Change, Casting, Culture, and Comfort Zones Revisited

Someone linked to this article on Jonathan Franzen the other day.  I'd better begin by admitting that I haven't read any of Franzen's books -- I got about 100 pages into Freedom before I gave up -- and that his insulting remarks about Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001 gave me a bad impression of him that I haven't bothered to try to shake.  Despite his current cachet as an American literary giant, for Salon to take a few pokes at him indicates that he's a safe target.  What I read of Freedom seemed like ordinary MFA prose; he doesn't seem very important as far as I'm concerned, but I took a look at the article anyway.

I was surprised, because I didn't see any good grounds for hating him there.  For example, here's Reason Number One:

Why he will not be writing about race: “I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare…I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person—a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people—I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.”

This actually seems fair enough to me, especially because there is widespread hostility to white people writing about non-whites, or people from other cultures, and not without reason.  In Reason Number Two, Franzen explains further: "I’m lazy. I don’t like to do research for books ... I upbraid myself for not being a real novelist because I won’t go out with a notebook and gather impressions. I won’t wade into difficult situations trying to get material."  If you're not going to bother to inform yourself, stick with what you know, or make up imaginary worlds or something. That Franzen is honest enough with himself to recognize this speaks well for him, not badly, though one could fairly look down on him for having so little interest in people outside his immediate experience.  The main characters in Freedom were white suburbanites, whom I presume are the kind of people Franzen knows, but he didn't seem to have much interest in them either, except as punching bags.

I can look down on Franzen for his inability to engage with people who are different from him, but at the same time I don't approve of telling artists what subject matter to take on.  Artists do what they can, not necessarily what they would like to do.  Some can do research and enjoy it; good for them.  Some do "dare" to try to write from inside the heads of people who are superficially different from them (race, sex, culture, religion, are all superficial differences), and some do it well.  Artists may do whatever they feel called to do, though there's no guarantee they'll succeed, and there's no obligation on the part of readers or critics to ignore their failures.

Remember, though, the writer K. T. Bradford, who retreated to her comfort zone by taking a break from reading work by straight cis white male authors.  This move was widely misunderstood as a move away from her comfort zone, partly because Bradford herself confused the issue, framing it as a "challenge" to other readers to read writers different from them rather than like themselves, as she had.  It led to a lot of confused responses and discussion.  But again, I'm fine with people reading only in their comfort zones, or outside their comfort zones, or mixing it up.  I don't think you ought to prescribe these things, and anyone who tries tends to fall on their face, as Bradford did.  I might hate Jonathan Franzen for other reasons, though I'm not interested enough to find them; his self-exculpating remarks don't seem like a good reason to hate him -- rather the opposite.  They made me respect him a little, or disrespect him a little less.

Goodness, how time flies.  This post began as a response to a post on writing about the Other by John Scalzi, with contributions by other writers (including K. T. Bradford!) on Labor Day.  That was several weeks ago, but this issue isn't going away anytime soon.  I'm intrigued by the topic, partly because I'm a gay man and these issues have often come up in writing by and about us.  I was glad to see other people expressing my own first reaction, that individual characters are individuals, not their cultures.  But there's a problem with this, because characters are not people, nor individuals: they are abstractions who stand for all kind of things beyond themselves.  So this problem can't be brushed aside too lightly.

The whole issue of "representation" is very messy.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak did a fascinating discussion in her much cited (but, I suspect, seldom-read) "Can the Subaltern Speak?"  There's no agreement about what is an acceptable or positive depiction of gay men, to stick to my own People.  What one gay man considers positive will be a very bad, negative representation for another.  This came up, for example, in the movie "Cruising."  The gay leathermen who appeared as extras said it was great, and about time, that Real, Masculine gay role models were being shown in a Hollywood film.  Other gay men were outraged that these filthy degenerates were being depicted at all, instead of the respectable suburban Homo-Americans that none of them actually were, but wanted to see in Hollywood movies anyway.  (The controversy also involved other issues, but this was an important part of it.)  And some of the best, most-popular-among-gay-men, gay male characters have been created by straight and gay women.  And most gay people are so ignorant about the variety of real gay lives that I don't think "accuracy" really comes into it all that much; I think "wish fulfilment" plays a major role -- we should be depicted as we think we would like to be.  We certainly are no authorities on what is accurate or realistic -- but then, who wants fiction to be realistic anyway?

