Falling American solidarity since the '90s, immigrant surname edition

Here is an article about the decline in immigrants Anglicizing their surnames, which they say has happened within "the last few decades." So this is likely another instance of the huge social fracturing that began in the late '80s / early '90s, depending on the case.

One idea is that most of the recent immigrants such as Latin American mestizos and Asians could not pass for white and therefore see no point in trying to fool others by changing their surnames, in contrast to earlier waves of European immigrants who could blend in by looks. The article itself proves this idea wrong, so you wonder why they don't mention that. The current decline in Anglicization of surnames affects even European immigrants (one of the people featured is from the former Yugoslavia).

Plus before the decline, white-looking and non-white-looking both tried to adopt Anglo surnames. Ashkenazi Jews are a clear example of the former, and blacks of the latter. Blacks may not have been immigrants, but if there had really been a desire to emphasize their cultural difference, they would've changed their last names like Malcolm X or those who adopted Arabic surnames when they got into the Nation of Islam. Those few who did were lampooned by the majority of blacks for taking their African roots too seriously -- we're Americans first, they were saying.

And blacks could certainly not pass for white or Anglo, but only a clueless journalist or social scientist would think that's what influences the decision to adopt a certain group's surnames. Rather, it's about signaling the good faith effort they're making to leave behind the tribe they came from and join the one they've come to. It has nothing to do with signaling race.

They didn't even change them to something European but less Anglo -- they kept Jones, Jenkins, and Smith. Their first names started to diverge from whites' during the second half of the 1960s, but surnames are more important for identifying what Big Group you come from. Most people inappropriately project the '90s-era identity politics back onto The Sixties, which was about civil rights and anti-war. Black power was a fringe movement and vanished in a flash. Blacks wanted to join mainstream society so much that when three of the top ten TV shows featured all-black casts, they didn't try to blackify their surnames (or first names) at all -- they were the Evanses, the Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son. Ditto when The Cosby Show took over.

As late as 1984, we were still a very nation-oriented country, as the Los Angeles Olympics exemplified:

But the Los Angeles Games, televised by ABC, were a flag-waving, chanting USA ad...

"As a spectator at the Opening Ceremonies in 1984," NBC 2002 Opening Ceremonies producer Don Misher said recently, "I came out of the stadium euphoric. An IOC member later told me it was very nationalistic, second only to Hitler's (1936) Games."

You didn't see that at all in the Atlanta or Salt Lake City Olympics. Since the early '90s, it has become cool to be "ethnic," that is to de-nationalize the level that you base your identity on. Most of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" narrative really applies to the '90s and 2000s, not the '60s through the '80s. If during the latter period people stopped playing bridge together, having friends over for dinner, and joining the PTA, it's because bridge ended as a fad as people took up other social games and sports (like softball), because people began to eat meals together outside the home, and because parents decided to get a life rather than hover over their kids and hound their teachers.

It was an incredibly social time, not to mention nationalistic. The public accepted or even cheered on a continual series of large wars and interventions, whereas during the '90s and 2000s politicians found out that they couldn't do that anymore, so we've had no large wars, let alone a string of them. If you weren't chanting "U-S-A!" during the Olympics, you got punched in the nuts for being a traitor. Since then it's become gauche and everyone will ostracize you for "jingoism." Right through the '80s, the description "All-American" was a complement rather than a put-down. That glowing image of the All-American showed up in popular music, too, from "California Girls" in 1965 to "Free Fallin'" in 1989.

No shampoo, and no problems

I've been thinking where else to apply the back-to-nature principle, which goes like this: if we're disturbing the outcome of natural selection, this practice is guilty until proven innocent. In some cases, a good case can be made -- like washing your hands. True we didn't evolve in a world with soap, and we are thus messing around with our natural state. However, we live in a world that's far more germ-ridden than when we all lived on the African savanna, mostly due to crowding, contact with animals, and living -- and doing our business -- in the same place over time. So, severely cutting down on the concentration of harmful junk on our hands gives a huge boost to our health.

