Post date: 10.13.05
Issue date: 10.24.05
[ Editor's Note: TNR highlights some of Andrew Sullivan's most powerful articles about gay life in America in a collection inspired by this article. ]
or
the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in
the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. It has long
attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the bohemian; and, for
many years now, it has been to gay America what Oak Bluffs in Martha's
Vineyard is to black America: a place where a separate identity
essentially defines a separate place. No one bats an eye if two men
walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple pecks each
other on the cheek, or if a drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the
main strip on a motor scooter. It's a place, in that respect, that is
sui generis. Except that it isn't anymore. As gay America has changed,
so, too, has Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across
this
country, its culture is changing.
Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made
Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding
poorer and younger visitors and residents. Where, once, gayness trumped
class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses are slowly
outnumbering beach shacks, once crammed with twenty-something,
hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The role of lesbians in the town's
civic and cultural life has grown dramatically, as it has in the
broader gay world. The faces of people dying from or struggling with aids
have dwindled to an unlucky few. The number of children of gay couples
has soared, and, some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks. Bar life is
not nearly as central to socializing as it once was. Men and women
gather on the beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or
meet at the Film Festival or Spiritus Pizza.
And, of course, week after week this summer, couple after couple got
married--well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay marriage
has been legal in Massachusetts. Outside my window on a patch of beach
that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I watched dozens get
hitched--under a chuppah or with a priest, in formalwear or beach
clothes, some with New Age drums and horns, even one associated with a
full-bore Mass. Two friends lit the town monument in purple to
celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple slipping onto the beach was suddenly
greeted with a huge cheer from the crowd; an elderly lesbian couple
attached cans to the back of their Volkswagen and honked their horn as
they drove up the high street. The heterosexuals in the crowd knew
exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly,
as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an
instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a
little.
But here's the strange thing: These changes did not feel like a
revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an
inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture. For
what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America
as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a
social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity
anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees
the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy
band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and
earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the "circuit boys,"
with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife, designer drugs, and
countless bottles of water. For a week in mid-July, the town is
dominated by "bears"--chubby, hairy, unkempt men with an affinity for
beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried
gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. Women's Week
brings the more familiar images of older lesbians: a landlocked
flotilla of windbreakers and sensible shoes. East Village bohemians
drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time
browsing gourmet groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the
predictable population of artists and writers--Michael Cunningham and
John Waters are fixtures--mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and
teachers and shrinks.
Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the
poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on
university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and
in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on
many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear
altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians
will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a
culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what
encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of
subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about
any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will
become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become
more helpful not to examine them separately at all.
For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a
triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being
gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is
a threat in the way that all loss is a threat. For many of us who grew
up fighting a world of now-inconceivable silence and shame, distinctive
gayness became an integral part of who we are. It helped define us not
only to the world but also to ourselves. Letting that go is as hard as
it is liberating, as saddening as it is invigorating. And, while social
advance allows many of us to contemplate this gift of a problem, we are
also aware that in other parts of the country and the world, the
reverse may be happening. With the growth of fundamentalism across
the religious world--from Pope Benedict XVI's Vatican to Islamic fatwas
and American evangelicalism--gayness is under attack in many places,
even as it wrests free from repression in others. In fact, the two
phenomena are related. The new anti-gay fervor is a response to the
growing probability that the world will one day treat gay and straight
as interchangeable humans and citizens rather than as estranged others.
It is the end of gay culture--not its endurance--that threatens the old
order. It is the fact that, across the state of Massachusetts, "gay
marriage" has just been abolished. The marriage licenses gay couples
receive are indistinguishable from those given to straight couples. On
paper, the difference is now history. In the real world, the
consequences of that are still unfolding.
uite
how this has happened (and why) are questions that historians will
fight over someday, but certain influences seem clear even now--chief
among them the HIV epidemic. Before aids
hit, a fragile but nascent gay world had formed in a handful of major
U.S. cities. The gay culture that exploded from it in the 1970s had the
force of something long suppressed, and it coincided with a more
general relaxation of social norms. This was the era of the
post-Stonewall New Left, of the Castro and the West Village, an era
where sexuality forged a new meaning for gayness: of sexual adventure,
political radicalism, and cultural revolution.
