Can the phenomenon of male gay groups be discussed as “colonies”? Male gay persons are defined by a scattered, low-frequency, recurring biological difference from the main mammalian sexual desire spectrum that is marked enough to make that person feel different in a way that can have radical consequences if the dominant culture stigmatizes or even criminalizes that desire. Normally it appears with the onset of adolescent puberty, so it is clearly an aspect of sexuality. As if a teen didn’t have enough trouble already.
Sexuality is so plastic and individual, that it can adapt to many conditions. One thing that can happen is early sexualization, possibly physical but also maybe psychological desire diverted from something else, maybe as basic as survival for a small child. Equally radical in results is the connection of sexuality to violence, which is not necessarily bound to gender or age. However, violence is bound to domination, the ability to get away with it, so it depends upon a difference in power between the dominator and the victim, like that between a powerful adult and a child or woman. The impact [sic] on both sides is major.
Since power is seen as a mark of superiority, those who are uncertain of their superiority will use violence and will be looking for undefended vulnerable others. Maybe the vulnerability will not be gender-related, but minority status or enemy identity. That is, the uncertainly powerful (cops?) will try to “colonize” certain categories (blacks?). We’re seeing this demonstrated by unemployed, uneducated, and undeveloped white males waving tiki torches.
Because desire is normally private (art is not normal) in case it is not conventional or simply nonexistent, for centuries we’ve known of individuals who were gay and revealed as such either because they were radicalized, flaunting their own individuality, or because they were radical and their gayness was revealed by enemies as proof of decadence. Maybe there hadn’t been homogenous [sic] groups that could be called colonies of gay men until they burst onto the scene in the Sixties and Seventies.
One theory of this group forming in San Francisco about the time of the Vietnam War is that the military, esp. the Navy, was so vigorous about identifying gays and throwing them out (not that some of them minded and some non-gays were even able to see the advantages of claiming that status) and so inclined to just dump them at the closest port (SF) that they naturally formed into a group, because they had a double bond: gay and military. They were also full of questions about what was good and right — many confused messages to process -- which created a political solidarity supported by a worldwide revulsion against colonizers everywhere.
It’s pretty easy to see these men as a colony with language and practices, even boundaries within the SF housing scene. What had once been a here-and-there happening, now had enough power to be a voice. Occasional attempts at domination by the larger culture were resisted, mostly successfully.
Then came the same overwhelming force that had pushed the indigenous people into minority dependent status: disease. This time it was not smallpox but HIV/AIDS imported from Africa, the same as smallpox was when it spread through Eurasia 10,000 years ago. Disease is the ultimate colonizer.
A dispersed colony is called a diaspora, and surviving gay men spread to friendly beaches everywhere. A core remained and showed their heroism by faithfully nursing those who were not just desired but loved. Gay males are not just like each other in every way. Some created pair-bonds and some built on those as families, raising children. But those who treated adolescents as sexual partners — maybe avoiding violence but not other forms of unavoidable dependence and authority — triggered cultural revulsion and criminalization to the point of suppression.
The resulting pulling-away of the mainstream left the most vulnerable adolescents — the ones with same-sex desire — without points of attachment for understanding and support. This was ameliorated with drugs, self-abuse, dark defiance, and predation for survival. The public response was incarceration. Yet most het adolescents, both genders, in the process of forming their own morality, were able to accept gay males. In fact, many females found them to be good friends and a relief from the sexual scrimmage of mating. This is in our literature.
There is a large and growing world body of gay male literature, some of it classic: Whitman, Pasolini, Oscar Wilde. Netflix always lists gay films. But they are on a long spectrum according to violence, health, inclusiveness, political activism, art, religion and so on. It’s impossible to separate porn from mainstream, esp. if you take the French attitude that violence is a more intense porn than sex. What little bit of exploration I’ve done was — well, I can’t think of an adjective that isn’t a double entendre.
One “kind” is the stable group of men who love each other — a kind of commune — and express it physically, which the larger culture calls porn and which they sell as such, in the way that the Amish sell quilts as a sort of ethnic craft. The tiny bit of one vid that I saw was domestic: gardening, cooking, laughter while standing around joking — what the English call “happy families” but without the irony. I’m told that gay men are embarrassed to own these vids, maybe because they reveal the love behind the sex.
This is a defense I’m making, but it’s also a gesture at decolonization, to take away the idea that a biological difference is necessarily depraved, but not to take away their right to be a unique group by forcing them to include women or even children if they don’t want to. Individual liberty to make choices is the ground of my defense, but I can’t really defend why I would want to think about gay male colonies because I am not and could not be included in any. I’m in the position of a white person writing about Native Americans, though I can’t write a book pretending to be a male gay. Or can I? Should I? Should a gay male pretend to be me or vice versa? Why would that be stigmatized?
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