What does it mean to be post-gay?

I’m missing the Pride festivities this year.   I’ll be in Mykonos, Greece, having a more private Pride celebration—my 10^th anniversary with my partner—along with close friends and family.

Last year’s Pride month had me thinking about growing older in the Gay community. This year, I’m stuck on the concept of “the post-gay generation,” which has gotten some chatter lately.

It’s come up through reactions to the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s 1980s AIDS saga The Normal Heart, or—more to the point—the revival of Kramer calling out the younger generation as “tragic” and “apathetic.” Then, there was the responding, angry “Open Letter to Larry Kramer” by J. Ricky Price from the youngish queer media site TheNewGay.net.

To be precise, Kramer and Price don’t use the term post-gay generation per se in their interviews or letters, but the issues and questions surrounding this new identity are evident through their exchange.

Are Gen Y-gays unappreciative of the extraordinary work their forebears accomplished to make life better for them?

Do Baby Boomer-gays place too much emphasis on sexual identity and politics, to the exclusion of the many interesting facets of being an individual?

Is it necessary to identify as gay, at all times, first and foremost, to push the civil rights movement along?

Are young gay men who prefer to stay outside of gay politics and the gay community feeble assimilationists, and likely self-hating?

As a Gen Xer, my views on all these debates are, predictably, somewhere in the middle.

But first, what does post-gay mean?  According to the Urban dictionary:

The notion that homosexuals should be able to define their identities by something other than sexual preference.

OK.   Doesn’t sound so new, or terrible for that matter.   This is the Urban Dictionary, after all, so I’ll even forgive the specious, antiquated terminology like “homosexual” and “sexual preference.”   I believe people should be able to identify however they want, and if a young man sees his gayness as secondary or tertiary to say…being an artist…or being Black…or having an eclectic mix on his iPod…that seems perfectly reasonable.

The problem I see with the term post-gay—-which is the same problem I see with “post-racial” or “post-feminist”—-is it seems to imply putting something in the past, as though certain experiences, histories, or I guess identities are no longer important or relevant.

I could but won’t argue the relevancy issue, since I think it’s pretty obvious.   Instead, I’ll frame the post-gay debate in the context of our broader post-identity culture (which is not the sole creation of Gen Y).

We live in a world where becoming skin color “blind” is considered to be a state of enlightenment.   Our most visible female politicians may invoke sexism when their qualifications are questioned, but their platforms say nothing about promoting the status of women.   It makes sense that many gay men are gravitating toward “neutral” identities that make navigating the decreasingly identity-conscious, decreasingly community-conscious world easier.   It’s not precisely assimilation, I don’t think, or social conformity.   It’s more about individualism trumping group identity.

There’s something sad in that, but every generation has demanded the right to identify on its own terms, not just to spite their older detractors, but because that’s how we find ourselves in the world.

At 18, I was a retro Dead Head.   Five years later I was a gay-liberationist graduate student in Doc Martens.   At 41, I’m a gay writer slash social worker cum humanist-atheist cum social justice enthusiast.   Maybe our identities get longer the older we get.   I’d never use the label post-gay.   Maybe gay-plus.

andrewjpeterswrites.com goes dark next week due to vacation!!

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