Top Quotes: “How To Be Gay” — David Halperin
Background: The author attempts to answer questions like, “What is gay culture?” “Why is gay culture the way that it is?” “Why are there so many gay male interior decorators and hairdressers?” “Why do gay men prefer straight female icons?” It’s a fascinating exploration of gay identity, and I thought it did an incredible job of explaining why gay men and our lives are the way that we are. Took way too many notes (again!) — oops.
Introduction
“That gay men have a specific, non-standard attachment to certain cultural objects and forms is the widespread unquestioned assumption behind a lot of American popular humor.”
“Gay men teach other gay men how to be gay by showing them how to transform a number of heterosexual cultural objects and discourses into vehicles of gay meaning.”
“Gay acculturation often begins in early childhood without the conscious participation of the immediate family and against the grain of social expectations.”
“Gay male subjects resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”
“Gay culture is a shared alternative reading of mainstream culture; as a result, certain icons who are already prominent in the mass media become gay icons — they get taken up by gay men with a peculiar intensity that differs from their wider reception in the straight world.”
“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a different way.”
“’Gay’ refers not just to something you ‘are,’ but also to something you ‘do,’ which means you don’t have to be homosexual in order to do it. Gay culture does not appeal exclusively to those with a same-sex erotic preference.”
“If gayness is a practice, it’s something you can do well or badly. In order to do it well, you may need to be shown how to do it by someone who is already good at it and who can initiate you into it — by demonstrating to you, through example, how to practice it and by training you to do it right yourself.”
“There is not a single gay culture. There are many variations in the way gay male cultures is constituted — but also common themes that cross social and geographical divisions.”
“Gay culture doesn’t just happen. It has to be made to happen. It requires material support, organization, and a queer public sphere.”
“The great value of traditional gay male culture resides in some of its most despised and repudiated features: gay male femininity, diva-worship, aestheticism, snobbery, drama, adoration of glamour, caricature of women, and obsession with the mother figure.”
“Every gay generation — or half-generation — since those who came out in the mid-70s has rejected the gay culture of the previous generation — gay culture itself — as hopelessly anachronistic and out of touch, always thinking it was the first gay generation to do so, the first gay generation in history to see nothing of interest or value in inherited, traditional gay culture.”
Gay Culture From the 1800s to 1990s
“The first psychological definitions of deviant sexual orientation in the late 1800s saw same-sex desire not as the essence, but merely a further extension of estrangement from one’s own actual sex and with the opposite sex.”
“Deviant sex could be saved from pathology by normative gender identity and style: the conventionally feminine women who allowed herself to be pressured by a butch wouldn’t routinely come in for a sustained medical attention until well into the 20th century.”
“As late as the 1900s, Navy soldiers seeking easy women for sexual gratification could be redirected to ‘fairies’ as plausible substitutes for them.”
“But the 1948 Kinsey report didn’t distinguish between men in receptive and insertive sexual roles.”
“This reflected a culmination of a long process of change in the system of both sexual classification and sexual desire. Sexual, emotional, and romantic bonds between men, which had once been conventional, started to dissolve well before the end of the 19th century, and middle-class men began to avoid physical contact with other men for fear of being considered deviant.”
“This is when the ‘straight-acting’ man — indistinguishable in every other aspect from normal men — emerged. He became the preferred hero of 1940s-1970s gay romance whose ideal sexual partner was also straight-acting and thrived on explicit put-downs of effeminate men, from whom the hero or author recoiled in horror.”
“In the ’70s, a giddy sense of exhilaration accompanied the discovery, made and ceaselessly remade throughout lesbian and gay male urban communities that homosexuality was not irretrievably wedded to gender non-conformity, that lesbians and gay men were and could be ‘normal.’ The first model of gay identity focused on sex at the expense of culture.”
“Mutuality and reciprocity were the expected sexual protocols in the ’70s, in gay life as well as gay porn. The active/passive role playing seemed increasingly on the wane. Gone were the supposedly self-hating queens who lived only to service straight trade, who spent a lifetime on their knees. Modern gay sex positioned partners identically in relation to each other — no tops or bottoms. Hence, successful sexual relations involved equal partners of the same age, wealth, and social standing, each of them do everything with and to the other with perfect reciprocity — a 35 year old lawyer in love with a 35 year old doctor who shared expenses and household duties and took turns fucking each other.”
“But that classic utopian vision didn’t long survive unscathed. In 1990 came the ‘queer’ moment with its militant vindication of deviant sex and gender styles, its reclamation of tops and bottoms, and its multiplication (or rediscovery) of queer sub-ids: twink, bear, emo.”
“In the late ’70s, traditional gay male culture — with its feminine icons, its flaming camp style, its polarized gender roles, its sexual hierarchy, its balked romantic longings, its sentimentality, its self-pity, and its profound despair about the possibility of lasting love — all that seemed outdated and repulsive. Gay male culture appeared to be nothing more than a series of stereotypes.”
“The ’70s post-Stonewall message was ‘we are the same as you except for what we do in bed.’ The ’90s queer movement made it fashionable to claim the opposite — ‘we are completely different from you except for what we do in bed’ (which is more or less what everybody does in bed, with some minor, insignificant variations). But that queer fashion didn’t last long and a lot of gay men have gone back to claiming gay men are defined only by a non-standard sexual practice.
American Falsettos
“Defining homosexuality as a political and social condition rather than a subjective one — what if feels to us — has prevented us from knowing ourselves.”
