Hipsters are agents of social change
Hipsters, East London. Photo: Tim Sullivan
This article titled “Hipsters are agents of social change” was written by Anna Leach, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 21st January 2011 14.29 UTCYou can always tell that a young man doesn’t belong in Belfast when he has green and pink flower tattoos up his arms, a light brown moustache and shrink-wrapped skinny jeans. You can tell where he does belong – Shoreditch – which was why I wasn’t surprised that the only time I saw a man dressed like this in Northern Ireland was when I was waiting to board the plane back to London. Clearly the young man was a hipster.
Described by Time Out as “zombies” who must be “buried for cool to be reborn” and by Adbusters as “a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion” that “represents the end of western civilisation” – hipsters aren’t the most feted of subcultures. Blogs abound on the subject of just how annoying they are. Well, a Guardian writer defended hipsters back in 2008, and I think it’s time to do it again.
As the young man shuffled his vintage sports-branded hand luggage down the security queue, I was reminded why I’m always glad to see hipsters – even in east London, where you can hardly leave the house without tripping over one. Hipsters make me happy, because I see them as agents of social change. As a young British homosexual, I can only be grateful to them – because they make it cool to be gay. I know people have been making gay cool since Marlene Dietrich, but the effect on the streets has been negligible.
That sort of culture pillaging, however, is exactly what so annoys Christian Lorentzen in Time Out: he says that they “devour gay style” and the marks of other minority cultures and that “these aesthetics are assimilated – cannibalized – into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod”.
Well, cannibalised or not, let me tell you one thing. It means you can run around large swaths of London being as gay as you want. And while outside the East End bubble it’s still reckless to hold hands with your partner or look in any way physically attracted to someone of the same sex, you can at least mooch about in skinny jeans, hoodies and some form of sneaker and instead of classing you as a threatening gender-defying dyke, people will just assume you’re a hipster. In that case, take more of my subculture, please!
True, fashion references don’t make for automatic tolerance. But it’s not just the clothes. Hipster places are places where it’s fine to be gay. It’s almost, dare I breathe it, a positive thing. You can take your straight friends to gay hipster nights, and your gay friends to straight hipster nights. And it’s cool – everyone’s fine about the whole thing. And that, God damn it, is exactly what we’ve been longing for since gay sex got decriminalised in 1967. Sure, I wouldn’t trust some yawning graphic designer with a pencil moustache to have my back if there was some kind of violent homophobic uprising – but at least you know they’re not the ones who are going to be throwing the rocks.
For all the fetishisation of punk and hip-hop as genuine movements by the lead hipster-bashers, I don’t imagine either of those testosterone-soaked cultures provided as relaxed an atmosphere for a young gay person. So don’t just take the hipster’s can’t-see-past-the-end-of-my-rollie shrug for simple apathy. There’s a certain tolerance in just hanging around, being cool with it. Those are social statements.
I know Chloë Sevigny isn’t Martin Luther King. And I know many people are left behind by the hipster movement. And no, I don’t think that Stonewall should stop fighting for equal rights legislation because a bunch of people right now are wearing American Apparel. The tide will turn and skinny jeans will be swept out of fashion, but hipsters will have brought gay to the mainstream, and made it part of our cultural vocabulary.
The adoption of black culture in the 60s – music, slang and attitude – paved the way for the more racially equal society that America has today. This may be a grandiose parallel, but I’d like to think that hipster culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better.
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Totally bemused by what I have just read! The person in question must be a newcomer to east London? I’m gay and have lived in and around East London for most of my life, now 40 and have never known the area to be as ‘straight’ as it is now. The east end traditionally had a very large gay community and many many gay pubs, which one by one turned in to strip joints. The more trendy the east end becomes the straighter it becomes. The middle england, middle class, skinny jean home counties brigaded have done nothing but kill the diversity of gay life that once thrived here, in it place is todays gay clones that have Pasteurised and homogenised all that stands in their way! They have created a ghetto in the east end that is totally self serving and ignorant.
ps the punk movement was a gay movement ‘punk’ is the old American slang and gay polari word for a man who has anal sex with another man.
The ‘hipster’ (or ‘Shoreditch Twat’, as many of us prefer to call them) is little more than an unwitting footsoldier in the global ‘New Model Army’ of commercialism; an unpaid agent in the ‘levelling’ of local character, leaving in their wake the familiar identikit High Street, which deserves nothing but our contempt (for a poignant illustration of this, just look at what’s happened to Spitalfields Market, now that the big brands have moved in).
Where is the rich cultural output one normally associates with a vibrant subculture? Nowhere, because the ‘hipsters’ are nothing other than the Ton Ton Macoutes of the multinationals! As for prejudices: they have plenty of those, but they tend to be of the fashionable variety (so that’s alright then)…
Anna writes: “I’d like to think that hipster culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better.”
You might like to think that, Anna, but you’d be wrong!
If your skin is the wrong colour, you are too old or poor or disabled, hipsters will reject you, whether you are gay or not.
Following your logic, Anna, one might argue that single-sex military culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better or,
theatre culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better or,
art culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better or,
left-wing political culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better or,
my favourite …
the 1960s hippy culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better.
But it would all be bollocks. It is individual brave women and men, who have made repeated stands against homophobic bullying, that have turned acceptance of gay people for the better.
I think you’re mixing up “gay” and “camp” there tbh, not quite the same thing.
Eastend & Gay you’ve hit the nail on the head. Remember back in the 1960’s Hackney had stars like Gay Travers and RayMartine. The Deuragon Arms and the Frampton Arms were gay pubs all gone now. It’s nothing new and your right the Trustafarians are ruining Hackney as we speak. Check out all the Sloanes on London Fields and Broadway Market it’s like a private school reunion. One thing though they will soon find another area to ruin and move on. I’m guessing Dagenham or how about Croydon? Well we can but hope
p.s the newbie hackney lefties on here make me laugh
Potentially one of the worst articles ever written. Is the writer a genuine Journalist or just another blogger? Think her finger is about as far away from ‘the pulse’ as is humanly possible.