Mainstreaming

Believe it or not, this comes up because of Brokeback Mountain (and just how could that happen?). It has to do with mainstreaming gays. You can call it, depending on your ideological stance, assimilation or co-optation, but it seems to be happening.

I'm actually of two minds about the whole phenomenon. On the one hand, acceptance by the main culture is necessary: it's called survival. There is no real reason we need to continue to be marginalized, in some cases hunted. (I'm not talking about the rabids here: they're fading; all the noise is just their frenzy at the realization that their time is not only past, it never really happened. They're merely the latest manifestation of one of the nastier streaks in the American psyche.) And we have to face the reality that most gay men (and lesbians, it would seem) are really just like everyone else in this country: middle-class, ready, willing and able to become "normal" and even complacent, a little self-absorbed, and chubby. (I am outraged that, even in the midst of middle-age, I have to succumb to wearing pants with a 32-inch waist. Lo, how the mighty have fallen! I take solace in the fact that love-handles are sexy.)

But I miss the difference. For a brief moment, there was the beginning of something very special and good among gay men: sensual, sexual, spiritual, yeasty and vivid. Our own poets, priests and shamans were making something that I thought then we as a nation really needed (and by "nation" I mean all of us in this impossible muddle called "America"). Subsequent history has proven me right: the plague happened, the response was what you'd expect from a nation that can't deal with reality very well, the impulse was redirected, and the national we has gotten really boring and venal. (If you don't think the two can go together, just look at the White House.)

One of my favorite movies of all time is a short called The Dead Boys Club, from the beginning of the plague. It's a simple story -- friends gather for the funeral of an AIDS victim -- and really not particularly substantial, except that it holds the beginning of a mythology: the narrative is intercut with scenes of the dead protagonist at the clubs. (He actually does become the protagonist, even though he only appears in memory.) I tried to explain to someone (a straight friend) what it was like, to be one of a thousand men on a dance floor. It's something beyond words -- as I recall, the phrase I used was "beyond tribal." It's not the same as being one of a thousand mixed couples (been there, done that). There's a particular energy that happens (and I know it happens even without drugs, which I don't do and never have), and it's not like any other energy going.

I think we also began to define a new standard of morality. It had a lot of rough edges at that point (well, we had no guidelines, the only rules we'd ever learned didn't fit, and we were kids flailing around trying to figure it all out), but I think at its core was something solid: a sexual morality based not on who we slept with, but how we treated them, which can't help but feed back into the way you approach the world in general. It was a sort of morality that was beginning to work its way past the traditional power games because it was a morality coming from people who had a legitimate (and traditional) expectation of dealing from positions of equality. It was built on a distinctly personal interchange without the sexual politics and without the baggage of traditional of male/female relationships. (The scene in Brokeback Mountain (aha!) in which Ennis threatens Jack over suspected infidelity and Jack refuses to tolerate it is a good, concise illustration of what we were having to do: most of us only had the roles we had learned growing up straight (which everyone does), which on the one hand dictated that we did not submit to that kind of control, and on the other dictated that we exercise that kind of control.) There was probably a certain amount of synergy between gay lib and women's lib in this regard -- heading toward the same place, or places very close together, but starting from two radically different points. (It's also very interesting to note that Ennis' objections were not to Jack having an affair with a woman -- that was acceptable and, indeed, even expected -- but to having an affair with another man, because that intruded on the -- call it the "sanctity" of their relationship.)

Of course, in real life at that point, discovering that your boyfriend was cheating on you with a woman would have been devastating. We had bought into enough garbage from the mainstream culture to feel that we couldn't compete against a woman. We have, I hope, learned better.

This sounds all very nebulous, and it is something that's hard to pin down. The development of a specifically gay culture is well-documented, and in some areas has been studied beyond exhaustion; the shift to our becoming just a component of mainstream culture -- a target audience -- is less well understood. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting article on it that I haven't fully digested yet. He welcomes the idea, apparently; I don't, particularly, except that, as I stated above, I think a certain amount of assimilation is necessary, politically, at least. Think of it as camouflage. We're good at that.

I think the fact that our most vociferous critics have very little idea of what morality is and on what it's based indicates that we were on the right path in a lot of ways -- we really had something solid to offer. I'd really hate for us all to move to the suburbs and start driving SUVs. We were special. I like being special. I love the idea of a country where everyone has something special about them, where we all have differences that make us all richer. Perhaps that, once again, could start to be the ideal, once the wildmons have finally died off.

This is a topic that will probably surface from time to time, as I think more about it. In the meantime, how about some feedback?