When did you realize you no longer were part of the gay mainstream?

Why do you think they are the mainstream and you are not? Drag Race UK? Twitter gays?

I'm repulsed by OP and glad he's no longer part of the inner circle. Bye, Felicia!

R2 it's "Felisha" actually.

R1 They're the ones that everyone sees, they're the ones going out and attending parties, they're the ones who are shown as examples of gays, interviewed, etc.

And yes, the gay mainstream watches Euphoria and Drag Race, apparently.

I was thinking about this shit recently.

Other than caring about skincare, loving Kate Bush and Tori Amos, and the fact that I watched 2 soap operas as a teen(and for around 20 years after)- I have never had much of a connection.

I did the gay club thing in Boston from 1999-2001 and that was basically it.

I dug this club called "Campus" in Cambridge.

I have not been involved in anything "gay" since. Always feel like an island. Never been to Provincetown either. No desire to.

[quote] What moment caused you to realize you were no longer part of your mainstream culture group?

I never fit into the gay community.

I went to Uncle Charlie's. Better looking guys would actually stand in front of me, blocking me from other guys. My stand and model game wasn't good enough.

I went to Splash, but my ass is too flat to shake it on the dance floor.

I went to the Eagle and wasn't beefy or hairy enough.

I went to Marie's Crisis and sang my lungs out but I wasn't chorus boy material.

I went to the Town House. Patrons couldn't decide if I was buying or selling, so avoided me.

I went to church at MCC, but everyone was already paired off.

People who cast the broadest net on Twitter or other social media and feign SHOCK! and what they pull ashore.

Set some search parameters, FFS. Don't expect Twitter --of all sources-- to hook you up with the latest reexamination of references to Old Masters paintings and tapestries in British between the wars literature

Asking Twitter to give you anything that's popular and "right now" is an invitation to s floodgate of sewage. But you know that and like to act appalled at what you see floating by.

There's brilliant stuff of all stripes to be found if you take a bit of care in defining what you want. If you get random awfulness who is to blame but random you?

When we had our daughter - and then our son. We weren't ever really part of the gay mainstream - but once we had kids, it ALL changed...

Almost from the beginning. I came out in 1975-76 and I hated disco. Hated it.

My favorite bars were the Candle (Upper West Side) and Ninth Circle (Greenwich Village). Not as much disco. My favorite Candle song was "Let 'Em In" by Paul McCartney. At the Ninth Circle, it was possible to hear Tammy Wynette, Linda Ronstadt, Hall and Oates, and Boz Scaggs.

I met a guy named David at the Candle. He was a gorgeous and exceptionally well hung Jewish boy. I wish I had let him in on a more regular basis. He was kind of in love/obsessed with me and I broke up with him when I met another guy. If he thought of me when he heard "You're No Good," I would not be shocked.

That is awesome R8. Hugs man!

Yes, yeah, yep, you're different from us, you're superior to us. Whatever. No need for that long, meandering rant notwithstanding.

I've never been part of the "Gay Mainstream" because being Gay is only part of who I am

I’d way rather deal with a bonafide basic bitch than the sort of basic bitch who doesn’t realize that they are one because “I don’t watch drag race” or “I hate the Kardashians and don’t even know any of their first names” or “please don’t call me to make plans because I hate going out and just want to stay in an eat tacos NOM NOM”.

In college, I went to a pride alliance meeting and felt a very Mean Girls vibe and never went back. No one was welcoming at all. A guy in my French class asked me to tutor him and I ended up going to an LGBT group therapy type thing with him and made some gay (mostly lesbian) close friends through it.

After college, I wanted to be part of a gay community. I couldn't find one. I ended up doing freelance writing for a major LGBT publication and after a short while I realized I was a total fish out of water. I did inane celeb interviews that were nothing but hawking product through pandering to gay people, and eventually I started writing personal essays. I was shocked to find that the essays engaged readers a lot more than the entertainment stuff did, and I attracted a lot of followers, some of whom became quasi online friends.

But writing for LGBT publications taught me that 'the LGBT community' in terms of magazines/websites, TV networks et al. is nothing but a marketing segment. That's it.

I applied for years to jobs at HRC, GLAAD et al and never got so much as an interview. I longed for some kind of connection to a gay community.

Even as I did, I resented a lot of what I saw 'out there.' Gay culture is mean mean mean from what I've seen from the fringes.

I had a young gay coworker for a while who knows every gay guy in town, considers all of them friends, and only says nasty things about everyone he knows. He's extremely arrogant, thinks he is more attractive than he is, he's smart but he throws around his pedigree all the time and I find that off putting, he's into job titles, people with high incomes and other demonstrations of status. And he is just one nasty little critter.

Knowing him helped me to realize I never fit in with gay culture because I have little in common with it. I am basically an average schmo who grew up lower middle/working class and I am anti-elitist. That's incompatible with the gay culture where I live. I'm average looking and I'm fine with that. Everything in gay world is about being 'the best' in competition for 'the best,' and it's a worldview I do not share in any way.

I was probably 35 before I finally accepted and understood that. I don't have many gay friends because I don't have much in common with gay men. We all like dick. That's about it.

A big part of my confusion and feeling of disappointment stemmed from the fact that I am a creative person who paints and draws and writes and I grew up believing gay men are creative people. Apart from the drag queens I see on TV, I have experienced almost no creative culture within DC's gay culture; it's all about asset accumulation, appearances, drinking and most importantly measuring everyone against everyone else. I find it American Psycho-level grotesque.

The Gay mainstream would be Pete Buttigieg and influential gay men like him. I doubt some random twitter Nelly (who probably doesn't even identify as gay) is consider the mainstream.

Because some people on twitter represent all gays!

I'm shocked and a bit disgusted you think Drag Race is gay mainstream. Most gays are very boring like everyone else.

I have never been a part of the gay mainstream: I do not drink or do drugs. I cannot abide techno/dance music (or disco). The only people I call Mary are my three friends named Mary.

Drinks and drugs are hetero mainstream R18.

Oracle is right on the money there.

Drink and drugs are USA mainstream, Gay/Straight/Purple.

I may have 3 glasses of wine in me now.

Twitter is not a mirror of gay mainstream. Twitter is for attention whores. .

When I was in high school, in Manhattan, in the 90s, I thought being gay meant being obsessed with women's fashion and drag queens and hating sports and walking and talking in a swishy manner even if you looked like a "bro" from a distance, because when you went down to Chelsea, that's pretty much all you saw. And I was miserable because none of that appealed to me.

