Science Is Coming

Numerous people have encouraged me to watch The Big Bang Theory over the years, but since I don't have access to current TV shows I never got around to checking it out.  Then while traveling a couple of weeks ago I watched a bunch of syndicated episodes on the motel room TV.  (This was also how I got into The Golden Girls a few years ago.) They were entertaining enough that when I came back home I got the first-season DVDs from the public library, and I just finished watching the second season.  Eventually I expect I'll go through the whole set.

So, The Big Bang Theory is fun; it's a standard situation comedy, well-written and excellently cast.  It's built around four scientists -- or three scientists and an engineer if you're a purist, as they are -- based in a university near Los Angeles, plus a pretty blonde, young actress/waitress, newly arrived in LA from Nebraska at the beginning of Season One, who lives across the hall from two of them.  That the protagonists were scientists excited the show's fans, who celebrated the arrival of media representation for Sciento-Americans on a major network.  A physics professor was enlisted by the show's creators to fill in jargon for a veneer of authenticity.  According to an interview with him featured in the Season Two DVDs, the writers would write the script, with "[Science coming]" at key moments for him to fill in.

Not all the nerdiness is science, though.  The program is peppered with references to videogames, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books and their spinoff media, paintball, and other such cultural artifacts.  Without these elements I think the show would have had less mass appeal.  But it works, and it ran for thirteen years.  Looking at the full cast listing from IMDB, I see that a lot of nerd magnets had cameos, from George Takei, William Shatner, Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones to Bill Nye, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Buzz Aldrin.  And more.

So, is this representation?  I haven't hung around with enough scientists to say.  What I see is that the characters are a collection of stereotypes, which is to be expected in a comedy, but I'm intrigued that scientists and nerds evidently embraced their depiction as stereotypes, even caricatures: Sheldon the former child prodigy and Spock imitator from Texas, probably on the Spectrum; Howard the Jewish horndog engineer who lives with his mother and has a peanut allergy; Rajesh the Hindu who can only talk to women when he's drunk and must fend off his parents' nagging to get married; Leonard, Sheldon's lactose intolerant roommate but still kinda Everyman, who has more romantic success than his buddies but lusts hopelessly after Penny.  

Compare Will and Grace, another landmark of minority representation on network television.  Most of the gay men I know professed to hate it, mainly because of the flaming, flighty Jack, and it was widely attacked for its use of stereotypes.  That I recognized the justice of these complaints didn't keep me from enjoying the show.  The Big Bang Theory surprised me by its use not only of nerd stereotypes, but of ethnic ones.  I thought Political Correctness and Cancel Culture had destroyed comedy?

To me the guys in The Big Bang Theory seem to be normal TV sitcom guys, with their scientific pursuits and nerdy cultural consumption mere superficial details; they could be on Friends or Seinfeld, for example.  Their incomprehension and frustration with women is standard, as is their assumption that ordinary shlubs like them have the right to date and sleep with the hottest women.  (One variation I like is that Kunal Nayyar is not only the best-looking of the bunch but, when he has a couple of drinks and is able to talk to them, the most successful with women until the alcohol wears off.  Sheldon's hot sister Missy, for example, rebuffs Howard and Leonard but is very interested in Raj and frustrated when his voice cuts out in mid-encounter.  The actress Summer Glau also responds to him warmly in her cameo, but is also frustrated.  I'll be interested to see how this pattern continues as I watch more of the series.)

I've said before, in connection with Will and Grace, that great comedy characters like Jack or Karen Walker, or Sheldon and Howard, aren't supposed to be role models or positive images.  Just because they're fun to watch on the screen doesn't mean that you'd want to spend much time with them in real life.  For that matter a real live physicist, George Smoot, has a tiny scene putting Sheldon down in one episode of Season Two; he's terrible, even for a non-actor.  (I wonder how many takes they needed?)  Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, is a marvelous physical comic, exemplified by a scene in which Sheldon realizes he owes Penny a hug and delivers it with hilarious and yet touching pathos.  It's not reality, it's writing and acting.

More Good Gals with Cameras

Also today, Morning Edition interviewed Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma.  Lankford is one of a "working group" of Republicans who are "putting together a legislative package to address the U.S. policing system."

Gee, you know I hate to stereotype people, but I don't expect this working group to come up with anything worthwhile.  (To be fair, Congressional Democrats aren't likely to produce something better.)  Lankford, who is evidently an NPR regular, didn't say anything that would lead me to change my mind.

You could tell he was trying to be reasonable and moderate and sensible, which shows once again that it's a mistake to confuse moderation of tone with moderation of substance.  But to be fair, I suppose he was moderate if I set one extreme as putting a bounty on police heads and the other as putting all African-Americans into concentration camps.  Remember that, as Jim Hightower says, there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

The best thing Lankford mentioned was a provision for penalties (but what kind? a stern gaze from Vice President Mike Pence?) for officers who turn off their body cameras.  In the end, though, he fell back on evasion and both-sidesism when reporter Noel King asked him if he believed "that the U.S. policing system is inherently racist?"

