The End of Gay Culture

I'm troubled by the piece, "The End of Gay Culture," by Andrew Sullivan from The Atlantic and The New Republic. It provides fodder for hours upon hours of conversation in university Arts and Queer/Women Studies departments. Sullivan laments the death of a homogeneous gay culture with much passion and consideration. Within three decades, an open and vibrant gay culture was birthed and died. There are gay teens today without knowledge of Harvey Milk because sexuality doesn't have the same kind of lineage that race or religion does: "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." Sullivan's piece is a timely discussion about difference and our unwillingness to recognize that we are not post-racial, etc, etc societies, despite the inroads made.

I'm still thinking about this piece; it brings up a lot of discussions I've had in class that make me uncomfortable, and which are never finished but rather, grow even larger and more thorny. I can respect other people's opinions but at the same time, I'm also scared at the way some (intolerant) people feel and think (is that really hypocritical?).

Sullivan's lengthy article can be summed up on these quotes. Or, there is a link to the full piece below.

"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."

"...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."

Read the full article here