(... no, this isn't about Everquest.)
I went on another hike last night with the gay outdoors group I joined. Technically, it was the same hike as last time (Charlie Turner trail to Mt. Hollywood), just a different night and a different set of people. This was definitely an older crowd than the first time I went: ages are hard to gauge, but I was easily one of the younger people there. That isn't a problem, but it does mean a different dynamic.
To over-simplify, there is an observable difference in how people approach being gay that seems to be related to when they came out. This is only an "age" thing to the extent that there is a pretty significant change in the 90s in attitudes towards LGBTQ folks in our society, or at least in SoCal; that means that, on average, people since the 90s started coming out at a much younger age and with less social resistance than people before that.
That emphasized point is probably the key. I officially came out at 13 in 1991 to damned near anyone, including my friends at school (and it being high school pretty much everyone else as a result). My mother met (and actually "caught" me in bed with) a boyfriend at 16 - and made us breakfast. I was only picked on once in high school, never got threatened with being kicked out or abandoned, and only had one friend react badly (he was pretty religious). Hell, I even got asked to teach a class at my Catholic church - by the head priest (obviously before I walked away from religion).
This "experience profile" (if I can call it that), while thankfully more and more common since then, was fairly unusual at the time and almost unheard of before that. Most of the people I've met who came out before adulthood in the 80s or earlier were all "forced" into it - either by discovery or other factors - and almost universally had extremely negative responses. Certainly, everyone I know who was an actively gay teenager before 1990 had been kicked out of their house and was either living in youth hostels or had found someone older to act as a surrogate parent/guardian.
I also realize there are exceptions, but the general gist is that guys who were gay before the 90s had to be able to take care of themselves, which means most were college age - or even later - before being openly gay. Even today, this still happens with guys from some of the more conservative families, but it's rarer and rarer. You also have more people today coming out in a "second-wave" kind of sense, after years of marriage or simply having never felt (or accepted being, in some cases) gay.
So why does it matter? It just seems to me like these experiences create two very different mindsets between those who were "gay as kids" in a sense and those who weren't, similar to how there are different mindsets towards technology between those of us who grew up using computers and those who didn't. Obviously, the former group couldn't have existed without the efforts and advances of the latter (in both cases), but that doesn't make the assumptions and approaches between the two groups any less different.
The diaspora of the "gay community" out of the "ghettos" and into the historically-straight world is one aspect of this difference. To a lot of people older than me, of course predominantly-gay communities should exist and will continue to exist. To a lot of people younger than me, of course gay people go to straight bars and are perfectly accepted; who needs to have a gays-only place? One younger couple I know has parties where both of their parents show up and everyone has a blast; many older guys I know only officially came out to their parents after 40, if ever.
And perhaps more significantly, a lot of older guys see being gay as central to their identities (I assume it's often because of the price they had to pay to be openly gay), whereas a lot of younger guys see it as incidental (because it's always just been part of who they are).
Neither is right or wrong. Neither is better or worse. Neither is absolute. But they do tend to be different, and that difference shows up in subtle ways if you listen for them. I'm kind of caught in the transition between generations - in as much the same sense as I'm "transitional" between those who had computers growing up and those who didn't (I did, but most of my age group didn't until later). Being 37 and looking like a 20-something doesn't help (I actually heard/saw one of the hikers whisper to someone else, "Who's the twink?" while looking at me).
But therein lies the problem. I explicitly joined a "gay outdoors" group with the hope that it would be more "outdoors with a slice of gay" and not the other way around. I mean, I enjoy talking about pride and entertainment and coming out experiences and all that - sometimes. But I also want to talk about other things that have nothing to do with being gay. It's possibly just the nature of the couple of hikes I've been on, so I'm going to try one of the camping trips to see if that may be a different crowd or something more like what I'm looking for. And I'll probably keep doing the hikes - I actually enjoy them, mostly.
It isn't explicitly an age thing, though it seems to correlate with it. But if I'm going to be combining "outdoorsy" with "gay", I'd like the emphasis to be on the former rather than the latter, and most of the people I've met so far seem to be the opposite. I'll just have to give it time and see.
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6 comments:
This is a fascinating topic, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
If you have any more observations about the differences between the pre-and-post 90s generations, I'd love to hear them.
They're not really generation things so much as "the way your slice of the world treated you" things, which does sort of link to generation but not exclusively.
I'd have to think (and likely stretch) to come up with others; these are just two that I run into all the time.
There's a lot in these observations I agree with, but much of the analysis rests on the idea that gay cultural institutions (lower-case "i") exist primarily as a source of comfort and solidarity in the face of discrimination. That's a reason they exist, but the primary reason has always, I think, been to increase the percentage of other gay folks for the purpose of meeting other gay folks, often to date or just to have sex with.
