Gay Culture In Boston

The old clubs may be dying, but a new one is being born:

In less than three months, the Estate's weekly Thursday night party - called the Glamorous Life - has grown into one of the most frenzied and fizzy gay nights in the city. Glistening shirtless male dancers stationed on perches high over the dance floor thrust along to the beat. On the floor below, a racially diverse - by Boston standards, at least - mix of young professionals, collegians, and a smattering of men who probably should have gone to sleep after "Grey's Anatomy," flail along to the music.

Yep: gay hip-hop. Love it. Bob Mould's and Rich Morel's "BlowOff" in DC (and occasionally in NYC) has also charted new ground by appealing to bears and mixing rock and pop. But my sense is that we will soon witness an eruption of openly gay culture within the black and Latino populations. Repressed for so long, and still less public than white gay culture, minority gay culture, already vibrant, may achieve greater visibility. I sure hope so. We desperately need strong public gay role models for black and Latino gay kids, who deal with stress and discrimination many of us white guys no longer experience in quite the same way.