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    Sean BrodyRich Juzwiak
    3/04/16 5:19pm

    And I think the marriage equality battle was important and it’s important that we won it. I also think that it came at a really great cost. And that cost was a marketing campaign that took queer lives and translated them into values that could be appreciated by people who are disgusted by queer people.

    I have long thought that the great victory of modern gay culture and the marriage equality movement was to stop the public at large defining gay men by what they did in bed, and instead by who they were as people.
    I don’t know if that’s so much a cost, as a leveling of the playing field and starting over.

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      Sid and FinancySean Brody
      3/04/16 5:28pm

      Also, defining anti-gay bigotry as “homophobia.” I don’t love the imprecision, but it sure was a genius PR move.

      (I just read an article about this, but I forget where. NYT? New Yorker?)

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      frankwalsinghalmSean Brody
      3/04/16 5:36pm

      ...it was also the elimination of traditional gay culture. So, now maybe sex is a key defining point, which is boring.

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    eXtoferRich Juzwiak
    3/04/16 5:33pm

    I really appreciate your viewpoints on being gay and writing about gay things. I also appreciate that Greenwall’s words resonate with you strongly.

    I hope in my lifetime that I encounter someone that can resonate with me that represents my feelings, struggles, etc, as a gay man. Not that they’re unique. I just feel like sometimes I live in a completely different world than most other gay guys.

    I sometimes feel like I am not a part of the community that we all celebrate because I don’t call my friends “gurl” or I don’t go to clubs every weekend or I don’t actively pursue sex, anonymous or otherwise. Not that I think anything is wrong with all of the above.

    I am a 36 year old gamer, a geek, a podcaster. I have a life-partner. I’m fairly liberal and see absolute value in all things gay rights. Greenwall’s words above all sound correct. But somehow there’s a disconnect between what he’s writing and me. As if I somehow missed a sermon on gay culture that I should have learned from years ago.

    It’s very disconcerting for me and I think maybe other gay guys. I dunno. Just my thoughts.

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      ThidrekreXtofer
      3/04/16 5:42pm

      Introverts are always going to have a hard time finding kindred spirits, irrespective of one’s sexuality. “Community,” on the other hand, is pretty much always an expression of extroverted qualities. I also like to remember that “people” are different than “individuals”; you might find that you have quite a bit in common with some of those gay guys who seem otherwise incomprehensible in groups from afar.

      I don’t exactly have room to judge, though—what you’ve written here might as well have been written by me...heh. I’ve just learned to be more at peace, I guess.

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      puncha yo bunseXtofer
      3/04/16 6:09pm

      We’re all different, man. If I had a nickel for every time I read a post like yours/heard someone say something like this, I’d be Donald Drumpf by now. You know, if he’s not grossly overestimating his worth. Which is not to belittle your experience, but is to say—trust me, there are many and varied a gay person out there.

      And I completely agree with the poster above me in terms of extroverts typically being the people to define a visible community that people refer to. Just the way it is, for better or for worse.

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    raincoasterRich Juzwiak
    3/05/16 8:15pm

    As someone who exists primarily online, where we choose our own neighborhoods and rarely encounter strangers except by choice (and it’s generally not my choice to do so) I appreciate this. It’s expanded my world. These are the kinds of conversations I’d have with co-workers at Starbucks, which is where I learned to throw off the homophobia I was raised with, and begin to understand the gay way of life along with the dangers of homophobia. The partner of a very good friend of mine was killed in a homophobic assault, for which no one was ever convicted, and the police didn’t treat it as a serious crime, although it was clearly the most serious of all. I wonder what that gang went on to do with their lives afterwards. If I’d never worked for that company, I’d probably have gone on blithely assuming homophobia was a made up PC thing.

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      Geofferyraincoaster
      3/12/16 1:08pm

      What “gay way of life” have to come to understand?

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      raincoasterGeoffery
      3/14/16 1:46am

      Darling, I would never claim you have come to understand anything, ever.

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    Ossetia von AzerbaijanRich Juzwiak
    3/04/16 6:58pm

    On the point of sexual discourse, though, I often think about how much of definitions of queerness depend on living sex-filled life. Which on the face of it, makes sense: for many, gay is a sexual identity. It defines who men and women who identify as such have sex with and, perhaps, eventually partner with. But I wonder if it isn’t also myopically sexualized, perhaps because I’m also wrestling with the situation of gayness within queerness more generally. I think marriage-, family-, and sex-centered narratives all leave out important questions about gay life and identity that fall outside of sex and relationships.

    As someone single and whose sex life petered out from disinterest in the ways in which many other men seemed to want to connect, I’ve had a bit of an existential crisis from feeling like I wasn’t doing gay right, literally. Was I still a gay man and expressing queerness if I wasn’t having sex or partnered? I think there’s something more to queerness (and the gay it contains) to be expressed than the binary of sexless, sanitized monogamous families and flexible, vocal sexual liberation. Ongoing psychological vulnerabilities (including but also beyond suicide ideation), social and political alienation, and gender-performative questions are just a few that come to mind. Those, in my view, are some of the most complex and difficult stories to tell.

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      Emperor SheevRich Juzwiak
      3/04/16 5:19pm

      I don’t need to buy/read a book to develop my identity as a gay man. And people who feel they need to are kinda sad in my view.

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        Gaying Mantis TobogganEmperor Sheev
        3/04/16 10:05pm

        I pity those who pity people.

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      The noble houseRich Juzwiak
      3/05/16 8:45am

      Ummmm, from reading the description it seems like the crux of the book is the relationship between a prostitute and a john. I’ll pass, and I have no issue with gay topics or gay writing or gay sex being described.

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        GeofferyRich Juzwiak
        3/04/16 6:51pm

        If this is the “Great Gay novel of our time” we’re in a heap of trouble. It seemed recycled, probably because I’d already read the first section, published earlier as “Mitko.” Also, a sick, tatterdemalion hustler? Hardly “novel.” Maybe I’m just a crank, but I just don’t see the greatness.

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          gadflyGeoffery
          3/04/16 10:30pm

          Extra points for use of the word “tatterdemalion.” Also, as a gay lady I totally agree that most gay men that I know and with whom I hang out are not the hustler/bathroom kind of guys. In fact, almost none. Am I missing something? I live in a giant southern city.....

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        zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzRich Juzwiak
        3/04/16 5:30pm

        The slim novel, which chronicles a multi-year relationship between its narrator and a hustler named Mitko that he hires after meeting him in a bathroom under the National Palace of Culture in Sofia

        First draft appeared on literotica.com, home of many similar stories that “have the possibility for a kind of ethical spark that can engage the entire gambit of moral and emotional response”

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