It may be ironic to refer to your intellectual rival Andrea Long Chu in this regard, but I think what you have to say about queerness co-opting and dissolving gay men’s culture isn’t so different from Long Chu’s argument that feminism (in the post-Butler era) has eaten itself.
“Contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air.”
If I understand you correctly, queer theory likewise has refused gay men as a political category and become obligated to defend its own impossibility, too. A coalition of the oppressed may indeed make it difficult for some distinctive older gay cultural forms to survive. But I think we can let queer culture, and gay culture, develop as they will. After all, gay men aren’t gonna disappear just because some theorists have provided us with the insight that various forms of oppression are linked together! Or if we allow polymorphous queerdom into our ranks! The Tom of Finland Foundation hasn’t disbanded now that younger queers have started serving tea in its gardens. If we consider gay men’s culture to be *that* fragile, we will end up policing our identities to save our unique spaces under the misapprehension that we are liberating ourselves. (Duh: Elements of the ‘radical’ left have always been in league with the ‘traditional’ right — one of Foucault’s now totally bastardized insights.)
On another note, your otherwise fascinating expose of the ins-and-outs of disagreements within early queer/gay theorizing tends to idealize the gay bars, magazines, and literature of the 70s and 80s; they weren’t all that. Gay clones with boots and staches may be oh-so-sexy in retrospect, but they formed a conforming, restrictive, and discriminatory environment in which younger people couldn’t easily come out without joining their ranks. I personally found a more inviting and empowering climate among the more ‘conservative’ mods of the time in order to avoid the stifling atmosphere of San Francisco’s gay heyday. (The bathrooms were where it was at—and if you really want to save a dying form of life you perhaps can recapture that experience by following Garth Greenwell’s footsteps in Bulgaria…)
NO NOSTALGIA, or else we lose (to quote the campy Dave Hickey, in conversation).
Well, if I can say this without being mean... Chu was/is a straight man who got down a rabbit-hole of feminization porn and sexual guilt, and ended up as a woman who tells other women that feminism is a failure and impossibility. In that sense, yes she's a lot like the queer theorists like Sedgwick who as it were colonize gay identity and, becoming stars of the discourse, crowd out the possibility of actual women or actual gays speaking to each other about matters of common concern. This does strike me as a real problem with consequences.
Male homosexuality won't disappear and has been around forever. Gay male identity and culture are recent creations and are not eternal. I don't think that it's a sign of fragility, nostalgia, paranoia, policing, etc., for any group of any kind to try to maintain spaces, practices, forms etc by which to transmit and perpetuate itself as an evolving but still recognizable entity. Everything from churches and synagogues to university departments and book clubs and Masonic lodges etc etc etc speaks to this desire of groups to somehow remain themselves. Perhaps gay culture and identity is fated to disappeared, as people from the right and left have been saying for decades--and perhaps we don't need anything like an intellectual register of gay discourse, in which gay men speak publicly about the canon of gay male literature, art, style, taste, etc... it may be that this is all destined to dissolve into the mainstream of American/global culture, in which gay men will be increasingly 'normal' elements of a 'queer' polymormphous sensibililty.
But I take it that there is still something to preserve, transmit, and expand on in what I and other people of my age find most stimulating about what the 50 years of gay culture. This isn't a nostalgic idealization of a previous time, which of course had many aspects worthy of criticism (AIDS alone shows that something was definitely awry!). But as a younger gay man it is frustrating to see how much less there is today in the way of decent gay publications, gay bookstores, gay academia, etc... and how to my mind disturbingly blase many gay men of your generation (of quite varying persuasions, I've heard something similar to what you've said here from Daniel Mendelsohn!--and as I say no one sounds more like 'post-gay' queers telling us not to lament the disappearance of 'exclusionary' gay spaces than Andrew Sullivan celebrating assimilation...Two ends of the same stick) seem to be about the whole thing. Isn't the world you participated in worthy, at least in its best aspects, of being transmitted and perpetuated? Much of gay literature from the 70s and 80s was not great--but as Eliot says of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries, it takes a lot of mediocrities to produce the context in which a genius can arrive. And even some of what was 'bad' was interesting, experimental, important.
It strikes me as quite sad that you and Moser both in different ways seem to take gay male culture as already over, as if there were nothing to pass on, when gay men in their 20s and 30s are, at least as I talk to them, still interested in discovering and taking up its legacy.
