"Let’s imagine, then, that among the assorted warblers and strummers
and leather-lunged divas that have made up the renewable cast of
hopefuls on the country’s No. 1 television show, you appear not as some
talented hopeful with a shady back story but as a theatrical creation
with a message to sell beyond the usual will to prevail. You are swivel
hipped and pillow lipped. You have an outsize talent and a fondness for
Cher. You have blond hair dyed black and styled in an asymmetrical
shag. At some long-ago moment, you gave in to your inner Maybelline
girl.
You are Adam Lambert, the contestant widely tipped as a
favorite to be the next winner of “American Idol.” And the only thing
standing between you and riches and the chance to play arenas may be a
question currently burning up the Internet: Can a gay contestant win?"
So asks the New York Times writer Guy Trebay. It is easy to forget that it is 2009 when such questions are asked. We are reminded of Clay Aiken, who only in 2008, finally quelled the flurry of suspicions and came out. It begs the real question: why is this important in a singing competition? While Trebay harkens back to Rock Hudson and Liberace, it is David Ehrenstein's remarkable revelation that “I see us as living in the post-Neil Patrick Harris era." Or PNPHE, for short. The apparently quite historic Neil Patrick Harris outed himself in 2006 in the face of being publicly outed by People magazine. The fact that his career has survived is the apparent historically remarkable thing.
There is no mention of last years NAMBLA entry, the seraphic David Archuleta, who has been in the cross-hairs of gay suspicious agents everywhere—more out of desire, one suspects than curiosity.
What seems to be lost in the all cultural cross referencing is that Adam Lambert is an astonishing talent and it shouldn't matter. His performance on last weeks show conjured up a young Michael Jackson in the 1983 Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special: a singular performance that catapults your career. His version of Roland Orzabal's Mad World, though reinvented by singer Gary Jules, was nonetheless a hypnotic rendering both visually and in voice. It was so much so that the perpetually sitting Simon Cowles even rose to the occasion giving him a standing ovation. Deservedly so.
That should have been enough. The discussion should have ended there. As one cultural critic recently commented: "it shouldn't matter but controversies have become a blurred commodity in the time of Obama."