A lesbian scriptwriter on a successful British soap opera once explained to me why it was impossible to maintain long-term gay characters in it. "Soap storylines rely on couples splitting up and getting off with someone else. So my gay characters would have to find others to sleep with and split up with constantly and the whole neighbourhood would end up far too gay."
"Too gay" is a marvellous concept, beautifully illustrated by Steven Soderbergh's revelation that Hollywood studios refused to finance his forthcoming biopic of Liberace because it was "too gay".
"Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after Brokeback Mountain, by the way," Soderbergh said on Saturday. Is it really that shocking that after the huge mainstream success of Brokeback Mountain, Liberace gets the cold shoulder? The characters in Brokeback were "proper men". Macho, closeted and not the least bit camp. Cinema has long been wary of characters that are "too gay" unless they are deliberately extreme and stereotypical, such as those in The Naked Civil Servant or The Killing of Sister George.
In film and TV we often see heteros bonking each others' brains out in graphic detail but gay characters are required to behave with a little more decorum. Lesbians can get away with girl-on-girl action because it is considered to be little more than visual foreplay for straight men.
But the "too gay" argument extends beyond cinema, of course. Last week, repelled by those deemed "too gay", the Church of England announced that gay bishops in a civil partnership are acceptable as long as they don't have sex together. As for lesbians, we are crossing the line when accused of "looking like men". It is amazing the number of times I have been told I am mannish, bearing in mind the fact that I have breasts that walk in the door five minutes before I do.
For gay men it is often because they wear feather boas, like show-tunes and always do Shirley Bassey numbers at karaoke. But the criticism is also levied at those in hard hats, work boots and ripped Levis – in which case I just walked past a whole group of "too gay" workmen doing a loft conversion at the top of my road.
Lezzers are too much if we swagger around in outfits that make us look like a prisoner or prison officer, resplendent with bunches of keys clipped to our leather belts, or when we lash on the lipstick and play chase-the-tonsils with some girly outside a Soho bar. We can't win.
I was once beaten up by a group of men in a straight nightclub for drunkenly snogging my date. The straight couples all had their tongues down each others' throats and hands all over the show, but the police officers that dealt with the incident said it was no wonder that we were battered sideways as we had "shoved [being lesbians] down everyone's throats". We were far "too gay" for the boneheads to cope with. What we could have done was approach our attackers and asked if they fancied a bit of a lezzer floor show for their amusement, then we might have been applauded rather than pasted.
If not for the sex, many straight folk adopt and colonise aspects of gay culture. Some gay bars are filled with hen parties and hetero tourists gawping, and camp is often adopted as a way of showing how right-on and relaxed they are in their straight identity. In reality the "too gay" insult is simply disgust at those of us who love being lesbian or gay and openly celebrate it as a positive alternative to the norm.
Come on boys and girls, don't play it down. Get out there and flaunt your gay ways to the world. For the bigots, simply being out as lesbian or gay is way too gay. Let the world know we are here. Because from where I am standing it is much too straight for its own good.
