Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

Born in the Seventies and Eighties: Postmodern Memoirs

158 6 Born in the Seventies and Eighties Postmodern Memoirs The ’90s showed themselves to be a decade not much of new developments or new social revolutions but a new synthesis of the events characterizing the previous twenty- five years. Douglas Sadownick, Sex between Men It is not possible today for most men to view public sex (or any sex for that matter) except through the viral veil of safety and risk . . . for us younger men . . . who cannot retreat to the backrooms of 1976—because we were in grade school, or even diapers at the time . . . today’s public sex renewal does not represent a step backward in gay men’s sexual development-either to the days of liberation or from the horrors of the epidemic— but rather a step ahead in time toward a new kind of sexual and political expression. Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe Into the Millennium It has never been clear why Bill Clinton chose to make the issue of gays being able to serve in the military one of his first priorities upon assuming office in 1991. What is clear is that the controversy regarding gay life was brought to national attention. Gay life-writer Scott Peck, author of All American Boy, described in chapter 5 his father’s testimony before the Senate Armed Forces Committee. For men born in the 1970s, coming to adulthood in the 1990s, debates such as those regarding gay men and women serving in the military showed that alternative sexualities had become a recognized part of contemporary society. By the 1990s the two postwar cohort-defining events for the gay community were well understood; the gay rights revolution had taken hold. Even with such cataclysmic events as the assassination of San Francisco mayor Moscone and city councilman Harvey Milk, and the Anita Bryant antigay campaign, gay identity had entered the national political debate. When a group in Miami Beach sought once again in 2002 to repeal the antidiscrimination ban associated with Anita Bryant’s 1977 successful campaign, the national media acknowledged that gay rights had come too far for such campaigns to have any success. Andrew Sullivan (1995) has argued that at least within urban life homosexuality had become “virtually normal.” Others maintained that the time of the “postgay” movement had arrived, suggesting that the issue of sexual identity was no longer a salient issue in urban American life. Only a few holdouts such as Michael Warner (1999) were left to complain that this new visibility for gay and lesbian lifestyles was compromising traditional gay culture. Others complained that gay men still were not normal enough. Gay critic Michael Signorile (1998) continued to chide gay men for their fetishistic interests in public sex, pornography, and wastrel circuit parties fostering “crystal meth” and other substance abuse. An alternative perspective regarding the gay lifestyle of these recent generations of gay men, which contradicts Signorile’s (1998) portrayal of gay life, is reflected in the work of such out gay writers as Dan Savage (1999) and Jesse Green (1999), who describe their satisfaction adopting children and being fathers who also happen to be gay. Even sometime gay escort and gay porn producer Aaron Lawrence looks forward to the time when he and his husband, Jeff, can settle down in their suburban New Jersey home and become parents. Indeed, if the generations born in the postwar era were concerned with finding fathers in the ideology promulgated by misguided psychiatrists that their own fathers had been emotionally distant (Bieber et al. 1962), men born in the generations of the 1970s and 1980s were more concerned with becoming fathers themselves through adoption or cooperation with a woman friend. In these more recent accounts , such as that of 1970s-generation Kirk Read and 1980s-generation BrYaN Phillips, fathers are often portrayed as close, supportive, and indeed role models to emulate in becoming parents. The major mental health professions had long since removed samegender desire from diagnostic manuals of psychopathology. By the end of the decade even the American Psychoanalytic Association, the last of the mental health professional holdouts, had acceded to the view that homosexuality was, as Freud (1935) had put it, not necessarily a virtue but certainly not a vice. The American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), long dominated by a group of recalcitrant New York analysts under the leadership of Postmodern Memoirs 159 Charles Socarides, had insisted that same-gender desire re...