The Great Gays are Gone

the kids nowadays are useless

I just wanted to expand a little bit on some points I made in my review of Manuel Betancourt’s book for RealClear.

In the review, I emphasized how the mainstreaming of homosexuality has led to less gays creating great works of art and literature. Among the main factors that dampen the gay man’s creative impulse are:

• the loss of taboos surrounding homoerotic behavior and effeminacy; this stigma and subsequent feeling of being ostracized can be both emotionally crushing as well as an inspiration to see more deeply into human nature/society and communicate said realizations through art

• the loss of the taboo also absolves gay men from having to repress and/or sublimate their desires—which can serve as fuel to inspire creativity and innovative artistic expressions

• the normalization of homosexuality has been ushered in by a widespread secular, disenchanted ethos; sexuality is no longer thought to be a symbolically charged reality, which draws us into a broader cosmic, metaphysical drama—especially when it comes to forms of sexuality that are in conflict with the design of Nature; this has had a flattening effect on the artistic endeavors not just of gays, but of all people living in secularized societies.

I wanted to dig into two other aspects of the shift in narratives of homosexuality: the narrowing of identity “options,” and the hypermoralization and disenchantment of gayness in both traditional/religious and progressive/secular circles.