Originally appeared June 27, 1996, in the Windy City Times.
Living in the 1990s, we tend to take the gay community for granted, much as we tend to take ourselves as gay people for granted.
And yet historically and cross-culturally gay communities such as ours do not exist. And most people with gay erotic valences do not seem to have arranged their lives as we do now.
So the questions persist: How come us? How come now? What is it that we have created? And what is the right way to think of our community and ourselves?
It takes a certain trick of mind to separate oneself from living one's life in order to figure out what the influences are that lead us to live as we do: it is something like staring at one of those 3-D posters, trying not to look at the surface but through and beyond the surface, in order to see the impressive 3-D effect.
We ask these questions when we want to see our lives in 3-D.
Enter gay sociologist Stephen O. Murray, who has just published a fascinating book on gays and the gay community called American Gay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). There are not many good books in sociology (trust me!), much less ones that could be called "fascinating," so this one immediately joins that small shelf of "Essential Gay Reading."
According to Murray, our modern understanding of ourselves has four salient features which taken together are new in the world.
1. An awareness of our distinctiveness as a group (and a willingness to assert the legitimacy of our distinctiveness).
2. De-assimilation from the general, mainstream culture and the development of separate institutions to serve the community.
3. The primacy of egalitarian same-sex relationships rather than ones that involve marked age differences (as in ancient Greece) or ones that imitate male/female roles (as in many third world cultures).
4. People engaging more or less exclusively in same-sex relationships rather than in bisexuality (as in most cultures where homosexual behavior is "tolerated" or "institutionalized").
Where did this combination come from and how did it get put together? If it is culturally shaped, what shaped it; if it is in some sense natural, what forces or factors allowed it finally to express itself now for the first time?
First then, how did gay communities come to be?
Murray points first to economic changes: "I would suggest that the long term trend from farming and manufacturing to service occupations provided slots for men and women who were relatively detached or seeking to be autonomous from their families."
In support of his hypothesis, Murray notes that the growth of San Francisco gay culture occurred simultaneously with the rapid growth of the city's downtown office space and the virtual end of manufacturing and handling of ocean freight there.
The greater geographical mobility and "car culture" that followed World War II permitted single men and women, who had previously typically lived with their families until they married, to move away from home to take advantage of those new jobs and to express their sexuality.
In addition, the rapid growth of the welfare state created a sort of social and economic "safety net" that previously only families had been able to provide, allowing would-be gays more autonomy from the monitoring eyes of their families and neighbors.
Murray is skeptical of ideological sources of change. "While ideas matter," he cautions, "they don't matter all that much." Still, he does allow a role for the groundwork for gay liberation provided by the greater openness about sex fostered by the Kinsey reports, the "do your own thing" mood and anti-orthodoxy political climate on 1960s college campuses, the remarkable popularity of "situation ethics," and the rapid loss of credibility of psychoanalysis which had been a main support for the idea that gays were mentally ill.
Once gays began a clustering effect in large cities, and once they were provided with an awareness not only of their own numbers and moral legitimacy but a publicly defensible set of arguments for that legitimacy, the gay community began to "recruit" just by existing - to grow, attracting more like minded people, coalescing and crystallizing out of its surroundings, and beginning the process of (selective) de-assimilation from the mainstream that we see continuing to this day.
Of what, then, does the gay community consist? Rather than using some sort of vague, metaphysical notion, Murray opts for the concrete criterion of "institutional completeness." By that he means a variety of institutions which allow members to obtain their basic services from within the community, ones such as gathering spaces, periodicals, religious groups, health and social services, and the like.
It is relatively easy to show that most large cities now contain an elaborate set of gay-specific institutions and that smaller cities are developing more of them, experiencing "institutional elaboration" even in the 1990s. This is in marked contrast to the situation of almost every other social or ethnic group.
In the beginning, of course, were the gathering spaces, the bars (though preceded by friendship networks and private parties). Murray cautions against regarding this as just "sociology discovering the obvious" and points to the specific social impact of the bars. Elsewhere too, gay bars were the first institution to develop in cultures where gays have only recently begun to challenge the equation of homosexuality with female gender behavior (Latin America, Polynesia). And in cultures where homosexuality is age-divergent (a younger with an older partner) gay bars and gay identity have never developed at all (Arab and Persian societies).
The reasons seems connected to the fact that drinking together seems to represent a kind of solidarity which creates a sense of social equality among the participants, undermining socially constructed roles. Drinking, in other words, is used to join something as an equal, not merely consuming alcohol for a respite from one's anxieties or from a hostile world.
The process of "de-assimilation" is an interesting puzzle in itself. One important factors was the challenge made by gay men to the (repressive) cultural stereotype of gay men as effeminate. In earlier periods many gay men apparently tended to avoid having affairs with fellow homosexuals ("sisters") with whom they may have socialized and instead sought sexual liaisons with putatively heterosexual "trade," to whom they imputed masculinity.
