Ziggy Stardust aka David Bowie

It’s Black History Month, but gays are the new blacks, so let’s dip into some timely homosexual lore:

On Valentine’s Day, 1974, we were informed that “David Bowie turned down a Gay Liberation group who asked him to compose the ‘world’s first Gay National Anthem.’”

The jokes write themselves: Bowie had already written two of them; hell, so had Harold Arlen. And why no love for 1971’s “Stonewall Nation”? Oh, right: A woman (yuk!) wrote it. Also? It’s crap.

What’s less amusing is that forty years on, if Bowie”€”whom Melody Maker once called “as camp as a row of tents””€”dared to turn down such a request, he’d be hauled before a Canadian Human Rights Commission or some “legitimate” court in the US and would have lost both times, big time.

The Gay Mafia’s offers cannot be refused, not even by Ziggy Stardust.

If Bowie had duly penned some little ditty on demand back then, today he’d be caught between a cock and a hard ass regardless.

You see, not only was Mr. Jones merely posing as a Somdomite [sic], but a passing familiarity with his 1970s output leads one to conclude that Bowie would have likely restricted himself to lyrics about “boys” and “girls”, “gays” and “straights,” and maybe a shocking shout out to “drag queens.”

And according to Facebook, that goddamn rainbow now boasts more than fifty different colors.

The social-networking behemoth’s 1.2 billion users can now customize their profile “gender” to something more granular than the two previous”€”and hopelessly old-fashioned and oppressive”€”options of “Male” and “Female.”

(Who’d have thought that old standby option at other websites”€”“Prefer Not To Say””€”would one day sound refreshingly discreet rather than bratty and petulant?)

As of this week, Facebook users can choose from dozens of ugly, comical, and even redundant pet names for their own private I-dunno, from the quaint”€”“Androgynous,” “Intersex,” “Transsexual””€”to the cutting edge: “Pangender,” “GenderQueer,” “CisFemale.”

Today’s twisted narcissist who has everything (in a manner of speaking”€”or should that be a “cismale-er” of speaking?) can even pick a word that contains an asterisk, such as “Trans*Man.” What looks like an annoying, attention-getting flourish designed to set “breeders’” teeth on edge”€”the punctuation-mark equivalent of an aggressive lip piercing”€”is in fact a deadly serious and very important signifier, you haters:

[T]he * is used metaphorically to capture all the identities”€”from drag queen to genderqueer”€”that fall outside traditional gender norms. (The asterisk usually goes unpronounced in spoken English, though some users do say ‘trans star’ or ‘trans asterisk’ for clarity’s sake.)