Initial chapters towards a book. Our potential and opportunities in being Gay.
Affordable housing within a supportive Gay Community neighborhood both of which remains ours.
Edward H. Sebesta
Copyright © 2024 Edward H. Sebesta Gay Partisan Press
All rights reserved.
To Steven Scales whose support has made this book possible.
6
The title of this book, “On Being Gay,” might be misunderstood. This book is not advocating that there is a specific way of being Gay, but rather sees that there will be endless ways of being Gay but as Gays.
This book seeks to examine the circumstances in which Gays exist and discuss the opportunities and challenges Gays as individuals and as a community have and how to realize those opportunities and overcome those challenges.
This book sees being Gay as winning the lottery with many wonderful benefits and possibilities in a global community. We are a universal community.
With a Gay partisan and Gay centric approach, we could be much more effective in overcoming the challenges and obstacles we face and accomplish great benefits and possibilities for ourselves and our community. We could live better and happier lives.
This book doesn’t seek to enlist the Gay community into any particular cause or movement or politics. Instead, it will advocate that Gays need to recognize their interests and support self-determination and not be an appendage of other movements. They certainly will be involved with the affairs of society, but they must not be bound by any specific movement.
It also seeks to include and speak to as broad a range of Gays as possible and discuss and present the common interests of
Gays. It will advocate Gays working together despite possible social and political differences on the basis of these common interests. This book seeks to build Gay social cohesion.
This book will recognize that there are anti-Gay forces and there is discrimination in the world, but also recognize that there is a Gay agenda of which fighting discrimination is only a part, a very important part, but not the entirety of the Gay agenda. The larger Gay agenda will not only achieve great benefits and help with obstacles, but also greatly strengthen and empower our community to fight and defend it and defeat our enemies. The larger agenda will help with the more specific agenda of fighting discrimination.
Without an idea, theory, philosophy about being Gay and a Gay centric Gay partisan agenda we will fail supporting the needs and objectives of ourselves and the Gay community as a whole. We will fail to defend the Gay community. There will be no Gay self-determination, but the agenda will be set by various social forces outside the Gay community to support their agendas and not ours. The Gay community will be fractured by contesting social forces.
Finally, this book doesn’t seek to be the final word on being Gay. Instead, it hopes to define and discuss issues as part of a continuing discussion of a Gay agenda. It seeks to start a Gay centric discussion about being Gay.
The arrangement of this book isn’t going to follow a plan that might be expected. Which would be first foundational ideas, then ideas that build on the foundation. I think the fundamental problem we face is that Gays don’t value themselves and have expectations. It isn’t that they are selfhating, they just don’t fully value themselves. That would be a dreary chapter to start out with, and Gays do get endlessly
lectured.
Nor am I going to discuss anti-Gay sentiment first. We know of it and it is another dreary chapter.
What I am going to do is start out with what opportunities we have, what gains we could make, how our needs are neglected. Discuss the rewards we as Gays might achieve. I think this is a much more positive beginning. It will show the rewards of tackling the issues of being Gay.
However, before that, I am going to discuss whether Gays are different. I don’t think we are innately different. I think differences arise from the circumstances and specifics of Gay life. I want to discuss this, since whether we might be different or not, or how we might be different is a topic of which that Gays are fearful. Don’t worry, I am not going to argue you have to put color in your hair or have to wash it out.
But the opportunities that Gays have suggests that we are different from straights and I think if the reader is fearful that my discussing this might mean he has to live a certain way, the reader will just stop being open to ideas. So again, don’t worry, I am not going to argue you have to put color in your hair or have to wash it out.
The beginning of each chapter is going to be somewhat repetitive. I am going to restate an idea, but then take it in a different direction.
As I think through the issues of being Gay and when I get them written down into additional chapters written there will be later editions of this book.
I want to re-examine the same questions raised in the Introduction. The Introduction was to prepare to be asking these questions and not being alarmed by them.
What is being Gay? What are the possibilities and opportunities in existing as a Gay person? What do we think about our place in the universe? How do we value being Gay? What should be our basis in thinking about these questions?
I think that these are important questions. Without considering these questions a Gay person could miss out on the great possibilities in Gay life and with considering these questions he could avoid adopting anti-Gay ideas and their self-destructive consequences. Also, without considering these questions we can’t build a Gay community with the strength and resolve to effectively defend the Gay community from antiGay forces and ideas, develop and advance policies and programs that benefit the Gay community and meet its needs and avoid destructive bad policies.
The answers to the questions asked in the introduction are as follows
1. Being Gay is a central element in defining who we, but not so much inherently, but instead through its unfolding impacts due to our different situation which gives us different paths in life or the possibility of different paths.
2. Gay people those men with same-sex attraction.
3. We have the potential to live our lives in many ways other than that in imitation of straight people. The unfortunate focus has been, however, on enabling Gays to live
in imitation of straight people, assimilate, rather than to explore and discover our potentials, as to what possible different ways, perhaps radically different ways, we might live.
4. We are part of the creation of the universe. We have a fundamental right to exist and to pursue our lives as Gays. All beliefs, ideologies, movements, religions that deny our place in the universe need to either correct themselves or be understood to be trash. We must not beg for acceptance or accept a begrudged lesser station in life.
5. We should consider that it is a great and good fortune to be Gay.
6. We should have a philosophy and value system thought out by ourselves, for ourselves. We should judge values and beliefs relative to the needs of ourselves and the Gay community. Straight people and their beliefs should not be our standards. Their ways aren’t more valid, there are just more of them.
For our security, happiness, and self-realization as Gay people we need an inner temple of thought for ourselves and away from the pressures and propaganda of society and the discord of anti-Gay noise where we can contemplate living as Gay people and achieve inner strength as Gay people.
The dominating ideology of the LGBTQ+ media is opposite. Gays are like everyone else and their difference is just a private one with different sexual mechanics but, essentially, each letter of the LGBTQXYZ initialism, how many letters it might be when this paragraph is read, are the same as each other and straight people and the goal of social justice for Gays is assimilation. Being Gay in the dominate neoliberal ideology is not same-sex attraction of men, but between any two
individuals who claim to be men.
Much of the political program of the LGBT is to plead with religions, political movements, ideological movements, and other belief systems that LGBT are good Christians, or good Marxists, of Buddhists, or conservatives or Democrats, etc., often arguing that the belief system that they wish to be part of isn’t truly anti-LGBT, to get acceptance and earn favor with the straight people in these movements.
The goal of the current LGBTQ+ neoliberal movement is to get all these letters to assimilate so we can be just like the straight people and seek the favorable judgement of straight people through respectability politics.
The author of this essay feels that in being Gay he has won the lottery, has had the great good fortune to be Gay, since it isn’t something that you can choose. To some extent his success in life is due to the fact that he saw opportunities in being Gay. To some extent it is due to the fact he didn’t preoccupy himself with foolish regrets. A sensible life for a fish is to enjoy swimming, not regret the lack of wings and the ability to fly.
However, the foundation stone of the modern LGBTQ+ movement is that they shouldn’t be persecuted because it isn’t a choice, they can’t help it, they can’t change, conversion therapy doesn’t work. The underlying idea is that they can’t be faulted since it is inherent and unchangeable. The author of this book, in contrast, would endure painful treatments daily to continue to be Gay.
The neoliberal management of desire also doesn’t see the different letters, the full initialism is now LGGBBTTQQIAAPP for Lesbian, Gay, Genderqueer, Bisexual, Bigender, Transgender, Trans, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual,
Agender, Pansexual, and Polyamorous. (There are other initialisms, I just chose one of them.) Since being Gay is reduced to individualistic private practice and essentially just another sexual minority to be lumped in with these others, the idea of a Gay-centric philosophy, a Gay consciousness movement is represented as nonsensical. There is no need to have an inner temple for interior reflection on being Gay, just assimilate.
Unlike other minorities where they have organizations separate and autonomous groups, there aren’t Gay-centric organizations to focus on the interests of Gays. The are organizations of LGBTQ+ who are parts of various movements, such as Stonewall Democrats, “queer” special interest groups in professional societies, and others.
The dominate neoliberal ideology is oriented to serve the agendas of others and not so much Gays.
The goal of this book is to give a new birth to the Gay community to reach its full potential.
Note: At this time, a meeting is scheduled in London, Jan. 25, 2025 to launch a Gay movement, but it is still a few weeks away. I will be reporting on it in my newsletter, The Gay Agenda.
You might just say it is biological men who are sexually attracted, exclusively or nearly exclusively, to biological men as opposed to women, and be done with the question. That is generally how it has been understood and what the author of this essay believes it to be.
However, with trans extremist ideology it is anyone who imagines that they are a man who is attracted to anyone else who imagines they are a man. Homosexual is replaced by homogender.
What would be the basis in choosing one over the other besides some personal preference or bias? Also, without an understanding of why one classification is correct how would you exclude misleading classifications and classifications invented for agendas? Also, why have classifications?
First consider the need for classification. When Gay people have trouble accepting being Gay, they might be sexually active but sometimes say that they, “I don’t like labels.” Imagine a supermarket where none of the products had labels, or bottles of chemicals. Imagine biology without names and classification. Though humans are individuals they are also in groups and types. With labels I can be informed that one person is a doctor if I am ill and a carpenter when my roof leaks. I am not going to write more on the need for classification. This is usually the grasping for excuses by a person who is having Gay sex but can’t accept being Gay or others with various agendas which are also destructive of the Gay community and its prospects. Also, this excuse about labels would be useful to those who don’t want to accept a Gay identity to keep out of Gay discussions or talk about being Gay.
A classification for groups of people can be looked at analytically and in terms of cultural history. First consider the question analytically.
The validity of a classification is based on its usefulness and descriptiveness. Is the grouping useful in understanding a collection of things and give some idea of what they are?
Let’s consider numbers, we can divide them into even and odd numbers. There are prime numbers, number that are only divisible by one and themselves, (1,2,3,5,7,11, etc.), Fibonacci numbers, and squares, (1,4,9,16, 25, 36, 49, etc.) and other classes of numbers. These are useful since they give some useful information about the specific collection of numbers. Even numbers can be divided in half. Prime numbers are useful in the factoring of numbers and have many other roles in mathematics. Fibonacci numbers appear in many patterns of nature.
Let’s say, for purposes of argument, I decided to have vowel numbers and consonant numbers based on whether the last letter in their English name was a vowel or consonant. There would be vowel numbers one, two, three, five, nine, twelve, etc. and we would have to wonder about twenty. (That sometimes y rule.) There would be consonant numbers, four, six, seven, eight, ten, eleven, and thirteen through nineteen.
You can divide all the numbers into two groups this way, but this classification would wouldn’t be descriptive of any properties of the numbers in the two groups and would be totally useless.
A consistent classification also pulls into the class that which is validly belongs together what should be included and also excludes what shouldn’t be included. For example, if you
defined birds biologically as vertebrates that fly it would be correct in describing birds, but in this definition, you would pull in both bats and flying squirrels as well as flying fish. If you intention what to study birds, phylum Chordates, class Aves, this definition is not valid. On the other hand, you can refer to a class of flying creatures if your study was the aerial activity of flying vertebrates, perhaps as a study of biomechanics, however, they wouldn’t be birds. You might want to identify a bat as a bird, but that would be a definition driven by some other need that understanding the reality of things.
If you were mentioning the patrons of Gay bars, it might involve straight women, bisexual men, Gay men, transmen, and others who make up a regular patronage, but those people wouldn’t compose the class of individuals who are Gay.
For Gay men if you define Gay as biological men who are sexually attracted exclusively or nearly exclusively to biological men you have coherently define a group of individuals with a common feature which shapes their activities, culture and life paths, and provides a fairly clear boundary of who is in and who isn’t. It is a definition which would include the variation we see in the Gay community. It is a functional definition of like things.
Also, it isn’t a definition which includes additional needless criteria which are not needed. For example, if we defined it as men who additionally, besides attraction have had sexual activity with a man, we would exclude those who have sexual desire for men, but have not yet for some reason had the opportunity to have sex with a man or hadn’t acted on that desire for some reason, and it would drop out those who cease having sexual activity for some reason.
Another bad definition would be men who have sex with men, which would include rapists who aren’t Gay, but are committing an act of aggression, and those who have sex with men but are bisexual or other sexualities or those who are Gay for pay.
Bisexuals, biological men whose sexual attractions include both biological men and women, have a different set of desires than Gay men which shapes a different activities and life choices. We might have some shared interests, but they are not us.
The homogender concept, that Gay is anyone who imagines that they are a man who is attracted to anyone else who imagines they are a man isn’t descriptive of a common community of desire, life choices, life experiences and concerns. It has been noted that transmen generally don’t have relations with transmen. They aren’t part of a community of desire that includes each other. The common complaint of transmen is that Gays don’t want to have sex with them. They have YouTube videos complaining about this, the so-called LGBTQ+ media has articles where they lecture Gays to consider that they should consider transmen as potential sexual partners and denounce as transphobic those who won’t. The complaints of transmen themselves show that they aren’t part of a common community of desire and that there isn’t a common homogender community.
Homogender is a definition in defiance of what homosexuality is. Transmen simply don’t have biological male bodies to which homosexual men have attraction. Homogender is an erasure of homosexuality and nonsensical. It insists on homosexual men to be heterosexual performers.
Also, homogender is based on a theory where sexual identity is
all based on one thing, self-imagining, and entirely excludes biology, imagined identity is privileged over physical reality, and made hegemonic. It also, sees sexual identity as like a mathematical state function, that is based on the individual’s existence in the immediate present, and entirely precludes it being like a mathematical path function, even though the very word trans conveys the idea of going from one place or location to another, following a path. Trans means “across,” to go from one place to another. A state function is a function where the value is determined by a single point in a domain, a field of possibilities. A path function’s value is based on the path it has taken to that point. People are born and have a trajectory in life which they have taken to the present. Their identities are determined by their past as well as the present and the trajectory which they took to the present. Trans has strongly expressed dislike of their past, because, rightly, their assertion of their identity involves truncation and omission of their past. Trans dread their past, even something trivial like “deadnaming,” where their prior name of their pre-trans life, is seen as very threatening. Gays don’t dread their past as men, though they might have other things to dread in their past.
Gays have a common path is life, born men, and growing up as men, and discovering and acting upon Gay self-identity. Gay men exist as the current point on a timeline going into the past. In contrast, just as transmen often cut off parts of their bodies, they also seek to cut off their pasts to attempt to be comparable to Gay men by only considering themselves in the present.
