Lindsay & Sam: Post-Gay?

This may by now be old news – if even it is news at all, which is an assessment we’ll leave up to you.

At some point in the last couple of days, though, Lindsay Lohan split up with girlfriend Samantha Ronson.

There’s not much else to say.

Lilo, apparently on a rebound of sorts, has tattooed a Marilyn Monroe quote on her wrist: Something about stars being allowed to twinkle . . . meta and metaphorical, all at once. (No word on whether they should be allowed to fade, which is actually the more apropos angle).

Anyway, the point of this post is that, now that we’ve seen the rise and fall of the world’s first post-gay couple, maybe homosexuality can finally recede from the cultural foreground.

By “post-gay,” we mean that their union has been widely understood as a pop star’s caprice – a quirk, an idiosyncrasy, an embarrassment of sexual riches which one or the other would eventually come to view as prodigality.

(Greed is unbecoming).

“Lesbian” is not a label anyone ascribed to Lindsay and Sam, because their relationship simply couldn’t bear the weight of the word – there was never enough grit nor enough gumption for the word to apply.

More than that, also absent from the contemporary discussion was the ever-handy “bisexual” tag. That term in particular, with its overt base word, could never describe the utter blandness of the hook-up.

There was nothing “hot” about it . . . it was all lukewarmth and tepidity.

They were a gay couple that was neither gay nor even much of a couple. They were merely a pair – and because they were two-of-a-kind, the whole thing was halfheartedly called a coupling.

At its core, it was more of a companionship thing – which is not so unlike many actual couplings. For the most part, Lindsay and Sam managed to sidestep the raw edges of homosexuality, maintaining a degree of mildness where before there has been none.

Welcome to “post-gay” America.