Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.
The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? "What the hell are you talking about" is too aggressive for the curious conversation we're trying for.
Sure. Stating the authors of the Beat novels, despite many of them being married to women, were "mostly gay" isn't curious conversation though. It's an obviously false conjecture not based in evidence.
That may well be so, but we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone here) to follow the rules even when another comment is wrong or bad. Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral. There's actually an interesting reason for that: we all underestimate the provocations in our own posts and overestimate the provocations in other people's posts. If the skew is 10x each way then that's a 100x perception gap. Since more or less all comments suffer from this baseline bias, we need to compensate for it by doing extra work to stay within the guidelines.
