Gay culture?

I went to post this in this thread on @forumz, but the server crapped out, and hasn't come back, and I didn't want to lose it, so I'm posting here instead.

Loca!
My life would suck without Tom of Finland.

I always wonder about the concept of a gay culture, as I don't believe there is a particular culture associated with the gay orientation, but there are subcultures which are tied together or grow out of a shared outsider experience. Whether it arises out of a need to have some kind of identifier to an outside world, or as a way of signalling to those in the know that you too are "that way".

For example, the polari slang grew as a way for gay men to comfortably chat about their orientation, who they fancied, any gossip, and signal their orientation to others without people outside of the sub-culture understanding what they were talking about. So it grew out of the illegality of the orientation and the activity. It's also interesting to look at, as it has virtually disappeared since the laws changed in Britain, and it just wasn't necessary anymore.

Is anything created by a gay artist automatically a part of the gay culture? Is the gay culture not just then a hodgepodge of many different types and styles of artistic expression only grouped together because of the sexual orientation of those artists? There's no such thing as a gay style of music, is there? Is there a particular style of gay art? What makes it so other than conveying same-sex attraction? Then what of straight artists who deal with gay themes? There's a straight female Irish author who has written two novels featuring primarily gay characters and the gay scene. Is this then a part of gay culture because of the subject matter? Or should it be disregarded as it's an outside opinion of gay life?

Conversely, I was one of the organisers of Pride here in my city this summer, and that's supposed to be a big representation of the gay community in the city. So we tried to organise a diverse range of all kinds of events to try and reflect the diversity inherent in the community. Which only served to show me that there's no such a thing as a gay culture as it's so multifaceted as to be a completely irrelevant umbrella term to connect people of a similar sexual orientation. Gay culture has always been a part of the mainstream culture, whether overtly or not, as the arts has always been a haven for more liberal thought, and gay expression more likely to be tolerated or accepted. Indeed, two of the major theatres in Ireland were set up by a famous gay couple in the first part of the 1900s in Ireland.

Unfortunately, a lot of gay people feel the need for some kind of tangible connection to other folk with the same orientation, and take on whatever is considered to be a part of their new lives. Sure coming out is a life-changing experience, but it's not supposed to completely change who you are. Especially witih gay boys - who become exaggeratedly camp, and pop-loving or whatever stereotype they ascribe to initially in their quest for self-identity as a gay man. You see the same happening with lesbians - often due to pressure from within the lesbian scene. Femme lesbians are only starting to be tolerated in my city, for example, but still there are women who will berate more feminine lesbians for being a true lesbian.

A lot of gay culture I believe is utter bullshit that has been drawn up to tenuously link people of a similar sexual orientation to create an identifiable concept of what a gay person is in order to present something tangible in order to fight together as a group for equality and rights. People who feel a part of a group are more likely to do group events  and pride events capitalise on this false sense of a wider gay culture.

If you were to talk about sub-cultures that are more prevalent with lesbian or gay orientations, then there'd be something more concrete there, but I don't think there is such a thing as a great grand gay culture which a gay person ascribes to or not. And I've not even touched upon the argument that as a gay person comes out and breaks out of the societal norm, that they are also more open to breaking out of the restrictions placed within society on conforming to a particular stereotype (how many jocks love musicals? how many alternative music lovers are into interior design?)  If anything, coming out as gay enables the person to also break down any of the other categories that people get boxed into, but this notion of a gay culture seems to suggest that once someone comes out they must then love Judy / Madonna / Edmund White / whatever else is considered to be gay.

I say bollox to all that :) A gay person can like whatever they like. Sometimes it follows a pattern of what other gay people relate to - usually themes of isolation, being an outside, heartbreak or unrequited love as they are themes which feature frequently in the lives of a gay person until it becomes more of a non-issue. Indeed a lot of gay people go out of their ways to be not associated with the gay community or anything gay related as they don't relate to what is considered to be the gay culture.

There are some parts of gay culture which are exclusively gay, and not really a feature of the wider culture at all, nor do they have much chance of becoming a part of it, but that's things like the bathhouse/sauna sex culture, or two-way love triangles, but usually they're linked into either sex, or the unique situation of liking someone of the same sex, which of course reverts back to being linked into sex.

So while the primary connection between gay people is that of sex, the only other ones that specifically link gay people is the outsider status/isolation/shared experience of having to deviate from what is considered the norm, that that's only still the case while sexual orientation is still such a big issue in many parts of the world, and the gay rights movement is fighting to change that, which would then negate that connection, leaving just sex as the main connection between all gay people.