That does not apply to shampoo, though. It has no anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-viral powers, unlike soap. (There are special shampoos if you want to zap the bacteria that contribute to dandruff or if you have lice, but I'm talking normal everyday shampoo.) All it does is remove some of the dirt and dust that sticks to the oil that your scalp makes and that coats your hair follicles (sebum), so there's no sanitation or hygiene angle here. Yet it doesn't have laser-like precision in removing these dust particles -- it strips away a good deal of the sebum too.

Now, natural selection put oil-making sebaceous glands on your scalp for a good reason -- and you don't even have to know what it is, although it's fun to speculate. It survived natural selection, so it must have been doing something good for you. And people can easily tell that their hair gets messed up in some way (too dry, too limp, whatever) after shampooing, so they then try to put some of the moisture back in with conditioner. Whenever you need a corrector for the corrector, you know you're digging yourself deep.

Washing the dirt and dust out of your hair doesn't take anything more than a thorough rinse in a shower with good water pressure. This is what humans have done for as long as they've had access to bodies of water in which to bathe, and the hair of hunter-gatherers looks just fine. They've also infused oily substances into their hair -- olive oil in the Mediterranean, coconut oil in the South Seas, a butterfat mixture among the Himba pastoralists of Namibia, and god knows what else. But whereas rubbing fatty stuff into the hair appears universal, using cleansing agents just to get out a little dust hardly shows up at all.

That's true even in the industrialized West. I searched the NYT archives for articles mentioning how often you should shampoo. There aren't any such articles before the first decade of the 1900s, when the consensus was that once a month was good, but aim for once every 2 to 3 weeks. That was true for the 1910s, too. I couldn't access the articles from most of the following decades, although there is one from the WWII days that mentions women's weekly shampoo. Brief histories I've read suggest that the advertizing of the '70s lead to even more frequent shampooing, and certainly I remember from personal experience that by no later than the end of the '80s, daily shampooing was expected.

As much as I rave about that decade, no one did babes like the '60s. Everything lined up just right for them -- lots of animal products in the diet, little / infrequent shampooing, no layers of hairstyling products, normal amount of sun exposure, and little or no air conditioning = normal level of sweat, helped out by a normal mix of physical activity. God, that big bouncy hair... here is a cropped, safe picture of Cynthia Myers, Playmate of the month for December 1968. You won't see that in the era of Clueless and Mean Girls. In fact, if it weren't for styling products, I doubt you would've seen it in the '80s either.

As for guys, here's a picture comparing current star Zac Efron to Leonard Whiting, who played Romeo in Zeffirelli's 1968 movie. Whiting's hair looks thicker at the individual hair level, more voluminous overall, and more lustrous.

It's been almost two weeks since I last shampooed my hair, although I still rinse it well with just water in the shower, and it's not a big greasy mess like I imagined it would. After a lifetime of daily shampooing, it'll take my sebaceous glands some time to adapt to the *lack* of the oil-sapping stuff and dial down their activity. From what I've read, it'll take between two weeks and two months for a complete return to normalcy, but it's worth it. Reading around, I was struck by how wimpy people are when they try this out -- "omigod i could never go for more than like three days, i'd feel so gross!" They know that it will all work out, but we've become so focused on immediate comfort rather than enduring robustness. It's considered a violation of someone's human rights to tell them to deal with it until it gets better.

There seems to be an eco-friendly movement afoot called "no 'poo" -- those damned Greens will never learn good advertizing -- which aims to reduce shampoo use for some environmental reason or other. It seems like most of them still use a cleansing agent and conditioner to ameliorate the damage done by the cleanser, though. Knowing that they're eco-friendly, we can infer that they ingest little animal fat and protein, on which our hair is so dependent, so they're not the best example of what little or no shampoo looks like -- for that, have another look at those '60s honey bunnies.