Uh, no, I would not say that police officers are systemically racist.  [She did not ask him that.] This has been a big conversation that we've had around the country lately.  To me, calling all police officers or all police departments racist is like calling all protesters rioters. There are some rioters that are in the middle of some peaceful protesters, that are frustrated. There are some police officers that are bad apples in the middle of some police departments, and those police officers are frustrated that they've got some bad apples in the mix as well. So part of what we're focused on is how do we get greater training, how do we work through better transparency, so we can expose those individuals that in the middle of good police departments, among good officers that really do want to serve and protect the community, that are working very hard and we are grateful for the work that they're doing, but those officers also get frustrated, when someone commits a murder clearly as a police officer or does a racist act.  So this is one of those issues that we can't all paint all protesters with a broad brush or paint all police officers with a broad brush, we've gotta be able to treat all people as individuals.

The Senator overlooked a few things here. The first is that the protesters are not a taxpayer-funded and -armed, hierarchical organization; they are not, and can't be, their brothers' keepers. The police are under orders, the protesters for better or worse are not.  (Leave aside that an unknown number of rioters were outsiders, some were white supremacists out to discredit the protests while having a little fun, and some were police provocateurs.)  Second, the police hierarchy, including police unions, has protected police misconduct by "losing" and suppressing evidence, closing ranks against outside efforts to impose accountability and certainly not imposing any themselves.  A prime example of this is the 57 officers who resigned from the Buffalo Emergency Response Team to protest the suspension of their colleagues who'd shoved and injured a 75-year-old protester, but there also have been furious denunciations of any criticism by police leadership; I'm not aware of anything analogous from protestors.)  In general, those good, "frustrated" cops have not distinguished themselves by expressing their frustration or doing anything about it, though that too is probably due to fear of retaliation from their brothers for snitching.  It would be a service to those good officers to help them by breaking the grip of police culture with stronger accountability for the "bad apples."

To her credit, King pushed back when Lankhorn claimed that "even in the situation that happened with George Floyd, within hours those officers were fired and as they worked through the criminal justice system, being held to account."  King interrupted him:

Yeah, I would note though, I would note that the original police writeup on Mr. Floyd's death, er, killing was completely inaccurate, and it was because a girl, a 17-year-old girl, was recording it that we have that video, not because of body cams.  So I think when people talk about ending qualified immunity, it's that kind of thing that they're really after.

Lankhorn replied weakly, "I completely understand that, that's why we're trying to increase the use of body cameras so we can get more footage and get every situation and not have to rely on a bystander to get that."

But this is the problem: police reports in incidents like the killing of George Floyd are so routinely inaccurate -- that is, lies -- and body-camera footage has been "lost" or suppressed, often with city-government connivance, that we will need to rely on bystanders with phone cameras for the foreseeable future.  (Why is Rahm Emanuel still at large and an active Democratic Party insider, instead of being held to account?)

Some of the proposals Lankhorn described were mere cover-your-ass stuff, but it seems to me that penalties for turning off body cameras and the anti-lynching provision he mentioned could be encouragingly strong stuff, especially from Republicans.  I just don't expect them to go anywhere, certainly not on their own initiative.

Mnyeh, Typical

Jews Sans Frontieres has several good new posts up, dealing with accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his section of the Labour Party.  It happened that I read these a day after a Facebook friend linked to an article warning of newly increased anti-Semitism. These are important and contain valid information and arguments.  But I noticed something that bothered me here.

If you look at the way the Zionist movement is throwing its weight around in the UK ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, it's not an edifying spectacle. I mean it must be causing antisemitism given the unjust and unfounded nature of the allegations. 

And here:

Sadly it also has the effect of making ill-informed people subscribe to the old antisemitism because of course Dave [Rich, author of a book accusing the left of anti-Semitism] and others like him, including now a Home Office Select Committee have decided that Jews and Zionists are the same thing.  All very sad and very irresponsible.

I agree that many, probably most people react to the bad behavior of a few people by ascribing it to all members of the group they associate with the bad actors.  So, for example, I captured this specimen a year ago after the Paris attacks, in comments at another blog:

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. 

Since it's so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, I think it's important that everybody be vigilant against it, in themselves and others, and challenge it whenever you encounter it.  It's not something that occurs only far away; it happens all around us.

I disagree with JSF and the commenter, though, that this tendency has anything to do with being ill-informed, or knowing any members of the group being demonized.  For one thing, even scholars fall into it: though they are generally very well-informed, they can't or won't apply the knowledge they have.  And contrariwise, anytime someone hears about some bad behavior and asks themselves "What's wrong with those people?", meaning not the specific perpetrators but their country, their religion, their political party, they need to stop and catch themselves.  You don't need to be informed, beyond the knowledge that no group is completely homogeneous.  You don't need to know any Muslims.  The burden of proof, and it's a heavy one, lies on anyone who claims that They are all alike, They are all responsible.  The variety within groups is always enormous.  (Think of the old Jewish proverb Two Jews, three opinions.)

