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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1990)
up citified suburbs close to work. There will be the usual jokes about polyester and breeders, but smart gay and lesbian business persons will follow their clientele or make their services available to them (newspaper subscriptions, for example.) Where we've been, where we're headed, what's likely to happen soon Living quarters: small is beautiful N o, we can’t predict the future — but we can make some educated guesses about what life in the 1990s will hold. Here are this author’s best guesses and forecasts about your daily life in the decade to come: Architecture: retro/schmetro I n the 1970s, architects could design anything they liked as long as it was slablike, with floor-to-ceiling windows and flat roofs. In the 1980s, they designed anything but and strained to incorporate witty- campy historical ornament in the name of “post-modernism.” In the 1990s, every American city with over 100,000 people will have at least one pyramid-topped office building and “postmodernism” as a design phase will come to seem self-indulgent if not downright decadent. Architects will start inching back toward the form-follows- function of the Bauhaus slab but will be careful to avoid provoking the populace and the critics by stressing “contextualism” — the integration of the building’s ground level into the overall life of the street Above the fifth floor, though, efficiency will prevail. Economic life: the vanishing middle class B amount of advertising placed with gay papers falls way off. Best positioned to withstand the hard times will be those papers with strong local advertising and broad-based circulation. Subscriptions will become more common as gay people move away from core “ghetto” areas (see “Lifestyle,” following). Gay literature will show a familiar boom- and-bust pattern as the larger, mainstream publishing houses shy away from publishing gay- or lesbian-themed novels. However, smaller presses and a few sympathetic academic presses will make the new literature of the 1990s available to gay and lesbian readers. Eventually, by the mid-to-late 1990s, gay- and lesbian-themed literature will start to infiltrate the big publishers again. acking for this one comes both from economic forecasting and from the left. Generations: the young and the The World Future Society notes a “bimodal” not-so-young trend toward luxury and economy while the middle gets squeezed out. Increasingly, it’s he true “gay gray” revolution won’t Hyatt or Red Roof, Bloomie’s or K-Mart, come until after the turn of the century, with the middle in decline. Barbara when gay Baby Boomers retire in droves. Ehrenreich’s provocative new book. Fear of However, the strains of middle age will be Falling (Pantheon, $18.95), offers a grim much more apparent as the older Boomers view of self-deluding “yuppies,” who fancy reach their 50s in the 1990s and the youngest themselves an elite but who, in reality, have turn 30. “Younger people” — who by 1995 more in common with the classes below them will be anyone under 30 — will continue to than the classes above. We note as well the hold themselves somewhat aloof from the trend away from classic up-the-line middle Boomer majority, in part due to differences in management corporate jobs, as computeriza style (the “Boy” phenomenon observable in tion renders obsolete the information large cities), and of course health (pre-and gathering functions of the dutiful white-collar post-AIDS gay men). What will happen to yeomanry. Pessimists extrapolate a future gay male role playing in an era of social structure that resembles a lopsided grandfatherly “daddies” and balding “sons” figure-eight, with a few truly wealthy and will be anyone’s guess. Intergenerational powerful astride a huge nouvelle proletariat. conflict among lesbians will not be quite so pronounced, but still there will be a clash Environment: permanent between those who came out in the 1970s and their younger, (perhaps) more career-oriented pollution counterparts. n the 1990s, the EPA or local versions Lifestyle: urban-suburban thereof will be forced to intervene in our daily lives to protect us from ourselves. In the convergence largest cities — particularly New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — pollution monitoring n the 1990s the cities will start to resemble will become the norm, even of gasoline suburbia a little more, as discos and revival stations, dry cleaners and home furnaces. On movie houses are tom down to be replaced days when ozone and hydrocarbon levels are with strip shopping centers and video stores. way up, expect periodic bans on backyard And suburbia — at least the older postwar barbecuing and lawnmowing. Cleaning up areas — will resemble cities more and more, the environment will gradually cease to be the as they add office complexes and day-long goal; holding the line will be about all we can traffic jams. Most important, this is where the hope for. — new jobs will be. like Chicago and San Francisco, it Gay press/gay literature: best of will In be cities practically impossible to maintain a times/worst of times visible gay “ghetto” as skyrocketing rents brought about by gentrification make it hard for the young to get a toehold in the Castro or uch of the gay press will fall on hard New Town. Increasingly, gays will choose to times in the 1990s as the “976-phone sex” numbers cease to be a novelty and the live all over the place, even in the new built- T I M I R Three who core — lesbian and gay experts forecast the 1990s ents will skyrocket in inner-city areas as Robin Tyler, events producer/activist yuppies bump into unreedemable slums and housing projects. Smaller lofts and e can go one of two ways in the condos and Japanese-style miniaturized living ’90s — we can struggle around the will become increasingly the norm in such scarcity of resources in our community in districts, at least for those of us who don’t have a lot of money and live alone. The older, terms of a position of weakness, or we can work together from a viewpoint of strength. 