I answered a few questions for a local high school student recently. He was working on an essay about queer culture in the Pacific Northwest and was looking for me to “provide a much-needed counterbalance to the somewhat one-sided mainstream of contemporary queer culture.”
Since I worked on my answers for a couple of hours, I figured I might as well post them here.
1. Why do you think the gay community here has formed, for the most part, a homogenous mainstream culture?
The gay community here has formed a homogeneous mainstream culture in the Pacific Northwest as it has elsewhere because “out-of-the-closet” homosexuality as we know it happened during the media age and what I would call Gay Pride Culture reached its peak in the mid-to-late 1990s, during the dawn of the Information age. I have lived in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland and York, PA. The gay scenes are virtually interchangeable. Do you know how many leather bars have been named “The Eagle?” Google it. There is or has been one in every almost every major metropolitan area. I’ve received emails from men in Australia, Berlin and Great Britain who have the same complaints about the gay community that I’ve had. The behavior is the same, the culture is the same, and as far as I can tell the bars even look the same. This may also be in part because single homosexual men tend to be mobile and have a lot of discretionary income. They travel from city to city, from country to country. Tom of Finland was obviously from Finland, but he ended up in LA. There are circuit boys who plan their vacations around moving parties and special events that take place all over the country and the world.
But, in a nation where you can go to the mall and find the same stores in every city, is homogeneity really so surprising? Thanks to globalists and global corporations, the world is getting smaller and unique cultures are being rapidly absorbed into the global monoculture.
One difference between the scenes in different cities has to do with the varying population of homosexual males. It becomes a question of scale. In Los Angeles, there are so many people that the city can support many subcultural niches, and it is possible to be part of one scene and have little experience with another. The gay rockers and bears and indie rock hipsters don’t end up in West Hollywood bars with the fashion queens very often. But in a place like Portland, where the total population is fifteen times that of Los Angeles, the gay community is going to be smaller and the marketplace isn’t going to be able to sustain as many dedicated niche bars, club nights, etc. Members of the community are going to intermingle more often, and the network of potential partners is going to link almost everyone eventually. The real “diversity” among homosexual men happens when they take part in that small community less, and spend more time in heterosexual scenes and environments that the gay community has not, will not or cannot effectively appropriate for their own purposes.
I am of the opinion that there really isn’t much diversity among gays regardless. Gay “diversity” is like The Village People. You can all wear different goofy outfits as long as you all sing the same goofy song. The “diverse” gay subcultures tend to be either sexual fetish subcultures or music subcultures. Politically and intellectually there really isn’t that much diversity there or it is only in matter of degree. Gays generally stand together and believe the same things, at least when the cameras are rolling. Real, public diversity of opinion is not tolerated. If you don’t believe it, read some of Androphilia’s nastier reviews on my Press page.
2. Why is homosexuality now associated with femininity when, for instance loggers, some of the most masculine of men, regularly engaged in homosexual sex in logging camps?
Well…as I wrote in my first book, Androphilia, the idea that homosexuality and effeminacy are one and the same has been around for a long time. It certainly didn’t start in the Pacific Northwest. There are many reasons why effeminacy is associated with homosexuality; the most obvious has to do with a sort of vulgar but understandable confusion heterosexual men have about other men who “take it like a woman.” However, let’s just focus on one reason that has more to do with how homosexual men are perceived in the mainstream media and mainstream culture.
Masculinity seeks status through action and achievement; masculine men generally avoid seeking attention for attention’s sake. They intuitively understand that drawing attention to yourself for now reason makes you a target, and draw attention to themselves very selectively. If your school is even remotely normal, you will be able to observe your male peers gathering into packs with a few clowns, some quieter guys, and an alpha or two who get the most attention because they dominate the others.
Natural effeminacy is probably better understood as being “masculinity-challenged” or having difficulty finding common ground with or successfully socializing with overtly masculine peers. It may be a quietness, an emotional or particularly empathic character, a delicateness, a clumsiness, being risk-averse, being physically weaker, or having interests that are not traditionally masculine. There are certain areas where men excel –math and visual spatial ability, for instance. A male who is more verbal may be judged to be, or feel himself to be, somewhat effeminate. A lot of these differences seem to work themselves out in adulthood, so long as the stigmatized adolescents are not too emotionally scarred by accusations of effeminacy. Plenty of straight men are actually regarded by their peers as being effeminate.
