Gentlemen Callers

This isn't the first variation I've seen on this theme, posted on Facebook by a gay male friend around 40 years old.  I have to remind myself that if social media had been around when I was 40, I probably would have posted such things myself. So let's imagine that I'm writing this to my younger self.

Actually, though, 40 was roughly when I realized that I wasn't really interested in a long-term committed relationship.  I already knew that the trouble (if it was trouble) lay with me, not with the men I met and dated.  I wanted someone to be there for me, but not all the time, just when I wanted him to be there, and that wasn't fair to him.  I knew some men who I wanted to be with more often, but not all the time, and probably not permanently.  It began to occur to me that I would be content if I had two or three occasional but ongoing partners -- the term Friends With Benefits hadn't been coined yet; "fuck buddies" had.  The trouble was that FWBs are hard to schedule: when I found several such a decade later, either I wouldn't see any of them for a month or more at a time, or they'd all come calling at the same time: feast or famine.  I also found that they had to be the ones who decided when to show up; if I invited them over, they'd get nervous.  But I realized I could live with that.

Sometimes one of the men I knew would drift away altogether.  He might move to another town, or get into a committed relationship, or just lose interest.  But before long someone else would find his way into my life.  I began to trust that I wasn't likely to be without willing partners for the foreseeable future.  Some of those FWB relationships went on for years, certainly longer than any attempted commitment I'd tried.  In some of them, the word "love" wasn't out of place, though it might have been if we'd moved in together.

Often I've encountered people who chided me, "What's going to happen to you when you're old and you're still alone?"  I pointed out that plenty of people get divorced or widowed: marriage, or even commitment is no guarantee over the long haul.  I didn't like the idea of someone staying with me out of guilt or fear; I didn't want to do it myself, so why would I inflict myself on someone else?  Admittedly, I have a greater tolerance for being alone than many other people, and conversely less tolerance for having company when I'd rather be alone, so the prospect of being solitary never terrified me the way it does other people.  I eventually realized that committed couples work out ways of getting time to themselves, they aren't joined at the hip 24/7.  For me, the amount of solo time I need is great enough that I preferred that it be the default: that I would rather be alone when I might have preferred company, than have company when I preferred to be alone.

But perhaps my chief objection to this meme is about the word "real," used as the opposite of "temporary."  I think my FWBs and one-night stands were "real."  Not only that, but I've had many nonsexual friendships that enriched my life wonderfully.  It was always a gamble, living in a college town with its transient population, whether I'd always find enough company to keep me going, but I did.  The words of Allen Ginsberg's psychoanalyst reassured me: "Oh, you're a nice person, there will always be people who'll like you."  I didn't believe that when I was 20, or 25 (me? nice?), but at about 30 I began to trust that I was likable enough: not to be smug about it, but to believe that I'd get by.  And so I have, though admittedly the current pandemic has thrown a wrench into the works.  Still, I know that it's not about me, and I'm doing all right, with enough friendly human interaction to warm my heart.

And anyway, we are all temporary.  Few long-term couples manage to die at the same time, which would be the best you could hope for if you demand that neither you nor your partner checks out ahead of the other.  And what does it mean to say that one shouldn't "entertain temporary people"?  How do you know that the person you've met will last for the rest of their life?  I've challenged some people on this point, and never got a convincing answer. "You just know" is the best they come up with, but I've learned as I observe their romantic careers over time that they don't know.  It seems to me that to find a serious partner you often have to audition many others who turn out not to be serious -- or you aren't serious about them; there's something very egoistic about this meme, as though one's own feelings are the only ones that matter.  Besides, the need to entertain people whose seriousness is unknown is proverbial: think of memes like "In order to find a prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs."

The only remedy I can think of is arranged marriage.  It works for some people, apparently, but I'll pass.  And I don't consider the men I've kissed over the past half-century to be frogs -- well, one or two, but in general they were perfectly fine people I just didn't want to spend the rest of my life with, or vice versa.  But that doesn't mean they were worthless, and the dismissive attitude toward ordinary humanity in this meme is disturbing.  If you aren't permanent, you're unreal, a waste of time.  The person who made this meme might just be projecting.

A Thousand Milliseconds of Peace

I'm actually kind of glad that Pete Buttigieg is running for President, because it gives me an answer to a question I didn't really expect to see answered.

A number of black friends have complained since 2008 that I just don't understand how much it means to them to have a black President, and that my lack of enthusiasm for Barack Obama is at least partly because I'm white.  During the 2016 campaign, a number of women I knew had the same complaint: because I'm male, I just didn't understand how important Hillary's candidacy was to them.  In both cases they regarded the candidates' policies and record as minor distractions compared to the historic significance of a black or female president: they found it irritating, even upsetting, to be pressured to think about them. 

I still think they were wrong, and that I did understand very well what it meant.  I just thought that their candidates' policies were more important than his race or her sex, and that the boost to the self-esteem of their fans was, while not completely unimportant, much less important than the lives of the many people (including women and people of color) their policies would materially harm.

Just in the past few days, a woman argued angrily on Twitter that white male contenders (Sanders, Biden, O'Rourke, Buttigieg) were once again getting all the attention, and that it was time women of color had a chance to show what they could do.  I didn't think this was entirely unfair until I remembered that similar claims were made for Obama and Clinton.  Obama did not, as far as I can tell, govern differently than a white male of his class.  Clinton was not elected, but her record of warmongering and her glee over other people's deaths does not inspire confidence in me that she'd have brought woman-wisdom and Earth-based grandmother-compassion to the Oval Office.  (See her gloating over the death of Qadafy in the clip linked here, for example.)  That doesn't mean that we shouldn't elect another black man or a woman of any color to the presidency, only that sex and race are not qualifications for the office.  I think that the examples of Obama and Clinton confirm this.

Still, I admit to some qualms about my position.  If an openly gay person became a viable candidate, would I cut him or her more slack than I have to Obama or Clinton?  Would the world-historical significance of a homosexual presidential candidate, and what that would mean to young gay kids in America and around the world, sweep away my concerns about such a person's policies and record?  I couldn't deny that until it happened, I wouldn't know for sure, and I didn't really expect to see it happen in my lifetime.  So it's mildly gratifying, for selfish reasons, to find that my faculties remain intact in the face of Pete Buttigieg's campaign.  And what I saw during the Obama and Clinton campaigns is happening again: Buttigieg's fans don't care about his policies, they care about irrelevancies (often charming ones, but irrelevancies nonetheless) and their fantasies about him.

Jacob Bacharach wrote an entertaining essay on the gayness of Mayor Pete, and while it's not his best work, nor is it as good as Nathan J. Robinson's close reading of Buttigieg's autobiography, it's worth reading.  It reminds me of Sarah Schulman's discussion of American commodification of homosexuality in her 1998 book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Duke), which was brilliant then and feels prescient now.  I may return to that some other time, but for now I want to mention one other thing about Buttigieg that concerns me.

One of his selling points, one he stresses in public statements and that is echoed by many of his fans, is that people are tired of divisiveness, and that he can bring us together.  That's how Barack Obama marketed himself, and it's how many of his fans see him to this day.  And if that's what Pete Buttigieg wants to be, he should not be president, because while he wants to play nice, his Republican opponents do not.  Obama and his crew claimed to be, and maybe were, taken totally by surprise at how mean the Republicans were: You guyzzzzz!!!  This is so unfair!  Why won't you work with me instead of against me?  Obama threw staff they targeted to the wolves, rather than fight for them.  If the Republicans can't keep Pete Buttigieg out of office, they'll set out to block him from the get-go, as they did with Obama.  It'll be comforting to blame the Rethugs for the next Democratic President's failures, but it's a comfort we can't afford.  We need a president who can fight back, and it doesn't appear that Buttigieg has had to deal with that kind of total war yet, so there's no way to know how he'll cope if he's elected in 2020.  Of course, he'll also need good advisors and a Supreme Court and Democratic-controlled Congress that will work with him.  Playing board games, having a husband who's followed on Twitter by Lin-Manuel Miranda, liking Joyce's Ulysses, performing with Ben Folds -- all these are cute, but if we get a third Obama term, we are truly doomed.

Why Can't a Woman Be Less Like a Man?

“Wouldn’t the males in the room like to think that the Y has some more enduring contribution to maleness?” It is 2001, in Bethesda, Maryland. Y chromosome geneticist David Page looks out at the audience’s young men—high school honors students. In the beat following Page’s question, they visibly twinge with anxiety and anticipation. With a beaming smile, Page breaks the tension, reassuring the boys that new research in his lab has, fortunately, “intellectually rescued” the Y from “years and years of misunderstanding.” The faces relax and nervous giggles titter around the room.

