Daniel Harris

The Fall and Fall of a Gay Critic

For a moment in the 90s, Daniel Harris was taken to be a fascinating cultural critic. He had essays and book reviews in Harper’s, Salmagundi, The Gay and Lesbian Review. His first book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (1997) was blurbed by Janet Malcolm and Gary Indiana (who like his namesake city is a shithole). Now you can find him on Linkedin begging for scrapwork as a part-time ‘word processor’—she won’t take less than $35 an hour! A grim descent and a cautionary tale for yours truly.

The above photo, a publicity shot for Harris’ 2005 book Diary of a Drag Queen, makes Dianne Arbus’ pics of busted queens look like downright positive representation for the community. And the title of book is a self-flattering misnomer, since, as the review in OUT accompanying the photo explains, Harris made himself halfway up not as an entertainer—nor indeed on a gender journey—nor quite as a kink—but, at least he claims, to have sex with straight guys:

There’s a time and place for sex with ‘straight’ guys: liberal arts college (or, I guess, the army—or, if you had a step-brother, at home). Which ought to be enough to wipe away any illusions about these guys being ‘straight’; about their ‘straightness’ making them somehow exotic, virile, good at sex, etc; and indeed about sex itself being either difficult to get or interesting enough to write a book about. As Beauvoir says, if you think men are so impressive, take a good look at the next one sweating and heaving on top of you.

I sometimes have nostalgia for the short time in my life when fucking seemed like it could transform myself and society, like going to an orgy or doing coke and taking a shit on a guy were really ripping the fabric of normativity rather than activities analogous to knitting or stamp-collecting in their apolitical harmlessness. Part of that investing of sex with such power was also investing certain kinds of people with a particular degree or kind of sex-power such that having them for an hour or night would be like smashing the hinges on the doors of perception—people who are for some reason (because of how hot, masculine, not-gay, not-me or whatever they are) unobtainable and thus like a sacred mountain I have to climb.

I don’t think it was until I was maybe 20 that I realized as a skinny mean bottom who no longer had acne I could indeed climb, if not every mountain, enough mountains that there’s no sense imagining I’m proving something (my desirability, my bravery) by doing so. Whatever Proust and Quentin Crisp say (with whatever degree of irony) about how the effeminate invert must suffer alone because he loves real men and real men don’t love boys like him, that’s really only true if you’re not cute.

Likewise, although it is very normal that after a break-up and/or in a midlife crisis, one might think having sex with young people is a fun challenge. But, besides being generally bad at fucking (and anxious, insecure, etc) young people are not hard to get into bed (at least, in Dan Savage’s useful phrase for me)—in part because they’re horny, in part because they’re stupid. One of my exes who has become a chickenhawk in his 30s says of the college-age boys he chases (I say college-age because many of these boys are not going to college) that they’re impressed by shit like him having a studio apartment and a car. Being able to host goes a much longer way with that set than it will among men your own age who are, rightly, not impressed by your accomplishments (indeed, how many guys my age find my unremunerative and idiosyncratic life path attractive, or even acceptable?)—and likewise, that’s more common than a middle-aged intellectual (professor, writer, etc) throwing off his same-aged partner who is correctly unimpressed with them to shack up with a young person who thinks wrongly that they’re a genius? Agnes Callard is very proud of herself for have gender-flipped this sad old script, but it’s a truth almost universally acknowledged that young people, being dumb, will fuck you and even love you.

So while young and straight are often valorized as categories, especially by delusional gay men, set apart and higher up as something older queens can’t access except through feminine trickery (Harris) or by paying for it (Ed White), they’re actually much more accessible than someone your own age and status who can smell your bullshit—which is the whole point of the fantasy that there is some ‘real’ of masculinity, youthful vitality, or whatever, just out of reach; it’s a way to avoid having your bullshit smelled. And maybe for Harris (another midlife male cliche), it’s a chance to indulge in some AGP bricked-up turbo-hon realness.

