The New Gay calls it quits.

The web site The New Gay has announced that it is shutting down. I saw its demise coming a while back, as articles other than "Song of the Day" slacked off. While I am sad to see TNG go, I believe that it did not live up to its original promise.

TNG's stated purpose was as follows:

While we have our differences, our common bond is that we choose to define ourselves instead of letting a narrowly defined mainstream gay culture do it for us. That is what’s new about what we’re doing here.

So far, so good, since someone needs to question the assumptions of the queer orthodoxy, but then we come to this:

We* all agree that the mainstream definition of “gay” isn’t just a sexual orientation, it’s a white male culture defined by consumerism, superficiality and anti-intellectualism.

* We = the handful of people who write for this site.

I am glad that they qualify "we" as the writers, since we as the potential audience all agree to no such thing. Mainstream queer culture shifted to politically correct puritanism, dogmatic leftism, and anti-rationalism before some of TNG's writers were born.

As a result, the site missed a ship that had sailed long before and, instead of genuinely challenging mainstream LGBT culture, challenged a small subset that no one was seriously defending anyway. Indeed, some of the authors seemed to accept without question the prevailing politically correct mindset. Challenging a mainstream is a worthy goal, but it is hard to do if you remain willfully ignorant of what that mainstream even is.