Word on the street is that Marc Jacobs likes to have sex with men. He allegedly liked finding these men (sometimes multiple at a time) using — wait for it — Grindr.
All things considered, there’s nothing particularly scandalous about this aspect of Jacobs’ sex life. There are no hard numbers about just how many men use Grindr, Scruff, or related apps to find guys to hook up with, but common sense would suggest that many, if not most, gay men have downloaded (and used) the app at least once.
There’s nothing shocking about the idea of a sexually active gay man in New York City getting his rocks off with a guy or two over any given weekend. But there is something decidedly refreshing about Jacobs’ frankness regarding his non-normative sexual escapades.
We’re living in a golden age for queer visibility and that’s especially true of gay men. Commercials featuring blissfully familial gay dads and tearful coming out videos produced by young, gay men have quickly become the media standard for progressive portrayals of homosexuality.
On the one hand, this newfound, high-profile visibility is great and undoubtedly broadening people’s opinions about LGBT people. On the flip side however, today’s media representation of gay male identity is still pretty narrowly defined as “nice, regular” guys who happen to enjoy sex with other men.
There are a number of things left to be desired in how queer masculinity is understood by the world, but there is one in particular that Jacobs is keenly addressing: sex. For all of the inroads made in “normalizing” queer identities, we still treat sex — gay men having sex — as one of those things that isn’t appropriate to talk about without softening the edges.
One of the more salient critiques of the It Gets Better Project was its implicit backing of a sort of milquetoast gayness. True, the videos were meant to be a conversational bridge between young gay kids and their older gay counterparts, but let’s be real: one of the best things about growing up, coming out, and becoming comfortable in your sexual identity is being able to have good, satisfying sex without shame.
Typically, the kind of gay sex that we talk about in polite company maps pretty closely to traditional, heteronormative forms of straight sex. It’s in bad taste to assume that there’s a “man” and a “woman,” when two men decide to go at it, but rather than unpack the very real complexities of intimacy between two gay men, we tend to treat gay sex as the pairing of two basically inert substances.
(A scene from ABC’s ‘Modern Family’ in which Cam and Mitchell’s bedroom, and by extension their sex life, is played up for hyucks.)
Marc Jacobs’ alleged orgy wasn’t a glorified bacchanal that the designer chose to publicize and endorse as the ‘one true form’ of gay sex to have. It just so happens that he may have spent a few hours enjoying himself in a way that gratified him sexually. That isn’t all that interesting in and of itself, but held up to what goes for representations of gay sexuality these days, it’s a powerful statement.
We’re all just out here trying to get through life and have a little fun along the way, it says. How we choose to have that fun is entirely up to us and it doesn’t have to be something we’re ashamed of.
The Interplay is a biweekly column exploring the intersections of sex, pop culture, and current events. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