Homogender as a concept for Gays is an agenda to privilege one interpretation of male identity over another and establish a hegemony of that interpretation regardless of its reality or its conflict with the reality of the Gay community. It is an ideology of appropriation of the Gay community, our bodies and the
colonialism of the transmen. It is an ideological instrument of oppression.
There is the historical argument also which needs to be considered.
Communities define themselves, and Gays have a right to have a self-definition that works functionally for them and they don’t have to justify it to anyone.
Queer is a term to diffuse and obscure Gay identity, slopping homosexuals in with a slew of sexualities and identities, with often little commonality, or no commonality, in the initialisms of LGBTQ+ which can now have 14 letters representing different things. Queer is an identity which is centered on straights, staring at straightness, meaning only that an individual is not straight, and not some stereotypical hypermasculine straight man. As being an item in a list it is reduced to being an individual sexual variation and not a community in itself and it is positioned as an identity in the Alphabet Soup Sea to be defined by social workers and academics. It has been imposed by academic elites onto a set of communities.
Whereas, the African American community denies that white person Rachel Dolezai and other white transracialists are African American, and Koreans have laughed and scoffed at the pretensions of Oli London, despite his surgeries to appear Korean, to be trans Korean, because of a small academic elite the pretensions of transgender men to be Gay men is pushed on the Gay community by the LGBTQXYZ+ media and those who don’t agree are denounced as transphobic, as well as those who might accept transmen self-definition as being Gay but do not want to have sex with them.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) says that race is a social construct, that is how we divide people into races, but it doesn’t deny that there are a variety of people in the world and different social groups and historical experiences. If you divide people on the basis of the mitochondrial DNA you get a different set of races, and you might group people based on the DNA they inherited from other species than homo sapiens. When it is said race is a social construct, it isn’t saying that there aren’t definable groups, it just says how we see groups, or how we group people, comes out of history and society.
The idea of race being a social construct isn’t going to give Rachel Dolezai or Oli London and other transracialists a pass to define what African American is or Korean is. They aren’t part of those groups. However, the LGBTQXYZ establishment thinks that theories of gender construction can be used to define the Gay community and instruct the Gay community who they are and foist transmen onto the Gay community as Gays.
Even small groups are able to insist on their self-definition, such as when Hilaria Baldwin claimed to be Majorcan and when it was revealed that she wasn’t. No trans-Majorcan identity was accepted, but Gays can be subjected to lectures as to who they are or how their community is to be defined.
Transracialists have arguments why their identities are valid, but racial and ethnic minorities won’t accept any of it, they won’t stand for it, and academic elites don’t dare push transracialism.
However, the fact academic elites feel empowered to push the homogender definition of Gay onto the Gay community shows how being Gay is not really respected, how the Gay community is weak, and can still be subject to abuse. Other communities
are respected and have the clout to not be subjected to abuse.
These Gender studies groups are not Gay studies groups and mostly aren’t Gay men. Can you imagine the uproar is a mostly white history department, American studies department, or sociology department declared that African Americans include persons like Rachel Dolezal. What would be the reaction to such a history department if they tried to condemn African Americans who didn’t accept Rachel Dolezal as transphobic? They would be laughed at, condemned and ridiculed. You would want to stand back as anger and outrage exploded all over the place.
The fact that Gays largely haven’t exploded with anger is evidence that Gays don’t value and have pride in being Gays. One of the goals of this book is to change the Gay community so Gays do value being Gay and see being Gay as something worth defending. Without Gay pride, even if the Gay transmen idea goes away, we will just face something else in the future.
We are not obligated to justify our self-definition to others or get entangled in their theories.
In the end Gays are homosexual biological men because we say so, because it is a working definition for our community and comes out of our own community experiences and history as well as being a rational self-classification. The definition which is proposed in this book is a definition that comes out of the Gay community’s experience, is functional for it, and works for it. Our community is not to be seized by others and defined by others and parasitism is to be resisted.
CHAPTER THREE – We are different.
Gays are different than others. It isn’t so much that it is samesex attraction itself or the mechanics of Gay sex that make us different, but the consequences and circumstances of being same-sex attracted which make us radically different than the others as well as the nature of our origins and how we exist in the larger society.
If we are just variants of straight people the current neoliberal agenda of civil rights in housing and jobs, same-sex marriage and the right to adopt children, to assimilate and to be just like the straight people as much as possible makes sense. Also, the promotion in media and theater of the idea Gay life being a monogamous couple, married, with adopted children might be a credible ideal to promote. (Though since marriage is in decline with straight people, there are other reasons that it is not a credible ideal, but that won’t be discussed here.)
If on the other hand we are fundamentally different in our life trajectories and prospects, then the agenda of assimilation cuts us off from other possibilities of who and what we might be as Gay persons and how we might live and think as Gay people. The agenda of assimilation truncates us, cuts us, imprisons us and limits us from developing in directions that could be our full development as individuals and full realization as Gay people.
The agenda of assimilation has been so dominant there hasn’t really been much discussion at all of the possible ways Gay people might exist. The author of this essay can very clearly see how in his life being Gay has opened up opportunities and a significantly different life than if he was straight, but he doesn’t have good concepts of what the alternatives might be for other Gay people who are different from the author.
Once we realize that we are different and start realizing what ways we can exist, what trajectories in life we might have, we will realize how devastating the current neoliberal agenda is.
Before discussing what makes Gays different, we need to recognize one issue and discuss a common assimilationist issue. A lot of Gays would like to believe and have straights believe that Gays are just like straight people are fearful if straights thought otherwise. The assimilationist agenda is directed towards Gays being like straights. Popular liberal civil rights are based on the idea that we are all the same and should be treated the same. A popular slogan is “One Love,” that essentially, we are all the same, straight and Gay, is the basis of advocating civil rights for Gays. This idea we are like the straight people is generally applied to all the letters in the initialism by the LGBTQXYZ establishment.
As a result of the anxieties about being perceived as different and widespread investment in the agenda of assimilation by many Gays, there is often a strong reaction to the idea of Gays being different and the consideration of different life trajectories.
One of the most common misrepresentations should be discussed before going forward, that is the misrepresentation that we are trying to dictate how people should live. We aren’t dictating anything. What the purpose of this book is to discuss possibilities, the lack of discussion of possibilities, and how one possibility, assimilation, has been promoted such that it is implied it is the logical choice for Gays as if there weren’t any other choices to consider. However, if you want to get married, adopt children, possibly have a white picket fence, and model your life after straight people you certainly have a right to do so. We are just discussing that there might be alternatives.
Also, the choices made assimilationists doesn’t preclude others from evaluating possibilities and coming to different conclusions than assimilationists.
These are the things that make Gays different.
1. Gays are not part of all the social customs, beliefs, systems, expectations, and gender roles that manage heterosexuality. Heterosexuality pervades the running of the world. Just by this we exist out outside the straight world and heterosexual gender roles. This in itself is enough to make us different.
2. Gays are men and are generally ready to have sex and have casual sex as well as sex as part of romance. They generally explore and develop their sexuality and are part of communities which are much more sexually active than society in general. Further their sexual activities are often outside straight male gender roles, most notably Gay men cock sucking or getting fucked.
3. Gays are born everywhere, geographically, in all social classes, in all religious backgrounds, in all political backgrounds and are brought into contact through Gay spaces, in particularly those which facilitate sexual contact. They more than the heterosexual public social and sexual contact with a broader range of society.
4. Gays are not involved with reproduction and not directed by society towards raising children or constrained by the responsibilities involved with reproduction. They have available both the time and the resources that might be used to raise children to pursue other goals. They will be able to take risks and chose paths that those responsible for children are less likely to take.
5. Gays face some degree of prejudice everywhere, if not outright persecution. Homosexual acts are illegal in many places both now and historically. Major religions and political movements denounce homosexual acts and have programs to persecute Gays.
6. Gays are nearly always born to non-Gay parents and it is very likely that none of the Gay person’s relatives are Gay, given that Gays are about 3% of the male population. It is very common for the parents and relatives to be hostile to Gays and hostile even when they realize that the Gay person in their family is Gay. Even when there isn’t hostility, the word best describing the parent’s attitude is “acceptance.” Often Gays keep their identities secret from their families. These families can’t teach them anything about being Gay.
7. Gays aren’t born knowing they are Gay. They come to realize it at some point later in life often with struggles in accepting their identity.
8. Gays have a nearly a universal life path of “coming out,” when it is at all possible to not have to entirely conceal identity. The term “coming out,” often is a path in life in terms of self-realization, then ending secrecy with the family, friends, and relatives, and then society. Straight people don’t have coming out as an experience in their lives. The default assumption is that you are straight.
9. Gays will always struggle to have a cultural inheritance. Parents are extremely unlikely to know anything about the Gay past or be able to direct their Gay son towards any resources. The schools won’t be having it in their curriculum. The only place where it will be in the curriculum might be in some Queer studies course in college, focused on the whole
initialism, (LGBTQXYZ), and that will be limited to those who go to college. Historical amnesia and Gay cultural illiteracy are common.
10. Gays being 3% of the population will need separate places where they are concentrated to support meeting other Gays for sex or dating or spouses. So they will have their own spaces like Gay bars, baths, night clubs, and also seek to live near other Gays in Gayborhoods. We aren’t on a path of integration like other minorities.
11. Gays will always be a minority everywhere attached to the larger straight society. There isn’t a home country where they are a majority. At most there will be some neighborhood which at some time in its development has had a concentration of Gays, even then these Gayborhoods might just be a contemporary historical phenomenon which won’t occur in the future.
There are endless social customs, practices, gender roles expectations that are a part of heterosexuality and subject to endless contentious or angry debate. From who should pay for a meal, to what the relative levels of education of the spouses should be by sex, to what the income of the spouses should be by sex, and who should be paying the bills according to sex. There is the supposed “weaker” sex and expected behaviors by men in regards to that and conflict with how these beliefs might be contrary to equality for women. (I am not saying there is or is not, I am just observing what straight people believe.)
There is the popular template of dating and then marriage and
then children and then there being grandchildren and all sorts of customs built around that with various roles assigned by sex. The assignment of tasks and responsibilities in the marriage, usually, though not always, is based on the sex of the spouse. Often women clean the house and men mow the lawn. There is still a belief that is held by some that the best arrangement is where the man works and the woman maintains the home. It is often believed that the man should be the head of the family.
They are dimorphic in dress and grooming and hair styles. Women wear makeup, men generally don’t. Women wear one type of clothing, men another. The dimorphic difference is so different that drag performers use it to do drag. Men and women relative to each other are referred to as the “opposite” sex.
Many women feel they have failed in life if they haven’t gotten married, men not so much. Even though Gays now get married, even wearing tuxedos, even a cursory review of wedding magazines show that that Gay marriage is not straight marriage. The issue of pre-marital sex isn’t even a concept in Gay life, nor is the issue of living together before marriage. No doubt the assimilationists can find some Gay couple that will triumphantly announce how they imitated straight life, but in general, almost entirely, this isn’t a practice or concern in Gay life.
Men tend to be older than women in their relationships and generally this is what straight people expect to be the norm. When women are older than the man, they often get labels such as “cougar,” a predator.
Heterosexuality is endlessly structured around the fact that heterosexuality is heterosexual, that is it is between men and
women with the idea of difference between the two sexes and different roles for the two sexes. The author doesn’t criticize heterosexuality, since he isn’t a part of it, he just states the reality of it.
There are technical differences also, for example, in retirement with one spouse generally substantially outliving the other based on their sex. More significantly women bear children, men don’t. Gay men won’t be getting pregnant.
Regarding sexual activity, there is an extensive set of cultural practices with contestation between the sexes and often involving anger. However, that will be discussed in the next section.
It might be argued that not every straight person follows all these rules, but I don’t think you will find very many straight people that don’t accede to any of these customs. Even then, even if it is a refusal to follow some or all of these customers, they are done in opposition to prevailing straight norms and a part of an active contestation of those norms.
It isn’t going to be the goal of this section to describe in detail how heterosexuality is emmeshed in numerous social practices and customs, no doubt the reader can observer easily customs not mentioned here by even a cursory glance to the topics discussed on social media. The goal here is to show that heterosexuality is emmeshed in social practices based on sex identity.
The point is that nearly all, if not all, of these customs related to gender roles in heterosexuality don’t apply to Gay men because we are homosexual.
Just on the basis of this alone, the customs related to gender
roles in heterosexuality, Gays are substantially different from straights and the differences are much more than the differences in the social customs between nationalities.
Some will argue that the author is basing his argument based on society as it is now with its practices, but in some utopian better world these practices wouldn’t exist and Gays would be like straight people. This is used by assimilationists to deny the present real world, by the invention of an imaginary world in which assimilation might make sense. I think discussing an imaginary world which not only doesn’t exist presently, has never existed in the entire historical record, and further shows no signs of coming into existence while any of us are alive is just nonsense and a misdirection.
Like everyone else we exist in the here and now and Gay people’s strategies need to be relevant to the real world and not designed for an imaginary world. That this type of argument is actually made by assimilationists and not immediately thought nonsensical, is the desperation by Gay assimilationists to be just like the straight people and reveals that the assimilationists don’t have Gay pride.
There is an opportunity to just not participate or imitate heterosexuality, but the opportunity to develop our own ways of living or even multiple different ways of living that suit our own needs and desires and situation. This discussion needs to really get started and move forward.
Sex in in straight society is emmeshed in a variety of customs, practices and taboos, many of which involve gender roles. Further men and women often have conflicting objectives and
expectations regarding the practice of sex. Men generally would be willing to have sex for sexual gratification itself. Women generally want sex to be part of some relationship though not always. Even in the year 2022 you can see on social media women saying, “Men only want one thing.”
The old expression, “Battle of the Sexes,” seems inadequate to describe the conflict observed on social media. Battles, are that which occurs between sovereign nations, but observing heterosexuality in the media one is more remined of some fratricidal war. Gay men do get upset with each other over issues of sex, but it isn’t a bipolar conflict and the discourse is not shaped by viewing the other sex as alien. There is a popular book, “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus,” as if they were extraterrestrial aliens relative to each other. Where Gay men might be in the cosmos hasn’t been declared.
