Camille Paglia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Tamer. More domestic. More people adopting children, more people settling down. It’s changed. There’s no doubt about it. I think that AIDS was like a Holocaust. The number of interesting, fascinating, talented men and artists and people in fashion and every level. I think that, in many ways, gay culture is still recovering from that. We’re at a kind of holding pattern. There was an enormous flamboyance and assertiveness to gay male culture once. It had a distinct style and voice of its own. What you’re saying, things are turning out better. Yes, there’s an assimilation going on, but also, to me, a disappearance of that gay aesthetic. Oscar Wilde is one of the major influences on my thinking and remains that. I teach a whole course on Oscar Wilde. Now, what can you say? Is there anything distinctly gay right now, except there are certainly gay activists who are extremely successful in terms of pushing their agenda. Probably these little cadres of gay activists are the only thing that’s left. I don’t know. Assimilation is always a loss. Certainly, my culture experienced it. Italian-American culture has kind of vanished, too. For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now?…

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