Gay

It's over, I voted, now let's move on from all of the amateur punditry that's been going on since the campaigns started and the media picked up on it. But bravo to Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, which all voted to affirm that people like me deserve logical and not religious sensibility in the legislation affecting us.

So, it happened. I watched a whole season of RuPaul's Drag Race in one day (among other shows), vegging out to drag divas, heathers, and their t. It made for entertaining television, but I felt the same sensation of being a little dumber afterward that accompanies watching the Real Housewives or the Kardashians. It was a day of cotton candy and cheesecake for the brain in the form of wigs and duct tape.

Identity, culture, belonging. These concepts are thrown around so often in the collegial environment, discussed over coffee or tea in the late afternoon with friends who have the same malleable beliefs and understanding of lower-division coursework that you do, conversations accompanied by the vague feeling of advancing yourself into a progressive new social era. Without this kind of thought, though, we might never come to build on our understandings of the world or question the things around us. These three concepts are things I find myself frequently questioned about by other gays most often, whether being derided for not engaging enough or out of innocent enough curiosity.

I think what interests me the most are the accusations I get of somehow not being gay enough or of engaging with our culture. But you're always denying your culture, you're just not outspoken or political enough, you're such a bad gay. I hear it so often, and I don't know what that means. I challenge anyone to present to me a solid showing of what we could call a singular gay culture. That doesn't exist, nor should it, because the whole point of queer culture is the idea that we're all crazy little critters trying to make the most sense of the world the way we're in it with all of our differences—cultural and otherwise—and they're all perfectly okay as long as you're not harming anyone else along the way. It doesn't require loving Cher or being an activist or being androgynous or anything else that is thrown at me as an example of what I should be doing to be a "better gay", for as wonderful as all of those things are for the people who do. The idea is humanist at its core, which is why you hear similar concepts repeated ad nauseam in feminism and why most people with higher education in the social sciences have embraced this concept to the point of expanding upon it without second thought.

Here's the thing. With all respect to our—and I say our, because whether you're fully a part of gay culture or something of a "gay secular" like myself, it affects us all—very important political history over the last fifty years (and we can all be so thankful that it's happened so quickly), something which I hold of utmost importance to be aware of and build upon, I've always felt like a foreigner in gay-specific cultural events. When I go to pride festivals, I feel the same indifference as I would to any other festival, with the addition of guilt because I feel like I'm supposed to feel more passionate about something that just feels like a parade, a city event, another notch in the calendar of summer activities in the public sphere. It's just there—in my lifetime it always has been—and I have no true emotional or personal connection to it. Every time I've gone to Pridefest or attempted to involve myself in other gay community groups, I feel myself a cultural outsider in these groups of people who work so hard to be all-inclusive. This sense of gay community, this idea of cohesiveness that we espouse, rings false to me for the simple fact that there are people like me who don't fit the bill of engagement most prominently offered. When I feel like I'm forcing the issue, it's negative, and it doesn't give me any motivation to engage further. When I don't engage in these specific ways is when other gays start telling me that I'm a bad gay and that I'm rejecting my culture.

The same goes for the heart-wrenching stories of coming out and hardship that many support groups and other gay functions are built around. I have deep compassion for the hardships of coming out and self-acceptance that so many have experienced, but I never had that experience. I don't connect with it in a personal way, I can only have the compassion of knowing that suffering for trivial matters is never acceptable and that it takes courage and strength to work past it into a better place. I grew up in an environment where even those who held nominally negative views toward homosexuals never had a problem with it in me. The way I grew up, it was never an issue any further than people just wanted me to confirm it to them and then we would all collectively move on to more pressing concerns like breathing, what's on the television, what have you. I've never personally felt the effects of discrimination or violence, I've never been told to leave somewhere because I'm gay or threatened for it or anything else in that vein. "Gay, so what?", not "gay, what's wrong with you?" My mother publicly claims up and down that she never had any suspicions about it but she and I both know that's not really true, that she had given me plenty of space to tell her or not until I did at the early age at which it happened. I always knew, and I never struggled with it or the idea of being different from the other boys as far back as kindergarten. Even then, my socialization never put me in a position of clashing with the swinging scale of heteronormativity; if I wanted to play with the girls, no big deal, and if I wanted to play with the boys, that was fine too. I've been a socially abnormal creature for my whole life and being gay was always quite literally the least of it. Nothing changed through grade school, high school, or college either, where the other students were indifferent and the other gays had similarly comfortable lives of acceptance as mine.

I'm a so-called millenial and grew up in front of various kinds of electronic screens, and accordingly I had to learn about gay culture from the internet and whatever shows happened to be on basic cable. It was like most of my knowledge pursuits, Googling and Wikipedia-searching for factoids and an understanding of how these things worked. It was one of countless things over time that I've completely immersed myself in learning about, things which I couldn't enumerate if I tried because it's just what I do with my time. I'm obsessive with things in that way. I could always intellectually relate myself to these gay things I read about, but in practice being campy and embracing lots of the things we typically assign to gay culture was foreign to me. I don't believe anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes with me has ever doubted my sexual orientation, superficial identifiers in the form of campiness or lexical quirks or anything else are unnecessary. I've taken a liking over time to more and more things that we think of as gay, in part due to their expanding presence in general American pop culture and in part because I can appreciate that sometimes we do stand out in our own peculiar way. It's just never been the whole picture—a small and significant part of it, but by no means the whole thing. I am not and have never been the kind of gay whose life revolves around it, due to the circumstances I've had throughout my life and the work of others past who have enabled those circumstances, which is no less reasonable or okay than those who do. Call it secularism if you want. I'm not rejecting or denying gay culture, I just accept that my relationship with it is an in but not of situation, and I think that's what many have a hard time understanding.

So I watch the wink wink, nudge nudge of Drag Race feeling both like I have some kind of cultural agency in viewing it and like it's the ultimate realization of a particular format of reality show that lends itself to over the top everything and thus that I am completely in keeping with pop culture "normal". I can not credibly say I have more than a passing interest in drag, as entertaining as it is, nor can I credibly say that it's something that's completely in the mainstream despite great recognition of RuPaul and his show, so the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The point is, it doesn't make me a "better" gay for watching it, it just means I'm comfortably following a similar pattern of interaction with the overly broad umbrella of queer culture that I always have. I don't need to have interest in or be entertained by drag queens just because I'm gay, but it's all the more salient that I do and am. I think my story is more normal than it might at first strike you.