One leading woman sexologist, Peggy Orenstein, condemns blow jobs done for men by women with the article, “It’s a ‘blow job’ because it’ work: How guys push women to make oral sex as shaking hands,” published in the liberal online publication Salon.
In popular culture women who want sex for sexual gratification are called “sluts,” though this is now being contested and rejected by some women.
With straight couples, generally, a relationship involves sexual monogamy. Whereas with Gay relationships it might or might not involve monogamy and that might change over time. The author has known xenogamous relationships.
With straight people love and sex generally gets intertwined, with women especially conceptualizing them as being part of one thing. There is the idea of courtship, meals, roses, gifts etc.
This isn’t a part of Gay life. I remember when a Gay friend at college gave a dozen red roses to a man he had a crush on, the Gays on campus were amused at his modeling after what straight people do. (The roses didn’t work.) The whole thing to give gifts to demonstrate that you can be a provider doesn’t exist with Gay men.
There is a whole culture of straight men pursing women as if they are a castle to be taken. There are outer walls, like the “friend zone.” In straight society they discuss the ratio of men to women in different places and professions. In Gay society the idea of a ratio doesn’t apply. If a town had 13,482 Gay men the ratio would be 13,481:1 not including the number of bisexual men looking for a man to have sex with at the moment.
One popular slang expression when straight men have been able to have sex is to say, “I got lucky last night.” For Gay men, “lucky,” would mean that the morning after the guy they met was able to repair a kitchen appliance.
Gay men can have sex with each other for the sake of sex as well as part of romantic relationships. Going to the nightclub is usually with the expectation that you can easily have sex with someone that night if you wish and it is likely with someone you just met there that night. Prior to the Gay apps, Gays had bathhouses, frequented parks, and made use of other spaces to have sex again with people you just met, or absolute strangers.
Generally, for most Gay men sexual opportunities are plentiful and sex is easily available if you are reasonable in your choices. If Gay men aren’t having sex frequently it is generally a matter of choice on their part, not the lack of opportunity. With the easy access to sex Gay men have an opportunity to explore their desires and more precisely know them and develop them.
Gay men develop sexual subcultures. Currently in 2022 the Gay pup subculture with its costumes and paraphernalia has established itself. What subculture are the straights going to be developing in the next ten years if any?
Straights with their monogamous relationships and limited sexual opportunities are not going to be learning about sexual possibilities as fast as gays. Also, a straight guy is going to have to read about some new sexual position and method, have it described by a close friend, or view it on a video. A Gay man learns it directly when he experiences a new sexual practice done with him by another Gay man.
Gay men also have a much broader range of sexual activities. Gay men can fuck or be fucked, give a blow job or get a blow job. Being same-sex they can have sex as threesomes in all sorts of interesting combinations. Penises can be pressed together for mutual masturbation.
Gays generally consume pornography and it generally doesn’t carry any stigma that when they do so. Pornography for Gay men, performed or created by men, doesn’t involve what issues heterosexual porn might. Heterosexual porn is controversial in heterosexual society. Pornography is another medium of exchange of sexual ideas and possibilities among Gay men and self-exploration of desire.
A Gay person will likely have ideas about fucking that will be much different than a straight guy, when he is being fucked and shouting “harder.” Though this is changing to some extent, Gay men much more often than straight men realize that they can be objects of sexual desire and with their greater opportunities for sex are much more likely to be working out and watching what they eat than the general population. When taking aerobics classes I noticed that it is made of mostly
women and Gay men. Back in the 1980s the author remembers reading a newspaper reporter’s shock and dismay that none of the pants for sale at a clothing store in the Gay neighborhood could fit him. This was considered newsworthy for the readers of this major metropolitan paper.
Some straights are more experimental than the great mass of straight people, but they are few. Even then they perhaps only reject one thing or another, but they are still within many of the other constraints and practices of straight life.
Gay men in having much more sex will have more developed sexual practice and awareness of their sexual desires. They typically will have experienced much more sex with many more partners than straight men. So, the lives of Gay men are lived differently in regards to sex and they will be sexually different besides being homosexuals. They will typically have a more positive attitude towards sex than the society they live in.
In just this, sexual practice, Gay men in general are quite significantly different from straights in general. However, perhaps it in combination with another feature of Gay life that the sexual practices of Gays have their most profound impact on Gays being different.
The hidden agenda of assimilationism is the control of Gay male sexuality to constrain it.
Gays are everywhere geographically, are born in all groups in society, and have been noted in the historical record since when there have been enough records to be likely to include Gays. Very likely Gays existed prior to the historical record.
Persons who are entirely Gay or nearly entirely or enough such that they are going to live as homosexuals constitute about three percent of society. To meet other Gays, they will need to go to Gay spaces where the others are Gay or not hostile to Gays.
So, to meet each other it will be necessary for persons from all groups in society to come to Gay spaces to meet. Being that Gays are only three percent of society some of the types of Gay spaces, such as nightclubs or bars will be few in numbers. At these Gay spaces there will be likely Gays from all classes, ethnicities, races, religions, occupations, ages, castes and whatever socially different groups that might exist in that society since Gays are born in all social strata of society everywhere geographically on earth.
Gays in rural areas have strong incentives to migrate to urban areas not only because the generally more hostile attitudes towards Gays in rural areas. In a town of 2,000 inhabitants, if Gays are three-percent of the men, after excluding women, children you might have maybe 600 adult males and that would mean 18 Gays living there from 18 to 70. However, just calculating a percentage for the general population wouldn’t apply to this small town. Maybe 18 Gays have been born there, but many of them have realized the limited prospects of this small town for Gay people and have long since migrated to urban places. Those that remain might be young and haven’t yet figured out when, where and how to migrate out, or those who got married to a woman and for some other reason are trapped there, and those who are content with bleak prospects. However, the number of Gays there, if any, would be few, which would encourage what remaining Gays who have reached the age of 18 in that town to leave or having finished college education not to come back.
Small towns offer little opportunity to escape observation by the community at large and by relatives. For some straights, the reason driving them to stay is that their relatives are there, but for Gays the presence of relatives nearby might be a driving force for Gays to leave the town. Having lived in high school for a year in a very rural area, a common complaint was that you couldn’t flush the toilet without everyone knowing about it.
The ability to escape observation by the community would be another reason, the larger city offering more anonymity. The visiting straight relative surprising the Gay couple in the city is a common theme in Gay movies.
Even if the town was the most welcoming town for Gays in the world, what type of specialized supports could it feasibly provide for Gay people? Is there going to be a Gay bar there? With a few Gays what type of cultural events or social activities would there be for Gay people. If a Gay person had a specialized sexual interest, it might be an impossibility to satisfy it in a small town. Even the ability to learn sexual practice and experience variety in sexual practice might be limited.
Straight people do migrate out of rural towns, I would argue however, the opportunities to stay in a small town are greater for straights and the pressures to drive Gays out of rural areas are particularly intense on Gays. Gays would have the usual pressures that straights find that drive them out of rural areas, added on would be the issues of Gay isolation.
Similar driving forces that lead Gays from smaller towns, lead Gays to go from smaller metropolises to larger metropolises, resulting in very large Gay communities in the top-tier major
metropolises in the United States. Migration has been an ongoing fact of Gay life for many probably going back historically to the rise of cities to which Gays could migrate. The slang expression for New York at one time was the Emerald City and for Gays was “friends of Dorothy,” derived from the movie, “Wizard of Oz.”
We live in a world where there are large migrations of refugees due to catastrophes both natural and political, and due to economic inequalities. Gays are present in these migrations also, but Gays are also are migrating internally in a nation that is at peace from the rural area to the urban area. Gays also migrate internationally, when there is anti-Gay hostility in one nation making Gay existence there particularly difficult.
This leads to another increased factor of diversity in Gay spaces, people that have moved to the geographical location where the Gay space exists. In a Gay space you are likely to find people from elsewhere. In San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s, few Gays in the community had grown up there, they had moved there.
Also, given that Gays are three percent in number, it is generally much less likely that you might meet a Gay person who you would be interested in at a work place, church, school, than a straight person. Your opportunities as a Gay person to connect with someone in your social demographic groups is small, 97% of the men are precluded from the beginning since they are straight.
Being outside of straight society, being outside of the society of family members in regards to meeting Gays, Gays don’t have the constraints and restrictions that the straight society might otherwise apply to Gays as to who they can or can’t date, who their social network or family of which might disapprove. What
disapprovals the social group or the family might have against members of a religion, race, ethnicity, class, family background is much less likely to be applied to a Gay’s dating or sexual activities. The Gay person himself might have internalized it, but the straight society and family aren’t present when social and sexual choices are made. Also, what ideas that Gay person might have had derived from his straight environment can often disintegrate in the face of sexual desire.
Though in some societies more accepting of Gays there might be straight people trying to suggest to a Gay person who to date, perhaps some parent might attempt match making. Even so, how many Gay people would these parents know to arrange introductions? The great majority of the men of their friends and social contacts of who these parents know are straight.
This is where the casual sexual activities tend to erase or minimize the boundaries between social classes, occupations, ethnicities, races, religions, ages, geographical origin, castes, and other possible social groupings.
In nightclubs and bars Gays are socializing with each other, drinking with each other, and going home with each other to have sex. In parks they are having sex with strangers. In bath houses they are having sex at an institution with people selecting others based on sexual attraction. At these institutions there are opportunities to socialize or have sex with people from different backgrounds and Gays do. Interactions across the social boundaries of the larger straight society happens much more than in the larger straight society and in interactions that can be intimate.
Gays when traveling internationally, even when traveling to nations outside the cultural sphere that their nation might be located in, such as a Westerner going to East Asia or an East
Asian going to a Western nation, will find that going to the local Gay spaces and getting laid is easy. The Gay spaces will likely be the same or very similar to ones they know at home.
Gays are socially and sexually gloriously promiscuous, that is pro-mixing.
It isn’t to say that the Gay community is one of an allpervading universal brotherhood, or that merely having sex will result in a greater social understanding, the larger divisions of straight society do manifest in the Gay community, but the interactions across these divisions are much more common in Gay society than in straight society. Talking with different people, drinking with different people give an opportunity to know people, an opportunity that is more common with Gay society. Fucking and cock sucking tends to be an ice-breaker, with an intimate shared experience. This results in a society of individuals with generally a broader social perspective and tolerance than that present in the local straight society. It results in a Gay community incorporating within itself a great diversity and due to its migrations to the city, an urban diverse community.
As a global community, a community present in every place where humans exist, it is a globally pervading community with a global exchange of ideas relevant to Gay people. Indeed, one surprising feature of Gay life is how much Gay life in one location is like that of another elsewhere on the earth and how sexual practices are part of this global exchange.
Besides being a reason why Gays are different, it is one of the great benefits of Gay life and it is one of the strengths the community can have.
This is one of the reasons, there is another, why discrimination
by bars or other institutions in the Gay community is a deadly offense against the Gay community. It is destructive of our community’s strength that is derived through its diversity, it is a denial of one of the great benefits of Gay life, and it is essentially assimilationist, since it is making the Gay community like the larger straight society with its discriminations, and assimilation is the denial of the development of being fully a Gay being.
As a deadly offense, those who care about the well-being of Gay society need to be serious and determined about opposing those elements in the Gay community who would be discriminatory.
In a lot of series or movies about Gays, a pair of Gays get married, usually they are professionals, nearly always monogamous, are a model of Gay respectability, adopt children, face challenges resulting from prejudice and have a happy ending.
As will be discussed later, getting married is the great vehicle of the assimilationist agenda of the neoliberal management of desire, to direct Gays to not be different or too different from straights.
The fact is that marriage as an institution among straight people is in severe decline, but even it if wasn’t, it is a social institution designed for straights to bind them together, provide a social unit to support the raising of children, and support some dynastic ideas and it was not designed for Gays.
To avoid misdirection on the topic of same-sex marriage by
assimilationists and neoliberals, the author would say that Gays should have the right to marriage as an option, especially since no alternative useful options are available to Gays. Also, for one reason or another it might be useful or strategic to get married, such as guaranteeing the right to visit a partner in the hospital or securing inheritance of your residence from grasping greedy relatives. Finally, not being allowed to get married, establishes Gay as being unequal to straights. The author feels that Gays have as much right to be miserable as anyone else.
Homosexual activity doesn’t lead to pregnancy. Unlike most heterosexual couples, not having children isn’t an option needing weighty thought and isn’t the expectation of parents, relatives and society. Instead, it is the opposite, it is the weighty decision to adopt children without expectations of society that you do so, often in opposition to society’s expectations.
Gays have the opportunity and option to pursue many life paths besides being like straight people. However, in the media, including what is LGBTQXYZ+ media, the focus is on Gays getting married and adopting children even though for most Gays, either activity is something they are unlikely to do. By omission there tends not to be a discussion of what other paths Gays might take and what social institutions could there be that might support these paths.
Without the time and costs that children require what alternatives might there be for Gays to use that time and resources, what paths might they follow instead? Without marriage how might their relationships be constructed?
One obvious difference is that a lot of Gays often can and do go night clubbing until their 40s or other Gay entertainments, like
circuit parties. They are not bound to child raising. These Gays having fun and sex seem to annoy LGBTQ+ moralists.
Again, not being directed into cycles of reproduction is a huge difference between the possibilities in Gay life and straight life and yet the discussion and focus of the Gay movement has been nearly entirely directed into same-sex marriage and adopting children and living like straight people. There are tremendous possibilities of different paths for Gay people and it is largely undiscussed.
Gays being unencumbered with a family can take more risks or take paths without concern about loss of income. A straight person with a family and financial responsibilities has often the job which can’t be quit and risks that can’t be taken. There are paths that simply not available when a family is being supported. The author decided to sell it all and go back to school to get a masters in chemical engineering. A person without a family can decide to leave their current situation and spend a year someplace or take a new career direction with much less income. One major difference of Gays and straights is the relative lack of binding obligations and responsibilities.
Since marriage is more and more an upper-middle-class and upper-class phenomenon in the United States what paths do we offer for Gays aren’t upper middle class? Besides marriage, what paths do we have for the Gays lacking upper-middle-class incomes and won’t be having the finances to purchase a home and restore it?
The author didn’t get married, didn’t raise kids, restored two homes, had a successful career in semiconductor processing, and at the same time was able get two university press books in cultural geography published. This is only one option, to have two successful careers, technical and in the liberal arts, done in
parallel. However, that is just one option. The author sees an opportunity to have a dual career, but that isn’t for everyone. There might be a person who puts the extra time into one career. These two opportunities aren’t available for everyone or of interest for many Gays. They are just one option available when you don’t have children.
