THE GAY MALE DIASPORA

The Castro, San Francisco, Street Fair, 1976

I traveled to Paris when I young. It was 1973. Back then, a poor high school teacher like me could scrape together the money for a couple of weeks in Europe. My cousin was studying at the Sorbonne and teaching English in the City of Lights. Tommy was also gay, four months younger than me. Our mothers were sisters. Tommy's story is one for another time.

I slept on a cot in Tommy's small condo in the chic Jardin des Plantes district. It was lovely, except for Jean-Didier, Tommy's sadistic bourgeois lover, a confirmed hater of all things American. That included me, by the way. 

I was an active participant in Boston's large gay male community, a true community based on Beacon Hill in those days. Charles Street, now a boiler-plate international shopping mall, was the spine of Beacon Hill's gay ghetto. The local Unitarian pastor opened one of Boston's oldest churches on Charles Street to the gay community. 

We maintained an active community center in the church's basement. During Boston's short summers, we set up an outdoor cafe adjacent to the church. This supported the gay newspaper, mimeographed on a hand-cranked machine in the basement weekly. Cranking the machine was one of my volunteer jobs. The cafe also supported regular dances and the annual parade down Charles Street.

The lack of a definable gay ghetto in Paris baffled me. Gay Liberation had not evolved in France in 1973 as it had in coastal America. Gay bars were still seedy holes without signage, like the speakeasy of American Prohibition. Gay men met in risky outdoor venues. The police were hostile. I appreciated my American gay ghetto experiences much more after that trip.

I would travel to Manhattan occasionally to experience Greenwich Village life. Stonewall Riots had established the reputation of Christopher Street and environs as pure gay mecca. 

I traveled to San Francisco in Spring of 1978. It was the year Harvey Milk ascended to City Hall. The Castro was in full swing. The whole inner city hummed with gay male culture. Gyms were popping up everywhere. Bath houses abounded. Gay bars were many and varied in their themes. It was this gay male City on a Hill which frightened many Americans, especially after gay men rioted (without looting) after Harvey Milk was martyred by an absolved homophobic city councilor later that year.

My years of emergence as an adult gay male were spent in these urban gay male cultural centers, which barely exist today in the U.S.. This is an age of LGBTQI equivocation. In those gay ghettos, we were not trying to be the same as everyone else. 

We celebrated our difference, our innovation, our resourcefulness and our sexuality openly. Defiance was a driving energy, but it was not our primary medium of expression. Gay Pride Parades were homages to the civil rights marches of Mississippi and Alabama, not moving block parties. Our leaders came from working-class origins for the most part. Most of us were second-generation Americans from some immigrant background.

HIV/AIDS was introduced into the gay male community during the height of this growing gay male civilization in America. That civilization had sparked a gay male revolution around the world. Whether you subscribe to the theory that its introduction was deliberate or not, you cannot deny HIV/AIDS effectively destroyed gay male urban society as a cohesive force in America.  

Following generations of gay men have grown into their adult identities in the resulting vacuum. They have been easy prey for the ideologues who have twisted their concepts of gayness and maleness through feminist education. 

The churches, more conservative now than those who opened their doors to us in the 1970's, advocate monogamy, marriage and emasculated identity. Lesbians rule over the LGBTQI commercial empire. Their matriarchy has fused with Leftist ideology, never ultimately a friend to gay men. 

Large concentrated populations of single gay men in American inner cities have all but disappeared. This is partly due to the low earning of many single gay men who can no longer afford their own apartments in city centers, where young married urbanites now compete for 1-bedroom apartments and condos. Many young gay men also suffer the economic insecurities which may cause them to live with their parents longer.

Gay men have lost their group social power as a result. Their recent political gains in law have resulted from legislative lobbying instead of community action. Their social world is centered on dating apps instead of actual meetings at gay businesses or on the streets of gay ghettos. 

In Boston, New York, San Francisco of pre-HIV/AIDS, the gay ghetto was like a small village, despite being inhabited by a large population of residents and regular visitors. Walking down the street or into the local bar came with a guarantee of recognition and encounter with acquaintances. Now, despite ample access to sex via apps, gay male life can be as anonymous as it was in the pre-Liberation years. 

Being scattered in this way may simply be a reaction on a meta level to HIV/AIDS, which killed so many so fast due to proximity. The opportunistic destruction of gay meeting places by eager local authorities in the post-HIV/AIDS decades has erased the infrastructure which could revive urban gay male communities. Heterosexual gentrification in urban slums which were rehabbed initially by gay male pioneers has made a resurgence of gay ghettos in major cities unlikely. 

So are gay men satisfied to live in a scattered suburban diaspora in exchange for living as heterosexuals by day and hooking up by night and on weekends via apps? If the answer is "yes", I would be sorry to hear it. Men of my generation were raised to believe that we deserved to live in that purgatory without any other choice. We chose to rebel and create vibrant villages of our own. HIV/AIDS effectively destroyed what I see as that Golden Age of Gay Male Liberation.

Time may change this, of course. Our work to free gay men from harassment and legal persecution has sown the seeds for a more prosperous gay male population in the future. Employment and education are more gay-friendly than ever. And single gay men have the opportunity to work longer hours and gain an advantage through education without the burden of dependents. 

I hope gay men in the U.S. will some day return to building their own open communities within general society. The Canadians still have remnants of state-recognized gay villages which may some day rebound. The mark of Gay Liberation has not been erased, despite HIV/AIDS. That alone is a testament to our resilience and determination to be ourselves. 

Note: Here is an interesting article on a gay male diaspora.