Gay: marked

What happens when someone “reveals” or “announces” or says or lets slip or shouts out loud that they are gay? What is significant or relevant about it. Far more than what God thinks about it or people’s predilections for some kinds of sex and disapproval of others, it’s to do with marked forms.
A marked form is the one that does for all. Duck means all ducks, drakes included. Drakes just mean drakes. Drake is the marked form. Cow is unmarked. Bull is marked. And we, human beings, have a built-in discrimination; Us, the unmarked form, and Them, the marked. Us is usually so unmarked that it is practically invisible, only perceivable in its contrast to the other - Jew, black, woman, gay.
It’s no use pretending we don’t have these discriminatory categories; for one thing they have an up side; friend, colleague, mate, family. And outside each of these warm and positive collectives are the excluded. And since the pople inside are our best people, those outside are not so good, or inferior. No, no, not inferior, just....different.
In sex, straight is the unmarked form, so very unmarked that it includes lots of gay people, discreet cross-dressers, heterosexuals who practice together every bodily conjunction there is as far as anatomy allows - practically everybody, in fact, as long as they are, well, straight. And gay is a marked form. Still a very marked form. And it’s useful politically and culturally, just its very markedness, for use by political rivals and the mighty operation that mediates our cultural foreground, background and middle ground; so that the Sun and the Daily Mail and all the broadcast news can say “...revealed that he was gay...” and allow whatever form of themness is at hand to accrete and do its dirty work as it may. Because themness is always worse than usness, however bad we may be.
And we do it in our personal lives, or I do. A gay friend is very much us by definition, a friend, unmarked us. But let him or her offend you, or upset you, or hurt your feelings for a moment with a thoughtless betrayal or a spiteful joke, and you know what you do. You look for an excluded category, one that explains them, their behaviour, as other. It may only last a second, but it happens. It was interesting in that kids with Tourette Syndrome programme a few weeks ago, the girl who said, absolutely believably , “I’m not racist. Not at all. But I see a black person and immediately it comes into my head the worst thing I could say, and there’s nothing I can do, I say it. I shout it. Luckily,” she said, “my black friends know I’ve got Tourettes and understand and don’t hold it against me.” But it’s there, isn’t it, in all of us.
What are we to make of the fact that Simon Hughes has revealed, or maybe admitted, that he has had gay relationships in the past? That he should front wildlife programmes in the land of his ancestors like Michael Portillo (who is ever so jolly and cuddly looking these days). That we can stop thinking of poor Lib-Dem Simon as a decent but slightly milk-and-water do-gooder and cast him more in the rollicking mold of George Melly, Simon Callow and Oscar Wilde? Probably not. Maybe we’re meant to think nothing specific at all. It was after all the announcement of a plain unvarnished fact. Just that unlike us - Rupert, Tony, Dave, Harry and William and the ABs of C & Y - poor Si is now very much marked.