6
I Hate the Gays
I’ve been saying “I hate the gays” for about as long as I’ve been aware of being gay. It was, originally, a joke. How could I hate the gays when I myself was a gay? Irony, the bread and butter of comedy. But to be fair, I hated everyone. I was a hateful child who grew into an even more hateful adult.
Over time, “I hate the gays” became less a joke and more of a bitter commentary. The phrase became a way to express my disappointment in what I had mistakenly believed to be an inclusive community. I had thought I had found my people, but the people didn’t seem to want to include me. My disappointment did not result from some sense of self-loathing or internalized homophobia—quite the opposite. I wanted my community to accept all of us, and all of me, and it kept refusing.
I fucking love being gay. Every fag has their own kind of gay, and some kinds are more compatible with others, and some are not. My kind of gay is stereotypical as fuck. I love camp, I love divas (I don’t love drag queens, but don’t tell anyone), I love show tunes, I live for disco. I will go on long tirades about why a particular actress deserves an Oscar for a specific role that happened decades ago. I pride myself on my taste and on knowing what’s tacky and still loving it anyway. This gay essence, in its purest, uncut form, flows through many a kween. This kind of gay is a secret language, it’s a shared side-eye, it’s kept character actresses working for years. It’s a kind of gay that has been passed down from generation to generation, like a cherished heirloom bottle of poppers. It’s a kind of gay that transcends race, age, and socioeconomic status. It’s a kind of gay that serves as a foundation for the gay community.
To meet someone who loved the same dumb gay shit was to meet a kindred spirit. A meeting of the minds meant there was someone who saw you in a world that erased you or reviled you. The shared connection meant that one would feel less lonely or even feel loved.
Love is one thing, sex is another, and sex ruins everything.
If only gay men could exist in some sexless, platonic fantasia wherein we all sing along to Whitney Houston songs while watching The First Wives Club on mute. (We’d pause Whitney for the movie’s finale musical number, “You Don’t Own Me,” obviously.) But alas, the threat of sex inevitably arises and sows discord. Resentment, envy, hate.
I don’t actually hate the gays. I don’t even hate the gay community. But I hate how I feel in relation to the gay community, particularly to other gay men. And when I talk about the gays, I almost exclusively refer to white gays.
Of course there have been times when my umbrella of umbrage has shaded the entire queer community in general. But then, unfortunately, it was also easy to conflate the entire gay community with a small subsection of it when that subsection had an outsize influence. My resentment of white gays and their place atop my gay world—because I also lived a very specific gay existence, one defined by whiteness—meant that I didn’t feel comfortable in gay spaces, which were predominantly white and catered to whites.
Because I didn’t feel comfort in the traditional places where I was supposed to be able to find it—the gay bars and clubs of my forekweens—I didn’t develop a sense of community. Instead, I cultivated a resentment of that community and its exclusion of me. Yes, there are Black and Latino gay spaces, but they always feel second-class or like an afterthought or an obligation, such as when a gay bar offers a Blatino night and they beef up the security inside and at the doors. Even spaces that regularly cater to queer people of color have that enhanced air of surveillance, as if Black and brown fags are more violent than white ones. As someone who’s witnessed two white twinks get into a slap fight culminating in a Real Housewives–esque thrown drink multiple times, I can attest that we are not.
But darker skin comes with the expectation of violence, as does a lower economic class, since those Black gay clubs are often in the hood. Even when they’re not, the expectation is that the bar will be patronized by poorer people, despite the existence of an exorbitant cover and watered-down drinks. Being Black in the gay community feels more second-class than being Black in America as a whole. In the gay community, you’re actually encouraged to settle for separate but less-equal, whether it’s a bar, or the apps, or health services. But on the other hand, you’re also expected to stand with and support your gay community, unquestioningly, regardless of how your community treats you.
Often, perhaps too often, I used my platform as a writer not to tear down but to call out other gays. White gays. In 2016, I wrote an essay for Out.com about Steve Grand, an openly gay, openly okay singer who was lamenting how people “love” to hate on “young, good-looking, white, gay men.”
