For Pride 2010, we asked an eclectic group for their take on Gay Pride. From living to loathing, the responses cover a wide spectrum - a rainbow of opinion, perhaps?
This response comes from Mister Choire Sicha, who, among many other things, is coproprietor of The Awl. He's also sort of finishing up a book. Here's his take:
Faggotry as we know it today is still very new, and it probably won't
last very long. It's a very temporary thing, I think! Some of what we
understand as faggotry was invented before the last world war but much
of it was codified after, when the ranks of city-living gays swelled
(thanks to servicemembers who returned to the country but never went
home). This is when it became more easy to enter into the class that
could afford (financially or otherwise) some geographic mobility in
the United States. The great cities are what made faggots, and I think
today that's related to how we today look down on people who are left
behind, outside of the big cities. We left! And mostly for good
reasons. And so why shouldn't anyone else worth anything have left as
well? Obviously it's a brittle piece of defensiveness in action,
although some of it is true--I'd like to see my straight cousin S____
try and live in Manhattan, he'd totally die. But then I wouldn't do
very well living in that shit show that is Arizona either, would I.
One of the positive benefits of the early gay relation to
commercialism is that we retained a market for the handmade in
America, as everything else became ugly and internationally mass-produced.
Faggots commissioned architecture, and bought paintings and
handmade clothing and quilts and furniture. The gays wanted the
unique, and the special (even if it was, already, often a little
overly trendy). But there is now so little left in our country that is
made painstakingly or by hand, because the value of the time spent
creating such a product makes it too expensive to be consumed by a
country that is kept poor so that a very small class (a class that
very, very rarely includes homosexuals, actually) can be made
extravagantly rich.
But for many years, gay men harvested the remnants of an America that
could no longer afford what was once commonplace. Now, I'm afraid,
many of them have stopped. You and I both frequently look at a
microcosm of well-off gay men on Fire Island; it has changed over time
in many ways. One way is that now grown men dress in clothing that is
designed for tweens, but this is only one small sad symptom.
