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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

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Seinfeld, Rudnick, Frank

By Andrew Sullivan
Posted Friday, May 15, 1998, at 11:32 AM ET

Katha,

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Yes, I watched, and agree with you. It tried too hard to bring everything together. Although I was oddly moved by the last scene of them all in a cell, talking about nothing. Very existential. I had become attached to them. (Even yesterday, I had an actual Seinfeld moment in my friend Chris's apartment, when I peed in his toilet without shutting the door. I remember thinking: what does this say about our friendship?) And their wonderfully brazen Jewishness, of the kind I've come to love in America (especially at TNR), was indeed a cultural turning point. But does it mean the end of real Jewishness in America, as Charles Krauthammer worried about in a recent Standard? Or is it really a new phase in Jewish Americanness? Me? I prefer Jerry Seinfeld to Elliott Abrams any day.

I was thinking about this, after seeing that the comic writer Paul Rudnick has another play on Broadway. It features a classic gay stereotype--all interior design, bath robes, and operettas--and flaunts it. I guess I wouldn't worry too much if Rudnick did not parade this as some kind of political statement about gay identity in the face of rampant "assimilation". He is, sadly, ahead of his time. Homosexuals are way behind Jews in terms of cultural presentation. A friend Jonathan Rauch posits several phases for all minorities--invisibility, caricatured exploitation, p.c. whitewash, and then reality. I think Seinfeld is relatively close to reality. Rudnick, however, is thoroughly in Phase 2. He has figured out that there's a demand for gay people being represented on screen, and that most members of the audience are straight, so he's managed to come up with a bunch of screaming stereotypes to flatter his straight audiences. His target audience is a less benign version of Homer Simpson, who once famously remarked: "I like my beer cold, and my homosexuals flaming." Rudnick, apart from being a hack purveyor of old, bad, one-liners, is the gay Stepnfetchit of the 1990s. His movies and plays will soon be looked on in gay history as blaxploitation movies are in black cultural history.

In & Out was particularly grotesque. Gayness, in that movie, was something that could happen to someone completely conventional, but necessarily involved listening to Barbra Streisand, knowing how to disco-dance, and having an exquisite taste in drapes. What if someone in a movie discovered he was Jewish, and suddenly developed a capacity to play the violin, and amass large amounts of money? Rudnick's response is to say that any reservations have to do with one's discomfort with effeminacy. But that's ridiculous. I love drag queens; but they are not representative of most gay men; have nothing to do with the core of what it is to be homosexual (which has nothing to do with effeminacy); and deter many closeted gay men from leading fuller, deeper lives.

But Rudnick has figured out the market, and, I suppose, good luck to him. The last thing I'd want to do is mau-mau someone for being silly. I just wish he wouldn't present himself as anything more than a hack peddler of stereotypes for cheap laughs from straight people, and from gay men who still struggle with their own insecurities.

I see Frank Sinatra just died. Good timing for Johnny Chung.

later,
Andrew

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