Sensibility

I don't think I'll continue reading Walt Odets's new book, Out of the Shadows (FSG, 2019).  Right after the passage I discussed last week there came this:

For gay men, sexual attraction to other men is only one expression of something more formal, more fundamental, something that might be called a gay sensibility.  As I am using the term, gay sensibility describes the man's internal experience of himself, and his characteristic external expression of self to others.  Together, the two constitute "a sensibility," and a gay sensibility is often different from that of heterosexual men.  Sexual attraction is not the cause of gay sensibility, although it may influence and inform it; nor is the simple idea of the homosexual an adequate characterization of that sensibility.  The question I am raising -- whether or not gay men are homosexuals -- is not at all intended to dismiss the importance of gay sexual lives.  Sexuality is of central importance in all human life, whether acknowledged or not.  What it means to "be gay" has for too long been defined by others, and too much of that imposed definition has been incorporated into gay self-experience.  Being gay offers important opportunities that can only be realized if gay people can free themselves from the conventional idea of the homosexual.  Freed from this narrow characterization, gay people have lives that are, in some ways, like heterosexual lives and, in other ways, appreciably different.  Lives that express such complexity are often better, fuller, more authentic lives [20].

Odets might possibly make an interesting and useful case from this mess, but right now I don't have enough energy or curiosity to find out.  He allows that gay men are different from each other, but I can't see how to reconcile that acknowledgement with the notion of a "gay sensibility."  If erotic experience is only one expression of this putative sensibility, it would seem to follow that a gay male sensibility could express itself in erotic interaction with women as easily as it could with men, and that a man could have erotic experience exclusively with other men without having that sensibility.  In that case, it's hard to see why that sensibility should be called "gay."

This same problem arises in attempts to make sense of gender.  The psychological traits that are stereotyped "masculine" or "feminine" are really found in both / either sex most of the time, so it makes no sense to gender them.  Doing so just keeps people, whether they are professionals or laypeople, confused.  My sensibility is gay, not because I possess some indefinable gay essence, but because I am gay, so whatever sensibility I possess is a gay one.  In that I echo the "woman-identified woman" who asserted that whatever she wears, be it a gown or an army-surplus coat, it is by definition women's wear.  I am different from many straight men, but I'm also different from many gay men.  (I wonder where bisexual men fit into Odets's schema.)

I still disagree with his characterization of "the homosexual" as a concept consisting purely of sex.  In fact "the homosexual" has always been an incoherent conception, but it has always been more complex than Odets allows.  Foucault was correct when he wrote: "We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized ... less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself" (History of Sexuality, 1:43).  Gayish men had a good deal of input into the construction and elaboration of "the homosexual," not just as case histories but as thinkers and writers.  Perhaps Odets will take this history into account as he proceeds, but I'm not going to find out in the foreseeable future.

But I also object to Odets's stereotyping of heterosexual men.  It's not news that the social construction of heterosexuality has been restrictive and destructive of men's lives, as well as women's.  Nor should it be news that heterosexual men are as varied as gay men, and that there are large differences between cultures in the official definitions and limitations imposed on straight men.

For example, last week as I headed downtown I passed a group of about twenty international students being shown around.  They were all black Africans, mostly male, and two of them were holding hands.  They looked a bit uneasy, almost defiant, but they held on.  I presume they had been told that in America, men holding hands is taken as a sign of homosexuality.  Even many if not most gay men would make that mistake.  In many cultures, even quite homophobic ones, people of the same sex hold hands in public.  But in the US, any public display of physical affection between males is a fraught business.  (That 'affection' in that phrase generally is a euphemism for eroticism says a lot about our moral impoverishment.)

Even within a culture, manhood is an incoherent concept.  For an easy example, consider the attempts to limit artistic expression to males, to defend it as an inherently male capability, at the same time that male artists' manliness is often suspect.  For another, consider male bonding: men are supposed to be heterosexual, but they are also supposed to form powerful, even intimate bonds with other men -- yet they can never be sure they haven't gone too far and crossed the line into homosexuality.  Freed from the narrow and self-contradictory characterizations that constitute gender, everybody has the opportunity to build lives that are better, fuller, and more authentic.  I don't believe that a "gay" or a heterosexual sensibility is necessary for doing so.

The quip that gay people are different from straight people except for what we do in bed has been attributed to more than one gay sage, but I've never seen a good enumeration of what the real differences supposedly are.  Harry Hay was one of those sages, and I think it's significant that he not only wanted to define a gay spiritual sensibility, he based it on a biological-determinist theory of our origin and nature.  Odets objects to the born-gay dogma; I wonder if he realizes that Hay believed we are born fairies. For that reason I feel free to reject the claim, which feels to me like one more attempt to force us all into boxes instead of encouraging us to explore and own our complexity and richness.

