What "The New Gay" Means to Me

As we're three days into TNG's anniversary month, I thought I'd repost the first thing I ever wrote for this site. It's an explanation of why I helped found TNG, and what the concept of "new gay" means to me. I had originally tried to include some relevant song quotes — specifically Roxy Music's "Just like flamingoes look the same" and Neko Case's "I'm a free man with no place free to go" — but it was too clunky. So consider them included here.

I'll be thinking about this post and writing an updated version of it at the end of this month. In the meantime, we encourage anyone with their own meditations on the state of gay culture to send them over to submit@thenewgay.net

Gay men, as a whole, have one thing in common: they fuck other men. That's it. No man was born holding a cosmo, or listening to a Christina Aguliera cd, or wearing a backwards Hollister cap. No six year-old burns to attend a circuit party, does drugs to fit in, or sits up till sunrise wondering if his new haircut will garner attention in some dark lounge on Sunday night.

Instead, he will be put down by his older brothers for saying something's pretty. Three years later a shirtless jogger grabs his attention and he doesn't know why. At the age of 12 the girls around grow tits and he doesn't care — he talks about them anyway, so his friends don't catch on, but the parts that arouse his interest lie further south on different poles.

And that's what we have in common. We all paid extra attention in the locker room, feigned nonchalance at a sleepover when our friends boasted over who had the biggest dick. We watched 120 minutes compulsively, hoping for one more glimpse of Morrissey's nipple. We locked the door to our downstairs bathrooms at 2:30 in the morning and jerked off to underwear ads, or Abercrombie catalogues, or to the dark-haired model on pg. 23 of a dog-eared Interview magazine that you kept under your bed. We fingered girls at parties and prayed that we could get it up to fuck them. We heard love songs on the radio and knew they weren't for us.

And then we came out. In highschool, in college, in the city you moved to when you started your life. And you knew what your hairdresser talked like, or how your music teacher dressed, or what a club is like because you saw it on Queer as Folk. You're ready. You do it. You're finally gay.

Except you're not you. You chop the sleeves off your favorite t-shirt, feign interest in music you wouldn't even OD to and wonder how you lost your personality when, for the first time in your life, you are actually in a position to unleash it.

No one mourns the old days, when we worked in design, or lurked in the park, or donned fluffy mohair sweaters to say, without really saying, I am. I'm one. Approach me.

So now we're open. we're governors, athletes, writers, lawyers, fathers. We encompass an incredible breadth of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, yet we listen to the same music, dance at the same clubs and shop at the same stores. Is that what being gay is? We fight for the right to be ourselves and use our gains to mince around in tandem.

We've grown up different. Why stop now?

That, to me, is the new gay.