I've never been a fan of Russ Feingold, but then I never paid much attention to him. Many on the leftward end of the American political spectrum adore him, though.
Today Feingold appeared on Democracy Now! Although he's now one of thirty-five co-chairs of President Obama's re-election campaign, he disapproves of Obama's decision to accept Super PAC money. "That’s not who Barack Obama is," he said, which indicates that he needs to pay more attention. And then, later in a long interview:
AMYGOODMAN: You mentioned the killing of Awlaki. Did you support that in Yemen?
RUSSFEINGOLD: Well, obviously I wasn’t consulted in advance. The question there is, is there a doctrine where if somebody is an American citizen and they are clearly affiliated with an enemy power and it is impossible to get them—if that’s true, and that’s what I don’t know—if it’s impossible to get them any other way, is it justified? I would say, probably. But how do I know whether that’s true. You have to tread very carefully when you’re dealing with American citizens. But I am not shedding any tears over the loss of that person, who I think did horrible things.
To her credit, Goodman followed up, and Feingold provided a textbook example of waffling in reply:
AMYGOODMAN: The President—the ACLU has sued President Obama most recently. "The targeted killing program violates both U.S. and international law," writes the ACLU in their press release. They said, "As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts. The government’s authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat [to] life is concrete, specific and imminent." And they not only killed Awlaki, but then, in a separate killing, they killed his 16-year-old U.S.-born son.
RUSSFEINGOLD: I agree with the proposition of the ACLU’s lawsuit, and I think it should be litigated. I think it will be very interesting to see whether the killing of al-Awlaki fits that definition. I think that’s going to be a close question. As to the other ones, it’s a fair point. And, of course, I agree, as a general policy, as something that’s an excuse to do whatever you want and assassinate U.S. citizens anywhere near a conflict, that cannot be justified. But I think as to the actual person who was the target, I think it’s a fair question that needs to be litigated.
Notice that last sentence in particular, which is charmingly incoherent, and remember that there is no evidence that Awlaki did any "horrible things": he was a propagandist for al-Qaeda, but he doesn't seem to have committed any acts of violence himself. Certainly Feingold didn't specify any, nor did the Obama administration. What provoked Goodman's first question was Feingold's listing Awlaki, along with bin Laden and Qaddafi, as bad people who were now "out of power," thanks to President Obama; but of the three only Qaddafi was ever actually "in power." This could probably be explained as a minor error resulting from speaking extemporaneously if Goodman hadn't asked him to clarify.
Obama's contempt for due process was the entire point of the criticism directed at him in the matter. And if being a propagandist for "horrible things" provides your opponents with a license to kill you, there are a good many Americans, from journalists to government figures, who'd be in big trouble. But as Obama has also made clear -- by his stance on the mere possibility of investigating the Bush administration for its crimes against humanity -- committing horrible things is only a crime for Them, not for Us.
"Republican leaders believe that everything Barack Obama has done in his first term has been a canard so that he can do the opposite in his second term." Entertaining, and on target. But isn't that what Obama's supporters and apologists have also been saying all along? "Oh, he's just pretending to support all these right-wing positions so that he can get the nomination / be elected / to play 11-dimensional chess with the Congressional Republicans / get re-elected. But once he's safely in office, he'll be able to let the real Barack shine through!" Almost nobody in the political mainstream believes that Obama says what he really means, it's always a cover for his true intentions. The difference is whether you believe that his true intentions are evil, or good.
And those of us who, all along, pointed not only to his public statements -- the threats against Iran, for example, which began in 2007 -- but his record, and suggested that these had some relevance? Oh, we were accused of being secretly on the side of the Republicans, of being nasty Grinches who wanted to destroy all Hope, and of being conspiracy theorists.
I've been reading Shirley Hazzard's 1980 novel The Transit of Venus (Viking) -- rereading it, rather. I first read it soon after it was published, because of the rave reviews it garnered, but it made absolutely no impression on me. Hazzard writes very well, her prose is the main attraction, but I suspect I'll forget the book again right after I finish it. It reads like a Virago reprint of a novel from the 1930s or 40s, and indeed it's set (except a bit of backstory) in the 40s right after the end of the Second World War. The trouble is that it seems to have no perspective on the period, as one has a right to expect from a novel written, or at any rate published, thirty years later.