The fact that openly gay communities were still relatively small and
geographically concentrated in a handful of urban areas created a
distinctive gay culture. The central institutions for gay men were
baths and bars, places where men met each other in highly sexualized
contexts and where sex provided the commonality. Gay resorts had their
heyday--from Provincetown to Key West. The gay press grew quickly and
was centered around classified personal ads or bar and bath
advertising. Popular culture was suffused with stunning displays of
homosexual burlesque: the music of Queen, the costumes of the Village
People, the flamboyance of Elton John's debut; the advertising of
Calvin Klein; and the intoxication of disco itself, a gay creation that
became emblematic of an entire heterosexual era. When this cultural
explosion was acknowledged, when it explicitly penetrated the
mainstream, the results, however, were highly unstable: Harvey Milk was
assassinated in San Francisco and Anita Bryant led an anti-gay crusade.
But the emergence of an openly gay culture, however vulnerable, was
still real.
And then, of course, catastrophe. The history of gay America as an
openly gay culture is not only extremely short--a mere 30 years or
so--but also engulfed and defined by a plague that struck almost
poignantly at the headiest moment of liberation. The entire structure
of emergent gay culture--sexual, radical, subversive--met a virus that
killed almost everyone it touched. Virtually the entire generation that
pioneered gay culture was wiped out--quickly. Even now, it is hard to
find a solid phalanx of gay men in their fifties, sixties, or
seventies--men who fought from Stonewall or before for public
recognition and cultural change. And those who survived the nightmare
of the 1980s to mid-'90s were often overwhelmed merely with coping with
plague; or fearing it themselves; or fighting for research or awareness
or more effective prevention.
This astonishing story might not be believed in fiction. And, in
fiction, it might have led to the collapse of such a new, fragile
subculture. Aids
could have been widely perceived as a salutary retribution for the gay
revolution; it could have led to quarantining or the collapse of
nascent gay institutions. Instead, it had the opposite effect. The tens
of thousands of deaths of men from every part of the country
established homosexuality as a legitimate topic more swiftly than any
political manifesto could possibly have done. The images of gay male
lives were recorded on quilts and in countless obituaries; men whose
homosexuality might have been euphemized into nonexistence were
immediately identifiable and gone. And those gay men and lesbians who
witnessed this entire event became altered forever, not only
emotionally, but also politically--whether through the theatrical
activism of Act-Up or the furious organization of political gays among
the Democrats and some Republicans. More crucially, gay men and
lesbians built civil institutions to counter the disease; they forged
new ties to scientists and politicians; they found themselves forced
into more intense relations with their own natural families and the
families of loved ones. Where bath houses once brought gay men
together, now it was memorial services. The emotional and psychic
bonding became the core of a new identity. The plague provided a
unifying social and cultural focus.
But it also presaged a new direction. That direction was unmistakably
outward and integrative. To borrow a useful distinction deployed by the
writer Bruce Bawer, integration did not necessarily mean assimilation.
It was not a wholesale rejection of the gay past, as some feared and
others hoped. Gay men wanted to be fully part of the world, but not at
the expense of their own sexual freedom (and safer sex became a means
not to renounce that freedom but to save it). What the epidemic
revealed was how gay men--and, by inference, lesbians--could not seal
themselves off from the rest of society. They needed scientific
research, civic support, and political lobbying to survive, in this
case literally. The lesson was not that sexual liberation was mistaken,
but rather that it wasn't enough. Unless the gay population was tied
into the broader society; unless it had roots in the wider world;
unless it brought into its fold the heterosexual families and friends
of gay men and women, the gay population would remain at the mercy of
others and of misfortune. A ghetto was no longer an option.
