Gay Cars
(27 January 2012)
A friend of mine sent me a link the other day to an article, which linked to another article, which linked to another, and so on, all of them combining to give me considerable pause for thought. The general subject was gay cars, and what particularly caught my eye was the suggestion, made last summer, that the gayest car in Los Angeles (in terms of the sexual preferences, not the jolly demeanour, of the customers, not the car itself) is the BMW 7-Series.
Not saying it is, not saying it isn't. I'm not really in a position to comment. For a start, I've never been to Los Angeles. But if there really is such a thing as a gay car, as defined above, then it must be the case that two people will find two different cars appealing for no other reason than that one of them is gay and the other straight. And I would need to see some pretty convincing evidence before I believed that.
If there are goods or services that can be described as gay, then presumably there are others that can be described as not gay. But what does that mean? Imagine, if you have a moment, that I'm in a restaurant, ordering a meal, and it is somehow revealed that I am a straight person. "I'm so sorry, sir!" exclaims the waiter, blushing in confusion. "I didn't realise." And he takes the menu from me and gives me another with a different choice of food. This would be strange, would it not?
Likewise, if I were going through the final stages of buying a new car in, let's say, an Audi dealership, and the salesman spotted me glancing with admiration at a lady who happened to be walking past, is it within the bounds of probability that he would tear up the paperwork and give me the address of the nearest Mercedes dealership?
I'm suspicious of most assumptions that personal characteristics determine what kind of car you are likely to buy. Physical shape, certainly, and perhaps nationality (though that, I suggest, is more about culture than nature). But surely not sexuality. I don't see my life developing to the point where I would either need or want an SUV, but I can't believe that this is because Cameron Diaz does it for me in a way that Johnny Depp, admirable fellow though I'm sure he is, doesn't.
Not sex, either. For that reason I have never responded positively to suggestions from female journalists that they contribute reviews to CARkeys "from a woman's point of view". I don't think there is a woman's point view about cars, because if there were all women would share it, and I don't think there's a point of view that even most women have about cars, never mind all of them. Any time an article by a woman has appeared here, it's because I thought she was the right person for the job, and that's all there is to it.
As far as I can see, people like particular cars for a complicated variety reasons that are entirely personal to them (though of course two different sets of reasons may lead people to like the same car) and not because of some crude metric such as being gay, female, Norwegian, bald, Church of England, averagely-heighted or what have you.
And strangely enough this view seems to be shared, at least to some extent, by one Brett Berk, who might not be expected to agree with much of this article since he writes a gay car blog for Vanity Fair. Naturally, he is sure that the gay car concept is valid - his career would be peculiarly unsatisfying if he didn't - but he's been quoted as saying that he also believes "there are as many types of gay cars as there are gay people". Which I think is kind of my point.