Where do the art-lovers live?

GameFAQs just ran a poll about what your favorite subject was in high school. I excluded people who said "phys ed," then lumped the three artier ones together (art, language arts, foreign language) and the three sciencey ones together (math, science, social sciences). Then I found the percent of people who liked the arts classes out of everyone (excluding gym fans).

Across all of America, 32% like the arts classes. The map below shows each state's percent as a deviation from the national average, where browner means more art-minded and bluer means more science-minded:


The main pattern is east vs. west, with the middle and southeast of the country at about the national average and an outpost of science people in the middle. You might've expected it to show the northeast as the most art-loving, or perhaps bi-coastal vs. flyover country. Yet that would rely too much on things beyond a person's basic preferences -- there's the price of going to a museum, whether there are museums nearby in the first place, etc. By just asking what their favorite subject was in high school, we're only looking at differences in tastes. Compared to people who live in New York, people in Montana would rather read about western American folklore or take up an arts & crafts hobby, and wouldn't give a shit what Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt are up to.

Will pop culture be remembered only for its decadent phases?

In higher culture, we remember the works made during a vigorous, youthful hey-day than later works that are more overly ornamented and perhaps a bit too self-aware for their own good. Virgil has outlasted Ovid, Michelangelo Boucher, and Beethoven Stravinsky. I'm talking about people who are casual consumers up through the most erudite, not some niche group that tries to shock or stand out by telling others that Bach was a wimp and Mendelssohn was a giant.

Popular culture that lasts is very recent because it took industrialization to make mass production possible and to make prices affordable to a mass audience (through division of labor and competition among producers). So there's a lot less data to look at. Still, I wonder if we won't see the reverse pattern, where it's remembered more for its flabbier stages. Things that we hold in high esteem we remember for their greater qualities, since remembering their flaws would make the grand seem less elevated. But things that we hold in disregard we remember for their damning qualities, since remembering their strengths would dignify something base.

I ask this because I decided to get out of my popular music comfort zone and start exploring jazz. After some basic reading around and sampling songs on YouTube, I found that I like the ragtime through hot jazz era of the '20s and early '30s, that big band and swing is OK but too overwrought, and that with bebop and after it left planet Earth, while also spawning some really soporific background music. That's just a vague impression, but the styles are so different that it doesn't take a lifelong familiarity to have a pretty strong judgment.

So off to the used record store I went to pick up a few CDs -- and found almost nothing. There was a greatest hits by Scott Joplin, but I'd already heard most of that in high school (that was my one experience with pre-'30s jazz as a teenager). Fortunately there was at least one other collection there that I picked up, a collaboration between Louis Armstrong and King Oliver from 1923. It sounds pretty good, but not quite as make-you-get-up-and-move as the songs I sampled from his Hot Five and Hot Seven band of the later '20s. There wasn't even that much big band music available. Almost everything was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, etc. on the one hand, and a bunch of Harry Connick Jr., etc. on the other.

All of the carefree, fun-loving, don't-force-it stuff has been forgotten. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised, since while reading around very few of the names from the 1890s through the early 1930s rang a bell, whereas just about all of them from the mid-'30s onward I'd either heard of or knew some of their songs. How odd that the common understanding of jazz derives from what came after The Jazz Age.

Movie buffs may keep an appreciation for periods of grand activity -- Hollywood's Golden Age and its silver age of roughly the mid-'70s through the late '80s -- but if you look at what's on offer for new DVDs, in the used section of a record store, or on an illegal filesharing service, not to mention what movies people refer to on just about any corner of the internet, you'd think that these eras never existed. No one's memory appears to go back farther than 1993 (Groundhog Day). I'm not talking about fleeting gossip related to what's opening this weekend. I mean any discussion of movies or Hollywood whatsoever.