I wrote that he was right: “We do love to hate young, good-looking, white, gay men. Because they’re kind of the worst…They sit unfairly at the top of a hierarchy within a minority, mindlessly exerting their influence while ignorant of or indifferent to the world around them, the history before them, and the harm they cause. Their youth, their beauty, their whiteness insulate them from the realities of a world that rewards those qualities in disproportionate amounts. And in the gay community especially, the lack of those qualities strips you of any humanness.”
That was when I was still freelancing for Out—after a few more essays like that, I got hired full-time. Mine was a perspective that was unique to such a mainstream gay publication at the time. And I clearly didn’t give a fuck, which people either loved or hated, but either way, people clicked, shared, and commented.
But it wasn’t all calling out basic-ass white gays. I spent years at Out, and before at various queer websites, reporting LGBTQ+ news, championing LGBTQ+ issues, shining a light on issues that other (white) writers ignored or didn’t know how to approach. As the only Black voice in the room, it was my duty, my obligation, and my burden. If my complicated relationship to white gays is one reason why I “hate” the gays, working in queer media is surely another.
I never studied journalism. The closest I had to an industry education was a journalism class I took my junior year in high school and two years writing for the school newspaper, the Pioneer Post. So at my first queer site, Queerty, I had to learn on the job, with a loyal and very vocal readership watching. What I learned, early on, was not to read comments on anything I wrote. Anything. No matter how innocuous I thought it was, the Queerty readers could always find something to criticize, and it would be something about me, about my character.
I can’t recall what the story was, but I had written an article and had done my best to provide both sides to it, because I thought that was what journalists did or were supposed to do, but when I read the comments, one of the readers basically accused me of having a history of being anti-gay. This is when I had barely started, by the way. If they had known me personally, that was a criticism I would’ve accepted. I can be—and am—openly albeit ironically homophobic around my friends because they know that I am not homophobic in sincerity. If the Queerty readers knew how many AIDS jokes I made on a regular basis, I could understand their animosity. You don’t make those jokes in mixed company because you don’t know how people will react.
Case in point, I was in Provincetown with the gays one summer, having just touched down on the Cape and treading the boards of the pier where the daily Tea Dance was held. There was only a handful of mostly older gays waiting around for the fun to start when a friend of mine got an HIV test at a little pop-up testing site tucked away in the corner. I grew up in the generation for which AIDS was still a very scary prospect, one not yet easily preventable with one pill a day, and so it felt like a curse that we young gays were taught to fear. I was afraid of catching it, and because I was afraid, I made jokes about it. That friend and I had also talked extensively about our sexual practices and our own shortcomings when it came to safe or safer sex.
So after my friend got his test, I started walking over to him but first shouted, from across the pier, “Got AIDS?!” I wanted to make light of the situation and make my friend laugh, which he did. Raucously. Mission accomplished. Though I did hear some disapproving murmurs, as the population of Ptown was decimated by AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s.
When I got over there, the guy who was offering the HIV tests said bluntly, “Actually, yes. I do.”
All my years of practicing Bea Arthur’s deadpan comedic stare came to full fruition in that moment. And, he said, he thought I should apologize.
I refused. Because it was a joke. A bad one—and also a great one that my friends and I still laugh about to this day because we’re monsters—but comedy is hard and dying is easy. And I will not make an AIDS joke here, and how dare you for even suggesting it.
Through Queerty and, later, other outlets, I was able to engage with the gay community and thus able to feel more a part of it. I developed such a deep knowledge and understanding of LGBTQ+ issues, not just in America but also internationally. Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, Russia’s anti-gay propaganda, anti-gay purges in Chechnya. It was a fun few years. But it wasn’t all doom butt-fucking gloom. I got to report on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage in America. I got to write about Africa’s homophobic roots vis-à-vis its history of colonialism using a healthy supply of GIFs. I got to observe the amazing shift in visibility and acceptance of trans folks. I got to interview far too many queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race.
