I'm 10 years older than Mr. Bruni, and like him benefit from living in a progressive city (NYC) and working in a tolerant industry. That said, for millions of young people growing up in the South and the Midwest or rural communities, Gay still is a struggle that tells you much more than just queer folks' lusts and loves. Being Gay in these places remains a challenge, a struggle and a constant search for affirmative identity. I'm amazed Mr. Bruni is unaware of this fact.
Ask any 12 or 13 year-old in Alabama or Mississippi if it is safe to come out in school. Check with young adults growing up in Mormon Utah, Nevada, and Idaho if they still remain closeted out of fear of either reprisal or alienation from families and friends. And ask any kid in North Carolina with its hysteria regarding trans bathrooms if they wouldn't feel sustained and even protected by a gay community center, a gay men's (or women's) chorus just ONE "out" teacher, minister or star athlete in those communities.
Why do "It Gets Better" videos get posted and viewed by the thousands every day? Because it's bad out there. I respectfully suggest Mr. Bruni leave his NYC/NYTimes bubble. Hit the trail to places mentioned above. He will find an improved but far less rosy picture than that portrayed in his column. Gay identity and affirmation are still essential to people stigmatized for being themselves. We are no more "post gay" than "post-racial" when President Obama was elected.
Sad but true.
125
My husband and I recently had lunch with a young man from the Netherlands who was visiting San Francisco. He was all of twenty years old and spoke of missing his boyfriend, who, because he was still in high school, could not join him on the trip. What a brave new world it is, I thought. That said, Mr. Bruni's "and yet" rings true for me. I arrived San Francisco in 1978 at 22. I reveled in the gay community's otherness, embracing "our" bars, restaurants, and bookstores. Most weekends I danced until dawn and nearly brunched myself into bankruptcy. I suppose I could say it's a different city now (as it is in so many ways.) More to the point, however, is the fact that all these years later, I'm a very different person. To borrow a passage from Mr. Yeats: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
51
I am not and have never been defined because of what I do in bed! As randy as I am, it's still been an small amount of time spent in carnal pleasures when compared with all the other activities of life.
Several years ago, after perusing the posting on Craigslist, I decided that the words gay/straight/bi were worthless because it appeared that everybody was doing everybody!
The word "gay", is like the word, "race"! It's meaningless because race is simply a shade on a scale of blackness to whiteness.
Once we get over these words that define "us" from "them", society and the world, in general, will be a healthier, more civilized place for everyone!
20
I saw "Boys in the Band" at Theatre Four in August 1969, soon after I turned 18. It actually was my parents who got me interested in it, because they had just come back from seeing the production in London. For me, it was an exhilarating experience, one which later puzzled me because as I got a few years older, the play seemed mostly about gay self-hatred in the summer I began hanging out in the West Village following the Stonewall rebellion.
By the end of my senior year in college, in the spring of 1969, when students put on the play on our campus, it was picketed by some gay activists who found it offensive. By that time, I had friends in the Gay Activists Alliance, the Gay Liberation Front, and other younger, more radical groups.
"Boys in the Band" was fun -- even the picketers left their posts when the play began and joined the rest of the audience -- but it seemed to have dated so quickly. It was hard for those of us who came of age when we did to relate to those older characters.
I am interested in seeing how the play works in 2018. My suspicion is that it has aged better with the distance of time and is now a look at period that has long passed, for good and for bad.
And the dialogue was always great. Thank you, Mart Crowley!
15
I came out in 1975, at 26 years old. I was a country boy who got to NYC via Paris. The world was my scary but fulfilling oyster. I look back at the progress we've made and am pleased, saddened, and frightened by the large pockets of hateful resistance to accepting a world of equality for LGBT individuals. But gay life was more fun, IMO, when the world smiled at us. It was invigorating to live a life that was seen as a bit naughty. My partner's mother was a VP for one of NY's major cosmetic houses. During a board meeting, they broke for lunch and descended on Christopher Street to "see what we'll all be wearing next year!" Nobody sees us anymore. I'm not sure that that is a good thing for anybody.
26
I note the marketing campaign for the revival of TBITB shows the cast dressed in identity-neutral black shirts. I remember the original costumes reflecting the various gay mens' tribes at the time: the show-tune queen, the sweater queen, the street hustler, the Brooks Brothers closet case, etc. So much so that the New Yorker referred to the cast as a "40's movie bomber crew of stereotypes: the Jew, the black, the married guy." This leads me to wonder if the revival will hew to some of points made in Bruni's article -- that these demeaning stereotypes have gone by the wayside, much in the way the colored-bandana in the jeans signaling code of the time has.
7
Yep.
I never wanted to be "interesting". I never wanted to be the cause of gasps of amazement when people realized who I was. I wanted to know when to stand up and sit down, how to shake hands, and whom to open doors for.
I wanted to be an old man. All my life, I have wanted to make it to "old man", and I wanted to do it as well as my grandfather did it. I wanted to be one of the men who were proud to be American, grateful to be related to strong intelligent women, and happy to mess around all day with the grandchildren.
I don't have a sequin in my closet, but when my grandson wanted a mostly pink room, I painted his room every color under the sun, with multi-colored doors, purple-leaved trees, and mostly pink.
John Wayne may have been this happy at home. Or maybe he would have envied me just a little.
Those who regret that "people like me" are not "interesting" any more .... I dunno. Sorry to disappoint you.
35
Many thought that the Obergefell decision was the culmination of the battle for gay rights, fait accompli..then came Trump and Pence..come 2020, I fear we'll be fortunate to hold on to the rights gained over the last ten years..there may be more social acceptance, but legally we run the risk of turning the clock back, way back. In enclaves like NYC, SF, Seattle, DC, BOS and Chicago, one may feel relatively safe and accepted; not so in fly over country. The 2016 Presidential election is a wake-up call for all minorities and marginalized groups (sort of redundant, isn't it). Time wake up and take action! Marriage equality is not the panacea that some in the LGBYTQ thought it would be..the trangender community, in particular has a long way to go..and don't forget ENDA--in many states one could get fired for being who one is..the struggle continues.
28
In other countries not so.
You describe a few problems but all in all these are good/privileged problems to have considering the prior history of gay identity.
Ireland has a gay indian prime minister.
It can happen here too.
13
For an entire generation we have heard of nothing but the marginalization of, discrimination against and cruelty toward gay Americans. Thankfully, in 2018, gay citizens enjoy all of the civil liberties, rights and opportunities afforded by our constitution. Now it is time to accept ; as have other cultures that have transitionred into the mainstream, that equal means no longer persecuted, but also no longer special.
3
As a Canadian I enjoy full protection under our charter of rights and freedoms that were put in place over 30 years ago.
Americans do not. Some states do, others do not. The LGBT community is not protected in the constitution to the best of my knowledge.
32
Some of the biggest obstacles left are in the very media that Mr. Bruni (and I) are part of: namely the lack of LGBT people in non-gay news stories.
The next time the networks do a news story about finances or credit cards or car shopping, etc., why not focus on a lesbian couple as the story's center? Why not show them paying the bills, planning a college fund for their kids, buying a house? That's the reality of how most of us who are LGBT spend our lives. But to many TV producers we're invisible unless it's a story about gay discrimination or AIDS.
Newscasts (and newsrooms) are supposed to reflect what society really looks like. It's time for GLAAD and other LGBT groups to turn up the heat for more inclusion into mainstream news coverage.
15
I watched "The Bird Cage" (1996) again last night and it was still hilarious. Thank you for a thoughtful piece.
8
The voice you call absent has moved into independent cinema, where sex-obsessed materialistic wannabes try to be comical. Or sappy romantic dramas of inappropriate relationships. There were many good "gay plays" by a number of authors, helping develop the off-Broadway movement. But the best work of all was done in major motion pictures and television.
Now, what passes as gay culture is a perpetuation of idiotic stereotypes, consumption of alcohol and pornography, and the passive imitation of such negative role models as found in videos. It is sad how exploitation has become so institutionalized and accepter. Few gay men have any real integrity or authenticity when observed in a gay bar. The gay "accent" is absurdly preserved. Feminism has not done us any favors, helping deprive us of much-needed strength and male identity. Gay men need help growing into manhood, not to have their strengths sapped. Being gay does not mean you are not a man. That takes time to learn. And being a man means many things, but most of all, being able to own your own power.
Gay men are paid the least of all sectors of the population. Where's the outcry, where's the equality? Women demand all the attention for themselves. And AIDS activists demand all the resources, when it is an almost totally preventable disease, and there are may others preying upon the gay community but receiving no support.
The gay mafia further saps strength by assuming policy positions without a mandate from the community.
6
In 1995, when Denver International Airport opened, the old Stapleton Airport closed. It was eventually turned into a nice residential neighborhood. So many gays moved there it's informally referred to as "Gaypleton," according to a gay friend of mine who lives there.
3
Given that African Americans constitute ~12% of US population, wouldn't you expect about 1 of 9 people in the play to be black?
15
This puts me in mind of the intense esprit de corps which I have been told is formed among men in battle. There is a bond which forms among people who are facing the same struggle, such as fighting for a larger good, particularly when those people are under stress or facing danger. Many of those situations are not ones we would want to return to, but we can still miss the intense feelings of comradeship.
A perhaps less vivid but still emotional feeling can ensue when returning to the old neighborhood where you lived as a child, fully realizing that the remembered people are gone and you can never experience those days again. Bittersweet, sad, wistful feelings. Count yourself fortunate if your regrets are few.
28
A gay person living in a city such as NYC has a much better chance of being accepted than in so many evangelical, rigid parts of this nation.
There are still too many places in the USA where young people who want to come out, can’t, to the point of suicide.
I imagine that many gays have to leave their childhood communities, and move to more accepting places like NYC, to really be themselves.
That takes enormous courage and is much harder for those without a college education.
And I also imagine that many still hide behind a mask and want to blend in when they settle in a place like NYC, because this puritanical culture then still has the psychological power to intimidate them.
12
Now society shrugs and says "yeah, so?" upon hearing one is gay. And that's something to lament? Isn't integration the goal of a tolerant society - I'm OK, you're OK?
Sounds like another identity group who doesn't feel special.
8
I'm about Franks age and came out in college my freshman year. I studied in Los Angeles, but even there intolerance, discrimination and cruelty were hobbies that were proudly engaged in by a significant minority of students.
I do miss the ghetto.
Before the internet, meeting people to date, or simply to hang out, let your guard down and not have to explain your jokes, required traveling to bars and dance clubs in the worst industrial neighborhoods. The drinks were watery, the people were kind and the drag queens were brilliant.
But the OZ of the bars only existed because it was a refuge from the intolerance of every day life. The best & the brightest were there because we had nowhere else to go and because the weaker members of our tribe were lost on the battlefields of the culture wars.
I do miss the ghetto, but I do NOT miss the society that concentrated and distilled all of it's gay life into those dingy places.
30 years later, my wonderful husband has been drafted to coach out nephew's suburban soccer team. He knows nothing of soccer and everything about hospitality. He quickly became the most popular coach in the league.
We are still fabulous, but we have a larger audience now.
I miss the ghetto, but its better this way.
50
A side that’s not mentioned here is the exclusion from the gay community itself that many gay men like myself have experienced and still feel....for perhaps not having the gift of that witty repartee or the good looks that often mean immediate acceptance into the tribe regardless of character. As a 59-year-old, I have found my greater acceptance in society at large in the last 20 years a soul-saving source of comfort and security with which no amount of nostalgia can ever compete. And that acceptance is still fragile and has to be fought for now more than ever.
20
Be assured that you are not alone. I have had the same struggle.
11
"And yet ... " The rise of authoritarianism on the left and right is a very dangerous development for all types, styles and kinds of us queers. Your too brief reference to Pompeo demonstrates this forthcoming danger. I tell my Jewish friends to pay attention to what's going on in the world because evil, rotten people run most of the world. The authoritarians will someday hunt my friends down and put all us gays to the wall. We would do well to remember who we are and stay close to those like us.
I understand how society likes to pat itself on the back for all the progress it has made, but the reality is we have made very little permanent change. There are still gay bashings and bullying, snares and dirty looks here and overseas, never mind the murders being committed for gay, as well as condemnation for supporting marriage equality. The brittle healing that has taken place over the past 20 years will not rid us of our demons. As an older gay man I remember the self-imposed exile and abject loneliness as well as the profound fear of being outed. I definitely do not want to relive that ugly era. But, I do issue words of caution to every single one of us, whether gay, straight or somewhere inbetween: there are very bad people in-charge throughout this country and throughout the world. The rise of authoritarianism is upon us and we are all in danger, not just us queers. And so it goes.
29
These social developments are encouraging in spite of our racist and homophobic president and his agenda to divide and distract us. Why should a gay man or woman attach their identity solely or primarily to being gay. Gay men and women can be many things but first and foremost they are men and women who just happen to be gay as opposed to those that just happen to be straight or bi-sexual. They are as diverse a group as any straight people. We have enough tribalism in our society at the moment and is is pitting us against one another.
9
This article resonates with me. I left Detroit MI in 1986 and moved to New York where the gay bars were not hidden behind a shopping square. When I moved to NYC it was liberating, but there was still a way to go. I remember myself and someone I was dating at the time looking into a shop window and some person calling us “faggots” and looking at us.
Well that didn’t turn out well for him. I don’t think he was expecting ‘a fag’ to come back at him with the expectation that more could happen to him...and I did it in front of his girlfriend. When I moved to LA and visited West Hollywood there were still people driving down Santa Monica screaming “faggots, queers” and the like.
Now these are as distant as a memory of a Joy Reid blog post from the same time. West Hollywood has retained some gay spots but new attempts at gay bars on the Westside have failed. We had the Roosterfish in Venice on Abbott Kinney. As the street gentrified and straight people wandered in more, it went through an awkward phase. I.e. people coming in and seeing two guys kiss. Some people didn’t care, others blurted out their surprise...in a bar that was there long before they walked through the doors. They closed when the rent went up. Rumor has it is set to reopen and most likely will be like the Abbey, mostly straight with gays thrown into the mix because it’s the only gay bar on the Westside.
I remember “those days”. Things have come a long way but not far enough.
8
The reference to the aborted Natalie Wood movie is fascinating. 1969 was an era of several "dyke" movies including "The Killing of Sister George." Lesbian visibility (and gay visibility) have been a huge issue through film history, and slowly but surely, varied portrayals of gay and lesbian characters have become more prevalent (but nowhere prevalent enough.) Wood was a major star in 1969 and if she had been in the movie Bruni mentions in his column written by Crowley it would have become part of the national water cooler conversation. Wood's long relationships with many gay men would have certainly given her insight into those "sexual outlaws" of the time and as a result could have injected a committed frisson and human sympathy to these characters.
8
homogeneity is not equality, respect for diversity is sidelined for the comfort of the prevailing dominant class, the heterosexual. let us not be hoodwinked into a false sense of complacency.
4
Quentin Crisp saw this phenomenon coming and expressed it thusly: In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Hubby and I thought it resonated so well with the changing times that we included it on our wedding invitations.
13
Rights? Equality? I'd just like to put in a word for irresponsible male sexuality freely expressing itself. That's how it all began, and it continues in the bookstores and bathhouses, and now the internet. In those places people aren't exactly celebrating gay marriage or worrying about acceptance by society. A little alcohol also helps.
3
As if New York Theatre was still culturally relevant.
2
Showing "boldness, irreverence, independence" is a characteristic of outsiders who choose to stand firm. When you're no longer an outsider, you no longer need to call on those things to be yourself.
5
I expect Bruni to stay away from blatant statistical nonsense.
Re: "Among the nine men in “Boys,” only one is black."
