Are younger gay men more or less concerned with assimilation than previous generations?
The Newsweek column’s basic assumption is that younger gay people are “turning it down,” and, therefore, should be more likely to win marriage (which the author contrasts with TV representations of gay men, which are all too femmy, and therefore misrepresent us and hurt our chances of taking part in “sacred institutions” like marriage and the military). But is that true? Assimilation, or the idea that “We’re just like you except for loving the same-sex,” is not by any stretch of the imagination a new idea among gay and lesbian people. It goes back to Mattachine. What did change, since the mid-90’s, is that it stopped being a dominant or the dominant understanding of ourselves and became the only understanding of ourselves. And that goes all the way up the age brackets. The vast majority of gay men and lesbians of all ages right now have trouble even imagining another way of living or other goals. (A bright example of this was how “Bash Back,” a radical queer group focused on destroying
