Top Quotes: “The Culture of Desire” — Frank Browning
Background: Writing in the early 90s, Browning analyzes queer culture and particularly looks at how it was impacted by the AIDS epidemic and how it has evolved over time — calling out that queer culture is by definition meant to constantly reinvent itself and that it has fundamentally shifted the way straight people think about themselves as well. WARNING: lots of sexual content below lol.
Intro
“Tragedy and hostility are the ramparts of cultural identity. They intensify our sense of solidarity and inform the quality of memory.”
“In the center of the country and the South, lesbians and homosexual men alike — if they are over 30 — tend to embrace the identity word gay. On the coasts, lesbians tend to see gay as a male term.”
“Gayness is a tangle of dreams, ambitions, deceits, and contradiction, the examination of which may tell us as much about the portion of America that isn’t gay as about the portion that is. For those gay men whose greatest dream is assimilation — to be viewed in their relationships as ‘just like everybody else’ — the gay male ‘culture’ that currently exists is only a transitional arrangement of refuge against the hatred of the majority culture; when that hostility dissolves, so too will the otherness projected upon those of us who copulate and mate with members of our own gender.”
“‘Well,’ my classmate said, ‘Everybody knows you’re queer.’ ‘What?’ I remember thinking and maybe saying, feeling not angry or offended but completely confused. How could ‘everybody’ know the answer to the mystery that had so thoroughly eluded the person inside my body?”
“The New York Times declined to use the word gay instead of homosexual until 1986, an archaic embarrassment.”
AIDS
“During the AIDS crisis, the reintroduction of medical language surrounding the subject of homosexual union re-awakened bitter tensions between science and gay people. The anal sex talk turned everything upside down. Reviled by straight people as the next thing to castration in the unmanning of real men, anal penetration was remedicalized as the antithesis of healthy behavior, indeed as behavior that could cause death. Science had once again provided prima facie evidence of the inherently diseased nature of homosexuality, and certified it this time not in psychiatric language but in the irrefutable terminology of microbial and cellular biology. Couched in the discourse of disease — where abstinence was equated with responsibility, and promiscuity with homicidal negligence — gay men were given a new place in the vocabulary of the media. We were, infected or not, medical victims: not simply HIV/AIDS victims but, as a class of human beings, victims of unhealthy practices through which any of us could become the willing victim of the virus. Across the nation, stories surfaced of landlords and employers rejecting gay men — and lesbians — on the basis of AIDS panic, fear of contamination through casual contact with diseased people.”
“In 1987, gay men revolted. Raging against a national complacency that saw only pathos (and that was the most charitable response) in the likely deaths of a million homosexual men, a corps of activists found allies — gay and straight — in the press whom they conscripted to tell the full stories of their lives that were being lost, and not just stories of gaunt, hollow-faced men in hospital gowns. These activists were not so much interested in winning sympathy as in commanding public acknowledgment of their existence and the facts of government inertia and the lack of AIDS-fighting drugs. They stormed federal bureaucracies, disrupted the New York Stock Exchange, and gave the TV cameraman tight shots of French kissing on the Capitol steps. Their aim was not to moisten the eyes of straight viewers, but to project an image of themselves as fierce fighters who would not relinquish their fate to pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and academic researchers. If in the first few years of the epidemic many gay men found that they could win greater social acceptance by presenting themselves as people who had a disease rather than people who were homosexual and thus suffered from a disease, by the end of the ’80s a new generation of gay men came to insist upon and celebrate the fact of their queerness — whether they had HIV or not. They demanded attention to the emotional, sexual and familial dimensions of their daily lives; they insisted upon bringing home to straight America the queer plot that surrounds AIDS. They were unwilling to have their stories transformed into the jargon of science.”
“From the rage, paranoia, and confusion around the epidemic emerged a social and psychological upheaval in the historical dynamic linking homosexuality and healthcare. The conception of ‘the homosexual’ was an invention of 19th-century scientism, when modern medicine devoted itself to the exhaustive labeling of human differences. Not until 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association (urged on by gay liberationists) remove homosexuality from its catalog of pathologies. Yet by the middle of the ’80s, activist homosexuals had propelled themselves into the vanguard of the American public health system and were challenging nearly everything about the way healthcare in this country is organized and medical treatment delivered. Never before had those suffering from a disease hired their own buses to haul themselves hundreds of miles to DC to storm the government bureaucracy that regulated the drugs they could obtain. Never before had any group organized an international pharmaceutical distribution system to obtain its own drugs. Never before had the ill been members of the councils that designed the policies governing how doctors and hospitals and health insurers should treat them.”
