There is speculation on whether or not gay communities are in the process of losing their gayness. Gay identity is an important topic, one that is discussed in literature, media and politics that demonstrates the ongoing relevance of gay identity today. At the faculty forum “Are we post-gay yet? Changing LGBTQ communities and kinship” on Dec. 1, Clare Forstie, university fellow in the Patricia A. Doyle Center for Gender and Sexuality and Phillip Gordon, assistant professor of English, gave presentations on what it means to be post-gay.

“[Findings support] the idea that LGBTQ identities should not matter, but somehow they still do. But here’s the thing: evidence of post-gay communities has really only been found in large cities like Chicago and New York,” Forstie said at the start of her presentation.

The participants of the study she conducted were not from a large city but from a small, rural Midwestern city where there is no gay neighborhood.

“Yet, participants discussed LGBTQ community and their friendships in ways that align with post-gay narratives from urban gay neighborhoods and in ways that challenge those narratives,” Forstie explained.

The question of what was going on was raised and Forstie outlined what her project covered. This included research methods, evidence of a post-gay community in the city she studied and then evidence to support that we are not actually post-gay. Forstie said, “We should instead embrace ambivalence as a way to think about identities and communities.”

Gordon then discussed how literary studies has depended on community as a way to make queer identity visible. “Really, ever since 1978, if I had to put a year on it, gay people have struggled to understand who and what we are in relation to our historical context. No doubt we exist as a legal and political category and have for a great many years,” Gordon said. He went on to talk about various literature and what important queer theorists have been saying about what makes up gay community and identity. “We wonder aloud if we are post-gay yet but I’m a literature professor and I can’t help but wonder if post-gay is even possible in the ways in which we would narrate our lives and of course, much less, what it looks like,” Gordon said. “We come out of the closet, but into what? Well, generally speaking, into gay community, which ends up playing such a vital role in how gay identity emerges and structures itself.” Gordon went on to describe that there is no clear view of identity in a post-gay model.

After the presentations there were many questions from the audience that ranged from topics of a post-racial society to differences in gender identities.

“The moment you say we’re post-gay is the moment you actually start to look at how gay we still are,” Gordon said. “To say that we are post-gay will always get the pushback ‘no, we’re not’ therefore, even the syntax of it as ‘are we post-gay yet’ becomes at least a viable place to have an open conversation about kind of where we are in that movement.”