LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE.

San Francisco City Hall, November 27, 1978. Candlelight vigil in response to the assassination of Harvey Milk. 

"Living well is the best revenge." The quote is attributed to English poet, George Herbert (1593-1633), but it has been a fitting motto for urban gay men for some time.

Our first openly gay U.S. Presidential candidate in the U.S., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, has unintentionally peeled the scab off general political correctness concerning homosexuals in our media. And the rude and prematurely judgmental have scraped the old barrels for all the slimy rhetoric we have been accustomed to, even in more P.C. times. Perusal of mainstream conservative press pages on line are polite, but their comments sections are overflowing with old sexual slurs against gay men.

I am not crying "Hate speech!" here. Far from it. Let the venom flow in the light of day for all to see.

The great illusion, created by government regulation of our natural rights to be ourselves, will dissolve in that sunlight. The solid gray wall of heterosexual disrespect for gay men as the last despicable global minority will appear as the fog lifts. The spark of an old realization will reignite a fire in intelligent gay male minds:  Best watch out for ourselves and live as well as we are able.

Our gay ghettos were not accidents. They were constructed from the discarded shambles of urban slums, inner-city neighborhoods abandoned by middle-class heterosexuals with families. Our two greatest modern ghettos, Greenwich Village in Manhattan and The Castro in San Francisco, became the incubators for what is now the LGBTQI establishment.

Those gay ghettos became our walled cities within cities. The Stonewall Riots (1969) were a counter-attack against neighborhood prejudice and brutal police corruption. San Francisco's White Night Riots (1979) were a response to the denial of justice in response to the murder of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay male city politician, elected to represent a concrete gay community, The Castro.

The results of these riots within a ten year period (1969-1979) were meteoric. Homosexual men, the primary leaders and organizers, formed an international movement to gain respect and legal acknowledgment despite an entire human history of violent persecution and disrespect. Gay ghettos within major cities were acknowledged as functional commercial and residential villages around the developed world.

Those of us who lived through these times will not readily surrender our suspicion that HIV, a crossover primate virus known since the 1950's, was a biological weapon unleashed against this gay revolution by intimidated heterosexual men in power. 

It may well have been pure coincidence that the U.S. President at the time HIV became widely introduced into the American gay male population, years before its symptomatic outbreak as AIDS, was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, an evangelical Southern Baptist, an outspoken member of one of the most gay-hating religious groups of the time. Carter later renounced the Baptist evangelicals he was aligned with during his Presidency 20 years after leaving office. Perhaps it interfered with his attempts at that time to build a globalist legacy. 

The AIDS epidemic in the developed world at the height of its lethality (1984-1996) revealed the strength of our gay male momentum. AIDS was dismissively referred to as "The Gay Cancer" and "The Gay Plague" in mainstream publications. While it ripped through gay male populations mercilessly, gay men who were not incapacitated united to defend themselves and their friends against the disease's devastation and the overt bureaucratic indifference of heterosexual medical and government institutions.

Whether the AIDS epidemic was an intentional gay male purge or not, it served to decimate our rising gay male culture. That culture had been transforming from covert sexual interactions between gay men in the dark to global political and cultural contributions in the light. Gay periodicals blossomed. Gay writers were published. Gay films played in mainstream theaters. Gay professionals began coming out in all layers of society.

Gay bookstores had begun to open in major cities.No longer porn shops, these bookstores sold fiction and non-fiction by openly gay authors published by major houses. They sold academic publications on gay history. They sold guidebooks to the growing number of gay ghettos and resorts around the globe. They also sold the rainbow accessories that helped gay men and lesbians to be visible to each other in the urban environment.

Gay bookstores and gay nightlife venues never had time to fully recover from the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. The advent of internet dating and online reading coincided with the diminished lethality of AIDS. Once again the gay male population was more widely dispersed. This time, in part, by technology.

Gay ghetto populations in many U.S. cities were slowly displaced by a new generation of affluent urban heterosexuals. Many aging gay developers of these gay villages, those who had survived the AIDS epidemic, sold their property and retired to gay resorts, like Palm Springs, Provincetown, Fort Lauderdale or Puerta Vallarta. Many young single gay men were priced out of coastal U.S. urban centers.

Along with the displacement of gay men from gay urban villages in the U.S. came the demographic displacement of men in homosexual-rights organizations. Some of those organizations saw financial gains from legacies left by gay men who died of AIDS and contributions from those wishing to memorialize lost loved ones. A brief look at the current LGBTQI establishment will illustrate my point. Lesbian women and transgender women are more highly visible than gay men in the administrative structure of that political establishment.

Contemporary gay men of all ages are faced with a relatively hostile LGBTQI establishment. Being confidently gay and unapologetically male can lead to accusations of being aligned with "White male patriarchy", the invented bogeyman of those who would replace Western civilization with a Utopian collectivist global empire, where lesbians, transgender women and feminist allies would rule the thoughts and words of all human beings. 

The sane gay male response to this is obvious: Walk away from the LGBTQI establishment. This is quite easy to do without sacrificing much. Not financially supporting organizations or businesses that do not respect gay men is easy. Turning to organizations which do is also easy in this technological age. 

Gay men have a talent for forming their own families of choice. I am quite sure that these families of choice will build into new physical gay communities as the gay male population recovers from the impacts of HIV and its accompanying self-destructive behaviors of increased alcoholism and drug abuse. The LGBTQI establishment's rejection of maleness will be its eventual failure as movement for gay men. 

Excelling at living creative and comfortable lives has been one of the outstanding markers of urban gay male culture. We have been Western Civilization's acclaimed architects, painters, poets, singers, actors, playwrights, etc., for centuries. Behind the scenes, we have renovated blighted urban spaces into gay-friendly pockets of civility. We have developed our own special meeting places, despite shameless persecution by religious zealots and brutish heterosexual men in authority. 

Most of us with education and intelligence know that living well is indeed the best revenge in this world which would deny us respect for who we are. It is often more challenging for us to get there. But, in many ways, that continues to make us stronger.