“The category of ‘identity’ represents people as a general class of persons — as a group like any other — and by downplaying their shared, flamboyant differences, all those weird and disturbing shenanigans that at least partly define, distinguish, and constitute the group in the first place (like black people using Black English in white society or disabled people painfully and obtrusively negotiating a built environment not designed for them.”
“The term ‘gay’ identifies my sexuality without evoking its lived reality and without dwelling on my sexual feelings, fantasies, or practices. It functions in the same way that ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ do — referring to a sexual identity without foregrounding explicitly what is sexual about it.”
“The public gay response to AIDS was drenched in grief and anger — accompanied and amplified by their corollary public experiences: mourning and militancy. They expressed the personal experience of collective devastation. This was not the moment to celebrate the anti-social, self-indulgent queer pleasures of narcissism and passivity. ‘Bad’ gay emotions like shame, passivity, or cowardice were not personally or psychologically revealing. It was a terrible historical accident, and it had nothing to do with us or with who we were — and so our emotional response had nothing to do with us or who we were as gay men.”
What’s Gayer Than Gay?
“Our distance from normal folk is at once hyped and disavowed.”
“Musical theatre speaks to the sense of difference, desire to escape, and will to imagine alternatives that seems a widespread childhood experience of many pregay boys. Its function is to effect a break from the ordinary, to disrupt the normal order of things, to derealize the known world, and banish its drab reality, so as to open up a new and different realm. It projects (even better than gay sex) what we want, what we aspire to, what we dream of.”
“My students discovered more queer possibilities in adapting and remaking non-gay material (like The Golden Girls), and thus more uses for it, than they found in good gay writing. Coded, indirect, implicit representations that somehow convey the ‘gay disposition of the world’ continue to exercise a powerful attraction that explicit representations have trouble equalizing.”
“Non-gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness (which marks the individual as weird and subject to the demeaning judgment of the majority) into total, global queerness (an entire weird or wacky universe of someone’s creation). These forms exempt you from having an identity at all — you lose yourself and gain a world.”
“The biggest stars of gay discoveries [in the 60s-80s] were straight black women, even though there were gay anthems by gay artists released.”
“Despite greater acceptance, gay kids still have to orient themselves somehow in relation to mainstream, heteronormative culture, which remains their first culture. They have to achieve a dissident, queer perspective on it.”
Why Are The Drag Queens Laughing?
“The determination to treat as funny what was undeniably heartbreaking was an attitude that may be distinctive to gay male culture. During the AIDS crisis, an obituary was titled ‘Moody Bitch Dies of AIDS’ and artists created works with copy like ‘It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to, sugar.’”
“The Mommie Dearest child abuse scenes are viewed by most straight people as horrifying, but by gay culture as campy, hilarious, and iconic.”
“The Fire Island Italian Widows at an annual drag event wear black frocks and veils in the style of Southern Italian women who lost their husbands, but these men all lost lovers or friends to AIDS. Their grief was at once parodic and real. They mocked their suffering even as they put it on prominent display. By over-performing their grief, they mocked the claims to high seriousness that heterosexual culture willingly grants family tragedy. And they did it for a very particular reason. Their grief, however genuine, was disqualified from being taken seriously partly because male widowhood can never claim the kind of hallowed public space that female widowhood routinely occupies, and partly because gay love constitutes a public obscenity and so the pain of gay lovers evokes smirks at least as often as it elicits tears.”
“Gay male culture sees itself, its own plight, in the distorted mirror of a devalued femininity.”
“Feminine roles qualify in men’s eyes as performance because all feminine forms of embodiment and self-presentation necessarily come off in a male-dominated society as performative, at least to some degree. Even men in uniform look less costumed, less artificial, than do conventional women in evening dress.”
“Camp works to drain suffering of the pain that it also does not deny.”
“Mockery like the Fire Island Widows implies that no tragedy can or should claim so much worth as to presume an unquestionable entitlement to be taken completely seriously — that is, to be taken straight, in a world where some people’s suffering is routinely discounted. When you make fun of your own pain, you anticipate and preempt the devaluation of it by others.”
“Labeling something ‘kitsch’ says, ‘What kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle.’ Camp asks, ‘What if the right audience for this were exactly me?’”
“The recognition of something as camp is itself an admission of one’s willingness to participate in a community composed of those who share the same loving relation to the ‘ghastly object.’”
“Camp is a mode of ‘being-with-friends’ — collective.”
“Camp is not criticism, but critique. It doesn’t aim to correct and improve, but to question, to undermine, and to destabilize. In this, it differs from satire, which functions as criticism, a put-down of inferior objects and practices.”
“Camp makes fun of things not from a position of moral or aesthetic superiority, but from a position of having no serious moral or aesthetic standards — a condition it lovingly extends generously or aggressively to include everybody. Camp doesn’t preach; it demeans. But it doesn’t demean some people at other people’s expense. It takes everybody down with it together.”
“That impulse to identify with the outrageously disreputable and the grotesque may explain why camp particularly delights in and systematically exploits the most abject, exaggerated, and undignified versions of femininity that a misogynistic culture can devise.”
“Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be their shared condition, they also know how to communicate through such camaraderie a moving and unexpected form of generosity. The rules are A) get over yourself B) put a wig on before you judge and C) you stand to learn the most from the people you think are beneath you.”
“All identities are roles; camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, it’s a ‘lamp;; it’s not a woman, it’s a ‘woman.’”
