No matter who you are, it's worth making friends with lesbians.

It's remarkable how much can be lost in a generation. Cultural transmission isn't 1:1, not a father uploading a lifetime to a son nor a mother to a daughter. It's a distributed, asynchronous, mutlivalent forest of echoes, bouncing off warm, reflective barks facing the saplings of a community. Some teachings will inexplicably stick with a person for life, whilst others define a single moment in cultural and mortal time. Others still are time bombs; learnt in youth, stowed away, and exploded without warning in a transforming moment of sudden recognition. You have to be told a few times, at different times, for cultural knowledge to become part of you. Your elders build you up, and build you up, until one day you tilt your head, squint your eyes, and everything looks just like they told you it would.

One mustn't fall for the meme of environmental determninism—at least, not without really good evidence or a really tight deadline. Volcanoes (isn't it always volcanoes?) didn't do the 'dark age', nor the Bronze Age Collapse, nor the decline of the Moundbuilders. They barely killed Pompeii. Most of the time, cultures are killed by people. Whether responding to their conditions, expressing a new cultural paradigm, or adopting an idea from elsewhere, the greatest cultural violences are inflicted on us by our peers. The easiest way to inflict cultural violence on a culture is to interrupt its transmission; to thin out, disrupt, or otherwise make impossible the teaching of the young by the old, and in a few generations you'll have destroyed it.

The West, in its constant inflicting of cultural interruption onto the unbroken transmission of hundreds of cultures of the New World, has suffered but one such interruption in its recent past. The deliberate, systematic, institutional, and cruel amplification of the AIDS pandemic on gay men and women was the most notable cultural extinction event to ever brush the privileged classes. In fact, without the biological predisposition towards homosexuality that has lain in our genes since mankind's beginning, it may well have spelt the utter end of the culture of gay men entirely. Gay men suffered debilitating disintegration of the flesh within an uncaring community and a hostile state, choosing which funeral to attend on a Thursday because there are fucking three of them on with none but their women kin to comfort them. We shall return to this in a moment.

Do not think by "gay culture" I mean Polari, earrings, or handkerchiefs. I especially do not mean cops on parade, RuPaul, and Google diversity mixers. I also do not mean the culture of the myriad other minority groups who suffered during AIDS, and whose struggles are better spoken of within their own traditions. I mean the deep, embodied traditions of gay men that grew, morphed, and diffused across centuries in the West, as a response to various régimes of control. This was a culture that encoded wisdom, survival, joy, sex, satire, cheek, and love, all through speech and customs that are now utterly unrecognisable to us. It was a tradition with roots as old as mankind itself, transmitted continuously from old, sun-kissed faces with tired eyes to young, porcelain uncertains who felt the world was against them. It is a culture that I will not write, partly because it cannot be written, but mostly because it was never taught to gay men of my generation. The interruption of this transmission, as the AIDS pandemic literally tore human beings to shreds, meant that the saplings shivered in the grove, surrounded by dead and dying husks, with only the written record of their severed past to teach them. Those that remained, stricken by the deaths of their peers, were too few to form the critical mass of gradual, sustainable, community inculturation required to bring up their young, just as those young needed their guidance most.

Neoliberal capitalism, if it is anything, is a force of alienation. Atomisation. Once the gay community had been sufficienly displaced and decimated, its haunts shuttered and its elders cremated, the régime began its inexorable final step; subsumption and replacement. Satisfied with its stripping away of the heritage of gay men, it provided an Ersatzkultur of gaudy, vapid consumerism. What once was a handkerhief or an arsenic boutonniére was now a six-hundred-dollar polyester jacket from Zara. The gay lifestyle became inseparable from its expressive, material character, a character curated entirely by the same corporate interests that had profitied off the cultural destruction of their new customers' forebears. Left without guidance in an apparently newly-permissive era, those young gay men who had come of age without elders grasped at whatever collective markers they could, forging a new identity with the only symbols made available to them. However, the règime's victory was not yet total.

I was sitting in the living room of a friend, musing about Pride and the endless acronyms of which those in 'the community' must constantly keep abreast. She asked me whether I knew why the L came first. I said that I didn't. She told me of men laying in packed hospital wards, straight nurses refusing to enter their rooms to keep them alive. She told me of men desperately in need of transfusions, whilst gay men were prohibted from giving blood and there was little sympathy from others. All at once, it was lesbians who became their nurses. Lesbians who gave blood. Lesbians who helped at every turn to keep them alive and preserve their memory. In doing so, lesbians took their old culture, storing and encoding it into traditions of their own, foreseeing a time when the young men would be healthy, and cared for, and could be sat down and taught the knowledge of their forebears. That time has come.

It was the lesbians who kept the faith. The female capacity for generational memory is a miracle of human culture; it is no coincidence that a child learns its language best from the mother. All of those who value the cultures of the Earth, wherever they may blossom, must be willing to receive the traditions that they kept, and seek in them a revolutionary alternative to the 'gay' that we are sold at H&M.