Well, Frank, one in nine people in the U.S. were black (11.1%) when the play was written. Even today, with share at 12.5%, if you have a cast of nine, then one black person is the best proportional representation (11.1%) you can make.
Now, not every single identity needs to be proportionally represented in every production of everything, everywhere, every time. Sometimes there will be over-representation (which would be the case if there were, say, two blacks in this production) and sometimes under- (none in this case).
Also, if one were to insist on some representation of all intersections of identity, you cannot have a cast as small as nine.
17
Mr. Bruni - I have a son, 17.
He has scored the trifecta - gay/transgender/autistic.
He goes to a rough school, where he is enrolled in - you guessed it- the dance program.
And he's good.
He is liked and respected by the majority of his class mates, and admired for his ability.
But he still has to deal with that nasty element that continues to exist in schools and throughout the world. And sometimes it wears him down.
Forty years ago, his daily life would have been a nightmare.
His adult life will still be difficult.
There is a park ( no, not that kind of park) which he likes to go to in the early evening, where he works on his technique and seeks out friendly faces. He's seventeen and wants to be on his own - so I drop him off, and he calls me when he's ready to come home.
The park is on a lake , surrounded by a seawall. There is no shoreline. My nightmare vision is of a group of
backwords-hats deciding it would be 'fun' to throw the 'fag' into the lake. A couple of weeks ago, when he was there, I called him in a controlled panic, just to hear his voice. He was fine.
Oppressed groups need to band together. I get that. But the best case scenario will be realized when that need no longer exists for any group. And young men like my son will be able to traverse the world without being 'identified' - positively or negatively - soley according to their gender, sexuality, or color of their skin.
20
Thanks so much!
3
Yes, you have been "ridiculously lucky" to have been born into a particular time, place, and position in society, Frank. With gayness defined by desires of a white upper middle class, is it any wonder when homosexual difference gets coopted by Crate-and-Barrel heteronormativity? Witness, for instance, the move of Boys in the Band from off-Broadway to Broadway (along with the requisite increase in ticket prices) — not to mention the commodifying transformation of former protest march into today's parade. Admittedly, the original L.G.B.T. banner had already made these bourgeois distinctions manifest. Or, to analogize this socioeconomic reality, “gay” : WestVillage/Chelsea :: “queer” : LowerEastSide. So check your privileged mea culpa, please, and get down off your nostalgic cross. Those of us left in the revolution would like the wood for the scaffold we obviously still need to build. Thanks.
4
As a straight white woman who spent a good part of the 70s living in the West Village/NYC I think I understand what Mr. Bruni is getting at. I still get a kick out of watching the video of 'YMCA' opening with the shot of the McBurney Y. Our culture was so much less corporate and media saturated back then. For those of us who didn't end up in Vietnam it was a time of exploration and experimentation. It's hard not to be a bit nostalgic.
7
This all may be true but it is hopelessly bland and unthoughtful.
The essence of our gay selves doesn't just appear in our twenties when market forces can dictate behaviour (look! we buy the same things everyone else does!).
What about early childhood experiences, mother and father and sibling relationships, interactions with primary school teachers, neighbours, friends. It all matters and is very difficult to discern, but because the rest of the world likes to use us for our discernment and individuality, let's not forget that we are the ones who started it, we are the ones who suffered for it, likely from the very beginning.
LP
4
Bruni and others need remember, and remind others, that they and their fellow brothers and sisters are on this planet as products of heterosexual relationships and parenting- except perhaps in the more recent in vitro world of science.
The word "gay", historically synonymous with carefree and happy, has been usurped in the process. I and heterosexual others can't use that beautiful adjective any longer unless in homosexual context. It was stolen for political purpose.
The Boys in the Band, re-wrote the musical score, abandoning and castigating the larger heterogenous orchestra.
It remains to be seen what will be the eventual total fallout to the culture and society at large.
3
Um, if there was a "political purpose" to the use of the word gay, it was code to protect people from violence. "Homosexual" is not exactly a traditional word, either: it's an invention of the late 19th century.
Gay is still used in a non-sexual context. You are free to use it, with (without?) sanction.... It's hardly the only word in the English that is equivocal in meaning unless the context helps to make its meaning clear.
12
Oh brother!
7
@fsa...Please. This is just another form of a ridiculous micro aggression gay people are exposed to constantly during our lives. It's used to infalidate our experience and our community as gay people.
9
As an openly Gay therapist, who worked with abused children, I often found it puzzling why adults would consider me a threat. I worked with them as I felt the fear growing up from church, teachers and classmates. Even in my own family, I still find the attitudes byzantine. I would strongly suggest that the word Gay be capitalized at all times. I do the same for the word Blacks. Fear of the unknown is still a hazard in most of the world today.
Later in life I worked with AIDS patients dying from the disease and even in Gay agencies, there was homophobia. Internalized homophobia is the worst.
5
As Bruni, acknowledges,he views this issue from a ridiculously privileged position. Those of us in red America are nowhere close to celebrating Frank's Manhattan based gay panacea. Our fight continues on multiple fronts. That's our reality.
9
Alas, on history's roadmap, the next town past Acceptance is Boredom.
2
Is that a place in Vermont?
2
John, KANSAS. Big time.
3
Don't knock Kansas. I did incredible Zen meditations on my drives through the state.
You get what you ask for. Every win involves a loss.
3
When your outgroup is marginalized, it's easier to form a coherent identity that is defined partly by the ingroup. When gay was "not straight" that left a lot out of what could be included in being gay. The more that American society accommodates itself to the realities of gay life and moves toward greater tolerance and acceptance, the more diffuse gay identity can grow. Gays don't have to the Village People -- or even the village people -- any more. And that's a GOOD thing.
2
Yes, that's how far we've come: nice straight people like gemli and socrates are at the top of the reader picks. The point of Boys was that we were speaking for ourselves. Out loud.
Frank, check in with the young people. I'll bet that even in New York you'll find kids who are figuring out who they are and how to survive in a crucible. There is a gay identity.
8
Thank you for this lovely remembrance of times past. But all of yesterday's problems are not solved today if a gay man can be killed in Austin (Austin!) with his attacker only receiving probation as punishment...
https://nypost.com/2018/04/27/man-who-used-gay-panic-defense-for-killing...
4
Gay men and lesbians might not need "sanctuaries," but, like other affinity groups, they still tend to live in certain urban enclaves. In New York, the center of gay life has migrated over the decades from the Village to Chelsea to Hell's Kitchen as each neighborhood got more expensive.
I myself moved two years ago from HK to the South Bronx, and, yep, they're — we're — now coming up here.
2
" 'Gay' tells you about a person’s lusts and loves, but it used to tell you more — about his or her boldness, irreverence, independence. It connoted a particular journey and pronounced struggle, and had its own soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons. Not so anymore."
Hurrah! In that case, we gays have achieved liberation - liberation from the stifling norms that evolved in the gay subcultures of Manhattan and San Francisco and spread across the land like gay kudzu in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
Where Mr. Bruni's found that he became more interesting to others when he stated he was gay, I have sometimes sensed disappointment because I didn't live up the cultural expectation that I be FABULOUS! like those campy gay guys on TV.
I firmly believe that the label "gay" can only ever tell you about a person's loves and lusts.
The rest? It's all socially acquired. People are tribal, and because of that they form in-groups with specific norms and ways of being. The problem is that neither I nor my husband are culturally gay. We don't do FABULOUS. Why should we?
Unfortunately, there are still LGBTQ voices who are deeply invested in dictating the norms of gay culture.
They call people like me "assimilationists" for having exercised my right to marry. It goes one of two ways from there. I might be condemned for having bought into a patriarchal system or, in the tradition of Harry Hay, for not becoming the mystic poet all gays are meant to be.
9
None of this is new or particularly gay. I was born in 1955 so yes I miss the secret camaraderie that gay life had back in the past. It is why my husband and I moved to Rehoboth Beach, where there is still a little of this left. In one sense, it is nice to be more free and less afraid in our lives but as a minority being consumed into a majority culture, the risk of lost individualism is quite large. This is true among Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. We even see it in many white straight Trump voters who long for the 50’s when they forced their culture on the rest of us. I am not sure a harmonic culture is good for creativity in music, art, etc. With freedom may just come blandness, a sort of world of robots, where everyone acts and behaves the same. I am very happy to be married but I also love gay culture when it is away from heterosexual white-washing. I assume the young now will know no difference and be happy to be full fledged legal citizens or netizens. C’est la vie.
6
Oh please, NOT the brier patch. sounds like a yearning for more ghettos and firing squads. I want to be " just one of the folks" and "what happened to my "separateness". Maybe that is what afflicting the world today--even in Poland, I remember an article in NYT about cafes and restaurants re-decorating to simulate the "old days (e.g. COMMUNIST days) where everything was really shabby chic, rusty cups, bad food and chain smoking Turkish cigarettes.
It could be "be careful what you wish for" too. Now according to this article gays are just like everyone else and maybe they want to go back to PINK STARS?
1
I remember as a kid looking at the spread in Life magazine of the men from the movie Boys in the Bank and being fascinated, attracted, repelled, knowing that I was one of those boys. It scared me. I went to college and saw the movie at our student union with my straight roommate who I was in love with. The movie scared me. Was I self-hating? And then I moved to New York and swore I would never live in any closet, ever. And I didn't. To hold a man's hand on the street, to kiss a man openly on the street. What heaven.
Growing up gay in Ohio in the fifties and sixties was my trial by fire. I knew I was different from the age of 5. I survived.
I won't be around to see it, but I hope the day comes when there are no subcultures at all, just people, taking care of each other, supporting each other, being kind and compassionate towards one another, no matter who you sleep with or hang out with. Without labels. Just love. Long way off, I know. But hope springs eternal.
22
Frank writes: "I increasingly get the sense that gayness itself has scattered, becoming something more various and harder to define."
A gay diaspora? Wandering Tribes? Hmmm, I dunno, Frank. But that gayness no longer comes in pre-packaged social and behavioral constructs, I'll certainly concede you that.
1
I watched the movie version recently, and was surprised by how it seemed dated and still relevant at the same time. Many of the same characters are in my life. Michael, the one who doesn't dare drink because he becomes a raging , self-loathing attack dog. Donald - the rock that holds him together (aka, me). Hank - out of a straight marriage, not remotely queeny, but once out won't look back for a moment because it was too hard getting where he is. Harold, sharp tongued and viperous but also fiercely loyal to Michael. They're all here in my life - and if some of the insular aspect of Boys is no longer relevant, it's not that distant a memory. i will be very interested to hear the reaction of my college -age students to this play.
3
I would not trade going back into the ghetto for all of the strides we've made. A friend of mine just lost his partner of 40 years. If they had not been able to marry, he would have been deprived of any spousal benefits. Before we get too nostalgic about the good points of the past, let's not forget the bad ones as well.
7
I'm not so sure that when the "cause" becomes the identity that that's a good thing. You essentially won the war. Now you have to find a new identity. Imagine WWII vets still lived their fight. Time to move on.
6
I believe there was an article a few years ago in the NYT (I could be wrong) about a lesbian writing about how she and her partner in Chicago, a place she once lived and was moving back to had found that most of the lesbian bars and haunts were either gone or had lost their gayness. She came to the same conclusions as Mr. Bruni that lesbian culture had lost something that she attributed to the result of greater society-wide acceptance, which I believe applies to all movements. Once a counter culture movement is no longer counter culture but part of the mainstream it losses its need for critical mass, and it is this loss of need for critical mass (tribal-ness) that in this case reduces the "gayness", or need for tribe, at least the need as it once was needed.
2
Speaking as a white, straight woman, Key West where I live is still a sanctuary for gays and lesbians. While the gay community has assimilated into the community at large, there is an effort to remain separate such as with its own business guild which mimics the town's chamber of commerce and its Gay Pride week and the flying of the rainbow flag which is a signal that gays are welcome. Tourists treat the gay bars and drag queens as another attraction, sometlhing they aren't going to see back in Des Moine or Cleveland.
I don't know if you can have it both ways Frank, to be special, yet be accepted and assimilated. I just think of the heartbreaking sight of seeing so many happy people at Gay Pride week and among them was a booth for suicide prevention.
6
I totally get it, Frank. I came out in 1978 and found a welcoming, wonderful subculture in the lesbian community. It was a special and connected time for our community...yes, like being a member of a secret club. When you met another "member of the tribe" in the "outside" world you were immediate friends. I feel very lucky to have had that experience and share your nostalgic feelings.
6
You complain: “Among the nine men in 'Boys', only one is black.” But isn't that roughly the proportion of blacks in the US population as a whole?
3
Great care was taken to make the cast racially proportionate to a gay bar on Saturday night. It's a rainbow, of course, but it always fades to white.
So, maybe there's hope for seeing anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of bigotry and hate fade away?
5
How about “Modern Family?” Those guys/gays are great.
The gay bars and bookstores are disappearing because of the arrival of the biggest gay bar and bookstore in the world-- The Internet.
5
The good old bad days. https://youtu.be/zr8dAYY3mAU
Breathtakingly myopic. Save a few places on the east and west coasts, "gay" retains its dangers and necessary secret safe harbors. And what about beyond the borders of this country? "As a gay white man..." Indeed.
4
Use of the word Gay to encompass us all (LGTBQ) distresses me mainly because it a labeling and identifying term that is regarded as primarily male. Yet another example of how deeply Patriarchy rules us all on all levels.
7
In the 1990's the Human RIghts campaign would counter Jerry Falwell's pronouncements on gay marriage as ridiculous, saying gay relationships were special and unique so why would gays want a pastel version of straight marriage? Today, from marriage to employment, to a Republican President nominating a gay ambassador to Germany, gays are simply another element of the mainstream of society. While my nephew may still spend time on Fire Island or parts of Miami, it's more akin to Long Islanders visiting resorts in the PA Catskills. Frank is right (have I ever said that?): is there a gay identity if no one cares if you're gay?
The nostalgia Mr. Bruni feels for distinct gay personae and a discrete gay culture strikes me as an instance of wanting it both ways. Gay people have fought hard for acceptance and equality, as they deserve. So why does the author seem to long for a time when going to a gay bar was thrilling because it was dangerous? And must people conform to stereotypes as a way of proving that they are being true to whatever “tribe” they are associated with? Personally, I love it when I see individuals act against any sort of stereotyped behavior that might be expected of them. Straight men who love musicals, gay men who love sports—that’s liberation.
5
Even though I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family (in 1950), I still remember VERY WELL what it what like, growing up in the world before Will and Grace, RuPaul and Barney Frank.
THANK HEAVEN THAT WORLD IS GONE!
My parents would have loved to find a copy of Playboy in my bedroom, but all they found were Muscle & Fitness. I do recall my early years of being out, with the distinct sense of belonging to a special community, but I wouldn't trade our world today for anything.
It kinda reminds me of what I once said to someone who criticized Israel for some reason: "Yes; we now have Jewish prostitutes, juvenile delinquents and corrupt politicians, but that's exactly what we wanted: to be like every other nation, with the good, the bad and the ugly."
May the acquisition of equal rights continue to expand for our gay community, and may it also spread to all other minorities in this fractured world.
19
What Mr. Bruni writes is true: he is indeed lucky to be a 53 year old white man with a great job in a liberal city. And yet, for the black kid on the down-low, the Hispanic gay young person in the barrio or the poor white gay kid in rural or smaller city America life is truly hard and sometimes life-threatening. Things have vastly improved for the educated, affluent white gays - two warriors recently married at West Point ! - but the same inequalities that mark contemporary America writ large mark LGBTQ America.
11
Well Mr. Bruni it is time for you to revisit seaside Provincetown this summer. It is still absolutely fabulous in season.
Speaking of ab fab, Mart Crowley looks fantastic!
5
What's with all the tribalism? I thought we are enjoined from such; i.e. tribalism bad, everything else good ... at least so we are told by our cultural fabricators.