I thought I was being of service to my community, in however small a capacity. But in return I felt used and abused and discarded by my employer. Queerty was based out of San Francisco, so I worked remotely, as did a colleague whose edits somehow often resulted in more errors in my writing than there were to begin with, but I could understand, partially, because he was as burned-out as I was. And had been doing it for longer.
As a writer, I was expected to produce between seven and ten posts a day. I was young and had lucked into becoming a writer, and so I jumped at the chance. They didn’t have to be long or involved posts, but often I got carried away. If I was to put my name on something, I had to be proud of it. And more than once at Queerty I asked for my name to be removed from a story if I didn’t agree with it. I might have been young and inexperienced, but I had a baked-in sense of artistic integrity. Which was why I was broke. That and Queerty worked me to the bone and paid me in marrow. The pressure of writing that much, five days a week, and the stress of my finances burned me out completely. And I had a breakdown.
Online media has been on a steady, and at times rapid, decline for…about as long as I’ve been working in it. I’ve always had excellent timing. Online media presaged the death of print, the most protracted death in history, but a death nonetheless. Smartphones were the final nail in print’s coffin, as print continues to beat at its lid, crying out that it’s still alive, dammit, despite popular belief. Though print media is definitely not long for this earth, online media is experiencing its own demise.
We’re living, undeniably, in the most informed age in history. There is so much information, and it is so readily available, and yet people are still out here being ignorant as fuck. Part of the reason is that there’s too much information—and too much of it is absolute nonsense. There are also too many sources—and too many of them are nonsense. The very idea of truth is up for debate. In this climate, online media sites—whether they be news, entertainment, sports, what have you—emphasize quantity over quality, churning out content, content, content, always, always, always, to grab the wandering attentions of billions of increasingly disinterested peoples.
Conglomerates gobble up websites and brands in order to get a bigger share of ad dollars, yet there always seem to be fewer and fewer ad dollars. This, despite the fact that the proletariat continues to buy things, necessary and otherwise, with its stagnant wages. And then there’s the absurd wealth gap of our late-capitalist, early-apocalypse era. Just look at the salaries of the heads of those conglomerates. And then, for a good laugh, look at the salaries of the people churning out the content. I used to make $24,000 at Queerty. Writing ten posts a day. A decade and some change later, I make more at Entertainment Weekly, but not as much as I’m worth. Or as much as my peers at other outlets, according to industry averages.
In the end, the industry is going down in flames. With the acceleration of artificial intelligence like deepfake videos, the dismantling of facts and reality, and the growing apathy toward all of these things as well as the general fate of the world in which we live, online media isn’t going to be able to compete at all. Maybe online will even beat print to the grave.
That I was making 24K a year writing ten posts a day and living in Brooklyn meant that I eventually got evicted for not paying my rent. This was after I went through two nervous breakdowns at Queerty—which did nothing to help me, certainly not in the compensation department. In fact, Queerty fired me shortly after that second nervous breakdown. So within a month, I lost my apartment and my job.
Still, it was a relief to be free of that job. While it had given me a sense of gay purpose, it took a toll on my well-being.
For a few months I crashed at a friend’s place, collected unemployment, and resuscitated my career through freelancing—which also sucked. At least with a salaried job, I got a regular paycheck, no matter how small. As a freelancer, I found I often had to chase down the money owed to me. The unemployment checks made it possible for me to pursue that particular career angle, because I certainly wasn’t getting paid a living wage. All the while, every outlet I wrote for told me how talented a writer I was and how lucky they were to have me. All nice to hear, but talent is not free. It also shouldn’t be cheap. Literally anyone can write, but not everyone can write well.
Simply put, talent is not valued in the world of online media. That’s why print refuses to die absolutely. There’s still a degree of quality, of substance and regard, associated with print that online cannot and will never achieve. Nor does online media care to. It’s all about ad dollars, which is revenue. My perspective doesn’t matter so much as my ability to churn out content, content, content, always, always, always.
