Seymour Kleinberg goes to Brazil

tudo com muita CLASSE

David and I have a new podcast episode out discussing Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 essay “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” which laments the rise of “gay macho” and explores a supposed shift in the gender norms of gay male culture… by obsessing over a dancer at the Anvil who can clench a dollar bill in his butt-cheeks.

A scholar of Shakespeare by profession, Kleinberg was a frequent contributor to Christopher Street in the late 70s; his essays, including “Sissies,” were published in book form by Denneny on St Martin’s Press as Alienated Affections (which you can read on the Internet Archive) in 1980. For a brief time he was one of the major gay intellectuals, but has been quite justly forgotten.

But although he is a weird, annoying and pretty dumb writer, Kleinberg’s “Sissies” essay has some value as a reminder that frustrating conversations about gender—seeming to make us choose between masc and femme, clone and camp, ‘imitating our oppressors’ or ‘acting like women’—have been with us from the beginning of gay culture. And not just us United States Americans!

“Sissies” was quickly translated into Portuguese and published, in condensed version, in the pioneering Brazilian gay publication, Lampiao da Esquina (1978-1981), February 1979 (Christopher Street and other USA-ian gay mags/papers had a certain international impact; Canada’s Body Politic, a leftist gay paper, loved to shit on CS for being ‘assimilationist’ and insufficiently radical; France’s Gai Pied borrowed from CS’ look at tone, and shared a number of contributors with it [Foucault, Renaud Camus, Yves Navarre]).

In the following month’s issue, a reader responded that being masculine is not in fact a tragedy—what’s tragic is “why a guy, to like men, has to act like a doll, full of “oh, oh,” and calling everyone “darling”... Being a grotesque caricature of a woman, a sissy, that is truly a tragedy!” (thanks, translation robot)

Two different kinds of gay guys each finding the other unbearably sad… even though, in all likelihood, the supposed sissy/woman is a bricked-up giga-hon stopping, as Auden once said, “all the clocks;” and the supposed macho has purses falling out of her mouth.

All of the leading figures in the Christopher Street scene (Holleran, White, Denneny, etc.), although they wore flannel and jeans, were themselves, well, barely butch-of-center… and I’ve written before that if anyone embodied the kind of courage traditionally coded as ‘male’ (a readiness, even eagerness, to incite potentially fatal confrontations in order to assert oneself) it was Ms. Quentin Crisp.

Given these ironies, it might seem that there would surely seem to be room in each of us for masc and sis. And even more so room for both in the gay world. But people often find that the very existence of one of these types must mean that its ostensibly opposite (but really complementary) number is being repressed and marginalized.

In the May issue, two further readers wrote in, one saying that what seems to Kleinberg the “tragedy” of “gay macho” is just guys acting normal (“The macho gay is as simple as anyone who wears jeans to go to the club. By the way, here no one enjoys dresses and sequins… Even the crazy queens are no longer so crazy, shocking, and ridiculous”):

Another letter-writer, in contrast, while stressing that “macho” gays are only a small minority of North Americans, critiques them for sexism and “machismo.”

I take it that when we speak of “macho” guys in English, we’re referring really to questions of style and self-presentation, that is, to masculinity, and not to a man having beliefs that could be described in a language other than English as machist, what we would call, perhaps, misogynist, or male chauvinist or patriarchal. In a Romance language, I guess, the whole question runs rather differently. For instance this letter-writer is trying to separate “virility” (acceptable?) from “machismo” (bad), saying that the right politics is an overcoming of the latter that perhaps spares the former. Of course, in our own contemporary American English critique of “toxic masculinity” (or whatever other words we’re using to identify the bad kind of maleness) very often indeed does end up being conflated with hostility to masculinity of any kind.

There’s a sizeable academic literature out of Brazil today on Lampiao da Esquina and the debates within it concerning gender, particularly focusing on what scholars take to be the regrettable marginalization of effeminate and trans identities by an emerging, USA-informed masculine style. This is understood to be a politically reactionary move, one that weakened the connection between emerging ‘gay’ subjectivities and other sexual minorities, women, etc., and thus undermined the potential for gay male culture to contribute to a broader challenge to heteropatriarcocapitaloperialism.

