Much of "Tim's" spirit had been crushed by the fact that no one gave a shit about how gay he was, and not long after, he quit for greener pastures (the last I heard of him, he was running a pet grooming boutique on Long Island).

I don't know what any of that has to do with Ricky Martin, and just like the "news" that he's a flamer, I could really care less. I just find it funny that people can consider themselves shocked and surprised when the evidence was always on display, and that this somehow is "news".

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