Freelancing eventually got me in the door at Out, and once I got there, I refused to leave. I had never even heard of Queerty when I first started working for them, but of course I knew Out. I grew up with Out—well, around Out. Sneaking around Out. Spotting Out on magazine racks, tucked away in the “Gay” section, along with the nation’s oldest queer mag, The Advocate; the fun and flirty XY; and the porn. But Out, despite its reliance on shirtless white boys on its covers, wasn’t porn. Besides toned abs, their covers also featured queer celebrities and allies who might be tackling a gay role in their upcoming film. It was the most mainstream gay publication, and unlike the other mags and sites, their fashion editorials were on point. Not just some thots in underwear and Speedos by daddy’s pool. It was all fashion and entertainment with some social issues sprinkled throughout, and I wanted to be a part of it.
The key to success, I’ve found over the years, is just sticking around. Sure, talent, drive, ambition, connections, and luck all play their part, but sometimes it comes down to just hanging around long enough. It’s the same with celebrity. Any star experiencing a downturn in their wattage need only stick around long enough to be appreciated by a new generation with a new way of seeing them. Because we all love a comeback. And I’ve had tons. After losing my apartment and my job within weeks of each other, I managed to rebound with a job at Out, first as a contributor, then as an associate editor, and finally as a senior editor. That took the relatively short time of about three years, mostly because there was so much turnover and upheaval at Out and I hung in there long enough to be promoted. While also churning out some good content.
I continued writing my little gay essays about issues affecting me personally, in hopes they would resonate with other fags, and also did the news and pop culture commentary thing, which paid the bills. And the bills were more or less getting paid. Because Out and The Advocate were owned by the same company, Pride Media, and shared the same tiny office in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, their writers often overlapped. During one of the weekly staff meetings, The Advocate’s then editor in chief, Matthew Breen, assigned me a piece on the history of Black Gay Pride, the concept and the events surrounding it, for The Advocate’s big double Pride issue for June/July.
Print stories were assigned at least two months ahead of publication, so I had time. During that time, what was supposed to be the cover story fell through and The Advocate decided to use my story to replace it. It was 2016, and ya gurl had her first magazine cover story. Gay old college dropout me. And for the oldest, most respected gay magazine in all the gay land. And it was about Black shit. The cover featured this beaming Black woman wearing disco ball earrings. I was so proud. For the first time, I was feeling some kind of creative fulfillment. I loved what I was doing, and I was writing for a brand that I respected. It wasn’t an Oscar or anything, but it was something.
But when things are going well, I’ve come to expect the rug to be pulled out from under me at any time. The expectation, the pessimistic anticipation, makes the landing that much easier. Out’s editor in chief at the time was the Syrian British, lantern-jawed Aaron Hicklin, who was, it seemed, constantly being pulled in every other direction. But he would always be in the office for the hectic closing of the print issue every month. Once I started working on the print side of Out in addition to the web side, I got to know and really like Aaron, and he became the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mentor. He encouraged my writing and assigned me stories that challenged me as a writer because he knew I could handle them.
My first cover story for Out was my piece on Moonlight, on its journey from indie darling to top Oscar contender. The mag then flew me out to Los Angeles to interview RuPaul for Out’s twenty-fifth-anniversary cover story.
I had interviewed RuPaul once before, over the phone. It didn’t start well. I hate doing interviews, especially over the phone, because they make my insecurity around speaking that much more pronounced. Pun unintended. Okay, that’s a lie, too, puns are always intended. But I’m not a big “talker.” I usually prefer, and cherish, the sound of silence, and I tend to trip over my words when I do have to talk. I get nervous, no matter whom I’m speaking to, and I rush out the words. And I speak so quietly that I anticipate being asked to repeat myself. I’m a failure even before opening my mouth. I just don’t have the confidence in the spoken word that I have in the written one. This is all to say: the first RuPaul interview was almost a disaster.
