For those of you who do not know me personally, I am Ben Pulka, and I am a gay man. As a human being that participates in society at large and consumes contemporary media, I have noticed an increase in gay, particularly homosexual male, content. After reading that opening sentence, your next thought may be a mounting feeling of joy, pleasure, or even pride. It seems nice to see more queer visibility in the media. It seems like there is nearly a constant stream of musical talents, shows, companies, and films that shed light on and depict gay stories and individuals. But to me (and hopefully to you after reading this), this feels like a never-ending barrage of pseudo-homosexual fodder that is actually doing more harm than good.
Let me clarify: I am asserting that the current “trend” of marketing “gay” culture, products, and stories to the general population is not progressive but actually regressive. Additionally, in this essay, the word “gay” is only being used by its definition of a homosexual male. After previously examining the treatment, perception, and commoditization of gay people in the context of film and television, I am shifting my focus to examining the mythology of gay culture and the legitimacy of the notion of gayness as identity.
The “trendification” of homosexual male culture may read as a ridiculous and laughable line, but despite how outlandish the words may look together, the concept is very real and quite serious. The term “trendification” here means commodifying gay culture into a trend so as to minimize an entire umbrella of identities, subcultures, lifestyles, aesthetics, and persons (all of these being very complex and having widely different origins of their own) into the neat and tidy packaging of a trend. Rendering what was previously observed as an identity into a product to be easily bought, sold, and marketed to the general population of people that are not gay. This isn’t good. It’s bad even aside from the corporate greed implications. To make my point as clear and efficient as possible, I will make an analogy: gay culture as an idea used to be like a finely constructed and designed garment, after this garment started to gain popularity it became trendy, and once a trend, this garment started to get mass produced and the quality and craftsmanship fell off. Most alleged gay culture you see now is relegated to dupes. It is basically the quality of something from SHEIN. Gay culture has been commercialized, period. We can see this trend cycle come to a head in tandem with the “Brat Summer” we just had.
This past summer we all paid witness to Charli XCX and Troye Sivan touring the world, earnestly celebrating the intersectionality of queer and club culture during the Sweat Tour. Before you stop reading, I think Brat was doing some good. I obviously loved the music, visuals, and memes just as much as everyone else. I think that Charli making an album leaning into club culture was sensical — she’s literally Charli XCX, and Troye Sivan making an album leaning into his homosexuality is equally sensical — he’s literally Troye Sivan. So, what is my issue? The issue was a legitimately blameless one. Charli XCX made an album and decided to tour with her friend Troye Sivan because it was a really great business move, and it was probably more fun to go on tour with a friend. This tour was immediately attractive to gay men due to the two artists being very popular musical artists in the gay community. As a natural result of this, the tour culture was heavily reliant on gay club aesthetics and experiences.
A great example of this rapid adoption of gay culture being the popularization of poppers. Poppers, for those not in the know, are inhalants that have deep associations with homosexual males for reasons I will not be writing about, but you are free to look it up. Prior to Brat Summer, the amount of people not involved in the gay club scene (or the other scenarios in which one may find poppers handy) that knew what Rush was, or just poppers in general, were few and far between. Now I feel like it is hard to go to a party and not see a straight (or straight-passing, I’m not trying to assume) girl running around in search of poppers. The widespread popularity of Brat and the Sweat Tour led to an almost inescapable cultural reach. Brat was everywhere, and gay was a part of that entity. This created a trendiness with gayness. Everything gay became really cool; gay was IT, gay was brat. But the bad thing about trends is that they are famously disposable and trivial. If something is just a trend, it is a fad, something that will be very popular very quickly but will not stay relevant in the long term. It’s just cool for now. When the trend is something as complex and real as homosexuality, this is even more detrimental.
But this issue extends beyond just commercialization and fads. We need to be more critical and decisive about what is gay culture? I have complicated feelings about how gay men should even be representing themselves. There is obviously much to be said for authenticity and pride, but in an increasingly tense and dubious political atmosphere, would it be a good idea to pivot towards prioritizing good PR? Maybe right now, the safest move would be to create an accurate and humanistic public perception. It is evident that some have difficulty seeing us as equivalent human beings. Maybe some even choose to see us as less than such, but it would be harder to deny us if it was more obvious that we are as regular as human beings can be. For added clarity, I think that this PR stink of all gays as flamboyant, hedonistic party animals isn’t necessarily a result of the behavior of gay people but rather the noise around the gay community. Many people in the fervor of Brat Summer were mistakenly observing that they were participating in gay culture. To them, this participation was via clubbing benders and huffing whippits. But I want it to be clear that gay culture extends far beyond clubs. Going into a gay club with your lady friends doesn’t make you immersed in, and understanding of, gay culture. There is no monolithic gay culture. It is as ridiculous a suggestion as saying there is a singular human culture.
The hallmarks of gay culture being decided and declared by non-gay people is so shallow and inaccurate because of the inherent complexity of gayness as identity. To wax philosophical: it is my belief that gayness, and more broadly, queerness, is so challenging for many people to grasp because it is uniquely abstract as a trait. I previously understood sexuality (for me, gayness) as a trait similar in value to eye color. It is part of someone’s makeup from birth (that is not a statement up for argument) and is just another of many qualities that can vary from person to person. Like eye color, sexuality can also vary in specificity from one person to another; some may have more of an icy blue while others have a color that resembles more the ocean, and likewise, some may feel stronger feelings of homosexuality than others. Interestingly, it is a trait of widely varying value to each human. To some, their own sexual identity is paramount to who they are as an individual, and others may see this as the trifling tip of their interpersonal iceberg. I realized it is only to me personally that gayness seems of equal importance as eye color. So it is not unreasonable to believe that just by nature, some people think their sexuality and sexual identity is a very important aspect of their existence, and thereby project that onto their observations of others. To come to a point: should we examine and attempt to define gay culture as an entity in itself, or should we eradicate the term and instead examine the broader and/or more niche collectives and cultures that make up each homosexual individual’s reality? I no longer think that it is constructive to umbrella gay people under one cultural mass. There is no one underlying thread that connects gay men other than same sex attraction, and that is not a feature definitive enough to create its own culture. Gay culture as a term is archaic; it is not representational of anything. There is simply no gay culture.