The nuclear family was tyrannical enough in society when it was just the straight world. Would I turn back the clock on basic rights? Of course not. But now it often seems as if everyone's supposed to want to become part of the spouse brigade or stroller army. Eventually, Pride parades will just become miles of strollers. Sigh. Roseanne did a joke in her stand-up act, the gist of which was wondering why gay people were fighting for the right to do the two most repugnant things in society: get married and join the military. There’s something to be said for standing outside the mainstream and viewing it with a healthy dose of snark. And yes, I get it about being forced to stand outside vs. having choices. But does having rights mean we have to embrace it all with such zeal? A truly progressive society would encompass our differences, not merely carry the banner for "just like us"…ugh. We shouldn’t be aiding and abetting the marketing. I’ll never be just like anybody for numerous reasons and I fled my hometown so I wouldn’t have to be. Some of us have never been interested in fitting in…or couldn’t if we tried. A “gay sensibility” is only part of that, but it did once create an outsider culture that not only contributed vastly to our artistic landscape but also made the world a more interesting place to hang out. Of course, AIDS took many of the iconoclasts. But I’d like to think that had they lived, they wouldn’t all have ended up debating the merits of Mclaren vs.Bugaboo.
8
"Among the nine men in 'Boys,' " Mr. Bruni writes, "only one is black."
And this is an issue of some kind? One in nine is about 11 percent. Blacks have long been about 12 percent of the population of the USA. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the country's population was about 31 million, of whom about 4 million were black. That's 12.9 percent. Having one of the nine men in "Boys" be black is realistic, then, though it obviously leaves progs trembling with anxiety that there should be more. Maybe some clever diversity wizard will pull a "Hamilton" and cast the whole thing with people of color. Wouldn't that be something!
7
All this rings true. The rise of internet and smart phone apps is also linked to the loss of physical community.
In those old days, you knew you had to find an unusual life path, and all sorts of things were rooted in that fact. Now, the normal life path is open all the way to marriage and children. Yes, it is different but better in the end. Such an unexpected outcome.
1
As a member of another once-despised, marginalized "tribe" (Asian Americans), I see the extinction of "identity" as something that can't happen too soon. The real victory IS when we are less tribal, more "scattered" and integrated. Integration is not one-way--we give as much as we get. I am lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, where Chinese supermarkets are filled with white yuppies on weekends, mixed race people fill the malls, Blacks and Latinos know how to use chopsticks, and you can't avoid the influence of Japanese and Korean pop culture. Despite the best efforts of demagogues who want to return us to politics based on tribalism, Asians here do not vote in an ethnic bloc, but tend to vote based on issues.
Let's not get too nostalgic for the days when Gays, Asians, or any other group had to live in ghettos, real or imagined. As you mention, gays are in an infinitely better place than you were when you had to wear your style and lingo as "armor".
8
My understanding of my identity as a cis-gendered straight man of color is aggregated through the vibrant culture Mr. Bruni describes. I'm part Los Angeleno, part New Yorker, part masculine and part femminine. (I'm also "part" plenty of other things). The atomization of gay culture described in this marvelous essay does come at a cost. Gay culture has largely been stripped of it's militant wing, forged through hard fought battles mostly won.
The normalization of gayness doesn't mean the fight is over. As we're observing in our current political climate, the very concept of identity is being challenged.
Self-identifying gender non-conforming dear friends have inspired me to think of our many qualities, traits and behaviors as operating along a continuum. Rather than positioning myself at binary end points, do I have the personal agency to claim myself queer?
2
If you are forced to live on the fringes, you make the fringes really work for you. But once the social fabric weaves you in, you lose the need for fringe.
People can still be as outrageous as they want. But there is more freedom to just blend, just live, and that is an attractive option. Bemoaning what is lost is celebrating what was won. With so much forward progress, so many institutional walls breached, if not broken, living large on the fringes may actually move a lot of people backwards. We still haven't breached religious prejudice or the political wallop it carries to exclude gays, or any other LGBT person.
Change happens, and it balances out. Happiness can come in rare, huge spikes of joy, or as constant low level hum, but both end up being an equal amount of happiness. Is it a surprise most people prefer a baseline contentment?
12
Nostalgia is nothing but memory gone senile, ersatz memory. I don't go there. I think of what Walt Whitman said, a man who loved men at a time when the words "homosexual" and "gay" didn't exist:
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now
As for Boys in the Band, it is a very good play that deserves revival for reasons that have nothing to do with being gay in the 1960s. It is a play about friends who become family, and thus is very American, in the tradition of Long Day's Journey into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It is about what love is, is not, and can be. It is about friendship and its limits. The play is universal. To see it as a "gay" play bound in time is cheep nostalgia.
After all, the play is the working out of an idea that the Times recently pointed out "You Share Everything With Your Bestie. Even Brain Waves." This has always been true, ever since humans have lived in groups even if the scientists are only figuring this out now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/friendship-brain-health.html
Don't cheapen Mart Crowley's achievement by sending it back to the ghetto!
6
What a remarkable comment. Thank you, and bravo!
2
Frank, this is a sign of assimilation. For good or bad, for better or worse. The great melting pot of America also includes the naughty bits. Keep the tribal lore, celebrate the differences and diversity. But know that this also means greater, and broader, acceptance. Just saying.
4
Thanks for writing about what all us guys (and perhaps gals) in their 60s and older have known for awhile now. There is no gay or lesbian culture anymore. It's become homogenized, like Hellmann's mayonnaise. Nearly all the bars have closed because today's LGBTQ folks handle it all online, which is a killer to sex or communication. I miss the parks where we had group sex into the wee hours of the morning. I miss the trash talk at breakfast the next day, the smell of gin and tonic in the air, the dangerousness and exclusivity of growing up gay in the late 70s and 80s. A big part of being gay was precisely NOT being "straight." It was the act of making it into something we owned, which straights couldn't understand or imitate. [Of course I don't miss the gay bashings or the horrible acts of violence directed at us, the most heinous perhaps being what happened to Matthew Shepard in 1998.] A famous Chicago columnist, Jon-Henri Damski, said that the golden age of gay life (I'm talking about just the guys for a moment) was in the 70s and I think that's true. But after the first Absolut Citron ads began appearing in the gay rags, that marked the beginning of acceptance and the beginning of the end of gay culture. We fought and still fight for equality. But as Mr. Crowley points out, everything does indeed cost something. On the road to acceptance, we sacrificed our uniqueness: we gave up mystery and adventure for safety. Everyone's gay now, and no one is.
16
We aren't marginalized as much anymore for our religion, sexual orientation or even race in this country. Economic difficulties are creating ghettoes nowadays. You are acceptable if you are respectable and bourgeois, or, barring that, if you are rich and successful. Otherwise, heaven help you.
3
Coming of age in the '70's and working around the theater, I thought I was pretty open-minded about Gay folks. Maybe I was better than the haters, but I STILL had a fundamental bigotry that went for years despite being an avid supporter of Gay rights and Gay marriage (Sorry, I STILL can't use the "Q-word"). But I still openly thought of Gay as "2nd best". But as I pondered on it, I realized I had NO right to make any such judgement. Period.
I look at it that what happily consenting adults do with each other as nobody else's business. Happily.Consenting.Adults.
We can embrace our bigotries and fears.
We can deny to ourselves that we have them while we engage in them.
Or
We can recognize them, confront them and let our better selves over-rule our prejudices.
And I watch my boys grow up without such bigotries, and I am proud of them.
6
Mr. Bruni -
Something's lost and something's gained with each step forward. Would any gay person, from this vantage point, seriously want to trade the losses for the gains and go back to that world?
4
A small fraction of people participated in the lifestyle described in Boys in the Band for most in America it was a lonely and fearful extistence. I can understand the nostalgia for organizations or places to socialize for that sense of freedom had to be exhilarating after the clandestine life that was necessary in order to avoid being ostracized by friends, employers even families. It must have felt like a good high.
Many heterosexuals seemed to center on the sexual act, at present the trans community is a victim, when the subject arose.
Those most out spoken or some of the cast of characters I see in the news do not realize they too can be veiwed in that same light. Countless times I've watched or heard venom directed on all sorts of subjects and the thought crossed my mind....these people have reproduced? How was it possible they found someone to allow a touch on their skin let alone any type of sex?
There was no need for my beautiful, feminine, intelligent baby sister to tell me she was gay 40 years ago. I thought she was knew I was aware and was saddened by learning she wasn't quite sure. Since that conversation was long ago the greatest emotion discussed was fear that someone may harm her merely for her sexual orientation.
3
“I’m aware that too much of the past conversation and art about gayness focused on and was dominated by people like me. (Among the nine men in “Boys,” only one is black.)”
Which is as close as possible to being the same proportion as blacks in the US population.
Math is hard.
1
When Anita Bryant launched her hateful campaign against gay people in Florida , a woman I worked with , speaking in an acid tone, thought queers should be exiled to Madagascar. I was stunned by her righteous and dismissive comments. Many people thought gay men and women were an aberration and somehow 'sinful'. It all seems so ridiculous now, but there are places in this world, today, where being gay can get you jailed or killed. Hate crimes against LGBT people in the United States have also increased. Tolerance comes and goes in waves. Don't take anything for granted.
11
This column brings to mind a clasic song, from 1972, "A Thrill's a Thrill," by Long John Baldry. Available on the Tube of You.
Interesting article but I found this sentence a bit strange:
"Among the nine men in “Boys,” only one is black."
Given that blacks make up 12% of the US population, how many men in "Boys" should have been black? Are quotas the new norm? If so, how determined?
5
As a gay man, I am uncomfortable with the wide-spread use of the word ‘queer.’ It is hardly a flattering word, and at one time was accompanied with insults, violence and even death. To try to ‘destabilize’ and ‘normalize’ it now through population saturation is a mistake. I wish my community would revisit it use.
As far as gay culture, at least in New Jersey, it is nearly extinst.
3
I know quite a few gay men in their 20s and I can assure Mr. Bruni that "traditional" gayness is alive and well. One friend of mine for example, age 27, knows every Broadway show tune ever written, frequently breaks out in song and he can tap. What more could you want? The increasing acceptance of gays has led to the coming out of a great many people who don't memorize show tunes and who lead very conventional lives. They were always there and they were always gay but they were invisible back in the "Boys in the Band" era. Their new found openness appears to dilute the camp culture of earlier times. As for the disappearance of LGBT spaces such as bars and bookstores - yes, as an old man I am nostalgic for them but the fact is we don't need them anymore. This is what acceptance and liberation is like - this is what we fought for - to break out of the ghetto - to not need to hide in closets or behind masks of bitter humor - to just be, pardon the term, normal.
18
As a gay man I've come to resent having to go to special "gay" places to make friends with whom there is the possibility of "benefits", all the more so since I'm not particularly interested in the drag and camp which are a fixture in gay settings. I want the same benefits that straight folk enjoy - that love may be discovered in any of the places we frequent.
As a biologist, I'm deeply skeptical of the gay/straight binary and that ~10% divide. I believe that the cultural force that we call homophobia is responsible for this. I imagine a world where children learn to use their capacity for deep affection toward friends of any gender. Our species needs this desperately to put the brakes on unsustainable reproduction.
8
Most interesting part of this article is the wonderful photo from the original production of The Boys In the Band. Some of us remember when sets and costumes and lighting in NYC theater were brilliant evocations of place and time. Now The Iceman Cometh barely has a set!
1
Individuals are who they are and no one has the right the judge, even though an intolerant society containing those who think their way is the only way is still with us. It is more important to focus on assimilation of everyone in our common humanity. We all have to get up every morning and go to work and perform the mundane tasks that life hands us. How we treat one another is what counts at the end of the day.
They’ve been assimilated into a society that, it turns out, really isn’t all that great. Oh well. Oops.
2
How all people are treated in America is based on "what color we are, how much money we have and whom we work for" plus your schooling, looks, weight, and where you live. Welcome to it.
5
Maybe the gay community, the better off ones, who have earned and now enjoy marriage, families and open lives should go out of the mental island of Manhattan and travel to places where gays are still not so lucky: rural America, Russia, the Muslim World. I'm sure in those places, one will find the furtive, secret, insular, private, hidden, unique cultures that must remain underground to survive.
We are in Andy Cohen's world now.
This is gay culture today, in America: selling products, screaming in laughter across Youtube and Instagram, steeled with steroids, cosmetic surgery, starring in music videos, headlining hip-hop, comic venues, films, and TV shows; is this progress or are we soulless sell-outs performing for public adoration? Is that enviable or desirable? Or perhaps, we are now victims of something else which measures humanity by likes, net worth and low body fat.
8
Progress unquestionably has been made. We've gone from being reviled to tolerated to accepted. But, acceptance implies that becoming a member of the "club" is is a decision which is, more often than not, unilateral and exercised by those in power.
At the present time the baser instincts of those in power are being being held at bay by the current law and people of good faith Whether this will be good enough to avoid slipping back to our former status only time will tell but there are indications that the Millenials are ready to step up to the plate prematurely and that gives me a lot of hope.
2
“But we didn’t want to be consigned to the margins and forced into hiding. For our safety and survival, we couldn’t afford to be.”
We we we all the way home. Identity???! Ha.
This columm says more about Mr. Bruni than the joyous Gay culture that continues to thrive here and around the world in Gay spaces all our own. Gay culture rarely opens its doors to the shy, or the boring.
Honestly, can anyone imagine Frank Bruni as a character in Boys in the Band? The Gay culture he regrets is a club. Lots of good people are left out. Mr. Bruno is part of a different club, a good one. But just because he can't see Gay culture in the grand tradition, that doesn't mean it isn't still glorious in communities of every color everywhere.
3
It’s not just the increasing acceptance by society. Technology is a big reason why gay bars and bookstores have been disappearing. Amazon and “dating” apps changed everything.
5
"Boys in the Band" was the first 'gay play' I ever saw, when I was in college; it's also the worst gay theater I've ever been exposed to. In the 1960s my life was not the miserable existence that was portrayed in this 'gay Uncle Tom' play. If a play or movie depicts the reality of gay life the way it actually is, whether it's horrific, as in "Brokeback Mountain" or in a positive manner, like "Call Me By Your Name" then it's worthwhile, unlike Crowley's play. It's a bad idea to revive such a negative vehicle, and what a great pity it is that younger viewers, like the intelligent critic Frank Bruni and others in the TIMES can't recognize this play for what it is.
5
I disagree, the latest production of Boys in the Band is the mark of us fully claiming our place in American theater because the whole shooting match is gay. Our literature is the way our history gets passed from one generation to the next, so keeping it strong is vital to our survival. As for our identify, I urge you,Frank, to attend Lambda Lit's Lammy Awards this year because you will hear our myriad gay voices loud and clear.
The paradox with rights is you gain protection as an atomized, anonymous individual. Ideally, rights remove barriers, allowing you to live harassment free (though this is still not the case for gay and queer folk, even in the liberal bastions, as many have correctly pointed out). But rights are cold. They don't do anything to cultivate the fiercely protective bonds of community that thrive in the face of oppression.
2
You should take the short stroll to Hell’s Kitchen if you think gay culture is dead. You’ll find you are sorely mistaken.
3
Before getting too comfortable about progress, check out the story in your rival paper WaPo about the Texas murderer who even now was able to use the “gay panic “ defense to get off with no jail time for stabbing to death a guy who was non violently hitting on him.
7
The extinction of 'Gay Identity?' Heck, all one can see is IDENTITY this, IDENITITY that. From Goth to Sloth, Butch to Tatted, Pierced and Everything in Between, whatever your particular bent, it's now okay to flaunt it proudly (and rub the citizenry's noses in it, right?).
