One thought on “More on HM

  1. Sure, the Muschamp article is easy to mock, but whoever put together that critique of it really misses the point entirely.

    New York is a city of vanishing and vanished gay spaces — not just physical spaces, but emotional ones, too.

    How is it that the American city with the largest number of gay men has no “gay community” to speak of?

    Sure, we have The Roxy, crystal meth, Manhunt.net and barebacking parties, but these things do not a community make.

    We also have our beloved circles of friends and local haunts and the like, but these things are not exactly a community either.

    The whole continuum of shared values, shared rituals and shared culture was ruptured by the AIDS epidemic. I think that this is undeniable. And the reason that we can have such a flippant and throwaway (dis)regard for the landmarks of popular culture is because this continuity is gone and their traditional guardians — gay men who remember — are no longer with us (except for David Ehrenstein). This seems certain to me as well.

    As far as 2 Columbus Circle itself goes … I’m not sure. I think I thought it was a mosque for the first two years that I lived in Manhattan. It is always called Neo-Venetian, but isn’t it more North African looking? But the building itself could be any building. We can let it go, because it no longer means anything to most of us.

    In the same way that we allowed the city to take the Hudson River Parkway and the piers between Christopher St. and 14th away from the gay folk and to give it to hostile, baby-carriage walking Greenwich Village moms: The people who remember it as it a gay sunbathing/meeting/cruising/sexing area and who kept it as a gay space in the city are no longer around … And everyone else prefers to socialize via Manhunt.

    I was pretty exhausted by the time I got to page eight of the Muschamp article, but if I remember correctly, he did not end with a plea for us, gay men, to take back what we once had and to rebuild the community and sense of continuity that we lost. I guess it’s all a bit futile now.

    I guess things move on. In case, they are moving on because the people who really cared are no longer with us and they did not have the time or the means to pass on some things that were important.

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