In particular, if someone is angry about what members of the IDF, or settlers in the Occupied Terroritories, or members of ISIS or al-Qaeda have done, and then decides to beat up (or worse) the Jew or Arab or random brown-skinned person in their neighborhood in revenge, the legal penalty should be heavy, but more important, they should be shunned and generally given a hard time by everyone in their neighborhood.  If such a person tries to justify their violence by pointing to crimes committed against the ocean, the penalty should be even stiffer.  If only because such thinking and behavior lessens the safety of everybody in the vicinity, it needs to be nipped in the bud, killed before it spreads.

P.S. I forgot to mention that in a review of Dave Rich's book that JSF quotes approvingly, the reviewer says:

Clearly, insofar as some remarks are antisemitic they need to be confronted. Conspiracy theories, e.g. that Israel founded Isis or that Jews escaped 9/11, should be dismissed out of hand. 

People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  Those aren't "conspiracy theories," they're simple falsehoods.  They may be used in conspiracy theories, but that's not quite the same thing.  But the important thing is that Dave Rich and the constituency he's writing for are conspiracy theorists, accusing the British left of deliberately fomenting anti-Semitism in order to bring down Israel.  As I've pointed out before, conspiracy theories are a thoroughly acceptable feature of mainstream political discourse, as long as they name the "right" conspirators.

But do read JSF's new posts.  Though they are about Britain, the same tactics are being used in the US.

Cherchez la Lesbienne

The other day at the public library book sale I picked up a charming book I've been wanting to read for a long time: Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend (Firebrand Books, 1988) by Yvonne Zipter, an informal look at lesbians and softball.  I just finished it, and enjoyed it all the way through.  Zipter, a freelance journalist and poet, had found softball a helpful community builder and enjoyable recreation, so when a friend suggested she write about it, she came up with this book.  It's not a monograph, but she did read up on women in sports, circulate questionnaires, and interview people.

Zipter spends some space on friction between jocks and feminists, though one of the book's virtues is that Zipter recognizes that the groups are not mutually exclusive, and is more interested in doing justice to the variety of views and politics among lesbians rather than finding a unifying essence despite everything.  (After all, the dyke cartoonist Alison Bechdel -- several of whose drawings illustrate the book -- has celebrated lesbian softball as played by her strongly feminist characters.)   But I was brought up short by this quotation excerpt from one of the questionnaires:

Stephie: "What do you mean by feminist?  When I think of feminists, I think of hairy armpits, hairy legs, ERA all the way ... I believe in equal pay, yes.  [But] if I was straight and went out on a date with a guy, I'd still want the guy to open the door for me.  I don't think I'm a feminist.  I believe in equal rights -- don't get me wrong -- and I believe in equal pay, but ... I know some women are feminists but I'm not like that" [139].

Hairy armpits?  Hairy legs?!  Why, they sound like a bunch of lesbians!

Let me remind the reader: the person quoted here is herself a lesbian.  Yet she deploys the crudest and most laughable stereotypes of lesbians to distinguish and distance herself from feminists.  (Her evident assumption that "ERA all the way" is an extreme radfem slogan is equally wack: the Equal Rights Amendment was a liberal-feminist project.  And. of course, it was meant to enforce the "equal rights" that Stephie claims to support.)  I wonder who holds the door for whom when Stephie goes on a date with another woman?

My first thought as I tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance this quotation ignited was that Stephie was an unreconstructed femme, but she could just as easily be a butch with hairy armpits and hairy legs herself.  One happily effeminate gay man I met in my first year in a gay community said, when he learned I was involved in the campus Gay Liberation Front, said to me: "The GLF? Aren't they all -- you know -- [hand wiggle] effeminate?"  He promptly burst out laughing, acknowledging his own queeniness, and I have never been able to decide whether Reggie was serious or was just performing one of his little comedy routines (he had several).  Later, though, I met other less-than-butch gay men who denounced other GLB student organizations in the same terms: Oh, they're all just a bunch of screaming queens.

If Stephie were a straight woman, even a straight feminist, she might use the same stereotypes to establish firmly that she's not a lesbian.  (The trope about holding the door open is still, astonishingly, with us, and invoked by women as well as men.)  Zipter also discusses the anxiety of women athletes trying to fend off the stereotype that they are lesbians -- even when they are lesbians.  That's the irony of Stephie's remarks: she's not really talking about feminists, she's talking about lesbians, even if she shaves her own legs and armpits.  It's a fascinating example of someone tripping over her own stereotypes, and of the difficulties people have with thinking about principles and politics.

Your Mama Was a Bulldagger

The San Francisco Gay Men's Salon is going to be discussing Stereotypes next month, and I've got my plane ticket and hotel room reserved.  On Thursday morning, by happy chance, Democracy Now! featured Alison Bechdel, the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home, and Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, the composer and writer, respectively, of the Broadway musical based on Bechdel's book. 