It was about some bullshit reality show, Skin Wars, a skin-painting competition between professional makeup artists. I started by asking him what drew him to the show. “A paycheck,” he said flatly. I felt my asshole clench in on itself. The last thing you want as an interviewer is that—one- or two-word answers from someone who, it seems, doesn’t want to be there. As the interview went on, I got more and more nervous. He kept telling me he couldn’t understand me. I got very flustered. But RuPaul, to my surprise, was really patient with me. He could sense that I was having a hard time and told me to just breathe and said that we would start over and just have a regular conversation.
It was better after that. And I even managed to make him laugh. Before we hung up the phone, he had looked me up or something, and of course I was shirtless in the picture he unearthed. He told me, “You’ve got great tits.”
“Thanks,” I said. “They cost enough.”
And he laughed that big, boisterous RuPaul cackle. That laugh made the entire ordeal worth it. I felt what it must be like to be one of those struggling queens on Drag Race who was definitely being eliminated soon but who still felt the warmth of Mama Ru’s glow right before getting sent home to an Ariana Grande song.
I doubt Ru remembered that interaction when I went to interview him in Los Angeles, but I came prepared this time. I’m talking pages of notes, gurl.
The assignment was to walk through Ru’s career, the highs and lows, as his rise coincided with the history of Out. He was even one of Out’s first cover stars, shot in 1994, at the height of his Supermodel of the World phase, by Herb Ritts. We tried to get Ru to shoot a new cover for us for the anniversary issue, but he refused and instead sent over some file glamour shot. We at Out all agreed…it wasn’t the best. As a workaround, we zhuzhed up that file photo and used it as a secondary cover, then broke the bank to get another old Ritts photo—a gorgeous shot starring Ru, gams akimbo—that we all loved. All in all, the twenty-fifth-anniversary issue came out pretty good. But once the magazine’s ownership changed hands, as is far too common in media, prompting a mass exodus of staff, including Aaron, I realized that my tenure there had come to an end.
By the time I left Out, I had grown disillusioned with queer media. Compensation for writers and editors across media is, to put it plainly, hot garbage, but it’s even worse at under-resourced queer outlets. To further exacerbate matters, having come from poverty and never learning how to not be poor, I was terrible with money. Did you know when you’re a 1099 employee, as opposed to a W-2 employee, you have to set aside a portion of your paychecks to pay your taxes at the end of each year since they’re not automatically taken out? Well, if you did know that, hooray for fucking you. Meanwhile, I accumulated thousands in unpaid taxes.
The money, or lack thereof, was one thing, but I also felt like I was limiting myself, both in what I could write and in the audience I was able to reach. So often I had worked really hard on a piece only for it to be seen by a few hundred people, if that. I felt I was toiling away in obscurity for little pay.
I was also not a journalist. I had never claimed to be. I was a writer, first and foremost, and a pop culture junkie second. I did my best to report on serious news, but I would quickly tell you: I’m not the gurl for that.
Moreover, I had grown disillusioned with the queer community in general. The two of us never had that strong a connection to begin with. Through queer media I felt I was getting slightly closer to truly loving my community. I just never felt that love back. While I was reporting about the homophobia in Moscow, I was getting called a nigger back at home. The bars and clubs were never my safe space; that was never my community. And any attempt to find community on the apps was foolhardy at best. You can’t form community with a torso. Or with a bridge, or a meme, or other apparently viable forms of profile pictures. The internet strips us of our humanity, of the humanity we see in others and ourselves.
The apps didn’t replace the bars or make them obsolete, but they did damage the idea of a community. It had less to do with attraction than plain old respect. Saying “no Blacks, no femmes, no fats, no Asians,” etc. didn’t make me see white faggots as part of my community. Nor did their comments make me feel like a part of theirs. If anything, they were the enemy. Soon a few shitty white gays ruined all white gays for me.
