![drakemotel:
tylercoates:
Welp. Here’s this thing:
In Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, which is, in part, a satire about feminism and the American woman (acolytes are called Liz Lemonists), there’s an episode where the show’s assistant questions Fey’s character about whether or not, as a feminist who has everything she ever wanted, she’s actually deeply unhappy? I wonder if the post-mo will suffer a similar fate. Some say all the gays ever wanted were two things: freedom and choice. I have freedom, and I have choices. I’ve never known a life without them. I don’t want to get married, I never have. I don’t want to raise children, I never have. I suffer from online dating fatigue already and haven’t held a guy’s hand in almost three years. I have all the sex I want, in my own apartment or his, but none of it means anything. I have regular HIV tests, because I’m aware of the importance of sexual health, but I’ve still managed to forget the condom once or twice without freaking out. My parents have never actually heard me say the words “I am gay” because I don’t need to and it really doesn’t matter because they love me all the same. I am a writer who happens to be gay, not the other way around. I’m not fighting the good fight. It was never mine to fight. So what about us? Call us what you want—post-mos, faux gays, straight-acting, bitter queens—we’re the lucky ones.
Take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, as I am a 27-year-old living in New York City, but fuck everything that this 24-year-old man in Toronto has to say about the movement of “post-mos,” who are essentially gay millennials with enough privilege to foolishly poo-poo any sort of quest for acceptance and equality. I guess in their minds (if there is much in them at all), these young men are convinced that they are without an agenda, but it is in my experience that anyone who proclaims to be without an agenda has himself a pretty strong agenda. One of these men claims that he doesn’t say he’s gay; he just fucks dudes. Yeah, well, he also wears chambray dress shirts and bow-ties, so consider those two elements for a moment when proclaiming not to have an agenda, my friend.
I don’t want to complain about these guys as “white people” (I’ve always thought it to be a bit tacky to do such a thing, because it’s weirdly racist and totally classist), but what a bunch of selfish white kids who seem to have absolutely no idea what it means to be gay outside of their silly, frivolous little collective in fucking Toronto, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know much about the make-up of their city, but I can tell you from my experience living in Chicago and New York that these men and their notion of being gay (or “being a guy who fucks guys,” whatever) are so infuriatingly stupid and offensive. Tell that to the kids living on the street. Tell that to the adults living on the street. I realize that none of them look like you - they don’t wear designer glasses or manicured beards that purport a single-layered and ridiculous sense of masculinity - so it’s difficult to deign yourself to identify with another “minority within your minority” when your head is shoved up your own selfish ass that appears to be blessedly exempt from the struggles that the rest of us (all of us) have had to face.
A few weeks ago I posted a link to an interview with author and activist Larry Kramer, who said,
I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe.
A friend of mine told me that she found that so disheartening, that one (me) should not have to live life that way. I replied that I agreed with Kramer; what matters most is how one self-identifies, but there will never be a way to avoid being a gay man. That is what society is calling me, and, frankly, that is what I am, because if it shows to someone that I’m just as normal as everyone else, then so be it. But I am just as normal as a man who wears women’s clothes, or a man who dances in his underwear on a parade float in June. There are different ways in which we express our homosexuality, and different ways in which we say to the rest of the world, “This is who we are, deal with it.” It’s pointless to marginalize others from a group that is already so marginalized, and it’s dangerous to claim, as a homosexual, that you don’t want to call yourself “gay.”
I can’t help but think of this speech in Angels in America:
Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you what a person is, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology of sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. A homosexual is someone who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me? No. I have clout. Lots. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.
We are, indeed, hung up on words, and I am baffled at how trite the men featured in this article closely mimic the ideas said by the fictional version of Roy Cohn. Being a homosexual should not be a status symbol. It will always be a defining characteristic, no matter what, because it sets us apart from the straight world. I don’t mean to suggest that there are a lot of different kinds of gay guys, but if we all want the same thing - acceptance, support, the right to be married (even if marriage is not a life goal for all of us) - we must at least unite together in this basic way; otherwise, we’re going to keep setting ourselves back.
