When did queer culture become toxic?

A painful article to write, reflecting on years of GLBTQI activism. I’ll discuss how the fight for our right to be unique has taken a troubling turn, leading to a culture of conformity and commercialism that has stripped us from what made man to man connection intense and the lifestyle fulfilling. 

Queer culture and the GLBT world used to feel like home; now, it’s a very toxic environment, and for how much we all love it, we can’t truly deny its issues.

Love and Rainbows, but only if you conform to madness

Queer culture is all about sugary idealistic fantasies on inclusiveness at all costs, loving all the colors of the rainbows, and reinforcing the most extravagant and heavily engineered identity trends. Yet, this crowd is truly welcoming and inclusive towards those who conform to its tendencies, leading to several problematic dynamics.

Queer culture now demands conformity. If you don’t fit into the exact mold, such as being necessarily black, trans, feminine, non binary and so on, you face gratuitous discrimination. This exclusion extends to anyone who is cisgender and white, or who simply doesn’t align with the prevailing trends. The community, which should champion diversity, now marginalizes those who don’t conform.

As a result, we’ve strayed from our roots. The queer movement was once about celebrating individuality and uniqueness. Today, it feels like there’s an unwritten rulebook dictating how to be queer; and the most fun thing, is that they complain about this towards people who honor traditions. This culture of conformity undermines the very essence of what the GLBTQI community used to stand for.

What strikes me the most about the situation is how the same rights they dress up in colorful clothes for, are aggressively denied by them to whoever has a different opinion. When you try to confront them and invite them to a healthy discussion, you get immediately insulted and accused of being homophobic, retrograde, trapped in a toxic image of masculinity, that you are “cis” and suddenly, just because you were born that way and you genuinely feel ok that way, if you dare to enjoy being masculine in the most natural sense of it, or being linked to a set of values that today are not appreciated and so on, you are to blame. All of a sudden, they are perpetrating the same abuse GLBT people have been living for centuries.

How come that we have become this way? How come that at a Gay Pride you can jump on a car only if you are queer enough on their standards?

How come you are socially accepted by the main gay scene only if you take drugs, go to the gym for looks, alter yourself to fit into a standard? Why can’t your story be different and be valued and kept safe from homologation? Weren’t we fighting homologation?

Weren’t we the ones that were better, and respectful and taking care of diversity?

Glorification of Cruelty, Bitchiness and Brattiness

Cruelty and nastiness have become glorified, because queer culture has shifted role models from a world that they felt too “normative” (reads: too difficult, requiring integrity and hard work) to a world designed for entertainment and laughs, not certain for life.

Some examples are:

• drag queen shows based on the nastiness between the contestants, and not truly on the creative aspects
• queer educators who demonize traditional values and glorify freedom by decadence at all costs (overlooking the tendency to self – harm)
• The ideal of not having to conform to a life of work and responsibility, mimicking ways of reinforce narcissism as a lifestyle as success metrics (being a cash master, turning sex into marketing, and so on)

Look at the influence of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race. While entertaining, they’ve popularized a culture of shade and reading that encourages being mean-spirited. It’s one thing to have fun, but when cruelty becomes the norm, we’ve lost our way. The community’s heart is supposed to be about acceptance and love, not tearing each other down.

Where do we come from

I was a GLBTQI activist for several years, in which I dedicated with passion all of my energies to educate gay and straight people, and to be inclusive and positive, in order to fight globally against homophobia, oppression, discrimination and abuse on minorities. Something that the woke teenage world doesn’t understand, is that up to 2010 roughly, western world wasn’t what it is today.

I was enraged by how young people would not partecipate to civil rights movements with energy, underestimating the threat of a society which was not ready, in some areas worst than in others, to embrace multiculturalism and being respectful to all ideas and inclinations (and maybe, it’ll never be).

I have been trained to think taht we were all brothers and sisters, and I still think that we are. But we are still individuals and we still are all different, and we should stay that way. If you can still recall the time when you were free to have your own opinions, to be original in your own way, and to find a way of life that you validated, and not one that is validated by the masses, the whole agenda in the Queer and generally GLBTQI movement was to claim our right to be different, to be unique, to be special in our own way, and at the same time being considered normal in that, because we all have the right to be imperfect, we have the right to be humans.

Now, while we have been making some good progresses in that up to 2020, a short circuit have happened. Being gay implied, at some point of this revolution, not to have any strong set of rules. We were right out of the AIDS death toll, so we didn’t have the “Community” as it was intended in pre-AIDS time, one made of protection of one another, brotherhood, internal rules and mechanics, and such.

We were not ready to have our own made rules either, rules and codes that though existed before the HIV death toll, as an example in the Old Guard Leather Community (but not only that). Since society didn’t have a set place for us, we didn’t have any rail to follow. This was very scary, but also very liberating. You could do whatever you wanted, since society thought you were a worthless pervert anyway (and the damage of internalized homophobia is still kicking today).