So, when the plague receded in the face of far more effective HIV
treatments in the mid-'90s and gay men and women were able to catch
their breath and reflect, the question of what a more integrated gay
culture might actually mean reemerged. For a while, it arrived in a
vacuum. Most of the older male generation was dead or exhausted; and so
it was only natural, perhaps, that the next generation of leaders
tended to be lesbian--running the major gay political groups and
magazines. Lesbians also pioneered a new baby boom, with more lesbian
couples adopting or having children. HIV-positive gay men developed
different strategies for living suddenly posthumous lives. Some
retreated into quiet relationships; others quit jobs or changed their
careers completely; others chose the escapism of what became known as
"the circuit," a series of rave parties around the country and the
world where fears could be lost on the drug-enhanced dance floor;
others still became lost in a suicidal vortex of crystal meth, Internet
hook-ups, and sex addiction. HIV-negative men, many of whom had lost
husbands and friends, were not so different. In some ways, the toll was
greater. They had survived disaster with their health intact. But,
unlike their HIV-positive friends, the threat of contracting the
disease still existed while they battled survivors' guilt. The plague
was over but not over; and, as they saw men with HIV celebrate
survival, some even felt shut out of a new sub-sub-culture, suspended
between fear and triumph but unable to experience either fully.
hen
something predictable and yet unexpected happened. While the older
generation struggled with plague and post-plague adjustment, the next
generation was growing up. For the first time, a cohort of gay children
and teens grew up in a world where homosexuality was no longer a taboo
subject and where gay figures were regularly featured in the press. If
the image of gay men for my generation was one gleaned from the movie Cruising or, subsequently, Torch Song Trilogy,
the image for the next one was MTV's "Real World," Bravo's "Queer Eye,"
and Richard Hatch winning the first "Survivor." The new emphasis was on
the interaction between gays and straights and on the diversity of gay
life and lives. Movies featured and integrated gayness. Even more
dramatically, gays went from having to find hidden meaning in
mainstream films--somehow identifying with the aging, campy female lead
in a way the rest of the culture missed--to everyone, gay and straight,
recognizing and being in on the joke of a character like "Big Gay Al"
from "South Park" or Jack from "Will & Grace."
There are now openly gay legislators.
Ditto Olympic swimmers and gymnasts and Wimbledon champions. Mainstream
entertainment figures--from George Michael, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rosie
O'Donnell to edgy musicians, such as the Scissor Sisters, Rufus
Wainwright, or Bob Mould--now have their sexual orientation as a
central, but not defining, part of their identity. The National Lesbian
and Gay Journalists Association didn't exist when I became a
journalist. Now it has 1,300 dues-paying members in 24 chapters around
the country. Among Fortune 500 companies, 21 provided domestic partner
benefits for gay spouses in 1995. Today, 216 do. Of the top Fortune 50
companies, 49 provide nondiscrimination protections for gay employees.
Since 2002, the number of corporations providing full protections for
openly gay employees has increased sevenfold, according to the Human
Rights Campaign (HRC). Among the leaders: the defense giant Raytheon
and the energy company Chevron. These are not traditionally
gay-friendly work environments. Nor is the Republican Party. But the
offspring of such leading Republican lights as Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes,
and Phyllis Schlafly are all openly gay. So is the spokesman for the
most anti-gay senator in Congress, Rick Santorum.
This new tolerance and
integration--combined, of course, with the increased ability to connect
with other gay people that the Internet provides--has undoubtedly
encouraged more and more gay people to come out. The hard data for this
are difficult to come by (since only recently have we had studies that
identified large numbers of gays) and should be treated with caution.
Nevertheless, the trend is clear. If you compare data from, say, the
1994 National Health and Social Life Survey with the 2002 National
Survey of Family Growth, you will find that women are nearly three
times more likely to report being gay, lesbian, or bisexual today than
they were eight years ago, and men are about 1.5 times more likely.
There are no reliable statistics on openly gay teens, but no one doubts
that there has been an explosion in visibility in the last
decade--around 3,000 high schools have "gay-straight" alliances. The
census, for its part, recorded a threefold increase in the number of
same-sex unmarried partners from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, there were
close to 600,000 households headed by a same-sex couple, and a quarter
of them had children. If you want to know where the push for civil
marriage rights came from, you need look no further. This was not an
agenda invented by activists; it was a movement propelled by ordinary
people.
