What Gay Generation Gap?

GAY PRIDE SUNDAY UPDATE: All Things Considered interviews Harris. I am 54 years old. I lived in NYC for 30 years, through the AIDS years. I lost a life-partner to the disease. My experience could not be more different than Harris’s.
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A friend forwarded Mark Harris’s NYMag Summer Issue feature on the Gay Generation Gap as much for the mention of The DataLounge, a site from the company I once worked for, as for the text. An interesting premise, it might have been insightful. It wasn’t:

Here’s the awful stuff, the deeply unfair (but maybe a little true) things that many middle-aged gay men say about their younger counterparts: They’re shallow. They’re silly. They reek of entitlement. They haven’t had to work for anything and therefore aren’t interested in anything that takes work. They’re profoundly ungrateful for the political and social gains we spent our own youth striving to obtain for them. They’re so sexually careless that you’d think a deadly worldwide epidemic was just an abstraction. They think old-fashioned What do we want! When do we want it! activism is icky and noisy. They toss around terms like “post-gay” without caring how hard we fought just to get all the way to “gay.”

And here’s the awful stuff they throw back at us—at 45, I write the word “us” from the graying side of the divide—a completely vicious slander (except that some of us are a little like this): We’re terminally depressed. We’re horrible scolds. We gas on about AIDS the way our parents or grandparents couldn’t stop talking about World War II. We act like we invented political action, and think the only way to accomplish something is by expressions of fury. We say we want change, but really what we want is to get off on our own victimhood. We’re made uncomfortable, or even jealous, by their easygoing confidence. We’re grim, prim, strident, self-ghettoizing, doctrinaire bores who think that if you’re not gloomy, you’re not worth taking seriously. Also, we’re probably cruising them.

Good Gawd! What a cynical look at life. I promise you that’s not been my experience, here or there. While I know some individuals it may describe (and I’m sorry for them) it doesn’t hold the ring of truth for me:

These unnuanced generalizations, as everyone who makes them quickly notes, do a gross injustice to both groups. The gay community—or more accurately, communities—is hardly monolithic, and its divisions, not just of age but of race, gender, region, and income, are too complex to paint with a broad brush. And Pride Week—which this year falls on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots—is a reminder that we have always been able to unite when faced with either a common cause or a common enemy. It’s when we’re not on the front lines that tensions flare. “On its simplest level,” says Jon Barrett, 40, the editor-in-chief of the 42-year-old gay magazine The Advocate, “we think they’re naïve. And they think we’re old.”

I just don’t see the younger generation that way. And I get a little sick of us geezers patting ourselves on the back and crying about how hard it was for us back then. We had hard times and we had good times — I was thirty-something before I made my way in town from my Fire Island summers for a Gay Pride parade — just like all times.

Count me among those who believe the Millennials are our future; they may not end the culture wars but they will change politics as we know it. And for the record, those I meet here are generally interested to hear my tales of gay life in days gone by.

Harris may be describing the world he knows and lives in. It reads to me like a dreary old New York queer attitude I left long before I moved out of the city. I’m sure glad I’m not living in it now.