Boston Pride, which kicks off today (OMG I just noticed!) is always a time for me to reflect.  Mostly on not only being somewhat outside the straight mainstream but what passes (at least once a year) for the gay mainstream as well.  YAY PRIDE! 

If I find myself on the outside looking in it's my own fault, I know.  I don't go out to the bars often enough, and when I do I don't take my shirt off.  I don't go out cruising, or even online much anymore.  I've never done queeraoke, gone two-stepping, or gay bowling.  I only make it to Provincetown once or twice a year, usually in the off-season.  I don't like queer cinema, but I do watch gay porn.  And I did just switch to Fenway Health, if that beefs up my gay bona fides at all.

Politically, I'm on the team.  I support marriage equality, the repeal of DOMA and DADT, and explicit federal protections against housing and job discrimination.  But I would hope that I would if I were straight, too.  None of my political convictions requires me to believe that gays are any different in most fundamental respects than straight people.  If anything my beliefs require me to reject the notion on the face of it. 



Gays and straights have more in common than what separates us, and there's often more separating gays from each other than from straights.  The way I see it, most of my lovers are gay; my community's not.  But I'm lucky.  I live in a community where that's doable.  Where I can talk as openly with family and straight peeps — even about sex — as I can with my gay friends. 

I have to be honest, I'm glad it's there but I never got any warm fuzzies from Boston's "gay community".  I don't think it's controversial to say that the South End scene is pretty catty, and that gay bars in town are cliquish (to put it kindly). 

The degree to which identities are parsed in order to exclude undesirables is impressive, though.  Gay cultures everywhere they're allowed to flourish are somewhat the same, and I guess it would be odd if Boston's general insularity, its venerable traditions of racism and classism, with some of the finest gradations of social discrimination any mosaic of peoples has ever produced, didn't carry over to the gay community here.

I certainly have no sentimental attachments to it. I like gay people in roughly the same proportion as the general population, and explicitly and emphatically reject the notion that being gay carries any additional genes for empathy, generosity, or strength of character.

I feel I managed to meet my many extraordinary gay friends and lovers despite the scene, not because of it.  Which is not to say we didn't all hold out some vain hope once upon a time that we would one day be members in good standing of a vibrant, heroic gay community in which love and sex were as free and easy as breathing, instead of the multitude of mutually contemptuous cliques founded on the most superficial criteria we could think of that we somehow ended up with.  

Which is what we celebrate at Pride.  YAY PRIDE!

I'm all for it, but Boston Pride is always an awkward, somewhat embarrassing exercise in defining a "community" that doesn't actually exist as a community, however shrilly and self-consciously certain parties proclaim it to be one.  It always ends up a vanilla swirl of sanctimony and salacity-lite, as a mass of multi-hyphenated identities coagulate briefly and then separate and go their own ways again.

Like I said, I'm all for it.  I like the drag queens (some of my dearest friends are drag queens), and the lawn chair bears.  I appreciate the gesture of churches and local businesses that show their openness and willingness to embrace the Other.  The crowds are impressive.  But while it reflects communities that are gay-friendly and communities that are gay, it gives me no sense of belonging to anything like The Gay Community, which is as elusive as Shangri-La the rest of the year.

That's not a bad thing.  It's a powerful demonstration of the truth of the old slogan "we're everywhere."  Coming together this way once a year proves it.  I will say, again, I'm all for it.  But talk of The Gay Community, much less some "LGBT Community"?  It's pure poppycock.

Occasionally, particularly when there is a political victory for gays, even I forget that it's a marriage of convenience we're dealing with here.  Luckily all you have to do is go to a rally or reception or party to remind yourself.  Still, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't sometimes deeply distressing to me how little of myself and many of my gay friends I see in what is passed off as "the gay community" by a few individuals, groups, and publications who've appointed themselves arbiters of "gay culture". 

From magazines and newspapers like The Advocate and Bay Windows to PACs like HRC (who may or may not have a hand in delaying the repeal of DADT)  and MassEquality (whose recent endorsement of Mayor Menino stirred up some controversy) I can see how they speak to gay communities but not for The Gay Community.  I think — particularly in the case of the HRC — the claim that a PAC represents as diverse a group of people as tenuously connected as gays, lesbians, bi- and transsexuals of different races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds should be viewed with extreme skepticism. 