There just isn’t a discussion on what life paths Gays might have and the author hasn’t imagined alternatives for people in his social class and venue, let alone what working class people might have. The author has figured out what worked for him. What conversations in the Gay community that might exist are mostly around open relationships and polyamory, which are good topics, but there isn’t thinking of what a Gay life paths could be considering life in its entirety.
The scolding LGBTQXYZ media condemns circuit parties, but doesn’t offer alternatives besides marriage and the adoption of two children. (Circuit party guests, party all you want, I am not an Alphabet Soup scold.)
Could being Gay involve being a vocation? That is, you have time to plan on doing something special with your life with the time you have available? Or not so directed, but some life that is something that a Gay person could do? Or just not be a straight life?
What types of domestic partnerships might be designed for Gays and serve them better than marriage?
Does a housing market oriented towards nuclear families work for Gays? Would a lot of Gays benefit in a cooperative boarding house or cooperative housing? Are we satisfied with a large fraction of the Gay community being renters for life? Would different housing solutions help younger Gays be able to live
independently from their parents?
The author previously hadn’t given a lot of thought to what these paths might be, most focused on finding his path through life as a Gay person, and since one person is not likely to think of all the paths Gay people might follow, this is a discussion that needs to start.
Gays don’t have to live in the boxes of Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes,” and we should resist being put there.
But Gays are different in that in general, the great majority, probably are going to live without getting married, that might change in some future, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now, and even less likely are going to have adopted children. Even if we do get married, it might be because we are in our 60s and 70s and because we need to be concerned about inheritance and hospital visitations. The life timeline of Gays might be that Gay marriage doesn’t happen when you are young, but when it meets our needs. Straight people mostly get married when they are young, since their marriage is based on cycles of reproduction.
There really hasn’t been any discussion about how older Gays might live. Upper- and middle-class Gays have their homes to live in, and then sell if and when they want to move into other arrangements, or just purchase a condo. What prospects do working class and others who aren’t middle class face when they get older?
We are very different from straights in having options different from marriage and we need to develop and cultivate this difference.
BORN INTO
As stated in the introduction, Gays are nearly always born to non-Gay parents and it is very likely that none of the Gay person’s relatives are Gay, given that Gays are about 3% of the male population. It is very common for the parents and relatives to be hostile to Gays and hostile even when they realize that the Gay person in their family is Gay. Even when there isn’t hostility, the word best describing the parent’s attitude is “acceptance.” They often wanted children and grandchildren, and the Gay persons grandparents wanted grandchildren and they had various ideas about the family continuing down through the generations, but they accept the reality of their son being Gay, but it wasn’t what they wanted.
The attitudes of the family in terms of acceptance can be very mixed, there will be this cousin and that aunt that is supportive, and that other cousin or sibling that is not supportive.
Whereas most people in life have their families as a support, and this has been a feature of families throughout history, they are support networks, for Gays they can not only be not support networks, but often are anti-support networks, and can be sources of hazards and hostility.
From these parents and family, they will get no instruction on navigating Gay life and dealing with issues of Gay life. However, well intentioned, they aren’t Gay and don’t have experience as a Gay person. They won’t understand Gay life either, largely interpreting Gay life as straight persons.
What a Gay person’s family first teaches a Gay person is deception and secrecy and being careful not to reveal their true identity to their family. Often the family members are understood to be likely explosively hostile and angry to the Gay
person if their identity is found out, or even potentially dangerous to the Gay person if their identity is found out by the family. In a lot of cases there might not shouting, but anger nevertheless and interrogations and arguments about being Gay. Or they might want to push the child into conversion therapy or some type of denial of his homosexuality wrapped in a language of supposed support. This isn’t the universal experience of all Gay people, but it is the experience of the great majority of Gay people, and it is still somewhat exceptional that a young Gay person would feel free discussing being Gay with their parents.
The family teaches most Gay persons fear of their family. It is not surprising that this environment has crippling psychological affects that Gay people struggle to overcome. To have a sense of self-worth as a Gay person and not be ashamed to be known as a Gay person.
Perhaps in some utopian society, which the assimilationists are so keen to imagine, these phase of secrecy with parents will not be the great majority, majority, or even a sizable fraction of Gay growing up stories, but that utopian future is unlikely to occur within the life times of Gays being born long after the author has passed away. These imagined utopian societies are fictions for assimilations to deny the reality of the present, and avoid dealing with the present by defining it as being just a temporary thing.
Summarizing, Gays are born into families that often are hostile or those whose support is questionable, who can’t provide information on living a Gay life, and first teach Gays secrecy and fear of their families. This is very different than the lives of straights for which coming out as straights simple is not existing.
Gays aren’t born knowing they are Gay. They come to realize it at some point later in life. Though there are Gays who claim to be “8 before 7,” that is that they realized they were Gay early, most Gays slowly begin to realize that they are Gay when they reach puberty. They slowly begin to observe that when their male peers are starting to have interests in girls and women, they don’t feel the same interests and attractions, and further they are experiencing feelings and attractions to men that their male peers are not.
Prior to Gays realizing that they are Gay, they often have adopted the anti-Gay attitudes of their parents, their family, their family’s institutions such as their family’s church, and society in general.
So, one of the tasks for the young Gay person is confronting their internalized anti-Gay beliefs without support from their family and because of the concerns over secrecy, and often because of the underground or semi-underground existence that can be Gay existence in societies, not having easily available or available at all, sources of information to confront their internalized anti-Gay beliefs.
Being that young Gays often exist in an information vacuum surrounded by a hostile family and society it shouldn’t be surprising that outcomes are often not good.
Some Gays never do accept being Gay or they end up accepting it when they are 40 or 50 or 60 years old. I am sure there are cases where finally in their 70s they accept being Gay.
Some Gays never really deal with their internalized anti-Gay
beliefs. They experience being homosexual as a vice or like a drug addiction with a view of other Gays being fellow practitioners of a vice or fellow drug addicts.
Other gays acquire some degree of acceptance, but still have a variety of internalized subtle anti-Gay attitudes. For them Gay is not Good, just something that happens and has to be tolerated. Often Gays are very much secret, not so much because they need to be, but because they are ashamed or embarrassed about being Gay.
It is not accidental that the annual parade for Gays is called “Pride.” Often that is what most Gays get from the parade and the most powerful function of the parade is Gays being in a large crowd of themselves. Participation in a Pride parade, even as only an onlooker, is often a powerful transformative event in a Gay person’s life.
The whole process of self-realization and coming out just isn’t the experience of straight people’s life.
Though there is a Gay past, and art, literature and other cultural forms, Gays are often disconnected from a Gay cultural past. Gays will always struggle to have a cultural inheritance. Parents are extremely unlikely to know anything about the Gay past or be able to direct their Gay son towards any resources. The schools won’t be having it in their curriculum. The only place where it will be in the curriculum might be in some Queer studies course in college, focused on the whole initialism, (LGBTQXYZ), having only partially Gay content, and that will be limited to those who go to college. Historical amnesia and Gay cultural illiteracy are common for
In contrast, Straights have their parents, their schools, their academic institutions, the mass media, theaters, magazines, internet sources, all passing along their culture and their past onto them.
Most Gay men don’t have children. Even when they do, the chances of them being Gay is small, about 3%, the same percentage of men who are Gay. It is not inherited like skin color or type of hair or other facial features.
The historical record shows that Gay people are a minority and a small one and this is what is generally observed everywhere. There are claims that some place doesn’t have Gays, but usually these are places which are hostile to Gays and the Gays are existing secretly.
Gays will always be originating in a larger straight society in close social and geographical proximity to it. Existing in neighborhoods where Gays are not a small minority, or perhaps a majority, will be the exceptional case. There never will be a homeland of Gays of which to dream. Gay actors in history will always be located in the history of straight people.
Gays will always be in a position of being outside straight society, yet knowing straight society from the inside also, to look into it straight society from the outside and inside. Whether individual Gays do so and to what extent they will is another question, but many Gays will. Straights know little of Gay society and being inside straight society can’t look inside straight society from the outside.
Gays will always be managing their minority situation. Straights will always be the majority for which Gays will be engaged in managing their minority situations.
Derived from a variety of circumstances Gays will always be different than the Straights in many ways, substantial ways, important ways, and in life altering ways. There never will be a real assimilation of Gays into straight life and attempts to do so are destructive and obstacles to choosing real life Gay paths.
We need to realize we are different and act accordingly in defining what our opportunities are, what we need to think about what directions we might pursue.
We need to oppose all programs and projects based on assimilationist ideas or at variance against what the nature of Gay life is.
This chapter discusses family and being Gay from the perspective of Gays learning to become fully Gay people.
What is very unique about the lives of Gay people is that we come into existence from straight parents in straight families with straight siblings and straight relatives.
The institutions of school, public libraries, media can be deficient or lacking information for a Gay person to learn about Gay life. What religious organizations the family belongs to can be indifferent to hostile or tolerating regarding being Gay and not providing any support for being Gay. There is no place of Gays in their theology.
Further the family might be anti-Gay and starting out the Gay person might start out as an anti-Gay person or a person who growing up has acquired anti-Gay attitudes.
Where a family is usually supportive and has parents that give advice, a Gay person’s family with the best of intentions has little or no knowledge of Gay life to provide help, advice or guidance. With good intentions they might even give inappropriate or bad advice because they think what applies to heterosexual life always applies to Gay life.
As pointed out before, Often the parents and siblings are hostile to Gay persons and so the family isn’t a source of support or love, but an immediate danger to the Gay person and being Gay must be kept a carefully guarded secret with the Gay person living in fear of exposure.
Even the family which imagines itself tolerant of Gays is problematic. They may be fine with other people’s children being Gay, but they really didn’t imagine that there might a Gay person in their family. Their issues with their child being Gay might involve little subtle verbal cuts that don’t contradict their self-image of being tolerant or liberal. They wanted to have grandchildren and now they realize that is not likely to happen and the acceptance can be grudging.
Even with a supportive family, the environment at school might not be safe.
Other Gays in his age group will be in a similar situation and living in secrecy or struggling in isolation as to their identity, but for whatever reason not visible to others as a Gay person. Even when there is a Gay relative, they might both be closeted and not known to each other.
Thus, Gays start out in isolation struggling with having a Gay identity that is widely hated and despised and likely with some homophobic attitudes they themselves have acquired with little or no sources of information and with no other Gays to talk to and having to face this in secrecy. They will have to face this situation as a teenager, with little life experience and education, entirely or mostly by themselves, surrounded by a hostile environment full of negative stereotypes.
What is one of the most significant effects of growing up as an isolated Gay person is that we are imprinted by straight people. We conceptualize being Gay within a reference framework of that of straight people, straight peoples values, and adopt heteronormativity.
Commentators mention heteronormativity as something oppressing the Gay community, but its origins are commonly
attributed to the general effects of society and the dominating position of straights in society. It needs to be understood that it is already within Gay people and having been there as the result of imprinting of Gays by a straight society and this starts prior to coming out.
The common experience of Gay people is a struggle to come into existence and self-acceptance. To connect to other Gays and learn how to be a Gay person. This takes a lot of effort and can be exhausting and can be fraught with dangers including physical violence.
It isn’t surprising that many Gays don’t come out until their twenties and some later or never, that many Gays never let go of negative views of being Gay. Even among Gays who come out and on-the-surface don’t have obvious negative attitudes they often still worry what straight people will think, beg for acceptance and don’t demand respect. The anti-Gay cousin is to be indulged with discussion and attempted persuasion endlessly until either the cousin or the Gay person passes away rather than telling the cousin to go jump in the lake. For some Gays the grudging acceptance by some individual or group is prized.
Great emphasis is placed on the idea that sexual orientation can’t be changed, not as an understanding of the facts of being Gay, but to argue that “we can’t help it” so we are not to be blamed. People will point out that they didn’t “choose to be Gay,” as if no one would.
Many Gays just acquiesce to being Gay as unavoidable rather than a good luck.
How many Gays express that that in being Gay they won the lottery? After all the chances of being Gay is somewhere
around 3 percent, a little less than one in thirty. How many Gays feel they were lucky to be Gay and to life a Gay life?
The struggle to emerge as a Gay person is exhausting and many Gays don’t make it or emerge exhausted having done little more than having avoided drowning in the worst of internalized homophobia.
Even emerged Gays can face discrimination and violence and that be a struggle to be faced and preoccupy much of the individual’s thinking. In most places if not all places in the world Gays do face discrimination and often violence though it varies a lot depending on location. As a consequence they are left with less time to think about being Gay and what selfrealization might be. Their mental energy is tied up with countering or navigating hostility.
As a consequence, Gays emerge exhausted, confronted with serious ongoing prejudice, and imprinted on by straight people.
Efforts to throw younger Gays a lifeline with Gay-Straight clubs in the high schools, with things like the “It’s Gets Better” videos to let younger Gays know that they just need to hold on, are immensely important. School libraries with Gay stories that are age appropriate are helpful.
The news media with its coverage of the Gay movement lets younger Gays know that there is a world of Gays out there and that there are Gay people living happy lives. It also lets them know that the homophobia they might face is just the prejudice of a certain set of individuals, not everyone.
The internet has allowed young Gay people to bypass anti-Gay obstacles and get the information they need.
Again, this is vitally important. If Gay people can get information early, they are less likely to adopt anti-Gay attitudes, have less of a struggle for self-acceptance, emerge earlier as Gay people, be more informed when they do come out, and less exhausted by the stress of coming out.
However, the one issue that isn’t addressed at the present is the straight imprinting on Gay people since they grow up isolated with straight people.
Even if Gays emerge not exhausted by coming out and negative experiences, they often draw ideas from the straight society they are immersed in.
Gay people who emerge now tend to be assimilationists seeking to live like straight people and see the goals as being to eliminate the discriminatory barriers to full assimilation. They imagine themselves as only having a private bedroom difference from straight people. Being Gay is something they carry around in a bag. They can even find it alarming that some Gays argue that Gay people might be considered different since they are fearful that thus they might be treated differently in a negative way.
As discriminatory barriers to start to disappear, there are people who actually state that the Gay movement has accomplished its goals and isn’t needed anymore since they see assimilation as the end goal.
