The Identity vs. Community Celebrity Death-Match; Or, Your Subculture Needs You!
So this is just a first draft, and a fragmentary one at that. It's also rather belabored, and vague, and needs some specific examples... but bear with me, okay? When I said I wanted to spout off a little bit about my feeling against gay "identity," Van Twee responded with a frankly appalling anecdote which really does put his finger on the distinction I had been planning to make. In his words, the villain in his story "uses gay identity to trump gay culture," turning a poem that makes a grandiose philosophical claim into a very small bit of confessional auto-analysis. This cheapens the poem in question, obviously, but I want to stress the way that also cheapens homosexuality. What if the poem Whitman actually wrote was, in fact, conditioned by his experience and a lover of men? If we're going to say anything about that, then we need a radically different perspective than Prof. One-Million-Dollar-Endowment... a perspective that places homosexuality the beginning of the interpretation, rather than the end.
I don't actually mean this to be only about literary criticism. The flaws of Daniel Harris's 1995 screed The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture are many and obvious: it is dated, occasionally embarrassing, it tilts at windmills, it is blind to many new cultural developments that were well underway even in 1995. But for me the most powerful critical move he makes happens very quietly, almost understatedly: he chooses to treat gay culture just like any other subculture. That is, gay culture is not measurable as a genetically-defined statistical minority of the population, like the left-handed. Rather it is a social fact, defined by social interactions, special spaces, rituals, shared experience, language—I like to group all these things under the term "folklore."
We have a lot of models and analogues for thinking about such a social fact. (I use the word "folklore" because of a good Alan Dundes article here, which defines the term in this way, although he's certainly not thinking of the fags in the article.) The most obvious analogue for me, though, is the way we teach the concept of "Black music" in Music 26 (Music in American Cultures) at Berkeley. We give the students a long list of features that appear in various African-American genres (regarding musical structure, social organization, material culture, etc.) but then we stress over and over again that this is NOT a checklist to determine how "Black" a particular example is. Rather it functions as a set of family resemblances—a collection of traits that any given example may participate in, or not, for any number of reasons. (Then, after we've explained this many times, we write it again in big letters with a red pen, because the kids never listen to a word we say. But I digress.)
This understanding of the nature of gay culture perhaps doesn't seem that radical, or controversial, but it is deeply at odds with other ways of thinking about what constitutes the gay population: homosexuals are born that way; they are defined through sexual acts ("preferences," "orientations"). I have a term for this, which I picked up from an ex-boyfriend (the "bad" ex, for those of you familiar with him): "the MSM ideology," or occasionally "the MSM nonsense," with MSM standing for "Men who have Sex with Men"—the epidemiologists' alternative, inclusive term that doesn't "force an identity" onto anyone.
Larry Kramer, incidentally, has a name for this too: "being defined by our dicks." The phrase occurs in the rather insufferable play, The Normal Heart. (And I should add that Mr. Smearcase has recently said "when Larry Kramer starts sounding reasonable, we know we're in trouble." Indeed!) But Kramer follows his denunciation of being defined by our dicks with his alternative, a "culture" (his word) which includes the pantheon of Great Homos throughout History. (I can't be bothered to actually look at the play again, so I couldn't exactly tell who's on the list. But you can probably guess: Proust, Chaikovsky, Michaelangelo, etc.) The problem with the speech is both that it ends up being a smidgen too booster-ish about the whole thing, and (at least as far as I recall; it's been a while) doesn't actually enumerate what might be on the inventory of family resemblances that might bind gay cultural production together (and given the scope of this, he might be implicitly rejecting the idea that such a inventory is possible).
Daniel Harris is less reticent. In fact, he's fairly unflinching. His gay culture consists of not only the obvious: special slang, a unique aesthetic, humor, wit; but also things like drag, effeminacy, a particular way of thinking about sex, and particular sexual practices themselves. He even puts on the list elements like self-loathing and sexual degradation.
What do we gain by thinking of gay culture in this way? It is the same point that my ninth-grade algebra teacher made by way of justifying why one should understand algebra: not only because it is useful, and not only because it is beautiful, but because it is a human accomplishment. It is something that a group of men, living under very real oppression, created for themselves. Harris himself uses more concretely political terms, arguing that "diversity" is, in itself, a societal good—that gay culture is American culture, and when gay culture is dead and gone, transformed into a demographic that is marketed to, or a box to check on a epidemiology survey, then American culture has been diminished.
(Of course, this does not for an instant mean that any cultural product or trait is above moral or aesthetic evaluation. The passage to bear in mind is that place in the introduction to Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically where he asks us whose side we're on: the students in Tienanmen Square who ape the language and imagery of the West, or the Red Army tanks defending the special uniqueness of the Chinese experience? We can and must condemn things like historical gay culture's misogyny and self-loathing, while acknowledging their importance in the homosexuality of the past, and without allowing them to taint everything that constitutes the subculture.)