Then someone commented, "Rowling isn’t a very good writer – period. She’s a good story-teller, but all her characters are pretty one- or at best two-dimensional. It’s comical to even think of her attempting something like Native American characters."

I semi-agree with this, though I'm not sure that a good storyteller isn't a good writer.  She may be a poor stylist (though Rowling isn't that bad), with poor characterization, but if she's a good storyteller, she's got that strength and it's a major part of what she is as a writer.  But that's less important than the larger issue, which is: given this commenter's assumptions, why isn't it comical to even think of Rowling attempting something like English characters?  (For that matter, if wizards actually existed, I have no doubt that they'd have valid complaints about the way a Muggle chose to depict them.)  Why hold Rowling to a higher standard of characterization for "Native American" characters than for those of her own nation?  I'm not being snarky here. I see no reason to suppose that most readers really care about complexity of characterization.  And I'm sure that much of the appeal of the Harry Potter series, especially outside of England, has to do with its exoticising and unrealistic stereotypes about English life and in particular, about English boarding schools.  If accuracy really were a criterion, the whole series should be pulped and the films withdrawn - but accuracy isn't a criterion and it isn't going to happen.  Maybe Native American readers who loved the series are shocked now because they're seeing themselves through the same distorting lens, because they believed that Rowling's depiction of England was accurate.  And frankly, I see a lot of Othering of non-Indians by Native American writers, along with Othering of whites by Writers of Color generally.  It doesn't bother me -- sauce for the goose, you know -- and it comes in handy as a reminder for myself and others that artistic and moral laziness isn't limited to white people.

Incidentally, I liked Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch, which was effectively a Harry Potter novel in Nigerian-American drag.  But it had the same qualities that had disturbed me about the Potter books, mainly that its wizards were just as creepy and unpleasant as Rowling's wizards.  Not that Okorafor or Rowling unfairly or inaccurately stereotyped wizards, of course, since wizards don't exist.  The stereotypes are part of the appeal for most readers.

At around the same time Scalzi's post appeared I saw an article about representations of transgender people on TV and in the movies, focusing on the question of whether trans characters should be played by cis actors.  The writer of the article made a significant slip, however: they said that having cis actors play trans characters assumes that being trans is a performance, instead of a deep innate essence.  The latter may be true; what the writer overlooked is that acting is a performance. The actor is not the character.  This is a difficult concept for many people to grasp, I know, but it's true.  Many want to boo the actor as well as the villain she plays; others want to believe that the straight actor playing the gay character is gay, and secretly wants them.  Some gay people have expressed doubt whether a straight actor can play a gay character; one reason I doubt this is that they don't seem to have any reservations about gay actors playing straights, and indeed consider the suggestion that they can't to be discriminatory.  Which is one of the things which suggest that this issue is one you can't resolve by thinking logically; no principle is really involved either.  Something else is going on.

Similarly, for example, there has been concern about white or Latino or Asian actors playing American Indians.  Or white or Latino actors playing Asians.  Or American actors of Asian descent playing characters of different national origin than the actors -- a Korean-Canadian playing a Chinese-Canadian, say; again, that indicates to me that something funny is going on.  Some of my Asian friends claim that they can distinguish a Japanese from a Chinese from a Korean on sight, though I doubt this; but English-speaking American actors are going to be harder to read.  Hollywood's notorious laziness and racism are factors here of course, but I don't believe they're the the whole story: some of the complaints and concerns are themselves rooted in racism, the belief that culture is In The Blood.