Fun Home was amazingly successful, in both its iterations.  The book won numerous awards (scroll down to Awards) and was listed as one of the best of its year by a wide range of queer and heterosexual publications, and Bechdel was awarded a Macarthur Grant.  The play won five Tony awards, and has garnered a surprising amount of media attention, with the authors and cast appearing on TV all over the place.

Fun Home (the book, anyway -- I haven't seen the play yet) is about a lot of things, and its complexity has been noticed by many readers and critics.  But it seems to me that when people are listing what it's about, they tend to leave out "stereotypes" -- which is a bit odd, when I consider that Bechdel herself is a butch lesbian, and one of the key numbers in the musical is "Ring of Keys," based on a brief but important scene in the book where very-young Alison, in a small-town diner with her closeted gay father, is riveted by the entrance of a butch woman delivery-truck driver.



When people talk about stereotypes, they almost always mean negative stereotypes.  As I wrote in this opinion piece for the IU student paper fifteen years ago, the people who seem to embody those negative stereotypes are often the Boogeymen / women who scare gay kids and keep them in the closet longer than they might have stayed otherwise.  When we speak to classes we're often asked how we feel about those stereotypes, do we think they hurt gay people and let down the cause?  Lip service is often paid to the drag queens and butch lesbian of Stonewall, but in general gay people present the sissies and bulldykes as problematic.

Until now, that is.  Bechdel always had a range of types in her decades-long comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and butch characters were presented as a part of the lesbian landscape.  But despite the strip's popularity and longevity, it never got the exposure that Fun Home has had, with a little girl singing an ode to a butch woman on national (international?) television as part of the Tony Awards ceremonies.  "Ring of Keys" also seems to be one of the standout numbers from the musical, and other performers are picking it up for recitals and auditions, to judge by what is turning up on Youtube.  (Another song from the show that's catching on is "I'm Changing My Major to Joan," in which college-age Alison celebrates her first sexual experience.)

Fun Home's composer Jeanine Tesori told the Tony Awards audience that "'Ring of Keys,' ... by the way, is not a song of love, it’s a song of identification, because, for girls, you have to see it to be it."  But Alison Bechdel told Democracy Now's Nermeen Shaikh:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alison, one of the things that you’ve said about the performance of this song is that having a child singing about desire in this interesting way is also revolutionary.

ALISON BECHDEL: Yeah, I mean, desire and identification, and the complex relationship between those things. We don’t want to think that children have sexualities, and so that feels very revolutionary, that this kid is discovering this part of herself.

Presenting a stolid butch woman as an object of desire is transgressive whether the desiring person is a child or an adult, and I think that's the most revolutionary thing about this song.  It's not at all the same thing as, say, Ru Paul's Drag Race, where (from what I've seen) it's more or less taken for granted that a drag queen is an object of desire because he's dressed and made-up and moves and performs in conventionally feminine ways.  It isn't the queen who's the object of desire, but his outfit. I'm not the right person to say, of course, because I'm not at all fascinated by these tropes of glamor and beauty; I know very well that many people, probably the majority, love them.  And I think that whatever my own feelings, it's important to remember that contrary to the demonization of the sissy, effeminate males appeal to many people, men and women alike.
 
My own "ring of keys" figure was the early Captain Kangaroo (notice the jingling ring of keys the Captain wields as he opens the Treasure House each morning).  I think I exaggerate these traits in hindsight, but it seems to me that the Captain was a great male role model for little children, with his gentle voice and the kangaroo-like pouches of his jacket pockets.  He did semi-drag at times, putting on a frilly apron to dust the Treasure House, but it was the absence of machismo in his character that I liked about him.

Myself, I like to think that the woman who so impressed young Alison was a mother, maybe even heterosexual.  Smash those stereotypes!  I'm thinking of the story the poet Minnie Bruce Pratt tells in S/He about her lesbian friends' reaction to her mother:

But my friends are interested in something else: "We expected a little white lady in gloves. You didn't tell us your mama's a bulldagger!"

She has been the woman who sat at the grey kitchen table with me and my father, her child and her husband. She was always the one next to the stove, within reach of the pot of field peas, more cornbread. I'm so used to this that I saw her hands simply as feminine, though they are huge, capable with iron mattock or steel knitting needles. I'm so used to her height and bulk, her sneakers and windbreaker, her taciturnity and her ease with women, that I've never noticed how much she looks like the white-headed coach of a women's softball team [54].

Oh, I suppose it's more likely than not that the woman young Alison admired was lesbian, given the times -- it would have been the mid-1960s -- though from what writers on the butch-femme experience have said, many hard butches had to be supported by their femmes because no one would hire them.  But any woman who had a job driving a truck and delivering food to restaurants would have had to dress in a "masculine" way.  Especially in those days, any woman who wasn't wearing a housedress or heels and a string of pearls would have been perceived as a roaring butch anyway.  I wonder if the adult Alison Bechdel, if she could see that woman again, would perceive her the way she did as a child; maybe so, since her father clearly did.

I think it was DOB honchos Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who observed, in their 1972 book Lesbian / Woman, that if you see a stomping butch in jeans, hiking boots, and backpack on the Appalachian trail, she'll probably have a husband and children with her; the lesbians will be tottering along in capri pants and flimsy shoes, trying to look feminine and fit into society. Besides, butch lesbians did become mothers with surprising frequency, as a surprising number of drag queens I've known became fathers. 

I suspect that the connection between desire and identification tends to be severed after puberty, often forcibly though not always or completely.  That's another stereotype: if we see someone who fascinates us, it must mean we want to copulate with them, right?  Or its flip side: I'm not gay, I don't want to have sex with that fascinating person, I just admire them and maybe identify with them.  The complex relationship between identification and desire, is, by the way, an important theme of Bechdel's (as opposed to Kron and Tesori's) Fun Home, with Bruce Bechdel wanting to be girly.  Though he shares Alison's admiration for stylish male clothing, he discourages her interest in it by pointing out that it would sit poorly on her budding adolescent breasts; mostly he tries to make her into the girl he wants, or thinks he wants, to be.  The adult Bechdel comments in retrospect that she wanted to be the well-dressed man, not to have him.  Yet she desired girly girls powerfully, without wanting to be them.  After she came out, though she had some butch-on-butch relationships (according to some of her earlier autobiographical work) with other women.

What makes Fun Home so rich is this ambivalence, this awareness of the contradictions in all the characters and in the story's creator.  (Creatrix?)  Bechdel has always talked about her own ambivalence about becoming mainstreamed; I worry that as the Fun Home phenomenon spreads inward from the margins and occupies the vast center, its complexity will be eroded, dissipated, lost.  (I also worry that it will become the Token Lesbian Success, as Brokeback Mountain was the Token Gay Male Success: oh, we don't need to do another lesbian play on Broadway, let alone a musical: It's Been Done to Death.)  If that happens, it won't be the fault of Bechdel or of Kron and Tesori, it'll be the fault of people who lazily and reflexively fall back on stereotypes, which must then be disassembled and deconstructed over and over again.

Fit to Be Stereotyped

Today got hectic, so I wasn't able to finish the post I began.  It's just as well, though, because I realized I wanted to cite in it an article I wrote for the student newspaper fifteen years ago.  (I'm surprised I haven't republished it here before.)   So here is that older piece, and with luck, I'll be citing it in tomorrow's post.

I'm walking on uncertain ground here, so please bear with me. Gay people have made much progress during the past 30 years, but one thing is pretty much the same as ever: fear and loathing of the Stereotype. It turns up often in coming-out stories: "I didn't want to be gay, because there was this Stereotype of how gay people were supposed to act; and I wasn't like that, so I told myself I wasn't gay until I realized you didn't have to fit the Stereotype to be gay..."

Fair enough. I don't wish to minimize the fears and pain of so many gay kids, and I certainly agree that there is no single way a gay person must act. But that's just the trouble. Many people think there is a single way a gay person must act, conforming as much as possible to the sex-role (or "gender," to use the newer jargon) norms of American society. Those who can't or won't do so are condemned for fitting the Stereotype, giving us a bad name, and hurting the cause. The standard coming-out story I quoted earlier excludes those gay people who don't conform to prescribed sex roles, the sissy boys and the butch girls -- or rather, it includes them only as the Stereotypes who scared other "normal" gay kids.

Some people might imagine that such kids come to terms with their sexuality more easily. After all, they embody the Stereotype, so they don't feel any conflict, right? Maybe for some of them it works like that, but not for all. They are targeted by parents, teachers, child psychologists and, of course, by other kids for not acting as they should. The psychiatric establishment has declared that homosexuality is not an illness, and repudiated attempts to change sexual orientation -- but not gender nonconformity, especially in children, who still are considered fair game for mental health professionals. The amazing thing is that so many resist from earliest childhood; author Phyllis Burke has documented this in her important book Gender Shock.

But the relentless pressure and (all too often) abuse take their toll. The gay movement has publicized the high rate of suicide among gay teens almost to the point of romanticizing it, but what is seldom mentioned is that many, perhaps most of the gay kids who kill themselves are gender nonconformists. It doesn't appear that such kids have an easier time of it, or feel better about themselves -- instead they feel doubly stigmatized.

To add to the confusion, the science which claims a biological basis for homosexuality assumes that gay men are biologically feminized and lesbians masculinized. (Where bisexuals fit in, I don't know.) From neuroscientist Simon LeVay, who found that gay men have the hypothalamus of a woman in the body of a man, to researchers who believe that lesbians got an extra dose of testosterone in the womb, the underlying model of sex and gender has changed little since the 1800s. Ironically, this primitive model is widely embraced by gender-conformist gays, who miss its implication: that gender nonconformity is the essence of being gay.

