What Happens on Fire Island...

Two months and seven thousand years ago, over the July 4th weekend, my social media platforms were overwhelmed with shocked and appalled responses to what was happening on Fire Island.

Now, if you're a gay man (or if you're just gay-adjacent), it's not uncommon to feel the yearly FOMO of watching other gay men document every second of their gay-cations as soon as summer begins. It does wonders for my seasonal depression, and for some reason, it starts earlier every year with new themed weeks popping up all the time.

(Patrick's Day Otter Week in PTown? Sure, guys. If you say so.)

That's why my initial reaction to all the reactions screaming outrage and shock was "Okay, yes, they're being wildly irresponsible" but also "We're all just kind of a little bit jealous that we're not there...right?"

I mean, what could be better than having a socially justifiable reason to shame and mock gorgeous people who are having the time of their lives while you're sitting at home catching up on the Bolivian version of Love Island.

This is not me writing to defend attractive gay people.

I actually can't think of any scenario where I would expend energy defending attractive gay people.

What I'll say about people not behaving responsibly on Fire Island is that Fire Island is designed for good behavior the same way Las Vegas is designed for fiscal prudence. If you're there, and you're acting appropriately, you're doing so against the very grain of what the place is.

Rather than shame a bunch of people for giving into temptation, wouldn't it have been easier to just shut the whole island down?

(Full Disclosure: I am in the "Shut Everything Down" camp when it comes to how I think we should have handled/be handling the pandemic. Why we're all allowed to leave our houses right now is beyond me. I mean, why did I bother decorating my apartment like a bunker and stock it full of canned provolone if nobody was going to force me to stay there?)

But aside from all that, let's talk about gay men and misbehaving, shall we?

Because all the outcries usually landed somewhere on "Why can't these people just do the right thing?"

And here's why I take issue with that line of thinking--

The very essence of what it meant to be gay for decades, and still, in a very large way, today--revolves around the idea that you, in and of yourself, are wrong.

It is remarkable that any LGBTQI person has anything resembling a moral compass when many of us grew up being told that acting on our desires regarding love, affection, sex, trust, and intimacy was wrong only to find out--as society adapted--that, Oh no, it's totally fine. Have at it, boys.

But if you're my age, the acceptance of sexuality then had to overcome the various phases of being gay and navigating what that means in terms of presenting yourself to the world.

Heteronormativity, being shamed for being too heteronormative, being shamed for not being heteronormative enough, weekend warriors, drug culture, polyamory, open relationships, queer vs. gay, sex positivity, STI and STD awareness, etc, etc, etc.

We're given options for things to do that feel good and then told they're bad, don't do them, only to have them then become fashionable, see thinkpieces written about how they're great and we shouldn't feel weird about engaging in them, only to see the pendulum swing again and find that now we're being made to feel bad about something as minuscule as making out with someone dressed as The Riddler at a Kentucky Derby party.

It is honestly very hard to do just about anything as a gay person and not feel guilty about it. I lived with guilt over being gay for most of my adolescence, but once I got comfortable with it, I found a whole slew of other things to be uncomfortable with, not the least of which is because we're talking about a community that is connected via its sexual identity. You can argue that point if you want, but I'm only bringing it up to point out that we still have a very unhealthy way of looking at and talking about sex in this country, and our usual de facto approach is shame.

So.

If you drench a group of people in shame and make them feel as though no matter what they do, they're going to keep being ashamed, isn't it reasonable to assume that they're not only going to do whatever they want and not worried about being criticized for it, but they're going to have a hard time resisting the urge to make bad decisions, when many of us learned to love making bad decisions, because the alternative was resisting every impulse we had for fear that we were committing some grave moral error just by seeking out our first kiss.

I know that it is easy to make the argument that gay men are, ultimately, savvy enough to know the difference between right and wrong, and that we can't go easy when it comes to things like wearing masks and social distancing as the country continues to be absolutely ravaged by the pandemic, but I was hoping with two months of chronological distance, we could now see that many, many straight people were having reckless 4th of July parties that were much worse than anything we saw on Fire Island, and we weren't going after them.

We were turning on our own.

Maybe it's because we think we need to take out our own garbage.

Okay, fair enough.

But don't we also know what some of the intrinsic reasons for gatherings like that were?

This is a community that, yes, has already faced down one extinction-level event in the past forty years, but rather than say "So you need to be smarter" why not talk about inherited trauma and how something like that might impact a collective feeling of fragile mortality? The response to knowing your life is precious is not necessarily to hunker down and hide somewhere. Sometimes it's "Well, if I'm going to go, I might as well go shirtless on a beach surrounded by seventeen people who all look like they could be a Hemsworth."

As far as the argument that--Okay, fine, be stupid, but you don't have to post about it--I can't fight with you on that one. That's a problem that exceeds the pandemic and should be the subject of books, not blog posts, but I do think it's all tied into the rampant, unchecked depression and anxiety that is still widely not dealt with in our community, and that posting to document your happiness is ninety percent "Fake it 'til you make it."

We do have to be vigilant when it comes to behaving safely. We can't slip up just because we hit a holiday weekend and the weather is nice.

But we're also finally acknowledging that we can't discount human psychology when we think about how to best handle the human need for connection, and how different types of people have different psychological needs based on their history and their culture.

Or just force everybody to stay home for two weeks like we should have done back in March.

I'm game for number two, but if that's not what we're doing, then we need to realize this is going to be about a lot more than yelling "Put on your mask" at people and calling it a day.