Gay-Ass Coffee-Table Books

If the set dresser for the movie of my life had the gall to decorate the coffee table belonging to my celluloid self with the actual books actually sitting on my actual coffee table, I think I’d accuse the production’s art department of homophobia.

The books are:

• The Essential Fan Guide to ‘The Golden Girls’
• Streisand: In the Camera Eye
• Judy Garland: A Portrait in Art & Anecdote
• Dolly Parton Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones

A little on the nose, don’t you think? Surely there’s a subtler way to signal the sensibilities of the home’s residents. Couldn’t we just display old issues of Butt magazine?

If you ask me, we could probably cut the Judy Garland book. Heaven knows I am a fan of its subject, but the volume is beat-up and unwieldy. My husband, Frank, found it in the Little Free Library of which we were stewards back in Chicago.

I’d be fine with Judy going back into circulation, among the apparently inexhaustible supply of Nicholas Sparks novels filling all the other Little Free Libraries in America.

Though stereotypical to a borderline offensive degree, my coffee-table books do represent the gay icons I esteem the highest. Other LGBTQ+ folks my age grew up revering pop stars such as Madonna and Janet Jackson, but I have always gravitated toward the Broadway/Nick at Nite/easy listening end of the queer cultural spectrum.

Maybe that’s because I was raised in a heavy-duty evangelical household where so-called secular music was restricted. Among contemporary Christian music artists of the 1980s, your options for gay icons were basically limited to Amy Grant and Sandi Patty.

And I’m sorry, but they simply don’t have the pizzazz of, say, Chita Rivera. So I became a show tunes queen. What choice did I have?

Not that I was completely deprived of gay-icon sustenance as a child, mind you. Thanks to television, I had Miss Piggy, Vanity Smurf, Jackée Harry of 227, Pee-wee Herman, the Sugarbaker sisters of Designing Women, and the aforementioned Golden Girls. (I’m a Dorothy but Blanche is my favorite and that should tell you everything about me that you need to know.)

Then, in my early teenage years, I went through the inevitable classic Hollywood phase, perfecting my impersonations of Katharine Hepburn and Aunt Pittypat from Gone with the Wind, like so many red-blooded, all-American boys before me.

Around the same time I got very into I Love Lucy. I mean like very. I’d watch the reruns in syndication and then rewatch them on VHS. I’d pore over biographies of Lucille Ball. I’d ask for Lucy-related memorabilia at Christmastime. I’d memorize bits from the show. I’d even patiently sit through Ricky’s tedious musical numbers at the end of way too many episodes. I suppose for me it was more like I Stalk Lucy.

The most treasured piece in my collection of mementos was a plaster bust of Lucy Ricardo that my parents gave to me. I have no idea where they found this item. I have no idea why this item was made in the first place. I do know that I adored the thing with my whole heart, even while recognizing, despite my young age, the hilariousness of owning such a work.

There, in case you ever need one, is a pretty good working definition of “gay icon”: a performer with a capacity to inspire ironic adulation from closeted evangelical teens.

The present whereabouts of the Lucy bust are unknown. By the time my fire for the comedienne had burned out, the head had somehow lost one of its plastic eyeballs, causing an unfortunate slide from kitschy to grotesque.

It was still less unsettling than that Scary Lucy statue, though.