Best of 2009: REWIND: Why I Reject Gay Culture
Photo by Hans from the TNG Flickr Pool
The recent Washington Post article featuring TNG co-founder Zack did a decent job of charactarizing what we are trying to do with this site. However, it got one aspect wrong: that TNG is a resource for young people. The article impled that our efforts are for the Gen-Y and “Millennials” but that implication misses the mark. Two of TNG’s three co-founders are in their 30s. You don’t have to be young and just coming out to want more from live than what mainstream gay culture has to offer.
Let’s first get out of the way the fact that being “gay” and being a part of gay culture are two different things. Being “gay” or “queer” or “lesbian” means that you are attracted to members of the same sex. Being a part of gay culture means you accept and go along with a monolithic, single-minded “culture” mostly composed of people who are attracted to the same sex. A culture that, unlike all other minority cultures, you aren’t born into. You have to go seek it out.
Unfortunately, at least in my experience, it isn’t very easy to break into this gay culture. Firstly, it’s very male oriented, and white. If you are a lesbian or a person of color, you’re already have a few strikes against you when it comes to acceptance by greater gay culture. However, us white guys don’t necessarily have it all that easy, either.
Somehow, gay culture has evolved into a very homogenious and anti-intellectual stage show. People who pride themselves on their indiviuality often have a hard time fitting in. You have to look a certain way, like certain music, be interested in the lives and times of celebrities, and dumb yourself down. A friend of mine went to a grad student mixer while at UC Berkeley a few years ago, and an attractive young man walked up to him, asking “So, what do you study?” When my friend replied that he was getting a PhD in mechanical engineering, the other guy replied, “Well, we obviously won’t have anything to talk about” and walked away with a flourish. If a gay male graduate student at a relatively elite university judges another for his scientific and intellectual pursuits, something is very wrong with our “culture.”
My personal experiences growing up have provided me with a very suspicious nature. I experienced a lot of rejection in elementary school and junior high school. It wasn’t until my sophmore year of high school that I actually made a good group of supportive friends who helped me feel that I had something of value to contribute to the world. Up until then, I was always the butt of jokes. Always the one told he had yellow teeth by his locker neighbor. The one picked last in gym class, only to be horrified to learn that we were playing two-on-two shirts vs. skins basketball, and I was a “skin.” Growing up with two domineering older brothers who were very athletic, and who equated athleticism with masculinity, the uncoordinated kid I used to be was often called “gay” before I even realized what the word meant.
In order to survive that sort of childhood, we social rejects, we kids-picked-last-in-gym-class had to develop defense mechanisms. We built walls. We focused on music, art, academics, solitary walks in the woods. We learned to find nuggets of self esteem wherever we could find them: long hair-coming sessions with mom on her bed; small pep talks from encouraging teachers; other reject friends who, when compatible dysfunctions could be found, provided a few months of friendship that quelled the urge to commit suicide or start planning fratricide or a Columbine event.
One thing that my mother used to tell me when I was feeling down and out is that I shouldn’t need the acceptance of a group in order to love myself. Of course, she couched this conversation in Catholicism and told me to reach out to the love of Jesus. However, I was able to glean some truths from her council: Be yourself, love yourself, and find happiness. I took that to heart and focused on pursuits that made me genuinely happy, having faith that one day my self-development would make me a person who was likable, or maybe even lovable. Part of this process was to stop trying to be liked by people who didn’t like me. I stopped making efforts to endear myself to my brothers and their common friends, the neighborhood kids whose post-pubescent interestes began to diverge from mine, the classmates who deigned to share their notes with me when I missed a day of school. I learned to stop begging for acceptance from people that didn’t want me.
Fast-forward a decade or so: After 5 years in a very sheltered same-sex relationship, I came out to a whole new world called gay culture. At the age of 27, I made my first gay friends with whom I shared very few interests besides an attraction for men. These new friends accepted me very tentatively, unsure of who I was or what I had to offer. And within a year, I experienced the same sort of complete and utter rejection from them that I’d experienced over and over again as a kid. Somehow, I’d learned how to be myself as a person, how to get my needs met when it came to friendships and socialization, but I forgot it all the moment I tasted this potential acceptance by this new group of gay guys. And I set myself up for a crash so hard that, at one point, I had to pretend that poor quality Thai food was the reason I was crying while eating drunken noodles with a friend who’d screwed me over.
After such an incredible year, a year like a rollercoaster of ups and downs, side turns and queasy stomachs, complete 180s and 360s, I remembered what I’d learned as a kid that got me through grades 7 through 12. I retrenched myself emotionally, and repealed all of the exemptions that I’d made for the sake of being more open to people. I redoubled all the laxed standards to which I’d formerly held others. I picked myself up and started seeking out quality people outside the gay mainstream who also needed community and were sick of seeking it from all the dumb white aberzombies. And I was successful. Within a year, I had a good group of friends who, beforehand, all felt like social rejects from the gay scene. Finally, we felt accepted by each other, and that was enough.
The title of this post “Why I Reject Gay Culture” is actually a misnomer. I didn’t reject it. I attempted to embrace it, even lowering the high standards that my tough childhood necessitated for self preservation. I tried.
Gay culture rejected me.
To all of you who perceive our effort with TNG as an attack on gay culture, you are the lucky ones. You’ve been able to find comfort and acceptance in a mainstream culture that accepts you for who you are. Good for you. Roll with it. But please don’t feel threatened by rest of us, those of us who want more out of life than what mainstream gay culture has to offer; those of us who want to be friends with the entire spectrum of queer culture, including women, people of color and transfolk; those of us who believe in self-actualization instead of self-destruction and self-deprecation.