So the difference with younger gay guys (particularly men) that is mostly keeping them away from the older set of institutions is not increased acceptance, but the prevalence of online dating and hookup apps (particularly the latter). That's just how younger people meet each other now.
And I suspect that development means that it's the gay bars that are facing a long term threat. As you age (or at least as many people age) hookup apps become a less desirable place to put yourself out there, so there's still going to be demand for the gay hiking groups and probably genre(?) specific event nights in normal clubs. And maybe some neighborhood gay bars. But not so much big clubs, because you might as well just hook up on the phone and meet at the generic cool big club rather than a gay-specific one.
Skef - I think you're bypassing an important fact here. There are more tools to hook up in large part because being gay is more accepted than it used to be.
But you're also attributing intent here where I didn't say any. What I linked this all to was sense of identity: how much "being gay" is an integral/central part of who you are as a person. Discrimination acts as an influence on that - as a kind of gatekeeper - but the focus is still on self-identity.
Gay bars, coffee shops, social groups, etc., were all about more than just hooking up. The use of technology for online dating is hardly new with Grindr - it's possibly more prevalent now, but it's been there for decades. They're more prevalent now, but that's about it. Social media isn't killing straight bars; why would it kill gay bars?
Or, to put it another way - if you think that gay bars exist only for hooking up, then you're exemplifying exactly what I was saying: that personal identity for gay people is now less focused on sexuality than it used to be. And that shift in focus is what I was talking about (which goes far beyond just the bars).
Maybe some of my last comment was inartfully put. Let me try to do better in this response.
First, I wouldn't want to say that gay bars exist solely or primarily for hooking up, but I think that most of them do rely on patrons looking for sex and/or romance, in the sense that if they lost all of those patrons, the remaining ones wouldn't be enough to keep them in business. The exceptions being certain "corner bar" type places.
Second, I still think you're underestimating the technological changes. What has existed for years is the technology for dating apps ("I want to date someone, or just have sex with someone, this week") as opposed to hookup apps ( ... "in the next few hours"). That really is a huge difference, especially for younger gay men, that's mostly been opened up by smartphone. To get such a service going otherwise you would need enough people in front of their computers at one time to get a critical mass. (And, in fact, sites like gay.com did play this very-short-term role earlier, but generally only in the hours just after the bars closed in a given area.) These days you can simultaneously go out with your friends to the local Whatever bar and also flirt online with gay men in the general area -- which in many ways is a better arrangement.
Third, I think our main disagreement has to do with just what has changed in recent years. You write, "a lot of older guys see being gay as central to their identities (I assume it's often because of the price they had to pay to be openly gay), whereas a lot of younger guys see it as incidental (because it's always just been part of who they are)." This isn't the contrast that I generally see. What I see is that a lot of older gay men have compartmentalized identities, including a "gay/sex/love/community" bucket. (Of course, there are ex-activists, and people who lived through the AIDS crisis in urban areas, for whom being gay is truly central to their lives, for understandable reasons, but they are a small percentage of the whole.) And I guess I do agree that the compartmentalization did result in more focus on the "gay" for younger guys, because of the relative importance of the "sex/love". But I'm not convinced the changes will result in a great rebalancing of the importance of these various factors taken over a lifetime (on average). You seem confident that the changes over the past 10 years or so will mean that when now-young gay men are in their mid-thirties, they won't feel they have much reason or desire to gay-hike. I'm not so sure.
As far as technology goes, I'm not sure how old you are or what your experience is, but we had the equivalent of flash parties in the 90s. Our communication was largely via IRC, email, listservs, and BBSs, but that notion of using tech to up on short notice is *not* new. It's more prevalent now, but it's been around since the early 90s.
... I'm having trouble parsing your "compartmentalized" statement (which may be entirely on my end). You start talking about how older guys have compartmentalized, and then about how younger guys have, and I'm not sure what contrast you're suggesting.
I think compartmentalizing for a lot of gay men has to do with discrimination (real or imagined); as such, older guys would generally do it more, since they tended to face more (on average). And while (if that's what you're saying) I think that's true, that's a separate axis/thing from what I was discussing.
I just see some people as having more... I don't know, "personal investment" in the concept of being gay and, as a result, their lives tend to be more focused on it. That tendency seems to be related to how young they came out, in my experience. It's just an observation, and it could be wrong, but I haven't seen anything you've written that necessarily contradicts that.
I don't know that I said they won't want to gay-hike. But I do think the focus is going to be on the hike than on the gay, whereas the group I'm with now has the focus more on the gay than the hike. But again, I could be wrong.
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