LGBTQI+ DOES NOT REPRESENT GAY MEN.

(Gay) Castro Street Fair, San Francisco 1976

The contrived coalition, denoted by LGBTQI+ politically and journalistically, is a Frankenstein created by hucksters in D.C. lobbying non-profits. I say this plainly because I have been a gay man (G) working in my private and public life to positively represent male homosexuality since 1970. Nobody asked me if I wanted to belong to the LGBTQI+ gang, which all too readily shows up at Leftist protests of every type with unnervingly mass-produced rainbow flags and associated paraphernalia. No. The LGBTQI+ gang have stolen control over and have destroyed what was once a loosely bound community of gay and lesbian bars, gay spas, gay media outlets, lesbian biker gangs, gay and lesbian amateur sports teams, etc..

It started with large AIDS non-profits in the 1990s. 

The HIV epidemic decimated the American gay male population from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. Community leaders died. Community business owners died. Community activists died. The vacuum was filled by local AIDS support organizations, who garnered support from coastal elites and media celebrities. Being a gay man became being either a victim, or a potential victim, of the plague of HIV. Gay male identity was changed from the outspoken and dignified homosexual members of everyday life everywhere to a withered dying AIDS victim or an enraged ACT-UP protester. 

Gay men who functioned, coped and survived were the losers during the AIDS epidemic years. But were there winners?

The Harvey Milks of the rising gay subculture of the 1970s were replaced by the howling Larry Kramers of the new AIDS-centered gay male culture which was built on the ashes of the burgeoning gay communities of the pre-AIDS era. Gay became AIDS, within and outside the male homosexual population.  And those who were prone to speak loudest and most angrily eventually became leaders of an AIDS mafia which stretched across America. Some even profited by it. 

They did a good job. Homophobes at the highest levels of public health administration, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, felt the heat. By the late 1990s, results from new drugs were evident. 

Like most bureaucracies focused on healing one problem, the AIDS mafia worked itself into near obsolescence. But a huge new paradigm had been established in America. The identity-cause-driven non-profit. AIDS groups were eventually granted millions of dollars of government funds as well as millions in private and corporate donations. Supporting AIDS groups became a trendy public red-ribbon statement of moral superiority. Ribbon causes since then have flourished. The rainbow flag may well be used to represent all the various ribbon-adorned causes. Some have been very profitable to their founders.

Black Lives Matter represents the acme of the non-profit ripoff phenomenon. 

Gay men have been left homeless. The gay male community now exists virtually in dating apps. These apps have served the purpose of replacing gay venues which were largely shut down by authorities who used HIV as an excuse in many cases. They have also pushed single young gay men into social isolation. Neighborhood gay bars may be found in the few gay resort cities around the USA, but the open presence of gay male hospitality elsewhere is much harder to find. 

I believe the elite class of wealthy and/or extraordinarily pretty gay men prefer it this way. 

One of the oldest gay male meccas in the USA is Provincetown, MA. My own first friendly homosexual encounter occurred on Commercial Street in Provincetown during the summer of 1955. My parents took me on a day trip via ferry from Boston to Provincetown. It was a popular working-class day trip then. I was five. While we were walking down Commercial Street, we stopped momentarily while my parents tried to figure out where to have lunch. I was approached by a pair of slender lesbian women in matching outfits. Both had short platinum hair. They fawned over me until my mother noticed. I was jerked away immediately. But I remember looking back at them. They were laughing and waving at me.

That Provincetown has evolved from an open and affordable gay/lesbian community for homosexuals coming there from anywhere into a community of gay privilege. Housing prices act as gates around it. Funky inns, akin to rooming houses, which were affordable to the most working class of gay men, have been replaced by expensive hotels and inns that aspire to be luxury spas. Like San Francisco, it has become an exclusive place in which to live, while affording wealthy (older) gay men a stream of young tourists with whom to connect. This is not a community for those young men passing through. It is simply a tourist destination. 

The elite gay male class are fine with the obliteration of gay male community as its own inclusive place. They support LGBTQI+ for the masses, while circulating in wealthy gated communities of their own. 

I have always shared Walt Whitman's passion for working class homosexual men. They were the heart of the Gay Liberation Movement. Why? Because they had to live outside elitist havens as gay men. I have known many gay men who worked in factories or doing hard work as landscapers or driving cabs or working as aides in nursing homes. These men did not have the means to move to a big city gay ghetto. And they bravely came out after Stonewall, while remaining in their hometowns across America. They were the greatest agents of change.

The public image of gay men has been reduced, once again, to mincing decorators and drag queens in reality TV shows. Oh, yes, we do have Mayor Pete, the hapless cabinet member of a failed Presidential administration. Even he represents a form of contemporary gay-obscurity in his personal life: Mimicking heterosexuals with his sissy spouse and their manufactured children. They are all in with LGBTQI+ because it is easy to miss the "G" in that alphabet soup.

I take comfort in the cyclical nature of human development. I am sure that other gay men are awakening to their own need to see actual gay communities in their own regions. Rather than being scattered into suburban developments with the camouflage of  diapers and playdates, creative and sexual gay men will eventually tire of the confinement of gay phone apps. A new Gay Liberation will come as rebellion against the LGBTQI+ brand. Strong individual gay men will develop actual communities of local meeting places which will be inclusive and openly sexual. And they will profit greatly by doing it.