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

[rfmcdonald]

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.