The Soul of a Man Trapped in the Body of a Man

I've begun reading Walt Odets's Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019).  Here's how the first chapter, "What Is a Homosexual?", begins:

There are two different perspectives on what makes a man a "homosexual."  The first -- the heterosexual perspective -- is that homosexuals are "men who have sex with men."  The gay man's perspective, is that he s "attracted to other men."  The difference between the two descriptions is important: the heterosexual identifies a single, objective behavior, the gay man an entire internal life of feeling.  While the straight man may feel support, indifference, fear, or contempt for the idea of "the homosexual," the gay man has more complex feelings, in part because the term has historically been used to stigmatize ... The majority of gay-identified men do have at least a marginally conscious sense that being gay is about more than sexual attraction or sex; but many gay men have been swayed by the heterosexual definition and have accepted the narrow, behaviorally defined identity.  In today's gay assimilationist politics, gay men often explain themselves to heterosexuals with the idea that they are "attracted to men, but otherwise just like you."

Like most binaries, this one has some value, but it breaks down pretty quickly.  I think that heterosexuals also think of male homosexuals as essentially female by nature and in mentality. This conception certainly typified a great deal of professional and clinical discussion from the late nineteenth-century onward, which focused not only on sexual behavior but on the postulated feminine nature of the invert.  It's a concept shared by many gay men even as they resist it for public-relations purposes.

One reason for the binary Odets advances here is the difference between how I see myself and how others see me.  It's the old subjective/objective divide, which I thought had mostly been abandoned as oversimple and inadequate.  I'm reminded of Graham Shaw's comment on the New Testament stories of Jesus' disciples breaking rules of Sabbath observance, that these stories

also portray a fundamental contradiction in the religious viewpoint they convey.  For paradoxically the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face.* 

Contrariwise, observant Jews could feel their deep sincerity in keeping the Sabbath, while Jesus and his crew could only see the shallow exterior conformity.  So I don't think that Odets's point has specific relevance to gay people.  The same divide turns up internally to the community, as respectability-minded gay people deplore the shallowness of leathermen gyrating drunkenly on Pride parade floats, though those leathermen are probably perfectly respectable bankers and businessmen who think of their behavior very differently in their minds, perhaps as healthy role models in contrast to all the screaming nellies.  But if you're a gay man who's just been voted salesman of the year by your real estate company, why not celebrate with an amateur drag performance?  It's the gay thing to do!  In our day a gay man can celebrate making lots of money for his bosses by expressing his true, authentic self!  I'm not sure how that fits into Odets's classification.

I'm not happy with the sex / attraction distinction here either.  "Attraction" in this case means erotic attraction, the desire to have sex with someone.  Some gay apologists have tried to de-emphasize sex in favor of some other essential gay quality, but at best it's disingenuous, at worst it's collaborating with bigots -- agreeing that buttsex is nasty, but trying to claim that real, decent homosexuals just stay at home and crochet antimacassars.  Even the people who advance this position don't really believe it; at best they're engaging in doublethink.

Perhaps Odets is trying to see the heterosexual position as an assumption that "men who have sex with men" do so without desire or affect, for some mysterious reason.  But many gay men share that assumption, at least where other gay men are concerned: I'm a free spirit, you're just a slut!  I suppose it's all right to draw the sex / attraction line as long as "attraction" is defined so as to exclude copulation completely; unfortunately, its advocates seem to have trouble avoiding such a definition.

I've noticed myself that "we're just like you except for being attracted to men" backfires by reducing gayness to sex, a stereotype those who use this claim are trying to reject.  But I object to it because it also assumes that all straight people are alike and all gay people are alike.  I strongly reject any attempt to define for me the right way to be gay: there are many right ways to be gay.  I'm also a bit uneasy about Odets's reference to "assimilationist gay politics," since I don't think that "assimilation" is a coherent idea or strategy.  I don't agree with people who advocate some kind of gay assimilationism, because they have an unrealistic idea of what straight people are like, and equally unrealistic ideas of how prejudice works.

Well, I'm only on the first page of Out of the Shadows.  I've liked Odets's previous writings, so I'll read on and see where he takes his argument.
----
* Graham Shaw, The Cost of Authority, Fortress Press 1982, p. 246.

Yes, It Is So Gay

Back to The Tolerance Trap for a moment.  (That title annoys me; to someone of my generation, anyway, it's reminiscent of a Disney movie from the days when their live-action films were B-grade at best; or a Fifties sort-of sex comedy.  But maybe it's Just Me.)

