EMBRACE GAY MALE DIFFERENCE!
The tragedy of the decimation which the HIV epidemic wrought on the American gay male population is quite obvious to me as a survivor. I am part of the Gay Liberation generation which changed gay male urban life from a series of police raids and a constant likelihood of public harassment to a life of urban dignity. It did not stop with gay parades. Gay men took over large urban spaces and transformed them from slums into attractive and vibrant neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods have subsequently become the chic villages for yuppie straight couples with children.
Boston's South End of the 1970's was transformed from a deteriorating conglomerate of ethnic enclaves which had been abandoned by upwardly mobile descendants of Greeks, Syrians, Irish and African-Americans. As Boston's eventual gay male epicenter in the 1980's and early 1990's, it hosted bars, restaurants and cafes. It had a vibrant street life day and night. Tawdry rooming houses gave way to spiffy rehabs of brick townhouses into single family homes and condominium apartments. Clean, tree-lined streets and small central parks in wide avenues replaced trashy stoops and weedy dumping grounds. Fountains were restored in these urban oases. Stoops became potted gardens.
Yes, my gay brothers, this is part of our legacy, our contribution to society. We have been artists, renovators, urban pioneers. Our liberation did not aspire to suburban marriage with cloned children. That was what kinder conservative heterosexuals had always wanted for us ... to be just like them. But gay men, those who know their nature and desires, are not just like straight men. And that is a good thing.
The HIV epidemic killed us off and killed off our blossoming urban culture. The gay men born into the post-HIV world had lost their future elders. The gay movement eventually became the LGBTQ+ confusion we now see at the hands of lesbian feminists and socially conservative gay men. The transformation went far deeper than politics and lobbying for gay marriage. It was an eradication of gay male culture, aided in part by the replacement of real gay villages by digital dating. The pivotal place of the gay male bar in the gay culture was never replaced. We were successfully killed off and isolated. This was a social conservative dream fulfilled.
The easily perceptible rage of LGBTQ+ people who identify with the Far Left is in part the sublimated rage of a castrated gay male culture. That culture celebrated male beauty and male forcefulness. Its lifeblood was sex which was the fertile ground of developing community relationships. The reason gay villages were vibrant and relatively safe was simple: Their citizens knew one another through intricate threads of sexuality and changing partnerships. Sexuality in gay villages was accepted as a valid currency with which any newcomer could join in the community.
Gay male sexuality prior to HIV demanded a certain level of physical self-respect and fitness. Sexual pursuit was competitive. It occurred in gay society at bars and other venues. It entailed becoming educated about human nature and human interactions. It was socialization through sexuality.
The deepest tragedy of the HIV epidemic was its pollution of joyous sexuality among liberated gay men. Today's pressure among gay men to date and act like heterosexuals looking to marry is a gross perversion of eons of homosexual existence. Our deepest traditions are rooted in our sexual fluidity and its bringing together unshackled minds as well as bodies. Our gay male history is not the heterosexual history of bigotry and fixation on genetic heritage. That is heterosexual tradition, which has been foisted upon us by politicians, lobbyists and media.
Gay male identity reached its peak in the late 1970's in the U.S. ... and perhaps across the world. I believe it may slowly recover from the decimation of HIV and those who have misdirected gay maleness to mimicked straight marriage, having children and joining the military. They have subtly exploited fear of HIV to shame gay men back into a new closet, a suburban-style closet, where they pretend to be like their straight acquaintances in order to 'deserve' tolerance and maybe some modicum of respect. This is not liberation. This is surrender. And too much of gay male culture, once a source of all that was creative and ground-breaking in so many areas of civilization, has been transformed in an annual parade and obsession with gender confusion.
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