Consider too the controversy over the possibility that a black actor, Idris Elba, was being considered as the next incarnation of Doctor Who.  Since the Doctor has been played by several different actors over the span of the series, why not?  It was entertaining to watch fans and critics spluttering that the Doctor just is white (like Jesus or Santa Claus, I suppose).  Similar objections were raised to the idea of a black actor playing James Bond.  (Having Bond's boss M played by a woman seems to have gone over all right, however.)  Personally I liked the 2011 film version of Wuthering Heights, in which a black Briton played Heathcliff, but many objected, with often shaky arguments; at any rate, whatever he was, Bronte's ambiguous Heathcliff was not "white."  Yet he has often been played by white actors.  But how about the reboot of Dr. Doolittle, with the doctor moved from England to the US and a black American playing him?  I don't recall much fuss about that, but it's surely as much (or as little) of a dislocation.  And then there have been people who threw tantrums because black characters in the source material were played by black actors in the film.

And to bring things full circle, there was a kerfluffle recently because the latest Star Trek film was going to present Ensign Sulu as gay, supposedly as a "tribute" to the gay actor who'd originally played him.  The foolishness involved on all sides of that one was troubling, perhaps especially John Cho's concession to Asian/American sexism and antigay bigotry, "that Asians and Asian Americans might see it as a sort of continuing feminization of Asian men. Asian American men, Asian men have been basically eunuchs in American cinema and television, and I thought maybe it would be seen as a continuation of that."  A gay man is not a eunuch, for fuck's sake.  One would think we were still in the 1950s, and maybe we are.  Myself, I wanted a Kirk/Spock romance in the reboot, as a tribute to Kirk/Spock fan fiction -- not that I ever expected to see it.  (Speaking of which, should non-Vulcans play Vulcans?  Being a Vulcan is not a performance!)

But once again, it's clear that neither principle nor logic are involved here.  Marketing is the criterion, not artistic choice, though in popular entertainment it's generally impossible to separate the two.  But even when a decision is made for commercial reasons, it can work artistically if it's handled creatively.  If not, then it doesn't matter why the decision was made.  Marketing, however, attempts to find out what the public wants, or at least will buy; I'm not sure what is going on in the minds of the public on this score.  Some changes are acceptable, others are not.  It seems to me that almost any change is okay if it works artistically, and since almost any change will offend someone (as I argued recently), artists or entertainers might as well do what seems right to them, try to justify it by how they execute it, and defend it when necessary.

More on this soon, I hope.

What Is To Be Done?

[I'm trying to clear out my drafts folder; this one seems worth keeping.]

I sorta ran out of steam towards the end of "Dude I'm a Fag." Ever since the Sixties I've heard that those of us who criticize society shouldn't just criticize, we should come up with constructive, responsible suggestions for positive change! ("Withdraw US troops from Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan," for example, is too negative and critical. "Send more, better equipped troops until the Vietnamese/Iraqis/Afghans are ready to take responsibility for their own country" is positive and constructive.)

As you will no doubt have guessed, I'm not very concerned with being positive, constructive, or responsible. I am concerned with being practical, and I admit that it is not practical simply to say stuff like, "If more males simply refuse to play these games, and stop backing up the would-be Alpha Boys who play them, then 'that's so gay' will lose its sting." I know, I know: if everybody would just eat less, obesity would disappear. If everybody would ride the Peace Train, there would be no more war. Is that gay, or what? If it were that simple, we wouldn't be in trouble now, on any front.

After all, even a militant feminist movement let itself be slowed down and distracted by dyke-baiting, though there were noble exceptions who argued that feminists shouldn't be intimidated by accusations that they were lesbians. Mainstream feminists reacted by trying to purge lesbians from their organizations. To this day, women who try to distance themselves from feminism will fret about this and insist that they like men, for all the good it does them. Women in the military, "straight and gay, are accused as lesbians when they rebuff sexual advances or report sexual abuse. ... Lesbian baiting is a powerful tool to keep women 'in their place', not just in the military but in other societal contexts as well." As with fag-baiting, lesbian-baiting has little to do with a woman's actual sexual orientation or practice; but even many adult women with strong political consciousness have found it difficult to counter this move. Simple denial is not very effective, because a woman's heterosexuality is not the point; her willingness to be subordinate to men is.

Fag-baiting is one of the methods boys and men use to negotiate their place in male society. Sometimes it looks to me like a game of Musical Chairs: whoever can't unseat someone else loses and is the Fag. Stephen O. Murray wrote (Latin American Male Homosexualities [New Mexico, 1995], p. 55), "Topping other men (usually verbally or symbolically, but occasionally physically) is central to machismo, perhaps as important as maintaining the subordination of women. As [Roger] Lancaster [Life Is Hard (California, 1992, 236-37)] explained, machismo 'is not exclusively or primarily a means of structuring power relations between men and women. It is a means of structuring power among men.'" C. J. Pascoe shows that this applies among adolescent boys. One of the most striking passages in Dude, You're a Fag! recounts

just one of many instances from my field notes: two boys walked out of the PE locker room, and one yelled, “Fucking faggot!” at no one in particular. None of the other students paid them any mind, since this sort of thing happened so frequently. Similar spontaneous yelling of some variation of the word fag, seemingly apropos of nothing, happened repeatedly among boys throughout the school [59].

In a more sensible world, the boy who yelled "Fucking faggot" out of nowhere, at nobody, would be regarded as one views a derelict having an argument on the street with the voices in his head.

I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

Band of Thebes, where I got this clip, asks, "Do the bullies run completely unchecked in feral packs?" Of course they do. Parents and teachers and administrators stand by and do nothing; sometimes they join in. I've written before about this.

Reading Pascoe's account of what she calls "the rape paradigm," or remembering the Speakers Bureau volunteer who tells how once a month, in his high school in the 1980s, the cool kids would wear t-shirts that read "SILLY FAGGOT -- DICKS ARE FOR CHICKS", I find myself asking a question I never thought would pass my lips:

Where were the adults?

Where were the adults when Pascoe's Ricky was being harassed and beaten up, or when Keith was jamming a drumstick into another student's crotch and yelling "Get raped"? (Standing back and watching it happen, she says.) Where were the adults when those t-shirts were being worn in the halls, classrooms, and cafeterias? (Doing nothing, or chuckling at the wit of it all.) Even the word "dicks," which I'd have thought a punishable breach of decorum, didn't bother the administration. Considering that political messages or other attention-grabbing slogans are verboten in so many school dress codes, I find it incredible; but antigay bigotry is uncontroversial and apolitical. Their high moral standards, their obsessive concern with a docile student body, can be forgotten for the right cause.

As Anderson Cooper says in the clip, religious bigots claim that anti-bullying programs "encourage homosexuality." This needs to be fought more effectively. Kids like Jamey Rodemeyer shouldn't have to do it themselves. As Dan Savage has said, gay advocacy groups are kept out of schools by the bigots. But why should it be necessary for outsiders to do this? Parents should be the leaders in these matters; don't they care about their own children? Of course it won't be easy, but finding your child hanging from a rope because he couldn't stand his life anymore is presumably harder.

The gay community can set an example, and needs to clean its own house. As I also wrote before, there's a lot of hostility to effeminate boys and masculine girls (under the euphemism "stereotypes") among gay people who fancy themselves respectable, the kind of people I call Homo-Americans.

And if it's destructive to bad-mouth people, if speaking negatively about someone in their presence can drive them to suicide, something needs to be done about gay people who complain about the bad homosexuals who Fit the Stereotype and made it seem that they couldn't be normal Homo-Americans like they wanted to be, scaring them back into their closets for years. It's those Stereotypes who get beaten up regularly and are more likely to kill themselves; it surely doesn't help them to hear themselves denounced as scary, malevolent queer demons who ruin everything for normal homos. It's telling that many respectable gay people think it's proper to demonize them. (And like the straight homophobes, the image people never think about the the impact of what they're doing on real people.)

Then there are hip, radical straight boys (they never will be missed!) who want to rehabilitate the word "faggot," because on their account it doesn't really mean "homosexuals," it means people "who take a knee," who "choose to lose, because the alternative bears too heavy a cost." (This is especially funny, really, because the blogger who wrote it later whined, when IOZ playfully urged defiance of TSA groping at airports, that he couldn't do it, because he had his kids with him and it would just get him in trouble for nothing. Faggot.*) Or who, in their ideological purity, don't want class issues to be sidetracked by trivia like racism, sexism, and homophobia.

We've got our work cut out for us.

*Bear in mind, I don't think he should have defied TSA at the airport. I'm just pointing out that he fits his own definition to an F, so maybe he should be a bit less judgmental about other people's little capitulations. The faggot.

Hellspawn of Dude, I'm a Fag

Aside from getting ready to return to the US on Friday, I've been writing comments on other people's blogs instead of writing posts for my own. It's occurred to me that some of those comments could, with a little more work, be adapted and posted here. In particular the one that underlies what I'm writing now, in which I was struggling to articulate what I meant. I'll try again here.

So, from here I went to here, which made me go Huh. I thought I'd look to see what else the blogger had written, and found this. Some people are now up in arms about the phrase, "Just sayin'." According to Virtual Lee, the phrase is "most often used at the end of a rant or at the end of suggestion ameliorating a hot pitch with a shrug and an I don’t care." That's not how I recall having seen it used, or having used it myself. Gawker wants it banned, which seems to me like a good reason to keep using it. The writer at Gawker signed off with:

If you didn’t mean what you said or if there was no import to it, don’t say it. Why say it? Don’t say it. But worse than that, you obviously did mean what you said so don’t veil it with pretending you didn’t. Last month was the R-Word Month, during which the public was meant to avoid saying “retard” as an insult. Let’s make this the month of not saying Just Sayin’. It’s dumb and retarded. Just sayin’.

Lee, I think, missed what the Gawker writer meant to do. According to both of them, "Just sayin'" is like adding "Not!" to the end of a possibly incendiary sentence, or "No Homo", or pretending that you didn't mean a slur or other insult, you were just joking, geez, don't be so PC, chill out! "Dumb and retarded" was, I thought, intended to be an example of what the writer meant, since he had already established that calling someone or something "retarded" is a no-no. But Lee huffed,

... ‘Just sayin” is certainly not as hurtfull [sic] as accusing someone of having a specific neurological illness. Easy to ban, not so easy to dscern [sic]. Just sayin’

The word "accusing" struck me strange. Maybe calling someone a retard is an accusation, but it doesn't make much sense as one. Having a low IQ is not a moral, let alone a criminal failing; it's nonvoluntary. (And Down Syndrome, which I think is what most people associate with mental retardation nowadays, is a chromosomological disorder, not really a neurological one. I'm just sayin'.) The same goes for a lot of slurs. Naomi Klein reminded Barack Obama during last year's election campaign that "being called a Muslim is not a smear"; treating it as if it were only surrenders to the attacker. Being called gay, or even queer, is not an accusation, though many gay people inexplicably act as if it were. (Oh, not inexplicably -- it's because they agree that being gay is bad, only We Can't Help It, It's In Our Genes.) Refusing to use the smarts Nature gave you, however, arguably is a moral failing, and calling someone a retard is a good example of same.

I suppose that the people who throw around insults like "retard" mostly know that their targets aren't retarded, just as they know that the people they call "faggots" aren't gay. Which doesn't mean that they wouldn't pick on real retarded or gay people, of course; they probably would. They know it's not an accusation; rather it's a taunt, thrown to see if it will draw blood. That's why kids call each other "fag," "queer," "dumb," "fat," "girl," to see if the target will flinch. But I'm not being fair to kids there, since so many adults never outgrow this practice. The right 'accuses' Michael Moore of being fat; the left and the near right 'accuse' Rush Limbaugh of being fat. It would be one thing if such childishness were a way of letting off steam before moving on to more substantive matters, but in many cases it's all they know how to do. (As shown by the popular jape: "Arguing on the Internet is like entering the Special Olympics -- even if you win, your [sic -- they always write it this way] still retarded." In other words, they don't know how to debate or argue or think, which are done pretty much the same on the Internet as elsewhere, and they think their incapacity makes them superior. Superior to whom? To just about everybody, from their tone.

In our national political discourse, it matters a lot more how much you weigh, how you dress, your accent, your hairstyle, the "message" you're sending, than what you believe or do, and why. It matters more that you be "responsible," "positive," and "civil" than that you have any idea what you're talking about. Liberals dwelt much more on Dubya's inability to pronounce "nuclear" than on his real crimes, and now they're much more interested in Obama's comparative eloquence, his poise, how good he is with children (American ones, that is -- what he's done to Afghan and Pakistani children is not to be mentioned), what a great couple he and Michelle are, than in his policies and actions.

I suppose the same reason underlies the panic so many adults exhibit when someone throws a slur in their direction -- they've never outgrown the panic children feel when a gang of other kids call them names. Mommy! they're being mean to me! Still, we need to outgrow it. It's so much easier to try to ban words we don't like than to get people to change their ideas and feelings. (I bet the Gawker's R-Word Month made a big difference, don't you?)

Once, when I was about twelve, I fell off my bike, scraping my knee and hand. It was the first time I'd done that in a long time. I reflexively drew in a breath to start crying, which is what you're supposed to do when you fall and hurt yourself, but then stopped when I realized that though the scrapes hurt, they didn't hurt that much. After pondering this for a moment, I got back on the bike and rode on. I've had much the same reaction to some of the slurs and insults that were directed at me as an adult: they don't hurt that much, not enough to keep me from riding figuratively on -- and when possible, all over the person who used the slur. If I've left tire marks on their souls, then my life has not been entirely in vain.

Down Memory Lane

I haven't heard this sort of thing in a while:

nobody cares about u and what u do in the bedroom... get a life!!

That's the complete text of an e-mail message I received today, with the subject header "ur so messed up".

If the writer doesn't care, then why is he reading my blog? Not that I have much to say about what I do in bed, if I recall correctly. Should I change that?

If he thinks that nobody cares about gay people generally and what we do in bed, he should think again. Why are so many straight boys, often the most flamboyant ones, so obsessed with faggots and what we do in bed? Why do they insult and tease each other with accusations of anal penetrability? Why were some of C. J. Pascoe's straight high school boys afraid to go to a dance with just one faggot in attendance? Why are so many conservative Christians more concerned about what faggots do in bed than about poverty and social injustice generally? Why did so many American states have laws criminalizing what we do in bed until the activist Supreme Court overturned them in 2003? And contrariwise, if heterosexuals think that people's sex lives are of no interest to others, why do they announce their impending sexual partnerships (often solemnized in church) in the press? Why do they introduce their sexual partners to you as their sexual partners ("my husband", "my wife") -- do they imagine that everybody else as obsessed with sex as they are?

If we ever reach the point where nobody really cares about other people's sex lives, then I'll be satisfied. We're still a very long way from that day, of course; meanwhile, the insistence that nobody cares about a person's or a character's sexuality rings hollow. And when equality comes, gay people (including me, if I live so long) will be every bit as reticent and discreet about our sex lives as straight people are.

The Bastard Son of Dude, I'm a Fag

A couple of days ago I argued (or, if you like, pontificated) that gay people should embrace, rather than repudiate, words like "faggot" and "dyke." In the last analysis it isn't important to stop people from using such epithets, because they'll just come up with other words to take their place. This works both ways. Just as any word we claim for ourselves (like "gay") will be appropriated as tokens in the status games of masculinity, any word that Boy Culture uses in those games will include us in its meanings, because men who are penetrated by other men are the ultimate case of failed masculinity.

"Retard" seems a likely candidate right now. I've written before about a gay kid I knew who said that wasting food in the dorm cafeteria was "retarded", though he was adamant that no one say "That's so gay" in his presence. The gay advice columnist Dan Savage, criticized by a reader for using "retarded" as an insult, promised to substitute "leotarded": "I won’t be mocking the mentally challenged, just the physically gifted. I will pick on the strong—and the limber—and not the weak." In honor of this derisive gesture by Savage, I'm going to follow his lead and rename this blog "This Is So Gaytorade" for a few days. Then I will not be mocking the heterosexually challenged, but defending a great sports drink -- though not, alas, capitalizing on the product placement. (To his credit, I should mention that for years Savage printed every letter asking his advice with the salutation, Hey, faggot! "in joking reference to this lively debate [among gays] about reclaiming hate words.")

But I digress. My reason for returning to this topic is to clarify something. Many people react to the idea that they shouldn't distance themselves from the safely disreputable by assuming that they're being told that they should change their style to imitate the safely disreputable -- for example, that if they embrace the word "faggot" they have to dance naked and drunk in gay pride parades or something. Rather, I want gay people to show some solidarity with the safely disreputable, by getting it into their heads that bigots don't care how often they go to church, how monogamous they are, how much money they earn, how faithfully they avoid Pride Parades, how consistently they vote Republican -- how normal, in short, they allegedly are. If you are gay, you're a faggot in the eyes of bigots, no matter how many pounds you can benchpress; if you're lesbian, you're a dyke in the eyes of bigots, no matter how skilled at needlepoint you may be.

The same attitude infects other minorities, of course. Many European Jews tried to combat the rising tide of anti-Semitism around the beginning of the 20th century by publicly denouncing the stereotypical Jew with his sidelocks, frock coat, and degenerate feminine ways. They preferred to emulate their own stereotype of the butch, blond goy. Paul Breines wrote in his 1990 book Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry, page 141:

As a Zionist, for example, [Theodor] Herzl oversaw the founding of the first Jewish Burschenschaft, or fraternity, at the University of Vienna in 1897, its purpose, writes Arthur Koestler, later a member, being to demonstrate that “Jews could hold their own in dueling, brawling, drinking, and singing just like other people. According to the laws of inferiority and over-compensation,” Koestler adds, “they were soon out-Heroding Herod once more” – practicing dueling for hours each day, eventually becoming the most feared and aggressive swordsmen in the University.”

Not content with pointing out how assimilated they were, they agreed that the stereotypical hasid was despicable, eminently deserving of Christian hatred. I think it's safe to say that this attitude didn't delay the Holocaust by even a minute. Surveying a batch of 1970s pulp novels starring "a squadron of muscle Jews, the 'deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed' Jews for whom Max Nordau had called" (192), Breines comments,"One can be direct here: This is Jewish self-hatred masquerading as robust Zionism" (193).

To repeat: this does not mean that all male Jews should be narrow-shouldered, concave-chested shlemiels and yeshiva buchers (be still my heart!) -- that would be as one-sided as the opposite view, that none should be.

Just the other day, the gay site PlanetOut passed along the news that

In February, Skate Canada, Canada's Figure Skating Governing Body, announced a new Public Relations campaign to make skating in Canada look "tough."

Skate Canada is well aware that figure skating's image is seen as, well, gay and Skate Canada hopes to change that by focusing on the difficult aspects of figure skating such as strength, power, endurance...all the stuff that makes skaters sweat heavy!...

Skate Canada wasn't helped when two-time Olympic Silver Medalist, Elvis Stojko, went on a self-appointed mini press tour, speaking on behalf of what Skate Canada was looking for. Stojko told the Toronto Sun "If you're very lyrical and you're really feminine and soft, well, that's not men's skating. That is not men's skating, ok? Men's skating is power, strength, masculinity, focus, clarity of movement, interpretation of music."

