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It’s funny how you read, so often, about the gay culture of youth. We’re, apparently, consumed with the concept of staying young forever with cremes and pills and gyms and every single type of tonic you could ever hope for. The image, I presume, comes from all those pumped up bodies you see in gay magazines. I bought one today, they’re there. There is a culture of youth. Some people clearly believe it. But it’s ironic for me to point to that link because it’s a gay guy saying how gays are youth obsessed.

I come to this topic through a rather roundabout route. Gayclic, a wonderful french gay-themed ‘news’ video blog linked to GLAAD’s media campaign titled ‘Be an Ally & a Friend‘. It was promoting the idea of being an ally to people coming out on National Coming Out Day (October 11th). Be supportive by being respectful. That’s all. On their website there are a couple other video links which I decided to check out, one of which led to David Mixner, an LGBT activist, speaking at the Empire State Pride Agenda 2007 annual dinner. It’s a New York gay-rights charity.

He recounts, tragically, how as a result of the AIDS epidemic sweeping through his community, killing all his friends, he gave 90 eulogies

“We thought that freedom was very close at hand… and then came AIDS… But you gotta remember what it was like. I lost 296 friends. I gave 90 eulogies in two years. And I lost the man that I loved most in my life, for 12 years. We were not treated by dentists, nurses wouldn’t touch us, homecare workers wouldn’t come to our homes, doctors wouldn’t treat us, insurance companies told us we had brought this upon ourselves.”

It makes me stop and think. Perhaps, yes, gay culture is youth-obsessed. But perhaps that’s really only because almost all of the older generation were killed off by AIDS. Those who are still alive, those who lived through 1982 and onwards as out gay men and women are the lucky ones. The fact that they survived is enormously lucky, and in the same breath perhaps terrifying in how many of their nearest friends and loved ones died around them. So we are like a culture culled of all its patrimoine. How can you ever have an awareness of heritage without any elders. What other society has ever so publicly lost so much of a generation? Wars kill men but often leave their wives and lovers back home. This destruction, the destruction of an gay AIDS pandemic took homes and ruined neighbourhoods just like a war. It’s a certain way to create a ghost town, to tell people that by behaving as they had been behaving will lead to almost certain death. Nobody’s going to go to that bar. It takes homes because, as David Mixner says, sufferers had to sell them for their health care treatments, because it was fundamentally their own fault. But then also, there are no lovers or wives left behind because those lovers were the victims buried in the last funeral you attended or the last hospital visit you went on.

But today, this is interesting because Mixner spoke at a dinner that made me think that perhaps as a culture we’re not so gratuitous in our obsession with youth. We know nothing better. It’s those in their early 40s now who might be the first not to know the AIDS epidemic. They are the bearer of a culture’s heritage because there is nobody else to do it.

Part one of his speech is above. Youtube has the rest.