And don't even start me on rock music; I've covered that enough before. The whole lifetime of the late '50s through the very early '90s has vanished from the common culture. Instead, our understanding of "rock music" has come to mean alternative / emo, indie, and singer-songwriter music, which are all as far away from rock as bebop is from Dixieland. Just think: in 50 to 100 years, will "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath be forgotten, while "Du Hast" by Rammstein spring to mind when people discuss the long-ago genre of heavy metal?

I don't read popular lit, so I couldn't say whether this pattern holds up there or not. I'm talking the kind that doesn't aspire to lit lit, as a bunch of sci-fi does, but to thrillers, mysteries, etc., what's disparaged as genre fiction. Is this remembered more for its decadent than great works?

TV it's hard to guess about. Some say it's in a peak period right now, so we'll have to wait until it goes into its overly busy and too-serious phase. Other things to think about?

Albums that critics love, go unappreciated, but are actually good

Most lists of "the most underrated and under-appreciated" things are a see-through way of trying to boost the list-maker's status by implying how cultured they are compared to the philistines in the audience. But sometimes they do have a legitimate point. In most high school and intro college lit classes, you'll rarely read any Marlowe, but you can be sure to slog through Arthur Miller and Ibsen, even though he's superior to both combined. Someone who complained about the lack of Marlowe in the typical lit curriculum would have a good point, while someone who whined about not teaching Alfred Jarry would just be trying to score obscurity-based status points.

Applying this idea to music albums, let's take Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums as the list of what critics hype up. Next, we eliminate the ones that may be good but aren't out-of-this-world great -- that are there just because critics have to revere them or else lose their snob cred. (This eliminates over-hyped ones like The Velvet Underground & Nico's self-titled album). Finally, we eliminate those that the average youngish listener (say under the age of 25 or 30) has not heard much of -- let's say, no more than one song on the album. (This eliminates great but well known ones like Rocket to Russia by the Ramones.) If they've heard two, three, four hit singles but not the rest from it, I'd say they're still fairly aware of that album.

What's left is a pretty good list of "hidden gem" albums. I haven't listened to every one of the 500, so if it doesn't appear, it may be because I don't know it. Here's what I get:

Ramones (Ramones)
Purple Rain (Prince & The Revolution)
Back In Black (AC/DC)
Raw Power (The Stooges)
Pretenders (The Pretenders)
Electric Warrior (T. Rex)
1999 (Prince)
The Queen Is Dead (The Smiths)
Trans-Europe Express (Kraftwerk)
Psychocandy (The Jesus & Mary Chain)
Strange Days (The Doors)

Honorable mentions (quality isn't quite as high as the others, but still not well known by most young people):

Transformer (Lou Reed)
Siamese Dream (The Smashing Pumpkins)

Of the ones above, the T. Rex album is the best example of a hidden gem, since I'm pretty sure no one under 45 has heard even one song from it and the band is not well known regardless of which albums or songs we're talking about. The other albums would at least be recognized for one song, or for some of the band's other work.

Millennials, the second Silent Generation

I've never read Time's original 1951 sketch of the Silent Generation until now, and it's striking (although not surprising to me) how contemporary it sounds. When it was written, middle-aged people were cooler than young people, just like today.

It was also written when crime had been falling for 18 years, just as we've seen since crime peaked in the early '90s. Recall that the crime rate soared from at least 1900 (maybe even back through the "Gay Nineties") up through 1933, after which it plummeted throughout most of the 1950s. Another crime wave began in 1959 and ended around 1992, when it started falling once again.

People who have years of memories of wild times -- especially if those were during their coming-of-age years -- are basically a different species of human from those whose memories are only of tame times. Too many people focus on "defining events" like wars, economic booms or busts, but these are all pretty minor in shaping generations. The rate of violent and property crime is a lot more influential, simply because that's what the human mind has been the most tuned into for most of our species' history -- there were no labor markets or World Wars until pretty recently. There's always been violence, so that's the cue we zoom in on.

