Così Fan Tutte

I've been having frustrating computer problems, still not completely solved, or I'd have written here sooner.

A regular reader sent me a mail message recently, saying that he's "a LITTLE more in favor of [the] 'some people have always been gay' argument" than I am.  I found this baffling.

"Some people have pretty much always been gay" isn't an argument, it's a claim.  Depending on what it's supposed to mean, I agree with it.  That is, I think it's as certain as any historical claim can be that there have always been some people who were interested erotically only in their own sex.  There's documentation of that from many cultures over a couple thousand years, and I see no reason to suppose that it's not true at almost all times and almost all places.  I think it's also pretty clear that same-sex eroticism isn't limited to such people, that many people have had sexual experience with partners of both sexes in varying proportions.

What I don't agree with is the other claims some people make around this one.  It's not surprising, because most people bring cultural and personal baggage with them, myself not excluded.  There's no agreement what being gay, or being homosexual, or being bisexual, means.  I didn't exaggerate too much in my Gay Christians Say the Darnedest Things post, when I wrote sarcastically that because Leonardo had no Madonna CDs and (shame!) didn't go to Judy's Carnegie Hall concert, many scholars doubt that he was really gay.  In the first place, not all gay people are alike nowadays in the US, and I see no reason to suppose that that's a new development limited to the US.  Nor, of course, does it follow that because there have always been people who were interested erotically in their own sex, that exclusive interest is therefore inborn, or genetic, or biological, or whatever.

Related to these notions, I believe, is the excuse often made for stereotyping, that "stereotypes have some truth in them" because some people do fit the stereotypes.  This line came up at the discussion group I attended last week in San Francisco, and I wish I'd thought to ask what now seems to me the obvious question: So what? What follows from it?  It certainly doesn't follow that everyone is obliged to conform to the stereotypes just because some people do.  That seems to be what is meant, however: that inside every gay man, however butch he may pretend to be, is a screaming queen trying to claw her way out, and that every self-styled bisexual is just a closet case who, if he were honest with himself, would have sex only with other males.  In his book on male prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, for example, Mark Padilla reports that local gay men told him:

“I hope you’re going to prove what we already know: they’re all closet cases [son unos tapa’os].”  This implies the existence of a deeper, more authentic sexual identity that is being actively repressed by the bugarrón, who fails to recognize his own fundamental sexuality and public mark himself in terms of his presumed same-sex erotic preference [33].

There are numerous ironies here, aside from Padilla's own frequent cluelessness.  One is that these Dominican gay men subscribe to a trade/queer model of male homosexuality, though (as always seems to be the case) with plenty of slippage.  If all the bugarrones dropped their pretensions and came out as flaming travestís, there'd be no tops to supply the all-important dick to Dominican gays.  As Padilla also pointed out of a Dominican bar's quixotic attempt to exclude bugarrones,

The policy was doomed to fail from the beginning. First, it seemed entirely incongruous with the erotic integration – and in many ways, the economic interdependence – of bugarrónes and gay-identified men. Local bugarrón-gay or bugarrón-travestí relationships frequently entail an economic arrangement in which the gay/travestí mantiene a su bugarrón (supports his bugarrón), an inversion of the typical gender division of labor in heterosexual relationships.  Further, despite the occasional tensions between them, bugarrónes still represent the erotic ideal for a significant proportion of gay-identified [Dominican] men, reflecting what [Stephen O.] Murray ... has described as the sexual system of “homosexual exogamy” in Latin American homoeroticism. Thus, in their attempts to “clean up” the bar, the owners of Tropicalia were planning to purge a primary source of gay men’s attraction to the business: bugarrónes. As many local gay men commented to me, “So, if they keep bugarrónes out, why would we go there?” [32-3]

In much the same way that many heterosexual men will try to get "nice" girls to have sex with them, in order to prove that all women are essentially whores, the Dominican gays, like the norteamericano tourists, will try to get bugarrones to dar culo, or give ass: if they succeed, they can scorn them, their stereotypes have been vindicated.  The aim is probably not to move toward a more "egalitarian" mode of homosexuality, where either partner may penetrate or be penetrated, but simply to validate their erotic cosmology.  So, as Annick Prieur observed in her study of Mexican vestidas, they despise those mayates (equivalent to bugarrones -- men who penetrate other men) who let themselves be penetrated, even when it is the vestidas who penetrate them. This connects to a fantasy entertained by some gay men, who insist that there are no straight men, that every man can be had if you go about it correctly.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that every man is, at bottom, a bottom.) If these gays really succeeded, though, and exposed all bugarrones as closet cases who really, deep down, want only to be penetrated, who would penetrate them?

This is only a problem if you insist on eliminating the middle ground, but that is what people are doing when they stereotype: there are no differences, there is no variation, everyone is alike, even if they pretend otherwise.  It's not an empirical description but a principle that overrides observation and evidence, and can't be refuted because any observation that seems to contradict the principle can be dismissed as false consciousness, misunderstanding, or failure to grasp the essence that underlies mere appearances.  (So it's related to belief in biblical inerrancy: any seeming error is due to the interpreter's misunderstanding or lack of sufficient faith -- the Bible's lack of error is the first principle of interpreting it.)  It's true that some people can be found who fit any stereotype you like, and that's not problematic.  The trouble arises when the stereotype is postulated as the underlying truth about all individuals.

*The Caribbean Pleasure Industry (Chicago, 2007.)

Let the Sunshine In

Just when I start to think that I may after all be a bitter, carping, negative old queen who doesn't like anything (yeah, like that's a bad thing!), something comes along to restore my faith in humanity.  This weekend it's My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (North Carolina, 2011), by the late Allan Bérubé.  He's best known for Coming Out Under Fire, a history of gay men and lesbians who served in the US military during World War II, his first and (until now) only book.  (It was later made into a documentary that won numerous awards.)  Bérubé's friends and colleagues John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman contributed a biographical essay as introduction, which also sketches the history of GLBT American history.  The essays they chose include Bérubé's early work on passing women, preliminary reports on the research that became Coming Out Under Fire, and his accounts of the history of gay men's bathhouses, and conclude with selections with the project he was working on when he died (of complications from stomach ulcers), on the gay-friendly, antiracist Marine Cooks and Stewards Union.

So, why does this book make me feel good, despite its often downbeat content?  One factor is Bérubé's constant focus on resistance, ordinary people's dogged insistence on living their lives and seeking happiness even under persecution -- even fighting back, as he shows many times.  I still must remind myself sometimes that life before Stonewall wasn't always the depressing twilight world between the sexes of smoky, crummy bars, guilt, and shame that straight society wanted us to believe it was, and some gay people choose to believe.  (This notion survives as the plaintive cry, "Why would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated and persecuted?" used by many of us and our allies in defensive mode.)  A lot of our forefathers and foremothers apparently lived reasonably happy and fulfilled lives -- at least as fulfilled as many heterosexuals do.

Another factor is his emphasis on class, and particularly on what it means to be a working-class intellectual.  Many people, whether middle-class or working-class, take for granted that if you are interested in books and ideas, you must be interested in upwards mobility, in leaving the trailer park for Manhattan or at least the Ivory Tower.  Bérubé himself was working-class, the first in his family to go to college, though he didn't finish his degree.  (We have a number of other traits in common, from Catholic families to having been conscientious objectors during the Vietnam era.  This makes the differences between us very instructive to me.)  In his historical work he paid most attention to people who weren't rich, famous, or white.  This was more radical when he started his historical work than it is now, but even now his manner, the way he treats his subjects, feels unusual to me.  I haven't yet read the essays in My Desire for History where he deals directly with class, but it's everywhere in his work.

I also appreciate his approach to spirituality, notably in "AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disasters," a 1988 essay that deserves more attention.  It emerged from his own struggle to come to terms with the death of his partner Brian Keith, and addresses some trends in gay spirituality that have bothered me too.

There are two different ways to respond to the "why" questions we ask about AIDS.  Their differences are not between religious and secular, the political right and left, antigay and gay, but in the ways each assigns meaning to misfortune.  One response offers questions: the other accepts uncertainties and dwells between the questions and the answers.  When people respond with answers, they are likely to explain why AIDS at particular times to particular people and what AIDS teaches us.  They can cause harm when their definitive answers keep people from finding their own meanings, blame people for their illness, or fill the silences in which people can face their fears and grieve.  When people respond to the tragedy of AIDS without answers, they are likely to challenge moral explanations and open up the possibility of wondering, listening, and being silent together. But without answers, people can feel isolated, helpless, and without direction.

Each of these kinds of responses has ethical implications.  The stories we tell  each other about why particular people do or do not get AIDS have tremendous power.  They touch real lives with real consequences and have the potential for framing some of the most profound experiences in a person's life.  Even our most casual comments or reassurances -- "You should have loved yourself better" or "There must be a reason why your son is suffering" -- can be fragments of a moral framework which, if we could see it whole, we might not condone.  It is important for us, as individuals and as communities, to examine our assumptions and begin openly discussing with each other the ethics of how we ask and answer questions that assign meaning to other people's misfortunes  [151-2].

If I had seen this essay while Bérubé was still alive, I'd have sent him a copy of my more polemical review of gay New Age spirituality, which also criticized the destructive certainty of many spiritual teachers.

As I read the biographical introduction, I began wondering if I should have moved to a city like San Francisco or New York, as Bérubé did.  But I realized quickly that the difference was that he worked much harder than I ever have at building his own community of like-minded thinkers and scholars.  I've had some such community here in Bloomington, but not to the same extent: not because it couldn't have been available here, but because you have to make it yourself.  It's not something that already exists anywhere.  And I'm not saying this to complain, only as another example of the kind of things I'm learning from this book.

Another theme is one I want to tie to other things I've written, namely my criticism of post-colonial and other scholars who see the American construction of gay community as whimsically hostile to family.  Bérubé showed that urban lesbian and gay communities grew after World War II because of veterans who'd been expelled from the military for homosexuality.  They couldn't go back to their smaller communities and families because of the stigma -- jobs were hard enough to find in the postwar readjustment even for the honorably-discharged -- and often enough their families rejected them too.  So they stayed in the cities where they'd first found community, and often their first chance to explore life outside of the limits of heterosexuality.  Some of them were involved in the first gay-rights organizations (with staying power, anyway), which emerged in those cities.

My Desire for History is a good introduction to GLBT American history; it would work well as a basic text in a class on the subject.  But it's also a fascinating read for anyone with any interest in knowing where gay community in America came from.

Our Fore-Uncles and Aunts

Harry Hay, one of the co-founders of the Mattachine Society, would have been one hundred years old on April 7. Band of Thebes linked to this 1983 clip of Vito Russo interviewing Hay and Barbara Gittings.



There's another five minutes of the same interview here, with an extra segment of people-on-the-street answering the question "Is there a gay community?" Often hilariously.

The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

I'm glad to report that succeeding articles in The Brokeback Book have been much better than David Leavitt's opening clunker. Even Daniel Mendelssohn, whose The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999) annoyed me so much a decade ago, wrote a very smart review of the film for the New York Review of Books that is reprinted here. After that, Mun-hou Lo's "Backs Unbroken: Ang Lee, Forbearance, and the Closet" is a very interesting look at the concepts of repression and forbearance in Chinese culture, comparing Brokeback Mountain to Lee's earlier films The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in their treatment of this theme. James Morrison's "Back to the Ranch Ag'in: Brokeback Mountain and Gay Civil Rights" covers a lot of ground, including male romances in American literature as analyzed by the critic Leslie Fiedler, and the role of nature in the story and the film.

But now I'm in the middle of Chris Freeman's "'Jack, I Swear': Some Promises to Gay Culture from Mainstream Hollywood," which centers on the talismanic shirts from the film, bought by a gay collector in 2008. Freeman writes at one point:

What we know, as viewers with some historical and critical distance from this imaginary but all too real scenario, is that a life together for lovers like Jack and Ennis was almost unimaginable, particularly in the West of legend [111].

I guess it depends partly on what you mean by "lovers like Jack and Ennis" and "unimaginable." We know of quite a few male couples who lived together in US history, though we can rarely be sure that they were lovers, for very good reasons. To me that means that a life together for two men is quite imaginable, even if they didn't bugger each other on the front porch of the old homestead every Saturday night. In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, set in the 1780s, the aged Deerslayer and Chingachook (called Mohegan) live together in a cabin. In Cooper's Red Rover, two male friends, partners since they survived a shipwreck together, have raised a foundling to adulthood. In The Pilot, two seamen "wind up living together in a remote cabin deep in the North American wilderness" (Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys [Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 34). Abraham Lincoln shared not just a room but a bed with Joshua Speed for four years after his arrival in Springfield, Illinois. The fantasy of two male friends running a ranch together recurs in movie Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, and is referred to in John Steinbeck's short novel Of Mice and Men. I'm not claiming that any of these couples were sodomitical, but that's not the point: the point is that two loving friends could and did live together, not just in the wilderness but in town, without exciting suspicion. (Incidentally, Patricial Nell Warren gives a much more nuanced and informed account of this phenomenon in her essay "Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain", included in The Brokeback Book.)

(I haven't mentioned female couples here because of the male-to-male focus of Brokeback Mountain, but of course there's a long tradition of women living together too.)

Freeman goes on:

Domestic gay life in big cities wasn't a great deal different: an urban gay male couple during the early 1960s, when the film's first summer is set, was a rare thing. In his memoir My Lives, author Edmund White notes that when he first moved to New York in 1962 and lived with his lover, "two men living together was still a new thing in those days -- at least we knew only one other couple" [112].

Freeman then cites the Only Gays In The Village of Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy -- "and in their case, the exception proved the rule that it was almost never done" (112). Bachardy and Isherwood stood out because of Isherwood's fame as a writer, the thirty-year difference in their ages, and their refusal to pretend that they weren't a couple; they were an exception to the rule of the closet, not to a supposed rule of male couples not living together. (It would have been nearly impossible for them to try to pass as roommates, given the age difference.) Even in Los Angeles, there had been the earlier case of Cary Grant and Randoph Scott, who lived together openly as bachelors in the 1930s -- so blatant that they were latent. Again, the nature of their relationship remains controversial, but the point is that two men could and did live together; there was nothing "unimaginable" about it.

It's always dangerous to overgeneralize from what "we knew," especially in a city as big as New York. There were several famous male couples living in New York during the 1960s, among them Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, William Flanagan and Edward Albee, Paul Cadmus and Jon Andersson, Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy, and others less famous, such as the diarist Donald Vining and his partner Richmond Purinton. There were others; these are just some examples I can remember off the top of my head. Those who weren't famous mostly aren't recorded, so it's easy to pretend they didn't exist. But it might have been easier for the obscure than for the famous to live together openly.

I admit that there was plenty of social pressure against same-sex couples living together, but the fact remains that a good many people defied it or worked around it. Once again I find myself wondering why gay people are so often determined to erase our history.