By Crispin Sartwell

I know you are tortured by the question of gay and straight pop culture. It's easy, sweetie.

Straight guys like nature. Gay guys worship artifice.

Like, a straight guy will dig the Rolling Stones, the blues, hardcore punk, hardcore country, American beer, because he feels their "truth" and "sincerity," their directness and rejection of appearance in favor of an underlying reality.

A gay guy will like "divas" who are barely recognizable under their makeup. They'll like Judy Garland, smiling at the world but crying deep inside. They'll like opera, in which the human voice transcends itself into a realm beyond nature.

Actually, it's fair to say that terms such as "nature" here function as sheer ideology. Heterosexuality conceives itself to be a "natural" sexuality, what mammals are supposed to do for reproduction. Your rugged straight dude is a natural dude, in his own mind. He's a rugged outdoorsman, and likes to kill stuff.

So the basic grounds for condemnation of homosexuality is that it is "unnatural": as if the laws of nature could actually be violated, and as if "unnatural" and "evil" were synonymous.

One decent response to this is to turn against "nature" itself as your oppressor. Then one would exalt artifice and conceal one's mammalian status. Then one would fully embed oneself imaginatively in the "social" or "artificial": in the games of appearance.

Thus, the drag queen, killing nature by transcending gender, always obviously costumed. And thus too, the bluejeaned straight guy - Springsteen or John Mellencamp - studiously careless of his hairstyle.

Let us ponder briefly the Broadway musical, in which people take a break from their makeout session to burst into song and choregraphy. Backstage there is the incredible technology of appearance: the costumes, the makeup, the lighting, the set. Now I guess I find the whole thing merely embarrassing. Plus the music sucks because it doesn't have enough to do with the blues, i.e. with reality. If you know all that, I claim, you more or less know my sexual orientation.

Now, it is true that I think opera is a pointless horror, a sheer torture, a truly idiotic waste of energy and time. I don't believe that human voices can sound like that and I don't know why anyone would want them too. And I'm about as likely to go out vogueing as I am to flap my arms and fly to Jupiter. I don't really get what's good about a guy dressed as Tina Turner or whatever. Just kind of boring.

And I have an elemental response to art I think is real: Robert Johnson, say, or George Jones or Minor Threat. And real means direct: no artifice, no trumpery: just straight at you with the hard truth, baby.

But you know what? That's cause I'm straight. In the great scheme of things, "natural" is no less artificial than "artifice," and even if it were, there is no standard by which we could ultimately judge one to be superior to the other. And, by the way, the artificial is natural: everything we pathetic creatures we do is comfortably within the order of nature. In other words, the whole distinction cannot be made out.

So what the hell, I say. If you want to listen to divas, do hair, decorate interiors, design clothes, more power to you.

Just one thing: please no fucking opera, boys.