David M. Halperin: Style and the Meaning of Gay Culture

David M. Halperin, a professor of the history and theory of sexuality at the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming book “How to Be Gay.”

IT’S gay pride month again, and that means it’s time for the straight media to deliver its annual state-of-the-gay report....

Back in the Bad Old Days, or so the story goes, there was such a thing as an edgy, subversive gay male culture. But it was an artifact of homophobia. Older gay men may still thrill to torch songs, show tunes, classic Hollywood melodramas and Lalique; they may still spend hours arranging the furniture just so.

But all that foofy stuff looks irrelevant to modern gay men, who don’t see themselves as belonging to a separate culture, let alone such a queeny one. For today’s gay men, life is composed of PTA meetings, church socials and Nascar races.

The problem with such a claim — besides its denial of the Lady Gaga phenomenon — is that we’ve heard it for so many decades now that it can’t possibly be true. At least since the 1970s, gay men have been drawing invidious generational comparisons between gay boys in their teens and 20s — modern, liberated, enlightened, untouched by gay culture, “utterly indistinguishable from straight boys” and “completely calm about being gay” (as Andrew Holleran put it in his 1978 novel, “Dancer From the Dance”) — and older gay men, fanatically attached to an outdated gay culture and convinced that it is the only gay culture there is....