'Oh no, a fag...' shot through my head, forcing me to put down James Howard Kunstler's latest novel, A History of the Future. The appearance of a gay male character came as a complete shock - the horror arose just a few sentences in, as I realized the portrait to be painted was a probable future of mine and one I will surely have difficulty swallowing.
I say will because I've yet to pick the book back up again, lest it interfere with what I want to say here - so, no, this is not a book review. But it does include a brief review of these past eight years since reading my first Kunstler book, The Long Emergency, and my attempt to incorporate these sorts of perspectives into my life and relations. I write this only because I've yet to read anything like it, or even hear of other gay men who've followed a similar path.
Like many turning points in my life, it was baptismal by fire... Manhattan was sweltering the week I read my first peak oil tome, which was also the week of Hurricane Katrina and its wretched aftermath. My boyfriend was out at Burning Man and there was no work on, so I literally did nothing all week but watch horrific footage of unfolding urban disaster while mapping it directly to my own future. It didn't take much googling to realize my little island was also quite vulnerable to hurricanes, as became evident once Sandy hit.
Needless to say, I was in low level panic by the time the boyfriend returned from his desert escapades and therefore unable to deliver the kind of cool headed explanation I might provide today! It was a rough few weeks and months, but to his credit, he stuck with me and followed the links I sent and eventually came to share my outlook on the long term future.
As for many couples though, this recasting of the future brought challenging questions to the surface, as we both individually grappled with our gut responses. He worked pretty closely with folks who later became known as the one percent, and felt these connections and his salary offered him adequate protection in an uncertain future. My ties to these folks were more tenuous as a freelancer, so the question of whether or not we were truly partners in a practical sense mattered. If not, I wanted out of the city and into a smaller, more resilient community focussed on farming and such.
Here is where my story diverges from its straight counterpart, since gay male community mostly exists in urban settings. Like other minority folks, gay guys, and especially single gay guys, can be singled out in small rural communities for some pretty irrational harassment. Local laws are not always on our side either, potentially making it difficult to form community institutions or even a small family unit. And nowadays the general public is better able to spot even discreet gay guys, so the option of living a closeted life has mostly expired.
For these reasons, suggesting to a gay man he may be happier outside a city is usually met with laughter - many already escaped country life and have zero interest in returning. I grew up in a small beach town which ultimately became a first class gay resort, so the idea seemed less outlandish to me. And luckily my boyfriend had always been an urban creature so was more amenable to the bucolic fantasies I spun.
The following summer we rented a house in the Hudson Valley, to see if living together in a small town was feasible. The together part worked out great, but he decided city life suited him best and ultimately moved to San Francisco to enjoy the good life while it lasted. I stayed and spent the next couple years researching places to settle down and saving up for a house. The idea of going it alone was daunting, but friends and family said that if I just built the life I wanted to lead then someone would surely turn up to share it.
So I did just that - choosing a small, working class village in SE Vermont with hydro power, a still functional downtown, small farms nearby and easy access to the supercity via train. The state had just become the first in the nation to vote marriage equality into law and I knew at least a handful of gay guys called the area home, so I crossed my fingers and went for it just as the housing market fell to its current level. Whew...
In the intervening half decade world events have provided both hard evidence of the general unraveling as well as evidence of status quo's resiliency. So some small percentage of folks choose to believe the former while most others put faith in the later and perhaps hope they aren't next. What's astonishing is the overwhelming number of gay guys taking the later route. In fact, I know only a few who are willing to even entertain these ideas and exactly zero who have premised any decisions on them. In most cases just suggesting that progress, especially our cultural progress, may not endure is simply a conversation stopper.
This is particularly true of folks in my generation (I'm pushing fifty now) who came of age in the early days of AIDS. We had to witness the decimation of the generation before us and know the effort it took to turn that around in our own community, barring any help from the government or health services. I suspect many of us feel we've already experienced our collapse and want no part of a more generalized one, so long as we can avoid it.
Only the youngest of guys can appreciate the life I've built - usually from the vantage point of their parent's couch after failing to integrate into the failing economy post college. But even these outliers hold dear to the idea that things will eventually return to normal so they can make good on their student loans, or that collapse will come fast enough to bring the whole mess down so they won't have to.
Unsurprisingly I'm still single, even after building this super, solar powered, permaculture inspired doomstead complete with chickens, friendly neighbors and walkable community. And I'm close to giving up the effort out here, though I still believe this life offers unparalleled resiliency compared to any urban existence I could muster. But it won't actually be very resilient for me, if there's little chance of partnering up with anyone at any point in future.
I hope when I return to A History of the Future I'm greeted with a narrative I want to aspire to, but won't be surprised if I don't find it. Kunstler does like to demonstrate how our progressive ideals could easily fall by the wayside and gay culture is a ready target. I will be disappointed though if the narrative is simply unrealistic, and was saddened to learn right up front that our gay male character was celibate and pretending to be asexual. Given current US stats, in a community of a few hundred people we might expect a dozen or more guys to outright identify as gay, and a healthy number of the straight identified folks might be up for playing around too. Obviously a far cry from gay urban living in the age of hookup apps, but probably not the life of a monk either.
Clearly, folks will only adopt narratives with which they can identify. So those wishing to build small, strong communities should take care to construct narratives that are purposefully inclusive, or risk alienating the very peoples most skilled in building these communities. Our past struggles have not been identical to the struggles we all face now, but the tools we utilize to overcome them are the same.
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