To understand gay male culture as defined by style is to alter our sense of its meaning. It has to stand out, or stand apart from the world as it is given, in order to qualify as style. Style itself represents a deviation from the ordinary. “Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a ‘style,’ ” Susan Sontag wrote in 1965. And that means carving out space in opposition to straight society. It is an expression of difference through style - a way of carving out space for an alternate way of life. The last obstacle to complete social integration is no longer gay sex or gay identity, but gay culture.Īnd yet gay culture is not just a superficial affectation. Gay men who play by the rules of straight society and conventional masculinity, and who don’t aspire to belong to any other way of life, are more acceptable, to themselves and to others. (Of course, those sorry gay men in their 30s and 40s, who allegedly cling to an outmoded, passé version of gay culture, must be the very same people who, only a few years earlier, were those pioneering gay teenagers, taking their first innocent steps in a brave new world without homophobia, ignorant of gay culture and indifferent to it.)
At least since the 1970s, gay men have been drawing invidious generational comparisons between gay boys in their teens and 20s - modern, liberated, enlightened, untouched by gay culture, “utterly indistinguishable from straight boys” and “completely calm about being gay” (as Andrew Holleran put it in his 1978 novel, “Dancer From the Dance”) - and older gay men, fanatically attached to an outdated gay culture and convinced that it is the only gay culture there is. The problem with such a claim - besides its denial of the Lady Gaga phenomenon - is that we’ve heard it for so many decades now that it can’t possibly be true.
For today’s gay men, life is composed of PTA meetings, church socials and Nascar races. But all that foofy stuff looks irrelevant to modern gay men, who don’t see themselves as belonging to a separate culture, let alone such a queeny one.