Sing if You're Glad to be Gay

I mentioned Darren in an earlier post about FriendsReunited. We sat together for maths classes at school, and swapped music cassettes. I didn't contact him then - I wasn't even sure it was him - but now he's contacted me.

We're swapping emails and he seems like an okay sort of fellow.

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An evening of alcohol and peanuts with Simon M. We sat in the Boulevard, enduring off-key karaoke versions of "Mack the Knife" and "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", before crossing the road to the Old Vic, hoping for a more pleasant soundtrack. Unfortunately, the Vic has it's own karaoke, and guess which two songs assailed us when we sat down? Go on, I bet you can't guess.

I only mention this because, surely it used to be true - 10 or 20 years ago - that gay men had the best taste in music. Everyone knew that the best disco music was in the gay clubs, the most respected authorities on showsongs were all gay, and if you wanted to know which opera to see...you just had to ask a queen.

Now, in the pubs that used to be safe spaces for people like us to be themselves, you get a steady stream of young, well dressed, affluent, cute and crushingly vacuous men and women, droning songs from before they were born. Often tuneless, always anodyne - whatever the original meaning of the song, all reduced to a homogenised sentimental mush.

Some say gay culture has entered the mainstream, or the mainstream has expanded to include gay culture. I'd say gay culture changed wholesale to become absorbed into the mainstream, and then the mainstream went tacky.

The magazines on pub tables now contain adverts showing pointlessly barechested young men, instead of the pointlessly bikini-ed young women of years ago. Gay men and women can now marry in all but name, and have adopted the straightlaced hypocritical attitudes of middle-class married couples 30 years ago. Stripshows are "fun", sexism is "ironic" and casual racism is "obvious".

We have not gained respect. We have become respectable. Christ we're a boring lot.