I'll go back later and pick out some good quotes and draw the parallel in case some of them aren't obvious. It's not long, so read the whole thing. For now I'll just mention the "I-don't-give-a-damn-ism" attitude of both periods of rising crime (clear during the '60s through the '80s, but most people today have no idea how wild the '20s were), and something I suspected based on current trends but had never seen any evidence for before -- "The young American male is increasingly bewildered and confused by the aggressive, coarse, dominant attitudes and behavior of his women." Those super-soft, estrogen-dripping honey babies of the '60s, '70s, and '80s were not there during the '40s, '50s, and probably most of the '30s. And during that earlier period of tame times, young dudes were just as blindsided by the shift to bossy man-women, LOL. No more true sex symbols like you saw during the Jazz Age.

God I wish I could've been there for the Roaring Twenties! At least my mother's parents were (one born in 1914, the other in 1920), and I got to see a lot of them growing up. As with Baby Boomers today, they remained carefree and rambunctious even into old age (my grandmother is still an incorrigible prank-player). Once you get so much exposure to a wild-times environment, you shape yourself to fit in there, and that sticks more or less for life -- like learning a language. This huge effort of birth cohort can lead to the bizarre situation where it's the middle-aged who are exciting to play with and the young who are dull killjoys.

Are modernized people more feminized or more infantilized?

Although the picture goes back over 100 years, the events of the past two years have made it clear to everyone that we live in a bailout culture. This is just one way in which modern people seem fundamentally different from pre-modern people. (In Europe, the seeds may have been there somewhat earlier, but by the Enlightenment these tendencies had cleared a threshold so that they're visible to any observer.)

Most of those who are critical of the bailouts -- of homeowners, of investment banks, of people who bought crappy cars, of people who make terrible health choices, and so on -- invoke the image of a spoiled child who whines to his parents to make it all better when he gets himself into trouble in some predictable way. The message from this rhetorical frame is that we need to stop acting like babies, grow up, and behave like mature adults. Many notice how long it takes to reach the milestones of adulthood than it used to, which would seem to provide more evidence in support of the infantilization view.

However, couldn't we make another equally valid analogy to the spendthrift wife who, after ruining herself financially, tries to badger her husband into transferring more of his earnings to her? In this view, the problem is that we've become feminized, so that the lesson is to stop acting like girls and start taking it like a man.

In this case of our bailout mentality, the two ideas about modernization give the same result, since both bratty children and wives with a hole in their pocket scream for bailouts. So, what other changes that modern people show would help us to distinguish between the two causes? Both could be going on, but one may play a stronger role. What we want to do is find some aspect of life where children or adolescents (of either sex) go one way and females (of any age) go another way. During a late night stroll I came up with as many examples I could think of, and it looks more like modernization = feminization, rather than infantilization. Here's what I thought up. Any other examples that would distinguish the two?

1. Violence and property crimes. Feminization. Young people, whether children or adolescents, are much more violent and destructive of property than adults, whereas females are less so than males. The trend since circa 1600 in Europe has been downward.

2. Emotional sensitivity and empathy (even including non-human animals). Feminization. Young people are more callous about these things than mature adults are, whereas females are more adept than males. The trend since at least the Enlightenment has been toward greater sensitivity.

3. Sexual behavior. Feminization. Here we can only compare adolescents to adults, but the former have wilder thoughts and behavior, whereas females behave more conservatively. The trend during the modern age is toward more vanilla sex lives. (Remember to look at the whole sweep of things, rather than compare Victorians to the Summer of Love. Don't leave out Samuel Pepys' diary, Casanova, The Canterbury Tales, etc., and don't leave out the 1940s-1950s and the '90s-2000s.)

4. Gross-out and slapstick humor. Feminization. Young people participate in and consume these forms of humor much more than adults (especially if we're talking about smaller children), whereas females are much more repulsed by it than males. The trend since the Elizabethan era and before has been sharply downward. The movie with the most bawdy humor that I've seen recently is Decameron, adapted from a book of tales written in the 14th century.