“Gays have made certain style professions — hairdressing, interior design, dress design, ballet, musicals — very much theirs (at any rate by association, even if not necessarily in terms of the number of gays actually employed in these professions). These occupations are clearly marked with the camp sensibility: they are style for style’s sake, they don’t have ‘serious’ content, they don’t have a practical use (they’re just nice), and the actual forms taken accentuate artifice.”
“By refusing to accept social identities as natural kinds of being, as objective descriptions of who you are, and by exposing them, instead, as performative roles, and thus as not authentic, stigmatized groups achieve some leverage over the disqualifications attached to those identities. Camp irony makes it possible to get some distance on the camp ‘self’ society ha affixed to you as your authentic nature, as your very being.”
“Why are style and role-playing so intimately associated with gay male culture? Because we’ve had to be good at disguise, at appearing to be the same as everyone else. Because we had to hide what we really felt (gayness) for so much of the time, we had to master the façade of whatever social structure we found ourselves in — we couldn’t afford to stand out in any way, for it might give the game away about our gayness. So we have developed an eye and an ear for surfaces, appearances, forms: style.”
“The stakes in manipulating appearances and social forms, mastering style and passing for normal are highest for gay males, since the social rewards for success in performing masculinity are so lucrative.”
“Straight men learn to imitate straight men, to perform heterosexual masculinity, and then forget that they ever learned it, just as they must ignore the fact that they’re performing it. Gay men, by contrast, are distinguished precisely by their conscious consciousness of acting like straight men whenever they perform normative masculinity.”
“If seriousness is an act, and if seeing something as an act is not take it seriously, then gay male culture is perfectly entitled to convert the serious into the trivial, to laugh at what passes for serious — at what achieves seriousness by the very excellence and solemnity of its performance.”
“Camp is a form of self-defense. How else can those who are held captive by an inhospitable social world derealize it enough to prevent it from annihilating them?”
“Camp returns to the scene of trauma and replays that trauma on a ludicrously amplified scale — so as to drain it of its pain, and, in so doing, to transform it. Camp can register the enduring reality of hurt and make it culturally productive, thereby recognizing it without conceding to it the power to crush those whom it afflicts. In this way, camp provides gay males with a cultural resource for dealing with personal and collective devastation: a social practice that doesn’t devalue the suffering it also refuses to dignity.”
“Two major instances of camp are: camping about, mincing, and screaming; and a certain taste in art and entertainment.”
“At any given gay party, there will be two competing yet often complementary people around whom interest and activity swim — the most sexually desirable man there and the campiest, most dramatic queen. The queen often has the attention of the audience by commenting (by no means always favorably) on the beauty and on the strategies employed by those who are trying to win the beauty’s favor that night. It is unlikely the two virtues will be combined in one person — the queen’s most successful joke is on himself.”
“In the 1968 play ‘Boys in the Band,’ a handsome hustler at a party complains that he ‘feel on [his] heels and twisted [his] back’ at the gym. The camp relies, ‘You shouldn’t wear heels when you do chin ups. The joke points up the hustler’s glaring absence of whit, crosses the codes of masculinity and femininity, punctures the atmosphere of masculine seriousness surrounding straight male athletic performance and its erotic appeal to gay men, and testifies to camp’s inability even to imagine a male world inhabited exclusively by ‘normal men’; it shifts the tenor of the conversation from a tediously, unironically masculine one to an ironically effeminate one; it cuts the hustler down to size by pretending to mistake him for a practicing drag queen, hence several rungs lower on the scale of sexual prestige than the rank he actually occupies; and it implicitly rebukes the listening men for taking him so seriously while at the same time doing nothing to alter the attractiveness that continues to make him an object of their erotic interest.”
“Romantic interest depends on a certain mystery, or at least a degree of blankness in the love-object. The love-object has to be able to accommodate the fantasy of butch desirability that the would-be lover projects onto it. Familiarity may spoil that accompanying blankness, even as it enables friendliness, affection, complicity, and solidarity.”
“Thus, a man who arouses your desire initially appears to you as a pure archetype, as an embodiment of the masculine erotic value that makes him attractive. But as soon as you have him, he becomes an individual instead of an essence, an ordinary queen instead of a platonic idea. He ceases to be pure beauty and starts to become camp. So you stop sleeping with him.”
“Gay male culture takes beauty very seriously because it’s the object of sexual desire; there’s nothing ironic about it.”
“The camp takes revenge on the beauty for the beauty’s power over gay men, and he does so on behalf of the community of gay men as a whole. The camp punctures the breathless, solemn, tediously monotonous worship of beauty, to allow gay men who venerate beauty to step back ironically from their unironic devotion to it, to see it from the perspective of post-coital disillusionment instead of anticipatory excitation.”
“Camp is about deflating pretension, dismantling hierarchy, and remembering that all queens are stigmatized and no one deserves the kind of dignity that comes at the expense of someone else’s shame.”
“Beauty, by contrast, is aristocratic, not democratic. Beauty holds out the possibility of transcending shame, acceding to the rapturous completion of pure physical and aesthetic perfection, forsaking irony for romance, attaining dignity, and achieving true and serious worth, both in your eyes and in other people’s.”
“Camp is gay male culture’s way of trying to disintoxicate itself from its own erotic and aesthetic passion for masculine beauty. It represents gay male culture’s attempt to undo its romantic seriousness, to level the invidious distinction between queens and trade that gay male culture has borrowed from the opposition between masculinity and femininity in the dominant, heteronormative gender system, that it has made fundamental to its own vision of the world.”
