Gay pride is so last century, but that seems to have eluded Nikki Kaye. The Hero Parade failed, and any concept of a profitable gay festival must be unlikely or someone would have run one or have been running one for years.
What is more troubling is that for someone who is allegedly one of our best and brightest, our most intellectually able, Nikki has had a shocker. She has completely missed the zeitgeist, where being gay no longer means being weird, and gay culture has become assimilated with straight culture.
Fiscal conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, one of the most easy to read gay writers out highlighted this in a 2005 essay in the New Republic.
In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little.
But here’s the strange thing: These changes did not feel like a revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture. For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the “circuit boys,” with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife, designer drugs, and countless bottles of water. For a week in mid-July, the town is dominated by “bears”–chubby, hairy, unkempt men with an affinity for beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. Women’s Week brings the more familiar images of older lesbians: a landlocked flotilla of windbreakers and sensible shoes. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the predictable population of artists and writers–Michael Cunningham and John Waters are fixtures–mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and teachers and shrinks.
Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. 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.
What Sullivan highlights is happening here. Gays no longer need to dress up funny and act like weirdos because they are largely accepted in our society. Not before time, but not because of public money spend on prancing nancy boys whipping each other on floats in Ponsonby, while simulteously whipping up a frenzy amongst the intolerant religious right. He goes on:
For the first time, a cohort of gay children and teens grew up in a world where homosexuality was no longer a taboo subject and where gay figures were regularly featured in the press. If the image of gay men for my generation was one gleaned from the movie Cruising or, subsequently, Torch Song Trilogy, the image for the next one was MTV’s “Real World,” Bravo’s “Queer Eye,” and Richard Hatch winning the first “Survivor.” The new emphasis was on the interaction between gays and straights and on the diversity of gay life and lives. Movies featured and integrated gayness. Even more dramatically, gays went from having to find hidden meaning in mainstream films–somehow identifying with the aging, campy female lead in a way the rest of the culture missed–to everyone, gay and straight, recognizing and being in on the joke of a character like “Big Gay Al” from “South Park” or Jack from “Will %amp% Grace.”
There are now openly gay legislators. Ditto Olympic swimmers and gymnasts and Wimbledon champions. Mainstream entertainment figures–from George Michael, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rosie O’Donnell to edgy musicians, such as the Scissor Sisters, Rufus Wainwright, or Bob Mould–now have their sexual orientation as a central, but not defining, part of their identity.
As I said in my original post, if gays want a mardi gras let them. But don’t force tax payers or rate payers to fund them. And don’t pretend they are a different culture any more – they are not, so they don’t need to be treated as if they have special needs.
What is more interesting though is the complete and utter silence on the whole issue by Jacinda Arderm? Labour purports to be more rainbow friendly than National and yet in Auckland Central, perhaps the nations gayest electorate, it is National’s Nikki Kaye that is making the headlines for pursuing, if a little wrong-headed, gay friendly community events. Why is Jacinda silent? Rotorua does seem to be a strange place to be campaigning for Auckland Central.