So, as one generation literally
disappeared and one generation found itself shocked to still be alive,
a far larger and more empowered one emerged on the scene. This new
generation knew very little about the gay culture of the '70s, and its
members were oblivious to the psychically formative experience of
plague that had shaped their elders. Most came from the heart of
straight America and were more in tune with its new, mellower attitude
toward gayness than the embattled, defensive urban gay culture of the
pre-aids era. Even in evangelical
circles, gay kids willing to acknowledge and struggle publicly with
their own homosexuality represented a new form of openness. The speed
of the change is still shocking. I'm only 42, and I grew up in a world
where I literally never heard the word "homosexual" until I went to
college. It is now not uncommon to meet gay men in their early twenties
who took a boy as their date to the high school prom. When I figured
out I was gay, there were no role models to speak of; and, in the
popular culture, homosexuality was either a punch line or an
embarrassed silence. Today's cultural climate could not be more
different. And the psychological impact on the younger generation
cannot be overstated.
After all, what separates homosexuals and
lesbians from every other minority group is that they are born and
raised within the bosom of the majority. Unlike Latino or Jewish or
black communities, where parents and grandparents and siblings pass on
cultural norms to children in their most formative stages, each
generation of gay men and lesbians grows up being taught the
heterosexual norms and culture of their home environments or absorbing
what passes for their gay identity from the broader culture as a whole.
Each shift in mainstream culture is therefore magnified exponentially
in the next generation of gay children. To give the most powerful
example: A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many
parts of the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can
get married just as their parents did. From the very beginning of their
gay lives, in other words, they will have internalized a sense of
normality, of human potential, of self-worth--something that my
generation never had and that previous generations would have found
unimaginable. That shift in consciousness is as profound as it is
irreversible.
To give another example: Black children
come into society both uplifted and burdened by the weight of their
communal past--a weight that is transferred within families or
communities or cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide
a context for self-understanding, even in rebellion. Gay children have
no such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years, their
self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their gay elders.
That's why it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between
gay and straight teens today--or even young gay and straight adults.
Less psychologically wounded, more self-confident, less isolated, young
gay kids look and sound increasingly like young straight kids. On the
dozens of college campuses I have visited over the past decade, the
shift in just a few years has been astounding. At a Catholic
institution like Boston College, for example, a generation ago there
would have been no discussion of homosexuality. When I visited recently
to talk about that very subject, the preppy, conservative student
president was openly gay.
When you combine this generational
plasticity with swift demographic growth, you have our current
explosion of gay civil society, with a disproportionately young age
distribution. I use the term "civil society" in its classic
Tocquevillean and Burkean sense: the little platoons of social
organization that undergird liberal democratic life. The gay
organizations that erupted into being as aids killed thousands in the '80s--from the Gay Men's Health Crisis to the aids
Project Los Angeles to the Whitman-Walker Clinic in
Washington--struggled to adapt to the swift change in the epidemic in
the mid-'90s. But the general principle of communal organization
endured. If conservatives had been open-minded enough to see it, they
would have witnessed a classic tale of self-help and self-empowerment.
Take, for example, religious life, an area
not historically associated with gay culture. One of the largest single
gay organizations in the country today is the Metropolitan Community
Church, with over 40,000 active members. Go to, yes, Dallas, and you'll
find the Cathedral of Hope, one of the largest religious structures in
the country, with close to 4,000 congregants--predominantly gay. Almost
every faith now has an explicitly gay denomination associated with
it--Dignity for gay Catholics, Bet Mishpachah for gay Jews, and
so on. But, in many mainstream Protestant churches and among Reform
Jews, such groups don't even exist because the integration of gay
believers is now mundane. These groups bring gays together in a context
where sexuality is less a feature of identity than faith, where the
interaction of bodies is less central than the community of souls.