“It is unreasonable to expect gay male culture to dismantle the dominant social and symbolic system of which it is merely the lucid and faithful reflection.”
“Gay male culture strives to maintain a tension between egalitarian ethics and hierarchical aesthetics.”
“It is through identification with femininity that gay men (like those doing drag) can manage to recombine the opposing values of beauty and camp that divide gay male culture. Gay men are able to meld upwardly mobile aesthetic aspiration with the ethical leveling of social distinctions. The combination of feminine glamour and objection that gay men assume through feminine identification and appropriation makes available to gay men a position that would otherwise be difficult for them to claim in their own persons, so long as they retained a masculine gender identification.”
“The world gay men inhabit constantly reminds them of their lack of exemption from the brute realities of sexual stratification, cultural signification, and social power.”
“Camp works from a position of disempowerment to recode social codes whose cultural power and prestige prevent them from simply being dismantled or ignored. Dominant social roles and meanings can’t be destroyed, any more than can the power of beauty, but they can be undercut and derealized; we can learn how to not take them straight.”
“Gay male culture produces so much aversion in gay men perhaps because it’s a way of coping with powerlessness, of neutralizing pain, of transcending grief. And who wants to think of himself as a victim? Our society requires its neoliberal subjects to butch up, to maintain a cheerful stoicism in the face of socially arranged suffering. It teaches us not to blame society for problems, but to take responsibility for ourselves.”
“Gay pride is incompatible with an identity defined by dissidence or defeat. American manliness, and therefore American gay masculinity, mandate rugged independence, the denial of need, pain, resentment, or self-pity, so it’s understandable that a set of cultural practices designed to cope with the reality of suffering, to carve out a space of freedom within a hostile and oppressive world would not only fail to appeal to many subordinated people today, but would constitute precisely what we must reject in order to accede to a sense of ourselves as dignified and proud.”
Mommy Queerest
“A feeling of superiority to boring, normal people has long been a noted feature of gay male subjectivity; it reflects the elitist, aristocratic tendency in gay male culture.”
“Gay men’s insistent desire for precious possessions springs from a permanent sense of fundamental frustration at the particular unavailability to us of the objects we most want — erotic satisfaction. Sexual deprivation is crucial to the subjective experiences of gay men because adult satisfaction can’t quite make up for a previous history of unfulfillment. Early on in our lives at whatever point we become urgently aware of our desires. Gay men discover that most of the human beings who attract us are not the least bit interested in having a sexual relation with us, that they aren’t and cannot be attracted to us in return, and that some of them regard the mere fact of our desire for them to be abhorrent. Even as adults, we do not escape the awareness that, in the eyes of most men, we fail to qualify as possible candidates for either sex or love. We develop a habit of fantasizing about them. Belated access to sexual objects, no matter how numerous or glamorous they may be, can do little to close to long-established gap between fantasy and reality in the demand for erotic gratification. Once the very prospect of ‘getting what you want’ has been consigned to the realm of fantasy, erotic gratification ineluctably takes on hyperbolic proportions and exits the realm of the attainable. No wonder homosexual desire routinely verges on an obsession with absolute, unearthly perfection. If most of the men you grew up wanting were bound to reject you anyway, through no fault of your own, then you had no reason to limit the scope of your fantasies to the narrow field of the possible. And so, when the time eventually comes to leave that dreamscape, you may find it difficult to make compromises with humdrum reality.”
“An impossible but perfect object excites a very particular kind of desire that is characteristic of gay male culture: an attitude of passionate but detached contemplation, at once critical and idealistic. Straight culture separates eroticism from aestheticism, gay male culture does not.”
“Gay male culture does not pretend to be ambivalent about aesthetic perfection, nor can it claim in all seriousness or sincerity to be deeply critical of it. It treats beauty as a fundamental organizing principle of the world.”
“Gay male culture values pleasure over utility. It takes as objects of aesthetic delectation what others have created for mere use — like an athletic body.”
“Gay male culture yearns above all for the freedom and power to gratify its taste for beauty of style.”
“The luxury prized by gay male culture can be achieved without literal extravagance — it consists in the ability to obtain pleasure and to live out fantasy. You can do it in ways that are essentially or aspirationally middle class: singing along to recordings of Broadway musicals, collecting things, clubbing, or enjoying untrammeled sexual pleasure with untold numbers of desirable people. All these kinds of luxury represent points of entry into a way of being finally in tune with your vision of erotic and aesthetic perfection, instead of an existence that requires you to sacrifice your dreams to the service of reality as straight society would prefer you do.”
“In society, men in the public eye tend to be doing things, while women appear. A sports game is unscripted and depends on the action of the participants; a play is directed action by the stipulations of an existing script and action is predetermined. Their performance acknowledges their submission to the dictates of others.”
“A reason emotional excess has been traditionally gendered as feminine is that it correlates with relative powerlessness. People in authority don’t have to yell and scream to get what they want. They simply make their wishes known.”
“’Losing it’ to rage reveals the outlines of a ‘politics of emotion’ that gay men share with women whose desires are deauthorized and who cannot get the respect they seek: a politics of hysteria or emotional surplus. The life of gay sentiment, socially disqualified from the start, can find expression only in what looks like histrionics, rage, maudlin self-pity, hyperbolic passion, and excess.”
“’Losing it’ could also convey not powerlessness but the frightening power of the downtrodden, when they finally snap under the burdens of intolerable oppression with the uncanny terror of a womanliness that breaks through the norms of polite decorum and finally lets itself go.”
