Gay

The word "gay" is turning into one of those words that has all sorts of meanings. Not so surprising, given the imprecision with which we use language. Don't misunderstand -- I don't think we always need to be so precise, and even if we are, half the time people still don't understand what we're saying.

This is sparked by my contention, in the Brokeback Mountain review that I mentioned a few days ago, that it was not a "gay" film. Thinking about it this many months later, I still hold to that position.

Pre-Stonewall, the accepted designation for man who love men, if one was being polite, was "homosexual." There were a lot of things that went into that term, first and foremost being that it was considered a pathology. "Homosexual," to most people these days who are at all au courant, denotes a behavior. There are those, of course, who cling to that designation, mostly the gay bashers on the far right -- Wildmon, Perkins, Sheldon, Dobson, the usual suspects. They will not use the term "gay" because "gay" is a person. They don't want gay men to be seen as people. (They're not quite so vociferous about lesbians, but that's not so hard to understand. For a nice, hard-line patriarch, it doesn't really matter what women do.) It's that simple: if they start referring to gays as "gay," then they take on an identity, they become part of a culture, real people, and that doesn't fit the agenda. The agenda is there, of course, but if they allow that gay men, in particular, are individuals, all too human, who are doing the best they can with the hand they've been dealt, how can they transform them into sick, sinful, perverted predators?

"Gay" is an identity. It is a culture, a social context, a framework within which people can build lives. It may very well be a temporary thing, a culture that was necessary for a reviled and disenfranchised group to participate in as they established their legitimacy. Frank Browning, in A Queer Geography, notes that younger men are impatient with the designation and the separateness that it implies, and perhaps there really is, in some quarters, a post-gay identity developing. I'm not sure whether I approve. Assimilation just makes finding a boyfriend that much harder.

My reason for that is not just that I'm an aging gay man who came of age as that culture was being forged, but also that I believe that one of the most important things we have to offer the world is our difference. We may very well be more creative than most straights, more inventive, more adventurous -- we are certainly more colorful. I treasure those aspects of Pride celebrations that the religious nuts and our own political organizations decry: the drag queens, the leatherfolk, loud music, nearly naked dancers. Otherwise, why bother? I don't need to spend three or four hours in the sun watching a gaggle of politicans waving at me.

So, Jack and Ennis were not "gay." There was no such identity at that point. We're much too apt to project our contemporary attitudes back to inappropriate places -- a correspondent remarked that Alexander was gay. I think if you could go back in time and explain to him what that meant, he'd think you'd lost your mind. In his context, that identity had no meaning.

It does have meaning now. Like all such meanings, this one is elusive of definition, because the context has become so much broader than its origin -- I know straight men who are very gay, and gay men who are not gay at all.

So, what is my conclusion? I don't know that I have one. I'm not even sure I need one.

Maybe you have one.