Ok, like most gay men today, I’ve known that I liked boys forever. Like, from first grade forever. For the most part, I don’t think a first grader 
actually knows what that means in a sexual manner, they just know that boys are more fun, boys are more interesting, and girls are just yucky. That wasn’t the case with me, I had a very active sexual life by the time I was 7 years old, so knowing I “liked boys” was a bit more precise and defined for me than it was for a lot of kids that age.
There was an interesting video clip on Slate this morning from what is apparently an ongoing series knows as “Ask a Homo”, and the question was “What was the best time in history to be gay or lesbian”. The guy who delved into the answer, apart from being right up my personal “wow” alley and banging a “10” on the meter, gave a really interesting set of answers, which of course end up being no real answer at all.
Most people are completely unaware that the concept of homosexuality hasn’t really been around that long. It really wasn’t popularized until probably the late 19th century, around the time of Oscar Wilde. “Gay” didn’t come along until after that time – so, as the world turns, the concept of the individual gay person is really very recent.
That isn’t to say that there hasn’t been men who have sex with men since the beginning of time. While I don’t want to offend any lesbians who might be reading my random thoughts here, since I have no real experience with women who have sex with women, I’m going to drop that from my discussion and stop trying to pretend to be all inclusive. I am a gay man, and I’m not really sure I even personally know a lesbian, and I certainly can’t pretend to know what their journey through life has been like.
In most western societies of today, it’s pretty easy to be gay and not suffer any adverse consequences. There are even a lot of places where gays and be legally married and enjoy all the rights, benefits and responsibilities that other married couples enjoy. But that is looking at things from a very broad view, high in the sky – where details are hard to spot and you think that all the colors you see are drawn from the eight-crayon box.
Zoom in a bit, and you begin to see regional differences, nooks and crannies where life may be a bit more difficult as your “you’ness” skews away 
from what is considered normal. By the time you zoom in to full scale, you see that even in a place where society at large has no major issue with homosexuals in general, and may even have laws that demand they be treated just like everyone else, there is a lot of variance as to just how comfortable an individual may feel.
In a place like the United States, where for the most part a gay man can count on not being put in jail for having sex with another man, you may see that gay man move away from his family and the place of his youth to live in a large urban area, sometimes even in a particular neighborhood surrounded by other gays. In such a setting, it is pretty easy to just be whoever you are, although adopting a more conservative and “acceptable” facade for the rare trips home to visit the family.
There have always been men who had sex with other men. It was an accepted and common practice in ancient Greece for men to take younger male lovers. But, most of these men who loved men also had wives and family. The occasional romp in the woods with another man often wasn’t thought of as deviant, it was just a part of who you were. Deviance usually began to come into play when religion of one type or another got to define the rules. That has happened more often in the past hundred or so years, where despite our best intention we let politics and religion combine in places they shouldn’t.
Back to the original question of when was the best time to be homosexual? I have to agree for the most part with the first answer our handsome narrator gives: “..that would be now.” Even when there are some geographic abnormalities in where a gay person can live and truly be comfortable, this time we are in now has never been freer with regard to allowing gay people to just be who they want to be.
Yet, at the same time, I lament the fact that because so many of your young people today have had it so much better than my generation or previous generations, many icons of gay culture are slowly fading away. Places that were important to me and other gay people of my age and before.
Gay bookstores are almost completely gone. Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia recently closed, said to be the nations oldest gay bookstore. Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., A Different Light in California, Oscar Wilde in New York – all closed. Gay Bookstores were unique in that nearly all of their shelf space was devoted to books and music written by, for or about gay men and women. You didn’t have to go to the library and search through tens of thousands of other books to find something about people like yourself. Gay Bookstores encouraged a sense of neighborhood as well.
Equally alarming is the closing of many gay bars and clubs around the country. Some of the largest and most spectacular clubs in some of the largest cities have gone out of business and shut their doors. But, also disturbing is the fact that many bars and clubs in much smaller towns have also disappeared, in many cases these were the only places that the local gay population could gather on any regular basis as a group.
For many young gay men of past generations, the gay bar was a special place – where you could do things that other people your age could do in other places – like dance with your boyfriend, or kiss him – gay clubs for hundreds of thousands of us were the only place where we could go to be who we were.
I think that for me personally, not having “come out” until my early 30’s and having experienced some of this only from a distance makes it particularly difficult to see it fade away as it was a big part of what I thought being a gay person was about.
For a lot of young people today who are growing up gay, life for them isn’t so very different from growing up straight. They don’t need the gay bookstore, or the gay club to help them define who they are, or for a safe space on the weekend. They don’t need to move to The Castro in San Francisco, or to Christopher Street in Manhattan. A recent article I read disclosed that a lot of previously mostly gay neighborhoods in urban areas are seeing an increasing number of non-gay homeowners move in as the popularity of moving into the city gains new ground. Gays are becoming much more homogenized into the society.
There are a lot of older gay men who are feeling a bit lost and disoriented. For all of our lives we have had to be careful who knew we were gay. We’ve had to be discreet with who and how we’ve loved and lived. Many of my generation and older have family who rejected them outright, and the gay community is the only family they know, and as that community becomes more integrated with society at large, for some there is a sense of being on the edge of homelessness all over again.
I am happy that for many young people who discover they like boys better than girls, their lives will not be complicated by having to learn to be two different people. Adopting different personalities, based on who you are with is stressful, although many of us learned to make it second nature. It was just something we had to do. If you were having Thanksgiving with the family you were one person, and if you were with your friends at the Club, you were another. 
Yet, I do hope that young gay people of today take a minute now and then to understand that the fact they are free to live their lives as “normal” people wasn’t a natural process. That there were generations before them who struggled to make this reality they live a fact. That previous generations have actually shed blood or were horribly persecuted. That their new normal has not always been.
