What Was Gay?
If I had to reduce gayness to its most fundamental aspect, its most unadorned truth, it would be this: Gayness begins in the practice of paying attention, deeply and with great skill.
.. Enter cruising. Usually when we talk about cruising, we’re talking about the venerable gay practice of picking out, and perhaps picking up, other gay strangers on the street or at the bar with little more than a glance, a half-smile, and a nod.
.. When homosexuals say they no longer identify as gay, what they are asserting, at least in part, is a belief that they no longer need to cruise.
.. But drag queens don’t exist to make fun of femininity or gay gender expression per se; rather, they take the mask-wearing that our society requires of us as a mundane function of existence and turn it into entertainment
.. In his engrossing study of the midcentury paranoia over gay influence in the arts, Michael S. Sherry recalls that because gay artists were obliged to approach American life like foreigners, they were compensated with an outsider’s insight into institutions like the nuclear family and patriotism—and what Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and others reflected back in their work was not always pretty.