“Mainstream gay culture seems to aspire to living life as though it takes place in a photo spread in a glossy magazine or the set of a
sitcom. People leave behind everything that distinguished them before they came out. I think it’s perhaps a reaction to the ostracism that many gay people faced in high school, only instead of embracing difference, they’ve embraced conformity.” Ewww—is too fackin true.

kisses.

But seriously, I understand 100% what you meant by the definition of ”culture”; I had the exact same one in mind. The only thing that bogs me is the fact that sexuality is, as you very well said, a fluid thing and not something that has an effect on an entire persona.

My question is: How different has queer culture to be different from others? Maybe it’s only me that didn’t get into it enough, but I never succeeded in pin-pointing what could be part of queer culture, and what could not. Because I don’t think that a bunch of artists of all sorts working together can claim to create ”gay art” with the sole fact of being homosexual. There must be something more to it, right? Or if there’s not, I can’t tell what changes from the mainstream culture to more alternative ones.

The term you use, community, is totally interchangeable with the term culture in this respect. Culture has more of a refined quality to the way it’s heard, while community is more loose. It makes sense you’d see the term culture and not like how it applies to something as fluid as sexuality, but in my opinion culture is just as valid a word as the things anyone else does.

Sexuality defines us as much as anything, and the things people do in the name of their identity (be it on a grand scale or a smaller one) is what defines what a culture is and is not. But, like I said before, culture and community can be interchangeable. It’s just a matter of what term you prefer to apply to it.

Culture, to me, refers generally to an ethnical or geographical setting, and it’s not news that gay people have been a part of every culture since forever. Looking at myself, I consider that I am Canadian, caucasian, eat the same food than other people here, have more or less the same values. Being gay or straight does not enter in my criteria to define which CULTURE I belong to.

Now, I think for sure there are gay COMMUNITIES; it’s fairly frequent to see coalitions of gay filmmakers, artists, musicians, and so on. Although I’ve always wondered what differed that much from typically ‘’straight” and ”queer” alternative communities ( and to a certain point - why they were apart), I do acknowledge their existence.