Jay Brannan’s first album Goddamned is out this week, and is a must-download. He financed it himself – he is one of the growing number of singer/songwriters who are managing to start their careers with money earned from tracks released on iTunes and CDBaby and Napster, and whose reputation spread on MySpace, Facebook and, in particular, YouTube, where he has over 12,000 subscribers to his simple boy-sings-with-guitar-in-his-bathroom videos.

While writing for the album, he kept his day job as a proofreader in New York, and saved the money to produce it himself, and pay for the promotional tour. (Sadly, he’s not coming to Ireland this time around). He has not done a “record deal”, there are no executives in the music industry pulling his strings. He’s his own man.
Brannan first caught my eye playing the ethereal Ceth in the stunning 2006 indie film Shortbus, by Hedwig’s creator John Cameron Mitchell, a film that is ostensibly about sex but reaches far deeper into the human heart than most; a provocative, moving and ultimately life-enhancing experience, in which Brannan sings his own song, ‘Soda Shop’.
In his wistful track ‘I Want To Be A Housewife’ he dreams ironically of a life washing dishes, scrubbing floors, with his mythical man outside in the yard, suburban-stylee, working on the car, and tending to the barbecue, while Jay is doing his laundry for him. (“What are boyfriends for?”) “Crazy about each other/ we both have fucked up pasts/ but when we are together/ we have a fucking blast”. “I want to be a housewife” he asks. “What’s so wrong with that?”
Sadly, plenty. The more “feminine” of us, (does that correlate to those of us who are looking for love?), who yearn for the easy naturalness of simply stepping over the line into predefined traditional gender roles, our “straight-acting” guy un-self-consciously doing “guy things” out in the world, yet at the same time loving us at home as if we were a precious and irreplaceable part of his life, don’t have it easy. To a large degree, this is something to do with how we men relate to the “inner feminine”, for want of a better phrase. (Yes, I do want a better phrase. Trying to discuss gender is loaded with pitfalls and distractions and prickly sensitivities – we have yet to establish a way of talking about gender that isn’t steeped in esoteric and/or potentially divisive value systems – ie Jungian archetypes, astrological symbols, queer theory, feminism, gender studies etc).
Of all the times I have heard men speak about love, I have yet to hear a gay man speak of his long-term male partner with the same tenderness and awe as I’ve heard heterosexual men talk about their wives or girlfriends, with my dear old Dad leading the way in my book. This isn’t homophobia – lesbians outdo men in their capacity to speak of love for the women in their lives. (By the way – I’d love to hear testaments to redress that imbalance from men-loving men). It’s a guy thing, it’s our emotional illiteracy, and those who love women tend to learn and develop that literacy the longer they are in relationship with them. Across the board, I believe that anyone who looks to women to form loving relationships with has it easier than those who look to men. That may seem an outrageous thing to say; I’d just point out that not every man unambiguously looks for relationship in the same way that women do, we are far more ambivalent about them than is good for us. This is what prevents me from easily slipping into being the token gay at a bitchfest with “other” single women, complaining bitterly that all men are bastards, that men are the root of all evil in the world, the whole controlling aloof commitment-phobic lot of them. They’re criticising me. I’m criticising me. I am betraying myself, my gender if I do so. I feel uneasy when I am in those sorts of conversations – I am not sure whether being a traitor to my gender is something of which I should be proud. Or am I betraying the woman in me? Damn. So much treachery, so little reward.
Brannan comes from a hellfire-and-brimstone fundamentalist family that doesn’t take kindly to his being queer, which can’t have helped. He says he has spent “so much time trying to be comfortable with being a feminine person, a feminine guy.” He could work on countering it, he says, get coached, in which case he “would probably get laid more. Sad, but true”. Is it any wonder that he says he has the “lowest self-esteem on the planet”?
He’s not the only one. Plenty of men struggle, right across the scale of orientation, with how to prioritize love over sex. With his references to leather and his kinky septum piercing (visible on some of his videos) however, I would guess that Brannan has had enough of a taste of the sex-as-sport world to make the life of a housewife just that little bit less unambiguously attractive. If we fall for sexual players, we don’t settle down with the “nice” guys. Settling down with the sexual players may seem like a fantasy come true, having our beefcake and eating it, but those dogs don’t stay in the yard at night, and resent being tethered. And, usually, it’s women who get away with tethering, who know how to do it; once a man starts sounding like a scolding wife, he’s history.
There’s a real problem when it comes to how men express that soft side of them that needs/yearns/longs for love. Some gay men bury it, play the game just like the rest of the lads; some act it out literally, with drag-queen subpersonalities that are like alter-egos, singing torch songs of unrequited love; but there’s an edgy element of parody and misogyny that often distorts the impulse, mocks the tricks and traits of femininity without allowing the vulnerability and tenderness any room. And, as Panti has bemoaned in her one-woman show, trannie-lovers are a rare and curious breed, and not exactly given to settling down with a mortgage and 2.2 cats.
A queen may feel liberated getting in touch with her inner diva, feel more complete, get more attention and laughs, but it ain’t gonna bring her love. Indeed, in the increasingly sexualised “straight-acting” gay dating scene, such effeminacy is treated with suspicion and, at times, hostility, oddly reminiscent of the early homophobic bullying and teasing we received at school. It’s as if some gay men resent those who remind us of our own “inner feminine”, that which we’ve worked hard to suppress and cover up in adolescence, and work hard to be just as “straight-acting” as the lad next door, just as “normal” when we’re “grown up”. Because “real men” have all the sexual capital to spend.
Looking at the current cover of Gay Community News, in which seven well-known drag queens pose in their full glam splendour and proclaim: “Throw the Pride Bouquet, girls! We want gay marriage!” I am, perhaps mischievously, drawn to wonder how many of them actually have partners lined up to be their husbands.
Of course we deserve full equality and the right to marry – but perhaps it’s only when we do have that right will we men begin to honestly reflect on why it’s not quite as simple as the song says.