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SUNDAYREVIEW | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Read These Lips

MAY 24, 2014

Frank Bruni

A KISS is nothing. On the sidewalks, in the park, I see one every few

minutes, a real kiss, lip to lip. It barely registers. It’s as unremarkable as a

car horn in traffic, as an umbrella in rain.

And yet a kiss is everything. A kiss can stop the world.

The football player Michael Sam recently demonstrated as much. So

did my experience last Sunday, in a Broadway theater, of all places.

I say “of all places” because a theater is a progressive environment,

and this theater, on this night, was especially so. In the audience were

many people who’d participated hours earlier in the city’s annual AIDS

Walk, to which the performance was linked. And the performance was of

“Mothers and Sons,” a Tony-nominated play about gay shame, gay pride

and our steady march toward a less censorious society.

So it wasn’t surprising, or shouldn’t have been, when the woman in

the seat beside mine stood to greet the woman who was belatedly joining

her with a kiss, on the mouth, that lasted long enough to be unmistakably

romantic.

“Did you catch that?” said my own companion.

I most definitely had. And while neither of us was scandalized, we

were jolted nonetheless. We marveled — even in the middle of 2014, even

on the cusp of a week in which Oregon and Pennsylvania joined the rapidly

growing list of states to legalize same-sex marriage — that the couple could

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do this and would do this in front of so many witnesses, in a setting so

public. Others around us had also taken note, their eyes lingering on the

two women for a while.

Maybe marriage isn’t the dividing line between equality and

inequality, between getting full, reflexive acceptance from the world and

getting a piecemeal, willed respect. Maybe that border is traced with

kisses: with what Sam did and how those women said hello and the kind of

reaction it elicits and whether it elicits any reaction at all.

There’s a rich history of the kiss as frontier. I was reminded of this a

few days after the show, as I delved deeper into an excellent book that I

happened to be reading, “Pictures at a Revolution.” Written by the

journalist Mark Harris, it examines the changes convulsing Hollywood in

the 1960s. Chunks of it focus on the trailblazing career of Sidney Poitier,

and there were kisses on that trail, beginning with one in “A Patch of

Blue,” a 1965 movie about a black man’s friendship, blooming into love,

with a young white woman.

The woman is blind, and it’s a measure of Hollywood’s heavy-

handedness at the time that she can’t see the object of her affection:

Racism is expunged only when skin color is literally erased. What’s more,

Poitier’s character isn’t the agent of the kiss, which Harris identifies as the

first of its kind in a big mainstream movie. The white woman initiates it,

and it stuns him.

Even so, these fleeting seconds of “A Patch of Blue” were cut from the

prints of the movie distributed in the South, Harris writes. This was two

years before Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck

down the laws in many Southern states that banned interracial marriage.

In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” released six months after Loving

v. Virginia, Poitier again kisses a white woman. And it’s again presented in

a manner that suggests its audacity — as a shadowy clutch in the rearview

mirror of a taxicab whose driver isn’t prepared for it.

In a famous episode of the television sitcom “All in the Family” in

1972, the black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., playing himself, defiantly

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plants a kiss on the cheek of the white bigot Archie Bunker, who is visibly

aghast. The kiss is the great equalizer, collapsing the distance between two

people, leveling their altitudes. It makes them one and it makes them the

same.

A kiss speaks volumes, even when it doesn’t say precisely that. As

Maureen Dowd noted in a 1984 story in The Times about Geraldine

Ferraro’s historic selection as Walter Mondale’s running mate, Mondale

was strenuously advised not to kiss her, lest he seem to treat her with less

dignity and ceremony than he would a man. Sixteen years later, at the

Democratic National Convention in 2000, it was a kiss — an exuberant,

extravagant, somebody-please-get-them-a-room kiss — with which Al Gore

communicated his passion for Tipper and his passion, period, to an

electorate that needed to see it.

IN 1993, as a commentary on longstanding tensions between Jews

and African-Americans in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn,

The New Yorker ran a cover illustration by Art Spiegelman of a white

Hasidic man enfolding a black woman in a kiss. Many people were

shocked.

Now it’s the gay kisses we’re all aflutter about. They’ve been a long

time coming. Sandra Bernhard, who played a lesbian on the sitcom

“Roseanne” in the 1990s, remembers hearing a director yell “Cut!” as she

and the actress Morgan Fairchild stood facing each other under mistletoe

and leaned in. “The censors would not let us finish that kiss,” Bernhard

told me.

In a subsequent episode, there was indeed a woman-to-woman kiss,

though not involving her. But across eight seasons of “Will & Grace,” there

were just three man-to-man kisses, according to Max Mutchnick, one of

the show’s creators, and the paucity of kisses in “Modern Family” has been

a sustained curiosity.

Gay characters who trade sass and sexual innuendo are safe. Public

expressions of gay intimacy aren’t.

And they’re still rare enough that the initial, internal reaction that I

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and many other gay people had to the way Sam clutched and kissed his

boyfriend on national TV wasn’t exultation. It was alarm. Had he gone too

far? Asked too much?

“We reflexively feel in our core that someone’s going to get punched,

and that’s why we wince,” said Mutchnick, 48, noting that he and I and so

many gay people spent our youths and maybe portions of our adult lives

walking on eggshells, speaking in whispers.

Those eggshells cling. I still sometimes feel panic when my partner,

meeting me in a restaurant, gives me a perfunctory kiss on the lips. And yet

I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s

gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that.

We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football

draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did

so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects

everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical

tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was

something to hold on to.

•

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me onFacebook.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page SR3 of the New York edition withthe headline: Read These Lips.

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