I may have a few quibble with Andrew Sullivan’s End of Gay Culture essay, but by far it’s the smartest thing I’ve read on the shift going on in gay and lebsian culture right now. A lot of people are eloquent in putting forth the argument for rights, equality and integration. Another group grasp what gay culture means and has historically meant, and the loss that social integration would entail. Sullivan understands both.
The whole essay is worth a read, for its readings of sexual subcultures (I’ve been wondering what to call the bear-inflected Chelsea boys - was hoping for a name cleverer than "musclebears"), its observations on gay bars ("My favorite old leather bar, the Spike, is now the ‘Spike Gallery.’ "), or its great quips (the HRC fundraising dinners as the new Rotary Club). But this to me summarizes the argument best:
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’s a rebuke to the sort of wistfulness I’ve put forth before, or at least a step back to give such wistfulness proper perspective. There still is the danger that gay men and women are getting ahead of themselves - of expecting that social integration has arrived when in fact it’s still arriving - and will face an atomized existence with geographic dispersal. And, selfishly, I wish there would be a gay bar or two more to go to in Boston.
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