A beard is a woman who gets involved with a gay man in order to make him look like a straight man. Like the facial hair she is named after, she conceals something that should be as obvious as the nose on his face, but which he pretends is not there. We will not go into the reasons why he denies that he has a nose, or why he thinks we would believe him despite the evidence of our eyes. That is the stuff of dissertations.
It is not for us to drag him out of his closet if it is a very comfortable walk-in lined with Gucci loafers and Hermes belts. Who knows what roles we would agree to play if we were offered even an empty but very well-made walk-in closet? You know how cramped today’s condos are. Although it is silly for him to go on pretending if the closet has glass doors (“eskaparate” as the filmmaker Joey Reyes put it) and we can see right into it. Our point is that everyone has something to hide, and our existence is not necessarily improved by bringing this out into the cruel light of day.
There are several types of Beards.
1. The Willing Beard, who understands the nature of their role-playing game.
1.1. She derives some professional or economic benefit from the arrangement, especially if the gay man is a celebrity.
1.2. She is a very close friend of the gay man. One of her duties is to accompany him to family gatherings and company dinners so his relatives and colleagues can stop asking him why he doesn’t have a girlfriend. He does the same for her. Afterwards they can watch The Immortals and giggle together at Henry Cavill’s abs and Kellan Lutz’s man-boobs.
2. The Unwitting Beard who has no idea that her boyfriend is gay.
2.1. Being an accomplice in deception is one thing, but getting deceived into participating in deception is another. The poor girl could already be planning the wedding. A gay man who takes advantage of a gullible girl so that he can not take advantage of her deserves to be outed. (Are you getting a headache? You don’t hang out with gay men enough.)
2.2. True, some women are so dense that they can catch their boyfriend kissing another man and believe that he was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a drowning victim – even if the nearest body of water is 20 km away.
2.3. There are also women who are so desperate to be married that they simply refuse to process the information. Let’s call them Flat Earth Beards. No, better: Intelligent Design Beards.
3. The Trojan Horse Beard
3.1. This is the term we have just invented for a woman who knows that her boyfriend is gay but believes that she can change him.
3.2. The idea that gay men can be straightened the way kinky or wavy hair can be rebonded at the salon is one propagated by religious groups and right-wing American politicians. Usually the more homophobic the society, the greater the incidence of gay sex scandals.
3.3. The Trojan Horse strategy may work initially but it will peter out in the long term. If the beard is not amenable to sharing her boyfriend with other men, this will cause problems.
3.4. At best, the gay boyfriend could turn out to be bisexual.
3.5. Of course there are men who like men and are happily married to women. These complex arrangements require a certain sophistication and are not recommended for possessive types.
Beards and Fag Hags are two different species.
4.1. Fag Hags are women who hang out with gay men but consider them girlfriends rather than boyfriends.
4.1.1. They share an interest in literature, film, music, art, architecture, fashion and travel, and can converse or argue on these topics for days on end.
4.1.1.1. There are heterosexual men who share our interest in literature, film, music, art, architecture, fashion and travel, and can converse or argue on these topics for days on end. We have not actually met any, but they must exist.
4.1.2. After years of lamenting the fact that Meryl Streep has lost the Academy Award for Best Actress to inferior competitors (“Who cares about her German accent? Meryl would’ve done the movie in German!!”), they are already planning the champagne brunch to celebrate her victory for The Iron Lady, in which she plays former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
4.1.3. They are cheering the election of retired tennis superstar Marat Safin to the Russian parliament and predicting his rise to the presidency.
4.1.4. They share an interest in attractive men, and will affix their signatures to online petitions protesting the proclamation of Bradley Cooper as People’s Sexiest Man Alive when the deserving winner is clearly Ryan Gosling.
