The importance of Being Dorothy Parker according to Joel Derfner

Photo: ultrasparky

From the hard drive of Lambda Award Nominee, author Joel Derfner.

Five years ago, when I was thirty, I helped teach a musical theater writing workshop for high school students. Given the subject matter, I was not shocked to find that many of our male pupils were the sort whose response when confronted with a football would be to cover it in glitter. Of course my mandate was to teach them how to write musicals, but, recalling the difficulties with which high school social life had presented me, I looked forward to reassuring them that better things lay in store.

What became clear to me almost immediately, however, was that, to these kids, being gay and out was about as remarkable an achievement as flossing . “My last ex-boyfriend,” trilled one seventeen-year-old, and I couldn’t really hear what he said next because I was so agog with astonishment.

I came out at fifteen, but in 1989 it was inconceivable that I should begin a sentence with the words “my last ex-boyfriend.” I suspected a few other boys in my class of harboring feelings similar to mine—a suspicion confirmed, I am pleased to note, with the passage of time—but on the few occasions I dared approach the subject I was met with stony, stony silence.

Luckily, I was not forced to go through my teenage years alone; I did find a community of like-minded friends. But they were not my peers. They were a group of older men and women who congregated regularly in the chocolate store one of them owned. It was from them that I learned how to duel à la Oscar Wilde, hurling epigrams like hatpins; with them that I first saw The Women and gasped with delight to learn that it had been filmed just after most of its stars were passed over for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind; among them that I understood there was a place in the world for me after all.

But years later, the kids I was teaching didn’t need to search for a gay community, because their place in the world was already clear to them from watching Will & Grace, from talking to their gay next-door neighbor, from running into their last ex-boyfriend. I was deeply moved: the future I had only dreamed of was coming to be, before my very eyes.
After a couple weeks I found myself in conversation with a few of them, telling them how lucky they were to have missed the Bad Old Days. “Thank God for Dorothy Parker,” I said. “Otherwise I don’t know how I would have survived.”

“Who?” said one student.
Damn my tendency to mumble. “Dorothy Parker,” I enunciated.
“Who’s that?” another one asked.

I stared at them, so appalled I couldn’t speak. Who’s that?
I told them briefly about the 20th century’s greatest and most depressed wit, the woman who had said, “Ducking for apples—change one letter and it’s the story of my life,” and with every bon mot my students laughed louder and louder.

But even though they loved what they were hearing, I was alarmed. Dorothy Parker is near the center of what I think of as the gay canon—the people, books, movies, events, ideas that have shaped gay identity since there was such a thing as gay identity. What did it portend, then, that these kids were unfamiliar with her, with Auntie Mame, with The Lord Won’t Mind?

I’ve taught the course many times since that summer, and every year, when I ask gay students about the cultural icons I take for granted, I get more and more blank stares.

And this makes me think that today’s relatively widespread comfort with homosexuality isn’t an unmixed blessing. Because now that younger gay people no longer need to seek out older gay people to find acceptance, they no longer have access to the body of knowledge their elders can impart. Gay men tend not to raise children, so we can’t pass our treasures on to our offspring, but for a long time the next generation just showed up on our doorsteps wanting to be adopted, and of course the first thing we did was hand them a copy of Giovanni’s Room and pop in a video of The Boys in the Band.

Now that nobody is looking to be adopted, what will become of our cultural history?

I have no desire to turn back the clock; we’re much better off now than we were then, though we still have far to go. And I’m thrilled that high-school boys can now walk around talking about being between ex-boyfriends. But when I remember the shock of recognition I still feel reading Wilde or watching Crawford or listening to the Weather Girls, I think I can be forgiven for regretting, just a little bit, the price we’re paying.
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Joel Derfner is the author of Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever (Broadway, May 2008). This article appeared in Oct 2008 issue of The Advocate. Used with the author’s permission.

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