Fortunately there was the internet and I learned that most gay guys are not like that. I have never been one for gay bars or clubs or Fire Island except as a way of getting laid quickly and even then.. so the apps and CL and even AOL chat rooms were much more my style as I did not have to leave the house to find that evening's willing bottom.

Which is not to say that I don't have gay friends, it's just that the gay friends I have feel the same way about "the scene" as I do.

^^And yes, OP's obsession with Twitter AND RuPaul are both head-scratchers.

R1 is right. There are SO many more gays who aren't like that than who are, but those ones are just more visible.

I never really felt I fit in to that either. I was big into the alternative music scene as a teen, and really didn't like teeny bopper hits like others. But as you meet people you realise that you are being influenced in thinking you don't fit in by what is considered 'gay' in the mainstream. Most guys I meet much prefer the type of music I like, they read heaps, are up to date on current events, good with general knowledge etc. They just don't spend every second of their lives on Oxford Street, you know?

Look around at the varied threads on this site alone. Gay men are into so many different types of things, you will definitely find people who click with you.

R14. Blue Ribbon. Thank you.

I'm a Gay icon...

[quote] But writing for LGBT publications taught me that 'the LGBT community' in terms of magazines/websites, TV networks et al. is nothing but a marketing segment. That's it.

This is true of the gay non-profits, as well.

And many lesbians (myself included) have never felt part of the mainstream anything.

R27 I can see why. I remember when I was young, I didn't really pay much attention to the ads in Out magazine UNTIL the magazine introduced a "Nipple Count" in every issue, which tallied up the number of nipples pictured in the issue, all from shirtless men, of course, and nearly all in ads for alcohol, vacations, etc. I found it really creepy and it also made me notice how nearly everything was selling to men. The magazine halved its potential readership by doing that.

So many of us feel like this, we could almost make our OWN mainstream, hehe.

Seriously though, this is sappy but me, I'm a sap, and I just wanna send a big hug to anyone in this thread who has felt ostracised at all. Those who do that aren't worth your time x.

There's a big annual event called Mid-Atlantic Leather (MAL) in which horny musclegays dress up in leather S&M gear—chaps, harnesses, etc. and do the random group sex thing.

If I had any ambition to start an event, I'd create Mid-Atlantic Tweed for gay dandies who actually like to wear clothes and enjoy things like reading and the arts and, you know, all the boring things in life that don't involve lifting and putting down heavy things and getting strangers loads pumped into all your holes. I have a feeling some people would actually participate, those crazy gay outcasts who would rather have a conversation than zap their neurons with stinky poppers.

“Culture” is all about youth. 100 fifty year old gays and lesbians could fall from the sky like those birds in Mexico and people would be like “huh?”

But one 20 something twink who was inadvertently called “maam” would light up Twitter and the world like Russia attacking Ukraine.

You only matter as long as your ass is hot.

The first time I walked into a gay bar and saw the freakshow. Then they opened their mouths and the cruelty ramped up and I realized these are not my people.

And they always sounded like LADIES when they opened their mouths- with bodies of gods. R32

That was true in 2001!

When I first watched Follies. “Utter schlock,” I thought.

[quote]Then they opened their mouths and the cruelty ramped up and I realized these are not my people.

The cruelty is what gets me too. I have no desire to be a part of that. High school was horrible the first time I went through it. Hanging around "stunted-at-14-years-old" adults is not really how I wish to spend my time.

R35 - agreed. And I've read enough DL threads that when one laments that they have a hard time fitting in 75% of the responses are telling that poster to "lose weight/gain muscle and then people will want to fuck you"

Straight guys horrifically objectify women, but gay men are much worse to other gay men.

[quote]gay men are much worse to other gay men.

I almost have to laugh - the number of times I have been insulted by a guy who wants to fuck me! I don't understand it and I'm really not going to play games. If you wanna fuck, let's get to it. I like making men cum, it's really no more complicated than that and doesn't need to be.

I would attend Mid Atlantic Tweed.

[quote] I would attend Mid Atlantic Tweed.

So would I!

Straight men compete with other straight men over things they covet, including women, ways to get money and power, etc. Otherwise, they tend to support other men.

Straight women tend to believe in supporting women but become hyper-competitive to the point of sabotaging one another. I used to point out to women I worked with when they said (as literally every woman I know has said) "women are impossible to work with" thay they are undermining women in the workplace by saying it, but someone told me I was mansplaining and so I stopped. Nevertheless, countless women I have worked with have told me "you don't understand how terrible women are to one another" while simultaneously saying the world is sexist and women are discriminated against. That one I can't make sense of.

Gay men at work...I have had about a half dozen gay coworkers. One, described above, was pompous and vicious and while I appreciated his work, we were like two cats with bad energy together. (No, neither of us was sexually attracted to the other.) My other gay coworkers...fine, but I have never bonded with any of them. However, that said, none of the others fell into the 'mean gay' stereotype; they were more like me, just average guys who were there to work and then went home to boring domestic lives.

[quote]just average guys who were there to work and then went home to boring domestic lives.

So true. Personally, I get home from work and either play on my Nintendo Switch, watch a horror movie or listen to music if I'm not hanging out with friends. Nothing amazing, but it works for me.

I don’t drink much alcohol, but when I do go for a night out, I avoid gay bars completely. Other than finding the types of gay men who generally frequent gay bars utterly repulsive (effeminate, obnoxious, drugged up), I find I have much more fun at bars with straight people.

I was in the airport earlier this week and some queen was loudly talking into his phone and it was immediately, indisputably obvious he was gay by that annoying, attention-seeking, faggy, and non-masculine voice that SO MANY gay guys possess. It is like nails on chalkboard and an instant turnoff. I don’t care how good looking he is, any man with that voice is unattractive to me.

R43 just demonstrated the fine line between 'not fitting in' and 'rabidly homophobic.'

Shallow pop culture and nonstop parting is not all there is to be gay. Neither is being a slut or acting super effeminate. A lot of young gay and bi guys who are more masculine or introverts are less likely to go to gay bars, clubs and LGBT events because they can navigate mostly straight environments. They have apps now which makes it easier to get sex and date. So that leaves flamboyant queens and attention whores being overrepresented in mostly gay settings.

When I came of age and found I preferred punk clubs to gay bars.

It's not homophobic to not be attracted to queens. If you want to bang Johnathan Van Ness, he's all yours.....

I’m not homophobic. I just don’t find gay culture appealing at all, so I avoid it. It’s not like I’m out bashing stereotypical gay men, I’m stating MY opinion that I find many gay men unattractive due to their personalities, speech patterns, and attitude. Sorry that offends you, R44.

