Student CAMP: 

Recently Rockstar Games, the company who published the best-selling games Grand Theft Auto III, was sued by the family of a Tennessee man who was killed by two brothers firing a rifle into traffic. The boys, 14 and 16, claimed their motive was boredom and their inspiration was the game, in which players perpetrate incredible amounts of violence on their surroundings.

The games made them do it. Never mind that millions of people have played the game without unleashing assault weapons on the local populace.

How much does our entertainment influence our actions? I don’t think that the family’s lawsuit has any merit, but at the same time it’s ridiculous to pretend that what we see, hear, and participate in doesn’t profoundly affect us. How is one to reconcile saying that violent video games are harmless and thinking that the staggering rate of eating disorders in our country has everything to do with fashion magazines? It’s a slippery slope at best. Perhaps those boys would have done it regardless of what violence they were or weren’t exposed to and blamed anything plausible. I can only imagine them going wild with a trebuchet in the 14th century and saying that they thought it was fine since everyone else was laying siege upon the neighbors.

This is perhaps not the most elegant segue, but hearing of this lawsuit made me think of homosexuality and the media. We seem to be taking over the airways—or at the very least, the hets seem to think that we are—as is witnessed by scores of articles paying an awful lot of attention to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Boy Meets Boy, and every other homo-laden show on the airway. Queers are everywhere on the small screen! Or at least the rich white male ones are. I’m sure the assimilationists are jumping for joy somewhere.

One can only wonder what this will lead to. I’m waiting for the day that some grief-stricken mother sues Bravo because her son wants to become a hairdresser instead of an accountant and is claiming that watching Queer Eye made him do it. I’m convinced that it will happen.

We seem bent on warning ourselves about homosexuality. We’re subjected to pre-show warnings about how the content contained in show X is inappropriate and may cause us to become gay. Queer as Folk, for all of its faults, got one thing right—their disclaimer stated that there were Naked Gay Men in the show, thank you very much. As more and more people come out of the closet to be on these gay reality shows, us queers will doubtlessly be accused of spreading gay via media. (Well, more so then we have been.) It makes me want to walk into a Baptist church, sneeze on a few kids, and run like hell just to see what happens.

I’m convinced that fear of contamination is the primary reason why a significant amount of the straight people are physically incapable of saying any word about homosexuality in anything louder than a whispered hiss. My mother and I can be talking to one another from any distance at our house, and it’s like we’re on a phone with bad reception. "I don’t see why you have to dress like such a ——, everyone already knows that you’re a ——!" She’s clearly not aware that the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has become the Love That Just Won’t Shut Up. If she said the word "lesbian" aloud the windows might shatter.

Ultimately I find that all of our entertainment—violent video games, the latest summer blockbuster, a ridiculously gay man brandishing a hair dryer—is that it can take those of us with certain inclinations and subconsciously condones them. The impact of this can be both profound and subtle, but in the end I’m just hoping for more relatively well-adjusted homos out there. Hair dryers optional.