It's My Culture and I'll Cry If I Want To

In a similar vein, I came across this video clip today, of a famous speech from Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart.  I've actually wanted to write about this speech for a good many years.  It has always annoyed me, and the passing of time hasn't made me hate it less.

Ned Weeks, Kramer's alter ego in the play, declaims:

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . 

Even granting Kramer a shitload of poetic / dramatic license, this is absurd.  The names will be familiar to gay men of Kramer's generation and mine that followed his, the rote list of Illustrious Homosexuals rattled off to prove that taking it in the butt didn't mean you couldn't achieve in other realms. It wasn't entirely an invalid pursuit, because there was a relentless drumbeat of propaganda aimed at erasing non-heterosexuals from history, and it was important to rebut it.  Much of our counterpropaganda was dubious at best, and there were always gay cynics who declared that it should in honesty include famous but less inspiring figures like, say, J. Edgar Hoover. The important point is that these men do not constitute a culture, certainly not in the singular. They come from numerous cultures, and they made their achievements in a heterosexual context.  Kramer's decision to list them is ironic, given his own fierce culture-of-therapy individualism.

Ned goes on: 

Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do—and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don’t they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself and maybe you wouldn’t be so terrified of who you are. The only way we’ll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual.

This is shamefully dishonest on many levels.  Yes, Alan Turing did play a role in breaking the Nazis' secret codes, but he was only one of many people, most of them heterosexual and many of them women, engaged in that great project.  (Kramer was never much interested in women.)  Ned compresses the events leading up to Turing's suicide irresponsibly: Yes, Turing was not just "hounded" for being gay, he was prosecuted and convicted under British law for having sex with another male.  But how would teaching this fact "in the schools" have prevented Turing's suicide (which is how it's written here), or have made Bruce feel better about being gay.  Knowing the history of gay men's suffering is as likely to inculcate despair as "real pride."

As for "a culture that isn't just being sexual," Ned continues:

That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war. Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us. Must we all be reduced to becoming our own murderers?

This is malignant bullshit. First, neither Ned nor Kramer was "one of the men who fought the war" -- any war.  As an affluent, privileged gay man, Kramer had no interest in activism and despised gay activists until AIDS struck.  As the Wikipedia article on Kramer puts it, 

There were politically active groups in New York City, but Kramer noted 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."

Even when he became an activist of sorts, Kramer tended to frame his work in personal terms, especially in attacks on then-New York City mayor Ed Koch, and in denunciations of gay men's sexual culture, of which he was an active participant. It never seemed to occur to him that he was attacking himself.  Like the more conventionally recognizable antigay bigots of the religious Right, his jeremiads described himself as much as others; possibly even more.  In his twilight years he continued and amplified his hypocrisy, attacking other gay men for supposedly engaging in "meaningless sex" while complaining that they weren't having it with him.

Notice that when we know anything about the erotic lives of the men Ned/Kramer extols in his monologue, we know that they mostly consisted of the same kind of behavior he attacked in his contemporaries.  Far from the respectable, soft-focus fantasies Kramer concocted (inaccurately) about the monogamy of lesbians, those men patronized rent-boys, bathhouses, bars, streets, and other cruising places.  Oh, Henry James may have been the exception: it's not clear he had any erotic life at all beyond fantasy.  The rest of his list sometimes found long-term partners, but weren't monogamous with them any more than Kramer was with his.  Ned's speech probably gratified queasy straight audiences with its denunciation of gay sex, but even in The Normal Heart he (like his author) haunted the baths when he wasn't on Fire Island.  But that doesn't count as defining himself by his cock, I guess.  And as we now know, being a real soldier won't protect a man against AIDS.

Throughout history down to the present, most gay-ish men haven't been high achievers, and there's no reason why they should have been.  (If not for AIDS, Kramer himself would probably have gone down in history as a minor playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter.  Not a wasted life, but not Alexander the Great either.)  When I read Ned Weeks's speech again after seeing the National Theatre clip, I was reminded of a similar coattails-riding you'll observe among fundamentalist Christians: they may be barely literate, but they "belong to a culture" of famous, highly learned and accomplished Christians.  They know very little about them, have never bothered to read their works, but they are validated because C. S. Lewis was a distinguished college professor and scholar.

Maybe I should stress that I situate myself in gay history.  I'm aware of my predecessors, and I'm dependent on and grateful to the work of scholars who've broadened and deepened our knowledge of the erastai/eromenoi, arsenokoitai, sodomites, buggers, sapphists, inverts, hijra, llamana, katoey, jotas, maricones, marimachas, toms/dees, and others whose lives make up the history.  It's not a simple unitary history, it's a big hot mess, which Kramer's simplifications dishonor and diminish. He accused queer theorists of erasing gay history, but that's another of his lies: most of the work that has begun to fill out our knowledge over the past forty and more years was done by scholars who at least pledged allegiance to queer theory.  You can no more do justice to our lives by denying our sexuality than by centralizing it -- but then why not centralize it?  Gay people who say we're just like straights except for what we do in bed are reducing us to our sexuality, and also pretending that we are all alike when we are as various as straights.

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.