This passage, for example, from page 146. One of the principals, a young woman in her early twenties, is in a department-store tearoom overlooking Piccadilly in London, waiting for a friend to arrive.
Admitting only seemly sounds, the room sheltered none but the decorous. All tables were occupied by women. Waitresses like wardresses kept a reproving eye on performance, repressively mopping a stain or replacing a dropped fork. Something not unpleasant, a nursery security, came along with this. Yet in such a setting you might sicken of women -- sicken of their high-pitched, imperious, undulant gender, their bosoms and bottoms and dressed hair, their pleats, flounces, and crammed handbags: all the appurtenances, natural and assumed, of their sex. In such density they could hardly be regarded as persons, as men might be; and were even intent on being silly, all topics sanctified by the vehemence brought to them.
There is some validity to these observations, but exactly the same could be said of men in all-male environments, be they gay or straight, butch or nelly: in such density they can hardly be regarded as persons. I don't know much about Hazzard, but I get the impression from this novel that she's rather male-identified: the kind of woman whose friends are mostly male, who thinks of herself as above the fripperies and foolishness of most women. Or maybe not, who knows? The novel, so far at any rate, is highly gendered, a glimpse into the heterosexual lifestyle that makes me feel quite content not to be part of it.
HEY, EVERYBODY: You know how Mormons “baptize” dead people who weren’t Mormons—including Holocaust victims—because Mormons believe they have a right to choose Mormonism for the deceased? And you know how the Mormon Church says that being gay is a choice? The same church that doesn’t think you should have a choice about being posthumously baptized? Well, now you can choose homosexuality for dead Mormons! Just go to AllDeadMormonsAreNowGay.com, enter the name of a deceased Mormon or ask the site to find a dead Mormon for you, and—presto!—that dead Mormon gets to have a gay afterlife!
I was bemused by the utter hysteria that the revelation of the postmortem baptism by Mormons of Gentiles produced. For example: "The Mormon practice of converting dead people is so despicable and sickening" -- just one of many. You'd think that the performance of this rite actually did something, had some effect. Which, of course, it doesn't. Your late loved ones and revered historical figures will not become Mormons, they are safely beyond the reach of any intervention now. AllDeadMormonsAreNowGay.com seems a perfectly reasonable response, and just so there will be no confusion about this, I entered Orson Scott Card's name in there. I know he's not dead yet, but why should he have to wait? And, of course, this site is every bit as efficacious as the Mormon rite.
(The very first commenter on this column at The Stranger pointed to the next logical step: since the LDS also do posthumous marriages, because you can't enter into the Kingdom if you're single -- which would have surprised Jesus and Paul -- it is legitimate and indeed a blessing to posthumously gay-marry those poor dead Mormons who otherwise would have been shut out of Heaven.)
Come to think of it, though, the fuss over the Mormon rite reminds me of the way that many people, straight and gay, react to speculations or evidence that this or that historical figure (or even fictional character) may have "known the joys of homosexuality," as ADMANG puts it. It's as though we were posthumously recruiting them.* The suggestion is still commonly seen as an accusation, even in our supposedly more enlightened times.
*The comments on that article are entertaining. For comparison, see this helpful site. Aren't you glad that liberals and progressives aren't gullible, credulous fools who believe everything they see on the Web, unlike the fools who watch FOX News?
Last night I had a chance to see a 35mm print of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai shown on campus. It was the third or fourth time I've seen it in thirty-odd years, and it was a good time to see it because of the thinking I've been doing about violence in films and fanboys' celebration of it.
Seven Samurai was originally released in 1954, and it quickly became a classic. Kurosawa wanted to flesh out the samurai genre, which was already a standard of Japanese cinema, as martial arts was in China and the Western and crime film were in Hollywood. It's the story of a small village, ravaged by bandits in the late 1500s, whose people decide to hire samurai to defend them. Seven are willing to take on the job, a motley crew like the ensemble in a World War II picture: they range from the grizzled veteran and the hero-worshiping young novice to the drunken clown (played by Toshiro Mifune with enough mascara at times to double for Joan Crawford). The samurai organize the villagers and lead the defense, killing off all forty of the bandits and suffering some losses themselves. The survivors go on.
The finished product is 207 minutes long, almost three and a half hours, and it moves along steadily, expertly, at times creakily. Some of the plot devices, like a doomed romance between the youngest samurai and a village maiden, are just too obvious, but they don't get in the way. There's always the problem, when you watch an older film, that what seems like a cliche now may not have been one when it was made. In terms of the story (as opposed to technical aspects such as cinematography), I don't think that's true of Seven Samurai, but Kurosawa -- who also cowrote the script -- and his cast handle these elements with such conviction that they mostly work. And when you consider that the film is almost sixty years old, it stands up remarkably well.
Still, watching Kurosawa's old samurai movies brings home just how much cinema has changed in the intervening decades. Audiences expect brisker (not to say manic) pacing, less character development, and more gore. Seven Samurai's characters don't really develop -- those who live to the end are pretty much the same people they were at the beginning, even the novice -- but we do learn more about them and their backgrounds; that is, we get exposition rather than development. There are no real surprises, but then surprise really isn't the goal.
I recall one geekboy who argued online that because he personally fell asleep (or claimed he did) while trying to watch Seven Samurai, it was therefore inherently a boring movie. I pointed out that very many people did not fall asleep while watching it, so he was wrong. Granted, a 207-minute-long feature is a long slog, but as many viewers and reviewers have said, Seven Samurai moves along quickly. Sitting down in the theater last night, I was a bit worried about what I'd committed myself to, especially since I'd seen it before, but the time passed easily and without boredom. I couldn't help wondering what the many younger people in the audience, who'd grown up with a whole different kind of action movie, thought about it. The showing was sold out in advance, and I had to wait to get a ticket, but the film is a known classic and I'm sure instructors had recommended it. Were the kids disappointed? I don't know.
Consider: Seven Samurai is in black and white, in the old boxy screen ratio (1.33:1.00) of the days before Cinemascope and other widescreen formats. It must have cost a lot to make because of the extensive sets, the costumes, and the large cast (a hundred or so villagers, the inhabitants of the town where the samurai are hired), plus fight choreography and fire and rain effects (the final showdown takes place in a pouring rainstorm, probably machine-made). But one special-effects expense was conspicuous by its absence, namely blood and prosthetics. There are no geysers of blood or swords stuck into eyes, no lopped-off limbs or impaled torsos. A lot of characters are despatched by sword and spear, but the effect is theatrical, stagy. There's no attempt to make the violence look "real" by today's standards (though today's screen violence is increasingly unreal). So I was surprised by this online reviewer's assessment:
The fighting is brutal and Kurosawa doesn't sugarcoat it, men really die. The battle culminates in a final skirmish in the rain, leading to a bittersweet ending that comments on the nature of conflict and the price paid by those who undertake it. There is no easy victory. The saber rattling is tone deaf.
No, men don't "really die" in this movie; at least he didn't say "literally." It's just pretend death; it's a movie, okay? (And "skirmish" is really not the right word for the battle in the rain.) Often the camera "looks" only glancingly at the fighting, and the swords and clubs flail around without seeming to connect with anyone; only the agonized (but still stylized) screaming of the wounded tells you that the weapons found their mark. Fake blood is used very sparingly, only once or twice in a very long movie. It's reminiscent of classic Hollywood Westerns, where men who've been pumped full o' lead simply contort themselves and fall, with no blood shed, let alone exit wounds. But the fighting looks messy and brutal and no fun at all, which is probably the effect Kurosawa wanted. I just think it must seem tame to contemporary audiences.
Another specifically Japanese aspect of the film is the amount of male nudity, or rather exposed male flesh. Male peasants working in the fields often wear no more than a loincloth which shows off their buttocks, and there was one closeup shot of a man's backside and thighs that I don't think lingered on his body merely incidentally. Toshiro Mifune, playing the wild samurai, shows off his body quite a bit. It's not a great physique by 1950s Hollywood standards let alone today's defined, gym-toned buffness, but it's still impressive. As the samurai are on their way to the village, Mifune strips down to what this writer calls "a g-string" to frolick in a stream and catch fish for lunch with his bare hands, while the others (fully clothed) watch from above with amusement. Later he steals some armor from the bandits, a corselet almost like a Merry Widow, that covers his torso and allows his buttocks to peek out coyly below; he spends the last half hour or so of the film in this outfit. I'd be wary of reading too much homoerotic subtext into all this, including the young novice's hungry hero worship of the older fighters, if it weren't for the fact that Japan generally, and the samurai in particular, have a long tradition of male homoeroticism and hot man to man action. It needn't take place only within a minoritizing gayish framework (though it can do so, using different terms and categories than the contemporary American ones), so it shouldn't be ruled out in Seven Samurai.
Still, the (almost entirely Western) audience last night only giggled at Mifune's nudity -- and to be fair, it is clearly supposed to be as much a comic as an erotic element, though the two don't exclude each other -- as they did at the peasants' antics, though those are also double-edged in a different way. Kurosawa's peasants aren't simple, uncomplicated bumpkins: they have a darker side that keeps them from becoming caricatures. It's one of the great strengths of the film.
I really hadn't meant to write more about Jeremy Lin, but some of the noise has been hard for even me to ignore.
The two incidents involving racial stereotyping, for example. First there was this image of Lin's head emerging from a broken fortune cookie, aired on MSG Network. (And what's up with his tongue hanging out like that? I've seen what I'd call a disproportionate number of news photos of Lin that show him yelling, face distended, as if he was a coach. But I admit, the ways of fans and sports media are not my ways.) Second, somebody on ESPN decided to put a headline (via) on their site about a "Chink in the Armor" after Lin's gameplay faltered. The headline was quickly taken down, an apology was issued, the writer responsible was fired, and the anchor who read it was suspended. (Some reasonably intelligent discussion of "chink in the armor" can be found here.)
Maybe I should add Floyd Mayweather's deprecation of Lin's success, claiming that he only got attention because he was Asian. Rush Limbaugh couldn't have said it better. Mayweather responded to criticism like a white person, claiming that "Other countries get to support/cheer their athletes and everything is fine. As soon as I support Black American athletes, I get criticized ... Wow what a country." He later added, "I'm speaking my mind on behalf of other NBA players. They are programmed to be politically correct and will be penalized if they speak up." Right out of the Limbaugh playbook! I guess it's a sign of African-American progress that their pundits now borrow from the most characteristic right-wing talking points on race.
Saturday Night Live did a funny sketch about all this:
(Just a thought: Could it be an unconscious, tacit admission of the fundamental triviality and boringness of sports that sportswriters need to put so much energy into drivel like "Linsanity"?)
According to one of Kim Kardashian's friends, Kim's publicist has arranged for her to go on a date with Knicks demigod, Jeremy Lin. And while it's probable that there's no truth in this, it's kind of fun to imagine. Think of the Kimsane headlines.
My ever-vigilant Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to it, gabbling "Wow I bet she would totally fuck that dude's head up if she managed to get that close to him. lol" and "I'd be retarded putty in that woman's presence for a while...unless she managed to offend me sufficiently enough, which then kinda gets the blood flowing to the proper head, so to speak. lol" Racist ("she only like men with big dicks") and misogynist ("she's only after the money, afterall knicks offered lin billions") comment ensued, to say nothing of the comments at Gawker itself. I commented that TF was scraping the bottom of the barrel for material to link to. I did not add, though maybe I should have, that none of us even know that Lin is heterosexual. (He's an evangelical Protestant who wants to become a pastor -- two of the early warning signs of the closet.)
This stuff really makes me feel weary, because I hate being reminded how racist this country still is. Like most Americans, the people I referred to above would indignantly deny that they're racist. But if they're right, why does racism keep leaking out around the edges when they talk? And these are just the leaks; sometimes it's blatant, as shown in this story (via) from Lin's college days:
Some people still can't look past his ethnicity. Everywhere he plays, Lin is the target of cruel taunts. "It's everything you can imagine," he says. "Racial slurs, racial jokes, all having to do with being Asian." Even at the Ivy League gyms? "I've heard it at most of the Ivies if not all of them," he says. Lin is reluctant to mention the specific nature of such insults, but according to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, another Ivy League player called him a C word that rhymes with ink during a game last season. On Dec. 23, during Harvard's 86-70 loss to Georgetown in Washington, McNally says, one spectator yelled "Sweet-and-sour pork!" from the stands.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, I recognize that some "racial jokes" are not meant as slurs. I eventually came to realize that when some of my blue-collar Hoosier co-workers greeted foreigners of any background with clumsy stereotyping jokes, they were just being awkward, and meant well. They were being friendly, as best they knew how, as taught by their culture; it's just that their best was pretty poor stuff. (And of course their culture, like most, is racist. We're in Klan country down here.)
But what Jeremy Lin has had to deal with can't be excused that way. It was another Ivy League player who called him a chink during a game, and it seems fairly certain that he was passed over for the NBA draft because he is Asian, not because of any lack in his game. Of course racism is as Ivy League as Harvard and Yale, and I'm not at all surprised to find racism and overt stupidity in the upper classes. (An older professor once confessed to sports sociologist Michael A. Messner as they watched a women's baseball game, "You know, it amazes me to see a woman throw like that. I always thought that there was something about the female arm that made it impossible to throw like a man."* This wasn't a personal blip but a commonplace medical myth of the good old pre-Title IX days.) It looks to me like elite sports is one of the areas where even the pretense of eliminating bigotry doesn't apply, once you get below the surface protestations. But that, I think, is because it's so representative of American life. (For once I'm not going to say "white American," because as Floyd Mayweather demonstrates, the bigotry is not limited to whites.)
In her review of The Bell Curve back in the 90s, Ellen Willis wrote:
The idea that black brains are genetically inferior to white brains did not fade from public view simply because white people were convinced by Stephen Jay Gould's eloquent arguments. Rather, the gap between Americans' conscious moral consensus for racial equality and the tenacious social and psychic structures of racism was papered over with guilt and taboo. Many opponents of racism thought they were doing their political duty by shouting down the Jensens and Herrnsteins driving them underground. But this literal enforcement of taboo was only a crude reflection of a much more widespread process of self-censorship.
I don't mean that the moral consensus of the post-civil rights era wasn't genuine. I mean that morality isn't enough, that it can't forever keep the lid on contrary feelings rooted in real social relationships that have not been understood, confronted, or transformed. Commenting on The Bell Curve in The New Republic, John B. Judis indignantly points out that the taboo Murray and Herrnstein are so proud of violating was a reaction to Nazism: "It's not a taboo against unflinching scientific inquiry, but against pseudo-scientific racism. Of all the world's taboos, it is the most deserving of retention." The problem, though, is that taboos can never truly vanquish the powerful desires that provoke them. For some decades after the Holocaust, there was a moratorium on open anti-Semitism in Europe and America; it didn't last. So long as hierarchy is a ruling principle of our culture, the idea of black inferiority cannot be transcended, only repressed. And in an era when an ascendant global capitalism is creating a new, worldwide class structure -- when the language of social Darwinism is increasingly regarded as a simple description of reality -- genetic determination of social status is an idea whose time has come back.
While I agree with her main argument here about the limitations of taboo, I disagree with Willis on several points. The main one is that racism (and other bad -isms) never really went away. Racism didn't so much go underground as become more genteel, and mainstream American racism had always been genteel: Saying the N-word is tacky, nice people don't do it, but really, Those People would really be happier sticking to their Own Kind. White people created good jobs for ourselves, and while we'll be happy to let Those People have whatever jobs or positions at Harvard are left over when we've taken our share, they should be modest and polite and not become importunate. That Martin Luther King is just a Communist troublemaker, stirring up unrest; the Colored would be perfectly content if he and all the other outside agitators would mind their own business. The adaptation of this approach to other disenfranchised groups can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Aside from this, the problem I see is that most white Americans weren't interested in, or even aware of "the eloquent arguments of Stephen Jay Gould." And as Willis suggests, they were beside the point anyway. Racism was never based on believing that "black brains are genetically inferior to white brains"; the scientific arguments, worthless as they were, always floated atop the gut conviction of difference and inferiority. Willis even recognizes this: elsewhere in the same review she wrote that "If I bought the authors' thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don't advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes' bed" (40).
Many people believe (or act as though they believe) that simply reciting a list of fine principles -- equality, justice, can't we all just get along? -- should be enough to absolve them of racism, sexism, etc., when they get caught saying something vicious and stupid. There's a great Feiffer cartoon from the late sixties depicting a male and female hippie facing off. The woman listens blankly as the man declares for several panels that they're in the same struggle, the same fight; her face only closes down when he asks, "So why is it that every day after slaving away on the barricades, I come home to a dirty commune?"
But back to the way racism leaks out of the celebration of Jeremy Lin. I can't understand why his success is so threatening to white sports commentators; for that matter, it says a lot about the culture of elite sport in the early 21st century that he was passed over for the NBA draft and then spent so much time on the bench. The people in charge -- presumably white males, again -- couldn't see past his Chineseness to the talent he had. It took a couple of accidents to give him a chance to play; otherwise, who knows how long he'd have languished without a chance to prove himself? As Andrew Ti wrote at deadspin,
NBA fans have almost no vocabulary with which to talk about him. As with any Asian person in popular culture, people's first resort is a torrent of pan-Asian racist gibberish: If it has anything to do with any country, food, product, concept, or stereotype involving Asia, the rule is basically, "Make any association or equivalence you want, whatever." ... There isn't much to say other than that this is racist as fuck.
He's right, but really? In 2012, white (and also, judging from the examples Ti gives, black) Americans still have almost no vocabulary with which to talk about a talented basketball player who happens to be Asian? And lacking such vocabulary, they aren't smart enough to shut up totally about it and just talk about his playing? And they are so obsessed with his Asianness that if they try to shut up about it, it keeps leaking out? And somebody at ESPN thought he could sneak it in with "Chink in his armor"? And probably thought he was terrifically clever?
Which is one more reason why I stopped worrying about being normal decades ago. I looked at the conduct of the people who were normal, and realized I wasn't missing a thing.
*"Ah, Ya Throw Like a Girl!" by Mike Messner, in New Men, New Minds, Breaking Male Tradition, edited by Franklin Abbott (The Crossing Press, 1987), p. 40.
** In Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Beacon, 1999), p. 40-41.
I've just begun reading Christopher Bram's new book Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve, 2012). It's a fun read, and I should have known better than to start reading it early in the evening. I kept reading twenty or thirty pages, putting it down, and then thinking, "Hm, I'll just read a little more." Next thing I knew I was over halfway through its 306 pages, it was three in the morning, and I stopped reading reluctantly. I'll probably finish it today.
That's probably just me. Bram and I are almost the same age, and we're both readers ... oh, and we're also both gay. So we read pretty much the same books, and we have similar tastes. He's also read a lot of the same critical and biographical material on these writers as I have, so the historical narrative had few surprises for me. Reading Eminent Outlaws is like a long chatty comparing-notes session with another serious reader.
Of course, we disagree on some minor points. He has a somewhat different take on the great Foucault question, and I wonder if he's actually read Foucault. I really disagree with his claim that "Queer theorists imagined a wonderful arcadian past where men and women simply did what they did and only their actions were judged, not their souls" (311). I've read enough queer theory to know that's not true, even when you take into account that the judgment of the actions in Christendom was extremely harsh. What he says there reminds me of what a lot of my non-Foucauldian contemporaries believed: that somewhere in the past -- ancient Greece, the Islamic world, Latin America -- society had not been corrupted by Judeo-Christian homophobia and the love of men for boys was celebrated. (This attitude is epitomized for me by Arthur Evans's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture [Fag Rag Books, 1978], which as I recall managed to argue both that classical Athens was a totally gay-friendly society and that Socrates was executed for having sex with other men, because of cultural homophobia.) Still, I agree with Bram that "gay people today, whatever they call themselves, occupy a very broad spectrum of desires, personas, and self-definitions. The names are only approximations, anyway" (x). The men he's writing about all lived after 'the invention of the homosexual', so it's appropriate to discuss them under that rubric.
Similarly, on page 194 Bram writes:
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don't understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal. But the straight world made coming out important and dangerous. They despised homosexuals so much that the homosexuals responded with either total silence or the clever argument of Gore Vidal and others that there was no such thing as a homosexual -- if only people understood that gay identity was a social fiction, then antigay feeling would go away. Yet it wasn't until huge numbers of men and women took the banal and embarrassing step of naming themselves and sharing the name with their families that not just culture but the whole body politic began to change, shifting forward a few inches.