There's the rub: you ask to be 'normalized' like everybody else, and pretty soon you're not so unique and special anymore.
5
Gays are part of the citizenry.
3
“‘Queer’ includes everybody,”
Not I. I reject the word. I prefer to be called "homosexual" if anything. That and "LGBT" are like nails on a chalkboard. The so-called culture of an urban ghetto was never to my liking. Those personifications made my coming out harder. I'm a country homo. And yes, I don't want that past world back.
3
Isn't there some way you could give us back the word "gay" ? Maybe pick something else to mean homosexual ? Others have written about this, but "gay" seems to have stuck.
Which is odd because homosexuals are a generally morose group. Even a laugh-riot like David Sedaris is decidedly not gay.
I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter.
Perhaps we need the remnants of Gay Culture - after all, the Trump Administration is trying to drag the country back into the 1940s.
2
Take away the bigotry, the sheer physical danger, and take another look at the world where gay was real and something you could identify with and knew others would identify with.
Not one of an ever-changing series of letters. The G in gay is the first letter of a meaningful descriptor of an essential part of who you are. The G in LGBTQIA+ is literally nondescript, tucked away, devoid of distinction.
The stupid term “cisgender” attempts the same questionable feat with straight folks: defrock them, remove specialness, fold them into the batter of the undefined and undefinable.
Frank, fight for your gayness, your self, your truth. You are not a floating instance; you are part of a proud, completely identifiable group whose reality is dependent neither on oppression nor on the dictates of the latest doctoral dissertation from the gender studies department.
1
"“Gay” tells you about a person’s lusts and loves, but it used to tell you more — about his or her boldness, irreverence, independence.”
Brilliant!...and reveals the risk of being characterised by desire.
1
Seems to me the reviews of "Boys" back then reveled more in the bitchy and self-destructive than in the cliquey humor and flag-raising.
Still, it was a welcome addition to the pallette in the country, especially in the midwest where, as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov once said, "there are no gay men."
No, we don't want to go back. But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me.
A nice column on change. Because that's what it really is.
Growing through life allows us to find our niche, or maybe struggling through a few contemporaneous niches at the same time. Then no matter how hard we try, the culture moves on and our frame of reference becomes a history.
The great bonus of these changes is having our recollections. The good. the bad and those times of joy and hurt we never lose.
It's quite a ride.
4
What used to upset me about gay male expression was the cruel scathing criticism not only of the straight world but of each other. As with bullying in any other tribe or venue, this viciousness is bid good riddance.
6
With all due respect I need to take exception with Mr. Bruni in this article. I remember 30 years ago everyone heard from the gay community how many wouldnt wouldn't come out for fear of being ridiculed, being discriminated against and not having the same rights as straight people and on and on in which I did agree with most everything they felt they were unjust ly treated . Fast -forward to today. it is a crime to discriminate against a gay person. They are welcomed by the majority of the population as two heterosexual couples. Heck, they can even get married and have kids like a heterosexual couple. Now Mr. Bruni seems to be complaining that they were treated to fairly. That they need to have an identity which is what they did not want 30 years ago. Mr. Bruni, everything the gay community fought for they won which to my recolection as I stated above was being discriminated against and not being recognized as a frue couple with the rights of a straight couole and nowcyou sound as if you are comolaining as if the American court system did too good of a job doung it. You can only have it one way or the other.
1
The Internet has changed everything from how and what gay people read and to how we meet. Who needs gay bars or gay bookstores, both of which seem like fossils when there's Amazon and any number of dating apps....
2
This is the same moaning we see at straight families attending “cleaned up” gay pride parades. Go to Ptown for the flamboyance; it’s still there. Please stop moaning about the loss of your sexy parties while gay teens in the Midwest are still killing themselves in despair.
7
Full disclosure here, Mr. Bruni. I am not a gay person.
And I remember when "Boys in the Band" (movie version) came out. I was twenty--and my goodness! shock waves ran round the land. This you probably know: some newspapers refused to run the advertisements. They were deemed--oh what? offensive--tasteless--"inaccrochable" as I believe Gertrude Stein might have put it.
But is there not a more general paradox lurking here?
The restrictions MAKE the culture.
I would ask: what IS art--really--but a contending with limits--with borders--with places where "you're not supposed to go"--with "no no's."
Jazz, for example. Or blues. Or ragtime. Can you imagine these art forms flourishing in any OTHER place besides 19th and 20th century America? Black artists--or people who (as my school's choir director puts it) have "sat at the feet of the culture"?
This, they would say--this is WHO we are. This is WHAT we are. IN SPITE of Jim Crow. IN SPITE of the KKK. IN SPITE of. . . ..
. . .and in a weird, symbiotic way BECAUSE of all those things. EVIL things, yes. MONSTROUS things, yes.
But they helped (in some strange, unimaginable way) to CREATE the culture as well. Those jackbooted feet--oh so sedulously stamping on the smoldering embers of black identity, black culture. . . .
. . .SPREAD the culture. They never stamped it out.
Not for a moment would I justify hatred--bigotry--intolerance.
But this would be MY take on it. What do YOU think?
4
Straight people? Who are they?
Men who feel it is better to kill than love?
Women who know it is better to bring unwanted, uneeded life into an uncaring world than love?
Please!
1
The lesbian bars in my hometown started closing about the same time I could legally drink. I recently went to a supposed gay bar with a gay friend of mine--got groped and forcibly kissed by a clearly not gay man on the dance floor. Most of the other women at gay bars aren't interested in women--they're straight tourists, who have the gall to be offended when a woman flirts with them or asks for her number when they're at a gay bar.
(The term "queer" seems meaningless--if you're married to someone of the opposite sex, with all the privileges that entails, but consider your relationship "queer" because you both use "they" pronouns--on the one hand, sure, do your thing and live your best life, but why are you "reclaiming" a slur that no stranger would ever throw at you? Do you realize you have advantages all single people, even straight ones, do not?)
I feel old (this started at 24) and unwelcome at my city's Pride festival/parade--it seems an excuse for (mostly straight) suburbanites don rainbow clothing, invade the neighborhood and get drunk.
Acceptance is wonderful, and I'm glad I can marry who I want. But we lost something, and there is nothing wrong with wanting our own subculture or spaces of our own. The punks, the goths, the geeks, and sports fans of all varieties have that. Why not the LGBT?
5
Recently after watching the first half "Face the Nation," the local station, as usual, switched to the local Presbyterian church service. The pastor told the story of a radical lesbian feminist who over time was convinced with large dollops of honey, to explore the immorality of her life. He concluded that portion of the sermon with the image of her leaving her and partner's bed and going to a Christian church. He segued to a biblical story replete with quotes and recaps. He made it clear that all the parishioners should go forth and evangelize to the immoral gay people and not use a cudgel to convince them of their sinning ways.
After a while I switched to the local station which show the other half of FTN. I don't know if he ultimately finished the story but I wondered if he had thought of the partner or even cared what sadness and pain the evangelizer might have caused or is he even cared. I was reminded of the Kenneth Clark quote, "I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology." Ah yes living in the southeastern United States.....
4
I really enjoyed reading this, Frank. Thank you!
2
This is why I count Blackish among my favorite shows. It questions the arrival into mainstream culture and the loss of identity formed in the struggle. More should be written about these transitions. Each group tells its history as outsiders and now lives assimilated lives, but the middle part of the passage has little representation.
3
"Gay" is becoming more just another adjective and less of an entire definition of a person. It joins terms like 'Jewish' or 'Irish' or even 'black', terms that still mean something, but perhaps mean less than they did 10 or 50 or 100 years ago.
Despite its perils, there is an undeniable appeal of membership in a societal outgroup. As a straight white man, one of the few outgroups I could call my own was the pot-smokers in Texas in the 1960s. Somehow, the legal cannabis available at my local strip mall doesn't have the allure of the illicit reefer of days gone by. Something has been lost, maybe, but all the same I am glad people aren't going to jail for it any more.
4
BitB, which blew the lid off aspects of male homosexual subculture, was in some quarters, of course, seen as a freak show, as it unflinchingly depicts social pathologies not unallied to those found in other repressed groups. As such a depiction, it will retain an unassailable place as a testament in the history of so-called minority sexuality in the USofA. It may have helped some thoughtful mainstream Americans to insight into human situations they themselves perpetuated, totally unawares.
BitB is not, however, the whole story, nor does it pretend to be, I believe. Growing up 50s–70s, my own gay icons – WH Auden, James Baldwin, James Merrill, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal (infamously bisexual, apparently) – were not, I felt, united by “a particular journey and pronounced struggle, [that] had its own soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons”. They were all, in fact, too intellectually “bold, irreverent and independent” to take part in what was a bit of a caricature of the depth and breadth of gayhood even then. Auden et al. also taught what it was to be homosexual.
Granted, there was a titillating element of secrecy in our lives. But in my saner moments, I sensed that that titillation owed its very existence to the backwardness of the hoi polloi. As soon as that could be changed, we’d be free to be exactly what we already were, and a lot less secretly, for many of us. BitB may have made a contribution to that evolution.
Hey Bruni - clearly you realize that the impetus behind the hidden clubhouses and coded language and secret door knocks was the threat of getting your head bashed in. As great as it is to lionize and romanticize a time when these were prevalent, isn’t it also important to acknowledge that your status / experience / dare I say “privilege make these unnecessary for YOU but they might still be the reality for many others who don’t think it’s all so cute and jolly?
1
Mr Gee:
I'm sure Mr Bruni certainly understands that; but it was more than the threat of violence that bonded gay men and women. It was a distinct sub-culture that thrived in secrecy, and yet, at times (say, the Disco/Punk/New Wave eras) could be out in the open.
2
Yes, once marriage became something approaching normal in America rather than something out of a fairy tale (excuse me), “we” indeed started disappearing into world dominated by white picket fences and weekend trips to Home Depot. While I wouldn’t trade that near normalcy away, I admit I do miss the secret handshakes and decoder rings.
But step away from the US and the EU and pine no longer. The really hard, terrifying work remains. In Chechnya, families willingly off their own gay children through ‘honor” killings while Russia's President and cronies traffic in brutal homophobia every day. ISIS throws gays off buildings for sport, and the surest way to get yourself raped or beaten or robbed or murdered in parts of Africa, Central America and Asia is to publicize your sexual orientation. In too many desperate, forlorn places across the globe, men and women would gladly take a secret handshake, a safe nightclub and physical security over marriage any day.
5
I feel you Frank. First off, I'm not gay but I am a San Franciscan (pre-silicon valley). I was an awkward kid, nerd, motherless, teenage runaway who stayed gone, tomboy, dressed in my brother's clothing, loved Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Mapplethorpe, felt liberated to go dancing at the gay clubs in the Castro, felt safe around gay men, had friends who were neither men nor women, photographed every gay pride parade and loved the Folsom St. fair for its unabashed display of freedom. I feel you Frank. I love my gay friends and my gay SF but it's different now. It's become Gay.com or Gay and Deluca, streamlined, ordered, neatened, cleaned up, equalized by main stream media and main stream gays that all the beautiful edges and arcs of the old Castro are gone. The Castro has become a destination in a tourist's travel guide. Yes, my gay friends have better civil rights but something is lost with assimilation. I say this as a Native American whose tribe struggles everyday to remind the youth of the importance of maintaining the ceremonies, customs, language and history while staying relevant to their daily struggle. Something happens when a level of freedom and equality is achieved. Something is lost. My "people" have always been the gays, lesbians, queers & outsiders because they understood what it was like suffer in silence, stand your ground and protest. Of course I'm in support of progress & legal rights, I just hope that the ceremonies, customs, language and history stay alive.
21
Back then we had each other. No question, we could sometimes be catty, cutting and even cruel to each other in our enclaves. But more often I saw tenderness, shared wit, and genuine admiration for the style, humor and taste (good, bad and everything in between) on full throttle display. Today we have more "acceptance". But in the wider society are we truly met with unqualified respect? Remains to be seen, as far as I'm concerned.
Just back from my 10,000th viewing of CMBYN in a movie theater. I own it and could watch at home, but I like hearing and feeling the -- largely straight -- audiences' stunned, even awed, silences when male-male tenderness can't be denied and is approved, applauded, admired by Elio's father. Also, I have my ticket to the revived "Boys in the Band". That play and movie helped to liberate me years ago, and kept doing so in revivals I've seen in the years since, and today I look forward once again to seeing Michael and the gang go at each other. Their frankness, including about their pain, helped to set me free. With all of today's "acceptance", I, unlike many, I guess, still feel the need for some further liberation.
3
This should be familiar to American Jews not too far removed from the generations that stepped off the boat. For many, the orthodoxies vanished so as not to be seen as Jewish, such as wearing yarmulkes in public. Learning English and leaving the Yiddish at home and the synagogue. As Jews were more accepted in American culture, quotas still existed at colleges and universities while private clubs remained restricted. More acceptance brought mixed marriages and less attendance at religious services. Where outright bigotry remains fro any group, the oppressed have no choice but to have their own culture.
7
Before we lost our music. Before we lost our community centers and “rap groups” and bookstores and piano bars. Before we lost our unique style. Before we lost our cabarets and handkerchiefs. Before we lost the piers and the tea dances. Before we lost our friends.
It’s nice to be gay now, but, my, didn’t it also used to be interesting?
11
Lotsa gays and L's worked very hard to get to where the community is today.And a lot of the same folks sat back and let others work to change things. Now that change has happened why spend hours lamenting the disappearance disco nites and
platform shoes.The gay uniform hereabouts is flipflops, grundgy baggy shorts,wifebeater t's,walk into Target and the gay identity is instantly recognized.So gay bars are disappearing,who cares, no one talks to an unfamiliar face.
I prefer Blue Martini hereabouts.Attractive faces and fun talk.
Guys and ladies get with the 21st century. Its the here and now,and lotsa of folks worked thru bad times and bruises too, to get all of the complainers to this point in time.
I for one would like to see another writer on the national scene comparable to Mr Bruni.
1
“Culture” is different from legal, political and societal status. I’m gay, but do not think drag, parades and bars constitute “culture.”
6
Honestly, this was an odd piece. I suspect over time academics will comb over this and cite it for its misplaced nostalgia.
Gay enclaves existed out of necessity, and within them a unique culture was formed.
But something great happened, Frank. We call it "acceptance."
Your piece is also counter-intuitive to the great American experiment known as assimilation.
You can't have it both ways. Celebrate the special aspects of your past, yes. But you're not celebrating, you're mourning, and that seems wrong.
4
Life itself is moving through various stages, plays for a little while in whatever spaces we find ourselves. As much as one thing opens up we yearn for the nostalgic past, often viewed through rose colored glasses. We can't go home again. In a way, we wouldn't want to.
The late Harry Chapin summed it up well in the concluding lines to his follow-up to his big hit "Taxi," "Sequel:"
"I guess it's the sequel to our story,
Of our Journey 'tween Heaven and Hell,
Half the time thinking of what might have been,
Half thinking, just as well.
I guess only time will tell."
4
I want it back. I want Bruce not Caitlin Jenner. I came out at 17 and am now 64, I don't call myself "gay", I say "homosexual".
Queens, clones, verschiedene dolts messed everything up
4
Although there are many thoughtful comments, it feels like the majority of the commentators have missed a fundamental aspect of Bruni's piece: The notion of a shared "gay male esthetic sense".
It's not just about civil rights, or being accepted at work.
It's the idea of having a particular artistic lens for viewing the world. As Bruni puts it: "...Boldness, irreverence, independence.... its own soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons. "
It's less about being marginalized or not accepted, and more about forging that marginalization and lack of acceptance into a particular art form (if an esthetic sense can be thought of as an art form).
What I picked up from this piece was Bruni's nostalgia for that esthetic sense, coupled with gratitude that the conditions that forged it no longer exist.
