I give it two years before West Hollywood, New York or Tel Aviv Pride pays him to sit shirtless atop their premier float with a plastic crown and a sash.
As I keep on getting older, life has been consistent with one thing: everything that I feel makes sense by X point continues to evolve until it corkscrews into an entirely different reality. Politically, culturally, scientifically, everything.
When I was a teen in the 90s, people beat the shit out of me because I was gay. They called me cruel names and made me hate myself, BUT I had an actual, deep-seated pride about being gay because I believed cultural depictions of gay people as creative, innovative artists and activists who turn lemons into lemonade and just fight through bullshit.
In early adulthood, late 90s to early 2000s, the culture turned around in a matter of years so that it was cool to be gay, and people liked me just because I like dick and didn’t care about anything else. That annoyed the fuck out of me. Straight men became narcissistic and vain “metrosexuals.” I felt accepted, i longer self-conscious, and I wrote for LGBT magazines, etc.
In a matter of years, I realized all LGBT media focuses on is coming up with excuses to run shirtless or naked pictures of young guys in order to sell alcohol, drug and vacation ads. Everything I wrote wedged in a gay angle, mostly artificially. In my personal life, I found zero relationships. I found zero creativity among other gay people. I write and paint. I went into an MFA program in part to find like minded creative friends and I did...and I was devastated to encounter not one gay person among everyone I met. What happened to the creative gay culture I grew up admiring?
Now, being a gay man seems to be NOTHING at all but working out and preening and fucking A LOT of different people. It is nothing but that. Gay slang is prepackaged in a big box. Avant garde drag is no more; now it is literally a mass produced product available at Wal-Mart. Gay culture is either Drag Race cliches or else Pit Crew Ken doll realness and lots and lots and lots of swapping of sexual fluids. There is nothing more to it.
I don’t have any pride anymore at all. HRC and GLAAD are money makers without principles. They trade in male models and nothing more. It Gets Better was launched to save lives and devolved immediately into a platform for a creepy S&M obsessed couple to become exhibitionists and adopt a young gay sex toy to show off.
I don’t know what the fuck makes everything turn on itself in life, but I do look at all things Aaron Schock and see a fully fitting representative of what gay culture has become: waxed muscles on the outside, a deep black hole on the inside.
