Gay/Not Gay

[Ah, jeez; here we go again. I spent what little time I had on the home machine this morning being bowled over by GayProf's astoundingly great take on former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey's squalid saga. More and more, the Prof speaks for me, in words that I either don't take the time or simply lack the ability to express.]

[Anyway, one of the implications of Greeve's grief surrounds that old chestnut: gay identity. I don't think today's the day for my long-threatened rantclosely-reasoned essay on why I think gay identity has a validity beyond circuit music and tight pants. Just let me point to any of my readers who don't read Joe.My.God (HAHAHAHAHA!) the comments thread to this post.]

[There's a commenter there named Giorgio who seems to have the key to the whole debate: we're not "gay" (as opposed to homosexual) just to belong to some faaaaabulous club, y'know. Systems of oppression beget systematic structures of response, structures that are bound to become culturally marked. I've never formally studied cultural anthropology, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that someone somewhere has formulated that as a law. Does that mean you have to participate in every aspect of that culture? Nope. No one's gonna force anyone to put on freedom rings and worship Madonna - really! But it strikes me as slightly disingenuous to pick and choose among those aspects (as every "anti-gay" person I've ever known does), and to benefit from the sociopolitical advances achieved collectively by that culture, but to deny any identification with the culture as a whole.]

[(None of this means that I didn't cringe at McGreevey's word choice when he came out as a "gay American." The ethnic analogy can be taken pretty far, but that grated.)]

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