There is no recognition that Gay people have unique opportunities, challenges, and choices because they are different and because they don’t exist within the social formations of heterosexuality. There is a denial that Gays are different instead.
Since there is no recognition that Gays have different life choices and opportunities there is no individual or collective discussions in the Gay community about how a Gay life might be lived, how a Gay identity might be cultivated, and what the real needs of the Gay community are.
One of the most obvious opportunities that Gays have is that they have the time and resources to devote to projects and activities. The author had a full career in semiconductor processing making microelectronic devices as well as being the editor of two university press books published which helped bring down the neo-Confederate movement and their statues. Also, has restored two old houses.
Gays have been in earlier decades prominent in renovating old houses and built neighborhoods out of aged and decayed real estate.
Not all Gay efforts have to be so utilitarian or goal oriented. It might be the development of a music culture like the circuit parties. There are possibilities that the author doesn’t imagine since he is goal oriented.
The failure of even imagining that there is a different path for Gay people results in serious failures to meet Gay needs. For example, it is thought that the housing needs of Gay people are largely the same as straight people, even though a modest amount of thinking would show that it isn’t.
For nearly all Gay people who now live in a house, they live as a single couple in a house just as they were a nuclear family. Homes are constructed for nuclear families and Gays select from that housing stock. Given how housing prices have risen, this means the great majority of Gays will never live in a house
they own. A great many won’t be able to afford a condominium. Gay people who will be able to live in a house will be upper middle class. Likely the great majority of Gays will always be renters facing the prospect of ever higher rents. The LGBTQXYZ+ Democrats or leftists don’t even have a concept of Gay housing needs as being different then straights, let alone some plan to address it.
What is needed is collective housing, like dorms or boarding houses or fraternities designed for Gays. For single detached homes, construction for multiple unrelated adults, modifications of current nuclear family housing to accommodate multiple unrelated adults. There needs to be plans on how nuclear family housing might be repurposed for Gays. There needs to be a development of law and policy to facilitate this.
However, the current situation now is that zoning for many homes limits the number of unrelated people that might live in a home. Much of the housing stock of the United States is bound by nuclear family land policies making it heterosexual housing available only for Gay couples owning the house as if they were a nuclear family. This heterosexual apartheid is vast, but isn’t even acknowledge by LGBTQXYZ+ leaders.
Employment is another area of concern. Most of the agenda is to have policies to end discrimination at which case the issue of Gay employment is considered as being addressed. There is nothing wrong with this, and it is a good thing to do, but by itself, just a goal for the absence of discrimination fails to meet Gay employment needs and limits Gay opportunities.
There are multiple issues here.
First, even with the best of efforts, there is likely always going
to be prejudice against Gays and also liberal attitudes of “tolerance.” Gays need to think carefully about what training and education are they going to seek so they have a strategic position in the economy and have good job prospects and leverage with future employers.
Gays have historically already have been concentrated in certain professions to be positioned so they aren’t subject to discrimination, most notably in the profession of hair dressing. This idea of locating yourself strategically to avoid negative consequences of discrimination is hardly new.
Even if a Gay person decides to go into a profession or a type of employment where they aren’t in a strategic position, they need to do so knowingly, that is with an understanding of strategic employment for Gays and the lack of it in their career choice.
Second, Gays need to think that without the burden of a family they have certain opportunities precluded to those with families. They might choose a risky employment opportunity or join a start-up or be part of a venture that has high risks of unemployment. At the most they just risk their own personal situation; they aren’t having to worry about a homeless family or moving a family in with relatives.
Third, Gays, when single, and even when a couple, can consider just moving to another location to pursue better opportunities without having to move a family. Gays can consider taking the risk of locating to a job and place provisionally since it won’t be that difficult to move again. The formation of the Gay neighborhoods in major cities was the result of Gay people leaving where they were and moving to major cities and settling in Gay neighborhoods.
Fourth, Gays can also, if necessary, put in a lot of hours into employment without concern of neglecting families. Or lots of hours getting a business going or being part of a start-up.
Fifth, without the need to support a family, with less need for an income, the are some opportunities they can pursue that a person with a family couldn’t pursue. It might be a lower income in restarting a career by going into a different field. Perhaps some entry level opportunity can be pursued. The author restarted his career when the employment in his industry collapsed by taking a low paying contract job so he could then move from that base pay rather than his previous pay which scared away potential employers.
Sixth, the money that might be diverted to supporting a family can be used to be debt free or to pay down a mortgage and to have savings. Thus, some economic shock resulting in unemployment isn’t going to cause the loss of a house or being thrown out of an apartment.
These are probably only some of the unique elements of the employment situation for Gay people. Yet, in doing research online about Gays and employment, there wasn’t specifically any Gay information, instead it was for LGBTQXYZ+ in general and it was about the elimination of discrimination.
Employment and housing are really important issues for Gay people, but as distinct Gay issues they aren’t even imagined as such much less discussed as issues. They aren’t products and services to be provided by the LGBTQXYZ+ social workers nor are they important for vote harvesting by the LGBTQXYZ neoliberal Democrats. In fact, the issue regarding zoning would likely be a difficult issue for the Democratic establishment.
Generational transmission of Gay culture is weak since our parents and relatives are straight. How many younger Gay persons know of Mutsuo Takahashi or Constantine Cavafy?
As long as the imagining of being Gay is limited by straight imprinting, most Gays are going to be choosing assimilation, much less developing and thinking about the issues that Gay people have and what might be our choices and solutions to our issues, what opportunities we might have, and what unique directions our life paths might take.
The straight imprinting of Gays given our origins in straight families is one of the critical issues Gays need to address and solve.
In all areas of life, we need to consider what is the Gay path and what our needs are, without assuming that we a just a variant from straight people. This will also lead to Gays expecting something from life more than just being tolerated and worrying about what the straight people will think. With Gay identities and Gay lives to live, we aren’t going to be subsumed in some LGBTQXYZ queer Alphabet Soup as another assimilated sexual minority.
As for throwing a lifeline to the younger generation, some good efforts are being made and what has been done is good. What is needed is to develop a global conceptualization of how to provide an easier and better path for future Gays to emerge safely from all situations and also how to provide for generational transmission of information and culture and from that conceptualization start projects to achieve those goals. With an easier path for Gays to emerge in the future, they will be less exhausted and not fearful of being different and be able to engage in defining what Gay life can be and have greater expectations of being respected and strength as Gay people to
demand it.
In summary:
1. We need to have a systematic plan to help coming generations of Gays to arrive with a positive self-image and not exhausted so they can move on to the challenges of the next stages of their Gay life and not settling for tolerance.
2. We need to overcome straight imprinting and move on to defining and living a Gay life rather than choosing assimilation as a default and worrying what the straight people think.
3. We need to realize that Gay life is different and that it has special opportunities and challenges and have individual and community discussions about what living Gay life might be or could be. The Gay community goals need to be more than achieving the negative absence of discrimination, but a positive goal of constructing Gay lives and communities.
4. We need to provide for multi-generational transmission of culture and knowledge.
If we don’t, we will remain merely a sexual minority to be managed by social workers and opportunistic political elements who will define us. They will even have the temerity to decide to define Gay as homogender rather than homosexual. We will seek merely to be tolerated and have low expectations of respect. We won’t pass on to future Gay generations the learnings of the past. We won’t actualize our potentials to live Gay lives but instead exist as assimilationist shadows of straight people.
Gay neighborhoods everywhere in the United States are disappearing as straights move in and economically displace Gays.
If you had a Gay neighborhood with the housing specifically built for Gays we wouldn’t lose that Gay neighborhood. The Gay nature of the neighborhood would literally be built in. It would be physically very difficult and perhaps impossible for straights to move in and displace Gays.
The Gay neighborhoods were originally run down or even abandon spaces of existing housing stock, that Gays repaired and restored. They were however, structures designed for straight people, so when the neighborhoods became desirable, there was nothing to keep straight people from displacing the Gays. Hence, we are losing our Gay neighborhoods across the United States and Canada.
The many Gays in the Gay neighborhood were renters and hence were a factor in increasing the value of the neighborhood, they faced financial stress as rents increased, and then exile when they couldn’t afford the neighborhood and further, they didn’t receive any portion of the appreciating real estate value.
Gay housing would have multiple benefits:
1. The concentration of Gays could be nearly 100%, instead of the 3% in the general population. It would be easier for Gays to meet Gays, it would provide a Gay neighborhood community, social support, and this concentration of Gays would support businesses, services, and institutions for them.
2. Types of housing options could be provided which would be significantly less expensive and more affordable for Gays and provide entry to equity ownership of their own housing.
3. Security would be significantly better. With the higher concentration of Gays, there would be fewer straight people present, and
therefore fewer potentially homophobic straights. Also, in a neighborhood where Gays are nearly 100%, homophobes would be discouraged from attacking superior numbers. Having Gays concentrated into a specific geographic location would allow for various programs of neighborhood self-defense such as neighborhood patrols, distribution of whistles, training in tear gas. Neighborhoods could be designed in such a way that enhanced security for Gays. Home owner association could restrict entry. Finally, as a concentrated block of voters, demands could be made that the police provide protection.
Gay housing in this proposal is housing designed for Gays without children, and who won’t be having children. This represents the great majority of Gay men, more than 90%, if not 95%. It is not “queer” housing nor LGBTQ+ housing.
These other groups certainly have housing needs and someone should be working on those housing needs. As for Gays with children, the existing housing stock build for heterosexual families likely will meet many of their needs.
Something that is designed for everyone isn’t designed specifically for one person or one group of people.
There is no assumption that Gay housing as defined and designed in this monograph is necessarily going to be for everyone. There are diverse needs and more than one type of Gay housing will be proposed, and there is an expectation that this monograph will inspire others to design yet other types of Gay housing.
Opposition to Gay housing is opposition to affordable housing for Gays and Gay neighborhoods and social support for Gays and likely driven by assimilationist ideologies.
The loss of Gay neighborhoods is felt keenly by many Gays. It was in the Gay neighborhoods that Gays often were a majority and had a space outside of straight society. There was physical safety. The businesses generally were oriented to supplying Gay needs and wants and were supportive. Anti-Gay individuals, businesses and institutions would leave. The elected officials were attentive to the needs of the Gay
community, and the Gay neighborhood was the source of the first Gay elected officials.
You weren’t before a straight audience and could live in a community without the straight gaze. If some straight person didn’t like something, they could be told to leave.
Socially, it was a great place to meet other Gay people and hence find a boyfriend or build up a social network. You would run into people you knew and they would have their friends and you would meet them. You might be in a store and meet people with a shared interest. There would be the bars which were neighborhood bars and people would meet people.
On the street, if there was someone you wanted to meet, you could approach them without fear of problems. Very likely they were Gay, and even if they weren’t, they knew they were in a Gay neighborhood and it was something that they should expect might happen, and even if they were violent, they were planning on being violent, they were surrounded by Gays who could stop it.
Gay neighborhoods were places where it was a Gay place and for us and largely run by us.
Gay housing would create Gay neighborhoods which would be preserved and the Gay neighborhood level of concentration could be maintained. Gay neighborhoods built from the ground up as Gay housing, could be designed to further concentrate Gays in ways that provide social support.
By having Gay neighborhoods not be destination sites for straights, that would reduce a lot of the pressure to drive up rents and the cost of housing. However, there are other reasons that a specific Gay housing would be more affordable.
The following are some briefly stated ideas of what housing designed for Gays could be as a starting point for discussion. They will be discussed more in depth in later sections.
The design of a standard home has what is called the “primary bedroom,” formerly known as the “master bedroom” for the parents, and then two or more smaller bedrooms for children. These houses, such as the ranch style home, are design for heterosexual reproduction. Gays without children don’t need these smaller bedrooms. One bathroom can be eliminated, the kitchen can be smaller, the eating area. There doesn’t have to be a family room in addition to the living room. The lot of land doesn’t have to be as big. The heating and cooling would be less. Taxes would be less. There would be considerable savings.
Alternatively, the same house if it has three “primary” bedrooms, could house three couples, who could split the cost of the house, taxes, and utilities three ways. It with two children’s bedrooms not being “primary” bedrooms, the total cost of the housing structure wouldn’t be that much more, and it would be split three ways, making housing much more affordable for Gays.
Note, that this description of the house designed for Gays is referring to three “primary” bedrooms which doesn’t make language sense. “Primary” means first in order of time or development, or first in rank, importance or value. Since we are discussing three adult bedrooms of equal rank, none of them are primary. The talk of primary bedrooms assumes a house designed for heterosexual reproduction with a bedroom for the parents and smaller bedrooms for their children.
Students need affordable housing and some of the ways to provide affordable housing are student fraternities and student dorms. For adults there used to be boarding houses. These types of structures are already would largely meet Gay needs and they could be very affordable. The housing could be structured where the residents own a share and room in the dorm like building, a share and room in the fraternity type building. Cafeteria meals would be an opportunity for economization also.
It would be unlike the situation many Gays face now, where a large fraction of their income goes to rent, instead they would end up owning some small amount of real estate and when the debt is paid off, they would just have the shared cost of the utilities, taxes, and maintenance. They would have equity also and have something to sell later if they sought a different housing arrangement. Instead of facing ever higher rent for the rest of their life, they could pursue a path of ownership of Gay housing.
Gay neighborhoods have increased safety for Gays. There are fewer homophobic straight people about. Gay neighborhoods have a defensible concentration of Gays. Gay neighborhoods have had patrols. There have been organizations handing out whistles. The author was in a program where we received training so we could own chemical mace in the State of California. One of the major reasons a Gay neighborhood can be safer is that being a concentration of voters, they can demand their elected officials work to have resources like the police protect the neighborhood. With their electoral power they can also work to stop police harassment of Gays, though this is largely an issue of the past.
The structure of Gay housing could provide more security. With six adults living in the house with three adult bedrooms, it would be likely an adult is home at all times and burglary would be lessened. With six people in the house, a small group of homophobic would be gay-bashers would likely end up running for their own safety, especially if the neighborhood is made up of Gay housing.
A student dorm type housing would have many people to stop any homophobic assault and even if there was a mob, it would have a couple very defensible points. Some of the other types of construction that will be proposed, could be very defensible.
There are real opportunities to provide for the housing, economic security, and safety of Gays with housing designed for Gays which would provide a real material benefit for the great majority of Gays.