Hookups, FWBs, and Cruising
“Hardly any of my colleagues over the years could quite have imagined that sort of encounter, a mixture of trash and grace, wantonness and repartee, foolhardy risk and thorough trust, that could come of two strangers wandering into each other late at night in a shadowy city alley. But that chanciness is part of the lasting magic of gay life, a sort of radical plot twist that characterizes queer life and sets aside so many conventions of social judgment, class, race, and attitude, supplanting them with a direct and naive faith that bonds of great value can be forged on nothing more than instinct. Not that such bonds always occur (more often than not, these brief encounters are merely tiring and banal). But there is a genuine spiritual affirmation in discovering how often magic can arise between strangers — magic that in most of our waking moments we train ourselves not to see. The love of strangers, or the love of loving strangers, teaches us that one man can touch the soul of another before he knows the size of his companion’s shoes or paycheck. From the fragmentary details one man shares with his stranger-friend — the private glades of a morning stroll, the suppressed angers of a family feud — from these random glimpses of identity a window can open between the souls of unconnected people, a window framed only by intuitive readiness and undimmed by a lifetime’s accumulated judgments. Led on by nothing more than the broken line of a shoulder’s scar or the wrinkle of a closed eyelid, strangers reveal themselves in confessions that more careful lovers may take years to express.”
“Tommy and I became intimates. We realized from the beginning that we would not become a couple, but we knew that as occasional as our assignations would be, we were of value to each other. We were friends and fuckbuddies, two men who discovered delight in each other’s presence. We could talk easily about the conundrums of integrating work and passion and identity — in part because we lived far apart, free of the usual daily obligations that define mateship. Other more regular partners might enter our lives, say awhile, and pass on, but over time we came to our own peculiar mutual reliance.”
“Fantasies, of course, can remain perfect only as long as they remain fantasies, and much of my Tony fantasy lay in how untouchable he was. I assumed he was straight, and keeping company with my assumption of his straightness was a self-denigrating assumption that so much perfection couldn’t also take in homosexuality. So it was that I never mentioned my fantasy to our mutual friend; it was completely clear in my mind that if I told her of my attraction to Tony, she would hear it only as a predatory intended assault on his inherent decency. To mention even the notion of my touching his perfect body (and to suggest even the possibility that he might respond) would cast a shadow of lechery and pederasty over all our relations, rupture her trust in him, smear his image of mentor to her boys, and cast me, as lascivious instigator, out into the street. It could not be done.”
“In the baths, he found remarkable qualities of communication with men whose names he never knew, men with whom he did not even have sex, with whom he embraced and then moved on, all of which left him with a nearly religious feeling. ‘I felt very close to God,’ he says, ‘My friend says that’s because I’m always on my knees.’”
“‘The first time you suck dick is really like Holy Communion. Mystical.’ He reminds me that Holy Communion is not about fellowship, as Protestants might conceive of it; for those deeply driven by the spiritual quest, Holy Communion is literally to eat the flesh of God, and so to be one with God. To eat God is to be liberated from the alienated division of the self, to lose the self. To eat cock is some profound measure to find the unity that divides the dictates of his spirit from the drives of his flesh, and so to eat cock became a Holy Communion.”
“Gay Power, Gay Politics implicitly portrayed gays, at least gay men, as a threatening force of degraded animal wildness. Bad enough they had taken over the small, formerly Irish working-class neighborhood called Eureka Valley and renamed it the Castro. Worse, they were threatening to extend their decadence into the parks of decent orderly people, they openly discussed the range and nature of their sexuality, and they dared, in violation of accepted social codes, to introduce the matter of sexuality into public discourse. Years later, a left-wing heterosexual friend of mine, who owned a house at the top of the ridge separating the Castro from the yuppie neighborhood called Noe Valley, acknowledge to me his apprehension of the gay frontier. ‘They’ were on the verge of swarming up and over his still-heterosexual hillside.”