This anecdote comes from Sarah S. Richardson's Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago, 2013, p.149 of the Kindle version).  It's followed by another anecdote from five years later, in which another researcher retails a newer improved model of the Y chromosome, thereby putting "broad smiles" on the faces of the women in the audience while "the blokes are shifting uncomfortably, unnerved by the prospect of their fundamental redundancy."  Which supports what I've been saying for a long time now: it's not a good idea to hitch your self-esteem or your politics to scientific claims, which have a way of changing with the winds of fashion.  That's especially true since as Richardson herself insists repeatedly in the book, the X and Y chromosomes have nothing to do with the social status or value of men and women, nor do they determine our behavior, gender expression, or much of anything else.  That young scientists and scientist-wannabes are being encouraged by their elders and teachers to think otherwise is not good news.

Why would "the males in the room" be stricken with anxiety if the Y chromosome doesn't make "some more enduring contribution to maleness"?  Males are males, and females females, regardless of what role the Y chromosome plays.  I presume, going by other quotations from Page in Richardson's book, that he means that the Y chromosome causes in some obscure fashion the stereotypical masculine traits and behavior that he casts as caricatures when he's not advancing them himself.  (This is common coin in masculist propaganda, of course: if you criticize male violence, you're stereotyping men unfairly and subsisting on their tears; if you celebrate male violence, you're ultra-cool and recovering primal male energy.)  So, for example, when talking to the laity, Page 

is quoted saying that “the Y married up, the X married down,” and “the Y wants to maintain himself but doesn’t know how. He’s falling apart, like the guy who can’t manage to get a doctor’s appointment or can’t clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it [Richardson, 159].

But even in one of his journal articles:

Figures depicted X-transposed genes as pink, X-degenerate genes as yellow (representing an ancient mix of male and female—presex, neutral, or neither-nor), and Y genes as blue. X genes were characterized as "housekeeping" and "ubiquitous" while Y genes "acquire" and "maintain" male-specific functions and experience "abundant" palindromic recombination [Richardson, 162; boldface added].

That, remember, is a professional publication, aimed at his critical-thinking scientific peers, not throwing dust in the eyes of the credulous and irrational sheeple.

One of the funniest symptoms of male anxiety Richardson discusses is the reaction to a prediction, by the Australian geneticist Jennifer Graves, that the Y chromosome is degenerating and will go extinct -- in about 14 million years.  That is a prospect to keep you up nights, isn't it?  Graves seems to be Page's mirror image, with her equally loaded descriptions of the Y chromosome as a "wimp," a "genetic wrecking yard," and the like (Richardson, page 170).  The disappearance of the Y chromosome wouldn't mean the extinction of males, by the way: there are mammalian species without Y chromosomes, but they still have fertile males.  The curious thing about this emotional reaction -- you'd think they were facing execution the next morning -- is that extinction is as much part of evolutionary theory as the change of species itself.  Everybody dies, and most species eventually go extinct.  If men vanished from the planet, it would simply mean that we had lost the struggle for existence, that Nature had weighed us in the balance and found us wanting and blah blah blah. 

The ascription of sex/gender stereotypes to genes and chromosomes as if they were fully-developed organisms is about as ridiculous as anthropomorphizing subatomic particles.  (Our Friend, The Quark.)  Evidently it doesn't keep people like Graves and Page from doing valid scientific work.  Richardson argues: 

Perhaps Graves’s and Page’s research on the Y has been lively and productive at least in part because of the gendered models they have drawn on. We have here a case of competing biases, each productive in channeling particular programs of Y chromosome study. As these biases are the subject of active and open debate, they do not carry with them the same threat to scientific objectivity as do biases shared by an entire research community and thus invisible to its participants [174].

She points out, though, that Graves is avowedly feminist, while Page casts himself as a neutral, objective, just-the-facts-Ma'am "nonideological scientist" (173). The lack of self-awareness on Page's part, given how freely he throws around the most cliched Blondie/Dagwood gender stereotypes, is troubling, but also old news to anyone familiar with the history of sexism in the sciences.

One of the first things I thought of when I read about this controversy was the attitude expressed by one of my readers, that the idea that he was born gay appeals to him emotionally.  I'm not sure what that appeal is.  I'm weird, as we all know, but my own change of heart, when I was twenty, had nothing to do with any theory of why I'm gay.  It was inspired (though not caused) by the writings of people like the lesbian writer Jill Johnston, which helped me to decide that my desire for another young man was as valid as desire for a young woman would be.  I say "decide" instead of, say, "realize," because it was a decision about how I was going to regard my homosexuality, rather than an objective claim about its nature or status.  A moral decision, which is what is at issue.  Thanks to other reading I'd done, notably Martin Hoffman's The Gay World (Basic Books, 1968), I knew about the then-current dominant theory of the origin of male homosexuality, that it was due to faulty relationships with one's parents; I also knew that this theory was flawed and invalid, and that homosexuality was not an illness or disorder.  I believe I also knew about the born-gay theories of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and that they had been discredited too.  But it doesn't seem that I cared why I was homosexual; what mattered to me was that it was all right to be attracted to other males, and to try to find one who'd be attracted to me.

It appears that not everyone considers the born-gay doctrine emotionally appealing.  In An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999) Jennifer Terry wrote:

Among those gay men who are economically and socially powerful in the world, conceding that nature makes them gay is apparently less damaging than it might seem to working-class gay teenagers. A social worker who works with gay suicidal teens recently remarked that the biology-is-destiny line can he deadly. Thinking they are "afflicted" with homosexual desire as a kind of disease or biological defect rather than thinking of it as a desire they somehow choose is, for many gay teenagers, one more reason to commit suicide rather than to live in a world so hostile to their desires.

If you're born that way, after all, it's incurable.  I've noticed before how bleakly many born-gay dogmatists portray gay life: we are hated by all, rejected by our families, persecuted by the law and religion, and so on.  It's remarkable how similar this is to the 1950s' pulp cliche of the Third Sex, doomed to a life of loneliness in murky bars, trapped in the Twilight World Between the Sexes ... Far from replacing the moralizing judgments of the religious and legal approach to homosexuality, the medical model merged with them, like the joining of an egg and a sperm.

What it would mean if it were proved that we are born gay is simply that we are not morally or legally responsible for our condition.  But no one would claim seriously that inborn conditions are necessarily positive: the same science that produced the born-gay theories also "discovered" genetic causes for schizophrenia, alcoholism, and other disorders.  ("Discovered" is in quotes because those discoveries are as dubious as that homosexuality is inborn.)  When a child is born with a disabling, congenital condition, no one but perhaps a member of Donald Trump's administration would argue that it should be left untreated.  And, of course, being born dark-skinned or female has never shielded African-Americans or women from discrimination or oppression.  Facts, let alone theories or speculation about causation do not establish anything about the moral status of the condition involved.  Yet it appears that many people do feel that as long as they can't help themselves, they are not only exempt from blame but from any criticism at all -- hence the bluster of masculists like David Page: not only is the refusal to ask directions, or to put their clothes in a hamper rather than on the floor, in their genes, it is a sign of male nobility.

It's easy enough to see why people who know nothing about science would fasten onto media reports that sex/gender cliches are "natural" and therefore unchangeable, and wouldn't blink at the ascription of those cliched traits to chromosomes and genes.  Personifying the inanimate and impersonal is a widespread (perhaps inborn and natural, who knows?) human tendency, so it's not surprising that scientists succumb to it too.  But I still don't understand the emotional appeal of seeing men and women as natural (at the genetic level) opponents, even enemies.  (Richardson also discusses the claim by some geneticists that men and women are more different genetically than Homo Sapiens and chimpanzees.  In addition to the flaws she finds in this claim, it seems to overlook the fact that men also have an X, or Lady, Chromosome, so we have the genetic difference right in our genes.  The Enemy Within, I guess.)  The War Between the Sexes, contrary to some propaganda, is not an invention of radical man-hating feminists, but a cherished fantasy of gender traditionalists; and as with American Exceptionalism, Male Exceptionalism demands that the Other always lose.

Given that genetic manipulation is the Holy Grail of the genetic research establishment, the biology-is-destiny fatalism of people like Page is rather curious.  Surely Science will someday make it possible for men to ask directions, wash dishes, and get their own beers from the refrigerator, thus freeing them from dependence on the women they want to view as an alien and malignant species?  Instead it appears they want to remain as they are.  That's up to them, but Natural Selection never sleeps.

What Do We See? What Do We Not See?