The racial divide between Black and white gays is very real. Left to our own devices, we’d inhabit separate worlds and ne’er the twain shall meet. I’ve been to white parties—which are just marketed as regular parties, only with overwhelmingly white iconography, like go-go boys—and they’re majority white with a few non-white gurls sprinkled in between. I’ve been to Black parties—which are marketed as such to emphasize the safety (from whiteness) of the safe space—and there are inevitably a few white gurls sprinkled throughout. They’re the “acceptable” ones. The ones invited to the proverbial barbecue.
But a space where Black and white gays come together organically? That’s rare. Only the most bougie and delusional Black gays always feel comfortable or welcomed in de facto white gay spaces. The rest of us would sometimes just not bother. They either don’t have our music (my queendom for a ratchet turn-up), or their bartenders openly ignore us, or we’re just subject to increased scrutiny by security. For how much things have changed for the LGBTQ+ community, the racial divide is still standing firm. Because, well, America.
But that’s an observation from someone whose main interaction with the gays comes from dating apps, which only recently got rid of racial search filters. Grindr can still feel like Plessy v. Ferguson happened yesterday. That’s not the real world, though. My time for going out in the real, gay world has expired. I may still have a few years left before my sell-by date, but I’ve more or less retired from the streets. When I have gone out, tempted by youthful memories of doing a spread eagle at the Eagle, I’m reminded of how old I am—and not in the “Hi, daddy” way but in the “Isn’t it past your bedtime?” way. While I feel out of place and out of time with the younger queers, I’ve noticed that they actually practice what they preach when it comes to inclusivity. In a way that my generation never did.
Inclusivity of race, gender identity, gender expression, body type. At events, their rainbow flags have the black and brown stripes in solidarity with the QPOC community and the pink, light blue, and white stripes in recognition of the trans, gender-nonconforming, and intersex communities. I mean, the rainbow flag was ugly before, but it’s absolutely hideous now. Hideous but intentionally, even aggressively, inclusive. If I weren’t so cranky, I might even find a spot for myself.
My time with the upcoming legendary children has been brief, as per my intention. I worked with them at Out, and I found them mostly obnoxious know-it-alls lacking the range to back it up. I’ll concede, however, that I’m a grumpy old faggot, and I have been old way before I even hit puberty. But something about deeming Katy Perry iconic really just rubbed me the wrong way. Violently. I mean, “Teenage Dream” is a great song, but it’s fucking Max Goddamn Martin, what the fuck do you expect?
It’s crucial to understand the relationship between a gay man and his diva—or divas, as is often the case. A gay’s diva is his mother, sister, daughter, best friend, and therapist all in one. So to speak negatively of her is to gain an enemy for life. We’ve grown real lax with the word, but that’s an entirely different essay—one I wrote several years ago. I would never disrespect another gay’s diva, but there might at least be a raised eyebrow. Divas, thankfully, are a gay fixation that transcends generations.
These younger fags’ kind of gay is a different gay than mine. It’s less campy, less stereotypical, less broad, with fewer broads (I worry for the character actresses aging into gay iconhood). Their faggotry is informed by social media, Tumblr, Reddit, memes, GIFs, the whole-ass internet. Their youth was far more openly queer than mine, which reduces the reliance on and thus the importance of subtlety. So much of my kind of gay is snarky comebacks, the mother tongue of every gay and gay-coded character from the twentieth century. I had very few examples of how to be gay, whereas these baby kweens had the gay world, past and present, at their grubby little fingertips.
I’m sure older gays thought the same of the gays in my generation. We were definitely obnoxious know-it-alls. But we at least respected them. Loudly making AIDS jokes directly in front of them notwithstanding. I befriended the gays I did because we all had a similar queer sensibility, the same kind of gay. But our gayness was even out of step with our own generation. My friend Dane and I would often joke that we died on the floor of Studio 54 and got reincarnated in this shithole timeline. Simply put, we were the kinds of gays older gays didn’t resent. We kept their memories alive, we worshipped their divas, we quoted their movies, we spoke their language, we knew their history—and without being asked.
