Is community building the next "big thing" in gay activism? Should it be?
Over the past 50 years, gay men and lesbians have come together to meet critical challenges in the development of gay life as we know it today. These waves of mobilization have come about either to achieve common goals or fight common threats.
Often these periods of activity have been in response to increasingly explicit and urgent circumstances – such as the "homophile" groups in the 1950s, "gay liberation" in the late 1960s and 1970s, and, of course, AIDS activism and mobilization in the 1980s and 1990s.
Is there a similar situation today that might require another focused bout of activism? An article in the October 11 issue of the B.A.R . reported some of the findings of the "Men's Minds" surveys conducted in the last three years by the San Francisco Gay Men's Community Initiative. The surveys were designed to gauge local gay men's feelings toward the state of the "gay community" and much of the findings have been consistently troubling.
As the article showed, the surveys revealed a deep ambivalence about the very idea of the gay community. People in significant percentages reported feeling closer to sub-communities than with the larger gay community while clear majorities felt that the community was sharply divided by race, ethnicity, economics, lifestyle, health and other factors.
In addition to a sense of fragmentation, people reported an alarming sense of isolation. A great many reported difficulty making new friends, attributing the trouble with a widespread fear of intimacy and fears of rejection. Large numbers also reported difficulty trusting other gay men on important issues such as HIV disclosure. Many reported their belief that gay men treat each other worse than do people from outside our own gay male culture.
Social isolation and fragmentation are of course not unique to gays. Sociologist Robert Putnam coined the phrase "bowling alone" a few years ago to describe the drastic decline of social networks in the last few generations across all sectors of modern society.
However, gay men and lesbians might be especially vulnerable to these widespread trends toward social isolation. Despite obvious gains over the years, gays are still often excluded from many traditional social environments, such as family and church, which still serve as a social foundation for most people. Plus gays and lesbians are very likely to have moved long distances to be in gay friendly urban centers and often endure financial precariousness to do so.
Gays, especially gay men, are also likely to seek friends and contacts in bars and clubs once in their new hometowns, which exposes them to high rates of substance use and other problems strongly tied to social isolation in the long run (especially as individuals get older). Gay men have also been avid early adopters of online social networking – a technology which is good for many things but also increasingly associated with fewer close friends, fewer offline social interactions and a tendency to seek out others like one's self (the "UB2" phenomenon).
Fields like public health have long been aware that "upstream" factors like social isolation and fragmentation contribute to "downstream" or individual problems that many of us in the gay community struggle with, such as depression, drug abuse, STD/HIV acquisition, and social alienation in general – to name just a few. Unfortunately, community building is not easy and usually expensive and hard to sustain (especially after funding ends). Also, these efforts are often bypassed by community members who are wary of being a "client" – which implies that "there is something wrong with me" – or who react defensively when a bureaucratic agency appears to tell the community what type of gay person we should and should not be.
Fortunately, in addition to the troubling findings, the Men's Minds surveys also had very encouraging results. By large majorities, local gay men haven't given up on the idea of community or having a network of gay friends. Nor have gay men abandoned a belief in the importance of helping to create a more unified and less divided gay community. As if to reflect these deep aspirations, a number of local groups – such as SFGMCI, Qnection, Men in Gear, And Castro For All – have arisen in recent years to encourage community building and increase real-life social networks.
Those who study social isolation say that civic engagement and community building have come in bursts in American history, usually after a time of quick social or technological transformation. The many waves of gay and lesbian activism in the last 50 years are excellent examples of some of the most successful attempts of community building from the bottom up. The question is, now, are we ready to do it again?
Doug Sebesta, Ph.D., is executive director of SFGMCI and a medical sociologist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Tim Vollmer, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist and a member of the SFGMCI board of directors.