‘The Sopranos" has made fun of the mob and taken on corrupt priests and Italian stereotypes without causing much fuss in this area. But Vito changed all that. In a feudal world where machismo rules, Vito has been forced out of the closet and nothing will ever be the same for many of the show’s male fans. You can put a bullet in somebody’s brain and cut up the body parts until they fit in a large gym bag. You can kill your best friend for business reasons, but don’t get caught in bed with another man. That’s a major violation of the Code down here.
I was in the men’s room at Citizens Bank Park the other night when a little boy insisted he wouldn’t stand behind his father in line at the urinal because he wanted to watch him pee. The men’s room rocked with laughter, especially when one guy shouted, ‘Kid there are two rules you have to remember about the men’s room – never say you want to watch somebody do it and never touch anything in here." It’s all part of the Code.
The Code also says lesbians are just fine – as long as they’re not your wife (and preferably in porn movies) – but not gay men. Not even in porn. Not ever. If you weren’t disgusted enough to walk out of the room when Vito swapped some tongue with his male lover, you might as well turn in your membership as a South Philadelphia male. It was devastating enough when Hollywood turned the Marlboro Man gay in ‘Brokeback Mountain," but messing with mob movies is just too much for the downtown crowd. You wear lavender around here, you’re suspect. It’s all part of the Code.
But getting back to Vito. There’s a real dilemma for some of the show’s male fans. Do they want Vito whacked for being gay – an outright admission of homophobia? I think most of the straight guys just want Vito gone real quick, so they can get back to their comfort level with the show, where beating up women and screwing the average Joe in business deals are the norms. Maybe Vito can commit suicide. That would show real remorse at having committed the ultimate crime of being a gay male in his testosterone world.
When I grew up in South Philadelphia, gays were ‘queers." Back then, we would have laughed in your face if you told us a guy in your crowd could possibly be homosexual. Someone built like a linebacker, who played pinochle and loved sports couldn’t be anything but a super-male. Queers were all drag queens. We knew who they were. If your name was Richard and you used makeup and swished when you walked, you were ‘Ricky the Queer." Subtlety was not our forte. We didn’t like ‘homos."
As a teenager, I never thought much about Ricky as a person. I knew he raised my adolescent discomfort level. He was a freak in our eyes, less than human. I am ashamed now to admit it.
We also knew a lesbian when we saw one (this was before Howard Stern and girl-on-girl movies became many a straight man’s fantasy). The one lesbian we knew was a female in name only. She was a bulldyke who could break you in half if you looked at her the wrong way. That’s the way all lesbians looked in the 1950s. We had it all figured out.
There was a nightspot called The Jockey Club in Atlantic City back then. It featured female impersonators. I used to hear my folks whisper about it. They would go there once in a while and thought it was a big kick to see men in drag. I guess that was considered sophisticated entertainment in those times. I was too young to go and was just as glad. It didn’t sound sophisticated to me, it just sounded like a freak show.
We knew so little and yet thought we knew so much about the nature of human beings. We were who we were and somewhere out there were a few sexually mixed-up people – easily recognizable aliens from another planet.
I have lived through the civil rights and feminist movements and, hopefully, each step of the way, discarded the foolish prejudices of my youth. And maybe for the straight male, the struggle for gay rights has been the most difficult to assimilate and join because the biases went to the root of how we identify ourselves. My disgust is not with men kissing, it’s with denying human beings the right to their basic humanity and, yes, that means marriage and adopting children if they so choose.
Old age is rapidly approaching. I am running out of time to grow as a person and unlearn all the bad lessons of my youth. But I am trying. There are no aliens, there is no other planet. We are all part of the whole. Even Vito.
