it's a different model, I guess

I was chatting with a couple of friends last night about Paris is Burning. It struck me just how different our message about gay people and gay rights are than the one that I received as a kid. My father was a drama professor and had worked in the theater for his whole life, including for a decade in New York City's experimental and avant garde theater scene. As you can imagine, it was normal for my siblings and I me to interact with gay people in our childhood. Part of the contrast between then and now is that a lot of these people were defiantly out of the mainstream. There were a lot of gay men who would refer to straight people as breeders, dedicated drag queens, people who had a fierce rejection of traditionalist marriage and monogamy, etc. For many of these people, their sexual identity was part of a broad rejection of what they saw as the bourgeois conformity of mainstream American life.

In contrast, the message that resonates about gay people today is one of normalcy. The lesson that is delivered over and over again is that gay people are just like everyone else, that of course, everyone wants to get married and everyone wants to have babies and put up a white picket fence.... Aside from the many little ugly pathologies hidden in mainstream depictions of gay people (such as the notion that every gay man is your best frieeeeeeend), I can't find much to dispute with the insistence that everyone deserves the respect and autonomy that comes with normalcy. And it's hard to argue with the results; as much work remains to be done, the growth of marriage rights over the past decade has been frankly incredible.

Yet I can't help but think that something has been lost in changing the message to "people are the same" from "people are different." That was a message my parents delivered early and often in my life: people are different, often radically different, and they will behave in ways you wouldn't and believe things you don't, sometimes in ways you'll find uncomfortable or challenging. Get used to it and get over it. I recognize the political limitations of that model. But it had the advantage of being portable: respect for genuine difference, rather than constantly looking for ways in which everyone is the same, can make people more generous and more compassionate towards those who don't yet enjoy the blessing of the majority.