24th
The New Old Gays
I thought this article was fun, and most of the people complaining about it probably haven’t ever read The Observer. (Context!)…I will say that after my crazy week in the middle of that Nike ad controversy, it makes me realize that there’s also a new breed of twenty-something gay guys (let’s call them the opposite of the New Old Gays) who basically want to “out-straight” their straight peers, which means turning sex and hooking up (and commenting on blogs) into an ultra-competitive “sport” with all sorts of “in-your-face” jargon that you see on Craig’s List, etc and is essentially an extension of the elementary-school playground (scary place). Needless to say, I find the degree of homophobia at work here kind of alarming, and interestingly enougth, I was just reading this passage in a Carson McCullers book (btw, she is now in my top three American novelists of the 20th century) where this Jewish kid is talking about how much he initially admired Hitler and the fascists because to see all the youth together filled him with a sense of belonging, and as an outsider in a small Southern town, that mattered most to him; as he put it later, he was aware of what was happening to the Jews, but he didn’t want to think about it in light of his desire to belong. I think this is very much the same dynamic at work in many gay “scenes,” and while it’s understandable, it’s also kind of frightening; the level of aggression and denial at work can result in some fairly monstrous actions…
My Observer article this week:
These days, the young gays of Williamsburg and the East Village—the ones who wear pointy shoes and tight cutoff shorts, who studied queer theory and dabbled in heroin at Sarah Lawrence or Bard or Wesleyan, hang out at bars like Metropolitan and Sugarland in Williamsburg or the Phoenix and Eastern Bloc in the East Village, and listen to Chromeo and Girl Talk and Le Tigre—get all the attention. Corner one of these young men, and he will profess ignorance of that other scene of youthful gays, the gays of the Friends of Dorothy variety. As one of the New Gays confidently told me, it is a scene made up exclusively of the old and, quite possibly, fat, adding that the only young men who fraternize with this group are those who cannot, in all likelihood and despite their best efforts, get laid.