I'm still bogged down in the introduction.  It occurred to me that, so far, Suzanna Danuta Walters hasn't actually quoted anyone who says that tolerance is the be-all and end-all of the gay movement.  I checked the endnotes too.  Maybe she will later, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that she give an example or two at the outset.  If "most gay people and their allies" are really putting tolerance first, at the expense of equality and rights, there should be plenty of quotations to choose from.  As I noted when I quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in the previous post on this book, "tolerance," "acceptance," "equality," "rights" and suchlike are part of the vocabulary of modern American movements for social justice.  To determine what role a given concept plays as a movement's goal, one must examine how it's actually used.  And as I also noticed, to claim that "rights" and "equality" have been sidelined by "tolerance" in today's gay movement is a bit silly at a time when "Marriage Equality" is so prominent a buzzword.

I notice too that Walters keeps linking "tolerance and acceptance" as though they were somehow equivalent.  (So does the sociologist Michael Kimmel in his blurb for the book.)  It seems to me that they're more like opposites.  As Walters also writes:

It doesn’t make sense to say that we tolerate something unless we think that it’s wrong in some way.  To say you “tolerate” homosexuality is to imply that homosexuality is bad or immoral or even just benignly icky, like that exotic food you just can’t bring yourself to try.  

That’s not quite right, though.  Rather, it’s to imply that you think homosexuality is bad or immoral, etc.  Quite a few people still do.

You are willing to put up with (to tolerate) this nastiness, but the toleration proves the thing (the person, the sexuality, the food) to be irredeemably nasty to begin with.  We don’t speak of tolerating pleasure or a good book or a sunshine-filled day.  We do, however, take pains to let others know how brave we are when we tolerate the discomfort of a bad back or a nasty cold.  We tolerate the agony of a frustratingly banal movie that our partner insisted on watching and are thought the better for it.  We tolerate, in other words, what we would rather avoid.  Tolerance is not an embrace ...

(Oh? then why does Walters conflate it with acceptance?)

... but a resigned shrug or, worse, that air kiss of faux familiarity that barely covers up the shiver of disgust [4].

She has a point, of course; it's one that has often been made before.  (Walters quotes some rather famous lines from Jean Cocteau's queer novella Livre Blanc as an epigraph to the book, for example: I'm not willing just to be tolerated.  That wounds my love of love and of liberty.  Notice the word "just" in the first sentence; it makes a big difference.)  But I think she's missing the point of the appeal to tolerance in political and social life.  For one thing, it's about power, not morality: the less powerful asks the more powerful for tolerance.  As for acceptance, I'll return to that presently; remind me if I forget.

True, to ask to be tolerated is to accept, provisionally at least, a negative evaluation of one's condition, to concede that the persons from whom one is asking tolerance disapprove of one.  Sometimes that's the best one can hope for.  But it's not necessarily to agree that one's condition is bad.  Consider another case where toleration has historically been asked and counseled, namely religion.  It isn't realistic to ask for an embrace of unpopular religious beliefs and practices and affiliations, since one of the perks of religious belief in a pluralistic society is the right to look down on one's neighbor's religion.  We don't expect Catholics to embrace Protestants or vice versa, or Christians to embrace Jews or Muslims or neopagans or vice versa, or any of them to approve of atheists.  What we do expect and require is that people don't try to make different sects illegal, or discriminate in certain spheres against their members, or kidnap and forcibly baptize their children, or burn down their churches, synagogues or mosques with the congregations locked inside -- even though such treatment was claimed as proper and indeed obligatory in the days when people took religion seriously.  As I've argued before, today's religious freedom has made necessary (or perhaps been enabled by) a decreasing fanaticism, because in order to keep others from persecuting them, religious believers have been obliged not to persecute others.  You need not agree with your neighbor's beliefs, you may indeed abhor them, and you are free to denounce them privately or publicly, but you must tolerate his or her right to worship in peace.

While most people don't think of religion per se as a bad thing, like that nasty exotic dish you don't want to try, they still feel free to hate specific other religions, including other denominations or sects within the same main tradition.  Sometimes the bitterest denunciations arise from what seem to outsiders like trivial differences, but they aren't trivial to the principals involved.  (Remember that the young Israeli girls who were attacked by ultra-orthodox Jewish men for supposedly dressing like whores were themselves Orthodox, dressed much more "modestly" than most American girls their age; but that tiny difference was enough to inspire hateful fury, as if they'd said "nukular" or put an "h" where it didn't belong.)  In the US, formal religious equality and the prohibition of discrimination based on religion certainly don't require members of different religions to accept or approve or embrace or love each other; but they must tolerate each other.  The political philosopher Michael Neumann has written:

Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

I've quoted this passage to a number of people, most of whom don't seem to get it.  To many people it seems important to have someone of whom they think it's legitimate to beat them or put them in jail or drive them from their homes simply because of who they are.  They don't actually do this most of the time, for fear of getting in trouble, but they like to fantasize about it.  So tolerance in any meaningful sense is still, I contend, a worthwhile aim in many cases, and too often a utopian ideal.  I want a good deal more, or other, than mere tolerance, but it's certainly part of what I want, not only as a gay man but as an intellectual and an atheist.

Whether homosexuality is a case like religion, I don't know.  But when I was growing up, demanding to be tolerated was a good starting place for us: not to be attacked in the streets by police or by other citizens, not to be fired from our jobs, not to be thrown out of our families, not to have our meeting places and businesses raided or vandalized -- just to be allowed to live our lives without government persecution was a radical demand.  Times have changed, but toleration is more than many gay people get in the US to this day, as Walters admits.  She's very critical of what she says "most gay people and their allies" claim:

Most gays and their allies think that we have essentially won the culture wars and that gay visibility in popular culture is a sign of substantive gay progress.  Most gays and their allies believe that gay is the new black: hip, happening, embraced.  Most gays and their allies believe that if those who are anti-gay just got to know us as their PTA-going neighbors, they would love us.  Most gays and their allies believe that we are almost there, we can see the end of the tunnel, where a rainbow world of warm inclusion awaits us [4].

She then lists a number of stories that show just bad the lives of many American gay people still are, in contrast to what "most gays and their allies think".  But I heard such stories from the assimilationist gay movement Walters dislikes: the harassment, the bullying, the suicides.  "Most gays and their allies" may very well exaggerate for rhetorical purposes how much progress we've made, but they also, from what I see, stress how far we have to go.  I've argued before that the movement tends to romanticize gay youth suicide, and that the born-gay claim goes with a stance of suffering and martyrdom. (On the other hand, Walters seems not to have noticed that many anti-assimilationist gays claim that we were born this way too.  The claim itself is neither radical nor reactionary; it's just false.)

Maybe Walters will manage later in The Tolerance Trap to reconcile these realities with her caricature of the movement in the introduction, but it's obviously false as it stands.  When she writes, "This book takes on the illusion of progress that is rooted in a watered-down goal of tolerance and acceptance rather than a deep claim for full civil rights" (3), I cannot take her seriously.  Is it a "goal of tolerance and acceptance" (again, notice the conflation and confusion of two very different goals) or a "watered-down" version that she objects to?  But she herself acknowledges that progress has been made, that things have changed -- for the better in many ways -- for gay people in the United States in the last four or five decades; it is not an illusion.  We still have a long way to go, and we don't really know what the goal is, what a good society will look like, but saying that change has occurred is not saying that we have won everything we wanted or needed.  An intelligent, informed critique of the mainstream gay movement is always needed, but Walters is attacking a straw movement here.

The subtitle of The Tolerance Trap is How God, Genes, and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality.  (Good intentions?  Oh noes!  We've got to get rid of those right away!)  "Equality" is as troublesome a word and concept as "tolerance," and it doesn't tell me much about what Walters believes the goal of the gay movement properly should be.  (That's leaving aside the detail that the gay movement already embraces "equality" as its goal.)  Many people confuse equality with sameness, just as Walters confuses tolerance and acceptance.  Political and legal equality, protected by Civil Rights acts, is a valid goal for a movement which demands social justice, but it's not the be-all and end-all any more than tolerance is, even if the Civil Rights laws are well-enforced, which they generally are not.  Civil Rights are themselves only a subset of legal rights, and what one can claim legally only is a small part of what a person needs for a full, satisfying life.  Equality beyond that narrow domain is even less clear to me.

I've been wrestling for some time with the issue of marginalization.  Many people talk as though they believe we could have a society in which no one was marginalized.  I don't think it's possible, as a logical or an empirical possibility.  Remember this story about a student who tried to block prayer at his commencement.  "'They just wanted to be able to attend their commencement without feeling like an outcast,' ACLU NC legal advisor Chris Brook said."  I suppose I sympathize, but the First Amendment doesn't guarantee you the right not to feel "like an outcast" -- rather the opposite.  Nor should it. I have the right to espouse and express unpopular beliefs, but I do not have the right to be agreed with.  As a social species, human beings are likely to regard eccentric or minority ideas or styles or behavior to be weird or uncool.  Some human beings like the idea of being different from the mass of "sheeple," though they often exaggerate just how different they are; others hate the idea of not being like everyone else, no matter how different they are, and there's no way to reassure them that they aren't different when they know (and everybody else knows) they are.

Whether a given difference is good or bad is a question for judgment.  Whether a difference should be tolerated or celebrated -- or excluded and punished -- can't be decided in advance: it can only be decided after consideration.  Walters recognizes this when she writes that "there are limits to tolerance -- as there should be.  Most of us are intolerant of brutal acts of random violence or equally brutal acts of state violence such as rape as a tool of war" (10).  This is, come to think of it, an odd remark: why only "rape as a tool of war" (which is a biblical value after all), and not the routine, official violence of shooting, bombing, and other destruction of life and property in war?  Maybe because many people are quite tolerant of state violence in war and peace, as long as it's directed at those who supposedly deserve it,

One proper function of a gay movement, like any other movement for social justice, is to advocate and argue for certain conclusions of these judgments: why tolerance, why acceptance, why celebration of our differences from the majority of from each other.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that as the gay movement grew, it aspired to mainstream positions and status.  (The professionalization of the movement, with its attendant stratification and corruption, seems to me at least as important a problem as "God, genes, and good intentions."  It'll be interesting to see what if anything Walters has to say about that, since as Director of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, she's part of the phenomenon herself.)

I believe that acceptance is as valid a goal for the movement as equality, rights, and freedom from discrimination.  It must, of course, be distinguished from tolerance, which is also valid but is not the same thing.  There's been a great (though not total) increase in acceptance of gay people by families and American society as a whole, which has gone in hand with our increased visibility.  We stopped collaborating by pretending we weren't there, and demanded that our presence be acknowledged.   (Again, not all of us did this, and not all at once.)  Whether we brought this change about by our actions and speech, or whether it was a result of other changes like the changing status of women (also not complete), no one knows.  We don't know why or how cultures change, any more than we know why language changes.

It's also important to remember that different gay people want different things from their lives.  Some of us want to be included and valued by our families; others want to escape from them.  Some of us want to Be Like Everybody Else (even if we have some strange ideas about what Everybody is like); others are content to be different, to be outsiders or even outcasts, but you can't be an outsider without an inside to leave.  I don't think there's any one goal the movement should have; if we really want difference to be embraced, we have to embrace differences in the movement.  I'm curious to see if Walters has anything useful to say about these questions.  But she's off to a bad start.

Not My Definitive Post on Assimilation

... Nor was this. But I'm getting there.  I'm having trouble with Suzanna Danuta Walters's The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality (NYU Press, 2014).  As readers of this blog will know, I'm sympathetic to her position, having written critically on the same topic many times.  But already, just a few pages in, I'm hitting some stumbling blocks.  For example:

No civil rights movement worthy of the name has banked its future on being tolerated or accepted.  Women didn't demurely request tolerance; they demanded voting rights and pay equity.  African Americans continue to struggle not for some bizarre "acceptance" of their skin tone but instead for an end to discrimination in work, in schools, in housing, in the judicial system.  They want, as do all these groups, full and deep integration and inclusion in the American dream.  Disabled Americans don't want to be tolerated; they want streets made accessible to them and laws strong enough to protect them from discrimination [12-13].

Walters has already indulged in an analysis of what "tolerance" and "acceptance" mean, but all the key terms in this passage are just as loaded and ambiguous: "integration" and "inclusion," for example, to say nothing of "discrimination" and "rights."  I've criticized this kind of linguistic determinism before, whether it's espoused by academics or by laypeople: the etymology of a word tells you its history, not its meaning, let alone its use.  Most people, including academics, aren't very clear as to the meanings of the slogans they brandish.  They adopt them because they're timely, in the air, and sound good to them.

Aside from that, it's not obvious to me that the current gay movement puts "tolerance" and "acceptance" ahead of demands for rights and equality and an end to discrimination.  "Rights," "equality," and "discrimination" are frequently invoked in the drive for marriage, entry to the military, and calls for the passage of ENDA, as well as in areas such as religion where they aren't especially relevant.  "Acceptance" and "tolerance" wouldn't have been particularly relevant to the women's movement because women were already part of everyone's everyday life, whereas gays were largely invisible and presumed to have no connection to straights.  "Tolerance" was part of the rhetoric of the movement for African-American equality, though like everything else it was contested.  Martin Luther King Jr. said to an interviewer, for example, "How could there be anti-semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice?" (quoted in A Testament of Hope [HarperOne, 2003], 370).  He also described how "a situation that many had predicted would be the end of the [Montgomery Improvement Association] left it more united than ever in the spirit of tolerance" (ibid., 454).  It wasn't a central theme of his, but he did use it as a term of approval.

 "Civil rights" has come to be understood as referring to the rights of black people only, which supports what I just said about people not understanding what their buzzwords mean.  It's no wonder that many hostile people have come to think that "gay rights" refers to some supposed "special rights" for gay people, when it's at best shorthand for "the civil rights of gay people," and that's still misleading because civil rights laws cover majorities as well as minorities: whites as well as blacks, straights as well as gays.  Many gay people have been surprised when they found out that, when "sexual orientation" was added to civil rights ordinances, they couldn't discriminate against straight people, or even against bisexuals.  And civil rights are only a subset of what any movement for social justice must concern itself with.

Walters must also know that movements for social justice have always been divided internally, not just about tactics but about goals.  Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Dubois represented different conceptions about the struggle for black equality, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  Feminists have always been divided between radicals, liberals, and conservatives, as have advocates for homosexuals.  Walters mentions Magnus Hirschfeld (once), but I haven't gotten far enough yet to know whether she realizes how different the post-1945 European homosexual movement and organizations have been from her ideal of a "civil rights movement worthy of the name."  It seems that her political analysis is less than fully informed historically.  (So, it appears, is her account of what "how it went" to come out in a major American city in the 1970s, which is reminiscent of skewed accounts I've addressed before.)  I'm sympathetic to her complaints, but already she evinces conceptual muddling that forebodes hard reading ahead.  I will try to finish the book, though.

Every Bookstore's Closing Diminishes Me

Rolling Stone ran a story recently about the closing of Giovanni's Room, a GLBT bookstore in Philadelphia.  I quibble with its characterizing Giovanni's Room as "the oldest gay bookstore in America," since the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City was founded six years earlier than Giovanni's Room, but it closed five years sooner, on 2009. 

Giovanni's Room is only the latest gay-bookstore casualty, as many other such stores around the country have closed.  But so have general-purpose brick-and-mortar bookstores.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, I always enjoyed visiting a new city and having the local gay bookstore to check out, and I'd often discover new works there that had been unknown to me, or that I hadn't been able to find before.  The loss of these places saddens me, but I remind myself that it's because I'm a bookworm, and there are plenty of GLBT resources left.  So, on the other hand, I'm glad that books on homosexuality are readily available everywhere, and there are a lot more of them now than there were when I was growing up.  To kids growing up outside of cities even now, a gay bookstore in New York or Chicago or San Francisco isn't that much use; it's much more important that they be able to find resources in their local library.  In the small town where I grew up, population about 8000, the public library -- an excellent one, by the way, which speaks well for the town -- has plenty of books and DVDs on GLBT subjects.  When I was a young fagling, there were none except perhaps for books marketed to the mainstream, like Mary Renault's historical fiction.

The Rolling Stone article stresses the value of Giovanni's Room as a general resource apart from, or in addition to, the products it sells.  The owner, Ed Hermance, told the reporter, "The store has played a critical role in so many people's lives ... Coming in the store can be like coming out to yourself."  It can be, and it's important that such places exist, but there's no reason they need to be bookstores.  (Hermance also told Rolling Stone "sales have been declining since 1992.")  "'With all the money in this community,' says Rita Adessa, former executive director of the Pennsylvania Lesbian and Gay Task Force, 'there's no reason for Giovanni's Room to go down.'"  That's true, too, but I hope that with all the money in that community, there are other resources available for people who need to come out to themselves.

I wish I had a better sense of how young gay kids are coming out these days, even in my own city.  Indiana University's Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Student Support Services is doubtless useful to many, and I'm glad it's there, despite my old gay-liberationist distrust of GLBT professionalism.  It's a niche that some people can relate to, so I'm glad it's there for them.  No single resource will appeal to everyone.  Other people come to IU already out from their high school days, and the main thing they need is finding a social environment.  There is one gay bar in town, but it's of limited use to people under 21.  There have been many attempts to build alternatives in the more than forty years I've been in Bloomington, but they soon falter for lack of support, which also means use.  I've often tried to get people to explain what they are looking for in terms of resources, with little luck.  Many people weren't interested in the dances and coffeehouses of the seventies because they didn't serve alcohol; that was never important to me, but it's noteworthy how many people weren't even interested in places where they could meet other gay people without using alcohol.  Booze is, after all, a social catalyst in American society generally, not just among gay people, so that's not surprising.  There wasn't a specifically gay bar in Bloomington until the late 1970s, and it wouldn't have survived if not for the straight people who also went there for the dance music and the ambience.  Many gay men from Bloomington went to Indianapolis and the bars (and baths) there, so that they wouldn't be seen by people they knew -- unless they were also going to Indianapolis.  Despite all the talk about community, not all gay people are interested in community.  I'd like to know how much this has changed, if it has.

But, along with the lopsided competitive advantage, online retailers, Hermance notes, aren't as attuned to the quality, rather than quantity, of the sales they make. Search on Amazon for "gay fiction" and the first result to come back is Sebastian, a book with a shirtless man in cut-off denim shorts on its cover. A few of the other top-10 book titles showing nearly-naked men included: Feeling No Pain and Naked Hero – The Journey Away. There is no contextual guiding hand nor emotional intelligence to these recommendations. 

A look at the photo of GR's stock in the article shows that this isn't an issue limited to online booksellers, and I wonder how often the "contextual guiding hand" and "emotional intelligence" got a chance to do its job in gay bookstores.  There was always a lot of erotically-oriented material, not to mention porn, in the gay bookstores I had the chance to visit, and I bet such material paid the rent better than the more respectable books and magazines.  (In the same way, heterosexual non-chain "mom and pop" video stores that have survived usually have porn in a back room, and they couldn't survive if they didn't rent such material.)

Again, Rolling Stone reports:

"There was a golden age when feminist and gay bookstores helped elevate the quality of reading," says Phil Tiemeyer, Lambda Literary Finalist this year for Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. "Employees might say, 'Oh, you came in for Sci-Fi but did you also see our Philosophy or History section?"

When Tiemeyer's historical work appeared on the Top Five on the Amazon LGBT nonfiction list, he says it was couched between two sex guides – How to Have Anal Sex and The Ass Book: Staying on Top of Your Bottom. "There's something really problematic about that from an intellectual point of view," he says.

Oooh!  That sets off my bullshit detector.  I'm amazed that Tiemeyer's book -- published by an academic press and not written for a general audience -- appeared in a Top Five bestseller list at all.  As I recall, the best-selling gay male books have always included stuff like The Ass Book.  Lesbian bestsellers have included soft-core porn in the form of romances.  For that matter, the current New York Times nonfiction bestseller list puts Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century at number 1, followed by Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent; the number one fiction bestseller is a mystery by James Patterson with a cowriter.   I wouldn't be surprised if many people who bought Plane Queer hoped for hot parts, and were disappointed to find academic jargon instead; I'd be surprised if most who bought it finished it.  As Mark D. Jordan wrote of John Boswell's famous Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980, it, "and, to a lesser extent, [Boswell's Same-Sex Unions] are talismans more than books. People own them much more often than they read them, because mere possession is enough to allow one to benefit from the results."  Kinsey's Sexual Behavior books were bestsellers too, but how many people actually read them?

I wish more people would read more serious stuff, but that they don't is not news nor a sign of general cultural (or subcultural) decline.  I stress "more" there, because there's no reason why serious books should be all that people read.  I read more academic writing than most non-academics do, often with pleasure, but I also read a lot of lighter work, as do academics themselves.  One reason why feminist scholars began analyzing romance fiction and Gothics was that they were embarrassed by their own fondness for such fare, and then questioned their embarrassment.  But it doesn't work the other way much, and that's too bad.  I believe that people would get a lot out of history and philosophy and political writing, if they'd just give it a chance, but they won't.  I hear a lot of excuses, some of which are probably true enough (not enough time on top of their job, they fall asleep when they read, etc.), but I don't think they're the whole story.  What to do about this, I don't know.

Whatever the Market Will Bear

It's true, I'm a hateful, bitter, cynical negative old man. What would I be without brand recognition? (Speaking of which, I was accused of cynicism and negativity in alicublog's comments again the other day. Which, as I pointed out, is like being chided for incivility by Ann Coulter fans.)

Another one of my Facebook friends posted a link to a Lakota-dubbed version of The Berenstain Bears. I've never seen the series myself, but fine with me. I'm all in favor of preserving the pre-Columbian languages of this hemisphere.

My friend, however, made this remark about the link:

Self-reliance is more fun than being consumers. Living languages are more satisfying than assimilation.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. I posted this comment:

Wait a minute -- isn't English a living language? And who am I assimilated to?

It could be that I've misunderstood my friend's comment, because it doesn't really make much sense. It could be that she objected to dubbing a bland commercial product into Lakota, hiding niche marketing behind cultural preservation and diversity. The Berenstain Bears are very much a consumer product despite (or because of) the show's PBS provenance: "As of 1983, the Berenstain Bears had been licensed to approximately 40 companies for more than 150 types of products, with projected annual sales of $50 million", extending to "clothing, Happy Meals, cereal, chocolate, crackers, greeting cards, puzzles, embroidery kits, and notepads." But that has nothing to do with "living languages." No matter how socially concerned the owners of the franchise may be, they're not likely to dub the Bears into Latin. (Maybe they should: The Berenstein Bears Go to the Gladiatorial Games ! Grandpa Berenstain Bear and the Slave Boy! There are real possibilities there.)

Assimilation, of course, is relational, not absolute. Children who don't assimilate to one culture (call it Tele-American) assimilate to another (Lakota). Learning your "native" language is a major part of assimilation to your "own" culture.

And where does "self-reliance" come in? Traditional cultures are not self-reliant, they're built on interdependence. My friend's first sentence seems to staple Ayn Rand to Ralph Nader. (Admittedly, the thought of a cage match between the two is intriguing.) The second appears to embrace an essentializing nativism. The comment is no more incoherent than those of my RWA1, but that's exactly the problem: it's setting the bar too low.

Assimilation and Its Discontents

I've been dithering around writing about gay people and assimilation for years. People are still talking about it, and every year or so I get a request from a student journalist to ask if any Speakers Bureau volunteers are willing to talk about the assimilation question. I think my position has more or less stabilized (though you never know), so here goes.

I think GLBT assimiliation is a non-issue -- I'm not sure the idea even makes sense. First, we are born assimilated into straight society: our parents and families are overwhelmingly heterosexual. There's no analogy between our situation and that of people who come into a new culture from another one, speaking another language, having other customs, used to other political systems. (Even this ethnic model of assimilation has been questioned, though in many respects it seems a moot point: most immigrants' children and virtually all of their grandchildren learn English and acculturate. This article, for example, mentions a study which found that "after four years of American high school the children of Mexican and Filipino immigrants were fifty percent more likely to self‑identify themselves as Mexicans and Filipinos than as Mexican‑Americans, Filipino‑Americans, or unhyphenated Americans." It's not clear what the "decrease" was measured against historically, compared to previous generations of Irish or Germans or Italians, and I wonder what effect anti-immigrant sentiment and propaganda had on the self-perception of the kids in the study. But anyway...) If queers want to refuse assimilation, we have to secede, though often enough we're expelled. Still, I'm not sure how well either withdrawal or expulsion fits with the notion of assimilation or its rejection.

Nor am I sure what constitutes assimilation. Many of us take for granted that same-sex marriage is assimilationist, and I agree that the motives of many if not of its advocates are precisely to blend into mainstream society. But will they succeed? How well do same-sex couples blend in? I'm not the only person who's noticed that same-sex and especially same-gender couples undermine the gendered, separate-spheres structure of "traditional" marriage. That is certainly among the reasons why religious bigots oppose it: they want marriage to be hierarchical, with one person in charge and the other subordinate. Heterosexual marriage was already becoming homosexualized in this sense before the same-sex marriage movement got into gear; the controversy lies in whether or not you consider that a good thing.

On the other hand, I've also noticed that many straight male liberals who are vocal in supporting same-sex marriage and an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell are still homophobic, often intensely so. They reflexively fall back on homophobic imagery to describe conflict and unfairness -- bending over, having something rammed down their throats, castration and the lack of "balls", and so on -- and fag jokes are still part of their repertoire. Assimilation is never as easy as the assimilees think it will be, and resistance runs deep. German Jewry was Europe's most assimilated, and they were very proud of the extent to which they'd Germanized themselves, right down to assimilating hatred of "stereotypical" Jews. In the end their assimilation was used against them, just as gay invisibility has been used against us (we're a fifth column, trying to undermine society, pretending to be normal when we're not, etc.)

Sure, the craving of so many Homo-Americans to be recognized as a regular, normal part of our glorious country makes me gag. Which isn't to say it doesn't make a kind of sense, since as I just said, we are born and grow up as part of American culture. It's not surprising (to me, anyway), that many people would react to attempts to expel them by refusing to be expelled, to insist that they do so belong. And who's to say they don't? As I've said before, my own experience has been that being openly gay enabled me to mix (not to assimilate) among straights, while gay community / culture seemed to me like a product of the closet.

I just finished reading Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books, 2009), edited by longtime activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca. It's mostly a collection of short memoirs by people who were involved in the radical gay movement that exploded in 1969 and petered out sometime in the mid-1970s, with some contemporary documents, some of them published in full for the first time. For those of us who lived through that period and were inspired by that movement, the book is an important jog to the memory; for those who were born long afterwards, it will be probably be something of a revelation. The writers don't minimize the downside of those years -- the government repression from outside, the ego trips and burnout that sent Gay Liberation into a downward spiral, though it never quite died out. Gay Liberation still should be an inspiration, simply because it asked deep questions and proposed radical answers and tried to live them. This was true not only of Gay Liberation but of other movements for social justice and radical change that flourished in the 1960s and were crushed in little over a decade, and that are commonly derogated now as utopian foolishness by a society that was nevertheless affected by them. People who didn't grow up in the 1950s and 1960s can't feel in their bones how much things changed. If those movements didn't directly cause the change, at least they were the vehicles, the channels through which the change flowed.

One thing that struck me as I read Smash the Church, Smash the State! was how many of the writers, men and women alike, have become therapists. That looks like assimilation to me. Given the historical role of psychotherapy as an enforcer of conformity (and worse -- remember the major role therapists and counselors played in the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1990s), I find this fact disquieting. Did we take over the profession, or did it co-opt us? I think it's more the latter. So I had probably my most mixed feelings about Don Kilhefner's contribution, "The Gay Community in Crisis." Kilhefner was involved in GLF, helped found what is now called the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center (later to be taken over by professional diversity managers -- see Jane Ward's Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in GLBT Activist Organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008]) , and was a co-founder of the Radical Faeries. He's now "a Jungian psychologist and shamanic practitioner" in Los Angeles.

I agree with a lot of Kilhefner's diagnosis of the current gay malaise, though I think it applies no less to other minorities. He writes (275), "It saddens me tremendously today when energized young gay men want to know where they can go to become actively and constructively involved in the community. For the first time since the 1980s I have no place toward which to point them. It tears me apart when intelligent young gay men tell me they have to 'dumb it down' to be part of the gay community. I have a hunch this is true in your community as well." But then I remember having to struggle against dumbing-down in the early 1970s too. There was great resistance to gay politics of any kind among most gay men I met in those days. It wasn't just heterosexuals who laughed at the idea of homosexuals organizing, making demands, changing the way we saw ourselves and expecting straights to do the same. I had unrealistic expectations of the thoughtfulness of other gay men when I first came out, and remember that I did so in a college town.