“The old Fire Island Pines life was about transgressing the moral code of family life, reenacting the conventional beach vacation but fucking your buddy in the living room.”
“To those of us whose incipient attractions were not of the conventional romantic boy-girl sort, difference became inseparable from desire. Unable to take our own flesh for granted, unable to take our relation to it as natural, we increasingly experienced desire as the pursuit of the mysteriously unnatural, the examination of the difference between us as a route to comprehending the difference within us.”
Action
“The protesters said, ‘We’re going to be at the mall for Back-to-School Days, and the reason we’re going to be at the shopping mall is because it’s the cultural center of suburbia.’ The action would begin with 50 or so queers, fags, and dykes taking over the head car of the BART commuter train that will whisk them out to Concord. Once on board, they would transform the car into a ‘queer space,’ redecorating it with ropes of lavender crepe streamers, confetti, and sparklers. But everyone who came on the train would be greeted with ‘Queer Nation friendliness.’ The strategy for all these actions is to be playfully provocative, never hostile. But a hostile response is expected from BART riders, shoppers, and mere passersby, so the protesters were urged not to ‘go anywhere alone.’”
“Mall actions are a mainstay of the Queer Nation. Gay men and lesbians — usually in a three-to-one male-to-female ratio mount ‘queer visibility’ expeditions, walking hand in hand into stores, shopping a lot, buying a little, and engaging in exaggerated mimicry of the straights who surround them. Occasionally, there is a kiss-in. The look is punk, drag, leather, bleached hair, earrings, nipple rings, scarves, streamers, and balloons. It’s demonstration as picnic, picnic as political action. And always, there is ‘literature.’ For this Back-to-School Day, the packet is called Queer Studies 101 — readin’, ‘ritin,’ ‘rithmetic. Under ‘readin’’ is a list of books and pamphlets about coming out. The ‘’ritin’’ section includes quotes by and about queer people. ‘’Rithmetic’ includes stats on homosexuality in America. The packet also includes safe-sex flyers (for gay and straight people alike), pages of stickers, as well as ‘queer calling cards,’ listing phone numbers of gay community services: mental health counselors, switchboards, rap groups. And of course, there are pocketsful of condoms to be handed out to everyone.”
“Out of some spontaneous inspiration, someone comes up with, ‘We’re here in suburbia. Thank God it’s not for eternia!’”
“In our daily battle with homophobia, we seem to only have two choices: One is to swallow all the insults, stay in the closet, avoid our desire and let our true selves shrivel slowly away until very little is left. Or we can respond to every cutting and fag comment with a hearty ‘fuck you,’ start swinging when someone grabs us on the street, kiss our lovers whenever we damn well please and face getting hurt or killed. We are forced to choose between a sudden, violent death at the hands of our haters and the insidious, lifelong murder of our souls. Quick or slow? We cannot live with these options, they create a rage that is too large to be contained.”
Words
“If my black colleagues in the mostly-white offices of NPR were using the N-word among themselves, it would tell me instantly that they, normally outsiders in a majority-white place, were deliberately employing language to exclude me. It would be language whose exact meaning I might not know and that I certainly have no permission to speak. Black teenagers using the N-word in front of me on a bus in an inner-city neighborhood have even more power. Not only am I isolated, but I’m frightened, because I’m in a place that rumor and the media tell me is unsafe and because the same sources tell me these teenagers are likely armed and angry. The already aggressive, exclusive words become doubly threatening.”
Bodies
“A queer boy is a body whose plasticity, use, and presentation are controlled by its inhabitant — not responding exaggeratedly to the cultural and commercial styles of some moral, respectable majority. If the ‘gay body’ was a body of compensation (for everything it was denied in adolescence), the ‘queer body’ is the body of subversion (of all the roles and behaviors it wants to sabotage).”
Queer Culture
“First organized in SF in 1968, the Gay Games were originally called the Gay Olympics. The U.S. Olympic Committee, which has permitted other groups to use the ‘Olympic’ name, fought successfully all the way to the Supreme Court to block the homo partisans from calling themselves Olympians; hence, Gay Games, which have become the largest gay event ever organized.”
“I’ve become fascinated with the connection between queer desire and the social movement to compose a culture of desire, a culture fabricated by people who say that their defining identity developed out of the intimation and experience of queer or dissident or, popularly, ‘gay’ desire.”
