I write this column every month and obviously someone reads it. Once in a while, someone comes up to tell me so, saying how it struck a chord with them. As nice as that is to hear, for the most part, the column is intensely self-serving, rife with inside jokes, bitchy remarks directed at a chosen few, and semi-hypocrital self-analysis. It will start off at one place and end somewhere else entirely, and when the end does illuminate something earlier, I'm as surprised as anyone else. What's more, the fact that occasionally it actually resonates with a larger audience shocks me. This column is where all the rages, regrets, and secrets I've kept hidden spew forth in a monthly flood of words, like some literary menstruation.
This month is no different.
Fags seem to live life more intensely than straight people. I mean, who else, other than a fag, can go through marriage, adultery, and divorce, alcoholism, rehab, and relapse, quit one job, find another, change apartments, and accomplish all of that before Last Call? And go on to call it a slow Saturday! In their incestuous social circles, they live out their lives in what passes for contentment. So what if these circles can be so much like an "I slept with so-and-so" Fan Club where sex is the only way in, and there is no way out. So what if the parade of tricks and one-nighters is seemingly endless, a Safeway-brand serial monogamy that accomplishes nothing more than a worn-out mattress. In a shiny disco ball nightclub world where you fall in love every fifteen minutes and fall off your barstool every nine, so what?
Fags are fickle creatures. Boyfriends cheat in front of each other. Friendships are cast aside in the pursuit of good head. Family, religion, morality, these are all bonds that are cast off in a shiny happy world of posers and poodles, of queens clawing for a tin crown, of twinks looking no farther than a label and labeling themselves as shallow in the process. It's a superficial wonderland, a morality play that teaches by showing the immoral, a cesspool of booze, drugs, sex, and Shania. Conversations can be limited to "whatcha drinking" "top or bottom" "how hung" "where to". That's all they need to know to move from vodka-on-the-rocks to getting their rocks off, and what more is there?
Now don't get me wrong. I'm about as faggy as they come. After four years of University filled with almost full-time gay volunteering, I moved up here, worked at Down Under, Boots, and the Roost (and still sort of do at all three), do this column, joined Edmonton's Village People which brought me into the ISCWR, where I went from Prince to Emperor to President in rapid succession, as well as being on Edmonton Pride Week Society's Executive. Aside from family, I couldn't name a straight person I talk to on any sort of regular basis and it seems that if I'm not out at a gay bar, I'm on a gay chatline, watching a gay movie with a gay friend, or doing something else equally gay. So clearly, I don't have a major problem with the whole gay thing. Or do I?
It just seems to me that the magic's faded. You hear talk of the glory days of gay bars. "Do you remember that night at Flashback..." "...and Boots was packed every night..." "...every night at the Roost was as busy as a Saturday..." And then you look around and the current situation just doesn't match up to the memory. Oh, you can blame it on the smoke, you can blame it on the drugs, you can blame it on the fact that people just don't drink as much anymore, or that all that old crowd has coupled off and moved on from "the scene". There are lots of things you can blame it on, but the fact of the matter is, there was always smoke, there was always drugs, people still swill, and for every person who's moved on from the bar scene, two more have come out.
The problem is, we've evolved past the gay bar. Not only are there dozens of other places and ways to cruise for sex now, we yelled and screamed and hollered to be treated just like everyone else, to have people acknowledge that sexual orientation is no different than race or gender, and now that's come back to bite us in the ass. We don't NEED gay bars anymore. With a straight world becoming more and more accepting of queerness, we pick our bars based on music or location or whatever, not because of a big neon rainbow out front. Oh, of course, having that "safe space" is still important, but it seems that that importance is decreasing rapidly.
For the proof of that, look at all the out gay people who lead happy lives, meet fabulous partners, have the same fantastic parties, and are able to do it all without setting foot inside a gay bar. Further, in spite of supposedly being completely self-actualized, they consider gay bars, and those who go to them, beneath them. How times have changed from when you almost had to go to the bar to meet someone! Now, those very same clubs are actually used as a reason NOT to be with someone!
