E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Year of the Queer (continued)

BEYOND ALL the legal victories in 2003, the truest mark of how far gay people had come over the year could be seen in the high-profile escapades of Rosie O’Donnell. The larger-than-life personality lost her reputation as the "Queen of Nice" — not because she had dared to come out, but because a civil lawsuit over her now-defunct magazine had revealed her to be, in fact, mean. The November civil trial between O’Donnell and Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing over who was to blame for the demise of their magazine co-venture, Rosie, painted O’Donnell as a foul-mouthed, vindictive tyrant. First, the superstar admitted she’d lied under oath. Then, she conceded she’d brought a G+J female executive to tears by telling her she deserved to get cancer. But when the magazine’s former editor took a stab at O’Donnell’s lesbianism — testifying that a cover photo depicting O’Donnell holding another woman offended O’Donnell "as a lesbian" — the issue never picked up steam in the media. O’Donnell instantly squashed all talk of her sexual orientation by making fun of it: "Never in my life have I said the phrase, ‘As a lesbian ...’ So, all during lunch I was saying, ‘As a lesbian, will you please pass me the mustard?’" O’Donnell’s superstar crown had been tarnished by the trial, yet it had nothing to do with her sexual orientation.

In retrospect, 2003 repeatedly bore out the old adage that time breeds acceptance. Throughout the year, gay faces and issues popped up in the pages of newspapers and on TV screens without causing so much as a blink of the collective eye. Last spring, US Congressman Richard Gephardt, the Democratic presidential hopeful, warily went public with news that his 30-year-old daughter, Chrissy, is a lesbian — only to find it wasn’t a political liability. He’s talked freely of his daughter’s divorce and subsequent lesbian relationship on the campaign trail since, although the revelation hasn’t exactly made him into a champion of full equality for gay people.

Even so, the Gephardt experience was just one coming-out story that barely registered a yawn on people’s radar screens. In June, actor Richard Chamberlain — "who made a career of wooing women for five decades," in the words of Dateline NBC — declared that he is gay. Chamberlain, the "heartthrob" of the 1960s TV show Dr. Kildare, revealed his secret before millions of Dateline viewers, all the while plugging the release of his autobiography, Shattered Love, which contrasts his public lady’s-man persona with his 27-year relationship with his partner, Martin.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts state senator Cheryl Jacques, who busted out of the closet herself in 2000, soared to the top of the gay class in November, when she was picked to head the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group in Washington, DC. That Jacques could skyrocket from the depths of the closet to the peaks of gay power in just three years seemed more than appropriate — a perfect allegory for the rate at which gay America sped toward equality all year.

On the pop-culture front, TV viewers certainly delighted over an unprecedented number of gay-oriented programs. There was the Bravo cable network’s July series Boy Meets Boy, America’s first gay-dating show. Of course, Boy Meets Boy was more of a shell game in which gay and straight suitors vied for "one exceptional gay man" and, naturally, a cash prize. But it intrigued us nevertheless — and showed how hard it is to spot the homosexual in the crowd. There was also the ABC fall pilot It’s All Relative, the first sit-com to show a male couple in bed. Racy? Not! The couple was of the drab, churchgoing variety, parents of a college-age daughter in love with the son of an Archie Bunker–esque Boston Irish couple.

And then came the surprising smash hit of the TV season, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which a team of gay men — better known as the "Fab Five" — swooped into the lives of aesthetically challenged straight men and saved them from their warped fashion sense. Though the show offended the sensibilities of some people — L. Brent Bozell, of the Parents Television Council, dubbed it "The Gay Supremacy Hour" — it drew roughly 1.6 million viewers on its first two outings on Bravo, the largest audiences in the network’s history. The success even landed the Fab Five on NBC, Bravo’s corporate sibling, where the guys attracted an audience of seven million. The strong standing left many wondering: Who says gay men aren’t mainstream?

Though not billed as such, the 2003 Tony Awards last June also turned out to be quite the gay reality-TV show. The host was Hugh Jackman, who got to plug his Broadway musical debut this fall as the gay singer-songwriter Peter Allen. The award for Best Play went to Take Me Out, a ballplayer’s coming-out story, replete with full-frontal locker-room nudity. And then, there was the pièce de résistance, what New York Times culture columnist Frank Rich called "The Kiss." As Rich described it in a June 22 article, "Smack in the middle of what used to be known as TV’s ‘family hour,’ Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman" — the award-winning songwriters of Hairspray — "locked lips to celebrate their Tony and their 25-year partnership."

The passionate display captured attention. But given that the Tony Awards are all about the theater, long seen as a gay-male bastion, it wasn’t exactly an accurate reflection of pop culture’s crush on gay America. A better indication of that came with a different, more hyped-up kiss — the Madonna and Britney Spears "lesbian kiss." The two pop superstars exchanged a wet, open-mouthed lip-lock on the MTV Music Video Awards show in September, which prompted even reputable news outlets (hello, CNN) to devote lengthy coverage to the two-second event.

AFTER SUCH a progressive 2003, 2004 seems destined to bring some setbacks. After all, history has shown that when the rights of disadvantaged groups are newly recognized, the opposition is often fierce and ugly. As the number of states recognizing same-sex unions has grown, so has the backlash. The Massachusetts SJC ruling turned this state into ground zero for the culture war — especially since it gave the legislature 180 days to make same-sex marriage possible. Advocacy groups on both sides have already braced for a high-octane battle at the State House over the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. And Bay State legislators made a cowardly attempt to avoid the maelstrom by sending a civil-union bill to the SJC for review on December 11.

Meanwhile, the gay-rights triumph that characterized 2003 is bound to flicker as the same-sex-marriage debate plays out on the national stage. Even before the SJC ruling, a coalition of right-wing Christian groups was vowing to end the struggle once and for all — through a federal constitutional amendment that would define marriage in the US as "only the union of a man and a woman." Although President Bush has yet to come out in favor of such a measure, he did throw a bone to the churches that began promoting it on October 12 by officially proclaiming the week "Marriage Protection Week." Count on Bush — and his fellow Republicans — to smirk and swagger their way through the 2004 presidential-election campaign by using the issue against the Democrats.

And as the year closed, most of the nine Democratic presidential candidates — the serious ones, anyway — had cowered in the face of the same-sex-marriage issue. Rather than stand up for equal marital rights, they expressed support for gay civil unions, which provide only a fraction of the benefits that flow from secular marriage. Perhaps the Party of the Disadvantaged can get it together in 2004 and see the same-sex-marriage issue for what it is — namely, the final frontier of the civil-rights movement. Perhaps gay America will experience more ups than downs after these momentous 12 months.

Only one thing seems certain: profound cultural change is already upon us. And that will make the Year of the Queer more than a flash in the pan.

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com