5. Respect for laws, order, structure, etc. Feminization. You all remember Lord of the Flies and Boyz n the Hood: younger people are much more rebellious against these things, whereas females cling to them more than males. The trend has been toward greater respect. I'm not talking about behavior that may or may not break the law, but about how elevated in people's minds these concepts are. Under feudalism or absolute monarchy, people were more cynical about law & order (although thankful that it protected them from harm), compared to modern people who see most law enforcers as the good guys (because they are).

6. Sense of adventure and curiosity. Feminization. Young people are more driven by the Indiana Jones impulse than adults, whereas females are less adventure-seeking than males. The trend has been toward less boldness in one's adventures. It's not that no one enjoys a good real-life adventure anymore, but compared to braving the high seas to find treasure or virgin land, crusading in exotic far-off countries, or living by transhumance pastoralism, you have to admit that we've become pretty wimpy.

7. Attention to our health. Feminization. Young people feel more invincible and behave more recklessly in health matters compared to adults, whereas females are more mindful than males. The trend has been toward a greater preoccupation with personal hygiene, diet, exercise with the explicit goal to improve health, and so on. This is not merely due to the fact that it's safer to visit doctors now than 200 years ago or earlier, since most of these changes involve lifestyle habits rather than hospital visits. And I'm not talking about specific diets -- like more meat or less meat -- but just to how much we dwell on the topic and act on it no matter which particular choices we make.

8. Aspbergery / autistic behavior. Infantilization. Younger people have less developed social skills, less developed "Theory of Mind" (i.e., appreciating that other people have their own minds and beliefs), are less tolerant of ambiguity, and are more literal-minded when interpreting someone else's words or actions. Females are more developed in these areas than males. The trend since at least the Enlightenment has been toward a more Aspbergery personality. We seem less dexterous in our social relations, we're more likely to rule out that another human being could hold an opposite viewpoint from our own (a classic test of autism is the "false belief task"), and we're less accepting of ambiguity and open interpretations -- as shown by the proliferation of grammar Nazis since the 18th century, who were wholly absent before.

9. Faith in the supernatural. Infantilization. Younger people aren't quite so committed to belief in the afterlife, spirits, etc., as older adults are, whereas females have stronger beliefs here than males. The trend since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment has been toward a more materialist view of the universe. I don't want to include a discussion of "religion" because that covers so many different beliefs and behaviors, so I focused on just one aspect.

Just by the number of cases, feminization looks like a stronger explanation, especially when you weight each case by how important the change is in defining the shift from pre-modern to modernized societies.

You could object that these changes only show that we're more mature than infantilized -- that the infantilized view was just plain wrong to begin with, not one of several viable explanations. Still, the larger picture of how long we delay reaching milestones of adulthood -- having a sustaining job, courting and having sex, etc. -- would seem to rule out a "we're so mature now" view.

This isn't just some hairsplitting exercise, since these two ideas could predict different mechanisms for the change. For example, the change could be due to a higher or lower frequency of some genes, as the result of natural selection. The genes involved in keeping an organism in a youthful state (neoteny) is not the same as the ones that promotes feminized rather than masculinized features. If we had reliable methods of detecting natural selection within just 300 or 400 years, I'd look at genes that affect the concentration of sex hormones, how sensitive their receptors are, and so on, based on the feminization idea. Someone who thought the infantilization angle was more important would look at a different, somewhat overlapping set of genes, such as those that stimulate growth.

Adults playing softball tracks crime rate

Here's another demonstration of the sociability and team-mindedness of people tracking the crime rate. The Statistical Abstract of the United States has data on the number of adult softball teams (baseball must be included in this), and I've divided them by the total population. Because the size of a softball team is basically constant across time -- free of bias with respect to time, at any rate -- this picture also tells us the fraction of people playing softball.

