[BRIEF NOTE] On the latest queer assimilation social media frenzy

Venerable free Toronto weekly Eye Weekly was replaced a month or so ago by The Grid, which according to its editor Laas Turnbull is to be a "younger, hipper, more provocative version of Toronto Life in a weekly guise".

The feature article of the most recent issue was Paul Aguirre-Livingston's essay "Dawn of a new gay".



The article argued that Toronto's gay village, community, et cetera, was fundamentally irrelevant to younger generations.

Forty years after the Manifesto and the infamous Stonewall Riots in New York City, a new generation of twentysomething urban gays—my generation—has the freedom to live exactly the way we want. We have our university degrees, homes and careers. In Toronto, we’ve abandoned the Church Wellesley Village. We’re tattooed and pierced and at the helm of billion-dollar industries like fashion and television. We vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents, who don’t mind us coming to stay as a couple. Hell, we even marry our boyfriends, if we choose to, on rooftops overlooking Queen West. Our sexual orientation is merely secondary to our place in society. We don’t need to categorize or define ourselves as gay, and who we sleep with—mostly men and, hey, sometimes women—isn’t even much of a topic of conversation anymore. The efforts of Wittman and his peers produced a whole new type of gay. Say hello to the post-modern homo. The post-mo, if you will.

It also featured interviews with a selected number of members of my cohort, all the interviewees being photographed in the cover.

Aguirre-Livingston's article got a lot of negative reaction. Some of it was came from as far away as New Zealand, even as far away as The Globe and Mail, but Torontoist's Jamie Woo seems to have served as a lightning rod for the mass of critiques out there in his post "Post-Mos and the Dangers of Privilege".

Yes, there are valid criticisms to be made for the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood: the area often feels like a queer take on the Entertainment District with ridiculous pressures to dress and act a certain way. However, the area remains a vital heart of the queer community. For example, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives—one of the largest collections of queer materials in the world—sits on Isabella Street, filled with decades of history. While the Village may not be the right place for an established urbanite like Aguirre-Livingston, it offers a safe and welcoming space for other, less privileged members of the queer community.

The outstanding 519 Community Centre acts as a second home for transgendered men and women, the young, and the newly out. Helen Rykens, the office manager at the 519, recalled to me stories of newcomers from other countries who have been to afraid to even utter the word “gay” before arriving. And let’s not fool ourselves that only people from abroad feel closeted and oppressed. We only need to look at Northern Ontario, where work is being done by organizations like LGBT Youthline, spreading outreach and support, to realize we’re in a lucky position in Toronto.

I look to how Toronto has multiple Chinatowns and that there isn’t a sense of turf wars between them. Berlin has half-a-dozen areas that cater to specific segments of the queer population. How young is Toronto when it can't handle two queer-friendly neighbourhoods? It’s a perpetual mystery why, to some, progress in the queer community has to be coupled with a disdain for the past. While there can be some benefit to critiquing past norms—the drag queens, the camp, the bathhouses—and the rejection is a fair personal choice, the post-mo attitude smacks of “otherness” creation that whiffs of homo- and transphobia. Aguirre-Livingston is a friend and I am not suggesting that he is either homophobic or transphobic. His description of post-mos who fetishize heteronormative definitions of gender, however, certainly raises eyebrows.

Part of the difficulty is the nature of the queer community: it is a large umbrella that encapsulates many people who do not necessarily have anything in common, except for a societal hostility toward their sexuality. But, which demographic does Aguirre-Livingston’s piece speak to? It’s telling that there are no women interviewed in the piece, nor are there any transgendered men or women. In addition, the ethnic make-up of those surveyed is fairly homogeneous , rendering people of colour invisible. Maybe having grown up on fare like Will & Grace—a show that rarely had lesbians or people of colour, and, without a doubt, had few transgendered people—what looks like progress, what looks like post-dom, is really an illusion. It’s not that the queer community has launched ahead so much as the marginalized within the minority have fallen behind. It’s a shame, because the diversity of the community can and should be its greatest strength.

Different interviewees have since come out on their own blogs arguing that they've been misrepresented. The whole thing has sprawled out far beyond this, becoming--via Twitter and blogs and Facebook and everything--a great sprawling debate on queer identity in early 21st century in Toronto and the extent to which it's relevant, etc. Woo's careful commentary has been exceeded by angrier rhetoric out there.

