Then 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 thirteen hundred dues-paying members in twenty-four chapters around the country. Among Fortune 500 companies, twenty-one provided domestic partner benefits for gay spouses in 1995. Today, 216 do. Of the top Fortune 50 companies, forty-nine 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 antigay 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 three thousand 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 six hundred thousand 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 seventies, 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 forty-two, 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 from 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 Tocquevillian 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 eighties—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-nineties. 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 forty thousand 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 four thousand 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 seventies 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 fundraising 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 twenty-three 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.
How 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 hypermasculine bikers and musclemen; lipstick lesbians were offset by classically gruff “bull dykes.” All these sub-subcultures 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 from 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 “muscle bears,” 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 fifties, sixties, and seventies, 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 Ptown’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.
Who 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 anyplace 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 eighties. The tired emblems of the past—the rainbow flags and leather outfits—retained their relevance there.
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