LGBT Culture - Gay Male Culture

Gay Male Culture

According to Herdt, "homosexuality" was the main term used until the late 1950s and early 1960s. After this point, a new "gay" culture emerged. "This new gay culture increasingly marks a full spectrum of social life: not only same-sex desires but gay selves, gay neighbors, and gay social practices that are distinctive of our affluent, postindustrial society".

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, gay culture was highly covert and relied upon secret symbols and codes woven into an overall straight context. Gay influence in early America was mostly limited to high culture. The association of gay men with opera, ballet, couture, fine cuisine, musical theater, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and interior design began with wealthy homosexual men using the straight themes of these media to send their own signals. In the very heterocentric Marilyn Monroe film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical number features Jane Russell singing "Anyone Here for Love" in a gym while muscled men dance around her. The men's costumes were designed by a man, the dance was choreographed by a man, and the dancers, as gay screenwriter Paul Rudnick points out, "seem more interested in each other than in Russell", but her reassuring presence gets the sequence past the censors and fits it into an overall heterocentric theme. After the Stonewall riots in the United States in 1969, gay male culture began to be publicly acknowledged for the first time. Some gay men formed The Violet Quill society, which focused on writing about gay experience as something central and normal in a story for the first time, rather than as a "naughty" sideline to a mostly straight story. A good example is the short story A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White. In this first volume of a trilogy, White writes as a young homophilic narrator growing up under the shadow of a corrupt and remote father. The young man learns bad habits from his straight father and applies them to a gay existence.

Celebrities such as Liza Minnelli, Jane Fonda, and Bette Midler spent a significant amount of their social time with urban gay men, who were now popularly viewed as sophisticated and stylish by the jet set. And more celebrities themselves, such as Andy Warhol, were open about their relationships. Such openness was still limited to the largest and most progressive urban areas such as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Washington DC, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, however, until AIDS forced several popular celebrities out of the closet due to their contraction of what was known at first as a "gay cancer".

Some elements that may be identified more closely with gay men than with other groups include:

• pop-culture gay icons who have had a traditionally gay male following (for example, disco, Madonna, Judy Garland, Cher, Diana Ross, and so forth);
• familiarity with certain aspects of romantic, sexual, and social life that have been common among gay men (for example, Polari, poppers, camp, and the fag hag; in South Asian LGBT culture, evening people).

There are a number of subcultures within gay male culture, such as the bears and chubbies. There are also subcultures that have historically had a large gay male population, such as the leather and SM subcultures. Openly gay critic Michael Musto opined "I am a harsh critic of the gay community because I feel that when I first came out I thought I would be entering a world of nonconformity and individuality and, au contraire, it turned out to be a world of clones in a certain way. I also hated the whole body fascism thing that took over the gays for a long time.