Pablo y Kiko

If you're a member of a despised or threatened minority group, you'll be familiar with the practice of "tribal spotting." A Jewish friend of mine once told me that the first thing he does when he enters a room full of strangers is to see if he can figure out who the other Jews are. I once had a group of gay friends who would get together regularly. We used to laugh at one member of the group who spent most of his time whispering about celebrities and wondering if they were members of the tribe. We used to tease him about being able to spot which fire hydrants were gay and which were straight.

You do that as a defense mechanism. It's always important, when the world is out to get you, to know who you might turn to in a pinch. Totally understandable.

I'm lucky to live in a part of the country, in a part of the world, where gay people are no longer despised and unwelcome. And that means fussing over who's gay and who's not is a practice worth tossing out. But some of us are too conditioned to paranoid behavior to be able to do that. Some of us fear the South (or wherever the homophobes live) will rise again.

Jewish paranoia, given the long tradition of anti-Semitism, is not unjustified. In Germany alone, from Luther to Hitler it lay just below the surface, waiting for a Trump kind of low-life to dog whistle it to the surface. Or, in Hitler's case, to make it national policy.  Even today, although Germany has done an excellent job, in my view, of shaking off that curse, it still pops up.  Nobody can forget the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where marchers shouted "Jews will not replace us!" 

We inherited the Jewish fear of extinction which led the ancient Hebrews to come up with the notion that all non-reproductive sex - masturbation, prostitution, and of course homosexual acts, had to be proscribed. The Catholic Church picked it up and ran with it because they needed to control marriage so that they could control property. The Jews are OK with birth control these days. Not so the Church of Rome.

That means lesbians and gays pretty much had to wait until the power of the church waned sufficiently for there to be some room for people to stop fussing over other people's sexual practices. And of course it's not just the Catholics. Authoritarian Protestant groups like the fundamentalists and Mormons took the same path in focusing on Old Testament injunctions against same-sex practices.

This topic was once front and center in American life when gay people decided to put their efforts into supporting same-sex marriage. There were always two distinct subgroups among LGBT people: those who wanted nothing more than to be seen and accepted as "normal," and have the same civil rights that heterosexual citizens had, and those who wanted the opposite - to be noticed as different, whether

scene from the documentary "Queer Japan"

motived by the need to signal their gay identity to other gays, or out of a love of theater and the recognition of the power of satire to poke fun at the absurdity of rigid gender distinctions. Some went for flashy clothes, and some pushed "noticeable" into the outrageous. These days the drag queens with the Dolly Parton hair are still with us (and I hope they will always be - who needs more dull people?) But most of the rest of us have retired into an attitude of "who cares?" People who are happy with their own sexuality are seldom preoccupied with the sexuality of others. And now that we are free to be gay, it's time, they (we) say, to stop trying to identify all the gay fire hydrants.

I'm focused on this topic at the moment because of a wonderful video that showed up on YouTube of two guys dancing together. They are Pablo and Kiko, and you should have a look. Unless you're a homophobe, it will bring a smile to your face to watch these two professional dancers do what they do so well, evidently spontaneously, and showing off their tremendous talent.

For me, the delight increased when friends launched into the the (still) inevitable question of whether these guys were gay or straight and I realized that my first response was, "What does it matter? They make me feel good." They present themselves as straight, and I think one should begin by accepting what people say about themselves as true. The delight is in the fact that straight people no longer need to bend themselves into pretzels proving they're not gay. If these guys are straight, they're having such a great time being sensual, even sexual, with each other, without any evident concern for the possibility gay people like my fire hydrant friend are going to insist they're gay. It simply doesn't matter.

Things do get better.

Check out this video. The dance they are doing is a modified bachata, a dance originally from the Dominican Republic. The dancers are from Spain and they have added bits from salsa and tango to the mix and smoothed out the boxstep with silky hip movements. And it doesn't hurt that they've got great music to dance to, "The Kiss" by Pablo Alborán.  Look at it and celebrate the progress of gay liberation, and the fact that we can now respond to the gay identification question with a hearty "Who the hell cares?" Or just enjoy the beauty of two dancers doing what they do so well.

Pablo y Kiko.