DJ Susan Morabito, left gives Eric Rofes a tutorial in gay community involvement of the dance-floor variety at the Center. (Photo by Steve Weinstein)
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By Steve Weinstein
Friday, January 13, 2006
“Where did all the gay guys go?” activist Eric Rofes asked in
the title of a workshop held at the Gay Center.
About 60 of those very guys showed up Jan. 11 to try to figure out what was
happening to the perhaps oxymoronic “gay community” and what they
could do about it.
Leading the gathering was Rofes, an activist currently teaching at Humboldt
State University in Northern California. The room was like a Who’s Who
of gay activism in the city, with notables such as George Jagatic, head of Axis
Danz and flagger extraordinaire; longtime community leader Candida Piel; Dave
Nimmons, founder of the group Manifest Love and author of “Soul Beneath
the Skin”; and DJ legend Susan Morabito.
Befitting someone who emphasizes one-on-one, grassroots, bottom-up movements,
Rofes divided people into small groups to discuss issues of gay identity and
changes facing gay men in the new century. Then, everyone got together to talk
about it.
The discussion was freewheeling. Opinions encompassed a Dickensian range of
best of times, worst of times.
Many people expressed concern that the Internet had effectively eroded any
gay community and inhibited socializing. This gay “bowling alone”
school complained about bars being too noisy to communicate; young people growing
up alone facing a computer screen; and lack of social graces while IMing potential
tricks.
Others believed that younger gay people were, in the words of one woman, “less
gay and more queer.” These people believe that gay men are forging their
own identities independent of preconceived strictures such as “gay”
or “straight.” They hang out with straight friends and don’t
want to compartmentalize their lives.
The Internet has widened our circle of friends at the same time as it’s
narrowed it, Rofes said. “I spend more time with my friends in New York
or London or Sydney than I do with my best girlfriend three blocks away.”
Some people pointed to ever-greater sero-segregation between HIV-positive
and -negative men. One man, an immigrant, talked about how perilous his situation
is and how that changes his perspective of American gay culture.
Piel bemoaned the fact that AIDS had intervened in so many men’s lives.
The result, she said, was that the coming-out process — which, no matter
how accepted gay men are, remains fraught — has been ignored or downgraded
in the wake of the collective “post-traumatic stress disorder” that
we all suffer from, knowingly or not.
“The one right of passage we all shared was coming out,” she said.
“The one thing that tied us together is considered not particularly important.”
The wider world of politics certainly impacts on our lives in ways we can’t
comprehend, one speaker said. “The Republican Party influences the way
we have sex,” he said. “In the back of our minds there’s a
creeping feeling everything’s getting scarier and scarier.”
The continued morphing of New York City into a Parisian model of an affluent
city center surrounded by working-class suburbs is greatly impacting gay life
in our town, according to some speakers, who bemoaned the days when artists
and self-proclaimed societal outlaws could live and love in Manhattan. Rofes
pointed to Times Square as a Petri dish of social interaction, where a banker
could have sex in a theater balcony with a stevedore — something that
probably never happens in the New Amsterdam Theater.
But at least one speaker thought that the times were not all bad. He pointed
to greater visibility in the media, from “Will & Grace” to “Brokeback
Mountain.”
“Those of us who are older are sort in disbelief over it,” he
said. “In the last few decades, some of the barriers have come down.”
This speaker extolled the Internet as a virtual Washington Street truck, where
people can play out their fantasies.
Assimilation was a favored word. Some people saw it as the great bugbear of
gay life, something that would reduce the uniqueness of gay men into a bland
conformity. Others implied that it was a paper tiger which enabled people to
work within the system — or to define themselves as against it, if they
so choose.
Rofes then detailed some of his observations and concerns on the state of
gay life in 2006. “The arrival and expansion of cyberspace and its many
uses is affecting the entire culture,” he said. “It’s reinfused
the sexual in my everyday life. So many gay men are online during working hours.”
Add to that unexplored ramifications of our increasing focus on mobile technology.
Rofes pointed to “anecdotal reports of diminished participation in bars,
community meetings.” Along with that is the “heterocolonization”
of resorts like Provincetown and neighborhoods like Chelsea, the decline of
gay bookstores and newspapers, and the generational divide between gay men.
(Rofes defined a “gay generation” as 10 years.)
Who is gay today, anyway? Rofes said that more and more young men refuse to
self-identify as “gay”; rather, they pick and choose identities,
even changing them around at will. That also holds true for men who define themselves
more in terms of ethnicity than sexual expression.
The anxiety in today’s workplace paradoxically means that everyone’s
working more but that they’re partying harder — if less frequently.
According to Rofes, more men are holding off for weekend-long parties rather
than regular outings to bars and clubs. They also aren’t going to sex
clubs as much, judging from the disappearance of such places.
Rofes asked people to look into their crystal balls and gauge gay life in
2015. One person it would be “all Jackson Heights and Park Slope”
— new energies from former outsiders. Several people pointed to gay marriage
as an eventual reality, opening new doors and challenges.
Whatever happens, for Rofes, the most important thing today is to foster that
ever-elusive sense of community. He pointed to study after study, in gay ghettos
and backwaters, that gay men feel isolated.
“At this moment, for various reasons, there can be the possibility of
greater isolation,” he concluded. “As a gay activist doing this
work for 30 years, I see the choice as go to a meeting, go to a debate, or sit
at home and watch ‘The Simpsons.’” He said he didn’t
blame people for getting burned out on activism. But he hopes that those who
do go to meetings realize that the only way to keep a movement going is to invite
new people in and welcome them.
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