In contrast, look at bar life. For a very
long time, the fundamental social institution for gay men was the gay
bar. It was often secluded--a refuge, a safe zone, and a clearing-house
for sexual pickups. Most bars still perform some of those functions.
But the Internet dealt them a body-blow. If you are merely looking for
sex or a date, the Web is now the first stop for most gay men. The
result has been striking. Only a decade ago, you could wander up the
West Side Highway in New York City and drop by several leather bars.
Now, only one is left standing, and it is less a bar dedicated to the
ornate codes of '70s leather culture than a place for men who adopt a
more masculine self-presentation.
My favorite old leather bar, the Spike, is now the "Spike Gallery." The
newer gay bars are more social than sexual, often with restaurants,
open windows onto the street, and a welcoming attitude toward others,
especially the many urban straight women who find gay bars more
congenial than heterosexual pickup joints.
Even gay political organizations often
function more as social groups than as angry activist groups. HRC, for
example, raises funds and lobbies Congress. Around 350,000 members have
contributed in the last two years. It organizes itself chiefly through
a series of formal fund-raising dinners in cities across the
country--from Salt Lake City to Nashville. These dinners are a social
venue for the openly gay bourgeoisie: In tuxedos and ball gowns, they
contribute large sums and give awards to local businesses and
politicians and community leaders. There are silent auctions, hired
entertainers, even the occasional bake-sale. The closest heterosexual
equivalent would be the Rotary Club. These dinners in themselves are
evidence of the change: from outsider rebellion to bourgeois
organization.
Take a look at the gay press. In its
shallower forms--glossy lifestyle magazines--you are as likely to find
a straight Hollywood star on the cover as any gay icon. In its more
serious manifestations, such as regional papers like the Washington Blade or Southern Voice, the past emphasis on sex has been replaced with an emphasis on domesticity. A recent issue of the Blade
had an eight-page insert for escort ads, personals, and the kind of
material that, two decades ago, would have been the advertising
mainstay of the main paper. But in the paper itself are 23 pages of
real-estate ads and four pages of home-improvement classifieds. There
are columns on cars, sports, DVDs, and local plays. The core ad base,
according to its editor, Chris Crain, now comprises heterosexual-owned
and operated companies seeking to reach the gay market. The editorial
tone has shifted as well. Whereas the Blade was once
ideologically rigid--with endless reports on small activist cells and a
strident left-wing slant--now it's much more like a community paper
that might be published for any well-heeled ethnic group. Genuine
ideological differences are now aired, rather than bitterly decried as
betrayal or agitprop. Editorials regularly take Democrats to task as
well as Republicans. The maturation has been as swift as it now seems
inevitable. After all, in 2004, one-quarter of self-identified gay
voters backed a president who supported a constitutional ban on gay
marriage. If the gay world is that politically diverse under the
current polarized circumstances, it has obviously moved well beyond the
time it was synonymous with radical left politics.
ow
gay men and lesbians express their identity has also changed. When
openly gay identity first emerged, it tended toward extremes of gender
expression. When society tells you that gay men and lesbians are not
fully male or female, the response can be to overcompensate with
caricatures of each gender or to rebel by blurring gender lines
altogether. Effeminate "queens" were balanced by hyper-masculine bikers
and muscle men; lipstick lesbians were offset by classically gruff
"bull-dykes." All these sub-sub-cultures still exist. Many feel
comfortable with them; and, thankfully, we see fewer attempts to
marginalize them. But the polarities in the larger gay population are
far less pronounced than they once were; the edges have softened. As
gay men have become less defensive about their masculinity, their
expression of it has become subtler. There is still a pronounced muscle
and gym culture, but there are also now openly gay swimmers and artists
and slobs and every body type in between. Go watch a gay rugby team
compete in a regional tournament with straight teams and you will see
how vast but subtle
the revolution has been. And, in fact, this is the trend: gay civil
associations in various ways are interacting with parallel straight
associations in a way that leaves their gay identity more and more
behind. They're rugby players first, gay rugby players second.
