If it’s any real consolation, gay men themselves are slowly getting replaced by lesbian/bi/queer women. Currently amongst the youth, internet, and explicitly queer spaces, tomorrow the world.
To be honest, I don’t see a shift happening in the short term, large swathes of a combined intellectual, academic, and administrative faction would just have to eat too much humble pie at once. The career paths of a generation have already been set, and a generation of young men just tune into to video game streamers and podcasts instead.
You mentioned disposable income, and I can tell you from my experience working for a large retail conglomerate, gays have FAR more disposable income than straights. For one thing, most of them are never going to have children. The infinitesimal percentage who adopt only want one child; two at the very most. So yeah, OF COURSE advertisers and large retail chains run gay-friendly promotions, and pro sports teams will continue to hold “pride” events with sellout crowds. It’s the same reason Jesse James gave when asked why he robs banks. “Because that’s where the money is.”
Oh for sure. My family has been on New Orleans for 200 years and we’ve watched the gay community pour money into the Quarter and the Marigny. It’s been great actually.
Even if I accept your premise that on average gay men have more disposable income (and I do), businesses need total revenue. And gay men are still in the minority. So no, it’s simply not the case that in total gays have far more disposable income than straights.
(Now, yours is a damn good reason not to explicitly offends gays, but that is hardly the same point.)
Well, along with the idea of testing writer's room candidates for gayness, that's one of the places where I slid into satire. It should go without saying that straight guys also have a lot of disposable income to spend on things like movies.
Well, now address the problem for women (co-write with your wife maybe) that are not white liberal suburban- not part of the rainbow gang, aren’t going to the baby stores to customize their “new purchase”, nor have they given their eggs or bodies with a nifty supermarket sticker stuck on their heads like a bunch of bananas and (rant is almost done) aren’t boomers, aren’t “trad” living on some farm wearing a prairie dress with 500 dollar cowboy boots while trying to look wholesome while selling their paint on HGTV, but just possibly, just maybe happen to be white and suburban and what used to be “middle American”.
For theatrical movies, straight (young) males are still the biggest spenders, and all the action movies and (the successful) superhero ones still make a point of targeting straight males.
It’s the subscription biz where it seems to me far more that Hollywood most indulges its identity leftism. Because it doesn’t cost them nearly as much to do so.
Movies from Hollywood these days are practically unwatchable, due to much of what you said.
The fact is that heteronormative relationships and sex are hetero-normative, because they are the norm, ie the default state for our species. If they weren’t, we, as a species, would have ceased to exist, when we were living, quite literally, hand to mouth, in sparsely distributed hunter gatherer groups.
However, something they teach in ecology, or used to teach, idk, is that in many mammals groups, homosexuality tends to increase in frequency in a population with increasing population pressures.
This is an adaptation that likely occurs to prevent over population and potentially extinction, due to resource exhaustion from exceeding what is called the ‘carrying capacity’ for a given environment.
As we as a population increase, the percentage of gay people in that population will increase.
We should accommodate that segment of population, in creative outlets like movies, as all should be, but elevating gay culture over heteronormative culture, while maligning the latter, is as obnoxious as suppressing gay existence was to social harmony in the past.
If it’s any real consolation, gay men themselves are slowly getting replaced by lesbian/bi/queer women. Currently amongst the youth, internet, and explicitly queer spaces, tomorrow the world.
To be honest, I don’t see a shift happening in the short term, large swathes of a combined intellectual, academic, and administrative faction would just have to eat too much humble pie at once. The career paths of a generation have already been set, and a generation of young men just tune into to video game streamers and podcasts instead.
You mentioned disposable income, and I can tell you from my experience working for a large retail conglomerate, gays have FAR more disposable income than straights. For one thing, most of them are never going to have children. The infinitesimal percentage who adopt only want one child; two at the very most. So yeah, OF COURSE advertisers and large retail chains run gay-friendly promotions, and pro sports teams will continue to hold “pride” events with sellout crowds. It’s the same reason Jesse James gave when asked why he robs banks. “Because that’s where the money is.”
Oh for sure. My family has been on New Orleans for 200 years and we’ve watched the gay community pour money into the Quarter and the Marigny. It’s been great actually.
Even if I accept your premise that on average gay men have more disposable income (and I do), businesses need total revenue. And gay men are still in the minority. So no, it’s simply not the case that in total gays have far more disposable income than straights.
(Now, yours is a damn good reason not to explicitly offends gays, but that is hardly the same point.)
Well, along with the idea of testing writer's room candidates for gayness, that's one of the places where I slid into satire. It should go without saying that straight guys also have a lot of disposable income to spend on things like movies.
Well, now address the problem for women (co-write with your wife maybe) that are not white liberal suburban- not part of the rainbow gang, aren’t going to the baby stores to customize their “new purchase”, nor have they given their eggs or bodies with a nifty supermarket sticker stuck on their heads like a bunch of bananas and (rant is almost done) aren’t boomers, aren’t “trad” living on some farm wearing a prairie dress with 500 dollar cowboy boots while trying to look wholesome while selling their paint on HGTV, but just possibly, just maybe happen to be white and suburban and what used to be “middle American”.
BTW great essay- very good
Thanks! But can’t write that essay… as a man I don’t have the relevant “lived experience” and if I try, I’ll just get cancelled
“Truth to power” “manifest” lol
Hmmmm…
It ain’t for revenue reasons.
For theatrical movies, straight (young) males are still the biggest spenders, and all the action movies and (the successful) superhero ones still make a point of targeting straight males.
It’s the subscription biz where it seems to me far more that Hollywood most indulges its identity leftism. Because it doesn’t cost them nearly as much to do so.
Movies from Hollywood these days are practically unwatchable, due to much of what you said.
The fact is that heteronormative relationships and sex are hetero-normative, because they are the norm, ie the default state for our species. If they weren’t, we, as a species, would have ceased to exist, when we were living, quite literally, hand to mouth, in sparsely distributed hunter gatherer groups.
However, something they teach in ecology, or used to teach, idk, is that in many mammals groups, homosexuality tends to increase in frequency in a population with increasing population pressures.
This is an adaptation that likely occurs to prevent over population and potentially extinction, due to resource exhaustion from exceeding what is called the ‘carrying capacity’ for a given environment.
As we as a population increase, the percentage of gay people in that population will increase.
We should accommodate that segment of population, in creative outlets like movies, as all should be, but elevating gay culture over heteronormative culture, while maligning the latter, is as obnoxious as suppressing gay existence was to social harmony in the past.
Heterosexuality is boring? Don’t think so. What’s with homosexuality; I already have those tools. 😜