Gareth Roberts: How younger gay men are LARPing the lives of their forebears (i.e. Live Action Role Play)

It was 1993. I dropped in to see a friend, and on the wall of his typically disordered student bedroom was a poster against homophobia. Women kissing women, men kissing men. Standard stuff, you might think. But one detail flipped my mind. At the bottom was the legend ‘This campaign is supported by BBC Radio 1’.

This was a positive, welcome move. Just a few years earlier one of the station’s top DJs had been cracking AIDS gags. Radio 1, at least in the daytime, had tried (and sometimes succeeded) to ignore and exile to the margins any musical act that was a bit too gay. Now they were on board.

But I felt a bit of me was disappearing. The world was changing for the better, but that was going to change me too, and I felt a pang of disquiet.

For some people – and, incredibly, for the young gay men who cannot even remember those days – it’s more than a pang. When people don’t or can’t acknowledge that things have substantially changed, they’re stuck either fighting battles long won or inventing specious new ones. And now, when to be a victim of oppression gives you status, a righteous glow, and a right to accuse anyone who disagrees with you as a bigot, then of course you’ll want to aspire to that.

In 1987, 90% of the British population thought sex between members of the same sex was wrong. Back then being oppressed wasn’t a fashionable identity for lesbians and gay men, it was a fact. Nobody enjoyed it. They wanted it to stop, in no small part so that future generations wouldn’t have to be bothered by it.

LARP originated when nerds went into the woods and pretended to be knights and wizards having adventures. A lot of younger gay men in particular seem to be LARPing the lives of their forebears, as if nothing had changed, acting out an identity from decades long gone.

There’s obviously a divide between older and younger people across all cultures. For example, young people cannot possibly appreciate the sheer pleasure of physically being young, which is perfectly fine. They shouldn’t be expected to. They will eventually, when bits start dropping off them.

But the specific modern Western generational gap is another matter. Youth culture as a whole seems to be stuck in about 1956 – ‘hey don’t be a square daddyo, you just don’t understand, let’s dye our hair,’ etc. The supposed cultural gulf between parents and kids already seemed a slightly naff concept by the 1970s. It’s horrifyingly embarrassing in the 2020s.

Because if there is such a gap now, it’s a false one, a kind of Live Action Role Play. LARP originated when nerds went into the woods and pretended to be knights and wizards having adventures. A lot of younger gay men in particular seem to be LARPing the lives of their forebears, as if nothing had changed, acting out an identity from decades long gone.

This you can see in the applauding of people doing things as if they were groundbreaking when the actual breaking of that ground happened long ago. Sam Smith is a particularly egregious example of this, seeming to think that attempts at androgyny and award wins are spectacularly fresh and epoch-making, when for much of the 70s and 80s in the UK it was difficult to find a male pop star who wasn’t wearing cosmetics and swishing about.

What people seem to do is view the past of living memory as being much worse for gay men – and it was – but in the wrong way.

Because there were blatant homos on TV all the time; barely half an hour would go by without a mention, usually a joke. The music press, read by huge numbers, was incredibly open and vocal, including teen magazines like Smash Hits.

There was generally more openly political mass culture, which has been forgotten. Yes, it was a rougher, tougher world, but there were some advantages to that. What there wasn’t was any government, institutional or corporate support for lesbians and gay men. All Western ones now openly pledge that support (to a fault as we can see in their nervy acceptance of gender theory).

Yes, there is still homophobia. But it’s nothing like it was and it’s often festering in the most unlikely and overlooked places – Stonewall, for example.

It’s very funny to see young people in general pretending to be anti-establishment misfits and outsiders, when they parrot the accepted mantras of governments and huge companies, who are often pathetically terrified of them.

This ease the gays should revel in, but they’re trapped in a LARPing bubble. Recently gay Twitter was banging on about the Conservative Party and Section 28, as if this was a live issue, and as if the Tories hadn’t changed out of all recognition on sexuality. And the social media obsession with whether superheroes, cartoon characters and even puppets are, aren’t or should be LGBTQetc is pitiful.

Yes, there is still homophobia. But it’s nothing like it was and it’s often festering in the most unlikely and overlooked places – Stonewall, for example.

For goodness sakes, for our sakes, enjoy yourselves! Because we couldn’t.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, novelist and journalist.