Great piece! I agree queer theory doesn't seem to have served the interests of anyone apart from the queer theorists themselves. Standing outside academe, I'm all for an uninstitutionalized and untheorized homosexuality. But that's why I remain a bit puzzled as to the need to rehabilitate a particularly gay male identity politics at all. Take this sentence, for example: "Neither the conservative nor the radical appeared able to imagine that gay marriage might be desirable for gay men because it might help gay men to flourish not only as individuals and couples but also as a particular community with its own material interests." What distinct material interests are we talking about here?
thanks! I do wonder if you are really for a 'homosexuality' without 'institutions'... homosexuality was developed as a medical legal category for managing sexual deviance in the 19th century, and its only by creating distinct minoritarian institutions (political action groups, bars and clubs, bookstores, churches, etc--even things as simple as the existence of novels about gay themes and marketed as such, or the possibility of being obviously gay with friends or lovers out in public, depend on the existence of a whole set of institutions and practices that we might take for granted, but that are in fact contingent, historical and precarious)... there are ofc many people who live what we could call 'homosexual' lives, the way many more people did before, say, the 70s, lives in which they have homosexual desires and acts but don't participate in a culturally specific gay world and its 'institutions'. Perhaps this is the case for you--although I suspect rather you do interact with the latter, whether or not you consider your taking part in it to be something having to do with institutions and politics. Even identifying as gay is political and its possibility depends on the cultural availability and legibility of this identity, which is maintained by institutions. Gay institutions and identity, whether one engages with them oneself or not, emerged half a century ago, and I take them as being valuable and worth preserving, the same way other constructed identities...
as for material interests, well, if you think back to the late 20th century, all the obvious things, from job and housing discrimination to medical treatment and AIDS research to homophobic violence to inheritance and spousal benefits... gay men (and on many issues lesbians) shared and still share lots of material interests that characterize them as a particular group, although of course they interpret and act on these interests differently. Like, marriage is an institution that concerns lots of material, economic interests--it's indeed perhaps best seen as an economic institution.
I must have misunderstood the last sentence of your article then! Of course I appreciate the existence of gay clubs, gay films etc. I was more questioning the need for an academic enclave for gay studies to support gay culture - gay culture seems to be doing fine! And yes, some things that used to be called "gay" are now called "queer", but the fact that you can now list your pronouns on Grindr doesn't mean a distinct male gay culture doesn't exist anymore.
With regards to material interests, I was just trying to work out how your position differs from that of Sullivan's. The basic argument that seems to have won out in the West (at least for now) is the classical liberal one that one's sexual preferences or gender identity shouldn't impact one's civil rights (any more than one's race or religion should).
At present, the real fight for the material interests of gays and lesbians (as well as trans people) is in non-Western countries and here I agree that the coalition of the oppressed approach doesn't bode well for any sort of cross-cultural gay, lesbian or queer solidarity.
well I think for instance gays have a material interest in having our own cultural spaces, which strike me as a pre-condition for the possibility of politics. I'm not, as Sullivan seems to have been, advocating for gays to as it were melt away into the straight mainstream via liberal tolerance and rights-granting, but to be more self-conscious about their already ongoing and continuing investment in gay forms of life and culture... gay culture exists ofc but idk about doing fine (much of 'gay culture' seems to be say, Yanigihara or Hearstopper, things made by quirky women for their own consumption)--we have much fewer in the way of our own magazines, journals, bookstores etc than we did a generation ago, and the possibility of gay men speaking to each other in an intellectual register in public--without having to go through the ideological matrix of queer, feminist, etc stuff--has considerably diminished. That's part of why having X Studies would be important to any minority group--the academy is, for better or worse, where cultural traditions are maintained in our society. Again, I get that many people are not interested in there being a gay culture as long as they can go to the club and use grindr, but to me, that's sort of just looping back to a pre-Stonewall mentality. Men loving each other publicly and romantically, without hierarchy or pedagogical pretext, and forming a distinct cultural group out of those attachments, is a recent historical innovation that might disappear, whether into liberal tolerance or 'queer' polymorphism. To me that does not seem a desirable prospect--or at least I'd want to ask if there isn't yet a bit more life in gay identity and in identity politics more generally.