It's possible to love a particular kind of art and hate the conditions that created it. (Probably there's even a German word for that. )
In any event, that was my takeaway from the piece.
9
"It's the idea of having a particular artistic lens for viewing the world. As Bruni puts it: '...Boldness, irreverence, independence.... its own soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons.' "
No, this is just plain wrong. It is suffocating essentialism at its worst.
Declaring that there's a right way to be gay is on a par with Victorian notions about womanhood: that women are inherently emotional, passive, submissive, dependent and selfless. Women, being morally superior to men, were required to purify the home of the "the moral taint of the public sphere," where they had no place.
I submit that the "particular artistic lens for viewing the world" has nothing to do with being gay and everything to do with a particular time and place: Manhattan of the "Boys in the Band" era.
Mr. Bruni correctly understands that the "boldness, irreverence, independence . . .soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons" describes a sociological phenomenon, namely the elements by which a marginalized subculture defined and protected itself from a hostile world.
That way of being is as useful to gay men today as Leave it to Beaver is to young families.
As a boy, I was a failure by my straight peers' standards because I was terrible at team sports and hated horseplay.
I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone, especially another gay man, dictate the sort of interests and sensibilities I need to acquire to be a proper homosexual.
6
Well, we can't have it both ways can we, unless we perversely long for something dangerously close to separate but equal.
It goes without saying that gay culture has been embraced and absorbed by whatever the mainstream is, hence Crate and Barrel and Calvin Klein and the million others in the general soft friendly gayness of all trends and fashion etc. We have arrived. The train (nicely furbished) has left the station (designed by one of us). The platform is well-lit and pretty, and outside a gentrified tasteful plant-lined street full of beautifully sleek automobiles awaits. We'll have lunch at a chic retro mixed-crowd bar. Enjoy afterward a show of David Hockney. At home have a mohito with the same-sex couple and their two kids, next door.
Four of five? Who knows and who can tell. And what's more important, who cares.
3
Gays, among social groups traditionally disapproved of, remain the one it's still permissible to disapprove of openly. An editorial appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times, something along the lines of: "Gay 'reparation' therapy is terrible, but suppressing Free Speech about it is even worse." Gays are the most likely to be admonished, "Now, now, people are entitled to their beliefs and opinions, and if you don't accept that, aren't you as intolerant as you accuse them of being?" Then, of course, there's the "freedom of religion" aspect, most notoriously illustrated recently by the "wedding cake" controversy. (Religion, of course, has played a part also in the discrimination of blacks, women, and Jews.)
Gays are unique also in the "ghettos" they'd been shunted to tending to become the more desirable parts of town. Then in move the heterosexuals, and there goes the (gay) neighborhood.
It'll be interesting to see the reaction to the new production of "Boys In the Band." Will the post-Act-Up LGBTQ generation find it a minstrel show or a revelation? Incidentally, I've always wanted to send Mart Crowley a Nativity scene for Christmas using "BITB" characters. Can you guess who would be whom? (Hint: Harold would be Jesus because he's Jewish and the play takes place on his birthday.)
1
This is both good news and bad, similar to other racial and sexual advances (ie. Women's Movement).
Isn't it great that gays and lesbian don't have to "stand out" to make a stand? They're much more integrated and accepted in our society. So, in many regards are black and women (Yea!).
But I understand history needs to never forget discrimination and isolation.
So let's do both: celebrate inclusion and NOT forget past isolation and segregation!
PS: I've heard God is a black lesbian :-)
3
Thank you Mr. Bruni. Thoughtful as always.
Thank you. As a straightish male, thank you. But above all else, like many I only want the end of tribes. Wave goodbye and say hello.
1
I am straight and recognize that the world is pretty much designed for straight people. If you're gay, you're performing opera when everybody else is listening to pop. But if you're gay in NYC or San Francisco or Seattle, the path is a bit easier than if you're gay in, for example, Tallahassee, Florida or Helena, Montana.
I'll admit to being a little tired of constantly hearing about gayness like it's a person's only defining feature. I know a number of gays and count some as friends. I don't look at them as "my gay friends." I don't treat them any differently than my straight friends. I don't know why anybody would.
I have a job and a house and pay bills and try to save for retirement. I go on vacation. I have hobbies and maybe a couple of talents. I go to movies and shows and like hearing live music. I love dogs. I like playing around in the garden. I went through a divorce a few years ago, which sucked, but I have since met someone great.
I point these things out because the gay people I know could have made exactly the same statements. We talk about a lot of things on that list. But we don't spend our time when we're together talking about them being gay, and we don't spend our time when we're together talking about me being straight.
If this non-focus on their gayness makes me a bad person, so be it, but I don't know any other way to be.
11
exactly. and what a joyful change that is.
3
I predicted that many of us would miss the fun and furtiveness of the 70s and 80s, with its wit, code, and strategies (minus the internet, no less!). Sure, we endured our slings and arrows, but for many of us it was great fun as a tribe. HIV/AIDS killed so many and marriage created a mindset among many that fun was over and monogamy and domesticity were the sine qua non. I did not follow that train. Why should we imitate straight people who are and have been for many decades in modern society apparently so screwed up? I'm 64 and I miss disco.
5
I don't know what to think of Mr. Bruni's essay or the revival of "Boys in the Band."
This revival of "Boys in the Band" seems quaint, like a pair of love beads or VW bus.
I'm 60 years old, and I never felt like I fit in anywhere in the gay community, either in piano bars or leather bars. I've always been told the gay community was welcoming, but it hasn't been my experience. It's all very tiresome.
2
There's life outside of Nebraska.
3
I am 20 years older than Frank Bruni and was one of the founding members of New York's Gay Liberation Front. I remember quite well how cruelly the world treated us before Stonewall, and have absolutely no desire to return to those days. The subculture we created back then, however witty or amusing, could not begin to compensate for gay bashing, occasional murder, the forced electroshock therapy that some of my friends endured, being thrown out by one's parents, or losing one's job. In New York, our "sanctuaries" were often Mafia-run bars where we paid exorbitant prices for watered-down drinks and were subject to police raids.
In any case, those days aren't gone forever. We're not living in a post-homophobic society, any more than in a post-racial society. Per the most recent FBI statistics, as quoted in your own newspaper (June 16, 2016), L.G.B.T. people are twice as likely to be targeted as African-Americans, and the rate of hate crimes against them has surpassed that of crimes against Jews."
33
You make a good point. For those of us fortunate to live in New York, DC, Los Angeles or San Francisco, the battle may seem over. It's not. Let's not forget that it will never be over as long as religion and politics are filled with hate-filled rhetoric and intentions.
10
I'm a 70 yo gay man. I remember the 1970s as a time when I morphed from the self-hatred of feeling like "the only one in the world" to exuberanance that there were zillions like me and my people knew how to have fun (I don't mean just sexual fun). As being gay became more commonplace & accepted with the years -- which, admittedly, is a good thing -- I missed the outlaw aspect of being in a tribe that had arisen from shame to ain't-life-great.
When I first saw petitions for gay marriage in the 1990s on Castro Street, I wondered what self-respecting gay person would ever want to get married. It felt like the oppressed aping the oppressor. But when my eyes were opened to the benefits married couples enjoy, I got angry that gay folks were deprived of that.
So I feel great about the progress....but I still shudder when a gay guy refers to his "husband" and a lesbian refers to her "wife." Seems to me those terms are rooted in Old Testament sexism and Victorian power-exertion.
But don't listen to me....I'm happily single.
5
“They’re just like us , now you’re all caught up “ . -Roseanne
2
If one wishes to heap scorn upon a present day minority, the most comfortable place to look: adult, straight, white, males. There is no verbal assault (upon me) that will even raise an eyebrow.
1
Bruni gives an example of what visiting a gay bar was about back when homosexuality was deemed to be a sexual perversion, in that it had an "electric charge" because it was "forbidden ground, as opposed to today where to be gay today is viewed as a sexual orientation.
However the reality is that the difference between gay bars back in those days as opposed to today is allot more than than the fact that outside society viewed gays as deviants. Before being gay became accepted in society there were allot more gay people who lived what appeared to be hetrosexual lives. And so many gay people would satisfy their sexual desires exclusively in an anonymous way. Those were the days when the woods in the northern part of Central Park were full of gay people looking to have sex with strangers because of their desire to be anonymous in their homosexual sex.
And the same was true of gay bars. People did not simply go to gay bars for the chance to meet other gays, in the way that members of the opposite sex go to straight bars. Gay bars were places where allot of sexual activity took place, and this sexual activity took place between total strangers.
So now that gay sex is viewed as normal and not something that people want to hide the very nature of gay sex changed in that people go about it in the open. This as opposed to the days when gays would look towards strangers, whether in gay bars, or in gay cruising areas, to find partners.
7
Have you ever heard of Grindr? The only thing that has changed is that it's now easier to engage in anonymous sex. The entire internet is now a gay bar!
3
I'd like you to write a follow-up about how transideology has convinced some young gay men and lesbians that they are heterosexuals "trapped in the wrong body." Outlaw identity becomes medicalized, pharma dependent, consumerist gender stereotypes of compulsory heterosexuality.
3
Amazingly enough, the Catholic church, in some parishes, is in the forefront of gay acceptance. Although not gay I recently attended a weekend LGBT retreat with extraordinary gay men. We are all members of the same parish.
As the father of a gay woman I was so proud to be there. Dorothy day said "God understands us when we try to love"
3
We still need places where we feel comfortable and the shared sense of camaraderie. I came out in the seventies when the world was a different, although not completely different place than now. Walking into a bar was exhilarating, because for a few hours, I could relax. The bars then were not as segregated by gender or race. There were men and women of all sizes and colors. People so unlike me but so like me in an important way. Like me, they knew what it was like on the other side of the bar door. The music, the dancing, the language and the laughter liberated us from all that, temporarily. Yes, I'm glad that so much of that scene seems unnecessary now, at least for those of us fortunate to live in accepting places. Not all of us do. Let's not forget that for some of us, living in smaller cities and towns, a place of our own is still important where we don't have to explain ourselves or be treated with either disrespect, disdain, or like pets.
12
The gay world was never a rainbow. It was and is run by and for the bar owners almost all of whom are white and male. Many if not most gays I have met are in their hearts "liberal" about only one thing, and that is their own homosexuality. Unfortunately gayness is not a ticket to liberalism any more than it is with any other human trait. So let's stop pretending.
1
Of course, I don't want to go back to the dangers and oppressions of those earlier days but I don't want to disappear, either. We don't ask racial and ethnic communities to give up their cultural practices and habits as they gain their civil rights, but our Lesbian and Gay culture--its boundry-busting presentations of gender, etc.--is too often required to "tone it down," to present ourselves as just like everyone else in the general mainstream world for the purpose of convincing that mainstream world that we are not a threat to their precious status quo. Here in New York, that enforced assimilation is, thankfully, less true, but it is not nonexistent. We seem to be in full fantastic flower only during Pride month's parades and celebrations. For me, then, the issue isn't openness vs. tribalism, but suffocation via an assimilation which erases us, subsumes our plummage, our creativity, and our daring, magnificent heritage.
6
Once you're accepted, you're sunk. You and your partner now need to wear sweaters and go to PTA meetings and wonder why you're the only males there. You now have to put up with straight women telling you they just love gays, and it just doesn't make any difference as long as you're as boring and conventional as they are. So put on your boa or go to Sarasota--anything to get away from bourgeois "acceptance."
2
Mike Pence is the vice-president of the United States, the Supreme Court is deciding whether a business can refuse to serve you because they don’t like that you’re gay, Congress and several states are considering so-called Religious Freedom acts that would legalize business’s ability to discriminate against gays, the Oklahoma House of Representatives just got through okaying legislation that would let adoption agencies deny adoptions to gay people based on religious grounds, and we daily see attacks from the highest levels of our government on ourselves and our transgender allies, a particular target of the Trump administration.
So seeing people talk about gays being fully assimilated into our society seems, to put it nicely, incredibly premature. We should celebrate the things that have changed for the better, but we should definitely not give cover to those who find it convenient to ignore the fact that discrimination is still widespread and there’s still much work to be done.
34
I'm not a gay, white male but I do have some thoughts on this matter, especially after having buried too many gay, white (black and latino) male friends who died from AIDS, on both sides of the Atlantic.
When that epidemic first broke out I wasn't in New York but in Berlin, which in later years would become another tragic epicenter, so I've seen the devastation up close and personal too many times.
There's no doubt that the times now are very different from the 80s and 90s when Gay Culture was at its highest, but to a large extent still reviled by mainstream social interests, which in a way gave it its spark and allure.
But to be fair it's not only going commerical, gaining popularity and to a certain extent more acceptance that changed Gay Culture, it's also the untimely and premature loss of so many bright lights and voices involved that scene, and the gentrification that transformed once vital Gay communities (Chelsea and the West Village come to mind) into no-go areas for anyone who isn't a multi-millionaire.
Plus these days, people don't have time to go out and demonstrate anymore because they're too worried about how to pay the rent.
And while seminary shows like "Boys in the Band" and "Angels in America" are now marking a comeback with different casts and different audiences, there's probably no greater tribute and memorial to those who are no longer with us.
34
Since the time I came out in 1974 I have wanted a home, a garden, and a long term partner. Sure I spent my 20's in the bars, but now spend my time at home because I have all three.
There has always been a large percentage of gays and lesbians who settled down, or moved on from the fast paced 'gay culture.' It has always been that way in the Midwest.
We grew up.
28
You seem like many of my gay friends in the Midwest.
Find a partner (or not) , settle down, be my neighbor, no worries.
The isolation and self-segregation that Bruni describes didn't seem to me to happen up near the 49th parallel.
But I used to have a matchbook (me so old they had those) touting "the only gay bar in Fargo"
1
The evening I first saw the movie version of "Boys" has a very distinct place in my memory. I was 19, sitting in a large lecture hall at CU-Boulder, where the film showed as part of the regular (!) student union series. A "straight" friend (quite handsome) invited me to the showing (I never took the hint, sigh). While the characters didn't reflect my generation then, I was thrilled nevertheless to see a film with all-gay characters (well, almost all—what are we to make of Alan?).
Through large parts of our country gay men and lesbians are anathema still. When I retired from teaching in NC (college are often gay-friendly in name only), I moved to a South Florida gay community, and it's still easier to live among people with whom I don't need to pretend. For my generation, many of us lost almost all of our friends and partners to AIDS, and this reconstitutes that community lost by people, now senior citizens, whose network of support slowly but irrevocably disappeared wherever they were.
We still need to come out to our families (and one whole segment of my family basically doesn't want anything to do with me—the feeling's mutual), we can still lose our jobs because of our sexual orientation. But, yes, there's (limited) progress, and yes the self-hatred in Boys no longer exists. It's still good to see the comradeship among a group of gay friends—and I'll get to see it on stage (as I do among my current buddies where I live) in just a few days. Can't wait.
18
Through from NY, I was fortunate to have been living in Europe throughout the '70s, mostly in Vienna. I then moved to of all places Detroit, the headquarters of the company for which I worked for 30 years (no, not autos). I came out in Vienna and nobody with whom I worked let alone my friends gave a whit about it - rather like my friends and acquaintances now (my husband and I live in Sarasota). The same wasn't true when I got to Detroit - though the company was actually quite supportive and could care less about my sexuality. I suppose that was rather unique for an American company of the time.
Now I take a certain pleasure when newly meeting someone to mention my husband to gauge their reaction. Maybe I've been fortunate but I've yet to encounter one that's been negative. That is real progress. While I can appreciate the nostalgia some have for the gay identity past I think it's rather like someone in the late 1930s pining for speakeasies. I can appreciate it but I'm not about to dwell on it.