[Link via ArchNoble (NSFW)]
Probably the reference to “Will & Grace” being this guy’s signal moment in his gay man-fucking-man life should have been the tip-off, but goddamn if this isn’t frivolous.
That said! Why shy away from the race-class questions? And gender, too! It seems to me unremarkable to the point of hiding-in-plain-sight that OF COURSE these are fashionable, well-off white guys. With the right to marry they now enjoy in Canada, that’s it! The fight is over for them. Unless we are discussing the myriad social cues and pressures, the subtle discriminations that construct in a human being the ability to say this:
I always enjoy people’s accusation that ‘You can’t be gay’ because of my appearance, my tastes (in music, wardrobe, etc.) and my personality.
without also imploding (and they are certainly not discussing those things), there is nothing else for these people to ask for. They are wealthy, white men in Toronto. They are not being disingenuous when they say they have no agenda, because they literally have no agenda. A mind that can be casual about HIV risk is a mind unburdened by the questions of how to pay for health care, what roof to sleep under, or what community to turn to.
This doesn’t mean the privileges that accompany being a young, educated, white Canadian preclude or occlude being a gay man, but it does mean that one probably cannot “be” a gay man “before” one is something else, in Larry Kramer’s formulation. It would be no more possible for this parade of bow-tie-wearing yobs to extricate their essential gayness from the silly string strands of class privilege than it would be for them to pull their heads out of their asses.
And that is sort of the point, I think! Because I disagree with Kramer—it is not possible to “be” “gay” “before” you are anything else; a gay rights movement cannot be anchored by an imagined gayness, or else it will evaporate once its supposed goal (marriage, in this case) has been achieved. The reason these people think the gay rights movement is over is because the “gay” rights movement is over, the one that was about marriage for wealthy white guys.
So I guess I’m disagreeing with Mr. Coates here a little bit—or at least hoping we can more clearly explain what we mean when we ask for gay solidarity.
my brother is s-m-r-t](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmknmyDAJ41qz7ztxo1_500.png)
Welp. Here’s this thing:
In Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, which is, in part, a satire about feminism and the American woman (acolytes are called Liz Lemonists), there’s an episode where the show’s assistant questions Fey’s character about whether or not, as a feminist who has everything she ever wanted, she’s actually deeply unhappy? I wonder if the post-mo will suffer a similar fate. Some say all the gays ever wanted were two things: freedom and choice. I have freedom, and I have choices. I’ve never known a life without them. I don’t want to get married, I never have. I don’t want to raise children, I never have. I suffer from online dating fatigue already and haven’t held a guy’s hand in almost three years. I have all the sex I want, in my own apartment or his, but none of it means anything. I have regular HIV tests, because I’m aware of the importance of sexual health, but I’ve still managed to forget the condom once or twice without freaking out. My parents have never actually heard me say the words “I am gay” because I don’t need to and it really doesn’t matter because they love me all the same. I am a writer who happens to be gay, not the other way around. I’m not fighting the good fight. It was never mine to fight. So what about us? Call us what you want—post-mos, faux gays, straight-acting, bitter queens—we’re the lucky ones.
Take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, as I am a 27-year-old living in New York City, but fuck everything that this 24-year-old man in Toronto has to say about the movement of “post-mos,” who are essentially gay millennials with enough privilege to foolishly poo-poo any sort of quest for acceptance and equality. I guess in their minds (if there is much in them at all), these young men are convinced that they are without an agenda, but it is in my experience that anyone who proclaims to be without an agenda has himself a pretty strong agenda. One of these men claims that he doesn’t say he’s gay; he just fucks dudes. Yeah, well, he also wears chambray dress shirts and bow-ties, so consider those two elements for a moment when proclaiming not to have an agenda, my friend.
