Gay Amnesia

If cultural amnesia – the ability of human societies to forget collective misdeeds – is an evolutionarily advantageous trait, then gay amnesia – defined by the Urban Dictionary as the failure to recognise one’s lovers on encountering them in public – is the most perverse form of this adaptation. Gay men have become the perfect amnesiacs, lacking not only biological progeny on whom to bestow their tales but, often, the desire to have their business witnessed by anyone other than its miscreant participants.

Far from illuminating the historical homosexual hinterland, the recent vogue for queering narratives proposes a celebratory, revisionist outlook that evades the profound, difficult questions pertinent to today’s gay culture. In an age of sexual forgetting, Gay Amnesia at Verdurin is at once the walk of shame at the end of the club night and a mournful parade for a fantasy of better past times.