NEED TO KNOW
- Writer Kelly Foster Lundquist was married to a closeted homosexual man and now writes about “beard” relationships in her new guide
- Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage options in style characters like Marcia Langman on Parks and Recreation and Angela Martin on The Workplace
- Beard is on sale now, wherever books are bought
If you happen to’re a sketch comedy fan of a sure age (that age being maybe 48, which is my age, or thereabouts), you would possibly recollect a sure recurring SNL character of the early aughts, The Woman With No Gaydar. If you happen to don’t bear in mind it, possibly it’s since you weren’t watching the premiere of that sketch in November 2001 on a sofa along with your then (unbeknownst to you) closeted homosexual husband. I laughed alongside with out realizing I used to be the joke. Years later, I’d study I used to be what popular culture calls a “beard.”
For the file, “The Woman With No Gaydar” was performed (hilariously and assuredly, it needs to be famous) by Rachel Dratch. And the web can’t resolve if the sketch was written by Ryan Shiraki or James Anderson, each of whom have been overtly homosexual SNL writers and employees members.
John Goodman hosted that November 2001 episode, and he seems within the sketch as Julius, a stereotypically flamboyant homosexual man carrying a small canine named Trifle and making double entendres about desirous to come up with his good friend’s “dumplings.”
Whereas “The Woman With No Gaydar” was about as broad because it will get in depicting the cluelessly obtuse straight lady who fails to learn the room, she’s removed from alone on the planet of sketch comedy and sitcoms. In my upcoming guide, Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage, I write about a number of of them, together with the morally inflexible characters Marcia Langman on Parks and Recreation and Angela Martin on The Workplace.
There’s Emma Stone’s Grace from SNL’s “The Actress,” who performs a lady named Dierdre in a homosexual porn. She retains trying to imbue the character with a backstory or motivation, and at last is advised by an exasperated director, performed by Beck Bennett, “She doesn’t have a backstory! She exists to be cheated on!”
There’s Ann Harada’s Florence Menlove, who sings “He’s a Queer One, That Man o’Mine” of her husband, Aloysius (performed by Alan Cumming). And there’s the “beige” lady from Liz Lemon’s first Dealbreakers episode, who, when she reveals up in an viewers Q&A to ask why her conventionally good-looking, strapping fiancé is having hassle committing to marriage ceremony plans, is advised by Lemon (Tina Fey), “Nope. Your fiance’s homosexual. Have a look at him. Have a look at you. Traditional case of fruit blindness.”
The record goes on, via movie and status TV and literature: Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven. Harper Pitt in Angels in America. The character Dolly in Rebecca Makkai’s good 2017 novel, The Nice Believers, of whom the principle character observes, “Dolly was brief and plump. Her hair tight in curls. If Yale was proper about Invoice being within the closet, then he’d chosen his spouse predictably: plain, however put collectively; candy sufficient that she possible forgave so much.”
There are a lot extra examples, however these are those which have caught with me, and to be clear, I do know of them as a result of I really like all this work. The Nice Believers is a prime three guide for me (it’s really set a block from my outdated condominium in Chicago). SNL is mainly my love language, particularly something by Bowen Yang (who wrote “The Actress”). Together with my theater and film-obsessed daughter, we’re by no means not re-watching outdated sitcoms.
Within the parlance of Outdated Hollywood, a “beard” is usually a straight one that (knowingly or unknowingly) marries a queer individual as a method of overlaying for his or her sexuality. There have been well-known beards all through the historical past of Hollywood and much more well-known queer actors who married them. Two of Judy Garland’s husbands have been rumored to be homosexual, as have been two of her daughter Liza Minnelli’s (one among them, Peter Allen, lived as an overtly homosexual man later in life).
Minnelli would possibly really be the principle cause I’ve by no means wanted to write down the story of my first marriage as fiction. In one among many comedically broad ironies of my precise life, I used to be dressed as Liza Minnelli for Halloween the night time earlier than my first husband obtained outed to me. I used to be getting a Ph.D. in Queer Concept and dwelling in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood. My finest mates have been homosexual males I noticed each day. And but, for all that, I really didn’t know that my ex-husband was homosexual or that he’d fallen in love with another person. I’ll have been in doctoral college, however let’s face it. I used to be a woman with no gaydar too.
I wrote my guide, amongst different causes, as a result of I needed to have a good time, complicate, explode, poke just a little enjoyable on the trope of the beard. However like all tropes, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are such a lot of tropes that give the beard her context: the tragic closeted homosexual man, the homosexual finest good friend, the homosexual villain — the record goes on. However all of those tropes, from the beard to the villain, are predicated on the concept sexuality and need are all the time legible on the physique.
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All these tropes — gaydar and women with out it — make for simpler narratives, however the presumption that the codes of the center will be deciphered on the physique is one which, outdoors the world of absurdist comedy — and doubtless typically inside it as nicely — can wound and harm. They’re neat as a result of they flatten, and it’s simpler to punch a factor that’s flat.
Real love tales are all the time messier than tropes, and the final word cause I wrote my guide was as a result of it’s and was a love story. As soon as, there have been two candy youngsters who got here of age within the evangelical purity tradition of the 1990’s, a world by which being LGBTQ+ or accepting anybody who was homosexual was seen as a sin that would ship you straight to hell. From the second these youngsters met one another, they stored speaking and speaking and speaking. They made one another snort. They understood one another. They’d the identical imaginative and prescient for the life they needed to steer. They liked the identical films and TV reveals and songs. They liked one another. They slept collectively no much less — possibly much more — than the common American couple. Actually.
But it surely was what occurred after that made this a love story — the best way we have been capable of let one another go, the best way we’ve been capable of assist one another within the 20-plus years which have elapsed since we break up up. In the previous couple of years, it’s develop into straightforward for us to speak and speak and speak once more. We met for brunch this previous Sunday once I was again in Boystown, and as we laughed and talked about so many issues, I used to be so grateful for the grace of that relationship.
We have been by no means a joke.
Our love has modified, nevertheless it hasn’t vanished. What stays is just not disgrace or bitterness, however real care. In some methods, I’m grateful to have had no “gaydar” as a result of the elements of myself I’m now proudest of have resulted from studying the room unsuitable all these years in the past.
And solely the love goes on.
Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage is on sale now, wherever books are bought.