Greg Tate has written some very good stuff; sometimes he's gone right off the rails into wackery; sometimes he steams boldly down the middle.  On Tuesday he posted this on Facebook:

You (incredulously) hear some folk say that they ''never see color '' or that bugaboo 'race', but you've never heard anyone say, ''I never see gender''. The former argument seems motivated by a pre-emptive guilt reflex--a knee-jerk desire to prove one isn't capable of racism because you're a magician of entitlement-- one who can make racism and yourself disappear from the world by refusing to be implicated or even see that race and difference keeps mattering, keeps producing violence against those invisible others. But gender related isms and phobias don't grant the same superpowers or superpowered delusional desires--the ability to bestow innocence on yourself by denying the existence of your own genitalia and everyone else's.

His initial claim grabbed my attention, and it has some truth in it, but only some.  I'm not sure I've actually heard or seen anyone claim that they don't "see gender," but I have seen a lot of nice liberal people claim that we shouldn't see it, for example in those memes that point out that a skeleton has no gender or sexual orientation, so we should just look past the deceptive flesh to the honest bones.  I've also heard of gay people who were told by their closeted partners that they didn't think of their sex, they just loved them.  Of course there's as much bad faith in those memes as in the claim of color-blindness.

That last quoted sentence is the wackery here.  "Gender related phobias and isms" certainly do generate entitlement and violence, not by "denying the existence of your own genitalia and everyone else's" but by creating a mythology about their vital cosmic importance, in order to "bestow innocence" on those who use that mythology to exclude, control, and punish others.  As Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields wrote in their brilliant book Racecraft:

The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.  Consider the statement "black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color" -- a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality.  But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke -- paff -- reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole [17-18].

The same applies to sex/gender, which Tate seems not to understand very well.  The distinction between (biological) sex and (cultural etc.) gender, invented to express an important difference, failed for many reasons as the distinctions turned out to be difficult to draw, and nowadays "sex" and "gender" are often conflated, which expresses something true but also puts us back where we were before.  Biological sex is mostly visible on naked bodies (though there are well-known ambiguous cases), but since human beings cover our bodies in varying degrees, we create other markers to declare sex very visibly.  Weirdly, to my mind, we often cover the visible bodily markers to signal sex at the same time we hide it.  Gendered clothing, cosmetics, decorations, stylized body stances and signals, conventions of language intonation and even vocabulary, divisions of labor, and so on, express and enforce a society's assumptions about bodily configurations, and because they are mostly not directly connected, all these conventions can float free, and that freedom is used culturally for many purposes.  Cross-dressing, for example, can be a disguise, or entertainment, or ritual, or the expression of a deeply-felt personal essence ("identity").  It can be nonconformist or conformist, or both: a drag queen doesn't conform to gender expectations for his body, but he conforms to gender expectations for the gender he's performing, and to the conventions of drag performance.

Whatever else it is, gender is something one shows to the world -- not always consciously, much as I sometimes forget which t-shirt I'm wearing and am startled when someone comments on it -- but then, "race" can be that too, because "race" as Americans use it is not just skin color but cultural and personal expression.  Many people of various "races" would be furious, I expect, at the idea that "race" too can be performed, but when "race" is conflated with culture (analogously to "sex" and "gender"), it is certainly being performed.  (So is something like "age," by the way, as in the admonition "Act your age!")  I still remember the impact Cornel West's remarks about young black men's "stylizing their bodies" (Race Matters [Beacon Press, 1993], p. 88) had on me the first time I read them.  I had never believed that "black male styles of walking, talking, dressing, and gesticulating in relation to others" (ibid.) were innate, but it was exciting to see West state that they were cultivated and write about what they meant.

The question, I think, is not whether we "see" race or color or sex or gender or age, but what we do with what we see, or choose to see.  Of course I see color -- which does not equal "race," of course, though many people believe it does; that's what the Fields call "racecraft" -- as I see gender, but I don't make assumptions about the person whose skin color, or whose style of walking, talking, dressing, or gesticulating I see.  I'm aware of cultural conventions, as I am of gender conventions, but I don't universalize them: I know that the variation in behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and traits within groups is immense, far greater than the average differences between groups.

It felt odd to write that, because it seems so obvious, and I think most people would say they agree with it.  The curious thing in most people's discourse about this topic is the way they oscillate between the belief that these traits and behaviors are innate -- rooted in biology, unchangeable -- and the belief that they are surface phenomena -- customs, conventions, culturally created, changeable.  The position they take at any given moment about a given trait is generally determined by their attitude toward it: if they don't like something you're doing, they assume you can change it; if you accept what they're doing, it's natural and they can't change it.  Or a trait is unchangeable if they use it to defend a certain social arrangement: black people were born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, women were created to stay at home and clean house, girls can't throw a baseball because their arms are built differently, blacks are just naturally better at (certain) sports than whites, these things are in our DNA and cannot change.  Beliefs about innateness generally predate any evidence about the basis of the trait under discussion, and are fiercely resistant to evidence against them -- indeed it seems that the belief will be expressed in the face of disconfirming evidence.

Cultural stereotyping, of race or gender or age or religion, heightens this contradiction.  That the trait, doctrine, behavior is socially constructed is all the more reason why it must be enforced and protected and nonconformity punished, yet Nature is often invoked in its support.  The apostle Paul notoriously claimed, for example, that "nature itself teach[es] that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him" (1 Corinthians 11:14), and a commentator whose name I can't recall claimed that Paul was using "nature" to mean "custom."  I would say that by "nature" Paul was referring to custom, but he was obfuscating the distinction, whether he did so consciously or not.  To use F. G. Bailey's terminology, he was using his "moral mind," which flouts evidence and reason to establish one's bona fides.  That's true of most discourse in such matters, including Greg Tate's as I've quoted him here.  But then, people who claim they don't see race are also using their moral minds.

Of course I see color, and because I'm a reasonably well socialized American I see "race" -- that is, I know the convoluted mythology America has invented around skin color, ancestry, culture.  But I know it's a mythology.  I don't claim to have escaped it completely; no one has, and that includes black people.  What matters is not that you see color, but what you think it means and how you act as a result.  That's why I immediately become wary when someone insists on the "reality" of race: are they getting ready to deploy some version of mystical biological determinism?  Robert Reid-Pharr wrote in Once You Go Black: Race, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007):

While the black body so ably described by postwar Black American nationalists may be a marker of a more politically efficacious political rhetoric, it also seems to be the last depository of wildly simplistic thinking regarding Black American history and culture.  George Jackson, arguably the most sophisticated of mid-century nationalist intellectuals, makes the point nicely:

My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing.  I recall the very first kidnap.  I’ve lived through the passage, lain in the unmarked, shallow graves of the millions of fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, “unto the third and fourth generation,” the tenth, the hundredth.

I continue to return to this rather stunning quote from Jackson precisely because the beauty and economy of the prose belie the incredible sloppiness of the thought.  Jackson has no recall, no memory whatsoever of the African continent, the middle passage, enslavement.  Indeed in his admittedly noble efforts to reclaim the lost African body he shuts himself off from the most basic realities of Black American history and culture.  That is to say, confronted with the reality that there is no authoritative history of the slave, Jackson constitutes a sort of Baroque poetics of the black body – fecund modifier substituted for stale fact [127].

I would add that I've also become wary of "black bodies," a critical-theory term* which seems to have spread like a radioactive virus through public discourse on race in America in the past few years.  "Black bodies" may serve as a reminder that your mind doesn't matter, it's your body that the police will seize and punish.  I suspect that Rodney Harrison claimed that Colin Kaepernick wasn't black (in an attempt to discredit the latter's protest against racist oppression in the US) because Kaepernick's adoptive parents were white -- as though that would have shielded him from racial profiling or other racist practices.  Similar accusations were made against Barack Obama during his first Presidential run, as I recall.  (I wonder if Harrison would claim that a white kid raised by black parents wasn't white?)  But I'm not sure that's all that "black bodies" is meant to imply.  So far it seems to be just a buzzword, which is harmless enough.  What would speaking of "white bodies" signify, I wonder?  So I'm still listening carefully when a black speaker refers to "black bodies," to try to hear what else is being said.  I've found it instructive, for example, when I hear (or am tempted to use) the word "racial," to substitute "racist" -- "racial epithet," for example, or "racial language."  Sometimes "racial" is meant to suggest that whatever is going on is inspired if not caused by "race," when it clearly comes from racism.  It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's real, and useful to bear in mind.

"Race and difference keep mattering," Greg Tate wrote, and he's right.  Rather than deny difference, as do people who claim not to see it, we need to see it and think about it.  What would those people do if they did "see" color?  But as Barbara and Karen Fields insist, racism doesn't happen "because of" race; "race" was invented -- "constructed" might be the right word here after all, because the term already existed, with different meanings, long before it took on the meanings we are used to in the US today -- to rationalize the oppression that some people wanted to impose on others.  The same is true of the sex/gender oppression that Tate apparently wants not to see.  What does he see?  What does he not see?