The fear of being forgotten. That’s why every gay generation hates the next. That, and they don’t understand them. They don’t understand the hype around their divas, they don’t like their clothes, they disagree with their politics and their methods, they resent being replaced by the younger, hotter models, and, most of all, they envy—and, to a degree, resent—their freedom, the freedom that they helped make possible.
I personally didn’t do shit. I didn’t march, I didn’t vote. I wrote some articles, but that’s about it. I also don’t mind the so-called divas of today. They’re not my divas. I couldn’t pick most of them out of a vocal lineup. But they’re fine. Bops are being had. The less said about this generation’s clothes, the better. And that’s coming from someone actively wearing Crocs…while still side-eyeing other people who are actively wearing Crocs, so, whatever. I also agree with and admire a lot of their politics. I thought you were supposed to get less radical as you got older, but I find the opposite to be true. The more I understand about our capitalist society, the greater my urge is to tear it the fuck down. However, I do find the urge to tear it the fuck down a bit simplistic and think doing so would cause more harm if there’s no plan to effectively rebuild that which has been destroyed. Especially when the rebuilding will fall to the still younger and future generations.
Aging as a gay man is a funny thing. I mean, it’s definitely giving echoes of Death in Venice. Meanwhile, Gustav von Aschenbach, the dude who dies in Venice, is like in his early fifties. That’s prime daddy territory. My favorite territory. I was never into younger guys until I started aging into my daddy years. Now I get the hype. But I still tend to gravitate to a daddy. Some gay men just get better as they age, while some peak early and spend their days melting away on a beach chasing after their metaphorical youth. I’ve always been a late bloomer, so I’m looking forward to getting older, and I am less worried about being replaced by younger, hotter models. Instead, I’m looking forward to scoring the younger, hotter models who, like I was, are into daddies. Aging ain’t nothing but opportunity, baby!
Finally, I don’t resent or envy the freedoms of this upcoming legendary generation, mostly because I got to experience the acquisition of those freedoms. Therefore I value those freedoms all the more. Coming out was also a pretty painless process for me, but that’s in large part due to the sidestepping I did of my family.
Still, I’m not as radical as I’d like to believe. Like a lot of older kweens, I feel some type of way about pronouns and labels.
I went to a few conferences for the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, back when I worked at Queerty. That was the first time I recall being asked what my pronouns were. At each conference, we had to go around and say our names, our pronouns, and for whom we wrote. I was rather flippant about the pronouns, because they were never a big deal for me. I understood even then, however, that they were a big deal to some people, and I respected that. After all, what someone chooses to call themselves is none of my business, and abiding by that is not a big fucking deal. Because why not?
Of course, being a cis man, I can afford to be flippant about pronouns because not only am I unlikely to be misgendered, but if I was, it wouldn’t mean to me the complete denial of who I am as a person.
I also have my issues with labeling my sexuality. I’m gay, I like dudes, I only like dudes, I’m a Kinsey six-plus. I just…really dig dudes. I don’t care for men. As a concept and a reality. They’re awful. But boy are they pretty. I also use “queer” because I don’t always feel like associating myself with other gay men and their stereotypical behavior, notably, their blatant misogyny. It also reflects more of my general outlook on life: queer. I feel similarly about pronouns as I do about labels: I don’t care about them for myself, but I’ll respect others’ decisions to specify them. I hear how some people would prefer no labels at all, which is a great idea in theory, but human beings need to label things in order to understand them. The myriad labels for gender and sexual identities are attempts at fostering understanding.
We just shouldn’t conflate understanding and acceptance, nor do I think acceptance is really all that important. When I was reporting on queer issues, I remember switching out “tolerance” for “acceptance,” in terms of what we were fighting for as a community. Tolerance was the bare minimum. No, we wanted, we demanded acceptance. But I think fighting for mere acceptance was a folly. Acceptance is unnecessary, and so is understanding. Respect is what it all comes down to, personally. If we can all just respect one another’s right to exist, we might stand a chance of salvaging this failing experiment we call the human race.