[LINK] “How Gays Helped Make and Remake America”

British journalist Johann Hari’s recent Slate review of American history Michael Bronski's new study of queer history in the United States, A Queer History of the United States, seemed worthwhile linking to in light of this afternoon's posting on the tensions regarding the tensions re: queer identity recently permeating the local Toronto blogopshere. The book, as Hari describes it, systematically demonstrates that non-heterosexuals have been present and active throughout American history, that though--as Hari puts it--the "statements of Michele Bachman, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag", they're ultimately false. Very false: according to Hari, the "rioting drag queens of the Stonewall Inn arrive only on page 210 of a 250-page book".

Hari's main problem with Bronski the author isn't with his collection of evidence, or Bronski's tracing of gay rights back to the anarchists and other radicals of the late 19th century who didn't see the sense in making natural sexuality so artificially regulated by law, or with the portrayal of the emergence of queer communities and gay rights in the context of the breakdown of the old dear Gemeineschaft society so bound in tradition and the rise of more fluid and freeing late modernity. (He likes all that, actually.) Hari's dispute with Bronski is fundamentally political, expressed in the review' last six paragraphs all reproduced below.

My view—since reading Andrew Sullivan's masterpiece Virtually Normal when I was a teenager—is that the point of the gay rights struggle is to show that homosexuality is a trivial and meaningless difference. Gay people want what straight people want. I am the same as my heterosexual siblings in all meaningful ways, so I should be treated the same under the law, and accorded all public rights and responsibilities. The ultimate goal of the gay rights movement is to make homosexuality as uninteresting—and unworthy of comment—as left-handedness.

That's not Bronski's view. As he has made more stridently clear in his previous books, he believes that gay people are essentially different from straight people.[. . .] He believes that while the persecution in this 500-year history was bad, the marginality was not. Gay people are marginal not because of persecution but because they have a historical cause—to challenge "how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture."

Their role is to show that monogamy, and gender boundaries, and ideas like marriage throttle the free libidinal impulses of humanity. So instead of arguing for the right to get married, gay people should have been arguing for the abolition of marriage, monogamy, and much more besides. " 'Just like you' is not what all Americans want," Bronski writes. "Historically, 'just like you' is the great American lie." He swipes at the movement for gay marriage, and Sullivan in particular, as an elaborate revival of the old social purity movements—with the kicker that gays are doing it to themselves. (It's easy to forget that when Sullivan first made the case for gay marriage, his events were picketed by gay people spitting this argument into his face.)

When Bronski argues this case, his prose—which is normally clear—becomes oddly murky and awkward, and he may not agree with every word of my summary: This is the best I can figure out his position. He does finally explicitly say that the gay movement should have fought instead to "eliminate" all concept of marriage under the law, a cause that would have kept gay people marginalized for centuries, if not forever. Of course some gay people hold revolutionary views against the social structures of marriage and the family—and so do some straight people. But they are small minorities in both groups. If you want to set yourself against these trends in the culture, that's fine. Just don't equate it with your homosexuality. When Bronski suggests gay marriage "works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy," he is bizarrely missing the point. Nobody is saying gay people have to get married—only that it should be a legal option if they want it. If you disagree with marriage, don't get married. Whose freedom does that restrict?

It's bizarre that Bronski—after a rousing historical rebuttal to the right-wing attempt to write gays out of American history—ends up agreeing with Rick Santorum, Glenn Beck, and Michele Bachmann that gay people are inherently subversive and revolutionary, longing for the basic institutions of the heterosexual world to be torn down. There's a whole Gay Pride parade of people marching through Bronski's book who show it isn't so—from the residents of Merrymount proudly carrying their giant phallus, to Deborah Sampson Gannett dressed in her military uniform as Robert Shurtliff, to the men in Physique Pictoral in their little posing pouches. They didn't choose marginality and exclusion. They were forced onto the margins. It would be a betrayal of them—not a fulfillment—to choose to stay there, angrily raging, when American society is on the brink of letting them into its core institutions, on the basis of equality, at long last.

A generational difference, perhaps?

[#FORUM] What do you think of the whole idea of authenticity?

My two posts earlier today touched on the fairly contested question of queer assimilation and the globally vexing issue of authenticity for any number of once-suppressed groups (women, queers, various ethnolinguistic and racial communities, religious groups, et cetera).

What is authenticity? In those steadily expanding areas of the world where different demographics’ differences from older norms are increasingly seen as functionally irrelevant, what does it take to live in good faith with oneself and one’s others? The reasons that the debate I pointed to earlier have elicited such responses have everything to do with the time-honoured question of how people should lead their own lives with integrity.

Well? Me, I’m quite clueless on the issue, altogether lacking any grand theoretical frameworks. You, too?