Stonewall the QUEER SUMMER 2019

What goes less mentioned is that Stonewall was just two years old at the time, and when the first pride parade—then known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March—was held the following year, the bar had already shut down after timidly limiting its drink selection to juices. The space became a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a shoe store until its current iteration opened in 1990. As much as Stonewall galvanized the gay community, that community navigated both its 1970s heyday and the apocalyptic throes of the AIDS crisis without it. Pride finds a way....

“Circuit parties [gay raves] and parades are thriving. Grindr isn’t killing them and Grindr isn’t killing gay bars. Boredom is,” posits Daniel Nardicio, an impresario of gay nightlife in New York who also runs his own gay bar and cabaret, Club Cumming, with actor Alan Cumming. “Ooh, you have drag bingo? Drag brunch? Drag karaoke? Stop. Give me something new, not just a rainbow on a bottle of Absolut or a retirement home cliché hosted by a drag queen.”

Even as gay bars have ridden the acclaimed historic visibility of television shows including RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose, they’ve merely become “vessels for viewing parties” of those shows, adds Nardicio.

Gay bars are “stuck,” he says, and he has a theory about why.

“AIDS killed lots of artists and free spirits, but it also killed people who would’ve grown up to become mentors to everyone under 50 now. We grew up alone and without that sense of connection across generations. We lost them, and we’ve paid the price by slipping from the creative class to the consumer class. We went from radical to basic.” “Basic,” according to the Urban Dictionary of American slang, is one “only interested in things mainstream, popular, and trending.” Consider how derivative 2019 queer culture seems compared with 1967. Gay liberation pulls its punches....

In contrast to broad LGBTQ acceptance by the mainstream, queer culture itself has fought and fractured internally largely along racial lines. The idea of a united gay community in 2019 is as much a fantasy as there ever was for a demographic group whose sole uniting factor is sexual preference and societal marginalization—not, say, age, creed, career, class, color, health, or regionalism, the identities around which Americans often coalesce. So as gay bars embrace bachelorettes and other straight audiences even as they tell trans women they “aren’t real women,” or assert that centering blackness too much is “not good for the businesses,” there is actually more of a need for more vulnerable members of the queer spectrum to have spaces that feel safe to them, and exclusively for them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/the-american-gay-bar-is-down-but-don-t-count-it-out-just-yet

totally agree
so much basic
it's shit
i always say i wish i had grown up in new york in the 80s....without all the death.

gratified to seem some grousing about the gross corporate hedonism of pride parades, cuz I was starting to feel like a homophobe last weekend for having similar thoughts

are you kidding? half my contemporaries are morons, sorry ya shits

it's a miracle i found any gay friends in this city tbh

They don't come more basic than me, sorry to say.

waitaminit, surm are you in SF?!

you're high-end basic, dear

xp

omg no i wish! in NYC, sorry if i confused you!
and Eric i beg to differ. you have a big heart. that's p unbasic, shocking as that may be.

btw Happy Roundnumber Birthday, Eric!

The only thing I remember about the summer of '79 is I saw a double bill of Animal House and Putney Swope at my hometown theater.

Round number and rounder midsection!

all part of the otter to bear transformation

I'm having Jake over tonight
There's a real spark there!
He's adorable and sexy af and I'm a little bit pinching myself
!!!!

Jake Ryan?

Lol nooooo
Jake with the floppy hair who lives on my street and wants to watch horror movies with me!!!!!

damn, see what I miss by hating horror movies

:P he let me top and now I want a burger

Horror movies, topping and burgers?! Keep that one!

Omg right

hooked up with a dude at a wedding I attended -- Brooklyn's good for that sort of thing

Lol Brooklyn is so slutty. What did he look like?! Give us the deets

I don't get nuthin in Brooklyn

I feel lost that I haven't had my fill of Manhattan gays ever
Am I missing much?
This guy I was seeing recently gave me a dispassionate goodbye and I figured we came to parting ways but he texted last night
I'm gonna make him wait a few days before I respond.

I shaved my balls while listening to The Hidden Cameras this morning. Don't really care for the song that much but I really like the lyrics:

Hunting hair to find emotional grace
I am scared you'll see my body and know
That removing hair has taken over my life
And I don't know how to stop

I want another enema, nema, nema
Good waste is an oxymoron, moron, moron
My body is an exit wound, oh my wounds, oh my wounds
I want another enema, nema, nema

hairless balls make me sad

they also make you itch

I flip-flop on whether or not I'm a man who is crotch-hairy or crotch-shaven but usually it's just a once-a-year thing when it gets hot. I am rollerblading a lot these days, speaking of gay. I went 13 km yesterday, with my shirt off.

video or it didn't happen

when I had my stem-cell transplant my crotch hair fell out and frankly it was traumatic

Omg
That so is
I had a traumatic incident with hair removal last summer so this year I'm committed to being a total caveman beard and all

It doesn't need to be shaved to the skin for me, but I am no fan of a briar patch down there.

Ok admittedly I did trim yesterday

But like just the essentials

but Eric, it adds so much mystery

Save that bush for Jessica Fletcher.

Baahhhahhahhahahahhhhahahahahaha
She was (obv) just on my TV today

I find that pouring gin over the pubes causes them to gasp and self-immolate.

I love my boyfriend so much! We watched the pilot for Pose over dinner at his suggestion and it was weird and sad and beautiful and cheesy and I kissed him after dinner and it was so nice

We are going to Berlin for a vacation at the end of the month, what should we do? A friend is putting us up in Mitte

Yesss we have been watching pose too
It's a v strong show

you guys
i did not feel strong about my sensual encounter yesterday

Last night I watched the Press Your Luck reboot with my BF and it seemed like the right thing to be doing.

how long have you guys been together?

More than 3 years, somehow! (We were friends for 7+ years before that though.)

<3 :+) :+)

The real bummer about this set-up, and one which has set up a fairly big potential landmine up for us both, is that we respect each other too much as friends to actually go through with some of the fights that I think it's necessary to have with a significant other. (Not all of them; we have fought. Just not with the id fully unsheathed.)

necessary fights = why i have avoided having a S.O.

No Drama Morbama

You'll note I've started a tad fewer pointless fights on ILX these last few years.

i do know what u mean
conflict avoidance can backfire
but honestly sounds lovely!

Possibly controversial belief alert, but relationship fights, I think, are a useful tool in helping people better themselves.

they take a huge toll on me,
but admittedly
sometimes they have made me grow
(in a big way)
currently reading "why buddhism is true"
i like it!!!

i like to grow alone

mediocre is often good enough.

not ready to start a fall thread yet (maybe cuz it's 89 F in NYC today) but i can't think of a good title.

fuck. so ready for 65 degrees.

ummm also Alfred that's a really good tip

xp from my own post in the "nobody goes to the theater" thread but i love this musical and wish everyone would give it a listen so:

The OST for the outrageously good and crazy wordy "A Strange Loop" came out today - described by the Liz Phair loving playwright/composer as a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd searching for meaning by writing a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd who writes a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd searching for meaning - and it's great.

Author is Michael (r) Jackson, so he names the lead of his roman a clef "Usher" and he's an usher at a Disney show. Highly recommended!
https://open.spotify.com/album/7vlAmEdZEOVdRUsB4fgrvC?si=1MkKwKxrSPKsLgS_qkobmg

"Inwood Daddy," in context, is fucking devastating

Ahhh hahahah that sounds so awesome!!

i think you'll love it fgti, kinda has your name on it; would love to see you and jackson collabo.

so i just started getting furniture in my bach pad
feels so gooood

including the waterbed?

ha that would be the day

summer is over, queers

THANK GOD

Do not accept.

are you saying we need a new thread morbzy?

i have a really unpopular title ready, so beat me to it

No please share.

Hurry up and make the thread I have sumthin to say

https://66.media.tumblr.com/d1b2b986c8e1ef88e9f1f57f29725a01/tumblr_p542ecSrAK1tstd16o2_250.gif

Oh no, I was posting that in a Jazmine Masters voice

--- - Oop

Canceling Ellen and the NFL: QUEER FALL of 2019