aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 26, 2007

Assimilate me (reprise)

On the occasion of a San Francisco Chronicle article about the Castro district facing an identity crisis, Andrew Sullivan has recycled his End of Gay Culture shtick. Having read it all again - and still not hardly disagreeing - I’m recycling my reply. Only the links have been updated...

Andrew Sullivan is at it again. Gay culture is over. You see it, he says, in the P-town real estate bubble, ignoring that it’s of a kind with that in San Francisco, Manhattan and L.A., and that gentrification there is like gentrification everywhere.

I’ve been going to Provincetown for twenty years too. More even. I see change but can’t agree that the end is near:

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.

The gay culture he describes, the one I agree is ending, is the gay sex culture. Though he notes the paradox that “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.” I know that to be true.

He’s also right that there is no “single gay culture” today. But when he asks, “Who can rescue a uniform gay culture?” I wonder, was there ever? Not that I know of. And I was there in the 70s when:

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.

Sullivan says that culture was “primarily about pain and tragedy.” I’d quibble with words. Not “primarily about” but infused with…

That was an era, but there was a before. Indeed, I worked on the film, Before Stonewall, that made the point that gay culture didn’t start then. There was Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis and Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde.

And there will be one tomorrow.