The Myth of the Gay Community
January 30, 2015 1:32 PM   Subscribe

 
One pager that will get you around the pop-up: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/print/2015/01/have-gay-americans-outgrown-their-community/384996/

Andrew Sullivan foreshadowed the dissolution of a communal gay identity in his article “The End of Gay Culture”, writing, “[W]hat 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.”

I regularly walk through what once was a major social hub for gay men in DC, and have watched the population that congregates there age and diminish steadily. Between Grindr et al, decreasing homophobia (at least here), much more openness generally, and the larger web-driven splintering of peoples' interests, the existence of a "gay ghetto" (and, increasingly, large, clearly identifiable subcultures at all) feels increasingly dated.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:50 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


I feel like there's two questions that come up when we talk about the "myth of the gay community".

There's the gay community as places and groups of people, which is an interesting conversation in and of itself.

But the gay community as is mentioned in this piece (and when people say incorrect things like "the gay community started with Stonewall") isn't and has never been a community as such as much as it has been a social movement. And like most (maybe all) social movements (labor, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement) those with the power to shape it were those that reaped the most immediate benefit and the rest have had to ride along on the coattails and/or grab what they can.

I'm glad to see an increasing number of people pointing this out but am depressed to realize I've been hearing similar arguments for the last 20 years. I hope it starts to stick.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 2:15 PM on January 30, 2015 [7 favorites]


I haven't the least doubt this is true. But isn't it equally true of any and all "communities" defined on a meeting of the minds on some big issue, a shared interest, a shared self-interest, or a shared kind of oppression? If someone looks closely and discovers that hey, all the members of this community aren't just like some abstracted idea of the "typical" member, are we to conclude that that the previously imagined community was, or is now, a myth? P.S. if so, OK with me.
posted by jfuller at 2:32 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


He refers to marriage as belonging to the culture of well-to-do, educated gay men, but I had heard that some 2/3 of married same-sex couple are women.

I always assume that the continuing media obsession with the image of married men (eg the two grooms on the cake), rather than women, is because the media has much more interest in the doings of men, and also two brides in white make a less good image against a white cake than two grooms in black.
posted by jb at 2:41 PM on January 30, 2015 [7 favorites]


I regularly walk through what once was a major social hub for gay men in DC

I'm assuming you're talking about Dupont Circle, and yes -- I walked around for about an hour last week looking for a same-sex-appropriate wedding card for two of my friends, and ultimately walked away empty-handed.

The woman at the HRC store suggested that I try Target.

I suppose there could be worse signs of the times...
posted by schmod at 2:41 PM on January 30, 2015 [10 favorites]


lol a "gay community" that dates itself to Stonewall deserves to wither and die. your assimilation and "civil rights movement" is built on our backs.

The emergence of this cis masc homosexual male identity that we all tend to think of as "gay" did not happen naturally, it happened through the systematic exclusion of trans women and trans femininity by masc white men, starting right after your mythologized Stonewall riots with trans women of color and sex worker Sylvia Riviera getting forced out of the Gay Liberation Front she co-founded.

i have so much schadenfruede at your sadness that your "community" assimilated itself out of coherent existence. what a better way to make clear that you never cared about us and still don't.

Look at this quote:

"But while 5 percent of youth identify as LGBT, 40 percent of all homeless youth do. For gay children...".

you "gays" don't care about the "lgbt" kids who have to deal with your systematic transmisogyny, your unsafe spaces, your apathy towards our medical needs and civil rights, you just want to use our suffering rhetorically when you're addressing each other and het people.


the wikipedia articles on 60s queer history are terrible, so i was unable to double check details. It's worth reading interviews with Sylvia herself, and Stryker's Transgender History is worth reading.
posted by thug unicorn at 2:52 PM on January 30, 2015 [19 favorites]


I think this article makes a crucial point, and it's one that I've been worrying about recently--that, once marriage equality is secured in the U.S., the mainstream (along with many privileged gay people and the non-profits/institutions that serve them) will declare that the problem is solved and ignore the many other forms of oppression and marginalization facing queer people.

But I'm troubled by the impulse to get rid of the word "community," especially in an article that approvingly cites Andrew Sullivan on the issue. It seems like part and parcel of the pressure for queer people (especially those with the most privilege) to assimilate into straight culture. Like it could easily function as a fig leaf for privileged people abandoning ship and cutting ties--"we aren't even a community anyway!"

I mean, maybe I don't know because of my own white privilege, but it seems like the existence of QUILTBAG community centers is important and--despite all the problematic dynamics that I'm sure happen--especially helpful for queer people who experience more intersectional oppression.

It's also interesting because I feel like I am part of a flourishing, multi-generational queer community--the Radical Faeries--but I expect that's an uncommon experience.
posted by overglow at 2:54 PM on January 30, 2015 [8 favorites]


the existence of a "gay ghetto" (and, increasingly, large, clearly identifiable subcultures at all) feels increasingly dated.

It really does. I don't live in the gaybourhood but I'm relatively nearby... and that's about as close as I get these days. I'm there mayybe once every month or two. Part of the problem I guess. The crowd is definitely skewing older, and therefore thinning out. Two major mainstay bars closed over the past several years, one of them replaced with a store which has been gone for months now--if not longer--and is still sitting empty. I was at another mainstay bar on a Saturday last year with my then-bf and others, we were there at peak time, and we were never crowded. Unheard of for that place ten years ago, and it's looking like everywhere else is the same, from what I hear.

And I'm not sure how to feel about that. It's unusual for a neighbourhood in Toronto in that its boundaries are pretty discrete; integrating into adjacent neighbourhoods and blurring the boundaries would be difficult, so I think it's going to retain its character/population for quite some time to come in any case. And it seems important to always have some sort of relatively safe area/place of concentration. And at the same time, for me, I sort of long for the day when being queer really is the least interesting thing about you--but I don't know how to reconcile that with honouring that there is a unique queer story that needs to be remembered, the good and the bad.

At the same time as all that, I really miss the days before the internet, and really before the splintering once people turned away from gay.com, where the bars would be more of a melting pot. And you weren't just there to pick up, you were also there to make friends. At Woody's in particular, there was always this amazing cross-pollination, and it was the place everyone went to for a couple drinks before going to whatever club. So you'd have twinks in glitter and young guys like me having a couple Revs before dropping something and going to 5ive, playing pool with a couple of leather daddies all dressed up to go to the Eagle later, and everyone was having a great time. The Barn, too--just a bunch of guys and silly music and dancing. Everyone all mixed together.

And now you self-select your pickups onto Grindr or Scruff or Growlr, and you self-select within there, and everyone's circles become much more homogenous. Ahem. I mean sure gay.com was kinda self-selective, but every city had channels and everyone would be talking in there and making plans--frequently "meet you at Woodys at 10:30 and we'll go wherever for midnight"--and shooting the shit and arguing and it was grand. That kind of space just doesn't really exist anymore, online or off.

I miss the aging queens who used to hold court in the front window at Woody's and would draw anyone into conversation and having a great time, and the twinks and hipsters and nerds who'd all give no fucks at Buddies (well maybe that one still happens, I'm way too old for that crowd or music anymore, I need sleep), just all these totally different people all mashed up with each other.

That's what I miss, and that's what I think we've lost from the gaybourhood here at least, and I feel like it's not coming back. All these groups that used to mingle somewhat now only casually intersect at the edges and are increasingly subdivided within themselves. It's tragic, and I feel like queer kids now who want to feel part of the 'historic' queer male community (I am not sure if the female pockets of the community have similarly splintered, I'm not being exclusionary) get more trammeled into roles than ever, because moving through the different parts of the community isn't so easy anymore. At the same time, there are queer communities growing that are much more inclusive and progressive and future-focused; maybe it's time that became the dominant narrative.

you "gays" don't care about the "lgbt" kids who have to deal with your systematic transmisogyny, your unsafe spaces, your apathy towards our medical needs and civil rights

Some of us really do, though, which is a lot of what leans me towards what I said about the newly-visible or -created queer communities needing to be the dominant narrative; there's a politics of inclusion and respect for listening to everyone's story that the gay male community needs to learn ASAP. Some gay men are trying; Mandy Goodhandy and Todd Klinck (who is cismale and I'm fairly sure identifies as gay), here in Toronto, run a club that I have been told requires all events being thrown there to be explicitly trans-friendly and inviting. It's not a lot. And those of us who want to call ourselves allies need to push harder for inclusion and not pat ourselves on the back for baby steps and stop there.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 3:04 PM on January 30, 2015 [17 favorites]


That is not to say that I, or other gay people, am annoyed to be an involuntary member of this rag-tag group of sexual minorities. But the term “community” perpetuates a one-off identity which has never been further from reality.

Urban gays, please drop this trope. Muster your integrity to remember your former life if, like me, you grew up small and moved up large. If you're a native urbanite, visit some spots outside of your metroplex before you write about community. For rural gays--for rural anyone outside the regional mainstream--communities build tightly around nothing more than the shared experience of safety in numbers. NYC/DC/LA/SF =/= everywhere in between.

I loved my very real queer community growing up. I was inspired by my friends, our peers, our cohabitation and interaction. It was so natural, unforced. It was when I moved to the Big Enlightened Cities that I got my first whiffs of gay elitism, cynicism, and separateness. And that's a genuine plague among our kind (and by 'our' here I'm referring to the urban gays, which I've long since become).
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:10 PM on January 30, 2015 [19 favorites]


you "gays" don't care about the "lgbt" kids who have to deal with your systematic transmisogyny, your unsafe spaces, your apathy towards our medical needs and civil rights, you just want to use our suffering rhetorically when you're addressing each other and het people.
Respectfully disagree, and please don't put entire classes of people in scare quotes.
posted by schmod at 4:38 PM on January 30, 2015 [14 favorites]


as a gay person, i absolutely will use scare quotes around "gay" when i'm addressing "the gay community" that this article imagines.
posted by thug unicorn at 5:45 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am not sure if the female pockets of the community have similarly splintered,

The last women's bar in Church-Wellesley closed just before World Pride.

There is Cherry Bomb, which is a dance event, but it only happens once a month. A couple of other dances, too.

I thought Buddies be pretty mixed, but when I went this summer it was just gay guys and a bachelorette party. I seemed to remember it more mixed (queer women as well as men) in the 90s, but maybe I was just seeing it in rosy memories. I didn't go to the gay ghetto then, because I was female and had no money for drinking, so socialised in coffee shops in the Annex instead (where $1 goes a lot farther). But the one time I went to Buddies was like a golden memory of dance and fun and inclusiveness for men and women.
posted by jb at 8:11 PM on January 30, 2015


oh - and Cherry bomb happens in Kensington, and Toaster is down in the east end, and Tramp happened at The Steady in Bloorcourt - so the women's stuff is definitely not centred on Church (if it ever was).
posted by jb at 8:13 PM on January 30, 2015


I miss Slack's :( Their duck sandwich, back when they were open daytime for lunch, nom. Had some fun party nights there too.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:16 PM on January 30, 2015


I grew up removed from big cities, in a small-town that sat between two large cities, but which was distinct from either and prone to rednecks and right-wingery, and for a time, the thought that there was a community was pretty thrilling. As a teenager driving down to DC for Pride for the first time with my newly minted driver's license, there was this wonderment at the sight of the "community" gathered in common enjoyment, but the thing is—this sense of community is corrosive when you expect more from it than one big annual party.

The thrill of "WE ARE FAMILY!" fades fast when you're standing around, choked by all that Benson & Hedges smoke and Drakkar Noir fumes while you carry around a Bartles & James without drinking it so the bartenders will quit hectoring you to buy a drink. If one is not comfortable being around bleary-eyed drinkers shouting into one's ear in the pursuit of a quick fuck, and horrified by the parade of cars weaving sloppily away as the bar closed down for the night, the community loses its thrill.

In the end, though, I never felt lonelier than when I was in the embrace of my "community."

Before queerness and before freewheeling openhearted millennials expanded the old guard nonsense into something a bit less regimented, when it came down to it, if you didn't like to drink, fuck everything that moved, or argue endlessly about stupid politics with people who basically agreed with you, you were never going to be a part of that community.

It may have served a purpose in 1972, but it ain't '72 now.
posted by sonascope at 6:08 AM on January 31, 2015 [4 favorites]


jb: I thought Buddies be pretty mixed, but when I went this summer it was just gay guys and a bachelorette party. I seemed to remember it more mixed (queer women as well as men) in the 90s...

You recall correctly, if I recall correctly.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:02 PM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]


The emergence of this cis masc homosexual male identity that we all tend to think of as "gay" did not happen naturally, it happened through the systematic exclusion of trans women and trans femininity by masc white men, starting right after your mythologized Stonewall riots...

Nein.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:06 PM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the Atlantic article is missing something here:

Andrew Sullivan foreshadowed the dissolution of a communal gay identity in his article “The End of Gay Culture”, writing, “[W]hat 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.”

Horsefeathers. Volumes were written on this topic long before, by better (and funnier) writers than Andrew Sullivan.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:31 PM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]


I also found this pretty tone deaf - fairly egregiously so considering the naive references to Stonewall and whitewashing, and the narrow treatment of intersectionality. I think overglow's comment is spot on not just about the politics but also the conception of the "LGBT community." (Of course the article completely ignores the L, B and T while relying on the intact acronym for rhetorical weight). The community isn't dissolving - I too "feel like I am part of a flourishing, multi-generational queer community." If these cis gay men aren't in it, it's because they left, which I can understand from someone like Andrew Sullivan, but not as much from someone just leaving a university campus. My queer groups, both online and off, are more diverse and more aware and more feminist and more intersectional than ever, and I haven't been in college since 2009.

Maybe that's scaring them off? Or maybe cis white gay men drifting away has allowed this kind of growth to accelerate? I don't know. A friend of mine has been invigorating a faded downtown LGBT community center with a fresh social justice agenda. Last Saturday we had 500 people show up at our protest against Governor Jindal's prayer rally on LSU's campus. Afterwards, a panel discussion with queer community leaders focused heavily on issues of poverty and education. At a breakout group on coalition-building later that afternoon, a black gay campus group leader asked me for help reaching out to trans people, who he knew were underrepresented in his membership and leadership. Yesterday at a board meeting for a trans org we talked about starting a new mid-year shindig and sending at least three people to the Creating Change Conference. But yeah, we also talked about how to shake down these separating establishment groups for money (which they have a ton of and we have none of) using their guilt over leaving as leverage, because if they don't want to keep at it they can at least use their assimilation to help those of us who are still actively working to move the community forward together.
posted by Corinth at 12:11 PM on February 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


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