“Joan Crawford was the good girl — tough but brave, hardworking and decent, destined to rise in the world — but faced with terrible odds, who, when pushed to the breaking point — is fully entitled to strike out and let the world have it, especially the people she loves who have let her down.”
“Femininity in divas gathers force, intensity, authority, and prestige. Without seeming to take on masculine gender characteristics, divas nonetheless manage to achieve a position of social mastery. Instead of contesting or subverting traditional femininity, they acquire power through an exaggerated, excessive, hyperbolic, over-the-top performance of it.”
“Crawford’s films Mommie Dearest and Mildred Pierce portray the power of the victim who isn’t going to take it anymore, and who returns in triumph ‘wounded and dominant’ to confront their persecutors with the full force of her pain, a form of power gay men can claim as their own.”
“Generational struggles between father and son are very serious business — the stuff of high strategy. A generational conflict between women by contrast, even at its most serious or passionate, cannot rise above the level of melodrama.”
“A certain effect of will is usually read to render the expression of a feeling adequately to the nature of the feeling. And such an effort may be strenuously necessary for gay men whose every expression of an emotion has to orient itself in relation to a preexisting heteronormative social form, of which it can only be an imitation or parody. No wonder gay men have a reputation for melodrama in their styles of emotional expression.”
“Gay male culture’s identification with aristocratic values is a strategy of resistance to specific forms of disempowerment that stem from social inferiority.”
“The uphill battle gay men must climb to attain acceptance and equality is steepest where it passes through the terrain of erotic feeling and romantic love. For in a homophobic society, any expression of a sentiment inspired by gay sexual desire or love will register as inappropriate, extravagant, obscene, grotesque — and thus, as performative rather than authentic.”
“The human cost of love results from mistaking the social institution of love for the natural, spontaneous, helpless expression of a powerful emotion. By blocking the lover’s perception that his behavior in love is in fact a performance — rather than the involuntary result of some omnipotent impulse — romanticism turns love into an inescapable destiny. Its effect is to deprive the lover of any sense of being in control of his emotions or actions, and thereby to exempt him from any responsibility for his feelings. Gay men may be particularly susceptible to the myth of romanticism and thereby particularly in need of the ironic perspective on love that gay male culture provides.”
“Why? Romance provides an alibi and a cover for the shameful details of gay sexuality; it repackages gay eroticism in an honorable, dignified, socially accepted form. Romance redeems homosexuality. It transcends the sickness of perversion and dissipates the pathological taint of gayness in the glory of a happy couple.”
“Romance allows us to escape any awareness of the social coldness and incongruity of homosexuality; it returns us to the innocent spontaneity of the natural. Natural instinct is stronger and truer than any moral prejudice; it trumps any judgment on gay love that reason can make and defeats all criticism.”
“Falling in love is the one way you behave like everyone else and still claim, at the same time, that you did it your way.”
“The maternal bond is at once the most involuntary and the most conventional of social relations. Gay male culture’s fascination with the enraged mother losing it with her ungrateful child could be because it shows gay men that contrary to what romanticism would have us believe, love is not our destiny. There is in fact a way out. Gay male culture’s investment in the scene alludes to the abject situation of one who believes she has no choice but to love unconditionally…until she is pushed to the brink.”
Bitch Baskets
“Gay male femininity is not just a stereotype: it’s a damaging one with a long history. It resuscitates a host of bogey men that have been used in the past to harm us — to turn us into objects of abuse, victims of hatred, moral condemnation, and violence — and it reminds us uncomfortably of those hoary medical understandings of sexual deviance that same-sex desire was a symptom of sex role reversal. The ideology of the post-Stonewall gay movement has exhorted us to reject, refute, and transcend such demeaning clichés — to prove them wrong, to become virtually normal ourselves, and to accede on that basis to an erotic community of equals.”
“Masculine representation is not only a central cultural value — associated with seriousness and worth — but also a key erotic value for gay men. Gay men’s sexual dignity depends on it, as well as our erotic prestige and desirability. To participate openly in cultural practices that are marked as feminine is socially and erotically risky for gay men, no matter how proud or self-accepting.”
“If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuality than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them to keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing to be queer, it may be that one of the social functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to their sex’s gender style.”
“Baking is coded as feminine in the U.S. and masculine in France.”
“Social practices that are not conventionally masculine are quickly and unreflectively coded as feminine.”
“A passionate emotional investment in specific elements of style, a meticulous concern for the niceties of architecture or interior design, is not considered masculine. But are women generally thought to be that fanatical about precise matters of aesthetic form?”
“Many gay male cultural practices are not masculine or feminine, nor do they represent a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics or a condition halfway between male and female. They imply something unique, or at least a particular form of gender and sexuality that is specific to some gay men and has yet to be fully defined.”
“Gay male gender dissonance is really a refusal to define any and all departures from canonical masculine autonomy, unreflectively, and uncritically as ‘feminine.’”
“’Gender non-conformity’ does not equal ‘feminine’ for gay men.”
“’Feminine’ is a proxy identity that stands in and substitutes a form of existence that gay men cannot claim — at least so easily — in their own persons.”
“Any gesture that implies a refusal of conventional masculinity — melodrama, style — is certain to be read as feminine.”
“If you’re born and raised an American, you inevitably became an American of one sort or another, whether you want to become an American or not. But this doesn’t mean there’s a gene that causes you to have an American subjectivity.”
