My Culture Is Not Your Identity and Never Will Be… It’s How We Survived

Pride is dead to me. It’s been on life support for a long time but we’ve reached the point where the conversations we’re having are so far afield from anything that is important to me as  a gay man that they have become ridiculous and meaningless.

For many gay men coming out and understanding our sexuality is often a series shedding aspects of our identity and constantly evolving. It’s sometimes exhilarating, finding out at nearly 40 years-old that you could not only fall for a gay trans dude but that the sex would be off the hook… well let’s just say there are few things you learn about about your physicality post 30 that aren’t terrifying let alone exciting.

Sex, I have come to accept, is at the heart of our sexuality and our culture. It is indeed the defining feature of gay culture. And to anyone that would dare object but think you get what Madonna, Keith Haring, and Basquiat have in common, and why they’re queer, you don’t.

I’m not the kinkiest person in the room, but I have to understand punch fisting and wrap my head around it because I will be called to defend it at some point, so you don’t get to tell me that they’re can’t be kink at pride because it triggers you.

Above: gay culture.

Doesn’t matter if you agree or not. As comedian Neal Brennan has noted, part of the problem with contemporary rhetoric is people have opinions about facts.

There are no buts allowed after that closer.

If you think that there is no such thing as gay culture, I submit the following photographic evidence from Rolling Stone magazine’s 2010 Fall TV preview. Shot by photographer  Robert Trachtenberg, it features Glee’s Chris Colfer in a leather bar that is reminiscent of the the Blue Oyster bar from the Police Academy movies.

You cannot understand the humor of it and say there’s no such thing as gay culture.

And there is something in the ether. The highly anticipated movie Bros gets at a lot of these issues. Starring Billy Eichner and Luke McFarlane, at one point Eichner says incredulously “love is love? No. No it’s not.”

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Eichner said:

And he’s right.

Above: Definitely gay culture.

Being gay is having to understand how to navigate the intersection of Grindr, HIV, three-ways, cock rings, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, The Wizard of Oz, and PnP.  Eichner gets at this in recent interview about casting Bros, especially the lead.

“I just assumed that my love interest had to be played by a big movie star, which would mean a straight man because we don’t have any openly gay movie stars in America. We have TV stars, a lot of openly gay actors, but a movie star, we’ve never had an openly gay Ryan Reynolds, or an openly gay Paul Rudd, or an openly gay Kevin Hart, they just do not exist. Hollywood did not allow for it. When we all started talking about it, we all decided that that wouldn’t be the right thing to do for this movie, it wouldn’t be the right thing ethically, the right thing creatively, we’re doing a movie where you have this through-line about how LGBTQ people have been erased from history, so it would be so hypocritical.”

It’s why we get and can laugh at Dave Chappelle’s jokes about being LGBT. Especially after hearing his thoughtful, nuanced joke explanation that says they are separate movements all riding in the same car, a car being driven by The Gays.

Gay rights are rooted in the first amendment. Perhaps most widely known, in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), the Supreme Court held that same-sex couples could not be excluded from the fundamental right to marry. The Court grounded its analysis in the due process and equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which together prohibit the government from interfering with equal access to certain fundamental rights—rights so important that no amount of process is sufficient to justify their deprivation.

In particular, the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech protects the rights of LGBT people to speak and express themselves openly in ways consistent with their identities. Courts have increasingly applied this principle to government laws and regulations that directly target certain behavior or that have the effect of stifling or discouraging identity-affirming speech or expression.

This is why participating in any kind of “cancel culture” is a terrible road for us to ever walk down.

It’s understanding why the L comes first in LGBT. Understanding the devastating incalculable human loss to the AIDS epidemic of the first generation of gay men who were able to live their lives. A loss articulated in Leo Herrera’s Fathers project. Understanding that lesbians, at the height of the epidemic and who had nothing to fear from HIV stepped up and drove. And we wink and nod to our lesbian sisters who we weren’t always nice towards. Gay men can and have been misogynistic too. Fags and dykes though, are like America and England, we have a special relationship.

 

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Above: Also gay culture. 

It’s understanding that up until yesterday historically speaking, being gay was only two things in America: a mental illness and a felony and/or capital crime. Understanding that there are still sodomy laws on the books in many states. Understanding that in those states they are being used to arrest men who have had consensual sex with their partners  are on sex offender registries because of those laws even after the Supreme Court determined marriage equality to be law of the land. That contradiction is what implicit bias in law enforcement looks like.

