Today, as I prepare to see a Lincoln Center tribute to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, I find myself mulling one of the deepest questions regarding sexual strategy: Did you know all five current and former members of Depeche Mode are married (or in one case divorced)…to women…even the guy who left to start Yaz and Erasure? (One of them to a lingerie model, just like a heavy metal band.) I gotta admit this is something of a surprise. It’s nice in a way, though, to be reminded that not all New Wave bands were gay (not that there’d be anything wrong with that), since I’m sometimes astounded in retrospect how androgynous they all looked without me realizing it back when I was thirteen.
After having the New Wave as one of my most important aesthetic influences (Duran Duran, Eurythmics, etc.) at a formative age, I have long thought that if I am ever summoned before a court and asked to give evidence that I am heterosexual (as all straight men of course assume they may be at some point), pointing to my manliness will be a losing strategy, using the usual standards. (No interest in sports…not only defeated in arm wrestling by a female but by the one who resembles Bryan Ferry that I mentioned in my blog entry on June 6…genuinely wish people would be nice to each other…wish everyone would sort of bellow less…etc.)
The case is going to have to rest entirely on enthusiasm for females (now, of course, you’ll hear plenty of people point to repressed cases who’ve been drawn to many women in a misguided effort to “prove” their heterosexuality, and I’m sure there are such people, but all I can say is, if that’s gay, bring it on — and may straight men everywhere aspire to be as gay as Hugh Hefner).
No, whatever warping effects the New Wave males may have had on my aesthetics, I think the credit for shaping my hormones during those pivotal years of 1982-1983 clearly has to go to numerous female singers appearing in rock videos back then. And if for any terrible reason I find myself single again, I notice that Sheena Easton (who at that stage in my life seemed just about ideal, odd as that may sound now to some of you) is only fifty, lives in Las Vegas, and has been through four marriages of about one year each. Sounds like an easy mark. We’ll call that Plan B, though.
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