Maurice Sendak was gay.

[fishwax]

34. "When the grand majority of people die, no one really talks abt their sexual gender or orientation"

Last edited Wed May 9, 2012, 03:23 PM - Edit history (1)

But they do, by prominently mentioning their marriage(s) and the relationships that stem from them, which are a significant (and often extensive) part of most obituaries. Many stories Sendak, on the other hand, have not even mentioned the fact that he was in a committed relationship for 50 years that ended only with his partner's death five years ago. I haven't read many that made more than passing mention of it. That strikes me as unusual.

This is a double standard that extends to other aspects of life for members of the gay community--for instance, it is not at all uncommon for people in an office setting to display pictorial evidence of their heterosexual relationships (wedding pictures, vacation pictures, etc.) or for a straight man (for example) to talk freely and unthinkingly about what he and his wife/girlfriend/what-have-you did over the weekend.

But if a gay man puts up pictures of his husband and their kids or talks about what he and the hubby did on vacation he can (in most states) be fired, and such behavior is likely to be referred to by a certain segment of straights who "don't mind people being gay as long as they don't make a big deal out of it" as "shoving it in our faces."

On edit: changed "one" to "many" in the penultimate sentence of the first paragraph because there have been a few that did.