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By Root 799 0

a stage. He said it was a culture in which he could redeem time, experiencing the adolescence he had never had with friends from whom he was not estranged by an awful secret. He said it was a culture of sex and camp and whimsy that bound him to a community with a history and geography. I asked him if his mother had understood this, and he said he thought she had. He said that on the ferry ride home, she observed that gays must feel really suppressed in straight culture to need to flaunt so much when they were free of it. Then she asked if he shouldn’t be exercising more.

The place is just a placeholder. A web of gay culture now extends over America: gay TV shows like The L Word and Will and Grace, gay musicians like k.d. lang and Elton John, gay fashions like Carhartts and boxer briefs, gay divas like Garland and Garbo, gay authors like Barnes and Wilde, gay drugs like K and poppers, gay sports like figure skating and gymnastics. Historically, the practice of alluding to gay culture—known as “dropping hairpins”—was a means through which gays identified one another while passing to the rest of the world. Now such references also distinguish openly gay individuals: gays who immerse themselves in gay culture are seen as “in the life,” those who eschew it as in the mainstream.

Some might question whether anyone is imposing a cultural covering demand on gays. Far from forcing gays to mute gay culture, America seems increasingly to ask us to flaunt it. A recent instance is the hit series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which five gay men make over a straight man (and, by proxy, the viewer) in each of their areas of expertise: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming, culture. The success of Queer Eye suggests that gay men, at least, have assumed model-minority status—that, as my Korean-American dean Harold Koh says, “Gays are the new Asians.” And just as Asian-Americans have pointed out that positive stereotypes are still stereotypes, gays have argued that Queer Eye puts gays in a box by implying we all know how to julienne a carrot. Yet as defenders of the show rightly say, “It’s better than homophobia.” When the show is placed in a history that begins with attempts to convert gays to heterosexuality, this fact is startling: gay men are now teaching straight men how to behave, rather than the other way around.

Yet Queer Eye’s triumphs fall short of conquest. My friend’s mother was right to read Fire Island as a symptom of the suppression of gay culture in everyday life. In fact, when I think about where I have experienced the cultural covering demand, I think of the journey back from the Pines. At some point on the train ride, I look up and realize the moment has passed—the moment when straight culture has reasserted itself. Men who were lolling in each other’s arms are now separate, fingers that were interlaced are now disengaged, tattooed bodies have disappeared into their clothes, faces have tightened. It is a moment as imperceptible as the change of a season, or the moment one falls out of love.

The selective uptake of gay culture—gay fashion, yes; gay affection, no—shows that acceptance is driven by the desires of the straight cultural consumer rather than the dignity of the gay person. It is natural for consumers to be selective in their appropriation of minority cultures—they choose the parts that are meaningful to them, and that give them pleasure and self-definition. But in that respect these consumers are no different from members of those minority cultures. True pluralism would be receptive to traits valued by those who bear them, regardless of their mainstream appeal.

ACTIVISM

It is 2001, ten years since I have come out to my parents, but somehow I am still sitting on the same ivory couch, which is somehow still immaculate, like a couch in a dream. I have come to Boston to tell my parents the New York Times is about to run a profile on my work that will mention I am gay. Given how long I have been out to them, this revelation should not be momentous. And yet it is.

After I came out to my parents,