“Because the social reproduction of gay male culture, initially at least, takes places in a heteronormative (family) context, it inevitably involves the appropriation and queering of mainstream cultural objects.”
“Social life reaches down very deep into the subjectivity of the individual. It shapes what appears to us to be our profound, abiding intuitions about the world and about ourselves.”
“Much of gay male culture delights in activities that — unlike gay sex, which is socially constructed as abnormal and unnatural — inspire widespread admiration on the part of straight society insofar as they involve making the world beautiful. It’s understandable that what some gay men would prize in those activities is precisely their merciful exemption from sexuality, and thus, from punitive judgment, whether other people’s or their own.”
“Under heteronormative conditions which position those who are attracted to men to be women, it’s only natural for a male to experience his desiring relation to men as feminine and identify with a feminine role on that basis.”
“Gender practices connect femininity with particular forms of expression and an extensive set of cultural values — like women in musicals getting sensitive songs and men getting songs of philandering. A gay man who is drawn to a feminine position may be expressing not an identification with women so much as an attraction to the cultural values associated with certain practices that happen to be coded as feminine — like sensitivity, emotional intensity, or private forms of expression.”
“Real cultural patterns shape human subjects in specific, profound ways because they are impressed on the individual so early, at such a formative age, they are stubborn, enduring, and constitutive of the self. Culture is preserved by transmission of patterns of thought and behavior from one generation to the next. Those who make gay male cultural identities often describe them as instinctive, natural, unshaped by social attitudes or prejudices, and as a persistent, enduring aspect of their personhood.”
“A process of socialization into gay male cultural practices can begin long before adult participation in the gay community because proto-gay subjects at an early age begin forging a non-standard relation to the gendered values attracted to mainstream genres of discourse, feeling, behavior, and personal expression and to the cultural forms and their correlate emotional forms in individual behavior that embody, differentiate, and consolidate those genres. And proto-gay subjects respond to the queer solicitation of certain elements in those mainstream forms that speak to these kids’ sense of difference, desire to escape, and will to imagine alternatives.”
“The most immediate way for gay men to defy social humiliation, and to assert our own subjective agency, is not to deny our objection, or strive to overcome it, but to actively claim it — by taking on the hated social identity that has been affixed to us. Resistance to it requires us to engage with it, to find value in it, and to invent opportunities for self-affirmation in it. Whence gay male culture’s tendency to carve out for its participants an absurdly exaggerated feminine identity is clearly designed to support a larger strategy of political defiance.”
“Gay male culture’s simultaneous embrace and ironic reversal of the abject social positioning of women may help to explain perennial misunderstandings between gay men and feminists, as well as the reputation for misogyny that gay male culture has acquired. Gay male culture delights in excessive, grotesque, artificial, abject portrayals of femininity, and it seeks its own reflection in them. To women, gay male culture may seem to reinforce the deprecation of women typical in patriarchal societies. But gay male culture’s embrace of degrading representations of the feminine is not an enforcement of them but an expression of the camp intuition that there’s no outside to power, that minorities cannot choose how we are regarded and what value society sets on our lives. There’s no safety in so-called positive representations — if you don’t have the social power to make them stick — like Hollywood’s portrayal of strong women being power-hungry, unfeminine, or love-starved.”
“Taking up a position in which we are inexorably situated is not to accept the adverse conditions under which we accede to representation. It’s the beginning of a process of reversal: a way of claiming ownership of our situation with the specific purpose of turning it around, or at least trying to turn it to our account.”
“If gay male culture borrows the demeaning cultural symbol attached to femininity, and if it even takes pleasure in doing so, that is because it sees a strategic opportunity, which it gleefully exploits, in feminine identity — an opportunity to undo the seriousness with which our society treats gender conventions. For femininity reveals its utter incoherence, excessiveness, and absurdity more clearly when it is embodied and enacted by a man.”
“Women themselves have to figure out how to take advantage, if they can, of the prestige and social rewards conventional femininity makes available to them, without purchasing respectability at the price of their own devalorization — no easy trick.”
What Is Gay Culture?
“The social costs of insisting on our differences from normal people are exorbitant when you have no choice but to integrate yourself into heteronormative society because substantive gay alternatives to the straight world no longer exist, now that the urban infrastructure of gay life have been largely dismantled. Gay youth’s reluctance to assert a separate gay identity indicates that straight society is actually a good deal less accommodating of queer kids who want to proclaim their difference from straight kids than we are led to believe.”
“Covering is the tendency on the part of stigmatized groups to acknowledge their differences, but to minimize the significance and visibility of those differences, so as to be acceptable to society at large. Covering reflects ongoing realities of racism, sexism, and homophobia.”
“The fact that you have to say over and over again, how unimportant to you being gay is in order to retain some kind of social or cultural credibility dramatizes how much pressure you evidently feel to do so. If it were really so unimportant, would you keep saying so?”
“Many gay people nowadays seem determined to imitate and to reproduce the most trite, regressive social values of heteronormative culture: family, religion, patriotism, normative gender roles. They’ve also taken up the heterosexual ethic of erotic impoverishment, which goes — the less sex you have, the more meaningful it’ll be, and what you should want above all in your sex life is not pleasure but meaning. This is the ethics against which gay liberation once led a world-historical rebellion.”
“Gay men may claim they want to see representations of themselves and their lives, but they often don’t like the representations of gay men that gay men produce, or they fail to stay interested in them. Gay men don’t excite gay men. Gay men have female icons and female politicians to identify with and they have straight male icons to desire. Either way, they don’t need gay men and they don’t need to read novels, watch movies, take classes, or go to cultural festivals that focus on gay men.”
