A kick in the teeth

I think it's sale to say that President Bush has no idea that in proposing an amendment to the Constitution mil to ban gay marriage he has accomplished something that no other event or political figure has managed to do: He has galvanized a previously apathetic generation of gay men in their mid to late 20s.

We are the first gay generation to be maligned and dismissed not by our straight oppressors but out gay aunts and uncles. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide is full of dire warnings about us. We are too satisfied with out vapid media representations on reality television. We are too hungover and broke from circuit weekends to fathom out continuing oppression. We have mistaken retail recognition for social acceptance.

But on the evening after President's Bush's announcement, we came out in full force--among an estimated crowd of 400--to protest the proposed ban on same-sex marriage. And we did it in West Hollywood, Calif., no less, gay America's leading purveyor of scented candies, closeted celebrities, raid pornography. Who are we, and where have we been? And what are we going to do now that we've hit the pavement?

I came out around the same time protease inhibitors did, and I made a beeline for the bars in search of the kind of hedonistic lovefest I had read about in the novels of Edmund White and Felice Picano. The experience was akin to dressing up in your Sunday best only to find your favorite church with defaced frescoes, overturned pews, and the central air turned down to 60 degrees. The supposed golden age had come and gone; Harvey Milk had been shot; Gore Vidal had moved to Italy. New medications managed to hide the physical devastation wrought by AIDS, but there was no hiding the wrecked emotions of the survivors. Their contradictory and condescending message? The best is over. Try to feel an ounce of the joy we felt--just don't do anything we did.

We wrapped ourselves in a quilt of high fashion and wealth to insulate ourselves from the emotional devastation. Without meaning to, we made being a gay as grim and humorless a task us I imagine it was in the 1950s. We turned the badge of sexual outlaw into the badge of strung-out underwear model. We replaced camp and its social sophistication with sarcasm, high on cruelty and shock value and low on wit and erudition. (Goodbye, Oscar Wilde. Hello, Simon Cowell.) A genuine interest in pop culture was replaced by a lionization of Hollywood moguls raid fashion icons, based more on their real estate holdings than on their latest creations. Drugs like GHB and crystal meth enabled a 1970s sexual free-for-all that flew in the face of 1990s medical realities and relied on a 1950s code of vague secrecy and denial. (When a young friend of mine died of a drug overdose at a bathhouse, the real shock to his close friends was that he had been frequenting bathhouses.) In his pathological addictions to wealth and crystal meth, spree killer Andrew Cunanan became the perverse and unwanted icon of my gay generation.

Gradually we began to realize that we were our own worst enemies, and a crusade for personal accountability began. The media joined in, and circuit parties and bug chasers earned more ink than the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It was a noble endeavor, but its austere tone had the contradictory effect of driving many young men out of the streets and into the bars. Matthew Shepard's murder had the potential to galvanize us, but the overwhelming media response and the horror expressed on both sides of the fence convinced us that our work had already been done for us. (To a large extent, it had been.)

The only thing that could wake us up was a desperate president's naked appeal to his financially powerful Christian conservative base. It was a kick in the teeth. Expect to hear the line, "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!" once again--only this time it will be the drug-addled circuit boy shouting it at the seasoned, middle-aged activist.

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