Acceptance and understanding are nice! They’re great; they make everything better. But I think respect has to come first. Otherwise, you may accept and understand me but still try to take away my right to exist.
This younger generation is lucky in how naïve they are. They grew up knowing what it meant to be free, as a lived experience; they grew up knowing they had options, if not necessarily the right, in being who they want to be. They grew up knowing that they exist, that there were others like them, that in some parts of the world that was okay, even celebrated. They grew up more confident in their right to be alive, and with that knowledge engrained in them, they’re unlikely to relinquish their rights without a fight. And these kids can organize a protest in front of your house, your mama’s house, and your job, all at the same time, in like five minutes.
I guess the only real gripe I have with the younger gays is their goddamn sincerity. Birthed as I was in a cesspool of gay cynicism, the earnestness of this younger generation is jarring. That’s in part where all this overreliance on labels and pronouns comes from, the need to be sensitive to other people’s identities. It’s commendable, really. Just…annoying. It feels a bit like micromanaging personal freedom. And sometimes that leads to missing the forest for the trees when it comes to their selective outrage.
Like, there’s so much to be angry about when it comes to life in America, and for the sake of what’s remaining of my sanity, I won’t go into everything, but those problems can seem so big and unsolvable that it’s easier to focus on, say, a brand’s insensitive ad campaign, because that’s something that can be figured out relatively easily and quickly. But the energy spent on policing social media or Corporate America could instead be spent on burning Corporate America to the ground for destroying the world’s climate, for hoarding mind-boggling amounts of wealth, for exploiting the labor class to within an inch of its life, etc., etc., etc. Again, I won’t go further for the sake of what remains of my sanity. Hint: it’s not a lot!
I can’t, and I sincerely do not want to, tell anyone how to fight for their rights, especially if I’m usually getting high on the sidelines. But as a stoned casual observer, I find it hard not to notice how conservatives thrive by tripping up their liberal nemeses in so-called identity politics, while liberals rely on those very identity politics to win elections and to absolve themselves of failing those who got them elected in the first place because at least the big tent’s got you covered. The gays are an easy target, the transgender community even more so. Targeting vulnerable populations in order to avoid dealing with planet- and future-destroying issues like late capitalism and the wealth gap is like the third lesson they teach in political science. Right behind “Greed is good” and “Always be closing…the democratic process to as many people as possible.”
The thing is, the gays these days…are not so easy to please. The gays have actually never been easy. We’re a real ornery bunch and can get shit done when we’re not fighting or dehumanizing one another. I’ve witnessed firsthand the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other and seemingly back in this country when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. I’ve learned my history, goddammit. I know how the gays have survived and know how the gays will continue to survive, to fight. I do worry sometimes that my constant, reliable criticism of the gays, from my days at Queerty to Out to this book, does more to harm than help the community. When under attack from the Supreme Court or state assemblies or the president, am I also just micromanaging personal freedom? Am I missing the forest for the trees when the forest is reborn fascism?
I mean, maybe? But also, shut up. The true crux of freedom is that no one’s free if we’re not all free. If Black people are marginalized within the queer community, then how can we all fight as a united front against the relentless tyranny of twenty-first-century conservatism? Everyone knows the straights are lame, but the gays should be better than that, should be better than racism, or misogyny, or transphobia among our own ranks. That’s all I’ve been trying to tell these stupid faggots all along. God bless ’em. We’re better than this.
I think the younger gays get it. They’re more aware. About everything. Race. Gender. Class. The things that keep us from being free. And knowing them, they’re going to label the hell out of all of it. But the good side of labels is, once you name an evil, you get that much closer to destroying it. Because you know what you’re fighting. So as much as I don’t relate to, or even like, this younger generation of gays, fuck do I respect those faggots.
I have to, as they’re really the only hope I have left for this world.