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5.0 out of 5 stars
Prologue to the New Closet, December 24, 2010
This review is from: South Park (Amazon Instant Video)
It's amazing how many times I have thought of South Park episodes and just started to laugh. Comic genius barely even sums up the cleverness of the show of course. Prescience is surely one of the other virtues of the show. But I was reflecting recently that perhaps not prescience as many, particularly the creators, might like to think. "Trapped in the Closet" is certainly one of the funniest and prescient of all the episodes, and unsubtle commentary on the world-view of sofa-bouncing movie stars hardly could be more pointed. Yet my reflections recently lead me to conclusion that the South Park take on things, super- clever though it is, is also a sort of prologue to a new closeted way-of-being for the younger generation. For my generation of gay people coming out of the closet meant essentially interjecting the reality of our lives and loves into a world that acted as if they didn't exist. And by the way, blinkered portrayals and crazy claims are a form of absence. If the other person in life is different from you one way to maintain a sense of unreality about that person is by creating zany mistruths about them. This is the dark side of human interaction. It is only when someone is real enough in a society to get rights that -- miraculously -- the mistruths start vanishing as well. So when my generation came out you really had to assert your own reality in a way, plain and simple. Many of us were lucky to be able to do so in lives filled with love and fun, but clearly not always. How different the world is now for people coming out. I reflect that people "trapped in closet" today have a perhaps more tangled time of it, in strange irony. For now "being gay" is not something undiscussed...hardly! It seems all that the media seem to discuss! But how is that that could possibly make it harder to come out in a way?? I think it goes something like this. Before, if a kid was gay, he kept it to himself. Since no one wanted to discuss it anywhere, he naturally sought out his own life away from other people's existential equations. In a way that was a liberating set-up. Of course in other ways it was terrible. But how otherwise it must be in the family scene today. Even in a family where the parents are against open acceptance of gay -sexuality, there is naturally still a vastly more freed-up sense of discussion about it. For the simple reasons that it is now everywhere discussed. So I can well imagine that parent who don't like gay sexuality in fact may quiz their children now much more if they don't see them doing predictable heterosexual things at certain ages. And since, concomitantly, psychological rhetoric has entered society much more, I can well imagine that some parents feel free-up to be armchair gay reparative psychologists for their children. It might go something like this: "Ricky are you have gay feelings??" After Ricky answers yes hesitantly, the parents begin a compassionate yet still conservatively religious ramble about how they love the kid, but they are going to work with him to address the complex issues both psychological and religious that touch on the matter. Because the kid loves his parents, he is drawn into more and more talk about the matter. Thus in the end, to come out the closet he would have to overcome the original strictures of the religion, but also be willing to let his parents feel like failures in their
recent attempts at "discussing" the matter in a modern and hip way!! Coming out then means that you question the parents idea of themselves as modern and hip as well. Because we all know that reactionary types, no matter how prejudicial, always also consider themselves very with-it, and modern and hip. This would be a lot harder. The South Park ethos is hilarious, but it is already a bit old fashioned. It belongs to the pie-in-you-face interjection of reality that characterized the old way of being. Coming out now means not only coming to terms yourselves, but helping your pseudo-hip parents understand that their reactionary views are not hip are just the worst kind of dirty, skeezy old bubba thinking dressed up in fancy clothes. Not how people want to see themselves. And that is a lot to ask of a kid. Where South Park was a great cultural success is in proving that you could laugh at the whole complicated matter of "coming out" thoroughly. It is only sad, upon reflection, that despite society's ability to laugh, it seems to have become more complicated, whereas one would think the opposite.
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