(The title of this post, by the way, comes from a relevant poem by the radical poet Muriel Rukeyser.)

* I'm not certain about this, but my impression is that this particular use of "bodies" comes from Michel Foucault's declaration that instead of speaking of sexual orientations, we should rather speak of "bodies and pleasures."  If I'm right, references to "black bodies" or "queer bodies" obey this marching order while misunderstanding it.

U-G-L-Y, You Ain't Got No Alibi!

Avedon links to a lot of good material in her latest post at the Sideshow, so go and check it out.  (Including the above image.)

Something occurred to me when I read Avedon's remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton's call to increase the minimum wage to $12.  (Which is better than Obama's target for it; I suspect both of them are trying to position themselves as moderates, between the extremists who want to raise it to $15 and those who want to abolish it.)  I'd been thinking inchoately about this for some time, at least since I wrote this post right after Obama's election in 2008, but it finally worked its way up to consciousness.

I notice that a lot of Clinton's boosters are stressing not how good her positions are -- perhaps because they know full well her postions aren't good -- but how important it supposedly is that we have a woman president. Here's the thing: it isn't important, it isn't important at all that we have a woman president, just that it was not important at all that we have a black president. It's a nice detail, but if you really oppose racism and sexism, the plumbing or pigmentation of the President is not important. What we need is not a woman president or a black president, but a good one. (Obama has been mediocre at best, and often quite bad.) Sex and skin color are not qualifications. I'm not sure that even Bernie Sanders will be a good president -- but hey, isn't it important that America have its first Jewish president? He might be better than the rest of the field, and I'm willing to vote for him, but I am not a cheerleader for anybody, and I do not trust cheerleaders.

Is He a Euphemism-Friend, or Just a Friend?

The kind of erotic teleology I criticized in Susan Sontag turns up elsewhere in other forms, of course.  For example, in William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America (Harrington Park Press, 2006), Benemann declares, "Male friendship may content itself with handshakes and backslaps, but male love yearns to be eternal" (19).

To begin with, this is a false antithesis, between "friendship" and "love."  Part of the problem of course is the ambiguity of the word "love."  One would expect someone writing an ostensibly scholarly work of history to be more careful using a word that is applied to such a wide range of feelings and relationships.  On one hand, "love" has often been used between same-sex friends, in ways that confuse moderns but also confused and upset their contemporaries.  Benemann knows this, as he shows when he asks why, "If this discourse was common for the era … why did [Alexander] Hamilton’s literary editor irretrievably obliterate part of [Hamilton’s] letters to [John] Laurens?" (xii).

"Love" is very often the word used for erotic desire and for copulation in popular culture.  In the Doors' song "Love Me Two Times," "love" can't really mean anything but "fuck."  Even granting that it's partly euphemistic -- a song with the title "Fuck Me Two Times" would never have been released on a major label in the 1960s -- it also reflects common usage.  But at the same time, "love" in common usage also refers to feelings that have no erotic component, from loving ice cream to loving one's child to loving one's country.  Everyone knows this, I think, but everyone can be amazingly obtuse when parsing other people's use of the word "love," refusing to consider the possibility that those others could have loved someone without wanting to bone them.  And here I'm just talking about contemporary use of the word "love," not its use in centuries past, when (arguably) different expressions of love were permissible and conventional.

On the other hand, "friend" has been used, sometimes but not always as a euphemism, to refer to erotically involved same-sex partners.  For example, the American gay writer Paul Monette wrote in the late 1980s:

I always hesitate over the marriage word.  It's inexact and exactly right at the same time, but of course I don't have a legal leg to stand on.  The deed to the house on Kings Road says a single man after each of our names.  So much for the lies of the law.  There used to be gay marriages in the ancient world, even in the early Christian church, before the Paulist hate began to spew [sic] the boundaries of love.  And yet I never felt quite comfortable calling Rog my lover.  To me it smacked too much of the ephemeral, with a beaded sixties topspin.  Friend always seemed more intimate to me, more flush with feeling.  Ten years after we met, there would still be occasions when we'd find ourselves among strangers of the straight persuasion, and one of us would say, "This is my friend."  It never failed to quicken my heart, to say it or overhear it.  Little friend was the diminutive form we used in private, the phrase that is fired in bronze beneath his name on the hill [Borrowed Time, 24-25].

More relevant to Benemann's work, friendship has often been a passionately imagined and sought ideal, far from his trivializing caricature.  Many men have dreamed of finding an idealized male friend.  Friendship isn't something that just happens by itself, it's an ancient cultural phenomenon celebrated in literature and history.  In Alan Bray's The Friend (Chicago, 2003), he quotes a sixteenth-century English writer, William Cornwallis, who in an essay "On Loue" wrote:

I laugh, and wonder, at the straunge occasions that men take now a dayes to say they love: If they meete with a fellowe at a Feaste, or in a Potte, If their Delightes bee enye thing a kinne, or theyr Faces anye thing alike; If their Countries be one, or their lands neare adioyning; if they be both rich, or both poore, or indeed if their new-fangled inuentions can finde out any occasion, they are sworn brothers, they will liue and die together: but they scarce sleep in this mind, the one comes to make vse of the other; and that spoyles all; he entered this league not to impaire, but to profite himselfe [quoted by Bray, 122].

Bray's discussion of this passage goes off onto some odd tangents, but he does supply the useful information that Cornwallis, however "hostile" he is to friendship, is writing about something real:

The two officials in Chaucer’s Freres Tale swear brotherhood as spontaneously as in Cornwallis’s characterization (or as the future king Edward II and Piers Gaveston are said to have done) and the peasant farmers in Chaucer’s Pardoners Tale swear brotherhood in a tavern.  As Cornwallis implies, sworn brotherhood was indeed used to reinforce bonds of local friendship between men who were neighbors, and his description that “they will liue and die together” is an accurate account of the form that they vow of two sworn brothers recognizably took [123]. 

Bray was concerned to counter the notion that men entered into friendship and/or sworn brotherhood merely for material advantage. That seems an unlikely motive anyway, if both men were poor, but I don't think that Cornwallis was saying that all male friendship involved a desire to "profite himselfe."  What I took away from Cornwallis's animadversions is that some men were so eager to find a soul mate that they'd pledge eternal brotherhood simply because they had some trivial trait in common, led on by literary depictions of friendship at first sight.  Cornwallis comes across like the forerunner of a twentieth-century advice columnist, warning girls not to give their hearts too freely or quickly, because boys will just play with their feelings in hopes of getting laid.  Or the evangelical writer quoted in James Barr's Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1977, page 331), "To share a common interest in Sunday School work is not, in itself, a decisive indicator that you should get married."  But the warning that some smooth talker will play on your feelings for his own profit assumes that your feelings are involved.

If late-twentieth century American males of my and Benemann's generation were intimidated by the threat of fag-baiting from expressing deep passionate friendship with more than a "handshake," they were outliers historically and cross-culturally.  The popularity of male-bonding stories in the notoriously homopohobic American midcentury indicates to me that many men at least fantasized about finding an Ideal Friend.  Of course one way to get around that fact is to interpret all the literature of friendship as covertly erotic, and that's as big a mistake as assuming that none of it is.

Consider, for instance, the letters Benemann mentions from Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens.  They're fairly famous among people interested in the subject ever since Jonathan Ned Katz published three pages of excerpts in his Gay American History (Thomas Y. Crowell) in 1976, with extended commentary on them.  (Notice that publication date.  I'm a bit baffled by Benemann's claim to an interviewer that "Most people have assumed that therefore it’s almost impossible to do research on early gay American history ... I just decided that probably was not the case."  Maybe "most people" assume that, but not queer historians -- a fair amount has been published on the subject, and Katz's book was a breakthrough thirty years before the publication of Male-Male Intimacy in Early America.  On Hamilton and Laurens, if not elsewhere, Benemann is retracing trails blazed by Katz.)  Katz wrote that Hamilton (yes, the Alexander Hamilton) and Laurens were "part of that close male circle surrounding General Washington -- his 'family,' as the general called them (453).  In April 1779 the twenty-two-year-old Hamilton wrote to the twenty-five-year-old Laurens:

Cold in my professions, warm in [my] friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it m[ight] be in my power, by action rather than words, [to] convince you that I love you.  I shall only tell you that 'till you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you.  Indeed, my friend, it was not well done.  You know the opinion I entertain of mankind, and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others.  You sh[ould] not have taken advantage of my sensibility to ste[al] into my affections without my consent.  But as you have done it and we are generally indulgent to those we love, I shall not scruple to pardon the fraud you have committed, on condition that for my sake, if not for your own, you will always continue to merit the partiality, which you have so artfully instilled into [me] [quoted by Katz, 453-454].

As Benemann says, if Hamilton's effusiveness was conventional in its day, why did his literary editor obliterate parts of his letters to Laurens?  But on the other hand, what the editor published is unsettling to readers two centuries later; so maybe it was conventional after all.  I'm becoming suspicious of the word "conventional" in this kind of context, though: it usually seems to be used to dismiss the possibility of personal connection and emotion on the writer's part: Oh, he didn't really mean it, he was just saying that.  But why?  Convention is as likely to provide a way of expressing feelings where one might otherwise be inarticulate.  It also plays a role in situations governed by unequal status, as in petitions or declarations of fealty to those more powerful than we are.  It's one thing to close a letter with assurances that the writer is the recipient's humble and obedient servant, and another to run on and on as Hamilton did in these letters.

Which isn't to say that Hamilton was necessarily hoping to get into Laurens's breeches.  Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't; I can't tell from what he wrote, and I don't think anyone else can.  The passages blacked out by Hamilton's editor might settle the question, or they might not.  But Hamilton also told Laurens repeatedly that their fellow officers ("the lads"), including Washington, sent him their "love" (Katz, 455, 456).  It's fun to fantasize about orgies in the General's tent, but I see no reason to believe they happened.  On the other hand, if Hamilton wanted to be merely conventional, he could have written something other than "love" there.  "Their respects," maybe; or "their best regards."  There were surely warm personal bonds of affection, not just duty, between these men, as is common among men who've served together in wartime.  "Love" is, as I said, an ambiguous word, and a person will use it in different senses in rapid succession.  That's what makes it so difficult to tease out the times when erotic "love" is meant.

It now seems to me that we will never know for sure which declarations of same-sex love spoke for erotic desire and which didn't, except in those rare cases where the eroticism is explicit.  Benemann reluctantly acknowledges this, but I think he still hopes that someone someday will find a key that unlocks the hidden copulations, so that we can know who was having sex and who wasn't.  To say this is not to say that there weren't some people who were homosexual in the sense of desiring, loving, and copulating with persons of their own sex, and uninterested erotically in persons of the other sex.  But we're unlikely ever to know who they were.  To recognize this fact is not to refute Benemann's largely straw-man accusation (and category mistake) against social constructionists, but it doesn't help him much either.  All he succeeded in doing in this book was dredging up archival material about male friendship and, in a number of cases, some rather "flamboyant" types who were suspected (or taunted with suspicions) of sodomitical conduct in their own day, whether or not the suspicions were justified.  In most cases we can't even be sure they were, since fag-baiting was on Benemann's showing as popular a political and cultural pastime in the 18th and 19th centuries as it is now, and fag-baiters often don't even care if the men they attack are really queer or not.  (Sometimes, then as now, fag-baiters hope to distract attention from their own proclivities.) 

Incidentally, this might be the place to recall that Benemann began his book with the declaration that

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].

When I first wrote about Male-Male Intimacy in Early America, I declared my skepticism about this passage.  Now that I've finished the book, I can say that he didn't make a case for it -- indeed, he seems to have forgotten about it.  He was making a profession of faith here, a credo, not drawing a defensible (let alone defended)  historical conclusion.  Which is okay, we all have convictions that matter to us despite a lack of evidence to back them up.  But it doesn't inspire confidence in Benemann's historical judgment.

So what can we do, we who are interested in our queer forerunners?  I think that the ongoing search for suggestive material in the archives is worthwhile and should continue (of course no one needs my permission or approval to do it); one thing that bothered me about Male-Male Intimacy is how much of Benemann's material is, like the Hamilton letters, quite old hat to anyone who's followed the gay historical quest, and Benemann doesn't seem to acknowledge this.  It may be, in fact it's likely, that previously unknown material will be uncovered.  But there's no reason to believe that great troves of accounts of explicitly erotic material will surface; mostly it will be more ambiguous romantic effusions, at least until the twentieth century or so.  Instead of (or in addition to) lamenting this, we should think about what it means and what it might mean to us.

I've been looking for a passage I remember from Katz's Gay American History (and if I find it I'll add it to this post), in which he argued that we should recognize the passionate male-male and female-female friendships as gay (or proto-gay, or gayish), even when we don't know whether they involved genital stimulation.  Sex is good, and important to acknowledge when we can document it, but I think we should stress the presence of love in these relationships, love that was intensely expressed enough to make many heterosexuals uncomfortable.  It should also be remembered that even when we do know that people in the past, or in non-Western societies, were engaged in same-sex copulation, the homophobic and heterosexual-supremacist response has been to deny its reality or significance.  Because of that it may be a waste of time to try to prove that Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens were doin' it; since both of them married, apologists for heterosexual supremacy will deny that any copulation they enjoyed with each other 'counted.'  So let's insist that Hamilton's love for Laurens, and all the other same-sex loves we know about, counted.  It may not have been "homosexuality as we know it today," but it sure wasn't heterosexuality as we know it today either.  These letters and all the other great love literature between males and between females are part of gay and lesbian and bisexual history, which is part of human history.

The Question Is, Which Is To Be Master -- That's All

As I continue to read Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay, I sympathize with his difficulties in trying to make sense of the styles of sex between males that he encountered in small-town South Africa.  I'm struggling with the same problem myself, and I don't pretend to have solutions.  Still, I think other writers have done a better job of describing the complexities of the subject -- Annick Prieur, for example, writing about cross-dressing feminine homosexuales in Mema's House.  Where Reid writes about a South African lady changing from his respectable church-lady outfit ("a bottle-green dress and a white shirt, headscarf and a matching belt", 98) into informal hair-salon wear ("tight-fitting white pants, stylish boots, earrings that were long enough to brush his shoulders and a delicate pink blouse that cascaded down his left thigh, offset with an orange jacket"):

There would be nothing remarkable about women church members changing from formal to informal wear, but because Nathi was not a woman, but a lady, his clothing was part of an ongoing and self-conscious performance of femininity.  In both churches and hair salons, gays frequently presented themselves as feminine, but in these two different spaces there were, of course, completely different styles [98].

Like many writers who refer to performativity, Reid seems to think that only drag queens and fairies are performing femininity.  As I understand it, though, that approach recognizes that even the born-female, XX-chromosome born-female church lady is "performing" femininity just as self-consciously.  She, or her daughter, may well dress in "completely different styles" in other spaces.  (Note to self: read Gender Trouble before the summer is quite over!)  Femininity and masculinity are not single, monolithic constructs.  But even so, changing outfits for different environments is part of the normative femininity that ladies aspire to.

Prieur, by contrast, writes:

So the jotas have considerable scientific support when they claim to have been born both feminine and homosexual. Still it seems a paradox that these persons who so actively go about forming their femininity, through makeup, dressing, and bodily transformations, at the same time insist that they are born feminine and are merely undertaking the necessary adjustments. Even if I am open to the belief that there are some innate or early founded differences that orient some more toward a heterosexual and other more toward a homosexual preference, some toward a rather masculine and other towards a rather feminine personality, I also believe that the actors' own essentialist interpretation of these differences accentuates them, polarizes them, and creates binary oppositions out of a continuum. A theory of innate factors cannot offer an exhaustive explanation of homosexuality [115].

Again, she is skeptical of the vaunted femininity of her informants:

Others, like Lupita, told me they liked housework. ... Having lived with some of them, however, I have good reason to doubt that they really like housework that much. Confronted with a stack of dirty dishes their femininity evaporates, and they start to resemble lazy teenagers. Not that this is any proof that their femininity is superficial - I suspect their sisters are not always fond of doing the dishes either. But their sisters can refrain from liking without much ado. (That they lack the same possibilities to escape it is another question) [176].

Prieur and Reid are writing about analogous milieux, though her vestidas live in Mexico City, not a small town (the country/city binary plays a major role in Reid's analysis).  The odd thing, though, is that Reid has so far been claiming that ladies are social women,  just as their gents are socially men, because in their culture gender trumps bodies and sexual orientation is determined by gender rather than sexual object choice.  (As I've argued before, if gender really did trump body configuration in this construction, effeminate men would pair up at least sometimes with butch women. but it doesn't work that way.)  On this logic, there should be no cultural difference between a lady with a penis and a woman with a vagina.  But there definitely is.

So, for instance, Reid writes about

a context where transgression of moral and social norms appeared to be determined not so much by sexual acts, but rather through the respect or transgression of gender boundaries. In other words, a heterosexual man could have sex with an effeminate gay without ruffling many feathers in the ambit of social decorum or jeopardizing his status as heterosexual. What does this way about the boundaries between (in Fuss’s formulation) the heterosexual ‘inside’ and the homosexual ‘outside’? Homosexual acts, per se, do not constitute homosexuality and same-sex practices can and do form part of heterosexual experience [39-40].

