Lez Keep It Real

And no, it’s not the Singing Bee.

When I was in North Carolina over Labor Day, I spent time catching up on my celebrity gossip. My friend, Allison, gets all of the juicy magazines - US Weekly, People, Rolling Stone, etc.

I bypassed a cover of US Weekly speculating that Brit was a bad parent (the girl is a train wreck, ’nuff said) and picked up the issue of Rolling Stone with Zac Efron on the cover. He is quite beautiful, for a guy. He has such delicate features, an engaging singing voice and JT-esque abs. It’s hard not to stare at him, even for a lesbian like me. I was intrigued by the article for two reasons:

1) What’s up with this whole High School Musical thing and why are billions of gay people obsessed with it.

2) Is Zac efron gay?

Neither question was answered upon reading the article, though I did learn that Zac Efron is as squeaky clean an individual as he is a pretty boy. The enigma that is High School Musical continued to haunt me until today. I stumbled upon this hilarious column in the Advocate and I get it now. The reason High School Musical is so appealing is so simple, yet so profound. Basically, it’s the gayest thing on television right now …

The Advocate ~ Elementary school–aged children love High School Musical because they live in a world where, one day, when they’re all grown up like the big kids, high school is going to be amazing: one dancing-on-the-cafeteria-tables production number after another. No swirlies. No beatings. Only complete acceptance of everyone’s unique selves and special talents, whether those skills be baking, singing, chemistry, cello, or propensity for wearing very gay hats. If things go wrong, they’ll be righted by a musical number, hopefully one where the chorus goes, “We’re all in this together…something something…we’re all stars, etc. Hey!” There, I just recapped the first movie for you in case you missed it. It’s a world where a movie like Heathers simply has no reason to exist.

Adult gays love High School Musical because they live in a world where, one day, when they invent a time machine, they will have the secondary-education experience they deserved to have, full of music so facile and dorky that it makes ordinary bubblegum pop sound like black metal, set in an environment so clean and sparkling and blazingly color-saturated it could cause cancer of the eyes.

When people talk about HSM, they talk about children—and sometimes the humming-along parents held hostage by those children. They don’t talk about adults longing for something that never was. But that’s the secret weapon of this maddeningly addictive one-two punch of gleefully uncool TV movies: They know what you always wanted and never got, especially if you were a show tunes–starved homosexual. READ MORE

I guess the only thing I have left to do is watch it myself.

zac efron, us weekly, rolling stone, high school musical, people magazine, the advocate