Word Spy - post-gay

(POHST-gay) adj. When homosexuals define their identity by something other than their sexual preference.

Example Citations:

Lauer and "Today" weatherman Al Roker are now conversant in Donatella Versace and Jimmy Choo, and the world is a little bit gayer. When Cojo visits, jokes fly about almost anything, including Lauer's chest hair. When Roker and Lauer dressed themselves in near-drag as tiger trainers Siegfried and Roy last Halloween, Cojocaru came on dressed in anti-drag, as Matt Lauer.

"Oh, look," he said, pointing to Roker's get-up. "It's Marilyn McCoo."

In the post-gay worldview, these unscripted moments can resonate better than anything cooked up by advocacy groups or the fictional, token-gay realms of "Will & Grace" or "Six Feet Under." Smart, covert gay banter is taking over, without crossed signals or viewer protest.
—Hank Stuever, "America embraces a glamour boy," The Record (Bergen County, NJ), May 22, 2003

Post-gay is a fledgling, somewhat murky idea that describes a homosexual identity in which sexual behavior no longer defines one's life. It's not bisexuality. It's not retreating to the closet. It is a way of saying, "We've come a long way, so calm down." In a post-gay world, homosexuals have won their battle for acceptance and are now free to move beyond identity politics. Anne Heche is post-gay, for example. Ellen isn't.

"Post-gay isn't 'ungay,"' explains James Collard, Out's editor in chief. "It's about taking a critical look at gay life and no longer thinking solely in terms of struggle. It's going to a gay bar and wishing there were girls there to talk to."
—"New Way of Being," The New York Times, June 21, 1998

Earliest Citation:

In the generation before (gay liberation), there were a lot of gay men, like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, who would not write about gay subject matter at all. ... They were frank about admitting they themselves were gay, but they never wrote about that because they wanted the big public.

Then there was my generation, and many of us wrote almost exclusively about being gay, although in my own case I've written two novels in which there were no gay characters. But they were my least successful novels with the public.

Now you have writers like Alan Gurganus, who published the first gay story in the New Yorker in 1974 and was always very clear about being gay. But (his novel) ''The Oldest Living Confederate Widow'' has virtually no gay theme in it.

I call it sort of post-gay. People aren't in the closet, they're frank about their sexuality, but they don't feel limited to gay subject matter. They feel they can write about anything.'
—Edmund White, quoted in Fritz Lanham, "Beginnings of liberation," The Houston Chronicle, November 27, 1994

Also:

Taxi zum Klo ... is as explicit as any porn movie, but in this context the sex is a form of honest reportage. It's given the emphasis it has in his life—sometimes funny, sometimes hot, sometimes gross. This may be the first post-gay-liberation movie: there's no didacticism, no special pleading, no "problem." Ripploh isn't trying to show that homosexuals are just average Joes any more than he's saying this is the truth of homosexual life.
—David Ansen, "Some Like It Hot," Newsweek, October 19, 1981

Category:

Gay and Lesbian

Posted on June 23, 1998
Updated on May 22, 2003