And sadly, gay men who carry on like this only hurt themselves personally and professionally in the long run. The truth is most people are uncomfortable with and avoid those who exhibit obviously-gay, attention-seeking behavior.

In 2022 few people are homophobic to the point where they want nothing to do with a guy who sucks cock — in fact, most Millennials and younger don’t care if you’re gay at all. But the over-the-top, exaggerated femininity and that voice are social suicide for gay men in most communities.

Which is why gay voice is so prevalent amongst a large portion of gay men. It’s self-fulfilling as these guys only hang around other gay men and subconsciously emulate each other.

[quote] it was immediately, indisputably obvious he was gay by that annoying, attention-seeking, faggy, and non-masculine voice

That is explicitly homophobic.

Mid Atlantic Tweed man,

If you seriously decide to make this as a small annual event, could you post a notice here on DL? I would absolutely consider coming.

I just love the idea of it.

Jonathan Van Ness? Doesn't [insert preferred pronoun here] identify as non-binary, and thus opted out of our club?

I mean, that's fine by me if he doesn't want to be a "boring gay" anymore.

Drag queens and Twitter are tiresome; the two combined even more so.

They are not 'culture' or communities, but self-promoting money-grubbing entities.

The gay voice isn't bad. Some gay men can't help having effeminate voice and they should not be ashamed. It's when it's over-the-top and obnoxious like a cartoon that it's disliked. Nobody likes shrill obnoxious straight people either.

I like gay artists like Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, writers like Stephen McCauley, Clive Barker, Yukio Mishima, Chuck Palahniuk, Dennis Cooper, James Balwin and Allen Ginsburg and film directors like Kenneth Anger, Gregg Araki, Bruce LaBruce, Gus Van Sant and John Waters.

R49, I should have been more tactful in how I described this man. But I was embarrassed for him — here we are in very a busy Centurion lounge with a lot of older business types and he’s yapping away, LOUDLY, in this really gay, exaggerated way drawing attention to himself. It’s embarrassing.

Gay men can’t get angry when stereotypes persist, because his type is so visible. I’m not saying every gay man has to conform to a masculine ideal, but many could tone it down a few notches.

R50 I'm just so not an events person. But I think I could conceive it well.

Not sure social media is neccesarily representative or reflective of the mainstream.

I've never been mainstream and that is just fine.

The heterosexism and homophobia on this thread is staggering. Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise. I cannot argue with someone’s lived experience, but I do know that I am at least 50% responsible for experiences and interactions in the world, and so are all of you. Generally speaking, you get what you give, and the LGBT community is not a monolith. Good luck.

r31 I can see your point.

******* ”my experiences and interactions….”

I'm also down for Mid-Atlantic Tweed.

r56 it's totally representative of the -mainstream- gay culture because mainstream gay culture is social, goes to events to see and be seen and get photographed, sleeps with each other, watches Drag Race and Euphoria together, and goes on vacation with each other. If you aren't doing that, you aren't part of the mainstream. It doesn't mean you don't have your own clique or that you don't have a perfectly normal life otherwise, you just aren't part of "current" gay culture.

Still the same tiny box I never fit into.

r11 if you think OP is a long, meandering rant because it has multiple paragraphs, you have bigger issues in life than worrying about some thread on the DL.

Majority of the people I know who watch Drag Race are straight women usually annoying ones. A lot of gay guys I know are diverse in taste and enjoy sports, video games, reading, and other things.

r65 how old are the gay guys you know?

R66 Young ones around my age (late 20s). You realize not every 20-something is an airhead who lives on social media? People gravitate towards those who are like them. Most young guys (gay or straight) are masculine and have similar interests. The gays who are into drag and Euphoria would not be the ones I associate with.

R64 - this is DL, not an Ivy League English compisition class, if I want to read a long, meandering essay. The problem is with the obese, friendless, no-life, holier-than-thou OCD ranter OP and you.

[quote]this is DL, not an Ivy League English compisition class

Obvs, it ain't no spelling class, either, r68.

And the OP is certainly no "long, meandering essay." You musta done real good in skool, huh?

Most the time I don't even feel like I am part of the human race let alone being part of any gay stream, main or otherwise. Fortunately I enjoy being alone.

r67 and to flip your own remark back on you, you do realize your bubble isn't the rest of the English-speaking world, correct?

r68 I suggest getting your GED and finishing high school, at last, rather than worrying about some random post on the DL.

R71 OK. You can create your own bubble. Part of being an adult is choosing who to surround yourself with. Social media itself is a bubble. If you are around shallow gays, then go out and try to find the ones who are interesting. It takes effort but it pays off. Good day.

r73 yes, but only one bubble is "mainstream", and that happens to be the one in the media all the time.

R74 Let's unpack some things. Why do you care about the mainstream? Why do you care what other gays enjoy? Why don't you focus on yourself and finding other people who have similar interests? The media has always been bullshit and has never properly represented anything at any point in time. You should not limit yourself like this. The world is way too big.

When I heard Barbra Streisand sing and was REPULSED.

Lots of self-loathing, stereotyping and generalizing in this thread. To all of you who are so sure that all Gays are this way or that you're missing out on meeting a lot of decent, fun people. Too bad

This is what happens when there is an extreme population loss of gay men in their late teens-50s in the 1980s/90s. You lose a large part of a generation that would have come into its own, and shaped society by the early 2000s. Because we are a much smaller group than we would have been without AIDS, we have Broadway covered in films made into musical spectacles, visual art is not much more than a cheap commodity or for money laundering, fashion is stale, music is terrible. The internet really ruined what was able to be created anyway.

So many who should have been here are gone, and those of us who carried on were not as powerful as we should have been.

I certainly don't argue that the losses of an AIDS generation were few or inconsequential, but over the worst 12 years or so the loss was more a literal decimation (1 in 10) than a whole generation wiped out or a cultural legacy disappeared.

To suggest that music is terrible is just wrong. Music is fantastic now, it's just not a collective experience but a thousand niche markets that you have to find. Television has done nothing but improve (to the detriment of film, but what was so great about pre-AIDS gay film?). Fashion was different. Music was different. Nightlife was different. Taste for musicals was different. Visual art is different. Gay men are no longer visible only in visual merchandising, fashion, as florists, as flight attendants, as interior designers, as choreographers, as shopkeepers, as neighborhood gentrifiers...they're now the boring bears in IT, or HR, in a thousand less than fabulous occupations.

Gays and lesbians are not visible only in a handful of occuptions, not seen only in s handful of bars and nightclubs, they listen to different music, travel outside of gay and lesbian ghettos in world cities and capitals, lead less segregated lives, live in different neighborhoods than 35 years ago, meet sex dates differently, get married, adopt children, have straight friends instead of fag hags. For better or worse or both or neither.

