The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, the people who have built the formations and institutions of survival, become overlooked by the powers that be. They are too unruly, too angry, too radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change in order to accommodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. The dominant culture needed gay people who would pathologize their own. Supremacy ideology could not tolerate the confrontation with the heterosexual self that is at the core of gay liberation. So instead of the representative radicals, there was an unconscious but effective search for palatable individuals with no credibility in the community, no accountability to anyone, with no history of bravery or negotiation with other queers, who were then appointed in their stead. This replacement process, facilitated by the straight media, really became visible in the late nineties. It was the first time that I noticed a crew of guys being interviewed on television as emblematic gay men whom I had never seen in a community capacity. It was the moment when the corporate media was creating its own gay personalities, who were entirely different from the people featured in the gay-owned press. And eventually, the grassroots voices were drowned out completely, as gentrification co-opted the gay media, and the gay lib...