Let me stress as firmly as possible: I reject the biological model of homosexuality, and I am not telling gender-conformist gay kids they ought to take up drag or leather. I'm trying to point out a fundamental contradiction in the advice we give people in the process of coming out.  I don't have any answers to offer. I only have what I think is a very important question: How can we help gay kids to like themselves better without demonizing those who are gender nonconformist? Something is terribly wrong when sissy boys and butch girls are portrayed as the horrible stereotypes whose example keeps other gay kids terrified in their closets. Until we address this issue and try to find solutions, gay adolescents will continue to suffer.

The Rejection of Shame

I'm still reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound, advancing chronologically through Philip Roth's career.  For some reason she skipped the long story "On the Air," which appeared in issue 10 of the paperback-magazine New American Review, back in 1970; I know I still have that issue around here somewhere.  It has almost never been reprinted, apparently because Roth himself hates it.  But it fits so neatly into that period, which includes several intentionally provocative works, from Portnoy to the Nixon satire Our Gang. And incidentally, one of the more amazing bits in Roth Unbound is a page-and-a-half excerpt from Nixon's White House Tapes, most of which I read before I realized that it was not a quotation from Our Gang but the real thing:

NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew
HALDEMAN: Oh yes ... He's brilliant in a sick way [73].

Anyway, I'm now reading Pierpont's discussion of Roth's middle period, initiated by The Ghost Writer in 1979.  This is the novel where the protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, meets a young woman who might or might not be Anne Frank, if Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen and immigrated to the US.  Roth was interested in her status as a sort of Jewish saint, had been wondering for years about her appeal.  As Pierpont explains it:

For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?

The question may seem naive.  But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth's defense of his stories years earlier.  The Diary has touched so many people -- and here Roth says "aloud" the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say -- because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews.  "A harmless Chankukah song" once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that.  They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing -- and look what happened to them.  They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne.  And look what happened to her.  What did it take to provoke what happened?  "It took nothing -- that was the horror.  And that was the truth.  And that was the power of her book."  As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm.  Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semites.  Repression, pretension, "putting on a good face": all useless.  Anne's diary offered a double lesson, really.  For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed.  And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them [118].

The stories Roth had to defend years earlier were in his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which had outraged many Jewish readers and spokesmen for (as they thought) airing Jewish dirty laundry where the Gentiles could see it.  At least once he was asked, "Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?" (14).  Roth was not living in Nazi Germany, of course.  His take on Anne Frank was in part an answer to that very stupid question.  For one thing, German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; all their efforts to minimize their differences made them no less vulnerable.  Hasidim who stood out were demonized in ways that often sound familiar from antigay propaganda now, but assimilated Jews were demonized as a Fifth Column, a secret menace pretending to be normal while burrowing away at the foundations of Western Civilization.  As Pierpont puts it, anti-Semitism (or any kind of bigotry, really) originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semite.  I've argued before that trying to appease bigots by conforming to predominant gender norms is just as futile, for the same reason: flamboyant "stereotypical" queers will outrage many people, but others will be just as outraged by non-stereotypical queers who pretend to be normal.  This doesn't mean that all gay people or Jews should strive to be visible, only that it's useless to rationalize conformity as a remedy for bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fine piece yesterday that (among other things) addressed the same point for African-Americans.

When W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, claimed that the "first and greatest" step toward addressing "the Negro Problem," lay in correcting the "immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves" he was wrong. No amount of morality could have prevented the overthrow of Wilmington by white supremacists—the only coup in American history—a year later. When Booker T. Washington urged blacks to use "every iota of influence that we possess" to "get rid of the criminal and loafing element of our people," he was wrong. When Marcus Garvey claimed that "the greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself," he was dead wrong. When Malcolm X claimed that "the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” and asserted that black people "will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community," he was wrong. He knew the game was rigged. He did not know how much.

In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that a few years after Du Bois made his proclamations he was shocked to find himself cited by unreformed white supremacists.

Besides, many of the black people who were lynched in Du Bois' day were in fact responsible, disciplined, and successful: that was why the mobs targeted them.  (Again, like Jews -- stereotyped as rich -- and gay men -- ditto.)

That isn't to deny, of course, that many black people are irresponsible -- Coates addresses that elsewhere in the piece -- or that many gay people are.  But so are many white people, and many straights.  Whites may complain about low-class white trash, but they don't see the misconduct of other whites as invalidating their own privilege, and they certainly don't expect to be judged by it.  The same goes for straights versus gays, or Gentiles versus Jews, or Christians versus Muslims, or men versus women ... any such division, really.

In another book I read recently, What Is English and Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), Tim Machan says that colonialists preferred that "natives" speak broken English, which could be despised as a symptom of laziness and/or inferior intellect, rather than fluent standard English, which caused the rulers anxiety on numerous levels.  This double bind persists, I think, in whites' contempt for poor blacks (or other Others -- it also applied to European immigrants a hundred years ago) combined with hatred of those who succeed in whites' domains.  This accounts for the racist hatred of Barack Obama, as can be seen in the memes which depict him as an African witch doctor or other "primitive" caricature.  But it can also be seen in white liberal middle-class caricatures of inbred rednecks and ignorant fundamentalists.  The Other is a mirror in which we try very hard not to see ourselves.

Hey, I Just Met You and I Know This Is Crazy, But Let Me Beat You Up

Early in my gay career I noticed that some people (gay or straight) were more comfortable around gay people who were gender-compliant -- that is, they behaved as men and women were officially supposed to behave.  Others were more comfortable around gay people who weren't gender-compliant, or "stereotypical" -- that is, they behaved the way people of the other sex were supposed to behave.  Each comfort pattern made sense in its own terms.  The former group liked men to 'act like men,' and women to 'act like women.'  I suspect that this made it easier for them not to think about what gay men did sexually with each other, but that's only a guess.  The latter group liked men who desired men to 'act like women.'  Perhaps it made it easier for them to think of sex between men as something a man would never do; if a man who coupled with other men 'acted like a woman,' they could distance the activity from something they, as manly men, would ever do.  Perhaps they were just more comfortable knowing who was gay, based on appearance and mannerism, and who wasn't.  I repeat that in both cases, I'm speculating.  The different expectations of how gay people should gender themselves, however, were clearly there.

Only a few years before I came out, homophile organizations like Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis were instructing gay men and lesbians to behave like 'normal' men and women (out of bed, at least).  Ironically, gender prescriptions for women at least were changing, broadening heterosexual women's options.  Lesbians were pressuring each other to be more femme just as straight women were becoming more butch.  I think it was DOB honchos Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who observed, in their 1972 book Lesbian / Woman, that if you see a stomping butch in jeans, hiking boots, and backpack on the Appalachian trail, she'll probably have a husband and children with her; the lesbians will be tottering along in capri pants and flimsy shoes, trying to look feminine and fit into society.  But then, as they implied, PR-conscious strategies generally imposed more restrictive norms on gay people than heterosexuals imposed on themselves.  If it's not forbidden, it's mandatory; if it's not mandatory, it's forbidden.

To a great extent, the call for gender compliance hid behind the excuse of What the Heterosexuals Will Think.  Often it reflected gender-compliant gays and lesbians' wish to impose their styles of gender and respectability on all gay men and lesbians.  (As I've argued before, PR-conscious gays don't really care that much about what upsets straights: when most heterosexuals were offended by the idea of same-sex marriage or gays in the military, these activists brushed their objections aside with derision. Only the standards they shared with bigots had to be respected.)  But then, gender-noncompliant gays and lesbians were just as willing to universalize their styles as the way to be gay.  The idea that different people express gender and sexuality differently, and that these differences should be allowed and respected, is still too radical for many of us.

This realization led me to conclude that no single gendered style was going to win us acceptance.  If we worked at passing for normal gendered citizens, that would make us acceptable as gay people to many heterosexuals -- but not to all of them.  Many other heterosexuals would prefer that we conform to the gender norms governing the "opposite" sex.  No matter which course we chose, we would win over some heterosexuals and alienate others.  That's not to say that we should ignore what heterosexuals think, only that we shouldn't let it determine how we live our lives.  Whether we try a public-relations approach of marketing ourselves to straights, insisting that we are just like them, or work at education, teaching them about diversity and how to live with it, will depend on what issues we're working on.

There are also different levels of stereotype-breaking.  One, call it first-order, is to defend and protect people who "fit the stereotype."  There's nothing wrong with a boy's being a sissy, a grown man being a drag queen, a girl being a tomboy, a grown woman being a butch truck driver.  But while being allowed to fit the stereotype can be liberating, it can also close off many options.  For Graeme Reid, hairstyling is the quintessential black gay South African occupation, and many ladies exhibit talent with hair and ask for nothing more than their own salon and roster of adoring clients.  But here's where second-order stereotype-breaking comes in.  One of Reid's informants, however, Nathi,

did not see hairstyling as his chosen career ... When he was 23 years old, he said that 'since he has schooling', he would rather be doing something else.  However, two years later he was still in the same job and appeared to have settled into the life of a hairstylist [120-1].

This doesn't mean that hairstyling is in Nathi's genes, however.  It probably has something to do with the widespread poverty that still pervades South African life, especially for blacks.  Most wealth in South Africa is still concentrated in white hands.  As Reid shows, hairstylists work long hours and don't make all that much money, so attending night school, let alone college, requires more determination than most people have.  But it also suggests that while gays may be accepted, even celebrated, as long as they behave as gays are stereotypically expected to behave, they are under considerable pressure, both from straight society and from gay society, not to stray outside the bounds that have been set for them.  Another of Reid's informants, working as an informal apprentice in a hair salon, said that "he would rather do catering or fashion design" (118), both of which are comfortably gendered for feminine gay men.  But what if he wanted to play soccer, or become a doctor or lawyer or astronomer?  Those occupations would be largely closed off to him for class reasons, but I wonder how much encouragement he'd get from his gay friends.  (You can't play football!  You'd muss your hair.  You might break a nail!)  Letting people occupy a gender- (or race- or class- ) defined box is all very well, but those boxes need to be expanded to give them more options.

