Green Means Go!

tylercoates:

About two months ago, Paul Aguirre-Livingston, a 24-year-old writer and blogger, approached The Grid with an idea for a personal essay about what it’s like to be part of the first group of gay men to come of age in Toronto in the era of legalized gay marriage. He had coined a term—the Post-Mo—to describe himself and the extended group of men he socializes with in downtown Toronto. This group of people, he said, has never had to fight its government for equality. Thanks to the internet, they were able to explore their sexuality as young men—ask questions, get answers and meet like-minded youth—from the safety of their bedrooms. They don’t feel the same connection to the city’s annual Pride festivities or the Church-Wellesley Village that previous generations did. In fact, he saw it as a mark of success and progress that young gays in Toronto had spread out into the city, east and west, and rejected the notion that there was a designated strip where the bulk of their socializing should get done. Other writers have expressed similar feelings of disconnection from the Gay Village in the past, but Aguirre-Livingston’s was a point of view we hadn’t heard before, and one we thought would be of interest to our readers. We knew that not everybody would like or agree with what Aguirre-Livingston was saying, but the gay community, like any large group, is not a monolith—it contains multitudes of perspectives and we believed there was room for one more.

…

The weekend before the piece appeared, we shot the accompanying photos at a Royal Canadian Legion. Aguirre-Livingtson invited people he knew to come and be part of the Post-Mo shoot. He asked them via email to “Please read the details about the piece first…If you don’t feel this way, please feel free to decline.” Here’s how he described his piece:

“[It’s about] the new generation of gays who feel they shouldn’t be so radically defined by their sexual orientation, choosing to live their lives outside of the village, how they want, and who do not feel forced to define anything or be hyper-political and ‘I’m here, I’m queer’-ish. We’re just guys who want more than just to be ‘the gay guy’ because that doesn’t inform our place in society or what we do—just who we sleep with. You may be on one end of the spectrum or the other, but you can’t deny [that] we definitely don’t share the same ideals or battles as the previous generation.”

In this response piece, the editors of The Grid make the point that their cover story was a personal essay (which, fine!). It does not, however, excuse the author’s complete disregard for history or even current struggles! It is personal, sure, but it’s an opinion piece, as well, some sort of attack on the idea of “mainstream gay culture,” which is not even really a thing that exists. What bothers me more than the insular nature of the piece (of course this guy just picked his friends to be photographed, and of course the magazine used quotes from them as if it were a reported trend piece!) is the flippant nature that the author used when describing the health risks of “having all of the sex [he] wants” while having not “held a guy’s hand in almost three years”: “I have regular HIV tests, because I’m aware of the importance of sexual health, but I’ve still managed to forget the condom once or twice without freaking out.” That’s just the tip of a massive iceberg, a new culture of selfishness running rampant among young gays who have come to maturity during a time when AIDS was no longer a major concern and for whom those “It’s Never Just HIV” ads were created.

It seems clear, of course, that this is a case of classic link-baiting. Scott made the good point that these sorts of opinion pieces pop up every June right on the cusp of international gay pride marches. And, unfortunately, we had to read another one, with the same post-gay message, and “post-mo” isn’t that much of a creative spin on a tired concept.

(Also, THE FUCKING BOW-TIES. Seriously.)