What is gay culture? These tweets have it nailed
If gay culture of a bygone generation was all about Broadway musicals, interior design, and diva worship—as How to Be Gay author David M.
Halperin noted in a 2012 New York Times op-ed — these days it’s all about walking fast, keeping an ear out for Grindr notifications, and finding weird ways to sit in chairs!We jest—mostly—but gay culture is indeed evolving alongside society in toto.In that 2012 op-ed, Halperin observed that gay culture was “the last obstacle to complete social integration” for gay men, and as gays appeared to be assimilating into mainstream culture earlier in this millennium, there were fears that gay culture was disappearing.Related: This tweet about gay online culture is sparking some very serious debateBut gay culture, for men and other genders, keeps morphing—and staying amorphous.
As ¡Hola Papi! author John Paul Brammer wrote in a 2019 Out advice column, gay culture is hard to define:What is it? Is it memes?
Is it language? Is it wearing a bonnet and signing your name on the Devil’s Leger in Puritan New England? Yes. It’s all those things, and much, much more, because it’s defined by manifestations of human activity regarded in the collective.
