On being gay before, like, 2005
I’ve been wanting to write something like this for a while now, and I’m not even sure if this is going to capture what I mean, exactly, but I’m going to give it a try. I want to try and describe the total, universe-altering sea change that’s taken place with the spread of gay culture since I was old enough to know that there was such a thing (I’m talking like, since the early or mid-90s). I know this isn’t news to anyone that this happened — it’s more just that, having now lived through it, I want to reflect on it. I admit, this post may lapse into a “when I was your age” old man rant. I’m trying to not do that. But I think some perspective on how quickly everything changed is important. To the extent it feels like maybe some of us can’t keep track of what the kids think about gay stuff and queer stuff anymore, well.. that’s what it means to get older I guess, right?
I graduated high school in 1998. I went to a very small school in a rural farm town, and while I’m not going to say the experience “traumatized” me in any way (it really didn’t — it was fine), it was definitely not where I “belonged,” you know? I did not fit in. I had friends and I was popular enough, but I knew I was different. I didn’t know why I was different though. I knew I was smart and focused and “a pleasure to have in class” and all that. But I honestly figured that’s all it was. I’m smart and neat and a little fussy about my clothes or whatever, and what else is there? I think most gays probably felt some version of this at some point.
But in 1992 or 1993, as I was just becoming a teenager and starting to become self-aware, I really didn’t know what gay was. In the literal sense, I knew, sure — but not culturally. How could I? Throughout the 90s, my knowledge of what it meant to be gay came exclusively from what I read in the Newsweek magazine that came to my parents’ house, which meant I knew two things: (1) AIDS was bad, and it was killing lots of people; and (2) RENT was on Broadway and lots of people loved it.1 (I had never seen a Broadway show or even been to New York of course, so this was a bit like getting society updates about what people were into on Mars). Neither of these pieces of information was something I could ever imagine as being relevant to my own sense of self.
RuPaul was a thing in the 90s. Richard Simmons was also a thing. But they weren’t gay. They were just .. performative. Like Marilyn Manson (shocking and outrageous, but not gay). Or Niles Crane from Frasier (silly and effeminate, still not gay).2 It was totally fine to think of gay things as being fun and different and weird and something you could get into. But they weren’t actually gay! Gay was something sad and lonely and private (except when it was over-the-top outrageous, which of course was just a mask to disguise how sad it really was). Maybe you knew someone or had heard of someone who was gay, but.. it was best to leave them alone and not talk about it. Because actual gays weren’t like RuPaul. They were more like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
This all sounds toxic and oppressive, I know. Sitting here in 2022, it sounds even judgmental and maybe hateful. But… it really wasn’t. Not at the time. It’s just what was. I can honestly say I didn’t know anyone growing up who went around being creeped out by gays or being overtly homophobic. It’s more accurate to say that — no one thought about gays or gay things at all — even when discussing things that were obviously gay (like RuPaul).
I can’t say definitively that this sort of dynamic was universal in all places throughout the 90s, of course. I didn’t live in a big city. I didn’t grow up around “cosmopolitan” people, whatever that means. But it was absolutely true from where I stood, in southwest Missouri. “Gay” didn’t exist as a category that pieces of culture could belong to. It wasn’t available an outlet for self expression in the 90s — not for me or for anyone else I knew. Thus, to be “gay” just wasn’t an option for someone in their mid-teens as a way to affirm or explore their identity.
I think back to my senior year in high school and my friend Marcus (not his real name). Marcus was extremely into Mariah Carey, and he had seen Titanic at least a dozen times, and he had a bit of a lisp when he talked. If anyone was gay-coded among the people I knew in high school, it was Marcus.3 But, within our friend group, this never occurred to us. At all. Marcus and I went to see the Spice Girls movie, SpiceWorld, in the theater in the winter of 1998, right as it came out. We went like, together. Got dinner at the mall, went to a movie. We were both excited to do this. It was not a date. It wasn’t a date because the notion of two guys doing anything like that romantically would have been so profoundly transgressive — so shocking and outside the norm — that we, as “good kids,” would never have even conceived of such a thing. That’s how off the radar gayness was for us in the 90s.
And to be honest, that’s just how it was until.. I don’t know. The mid-aughts? It was 2004 (two years post-college) before I ever had someone who was gay show an interest in me and I thought to myself, “wait.. is that.. is that ok? Maybe I’m not grossed out by that?” It was 2007 before I even thought maybe I would someday act on those feelings myself.
Everyone has their own journey, and my point is not that I was sheltered or late in finding myself (though I guess in some sense I was). And to be clear — I’m not saying that gays literally did not exist or that I didn’t know any when I was in college. It’s more just.. the ubiquity and visibility of gay culture that we take for granted now is so new and so overwhelming to comprehend. Twenty years ago, it just wasn’t there. No Queer Eye. No Will & Grace. No Drag Race. No Anderson Cooper, or Tom Daley, or Lil Nas X, or Lady Gaga Born this Way, or #LoveIsLove or rainbow flags or Pride Month at Target or the story of Stonewall — none of it. The best possible environment to be in was one in which parents, teachers, and older adults knew nothing about gay life or gay identity, because the most likely alternative to “nothing” was, well, probably some form of hate.
If you were a gay kid in the 90s, it was up to you to figure that out for yourself, because there were no culture clues or signposts to be found. The internet with its chat rooms and online gay porn would be a pivotal gateway for the kids who were maybe five or six years younger than me. But I missed that window, and the only gays I knew just seemed to exist in a world that I did not inhabit and that I could never imagine having any interest in. Maybe if I had been .. I don’t know. Braver? More rebellious? I would have figured out who I was a lot sooner. But I don’t think so. I needed the broadly visible cultural acceptance of ~gayness~ to become a thing in the world before I could realize that’s where I myself belonged.
I’d like to think I’m not that old and washed up (yet). But every time I meet someone who’s even five or ten or 15 years younger than I am, and I hear their story about being gay in high school.. I just can’t help be a bit mystified. I wasn’t gay in high school, and that’s fine. But neither was anyone else. It just — we didn’t know. We didn’t know. Part of me feels a certain measure of regret or sadness about that. If I had known at 17 what I started to suspect at 27 or 28, what choices would I have made? How would life have been different? But that’s part of getting old. You realize that the kids today have it better than you did in some ways (and worse in others). And on the whole, you’re happy for them.
Oh also there was Ellen. But she was a lady, and lady gays weren’t weird or threatening, they were just like.. women who liked to go camping and fish. Which was fine.
This is one of those generational gaps between Sam and I and the ten years that separate us. I’m able to see Niles as straight, because that’s just what he was to all of us who watched the show at the time. He was foppish and ridiculous, but he was straight. Sam just sees him as completely gay-coded. That the actor who played Niles, David Hyde Pierce, only came out years after the show was over really just underscores how weird this all was.
I can’t deny that Marcus probably did have a genuinely traumatic middle school experience, at least in part. I was not bullied in high school. I was tall and reasonably athletic, and I didn’t “present” in any certain way that the bullies would make fun of. Marcus was not so lucky.
Loved this! It’s wild how much things have changed even since I was in high school only 8 years ago. Media representation has helped, but there’s also been such a massive, rapid cultural shift in the last decade that seems historically unprecedented.