March 5, 2014

The Price of Assimilation!

Advancement and freedom has its price
Over the last century our society has made great strides in learning to embrace diversity. Most members of the majority now accept people unlike themselves into their circles willingly and sometimes enthusiastically. That is a good thing and gives both the majority and minority members a chance to learn and grow.!

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Inevitably though the minority loses a little bit of what once made them unique. This is partially because each of us wants to t in; and members of minorities tend to unconsciously mimic their majority peers. It may be true that imitation is the sincerest form of attery; but there is also something to be said for being unique and embracing what makes a group di"erent.!

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Assimilation into the majority a"ects all minority groups in a similar fashion; and this is certainly true of gay men and women. While it was once necessary to visit gay establishments to meet other gay people, nowadays gay people and straight people
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intermingle in the same fashionable places. Cities that once had a lot of gay bars are now down to a hand full of places. Younger gay people especially dont feel the need to patronize gay bars as much since there are so many gay friendly places to meet where one can form a party consisting of all their friends. The gay bars that remain are by no means exclusively gay either as their patrons often invite their straight counterparts to join them there. This adds up to a good time had by all.!

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I like the new way; and I hope that the trend continues to develop and expand. Still every gain brings a loss; and advancement and freedom has its price. James Franco and associates have released a new motion picture recently called Interior. Leather Bar. Its main purpose is to examine what was left out of the motion picture, Cruising, which was released in 1980. A full forty minutes of what was then considered graphic footage had to be cut in order to receive an R rating instead of the dreaded X rating which would have doomed the picture.!

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Without extolling the virtues of a time that many people, both gay and straight, now consider an unfortunate experiment, I cant help but reect on something I read in a review of Mr Francos motion picture.!

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"To an extent, Interior. Leather Bar. functions as a response searching and serious, playful and teasing to the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the United States. However much has been gained in the years from Stonewall to the ght for same-sex marriage, its worth asking, as Mr. Franco and Mr. Mathews do, what has been lost. When Mr. Friedkin took a peek into the leather bars once upon a downtown time, he might have seen something that frightened him. Yet the men inside those bars were part of a self-dened, self-sustaining and vital group that, as the years and milestones pass, can seem in danger of losing a part of itself. Or maybe, as Mr. Franco and Mr. Mathews suggest, the lines have become so very blurred that labels like gay and straight are no longer remotely useful."

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The picture used in this essay and the quote from the article referenced above can be found at www.nytimes.com. The article entitled, A Heavy Bass Beat, a Wreath of Smoke, an Aura of Sweat, by Manohla Dargis was published on March 4, 2014.!

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Copyright 2014 by Robb Chadwick Daring Muse Press

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