This week (or maybe last week by now) we have (had) an incredible opportunity. The Advocate magazine published its 40th Anniversary edition, and on the cover was a photo collage of 40 of the most influential gay rights activists of all time.
You should get a copy of the issue and see if you can put names to all the faces. I say that, because I’m worried about losing our gay culture.
Do you agree that Gay is a culture? Just host a dinner party with seven gay people and a straight man or woman. It’s a good bet that dozens of the evening’s references, not in serious gay rights discussion, but casual conversation will buzz right over his or her head.
Not to say that inviting your straight friends to dinner is a faux pas. On the contrary. I wouldn’t want to live in a ghetto, would you? That’s why I love living in Rehoboth, with its diversity -and by this I mean a vibrant straight community along with us homos.
It’s just that words or phrases like Stonewall, show queen, “of course she bought a Subaru,” and the ubiquitous “Did she bring a U-Haul on her second date?” are all in our lexicon and consciousness. It’s our culture.
Judy Garland, Daughters of Bilitis, HRC, Billie Jean King, Rubyfruit Jungle, Drag Kings, Harvey Milk, P-Town. Our history, our heroes, our catch-phrases, our culture. And I’m worried.
Exactly a decade ago writer Daniel Harris wrote The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, a terrific discussion of those secret signals and shared sensibilities that allowed an underground gay society to flourish even as the larger population despised and discriminated against it.
The very act of showing up at a Judy Garland concert and seeing other gay men around the room, all sharing the vulnerability of Judy’s music together made the denigrated community feel less alone.
But even a decade ago, Harris worried that assimilation and acceptance of homosexuals by society at large would cause our gay culture to disappear. It’s the very same concern that different ethnicities, immigrants and religious sects have as they meet the great American, and now great global melting pot.
But it seems to me that gay people often don’t recognize gay as a culture. They do, of course, appreciate all the hard work that has gone into the fight for gay rights in order to make their lives better. We’re not ingrates. But I’m not sure they see our heroes, safe havens and that elusive quality called “the gay sensibility” as something to learn about and celebrate. And I think that’s a shame.
I was fascinated to learn that Bayard Rustin, an African-American gay man was the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington with the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King. He was drummed from the activist ranks because of his sexuality. I was captivated by the tale of Harvey Milk’s rise to the title of Mayor of Castro Street, and I was mersmerized learning how Lillian Faderman rose from indigent sex worker to revered professor of lesbian studies and continues to be an influential writer today.
Our schools teach Americans about Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross and American social history – the rise of the railroads, the Gold Rush, the McCarthy Era.
Except for some gay studies courses, Gay people have to learn our history and culture on our own. Pick up a copy of the 40th Anniversary Advocate and test your GBLT- IQ. And if you can't name them all, you'll learn a lot on the inside pages. Enjoy!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hey, save that copy of the Advocate through the weekend; I think the cat-sitter tossed mine out, and I want to see it ...
And to your larger point -- yeah, sometimes I wonder what's being lost when gay people in their 20s or 30s who don't know their history. But I think that the entire gay community needs to take responsibility here. You "took me in" when I came out, but how many of your contemporaries have done the same? That's how history gets passed on in our community, when the VAST majority of us are raised by straight folks.
There are a couple of dynamics here, I think. One is that of course (as you note) if you're not oppressed there's less need for your own distinctive culture, and people are less likely to adopt that culture unless it jsut happens to mesh with their own sensibilities.
The other is that all culture has been so commercialized in the last few decades that any alternative culture - like gay culture - that becomes trendy or popular tends to be drained of vitality as it's made suitable for mass consumption. In the 80s, when I was a newly hatched fagling, it was civil rights, protests, the fight against AIDS, and so on. Today it seems to be about rainblow flag thongs.
OK, maybe I'm just hitting the inevitable cranky middle aged guy stage of life. But I think it really is different now.
An interesting question, I think, is how many people were ever really part of that gay culture. Was it perhaps a reflection of the most extreme (and thus most likely to be willing to take the risks of being out) people, while lots of other gay people observed it and used it as a helpful way to find others? If so, doesn't that still happen today? We've got the core of gay celebs and political leaders, and a certain amount of calculated super-gay stuff marketed to the masses (Queer Eye, etc.) and a lot of very ordinary gay people watching it and cheering it on. I wonder if it has always been so, but it's just a lot more obvious now because the gay masses aren't as uncomfortable being recognized as such.
I always felt a bit estranged from gay culture, not because it was gay-identified (basicaly, everybody in my life as known I'm gay for about 20 years), but because it just wasn't me. When I came out, I hated the music in gay bars just like I hated the hit music of the time, I never liked musical theater, and I just wasn't interested in memorizing lines from Steel Magnolias. I went through a phrase of being Mr Super Gay just after coming out, as part of the process of figuring it all out, and kept the parts that fit and dropped the rest.
What's been very interesting about my move from DC to Texas, a place with a lot more of what I'd call mainstream gay guys, is the realization that wow, we really are shockingly like everyone else. That was a little bit less obvious to me in DC and Boston; here, it seems like I'm constantly meeting churchgoing gay men with lots of Longhorns football accessories.
It's a fascinating topic, though.
I would love to see our schools teach ALL histories as a matter of course. I was looking at my daughter's history book -- this is a senior history course in a plum international honors program, where they're supposed to be getting deeper knowledge/analysis than the average history course. Out of this whole book, there was a tiny section -- probably a 1/4", maybe 1/3" -- dedicated to "Africa and the Latin American Countries". AND.
Anyway, I liked this post.
I lived and worked in the Castro (and was a through-and-through hag) in the late 70s and early 80s. I went back last year to freshen up my memories because I'm writing a young-adult novel that takes place there and then. I asked a guy on Castro where Castro Camera (where Harvey Milk worked and lived for a time) used to be, because I couldn't remember. He said, blithely, "I don't know." I jokingly chided him saying, "Don't you know your history!" He laughed and shrugged and didn't care. And when I went to All American Boy, which has been there forever, there was a t-shirt that read "Fuck your Good Old days."
What I take from all this is that each generation is the keeper of their own history. We may see the importance and linkages from our time to the times that follow, but the next generation is busy looking for their own history, finding their own linkages. In part, that's why I'm writing a book. Maybe it will help a wider audience, gay and straight, see the strands that connect us across time.
Post a Comment