16
It was my understanding that the AIDS epidemic disproportionately affected poorer, less educated gay men, as well as Black and Hispanic gay men (whose communities it continues to ravage). The white, professional and educated classes, though also devastated by the disease, were better able to deal with the crisis: they were more likely to abstain, wear condoms, seek medical help and, once medications were discovered, take them regularly. They were also perhaps somewhat less likely to succumb to the despair and quasi-suicidal behavior the disease engendered. This definitely was my experience living in Chelsea in the 80s.
So, paradoxically, the traditionally more closeted gay man - talented, professional, wealthy - increasingly became the public image for gay men in general. Could this have paved the way for the extraordinary gains in social acceptance over the past 20 years?
I'm not a historian and there is very little written about this that I can find, but I do remember people talking about it. Would be interested in peoples' thoughts.
11
As a straight woman with little to add to this wonderful piece, I can only say that the "mainstreaming" of male gay culture has brought great joy to my life. It provides colorful vocabulary, a default ethos of empathy, and a sense of celebration, all undergirded by a message of unshakable acceptance. My "bestie," a proudly gay man, has taught me much about how to weather the slings and arrows of life with grace, humor, and resourcefulness--all while looking fabulous. I'm grateful that gay culture is generous enough to be shared by all.
30
I always wondered at what it is, truly is, aside from the man-made religious prohibitions, which hundreds of millions hid behind, in their wholly irrational fear of those people who differ from their perception of sexuality of the individual.
In recent times, as religion was exposed for the self-serving tool of division it is, it became clearer to me that fear of, and outright hatred of, gays was just another one of those abysmal learned flaws in the human, in other words the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors, the majority of which are carefully imparted to the individual, and nurtured by an irrational society, itself the victim of such learned, often unwitting, behavior.
It appears we've come far in learning not to conform to archaic irrational ways of being, but as is becoming more apparent every day, especially here in this hardly progressive disunited United States of America, mean irrational, and dangerous ways of being, seem to be okay with a large part of the population.
One wonders how these people talk about, and profess their adherence to religious beliefs, beliefs which center their existence on the practice of loving ones neighbor, and tolerance.
I suppose it becomes easier to understand how Trump can be President, when looking at the decades of cultivated behavior which put him outside, and above, the need for love and tolerance.
What an odd species we are.
17
So much has changed! And we should not forget how the changes in the clubhouse -- New York City -- have contributed to changes in the club. Right in the middle of this story as I read it was a big ad for a redone building offering "distinctive 1-4 bedroom residences" for $1.5 to $20 million, in a Manhattan neighborhood I remember from 1981 as rough, but cheap and open for squatting. It's tough to be a marginalized subculture in a place that sold every last inch of its margins long ago.
28
You can't have it both ways.
By that I mean, you can't complain that you're being segregated and having people being biased against you, and then complain when you're finally a part of mainstream society, and nobody hardly pays attention to you!
19
I don't see it as complaining as much as remembering the past, which is a good thing.
10
jvr is right. The safety and support found in persecuted communities was important and a means of survival and is worth remembering/not forgetting.
At the same time, it is a fine thing that there are places in this country, despite all the hatred still out there, where one's sexuality is not relevant to employment, housing, etc. I hope that becomes universal at some point, along with unlearning racism and all the other hatreds taught to us by parents and other loved ones. Some day there will be generations who have raised their children to respect all other peoples. Sigh. World peace, too....
7
When all are accepted by all there won't be a need to brood on victimhood, which means politically we will become much more fiscally responsible/conservative and focused on economic growth.
5
When we have economic justice and equality.
1
Gay marriage and gays and women in the military are breathtaking victories and simultaneously enormous defeats. They represent the difference between social equality (far from being won) and the possibilities of liberation. Gay (LGBTQ…) and women’s liberation challenged in deep and profound ways structures that perpetuate repression, oppression, militarism. These victories often reinforce those structures.
11
Nostalgia for victim-hood is an interesting concept.
Perhaps Mr. Bruni can write about other issues in society where, notwithstanding enormous progress, people tend to dwell on the negative, as some kind of binding element.
21
Maybe it is like the comradeship of military veterans of WWII. A sense of belonging and common purpose that at the time was an experience of great difficulty but gives a sense of identity based on shared struggles and caring Maybe.
29
I didn't read this as negative. There's nothing unusual about a nostalgia for a tribe that no longer exists, and the mixed feelings which come as you see yourself as part of another or larger tribe. Anyone who has ever moved to another culture feels the same kind of nostalgia. The difference here is the added sense that your tribe was under attack, and the comforting safe space that you have to create in which “they” are the problem and “you” are the solution. I think it's the same kind of nostalgia that many Trump voters feel for a country in which they felt more a part of and now feel under attack for. Part of growing up is moving from family to tribe to society to mankind. Everyone and every group has to do it as history allows them to.
2
If you’re younger, I can see how you might interpret the comments as being nostalgic for victimization but as a lesbian “of a certain age” I can assure you the victimization is not what we’re (occasionally) nostalgic about. It’s for all the fabulous existence we were able to create for ourselves in the face of tremendous adversity. It’s the positives of our clandestine or semi-clandestine lifestyle we think back with an emotional tug.
4
I think of gay life like one of those maps in which cellular companies tout their coverage areas. I have a detailed map of the world in my brain of where it's OK to hold my husband's hand. Every big city (in the US) has a zone, and you just know instinctively where it is and where it ends. We can hold hands anywhere in San Diego's Uptown areas, for example, but if we walk downtown we'll automatically let go somewhere along the way. But that barrier is crumbling too, and will be abolished by the younger folk.
The good news is that the coverage zone continues to grow, though there remain entire regions of the country with no refuges. In Spain, I was thrilled to see men holding hands in working class neighborhoods, another expansion of the zone. The rural areas will be the toughest nuts to crack.
29
What a brilliant first sentence!
1
I had forgotten how far we've come until I was watching an episode of "law and order" from the 90's. The violence against gay people isn't as prevalent but the prejudice still lives on. We've come a long way from the days when being outed could cost you everything but there's still work to be done. There are still pockets of this country where being gay may not cost you your life but it can cost you your home, your job, and your family. Businesses can still refuse to serve you if your gayness offends them.
I too miss the comfort of gay bars. They were a place where you could be yourself and you didn't need to tone it down so that straight people would be more comfortable. I'm glad that we don't need those places as much. I look forward to a time when being gay is met with a shrug and we're free to be ourselves without putting on a show.
15
I've always put "The Boys in The Band" in the same category as "Triumph of the Will"; technically brilliant and utterly repugnant otherwise. Does it still end with the same line,"If we could just learn not to hate ourselves" ? I think it no accident, as far as the film goes, that the same man (William Friedkin) who filmed "Cruising" filmed this.
10
Almost all Americans under the age of 40, and certainly under the age of 30, simply do not care about a person's sexual orientation, and that's a very good thing, despite the loss of "gay identity." However, we are still under attack from the Mike Pence's and Mike Pompeo's of this world, who still wield considerable, and increasing, power.
40
"Almost all Americans under the age of 40, and certainly under the age of 30, simply do not care about a person's sexual orientation..."
Simply not true, even here in San Francisco.
1
Mr. Bruni fails to acknowledge or admit that gays in the United States had a nearly exclusive 30 year history of being special and set apart from everyone else. Starting with the death of Rock Hudson in 1985 from AIDS and until the legalization of gay marriage in 2015 gay men and to a lesser extent gay women in the United takes were viewed as an oppressed class worthy of special privileges.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage has been hailed by the LGBTQAIP community as the final straw that will finally break the camel's back of oppression and marginalization that has kept all from realizing the greatness that is the progressive movement in the U.S.
Unfortunately what Mr. Bruni and the LGBTQAIP community fails to realize is that you are no longer viewed as special. Whether you like it or not you will be held to the same standard as everyone else. Perhaps many in the community will welcome this universal standard of behavior. However I venture to guess many will long for the days of "Boys in the Band" apartness and being special.
14
I'm not sure what special privileges you're referring to. I don't read the article as longing for the past and "being special"; I read it as being grateful for advances while remembering the past.
13
Try not only reading but comprehending and understanding. Writer and subject acknowledge that there was both pain and pride in being gay; pride in Stonewall, artistic achievement, having that distinct subculture in NYC and SF; and the pain of discrimination and AIDS. It was a double-edged sword, filled with good times and bad. But both men acknowledge that no, they would NOT trade now for the past.
15
Special privileges--you mean like those enjoyed by straight, white men?
3
Gays are now completely integrated into society. This is a good thing. I understand nostalgia very well being nostalgiac myself. What I don’t understand, Frank, is your concern about the dilution of gay identity. Gays should be living in the same building and community? Should people of the same race, religion or ethnicity live separately from those who are not the same as they are? Sounds like self-imposed segregation and that is not a good thing. I don’t identify myself as straight or white or by my age group or even as a woman. Just as an American.
11
Liberation from oppressive communities (straight/white culture), not integration into them is what we're after. Queer forever!
Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s in Australia being Jewish was something that I avoided sharing outside the Jewish institutions or friendship circles. I recall hearing non-Jews speak derisively about Jews in general.
Things do change- for the better
16
Deja Vu!!! 1971, Wiesbaden Air Force Base, Wiesbaden, Germany, sitting beside my date (female - she later on would tell me that I would always need a man in my life), watching “The Boys in the Band” at the base theater, and internalizing the feeling that those guys up there on the screen were somehow a part of my soul.....
Thanks, Frank, for the memory...
13
In 1990, in the Castro, I was managing a low-rise condo project homeowners' association.
One of the board members worked for Pacific Bell and I would occasionally call him at work. He would answer the phone with this incredibly 'straight' voice. As soon as I would say who I was, his personality and voice would completely change.
I received quite a bit of good-humored teasing because I wasn't gay. After a very successful board meeting, I went out for ice-cream with several of the boys. Walking down the street, at the center of the West Coast gay universe, I felt a bit of the joy and power of having an entirely gay neighborhood, with the political muscle to keep it safe.
Where I live, being gay or lesbian is not remarkable. The world is a better place now that gays have more places of sanctuary in our major cities. God knows that is not true around the world. Something was lost when the Castro became less of a gay Mecca. But more has been gained than lost.
25
I loved The Boys in the Band movie because it was one of the first mainstream films I saw about gay men, 10 years after it first came out. Just to see uncloseted gay men on film at all was incredible. But even then the self-hating gay characters seemed dated, and the "flamboyant" Emory character was from another planet. After years in San Francisco's gay community I've known many beyond-fabulous self-described Queens, but none who were as starkly pathetic and self-pitying as Emory. Maybe the first gay characters presented to the straight movie-going public had to trade in stereotypes; the first spear of a culture moving into wider acceptance. For that reason I will always honor Boys, but it was just a movie, not a documentary.
11
As someone lucky enough to grow up in NYC and came of age in 1959, I luckily met other gay men and revelled in the "camp" of it all, in spite of being considered mentally ill. However, most of American gays throughout the country lived sad, desprate, and unfulfilled lives. Yes we had fun, but the human toll out there was tragic.
There are still Russian people, who were privileged then, nostalgic for the days of Stalin. Thanks for the lament but It's better (somewhat) now.
5
As I currently live in Mexico my perspective is different. However, about two years ago I took a Mexican friend in his mid 20s to see the film version of "The Boys in the Band".
His reaction: "Why is everyone so angry?"
I replied "It's a long story."
9
As a gay man about your age I very much feel the loss of “community” in recent years.
Yes, part of it is indeed attributable to the gains that have been made. But I think it is very important to add thar our community is fading in part because a significant portion of our generation was lost to AIDS.
Many Conservatives have not yet given up their hate. The younger generation would be ill advised to abandon the community started by the Boys.
12
Any gay man who goes to a job interview and is open about being gay----well, good luck. When the job committee later meets, the discussion will turn on how he does not seem to fit in for reason X, Y, or Z but not for reason G. Sadly, the candidate often attributes the rejection to a competitive labor market---a costly delusion.
If one's gay identity is ambiguous, it pays to keep it that way, at least until one has the foot in the door. If one's gay identity is unambiguous, enter "labor markets" and professions which are less hostile.
17
My only criticism of this great piece is that it's extremely US and coastal elite focused. In the mid-west, south and outside of large cosmopolitan cities the struggle goes on. Just a few weeks ago there was that article about the gay couple who own the biggest company in a small, conservative town and the solidarity they are trying to create and the values they are struggling against. Not to mention the global struggle. I get the nostalgia buts it's a minor, self-indulgent emotion in the face of this global struggle. Let all those recently freed from complete oppression never lose solidarity with all those yet remaining to be saved from that hideous oppression. And let's generalize that solidarity to fight against oppression regardless of whether it's source is homo- or transphobia, racism, anti-immigrant right wing fervor or whatever form of "other" hatred. Anti-oppression rebels can all still party together...
32
Frank, you are describing a general gentrification of society’s outcasts. The Jewish community, for example, has so many varied political and economic subgroups, that twelve tribes is no longer enough!
To a lesser extent, because of remaining prejudice, so is the black and Latino community.
And as someone who was born in the 50s, ethnic prejudice of the Irish and Italians doesn’t exist anymore. But they were once shunned too.
And so goes the gay community. It’s too diverse to be much of a community anymore.
And that’s probably good, despite the nostalgia.
14
What you describe as the past is still the present many places outside the big cities: Kids are forging a new gay (etc.) identity in their realities. No question that what has gone before is making it easier, but that is a relative term.
16
That boldness remains, shared in new forms. Kicked out by a Catholic Speaker, a Jesuit priest posted this version:
"I love the Lord, because he has heard
my voice and my supplications.
Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
I suffered distress and anguish.
Then I called on the name of the Lord:
“O Lord, I pray, save my life!”
Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
The Lord protects the simple;
when I was brought low, he saved me.
Return, O my soul, to your rest,
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
For you have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling.
I walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.
I kept my faith, even when I said,
“I am greatly afflicted”;
I said in my consternation,
“Everyone is a liar.”
What shall I return to the Lord
for all his bounty to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord,
I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of his faithful ones.
O Lord, I am your servant;
The child of your serving girl.
You have loosed my bonds.
I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice
and call on the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people,
in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 116)
4
As a gay male who discovered Birmingham AL's oft-raided and only gay bar, Tito's, at the age of19 in 1969 and has witnessed the entire arc of this astonishing evolution from the inside-out (and since 1978, from NYC-out), I cannot disagree with anything Mr. Bruni says, but hasten to add a couple of notes in support of maintaining that lively visibility that has long been a hallmark of our distinctive personalities: First, it is clear that one of the side-effects of the marriage agenda was the necessity of appearing as normal as possible - and thus less off-putting for the uncomfortable 'other' - and this did much to erase the more obvious behavior patterns that being a gay male in the mid-20th Century entailed, and secondly, that AIDS has done a feint upon us and it is nearly impossible to imagine, much less appreciate what is missing; to connect the dots surrounding the vast nothing where an enormous slice of our cultural heritage should be - along with a generation of mentors - due to the scourge that laid us waste so completely. I fear it may take another hundred years for the great gay dynamo of distinctive cultural creativity that once trod the sidewalks of New York, in particular, to regain the heights it had finally achieved at just the moment we - hundreds of thousands of us - were simply erased from the earth, though I pray it can happen sooner and applaud all those who strive to keep the beat alive. It is important work.
47
I'm a little more than a decade younger than Crowley, and saw the movie version of "Boys" when it first ran. I recognized only a few of the characters in the production among my own gay male contemporaries of the time, and they included none of the dramatic "self-hating" ones. I thought the source of the material was more "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"--that is, other dramatic pieces--than any true gay reality. That and perhaps Crowley's own angst, that could have come as much or more from a failing career as being homosexual. "Why do we hate ourselves so much?" never rang true to me, and I've heard more than one gay male of Crowley's generation say pretty much the same.