The idea that gay culture died during the height of the AIDS is only partly right. It changed and new things emerged, not all of them worse or second-rate to what preceded them. And everything else changed, too, as it does.

How old are you, R76? I'm genuinely curious.

I find it really interesting when people mention Barbra Streisand especially as a gay icon because her music may as well be elevator music to my ears. I find her bland beyond being able to tolerate, and she seems to have a pretty off-putting personality to boot. I know one gay person who likes her music and he is older, in his 60s now, and she still isn't one of his favorites. His favorite is Stevie Nicks.

It's interesting how (as with all people) there are stark generational divides among 'gay icons,' and yet people of older generations always in my experience believe that the gay icons of their generations are icons to all younger generations.

All my adult life, older people have assumed and implied that I LOVE Barbra Streisand, Liza, Judy Garland. It's very weird to me. I'm not very familiar with Streisand's music but what I've heard I sort of loathe. I'm hardly familiar at all with Liza's music, only with pop culture parodies of her wackiness. And I do love The Wizard of Oz but that is the extent of my knowledge of Judy.

I do love some old Hollywood actresses—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell—but not musicians.

Meanwhile, while I grew up listening to and like pop music by Madonna, Britney, Mariah, Whitney, even Cher post-'Believe,' none of these singers is a 'gay icon' to me. They're all good at what they do and their music is fine but I have never associated my gayness with them. Madonna comes the closest because she always incorproated creative gay men into her antics and appropriated from LGBT culture. Cher is a favorite of drag queens, so there's that. Still, to me, neither 'feels' like a gay icon.

My favorite musician is Tori Amos, and to me, she feels like a gay icon because I am gay and her music resonates most with me and with a lot of other misfits. She started playing piano professionally in a gay bar at age 12 and she always has stated her respect of gay men but without pandering to 'the gays' and making rote statements for the sake of selling to us. Her concertgoers are probably a majority gay despite her reputation for appealing to angry goth girls. So to me, she feels like my gay icon if I have to have one, and yet few people consider her to be one—despite her eternally supportive and sizable following of gay gen Xers.

All this is meant to relate to the question of fitting in with the gay community. My musical interests reflect my standing in a gay community. I understand what are considered mainstream interests to gay people but I don't personally relate well with those assumed intetests, and I identify with other things that feel to me to have something to do with my sexuality, but those things are not considered at all by most people to have anything to do with being gay. For example, I love Tori Amos's music. I love visual arts. I love reading and writing poetry and literary fiction. I always thought, growing up in isolation with no gay friends, that these probably were common interests with many gay people and honestly I continue to be surprised that no gay people I meet are creative in any way and instead they are ultra-conformist whose whole lives are competitions to outdo their peers in terms of (in order) looking 'hottest,' having the nicest home, having the biggest income and the most prestigious job, and so on.

I have always been a bit of a social misfit and growing up, I always attributed that to my sexuality. Then I grew up and learned being a gay man in a gay community is *entirely* about fitting in in every possible conformist way. Gay men seem to reject anything at all outside of a standardized norm and this caused some cognitive dissonance for me for years because I really, truly thought of gayness as not just what you do with your genitals but also as a 'Renaissance man/woman' type of spirit. As it turns out, I'm a misfit among straight people because of my sexuality and a misfit among gay people because of my artistic interests and deviation from standards.

@ r78, If you mean what happened to all the Warhols, Freddy Mercurys and countless Broadway creatives, I don't know. Maybe between AIDS an the push to be mainstream accepted we lost our creative edge

R80, a long post but a worthwhile one. Resonated with me in a number of ways.

R67 You wouldn't associate with gays who enjoy a drag performance or watch a specific TV show? You sound like a complete asshole.

Actually you are the one who sounds like a complete asshole R83

All he was saying is that the sort of people who are very into that are not likely to be people he has anything in common with.

Not "if a good friend of mine revealed he liked drag, he would be DEAD TO ME!!! HISSSS!!!!!"

R84 Either way it is myopic thinking to write someone off based on something so superficial, ya cunt.

R83 People associate with those who have common interests. That's reality. I doubt those gays would care as they have others who share their interests too. I'm not against people enjoying what they enjoy.

it was immediately, indisputably obvious he was gay by that annoying, attention-seeking, faggy, and non-masculine voice That is explicitly homophobic.

I thought it was funny. Anyone offended by it must have faggy voice

Less than five percent of gay men I've met have had voices that were not immediately recognizable as gay.

And yet I would estimate 60 percent of those men believe their voices are not 'faggy,' unlike everyone else's.

This thread isn't homophobic. Not liking stereotypical gay men is not the same thing. People of color don't like their stereotypical members of their communities either. Why are gay men accused of self-loathing for not liking stereotypical depictions and not being attracted to effeminacy? The only thing gay men share is being attracted to other men. Not every gay is a flaming queen and like most people, gay guys gravitate towards those like-minded.

[quote]When did you realize you no longer were part of the gay mainstream?

There's a gay mainstream?

R88 needs to meet more gay men than the ones he finds on Grindr.

It is really interesting that so many gay people say gay people are stereotypically embarrassing and intolerable, and so many women say women are embarrassing and intolerable, and so many black people say many black people are stereotypically embarrassing and intolerable.

And straight white men never, ever say that about straight white men.

One of the sagest pieces of advice I ever got was to remember that "lots of really dumb people are gay too."

[quote] And straight white men never, ever say that about straight white men.

Bullshit.

Plenty of straight guys are embarrassed by other straight guys-- "dumb jocks", "dumb rednecks" and "old leches" all get their own Haters.

[quote] One of the sagest pieces of advice I ever got was to remember that "lots of really dumb people are gay too."

True of lesbians as well.

When I was a teenager and into my college years, I always had this sort of idea that lesbians were sophisticated, multilingual, and exciting.

How wrong I was.

R94 That's not specific to white guys, though. There are plenty of dumb jocks of every class and there are plenty of Bill Cosbys and Clarence Thomases.

I accidentally switched off my age filter on grindr and noticed that every single under 30 was wearing makeup and almost half were some variety of transgender.

R95 That's funny; I always had the idea lesbians are blue-collar mechanic types who ride motorcycles and have big dogs. The Rachel Maddow type was entirely unknown to me. I had a gay friend in college who studied operatic voice and I thought she was a total anomaly.

"—I have always believed we inhabit a dark backwater. Prefer it, actually."