One of the newest reflections of this is
what is known as "bear" culture: heavy, hirsute, unkempt guys who revel
in their slovenliness. Their concept of what it means to be gay is very
different than that of the obsessive gym-rats with torsos shaved of
every stray hair. Among many younger gay men, the grungy look of their
straight peers has been adopted and tweaked to individual tastes. Even
among bears, there are slimmer "otters" or younger "cubs" or
"musclebears," who combine gym culture with a bear sensibility. The
varieties keep proliferating; and, at the rate of current change, they
will soon dissipate into the range of identities that straight men have
to choose from. In fact, these variations of masculinity may even have
diversified heterosexual male culture as well. While some gay men have
proudly adopted some classically straight signifiers--beer bellies and
back hair--many straight men have become "metrosexuals." Trying to
define "gay culture" in this mix is an increasingly elusive task.
Among lesbians, Ellen DeGeneres's
transition from closeted sitcom star to out-lesbian activist and back
to appealingly middle-brow daytime talk-show host is almost a microcosm
of diversifying lesbian identity in the past decade. There are still
classic butch-femme lesbian partnerships, but more complex forms of
self-expression are more common now. With the abatement in many places
of prejudice, lesbian identity is formed less by reaction to hostility
than by simple self-expression. And this, after all, is and was the
point of gay liberation: the freedom not merely to be gay according to
some preordained type, but to be yourself, whatever that is.
You see this even in drag, which once
defined gayness in some respects but now is only one of many
expressions. Old-school drag, the kind that dominated the '50s, '60s,
and '70s, often consisted of female impersonators performing torch
songs from various divas. The more miserable the life of the diva, the
better able the performer was to channel his own anguish and drama into
the show. After all, gayness was synonymous with tragedy and
showmanship. Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis: these were the
models. But today's drag looks and feels very different. The drag
impresario of Provincetown, a twisted genius called Ryan Landry, hosts
a weekly talent show for local drag performers called "Showgirls."
Attending it each Monday night is P-town's equivalent of weekly Mass. A
few old-school drag queens perform, but Landry sets the tone. He makes
no attempt to look like a woman, puts on hideous wigs (including a
horse mask and a pair of fake boobs perched on his head), throws on
ill-fitting dresses, and performs scatological song parodies. Irony
pervades the show. Comedy defines it. Gay drag is inching slowly toward
a version of British pantomime, where dada humor and absurd, misogynist
parodies of womanhood are central. This is post-drag; straight men
could do it as well. This year, the longest-running old school drag
show--"Legends"--finally closed down. Its audience had become mainly
heterosexual and old.
This new post-gay cultural synthesis has
its political counterpart. There was once a ferocious debate among gays
between what might be caricatured as "separatists" and
"assimilationists." That argument has fizzled. As the gay population
has grown, it has become increasingly clear that the choice is not
either/or but both/and. The issue of civil marriage reveals this most
graphically. When I first argued for equal marriage rights, I found
myself assailed by the gay left for social conservatism. I remember one
signing for my 1995 book, Virtually Normal, the crux of which
was an argument for the right to marry. I was picketed by a group
called "Lesbian Avengers," who depicted my argument as patriarchal and
reactionary. They crafted posters with my face portrayed within the
crosshairs of a gun. Ten years later, lesbian couples make up a
majority of civil marriages in Massachusetts and civil unions in
Vermont; and some of the strongest voices for marriage equality have
been lesbians, from the pioneering lawyer Mary Bonauto to writer E.J.
Graff. To its credit, the left--gay male and lesbian--recognized that
what was at stake was not so much the corralling of all gay individuals
into a conformist social institution as a widening of choice for all.