It began steadily rising at least since 1970, when the data begin, up through 1991. (Based on what I've seen of the 1960s, I'd guess it was rising during that decade too, maybe back to the late '50s.) Then 1992 begins a steady fall up through 2006. This exactly matches the movement in the violent and property crime rates.

There are influences in both directions. When people are more out-and-about (for instance playing softball), crime increases because there are more sitting ducks for criminals to exploit, unlike when everyone is locked inside. And when crime is soaring, it's always part of a rise in wild behavior overall. Being outside playing softball is more adventurous than staying inside, and it also brings together people to cooperate as a team, which they feel a greater need to do when the common threat of crime is rising.

At some point people have had too much with their exposure to crime and begin to retreat from public spaces. This drains the pool of potential victims out in plain sight, so the crime rate falls as a result, which in turn gives people less of a feeling of facing a common threat, so they don't feel so keen to form teams, socialize, and otherwise look out for one another. Now they're either hiding indoors or leaving only for a brief time to get a massage at a day-spa or stare at tire rims in a display room.

It's very hard to remember, even for those who lived through the entire period, but from the late '50s through the very early '90s, adults actually had a life. They weren't hunkered down in their homes like during the falling-crime times of most of the '30s through most of the '50s, or the more recent period of the early-mid '90s through today. Every weekend when I was only 3 or 4, and they in their late 20s, my mother would drag my dad out to a dance club where she could cut a little rug to the new wave explosion of the early-mid '80s. Back then they made use of a strange arrangement known as "finding a babysitter" (I think it was one of their friends from work).

If that had taken place during the past 15-20 years of the increasingly helicopter parent culture, Child Services probably would've robbed them of their custody. Parents aren't supposed to do anything fun anymore.

Gays in existential drift since AIDS and homophobia have been fading?

A comment in the previous post asks about asabiya among gay man -- that is Ibn Khaldun's term for solidarity and capacity for collective action. He used it to describe what force led tribes outside the center of power (nomads, barbarians, whatever you want to call them) to band together and overrun the civilized urban elites.

I don't have much connection to the gay world, aside from having one friend on Facebook who's gay (a "Facebook-only friend," as they say, not actually in my social circle). But based on the picture of the past 20 years, in which everybody seems to be losing the solidarity and sense of purpose they had from the '60s through the '80s, I'd guess the gay community isn't as tightly knit and ready for action as it used to be. I tried looking through the General Social Survey for questions that would bear on gay solidarity, but there aren't any. Still, here's anecdotal support (via Ray Sawhill's blog) from a gay man long familiar with The Movement:

What disappoints me most about the current state of the gay movement, if you can still call it that, is that most gays have settled for this really rigid, obvious, and stereotypical idea of what it means to be a homosexual. It's become a very facile, consumerist identity without any substance, purely decorative and inert, and strangely castrated.

I think he's describing most groups of people after the early '90s fall in violence ended three and a half decades of wild and solidaristic times -- caricature, consumerism, decoration, impotence. He doesn't come right out and say that the ties that bind are pretty loose by now, but that seems a safe inference from the quote.

This massive social shift must have been even more pronounced among gays because they weren't just the recipients of random opportunistic violence, which is bad enough, but were also targeted in virtue of being gay. That will bind actual or potential victims together more than if there isn't a clear targeting of victims based on group membership. Plus AIDS looked like the Black Death, and again nothing pulls people together like a common threat.

Once the violence rate dropped in the early '90s, so must have gay-bashing. Violence is just one component of the overall wildness that started falling then, also including a decline in risky sexual behavior. After putting a lid on their previously reckless ways, AIDS stopped wiping out gays at the same rate and may have become less virulent. With those two large threats absent from a gay man's life today, he feels no need to band together with others and revive ACT UP. Instead they've done like the rest of us and fallen back into the default state of competing against each other in a variety of petty status games.