I graduated high school in 2008. UNC, like many colleges, gave its freshman class a summer reading assignment and expected students to arrive in the fall prepared to discuss it. That year, the book was Covering by Kenji Yoshino. This reading assignment was serendipitous samizdat for an out-ish gay boy from rural Georgia in 2008. In brief, Covering is about how conforming to the norms of the sexual and racial majority can be harmful for minorities. The important thing here, though, is that the book made passing mention of Andrew Sullivan's 2005 essay for The New Republic called "The End of Gay Culture," which I duly located using our dial-up connection, downloaded and printed. "What is this?" my mother inquired in a somewhat concerned tone after seeing the text on my bed with highlights and annotations. "It's in connection with the summer reading assignment," I said, which wasn't false but felt like a sort of lie of omission.
I don't remember much about Covering, but "The End of Gay Culture" changed my life. It came to me at the moment I needed it. It is a hopeful vision of the world to come in which being gay is comfortingly banal. Reading it today, you are transported back to a moment in history of anxiety and anticipation, a society on the precipice of great and inexorable change, and Andrew's prescient vision of history set in motion.
The essay opens:
I don't remember much about Covering, but "The End of Gay Culture" changed my life. It came to me at the moment I needed it. It is a hopeful vision of the world to come in which being gay is comfortingly banal. Reading it today, you are transported back to a moment in history of anxiety and anticipation, a society on the precipice of great and inexorable change, and Andrew's prescient vision of history set in motion.
The essay opens:
For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. It has long attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the bohemian; and, for many years now, it has been to gay America what Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard is to black America: a place where a separate identity essentially defines a separate place. No one bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple pecks each other on the cheek, or if a drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter. It’s a place, in that respect, that is sui generis.
At the time, Cape Cod just sounded like a vaguely New England place. I can confidently say that until I read these words I had never heard of Provincetown. It sounded idyllic, but as Sullivan notes, hardly removed from the broader trends of society. Ptown was gentrifying, real estate was getting expensive, class was a marker of difference as much as race or sexuality. And even while it stayed unique and special, in many ways Ptown was converging toward the rest of society. Less and less people showed the outward signs of suffering from AIDS, more couples were coming to the end of the Cape with kids in tow, and of course, a lot of gays were getting married. You could do that in Massachusetts in 2005. In that way, the tip of Cape Cod was the tip of the spear.
I went to Ptown for the first time in 2019, and fell in love with the place. It's hard not to if you visit in the summer. I hadn't forgotten "The End of Gay Culture." I thought about it a lot during the week. I even had the great fortune of meeting and briefly chatting with Andrew Sullivan during Tea one day -- he's still there every summer. I think I said I was a huge fan but came nowhere near expressing how impactful he was on my life. It was a euphoric week. My friends and I decided we had to come back every summer.
Then COVID happened. I missed the chance to get back to Ptown in 2020, and then again in 2021. Along the way I found love and this summer I ended up going to Norway to meet my boyfriend's family. I missed the summer 2022 Ptown trip but knew I was coming in the fall, in October, for the wedding of one of my closest friends from college.
In "The End of Gay Culture," Andrew writes:
Outside my window on a patch of beach that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I watched dozens get hitched—under a chuppah or with a priest, in formalwear or beach clothes, some with New Age drums and horns, even one associated with a full-bore Mass. Two friends lit the town monument in purple to celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple slipping onto the beach was suddenly greeted with a huge cheer from the crowd; an elderly lesbian couple attached cans to the back of their Volkswagen and honked their horn as they drove up the high street. The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little.
The story of my own life, and that of my American generation, has been the the inexorable retreat of gay difference, what Sullivan beautifully called "a new consciousness that is immune to any law and propelled by the momentum of human freedom itself." The fact that the contours of sexuality seem increasingly blurred to the point of absurdity, in one respect, affirms the washing away of difference. I am a Sullivan-ian if there ever was one. The end of gay culture is bittersweet. Pour one out for the pioneering generation, look forward, and embrace the better world. Today, many people dismiss this vision as "trad" or worse, but it's still the one I hold dear.
At the wedding reception, bathed in the warmth and happiness of love and fraternity (and the euphoria of a few martinis), I vividly recalled myself in the summer of 2008. I was overtaken by the sense that things had come full circle. I tried to convey it to a newfound friend over a cigarette. I couldn't really find the words. At 18, the idea of me being 32 at a beautiful wedding in Provincetown among the lifelong gay friends I was about to make would have been fantastical. I am sure I would have grasped it conceptually, but it would have been sterile. I couldn't have even begun to conceptualize the feeling. What I wanted and was hopeful for at 18 was the sense of normalcy that I take for granted today -- that things are just-so and that I am blessed with success, health, love and friendship, and that these things can all come together on a cool fall evening in Provincetown, that far away place that felt so foreign all those years ago.
