3.4.06

ΕΚΕΙ ΟΠΟΥ ΤΟ ΟΥΡΑΝΙΟ ΤΟΞΟ ΣΥΝΑΝΤΑ ΤΗ ΒΑΘΕΙΑ ΓΑΛΑΖΙΑ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΑ

The gay world is looking straighter ever day. Or is the straight world a bit more bent
By Tim Dick.

IN A village near my home town, the only gay couple ran the pub. It was a pub famous for being in a potato chip television commercial, and the publicans were infamous for being gay. I've forgotten their names, and it took me some time to realise the significance of their presence.
I remember buying my first beer from them at 14, I remember calling in there often after that, and I remember the basics of what we heard happened one night, after a drunken party.
Some of my former schoolmates broke into the couple's nearby home. They found condoms in a bedside drawer, chucked them about the place, and tried to scrawl "faggots" across their bedroom wall. I say tried because they used an "i" where an "o" should be.
The moment I heard of it, I wanted to leave town. The rest of my school days were underpinned by a sporadic, gentle fear I may be the next to have "faggit" scrawled across my bedroom wall.
But the mere presence of a gay couple in a remote New Zealand T-junction masquerading as a rural village showed even then how far, and how fast, tolerance of homosexuality in Western society had come.
Some now question the viability of a separate gay culture, saying the acceptance of homosexuality by mainstream society is removing the need for it, in effect destroying the major gay enclaves.
Sydney's gay mile, Oxford Street, is tired. While one new gay bar has opened and another has been done up, more have closed than have opened since the late 1990s.
Drag stumbles on, Mardi Gras hasn't had a good past few years, and, while a Herald article declared gay to be passe three years ago, some now ask if gay culture is, in fact, dead.
If it is, death has come quickly. What was barely imagined by the first Mardi Gras marchers in 1978 - acceptance and legal equality - are close and, in some jurisdictions, reality.
But the successes may be killing a culture created to fight for those very things. After all, what is the point of joining together to proclaim your difference if most people think your difference isn't all that different anymore?
What is the point of a separate gay community when mainstream society likes the gay couple next door, the gay parents, the gay teacher, the gay plumber?
What is the need for gay clubs when lesbians and gay men can pick up in straight venues, and vice versa?
When gay men and lesbians look straight - and straights look gay - hasn't the rebel culture been so brilliantly successful at shifting the mainstream that it's no longer rebellious? Save for hold-out conservatives, who do homosexuals have to unify and fight against?

In America, a quiet debate was recently sparked by the columnist, commentator and provocateur Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed the end of gay culture in a recent edition of The New Republic. He wrote that "slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is dying".
"By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist - or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that 'gayness' alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all."
But his last rites may be premature. Ask other gay thinkers and you find few who agree with him entirely, but many who think he's partly right. Some claim there was never a single gay culture to be killed off, while others almost scream at Sullivan that not all gays are rich white men living in Western gay ghettos.
Arthur Leonard, a professor at New York Law School and long-time gay activist, says Sullivan's thesis is "profound and trivial at the same time".
He points out that before Sullivan saw off gay life, in the mid-1990s, he declared the AIDS epidemic over. While the panic did subside in rich countries able to afford expensive life-prolonging drugs, it is anything but over, especially in developing countries. Leonard says this situation is analogous to Sullivan's new theory.
"If one defines 'gay culture' as Mr Sullivan does, then, yes, it's at an end," he says. "But Mr Sullivan's definition of gay culture is irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of people in this world whose sexual orientation is other than strictly heterosexual and who do not live in one of a handful of major gay urban enclaves - and even for those people, one kind of gay culture is evolving into another kind of gay culture."
PROCLAIMING change isn't nearly as exciting as proclaiming death, and while there is general agreement that the most visible parts of gay culture - the bars, the rainbow flags, the festivals - aren't as important as they once were, they remain significant to many.
The University of Sydney history professor Robert Aldrich, who has edited Gay Life and Culture: A World History, to be published later this year, thinks there's something to Sullivan's theory, but there's much wrong with it.

