Stuff Gay People Like: Postmodern furniture

In the furnishing of their homes, people show the world who they really are. A room with a worn but tidy couch and love seat says the owner is “mainstream and family-oriented.” If your kitchen has spices and cooking utensils in plain view, it shows openness and intimacy with friends and guests. A spartan but well-lit home says “workaholic,” while a bean-bag bag chair with a plastic thrift-store coffee table says “oh fuck everything, I’m drunk.”

Gay people are citizens of the Earth; traveled and cosmopolitan, they love the power of location, but call no one place home. For that reason it is fitting that their living spaces look like international airport lobbies.

Yes, we did an image search for “airport furniture” and there it was, the apartment of everyone we know! The stilted bubble chairs, the table-ottomans and the flat-screens that that stick out perpendicular to a wall were all too familiar. This is the postmodern world where gay men live: it is the world that whizzes by like time.

One theme in gay living rooms is the presence of things that are also other things. A fish tank that mounts on the wall resembles a picture frame. There’s an end table that opens into a chest, and a plant stand with coathooks on it. Any futon is simultaneously sofa and a bed, but this one is, thirdly, concept-art, with a mysterious pointless hole one one end like one you’d find on a massage table, three legs and a back that folds up in two directions. Evidently it is also a torture device since no right-minded person would choose to sleep on something that hard and uncomfortable. “Which is the part of it that you sit on?” you will want to ask upon seeing it, but that is a stupid question: you sit right over there, on the chair-bookshelf! And lets not forget the fusionism of the studio apartment – the living room with a kitchen in it, and smack in the center is an over-sized bed with eight lime-green foam pillows.

The value of such unusual furniture is its novelty; it is journey into the future, apparently a time in which trees no longer exist on Earth because nothing is made of wood. But after the novelty has worn off, the postmodern apartment is left feeling creepy and sterile. It is time for another trip to Ikea to wrack up a little more credit card debt – so as to not appear to be poor and out of fashion!

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column featured in Out Front Colorado. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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