Culture Slut: Myth of Gay Good Taste
I was scrolling through Instagram on my phone the other day when I saw an article about Rebecca Black’s new music, and her coming out story. My initial reaction was very uncharitable, something along the lines of “Really? Do we need another ambiguously unlabelled not-straight star? Aren’t there enough?”, but after a few seconds of contemplation I was horrified at myself for having such a conservative thought. How could I be so unfeeling, so unsupportive?
Was it that I was becoming tired, uninterested, jaded (who, me? never)? I have always loved Rebecca Black (ironically), from her tween hit Friday - which me and my friends used to listen to in student houses whilst drinking vodkat before going to the gay club - to her attempt to reclaim her narrative in the 2014 song Saturday (which, gleefully, is even more cringe-inducing, full of YouTube stars you have definitely forgotten about, highly recommend watching the video now.) I think she’s very fun, so why did I deem her relatively new queer identity as bothersome or overplayed? I think the answer lies in how we as queer people consume media and the ways in which that has changed in the last decade.
I remember in my early adult years how you could count the number of major celebrities that had come out as gay on one hand, the lightest smattering of stars, some of whom barely counted as stars in the first place. I’m sorry, I know Adam Lambert was groundbreaking for mainstream American television, but he never spoke to me as a disgusting teen gremlin in a shoplifted dress getting drunk on the beach.
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Even the YouTube boom of the late 00s and early 10s only gave us people like Tyler Oakley and other completely neutered examples of queer identities, vapid video-creators whispering nonsense phrases through noise-cancelling headphones (availiable at the link below) and calling it content. I, and countless others, never related to Conor Franta and the comfort twinks, instead having to dive deeper into the canon of queer icons, constantly searching for excitement, for new feelings, for authenticity.
The dearth of openly gay stars lead us wayward teens to seek out queer history in the same way that all the previous gay generations had. We looked to Divine, James St James, Pete Burns, Steve Strange and the Blitz Kids, read about them, collected magazine interviews and paparazzi pictures to keep in a box below our beds just as they had done with Andy Warhol, Candy Darling and the Superstars of the 1960s.
The cutting edge queens of the 60s and 70s like Hibiscus and The Cockettes, John Waters and the Dreamlanders, Derek Jarman, Lindsay Kemp and the Alternative Miss World gang wore the styles of previous generations of glamour, emulating the 30s, 40s and 50s, Hollywood’s Golden Age, because that was the style worn by their grandmothers and great aunts and therefore were the clothes turning up in charity shops and thrift stores.
Queens from the 50s looked back at queens from the 20s, Quentin Crisp and his limp wristed fairies, Barbette in high drag, Stephen Tennant and The Bright Young Things gadding about in their mothers’ Edwardian gowns at fancy dress balls. Even those fairy futurist aristocrat brats were looking backwards, to famous queer eccentrics like the Marchesa Luisa Casati, anarchic art collector and patron saint of excessive tastes, to the artist androgyne Romaine Brooks and the exiled Russian royalty living in gay communities on the island of Capri - we are all interconnected by a lineage of discerning the queer icons of our previous generations.
For so long, queer people have had to become curators of our own histories; keeping the memories of our heroes, mentors and forebears alive so that they don’t get lost on the tides of sexist heteropatriarchal mainstream dross. It will always be important to keep the legends going, anecdotes passed down through word of mouth, like how Quentin Crisp described Tallulah Bankhead making an entrance on stage in 1920s London (look it up online), or the fabulous acid drop stories told by Kenneth Williams in his television interviews about famous gay ballet dancer Robert Helpmann, camp icon Edith Evans, or his young protege Maggie Smith.
Speaking of Bankhead, her memorable quotes (however dubious their origins are) have made waves posted as aspirational text posts in recent years, “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said a thing about women and cocaine” being a particular favourite.“Be gay, do crime!” is gleefully splashed across Instagram meme accounts, which is a succinct summary of the incredible literary output of philosopher, artist, writer and criminal Jean Genet. What seems to be just a flippant phrase actually contains a multitude of thought, history and inspiration. In fact, I have a friend who was so moved by Genet’s novels about theft, prison, queer desire and murder that he left home and tried to hitch hike his way to France to become a nomadic rent boy just like Genet was. He only made it as far as Soho but still, it’s the intention that counts.
