Smile when you say figure skater — or Spartan

I live in West Hollywood, a tiny section of Los Angeles where so many gay men reside that being gay isn’t even news anymore. It’s just another thing to be. As an “issue,” the population is, on the whole, post-concerned about it.

But studio marketers know where we live, and I’m betting that our “Blades of Glory” bus stop posters look a lot different than the ones you’re seeing in your neighborhood, provided your neighborhood isn’t The Castro in San Francisco, or South Beach, Fla., or Chelsea in New York City.

The oversized poster at the stop nearest my home features Will Ferrell and Jon Heder on ice skates wearing sequined spandex unitards and crotch-locked in what can only be described as an illustration from “The Joy of Gay Sex”  re-enacted by movie stars. Before that poster went up, the “Dreamgirls” poster lived there for about three months.

I saw “Blades of Glory”  last week. It’s very, very funny and manages to get right what “Wild Hogs” — with its open threats of violence directed to characters that displayed anything less than Snickers-ad machismo — got so miserably, stupidly wrong. “Blades” goofs on gay panic in a way that’s smarter than its characters and manages to comment on the real discomfort some heterosexual men still feel when they encounter that which might brand them effeminate. And it does all this in a way that’s not old-school insulting to gay viewers. The joke is on the dopey, against-all-odds heterosexual male skaters themselves, and on you, too, if you’re feeling squeamish about it all.

So this is the growing-pains stage of queer assimilation. We came out in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, demanded not to be invisible or brutalized anymore, and now the culture is slowly catching up. For better or worse, we exist on screen more than ever. And the general audience’s level of sophistication has risen alongside that visibility.

The power of Gerard Butler's abs
If the seemingly intentionally homoerotic and homophobic “300” had been released in the 1950s, those contradictory elements would have been discussed privately among gay audiences with eyes self-trained to see past the surface. But now, in 2007, everyone has those eyes.

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“I just saw ‘300,’” said my hetero friend Pete, over the phone. “And the night before that I went to the Scissor Sisters concert. Does a quick succession of events like this make me automatically gay now? I ask you this because, as the only gay I like, you’re sort of the expert.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes it does. Now you’re gay. You caught it from Gerard Butler’s pectoral muscles. I feel sorry for your beautiful wife.”

“And what was up with that Persian king with all the eye-shadow? How (F-wordy) was he?”

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My response: “About as (F-wordy) as you are right now, you ‘300’-loving Scissor Sisters fan.”

Pete (he’s allowed to say the F-word that means gay because I say he’s allowed and I’ll explain why later) is a good friend that I once forced to watch 15 full minutes of homosexual pornography as a cruel experiment for a magazine article I was writing. It was him, his wife Catherine, me and my own partner in their living room. As Pete cringed and howled in agony and covered his eyes as the video burned itself into his memory, the rest of us laughed our heads off. It was a good time, kind of like the ending of “A Clockwork Orange.” It turned into a great piece for the magazine, he’s scarred for life, and that’s hilarious.

All of that to say that Pete is fairly typical as far as straight men who are vaguely uncomfortable with gay “stuff” goes. But even a guy like Pete — who sees a film like “300” and prefers to remember the battle action and not the bodacious oiled-up abs — even he has more in common with guys like the “You know how I know you’re gay?”-taunting characters in “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” or the “Jackass” crew than with the kind of testosterone-poisoned warriors of the very self-consciously masculine movie he just watched. In fact, that my friend even noticed “300’s” weirdly retro dominant male paradigm of painting the enemy as a flaming, pouting, imperious queen-king, a trick used to promote the idea of that enemy being morally and physically weak, makes him more aware and more post-concerned than even he would probably admit.

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