[LINK] "The Myth of the Gay Community"

[rfmcdonald]

The Atlantic's Evan Beck makes the case.

A couple months before graduating from college last spring, a friend and I went out for pizza. Our conversation touched on the usual senior year talk—spring break plans, theses, the like. Sprinkled throughout, though, was a banal discussion of what it was like to be gay men on campus.

My friend made a comment in passing that stuck with me—that he felt an immediate bond with other gay people because, as he put it, “We all went through a special hell in middle school.” It’s a sentiment I agree with, and yet, it was not until after graduating that I started to realize how diverse the identities and needs of the gay community were—so much so that I am not sure the word “community” is either fair or accurate.

History has a tendency to airbrush a culturally accepted arc. Gay identity is no different. In his book Gay New York, Yale professor George Chauncey dispelled the myth that gay culture sprang from nothing out of the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots. Yet this inferred “beginning” of gay culture—and therefore community—exists today as the springboard for LGBT America. Following this liberation came a new, more macabre form of rage as the AIDS epidemic spurred gay male activists to coalesce, leading to organizations such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). When the root causes and consequences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were unknown in its early years, the disease was so tied to the homosexual identity it was referred to as gay-related immunodeficiency (GRID).

More than thirty years after the first cases of HIV/AIDS spurred an organized response by the budding gay community, the final frontier of gay rights has been reached: the ability to assimilate into the mainstream, the equity of legal standing, the right to marriage. But as gay men and women realize legal equality, some gay individuals still face uneven social challenges that diverge from the perceived interests and needs of the group. Nine years ago, Andrew Sullivan foreshadowed the dissolution of a communal gay identity in his article “The End of Gay Culture”, writing, “[W]hat encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that ‘gayness’ alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual.” Arguments that the gay community should redirect and broaden its approach beyond marriage equality, while well intentioned, rely on the existence of a monolithic gay community. Today, the use of the word “community” goes beyond the semantics, creating an outdated premise for viewing gay individuals whose dissimilarities often mean their only common thread is being a sexual minority. This is not a strong enough link to define a community whose different interests and needs will not always align, if at all.