“A revolutionary movement of sexual liberation and political insurgency has settled down into a complacent, essentially conservative form of identity politics that seeks less to change the world than to claim a bigger piece of it.”
“A comparative study of oppressed groups (blacks, Jews, concentration camp prisoners, children, and gay men) in the ’70s found that they tried to lessen the personal cost and psychological pain of social rejection by attempting to escape the social marking for their inferior status by refusing to identify with the group to which they belonged, by showing dislike or contempt for other members of the group — especially for individuals more indelibly marked than themselves by the stigmatizing signs that identified them as belonging to it — and by shunning contact with people from their own communities.”
“Gay culture’s apparent decline actually stems less from growing social acceptance but from A) the recapitalization of the inner city and the resulting gentrification of urban neighborhoods B) the HIV/AIDS epidemic and C) the invention of the internet.”
“Gay migration in the ’70s brought hundreds of thousands of gay men to specific urban districts (gay ghettos) in a dozen U.S. cities. This concentration provided a power base for a gay political movement, supported a large commercial infrastructure — from bars and bathhouses to newspapers and coffee houses — and produced queer communities freed from the surveillance of straight folks, where new kinds of collective reflection, consciousness-raising, cultural effervescence, and self-constitution could take place.”
“The new urban migrants were mostly people from modest backgrounds who, in the relative prosperity of the late 60s and early 70s, could find the same menial jobs in LA they had held in Iowa. They saved up for months or years and eventually moved to a big city, where reasonable rents in the gayborhoods that were forming in former ethnic, working-class, and/or post-industrial areas made it possible for people of limited means to support themselves working as waiters or nurses while still inhabiting a gay urban center. They could make gay life, gay sex, and a gay culture the center of their existence and build a life around these new possibilities.”
“In order to find sexual partners, you had to attach yourself to one of the institutions of gay social life: bars, bathhouses, the gay chorus, or a gay political organization. You were bound to meet all sorts of people you’d never have encountered in your own social circles. You couldn’t select the folks you were going to associate with according to your own criteria for the kind of men you approved of or thought you wanted as buddies. You had to deal with a wide range of people of difference social backgrounds, physical types, gender styles, sexual tastes, and sometimes (in the case of white folks) different races. You were exposed to many different ideas about what it meant to be gay and to many different styles of gay life.”
“The new gay public culture virtually guaranteed that people who moved to a gay enclave would encounter a lot of old-timers who were more experienced at being gay and more sophisticated at it than they were. Moreover, these veterans of urban gay life often held shockingly militant, uncompromising, anti-heterosexist, anti-mainstream political views. People who had already been living in gay ghettos for years had time and opportunity to be ‘liberated’: to be deprogrammed, to get rid of their stupid heterosexist prejudices, to achieve a political consciousness as well as a pride in their gay identity. By encountering these people, the new arrivals often found their assumptions, values, and pictures of the right way to life, to be gay, seriously challenged.”
“The sheer mix of people in the new gay social worlds aligned the coming-out process with a gradual detachment from traditional, heterosexual, conservative, mainstream notions about the proper way to live. Many of the new recruits found themselves gradually argued out of the old-fashioned, unenlightened views — their ‘hang-ups’ — including their adherence to rigid gender styles, inappropriate romantic fantasies, restrictive sexual morality, political conservativism, prudery, and other small town values. Some rejected the radical ideology of gay male life to be sure, but most of the new inhabitants in gay ghettos shared the experience of taking part in a new, exhilarating, and unprecedented social experience: the formation of a community around gay desire, sex, and identity.”
“The social experiment proved to be short-lived. For during the same period, a massive inflow of capital drove vast urban redevelopment schemes, gradually removing the cheap, fringe urban zones on the border of former industrial or mixed-use zones where gay businesses and residences used to flourish and replacing them with highways, high rises, sports complexes, convention centers, and warehouse stores.”
“The AIDS epidemic facilitated the ultimate triumph of urban redevelopment by removing individuals and communities opposed to the developers’ plans to rezone, reconfigure, raze, and rebuild entire neighborhoods. The malign coincidence of timing with a surge of urbanism, property development, gentrification, and a corresponding rise in real estate prices in the ’80s destroyed the gay ghettos. Ultimately, this has come to affect how all gay people live.”
“By 2005, 500,000 had died from AIDS, 300,000 of whom were men who had sex with men. 17,000 died in San Francisco alone.”
“The gay men of modest incomes who had populated the gay ghettos and who later died of AIDS were often not property owners. And those who did often had no living heirs or surviving lovers to pass them onto.”
“As real estate prices climbed, the vacancies left by AIDS in what were now stylish urban enclaves attracted people with serious money who didn’t object to the dwindling presence of gay people so the gay population was slowly diluted and dispersed.”
“The power base of the gay movement in specific municipalities was significantly weakened. The economic base of the gay media was also much reduced; in one city after another, local gay newspapers went out of business. These papers had facilitated the exchange of views about the needs of communities, the politics of sex, the threat of AIDS, and what to do about it, and they encouraged the mobilization of gay people around various issues affecting them were they lived. The gay press also promoted new plays, art shows, and performances targeted at small scale gay audiences and publicized emerging work in gay history and queer theory, interpreting its breakthroughs to the community in a language that interested readers could understand.”