Some people have sex in order to be alone (a point Bersani makes in Homos)—whether just by having lots of casual sex or by choosing partners, or even love-objects, who, even if they physically or emotionally reciprocate, can’t judge them, can’t be a mirror in which their lives could be seen and found wanting. That might be a quirky perversion, considered on its own, but in Harris’ case, and I suspect many others, it’s related to a broader hatred for other gays, for people like himself against whose example he might be compared, to whom he might be likened and by whom he might be rejected.

I think sometimes that a lot of what we call self-hatred or internalized homophobia is an expression of the way people feel uncomfortable not only with the idea of belonging to a type (I’m so much more than that! they whine, as if anyone cares about the infinite singularity of each individual person—which, by the way, is exactly as boring as an individual snowflake, pebble, or sandgrain) but with the idea of acting and being evaluated as a member of a common world with other judging subjects who talk about us. We want attention, sure, but most of us aren’t ready to be on stage—and a stage is what a community is, it’s where we perform and are judged. Gender-losers from Butler on down want performance without judgment, with government-mandated audiences and obligatory applause.

Anyway, before he tried to become the busted Candy Darling for barely legal Lou Reeds, Harris was a noted critic, whose first book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, made something of a splash, and whose second book Cute, Quaint, Hungry And Romantic: The Aesthetics Of Consumerism frankly seems like it was ripped off by Sianne Ngai. Like all gay critics everywhere—not least me—Harris has a lot of complaints about his fellow homos, and especially about how things are worse than they used to be. I should say that some of the chapters are quite entertaining and offer inspiration for further research—little histories of men’s underwear ads, gay personals and the “kitschification” of AIDS art that are in no way objective, comprehensive, or fair, but sure are entertaining and make me want to do more work myself.

It’s always fun to see someone doing something that’s both archival (looking through all the old magazines and bringing out weird little treasures) and personal (that is, staging subjective reactions, loving and hating, having feelings about the material uncovered)—in fact that’s what I’m trying to do here. Unfortunately much of what Harris says about his discoveries is twisted around his thesis that gays are being tragically assimilated, losing our distinctiveness and becoming just as boring as straight people.

Gays were distinct, he argues, back when we were still oppressed and semi-closeted, and had to express ourselves through indirect means like campy appreciation of celebrities and coded language. Once gayness is ‘out’ in the world of contemporary American capitalism, it’s subsumed by the latter, and gays become no more distinct than, say, Italian- or Irish-Americans, basic bitches distinguished only by the particular sorts of trinkets and flags the market sells us.

One chapter runs this narrative through Harris’ acquisition and loss of a faggily affected fake British accent, which he apparently learned from watching old Hollywood startlets. That was gay difference—joining a “race of sexually transgressive iconoclasts”—and now it’s been sadly ground down into the dull mainstream of corporate American sludge-culture:

Now as my college reminiscences above suggest, I guess it is better style oneself a “transgressive iconoclast” than a “lonely and miserable aberration”—it’s better to be me at 19 than me at 13, sure—but it’s pretty pathetic to still be stuck in the pose of Satanic rebellion after sophomore year. And, really, if you’re a member of a race, or some other kind of group, you are not, by definition, a transgressive iconoclast—you are the bearer of norms, histories, traditions, etc. Just as in dreams begin responsibilities, so do our apparent rebellions find us enrolling ourselves as proper members of a collectivity (even if only an imaginary and future one)—which is not a tragic selling out or, as Peguy had it, the passing of mystique into politique, but really just what winning, what maturing, looks like.

Something about the truth of sexuality—of subjectivity—is captured by framing it as a force that ruptures self-identity and our ties to community—but sexuality is also a force that binds us to others, creating and maintaining ties, roles, selves. And in pleasure, if we sometimes transgress, we also find ourselves called to take up and preserve the forms by which what we enjoy can be perpetuated. (A point I tried to make in my essay on Philip Rieff—which I remember his son hating on Twitter, so there’s a feather in my cap!)

