I haven't been to a gay bar since 1996. I did my year of clubbing to get at 42 the adolescence I hadn't had at 18, one night I looked at myself in one of the mirrors that lined the club, said "I'm done," grabbed my shirt and walked out.
My understanding is that it's all fizzling out, and frankly I think this…
I haven't been to a gay bar since 1996. I did my year of clubbing to get at 42 the adolescence I hadn't had at 18, one night I looked at myself in one of the mirrors that lined the club, said "I'm done," grabbed my shirt and walked out.
My understanding is that it's all fizzling out, and frankly I think this is a good thing, but a lot of gays are single and live alone; one article I read compared the stress of that life to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day.
But the gay life even when I was embedded in it wasn't very wholesome. It was aggressively shallow, encouraging of immaturity and compulsiveness, more ageist than any corporation and with a much lower threshold.
Thanks Chris, yeah, this is one of those things that's harder to see for people who have different experiences.
Your comment about getting the adolescence you didn't have at 18 made me consider more deeply what it must have been like for gay men growing up even 20 years ago in a society that was so much less accepting than today.
And yeah, the added complexity of meeting somebody (and just the smaller size of the gay population) must inevitably lead to more loneliness.
And yes, I completely agree with you about the Q. As in many other cases, I'm struck by the way the people who are so insistent that everybody uses the language that makes them feel most warm and fuzzy inside, are utterly indifferent to the way the language they use makes others feel.
It wasn't being gay that denied me an adolescent experience at the usual age; I was barely beginning to realize I was gay until almost 19, I had girlfriends before,. But I had a severe stutter, now vestigial, and it inhibited me a lot.
But living in an unaccepting society never bothered me for a moment. My adoption of the mannerisms was very brief and I could "pass"; more accurately I had no reason to project my orientation and have never regarded it as a significant part of my identity, I m more a musician and a lover of science and animals than a gay man. I had "faggot" yelled at me exactly once,
At 42 I had just been through a bad breakup and gotten myself into incredible physical condition and no more stutter so I hit the clubs and probably took a few years off my life from the cigarette smoke. But I got a lot out of my system.
The Q word: I think younger gays have grown up with it and see it as normal, to me it means Matthew Shepherd (who was seeking to die) and friends who were bashed into the hospital. But the first generation to adopt it, I am convinced, were simply moving into the post acceptance phase of the defiant belligerence that gave us ACT-UP and "in your face"; to them there was no dirtier word in the language than assimilation and since being gay was no longer shocking they needed a way to shock.
After my late adolescence I pretty much withdrew from gay activism as I had withdrawn from the public territories, learning as I did how many gays didn't want to be assimilated, they wanted the enclave society, the oppression mentality. They wanted to feel Special. When I read more and more that marriage was a "str8" institution and that we had something better (yeah, bathhouses) I just tuned out.
That the bathhouses were not closed when we learned of HIV just horrified me.
Matthew Shepard wasn't a victim of gay-bashing. He knew his murderer and no one in Laramie believes the guy was homophobic because he was a well-known bisexual in the area. Furthermore, he and Matthew had had sex together already (sometimes under sort of weird circumstances). Shepard's death was a drug-related murder. Lots of crazy shit going down in Laramie. Read The Book of Matt, by Stephen Jiminez, a gay journalist, if you haven't already.
Shepherd was killed by two people, so right out the gate this book is wrong.
The guy had a death wish. He liked to come on to straight men, often violent-looking ones; he had been bashed several times but never stopped. When on a school trip to Morocco he'd snuck out at night looking for sex and gotten gang-raped. He was self-destructive and got turned on by risk.
No I am not saying he deserved what he got. Nobody does. But I am saying he summoned it.
You should read the book. I know there were two guys present; one didn't do much, just, allegedly, tied him to the fence. I don't think he'd had any sexual contact with Shepherd but the other guy had; there was some weird little gay culture going on there that both of them were a part of, involving drugs. The book was written by a respected gay journalist himself who found no one in Laramie thought Shepherd's murder was a gay bashing; it was widely known that Shepherd was involved with drugs, both consuming and selling and he'd recently screwed someone in a drug deal. He'd said to others for days before, that he was gonna get killed, that people were coming after him. No one in Laramie believed the guy who did the actual killing was homophobic, either; he was widely known to be bisexual, and also involved in the drug trade.
