Of Acceptance and Celebration

The late winter of 2018 brought heavy rains and flooding to sections of the Northeast and Midwest. In late February, the Ohio River topped 60 feet at Cincinnati, roughly 10 feet above flood stage and 30 feet above its normal “pool” level. It was the highest it had been since March 5, 1997, when it reached nearly 65 feet and submerged the downtown riverfront south of Fourth Street (Weiser, 2018). The flooded areas included the Dock, an iconic LGBTQ dance bar whose clientele was so loyal that one could imagine them lined up outside the following Saturday night even so, clad in fashionable hip-waders and scuba gear. Instead, stories soon circulated of volunteers (presumably Dock regulars and local LGBTQ leaders) helping employees to squeegee out the remaining water and scrub away the mud after the river receded. That lore served to reinforce perceptions of the close bond between the queer community and its institutions—one for which most mainstream businesses would spend their last penny. Indeed, queer businesses mastered contemporary marketing strategy long before it was either modern or strategy: they eschew most conventional advertising in favor of in-kind community involvement—hosting fundraisers, providing meeting space, and contributing to queer-centric causes—to build and maintain loyalty to their brand. The result was that lesbian and gay businesses, once itinerant ventures that were subject to police raids and that hid themselves from the wider public behind blacked-out windows and nondescript entrances, enjoyed long runs in the post-Stonewall years.

Ironically, the Dock was spared the effects of the more recent floods. It had closed for a good two weeks before, on Valentine’s Day. By all accounts, its business continued to be popular and profitable; its closure was owed to its acquisition by the state by eminent domain for ramps to a bridge project that may or may not be completed. Its owner would like to relocate nearby, but downtown property is at a premium (Varias, 2018). Less than two months before, another decades-old LGBTQ dance club, this one in Toledo, closed (Rosenkrans, 2017). In an odd twist of fate, its building was bought by an anti-LGBTQ religious group (Reiter, 2018). The account in the Toledo Blade noted that the closing of Bretz left four other “LGBT-friendly” bars in the city (Rosenkrans, 2017). For many queers, however, there is a distinction. As Stephen Eckstein, an employee of the now-shuttered Dock, said, “You can go to LGBT-friendly bars. Most bars are, these days. […] But there’s a difference when you go to a place where being yourself is not just accepted but celebrated” (Varias, 2018, p. 8A).

The distinction between acceptance and celebration to which Eckstein referred may well capture the seismic changes to queer life in recent years, to which this issue of Journal of Homosexuality is dedicated. LGBTQ people still are in many ways the “others,” distinguished mostly by their more open (and lived) perspectives on the connections among biological sex, gender performance, and sexual attraction. But in spite of recent survey data suggesting that the intolerance of difference manifested by the political turbulence that brought Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 may also be sapping the acceptance of queers by the mainstream (Miller, 2018), LGBTQ people also are less “othered” than in the past, made more familiar and less onerous by more diverse and honest representations in media and popular culture, as well as by self-disclosures of queerness by celebrities, family members, and co-workers. Interpersonal visibility is important: studies have repeatedly shown that, among straight people, knowing queer people tends to be associated with having positive attitudes about them (Herek & Glunt, 1993), which appears to be true regardless of race (Herek & Capitanio, 1995; Herek & Gonzalez-Rivera, 2006) or gender (Herek, 1988).

But acceptance in the form of assimilation into the mainstream has come at the price of the disappearance of uniquely queer institutions: the bookstore, the bar, the café, the restaurant, the theater, the neighborhood. The gentrification of queer enclaves led to soaring property values and attracted mainstream homebuyers and businesses even as lesbians and gay men, many with families, moved to the suburbs or neighborhoods with good schools (Hobbick, 2016). Community became defined less by geographic proximity and more by online contact and more sporadic, interest-specific interactions, including Pride events, music festivals, and choral concerts. With so many other options, LGBTQ businesses became destinations of choice and convenience, rather than of necessity (Reiter, 2018). The growth of online queer communities has been a boon particularly for those who experienced isolation from physical queer spaces: those living in rural areas and smaller towns without the critical mass necessary to support a more conventional community, as well as LGBTQ teens lacking the independence and mobility to take part in them. Apart from its new virtual presence, the redefined community also could be international and intercultural in nature, given the spread of queer visibility through political structures, such as the European Union, and cultural capital in the form of ubiquitous popular culture.

Although it is tempting to think of changes to queer life as a balance equation comprising what has been gained or lost, it is more productive (and perhaps more accurate) to view it in terms of its multidimensionality, which is the approach the authors of the essays and studies in this issue take. One dimension that has undergone tremendous growth and change has been the field of queer children’s and young adult literature. Once the domain of novelties such as Leslea Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies, Rosamund Elwin and Michele Paulse’s Asha’s Mums, Michael Willhoite’s Daddy’s Roommate, and Susanne Bosche’s Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, that focused primarily on queer families defined primarily by cisgender adult parents, Jennifer Miller noted that it has effectively become a subgenre of children’s literature and now focuses on child protagonists who may be transgender or gender creative. Where in the earlier works, the children were cisgender and experienced queerness largely through comparisons of their families with those of friends from school or playgroups who were from heteronormative households, the children themselves are queer and must navigate an array of social institutions, including family and school. Given the controversy created in the 1980s by the mere suggestion that parents could be lesbians or gay men entrusted with childrearing, these more recent titles emphasize at once the increased visibility of gender-creative children, their acknowledgment and acceptance by mainstream society, and the boldness of authors willing to challenge the normative assumptions pervading children’s literature.