We grow up in housing design for straights, we living in housing designed for straights, and we only see housing designed for straights presented as ordinary housing. As a consequence we don’t recognize it as straight housing and we don’t even think that there exist Gay housing. We also assume that everything we see currently in housing is the way things are, must be, in the design of useful housing.
To conceive and design Gay housing we need to question absolutely everything, no matter how obvious it might seem that what we see is the way housing should be or must be or is the optimal solution. Systematically we need to think about every element that makes up housing. We have to press our questioning to the point of absurdity and beyond to be able to free our minds from presumptions which assume presently existing housing is the only way that housing can exist.
When the author started brainstorming and taking notes, at about 30 or so notes, the author thought that the list was about complete, then when away from the computer, something would come to mind. The list ended up being 63 items. It is almost a certainty that there are ideas about Gay housing which were omitted, but will seem obvious when we think of them.
When the author first started thinking about Gay housing, affordability
of housing for Gays was the primary concern. There were ways of designing housing that would reduce the price of entry level housing ownership to just a fraction of what it might be for entry level housing not designed for Gays. As the brainstorming progressed, the concentrating of Gays began to be seen as a benefit, and potentially an important additional benefit. It wasn’t until the author started writing the Introduction, and thought about why we lament the loss of the Gay neighborhoods that the author realize that concentrating Gays was a critically important aspect of Gay housing.
The examples given in the Introduction are modification or adaptations of existing housing types. It might be that Gay housing needs to be conceptualized without any existing form of housing in mind, but conceptualized by deriving the housing design from the needs of Gays. The Gay person needs to sleep, kept warm or cool, not rained on, prepare food, have place to keep food, keep property secure and wind out, etc.
Heteronormativity isn’t always obvious, and in housing it might prove to be present in ways we have difficulty perceiving.
The student dorm and the fraternity house provide examples of inexpensive single sex housing for men. In the case of an American student dorm there is a room for one or two students, and shared bathroom facilities for all the students on the floor. Usually there is a common room to watch television. The men’s dorm bathroom has both urinals and toilets reducing the need for toilets. Eating is in a cafeteria where meal cost can be kept low. In East Asia a student dorm can have two bunk beds and house four students. In Gay dorm type housing the bunkbeds could have under the beds a single shelf of drawers for belongings.
Though this might be considered only acceptable for students and not independent adults, the alternative is years of rent and not achieving any equity in any type of housing. This minimal housing arrangement is a path for Gays to own their housing.
At this time, 2024, the average apartment in Dallas, Texas, hardly the most expensive living area in the United States is $1200 a month, or $14,400 a year. In five years that will be $72,000 rent and the renter will have zero accumulated housing equity.
A student type dorm housing for Gays could allow much lower monthly payments with the benefit of owning their room and share of the operation in maybe five or ten years of payments at most. They would have equity. A place which only had maintenance, insurance, utilities, and taxes as the primary costs. Being only a room with shared facilities these would be minimal costs. A Gay person could decide to either continue living in the dorm type housing or sell their share and move on to another type of Gay housing.
A further reduced cost of living would be a barracks arrangement. Though it would lack a lot in many respects, it would be affordable, and as limited as it was, it would allow a Gay person to own a bed in a barracks and share in its facilities with a considerable reduction in monthly costs. Even with a minimal income the renter could accumulate equity in his arrangement and additionally save money.
The goal of this collected Gay housing is to allow even those working in low-income occupations, could afford some type of housing arrangement so they would not be drained of their earnings by paying rent and would have some modest equity in some type of housing. No working Gay person would be abandoned to paying rent for the rest of their life.
Acquiring equity in one type of collected Gay housing, they would have an option of selling the one type of Gay housing and move on to another type of Gay housing.
What young men do now, as group of men, get a landlord who is willing
to rent an apartment to five men, a one or two-bedroom apartment and they then split its use. The sofa can be an allocated bed at night. The apartment was designed for a couple, and so it is a crowded arrangement, not cost efficient as a dorm, and at the end of five years the young men have no equity, but they will have had rent increases as the years pass by.
For the dorm arrangement it would be adult men only so that the bathroom and shower facilities could be shared with maximum utilization resulting in less need for facilities. It would mean only a single set of facilities.
As an all-male living arrangement, the rooms and hallways would be clothing optional at night from 10 pm to 8 am for convenience of using the bathroom facilities at night. Visitors would be allowed during the day. For women visitors there would be a separate restroom.
These collected living arrangements could be a permanent arrangement for a Gay person, or the beginning point for moving on to other Gay arrangements. Whether the person stays with the initial stage of dorm like housing or moves on to other forms of Gay housing, it is a path of Gays being owners of housing from the very beginning and not renters struggling to save for some beginning housing or those sharing a crowded apartment with no hope of ever owning housing and being financially stressed.
As a collected living arrangement there would have to be some type of governance with rules of behavior and there would be obligations on the individual residents. This would involve overnight visitors and the use of shared facilities. There would have to be a governing body and the rules drawn up so they could respond to objectionable behavior, but not be excessive in their restrictions either. Though this type of governance might now allow the degree of independence as an apartment, the person isn’t paying ever increasing rent with no accumulation of equity either.
When the unit or share is paid off, it could be sold and the Gay person would have those proceeds for some other housing arrangement, and also savings since his earnings weren’t going all to rent.
This type of shared housing could offer opportunities to economize in other ways than cafeteria meals. There could be group purchasing of goods and services.
Though these types of potential housing have been discussed as a means to have low coast housing and reducing the cost of living, they could offer other opportunities also.
My aunt lived in a retirement apartment community with areas for individual gardens and facilities for activities. These barracks or dorm setups could reduce cost in one area to provide for other facilities that could be shared. There might be a gymnasium, swimming pool, sauna, tennis courts, activity rooms, craft rooms, and shared gardening space. A Gay couple would be giving up the partially used room of the straight house for the space they need to sleep in and extensive facilities for activities in the Gay housing. It could be conceptualized in the reverse order. Twenty houses having each a gym, sauna, tennis court, sauna, gardening space, swimming pool would have twenty spaces of each perhaps used 10% of the weekly hours. A person would have to have a substantial income to afford such a place. A Gay group arrangement would just need one or two of each with a high utilization. Instead of 20 tiny gyms, 20 tennis courts, 20 saunas, 20 swimming pools, it could be a modest gym, one or two tennis courts, two saunas, and one big swimming pool being shared, at a considerable reduction in cost.
When Gays aren’t trying to adapt straight housing to Gay needs, a lot of opportunities open up for efficient use of resources. So the adoption of barracks or dorms might not be to reduce costs, but obtain a type of housing that provides additional facilities than might be gotten for a nuclear (straight) family house.
Besides the financial opportunities involved with these types of housing there are powerful social benefits. As discussed before, Gays being 3% of the male population, are challenged to meet other Gays. It is one of the benefits of a Gay neighborhood that Gays are concentrated and the social environment changed such that Gays can meet each other and meet each other without fear of consequences of accidentally approaching a straight man. In urban settings where there is foot traffic on the sidewalks, Gays meet Gay friends while walking.
The complaints by many Gays about the difficulties of meeting other Gays in night clubs, bars have been going on for generations, and the hookup apps have their own discontented users.
In group Gay housing, Gays are concentrated and would see each other every day. An individual Gay person would not only be familiar with other residents in this group housing, but there would be a tendency for a resident to introduce other residents to their friends. It would be an immediate expansion of the resident’s social networks. Further, if there were other group Gay housing arrangements nearby, they could visit each other. The group Gay housing could have a social director. A dorm type facility might have multiple floors allowing an extensive social network. A Gay neighborhood of group Gay housing would provide a Gay support network and a Gay world.
Governing the complex would necessitate Gays being brought together and would lead to socializing.
Gay housing would also offer security. Unlike an apartment or house, where the issue of homophobia is present once you walk out the door, a building of group Gay housing would be a safe space and with just a few entrances, a very defensible space. A group of Gays in that housing could also undertake efforts to make the neighborhood safer.
A neighborhood with group Gay housing would be nearly impervious to being eliminated by the market forces which are eliminating the present
Gay communities.
A neighborhood built with barracks and dorm type housing, just wouldn’t be a housing stock that a nuclear family could physically use. The buildings would have to be torn down, or subject to such extensive reconstructions that it would be perhaps cheaper just to tear down.
Gay art should be built into the housing arrangements. Like bas-reliefs and sculptures with Gay themes. They should be part of a deed restriction so they can’t be removed.
There would be other barriers to this real estate being acquired by the general public.
The financial pressures pushing Gays out would be very much minimized. Since the housing would end up being owned by the Gay residents, and they wouldn’t be renters, they wouldn’t be priced out of the neighborhood by high rents if the neighborhood became fashionable. Since it would be affordable housing arrangement, there would be no financial incentive to move, even if there were increases in some costs, like higher taxes on the real estate. In fact, the Gay neighborhood might be an oasis of affordable housing in a city of increasing housing costs. Being that the property would be only useful to Gays, the real estate values might not go up. It would also be affordable for Gays to move into the community, even if real estate in the rest of the city was rising. The group Gay living arrangements would be isolated somewhat from pressures that might drive others out of the city.
Concentrated, Gays would have political power to make sure that city governance, like zoning, and taxes weren’t adverse to their welfare.
Most powerfully, would be that the group Gay housing wouldn’t be part of the general market where real estate is a commodity. Since it would be ownership of shares or rights in group Gay housing, the property wouldn’t pass out of the Gay community by sale to the public when an individual Gay person passed away or moved out. The share or rights would be sold to another Gay individual.
Even if the neighborhood real estate had a major increase in value to the point that moving would be necessitated, the residents would receive the value of the real estate and not some landlord, and the group
arrangement would have the means to construct a new place. Or the residents would have the proceeds to purchase a share or rights in a new group Gay housing arrangement.
Group Gay housing would make Gay neighborhoods extremely resistant to market forces that might destroy them.
Non-group housing interspersed in this type of neighborhood might be more resistant to losing Gay residents. Being located within an area of group Gay housing, they might be highly desired by Gay residents to purchase competitively and less desirable for straights, since they would be somewhat isolated.
Some Gays are going to want individual ownership of their housing as separate units that can be sold. The challenge will be how can you create a Gay neighborhood that won’t be erased by the same forces that have erased previously existing Gay neighborhoods.
Multiple things will need to be done so it is a Gay neighborhood and continues as such.
1. The neighborhood needs to be a home owners association so that it controlled to be a Gay neighborhood and support items #2, #3, and #4 in this list.
2. The individual housing needs to be designed for Gays and not heterosexual reproductive units.
3. The home owners association needs to be also a Gay social services organization with monthly charges for services directed towards Gays.
4. The home owners association needs to be a social club organization.
5. The character of the space in the housing development must intensely have a Gay identity.
6. There needs to be a plan to have the community persist into the future.
Keeping it a Gay neighborhood will be challenging. Many straight people, either as individuals or couples wouldn’t mind, and might prefer to live in a neighborhood where it is mostly Gay. The location of the housing and the neighborhood being pleasant might make it desirable to many straights, or enough straights that the neighborhood ceased to be a Gay neighborhood.
Unit ownership needs to be limited. Maximum two units. If someone for some reason an individual has more than two units, the additional units must be disposed of in at least one a year. No one individual will be allowed more than the votes for two units regardless how many they own. The home owners association needs to do what it can to have no one owning two units. Perhaps advertising, maintaining lists of prospective buyers, assisting with financing if possible.
The unit needs to be owned by a primary resident or residents. That is, it is their legal residence. The individual owning the unit needs to be identifiable, otherwise no vote will be allocated to that unit. A lawyer representing an owner or owners can only file two votes for owners maximum.
There can’t be absentee ownership. If someone buys up units, they might get enough votes to dissolve the home owners association. The dissolution of the home owners association will require two-thirds vote of all the owners.
The home owner association will have as part of their charter, the right to pay delinquent taxes on a unit, and prevent it being auctioned off by the city to the general public. Unit owners will be advised how to write their wills so that some issue doesn’t come up with the property.
The home owners association incorporation needs to consider all possible ways an investor might take to work around rules to design rules to prevent the home owners association from being dissolved if there becomes the opportunity to make a large profit with the dissolution of the home owners property.
For example distressed unit owners not being able to make payments should be offered some assistance, like the postponement of payments, so they aren’t forced to sell to some predatory investor. Some arrangement should be made that the home owners association can make an offer to purchase the unit up for sale at a bid above what might have been offered. The home owner association might keep a list of people potentially interested and contact them when a unit is for sale.
Housing and neighborhood design.
The housing units need to be built for Gays. No children’s bedroom. The space in the housing needs to be designed for Gays, though specifically what that might be the author doesn’t know. A close examination on housing space is used by Gays might prove useful to tailor the housing design more precisely towards Gay needs. Again, nothing should be taken for granted in designing the housing. Perhaps having rooms with different aspect rations, that the widths and lengths, might more accommodate Gays than straights. The sizing and shape of the room needs to be considered. There might be differences which make the housing more desirable for Gays than straights. Or the rooms might be purposely strange, so the straight public would find the houses weird, and choose other housing, but Gays desiring a Gay neighborhood would accommodate themselves to the strange rooms. The strange rooms would need to be functional or at least only slightly disadvantageous. It would be a distinctive Gay housing. Perhaps it would then need distinctive furniture. It could contribute to the housing being undesirable to straights.
How would you arrange these two rooms?
The neighborhood needs to be laid out to support social interaction and a feeling of community among the Gay residents. The housing will be dense, little or no space between housing units and facing inward to a street. If gardening space is desired, it will be facing inward to the street also. It will occupy a complete block or more. This will encourage social interactions between the neighbors and thus provide a sense of community. If the housing faces a commons area in the center, that could be a location for community activities. Having allocated garden space in a commons would be good also, in that it would provide fresh produce, and additionally bring people together.
. Having the neighborhood being bounded by the walls of the units would help with security. There would only be main entrances available to enter the neighborhood. In cases of civil disorder the main entrances could be defended more easily than trying to have a physical barrier
added around the entire neighborhood.
The top of each unit would be a patio garden type space for barbecue and socializing. Also, given the close packing of the housing, neighbors could talk to each other.
One of the chief challenges Gays face, is that being only 3% of the population, and in a society that can be hostile, meeting Gays for social or romantic purposes is challenging. The physical design of the housing, the neighborhood needs to be done to promote social interaction and a feeling of community as much as possible.
