Shop Talk Redux: Drinking makes you ‘gayer’

I finally understand why Joan Klein stumbles from topic to topic in her fashion column — she’s drunk when she writes it.

[[READMORE]]

Since we threw Prohibition over our shoulders, everyone feels better. I’ll confess that a dash of legal sherry in my turtle soup and a sip of brandy after my coffee have made a braver and gayer snooper of me.

I mean, who can blame her? Klein is writing her column less than a year after Prohibition was repealed with the ratification of the 21st amendment. She’s having alcohol at all hours of the day and at all meals. With her soup. With her coffee. (This last one should not be attempted by amateurs since it requires the delicate combination of uppers and downers.)

I totally understand how she feels. The second the U.S. ends its foolhardy War on Drugs, I’ll be the first to do lines of coke in the bathroom like a stockbroker. Or a model. Or a stockbroker-model hybrid. 

But this post isn’t about me. It’s about Joan Klein and her “snooping” made “gayer” with the addition of alcohol. In the modern parlance, “gay” obviously has a different meaning than the one she intended. She merely meant that a little nip makes her fashion investigations more enjoyable. Nowadays, a “gay snooper”might refer to blogger Perez Hilton, the TMZ reporting outfit, or someone who goes looking for a closeted person in men’s bathrooms or the ranks of the Republican party.

Then again, Klein does write about the fashion world where gay men are abound. Perhaps she really was on the lookout for homosexuals to give her style guidance. Maybe she really was “gay snooping” in the TMZ sense of the word.