So, the point is that, for Harris, gay culture was already dead in 1995. For him, visibility and assimilation are fundamentally incompatible with a subculture's continuing vitality. He was wrong, but it's not hard to understand his pessimism, since he points to instance after instance where very public, very high-profile gays express open contempt for the actual social facts of gay subculture—in effect willing it out of existence. This includes men trumpeting how well they can ape patriarchal masculinity, couples trumpeting how well they can ape bourgeois marriage, and all the "we're just like you" propaganda of visibility. He quotes people who openly dream of a time when being gay is "just like being left handed." For anyone who actually treasures he elements and products of gay culture, this statement is frankly chilling.
The thing is, we have models and analogues for thinking about this dynamic as well. Lots and lots of subcultures have managed to will themselves out of existence by deciding that their own languages, practices, and folklore were inferior to those of some other culture. Maybe in some cases this worked out okay. In a few rather, er, high profile cases this was shown to be the most catastrophic trade-off imaginable. But, although Harris doesn't allow himself to, we can all imagine how an individual can participate in, and actively create, embody, a particular subculture without forgoing other cultural identities and practices. In fact, every human being on the planet (or at least those who live in non-totalitarian societies) has done this at one time or another. Furthermore, we can all imagine particular American minority groups who have argued for their constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law without having to pay for these rights in exchange for their cultural specificity. (We demand equal rights, including marriage right, because we are citizens, not because we are "just like everyone else.") I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with specific examples for each of these cases.
If anything proves that Harris was wrong to announce the death of gay culture, it is the fact that in my recent travels it become obvious I have something in common with gay men from vastly different countries, something not essential, but rather fundamentally social. (And no, I'm not talking about the "international language" here, you filthy people. Well, not much...) I'm not saying I have everything in common with every homo everywhere, but I am saying I have something in common with almost all of them, and I have a lot in common with many of them. The other thing that proves Harris wrong is the fact of new developments within gay culture that are actually about creating something new by and for the gays, rather than "representing" ourselves to the broader public (or uncritically taking on the culture that was invented, so to speak, "for export only").
If I ever get inspired again to kill time by rambling on like this (dissertation? what dissertation?), I let you know what (and where) I think they are. But, um, does any of this make sense?
I don't actually mean this to be only about literary criticism. The flaws of Daniel Harris's 1995 screed The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture are many and obvious: it is dated, occasionally embarrassing, it tilts at windmills, it is blind to many new cultural developments that were well underway even in 1995. But for me the most powerful critical move he makes happens very quietly, almost understatedly: he chooses to treat gay culture just like any other subculture. That is, gay culture is not measurable as a genetically-defined statistical minority of the population, like the left-handed. Rather it is a social fact, defined by social interactions, special spaces, rituals, shared experience, language—I like to group all these things under the term "folklore."
We have a lot of models and analogues for thinking about such a social fact. (I use the word "folklore" because of a good Alan Dundes article here, which defines the term in this way, although he's certainly not thinking of the fags in the article.) The most obvious analogue for me, though, is the way we teach the concept of "Black music" in Music 26 (Music in American Cultures) at Berkeley. We give the students a long list of features that appear in various African-American genres (regarding musical structure, social organization, material culture, etc.) but then we stress over and over again that this is NOT a checklist to determine how "Black" a particular example is. Rather it functions as a set of family resemblances—a collection of traits that any given example may participate in, or not, for any number of reasons. (Then, after we've explained this many times, we write it again in big letters with a red pen, because the kids never listen to a word we say. But I digress.)
This understanding of the nature of gay culture perhaps doesn't seem that radical, or controversial, but it is deeply at odds with other ways of thinking about what constitutes the gay population: homosexuals are born that way; they are defined through sexual acts ("preferences," "orientations"). I have a term for this, which I picked up from an ex-boyfriend (the "bad" ex, for those of you familiar with him): "the MSM ideology," or occasionally "the MSM nonsense," with MSM standing for "Men who have Sex with Men"—the epidemiologists' alternative, inclusive term that doesn't "force an identity" onto anyone.
Larry Kramer, incidentally, has a name for this too: "being defined by our dicks." The phrase occurs in the rather insufferable play, The Normal Heart. (And I should add that Mr. Smearcase has recently said "when Larry Kramer starts sounding reasonable, we know we're in trouble." Indeed!) But Kramer follows his denunciation of being defined by our dicks with his alternative, a "culture" (his word) which includes the pantheon of Great Homos throughout History. (I can't be bothered to actually look at the play again, so I couldn't exactly tell who's on the list. But you can probably guess: Proust, Chaikovsky, Michaelangelo, etc.) The problem with the speech is both that it ends up being a smidgen too booster-ish about the whole thing, and (at least as far as I recall; it's been a while) doesn't actually enumerate what might be on the inventory of family resemblances that might bind gay cultural production together (and given the scope of this, he might be implicitly rejecting the idea that such a inventory is possible).
Daniel Harris is less reticent. In fact, he's fairly unflinching. His gay culture consists of not only the obvious: special slang, a unique aesthetic, humor, wit; but also things like drag, effeminacy, a particular way of thinking about sex, and particular sexual practices themselves. He even puts on the list elements like self-loathing and sexual degradation.
