Queer as role models.

Queer as Folk didn't make up its images, but it gives a young gay person in Nebraska, Boise, or even Brooklyn the idea that that's all there is.

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. When I started to get an inkling I was attracted to guys, the only actual gay person I knew of was my mom's hairdresser, a guy named Michelle, who wore tight pants--the words toreador and capri some to mind--fluffy, pastel-colored mohair sweaters, and light makeup. He talked funny, and he walked funny. It's not what I had in mind.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with Michelle--nor is there with the updated gym-bunny versions of him--but stereotypes per se are something I always instinctively shied away from, more because of their deadening nature than because of anything inherent in the specifics of the stereotype.

I always had this theory that there was something heroic, in an outlaw kind of way, about homosexuality. John Rechy and Jean Genet were my favorite authors. You weren't just going along with the "normal" crowd and accepting all the spoon-fed nonsense about how to think, act, look ... be. I never smoked one cigarette or drank one beer. That's what "normal" people did.

I started to postulate that gay men and women, being among the most feared and despised in society, had the least to lose by its collapse--or at least by its shake-ups. If 5% of the general population is living out a "homosexual existence," then, I decided, 10%, 15%, or 20% of any revolutionary movement was bound to be gay. I fantasized about the French and Russian revolutions. A few years ago, I read A Place of Greater Safety and freaked out to find out that Camille Desmoulins, a radical leader of the French Revolution--every bit as forceful as Robespierre and far better-looking--was gay (well, bi). When the punk rock movement began--an extreme reaction against overblown, overproduced, white-bread corporate rock--it seemed like half the people involved were gay. Political, social, and cultural movements have been attractive to gay people because they have traditionally had the least invested in the status quo.

Forming defensive, sometimes virtual, ghettos has been another response to social rejection. I guess it's easier and less painful to go along--even inside an insulated, well-defended minority--than to rebel and have to think and to question everything all the time. Being heroic isn't for everyone. Many people seem to retreat into a protective covering of mind-numbingness: drugs, booze, anonymous sexual encounters ... things that appear to be "fun" and can help some people avoid dealing with pain and unhappiness.

When I watched all the episodes of the original U.K. Queer as Folk, I was depressed that it offered basically one image of gay men. The director didn't make the images up; they're there, but in putting that one slice of gay life into the massest of mass media--the amoral promiscuity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the stereotyped flamboyance and campiness, the bitchy queeniness and flimsy values--something very dangerous happens even above and beyond reinforcing right-wingers' negative feelings about homosexuals. More important, it gives a young gay person in Nebraska, Boise, or even Brooklyn the idea that that's all there is.

I remember vividly sitting with Harvey Milk in the back room of his Castro Street camera shop and reading letters from young gay people explaining how his public image--not a florist, not an overly macho leather queen, not a swishy muscle boy--made it easier for them to go on living. It wasn't just the joy that Harvey was elected to public office as a proud and up-front gay person; it was that the image Harvey projected wasn't a predictable stereotype. It was an image of a thinking individual, proud to be gay, proud to be himself. If the media exposed more images like this, the stereotypes of Queer as Folk would just be a few among many. Right now those stereotypes might be all there is for too many people.

Klein is president of Reprise Records and is proud to point out that his label's current hit band Orgy wears tight pants and far more makeup than Michelle ever did.