Paidika

A friend sent me this article from hip, silly Toronto website The Grid, and I read the following piece of tripe by Toronto journalist Paul Aguirre-Livingston:

“A new generation of twentysomething urban gays—my generation,” Aguirre-Livingston declares, “has the freedom to live exactly the way we want. We have our university degrees, homes and careers. In Toronto, we’ve abandoned the Church Wellesley Village. We’re tattooed and pierced and at the helm of billion-dollar industries like fashion and television. We vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents, who don’t mind us coming to stay as a couple. Hell, we even marry our boyfriends, if we choose to, on rooftops overlooking Queen West. Our sexual orientation is merely secondary to our place in society. We don’t need to categorize or define ourselves as gay, and who we sleep with—mostly men and, hey, sometimes women—isn’t even much of a topic of conversation anymore. The efforts of Wittman and his peers produced a whole new type of gay. Say hello to the post-modern homo. The post-mo, if you will.”

This is the second time this week I’ve read someone stepping up to speak on behalf of a generation of LGBTQ persons, in the process claiming that this demographic is effectively post-political. That’s not Aguirre-Livingston’s term, it’s mine. What on earth is this fantasy, this inverted Arcadia into which these authors think that we’ve stumbled as a group? Well, leer these authors, AIDS isn’t our problem, we’ve got rights up the whazoo, and we can even marry (in Canada, that is). This line of thinking has both a descriptive and a prescriptive head: on the one hand, there’s the claim that, in fact, important political struggles are behind us, and so we no longer need to be defined by the stigmatization and ostracism that comes being sexual and gender minorities. On the other hand, there’s the normative proposal—implicit, but present in spades—that since we do not need to be defined by our non-privileged identities, that we ought not be—or at least that there is something liberating and empowering about being able to define ourselves as something apart from those grotty stereotypes of leather daddies, bulldykes, sissies, and queens.

This latter prong of the argument has something going for it, if well presented. People should be able to define themselves however they like and in whatever ways are empowering for them—Boy-Next-Door or Bette Davis. But that’s not how our man goes about his business. “Hairless twinks, move along,” he declares in one section of the article. He, and all those gay twentysomethings on whose behalf he feels privileged to speak, are looking for real men—”straight acting” men. The tone of his article when he touches on such glam fests as Pride is dismissive, even slightly repulsed. He is quick to point out his own masculine gender presentation and expression, and expresses something akin to disdain for other sorts. Reporting what someone said to him about a new party in the Village, “It’s where all the masculine guys and shit go now to avoid the fags.” Continues Aguirre-Livingston, “No, we have no problem with the fact that we want to be with dudes, we just want to be with dudes.”

In other words, he’s rejecting as unattractive and even gross any kind of effeminacy in gender identity or presentation—which, he makes clear, is exactly what he considers the classic gay stereotype to be. I might add that his refusal to acknowledge the hypermasculinized gay male archetypes—exemplified in, say, the Village People, Tom of Finland, or any neighbourhood bear bar—is stunning.

Well, honey, you go your way and I’ll go mine. Act straight—be my guest. I couldn’t if I tried and I don’t want to. I’m six years younger than you and you don’t speak for me.

But more problematic than this normative prong is its descriptive counterpart. It’s just not the case that young people in Toronto are growing up with full support as sexual and gender minorities. A 2007 report on LGBT persons in Canada lists the following:

• Three-quarters of LGBT students hear derogatory remarks at school frequently.
• Over one-third of LGBT students have been physically harassed in some way;
• Over one-third of harassed students did not report the harassment to school staff out of fear or knowledge that nothing would be done to correct the situation;
• One in four transgender persons has been harassed by a police officer;
• One in two transgender persons has faced employment discrimination;
• Thirty-percent of all suicides in Canada are committed by LGBT persons;
• LGB and questioning youth are 3.4 times—three-hundred and forty percent—more likely to report a suicide attempt than non-questioning, heterosexual peers
• Forty-percent of all LGBT students have dramatically low self-esteem; 

Meanwhile,

• Sixty-percent of the students at the justly renowned Triangle Program are homeless, while
• twenty-five to forty-percent of homeless youth in the GTA are LGBT;

Et cetera.

Now, Mr. Aguirre-Livingston chooses to speak on behalf not of LGBT or queer persons but on behalf of gay men. Does that change things enough? I hardly think so. He’s still white and upper-middle class. By the look of it, so is the circle with which he interacts. So when he writes that “[w]e vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents” or that “[o]ur sexual orientation is merely secondary to our place in society,” it’s difficult not to choke a little—out of disbelief, laughter, appall, or a mixture thereof. You might; “we” don’t. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are cisgender unisexual queer males with masculine gender presentation—in short, Mr. Aguirre-Livingston’s “dudes”—who nonetheless have endured and continue to endure serious social and personal torment over their sexualities because they’re growing up in households of first-generation Canadians whose countries of origin do not have large, visible LGBT populations, or even necessarily the language with which to understand those very identities. (For a vivid account of this issue, I refer you to Shyam Selvadurai’s fascinating memoir Funny Boy.) In short, for some of us, our sexuality and gender identities are very much still sources of a radical lack of privilege. And yet our author writes those people out. Evidently they are not among the urban gay twentysomethings for whom he’s really speaking.

Mr. Aguirre-Livingston concludes his absurd song of himself with the following gem: “So what about us? Call us what you want—post-mos, faux gays, straight-acting, bitter queens—we’re the lucky ones.” Granted, this has about as much intellectual rigour as a schoolyard taunt. But it’s highly indicative, and of a poisonous and selfish attitude at that. Sweetheart, you’re not lucky, you’re privileged. There is a difference.