And, of course, there’s nothing particularly gay about being sexually transgressive (for example, consider all rapists) nor even about having a fake British accent—Nathan J. Robinson is straight (thank God, who inflicted so much on us, for sparing us at least that). Being a poncy doofus from the provinces out to reinvent yourself is, of course, conflated with sexuality for someone like Edouard Louis, but it doesn’t have to be.

There’s at work that we might call queer, which is a way of being weird that allows one, for better or worse, to break rules and become different from both other people and oneself, an energy of ascesis that might appear shockingly antinomian (sexual transgression) or just annoying (postures of superannuated suburban pseudo-Dandyism). But at this point, queer is just naming the constitutive energy of ethical life, the way we can make a project of ourselves in order to become otherwise and have a life that feels like our own, whether by criminal or kooky means.

There’s nothing, I’ll repeat, particularly gay about all this—and perhaps why Harris ultimately seems to opt-out of gay sexuality to pursue drag-trade relations as if this were still George Chauncey’s New York, why he like so many gay intellectuals laments the death of ‘gay culture’ but means by the latter not the actual forms of life practiced by gay men but a certain by-gone set of affective self-stylizations, why he sounds so much like fellow loser Benjamin Moser is that he’s confused about how the queerness outlined above—which, let me stress, is universal and not specifically gay—relates to gayness, as an identity, community, culture etc. Because while Harris complains about the disappearance of the latter, he’s in fact concerned not with its preservation as a pseudo-ethnic minority (something about which I am myself concerned) but rather with its apparent loss of queer energy, which could only ever flourish under conditions of marginalization and concealment.

Here’s him sounding as if I could agree with him—America needs gays to be gay!

Isn’t this much of what I say via Arendt and Denneny here? I too call for America to be America, the culture-terror multicultural robot, again:

Yes, yes!

But Harris’ view of how gays can play a good role in the American assemblage is really a sad one—we’re supposed, as in Halperin’s How to be Gay—to have the mindset of bitter queens watching popular culture from our queer sideline, casting a kind of skewed critical commentary on it, as if yassified Waldorf and Statler (that is, gays are all supposed to be Harris-type critics!). Our productive difference collapses when we try to make a culture for ourselves, about ourselves, to relate directly to other gay men and to a gay tradition—that effort degenerates from brilliant marginality, a running critique of the mainstream, into nothing more than one of the mainstream’s flavors.

Harris—who has literally nothing to say about gay literature (although he has a chapter on porn) and criticism, about White, Holleran, or contemporaries like Peck, Mendelsohn, etc—has this tragic alternative play out in a history of the gay press that contrasts After Dark, the not-officially-gay 70s magazine, with OUT, the main gay-and-lesbian mag of the mid-90s on.

Let’s take a look at After Dark. Here’s an issue from 1979:

Not the height of indirection!

After Dark is interesting, because, like many magazines since, it has an extremely gay sensibility, but is not openly, explicitly, politically-morally addressed to the gay community the way that its rival Christopher Street—which in some ways replaced it in the early 80s—did. Harris, by the way, doesn’t even mention Christopher Street—if he did, he’d have to deal with the fact that many of the authors advertised and discussed in After Dark also appear in Christopher Street. For instance, Faggots, along with Lovers, which, although less well remembered, was a classic of the era and one of the best things Michael Denneny published:

But although being very gay-in-itself, After Dark was not gay-for-itself, as evidenced by this irate letter to the editor from a reader complaining that in a previous issue its book critic Nathan Fain had shit on gaylit, and specifically on the unnamed “gay novel of the year” championed by “a magazine of some sexual chauvinism”—meaning, Dancer from the Dance and Christopher Street:

Of course many gay readers at the time thought Dancer from the Dance was “embarrassing”—but they were wrong, and in this case certainly Fain’s being wrong about Dancer seems entangled with his thinking there’s something chauvinist, problematic, too male and too gay, about Christopher Street—a magazine almost identical in content and tone to After Dark except that it announces itself as gay, and thus takes itself as having some responsibility to gay people and culture.