The Gay neighborhood development needs a club room and space for Gay community activities. The neighborhood club needs a social director, even if only part time with the support of neighborhood volunteers, to develop a program of activities and events to serve the Gay community needs and build a Gay community. The activities should be specific to the needs and interests of the Gay community. What those activities might be shouldn’t be limited by what is typically done for community centers. It might be events where vaccinations are provided of particular need for the Gay community. They can also be open to the general Gay community. They can be for economic support, such as a yard sale for the community, postings of job openings, presentations on what to do if discriminated against, education on searching for jobs, composing resumes, navigating unemployment, investing for retirement. There might be group purchases of items.
The goals of the neighborhood club shouldn’t just be an accidental collection of activities, but as its goal the social welfare of the members of the Gay neighborhood, including the support of their humanity as Gay people. There can be viewing parties of Gay films or series, there can be lectures on topics of specific interest to Gays, Gay artists can have showings, Gay health activities, Gay sex education, life drawing classes, cooking classes, there might be a Gay reading room or least a place to exchange Gay materials. There can be social functions open to the general Gay community. Merchants with goods directed towards Gays could have showings of goods and services.
A crafts room would be good where people could do crafts, perhaps
a makers space would be good. It would help build community and be an added benefit.
All the events and activities could be advertised to the general Gay community providing opportunities for the residents to meet people and to provide a service to the Gay community.
One social service which would prove to be useful to preserve the neighborhood’s Gay identity would be a clothing optional pool. There might be contracted van transport service on some schedule between the neighborhood and the Gayborhood shopping and night club district. There should be participation in local Gay pride events.
This should be financed by a part of the home owners association fees. This would discourage straight people from purchasing a home, since they would be paying fees for services of no use to them. The purpose of the neighborhood and what services it would likely provide, needs to be upfront so no purchaser of the house would be surprised or lawsuit filed to destroy the home owners association.
Gay identifying the Gay neighborhood.
As much as possible, as intensely as possible, the Gay neighborhood space must incorporate a Gay identity. Fly the Gay flag. Make sure there are Gay cross walks if there are any cross walks. In the common areas have Gay art and sculptures. Give the street a Gay name such as Harvey Milk Street or Constantine Cavafy Court.
The entrances need to have some type of indicators, art, to signify that it is an entrance to a Gay space.
The Gay neighborhood should have its own social media as well as a website. The expenses of maintaining this identity will come out of the
home owners associations dues.
For hiking routes or just walking routes the neighborhood should have the pissoir.
Demographically sustaining the Gay neighborhood over time.
It would be good to get a range of ages of initial purchasers of the homes. If they are all of the same age cohort there is a potential that they become identified with that age cohort so as time goes on it gets harder to interest younger Gays to move into the neighborhood as it is identified with a certain age cohort. With a mix, there will be houses coming on the market when older Gays pass away to sell to younger Gays and it will be easier to maintain a mixed age community.
The neighborhood needs to be marketed continuously to younger Gays with the neighborhood being willing to do what adaptations are necessary to keep an interest in it. The goal is to have a neighborhood which will in the future will demographically have a mix of ages.
Another risk is that over time, the rest of the Gay community not resident in that neighborhood migrates to some location in the urban environment such that the Gay neighborhood is inconveniently away from the Gay community. However, these shifts in the location of the Gay community are primarily due to their not being built Gay communities that will be stable against shifting market forces.
However, two measures would assist in avoiding the Gay neighborhood being isolated from the rest of the Gay community. Have an overall area plan to have other Gay housing projects built near the Gay neighborhood. Subsidize the construction of Gay facilities in the area. Restaurants, bars, bath houses, might be considered.
Another measure would be to have regular transportation to other Gay community locations to lessen the impact of being distant from a Gay community urban area. Have the cost of the transportation paid by the home owners association.
All of the above actions should make a Gay neighborhood where the members are supported and a neighborhood where market forces won’t eliminate it. There very well might be other actions which would strengthen the Gay neighborhood, but this chapter hasn’t identified. Since we tend to think of housing in terms of the existing forms of housing created for heterosexuals, there is likely important ideas that
have been over looked. This chapter is the starting point for thinking about creating Gay neighborhoods.
Having such a community would be a great benefit to its Gay residents which could look forward to being located in a Gay community over time.
Much of this could be applied to row houses and other group living arrangements also.
Again, given that we think of houses in terms of the existing houses, there are likely opportunities in designing houses for Gays that this chapter over looks. However, instead of waiting until every possibility might be conceptualized, this chapter is written so that the immediate benefits are discussed and to stimulate creative thinking.
One obvious thing about designing Gay housing is to not incorporate features that are obviously for the cycles of heterosexual reproduction.
No need for a nursery room for example. There only needs to be the primary bedroom and there doesn’t need to be children’s bed rooms.
There doesn’t need to be both a family room and living room, that is a formal room and a room that children might spend time in. There could be just a living room.
There wouldn’t need to be both a formal dining room and a breakfast room or other informal eating space.
Without children and noise there isn’t a need for a study room, the living room can work.
With fewer rooms, hallways can be shorter or not needed at all, further saving space. The laundry room can be smaller since it is just handling two people.
The yard can be reduced to just areas for gardens, patio, and adult activities. The smaller yard, combined with the reduced number of rooms, means a much smaller lot is needed.
With just these changes, the elimination of three rooms at least, a much smaller lot, you have greatly reduced the cost of housing for a Gay couple significantly.
With fewer rooms in the Gay detached house the cost of making the house 3 or 4 story is cheaper. The expense for the extra rooms of the heterosexual house could be redirected into having a house be multistory with a deck on top and a bedroom and living room being on the 3rd and 4th floor. The house could have an elevator and dumb waiters. Maybe the house is elevated above the ground and the driveway is on the floor level beneath the house.
The multi-story house needs to have porches around each level so the owner can paint the house without scaffolding.
. With the reduction of cost in one area you could add in other features. You could have a basement swimming pool. The bedroom might be quite elaborate. Maybe the hot tub is on the top of the house on the patio deck.
It isn’t anyone type of house design that makes it Gay, it is a design of a house where a large fraction of the expense doesn’t have to be used for the raising of children. You might have an astronomical observatory, a hot house 4 stories up, or you might just have a much less expensive house. It is Gay because you aren’t using up a large fraction of the housing for child rearing.
Being a single sex house and also with no children, the requirements for privacy and isolation from noise and containment of noise is less. So the arrangements of the rooms could be done without considering either noise or privacy.
Guest bedrooms could be a space that is separated from a room with sliding partition. This avoids the cost of a guest room which is mostly a room that isn’t used. It also avoids having a room that can be converted
into a children’s bedroom. Similarly office rooms might be created with a sliding partition. Perhaps rooms normally not combined might be combined. The laundry room could also have the office or have a dropdown bed for guests.
Making the office or guest rooms with an unusual shape could prevent it from being converted into a children’s bedroom. The guest room could be L-shape with the bed occupying one leg of the L. Making the guest room and office as small as possible makes the space less desirable for conversion into a bedroom.
The guest room could be designed also with no closets and have a rack for clothes in the room. Office rooms shouldn’t have a closet either.
The amount of hallway space needed even for a one-story house would be less. You aren’t having to have multiple people needing a pathway to different rooms. Or since you have fewer rooms less hallway is needed to connect rooms. Or maybe all rooms could connect to a commonly used space like the dining room.
Urinals should be in the bathrooms. They conserve water and don’t take much space.
Rooms on floors without a bathroom, could have a urinal with a small sink in a small closet space. Room on the same floor could have a urinal for convenience. Most times when a person is going to the toilet it is to urinate and not defecate.
The yard of the house could have a pissoir like they have in France. It you are having a garden party and drinking beer, people don’t have to be walking in your house to use your bathroom. It would be something you could hose down with a water hose.
Again, there are likely other ways Gay housing design could be distinctly Gay, but given how pre-existing straight housing has conditioned my thinking it is a struggle to think of additional ideas past the initial set of ideas. There are very likely more design ideas. In the interest of getting this book completed and published so others can start thinking of new ideas for Gay housing, this chapter stops here in the discussion of ideas.
The house should be in a home owners association which is oriented to support a community of Gay home owners. The house should be in a neighborhood designed for Gays as discussed in the earlier chapter.
We might want to consider features that are not for adapting housing for Gay needs, but merely to make Gay housing odd or different so as to be undesirable to the general public. They shouldn’t be undesirable changes or be at most slightly undesirable differences. By being different it will be rejected by many.
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the house is an arch over a patio. Or it is single floor 30 feet up in the air. Or some fantastical shape.
For Gays it would be understood and accepted as a compromise to preserve the neighborhood as a Gay neighborhood.
In some ways the house could require customized adaptations to live in it. For example, if a room was circular, the furniture would have to be designed to fit against the wall and custom made. It would be sold with the house.
Deed restrictions could require the wall with the bas relief art of male nudes be kept, or a two-meter stone phallus in the garden. There would be financial consequences in regards to their destruction. It could be a mosaic in the patio that is Gay art, though it might be covered with some outdoor rug.
Housing designed for Gays could provide enormous social and economic benefits for Gays. A study group should be formed to further develop ideas in this essay and a task force should be organized to build a Gay housing project.
Housing designed for Gays could provide enormous social and economic benefits for Gays. A study group should be formed to further develop ideas in this essay and a task force should be organized to build a Gay housing project.
The author has been a Gay activist starting in the 1970s and has worked on different projects. His writings were important to defeating the neoConfederate movement and to bring down the Confederate monuments. That task being done, he now is working on the issues of importance to the Gay community and is working on what is important to support the Gay community and have it thrive.
The author has two Substack newsletters Gay Agenda (https://edwardhsebesta.substack.com/) and Dallas Gay Liberation (https://dallasgayliberation.substack.com/).
His other Gay liberation book is, “Disable, Demolish, Defeat Homophobic Christianity,” suggesting methods by which the Gay community could be defended from homophobic Christian attacks. It is also available on Amazon.
Ed Sebesta is an independent researcher awarded the Spirit of Freedom Medal by the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and an activist cultural geographer developing methods to fight for landscape reparations.
He is co-editor of “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction,” Univ. of Texas Press, 2008; “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,” Univ. Press of Miss. 2010; and is the author of chapter about the Civil
War and Reconstruction in the notorious Texas teaching standards in “Politics and the History Curriculum: The Struggle over Standards in Texas and the Nation,” published by Palgrave Macmillan.
He is the co-author of, “Dallas’ Confederate memorials scream ‘white supremacy’,” Dallas Morning News, 8/4/2017, launching a campaign which brought them down.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/04/da llas-confederate-memorials-scream-white-supremacy/
He has been working on the issue of landscape reparations and deracializing the landscape and was part of the successful campaign to rename part of Lamar St. to Botham Jean Blvd. as reported in the Dallas Observer.
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-botham-jeanboulevard-lamar-street-11922314
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/should-a-dallas-street-benamed-after-santos-rodriguez-12090562
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/renaming-belo-gardenwont-rid-dallas-of-racist-symbolism-12038049
Current academic projects He, with Euan Hague of DePaul Univ. have written a book chapter for “Time Journeys,” Springer, 2024, on the Dallas 1936 Texas Centennial. Additionally he is working on a biography of Dallas congress person Hatton W. Sumners who was most responsible for anti-lynching legislation not being passed in the 20th century.
His activism for the LGBT goes back to the 1970s when he was a leader in an activist group which integrated the Gay bars in San Francisco which were discriminating against Asians. “A look back at S.F.’s ’80s-era gay Asian activism,” Nichi Bei Weekly, June 20, 2019, No. 340, page 6. With the Confederate monuments down, he is back fighting.
The Kindle format doesn’t allow the boxed items that were in the paperback. I am putting them here. They were put in the print version so blank space wouldn’t be wasted and could be used to share little nuggets of Gay info.
They are here unboxed.
Finding Gay books and the used book market.
Finding Gay books with Gay material for a Gay person isn’t as straight forward as it might be expected to be.
A lot of books are “Queer” this or LGBTQ that, and much of it will be people who are queer or pansexual or some identity which perhaps you will need a Venn diagram to comprehend. If there is a Gay item in the book, it might well be a transman who identifies as Gay. Of course if you want to read queer materials it certainly is your right. However, if you actually want a Gay book, this section is to tell you how to find them.
When searching for book use the term “homosexual” or “homosexuality” specifically. The results are mostly books related to homosexuality. “Gay” often isn’t about Gay stuff. For example, “This Book is Gay,” by Juno Dawson is about seven identities besides Gay. In the 1970s and 80s, Gay actually means Gay.
Another thing is to use the used book sources that are online. I find Ebay and Amazon largely sufficient, but when it is really difficult, I use www.Bookfinder.com to basically search the used book universe.
In older books Gay actually means Gay.
You want the Ebay seller or used book dealer on Amazon to have 95% or better rating. For selling used book, a high rating isn’t that hard and less than 95% has in my experience has been associated with regret.
Some Gay publishers in the past have been Gay Sunshine in its early
years and Gay Men’s Press (GMP).
Gay books from the 1979s and 1980s in no particular order.
1. “Homosexual Verse,” Ed. Stephen Coote, Penguin Books, 1983.
2. “The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology,” Ed. Ian Young, Crossing Press, 1973.
3. “The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), John Lauritsen & David Thorstad, Times Change Press, 1974.
4. “On Being Different: What It Means To Be A Homosexual,” Merle Miller, Random House, 1971.
5. “Poems of a Penisist,” Mutsuo Takahashi, Tran. Hiroaki Sato, Univ. of Minnesota Press, modern edition, orig. 1975.
6. “Now the Volcano: An Anthology of Latin American Literature,” Ed. Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press, 1979.
7. “Tearoom Trade: impersonal sex in public places,” Laud Humphreys, Aldine Publishing Co. 1970.
8. “Theories of Homosexuality,” Martin Dannecker, Gay Men’s Press, 1981.
9. “A Gay Diary, 1936-1946,” Donald Vining, Pepys Press, 1979.
10. “Army of Lovers,” Rosa Von Praunheim, Gay Men’s Press, 1980.
11. “Chapters From An Autobiography,” Samuel M. Steward, Grey Fox, 1981.
12. “The Complete Poems of Cavafy,” Expanded Edition, Trans. Rae Dalven, Harvest/HBJ, 1976.