“All of us in the modern world of processed imagery are engaged, to some degree, in the self-conscious invention of our identities. Modern marketing tells us that we may become any identity we choose if we pay the money and fashion ourselves appropriately. Gay me, however, go further. For them, life is a continuous theater of multiple identities, where irony is constant. Fire Island Jared, for example, can never fully erase his flip-chart self when he’s in the sex bushes and can never erase his ecstasy self in the health-planning lecture. Luna and Gilberto may easily slip into high camp, but their sex is better in traditional street Spanish — and they can’t imagine forgetting Mother’s Day. We know that even if we buy an identity, we are constantly and simultaneously also other identities, and, what’s more, we celebrate the fact. Therein lies the essence of camp sensibility, of queer sensibility: intimate acknowledgment that there is no centered, secure self, that the modern self is a fluid fiction.”
“A queer military man is driven out of the military for confessing desire; he is not removed for having sex. Homosexual acts in the military are often ignored so long as the participants do not acknowledge homosexual desire. Loneliness, drunkenness, terror, confusion: All have been accepted as excuses for occasional homosexuality. Over the centuries, an enormous amount of homosexual sex has taken place on ships and in foxholes, most of it ignored by officers who saw it as acceptable relief for their soldiers from the tension of combat. Relief, however, is utterly different from embracing the objects and images of desire within the sanctuary where the desire must be suppressed.”
“To hear their commander speak proudly of his craving to lie with another man would disorient soldiers. It would threaten the arrangement of masks by which the master/subordinate command structure works — not to mention the confusing impact it would have on the intimate (and ostensibly chaste) devotion in the midst of battle. If an authentic hero is not necessarily a conventionally authentic man, then how can any of us be sure of his own male authenticity? It is not that homosexual men — or women — are themselves less loyal, less reliable. The problem concerns all those putatively heterosexual people whose sense of place, role, and identity relies on the denial of forbidden desire. By shattering the charade, more than morale is at stake. The threat to the military’s carefully constructed system of ‘authentic’ identity subjects puts the whole structure of authority at risk. Wartime, so the logic goes, is no place to play with the masks and charades of authority.”
“What has changed through the course of the century is not the nature of sexual acts or how they are condemned by civic and ecclesiastical authorities. What has changed is this: Having failed to suppress forbidden desire, modern society has elected to isolate and assign it to a distant category of ‘other’ people.”
“At the outset of WWII, military psychiatrists argued forcefully that the homosexual was not a criminal but simply a type of human being incapable of controlling his condition. It followed that since homosexuality could not be stopped, homosexuals should either be excluded or ‘managed.’ It was a turning point in America’s reconceptualization of homosexuality. Though the sodomy laws did not disappear, the new mental-health movement transplanted homosexuals from the jail cell to the psychiatrist’s couch and opened up the first broad discourse over what homosexuality is. Whether or not doctors could ‘cure’ homosexuality mattered less than that they saw it as a condition, a state of being that described vast numbers of human beings.”
“As much as the invention of gay urban communities is testament to the newfound worldliness of proudly gay people, these communities have also been open, celebratory, sexual territories whose success may also be the means of their demise. To the degree that gay culture subverts and transgresses the taboos of forbidden desire, to the degree that it disturbs and rearranges society’s presumptions about the very meaning of straightness, to the degree that it encourages everyone to linger a while longer on the queerness within them, it also destroys its own distinctive place and its raison d’etre. Only by curtailing perversity, by arranging and codifying its own images of desire, by erecting its own rules of inclusion and exclusion, status and shame — as all established cultures do — can it hope to persist.”
“The paradox of queerness is that it survives by continually collapsing and recreating itself. Traditional cultural separatists — black nationalists, radical feminists — secure their tribal meaning through the immutability of their codes, rights and rituals. Queer culturalists recognize and realize one another through disruption and sabotage of their inherited traditions. Employing wit and the critical parody of camp, they unravel the hidden forgeries of their own inherited cultures and then self-consciously construct new cultural forgeries that they know are destined to dissolve. That is the essence of desire in the queer paradox. To persevere is to disappear. The community of identity exists only in the state of transformation. In the culture of desire, there are no safe spaces.”
