Gay bars were shuttered and, unless you were being a horribly irresponsible person, Grindr was no more. The pandemic essentially shut down all of social gay culture, relieving me of pressures to participate in it. This is something I'd already been thinking a lot about since quarantine began four months ago. I too would, over the years, develop more flexible feelings in so feeling, which is why I continued to participate in a culture I never quite felt welcome in yet desperately sought validation from. Many years would pass before he would discover that everybody else felt exactly the same, but came out every weekend so to feel, thus over the years developing more flexible feelings in so feeling." Not Wanted On The Voyage, even though it was, so be it, his birthday. "Their glances his way seemed like disposable bottles, no deposit, no return.
But instead, my experience was very much summed up by this paragraph from the book: I first went to Pride in 2003, expecting a gloriously fabulous weekend of finally feeling connected to a community and maybe finding the love of my life. I thought about my relationship to Pride, which was not physically happening pretty much anywhere for the first time in my 36 years of existence. Reading Faggots this past month made me consider my own inheritance of its themes. (Prophetically enough, Fire Island is where the climax of Faggots - Kramer's excoriation of "gay culture" - takes place.) The most extreme and problematic representatives of this "culture" are the men, one of whom knowingly had COVID-19, who partied on packed beaches on Fire Island last week. If an impression of a monolithic "gay culture" defined by such a homogeneous demographic exists, it is because white gay cis men have until very recently dominated mainstream representation under the LGBTQ umbrella and have, in general, been handed a level of privilege in the last decade that is wildly disproportionate to any other demographic under said umbrella. What even does it mean to say "gay culture"? In mainstream gay media, the phrase almost always refers to a fairly specific subset of the LGBTQ "community" largely made up of white gay cis men - even though many of the battles won around queer rights were fought by people of colour, trans and gender-nonconforming folks, and queer women, and in fact the modern Pride movement itself was in large part initiated by Black trans women. And while, on one level, the book is a wild (if at times problematic) window into an era of gay culture 40 years in the past, it also felt like it had a lot to say about gay culture today. Yet, when AIDS hit a few years later, the same words of warning sounded almost prophetic. Upon publication, Faggots was dismissed by many as puritanical and self-loathing for its criticism of gay men's obsession with vanity, promiscuity and recreational drug use. We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we're abusing it.
Following a man in his late 30s (based on Kramer himself) who is seeking out a loving, long-term relationship in a sea of hedonism, the novel has a clear message: gay men need to start loving each other instead of being so obsessed with getting fucked up and (literally and figuratively) fucking each other. I spent a few quiet afternoons reading his 1978 debut novel Faggots, a satirical (yet clearly autobiographical) look at the lives of gay men in 1970s New York City that he wrote just before AIDS made him a figurehead of American activism. However, the ghost of Larry Kramer very much remained in my own head as I made my way through a Pride month unlike any other. But "these times" looked very different on May 27th than they did on May 29th, or June 2nd, or pretty much any day since.
I thought the fearlessness Kramer showed in the face of HIV/AIDS might teach us all a little about surviving in these times.
(If you don't know much about Kramer, please change that immediately by watching the documentary Larry Kramer in Love and Anger - currently available on Crave and HBO Max.) Kramer's legacy was forged during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, during which he played a pivotal role in combating governments and institutions who could not give less of a fuck about the lives of the marginalized people that disease was killing. When I decided to put this column on a brief hiatus, I was working on a reflection on the life of legendary gay activist, writer and shit disturber Larry Kramer, who passed away of pneumonia on May 27th.
#You how i know hes gay meme for free
Queeries 5 pioneering LGBTQ Canadian films you can watch for free right now