However, flamboyant effeminacy seeks attention. Extremely flamboyant homosexual males revel in attention, and boy do they get it. They make themselves into walking freak shows, and when they enter a room, everyone knows it. Women love them and men make fun of them, but they get enough emotional support from females that they take the bad with the good. To a flamboyant effeminate, especially now that attacks on homosexual males are generally prosecuted, any publicity is good publicity. Masculine homosexual men don’t seek that kind of attention almost by definition, so we don’t associate them with homosexuality. I’ve met a few homosexual men in the Pacific Northwest who were involved in law enforcement, and there’s just a world of difference between their behavior and the behavior of big queens. They will fade into any group of men successfully; queens won’t even try. If they’re not the center of attention, they go find a group where they can be.
This dynamic plays out on a much larger scale in the media. Masculine homosexual men fade into the other groups of men; they’re virtually invisible. Flamboyant effeminates are entertaining, attention seeking clowns—minstrels who are useful to the modern media. They go on TV and have tea party talk with women, where they giggle about boys and fashion and hairstyles and celebrities. These are the most prominent gay figures in our culture. I’m sure if you think about it you can name them. Perez Hilton. Steven Cojocaru. Jack on Will & Grace. Queer Eye. Oscar fashion commentators. Locally, we have Byron Beck. (He’s more low key and thoughtful in person, but he does the cutesy gay tea party thing for a living). Most Gay Pride parades could be described as little more than parades of flamboyant gay males who want desperately to be looked at.
3. Has the gay culture progressed as far as furthering its own causes, or has it become self-defeating?
Well there’s gay culture, and I don’t know if gays even know what the purpose of that is—aside from “visibility at any cost.” And then there’s gay activism. I think you mean gay activism so I’ll stick with that and say that it’s hard to say how much gay activists are even responsible for. Surely, they have achieved something. Homosexuality has been decriminalized, and that was the one major inarguable injustice. In my lifetime, and I’m only 35, homosexual men were being locked up and forced to register as sex offenders. That was bullshit. But as far as other things go, well, our society has become so sexually permissive on every level that it’s hard to tell what gay activists have done, and what has happened as a result of say, MTV, or the Internet—which desensitizes everyone to the idea of homosexuality. Homosexuality was rarely even discussed in America 70 years ago. Now it’s right there on everyone’s screen.That major difference is impossible to measure.
I think much of gay activism, especially the work of GLAAD, is self defeating because it is more about cultural Marxism and thought-policing. GLAAD isn’t just concerned with what happens to homosexuals or with what they can do, it is primarily concerned with scolding people and controlling what is said and thought about homosexuals in the media and elsewhere. This emphasizes the stereotype that homosexual men are hyper-sensitive crybabies who are so fragile they can’t be picked on. It’s all a bunch of melodramatic whining about hurt feelings and potential hurt feelings. They keep homosexual men victims because their organization is dependent on homosexual victimhood. Never forget that activist organizations, like any company, are filled with self-interested people who want to rise up through the ranks, expand their power, or at the very least keep their jobs.
The homosexual men who are able to successfully socialize with straight men—the other 95% of the male population—are the ones who learn how to shrug off coarse language and take a few lumps. Men resent and despise other men who are hypersensitive, who nag them and force them to use special PC language. That’s a great way to find yourself outside any male “circle of trust.” You can’t cry or throw a hissy fit any time someone says “faggot”-especially if it’s not even directed at you. If you tell men how they’re allowed to speak, you will get lumped in with their mothers, schoolteachers , girlfriends and wives. If you act like a woman, they will treat you like one.
4. Lastly, what do you make of the Pacific Northwest’s queer culture? (any aspect you care to comment on is fine)
Well, I think I covered a lot of that above, but one oddball thing is that the word “queer” is slightly more prevalent here than it is elsewhere. I always associate the word “queer” with queer theory, feminist theory, gender studies and maybe William Burroughs. I expect to see it in the same paragraph with the words “misogyny,” “dialectic,” “deconstructing,” “heteronormativity” and “masculinities.” I think of it as an academic concept embraced by a small disparate group of outsiders who are to the left of the gay mainstream but still very much a part of it. Like…“radical faeries.” But here in Portland, even the mayor uses queer for personal identification occasionally. That’s a bit, well…“queer.”
