It was just a few weeks ago, in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, that I realized the label for this era was the "decade of the gays." In light of all that's happened since--the appointment of a gay Episcopalian bishop in New Hampshire, a gay Supreme Court judge in Oregon, the creation of a gay high school in New York, the acceptance of queer marriages in Canada--I must now amend my statement.
The reality is that we are on the cusp of something much, much bigger: "Generation Gay."
We had "Generation X" in the late '80s. We had the "Me Generation" of the early 1970s. We even had the "Baby Boomers" of the '50s and '60s. But now in the double aughts, homosexuality has taken hold of the modern consciousness.
Splashed across the pages of every newspaper and magazine, we're inescapable. Don't believe me? Just look at the ratings for this summer's hottest television show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
And just like every other new generation that's been labeled, marketed and eventually dissected by students at liberal-arts colleges, this generation of homos should expect the inevitable backlash.
We must be ready to face the fact that all this media attention is going to piss people off.
Already Americans are cooling off toward queers. According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup Poll survey, support for legal relations between homos is down 12 percent, the lowest since 1996. On top of that, conservatives who think we've become too big for our bitches are telling every cable news show that we are big, dirty whores. So, OK, they've got us on that one.
It's only natural for us to want to celebrate our victories, but I think it's time that "the love that dare not speak its name" shuts the hell up. While we're making major strides here, folks--at a speed that only a few years ago would've left us dizzy--imagine how frightened conservatives are of this new world order.
So how do we go where no gays have gone before? My suggestion for this brand-new generation is for every step we make in our eventual acceptance by mainstream culture (it's too late to stop us now, Mr. Limbaugh) we must bring the rest of the world into the conversation.
I really don't want the next few years to be focused on whether or not gay people get treated fairly in the workplace--or any place for that matter. But rather that all people get treated fairly. By allowing the media and all its pundits to frame the world's ills on whether or not gays should have civil rights means we are beginning to lose sight of the goal.
It's a big world. And queers, I'm told, are just 10 percent of it. Every time we let politicians bash gays instead of focusing on health care, the environment or balancing the budget, we are losing the battle.
We are not taking over. There's no homosexual agenda. We're just finally coming out of the cultural closet.
And once you get to know us, you might be surprised to see just how much we have in common.
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