Coincidences are curious. By Monday night, The New York Times Sunday Styles article, “Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell,” was the newspaper’s most e-mailed article, a sure sign that people are talking about the latest social trend, “gay vague.”

Fashionistas believe “many men have migrated to a middle ground where the cues traditionally used to pigeonhole sexual orientation—hair, clothing, voice, body language—are more and more ambiguous,” reported The Times.

A recent book published by Princeton University Press, “Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights,” recommends that heterosexuals adopt what amounts to “gay vague” behavior—what the authors call “ambiguation.”

Ian Ayres and Jennifer Gerarda Brown, who wrote “Straightforward,” urge straights to abandon the trappings of their heterosexual privilege in order to help the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, a tactic self-consciously derived from the changes in social norms ushered in by the African-American civil rights movement. Americans of European extraction, for example, are far less likely today than they would have been several decades ago to refer to themselves as white in settings such as personal ads. Ambiguation involves acts like a straight couple displaying a gay pride flag.

Continue reading Harnessing the Power of Gay-Vague Politics.

Straightforward : How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights