I wrote this letter to Andrew Sullivan in response to
this post. He hasn't seen fit to include my perspective, which is critical of his own, so I thought I would post it here instead.
Dear Andrew -
Your Ivy-educated letter writer's palpable revulsion at the modes of self-expression favored by previous generations of gay men made me doubt his status as a "liberal," and more than a little saddened at gay young people's perennial lack of respect for their forebears. Based on his smugly self-satisfied run-down of his corseted experience of life thus far – J. Crew, L.L. Bean, and partnered at 21? My jealousy runneth over – I'd assume that his acquaintance with real-life drag queens has been rather limited. Of course, as you barely began to suggest, drag queens were a signally important part of the gay generations that started this whole liberation business, as even a half-hearted look at the history of the Stonewall uprising reveals.
As a 23 year-old gay man who has been out since I was 16, and as someone who has found myself more and more drawn to what might be categorized as "traditional" gay culture as I have grown older, I feel like it's necessary to weigh in here.
I've been a fan of yours, Andrew, ever since I read "Virtually Normal" as a mere faglet, and for many years I thought of myself as an assimiliationist.
One of the things that meeting gay men from other generations has taught me is that, in point of fact, the extraordinary exertions they underwent – the broken homes and hearts, excommunications from family and faith, the marches, the arrests, the plague – are what paved the way for me to take a boy to prom and come out to precisely not a peep from my liberal parents. That is to say, to be an assimiliationist, to crave status within and access to the heretofore straight mainstream of American culture, is an inherently privileged position. That Mr. J. Crew does not even hint at acknowledging either the suffering or the vibrant, self-loving defiance of the millions of homos who made his comfy blandness possible makes him, in my humble opinion, eminently bitchslappable.
Moreover, the extraordinary political progress made by gay people in a few short generations – that is, the fact that neither he nor I have struggled as those before us did - does not mean that we, or any other gay person, is the same, socially, as a straight person. I have long prided myself on my diverse array of friends – gay and straight, blah cultural differences blah. But as the NYU dorms get smaller and
smaller in my rear-view mirror, I can see that, despite political progress towards equality, the realities of dating, mating, and socializing in the modern context will conspire to constrain my social opportunities. And this is where I think that your argument for the end of gay culture founders, since I haven't noticed any gay bars or
gay gyms or gay churches boarding up the windows recently, and in fact new ones keep opening here in New York in the strangest of places, like Washington Heights and the wilds of Brooklyn. These venues, much more than vacation resorts like Provincetown, which many of us younguns haven't the funds to visit, are to my mind the basic arenas
from which gay culture flowers forth. And as long as the sexual opportunities sought by people like you or me – that is, gay people who weren't lucky enough to get monogamously hitched at 21 (and seriously, I don't even know any straight people who are stupid enough to get married at 21) – are different from those sought by straight
people, these places are going to exist.
The logic at work here is much the same as that employed by your friend Dan Savage when he tells gay people from small towns across America to move to big cities. Even full marriage and equal adoption rights – hell, even a sudden and divine reversal of the hate-speech emanating from the American Taliban – won't change the fact that you
and I will both occasionally want to go places populated at least mostly, perhaps exclusively, with other gay men. And so while the (perhaps not even imminent, certainly hard-won) end of political repression may result in profound changes within gay culture, claiming to hear its death-rattle strikes me as more than a little premature.
Sincerely, with great respect,
Dave Hughes
