Manners Are For Any Sexual Identity

In 2005, Miss Manners tackled gay-etiquette. (Hint… It’s pretty much the same as ordinary etiquette!)  “Dear Miss Manners, What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual couple?” “Gentle Reader, ‘How do you do?’ And ‘How do you do?’”

Gay Etiquette for the New Dark Ages

Minding your p’s, q’s and Queers with Miss Manners

From “Out There” 

by Roberto Friedman

Of all the many syndicated columns and features the popular papers depend upon to fill up their column inch es, ever-so-polite Out There's in disputable favorite has always been the unfussy “Miss Manners,” written by the impeccable etiquet tist Judith Martin. Now a “freshly updated” new edition of Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (W.W. Norton, $35) has arrived on our desk, and OT has spent many an idle mo ment thumbing through its pages – with white gloves on, of course. 

The niceties and no-no’s of social intercourse are all here, conveniently organized under headings like, “Table Manners for Particular (and Ornery) Foods” and, “Electronic Communication (Personal)- The Itinerant Telephone.” There are 858 pages of good advice, dispensed with wit and economy, on all sorts of heterosexual rites. There are charming illustrations (by Gloria Kamen) with amusing captions like, “The Awfuls Consider Becoming Perfect.” But a quick consultation of the book's index under “gay” first directs us to “see homosexuals” (oh we do, we do), then offers up only three, count 'em three, etiquette questions which concern us inverts. 

We present one of them in its delicious entirety:

“Dear Miss Manners, What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual couple?” 

“Gentle Reader, ‘How do you do?’ And, ‘How do you do?’”

We [heart] Miss M's succinct way of pointing out good sense and common civility. She has the best of manners, leavened by a knowing and very modern sense of humor. For example, the second time gays crop up in a gentle reader's inquiry concerns bedroom assignments when a father's gay son brings his boyfriend along for a weekend visit with the parental units. Gentle Reader explains, “I am unsure if the boys want to share a room, or if this arrangement will be uncomfortable to my wife. I don't want to raise an issue if there isn't one, so my solution is to make up both guest rooms and let my son decide, and let my wife know that this should be our son's decision.”

Out There intimate activities of one’s adult guests always leads to disaster, even when the hosts are the parents of the houseguests. In other words, you can assign people separate rooms, but you can not insist that they stay in them after dark.

The third and final instance of homos in this annals of manners concerns lesbian partners of 26 years fretting needlessly over their straight daughter’s wedding plans. “If mom walks our daughter down the aisle, how should I as mom #2 enter with the wedding party?”

“How you assigned yourself to be ‘mom #2’ in this regard, you do not say,” Miss Manners replies with equanimity, “but it might also be fitting for you both to give away the bride.”

Our favorite non-gay-specific gems of advice include the proper way to eat a slice of pizza. “This may be lowered into the mouth by hand, small end of the triangle first, taking care that the strings of cheese also arrive in the mouth.” Yes, please attend to those cheese strands, we can visualize them and don't want to.

Good advice for us winos, erm we mean “wine aficionados,” follows the question, “When wine is ordered by the glass and I have not emptied the glass when an other is served, what do I do?” “Gentle Reader: Have you thought of not ordering a second glass until you I have finished the first?”

On the topic of those ubiquitous “itinerant telephones,” Miss M observes the tendency of bulletins barked on these phones to be of the very important, “Hi, I'm on the bus, I'll be there in 5 minutes” variety. “Miss Manners is astonished that so many people appear to be on parole, and that parole is so strict. It is apparently no longer a question of checking in at set periods, but of not being permitted to make a move without simultaneously reporting it.”

Paging through this veritable orgy of good, old-fashioned etiquette has OT day-dreaming about writing our own advice column on the side. “Dear Mister Man[nerd],” our not-so-gentle reader would write in. “When is it proper to interrupt a panicked columnist on deadline in order to exhort him or her to publicize my gay second cousin's upcoming one-man show about growing up asthmatic, Armenian, big-boned and a big sissy in the Northwest Territories, working title: Yukon!?”

“Gentle Reader: On the 21st of Never.” Miss Manners quite wisely replies. –“Out There” in the Bay Area Reporter,2005

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia