Every Man for Himself

Alan Sinfield is pretty prolific: I need to pay more attention to what he publishes.  I hadn't heard of Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 1999) until I stumbled on a copy in a used bookstore, and I grabbed it.  It's an interesting survey, mostly of English-language GLB theatre, though it often felt a bit rushed, even at 350 pages of text; I'd have been pleased to see him say more on many of the plays he discusses.  I wouldn't be surprised if he had to trim it down for publication.  In any case, it's worth reading if you're interested in the subject, though I imagine most people who are would already have read it.

At one point in his discussion of drama dealing with AIDS, Sinfield contrasts American work with British, noting that mainstream theater in the UK produced much less original work on the subject, because of the different trajectory of the epidemic there.  (Most of the well-known US plays were staged in London, though.)  But there's another difference he finds:

The fact is, although the characters in the [American] plays discussed here are outlaws in that they are gay, in other respects almost all of them are notably privileged -- white, male, affluent, professional, metropolitan ... These men have no tradition of political dissidence.  They had not expected to need the State, and when they do they cannot quite believe that it is not on their side.  In Love! Valour! Compassion! the men hear a gay demonstration being broken up -- 'They've always hated us.  It never ends, the fucking hatred' (107).  But it is at a safe distance, in Seattle, on the television.  When Mickey in The Normal Heart gives voice to suspicions which challenge US democratic ideology -- suggesting that the virus may have originated as a military experiment -- he is quickly declared to be having a mental breakdown and hustled out of the action (67-68).  In 1995, in an interview with Lisa Power, Kramer says that lately he has been 'accepting and facing ... that all these myths I have swallowed about humanity and American and "one voice can make a difference" -- these things that we're all taught, that democracy works and all -- turn out to be bullshit when you're gay or you have AIDS or are a member of a minority or whatever the reason'.  'That was a surprise?' Power asks [323].

Notice that Kramer gave that interview after years of experience in AIDS activism, mostly with ACT-UP, which he founded.  But then, even though he lived through the Civil Rights Movement and the movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, he'd never had much interest in politics.  According to the Wikipedia page on Kramer:

Initially, while living on Fire Island in the 1970s, Kramer had no intention of getting involved in political activism. There were politically active groups in New York City, but Kramer notes the culture on Fire Island was so different that they would often make fun of political activists: "It was not chic. It was not something you could brag about with your friends... Guys marching down Fifth Avenue was a whole other world. The whole gestalt of Fire Island was about beauty and looks and golden men."

But then AIDS invaded Paradise, and like so many other privileged gay men, Kramer found that money and chic offered no protection against the plague.  Yet even fourteen years after reality came crashing down on his head, Kramer was evidently still struggling with it, and apparently only as it affected him and people like him.  I guess this isn't surprising: of course men (mostly they are men, of course) who thought they were part of the State, or at least part of the classes that run our society, were indignant when their sense of entitlement hit a brick wall because they were queer.  Of course they have no experience with political dissidence; dissidents are the Other, the losers raging ignorantly and impotently outside the Inner Circle of the Cool People.

"Despite its political pitch," Sinfield adds, "The Normal Heart tends always to pose issues as interpersonal dilemmas" (323-4).  On one hand, that's to be expected in drama, which uses people and their interaction to make its points.  On the other hand, it's especially typical of art and entertainment in the US.  One of the reasons Korean cinema was a revelation to me was its ability to situate characters in their society, with much more realistic political awareness than I've ever seen in US product.  Even a melodramatic TV series like Sandglass (1995) was anchored in Korean history in a way that I can't imagine any TV show in the US bothering with.  And right now the top-grossing film in South Korea is The Attorney, about human rights lawyers who defended victims of torture during the dictatorship that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1987.  (I knew I should have gone to Korea for the holidays; I could probably have seen it, since big films are shown in select theatres with English subtitles during their first run.  But it'll be out on DVD soon enough.)

I've noticed before that Americans are prone to see political conflict as "interpersonal dilemmas."  Kramer, again, fits the pattern well: in the 1980s he largely blamed New York City Mayor Ed Koch and President Reagan for the epidemic, with a personal venom that overlooked structural and systemic factors.  I now understand that this wasn't just political strategy: he genuinely thought they were personally responsible, just like in the movies.  So it's funny when the Obama devotee and journalist (and former ACT-UP activist!) Garance Franke-Ruta laments the "fanfictionalization" of US politics; it has ever been thus.  (Ma! Ma!  Where's my pa?  In the White House, ha ha ha!)   Franke-Ruta admits this, but she can't see that she's part of the problem.  US politics has always been a sports bout, with the respective fans cheering on their team and its star.  The American fantasy of individualism, with its rejection of human interdependence, fits this tendency perfectly, enshrined in entertainment, political philosophy, and the social sciences.

Hi, We're From ACT-UP, and We're Doing an Act of Civil Disobedience

I've been watching the documentary How to Survive a Plague, and I wish I'd seen it before, so that I could have put this bit in some earlier posts about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  The film includes a clip from CSPAN showing Senator Jesse Helms denouncing the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, who had sheathed his home in a giant canvas condom.  Helms said that there'd be no problem if homosexuals would just keep their dirty business to themselves, and shut their mouths.  Another senator, who wasn't identified as far as I could tell but he was another old white guy, said to Helms:

Sir, when we started this colloquy, I thought I was on your side, especially the First Amendment.  And under the First Amendment people don't have to shut their mouths.  They have a right to speak.

Helms, evidently slightly nonplussed, responded:

Well, uh, they can speak, as long as they don't offend anybody else, I suppose.

So there you have it, all my fellow GLBTQs and all liberals everywhere who think that freedom of speech doesn't extend to offensive "hate" speech: you're on the same side as Jesse Helms.  He was all for your freedom of speech as long as you didn't offend anybody.  By "anybody" he meant right-thinking people who agreed with him, just as you want to shield yourselves and those who agree with you.  You see?  People can come together on contentious issues of civil liberties.

Survivor's Anger: The Gentrification of the Mind

I've been meaning to write something about Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (California, 2012), but haven't been able to limit myself to one topic.  It's a very rich book, provocative and full of ideas, and it deserves a far wider readership than it's likely to get.  Along with the intertwined consequences of the AIDS epidemic and gentrification, she also writes about the loss of history and its effect of that loss on younger generations of people.

This last was something I'd already been thinking about, because I never thought that most schools would or could deal accurately with the history of the gay movement or of AIDS in the United States, or of activism in general.  Since these are still controversial subjects, they're not going to have a secure place in any curriculum at any level; if they were covered at all, it would probably be inadequately.  If you want to learn about such things, you have to educate yourself, and not many people do.

So, for example, Schulman tells about teaching at the University of Staten Island.

Most of the kids who attend the College of Staten Island are working class or poor, many are immigrants.  I had been at my job for eleven years, but it didn't take more than the first few months for me to learn that Staten Island is hell for queer kids.  Year after year my colleague, queer theorist Matt Brim, and I cry on the night bus coming home from New York about how profoundly traumatized our queer students are.  We do everything we can to intervene but for most of them, by the time they get to us, it's too late.

This, by the way, is why I was so surprised and annoyed by, for example, Bernadette Barton's Pray the Gay Away when she implied that gay kids are only traumatized in the "Bible Belt" nowadays.  Barton managed to reach adulthood without any awareness of how bad things still are in her home region of the Northeast.

This night a girl, Michelle, came out in class.  She had been taking my courses for two years and had never given any sign of being queer, but this one evening she read a story about falling in love with a girl in high school and starting a passionate sexual relationship.  When her parents found out, they gave her an ultimatum.  If she wanted to have a family, she would have to break up with her girlfriend.  Without much thought, she followed their instructions.  Three years later, waiting in the bathroom line of a Staten Island dive bar, she met another woman and fell in love.  In her story, Michelle described uncontrollable desire, accompanied by the knowledge of the tremendous familial punishment that lurked, waiting to pounce.  And it did ... At the end of the story, the protagonist finds a boyfriend, Danny.  She says that she is able to "be comfortable" with him. And the story closes with her parents gleefully welcoming Danny into their home to watch the football game, offering him a glass of beer.

Later in my office, Michelle tells me, I know my parents love and support me.  This is just too hard for them to understand."

I say nothing, but I know that her parents do not love and do not support her.  All they care about are themselves.  They do not see her as real.  And for now, she agrees with them [10-11].

This is heartbreaking enough, but it reminds me how often even some gay people, including academics, accuse other gay people, especially activists, of being hostile to "the family," when in reality it is much more the other way around.  (If some of us are hostile, it's not without reason.)  Schulman has noticed this too.  She first mentions a gay male artist who has performed the works of Joni Mitchell for many years; a reporter for the New Yorker asked him "why he 'did not want' to be part of a recent Joni Mitchell tribute album.  'I wasn't invited,' John replied" (85). 

About a week later I had a Facebook conversation with a reporter from New York Magazine.  She said she had "read somewhere" that I argued that gay people should have nothing to do with their homophobic families.  I informed her that my belief was, in fact, the opposite of that.  I told her that my book on familial homophobia argued that third parties should intervene and create consequences for homophobic families so that they could not get away with marginalizing and shunning their gay family members.  Again, she skewed reality to create a false but comfortable illusion in which it is the gay person who has the power and refuses to participate, when the truth is that we are the ones who are excluded [85-6].

There was a lot of other material I wanted to quote as I read The Gentrification of the Mind, but I came to realize I wanted to quote most of it.  So instead, I want to urge everyone who might be interested to read it.

When You've Got a Ph.D., Everything Looks Like an Intervention

I'm now well into Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio, 2008).  The author, Marc Epprecht, also wrote Hungochani, a highly-praised book on homosexuality in Southern Africa which I have on my shelves but haven't read yet.  In Heterosexual Africa? Epprecht takes on the doctrine, spread by Africans and non-Africans alike, that homosexuality is unknown in Africa, with an emphasis on the impact it has had on responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  In many ways it's a valuable book, and I suspect I'll be writing more about the book in the next few days, but one sentence on page 117 brought me up short, and I want to discuss it now.

In his chapter focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Epprecht surveys the quasi-scientific literature on modes of transmission, which he says ignored male-to-male sexuality almost entirely; at best, this literature mentioned the possibility merely to dismiss it.  What research did mention (usually male) homosex was itself ignored, as though it had never been published.

In an article on African AIDS patients in Europe, from 1981 through 1985, for example, Jean Sonnet and H.Taelman ... noted that one out of forty-two patients in their study admitted to not being heterosexual. The WHO study noted above found even more. Out of 117 African African patients in Europe who were tested in the first nine months of 1986, 5 percent were found to have contracted HIV through homosexual or bisexual transmission, and a further 1 percent either that way or though intravenous drug injection ... 

So far, so bad.  Epprecht repeatedly stresses the inadequacy of terminology like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" for traditional cultures in Africa, invoking the authority of queer and post-colonial theory; he even has wit enough to recognize that "sex" is problematic, since most societies, including the "West," tend to recognize only penis-in-vagina penetration as "sex."  Even that doesn't work outside English-speaking parts of the world, and researchers working in other languages with informants whose first language is not a European one, are often unclear about the languages they use to elicit information.  In this case I have the added difficulty that Epprecht is paraphrasing his sources, though since they were in European languages "homosexual" or its cognates were probably used.

Even among white Americans and Europeans, however, there's considerable ambiguity about a phrase like "not being heterosexual."  Does it mean that the subject is exclusively homosexual in his or her desires and behavior, or simply not exclusively heterosexual?  Considering the number of Americans who don't consider themselves homosexual because they've never been penetrated although they have penetrated many other males, or who have been penetrated but it doesn't count because they "avidly" penetrate females, some more care, if not precision, with terms is desirable here.

"Homosexual or bisexual transmission" is even worse.  Bisexual transmission would require a rather exotic sex life, even for the decadent West: it would mean that both a male and a female partner were involved (simultaneously?) in transmitting the virus to the recipient.  If he got it from a male, it doesn't matter whether he or his partner were "bisexual," which I suppose is what was meant by "bisexual transmission."  As Kinsey wrote in 1948, the word bisexual "should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657]."

Which brings me, in more ways than one, to the sentence by Epprecht that made me see red, emboldened below:

These figures are very low compared to the epidemic in Europe and America.  But they can more usefully be compared to what Alfred Kinsey found in American men in the days before gay rights (that is, 4 percent admitting to homosexuality as a predominant orientation).