1950s suburbs like Oak Brook, Illinois and Tyson’s Comer, Virginia, will continue to add It’s not just a question of leadership but of linking leadership among us all — lesbians, new apartments and condos and many of us gay men, minorities — crossing class and will find it more practical to live there (see color lines. “Lifestyle,” above). By the late 1990s, the “Among the so-called free nations, only “Beaver Cleaver” belt of single-detached homes for families will have shifted to the USA and South Africa lack a national health-care policy. Working toward such a exurban areas like Ventura County, California and Kane County, Illinois. Such areas will be policy is a good idea toward focusing our within driving range of the older suburbs but energy on a common goal and not fighting each other. That issue is the common thread far, far removed from the original cities. If the Democrats ever regain the White House, linking us all together...the feminization of poverty for women with AIDS for men.” look for something like a “housing IRA” to enable younger people to amass the (considerable) amount of money necessary for a down payment. Barbara Smith, black feminist writer/ activist Great (and not-so- r I ’o me, the political situation is more JL important than anything cultural by great) moments in itself. I think we will see increased leadership of lesbians and gay men of color, who in future forecasting many ways are politically positioned to be leaders now but who have not been recognized as such. There will be more 1939 — Designer Norman Bel Geddes’ acknowledgement that our movement will enormous “Futurama” exhibit debuts at the benefit from that kind of politics. New York World’s Fair. Centerpiece of the “It has been really hard up until now for exhibit is a scale model of the city of the “out,” politicized lesbians of color to get the future — 1960 — with 16-lane freeways funding, through grants and so on, to get us surrounded by identical-looking 80-story started writing novels. [In the ’90s] there will skyscrapers. Corporate sponsor General be more novels by lesbians of color, as some Motors’ input is evident in predictions of of us get the financial resources that would $200 cars-of-the-future (cheap even by give us space and time to work. It think that Depression standards) that are “probably AIDS will continue to bring various refinements of the diesel engine.” Exhibit communities together such as gay men, routinely drew two-hour-long lines. Visitors lesbians and the third world. For instance, who made it through received a button saying, third world communities are beginning to “I have seen the future.” confront issues of sexual identity and lesbians 1960 — Clark Kerr, then Chancellor of the and gay men of color are learning to deal with University of California system (including, issues of race. I pretty well expect — and among other campuses, Berkeley) goes on certainly hope for — a Democratic record regarding 1960s youth, saying presidential administration at some point in “employers are going to love” them, and the 1990s. I don’t know how much more of “there won’t be any riots.” this we can take.” 1971 — Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock is published and a new phrase enters the American vocabulary. Toffler’s thesis — that Jeff Zurlinden, syndicated AIDS columnist the pace of technical and social change in contemporary America alienated citizens from u < « r I nfection rates for AIDS have probably their own society — is still being debated. He Xreached their peak in New York, San was undoubtedly right, though, in using s Francisco and possibly Los Angeles. The California as a predictor of nationwide ‘second tier’ of large American cities such as change, and in viewing the rise of special interest groups. In the chapter “A Surfeit of Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston will Subcults” he mentions, among other groups, probably top out in the early 1990s. People gay motorcycle gangs. who live in these cities who have been spared 1974 — Publication of The Front Runner the plague up until now may come to regret their 1980s optimism. by Patricia Nell Warren, a heartfelt but sociologically naive novel set among gays in “Much of the health care establishment the near future. Warren viewed gay rights as will continue to view AIDS as someone else’s the logical culmination of civil rights and problem: in smaller cities and affluent areas, detailed the sweeping changes brought on by a gay men’s problem; in larger cities and the U.S. Supreme Court’s striking down of all poorer areas, an I.V. drug users’ problem. antisodomy statutes in the mid-1970s (an Those at greatest risk will continue to be the event that has, regretfully, never come to young, the ill-educated and the poorly pass). Drag queens feature prominently in informed, and their infants. Warren’s coalition of gaydom, even receiving “There probably won’t be a single special seating at track-and-field events. dramatic solution for AIDS like the Salk polio 1982 — Movie Blade Runner establishes a vaccine, but many new drugs and new courses gritty new look in science-fiction movies. Set of therapy will emerge in the 1990s. By the in the early 21st century in an impoverished, late 1990s, AIDS will be viewed not as an abysmally polluted Los Angeles, Blade always-fatal disease but as a treatable Runner is the pessimistic flip side of affliction, controllable like leukemia or even “Futurama” optimism. diabetes.” ^ W it O T V « just out T 1 7 V January 1990
