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Speak Out: Aspire, but don’t assimilate

Speak Out: Aspire, but don’t assimilate

Kelly
Kelly Lemieux

By Kelly Lemieux

I spiritually left my family behind 30 years ago, when I was 13. I took up acting and poetry and boyfriends.

As a young gay man, I witnessed groups like Focus on the Family turn families against their gay youth. Their hate speech, dressed in Sunday finest, about gay men, hurt me and so many others.

Focus on the Family is not my idea of family values. I didn’t think it was the LGBT community’s idea of family values either.  ­

So imagine my surprise when I learned the theme of Denver’s PrideFest this year was  “Focus on our Families,” a complete lift of the Colorado Springs–based religious right brand. I was speechless.

Was the theme ironic? Was the theme reclaiming a core value by turning the Christian right–wing group’s title into a slogan?

Yes. I could see politico queens in the city getting the joke.

But it makes me fear everything I love about gay culture is dead or being pushed out of the way. Long live family values. We’re queer, we’re impressionable and we’ve accepted the propaganda of a hate group. And that’s no joke.

Staring back at me now in LGBT media are images of gay families, smiling children, allies: the very images of oppression and dullness I left behind in high school to join my friends downtown for queer prom, late night cafes and cruising at Cheesman Park in my boyfriend’s truck.

This gay family subgroup of the LGBT community seems to me to have an outsized influence on imagery – shoehorning a majority of gay men who are city dwellers and singletons and bar–hopping young couples into a family values image factory created by this minority.

Never before has such heterosexual imagery been present in the gay community.

Maybe these conservative values and images of the gay community are helping us get past the years of the AIDS crisis? Maybe we as queers adopt the majority–heterosexual population’s image and value set so they won’t commit hate crimes against us or think of us as diseased deviants? Perhaps we’re hoping that gay men will no longer be posited in conservative iconography as the dangerous stranger, the antithesis of family?

Whatever it is, I am adapting to this new gay generation’s family values, the “new gay American Dream.”

But I still love bar crawls, shirtless parades, hot pants and poppers. I want to be a part of a community that still celebrates the sexual liberation that was the ’70s queer discourse, protest and thought. I don’t want that alternative space removed from my alternative sexual community.

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