‘New Gay’ Taxonomy Gets Old Gay’s Panties In Wad

Here’s the gist. In a world with increasingly blurry lines, gays are
reclaiming stereotypical identities as a way of reasserting themselves
in the overall culture. As Doree Shafrir in the Observer puts it:


If gays can be married and have children and live contentedly in the
suburbs, or on the other end of the spectrum, do the same drugs at the
same loft parties as their Oberlin classmates, and if everyone thinks
AIDS is no more serious than diabetes, then, really, what’s the
difference between the gays and the straights? By dialing back to and
reinventing the old gay stereotypes, they may have the best shot at
reclaiming gayness as something actually different.

Thus the Observer comes up with two new classifications of the modern
homosexual: New Gay and New Old Gay. We won’t bore you with the details
(there’s some fairly complex logic, much of which is based around how you take your Patti
LuPone), but essentially it comes down to this: You’re New Old Gay if you
unironically like things that Old Man Gays like (piano bars, The Golden
Girls
, AIDS hotlines) and New Gay is when you like those same sorts of
things (Barbra Streisand, pills, Top Model) but ironically. Get it? No,
really. It’s that pointless.

Oh, wait. New Gays also wear pointy shoes and listen to Chromeo.

Does this excuse our supposed hate crimes? Does it matter whether we
earnestly love Sondheim but can also  ironically get behind Marvin Hamlisch on a slow day and/or go to an
Okkervil River show? Or whether we prefer tragic heroin to tragic
heroines? It
doesn’t really, but here’s the quick, leaving-for-the-weekend,
conclusion to the fifteenth pointless meandering op-ed response on the New Old
Gay/New Gay panty-wringing: Our ability to laugh at ourselves is what
separates us from animals. Well, that and our lack of a gag reflex.

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The New Old Gays (New York Observer)
Doree Shafrir Is An Out Of Touch New-Old Fag Hag (Gay Men’s Social Crisis)
The New Adventures of The Old Gay: Which Gay Are You (AfterElton.com)

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