3. What is wrong with gay culture? What is right with it?

Oh god, I know people who have written whole PhDs on this subject. How long have we got?
I don’t believe there is one such thing as ‘gay culture’, but obviously many gay subcultures exist. I don’t mean culture that’s ‘sub’ in any ‘subversive’ way, or ‘less good’ way – I just mean in a smaller way. The clever-clever answer to the first question would be ‘the fact that it has to exist at all’, but it’s a double-edged sword. (Phew! Thank goodness you asked both questions, so I can expound my theory!). The good thing, of course, is that years of social change have seen us providing networks (social, business, community etc.) to support ourselves, but the flipside of the coin is that gay doesn’t necessarily mean better. To quote two very different examples, just because you work for a gay business doesn’t mean you’re being exploited any less, and for every Queer As Folk there’s a Gaytime TV. I have a big problem with the self-ghettoisation that some people have gladly brought upon themselves. But the people who have chosen that path probably don’t see it as a problem at all. It’s all a matter of personal choice of course, but I’m glad (nay, smug) that I’ve never felt the need to blinker my world view through pink spectacles and fling myself totally into ‘gay culture’, whatever that is. I’m glad gay bars exist, but I don’t want to go to them all the time, for example. I see myself these days more as an interested, sometimes amused, occasionally bemused, bystander and observer of gay culture. However, I guess that’s why I feel an ability to write about it for the occasional bits of journalism that I do for a well-known gay magazine(!) I feel involved, and yet detached, and I think it’s a good way to be. I know gay men who have told me that they don’t know any straight people outside of their own families. I find that shocking, and I actually pity them. If you ever find me living off Old Compton Street or in a converted Manchester warehouse, decluttered by a lifestyle therapist, on steroids, with a huge Celtic tattoo across my back, making financial investments with Ivan Massow, please have me shot.
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