“Local gay newspapers were replaced by national, highly-capitalized glossy magazines that were not about to cover political debates of purely local interest, much less critique the market category of gay identity on which their business depended. In an effort to appeal to a national public of prosperous gay individuals who could afford the products advertised in their pages (which paid the costs of staff salaries, printing, and distribution), these publications became increasingly uncontroversial, commercial, and lightweight.”
“With the internet, face-to-face contact in gayborhoods, which had already been on the wane, now became increasingly dispensable. You didn’t have to live in a gayborhood, which was no longer very gay and which you couldn’t afford anyway. You never even had to leave your bedroom.”
“The internet has completed the destruction of the non-virtual gay community infrastructure. In 2007, Entrepreneur magazine put gay bars on its list of businesses facing extinction, along with record stores and pay phones.”
“The estimated number of gay bars decreased by 13% (from 1,605 to 1,405) from 2005 to 2011. The decline was even steeper before 2005. There were 118 gay bars in San Francisco in 1973, now there are 33; Manhattan dropped from 86 in 1978 to 44 now.”
“Grindr launched in 2009 and currently has two million users, half of them in the U.S. 8,000 guys sign up every day.”
“You can now select the gay people you want to associate with before you meet them or come to know them. You can hang on to your unliberated, heterosexist, macho prejudices, your denial, your fear, and you can find other people who share them with you.”
“The emergence of a dispersed, virtual community along with the loss of a couple generations of gay men to AIDS, has removed many of the conditions necessary for the maintenance and advancement of gay liberation — cultural and political fervent and the cross-generational transformation of queer values. The lack of a critical mass of gay people physically present in a single location makes it difficult for the pace of gay cultural sophistication to accelerate. It stymies the diffusion of a gay culture.”
“Under these conditions, the agenda of gay politics and gay life is captured by the concerns of people who live dispersed, stranded among heterosexuals. And what are the concerns of gay people in such locations? Access to mainstream social forms: military service, church membership, and marriage. That explains a lot about the preoccupations of contemporary gay politics. When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation — that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole.”
“It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now because struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in rhetoric, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.”
“In such context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate.”
“The gay movement may be the only progressive social movement from the ’60s to have prevailed, to have consolidated its successes, and to have realized some of its most far-fetched aims (like marriage) despite the rise and eventual triumph of the New Right in the past 35 years. Nonetheless, gay liberation and the gay rights movement have not undone the social and ideological domination of heterosexuality, even if they have made its hegemony a bit less secure and less total.”
“Gay people seem to be rediscovering and championing the superiority of heterosexual social forms, including astonishingly archaic forms (like wedding announcements in the society pages of newspapers) that heterosexuals themselves are abandoning.”
“The rectification of social injustice, and the leveling of all differential treatment of sexual minorities — even should it occur — would not be the same thing as the end of the cultural domination of heterosexuality, the dissolution of heterosexuality as a set of cultural norms.”
“Social equality will not enable us to attain a queerer world more in line with our desires, our wishes, and our fantasies. It should, therefore, not be confused with, nor will it lead to, the erasure of gay specific subjectivity or cultural difference.”
“The survival of gay culture depends on heterosexuality retaining the power of heteronormativity — a horizon of expectations for human life, a set of ideals to which people aspire and against which they measure the value of their own and other people’s lives (sharing life with one person born of the opposite gender similar in age, sharing finances, and your own shared living space). Gay people nowadays do participate in heteronormativity — either because they dearly want to or because they feel pressured to conform to this single model of dignified human intimacy. Queer politics takes aim at it.”
“Gay men can’t experience their desire as a vindication of the naturalness of their human nature, as an expression of their spontaneous alignment with the natural, given world. They cannot perceive their instincts, their emotions, their longings, and their lusts as the default settings of a universal human nature, as obvious, self-evident, and completely in harmony with the ways things naturally are — unlike straight people.”
“Queers are forced to engage in at least a modicum of critical reflection on the world as it is given.”
“The queer reprocessing of personal and social experiences turns out to be productive — in the arts, literature, and cultural production which may be why there are so many gay men in the arts.”
“Only a departure from the given can bring culture into existence, and can yield the distance and detached reflection necessary to culturally act. In a certain sense, homosexuality is cultural which is why society needs us.”
“Heterosexual culture remains the first culture experience and our modes of feeling and expression, our sense of difference, are all bound to shape within the context and framework of heterosexual culture. From our earliest years, many of us are asked to act in ways that are at odds with the way we feel and the way we instinctively respond to the established social order. We are called to subjectively by a demand to be inauthentic. We are read by the social vicissitudes of our very existence to play a role that involves facing our own subjectivity.”
“An ordinary expression of inauthenticity defines for many gay men what it is to be gay. It accounts for gay men’s hypersensitivity to the artificial nature of semiotic systems, which generates the specific battery of hermeneutic techniques that gay men have evolved for exposing the artifice of social meaning and for spinning its codes and signifiers in ironic, sophisticated, defiant, inherently theatrical ways and so it conduces to the production of the gay cultural forms and styles with which we have become familiar.”
“So long as queer kids continue to be born into heterosexual families and into a society that is normatively heterosexual, they will have to devise their own non-standard reaction to the heterosexual culture and they’ll have to find ways of understanding, receiving, and relating to heterosexual culture that express their lack of subjective fit with its protocols. Straight culture will always be our first culture and what we do with it will always establish a certain template for later, queer relations to standard cultural forms. This is not going to change, not at least for a very long time.”