"For many urban homosexuals, political and social changes do mean that gay culture as an exclusive context for their lives is far less important than in the past," he says. "For others, however, a specifically gay culture continues to beckon - rural or suburban gays who feel that they must come in to the cities in order to come out as homosexual, for instance."
In other words, it's all very well to declare a separate gay life over, if you're entirely relaxed about whom you bed, and you're surrounded by friends, family and colleagues equally as relaxed. But it's different for those who aren't.
For those who know Darlinghurst and Newtown well, there's much evidence that gay life breathes on. Gay pubs, venues and parties still exist.
"Yes, the cultures are intermingled, especially in outward appearances - straight men with earrings and expensive perfumes, for instance, and countless gay men who get tattoos or head to the footy," says Aldrich. "However, there are still specifics: gay saunas, backrooms and sex-on-premises venues [which] don't really have equivalents in the straight world."
Then there's the subsisting-but-shrinking reality that gay men and lesbians are, under NSW and federal law, not equal with straight citizens, a difference that remains a unifying force among all who are not heterosexual.
There is continuing resistance to acceptance of what some call the "homosexual lifestyle" (a term that, to me, suggests sexual attraction is akin to picking out a new pair of swimmers).
The Macquarie University academic Nikki Sullivan writes about sexuality and culture, and agrees with Sullivan that victories have prompted a conservative backlash.
"It simultaneously produces an increased zealousness from those opposed to all forms of difference and, of course, this is most clearly illustrated by the debates and shifts surrounding 'gay marriage'," she says.
Her experience shows acceptance is not everywhere. "When my partner and I walk hand in hand down King Street [in Newtown] with our grandchild (whom we are raising) in tow, no one bats an eyelid. However, even a few kilometres away, in a typical Westfield shopping centre, the responses of shoppers to a butch-femme couple with a wee boy in a Ramones T-shirt is incomparable, to say the least."
EVEN if it is accepted that gays have firmly taken their place at the table, it doesn't mean they don't like to have their own party. Marcus Bourget, the chairman of New Mardi Gras, says gay culture evolves and changes to reflect the present reality, but that reality is not fully integrated.

"Acceptance into the mainstream does not mean there is no reason to dig out, nurture and celebrate the variety of life in our own community," he says.
"The author [Sullivan] talks about the fracturing of the gay and lesbian community into various tribes and cliques as signalling the end of gay culture. But it is these very tribes and cliques - from the couple with children in the suburbs, to the bears, the buffed, the tomboys, the dykes on bikes - who came together to form Mardi Gras in the first place. We still have a common identity and we celebrate the diversity and vitality of our cultural inheritance and current cultural life."
In other words, "we'll do gay when we feel like it", and many did at last weekend's successful and reinvigorated Mardi Gras parade and party. This argument reflects Aldrich's position that, for many, sexuality doesn't colour every part of life, but it has hardly disappeared.
Andrew Creagh publishes the glossy gay mag DNA, which last year sported Jake Wall, boyfriend of Newcastle's former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins, on its cover in tight pink Speedos. Creagh, too, thinks things are changing, rather than dying. "Gay publishing has morphed away from angry political editorial into a more relaxed lifestyle-oriented mood. It's all about fun and sex - with a bit of politics thrown into the mix."
Which sounds awfully like Cosmopolitan; the rage has gone, the interest in hot totty remains. Plus, there's a whole new gay enclave on the internet. "You only need to go online to see that there's a vast network of gay and lesbian communities flourishing in cyberspace," he says.
But he doubts that gay and straight culture will ever completely blend. "Straight people, as sympathetic as they might be, will never know what it means to be gay. It is a unique experience that only other gay people truly comprehend. As long as there is same-sex attraction, no matter how integrated we become into the rest of society, there will be gay culture."
Keeping straight in both campsFOR two men who represent an alleged threat to gay culture - one is straight, the other gay - they're pretty relaxed. And that is what some see as the problem: a spreading easy and comfortable attitude towards sexual orientation that might negate the need for a separate gay life.
Auskar Surbakti, a 22-year-old cadet reporter for SBS, is straight, but he's as symptomatic as anything of the lines between two camps which are increasingly blurred.

"From what I've noticed, you can no longer make assumptions based on old stereotypes," Surbakti says. "I generally think it's a good thing, because it means, you know, if you're of a certain sexuality, you don't feel you have to conform to a certain image as well."
It's the norm for people of his generation to have gay and straight friends, and not care much which is which, he says.
The first time he went to a gay pub he didn't realise it was one, while at this month's Mardi Gras parade - his first - he found the crowd completely accepting of straights, as were those in Oxford Street pubs afterwards.
Aaron Vaughan is a gay 27-year-old working in construction management, but he doesn't think the end of gay life is nigh. "I think there's always going to be a core principle of the gay culture. I don't think that's ever going to be blurred," he says. Vaughan is out to his colleagues, friends and much of Sydney after taking part in the Mardi Gras parade. But here's the catch. While he says he had no problem being out to builders here - he moved from the Gold Coast two years ago - there is "no way" he could have been so open in Queensland.
So far, Vaughan thinks, the blurring is a phenomenon of the big cities, where the straight world has engaged with the gay one for so long that a declining number of people - the young especially - just aren't bothered by it.
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(Αναδημοσίευση από την αυστραλιανή εφημερίδα The Sydney Morning Herald 11-03-2006)

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