The reason its about sex is because it’s because it’s about sex.

Sodomy laws are explicitly about sexual acts. Not identity.

The ACLU:

Originally, sodomy laws were part of a larger body of law – derived from church law – designed to prevent nonprocreative sexuality anywhere, and any sexuality outside of marriage. Sodomy laws began to be used in a new way, distinctly against gay people, in the late 1960’s. As the young gay rights movement began to make headway, and the social condemnation of being gay began to weaken, social conservatives began to invoke sodomy laws as a justification for discrimination.

In nine states, sodomy laws were explicitly rewritten so that they only applied to gay people. Kansas was the first state to do that in 1969. Kansas was followed in the 1970’s by Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Tennessee, and Texas. In two states, Maryland and Oklahoma, courts decided that sodomy laws could not be applied to private heterosexual conduct, leaving what amounted to same-sex only laws in effect. In many other states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and Washington, government agencies and courts treated sodomy laws that, as written, applied to all couples, straight and gay, as if they were aimed at gay people.

In 1986, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the U.S. constitution allowed Georgia to make sodomy a crime. Although the Georgia law applied to all couples, the Court said its decision was about “homosexual sodomy.”

That meant, the F.B.I. said, that it couldn’t be illegal to discriminate against gay people because gay people are a class “defined” by conduct which could be made a crime.

It’s understanding why we should be outraged at Grindr partnering with law enforcement in Florida for “Operation Swipe Left for Meth,” wherein the so called “dating app” allowed the cops to operate and arrest us for buying and using drugs, primarily meth amphetamines undercover on the app. Meth which has also seen an increase in pejorative mandated sentencing for possession, because that’s our drug, our gay sex drug no less.  Understanding the parallel between that law enforcement operation and the police raids that led to the Stonewall riots.

Above; Dick Grayson/Robin/Nightwing in bondage is gay culture.

It’s beginning to understand where the backlash, the rise in anti-LGBT legislation, the spike in the punch, stems from irrational, deeply held ignorant fears fanned by a recent Gallup poll and a study whose findings are part of a report from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) that saw LGBT identification among Americans under 30 increased by approximately 11% between 2008 and 2021. Understanding that simultaneously, individuals under 30 who reported a sexual partner of the same gender only increased by 4% since the 1990s.

Understanding “that very liberal or far-left young people, who are much more likely to identify as LGBT than their less liberal counterparts, are primary contributors to the LGBT environment we see today. However, the report noted that data suggests ‘while progressives form the core of the movement, there has also been a liberal shift in the broader culture that has affected a wider range of people.’ Understanding that data among young people shows mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated, the report indicated. Evidence also appears to show that people, especially liberals, no longer feel repressed when it comes to identifying as non-heterosexual.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with individuals who identify as non-binary and/or gender non-conforming being included in the overall LGBT population, but also understanding how insidious that inclusion is when it’s fanning the flames of hate. Understanding that allowing these fashion forward humorless pills, the same ones that are triggered by kink, that find sex at the heart of gay culture problematic, who aren’t even having any sex let alone sucking cock... understanding that they’re both undermining our identity and dampening our sex lives with what feels like a technicality. Understanding that they are one and the same ones insisting half the alphabet being included as equals in recognition of pride the entire month of June.

Knowing that most of them couldn’t tell you why pride is in June (it’s in recognition of Stonewall which occurred the last Sunday in June).

It’s learning that this past weekend that West Hollywood’s (the municipality with the 2nd largest gay populace in the country) pride parade featured appearances from Janelle Monáe, the parade’s grand marshal, and reality star JoJo Siwa. (Neither of whom are gay.)

Understanding that Harry Styles in a dress doesn’t make him trans. Lil Nas X singing a country song doesn’t make him straight. Zendaya wearing pant suites doesn’t make her a man. Tom Holland singing umbrella doesn’t make him a woman.

Understanding that there are several things happening here. 1) The project that really took root in the late 60s and 70s to allow men to abandon stoicism has become normal. Yes, men can be emotionally available now. 2) The feminist movement to empower woman to be equal under the law. Yes, now I can have a woman doctor or lawyer and not feel uneasy about it. 3) The radical homophobic / transphobic panic of the right has grown into organized terror.

It’s understanding all this and finally, calmly, realizing that if we’re driving the car then we can hit the brakes and we don’t owe you any explanation for getting off this crazy road trip than girl, bye.

Understanding it’s time to flip the script.