It is still possible to be a gay radical or rigid leftist. The
difference now is that it is also possible to be a gay conservative, or
traditionalist, or anything else in between.
ho
can rescue a uniform gay culture? No one, it would seem. The generation
most psychologically wedded to the separatist past is either dead from
HIV or sidelined. But there are still enclaves of gay distinctiveness
out there. Paradoxically, gay culture in its old form may have its most
fertile ground in those states where homosexuality is still
unmentionable and where openly gay men and women are more beleaguered:
the red states. Earlier this year, I spoke at an HRC dinner in
Nashville, Tennessee, where state politicians are trying to bar gay
couples from marrying or receiving even basic legal protections. The
younger gay generation is as psychologically evolved there as any place
else. They see the same television and the same Internet as gay kids in
New York. But their social space is smaller. And so I found a vibrant
gay world, but one far more cohesive, homogeneous, and defensive than
in Massachusetts. The strip of gay bars--crammed into one place rather
than diffuse, as in many blue-state cities--was packed on a Saturday
night. The mix of old and young, gay and lesbian, black, white, and
everything in between reminded me of Boston in the '80s. The tired
emblems of the past--the rainbow flags and leather outfits--retained
their relevance there.
The same goes for black and Latino
culture, where homophobia, propped up by black churches and the
Catholic hierarchy respectively, is more intense than in much of white
society. It's no surprise that these are the populations also most at
risk for HIV. The underground "down-low" culture common in black gay
life means less acknowledgment of sexual identity, let alone awareness
or disclosure of HIV status. The same repression that facilitated the
spread of HIV among gay white men in the '70s now devastates black gay
America, where the latest data suggest a 50 percent HIV infection rate.
(Compare that with largely white and more integrated San Francisco,
where recent HIV infection rates are now half what they were four years
ago.) The extremes of gender expression are also more pronounced among
minorities, with many gay black or Latino men either adopting
completely female personalities or refusing to identify as gay at all.
Here the past lives on. The direction toward integration is clear, but
the pace is far slower.
And, when you see the internalized
defensiveness of gays still living in the shadow of social hostility,
any nostalgia one might feel for the loss of gay culture dissipates.
Some still echo critic Philip Larkin's jest that he worried about the
American civil rights movement because it was ruining jazz. But the
flipness of that remark is the point, and the mood today is less
genuine regret--let alone a desire to return to those days--than a kind
of wistfulness for a past that was probably less glamorous or unified
than it now appears. It is indeed hard not to feel some sadness at the
end of a rich, distinct culture built by pioneers who braved greater
ostracism than today's generation will ever fully understand. But, if
there is a real choice between a culture built on oppression and a
culture built on freedom, the decision is an easy one. Gay culture was
once primarily about pain and tragedy, because that is what
heterosexuals imposed on gay people, and that was, in part, what gay
people experienced. Gay culture was once primarily about sex, because
that was how heterosexuals defined gay lives. But gay life, like
straight life, is now and always has been about happiness as well as
pain; it is about triumph as well as tragedy; it is about love and
family as well as sex. It took generations to find the self-worth to
move toward achieving this reality in all its forms--and an
epidemiological catastrophe to accelerate it. If the end of gay culture
means that we have a new complexity to grapple with and a new, less
cramped humanity to embrace, then regret seems almost a rebuke to those
countless generations who could only dream of the liberty so many now
enjoy.
The tiny, rich space that gay men and
women once created for themselves was, after all, the best they could
do. In a metaphor coined by the philosopher Michael Walzer, they gilded
a cage of exclusion with magnificent ornaments; they spoke to its
isolation and pain; they described and maintained it with dignity and
considerable beauty. But it was still a cage. And the thing that kept
gay people together, that unified them into one homogeneous unit, and
that defined the parameters of their culture and the limits of their
dreams, were the bars on that cage. Past the ashes of thousands and
through the courage of those who came before the plague and those who
survived it, those bars are now slowly but inexorably being pried
apart. The next generation may well be as free of that cage as any
minority ever can be; and they will redefine gayness on its own terms
and not on the terms of hostile outsiders. Nothing will stop this,
since it is occurring in the psyches and souls of a new generation: a
new consciousness that is immune to any law and propelled by the
momentum of human freedom itself. While we should treasure the past,
there is no recovering it. The futures--and they will be multiple--are
just beginning.
Andrew Sullivan
is a senior editor at TNR.
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