Sunday, May 14, 2006

Don't leave me alone with too many gay people



Well, on Thursday night when I returned home from the film festival opener I wrote a lengthy diatribe that I subsequently erased Friday morning. I have decided that blogging while drunk and annoyed is not a good thing. Thursday evening put me in a rather black mood on Friday which lead me to a long evening and early morning of hard core drinking. C and I met up with the other C and bar hopped and cocktail hopped our way about Boston and Cambridge. I really didn't want to go out. I wanted to sit and home and wallow in my existential crisis. Either way, I'm not sure what my problem was. I am always troubled by lengthy interaction with the gay male community. We don't have a lot of gay friends and those we have that are close are lesbians. Perhaps I need to rethink my impressions of gay male culture and those that are deeply planted within it. My world is sooo straight that when I interact with gay people who have no straight friends or who never interact with straight people I feel like I am on another planet. I think a large part of it is cultural criticism on my part. While I have never been wholly planted within that community I did program a film festival for five years. I traveled the world for gay film, either with my own films or for programming purposes. But I could never really reconcile the fact that I felt like I was giving something up (in a larger sense) whenever I self ghetto-ised. I always felt that there was a large degree of myopia in self absorbed communities that was dangerous. While I hestitate to identify myself with the people who yearn for conformity in declaring that being gay is just a small part of who I am as a person I somehow subscribe to that belief. I am not nearly so naive to believe that being gay is not a political statement. That is a dangerously blind perspective in our current political environment.
I remember being a gay punk when my every action was a statement to piss off or offend. And it saddens me to see that cultural acceptance had brought about conformity and banality. Now all of this is weighed down by the fact that I am a gay WHITE male and I occupy a position of power relative to other LGBT people. I could also be arguably described as a middle class gay yuppie (or Guppie) but I would fight you vigorously on that one (and lose if you took one look at our apartment). All in all I can't help but feel lost when amongst the gay community. I don't wallow in self constructed drama, I don't dance, and I couldn't name a circuit party if you handed me tickets to one. Somehow I feel that all of that is bullshit. When out to dinner Thursday night conversation centered on one night stands, which hip restaurant we should have gone to, whether or not this other guy should dump his boyfriend because he like circuit parties too much and I felt very lost. I was the freak with the long term relationship who lived on the wrong side of the river where there is no gay-borhood. I just wanted to talk about movies. what the fuck.

this is, once again, an excuse for procrastination.

back to work.

names...

2 comments:

TK8103 said...

Don't feel too bad, dude. I love you just the way you are.
Oh, and btw, punk... I've been sporting ink for 14 years. Ain't you never seen my tats before?
We need to hook up soon.

Mike said...

Dude. There are many gay men out there who are not the "norm". Why we, as a marginalized group, insist upon forcing rigid guidelines on who we should be and how we should feel about things is beyond me. If there really was such a thing as a "gay card" mine would've been cut up long ago. (I tried calling myself queer for a while, but it felt too contrived.) Also, as you mention in your second post, there is a danger in not grouping ourselves together for various sociopolitical reasons. (and yes, I did read your first post because of the time warp that is Bloglines, but it didn't strike me as being overly bitchy at all, in fact it was that post that I tried to comment on, but was taken to this more recent post instead - /lengthy parentheses)

I spent quite a bit of time checking out various facets of the gay sublife, but five years ago got into my first real relationship and decided we needed to be real with each other to survive...sure a relationship where I live in one of the gayest of gayborhoods, but off in the section where everyone's adopting babies and normalizing in another way that I appreciate, but don't necessarily want to follow.

Okay, this is going to turn into the longest comment ever if I don't shut up now, but wanted to reach out and give you a hug because your entries made me sit up and go Damn Straight! (No pun intended.)

OH, AND A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!