I always felt like I was part of a secret club. I kind of miss that :(

[quote] Never been to Provincetown either.

Me neither. No desire for such a "scene".

R98, I'm from the age of AOL internet.

So when I discovered I might be a lesbian, off I went to the library and found the book, "Women of the Left Bank"--that group of American ex-pat lesbians living in Paris in the 1920s. And that lead me to other lesbian writers who were sophisticated, polyglot, etc. I didn't think at the time that this was a self-selected group, highly specific to a certain place in time, and that many lesbians (the reality) were/are the motorcycle crew.

Give your opera gal my number if she is single :) I love opera and speak italian.

I do like big dogs, though.

I’m 40….never really had any gay friends. Like sports. I do like some “gay” shows, including Drag Race. But it’s not my go to. I’ve gone to gay clubs, but it’s always to find someone to fuck, not to find friendship. I feel bad about this. I’m married to a hairdresser. He keeps me up to date on everything gay. But there is an emptiness, a sense of not really belonging to the straights or the gays.

R49- The use of the word FAGGY was the giveaway.

@r103, You're married to a guy, how much more "belonging" do you need?

Don't use the "f word"! The alphabet people might try to "reclaim" it and add it to the acronym.

R75 I think you should save the attempt at psychoanalysis and prescriptions for someone who's interested. There's clearly some who understand what "the gay mainstream," means in this thread, it's just not you.

R54- Centurion lounge- Did you travel back to Rome in 45BC?

What gay people did you see in your young life? Did they represent to you people you could identify with?

As a kid, I grew up seeing Boy George, George Michael and Elton John, knowing they were gay or bi or 'something different,' and I think it made me think of gay men as stylish, offbeat, talented, artistic and 'exotic' in that all are British. Paul Lynde was the only American I can think of from my childhood who I knew was gay and I thought he was very funny and strange.

Otherwise, I only saw gay men in the media orbiting Joan Rivers and Madonna as talk show guests, stylists, dancers and singers. Rivers had female impersonators who were funny although I didn't know what to make of them.

By my teens, there was RuPaul and I liked his sass but I didn't identify with drag at all. Then there was Jack from Will and Grace but he was regressive for me because he was such a cartoonish stereotype and because Sean Hayes was closeted, which brought shame to the role. Then I remember Michael Urie on Ugly Betty and I loved him and assumed he was out but found out when I tried to interview him that he was 'bi' and closeted about it. He obviously came out later. I read Oscar Wilde in college and loved him and he was obviously gay.

I learned about Gore Vidal, watched old interviews and LOVED him, and I studied Leonardo da Vinci and learned he was almost certainly gay and these two made so much sense with my sensibilities.

I think we're still in an evolving period with respect to accepting gayness, to be honest. Everyone named above and others like Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon and so many actors (not many musicians, interestingly) have come out as gay in the past decade, but I think the effects of fear and anxieties about how gay people are perceived still is associated with it. Gay actors overall get very limited roles—lots of poor ones from Ryan Murphy productions. Gay men despise few people more than out gay actors—that is evident here. I think we are still dealing with a lot of internalized shame about being gay and that affects our relationships.

(I didn't mention Ellen, Rosie et al. because although they benefited me socially and politically, I didn't see them as physical role models being that they are women. No distrespect intended.)

Once upon a time, "gay mainstream" was what SWM said it was. It was a monolithic shorthand for discrimination.

Today, there are MANY gay mainstreams. Problems arise when one, thinks it's better than another.

Even if you belong to the "I don't belong to a gay mainstream" gay mainstream.

What BUGS me are queens who are presented as HOT when they are clearly NOT.

Wavy Davy- he is NOT humble about the hotness he doesn't even have. He's queeny and sceney. He looks like a GAY Keebler Elf.

That psychotherapist Matthew Dempsey with his JIFFY POP head. He's sceney and queeny too ( certainly more attractive than the Gay Keebler Elf) but not HOT.

I can be attracted to a guy who's mildly effeminate but I'm never attracted to anyone who's SCENEY looking.

R97 the other half of the age filter has married "straight" men wearing fishnet stockings. The best times I've had are with the Dark Profiles, where n'er a pic has appeared and the profile itself is ephemeral. Almost always the hottest guys.

What is generally perceived as mainstream gay culture is simply a facile, deeply bourgeois construct.

I'd argue a *majority* of gay and bisexual people don't relate to it in any way, and have nothing to do with it, which is why they are invisible to social commentators and even other gays. There's a strong push to homogenize gay culture and dumb into down.

However, beyond this mainstream gay culture lies a vast terrain of other gay culture: radical leftist, working class, elite, etc etc. To give a single historical example: the socialist homosexual groups in England who were inspired by Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter. At the other end you had effeminate types who followed the aesthetic movement and Walter Pater. etc.

That is what AmEx calls their new lounges for Platinum Card holders R108

One of the big advantages of Platinum Cards had been access to many airline lounges but then the airlines got smart and limited that to holders of their own credit cards and AmEx was losing business, hence Centurion Lounge.

(I realize you may actually know all this and were only joking, but I will guarantee there are other DLers who don't.)

R80 there's quite a few Twitter gays who worship Tori Amos. I get what you are saying though.

R111 I read posts that use ALL CAPS the way you do to be VERY DRAMATIC and I always imagine that the people who write them are probably EXTREMELY HYPERBOLIC and probably FLAIL their arms around while they talk, ROLL their EYES, etc. Just mentioning it in case you don't MEAN to come across that way. :)

What about Queer As Folk, R109? (The US version)

That show made me feel much better about what to expect as it portrayed a range of gay characters, most of whom were not overtly femme and were far more "normal" than the characters you tick off.

R79- Music is fantastic now?!

If this were the year 1966 you could say that. If you think music is FANTASTIC now then you ARE mainstream.

What's weird is that drag and trans now dominate gay media. Queer (which was adopted as a fashionable radical alternative) now equates with makeup, effeminacy, and being a loud and moronic.

Masculine gays who were upfront in the 70s and 80s have been almost completely expunged from the landscape.

It's very very fucking bizarre. I think that's another reason why so many young gay guys don't relate to it.

How to speak in all caps with body language.

Part two!

R113 - Popular culture always gloms on to the most stereotypical version of any culture and the one most different from the mainstream as its stereotype.

So Italians are all Jersey Shore Guidos

Jews are all neurotic Woody Allens and Seth Rogans

Blacks are all ghetto gangbangers

Southerners are all oveweight, dumb country music loving Evangelical Trumpists

WASPs are all uptight, repressed Fairfield County, CT residents

And so on....

R92- Donald Trump and Hunter Biden are BOTH embarrassing straight white men.