But with the first flush of gay liberation in the 1970s, gay men themselves conspicuously cultivated an aura of masculinity as a concomitant of gay pride. Gay gyms became a new community institution and men began working out in order to try to become the sort of man they knew they were attracted to - assuming that he, in turn, would be attracted to them. Even the "clone" look contained a stylized assertion of masculinity. A straight friend whom I took to some gay bars many years ago commented on how well-built the men were; then added, "Do you realize that every man in this bar has a mustache?"
With the continued development of the gay community, this self-presentation has been somewhat moderated by younger gays now coming out. Perhaps 25 years later the negative stereotypes are less pressing so they do not feel the need to resist them so assertively.
This change from gay "exogamy" (sexual involvement with those outside the community) to "endogamy" (sexual involvement with those within the community) seems to have been a key component of the ability to exist in some degree separately from mainstream culture and largely in the company of other gays. Once gays associated with other gays full-time and experience fewer pressures from the surrounding culture, whatever were to be the natural ways of being gay could develop and flourish.
Many young gays, taught about homosexuality in the bosom of their nuclear family (especially at the lower social levels where gender polarities are strong), are still brought up to believe gay cross-gender stereotypes, so for them joining the gay community at first involves not so much learning how to be homosexual but unlearning the false notions of how to be homosexual ("the homosexual social role") they had absorbed.
So the gay community does have an educational function: it teaches young gays how to be; it also teaches them how they do not have to be; it helps them develop an authentic sense of self; it teaches (often tacitly) "cruising etiquette"; it teaches self-esteem; it teaches safe sexual play; it can foster a kind of rough egalitarianism. In this sense, then, the gay community can be seen as a process as well as an entity.
We tend to think of the gay community as a male phenomenon, probably correctly. There is little reason to think there are as many lesbians as gay men. Using several different sources, Murray concludes that there are probably three or four self-identified gay men for every self-identified lesbian. It is worth noting that this is consistent with many gay men's experience in co-sexual gay organizations as well as with the reports of sexual behavior in the Kinsey volumes.
In his discussion of gay relationships, Murray notes that gay relationships tend toward the egalitarian far more than heterosexual relationships (at least until the recent influence of feminism on straight marriage). But he casts doubt on the frequent claim that gay relationships are "more democratic" or cross social or other boundaries to any significant extent.
There may be a slightly greater tendency to be intrigued by and to trick with people from different classes or ethnicities just to see what they are like, he admits, but there remains a tendency to settle down with people pretty much of one's own kind, ones own class, race, educational level, etc. For the same reason, most gay male couples tend toward the "butch/butch" form rather than the earlier model of "butch/femme."
What data there are suggest that partners stand a better chance of staying together if they have relatively equal success in the world. It may be the failure on this count that tends to undermine lesbian couples, whose relationships, as reported in one mammoth study of couples, were more unstable than gay male or heterosexual relationships.
Gay men and women also differ in their approach to sex outside the relationship. Gay men were relatively casual about sex outside the relationship - provided "it didn't mean anything." By contrast, lesbians tended to view sex outside the relationships as indicating a lack of commitment to the relationship or even "betrayal." The greater stability of gay male relationships may be due in part to this ability to handle outside sex, while lesbians may break up over such behavior. Although Murray does not speculate, the lesbian view of sex outside the relationship may be traced to the way all young women are brought up, a residuum of heterosexual indoctrination.
For what it is worth, he notes a finding that for both gays and lesbians (as well as straight men), the more the couples engaged in oral sex, the happier they said they were in their relationship, although the causal direction is unclear. And perhaps contrary to expectations, in the case of anal sex between gay men, it is not who penetrates whom, but getting what one wants (whichever that is) that is the most important element in satisfaction.
Despite widespread belief to the contrary, Murray says he is doubtful that AIDS has caused there to be more gay couples now than previously, at least not more durable gay couples. Even before AIDS some gay men were already losing enthusiasm for a fast-lane lifestyle, and by the early 1980s members of the first wave of gay liberation had grown older and were ready to slow down somewhat anyway.
Murray has surprising things to say about AIDS and the attempt to use it to attack gay male "promiscuity." There was never any evidence presented that going to bathhouses was a risk-factor for contracting AIDS, and some evidence to the contrary, he notes (it remains unpublished!). Most of the sexual acts at bathhouses were without significant risk.
Nor has "professional" safe-sex education had significant impact: most gay community gay men had already changed their behavior long before that professionalization, and the "professional" AIDS education has turned out to have little impact even now on preventing new cohorts of gay men from becoming infected, particularly those from minorities.
Murray says that there will be something in his book for everyone to disagree with. That may be true for academics, since Murray zestfully sets about showing what is wrong with many of the zany theories about gays and gay lives propounded by academics ("queer" theorists, social constructionists, etc.).
But the end result is remarkably close to the lived intuitions of enculturated gay men in gay enclaves. This is not to say that they will not learn something from the book. On the contrary, they may learn the most, because they will have the fewest mental obstacles to learning it. But they will have their intuitions given shape, improved, extended, given firmer foundations, and they will see unexpected implications of them drawn out.
Reading Murray is like talking with a bright, thoughtful, and extremely well read friend who is happy to pass on to us what he has figured out about how we live and why we live as we do.