This is congruent with the common picture of Latin American activo/pasivo sex between males, where a man's manliness supposedly isn't compromised by penetrating another male, especially an effeminate one.  (However, "heterosexual" is as foreign a term and concept in this context as "homosexual.")  In practice, it's a bit more complicated than that:

The most pervasive [generalization] is that being gay in these environs is almost invariably synonymous with being effeminate or, in local parlance, a lady or sisButi. According to jolly-talk, ‘straight’ men can be ‘somehow bended’. Bhuti explained to me that in ‘location language’, the phrase ‘somehow bended’ refers to ‘straight’ men known or suspected of being available as sexual partners to gays. Those who are ‘somehow bended’ are also referred to as gents.

So it seems that there is a difference, or a distinction, between being a man and being a gent. And that distinction indicates sexual object choice as distinct from gender. Which is not quite what Reid has been saying.

These are important categories, as ‘straight’ men remain the primary object of desire for gays. Injonga also refers to a ‘gay butch’, someone who is attracted to and involved with gays, but who maintains a male social and sexual role in a same-sex relationship.

Sexual object choice again.

This term is almost the same as a gent, but the subtle distinction is that the term suggests a primary, albeit not exclusive, attraction or sexual involvement with gays [who are males, even if they are ladies - DM], whereas a gent is primarily heterosexual, in orientation, if not in practice.

Wait a minute. I thought the idea of ‘orientation’ (meaning ‘sexual object choice’) was utterly foreign to these kids. What I see here is a blurring of those clear boundaries, and it indicates an imagined distinction that may not really be a difference. It indicates that the ladies, at any rate, know the difference between a man who’ll have sex with feminine males on the side, because he's been "somehow bended," and a man who prefers to have sex with feminine males out of desire.

A lady is a femme, who ideally maintains a female social and sexual role in relation to a gent, a ‘somehow bended’ or a butch. This gender binary is respected and adhered to by both ladies and gents. It is an orthodoxy that was constantly confirmed and reinforced [or simply enforced] on daily practice and through gossip, banter and rumour. People were characterized and allocated a gender role according to this gender binary and usually the allocation seemed so self-evident that it was not worthy of comment: a lady was obviously a lady; a gent clearly a gent [60].

It also appears that non-gays in South Africa can tell the difference between gender and object-choice.  (Compare the Dominican girlfriend of the Dominican hustler I mentioned in my previous post, who wasn't convinced by her boyfriend's insistence that only the maricón he was living with was queer.)

Brian’s girlfriend discovered that he was seeing someone else when she found condoms in his room in Richard’s Bay on the KwaZulu-Natal coast. She confronted him about it. At first he told her it was another woman, but she was already suspicious. She took their child and left him, telling his mother that her son was gay. His mother denied this, saying, ‘No, I know Brian is a boy.’

But by local terms, he isn’t gay, he’s a man. So that much may be true.

But later she told Brian that he would have to ‘pack his things and go’ if he did not change his ways. Brian said that with the exception of his younger sister (whose husband also had sex with gays) his family did not accept him and spoke badly about gay people.

Hey, no problem, because Brian’s not gay. Right? Right?

However, after a short separation, Brian’s girlfriend returned. Brian said, ‘The mother of my child said no, she wants to go on with me because she loves me. So we are back together and we are still lovers. And now she is pregnant with our second child.’ He remained involved with his girlfriend, but he moved to Ermelo to put some distance between himself and his family. In Ermelo he had a primary gay partner, known amongst others as his ‘senior wife’, as well as various other gay partners. While his girlfriend knew that he had male lovers, she did not want to see them. His gay partners knew about each other. The protocol involved was that the ‘senior wife,’ Zithembe, would grant Brian permission before he took another gay lover. Zithembe was deferential to Brian, declining to be interviewed, for example, until he had received permission from his ‘husband’, Brian [64-65].

Nevertheless, "Family members can play an important role in domestic disputes.  When Wandile's boyfriend assaulted him, his family intervened and his boyfriend vowed never to beat him again" (90).

It sounds to me as though the idea that gent/lady sex is culturally indistinguishable from man/woman sex doesn't hold true for the whole culture; it holds sway mainly in gay circles, and it takes a lot of work to keep shoring it up, even there.  I'd say it's more wishful thinking than a real cultural norm; I think that distinction holds up because writers like Reid talk as though South African gay social constructions are determined by overall South African gender norms.  And just as one finds in Mexican vestida circles or among twentieth century inverts, "It is accepted as a truism that 'straight' men inevitably end up with women" (90): the invert's quest for true love, which requires a 'normal' partner, is doomed because a 'normal' partner can never really be satisfied with a partner of the same sex, even if he (or she) is of a different gender.

I also suspect that Reid may be overstating the dominance of the lady/gent model in South African homosexual practice.  Ladies are easy to study because they are visible and have a social presence in their communities; insofar as they are small-business entrepreneurs, they aim to stay in one place, unlike their often unemployed boyfriends.  As many researchers have found around the world, getting their gent partners to talk about themselves is a lot harder.  Since they insist, and their lady partners insist, that they are just regular men, they have no basis for building a community.  Reid brushes up against other models, also down-low, of sexual interaction between males.  His informant Clive, for example, also a country boy, "was first introduced to gay life in KwaThema, although he was no stranger to having sex with men. Since he was twelve he had had thigh sex with older male farm workers who brought him gifts or small amounts of cash. ‘We never kissed,’ he told me and they never spoke about it. Sometimes Clive dressed up a bit, in ‘ladies things’ (80).  No one has any idea how many such men there are, because they retreat into the shadows as soon as the sex is over.  If you're looking for "identities", as Reid is, such men may not be of much interest.

Reid also comes across evidence that the penetrator/receptor binary isn't absolute, but he relegates it to an endnote and an informant's remark that "There are things that happen behind closed doors" (96 note 22).  HIV transmission, a very serious matter in South Africa, would indicate that gents aren't as impenetrable as they or the ladies want to claim.  Some men are gents in one locale, ladies (in bed, at least) in another.  The cross-cultural evidence indicates that getting gents to talk about being penetrated is going be very difficult.

South Africans who don't fit comfortably into the lady/gent model don't have an easy time of it.  There's no indication, and probably no way to find out, how common they are, but Reid talked to several of them.  Things weren't very different in the pre-Stonewall (but still "modern" and "Western") United States, where people were pressured to fit into existing community categories.  One famous rebel was Audre Lorde, who resisted defining herself as either butch or femme, and so was regarded with distrust by other New York City lesbians.  This is why I've always been wary of "community": I quickly learned that, far from being an environment where I could Be Myself, it was a place where a different group of people would tell me who to be.  Some of Reid's informants come up against the same constraints, and they don't like them any more than I did.  What Reid calls the 'gay activist' model of homosexuality, tainted by association with the City, Modernity, and the West, can be a useful tool for carving out space in a gay community that is not much more tolerant of difference than the straight world is.

The Gender or the Sex?

I've begun reading Daniel Humphrey's new book Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European art Cinema (Texas, 2013).  I knew there were gay and bisexual characters in some of Ingmar Bergman's films; already from reading Humphrey's introduction I've learned that there were more than I knew about, and the prospect of a queer-oriented reading of Bergman's work has promise.  I was also aware of the connection between European art films and sexual frankness in 1950s America, and that some "art houses" which specialized in showing such films later became porn houses, some of which harbored male-on-male cruising and on-site sexual activity.  But the mainstream movie palaces were also proverbial cruising places.  One thing I've begun to notice is that Humphrey seems unaware of this connection, of the overlap of the cultural uses to which film and its temples were put.

So, for example, Humphrey cites work on film narrative by the critic David Bordwell, who wrote that "in the art film, 'personal psychology may be indeterminate'" and that in many art films "'scenes are built around chance encounters, and the entire film may consist of nothing more than a series of them, linked by a trip ... or aimless wandering."  Humphrey then suggests "for the post-World War II queer spectator, a historically specific sense of queer relationality -- the habits of disaffected homosexuals searching for their lost reflections, the closeted queers' search for their equally guarded kindred spirits, the drawn-out experience of cruising urban landscapes for fellow travelers" (45).  Bordwell, according to Humphrey, prefers this "connotation-based" approach to cinematic narrative and exalts it for its "ambiguity" (46).

