So hey, there’s this story. You probably read it and/or read about it, and it probably made you cringe and/or want to cry as much as it did me. It was all sorts of wrong: According to its author, the modern young gay man — or the “post-mo,” as he dubs them — “has the freedom to live exactly the way we want.” This writer sees the post-mo as university-educated, as primarily nestled in the fashion and television industries, as the owners of “fabulously rustic country homes,” and as totally over being called “gay” in the first place. By his logic, the new gay man didn’t have to fight for anything, so taking it for granted is his privilege.

Of course, that’s only one aspect of a long, incredulous line of privilege because the new gay man is also, according to the article and its accompanying pictorial, totally fucking rich — higher educations! country homes! bowties! — and pretty much exclusively white. (The sole visibly nonwhite subject whose image appears in the piece, to his credit, wrote an entire follow-up essay denouncing the article as basically insane, and noted that where the author “got cottage privileges from his parents, I had a three-hour beating.”) I could keep going, but this isn’t exactly what I hoped to write about.

From the perspective of someone who is not — and has no illusions about being — a “young gay man,” I felt a strange tic in my neck every time this person made an assumption about anyone over 29. In fact, so much of this argument made no sense to me as a 37-year-old: “Post-mos don’t hang rainbow flags in their windows,” he writes, and neither do I, nor do the majority of over-30 gay men that I know. “We don’t torture ourselves to fit in with other gays,” he boasts, and I’m hard-pressed to think of more than three people I know over 30 who could arguably fit into some sort of established “gay scene.” And only one paragraph after he expresses his disgust for “the stereotypes and the ideals associated with preceding gay generations,” he argues that the post-mo struggles with more pressing questions, like, “How masculine is masculine enough?” That the author had merely replaced one set of gender identity stereotypes with a new one was apparently lost on him.

As I continued to read the piece, however, the only thing that became increasingly clear to me was that this writer does not seem to have any real world experience with the “preceding gay generations” —  a fact that is not only tragic, but also the most expository point in understanding how any one young person can be so terribly misinformed and, truthfully, spoiled. In failing to acknowledge that “being gay” exists within a historical discourse, that the ideas we have and the words we use have no basis in the present without their discursive connections to the past, this young man is implying that the world he lives in now is somehow causally isolated from the world before he was born in 1987. The hyperbole of this claim is succinctly measured: “To be a twentysomething gay man in Toronto in 2011 is to be free from persecution and social pressures to conform,” he says. “It’s also, in most ways, not about being gay at all.”

Now, either Toronto is the persecution-free gay promised land — in which case, call my real estate broker! — or this guy is so disconnected from reality that, as a post-mo, he refuses to pick up a newspaper. In order to determine which is which, I went to the Internet, and here is some of what I discovered:

• Earlier this year, Toronto’s gay village was essentially being terrorized by packs of students who — mimicking Glee — threw slushies at gay men, before elevating their actions to verbal abuse, harassment, and stone-throwing. Says one local resident, “It’s gotten continuously worse. One day I was out on my balcony and all of a sudden I heard, ‘You fucking faggots!’ And then a drink went flying by my head and broke up against the glass.”
• In January of this year, Ryan Lester and his brother Ben were viciously attacked on Toronto’s Church Street by two young men who hurled insults at them, like “‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ and ‘homo.’”
• In April of this year, openly gay Jon Chiasson was also physically attacked, this time on a Toronto city subway after a lone man began taunting him by repeatedly calling him a “faggot.”

It took about three minutes of Google to call bullshit on this so-called post-modern persecution-free Toronto. It is all about being gay.

Truthfully, there’s no tidy ending to all this: We’ve always seemed to have an intergenerational divide in the gay community, and its presence was exacerbated in the 1980s when we lost so many brilliant gay men to the AIDS epidemic and witnessed a real-time generational chasm. But the idea that any of us might stand to benefit from segregating ourselves into “old” and “young” is a disastrous proposition for our community — for our world, really — and if this writer’s essay has done any good, it’s that his work offers prescient empiric proof of such an intellectual catastrophe.

But if I can make one big point, it’s this: The idea of the single monolithic gay culture that these young people think they are rebelling against is, in fact, a myth. If this writer had actually cared to cultivate some meaningful relationships with a few older gay men before dismissing them outright, if he actually connected with personal and cultural gay histories from even before Stonewall, he might know that the only way to go “beyond gay” is, quite frankly, to be straight.