It may be ironic to refer to your intellectual rival Andrea Long Chu in this regard, but I think what you have to say about queerness co-opting and dissolving gay men’s culture isn’t so different from Long Chu’s argument that feminism (in the post-Butler era) has eaten itself.
“Contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air.”
If I understand you correctly, queer theory likewise has refused gay men as a political category and become obligated to defend its own impossibility, too. A coalition of the oppressed may indeed make it difficult for some distinctive older gay cultural forms to survive. But I think we can let queer culture, and gay culture, develop as they will. After all, gay men aren’t gonna disappear just because some theorists have provided us with the insight that various forms of oppression are linked together! Or if we allow polymorphous queerdom into our ranks! The Tom of Finland Foundation hasn’t disbanded now that younger queers have started serving tea in its gardens. If we consider gay men’s culture to be *that* fragile, we will end up policing our identities to save our unique spaces under the misapprehension that we are liberating ourselves. (Duh: Elements of the ‘radical’ left have always been in league with the ‘traditional’ right — one of Foucault’s now totally bastardized insights.)
On another note, your otherwise fascinating expose of the ins-and-outs of disagreements within early queer/gay theorizing tends to idealize the gay bars, magazines, and literature of the 70s and 80s; they weren’t all that. Gay clones with boots and staches may be oh-so-sexy in retrospect, but they formed a conforming, restrictive, and discriminatory environment in which younger people couldn’t easily come out without joining their ranks. I personally found a more inviting and empowering climate among the more ‘conservative’ mods of the time in order to avoid the stifling atmosphere of San Francisco’s gay heyday. (The bathrooms were where it was at—and if you really want to save a dying form of life you perhaps can recapture that experience by following Garth Greenwell’s footsteps in Bulgaria…)
NO NOSTALGIA, or else we lose (to quote the campy Dave Hickey, in conversation).
Well, if I can say this without being mean... Chu was/is a straight man who got down a rabbit-hole of feminization porn and sexual guilt, and ended up as a woman who tells other women that feminism is a failure and impossibility. In that sense, yes she's a lot like the queer theorists like Sedgwick who as it were colonize gay identity and, becoming stars of the discourse, crowd out the possibility of actual women or actual gays speaking to each other about matters of common concern. This does strike me as a real problem with consequences.
Male homosexuality won't disappear and has been around forever. Gay male identity and culture are recent creations and are not eternal. I don't think that it's a sign of fragility, nostalgia, paranoia, policing, etc., for any group of any kind to try to maintain spaces, practices, forms etc by which to transmit and perpetuate itself as an evolving but still recognizable entity. Everything from churches and synagogues to university departments and book clubs and Masonic lodges etc etc etc speaks to this desire of groups to somehow remain themselves. Perhaps gay culture and identity is fated to disappeared, as people from the right and left have been saying for decades--and perhaps we don't need anything like an intellectual register of gay discourse, in which gay men speak publicly about the canon of gay male literature, art, style, taste, etc... it may be that this is all destined to dissolve into the mainstream of American/global culture, in which gay men will be increasingly 'normal' elements of a 'queer' polymormphous sensibililty.
But I take it that there is still something to preserve, transmit, and expand on in what I and other people of my age find most stimulating about what the 50 years of gay culture. This isn't a nostalgic idealization of a previous time, which of course had many aspects worthy of criticism (AIDS alone shows that something was definitely awry!). But as a younger gay man it is frustrating to see how much less there is today in the way of decent gay publications, gay bookstores, gay academia, etc... and how to my mind disturbingly blase many gay men of your generation (of quite varying persuasions, I've heard something similar to what you've said here from Daniel Mendelsohn!--and as I say no one sounds more like 'post-gay' queers telling us not to lament the disappearance of 'exclusionary' gay spaces than Andrew Sullivan celebrating assimilation...Two ends of the same stick) seem to be about the whole thing. Isn't the world you participated in worthy, at least in its best aspects, of being transmitted and perpetuated? Much of gay literature from the 70s and 80s was not great--but as Eliot says of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries, it takes a lot of mediocrities to produce the context in which a genius can arrive. And even some of what was 'bad' was interesting, experimental, important.
It strikes me as quite sad that you and Moser both in different ways seem to take gay male culture as already over, as if there were nothing to pass on, when gay men in their 20s and 30s are, at least as I talk to them, still interested in discovering and taking up its legacy.