It's much discussed recently.
I haven't been to a gay bar since 1996. I did my year of clubbing to get at 42 the adolescence I hadn't had at 18, one night I looked at myself in one of the mirrors that lined the club, said "I'm done," grabbed my shirt and walked out.
My understanding is that it's all fizzling out, and frankly I think this is a good thing, but a lot of gays are single and live alone; one article I read compared the stress of that life to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day.
But the gay life even when I was embedded in it wasn't very wholesome. It was aggressively shallow, encouraging of immaturity and compulsiveness, more ageist than any corporation and with a much lower threshold.
Thanks Chris, yeah, this is one of those things that's harder to see for people who have different experiences.
Your comment about getting the adolescence you didn't have at 18 made me consider more deeply what it must have been like for gay men growing up even 20 years ago in a society that was so much less accepting than today.
And yeah, the added complexity of meeting somebody (and just the smaller size of the gay population) must inevitably lead to more loneliness.
And yes, I completely agree with you about the Q. As in many other cases, I'm struck by the way the people who are so insistent that everybody uses the language that makes them feel most warm and fuzzy inside, are utterly indifferent to the way the language they use makes others feel.
It wasn't being gay that denied me an adolescent experience at the usual age; I was barely beginning to realize I was gay until almost 19, I had girlfriends before,. But I had a severe stutter, now vestigial, and it inhibited me a lot.
But living in an unaccepting society never bothered me for a moment. My adoption of the mannerisms was very brief and I could "pass"; more accurately I had no reason to project my orientation and have never regarded it as a significant part of my identity, I m more a musician and a lover of science and animals than a gay man. I had "faggot" yelled at me exactly once,
At 42 I had just been through a bad breakup and gotten myself into incredible physical condition and no more stutter so I hit the clubs and probably took a few years off my life from the cigarette smoke. But I got a lot out of my system.
The Q word: I think younger gays have grown up with it and see it as normal, to me it means Matthew Shepherd (who was seeking to die) and friends who were bashed into the hospital. But the first generation to adopt it, I am convinced, were simply moving into the post acceptance phase of the defiant belligerence that gave us ACT-UP and "in your face"; to them there was no dirtier word in the language than assimilation and since being gay was no longer shocking they needed a way to shock.
After my late adolescence I pretty much withdrew from gay activism as I had withdrawn from the public territories, learning as I did how many gays didn't want to be assimilated, they wanted the enclave society, the oppression mentality. They wanted to feel Special. When I read more and more that marriage was a "str8" institution and that we had something better (yeah, bathhouses) I just tuned out.
That the bathhouses were not closed when we learned of HIV just horrified me.
Matthew Shepard wasn't a victim of gay-bashing. He knew his murderer and no one in Laramie believes the guy was homophobic because he was a well-known bisexual in the area. Furthermore, he and Matthew had had sex together already (sometimes under sort of weird circumstances). Shepard's death was a drug-related murder. Lots of crazy shit going down in Laramie. Read The Book of Matt, by Stephen Jiminez, a gay journalist, if you haven't already.
Shepherd was killed by two people, so right out the gate this book is wrong.
The guy had a death wish. He liked to come on to straight men, often violent-looking ones; he had been bashed several times but never stopped. When on a school trip to Morocco he'd snuck out at night looking for sex and gotten gang-raped. He was self-destructive and got turned on by risk.
No I am not saying he deserved what he got. Nobody does. But I am saying he summoned it.
You should read the book. I know there were two guys present; one didn't do much, just, allegedly, tied him to the fence. I don't think he'd had any sexual contact with Shepherd but the other guy had; there was some weird little gay culture going on there that both of them were a part of, involving drugs. The book was written by a respected gay journalist himself who found no one in Laramie thought Shepherd's murder was a gay bashing; it was widely known that Shepherd was involved with drugs, both consuming and selling and he'd recently screwed someone in a drug deal. He'd said to others for days before, that he was gonna get killed, that people were coming after him. No one in Laramie believed the guy who did the actual killing was homophobic, either; he was widely known to be bisexual, and also involved in the drug trade.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behind-americas-most-famous-gay-hate-murder-matthew-shepard