Admittedly, I used to be more subscribed to the concept of a gay culture. I would feel treaded upon when heterosexual men started flaunting poorly painted nails. I felt territorial of my turf. But it has taken time for it to become apparent to me that this feeling of gay identity and belonging is meaningless. Applying a certain product is no more culturally significant or genuinely unifying than it is just becoming part of yet another consumer demographic. I realized that wearing nail polish was not punk, and it didn’t make me any more of a genuine part of a cultural community. It just made me a human that consumed a product. It no longer holds the political meaning and weight I once ascribed to it. My current relationship with wearing nail polish is no less significant than me deciding how I want to do my hair. The gay culture saturating the media is nothing more than a clever marketing scheme.
So, if there is no gay culture, why is the fantasized and fictitious gay culture being mythologized by persons whom homosexuality does not concern? What is especially irksome about the idea of gay culture and its current visibility is that it is being used by so many other voices as a means to gain power or capital. Businesspersons are pedaling gay culture every year in June for Pride Month. They blather buzzwords on twitter (X) and celebrate a hollow culture of uncertain contents, breaking up the monotony of their routine ad campaigns and merchandise. Unsurprisingly, Gay culture is equally hot on the political stage. Politicians fight red herring cultural wars concerning queer and gay persons and cultures with the sincerity of a WWE fight and the authority of a wikipedia page. In this polarized, paranoid, and witch-hunting political era, drag queens are imagined to be predators to children and adults alike: perverted and evil. Honest educators have transformed into woke boogeythems hell bent on indoctrinating and corrupting children with a fierce and nonsensical hatred toward tradition and patriotism. Citizens defending their civil rights and liberties are construed as entitled and insurgent, dangerous and radical threats to American identity and the future of our country itself (which was founded on the alleged principals of liberty and justice).
In the abstraction of these twisted folktales, gayness has become convoluted and dramatized. What I demand from the government in relation to my sexuality is nothing beyond equality and security (which is already their purpose and obligation to provide to ALL the people of their country). There is no woke gay agenda. My simple demands are being stifled by all the excess mess obscuring gayness. We do not need marketing teams and trends creating an imaginary culture. We need to be viewed simply as humans. It needs to become unanimously observed that anti-gay legislation is as absurd as anti-blue eye legislation.
Politics aside, even just having visibility does not equate to representation. Just playing into this trendification of gayness doesn’t necessarily mean that anything good is coming out of it. It just reduces gay from an identity to a vibe. It’s literally reductive and trivializing. It makes gay men seem less like fully fledged human beings with depth and complexity, and more like fun and funny one-note characters, slightly removed from reality and the human experience. Brat Summer isn’t the first instance of this attitude being expressed towards gay men. GBF (Gay Best Friend) used to be a widely used term. Gay men were so tokenized that they became a commodity; it was a status symbol to have a gay guy as your bestie, with the idea being that all gay men are fashionable, funny, and cool, so they make great accessories. Obviously, this is a harmful idea, and it’s seemingly being reinvented and repackaged right now. The gay male community cannot be contained to a neon green square.
I could continue on in this same argument eternally. To retain the interests of the reader (and add more legitimacy to my argument), I will close by waxing historic. The insincerity of gay culture and invention and subsequent caricaturization of a gay identity is literally in opposition to our collective human nature. The following writing may seem to be dicey unless it is fully read through. Gayness is genuinely a new idea. Homosexuality as a term has only existed for under two centuries. Until exceptionally recently, sexuality has been isolated from identity. For most of humanity, the only words that were relevant to what we may now label as homosexuality were mainly specific to sexual acts between people of the same sex and occasionally referring to effeminacy in men or boys. In the historical record, sexual orientation was not a facet of identity. In Ancient Roman culture, sex held the same weight as hunger and thirst. This isn’t even much of an exaggeration at all; in Roman brothels, they had what are essentially menus of sexual positions painted on the walls. Ascribing so much ego toward sexual identity is seemingly unnatural and unintuitive to human beings. Perhaps this is the impetus for the amount of unrest and tension surrounding issues of identity and sexuality in political affairs. I am not claiming that sexuality does not exist and is unimportant, but I think that examining the possibility of minimizing the binaries and confines of sexual identity is a valuable and constructive conversation to humor.
Each human is a sum of their parts. I just think that the scales weighing the importance of these parts are being rigged. I do not think that sexual identity holds such an immense weight in the existence of each human being. We are being fooled and distracted by this mirage of identity as meaning. We as humans need to focus less on matters of identity (which have been overemphasized by marketing executives) and more on the security of our rights as a collective species. The issues at hand are not specific to LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s rights, or even race specific. This is an existential crisis that concerns all of humanity equally and indiscriminately. Maybe gay isn’t brat, but advocating on behalf of human rights definitely is.
Words by Benjamin Pulka
Graphic by Aubrey Lauer