R117 I bought VHS tapes of the UK Queer as Folk when I was in college and I loved it and it felt important to me. (I has seen Beautiful Thing, which was the most relatable and humanizing gay story I had ever encountered. It may still be.)

I tried to watch the US QAF but I thought it was a poor reproduction of the original one and I couldn't watch it. Some scenes were almost shot-for-shot copies and the actors were so much less convincing and compelling to me.

But I did write my English honors thesis about the uses of erotic depictions to humanize gay people, and I argued that while Will and Grace was important for representation to the masses, just to show out gay characters, it was a cartoonified, dehumanized version of gay men, and that messy, complicated, explicitly sexual depictions like QAF showed would be more effective at breaking down prejudices, not because of shock value but because viewers would understand gay people are not freaks or novelties, just fully human individuals.

[quote] Masculine gays who were upfront in the 70s and 80s have been almost completely expunged from the landscape.

Because in today's world, masculine gays are able to decide that being gay is not the most interesting thing about them and do not make it the core of their personality the way many (but not most!) femme gays do, and why they have become the "Voice of Gay"

Sort of the way there are many Black CEOs and elected officials, but when the media wants a "Black Leader" they turn to Al Sharpton not Corey Booker or Ken Chenault.

R100- Fire Island Pines is a SCENE. Provincetown is much more low key. And the town is at least 50% straight people. One can be outside of the gay mainstream ( which I always have been) and be quite comfortable in Provincetown.

DC is a SCENE. I grew up in Northern Virginia where, during childhood, gay people were freaks, and then by the 2000s, gay people were generally just boring suburban people who are gay. I didn't expect when I moved to DC what a huge share of the men would be gay and how the only discerable mainstream culture would be happy hours and brunches for business networking and catty gossip, and the only discernable exclusively gay culture would be working out at VIDA Fitness and luring as many gymbuilt guys as possible in to load you up.

I was still in high school when QAF US came out R124 and the fact that the characters were not all mincing prisspots and that characters like Brian were sexually aggressive in the way that straight men were, was huge. The UK version was similar in that regard. Stuart too was sort of angry at the straight world for reducing him to a swishy stereotype when he was nothing of the sort.

R81 I think a big part of what society has lost is the wise gatekeepers. It seems like there's so many options for everything now due to the internet. But there are still some things that seem to bring large numbers of people together and mainstream gays somehow usually decide what those are and if you want to be part of the mainstream, you will know this musician, this television show, attend that cultural event, that party, use the f-slur to pejoratively refer to gays you don't like, etc.

It all feels so aggressive now, though. Like the rise of the internet has some gay people clinging with iron claws to the common things such as Taylor Swift and Drag Race, lest they be swept away into the chaos. It's also like a "add water and stir" culture solution - if you want to fit in, pick these three things, become a fanatic about them, and you'll do just fine. Oh, and have one less common interest, and boom! You now have a common key to gain access to a whole chunk of (younger, hotter) society.

Previously, you could get accepted into gay society just by the fact that you were gay. Once inside, you'd be taught about Barbra and Judy and Stonewall and appreciate certain types of expensive furniture and lamps, all from the wise gays, and become more cultural and interesting as a result.

I think part of what is appealing (but fading more quickly than I would like) about the DL is that clustered here are a lot of the wise gays, still teaching and sharing, for those that care to listen. No it's not the mainstream anymore, but it's foundational to gay culture in modern times. Without that, it seems that a lot of what's left is just superficial, ephemeral pop culture.

I don't give a shit if a guy is muscular and I don't like guys who are too masculine. I prefer a slim guy with a natural body- no tattoos, no piercing, no rings, no shaved pubic hair. I don't mind a guy who's mildly effeminate or mildly masculine. I don't like extremes.

I am only attracted to CIVILIANS- meaning guys who don't feel the need to conform to the prevailing gay aesthetic- tank tops in summer , huge builds, tattoos etc.

[quote] Once inside, you'd be taught about Barbra and Judy and Stonewall and appreciate certain types of expensive furniture and lamps, all from the wise gays,

LOL

This is what I, and so many other gay teens like me feared most: that we would be stuck in a world where everyone was all about Divas, home furnishings, women's fashions and all sorts of other things that we had zero interest in...and that we would be the only ones who felt that way and be hissed at for caring about "sportsball."

Thank God for the internet, but R129 proves our fears were not unfounded.

R129- I use the Q slur for someone gay male I don't like. The q stands for Queeny or Queen.

R131 the generation after the gays who grew up with and appreciated those things naturally would have an aversion to them and run away from them, in an attempt to be "different".

I never fit it - anywhere. As a small child, I knew I was different. Other kids in my neighborhood kept me at arms length. School was the same thing. I was never picked on or bullied, but I was never invited or included in things. As a child, I was a voracious reader, taught myself to play piano.

When I came out, I really never fit in. I didn’t have the mean, bitchy, back stabbing personality. I wasn’t a bar fly, didn’t like loud music and crowds.

And now here I am at 65, retired and married. I don’t understand the world and all of the mental illness being put on a pedestal and treated as normal. I walk the dog, read my books, play the piano, and keep my distance from the crazies.

R110 you're talking about culture pockets, but no, there is only one gay mainstream, and it has a common language and tune.

Sounds like a Defacturd thread.

I think when homosexuality was socially disdained, gay men and women didn't have a specific type to which they were supposed to conform and by which to measure themselves, and so they explored and found new and different ways to identify and express themselves.

That has changed.

Men are supposed to look traditionally masculine, whether that means a suit or like an unkept, schlumpy American dad. They are supposed to like beer and watching sports. Their place is at the grill and in the garage and they know this from early childhood and mostly slot into that mold.

Women are supposed look traditionally feminine—although it is perfectly fine for any woman to wear just a tee shirt and jeans. Ideally, they are supposed to be thin with big breasts and long hair, makeup and jewelry, but other acceptible types now are Schlumpy Suburban Soccer Mom and Bob-haired Working Woman in Blazer.

Gay men now have a type that is equally defined. It just took mainstreaming us for the mold to be set. We are supposed to be gym built, intensively groomed and either stylishly casual in tailored, tight shirts, in a tailored suit, or in (upscale) gym clothes that show off our bodies. Not a hair out of place unless it's conspicuously styled to be out of place. It's the traditional expectations of women's appearances translated to the male body, but the expectations that gay men apply to themselves rise to the same level of self-shaming that women live with.

