Being Gay in the 21st Century

There is a whole new movement afoot - sometimes it is referred to as "post gay" - sometimes as "beyond gay" - but what it is about is moving homosexuality out of the "Gay" environment and asking just what is so different about what homosexual men want and what everyone else wants. It means i guess not being defined by sexual orientation and preference but by a complexity of who we are - and allowing that sexual orientation and preferences are only on aspect of that complexity. They don't define WHO I am - but they define a lot about HOW I want to live.

Good questions. And there - we have used the word - homosexual. the bad word - the word we don't use anymore.

Hmmm - you don't hear that word much. Gay has replaced it - but afterall - we are homosexuals - we arent' always gay.

We need to talk about this. We need to talk about what it means to be a homosexual - what makes us what we are?

Even more - we need to talk about why we don't talk about it.

How many people know that Native Americans saw their "gay" tribesmen as shamans - as messengers from the Great Spirit? They were referred to as "Two Spirt Persons".

Did you know that? They weren't, as the movies show it, "squaw men" - they were a different sex. And often considered to have magical powers.

Well, that's what we are. We aren't "effeminate men". We are Homosexual Men.

Here are some links to the new stuff being printed about "post gay". Read some if you have a mind to and then let's start talking. SL is about new worlds and new visions - let's be new world makers, not refugees from the old world.

Here are the links and some quotations and citations:

"In the generation before (gay liberation), there were a lot of gay men, like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, who would not write about gay subject matter at all. ... They were frank about admitting they themselves were gay, but they never wrote about that because they wanted the big public.

"Then there was my generation, and many of us wrote almost exclusively about being gay, although in my own case I've written two novels in which there were no gay characters. But they were my least successful novels with the public.

"Now you have writers like Alan Gurganus, who published the first gay story in the New Yorker in 1974 and was always very clear about being gay. But (his novel) ''The Oldest Living Confederate Widow'' has virtually no gay theme in it.

"I call it sort of post-gay. People aren't in the closet, they're frank about their sexuality, but they don't feel limited to gay subject matter. They feel they can write about anything."
—Edmund White, quoted in Fritz Lanham, "Beginnings of liberation," The Houston Chronicle, November 27, 1994

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A10951

The End of Gay: And the Death of Heterosexuality (Paperback)
by Bert Archer (Author)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_spirit

So - let's start a conversation - read especially about the two spirit tradition in Native American tribes. then post some comments.