New Gays, New Old Gays...

Interesting article from the New York Observer on current trends among gay college/post-college-aged men. Doree Shafrir divides them up into two camps(pun?); New Gays, who seem to be more of a liberal arts school/hipster crowd, and New Old Gays, who try to appropriate camp culture from before they were born:

These days, the young gays of Williamsburg and the East Village—the ones who wear pointy shoes and tight cutoff shorts, who studied queer theory and dabbled in heroin at Sarah Lawrence or Bard or Wesleyan, hang out at bars like Metropolitan and Sugarland in Williamsburg or the Phoenix and Eastern Bloc in the East Village, and listen to Chromeo and Girl Talk and Le Tigre—get all the attention. Corner one of these young men, and he will profess ignorance of that other scene of youthful gays, the gays of the Friends of Dorothy variety. As one of the New Gays confidently told me, it is a scene made up exclusively of the old and, quite possibly, fat, adding that the only young men who fraternize with this group are those who cannot, in all likelihood and despite their best efforts, get laid...

...And thus, the New Old Gay appreciates and embraces camp and high kitsch, but not ironically; ultimately, the New Old Gay is earnest. He doesn’t even necessarily have to be into musical theater, though he almost always is.

This article makes a lot of generalizations and relies on the idea that these are two separate groups with some sort of animosity between them, but I'm also seeing a certain degree of truth in the stereotypes...

And to think I've been using class, race, and gender performance - and not degrees of camp identification - to classify contemporary gay subcultures!

New York Observer: The New Old Gays
via Joe.My.God