The expectations of gay women also are defined, but like with men, there's a lot of forgiveness and it seems that although a lot of women go for the Rachel Maddow/Ellen/Cynthia Nixon or else the Portia de Rossi and they have these clear role model types, there's a lot of room to style oneself after different subcultures, whether it's punk or goth or conservative or anything else.

I remember going to a McDonald's on 17th Street in DC (where a lot of gay bars are) with a friend when I was 18 (1997), and two guys in their 30s in front of us were saying things like, "Oh my GOD, I can't believe I am about to eat French fries! Carbs! Why are you letting me DO THIS to myself JUST KIDDING DON'T YOU DARE STOP ME!"

And I distinctly remember telling my friend to kill me if he thought I might grow up to think that way.

Mainstream? I never was, OP. I’m a regular gay person. I’m not famous or a celebrity of any kind.

Why do people believe they’re famous?

Agree, r113.

This thread is filled with narcs.

For the past couple hours, this thread is being filled up faster than a $5 whore.

R138- Their conversation sounds funny to me.

R120 and R121, he was such a cute little gayling. Still got a great body though the face has changed beyond belief. I hope for his own sake that he comes out soon. He is absolutely flaming in those gifs.

R117 QAF (US) was fairly bad, especially compared to the UK version. It was an example of how gay cinema (cinema by gays about gays) was routinely subpar, partially because the creators often hired people they wanted to fuck rather than looking for actual talent. But at the time it was great because it was one of the few gay shows on cable and it was nice to see gays represented, even if the US version had more stereotypes and bad writing (remember the "faery" episode? I could still barf).

I remember buying gay film DVDs from TLA video catalog and SO MANY of them were just total crap, but you'd watch them because there wasn't much gay media out there at the time.

Then you had Will and Grace, which came out a few years before QAF US but lasted a lot longer. It was one of the first gay shows that actually had great writing, good acting, and best of all helped introduce gay culture to the rest of the country in a fairly tame way (Will wasn't fucking everything that moved and being unapologetically slutty, which is one of the reasons QAF US was actually kind of embarrassing as a representation of gay culture).

R145 The 'fucking everything and unapologetically slutty' type was totally new to me. I was born in 1978 and so HIV/AIDS was the backdrop of my entire young life. And at that time AIDS and "gay" were synonymous. Through media depictions, I knew gay men either as creative celebrities or else as emaciated dying victims, and they were victims of having had sex. It really fucked up my head and seeing sexually free gay men was unprecedented for me.

R136 your obsession is noted.

R145- I would not present Will And Grace as an example of a GOOD show, even the gay writer Andrew Holleran described it as a repellant sitcom. All the characters on that show seemed desperate to please. I couldn't stand that woman with the Minnie Mouse voice. Will was not very effeminate per say but he was a straight woman's fantasy of an Urban Gay Male- He'll take you dancing and to the theater. You can sit in the park and check out the cute guys together- YUCK 🤮

That show was strictly for straight woman not gay men.

(And to be honest, showing gay men eager to fuck every halfway attractive man who comes along is the truest to life stereotype I know of. Gay men are what straight men would be if women were as eager for meaningless sex as men are.)

Not an effeminate guy here, but I frequently notice men who are actually quite hostile when saying they don’t find effeminate men attractive. Perhaps you don’t feel part of gay culture because there is a part of you that loathes homosexuality. You do you fellas, but don’t parade around selling yourself as just a normal, well adjusted guy.

Count me as someone who thinks Will & Grace is a great sitcom. It's very funny, any kind of social commentary notwithstanding. The actors all played off one another well and it was a good balance of realistic-ish characters (Will and Grace) and sitcom cartoon characters (Karen and Jack). The writing was very funny, and it's definitely better written than the beloved Friends and shows like Mad About You, Family Matters, etc.

I realized it when friends started moving away or not accepting invitations as much as they used to or even passed away. I was in my 40's friends of a variety of ages, but the younger ones and select older ones who were left behind weren't as interesting. I too eventually moved away, found new friends, but rather than going to the big discos chose piano bars and cabarets. Those whom I had kept in contact with from my previous life began to fade away too. Even in my new location, I'm not as happy as I used to be, and changes in the gay and lesbian community just don't interest me. Pride is not the same either. I used to live going. Now I dread that weekend and stay far away.

When I would see a personals ad that said the person was seeking someone Straight Acting- I was not offended.

I was offended when I saw an ad that said- Normal guy seeks other Normal guy for safe fun.

You want to lick another man's balls your NOT normal!

R150 You may well not be very effeminate, but in my experience, most gay men who insist they do not act gay are types like Anderson Cooper who giggles like a little girl and Andy Cohen who is a teenaged girl who just happens to look like Jeffrey Epstein.

Who was ever "part of the gay mainstream"? Or thinks that they were?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s merely being counted as gay was presented as some sort of transgressive act. We were told it was a gay mainstream of outlaws and people making their own way, elbowing in on an existing world but also making a space apart: gay neighborhoods, gay restaurants, gay clubs, "pink pages" of gay and lesbian plumbers and electricians and realtors and gay doctors, gay bookstores, gay films, gay B&Bs and gay destinations, gay clothing shops, gay gyms, gay support organizations, gay roommate finders.... Even with all of that the "gay mainstream" was 100 different scenes even if there were more geographic concentration and overlap. Does anyone look back and say "I was a clone?" "I was a caftan queen?" "I was a conservative closeted gay afraid of being found out?"

Forty-some years later all that infrastructure to support separate worlds seems so quaint and so distant, it all seems so striving and such hard work (in the always wrong eyes of retrospect.) The once vital need to build community where none existed...it's gone. What is the gay mainstream now? The things that look most "gay" from a distance? Mainstream RuPaul and drag and painted up men with pastel hair as plumage and "YAAAAS!" mannerisms? Or the mainstream gays who find all the sex they could want online and otherwise look and act much as their crowds of straight and gay and bi friends where sexuality is somewhere between 'eye color" and "not very important"? Which one of them says, "I am the mainstream gay?"

R148 Will and Grace wasn't for everyone, but it did a great deal of work in helping make gay men acceptable to society (lesbians were already much more acceptable, because straight men thought it was hot). I know quite a few people disliked it because Will was so buttoned up, but he was what we needed at the time.

Compared to Queer as Folk US, which was basically "how can we fit as much sex and cum and gay subculture into each episode". Remember how the US version kept Ted instead of killing him off, and then turned him into a porn producer who was constantly around more and more sex? EVERYTHING about that was a huge turnoff for me. Brian's award winning marketing plans? Stick a nude muscular gay man or two in it to sell your adult diapers or children's tonic and boom, done.

It was gay fantasy fulfillment.

