LGBTQ-Plus Is a Car Boot on the Hetero Jaw

A comedian was scoring big points with his thoughts on tranny vs granny. Saying grandma is too much trouble and the word gets shortened to granny, he told us, and saying transvestite is too much trouble and it gets shortened to tranny. “Congratulations, English-language trainees,” he said, or something like that. Well, look. Transvestites hate tranny and they’re the people most affected by the word, so don’t call them trannies unless you’re a bigot. Next, let’s remember something the comedian chose to forget. Not all familiarity is the same. You say granny because you love your grandmother and she’s right there, part of the family. Now why do you say tranny? Words get shortened because people say them a lot, over and over. Unless you’re transgender or a fellow traveler, your reason for saying the word over and over is probably that you can’t stand those trannies.

I heard Trump say LGBTQ-plus, labor through the whole thing. It was a show of respect, and he did it back in 2016, in the middle of his speech accepting the nomination. I don’t know what he’s saying now. The rest of us seem to have stuck with LGBTQ-plus, that wall-climbing bootcamp for the tongue. If there’s a respectable short version, I haven’t heard it. The point is to put a wheel clamp on the jaw so we can’t spit out anything. The gay community, and by gay I mean the LGBTQ-plus community, decided a while back that we, the heterosexuals, couldn’t be trusted when their name was involved. I expect they had good reason, given the heteros’ track record. The same thinking lies behind black people and white people. I admit that sticking in people reminds you that you’re talking about fellow humans. But the word also takes up time and slows down the jaw, reducing the opportunity for words to start pelting.

In the event, people’s safeguards haven’t prevented many ill-natured remarks that follow the approved phrasing. Nothing is easier to ignore than a reminder, especially a constant one; and the time taken to say people amounts to a speed bump. A crusher like LGBTQ-plus can’t be driven over. I still wish some respectful short version might be allowed; as you saw, in practice I tend to slip into gay, like saying somebody’s Chinese when you mean East Asian. An obvious choice would be to get rainbow in there, but as a word it’s so corny. Talk about rainbow people or the rainbow tribe and you sound like a soda commercial from the late-1960s. Kind of hard to use them unless you know everybody else will, and they won’t without a go-ahead. Our sentence is LGBTQ-plus and we’ll keep on serving it.

DVD corner. Viewing the final season of Veep, it seems to me that the gang’s no longer a bunch of Democrats. They do have a gay megadonor, and at one point he summons the characters to attend a conclave of important speakers voicing forward-looking, future-embracing ideas. But consider the deadlocked convention that climaxes the season. You can’t satirize a Democratic convention and have its platform say no to gay marriage. Selena would sell out gay marriage, if she figured circumstances favored that. But those circumstances wouldn’t arise at a Democratic convention. At the fictional convention, Jonah’s horrible candidacy gets a second wind because of a mass shooting; the shooter’s an Arab-born math teacher, so the delegates think maybe Jonah’s attacks on Muslims make sense (he hates Muslims for allegedly inventing math). In real life the delegates would call for more gun control.

The Veep people could’ve satirized Democrats in the age of Trump. Instead the show has President Montez, who’s nothing like Trump and doesn’t come up much during the last season. Meanwhile, Age of Trump issues have seeped into the show’s groundwater. Topicality will do that, I suppose. Whatever the issues of the day, some of them have to get thrown at your characters, so the base of Selena’s unnamed party now has a MAGA tinge. Meanwhile, the closest Trump comes to being talked about is when a character lays into Jonah: “an embittered, vindictive, narcissistic manchild.” I’d say this is a deliberate echo of familiar rhetoric. It comes with an unstated joke: Jonah’s a freak show, but a freak show who lost; in our world his equivalent got elected.