What do we gain by thinking of gay culture in this way? It is the same point that my ninth-grade algebra teacher made by way of justifying why one should understand algebra: not only because it is useful, and not only because it is beautiful, but because it is a human accomplishment. It is something that a group of men, living under very real oppression, created for themselves. Harris himself uses more concretely political terms, arguing that "diversity" is, in itself, a societal good—that gay culture is American culture, and when gay culture is dead and gone, transformed into a demographic that is marketed to, or a box to check on a epidemiology survey, then American culture has been diminished.
(Of course, this does not for an instant mean that any cultural product or trait is above moral or aesthetic evaluation. The passage to bear in mind is that place in the introduction to Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically where he asks us whose side we're on: the students in Tienanmen Square who ape the language and imagery of the West, or the Red Army tanks defending the special uniqueness of the Chinese experience? We can and must condemn things like historical gay culture's misogyny and self-loathing, while acknowledging their importance in the homosexuality of the past, and without allowing them to taint everything that constitutes the subculture.)
So, the point is that, for Harris, gay culture was already dead in 1995. For him, visibility and assimilation are fundamentally incompatible with a subculture's continuing vitality. He was wrong, but it's not hard to understand his pessimism, since he points to instance after instance where very public, very high-profile gays express open contempt for the actual social facts of gay subculture—in effect willing it out of existence. This includes men trumpeting how well they can ape patriarchal masculinity, couples trumpeting how well they can ape bourgeois marriage, and all the "we're just like you" propaganda of visibility. He quotes people who openly dream of a time when being gay is "just like being left handed." For anyone who actually treasures he elements and products of gay culture, this statement is frankly chilling.
The thing is, we have models and analogues for thinking about this dynamic as well. Lots and lots of subcultures have managed to will themselves out of existence by deciding that their own languages, practices, and folklore were inferior to those of some other culture. Maybe in some cases this worked out okay. In a few rather, er, high profile cases this was shown to be the most catastrophic trade-off imaginable. But, although Harris doesn't allow himself to, we can all imagine how an individual can participate in, and actively create, embody, a particular subculture without forgoing other cultural identities and practices. In fact, every human being on the planet (or at least those who live in non-totalitarian societies) has done this at one time or another. Furthermore, we can all imagine particular American minority groups who have argued for their constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law without having to pay for these rights in exchange for their cultural specificity. (We demand equal rights, including marriage right, because we are citizens, not because we are "just like everyone else.") I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with specific examples for each of these cases.
If anything proves that Harris was wrong to announce the death of gay culture, it is the fact that in my recent travels it become obvious I have something in common with gay men from vastly different countries, something not essential, but rather fundamentally social. (And no, I'm not talking about the "international language" here, you filthy people. Well, not much...) I'm not saying I have everything in common with every homo everywhere, but I am saying I have something in common with almost all of them, and I have a lot in common with many of them. The other thing that proves Harris wrong is the fact of new developments within gay culture that are actually about creating something new by and for the gays, rather than "representing" ourselves to the broader public (or uncritically taking on the culture that was invented, so to speak, "for export only").
If I ever get inspired again to kill time by rambling on like this (dissertation? what dissertation?), I let you know what (and where) I think they are. But, um, does any of this make sense?
posted by Grrg at 9:44 AM
1 Comments:
"that gay culture is American culture, and when gay culture is dead and gone, transformed into a demographic that is marketed to, or a box to check on a epidemiology survey, then American culture has been diminished."
The problem here is that you run right up against the whole "good old days" mentality that accidentally waxes nosalgic for oppression. A friend of mine used to talk about how a semi-closeted prof at the U of C would always get a bit misty about the days when you had to know where the gay bars were. They were ours, and they had a specialness that is gone, but that's because otherwise we were gonna get brutalized in one way or another. I get tripped up by this: do I like being happily out? Of course. Do I wish there were more Oscar Wildes and fewer Hollister-sporting nobodies? Yuh huh. I guess the Taruskin thing kind of addresses this, but without much focus on the present.
So one question is: was it necessary (I guess I'm stating this as fait accompli, the kind of interesting gay culture that I think we can agree on, deadish) for us to become such house faggots, such Aunt Toms, to get people to put down their baseball bats? Ok, and has it really worked? I have a hard to figuring how dead the virulent hatred of homosexuals has become. Is it marginalized now, like the Klan? Have we followed in the footsteps of civil rights and gotten the people who hate us to take off their ugliest public face, meanwhile leaving homophobia, like racism, subterranean but very much alive? Even if this is the case, it's probably still a tradeoff most of us could live with if we gave two minutes' thought to what it would be like to have most of history and culture waiting outside the door to stomp on us if we came out, i.e. what it would have been like to be queer, pardon, MSM, even fifty years ago.
Maybe this is all like language death, you know? People like me get all weepy when the last speaker of an Amerind tongue is reported near death by the New Yorker. But languages have always died, and always will, pace Zamenhof. Now, gay identity is...the parallel falls apart pretty quickly. But what I'm poking at is gay culture can die, and be something you and I and a lot of our friends hate, and this isn't necessarily the end of the story. The arc of things as I'd like to see it is that this is transitional, and gay culture doesn't end here because there are a lot more gays to come. We earned this boring, bland period of rest. Who knows what's next, right?
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