I have an essay in the next New Republic, soothingly titled, “The End of Gay Culture.” And like most writers, ideas that I have read elsewhere but have now integrated themselves into my way of thinking are sometimes hard to pin down. That’s why I asked if any reader knew the precise origin of my half-baked notion that the British poet, Philip Larkin, had once complained that the civil rights movement was ruining Jazz. My readers are among the smartest on the web so I knew someone could find the precise reference – I rummaged through the brilliant collection, “All What Jazz,” to no avail. Anyway, a reader came through and here’s the money quote from an essay in that collection called “The End of Jazz”:
“The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue. They will end only when the Negro is as well housed, educated and medically cared-for as the white man.
There are two possible consequences in this for jazz. One is that if in the course of desegregation the enclosed, strongly-characterized pattern of Negro life is broken up, its traditional cultures such as jazz will be diluted. The Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved. End this, and the blues may end too.
Secondly, the contemporary Negro jazz musician is caught up by two impulses: the desire to disclaim the old entertainment, down-home, give-the-folks-a-great-big-smile side of his profession that seems today to have humiliating associations with slavery’s Congo Square; and the desire for the status of musical literacy, for sophistication, for the techniques and instrumentation of straight music. I should say that Mingus’s remark [“jazz means discrimination”] was prompted by the first of these, and much of his music by the second. The Negro is in a paradoxical position: he is looking for the jazz that isn’t jazz. Either he will find it, or – and I say this in all seriousness – jazz will become an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it is gone.”
I think something similar is now happening to gay culture as we have known it these past thirty years or so. I’ll link to the essay when it’s posted, if TNR allows me to.
A ‘DEFENDER’ OF MARRIAGE: The head of the Christian Coalition in Portland, Oregon, has had a busy few years, trying to prevent gay couples from getting even civil unions, let alone marriage rights. He’s now also accused of molesting three females in his own family.
The Dish 