I know I'm being too something.  Pride shouldn't be so serious.  Good thing you really can't take it seriously. The contradictions of the gay community are on glorious display all week. This Pride At Night ad is a good place to start:


I mean, what does the sweaty, epilated headless torso on the right have to do with anything?  I know I've criticized Boston Pride in the past for being too prim and proper, and I'm not saying we couldn't throw a little more meat on the grill, but, please, some truth in advertising.

Not to say that this isn't a perfect symbolic representation of gay "culture" in its present incarnation: the Fascist body-type with its zero fat and vanity abs held up before the blobby rainbow masses who worship it from below.  We love diversity.  Black, white, Latino, Asian, we don't care, as long as you've got a rockin' six pack you can come to our party!

The whole sixpack thing has gone too far.  I mean, can a body part become a cliché? Sixpacks, like goatees and tribal tattoos, don't even look good on a lot of guys, but you wouldn't know it by looking at  the covers of gay rags and the ads inside.  Everybody's gotta have 'em!  Don't care what you gotta do, just get 'em!

Frankly, I'm sick of gay publications constantly screaming about how gay people are being marginalized when all of their advertisers are doing the same thing.  And not just the advertisers, either.  Editors of gay magazines and websites perpetuate this affront to diversity themselves. 

I remember reading a few months ago the story of a certain Todd Belock, a college freshman who was booted from the Navy ROTC because he kissed his boyfriend at a frat party.  I first read the story on Wicked Gay Blog, a local glog, which somewhat misleadingly ran this photo along with it...


...and linked to an Edge Boston story which, somewhat inexplicably, ran a cheesy stock shot of two canoodling twinks.  It was only several clicks down the line that I finally found a photo of the real Todd Belock...


This seemed about right.  It reminded me of the episode of Little Britain where Daffyd, "the only gay in the village", angrily hunts down a usurper, only to change his tune when he finds the guy he thinks is the only other gay in the village is an Adonis.  Every gay man knows how the story ends...


Which is not to say that straight men and women don't know it, too (think of the old Sam Cooke song, "Another Saturday Night" — "Another fella told me he had a sister that looked just fine/Instead of being my deliverance, she had a strong resemblance to a Cat named Frankenstein" — which is even more jarring when you hear Cat Stevens sing it).

Unfortunately, and despite being so often on the bullied end, gays are socialized in many ways pretty much like everyone else.  Sometimes oppression leads to special insight, but a lot of times it doesn't.  A lot of times you see the bullied become bullies in their own right.  I call this the Dawn Wiener Effect, after Todd Solondz's immortal antihero from Welcome to the Dollhouse.

After being tormented relentlessly for the first quarter of the film, she asks one of her tormentors: "Why do you hate me?" 

"Because you're ugly," the bully (who's also been bullied) replies matter-of-factly. 

Dawn tries out all of the lines the bullies use on her on poor Ralphie, the neighbor kid, in turn.  Ralphie is at the very bottom of the food chain.  Everybody, including Dawn, calls him "faggot."  Solondz recognizes that bullying makes bullies out of the bullied, too, and that there's always someone for even the ones on the bottom rungs to bully.  The mean girls pick on the LD kid, who picks on the ugly girl, who picks on the "gay" kid, and so on.

All I'm saying is that social dynamics in the gay world aren't really any different than in the world at large, even though we like to fantasize otherwise.  Gay people, so often bullied, often become bullies in their own right.  Like most bullies they bully whoever's at hand, which means they often end up bullying one another.   Wanna see some real mean girls?  Thursday nights, Club Cafe.

As a declaration that "gays are everywhere," Pride is as necessary now as ever.  As a way of publicly marking the achievements in eliminating legal discrimination based on sexuality, Pride is important.  But as an attempt to convey a coherent sense of a "gay culture" (gay culture being an oxymoron — culture itself is obviously a gay invention) or a cohesive "gay community", it's just not very convincing.

Nor is it necessary or effective to ghettoize ourselves based on sexuality.  In fact, maybe it's time to disinvent the homosexual.  I recently wrote about the promise of the early gay liberation movement, which is finally being fulfilled, to eliminate the categories of discrimination based on sexuality, which would eliminate the need for the categories themselves as anything more than components of a more complex identity in a more sophisticated social matrix. 

The reliance on essentialism as a precondition of equality is a contradiction, and a weak plea on the part of gays unwilling to give up their "handicap" and join the human race as true equals.  To quote an unlikely ally: "People ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish."  That's all people, without regard to their sexuality.  Achieving that would be something we could all be proud of, finally without regard to our sexuality.