"What Was Gay?/In an increasingly accepting world, homosexual men are all too eager to leave their campy, cruising past behind."

"But the price of equality shouldn�t be conformity," writes J. Bryan Lowder in a long Slate essay, which I got to after watching the video at "Cover Girl Don�t Cover Boy: A Transformative Conversation on Drag�s Role in Gay Culture" (which ends with a reference to one of my all-time favorite movies, "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion").

From the "What Was Gay" essay:

This move away from broad-brush gay stereotypes is wise to a point. Ascribing an obligatory cultural component to homosexuality has caused a range of problems, from the merely annoying Oh you�re gay? Let�s go shopping!�variety to the more pernicious example of admission to safer, queer-only housing in prison being determined based on tests of �gay insider� knowledge or behaviors that not all queer people necessarily possess. Clearly, a person�s homosexuality should not be taken as evidence of any special affiliation, just as heterosexuals, united only by their sexual connection and propensity for procreation, are never assumed to share anything else. This has been one of the key arguments in the �we are normal� case for equality�and it�s been largely successful. Though the job is not totally complete, it feels like we are working as fast as we can to build what gay academic and activist Dennis Altman imagines in his provocatively titled The End of the Homosexual?: a world in which we no longer see �homosexuality as a primary marker of identity, so that sexual preference comes to be regarded as largely irrelevant, and thus not the basis for either community or identity.�

Let's go shopping?