Please realize, mainstream gay guys, that we aren’t rejecting you. We’re simply reacting to you having rejected us. If it feels like rejection, well, maybe now you finally know what we’ve been through.
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Great piece!
When confronted with aspects of the mainstream gay culture that I don’t agree with, I find the best philosophy is to just take those aspects and reject them. And when looking to make friends I try to seek out people who do the same thing.
Honey, i’m sorry to tell you, but you’ve failed in this essay. You never really define what you think “mainstream gay culture” is. Being rejected by some guys is not really a good reason to dismiss a whole class of people.
Personally, I don’t even think there is a “mainstream” gay culture anymore, if there ever was one. I have experiences, sexual and personal and professional, with plenty of non-male, non-twink, and/or non-white gay people, and i can’t really say that there was any one thing united them, other than having same-sex relationships.
Again I generally agree with the sentiment. Mainstream gay culture is stultifying, and it so often seems like “all the cool kids” have no time for someone who isn’t ready to dance to their disco beat. Want to be part of mainstream gay culture in DC? Then make sure you have plenty of Madonna and Britney and Lady Gaga on rotation, go to the gym daily, and wear tight t-shirts and low-rise jeans before going out for cocktails at 18th&U diner or dancing at Town. Also, make sure you are under 35 or at the very most 40.
However, and I ask this in all sincereness, because I’m not sure of the answer: can we reject mainstream gay culture without rejecting the mainstream, bourgeois gay people themselves? If culture is the product of the people espousing it, can we still feel brotherhood toward those whose culture we reject?
The culture isn’t the product of the participants. It’s the product of a commercial engine trying to sell us products. Totally rejectable.
Mainstream anything is usualy pretty disgusting in the modern age. I rejected being part of the “in crowd” when I realized how stupid most of those people are. They are easy to manipulate. They will do anything the coolest people do. I became one of those people that everyone followed and ended up becoming a monster. I got everyone to hate the people I hate (I’ve learned not to hate anyone since then) and even made some people cry with the supprt of most of the people in my grade. After a short time I saw how quickly I had changed and how short sighted all my “friends” were. (I also wasn’t into their artistic tastes for pop music and well-marketed Hollywood films. I like alternative rock and Indy films where people are alowed to be more creative.) I left them and made best friends with the people who’s feelings I had hurt. The “in-crowed” does whatever is cool without thinking once about morals. I think the only reason anyone should be rejected from a group of people is for very poor conduct, like the conduct I displayed. Now, I only attack prejudice intolerant people.
Well, this is a discussion we have had many many many times and we tend to agree. I say tend because I think the somewhat obsession you have with a definition in rejection is not really appropriate. I say this mostly because you are part of the gay culture I know and live in. Yeah I have and do party in the mainstream places with what would be thought of as mainstream people, but I also have alternative (I hate this word) gay friends, like you :), and even Josh is not mainstream, he makes fun of house music and likens to anyone who listens to it as a circuit boy. I can enjoy the best of what all world has to offer me.
So it isn’t that I disagree with you, and you know that. It is the kind of sour grapes feeling I always get when I read and listen to you talk about this. I am sorry if that comes across as harsh.
Moreover, I think there is nothing wrong with having a “culture” that has nothing to do with women, most of the lesbians I know are happy to not have men at their events. It just seems to be the way.
I do however reject that idea that gay “culture” is not racial integrated. Man do I see all kinds when I go out and I mean it, sometimes I feel like I live in the UN and I am happy about it. I know so many different kinds of people who are gay. I think maybe the only ones I don’t know are Arabs, now that I think about it.
I don’t think gay “culture” rejected you, I think perhaps what you see around you are gay idiots just like there are straight idiots who fall so easily into a niche and stay there. They want it easy. Just observe how people so readily want to become reality tav stars. They don’t want to do anything, just give me fame please.
You, me, and a lot of the people we know do NOT want it easy! We prefer to live thoughtful and awake lives where we make the most of our decisions and “ways”. We take this all very seriously – because you do not participate in something you do not take seriously or vice versa. This purposeful existence takes effort and so few people want to put in any effort at all.
What I am saying is that you are not (or should not be) railing against mainstream gay culture, but more against stupid people. And, in the end, don’t we all just want stupid people to go away no matter what race/creed/color/orientation?
From the beginning, we’ve defined “mainstream gay culture” as predominantly white, male and anti-intellectual. Therefore yes, Nathan, I am railing against stupid people.
Guys:
Great job! I am so happy to see that there are others that are aware, and that there is an alternative for those of us who don’t fit in gay culture. How do I join you in extending something like this in my city?
I don’t know how you define “gay culture”. Everywhere I look around this site is gay culture. Are you saying you don’t want to call this gay culture? Why? I don’t get it.
There is no mainstream gay culture. There is mainstream culture that absorbs parts of gay culture and spits out a caricature. It’s unfortunate when gay people think that’s their culture.
Gay is a cultural identity. It isn’t simply who you are attracted to. Homosexual, bisexual are sexual orientations. Don’t try to define it. It just is.
Michael,
Exactly 7 out of these 12 paragraphs could’ve been taken directly from my life, and another 2 I relate strongly to.
Of the 7, specifically:
“…provided a few months of friendship that quelled the urge to commit suicide.”
“…but I forgot it all the moment I tasted this potential acceptance by this new group of gay guys.”
I’ve come in my time to the same conclusion, that I’d lowered my standards and made exemptions for the sake of being more social and friendly. I’m finding it serves me much more to be picky about who I call a friend, and on whom I spend my time & energy.
Also I’ve seen your Gravatar before. Have you commented on youtube, on Michael Buckley or Jay Brannan?
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