Great piece! I agree queer theory doesn't seem to have served the interests of anyone apart from the queer theorists themselves. Standing outside academe, I'm all for an uninstitutionalized and untheorized homosexuality. But that's why I remain a bit puzzled as to the need to rehabilitate a particularly gay male identity politics at all. Take this sentence, for example: "Neither the conservative nor the radical appeared able to imagine that gay marriage might be desirable for gay men because it might help gay men to flourish not only as individuals and couples but also as a particular community with its own material interests." What distinct material interests are we talking about here?
thanks! I do wonder if you are really for a 'homosexuality' without 'institutions'... homosexuality was developed as a medical legal category for managing sexual deviance in the 19th century, and its only by creating distinct minoritarian institutions (political action groups, bars and clubs, bookstores, churches, etc--even things as simple as the existence of novels about gay themes and marketed as such, or the possibility of being obviously gay with friends or lovers out in public, depend on the existence of a whole set of institutions and practices that we might take for granted, but that are in fact contingent, historical and precarious)... there are ofc many people who live what we could call 'homosexual' lives, the way many more people did before, say, the 70s, lives in which they have homosexual desires and acts but don't participate in a culturally specific gay world and its 'institutions'. Perhaps this is the case for you--although I suspect rather you do interact with the latter, whether or not you consider your taking part in it to be something having to do with institutions and politics. Even identifying as gay is political and its possibility depends on the cultural availability and legibility of this identity, which is maintained by institutions. Gay institutions and identity, whether one engages with them oneself or not, emerged half a century ago, and I take them as being valuable and worth preserving, the same way other constructed identities...
as for material interests, well, if you think back to the late 20th century, all the obvious things, from job and housing discrimination to medical treatment and AIDS research to homophobic violence to inheritance and spousal benefits... gay men (and on many issues lesbians) shared and still share lots of material interests that characterize them as a particular group, although of course they interpret and act on these interests differently. Like, marriage is an institution that concerns lots of material, economic interests--it's indeed perhaps best seen as an economic institution.
I must have misunderstood the last sentence of your article then! Of course I appreciate the existence of gay clubs, gay films etc. I was more questioning the need for an academic enclave for gay studies to support gay culture - gay culture seems to be doing fine! And yes, some things that used to be called "gay" are now called "queer", but the fact that you can now list your pronouns on Grindr doesn't mean a distinct male gay culture doesn't exist anymore.
With regards to material interests, I was just trying to work out how your position differs from that of Sullivan's. The basic argument that seems to have won out in the West (at least for now) is the classical liberal one that one's sexual preferences or gender identity shouldn't impact one's civil rights (any more than one's race or religion should).
At present, the real fight for the material interests of gays and lesbians (as well as trans people) is in non-Western countries and here I agree that the coalition of the oppressed approach doesn't bode well for any sort of cross-cultural gay, lesbian or queer solidarity.
well I think for instance gays have a material interest in having our own cultural spaces, which strike me as a pre-condition for the possibility of politics. I'm not, as Sullivan seems to have been, advocating for gays to as it were melt away into the straight mainstream via liberal tolerance and rights-granting, but to be more self-conscious about their already ongoing and continuing investment in gay forms of life and culture... gay culture exists ofc but idk about doing fine (much of 'gay culture' seems to be say, Yanigihara or Hearstopper, things made by quirky women for their own consumption)--we have much fewer in the way of our own magazines, journals, bookstores etc than we did a generation ago, and the possibility of gay men speaking to each other in an intellectual register in public--without having to go through the ideological matrix of queer, feminist, etc stuff--has considerably diminished. That's part of why having X Studies would be important to any minority group--the academy is, for better or worse, where cultural traditions are maintained in our society. Again, I get that many people are not interested in there being a gay culture as long as they can go to the club and use grindr, but to me, that's sort of just looping back to a pre-Stonewall mentality. Men loving each other publicly and romantically, without hierarchy or pedagogical pretext, and forming a distinct cultural group out of those attachments, is a recent historical innovation that might disappear, whether into liberal tolerance or 'queer' polymorphism. To me that does not seem a desirable prospect--or at least I'd want to ask if there isn't yet a bit more life in gay identity and in identity politics more generally.
Don’t get me started on Heartstopper! Maybe I’m too cynical about the academy and politics in general. I do wish you every success in this endeavour!