So you could want a family, or you could want to be single all life, you could want to be monogamous, poligamous, poliamorous, you could want to just party and dance every day, and you could decide to claim your right to enjoying being a slut and taking as many cocks as possible for the sake of it. Those were roaring ages of a sort of sexual liberation, because at the time there was a need for sexual liberation. Are you really sure sexual freedom is what is still lacking today? Isn’t it maybe, instead, sexual connection that we’ve killed?

And with the arrive of PreP, while bringing an enormous improvement in the fight against HIV and its senseless stigma, this impacted also most of the gay men sexual behaviour towards safety, but that’s another story.

A Community adrift from Identity Based to Monetization Based

Quite soon, thought, we started to have a deep hunger for “more”. Once everything extreme has become permitted, it doesn’t feel so special anymore. It was great yeah, but what about that thrill of the conquer? What about being able to actually enjoy something because you had to work for it? That applies to sex too.

Maybe that’s why when most gay guys are done with their new grindr hookup, before he actually leaves the house they are already on grindr again? Gay culture started to cannibalize itself and its inner communities one by one, leveraging the feeling of being entitled to everything, because you are a minority; we have suffered, we have fought (well, the old generations did) and so now we want to enjoy everything; it’s understandable, but also dangerous.

Because the only drive in leveraging that sense of entitlement, is the commercialization of events, of parties, of drugs, of apps and of people. When the goal of the organizers in our community is merely and only monetization (and one must be very dishonest or a total idiot not to see this), leveraging glbt entitlement because of its minority has become a trend, and the very heart of the “woke” detour reality that the queer scene took.

Every community became easily accessible to everyone for the sake of doing it because “the other guys” was doing it, because it was “the new thing”. Take Leather, chastity, poliamory, genital modification… take anything that before was special and linked to a unique identity, had an history of it’s own and was about a personality, then commercialize it through professional aseptic pornography made only by “perfectly attractive models” (instead of men), commercialize it through parties, and put a price tag on it.

GLBT people will love it and buy it.

This happens because the gay community, for how much it likes to deny it, is still searching for itself, for its role models and its values; values that were lost after the AIDS epidemic in the late 80’s/90’s. So, fast forward to today, what is the result?

• Everybody looks the same
• Everybody goes to the same parties
• Everybody buys the same gear
• Everybody must use the same slang
• Everybody must “spill the tea sis”

Take all of this and mix the more pictoresque representation of some of the core assets of the Queer Culture, such as gender non binarism, gender fluidity, hyperfeminization as opposition to hypermachism, and so on, with what they have cannibalized.

Fascism is still fascism, even if it switches from black to pink

The act of cannibalizing every subculture diverging from an entity’s agenda, turning it into something without value and with free access to everyone, while commercializing it into a money making machine, and washing away the history of how things used to be by claiming “they never existed”, is fascist.

This is the pink fascist way throughout which a part of Queer Culture is doing a culture cannibalism of everything that has an history different from their Agenda. This is not how you empower a community, this is how you train men to be weak and spineless, by taking any seriousness, accountability, sense of duty and discipline, sense of honor and brotherhood, respect for traditions and respect for our natural biology (not talking about gender identity here AT ALL), and tossing everything in the garbage for all future generations.

The worst part is that this is reinforced by older men in the scene. They don’t want to face the fact that they are growing older, and they are afraid of remaining alone as it’s quite tough to be an older man if you didn’t fulfill your existence with a drive that has value to yourself; I guess that by luring younger generations into drugs abuse and hollow sexuality makes them feel less of a failure to themselves, as much a wiping out any culture based on integrity does.

Just count the number of the self-called “Daddies” who will offer you some “Tina” in order to get the party started and going. This kind of world cannot be accepted by and Old Guard Leatherman; apparently another difference between Old Guard and new guard is that this behavior in the second group is maybe not encouraged, but for sure not condemned either.

Older gay men used to Mentor. Now, they just mentor to use.

When I was in my early 20s I’ve met a guy who did Leather porn movies in the past; the way he look and spoke in chat was just right; the premises were just right. One day he contact me to let me know he was in my town and wanted to meet up. I’ve explained him I was home alone with a high fever and therefor it wasn’t possible to do anything, especially since I was concerned for my health. He proposed to still meet. I have refused several times. He was 56, I was 24; he started acting reassuring and saying he offered to just come and sit by my bed to keep company so we could watch a movie and he would watch over me.

I thought that was sweet and the mark of a real Man. When he came, we talked about Leather. I expressed my views, and when I’ve asked about his, he crawled on my bed coming towards me, and said “Oh baby. It’s just a different kind of Drag” and tried to kiss me.

I reminded him that I was sick and didn’t want to have any sex. He stated how nobody believed in “this shit” and that it was just a less colorful drag queen code, capable of opening you the gates to much many more and different cocks to suck. I told him that this is how people like him are raping a culture and murdering it.

I’ve seen this same kind of behavior from many, many older gay men, taking the roles envisioned in traditional Leather and non-Leather culture (being a mentor, a support, a voice of wisdom), just to bring on a sexual agenda with younger guys, as a way to cope with their middle life crisis.