Not long ago, a friend of mine had her heart temporarily broken. The man in question was the sort of guy who used Kiehl's moisturizer, wore silk underthings and spent his Saturdays preparing six-course Asian fusion dinners for friends. Despite the frouffy trappings, he had been expertly jerking her around for months with all the wordless dominance of an illiterate lumberjack. My friend, of course, was a goner.
"Look, the man buys organic lemongrass -- he's obviously gay," I said in a lame attempt to cheer her up.
"You're wrong," she said, with a miserable sniff. "That's the problem. He's not gay. He's just a bit gay."
I knew immediately what she meant, because I am a sucker for it myself: The irresistible allure of the slightly gay heterosexual man. Today's ideal male strikes a delicate balance between manly and fussy. He is the sort of guy who watches hockey wrapped in a pashmina throw. Who drinks neat bourbon while listening to Debussy. Who looks good in a sarong. Or a jock strap. Or both. He is Just Gay Enough -- a term coined last year by Talk magazine, and a concept familiar to all well-heeled urbane women of an uncertain age.
This does not simply mean that a well-placed bowl of edamame on a bachelor pad coffee table is the new Spanish fly. The perfect Just Gay Enough man must keep his feminine side in check. Every woman has her limits -- my personal feeling is that straight men should attend Broadway musicals only if dragged by women and children they love, that they should floss, but not bleach, and that they should never, ever be prettier than me.
The Just Gay Enough man is decidedly, at key moments boorishly, straight.I speak as a woman who once fell hopelessly in love with someone on basis of a) his extensive collection of post-structuralist literary theory (I was in first year, okay?) b) his hometown hockey pennant and c) his table manners.
"You want him to be a little gay about things," the Talk article states. "You want to be able to have a guy who knows the wall should be painted periwinkle and also knows how to do that himself. The perfect man could pull up to your house on a Harley, needing a shave, and tell you, 'I just cut this recipe out of the Times and I think we should make it tonight.' "
The requirements of slightly gay straightness are a finicky science, one that naturally sexy men (say, Jude Law) instinctively understand. Talk demonstrates the formula in terms of personal trappings. As in: clownish hipster boots + limited-edition car + calf's leather jacket = Not Gay Enough. Kiehl's + Henry Rollins poetry fan + twin Jack Russell Terriers = Just a Little Too Gay. After consulting a few like-minded friends, we decided the ideal combination would be something like: Powder blue cashmere turtleneck + pilot's licence + herb garden = Just Gay Enough.
The sentiment is echoed by an episode on The Simpsons in which Apu, clearly the least desirable specimen on the block at a charity bachelor auction, makes all the women swoon by announcing, "I like to make furniture, and then discuss where it is placed in a room."
"The secret is that combination of masculine and feminine traits," says my colleague Russell Smith. "A touch of gay flair, or at least what an extremely conservative, repressed society perceives as effeminacy or gay flair, is a very effective technique. An interest in clothes, in how things look, in aesthetics and services, a certain narcissism and vanity and, oh, classical music -- it scores chicks."
Ben Mulroney instinctively understands this secret combination. When the decidedly het CTV host recently dressed up as Karl Lagerfeld for Halloween -- lace fan and all -- the women in attendance loved it.
"A great many men won't do things they perceive as being too feminine," he says. "It's a cliché, but you do have to be comfortable enough in your sexuality to do those things. I took a wine-tasting class, I know how to waltz, I brunch. You have to brunch. It pays off in the long run."
Perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the Just Gay Enough man's appeal is the fact that they get the best women. My friend Jamie, who describes himself as "the gayest straight man on Earth" and can recognize a pair of Jil Sander boots across four lanes of traffic, is living with a sweet-natured grad student in the body of a Ford model. And the British columnist John Diamond, late husband of the finger-licking food goddess Nigella Lawson, once described himself in the Times of London as "one of those just gay enough men -- the sort who could strip down a motorbike engine and creosote the shed in the morning, run up a new pair of trousers over lunch and have the confidence to say to my wife, 'Actually, darling, I'd have gone for the Grape Crush with that top.' "
Some straight men get prickly about the Just Gay Enough tag. "Unfortunately, we've got to a point in this declining age where knowing how to use a knife and fork and knowing the difference between chardonnay and Chablis is perceived as being a bit gay," spat one male friend of mine, a dashing writer who did not appreciate my telling him how devastatingly, every so slightly gay he is.
"There was a time when such things were simply part of being a gentleman."
Touché, darling.