I suppose it is always embarrassing to say, I belong to X group, I am an X, I am linked even with the dumbest and most losery members and features of X, I am not hiding behind a pose of (really not even indirect) indirection—one wants to declare that one is not simply X but more, otherwise, queerer than that.

As though being openly gay, or openly anything else, would narrow me and limit me, put me in another kind of closet—as if membership in a group and participation in a form of life and responsibility for others and for a tradition were not, after all the condition for being a free human being, for having genuine possibilities for fashioning a life rather than simply whirling in futile rebellion against whatever I’d been doing until now.

Fain, I should say, would go on to be one of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 45—nil nisi bonum.

Returning to Harris, not only is After Dark hardly different from Christopher Street except in its pathetic sniping at Holleran, in its insistence “not me being a homo,” its narcissism of not even minor but imagined differences, but indeed its worship of celebrity, divas, consumerism, lifestyle piffle, etc is hardly different at all from OUT—sometime I will post here such “embarrassing” covers the latter have run throughout the years as Summer of Adele and Parker Posey’s Turn. Gays still seem hardly able to be gay without embarrassment, in what, I increasingly think, may have more to do with our (gays and straights) larger discomfort with the idea of community as an actually existing repertory of inheritances, and as a scene of judging-and-being-judged, than with the specificities of self-directed homophobia.

We all want our individual queer lives, our particular singular cleverly indirect relationships to popular culture and gender/sexuality, and readily decry the available forms as overly commodified, sold-out, assimilated, as if we had already tested and exhausted their potential—we do not want to be ‘normal’ bearers and inheritors of something (to be) transmitted, who could be judged for failing to do so properly. But it’s only within such a context—by being not simply queer but rather, even queerly, gay—that one can be a free person, as I once said in a review of the recently translated ‘last’ volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality:

…Foucault extended his research further back in Western history, tracing the antecedents of psychoanalysis, from Catholic practices of confession to the attempts of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers to “know themselves” through dialogue and introspection. As he traced confession back to older forms of religion and philosophy, however, Foucault came to see it as a more complex and ambivalent phenomenon — one that could lead to not only submission but emancipation.

Although Confessions of the Flesh is marketed as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality series, it is actually the second book, written from 1981 to 1982, as Foucault was studying the techniques of self-knowledge and moral-therapeutic expertise used in the first centuries of the Catholic Church. As Foucault saw it, the fathers of the early church had borrowed a range of practices and ideals from the Stoic philosophers, encouraging believers to explore their innermost thoughts and desires in order to gain control of them — and to confess these secrets to religious experts tasked with the management of souls. Self-analysis and confession, which eventually became obligatory for Catholics, struck Foucault as both origin points for the coercive practices of psychoanalysis and also, potentially, as resources with which people might resist coercion.

…Such practices of “discipline,” “ethics,” and “care of the self” are the subjects of his final writings, in which he tried to find methods for people not only to break free from the insidious pseudo-liberation offered by elites but also to commit themselves to projects of self-creation, which, he came to appreciate, are not possible without some degree of constraint.

Although often misunderstood as a thinker who cynically or despairingly saw power lurking everywhere, Foucault saw power as the vital energy of social relations, including one’s own relationship with oneself. It is futile, he believed, to hope to be free from power — to be free, that is, from being subject to some sort of external will. The best one can hope for is to use power constructively, to wield it over one’s own identity, pleasures, and activities in order to become the person one wants to be, in the process drawing on the help of teachers, priests, and other authority figures without becoming dependent on them.

The wager of my writing over the past several months has been that gay culture, both as a historical archive and intellectualized virtuality, and also as a real present network of relations and forms, is still the kind of resource Foucault, precisely as he was writing that book, took it to be—and that rightly understanding its utility means working through and then kicking away distorting traditions of queer theory and ‘not like other gays’ criticism, overcoming Daniel Harris and Benjamin Moser no less than Eve Sedgwick and Jasbir Puar.