I don’t want to complain about these guys as “white people” (I’ve always thought it to be a bit tacky to do such a thing, because it’s weirdly racist and totally classist), but what a bunch of selfish white kids who seem to have absolutely no idea what it means to be gay outside of their silly, frivolous little collective in fucking Toronto, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know much about the make-up of their city, but I can tell you from my experience living in Chicago and New York that these men and their notion of being gay (or “being a guy who fucks guys,” whatever) are so infuriatingly stupid and offensive. Tell that to the kids living on the street. Tell that to the adults living on the street. I realize that none of them look like you - they don’t wear designer glasses or manicured beards that purport a single-layered and ridiculous sense of masculinity - so it’s difficult to deign yourself to identify with another “minority within your minority” when your head is shoved up your own selfish ass that appears to be blessedly exempt from the struggles that the rest of us (all of us) have had to face.
A few weeks ago I posted a link to an interview with author and activist Larry Kramer, who said,
I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe.
A friend of mine told me that she found that so disheartening, that one (me) should not have to live life that way. I replied that I agreed with Kramer; what matters most is how one self-identifies, but there will never be a way to avoid being a gay man. That is what society is calling me, and, frankly, that is what I am, because if it shows to someone that I’m just as normal as everyone else, then so be it. But I am just as normal as a man who wears women’s clothes, or a man who dances in his underwear on a parade float in June. There are different ways in which we express our homosexuality, and different ways in which we say to the rest of the world, “This is who we are, deal with it.” It’s pointless to marginalize others from a group that is already so marginalized, and it’s dangerous to claim, as a homosexual, that you don’t want to call yourself “gay.”
I can’t help but think of this speech in Angels in America:
Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you what a person is, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology of sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. A homosexual is someone who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me? No. I have clout. Lots. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.
We are, indeed, hung up on words, and I am baffled at how trite the men featured in this article closely mimic the ideas said by the fictional version of Roy Cohn. Being a homosexual should not be a status symbol. It will always be a defining characteristic, no matter what, because it sets us apart from the straight world. I don’t mean to suggest that there are a lot of different kinds of gay guys, but if we all want the same thing - acceptance, support, the right to be married (even if marriage is not a life goal for all of us) - we must at least unite together in this basic way; otherwise, we’re going to keep setting ourselves back.
[Link via ArchNoble (NSFW)]
Probably the reference to “Will & Grace” being this guy’s signal moment in his
gayman-fucking-man life should have been the tip-off, but goddamn if this isn’t frivolous.That said! Why shy away from the race-class questions? And gender, too! It seems to me unremarkable to the point of hiding-in-plain-sight that OF COURSE these are fashionable, well-off white guys. With the right to marry they now enjoy in Canada, that’s it! The fight is over for them. Unless we are discussing the myriad social cues and pressures, the subtle discriminations that construct in a human being the ability to say this:
I always enjoy people’s accusation that ‘You can’t be gay’ because of my appearance, my tastes (in music, wardrobe, etc.) and my personality.
without also imploding (and they are certainly not discussing those things), there is nothing else for these people to ask for. They are wealthy, white men in Toronto. They are not being disingenuous when they say they have no agenda, because they literally have no agenda. A mind that can be casual about HIV risk is a mind unburdened by the questions of how to pay for health care, what roof to sleep under, or what community to turn to.
This doesn’t mean the privileges that accompany being a young, educated, white Canadian preclude or occlude being a gay man, but it does mean that one probably cannot “be” a gay man “before” one is something else, in Larry Kramer’s formulation. It would be no more possible for this parade of bow-tie-wearing yobs to extricate their essential gayness from the silly string strands of class privilege than it would be for them to pull their heads out of their asses.
And that is sort of the point, I think! Because I disagree with Kramer—it is not possible to “be” “gay” “before” you are anything else; a gay rights movement cannot be anchored by an imagined gayness, or else it will evaporate once its supposed goal (marriage, in this case) has been achieved. The reason these people think the gay rights movement is over is because the “gay” rights movement is over, the one that was about marriage for wealthy white guys.
So I guess I’m disagreeing with Mr. Coates here a little bit—or at least hoping we can more clearly explain what we mean when we ask for gay solidarity.
my brother is s-m-r-t