While the notion of gay men as parents is less than groundbreaking in the field of literature aimed at children, the same cannot be said for television in the United States, where representations of queer parenting are few and subordinated in the plots of series where they do appear. One exception is the recent NBC-TV series The New Normal, the subject of an essay in this issue by Jonathan Branfman. In “Failed Fatherhood and the ‘Trap of Ambivalence’: Assimilation, Homonormativity, and Effeminophobia in The New Normal,” he describes the disconnect between the tacit aim of the series, to normalize gay fatherhood, and what he terms the “effeminophobic” representation of Bryan Collins, the more feminized half of the parenting couple. Branfman describes how the stigmatization of more effeminate gay men not only reinforces the real-world difficulties many gay men face in their attempts to negotiate respect from colleagues, friends, and loved ones, but also creates very tangible barriers to professional success by justifying discrimination in employment based on gender expression, which he notes frequently receives less attention than discrimination based on sexuality.

Whereas the other articles in this issue document various facets in the evolution of post-liberation queer communities, the third article considers change of an entirely different sort: the accelerated emergence of the LGBTQ community in Serbia during its evolution into parliamentary democracy and neoliberalism. In “We Do Not Know What Queers Can Do: LGBT Community Between (In)visibility and Culture Industry in Serbia at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” Andrija Filipovic begins with the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1991 following the collapse of the Yugoslav republic, noting that Serbia’s queer community lacked the infrastructure taken for granted by its Western counterparts, largely because distinct political and economic contexts effectively prevented the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s other societies experienced. Filipovic concludes that, although LGBTQ Serbia largely achieved the visibility it sought through its activism, the development of its culture came at the cost of a singular queer politics that pursues queer rights only as they are conceived of in the West and of a sort of cultural gentrification resulting from capitalist cultural production. Even so, she remains optimistic for the development of a more critical queer politics.

Two of the articles in this issue address the extent to which social media platforms have become sites for LGBTQ community building. Andre Cavalcante’s “Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media Users on Tumblr” is the culmination of a year’s worth of field work studying the online and social media behaviors of young LGBTQ adults, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. He found that many have gravitated to Tumblr, launched in 2007, at least in part because it promoted self-expression and took a permissive stance on user content, including erotica. For younger queers who are exploring their identities, Tumblr allows for a virtual testing of the waters of social engagement through the maintenance of multiple user pages. In addition, in sharp contrast to other platforms, Tumblr allows users to identify themselves through nicknames only, thus providing a degree of anonymity. Ultimately, Cavalcante finds potential in Tumblr as a utopic space for younger LGBTQ people, but one that may be limited by its corporate prioritization of profits (via delivery of its users to advertisers) over people.

In the second, “Grindr Killed the Gay Bar, and Other Attempts to Blame Social Technologies for Urban Development: A Democratic Approach to Popular Technologies and Queer Sociality,” Bryce J. Renninger likewise uses field interviews to examine both how LGBTQ people use social media applications such as Grindr and the role they play in queer communities. He acknowledges the possible validity of concerns—including feelings of rejection and social isolation in some—that have been voiced in the directions in which LGBTQ community building have taken in recent years but finds the argument that social media effectively are supplanting traditional queer institutions as bars, bookstores, and entire neighborhoods to be not well supported—and perhaps not even relevant. Instead, he advocates for what he terms “a more democratic” approach to examining Grindr and similar platforms, with an eye toward considering the role of such technologies in larger undesirable social phenomenon.

Similarly, this issue’s concluding article, “The Evolution Will Not be Broadcast (or Published): Social Capital, Assimilation, and the Changing Queer Community,” challenges author Daniel Harris’s (1997) contention that, even by more than two decades ago, queer culture had embarked on a path away from its original subversiveness and in a direction in which its very viability was in question. That direction, he argues, is marked by a change in tone from the playful to the mean and in motivation from liberatory possibilities of a culturally and physically distinct community to the assimilative attractions of an attractive consumer market. But, examined from the standpoint of social network theory, this stance denies the agency of queers whose primary goal is the accumulation of social capital and whose objectives therefore may evolve as new and more viable options present themselves. This perspective offers an explanation for the simultaneous and yet seemingly contradictory growth in popularity for LGBTQ-focused online social network platforms and in more traditional cultural practices such as gay Pride events and fraternal organizations such as The Court.

Next year (2019) marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising by patrons at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, considered by many to mark a sea-change in the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Though mainstream national media initially dismissed it as essentially a local crime story, it nevertheless brought new visibility to the queer communities and dramatically altered the way in which LGBTQ people saw themselves. The queer life no longer need be furtive, limited, and second-class. Queers had beaten corrupt police, and the possibilities seemed limitless. Fifty years later, LGBTQ people likewise are bearing witness to changes in their communities and lives that are no less revolutionary—many of those changes springing from the achievement of previous generations’ activism and struggles.

Predicting the direction of future change is no simple task, should one choose to undertake it. Not many years ago, a number of writers were advancing the idea that queer people, particularly young queers, were part of a vanguard ushering in an era in which individuals would resist labels in favor of fluid identities. Some have, to be sure, but others embrace ever more specialized labels: agender, bigender, pangender, neutrois, transmasculine, transfeminine, and genderqueer, among others. As the queer revolution has advanced beyond the West, legitimate questions likewise have arisen as to its strategies and goals. Though there never really was a single way to be queer, the options have unquestionably proliferated. Even the term queer itself has acquired new and expanded meanings. From our current vantage point, this much is certain: the new struggles, at least in the near term, seem to concentrate on world-building that is virtual, intersectional, and gendered in ways different than previously considered. A new world, yes—and a brave one, to be sure.

Disclosure statement

This work has not been published by, nor been submitted for consideration to, any other publication.