In the old days, and I consider perhaps that my teen generation might be the last of that era, in order to find queer kinship in media you had to look to the past, or to niche arts-based productions. You sort of had to become a social scholar of queerness just to find representation. I know I watched The Shining purely because I had heard there was a weird gay moment in it (literally two seconds). I made a habit of staying up late to watch strange films on Channel Four like Mysterious Skin and Taxidermia which I previously spoke about in this column.
Me and my friends delved into queer cinema’s past to find moments of intimacy, the way that gays in the 60s and 70s would frequent art house cinemas because it was the only place where you could possibly see a naked man on screen. Who else would sit through Sebastiane, Derek Jarman’s first picture, a slow paced take on christian martyr entirely in Latin if it didn’t show explicit male nudity and desire? Or read the impenetrable heavy texts of Yukio Mishima in search of its gay subtexts? Or wade through E. M. Forster’s dirges about Oxford life because he was a known homo?
Of course, the fact that all of these examples of media that I’ve mentioned happen to be exceptional pieces of art in their own right is completely incidental, and this is where the myth of gay good taste was born. In recent generations there has been this idea of gay men as sophisticated aesthetes, literary geniuses, arbiters of taste who know everything worth knowing about art, but that comes from the lengths queer people had to go to to find representation. When the only way you can read a gay love story is to read nuanced narratives dealing with existential transcendentalism and the loss of youth, it kind of rubs off on you. Gay men gained a reputation for culture because they picked it up through osmosis, because the only media they had was intellectually advanced in a way that left lowest common denominator dross on the floor.
“Queer authenticity will always be found in the underground, in the basement back rooms, and, as America seems to think, in the criminal.”
This is where the current era of queer content comes in, and the media landscape could not be more different. In the 2010s, when there was a rumour that a television series had a gay character, queer people would happily sit through season after season waiting for that one episode that might feature a stolen kiss. We watched EVERYTHING that had gays in it, whether it was good or bad, decent representation or offensive, just because it was still a rarity. But in recent years there has been an explosion of gay media, with queer characters popping up in mainstream big budget films and tv series, making the task of consuming it all almost impossible. This is so exciting to older generations but is totally normal to Gen Z, because why wouldn’t it be? But this brings to my mind an interesting question; will the myth of gay good taste end with this generation as there is no longer a need for queer audiences to be cultural curators? Without the need to explore intellectually challenging texts will we lose our taste (and reputation) for it?
I tried to watch the acclaimed Netflix series Heartstopper when it first came out after it cast such a spell over the world with its charm and innocent gay romance, but I absolutely couldn’t hack it. It was so saccharine that I couldn’t continue without having to book a dentist appointment for my cavities. The portrayal of youth was so different from my adolescent experiences - no skulking in the shadows, no sneaking off with older men because the only way you could find gay kinship was in a goddamned public toilet, no permitting yourself be kissed in exchange for a pack of Camels - and totally different from queer coming of age films like Mysterious Skin and its exploration of the darkness of gay youth.
But then it dawned on me; it wasn’t for me. Heartstopper was for tweens and adolescents to help guide them into self exploration and discovery. It wasn’t meant to be a grim reflection of lived experience, but a charming dream to entice us in. Queer media has diversified so much now that we can have easygoing and unchallenging texts too, just like our straight counterparts. We can have cheesy rom coms and nonsensical soap operas, mind numbing reality shows and endless infomercials for gay cruises and Pure for Men.
It sounds like I miss when being gay used to be hard, when it was something to work at, and that I resent the younger generation for having things easier (relatively), which I guess to some extent is true. Or maybe it's less about resentment and more about not being able to relate as much to the younger crowd for the first time in my life. Kids who don’t remember a time before Lady Gaga was played at school discos, who have no idea who George Michael was other than a mum-aged (Granny-aged?!) heartthrob. Kids who didn’t have to wait until 1AM to see a gay kiss on Channel 4, or read Our Lady of The Flowers for a glimpse of the gay underworld.
Drag Race will define a generation, as it should, just as Tennesse Williams defined the camp 50s, or Divine did the 70s and 80s, but let us hope that the kids of today will continue the history of cultural curation they have inherited from centuries of our queer forebears. Never settle for the minimum, or the mainstream. Queer authenticity will always be found in the underground, in the basement back rooms, and, as America seems to think, in the criminal.
Words: Misha MN