But those identities, like the figure of the pansy in North American history, were historically linked to the idea that desiring men made you into a kind of non-man/pseudo-woman, who having lost the right to male respectability had to become a performative, extra-feminine thing whose provocative excesses made ‘real’ men feeling comfortable fucking and othering you. It took a lot of cultural and intellectual work to make it seem possible that two adult men, regardless of how masculine or feminine they were, could desire each other without one of them thereby ceasing either in social role or some supposed internal psychic/gender essence to be a man—and possible too for those two men to enter an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, sustainable romantic relationship not founded on difference in status, age, power, etc.

Pushing aside the older model of the pansy/effeminate/invert/loca who gets un-manned by trade didn’t have to mean, necessarily, insisting that all gay men now had to act like trade themselves. What it meant was, indeed, that ‘gender’ as a display of masculinity or effeminacy could be decoupled from ‘sexuality’—men who fuck each, by the new logic, are homos whether they’re nelly or butch. This rational kernel of that shift from pansy/sissy/etc to gay seems worth hanging on to, even as it’s made to seem in a lot of academic/queer discussion today as something that was, in fact, reactionary, -phobic, -normative, etc., and ought to be mourned and perhaps undone.

The models by which we make sense of our sexual desires, relations to others, expressions of masculinity/femininity, etc., are historically contingent, and are made and remade out of the way each of us talks about and styles ourselves. Our dressing, walking, gesticulating, speaking in some particular way, rests, whether we recognize it or not, on sets of claims, made to the rest of the world (the claim, for instance, that a given desire or feeling is rightly translated into a certain visible ‘look’ and associated patterns of action)—not least of which is that this way is legitimate, can take its place in the world, which it may have to reorder around itself. There is no way of living that is not in that sense utterly public, claims-making, and potentially in conflict with other ways of living.

I think we have many perfectly fine tactics by which in the micro-politics of everyday life we suspend the conflicts could arise out of our different ways of living, and manage to present the choices that underwrite the latter as if they were merely ‘personal.’ I’ve written about those tactics or fictions that make it possible for us to live tolerably together via an odd set of figures around whom I was trying to constellate a different way of thinking about ‘liberalism’—Barthes, Rieff, Esposito etc. (ironically for Tablet, a publication at present focused on Israel’s right to make America kill Muslims—so much for the Barthesian ‘neutral’!). But, at the same time, I take it that there are inevitable political stakes to each person’s acts of self-interpretation and self-presentation; how I am, and appear, in some measure alters you—and vice versa. What we owe to other people’s self-interpretations I’ve considered, too, through Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, trying to shift the terrain of discussion a bit from ‘gender’ to broader ways that people, we surely must think, do misunderstand themselves and are not owed our entire unironic assent to their stories about themselves—and to think of this, as Butler tried in her first book (on Hegel) as something hopefully more ‘comic’ than ‘tragic.’

While I affirmed just a few paragraphs ago that there’s a butch and a nell in each of us, and probably in the nearest gay bar, saying so doesn’t seem to help much to get us out of our awareness that how other people imagine and present themselves inevitably does affect us, and that if there is room, perhaps, in our pluralistic and evolving culture for X and Y, to accept Z might crowd us out. Consider stories ‘ex-gays’ tell about themselves in Soros-funded media. One doesn’t want to be hysterical about the ‘harm’ these stories do, or the ‘tragedy’ of such people’s lives (including that of the article’s author)… and the politesse that holds liberal society together lies precisely in cultivating indifference to the weird wrong ways that other people live and talk about their lives, in carrying on as if this could have nothing, luckily, to do with oneself.

Gender-slop, rage-bait and fake trend stories aren’t going anywhere—but perhaps some progress might be made if my Brazilian readers were to fund a beach-side seminar…