Declining or Transitioning?

Thanks to @harveymilk for the heads up.

An interesting article from the journal AIDS Care that uses the changes in the gay community over the past 20 years as a way of talking about HIV prevention. 

In dry terms: 

This study sought to identify how urban gay communities are undergoing structural change, reasons for that change, and implications for HIV prevention planning. Key informants (N=29) at the AIDS Impact Conference from 17 cities in 14 countries completed surveys and participated in a facilitated structured dialog about how gay communities are changing. In all cities, the virtual gay community was identified as now larger than the offline physical community. Most cities identified that while the gay population in their cities appeared stable or growing, the gay community appeared in decline. Measures included greater integration of heterosexuals into historically gay-identified neighborhoods and movement of gay persons into suburbs, decreased number of gay bars and clubs, less attendance at gay events, less volunteerism in gay or AIDS organizations and overall identification and visibility as a gay community. Participants attributed structural change to multiple factors including gay neighborhood gentrification, achievement of civil rights, less discrimination, a vibrant virtual community and changes in drug use. Consistent with social assimilation, across cities, gay infrastructure, visibility and community identification appears to be decreasing. HIV prevention planning, interventions, treatment services, and policies need to be re-conceptualized for MSM in post-gay communities. Four recommendations for future HIV prevention and research are detailed.

There are two interesting take-aways from the article:

1) The existing gay communities and organizations are changing, and no one is quite sure where it's going, or if it's for good or for evil.

2) HIV/STI prevention in gay men is becoming more difficult due to these changes.

Anyone who works in the LGBT community or in AIDS prevention will say, in response: no duh. But it's nice that we have the research to prove what we've been saying for years. :-) 

GAY STUFF: Gay Bars Going Extinct?

This is fascinating, also via the Joe. My. God. Blog (Joe, I don't know if you read this blog at all, but I think I secretly want to be you...) -- here's the audio from NPR:

At this point in the recession, or slowdown, or whatever you want to call it, you're probably familiar with the term "business cycle." Business and businesses have life cycles just like everything else. Demand creates new opportunities, and then when that demand dries up businesses die.

Every year, Fortune Magazine releases a list of 10 businesses it thinks are facing extinction. Some of this year's casualties? Record stores, crop dusting and telemarketing. Oh, and gay bars, too. That one caught our eye because gay business in general is booming.

We talked a little while ago about the death of the queer city, the end of the gayborhood, and the fact that the internet is destroying real-life gay culture.

We have talked before about the dying "real life" culture of the queers. We're a side show, somewhere to go every now and again. With the growing acceptance of homosexuality, the need for our own space is disappearing.

This is not the gay life I signed up for.

You know, it's funny, I have not been to a straight bar in a long, long time. In fact, I had one explosive night at Cadillac Ranch downtown and a handful of experiences at places like the Gypsy Hut or the Northside Tavern, but it's just not the same. I like my gay people. I like knowing that when I am in a bar, and I am out and free, that I can be who I want to be and not worry about whether or not I'm in the "right kind of bar."

In fact, this seems to go against the very premise of Small Town Gay Bar.

I wonder, rather, if the development of gay centers is a step towards integration, and if there is a lesson in racial integration. But there are very few international or cultural hubs around the country anymore -- is Chinatown what it used to be? OTR used to be a German center, are there any more European-culture centers anymore? And, if we have an African-American center, it becomes a "ghetto." I want to live within my culture; I don't want to just visit it on the weekends.

I don't know, I don't like it at all. I like my homonormative life.

GAY STUFF: "Last Call" Article

I will blog about this later (after having already blogged once about it):

"Last Call" Op/Ed piece from the Boston Globe

Although there is clearly a link there as to why I found this article interesting, notice the point of the "long tail" business. IE: is the marketplace as a physical structure now disappearing??? ARe commercial centers at the end of their life?

GAY STUFF: The Mainstreaming of Gay Culture

Listen Here

(Because I need to take ownership of my own feelings, I will preface this by saying: I hate that I am on the part of the NYU prof who says "queer is the new gay," implicating that there are people that are trying to keep gay as different just because it is and no longer represents a separation from American culture. I have my own fear that, to reference another interviewee, I may be, or want to be, Will in Will & Grace).

I think it's fascinating, the sociological implications of marriage. Tucker Carlson (conservative commentator on CNN Headline News) says he is pro-gay marriage because it's "civilizing." I think we are starting to see that happen here, but it's similar to what I have been saying for a while ... and Penny Tration pointed out the same thing in her blog (here -- go to her blog, there are two articles in a row) based off a Yahoo report about the death of gay ghetto's like WeHo, Boystown, Castro, and the Village (locally, Northside).

Gay is passe. (A sharp division from "gay is good" in previous generations) It's common now, and it's on the forefront of American politics but not in a cutthroat sort of way, more of a "tying up loose ends" sort of way.

Rather than fighting for visibility and recognition and the simple right to be, we are fighting just to make sure that our rights are guaranteed and for marriage -- marriage! The penultimate of heteronormativity. Don't get me wrong, I support the right to marry for anyone ... and, later, the right to divorce. But it's telling of where we are.

The commentator makes the point that gay pride parades are less about drag queens and "extremes" these days, but more about fathers with strollers.

How, unusual. We are no longer counter-culture in most sectors of the world ... we're, mainstream. (I knew the world was falling apart when a marketing firm found out that our "purchasing power" and our "market share" was just under that of the entire African-American population. I wish I could still find that link.)

A long time ago, I read Daniel Harris's The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture and was disgusted, at the time, of the idea that this idealized world that I had heard about -- fabulous clubs, flashy drag queens, counter-cultural movement, sexual liberation -- was falling apart. After all, that's what I wanted. The more I delved, however, the more I found it to be true.

All those wonderful things have given way to a mainstream society with an unspoken "underbelly" upon which all these other things happen. (I will never forget the day a friend of mine said to me in a gay community meeting "We don't talk about sex here, that's not what we're about" -- I don't think he knows I still carry those words with me.) Oh sure, the sexual liberation exists... that is, we can be sexually liberated behind closed doors... just don't talk about it or discuss it, or even mention that we have sex.

It's all very suburban, to my mind.

Are we like everyone else? No, and that's what makes us wonderful. I think I am beginning to understand what the black community went through in the 70s-90s. "Now we have the rights, but we still want to be ourselves." It makes sense to me.

Gay culture, like black culture, was borne out of oppression. It is from oppression springs acitivism (hence, why we don't see ACTUP or Queer Nation anymore).

We are becoming a true part of this American Life... assimilated, mainstream, consumerist, and armchair lobbyists.

I just don't hope we start losing our culture because of it.

Oh, and to the couple on the interview that says "here in suburbia, you can be radical every day." I would like to retort: it takes less courage to simply put a middle-class, suburban, white (not that there's anything wrong with that) face on homosexuality than it did to come out when your life was threatened. Sorry, you aren't no Harvey Milk or Harry Hay.

...and I bet you don't even know who they are.