I don't remember that queers of my generation thought any such thing. I think Bram underestimates the influence of Alfred Kinsey on our understanding, but then I might overestimate it from having lived so long in Bloomington, the home of his research. Kinsey was opposed to both biological determinism and to psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, but the biggest impact his work had that I remember was its revelation that sex between men (as well as most other stigmatized sexual behavior) was far more common than most people had realized. Queers of my generation argued, not that "gay identity was a social fiction" but that it was common and therefore okay; not a very strong argument. This claim was taken to the extreme of claiming that Kinsey had proved that everybody is basically bisexual, or that sexuality is distributed on a bell curve, with most people bisexual and only a few either exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. Kinsey didn't prove any such thing, but this was a powerful myth.
But nowadays gay people believe that if only people understood that gay people are a separate breed, the slaves of our genes, driven to commit sodomy and listen to Lady Gaga by our biological difference, then antigay feeling would go away. I don't believe that antigay feeling is based on any assumptions about the nature of gayness; rather, I believe that beliefs about the nature of gayness are invented to justify the antigay feeling. Or the progay feeling, which as I indicated, is compatible both with biological determinism and radical anti-essentialism. I admit, though, that from what I've seen the most popular defense is to wail that we are born this way and can't help ourselves -- a claim that has deep historical roots.
One criticism I've seen made of Eminent Outlaws concerns its male focus. Bram makes the usual excuses: "I chose this focus reluctantly, but I needed to simplify an already complicated story. Also, lesbian literature has its own dynamic and history. It needs its own historian" (x). To give him his due, he does mention female writers, like Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren, who contributed to the gay male canon: Renault for her historical novels of classical Greece, Warren for her breakthrough novel The Front Runner (Morrow, 1974), about the love between a gay track coach and his star runner, and he points out (174) the impact that poetry had on lesbian culture. That the full story would be too "complicated" is not a very good excuse, but I can sympathize. He might have mentioned that lesbian writing flourished as an alternative canon, often involving small presses and self-publication; few of the major writers found their way into the mainstream houses in the US. Adrienne Rich, for example, won recognition before she came out. (Notice how she's de-gayed in this bio. And this one.)
A better explanation would lie in this book's subtitle, the words "changed the world." The literary establishment is predominantly male, and was even more so when Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and the other post-WWII writers Bram discusses built their careers. They worked in the mainstream; even Allen Ginsberg, whose work was first published by small presses, and William Burroughs, whose first published novel was a pulp paperback, achieved nationwide notoriety as part of the legal campaign against obscenity laws. Women writers, regardless of their sexual orientation, were rarely allowed to have such impact on "the world." (Gertrude Stein, of an earlier generation, was an exception because of her male identification and connections to famous male artists; Bram barely mentions her, but she's chronologically outside his scope anyway.)
The women's movement changed the world, however, and the work of women writers, including lesbians, gained a prominence and even legitimacy that's new in history -- against intense resistance that continues to this day. But then, gay male visibility also faces such resistance. But few if any of the writers Bram discusses had much to say about feminism, or about women's writing. Christopher Isherwood met Virginia Woolf once or twice -- her publishing house put out his first novels, in fact -- but he was more influenced by E. M. Forster, who was uncomfortable with Woolf's feminism. Carson McCullers barely features in Eminent Outlaws, despite her connections to several of Bram's principals and her relevance to his subject. And there have been some important books focusing on lesbian writers to the exclusion of gay male ones, starting with Jane Rule's Lesbian Images (The Crossing Press, 1975); it's arguable that gay men and lesbians have different, somewhat parallel literary traditions, though some knowledgeable people, like Terry Castle, might beg to differ. Thanks to the lesbians I've known, my exploration of queer literature since the 1970s has always included the work of women.
Since Bram didn't aim to write a scholarly book (which would probably have legitimized an even narrower focus), he can probably be excused for taking the easy way out. Eminent Outlaws will be a good introduction to the post-World War II gay male canon for people, especially young ones, who didn't grow up with it. But someone ought to take a look at the bigger picture.