13
I am now in my late 50s. I have evolved in my perceptions over the years so that I no longer perceive people as gay and straight. To me, they are just normal variants like black, Asian and white, or blue eyes and brown eyes. Rather, i distinguish people as honest or shifty, smart or not too smart, etc. I am not sure if this is good or bad. But I think It is good.
Nonetheless, I also appreciate that this is not the case for significant parts of the population, either in Canada or in the US. They do discriminate based on the distinctions listed above. I hope they also evolve. If not, I am carefully optimistic that their kids might.
21
You said it better than I could. I am grateful for ‘just folks’.
1
By coincidence, there is a great play on in London at the moment that explores the question of what being gay in the past (recent and long ago) means to young gay men now. Called ‘The Inheritance’, it’s a seven hour, two parter. A wonderful experience, it brings a lot of these issues to life.
12
I'm half a dozen years older than Frank Bruni, and things changed so fast in our young years that I'm not sure our experiences are the same, but I feel that someone who was really there has to point out that "the LGBT community" is an artificial construct. We're stuck with it now since it became a catchall that enabled us to band together to secure our civil rights, but it still feels to me like a fake.
When I came out in the late 70's, gay men and lesbians had little to do with each other, and bisexuals (at least the men) were regarded with a mixture of amusement and disdain as gay guys who were not yet owning up to it. Truly transgendered people (as opposed to drag queens) were almost unheard of. It was the apocalyptic arrival of AIDS that broke down the barriers between lesbians and gay men when so many lesbians volunteered to care for sick gay men and previously cool relations between the groups began to thaw. Remember, this was a time when some hospital staff would refuse to bring a tray of food into an AIDS patient's room. Those women were wonderful and we who were nearly overwhelmed by the horror unleashed on us will forever be grateful.
168
You must have been in a big city? In small towns in the South, gay men, lesbians, and drag queens socialized in the same night clubs. We were connected before AIDS since we spoke the same lingo and danced to the same music and read the same gay newspaper. If that is not community then I don’t know what is.
2
I understand the spiritual and emotional toll of no longer being part of a small group with shared secrets, challenges, and experiences, but perhaps this is the inevitable result of growing normalization and acceptance. Humans are tribal creatures, and we tend to identify with members of our tribe - not with those other guys over there.
Some things may have been lost, but look at what may have been gained.
10
Though not gay, I am a theatre person in my 60’s, and I have to agree with the author who has brought a surprising perspective. Being gay was somehow more special in the 70’s and 80’s; an underground brotherhood that had its own lexicon, and heightened style , and humor, and heart, and wildness, and fun, and danger and risks and struggles. Its so mainstream now and diffused (as the author points out),and diminished by all of the other letters of the alphabet that glommed onto it...the waters are muddy now, and its unclear what it all means.
19
I came out back in 1972 at a university with one of the first lesbian and gay student organizations in the country. I became immersed in an exciting new "secret society" that was informed by prior decades of the world of the "closet." But we also bonded over the conscious raising of an emerging world of liberation, that was part of the cultural transformations of the 60's and 70's. Soon after coming out, friends and I discussed this very issue of what tribal treasures might be lost through "liberation."
Through friends, work, and varied civic engagements, I meet many gay men and lesbians of younger generations. Some of them think much differently, and their meld with a more inclusive straight culture results in my "gaydar" failing to work cross-generationally. However, I meet many millennials who hold these gay tribe bonds dearly, and share many of my political values with their "gay consciousness" very much intact.
I observe more differences in our world views pertaining to their relationship to technology and social media - habits they share with their straight contemporaries. But the tribe survives. Go to some bar where young gay men sit around a piano singing obscure songs that were dropped from opening night productions of Broadway musicals, and I hope some of your faith in the durability of the tribe will be restored.
29
I was thinking about this the other day when I read the story in your magazine about New York in the early 1980s.
Though it provided much welcome coverage of the growing HIV catastrophe, there was little else said about being a gay man in that era.
Maybe that's because we were marginalized and many, even then, were still closeted. Our gay lives were invisible; we were our own demimonde.
So while I wouldn't want that era to return for any number of reasons, dancing at The Saint had a powerful tribal pull that I miss.
Of course, I miss my youth, too. :)
53
I believe the most important words in your column are "you wouldn't want that world back." This statement applies to virtually every group which was formerly marginalized for an unjustly discriminatory reason.
33
There is a blandness to being straight, white, and heterosexual married. But with that blandness comes a security that many other groups do not yet feel. Those who are straight, white, and heterosexual married move through the social atmosphere unaware and focused on other issues. It’s as effortless as breathing. They don’t think of themselves as special, while they are the most special of all.
55
Feel free to congratulate yourself at anytime on your incredibleness, M.
30
M, Mirriam Webster's definitions of special:
1 : distinguished by some unusual quality; especially : being in some way superior our special blend
2 : held in particular esteem a special friend
3 a : readily distinguishable from others of the same category : unique they set it apart as a special day of thanksgiving
b : of, relating to, or constituting a species : specific
4 : being other than the usual : additional, extra
5 : designed for a particular purpose or occasion
So which definition of "special" are you applying here? 1?
3
I personally don’t care and am not impressed if someone is heterosexual, white and married. I am more interested to see if they are good company or boring, raise their kids well or not, and pay their taxes like I do or not. But maybe it’s just me. :)
1
On the one hand, given the continued marginalization of the LGBT community even today, it makes sense that its members yearn for the sanctuaries and communities they built and more importantly for the support, comraderie and sense of shared experience that they had. Yet at the same time, that's what any homogenous group experiences as it comes into contact with those who are different and experiences a disruption of its places of community and shared experience.
It's uncomfortable and it comes with a sense of loss, but it's also the cost of an integrated society that truly embodies the idea that all are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To reach that, all of us majority group and minority group members alike have to be willing to reach outside our groups open up our physical spaces andshare our experiences with those unlike us in gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity.
As a straight, white man, living in a more progressive era, I can't relate to the author's experiences. But I can assure him that there are thriving pockets of community across this city. There is community that includes gay and straight, white, Asian, black, and Hispanic. And I for one am incredibly thankful for these diverse communities of people in my life that can live openly as themselves, and that I can call by one simple word: friends.
65
I once heard someone say a long time ago that one issue with being gay is that from an early age a person has to constantly lie about a fundamental truth. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. I think gay identity was born from marginalization. Once a community is integrated into larger society, cultural traits become less distinctive. I don't think that's a bad thing.
95
Gay friends of my kids still hide, many hide especially from the family and friends they most depend on.
Progress, sure, but not as much as integrates into society. We are not there yet.
42
At 64 and speaking from experience, sometimes the only thing a gay child shares with their biological family is genetic material. We still often craft our own loving, compassionate, mindful, embracing, supportive families with other people wholly separate from the one into which we were unfortunately born.
18
I do think its a bad thing. It's also a boring thing.
1
It seems to be more of an evolution than an extinction. We’ve witnessed in most of our lifetimes a civil rights revolution from Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act while being conflicted by it, to Obama eloquently saying “it shouldn’t matter who you love” to Trump not opposing LGBT advancement, our society is advancing.
In the midst of an awful presidency that we are now experiencing, this is a bright spot that LGBT advancement in a legal and societal context is improving, no matter who occupies the White House.
While progress can reverse course and it will take constant vigilance to protect gains on the legal front, evolution of LGBT rights is something to be celebrated.
13
I'm wondering what LGBT advancement is occurring under the Trump administration.
3
In the era of gay entertainment defined by "RuPaul's Drag Race," I have no idea how gay men in their 20's, or even 30's, would react to "The Boys in the Band." It was the first gay movie I ever saw, frightening and tempting in one powerful piece, and it put me on notice that there was another whole world I hadn't even discovered yet (but it did not take me much longer — thanks to Mart Crowley!).
Today, as noted by Frank, everything is more diluted, more normalized and does not shock. Maybe that's a good thing, but something is definitely missing when it comes to feeling like a community. Walk the Castro in San Francisco, and see techie hipsters in Philz coffee waiting to spot Mark Zuckerberg, foreign tourists taking pictures of the rainbow street crossing, and all of San Francisco invading Dolores Park and 18th St every sunny day. Yes, everyone is there to be inclusive and have fun, but my gaydar does not resonate as often as it used to.
So, while I welcome the normalization of being open and included, I do miss the days when a gay party like the one in "The Boys in the Band" was the most fun I could have, even with all the drama and emotion. I'd go that party again any time.
50
I would too! However, many uptight gays these days would not. They would be appalled by self-deprecating comments and catty language and blatant prostitution as depicted in the Boys in the Band. Their panties would be in a wad!
2
Everything you say here seems true, it's happening. However, at 53 I still have my gay soundtrack, my history of independence, irreverence and fear. Coming out as a Catholic boy in the age of AIDS was like torture. But also thrilling to recognize myself as someone different, with something else to offer.
Don't wipe away my stories with the excitement of this new world for young gays, don't forget about the endless wedding rituals of my twenties, quietly seething at these celebrations knowing it would never be for me. That's just one example of an endless, daily self orienting exercise that took place over our lives. These memories are etched into my life and if gay men today can't relate, then its my hope they will be able to tell their stories that says something more than something you might hear from anyone else.
LP
26
isn't this what we ALL want?
to be treated as human beings, with no labels?
I understand "nostalgia", but the decades-old-fight (to be accepted) seems won for gay people... and now we mourn the loss of being sidelined?
Talk to mexicans, muslims, and then realize how very lucky you are.
22
I don’t think it’s the sidelined thing that is missed, but a different sense of oneness and commraderie for certain relationships that, even today, many find difficult to fully grasp. Just as the groups you cite have their own identify pleasures when together, music, food, shared experiences, etc., so was/is the identies, however dated, such as Judy, that one can be nostalgic for, if not the social environment in which that arose.
10
LGBTQ children often experience the hatred of homophobic bigotry first from those who are supposed to love them the most.
The suicide rate for LGBTQ adolescents is at least twice as high as it is for hetero-erotic adolescents.
LGBTQ youth, despite their low percentage in our population, account for 4O% of the homeless young people on our nation's streets. Kids made homeless by the hateful homophobic bigotry of Abrahamic religion.
The LGBTQ charity Stonewall has reported that same-sex relations are illegal in 72 countries and punishable by death in eight.
This past January local advocates Grupo Gay de Bahia published new research findings which showed that at least 445 Brazilians died as victims of anti-LGBTQ crimes in 2017. Which is a 3O% increase over the previous year.
2
Nailed it.
Just to push back a bit against this article, At our high school concert choir last night, the preident of the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance club sang a rousing rendition of Abba’s Dancing Queen, with her purple hair aflame! The ‘culture’ was on display and their club meetings feel like a safe space for lesbians to just be.
It’s the boys I worry about. The school hasn’t created a space for them to come out. How can we help support them.
35
Yes, no one wants "that world" back. Unhappily, far too many of its evils remain.
12
Ironic how formerly disenfranchised groups within society long for the balkanization of earlier times...
But - of course - as we all know - ironically - only certain groups are allowed to long for the balkanization of earlier times.
16
This would be great if true, perhaps in the future we will be evaluated as human beings, not members of some group that might not really have much to do with the type of person we actually are. Human first, and always.
8
As a straight male who worked in a predominantly gay profession in San Francisco beginning in 1961, whose majority of friends were gay, (including the married ones), with the exception of my girl friends of course(are we allowed to say “girlfriend” anymore?), I have to say I miss the old days.I realize San Francisco was a unique place and things weren’t so great for gay people everywhere, but in San Francisco in those days the gay people really made the town. They brought vitality and humor to funky old neighbors, were different and so often much more chic than the rest of us and just made San Francisco special. Myself and my straight friends, women and men, would often prefer the out of the way, gay restaurants and bars too the mostly raucous still stuck in the fifties Saloons that the tourists headed for. It was a time of great change, great style, outsized personalities, really attractive people and fun, fun, fun. That all ended with aids of course and for a while it seemed as though all I did was bring home bound friends food and books as I watched them wither away. I’m sure things are better now, everything being mainstream and all, but I can tell you there was something special about those days and the fantastic, creative people that made it all happen for those who followed. If I were in San Francisco now I would head over to the bottom of Powell Street and see if the terrific restaurant with the camp piano bar is still there, many wonderful memories. Thanks Frank!
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And the suicides. Too many could not continue to face the slurs, the beatings, the lost jobs, the snickers, the eye-rolling. Are things better now? I hope, I think that enlightenment is occurring. I see it in my grandchildren and their friends. And my children, my friends.
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Nor could they bear the loneliness.
2
If gay sanctuaries are vanishing, perhaps it’s because there is less need for sanctuaries today – at least in Manhattan. How is that bad?
Does one need to be physically embedded in a commune of the like-minded or like-natured to maintain his or her identity? Is someone less gay because he or she lives not in the East Village (or in 405 E. 54th St. 56 years ago); or has society found a way to assimilate its non-cis communities in at least some greater communities, in ways that don’t threaten true identity? How is THAT bad?
An argument that suggests otherwise could be argued to also suggest that gayness is something dependent on a unique culture that requires constant reinforcement to remain “pure”, which then calls into question the organic inevitability and eternalness (to the individual) of gay identity.
If you no longer live in exile, is it then lamentable that a “gay armor” is no longer necessary? Surely, as gays become more mainstream, it can’t be astonishing that they would lose some of the cultural characteristics of an oppressed minority and BECOME more culturally mainstream.
I recognize that Frank and Mr. Crowley seem to understand this, retaining however a distant ache resulting from loss. But you can’t go home again, Frank. And you should be very thankful that you can’t.
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And if your personal life is kept private you should be evaluated as a human being.
7
I'm not sure I understand this reply. Do you keep your wife and family private? Why should gays, lesbians and transgender keep their private lives secret? I can't imagine straight people anywhere not talking about their private lives.
I don't think Frank views these developments as "Bad".
Thank you, Frank, for your clear-eyed take on what is gained and lost when a vibrant culture once confined to the fringes of society enters the mainstream. I could feel it.
The last four paragraphs in particular are gold.
39
Though not gay, I can certainly identify with the dilemma of separateness experienced by all oppressed minorities (my firm and vocal attachment to the rights of Palestinian Arabs makes me something of an outsider within America's Jewish community). Even so, can someone explain why a new production of "Boys in the Band" needs to feature an all-gay cast? I certainly have no problem with the idea per se, considering how many talented gay actors are already working on Broadway, and yet should any role ever be "reserved" for an actor strictly because of his/her gender-preference, any more than it should be the case on account of race, ethnicity, religion, etc.? Presently, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams- both of them straight and both of them talented- are portraying lesbians in a movie called "Disobedience." Should they be criticized for taking on such roles despite their own sexual preferences?
15
"Though not gay"? Doth the gentlemen protest too much?
stu, your politically correct purist posture is ... puzzling, as always. Why would a production dealing with gay life NOT prefer an all-gay cast? Did Cliff Huxtable have a cute, blonde and blue-eyed daughter he sought to bring up responsible (!) in that Brooklyn townhouse?
And there will be questions and accusations of inappropriate "poaching" about the Rachels Weisz and McAdams playing lesbians, when you can't swing a Diamond Himalaya Niloticus crocodile Birkin 30 purse on Rodeo Drive without hitting AT LEAST five lesbian actresses. The Rachels WILL be criticized for taking on such roles despite their own sexual preferences.
6
@Richard: What's puzzling about standing up on behalf of the oppressed and the harassed? Gays are doing better these days but Muslims, immigrants, transgendered individuals...not so much. Ah for those days when miscegenation was considered criminal behavior, eh Richard? Or for that projected Trumpian future when women who abort their fetuses end up in the clink. Anyway, good actors don't need to be gay in order to play gay any more than they need to be straight in order to play straight (hello, Rock Hudson). Actually, I thought there were laws preventing producers from casting shows on the basis of race, religion, sexuality, etc.
