Is Being Gay Cool Now?

Circle all that apply:

I’m at a party/pub/sharehouse

full of straight people/millennial professionals/inner-West creatives

and I’m feeling bored/insecure/under attack.

So I say the magic words—‘my girlfriend’—and watch my conversation partner’s head snap upright, like a dog locked onto a scent. I’m rendered immediately more interesting/avant-garde/titillating. I am the subject of rapt cultural attention. I’m cool again.

In case you missed it, heterosexuality is a bygone institution which serves only to mortify the straight women of the 21st-century. The now-classic Vogue article “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”, which achieved a level of increasingly rare internet (and word-of-mouth) virality, confirms this. Writer Chanté Joseph diagnosed straight women as being in a peculiar dilemma of,

“wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across quite culturally loser-ish.”

In the ensuing maelstrom of outrage, hysteria, glee and thinkpieces, something was missed. If having a straight boyfriend is embarrassing, isn’t the logical counterpoint—of having a gay boyfriend—actually super cool?

Obviously, on the whole, being gay never became cool. Australia’s dominant cultural and political discourses are shaped by Whiteness, heterosexuality, and private-school attendance. Within these parameters, palatable queer expression is contingent on our sublimation—on being ‘normal’ (cis) (White) gays who get married and have kids, instead of those ‘weird’ ones who shout at police or take estrogen.

In the UK and US, trans rights are being rapidly eroded. The same can happen in Australia, because our ‘acceptance’ is similarly conditional. For conservatives, transness represents the ultimate threat of non-normative expression; queerness made legible on the body. No wonder that the same talking points once used against the gays are now employed for trans people—like that they want to turn your kids trans, invade bathrooms, have loads of freaky polycule sex, etc, etc. 

But amongst some inner-West snowflakes… some Arts-studying, Crumpler-wearing, lovely, well-meaning people… there’s been an almost imperceptible shift. Like a tacit understanding that heterosexuality is no longer fit for purpose.

And yet this rarely results in a meaningful interrogation of heterosexuality as a political identity. Or of gender roles. Or domestic labour. Or child-rearing, or unpaid parental leave, or why men don’t get flowers for Valentines’ Day.

Heterosexuality is taken to be inherently, unthinkingly ‘normal’. How and why this is constructed is a political question.

Spare a thought for those well-dressed, nice-smelling straight men who are questioned about their sexuality, often by those same lovely, well-meaning people. He must be secretly gay. Because being gay is fine. And gay guys are great. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with them?

But since any deviations are incompatible with masculinity, something as ridiculous as good grooming is construed as political—since, in order for patriarchal power to be maintained, masculinity must always be typified, rigid and unceasing, to the detriment of men everywhere, including gay men, who have to wrestle with alternate forms of masculinity. And so, this guy must be gay. ‘Un-masculine’ straightness does not compute.

So—is being gay at least cooler now? Is this the fetishisation of gay ‘culture’, which cannibalised Black, Brown and trans cultures in the first place? Or maybe it’s not the fact of ‘gayness’ itself that’s cool, but the cultural cachet earned from having gay people in your social circle, however tenuous or protracted that proximity might be?

As I talked to friends, both straight and queer, about this phenomenon, the answers seemed further away. All I knew was that sometimes, some people turned to me with more attention once they knew I was gay. Would this still be happening if I was visibly butch, instead of vaguely-feminine-Clairo-gay? Or if I was not White—or if I didn’t have a partner?

Why was it happening in the first place? Why did I feel a need to state my sexuality, regardless of the conversational outcome?

(I could talk about Foucault here, but I will instead direct you to any Gender Studies subject reading list.) Being gay can be cool if you’re an already legible subject—a wealthy, White, gay-looking one. And as long as it doesn’t represent any kind of meaningful liberatory politics. And if it lets the straight person talking to you say ‘diva’. 

The theme of this year’s Mardi Gras was “Ecstatica”, with the tagline: “Our Joy is Power!”  But what kind of joy is powerful, and what kind of power is palatable? It seems the commercial power of the gay community—mostly that of rich men in Darlinghurst, elevated by class, locality, gender and race—determines our aims and means, our parade, our modes of life, our ‘cool’. And that power couldn’t even save Sydney’s only dedicated queer bookstore, which closed late last year. And it was ON Oxford Street!!!!!

For Mardi Gras, I was added to group chats called things like Gaypointes Street and Dyke Mansion. It reminded me that for one night of the year, at least, we govern Sydney. I didn’t have to clarify my sexuality to a deluge of straight ears; everyone just assumed I was gay. I was made legible, and not just as a consumer.

Gay people are weird. A lot of them are not cool, not hot and not aspirational. At turns we are erratic, morally dubious, petty, annoying, and (yes, like the straight boyfriends) really embarrassing. The pressure to be the ultimate arbitrators of ‘taste’ and ‘cool’ will crumble, because a lot of us have horrible taste. This is our salvation—to be legible in all ways, even those that are unpalatable.

I champion the right of all queers to be outright bizarre, even—especially—when Greens-voting homeowners want to lap up our cultural know-how. Yucky queers have a proud history. Look at Larry Mitchell’s 1977 parable-fairy-tale-manifesto, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions.

“The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.”

Dearest queer weirdo—I beg you. Instead of telling your next dinner party that you went to Japan with your girlfriend and had a nice normal time or whatever, tell them you went to the twenty-four-hour lesbian orgy that occurs in the stables behind Lismore Showground every New Years’. They won’t see it coming.