There may be something to this, but I have some objections.  First, although cruising has the episodic quality Humphrey assigns to it, it is also goal-directed, seeking a particular kind of connection.  It may also lead to finding community, among those queers who stick around in the cruising places to socialize.  Second, I think Humphrey is conflating the post-Stonewall closet with its predecessor: the former means not telling straight acquaintances that one is gay, the latter means cutting oneself off from the fellowship of other queers.  "Coming out" (though not "out of the closet") in the pre-Stonewall period meant making one's debut in gay society, and having one's first homosexual copulation.  The "search" Humphrey mentions was the quest for the secret society, though in large cities it wasn't all that secretive or "guarded."

Most important, even the supposedly unambiguous Hollywood mode of narrative had its ambiguities, which gay fans made the most of, looking for in-jokes, double meanings, and the like.  Other gay critics have pointed out that there were plenty of gay people working in Hollywood, most of them in crew and technical areas, but also writing, acting and sometimes directing, and their sensibilities would have been reflected in their work, sometimes deliberately.  There's a large literature, starting with Parker Tyler and Vito Russo, on queer readings of Hollywood film.  Perhaps the style of European art film would have signified homosexuality in different ways, but gay moviegoers didn't have to go to art houses to find plenty of material for speculation, gossip, and wishful thinking.  I'm wondering if Humphrey isn't, to some extent, constructing a false dichotomy here.

Another area where I quibble is in his discussion of lighting and close-up styles for actors.  Humphrey writes that some European art films' "sexual allure also results from the ways in which the male actors are lit and photographed, reinforcing a sense of passivity, at least to an American spectator, which is in strong contradistinction to the ways men were typically lit and photographed in the classical Hollywood cinema ... Beginning with American motion pictures of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the image of women was concretized by using the rich, eroticizing chiaroscuro patterns that the artists Rembrandt and Caravaggio had conceived for their subjects centuries before, while male protagonists increasingly became more functionally illuminated through what cinematographers refer to as 'flat', or high-key, lighting" (42).  European art films continued to light male characters with those "rich, eroticizing chiaroscuro patterns" at least some of the time; Humphrey discusses Andrei Tarkovky's Ivan's Childhood (1962) at some length for its lighting of the male leads.

Again, there is something to this, but I still wonder.  Flat lighting of male stars in American films doesn't seem to have inhibited gay male (or straight female) fans from eroticizing them, even when they were not pretty boys in the mold of Rudolf Valentino, Ramon Navarro, or Ivor Novello.  Humphrey seems to assume that physical beauty means femininity, and that if men aren't lit and photographed in the same way Hollywood treats its women, they won't be attractive.  This is a weird kind of essentialism to my mind: far from being queer, it's built on the third-sex, quasi-heterosexual model so dear to 19th century and 20th century sexologists, and to not a few gay people.  But as I've pointed out before, this model is incoherent.  It assumes that erotic desire is male, and that eroticism always consists of an active subject (assumed to be male) and a passive (assumed to be female) object.  This assumption underlies a lot of cinematic "gaze" theory, pioneered by Laura Mulvey, which essentializes the camera as male, and the actor of either sex as female.  (As I recall, Mulvey was much more tentative in her 1975 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" than her disciples have been.)  But if a woman, let alone a sissy boy, gazes longingly at Clark Gable (whose advent, Humphrey declares, "portended the end of that era in mainstream Ameridan cinema, one that has never really been repeated" [44]), the woman/sissy becomes the man and the man becomes the sissy/woman.  The essentialist-despite-himself Gore Vidal claimed that this was why Hollywood actors became alcoholics: being subject to the objectifying gaze of the camera was emasculating, because men aren't supposed to be looked at.  (Actresses, he claimed, took up knitting, though I guess nobody told Judy Garland.)  Maybe this is true, but to me it suggests that gender needs to be decoupled from the Gaze and other related concepts.  Gender is accidental, not essential, in such analysis.

Like just about everybody these days, Humphrey seems to be of at least two minds about "gender."   He straddles the line between using the word in its 1970s feminist/sociological sense (where gender as behavior or personality traits is distinguished from biological, bodily sex) and its present confused and confusing sense, where it means both body and behavior.  So, for example, he opposes "male" and "feminine" several times.  "Male" is a sex, so its opposite should be "female."  But on page 109 he writes:

In many of his writings, Freud seems beholden to the conventional thought of his day, which suggests that it can only be a person’s “feminine” sensibility that desires to have sex with a “masculine” partner, and vice versa. In other words, masculinity requires femininity in its sexual object, and femininity requires masculinity in its sexual object. While Freud would later develop a theory of homosexuality in ways that seem more in line with contemporary understandings, only with the development of queer theory would scholars fully conceptualize homosexual and heterosexual object choices as distinct from – although not completely unrelated to – female and male gender positions. Meanwhile, the notion of bisexuality remained problematic in psychoanalysis; while it stood for a mere masculine-feminine mixture in the person, it was often discussed by Freud as part of a heterosexual-homosexual dynamic in the psyche. Put simply, Freud made the mistake of confusing gendered identity with sexual object choice. 

This problem is hardly confined to Freud or "the conventional thought of his day."  The tendency to assume that erotic desire for females is innately male, and vice versa, is older than Freud and persists in the present, where it's the unspoken assumption that structures scientific study of "sexual orientation."

Having just finished reading Queer Bergman, I've begun to reread Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women (Harper, 1993), which shows how women who loved other women were assumed from antiquity until the 19th century to be physical hermaphrodites, with oversized clitorises or possibly even genuine penises that came bursting out of their bodies like a Ridley Scott alien (only lower down).  The savants who postulated this couldn't decide whether the penis produced or merely enabled desire for women.  Nowadays, however, gender itself has been reified into a discrete matrix of traits and behavior, somehow radically separate from the body yet still obscurely tied to maleness or femaleness.

I can't blame Humphrey for succumbing to the conventional thought of his day, but this passage indicates that he can see the way out.  Queer Bergman was well worth reading, and I'll probably check out some of the early Bergman films Humphrey discusses, as well as look again at some of the later ones.

¿Por Qué?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook yesterday, and I thought it let some interesting cats out of the bag, so to speak.

For pinche gabachos que no saben español, here's a rough translation:

The Girl: "Don't talk to him, baby, he's a NERD"
The Nerd: "Why do they prefer the dogs?" 

YEARS LATER
The Girl: "Hey, handsome, remember me?"
The Nerd: "THE NERD doesn't remember anybody, you."
The Girl: "Why can't I get a good man?"

The friend who shared this picture seemed to identify with the Nerd, which is funny because (with all due respect and lust) he's much more like the tattooed chulo.  He certainly can't complain that girls aren't interested in him.  But what I wondered as I looked at it was why the Nerd wants the bimbo. 

I put it too bluntly.  I don't really mean to put the girl down, she's a human being too.  But if we're going to call Papi Chulo canalla (which must be related to canaille, defined by Webster as "riffraff, rabble, proletarian," then it's reasonable to ask why the Nerd is so interested in a girl of the same class.  Does he have fantasies of rescuing her, educating her, or has he thought that far ahead?  What does he imagine they'll talk about?  What kind of relationship will they have other than Owner and Trophy, and how proud he'll be to walk down the halls with her on his arm?  Lately I've read that Marilyn Monroe was personally much smarter than her screen persona, and while that's probably true (how could she not be?), I also wonder if it's more puffery of the kind that sought to tell me that Dan Quayle and George Bush were really closet intellectuals.  In any case, I doubt very much that Arthur Miller was interested in Monroe's mind: he wanted his own personal Sex Goddess, which is probably one reason why the marriage didn't last.  A sex goddess in the end is just another person.

Or a sex god: If the Nerd were gay, chances are he'd be pursuing the Chulo himself, and then wondering why he couldn't find a nice guy.  In the real world the Chulo and the Nerd might be having it off in the back of a car somewhere, in return for the Nerd doing the Chulo's term papers.  That's actually a more realistic basis for a relationship, to my mind: it has room for mutual respect and even affection.  But the Nerd isn't really interested in the Girl as a person: he wants her on his arm, to impress the other guys with his manhood.  This is the paradigmatic high school pattern anyway: a few golden kids rule the school as chief players in the fantasies of some of the other kids, and even more of the teachers and administration, until they flame out at graduation or soon after.  

As Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners) put it, in each school there will be a few lucky children with this charisma.

All the girls promptly fall in love with the boy who has this air, and all of the boys fall in love with the girl who does.  Just as automatically, they all decide that they despise all the other members of the loved one's sex, most especially those with the bad taste to admire their unworthy selves.  (...There is no such thing as a thirteen-year-old whose affections have been aroused by the charm of vulnerability.)

As I've pointed out before, I was a thirteen-year-old whose affections could be aroused by the charm of vulnerability; I don't believe I'm unique.  Other kids in my school were dating and even finding their eventual spouses without being Alphas.  When I look back at the boys I was attracted to in those days, I don't recognize any of them as the kind of boys I should, according to Martin, have wanted.  They were a motley bunch, blue-collar to working-class, a variety of looks and builds.  None were star athletes: the one closest to that type was kind of sexy (as far as a fifteen-year-old virgin could tell), but such an asshole that I never had much interest in him.  And I never got to do anything about my attractions until I was three years out of high school, at college; I've never actually laid hands on anyone I went to high school with.

... If you indulge in your inclination to insult those who look soulfully up to you, it will come back to haunt you.  The reason is that while it is extremely common for the desirability of a person to change radically after his early adolescence -- sometimes during it, from one year to the next -- everyone goes through life with a vivid memory of insults and kindnesses (if any) experienced when very young.  The popular boy or girl for whom you lusted from afar may live to bore you silly, which is an excellent reason against early marriage, but the beautiful creature you slighted when she had pimples or he stuttered will be only too pleased to break your heart for you when it gets big.  And that, dear children, is why we must learn to be polite to others.*

A timeless morality that, and something like it underlies the cartoon above.  But it's not quite the whole story.  Martin is perpetuating a myth that has been accepted even by academic students of human behavior: that a hierarchy of Cool organizes all adolescents.  But as Barrie Thorne showed in her Gender Play (Rutgers, 1993), this "Big Man Bias" in research on boys covers only part of any given cohort (97ff). Male researchers, especially, tend to gravitate to the Alphas in a school: "I was there to do a study not to be a friend to those who had no friends" sniffed one (quoted in Thorne, 99).  Martin also assumes that this jostling for status drives everyone in a community, an assumption belied by her acknowledgment that there are kids "with the bad taste to admire their [i.e., the Alpha wannabes'] unworthy selves."  On her assumptions, that shouldn't be happening: all eyes should be fixed on the Heathers at this stage of life.  Obviously, not all are.  Some of them are already too busy growing up to be much concerned with the budding power brokers among their peers.

This, I suspect, is a matter of temperament, not of intelligence. To (I admit) overinterpret the second panel wildly, not only does the Nerd still cling to seething resentment because a high school girl snubbed him years ago, he's sold himself out to the pursuit of money.  What kind of women does he pursue now?  Probably what Cynthia Heimel once called "Professional Girls," the high-maintenance women that rich and powerful men compete for and pass around.  (Oh, not only rich and powerful men: I used to clash online with a right-wing militarist whose chief boast in life was that he'd been married to a "former Beauty Queen."  Of course he was bitter that she'd exacted maintenance in the divorce, but he still waved around his achievement at every opportunity: Hey, everybody!  I used to be married to a Beauty Queen!)  He lets other men, rather than his own desires and interests, set his standards -- though maybe being envied by other men is more important to him than interacting with women as people.  And he's probably still complaining indignantly that women don't appreciate him for who he really is, just for his money and status.  (If he's into men, their male equivalents will dominate his love life.  I gather that such a milieu gave us Ira Sachs's recent film Leave the Lights On, and Jonathan Galassi's book of poems Left-Handed.)

This post was actually headed in another specific direction; I'll pick up the thread in another post.

* Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated (Norton, 2005), 329.

Me for You and You for Me

Over at Yo, Is This Racist? Andrew Ti has been grappling with the question of interracial dating.  He's even broken his normal rule against follow-up questions.  It started here:

Anonymous asked: Why is it racist to say you just dont find blacks attractive? Its a matter of personal preference, in my opinion, but my friend keeps saying its racist.

Yo, dipshit, are you seriously unable to grasp the concept that “personal preference” can be racist as fuck?

... and continued here and here without really adding anything.

This is all really ironic, because as often as not white people who do date interracially will be accused of racism, of objectifying and exoticizing and colonializing and degrading their non-white partners; or, in the case of their non-white partners, collaborating in their objectification.  For example, in his Global Divas (Duke, 2003), Martin Manalansan IV reported:

In a 1993 presentation to the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), a gay Asian group in New York, Gene Chang, a student at Columbia University, transported the rice queen phenomenon into the realm of the psychopathological ... He suggested that the rice queen’s desire for Asian (young and young-looking) men is really a mask for pedophilic tendencies. He supported his contention by graphing the “incompatibility of physical attributes” (height, age, penis size, and so on) between Asians and Caucasians in personal ads. Chang further explored the exploitative and “imperialist” possibilities of encounters between a Caucasian and a young Asian by examining mainstream gay porn films. He contended that the Asian gay man is relegated to passive sexual (as insertee) and social roles (i.e., masseur, houseboy, and so on). What is interesting in this presentation is Chang’s leap from his “findings” of corporeal asymmetry mapped out in personal ads to the contention of a rice queen's real pedophile identity.  Using statistical techniques and graphs, Chang charted the differences between Caucasian and Asian gay men in personal ads in terms of average height (two inches), weight (thirty to forty pounds), and age (fifteen to twenty years). He directly equated such differences with actual power inequality in gay Caucasian-Asian sexual politics [84-5].

This was too much even for Manalansan, who pronounced Chang's views "faulty" (while allowing that they are "prevalent ... among the growing number of politicized Asian gay men").  Chang's methodology is basically that of someone like Paul Cameron, the eminence grise of antigay pseudoscience on the Christian Right.  Manalansan admits that "these same 'radical' views construct the Asian gay man as devoid of agency" (85); I would add that on Chang’s logic, gay Asians who want older, bigger, hairier Caucasian men would be suspect of covert gerontophilia, if not bestiality.

(Incidentally, the gay Asian men I've known laugh to scorn the claim that rice queens are all tops.  But that's another post.)

I don't deny that there's racist stereotyping in a lot of sexual discourse; we live in a racist world.  This can be true whether you're attracted to people of other "races" or not: I don't know if it's universal, but it's clearly very common for people to generate expectations and fantasies about a person's personality from his or her looks. But that's a problem in people's intraracial sexual attitudes and interactions too.  As I've written before, nobody is attracted to everybody in their nominal pool of potential partners, be that pool defined by sex or class or race or any other attribute, and the reasons for interest or lack of interest are neither rational nor up for discussion.

What we do owe each other, I propose, is basic courtesy.  Yet it seems that many people, not all of them men, believe aggressive rudeness is the way to another person's heart.  Maybe it works some of the time: I recall seeing a batch of stories of how some heterosexual couples met, in which a recurring theme was Hate At First Sight; at some indefinable point Hate turned into Interest and then to Love.  I've never experienced such a pattern myself, but it seems to work for some people, at least sometimes.  Other people think that fetish talk (as I'll call it for lack of a better word) works.  In another one of the diatribes against rice queens that proliferated in the 1990s, a gay Asian writer quoted an obnoxious racially framed come-on he'd received online; when I read it to a straight white woman about my age, she snorted: He should see what women get!



(It's worth remembering, if you've seen She's Gotta Have It, that there's not a lot of detectable difference between the "dogs" and the "decent men" Nola accepts as boyfriends.)

On the other side, rejections should be made with courtesy.  "No, thank you," is enough.  There's no good reason to detail what is wrong with the person you're turning down.  I've had some strange conversations with (usually) gay men who, when called out for vilifying effeminate men, or older men, or fat men, or men of color, would insist that they had nothing against such men -- they just weren't attracted to them.  But we hadn't been talking about dating to start with; it was their wish that such men should not be visible in the Community, and shouldn't be having sex with anybody.  Now, that's bigotry.  I would tell them that I wasn't saying they had to date men they weren't attracted to, and they would flail around incoherently.  There's a difference between lack of romantic interest and wanting certain people to disappear altogether.

And yet, the only conclusion I can draw from Ti's position is that he believes people should date people they aren't attracted to, or don't want to date for some other irrational reason.  No one has to have a good reason for not wanting to date me, be it my age or my race or my general repulsiveness.  But if he goes off into a racist or ageist or other rant, he can expect that I'll give him a hard time for that.  By then I'll have retracted any invitation I might originally have offered anyway.  I suspect this ties into something I've written about before: the widespread belief that other people, especially hot people, should look past my meager looks and bone me for my personality -- but I don't have to.

So it doesn't matter why you're not attracted to someone who's attracted to you.  If you feel the need to tell me how repulsive people in your suitor's group are, though, I will probably have something to say about it.  I'll probably conclude with words to the effect of: I don't see why they'd have wanted to date a bigot like you anyway.

I also suspect there's something of the old "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" hangup going on here, the assumption that sexual desire is necessarily predatory and exploitative.  (Except when it's put on a pedestal and spiritualized, just as unrealistically.)  Sometimes rationalization and projection are involved: I'm not attracted to him, so he must want me for something bad.  And everything bad you can imagine is probably involved some of the time: some people do want to use you, others want to be used by you.  But you could say that about any human interaction.