13. “Gayslayer!: The Story of How Dan White Killed Harvey Milk
and George Moscone & Got Away With Murder,” Warren Hinkle, Silver Dollar Book Publishing, 1985.
14. “The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies,” Vito Russo, Harper Colophon Books, 1981.
15. “Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology,” Ed. Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press, 1975.
16. “The Christopher Street Reader,” Ed. Michael Denneny, Charles Ortleb, Thomas Steele, Coward-McCann, 1983.
17. “Flaunting It!: A decade of gay journalism from The Body Politic,” Ed. Ed Jackson, Stan Persky, Pink Triangle Press, 1982.
18. “Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress,” Edmund Keeley, Harvard Univ., 1976.
19. “Carnivorous Saint,” Harold Norse, Gay Sunshine Press, 1976.
20. “Greek Homosexuality,” K.J. Dover, Harvard Univ., 1978.
21. “Orgasms of Light,” Ed. Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press, 1977. Poetry. Lit.
22. “Gay Sunshine Interviews,” Vol. 1, Ed. Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press.
23. “Gays Under the Cuban Revolution,” Allen Young, Grey Fox Press, 1981.
24. “My Deep Dark Pain is Love: A Collection of Latin American Gay Fiction,” Ed. Winston Weyland, Trans. E.A. Lacey, Gay Sunshine Press, 1983.
25. “Aphrodisiac: Fiction from Christopher Street,” Perigee, 1980.
26. “Joy of Gay Sex,” Charles Silverstein & Edmund White, Crown Books, 1977.
27. “Calamus: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature: An International Anthology,” Ed. David Galloway & Christian Sabisch, Quill, 1982.
28. “The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life & Times of Harvey Milk,” Randy Shilts, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
29. “Crystal Boys” A novel by Hsien-yung, Gay Sunshine Books, Trans. Howard Goldblatt. English Ed. 1990.
30. “Confessions of a Mask,” Yukio Mishima, New Directions, Trans. Meredith Weatherby, 1958.
31. “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology,” Ed. Joseph Beam, Alyson Publications, 1986.
32. “Comrade Loves of the Samurai,” Saikaku Ihara, Trans. E. Powys Mathers, Tuttle, 1972.
33. “Byron and Greek Love,” Louis Crompton, Univ. of California, 1985.
34. “Homosexuality in Greek Myth,” Bernard Sergent, Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Beacon Press, 1984.
Books of the Gay Revolution.
These are the books at the beginning with the revolutionary spirit of Gay revolution.
“The Gay Militants,” by Donn Teal, Stein & Day, 1971. This book details the events of the beginning of the modern Gay movement from the time of the Stonewall Riots to the organizing and actions of the new movement. The book takes you to the time of the Gay revolution. It is unfortunately not in print, but used copies are available. Also, you can download it from the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/gaymilitants00tealrich/mode/2up
Karla Jay and Allen Young did two Gay liberation books which capture the spirit of the times.
“Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation,” Douglass Books, 1972. The 1992 reprint has a dull design. Used copies are available on Ebay.
“After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian Women,” Links, 1975.
The video, “Kiss of the Rabbit God,” produced by Andrew Huang is about an 18th century Qing dynasty God that visits a Chinese Restaurant worker at night and helps the worker accept his homosexuality. It is on YouTube. In 5 years it has had 5.8 million views. In New Taipei City, Taiwan there is a temple to the Rabbit God run by LGBT called Weimingtang. There is a Facebook group with information on the Rabbit God, called Tu Shen – Journey to the West, https://www.facebook.com/groups/596788864540581.
Gay art builds Gay identity.
A list of art books of artists you might not be aware of. I exclude the very well know Gary artists and focus on the ones you might not have heard of but are worth known.
1. Sadao Hasegawa. Gay Men’s Press published a large format book. There is also “Paradise Visions,” which is a very lavishly published edition. His art is extraordinary.
2. F. Holland Day, “Slave to Beauty,” Godine Publishers.
3. Jean Cocteau, “Drawings,” Dover Paperback.
4. Steven Arnold, “Epiphanies,” Twelvetrees Press.
5. Mario Dubsky, Gay Men’s Press.
6. Charles Demuth, Abrams, Whitney Museum.
7. David Hutter, “Nudes and Flowers,” Gay Men’s Press.
8. George Dureau, “New Orleans,” Gay Men’s Press.
9. Douglas Simonson, “Hawaii,” Gay Men’s Press.
10. Philip Core, “Philip Core,” Gay Men’s Press.
11. Cornelius McCarthy, “Interiors,” Gay Men’s Press.
Survey books published by Gay Men’s Press, are “Men in Erotic Art,” and “Out in Art.”
A good book to see a variety of photographers of the male form, would be, “The Hidden Image: Photographs of the Male Nude in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Peter Weiermair, The MIT Press, 1988.
“The Male Nude: a modern view,” Ed. Francois de Louville and Edward Lucie-Smith, Rizzoli Pub., has over two dozen artists who depict the male nude.
Robert Mapplethorpe, George Platt Lynes, and David Hockney are available in numerous editions.
Saving the existing body of Gay books.
Since the publication of new Gay books has largely ceased, it is important to preserve the existing stock of Gay books.
1. If you do purchase a new Gay book, get hardcover. They physically last longer. Also, later when deaccessioning, archives and institutes often won’t accept softcover.
2. Start work on deaccessioning books when you reach 60. It takes time to decide which books can go and where and when they can go. It takes time to find which archive or institution wants your materials and of the materials you have, which ones fit their collection. It takes time to pack and mail materials and sign donation paperwork. Do you have someone you trust who won’t dump the books into the trash?
3. Be careful dealing with universities when they say they want your books. Ask where are the books going to go? Are they going into a special collection, or are they just going to look at which of the books you mailed them that fill their gaps in their general holdings and then the rest go to branch universities libraries and then are sold to the public. Will they be part of a historical collection, or sold off as old books when they get new books?
4. If some of your books are damaged find a book repair person in your city. There will be one or two of them. It is expensive, so don’t let damaged books accumulate, and schedule one or two a year for repair. Damaged unrepaired books are hard to place. Don’t try to repair them yourself unless you are an expert.
5. Assess your collection regularly for books you no longer need to possess and act to deaccession them instead of them accumulating and becoming a large task later.
6. If it comes down to a choice of selling a book or giving it away, selling it is better. Someone has paid money for it and will value it. If you give it away, they got it for free. They might have accepted it as a favor to you, and maybe even think they will read it at some point, but it just sites. Also, if you give it to someone, it is better perhaps if it is someone much younger. After all, if the person you gave the book to is going to be
working on the problem of deaccessioning in a few years, the problem of books surviving into the future isn’t helped.
7. Facebook groups for academics in a particular field can be good to deaccession books. I gave three 1st editions to three Taiwanese universities that way. Make sure you mention you will cover mailing costs.
8. Make sure you have arrangements to dispose of your books when you die if there is some place they are intended to go.
The conservation of the written Gay past needs to be an objective of a group of individuals to facilitate the preservation of the physical past of the Gay community in the form of their books.
Purchasing the copyright for some of these books and releasing them into the public domain as ebooks might be possible. Given the increasing popularity in reading ebooks as opposed to physical books, in the future there is a risk that Gay writing is trapped in an obsolete form.
Collector guides mentioning a book would help the used book to be known and purchased, but also give the book more perceived value by used book dealers.
A discussion needs to occur as to what might be done in regards to Gay books that are published in the future to support their preservation. Acid free paper would be one item to urge upon publishers. Having an electronic copy in an open format to be released in the future at some time would be good.
Books in Kindle and other proprietary products can’t be transferred to anyone while the person is alive or dead. Gay writing could face oblivion trapped in closed systems.
Preservation of Gay periodicals. Results not guaranteed.
They were often printed without thought to preservation and on paper with high acid content. Preserving them is challenging. Acid which yellows paper can come without the object and more commonly in the paper itself. Store out of light, dry place, and away from heat.
One thing is that you can put them in specially made acid free boxes made to store such items. Amazon has them.
There is bookkeeper spray, which is nanoparticles of MgO in an anhydrous solvent. The nanoparticles of MgO neutralize acid. The archival boxes can be sprayed with it to make them also acid neutralizing. When applied to the periodicals, always do a test spray on a small spot. When you spray the object, the blacks will be slightly lightened. For text this probably isn’t an issue, but for illustrations it might be. You might consider spraying the backside.
Microchamber paper has small particles of zeolite to absorb acids. Putting sheet of this paper on top and below the item provides an additional location for acid to be absorbed and protects them from external sources of acid.
Once yellowing occurs, it isn’t reversible by any known method, so act proactively.
Dealing with family members.
Often Gays have parents and other family members who are problems in one way or another. You need to have a zero tolerance for their little games. If you take a hardline regarding their games, it is surprising how soon the games stop.
First don’t make excuses for them. It doesn’t matter what background they have, or what experiences they have had as justifications for their homophobia. You are not responsible for their stupidity. In particular don’t make the excuse for them that, “it takes time.” The year is 2025
and they should already be informed. Of course it might be they were all right with someone else’s child being Gay, but their real attitudes surface with you being Gay. They get 90 days, which is a generous amount of time, to cut the stuff and nonsense.
These tug of wars over your humanity and their little aggressions are erosive of your sense of self-worth and if you have a sense of selfworth, they are intolerable. You are also wasting a lot of mental activity which could be applied to other things. At some point you are better without them, which should be an early decision on your part.
You don’t want to have your boyfriend subjected to these slights. It is one thing for you to sacrifice your own self-worth, it is another thing to sacrifice the self-worth of someone you love. Plus it shows your boyfriend how much self-worth you have as a Gay person and whether you can get a grip on a situation and deal with it or whether you tend to wiffle-waffle.
So get a grip and deal with them decisively. That includes getting in the car and leaving. It includes telling a family member to shut up.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, www.archive.org, has a library of books, movies, audio, recordings, and also hundreds of billions of webpages archived.
You can also have a webpage saved into the archive to make sure it doesn’t disappear at https://web.archive.org/.
This is the webpage to search the library.
https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php
At this time most of the Gay books of interest are restricted so you can’t do more than view their covers and the first few pages due to an ongoing court case others you can view with online borrowing.
However, if you are trying to discover Gay books in the past to purchase, it can be a valuable resource.
The Internet Archive has an immense amount of material so sometimes you have to give it a minute to download.
Organizing a Gay centric movement.
Have a Gay centered, hence Gay centric movement. That is organize around the specific interests, and only the specific interest of the Gay community. Organize around the real needs and aspirations of the Gay community. Do not subordinate the Gay interests to a political party or social movement. See the rights of Gays and respect for them as being absolute.
1. Physical Security: This would be self-defense training, patrols, promotion of the use of whistles and tear gas canisters, tough prosecution of Gay bashers and a police contingent in Gay pride events.
2. Self-definition: Gays define who Gays are, not ideologues.
3. Legal protection: Abolition of anti-Gay laws, and adoption of laws against discrimination and conversion “therapy.” Legal recognition of relationships, not limited to Gay marriage.
4. Medical needs: Being a generally more sexually active community the Gay community has a need to be protected against STDs. Protection and cures for STDs should be a priority.
5. Housing and Gayborhoods: Housing for Gays and creation of Gayborhoods.
6. Cultural programs: Movies, art, literature, theater, music specifically for the cultural needs of the Gay community.
7. Social support: Active support for Gay community needs.
8. Defense: Active programs to disable anti-Gay organizations ability to harm the Gay community and deter others from attempting to do so. Public denunciation of anti-Gay acts and statements. Also, defense against slanders including those in the LGBTQ+.
9. Coming Out: Gays being out have been the greatest power against homophobia. It is to be strongly encouraged.
Alliances with other groups, including sexual minorities, will be contingent on specific shared interests and never in opposition to Gay interests.
I was watching a show in 2021 and there was Gay bashing in it and I thought, “This is intolerable and it needs to stop now.” The Stonewall Riot was in 1969 and 52 years later we haven’t crushed homophobia and the Gay community’s situation has improved, but we are still subject to abuse. There are still powerful anti-Gay forces out there and they don’t fear what might be the consequences of their anti-Gay campaigns.
I thought that likely that the reason homophobia isn’t crushed or on the way to being crushed is because the current LGBTQXYZ or whatever is full of stuff and nonsense and sentimentality. Upon examining the situation I found that to be true. There isn’t a welldefined ongoing plan to crush homophobia besides what is basically persuading or begging.
We are not supposed to even get angry or think of retribution in response to homophobia with people telling Gays, “Don’t fight hate with hate.” If we are abused, we have a right to be angry. Effective self-defense isn’t hate.
Behind this moral posturing is the belief that tolerating Gays is some pinnacle plus ultra of advanced morality, instead of being a basic
fundamental. Too many Gays have no further expectation than toleration since they have just acquiesced to being Gay themselves.
The relative position of Gays versus our enemies has dramatically. Gays have parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, colleagues, friends and others. They may have some problematic issues with homosexuality, but they don’t want anything bad to happen to the Gay person they know. Though Gays are 3% of the population, the percentage of all the people concerned about Gays is a majority, if not a great majority of the general population.
Non-religious homophobia is not organized and much less significant than religious homophobia which is organized.
We are more popular than the homophobes who have likely already annoyed the public for other reasons.
Anti-Gay religions have realized this and have come up with the New Homophobia. They admonish members to not be hostile and to embed their homophobia in the language of love. They are on the defensive.
Christianity, and in particular, anti-Gay Christianity, is in rapid decline.
The homophobic Christian is vulnerable, but there is no serious program targeting them, but instead Gays are restricted to sentimental persuading.
One obstacle in fighting anti-Gay elements are Gays who oppose criticism of anti-Gay elements in what movements, political parties, organizations, religious groups of which they are a member. These Gays may point out anti-Gay elements in group they are opposed to, but attack Gays who point out anti-Gay elements in their own groups.
Efforts against anti-Gay elements are also constrained by the agendas of movements which might find a possible effective campaign against homophobia contrary to their interests. Gays in those movements avoid supporting these possible efforts if not discouraging them.
These things mentioned are important to understand as obstacles, but
they aren’t the most important reasons why anti-Gay forces aren’t being crushed.
The Gay community has come to accept homophobia as a part of life and hasn’t decided that it is intolerable and aren’t looking and wanting to destroy the opposition unrestrained by sentimental ideologies.