Are They or Aren't They?

The above photograph is apparently world-famous -- in fact, it won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 -- but I don't remember having seen it before.  Someone posted it to Facebook this weekend, under the header "Amazing Facts."  It depicts one male utility worker giving CPR to another worker who'd been shocked by a high voltage line. The CPR worked: the stricken man survived to live another forty years, and the man who saved him is still living.

Of course it sparked a lot of comments, some eulogizing the courage of linemen, others questioning how the picture came to be taken -- some speculated that it must have been staged, because who'd have a high-quality camera on a work site? -- some babbling about "heros" and "angles" (meaning "angels, of course), and others fiercely defending the virtue of the men depicted, this was not a dirty gay kiss but the Kiss of Life.  The person who posted the photo set a high tone by beginning the caption with "It's not what you may think."  (Gee, I thought it was a lineman giving CPR to another lineman -- do you mean they were really making out?)  One commenter wrote to another, "I hope Someone lets you die if you need mouth to mouth. Or Elton John is there and does mouth to mouth."

There were, of course, the predictable exhortations to other commenters to "get your mind out of the gutter."  There's nothing wrong with two men kissing, there's nothing of the "gutter" in it.  It supports something I've long thought: you can't always (or even often) tell, just by looking, whether two people are touching each other affectionately, erotically, or (as in this case) therapeutically.  If the circumstances under which this photograph was taken weren't so well documented, it would be hard to be sure what is really going on in it.  (If you can bear to read an ignorant and virtually incoherent account of a homoerotic reading of the picture, look here.)  It could be a carefully staged erotic photo, though it isn't.  I can sympathize, in fact, with those people who question whether it really was unstaged, because the image is so clear and the disposition of the men's bodies looks as if they were posed as lovers.  (On the other hand, the photo also reminds me of paintings of the body of Jesus being taken down from the cross.  "Passion," after all, meant suffering before it meant strong erotic or emotional feeling.)  If you first read the photo as a gay image, that is entirely reasonable.  It just happens that it isn't.  If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it's also true that pictures may need a thousand words to clarify their ambiguity, and the words that label or describe a picture can change radically the way we interpret it.

The Teeman Multitudes

The Daily Beast has an article up, "How Gay Was Gore Vidal?"  The author, Tim Teeman, is apparently a successful British journalist, the kind you cannot hope to bribe or twist, with an upcoming biography of Vidal due to be published later this year.  The article is, well, painful.

Vidal said he was bisexual, but his family and friends say he was gay. Vidal adamantly believed “gay” referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity. 

Oh, no.  No, no, no.  First, I'm not sure Vidal ever said he was bisexual.  He did talk and write of having copulated with males and females, and maybe that's what Teeman means.  But as far as I know Vidal never labeled himself sexually, at least for the record.  (Readers, correct me if you know otherwise.)

Vidal did not believe "'gay' referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity."  The word Teeman has in mind, I suspect, is "homosexual," which Vidal insisted referred only to acts, not to persons. "Gay" does not equal "homosexual."  In this he followed Alfred Kinsey, whose research into sexual behavior Vidal supported and aided.  Nor would Vidal have used the term "identity" in this context; that's a post-70s usage, which has led to immense confusion.

On "gay," Vidal told Fag Rag in the 1970s,

I prefer the word faggot which I tend to use myself. I have never allowed, actively, in my life the word “gay” to pass my lips. I don’t know why I hate that word ... Also, I mean, historically it meant a girl of easy virtue in the 17th century. They’d say: “Is she gay?” Which meant: “Is she available?” And this, I don’t think, is highly descriptive of anybody. It’s just a bad word. You see, I don’t think you have to have a word for it. This is what you have to evolve. These words have got to wither away in a true Hegelian cycle.

Vidal wasn't the only fag of his generation who hated the word "gay."  (Just as gay men of my generation hated "queer" when it was reclaimed by younger people in the 90s, and a few years later younger queers rejected "gay" because they knew it only as a homophobic schoolyard slur.)  Christopher Isherwood was another, though he eventually grew accustomed to it as he made common cause with the post-Stonewall gay movement.  There were a number of reasons for this distaste, but since Teeman can't even get Vidal's words right, he can't shed much light on his reasons.

Teeman condescends to Vidal as a man of "his time," but he's too ignorant of even recent history to be taken seriously.  Writing of Howard Austen, with whom Vidal lived for over fifty years, Teeman writes "For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to Austen as his friend," and adds, "This was no 'friendship,' but, as I sketch in the book, a deep, enduring relationship."  "Friend" was queer code for "boyfriend" in those days (you can see this in Isherwood's writings) and for quite some time afterward, and not everyone even now would agree that a friendship, even a non-sexual one, can't be "deep" or "enduring."  It looks like Teeman's upcoming book will have some hot dish, but he too is a man of his time, and it's a time of shallow, sensational, ill-informed tabloid writing.

If I Get Her the Wool, Will She Make Me One Too?

I checked William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (Harrington Park Press, 2006) out of the library after Band of Thebes praised Benemann's work.  I just began reading it, and already he's doing the Foucault Two-Step:

I join my voice to those who have begun to question some of the theories of Michel Foucault concerning the formation of a homosexual identity.  I do not believe that a homosexual orientation was non-existent until it was socially constructed during the late nineteenth century.  From my reading of sources from the colonial, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary period, I am convinced that there were men who were homosexual and who -- without the physicians, clerics, legislators, or sociologists -- recognized themselves as different from their comrades, a difference based solely on their sexual response.  I also believe that there were de facto gay communities.  Some of these communities were congruent with specific geographic places.  Others were real but floating, linked to a profession rather than a physical place.  Still others had their existence only on a subconscious level but were nonetheless a powerful impetus to bring men together.  I believe that men loving men in the early years of this country were aware of the concept we now label as "queer space," and that they took active steps to separate themselves from the heterosexual majority in order to join their brothers in an underground community based on a shared sexual response [xv].

Well, that's a mixed bag!  I have reservations about Benemann's ability to read "sources from the colonial, revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary period" if he can't read Foucault, and from this paragraph I conclude that he can't.  I haven't read everything Foucault had to say about the emergence of the Modern Homosexual, but then neither have most people who cite him.  Some of them seem not to have even read the entire first volume of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault made his canonical remarks on the subject; all they seem to know is this one paragraph, and often only the very last sentence of this paragraph:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth – less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration [relaps]; the homosexual was now a species.

This is not a "theory," nor does it say anything about "identity" or "orientation."  It doesn't even use the term "social construction."  It does not say that "a homosexual orientation did not exist until it was socially constructed in the nineteenth century."  (Benemann begs the question whether there is such a thing as "a homosexual orientation" in the first place.)  What it does say is that nineteenth-century doctors interpreted sex between males, or between females, as a "psychological, psychiatric, medical category" involving "a kind of interior androgyny."   This interpretation persists to this day, and underlies most or all of the scientific work done today on sexual orientation.

On the very first page of the second volume of The History of Sexuality, written as Foucault was rethinking his approach under the influence of Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Foucault himself wrote about the word "sexuality,"

The term itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something more than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which "sexuality" refers.

So the kind of simplistic linguistic determinism that many Foucauldians fall into was eventually rejected by Foucault himself.

I like Benemann's dismissal of "physicians, clerics, legislators, sociologists," which comes closer to the heart of the matter.  What changed in the nineteenth century was the way such elites thought about sex between persons of the same sex.  Even Foucault, oddly enough, wrote not only as though what physicians, clerics, legislators, sociologists was the truth about homosexuality, but as though their categories were the only categories that existed in society.  He knew better than that, because before The History of Sexuality he'd dated the emergence of 'the homosexual' to the early 18th century English Mollies.  As usual, our information on the Mollies comes from hostile outsiders -- purity crusaders, the courts, newspapers -- so I'm not sure we know as much about them as I'd like.  But it's safe to say that the Mollies created their social forms through practice, not through theory, without the advice of medical professionals.  (There's also a widespread assumption that the classifications the doctors developed were something totally new and alien, as though the doctors were not men of their time and culture.)  When a category -- "Sodomite," say -- did filter down to the hoi polloi, it changed meanings and connotations along the way.  But then, the meaning of "homosexual" as a category was never particularly clear, any more than the meaning of "Sodomite."

A lot of the controversy over the nature of the "homosexual" has nothing to do with social constructionism or with Foucault.  There's no question that the fag/ penetrated / passive / bottom is homosexual.  The question is whether the trade / penetrator / active / top is homosexual; and it's disputed everywhere from Latin America to the Philippines to South Asia to right here in the USA.  The current model for scientific research assumes that the homosexual male is feminized and the homosexual female is masculinized, never thinking to ask who these people's partners are; but this model is much older than the 1870s, and appears independently in numerous cultures.

I must also dissent from Benemann's claim that early American buggers and sodomites "took active steps to separate themselves from the heterosexual majority in order to join their brothers in an underground community based on a shared sexual response."  A considerable segment of gay male community requires men who define themselves, and are defined by their queer partners, as normal men.  That includes only some men-loving men, however, but I'm looking forward to see how Benemann constructs his subjects.  And what, may I ask, is a "de facto gay community"?  I didn't know there were de jure gay communities.  Well, I'll see where Benemann goes from here.  His focus on romantic friendships might help him to avoid harping on Foucault.