R155 no, everyone thinks they are unique flowers who would never be the mainstream because of their love for kiwi fruit or football or something random makes them a totally alien species and completely different in every way from "common" culture. Especially now when "normal" is seen as such a horrible thing and you have everyone clamoring for intersectionality points and differences so they can stand out amidst the flotsam of society.

But, your own prejudices and inability to see yourself don't mean you aren't part of the mainstream.

[quote] We were told it was a gay mainstream of outlaws and people making their own way, elbowing in on an existing world but also making a space apart: gay neighborhoods, gay restaurants, gay clubs, "pink pages" of gay and lesbian plumbers and electricians and realtors and gay doctors, gay bookstores, gay films, gay B&Bs and gay destinations, gay clothing shops, gay gyms, gay support organizations, gay roommate finders....

When I was young and worked with the TV and film businesses, people always joked about "the Jewish mafia" and "the gay mafia" running Hollywood.

The quote above explains how the gay mafia established itself in Hollywood: with the support of the Jewish community.

The description quoted above also describes exactly how Jewish people were regarded in Europe for at least 1,000 years. They were social pariahs in most places who carved out their own communities and developed their own subculture that takes care of its own and developed their own industries that operated within the confines of the limitations imposed upon them. So they patronized the businesses within their own communities and this made them even more of a perceived threat as they made money off the gentile money and invested money into their own marginalized community.

It's interesting to me because I feel like gay and Jewish populations are both very small and generally accepted but also always targeted for various kinds of assaults, and yet we both have an outsized influence on our culture. I wonder if that will change once gay people become truly mainstream and once a few more generations of Jewish people marry outside of their own religion, which is becoming increasingly common.

Mainstream? Oh hunty!

R158 that's a very apt observation. Even though my experience with selecting other gay people as vendors has been less than stellar, I definitely used to try to find the gay ones to patronize, and that is very similar to how the Jewish community operates.

Yep R160, when people reject groups of people for being different, they tend to ally based on that differences. It's a natural behavior, just as fearing people who are different seems to be a natural behavior. I'm sure this is how tribes/nations form over time.

Ariana was my official wake up. She always sounds like she has rapper dick in her mouth, which i should find empowering or something, but no.

"When did you realize you no longer were part of the gay mainstream?"

When I just read your headline, OP.

You made me wake up and smell the coffee.

R163 was it a slightly acidic blonde roast prepared in a French press?

R164, As a matter of fact, yes.

I've never been a part of the mainstream period. Gay or otherwise.

Is SHE part of the gay mainstream?

Wow, you Gays sure do a lot of thinkin' about stuff

R168, How big is your cock?

Very interesting, R158. Susan Sontag said that, "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

What is considered “gay midstream” these days? Years ago, it was living in a gay ghetto, patronizing gay bars and restaurants, and gay owned businesses.

"What is considered “gay midstream” these days? "

Half way between here and there

When I came out a million years ago, the Welcome Committee was filled with bitter hags like R89, so I went back “in.” Thankfully, I eventually found my place in the tribe and I realized I was not alone. I think when you realize that you are half of any interaction, and you generally get back what you put in, you free yourself from victimhood. My experience of gayness in 1980s San Francisco was a very reassuring community, given the onslaught of AIDS. When I looked at Coming Up/Bay Times and realized there was a support group for disabled lesbians of color with environmental illnesses, specialized 12 step groups for every letter of the alphabet tribe, gay bankers, and a gay Olympics, I realized I was home. I do understand that some people cannot experience community, that they feel they don’t belong anywhere. That’s just their daily reality. I am very grateful to have had a community sustain me over the decades. As I edge toward the end of my life, I may need to lean on it again.

You're edging toward the end of your life?

How old are you- 99?

Not quite, R174, but old enough to realize that any bar I would go to would be labeled “the glass coffin” by loving souls like you. I would be called an eldergay by anyone who would meet me in person. I am a realist and also have a couple health conditions that could suddenly kill me. I’m grateful for every day. Enjoy yours.

R175

The 'glass coffin' as in Annie's on 17th Street?

Funny, but we called them Wrinkle Rooms back in the day.

[quote]you're talking about culture pockets, but no, there is only one gay mainstream, and it has a common language and tune.

R135 if you think that, you are living in one of the pockets and unaware that there are many different definitions regarding the scope and breadth of what constitutes mainstream.

I'm strictly a male male

And my future I hope will be

In the home of a brave and free male

Who'll enjoy being a guy, having a guy like me

I enjoy being a GAY!

[quote] Once inside, you'd be taught about Barbra and Judy and Stonewall and appreciate certain types of expensive furniture and lamps, all from the wise gays, and become more cultural and interesting as a result.

Absolutely pathetic

^ Yeah, I'm glad I didn't meet those guys when I first came out, but I do remember this one guy who seemed to be assigned the task of telling the newbies all about Rock Hudson/Liberace. I remember nodding politely and thinking, "Who gives a fuck? I'm here for the boys and the booze"

I would not have loved that as a young person out and about, but that kind of thing is a primary reason I used to love this site. I learned a lot about Bette Davis, Crawford, Hepburn et al here, along with insider insights and I miss that. To me, knowledge and experiences from within the entertainment industry were a major part of DL's identity years ago. I only ever watched The Women, Stage Door etc. because of recommendations here. It was so, so, so much better before the racist and transphobic and other political shit came out of the woodwork and took over the site.

That's why DL makes it so easy to block threads of little interest. The new thing trying to take hold here are the gruesome murder threads. Yuk, just block and move on

RR48: "I just don’t find gay culture appealing at all, so I avoid it. It’s not like I’m out bashing stereotypical gay men, I’m stating MY opinion"

"I'm stating MY opinion" is gay culture. It's the all caps "MY" that gays it up.

^ "I said what I said, so I'm telling you now so I don't have to tell you later"

R184 Agree. Typing in all caps on this site virtually guarantees that the poster is a hyper-animated drama queen who waves their hands around in a panic over every little thing and has explosive tantrums. It's hilarious to me when the all-caps emphasis is paired with complaints about effeminate gay men and assertions that the poster looks 15 years younger than he is and is über-masculine and disgusted by queeny men.

R182, you're still among friends. Many of us love these movies still.

@r186, ... and flounces off in a huff

^...

Maybe a big part of the difference here is between those gay men who identify with women and those who don't.

R180 I'm curious what is going on in your head that prompted such a harsh reaction.

The people making a big deal out of one word being in all-caps in a post are projecting a bit, methinks.

R181- Sit down. We need to talk.

I should have known you'd know where to find the BOYS and the BOOZE!