The anguished cry of the dodo: caw, caw

I once argued, on Radio Canada International, with a right-wing Christian about gay marriage. He hated and feared it because it would demean heterosexuality and destroy monogamy and all that is proper about cleaving to your opposite-sex spouse.

I hated and feared gay marriage because the damned heterosexual bulldozer was going to destroy all the new possibilities we'd tried so hard to create in terms of structuring different kinds of relationships. The brave new world, dontcha know.

The Sept. 4 New York Times features a quick profile of the changing Provincetown, the American gay mecca. "Friendly, flamboyant, overwhelmingly gay: Provincetown is still all these things and first impressions are not wrong. But stay for a bit and you'll find a less happy picture. A real estate boom has spread unease, pitting wealthy newcomers and developers against the townies, artists and free spirits who gave the enclave its bohemian character and who now fear it is being gentrified out of existence.... what makes the battle for Provincetown unusual is that it is largely a class struggle within a gay world." Real estate prices are skyrocketing, bars and B&Bs are shutting down, with condos taking their places. Drag queens are now high-end professional performers, not the ratty looker next door performing for a few bucks and the sheer joyful silliness of it.

Writer Andrew Sullivan said: "It's a microcosm of a broader shift, of the slow seepage of gay culture into mainstream culture. It's the bourgeoisification of the gay world." And Sullivan added that gay marriage, legal in Massachusetts, has intensified the transformation. "With nearly a sixth of all gay weddings performed in Massachusetts taking place here, Provincetown, he said, is reinventing itself as a utopia for upper-middle-class gay couples."

There's really very little to be done. Change happens.

Why it happens is a different matter. Older activist John Waters, the odour-ama film maker, said that it just ain't like the good old days. "We live in a much less bohemian time. Outsider is such a tired word. There's no great youth movement happening; there are no hippies today, no punk rockers. The world has changed. Some gay people are straighter than my parents."

Damned lazy young people.

And, more seriously, damn a lifestyle that is apparently not one that the well-established gay person wants to nurture. Because those well-established gays are the face of the movement, the ideological and economic movers and shakers (and partiers). And now all they want to do is fit in.

What, am I supposed to go down there personally and scream at all the married sell-outs? At all the not really gay, gay people? Should a culture be artificially propped up as it lays dying? Does such a culture deserve to survive?

Uhhhhg. Talk to the hand, honey.