I’m an actor and was in a play written by a gay man and I played a gay character.
The playwright has originally insisted that only a gay man could play the role in which I was cast. This was in the early ‘90s. Well, I auditioned, got the role and did well.
Even though I’m heterosexual, I was able to connect to the character. I like to think I taught the playwright something and opened his mind to his own pre-conceived notions.
Ten years later, I played another gay character in a play with two other hetero men. They each played gay characters, too. We had to kiss each other at certain points in the production.
The playbill's notes read, " No heterosexuals were harmed during this production."
The fantastic playwright went on to write for TV and wrote one of the first romantic storylines for two men.
How far we've come!
9
Don't worry, Frank, the Republican Party needs to hate gay people to help muster enough votes to hijack elections, so rest assured that homosexuals will be demonized for their gay identities until further GOP notice.
For example, Wes Goodman, an anti-LGBT Republican Ohio state representative elected in 2016, a Christian conservative who said on his campaign website that "healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families are the source of Ohio’s proud history"... who resigned from office in 2017 after being caught having sex with a man in his office .
Or the antigay activist and cofounder of the 'conservative' gay-hating Family Research Council George Rekers who was caught returning from a European vacation with a male escort he found on Rentboy.com.
Or, Glenn Murphy Jr., the antigay advocate and former president of the Young Republican National Federation who was sentenced to six years in prison after he was found guilty of sexual assault for performing oral sex on an unwilling male after a 2007 private party for Republican supporters in Indiana.
Or former Republican California state Senator Roy Ashburn who said, "I am gay. Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long. But I am gay. But it is something that is personal and...I felt with my heart that being gay didn't affect — wouldn't affect — how I did my job.” Ashburn blamed his constituents' wishes for his anti-LGBT voting record.
The Grand Old Homophobes are keeping homophobia alive and well.
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Socrates, your comment was entertaining and so very juicy, but what does the Republican Party have to do with Frank’s article? For once, Frank wasn’t writing about Republicans or politics. There are other topics.
2
Here in Chicagoland I'm a member of a very active and engaged LGBT social group. We socialize, raise money to award scholarships for LGBT students, do community volunteer work, and have historically helped enact city ordinances bolstering LGBT partnerships, housing and employment. We rallied at the state capitol for gay marriage and we continue to stay politically active and engaged.
Gay identity is not dead. While our group is primarily older (age 45 ) we are constantly seeking new ways to renew and refresh. There is a need. Many of our members have children or even grandchildren, and we welcome and include many straight friends and allies.
The movement and culture I experienced as a younger man is mature, seasoned, and gearing up for what we perceive as a coming attack on the rights we have secured.
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There is also a real loss to the larger culture. The special sensibilities, artistic insights and spot-on critiques developed as survival and coping mechanisms by those who must live both inside and outside the dominant culture provide needed leavening to the larger culture, making it richer, more interesting, more understandable and more flexible for all of us. This applies not only to LBGTQ people, but to women, African-Americans, immigrants and other still marginalized groups like Native Americans and poor people in rural areas of Appalachia. Certainly we need to continue our far-from-complete efforts to include all people as full members of our society. To mourn the loss of these fruits of ignorant and enforced exclusion and discrimination would be to mourn the exploitation and injustice they represent. But perhaps, somehow, we can find ways to salvage some of the richness produced at such a cost.
41
I think you hit the nail on the head with the phrase "both inside and outside the dominant culture." It is at this intersection that creativity can thrive. And there are very few people who never feel that they have one foot inside and one foot outside, no matter in how small an aspect of their being. In a particularly conformist junior high school in the late 1960s, I was derided by classmates for having -- gasp -- curly hair. It only helped me learn to value my uniqueness and my refusal to conform by ironing my hair (yes, with a clothes iron). This may seem like a trivial example, and it is -- except to an adolescent, for whom inside-outside is a constant struggle. As we grow up, those who stay true to themselves -- even the "boring" white married heterosexual males referred to by another commenter -- always experience moments of living at margins. Maturity is learning to find the value and richness in this.
2
If you step out of an urban environment, most of us still feel like we live in a secret society. My partner and I raised our daughter in NYC. She was born in 1986 and we dealt with homophobia as she was growing up, even in NYC. Yes. We have made lots of progress in the United States but with our present president, many of his supporters have made it clear that homophobia is still here.
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EXTINCTION OF GAY IDENTITY I think that the impetus for the change in the role of the gay community in the US began with the onset and takeover of the AIDS epidemic. Many young gay men who had fled the small towns where they had lived for the freedom and anonymity of the large cities. The horrible toll taken by HIV AIDS brought gayness into sharp focus. Many young men went home to die. Or died without explanation. Or were disowned by their families, only to be reclaimed for control over their corpses. Along with all the anguish and suffering, many people realized that those who had died or were struggling with AIDS were people the cared about. They were family and friends. The AIDS quilt was a very public place to mourn their passing. Now, with medications, HIV is no longer a death sentence. But for the generation that survived AIDS, their position in society is radically changed. They're no longer outsiders. Just like many groups, they're intergrated into the society, while maintaining their identity. I can understand the sense of loss. But perhaps the full recognition of the rights and dignity of LGBTQ people is overall a more positive outcome. As a Jew, I know that my community had been reviled and excluded in the US and elsewhere going back millennia. But now in many places, perhaps nowhere moreso than in the US, we're integrated into the society. Most of us feel like a part of the whole. The problem with our role is intermarriage and assimilation.
21
If you want to be included in the society of the rest of the world, one really has to accept that some desires are no longer possible, or at least, must be reassessed and realigned with the new reality.
It seems rather selfish to demand inclusion and then complain when you find that you are.
5
It was the power of the "gay identity" with all the struggles, fun, secrecy, anger that was the foundation for the response to the AIDS epidemic. That "community" burst forth with outrage and compassion and the love and connectedness that had brought us "of age". Although I am proud and relieved at what we have achieved so far I am also very glad that I came of age during those years. Just hearing "Stop in the Name of Love" brings it all back to me and that song will be played at my funeral...
1
We can still be fired from our jobs because of our sexuality in many parts of this country, and the push for "religious freedom" laws is meant to preserve that discrimination. And unless I've been the victim of fake news stories, it seems that holding hands on the street even in traditional enclaves like Greenwich Village or West Hollywood risks inviting unwanted commentary and even violence. It's happened to me. And now, in the way African Americans were told that racism was a thing of the past after Obama's victory, we are being told in the wake of same-sex marriage that anti-gay discrimination is a thing of the past. Except that it isn't. And that's just this country. Try your passport out in some of the more exotic countries and see what happens.
The piano bar queen might have gone the way of the dodo--which saddens me, because I liked piano bars--but we aren't safely shielded in invisibility cloaks quite yet. The politic sprinkling of us at the better law firms and corporations does not betoken a universal trend. The lines of the ghetto might be broken, but that was more due to property values than cultural ones. In most places, we are still Other.
205
When the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, I read either here or in The New Yorker a piece by a gay man who, while applauding the decision, expressed--not nostalgia for the good old day, but simply an acknowledgement that to some extent the gay community had been born and sustained by its struggle against the system. I think that is a realistic observation. Assimilation, whether of gay men, lesbians, or--historically-Jews, always comes with a price. Identity is weakened. What hasn't been considered is that regaining that identity, in its new form, is a struggle at least as difficult as the fight against bigotry, perhaps more difficult because less obvious. I recently watched the film "Boys in the Band" after many years and, although it is dated and the depiction of these gay men is a bit stilted, it is a bold film. I remember when it first came out. Stunning. One of my favorites. I hope all of us, gay and straight, will stand up and shout, "We're still here!" And with our current leader, there seems to be a whole new set of stupidities to fight.
70
Pride in our struggle and gay identity is a big reason why my spouse and I honor our Vermont Civil Union. In 2000, Vermont would give us every right and responsibility of marriage, but they couldn't call it marriage because Christians said marriage was sacred and same-sex marriage wasn't.
We traveled across America for that union, even though we knew one of us would have to live in Vermont for year to dissolve it. No holy matrimony could require such devotion, yet many federal agencies, including the IRS, refuse to recognize it to this day. So what?
I don't wan't any part of straight or sacred. We have something you can't get anymore, and nobody can take it away from us!
11
Is it possible the piece you mention was "The Future of Queer - How Gay Marriage Damaged Gay Culture" by Fenton Johnson. It was published in Harper's in January of this year. A fascinating exploration of a huge cultural cultural shift that came with a few unintended consequences. Alas, all things worth fighting for come at a price, but to be certain "We're still here!" - all of us, of every persuasion, working it out together.
1
In the very LGBT-friendly city where I live, the big thing among young people seems to be rejection of binary gender. I hear more and more people saying "they" instead of "she" or "he," to the point where I sometimes have to ask, "Are you talking about one person or a whole army?" It occurs to me that in a world without gender, there's no more sexual orientation, no Lesbians or bisexuals or gay men, just "peeps." Is the supposed obsolescence of gender just a fad, a word game, a pose, or is it actually the next phase of the sexual revolution that started in the 1920s? As a gay man who is even older than Frank Bruni, I may not live long enough to find out, but the prospect certainly has me perplexed!
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It might be less confusing if you keep in mind that gender-consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with sexual-orientation. Gender is a matter of consciousness and sexual-orientation is a matter of anatomy. Just because someone has a gender which is different from their anatomy doesn't necessarily mean they are homoerotic.
1
Yes, this is now the "gender queer" community. The thing that worries me is the amount of hormones these young people are taking.
4
As a straight white male who grew up in the segregated south in the ‘50s, I can tell you this: it’s exhausting to hate people. The lines you dare not cross, the kind gestures you dare not make—it eventually wears you out.
Race and gender identity have been easy targets for so long you’d think it would tire people out just to keep swinging at them. Ironically, the worst of the bashers and haters were actually possessed of the very same negative qualities that they erroneously assigned to their victims.
So while gay people may miss the sense of community, it’s about time that America started to crawl out of this pit of hatred. It’s suffocating down there. We’re tired of continuing to fight the Civil War and the gender war so long after there ceased to be a reason to do so.
We’re reaching the point where we can think, “That guy’s gay” without it meaning anything more than what it is. We have had a great black president. The world didn’t end, as it’s likely to do with the latest somewhat orange but mostly white president.
The turning point came when people realized that gay bashing and race baiting were things directed against not some nameless “others,” but at their neighbors, their workmates, their friends and their families.
When everyone is in the same boat, it’s no comfort in imagining that your end isn’t the one that’s sinking.
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Beautifully and thoughtfully expressed. Thanks.
50
Great Black president??? I wonder when that happened.
8
For the majority of thoughtful Americans, 2009-2017.
Careful, Frank - being 10 years older than you, we recognize the creeping into the psyche of 'the way things used to be' nostalgia :)
The only constant is change, and we can never know how things we work and slave and vote and hope to change will manifest. Besides, there are plenty of places left in this country's hinterlands where you can find society is still exactly as was portrayed in 1968.
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It sounds like the progression of gay individuals from the fringes to the mainstream has been a mixed bag.
On the one hand, being afforded the same legal rights as everyone else (including marriage) is only right and an end worth having fought for.
On the other hand, assimilation can also mean loss of identity. While the LBGT community should in no way be shunned from the larger community, is not something lost when in-group recognition and relating recede?
As with other minority groups, there is a delicate balancing act of belonging to two worlds simultaneously.
35
I find it sad and somewhat interesting, Mr. Bruni, that you, in your enclave of liberal and progressive viewpoints that you are still being made to feel uncomfortable in society.
I do have to ask the question, however, is it the environment in which you live or your perception of that environment.
The sad part is that you feel the way you do, whether or not the feelings are based on a reality or not, or some combination of the two.
The interesting part is that out here in this part of conservative land, the gay, the lesbian, and the transgender individuals are accepted as people of the community with the overriding view of what you do in your own home is your own business.
There is no latent hostility that I can see, and after years of many friendships of your self-identified group, I am somewhat sensitive to people who gratuitously abuse my friends. There is also no overt discrimination or animosity between citizens of our town, a community that is fully willing to agree to disagree without destroying a friendship.
Perhaps you might want to consider leaving the rather agitate bubble in which you find yourself and move yourself to more a accepting and comfortable clime.
Or, is describing yourself as a victim more important to you than anything else?
17
Owl - I reread the column after reading your comment, trying to find places where Mr. Bruni frames himself as a victim. I was unable to find any. Would you mind pointing some out?
(I mean, there was this paragraph "Gays aren’t yet on an equal legal footing with straight people. We’re frequently derided ("I’m looking at you, Mike Pompeo) and assaulted. How gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people are treated hinges on where we live, what color we are, how much money we have and whom we work for") but that looks to me like remarking on progress yet to be made, not describing himself or gay people in general as victims.)
Thank you.
13
What an unnecessarily nastly last line. I sense a bit of latent hostility.
12
What??!! Frank describing himself as a victim, where
is that? And if so, why would that be more important to
him than anything else? All I got was there was a kind
of nostalgia for the mechanisms the gay community
developed to survive before they were more accepted into the mainstream. I was around in the
60s in NYC and I remember my gay friends well.
I am white, strait female, and looked like the
all American girl. But I came from a dysfunctional
home. I felt like an outsider. I came from a small
town who never even admitted gay people
existed. When I got to NYC, one of my first friends
was an outrageous and over the top gay guy .
I loved hanging out with his friends, I felt at home and
I have never laughed so hard, nor felt so protected.
Later some of theses friend became Andy's super
stars. I was dimly aware in my own struggle to survive
of the pain they went through, it wasn't till much
later I realized how just brave they were. And yes I
too miss the incredible and wildly entertaining ways
they created to keep on going under enormous
potential backlash. Do not wish those days back,
but damn they were at times a hell of a lot of fun
and very alive.
out with my outrageous and terribly funny gay
friends. I felt at home and safe and I was in an
unhapp
8
As a gay man close in age to you, Mr. Bruni, I have no wish to go back to the days where the LGBT community was disparaged by most segments of society, where we had a president who refused to say the word AIDS as the epidemic was raging, and where the representations of gay characters in theater and film were negative or stereotyped in plays like "The Boys in the Band." In the present, I am grateful that I was legally able to marry my longtime same-sex partner four years ago and that more gays and lesbians feel more accepted by their families, friends, and coworkers. That being said, we're also starting to see a backlash against the advancement of LGBT rights, in the form of "religious freedom" legislation and a president who wants to ban transgender soldiers from the military. Perhaps the time has come for a reaffirmation of "gay identity" through political action and protest more than through things like pride parades. And enlisting the support of gay allies would help, too.
141
"..and where the representations of gay characters in theater and film were negative or stereotyped in plays like "The Boys in the Band."
For me as a man in his late 60s now, the movie 'The Boys in the Band,' was a double-edged sword. Yes. Finally there was a public representation of the gay world that reached out to small town boys with it's portrayal of gay life. But as a boy it set fear in my heart that to be gay I would become like them, which wasn't pretty. If anything came of it for me it was great confusion as I didn't picture living the negative life portrayed. Sadly the stereotype of gays in today's movies and TV hasn't changed much.
9
I am 62. When I saw the movie version, I was so disgusted with what I considered the nasty ugly side of being gay that it took me ten years to get past the negative stereotype portrayed. At the time, the movie version was the only concept I knew of gay life and I wanted no part of that lifestyle.
Today I am married and totally out and open about it.
Things change. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not.
This is beautifully written, Frank. *Thank you* for including the lesbian side of the story. <3
88