I had been wondering why Epprecht hadn't mentioned Kinsey before in this book, aside from a passing allusion seven pages earlier.  Kinsey understood the problems of studying human sexuality better than every researcher Epprecht discusses in this book (including, I fear, himself).  Long before AIDS, Kinsey rejected Western notions of sexual essence that ignored the widely differing experiences and practices of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women.  He didn't, as far as I know, ask any of his interviewees whether they were homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. (If he had, most of the heterosexuals would have had no idea what he meant, and would probably have said no.)  He didn't ask them if they'd had homosexual (or heterosexual) experiences.  He asked them what they had done, and with whom.  He was, if I recall correctly what his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote, ready to use non-clinical vernacular terms for sexual acts when the interviewee didn't understand clinical terms.  (Asking a farmer or a convict how many times he'd received fellatio, for example, would probably have drawn a blank most of the time.  I kinda wonder if some of the later sex surveys dodged this little problem by not interviewing lower-class or uneducated subjects.)  In short, Kinsey grappled with the very problems that stymied researchers during the AIDS epidemic four decades later, in large part because they'd ignored Kinsey as outdated and irrelevant.  He recognized that many people had a lot of same-sex experience without thinking of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and he recognized that this counted against the notion of homosexual or bisexual persons, not against their experience, which he rightly considered primary.

But what bothered me about the sentence I quoted above is that Epprecht -- who, you'll recall, has spent over a hundred pages denying the validity of homosexuality as an identity for purposes of studying sexuality in Africa -- is still trying to impose homosexual and bisexual identity on Westerners.  His reference to Kinsey (without a citation in the text or endnote) is incorrect.  It is false that 4 percent of males admitted "to homosexuality as a predominant orientation."  Kinsey didn't use the word "orientation" (to be scrupulous, he used it once in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in a different sense) in connection with homosexual or heterosexual experience.  What he found was that 4 percent of his male sample had exclusively homosexual outlet throughout their adult lives.  If he asked them how they "identified" (also a word that would have made no sense in that context in the 1930s and 1940s), it wasn't a factor in his numbers or in his homosexual-heterosexual scale.  Additionally, he found that another 6 percent of his male sample had at least as much homosexual as heterosexual outlet for at least three years of their adult lives.  This meant that 10 percent had predominantly homosexual experience for at least three years of their lives; it's the source of the popular claim that Kinsey found that ten percent of the population was gay or lesbian.  Thirty-seven percent of males had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm during their adult lives; I guess they were "not heterosexual." (This includes the 4 percent and the 10 percent, which I mention because I've encountered people who tried to add all the percentages together: 4 percent plus 10 percent plus 37 percent and so on.)

The point I want to make here is that if you're writing about the diversity and fluidity of human sexuality, Kinsey is fundamental.  True, his work was flawed in certain respects, most of which he knew full well (the absence of people of color in the sample, for one).  But he mapped out the understanding and approach that would be vital during the AIDS pandemic, and had to be largely reinvented from scratch because the researchers had ignored him.  Even thirty years into the pandemic, research professionals keep rediscovering that OMFG, there are totally men who have sex with other men and they aren't gay!  Anyone who treats this as a new revelation has just informed you that they don't know what they're talking about, and need to go back to sex-research kindergarten for remedial study of the basics.  Until they do, they are wasting money and time and human lives.

Nebraska

Another book review for Gay Community News, published in the April 30-May 6, 1989 issue. As I feared, Whitmore died between the time I wrote the review and the time it appeared in print. Rereading the review now, I wonder if I should reread Nebraska, but I really have little interest in stories which pile on the misery for no evident reason except, I suppose, to show the author's High Artistic Seriousness. Happy endings and happy people are like, so gay, y' know? For this reason I've never gotten very far with Dennis Cooper, Scott Heim, and other gay writers like that. It's not that I object to unhappiness, even misery, per se, nor to characters devoid of affect; but I don't get what these boys are driving at. I guess it's just a blind spot of mine, and again, I have no idea why my editor sent me the Whitmore books. Hell, I couldn't even come up with a flip header for the review.

And then it occurred to me that Nebraska would make a great Coen Brothers movie, or a movie by any filmmaker who shows his or her High Artistic Seriousness by tormenting the characters mercilessly. "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport," King Lear lamented. No, dear, that's playwrights and moviemakers and edgy gay novelists.

Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic
by George Whitmore
New York: NAL Books, 1988
224 pages
$17.95 hardcover

Nebraska
by George Whitmore
New York: Grove Press, 1987
154 pages
$15.95 hardcover

I've been reading George Whitmore's articles in the gay press for years and always found them intelligent, interesting, and well-written. (Also sometimes wrongheaded and infuriating, but that's gay journalism.) So I wasn't too surprised when I found a book by him displayed in the window of my usual local bookstore. Nor was I too surprised that Someone Was Here had originated as an article in the New York Times Magazine; whatever my differences with the Times, it represents a level of professionalism that Whitmore has certainly achieved. On the other hand, the Times also represents a self-consciously haut-journalese style that absorbs the prose style of any writer in its path, and Whitmore is no exception. Most of Someone Was Here could have been written by almost any competent journalist, and that's a shame, as proven by the book's epilogue, where the tone abruptly shifts: Whitmore acknowledges that not only is he gay, he has been diagnosed with AIDS himself. Up to this point the book has consisted of omniscient-narrator third-person accounts of people with AIDS and their families and helpers; now Whitmore suddenly appears in the midst of these people, shipping parcels to Houston for one of his subjects, visiting and holding a small HIV-infected child named Frederico whose parents both died of AIDS. Perhaps the rush of involvement the reader suddenly feels compensates for the detachment of the previous two-hundred-odd pages, but it also throws that impersonality into uncomfortably sharp relief. Thanks to writers like Whitmore as well as to the Names Quilt and other projects, AIDS is becoming a plague with a human face; we are -- to a perhaps unprecedented degree -- enabled to know its victims not just as statistics but as people. Someone Was Here is interesting, intelligent, and worth reading as an object lesson in the difficulty of playing chicken with an epidemic: we can't get too close, but we have to get as close as possible, for all our sakes.

Nebraska, Whitmore's second novel, was published a few months before Someone Was Here. It's a strange little book. This time we have a first-person narrator, but his voice is not the author's: a twelve-year-old Nebraskan named Craig McMullen, who has been run over by a truck and lost a leg. It would be going too far to say that his family is in trouble; rather, they are classically 1950s' lumpen-Midwestern. Dad is a handsome drunken Irish redhead, violent when present, but mostly absent. Mama works at "Monkey Wards", her body swelling from the ankles up. Grandpa, an old railroad man, lives with Grandma in a ramshackle house he built himself, one room at a time. Sister Betty becomes a cheerleader, sister Dolores grows up too fast. Uncle Wayne, Mama's baby brother, comes home after his discharge from the Navy, waiting for a call from his friend the Chief; the two of them plan to open a garage in California as soon as they can get the money together.

But there are delays, punctuated by mysterious long-distance phone calls from the Chief, and Wayne stays on. Coming home one night after a drinking bout, he helps the convalescent Craig change his sweat-soaked pajamas, and briefly touches the boy's scrotum. A few weeks later the highway patrol brings Wayne home, though without arresting him. Not surprisingly to a gay reader with any knowledge of the period, it turns out that Wayne was discharged dishonorably from the Navy for homosexuality; that the Chief, his lover, has rejected him out of guilt; and that Wayne has been cruising the rest stops. After Craig has been manipulated into claiming that Wayne "interfered with" him, Wayne is committed to a mental hospital for electroshock. Craig is sent to live with his grandparents. His father, who has been living in Denver and has given up booze for Jesus, suddenly appears and kidnaps him, but Craig escapes. His father then returns to Denver and blows out his own brains with a shotgun.

Twelve years pass. After Grandma's funeral, Craig goes to California to pick up Uncle Wayne's trail, hoping to understand what happened to him. He finds him living with the Chief, handsome and well-preserved, but regressed emotionally to pubescence -- to Craig's pubescence, in fact.

Nebraska reminded me somewhat of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, with its attempt to make a kind of poetry out of demotic speech, its merciless depiction of bigotry, cruelty, and madness. But Whitmore isn't interested in the kind of lyricism Walker achieved, nor does he offer more than a hint of her hopeful vision of redeeming love; in this he more resembles Raymond Carver, the poet and short-story writer who wrote stark, painful tales of human isolation. Imagine a cross between the two, then: more vivid than Carver's bleached-out, gray-scale snapshots, less optimistic than Walker's tormented but loving epic, but with all their power and then some. I hope Whitmore is as much a survivor as Craig, because I think he has important books in him, and these two are just a taste of what he could give.