And yet, no matter how much the Gay Bar might be stumbling about like a dinosaur on the verge of extinction, that is still not the problem. The Gay Bar is but one leaf on the plant of the queer subculture, and when a leaf begins to wilt, to turn from colored beauty to brown decay, the problem isn't in the leaf. The problem is deeper, in the roots which feed that leaf, and in the soil which gives those roots life.
Ten years ago, the gay community was leading the world in a war against HIV. Now, we've got stupid twinks posting messages on the Gayedmonton.com Cruiseboard looking for hot hung tops for bareback action because, as they so intelligently point out, everyone knows that youth is the smallest group for current rates of HIV infection! Have we become so lax that such blatant misinformation is actually accepted as Gospel Truth? But you can't point out the error of their thinking either. The flash of that strobe light may be fading, but it is still bright enough to obscure the days of fear and funerals from a generation of people breast-fed on safer sex information. They have rejected that mother's milk, and now, they just don't care.
They just don't care. Look around. Gay bars might be suffering a decline in business, but so too do our community groups. Reduced membership numbers, decreased funding, decreased interest, all leave our charitable groups on as shaky ground as our clubs seem to be. In a city of almost a million people, our Gay and Lesbian Center struggles to find enough volunteers to man phones they struggle to keep connected. Groups like the ISCWR, which provided years of fundraising for causes such as AIDS hospices, Children's Wish Foundation, and that same Gay and Lesbian Center, hold on to their antiquated ways of fundraising, even though the dollars don't seem to be flooding in the way they once did. This very magazine you're reading, a not-for-profit community paper, doesn't have nearly the support from the population that it should; the need for volunteers hours and donor dollars is never-ending, for Times .10, for ISCWR, for GLCCE, for all of them. But no one can be bothered. What has happened to a community that cared?
Have we so lost our way? Has winning so many battles in the war for equal rights robbed us of a common cause that brought us together in spite of our internal differences? Have we become so converted to Dionysus that Apollo no longer receives his due; do we prefer the wine and the decadence to the battle for truth and justice? Look at our own Gay Pride Festival every year. Where it once was a "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" political slap-in-the-face to all of those who'd rather pretend that "queers don't exist", it's now just one more week of partying in a year-long NewYear's Eve. Its lost its meaning, lost its significance, and that rainbow flag's six colors seem faded as a result.
Are we so insanely selfish that we really can’t be bothered to work for a common good anymore? Or is it that we don’t have a common good to work for? There was AIDS, a battle that while still being waged, has become, justly, non-exclusive to the gay community. There was equal rights, but already we see that enough has been accomplished that we can’t agree amongst ourselves where we should fight hardest next. There seem to be as many people anti-same-sex-marriage as there are pro, within our own community. How can any battle be won when the goal can’t even be agreed upon?
So what is the point of it all? As I said near the beginning, I do this once a month, holding up a mirror to my thoughts, my feelings, my life. When someone sees themselves in what I say, I’m as genuinely surprised as anyone else. Still, I would like to think that there is some deeper truth to be found in what many of you will write off as bitter rambling. Perhaps that truth is simple this: the wars that we fought, that served to unite us together as a community, those wars have changed. It is no longer simply about recognition, about equal treatment, about finding a cure. There is a new battlefield now, one entirely within our community. It is a war fought by twinks and trolls, by chubs and jocks, by butchy-type construction workers and flamey little poodles, by queens and clubkids, by everyone. It’s a war to answer the question "now that our other battles are winding down, what are we fighting for now? What can we, as a community, work together for now?" The side that says "nothing, no common goal left, no reason to be united" seems to be winning too often lately, a side that’s happy to wile away the hours on a dancefloor, cheering for the shooter sales, scoring with the latest stud. That can’t be the winning side, and so the war goes on. A war far more relevant to this one fag than Dubya’s dream. A war to fight nightly in those very clubs, by enjoying the party as much as everyone else but trying to accomplish some good at the same time. After all, good times with good goals, isn’t that what the gay community is all about?
Comments? Feedback? All my articles are meant to provoke thoughts and discussion. Send me your opinions, ideas, arguments. We will revisit this topic as the need arises.
