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I first heard the expression “heteronormative gender expectation” some years ago. No doubt a creation of LGBT intellectuals, like any good German compound noun, its meaning is self-evident. A more pedestrian version might go “what straight people think is right.” The phrase was uttered by a rather severe bisexual artist who produced a conceptual art show at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center. Steeped in feminist rejection of straight male dominion, her exhibit lashed out at the patriarchal presumptions of gender roles. Traditionally, those would be things like boys playing soldiers, liking trucks and contact sports, and wanting to grow up to be firemen or football players. Girls, on the other hand, should play house, like dolls and dream about being pretty ballerinas or princesses. In that perfect world, boys grow up as jocks, get engineering degrees, marry, reproduce, get fat and end their days watching football on the couch. Girls will go to college to marry an engineer, give birth, get fat and end their days bringing beer to their husbands on the couch.
While the exhibit was on view, I took a trip to visit a friend in Los Angeles. He introduced me to Don Bachardy, the famous American portraitist. Bachardy was Christopher Isherwood’s lover and made his fame and fortune creating portraits of luminary personalities from Aaron Copland and Allen Ginsberg to Bette Davis and Lillian Gish. A small, white-haired man, he was full of charm, wit and wisdom. Still, I felt intimidated in his presence. We spent the day at the Getty Villa. On the ride there my friend and Bachardy chattered away about obscure character actors from the days of film noir. During lunch, I tried to ingratiate myself to the master. I told him about the conceptual art installation at the Gay Arts Center. I explained the artist’s motivation in addressing heteronormative gender expectation. I then went on to enthusiastically describe the exhibition of her little ballet costumes, the ones she wore as a child, starched and hung from the ceiling like so many soulless and empty ballerinas and the pair of diminutive white patent leather shoes placed on the floor beneath an enlarged photo from a family album. The image showed the artist as a 5-year-old wearing those very shoes. She stands next to her mother and aunt, all ladylike, arrayed for a special occasion. Yet the little girl is visibly awkward and out of place. I actually thought the show was moving in its way. But, after concluding my description, Bachardy, jokingly but honestly, made his deflating assessment: “It sounds excruciatingly humorless.”
Indeed, it was. Sometimes we take ourselves all too seriously. Granted, it’s not hard to do. After all, growing up in worlds in which we were not accepted for who we were and having to perform in roles for which we had no affinity, our anger, trauma and suffering are legitimate. Still, lest we risk being “excruciatingly humorless,” we sometimes have to look forward and simply laugh.
