Having a strong female icon is somehow central to the gay identity (for more on that, pick up Halperin's book) and harkens back to the darkest days of gay identity when these troubled broads were the closest thing you could find to a representation of gay life. So in this age of mainstreaming, where gay men come out of the closet not to attend dinner parties of catty queens like themselves and the cast of Boys in the Band but to a room of welcoming members of society both straight and gay, how can we form a culture of our own? If there are a million ways to be gay, can we settle on a few key experiences every gay man should experience to draw them together?Įveryone needs a Kylie, even if you think Time Bomb is kind of a crappy song. It's a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.' As the New York Times review of his book points out, the thing that really brings gay people together is their culture. In his new book, How to Be Gay, professor David M Halperin says: 'Gayness is not a state or condition. Gay men and women don't share a place of origin, skin color, socio-economic class, religion, or anything else that would typify their experience. But, then again, maybe they gay community needs some sort of shared experience – outside of the experience of falling in love with a member of the same sex – to bring us together.