Gay activists are up in arms, and Cyd Ziegler of OutSports.com told the PlanetOut writer, Aaron Harris, "To draw in the hockey fans, you'll need to have figure skaters hitting each other. They're two completely different sports catering to two different interests. There are other fan groups, like tennis or golf, who would be more likely to gravitate toward figure skating. Targeting the hockey crowd is just a waste of their time." Ditto for the US: "Hockey fans and kids who want to play hockey aren't suddenly going to gravitate toward figure skating because the men are more masculine."
The article produced a small frenzy in the comments section. While numerous commenters criticized Skate Canada, many defended it, saying things like

Maybe it'll send a different message to those in the "gay community" who associate gay with being feminine. ... So gay people (as a whole) should act and speak like other Americans (where boys act/talk like boys and girls act/talk like girls). Certainly there are those of us who are gay and the rest of the world would find difficulty in figuring it out and while the masculine and more traditional of us may be the silent majority it's the flaming sissies that make the headlines a vast majority of the time when prancing around in fairy wings in pride parades and idolizing every female pop singer that becomes the latest fad (and wants to be just like HER). The latter is the image that get's associated with GAY and it sucks frankly.

Or this:

So as far as I'm concerned we can sh#t can the "girl" acts and get comfortable with our "Masculine" side. I'm sick of Gay being code for weak and feminine. Let"s see some Gay men kickin ass!

Or this:

I'm Canadian and I 100% the "man-up" policy. This policy should apply to all gays everywhere! It's okay to be gay, but at least be a real man. If I wanted to date a femme, I'd be straight.

And much, much more. Most tellingly, I think:

... i always tell people its kind of an inside joke. I tell them "you know there's gay people and then there's fagots".

One can be direct here: this is gay self-hatred masquerading as assimilation and manly-manism. These guys agree that to be a sissy, no matter how athletic (and figure skaters, like ballet dancers, are athletes) is despicable, and antigay bigots are justified in hating them and wanting to drive them out of sight at the very least. Indeed, these commenters are explicitly and avowedly on the side of the bigots.

Is it because the kind of masculinity they espouse is a positive image? I don't think so; hockey players fighting on the ice aren't what I'd call a positive role model for anybody. Nor are the high school boys C. J. Pascoe wrote about, who feel that they're entitled (and obligated) to beat up sissies; who wouldn't go to prom if even one gay guy was at the event, lest their fragile masculinity be somehow compromised; who, "Walking between government and drama classes, ... yelled 'GET RAPED! GET RAPED!' as he rhythmically jabbed a girl in the crotch with his drumstick" (page 100). These are the alpha males, the leaders, the popular guys everyone looks up to. It isn't the flaming sissies with streaked hair and swishing hips who are harmful to others, it's the men who denigrate them, dehumanize them, harass them, beat them up, and even kill them.

If the only alternative to being "masculine" in those terms is to be a "stereotype" -- and as the PlanetOut commenters are enough to show, many men think it is the only alternative -- then bring on the eyeliner and spike heels. But I don't think it is; at least I hope not. Reading Pascoe's account of what she calls "the rape paradigm," or remembering the Speakers Bureau volunteer who tells how once a month, in his high school in the 1980s, the cool kids would wear t-shirts that read "SILLY FAGGOT -- DICKS ARE FOR CHICKS", I find myself asking a question I never thought would pass my lips:

Where were the adults?

Where were the adults when Pascoe's Ricky was being harassed and beaten up, or when Keith was jamming a drumstick into another student's crotch and yelling "Get raped"? (Standing back and watching it happen, she says.) Where were the adults when those t-shirts were being worn in the halls, classrooms, and cafeterias? (Doing nothing, or chuckling at the wit of it all.) Even the word "dicks," which I'd have thought a punishable breach of decorum, didn't bother the administration. Considering that political messages or other attention-grabbing slogans are verboten in so many school dress codes, I find it incredible; but antigay bigotry is uncontroversial and apolitical. Their high moral standards, their obsessive concern with a docile student body, can be forgotten for the right cause. Students often have to fight to start gay-straight alliances in their schools, because administrators fear they'll be disruptive. A school in Utah, I think it was, banned all student groups when a court ordered it to allow a gay-straight alliance to organize there. (Yes, it was.)

(P.S. Compare this current case.)

Before you can work on the kids, you have to work on the adults. Including the gay ones.