Good for them putting in a dissenting viewpoint at 4:10.

I still want to see someone do a serious study of the role reversal that's happened in the gay rights movement over the last 50 or 60 years, where it went from the homophobic mainstream considering homsexuality a "defect" that you were born with - "one of nature's mistakes" - and claiming it as a lifestyle choice being a transgressive and empowering, to where we are now where things are exactly the opposite.

They even did this shit in Looney Tunes.

Fierstein's view on the matter is an interesting one, and he's far from the only person to hold it.

It's amazing how pervasive these stereotypes were and still are. My best friend in college was a gay dude. Without realizing it, he had internalized the sissy way of behaving, and in high school he actually practiced walking "like a straight man" in front of a mirror so he could pass as straight & not get beat up.

I really don't think of it like that at all. Only very few women who bought all of Liberace's records thought of him as gay. Most of them thought he was just a mother boy, and what kind of woman wouldn't want her own mother boy, if mothering is the role they need to play? Is the defined role of mother more restrictive than the defined role of burly breadwinner for men? Two generations before, solid Midwestern housewives lined up at the Chautauqua to swoon over Oscar Wilde. The idea of the gentle man has always been threatening to "true" American men, as each generation moves further and further from the colonial rusticism and toward a cohesive culture.

I feel like the sissy was a very deliberate, subversive character, in the way that the Jewish culture had the Borscht Belt and the blacks had the Apollo Theater. Rebellion and capitalization.

The gays were really the last true counterculture. To actively live gay, whether closeted or openly, at a time when marriage was not immediately predicated on love as it is now, was an active choice. It was perfectly possible to be a married, respectable queen. Now it somehow isn't. Somehow being a married, respectable queen is contemptible. Now the gays want to marry each other, and their radical message is lost. It's become domesticated and thus passionless.

The real truth about the sissy is not that he was homosexual. It was that he was European and dandified. Americans reject all European-ness as an Other, in almost exactly the same way Americans think of Mexico and Africa as Others. It didn't help that the archetypical sissy of the period was Noel Coward, who made a fortune off not only being openly gay, but openly British.

Also there were the Hanna Barberra cartoon characters like Snagglepuss and the gay alligator.