Of the genesis of Faery, Kilhefner writes (273),

I had gathered together all the gay visionary literature I could get my faggoty hands on, beginning with Walt Whitman and including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard (writing under the pseudonym D. B. Vest in homophile publications), Harry Hay et al.; culled the evolutionary biology and sociobiology literature about us at the time; and also rounded up the other usual suspects.

The reference to "evolutionary biology and sociobiology" put me on the alert. I remember seeing Harry Hay refer to sociobiology in interviews during the 1980s, and I'd wonder what he could be thinking. In the 1970s some sociobiologists were suggesting that (male) homosexuality could be explained in terms of "kin selection" -- that our cultural contributions in emergent human societies balanced our nonreproductive tendencies. When I first encountered this speculation (which was all it was), I thought it was plausible until I began reading the critiques of sociobiology that began appearing at around the same time. I also wondered what counted as "homosexuals" in this scheme, since most gay men and lesbians are capable of reproduction; the assumption (which is all it is) that we are somehow totally uninvolved in making or raising children is false. This theory is also at odds with the rejection of assimilation, since it assumes that homosexuals have always played an important role in their societies, rather than being outsiders with a society of our own.

But Kilhefner takes sociobiology very seriously (275f):

Evolutionary biologists inform us that the basic function of heterosexuals is the reproductive survival of the species. The most essential question for us at present is: What is the evolutionary function of gay people? What are gay people for? To mimic heterosexuals? I don’t think so. Otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, we would have gone down the drainpipe of history long ago.

This assumes, first, that gay people are biologically distinct from heterosexuals, which we aren't. If we were, we would indeed "have gone down the drainpipe of history"; the sociobiological fables were concocted to explain in Darwinian terms how a non-reproducing adaptation could have arisen in the first place. Second, it assumes that you have to have an "evolutionary function," and you have to know what it is, and if you know what it is you have to conform to it because it gives your life meaning. Or something. I certainly don't see why it's an "essential question," let alone the most essential "at present" -- if it matters, it always did, though it could hardly have arisen before Darwin. (Two centuries ago, I suppose a Don Kilhefner would have been saying that the most essential question before Mollies, Sodomites and Sapphists was to know our role in God's plan; the two ideas are functionally equivalent, and equally unimportant.)

Assimilationists will say we are basically just like heterosexuals except for our choice of sex partners. (Harry [Hay] would say to me: “We’re just like hets when it comes to sex, and in most other ways we are different.”) Assimilationists act as if we already have an identity (homosexual), and with cybersex and hookups who needs a community or even an intellectual life?

Harry Hay's quip has often been quoted, and while it's a cute, Wilde-wannabe paradox, I don't agree, or even get his point. What are those "most other ways" we're different? (I'd rather point out that the assimilationists' claim contradicts their rage at those who'd reduce gayness to mere -- you know -- sex.) I think that, given sexism and male supremacy, the sex of one's sexual partner has some serious consequences; it's not exactly trivial. But most of all, I reject the idea that there are heterosexuals, who are all pretty much alike, and then there are homosexuals, who are all pretty much alike. I've never wanted to assimilate to gay men's culture, any more than I wanted to sit around with a bunch of guys chugging brewskies, slobbering over the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, or screaming at a big-screen TV on Superbowl Sunday.

One thing that bothered me about Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal (The Free Press, 1999), which I mostly liked, was Warner's apparent acceptance of 'mainstream' society's self-presentation at face value: if respectable men pretended to be monogamous family guys who'd never think of sneaking off to a strip club or an adult bookstore, let alone a gay cruising area, then that was what they were. The underside of the "normal" is part of society, and can't be separated from it. Similarly, as I've suggested before, "assimilationist" gay people will most likely end up being as hypocritical as their straight counterparts, because hypocrisy is part of respectability.

It doesn't seem to me that gay enspiritment, as Kilhefner calls it, offers much of an intellectual life, which is one reason why I've always given it a wide berth. Especially the Jungians, who are especially pernicious. (Kilhefner also refers in his essay to "father hunger", which indicates his ties to the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, another hotbed of creepy pseudospirituality and anti-intellectualism.) A lot of very fine books have come from GLBTQ scholars, but the most resounding turkeys -- Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue, Jamake Highwater's The Mythology of Transgression, Mark Thompson's Gay Body, Arthur Evans's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Mab Segrest's Born to Belonging come to mind off the top of my head -- all come from the therapeutic/spiritual, and especially Jungian wing of the community. (Well, them and the New Agers, but then the latter are part of the therapeutic/spiritual wing anyway.)

Which doesn't mean I'm complacent about gay politics and community today, as anyone who reads this blog should know. But I think that pursuing "enspiritment" and the culture of therapy has been the road too many of us have taken to become lost in the wilderness.