Reid writes:

Local gender norms are fundamental to the ways in which same-sex sexual identities are expressed and performed in public. Gender norms also provide the framework for acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity. Yet the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of imitating a heterosexual norm or unwittingly perpetuated gender stereotypes. In other words, a feminine gender identity is not simply imposed or adopted in the face of patriarchal pressure, the unrelenting logic of which would render gays effeminate and thus unthreatening to heterosexual masculinity [122].

What I wrote earlier indicates why I think this won't do.  Reid does recognize that there are both "acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity."  In the South African townships, an "acceptable" form means that a man embraces a feminine style in varying degrees, which determines (while also enabling) his role in sexual expression no less than his social role.  A "transgressive" form in the same locale severs gender from sexual role, so that a man can be normatively masculine but still enjoy being penetrated, or take sexual pleasure in other ways.  But as I indicated, for a man to be a lady is both "acceptable" and "transgressive," in that he abandons normative expectations for males while adopting normative female styles; for a man to embrace what Reid considers an urban, male, activist, Western gay identity is also both "acceptable" and "transgressive," since such a man is normatively masculine except in his sexual activity.  Both styles appease some people while outraging others.  It's not possible to please everyone, so it becomes necessary to think about what one wants personally and how to get it in the face of opposition, which one will encounter no matter what one does.

It seems to me, by the way, that Reid is generalizing the gender norms of poor black people in the South African townships to all of South African society.  I imagine there are gay black men in South Africa who express gender differently; it won't do to accuse them, as Reid does, of conforming to "Western" concepts.  He assumes a much greater degree of uniformity than you'll find in any society -- including the townships, as his own examples show.

As for Reid's assertion that "the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of perpetuating a heterosexual norm" and so on (emphasis mine), those terms can't be completely dismissed either.  No one grows up in a vacuum.  A child learns her first language not by freely inventing one, but by observing and imitating the language used by the people around her; she also learns, at roughly the same age as she learns language, that gender matters, and can't simply go her own way in that arena either.  To reject one restrictive gender norm generally results in adopting another restrictive gender norm -- if I'm not going to be a Daddy, then I'll be a Mommy -- and yet no one conforms totally to those norms.  And in any case, there is considerable pressure to conform; if we all resist that pressure to some degree, we also surrender to it in some degree.  The penalties for nonconformity range from reproving, nagging, shunning, and harassment to exclusion, violence, and even death.

As Reid recognizes, adopting an overtly feminine style frees some gay men from the restrictions of masculinity, but it also exposes them to the restrictions and vulnerability of femininity.  Ladies, like heterosexual women, are menaced and victimized by theft, robbery, harassment, rape, and other violence.  Reid tells how, soon after his arrival in Ermano, he had to contend with the attentions of gents who said things like

I love you.  I love you so much.  Let us go and talk where no one can see us.  I know I am a black man and you are white, but just give me a chance to show you how much I love you.  I want you to be my girlfriend [52].

Such come-ons could shift from "flirtatious" to "openly aggressive" in a heartbeat.  Nor was this behavior comfortable for the black ladies: "Tsepo, who was with me in the car at the time, said, 'I hate it when people say "I love you" when they don't even know you" (53).  Some of this is directly tied to their being gay; some of it follows from being feminine, and even adopting the most respectable feminine image, that of the church lady and matron, doesn't immunize women or gay men against these dangers.

It appears that gents don't necessarily require their male paramours to be ladies who embody "a feminine gender identity."  The guys above could pursue Reid although he (whatever his personal style) was not a lady.  His lady informants, when he moved to Ermano, had trouble reading him: was he a gent or a lady?  Despite his failure to meet full feminine standards, they quickly classified and adopted him as one of them.

Reid continues to reify "performance" and confuse it with performativity, though he does finally recognize that "After all, women, like ladies, also engage in the daily performances that constitute femininity" (137).  As with all role theory, there are serious problems with seeing daily behavior as a role or performance, but confusing it with performativity just distorts Reid's intellectual framework.

I concede that this confusion has become normative in gender studies, but I'm not a big fan of normativity.  (Normativity is a pervasive social fact, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized.)  When I pointed out this problem to one gay academic, he dismissed it by acknowledging that although it began as a misunderstanding of performative speech, the scholars involved were entitled to redefine the term to mean whatever they wanted it to mean.  Well, no they aren't: not if they continue to cite J. L. Austin as authority for the concept, and besides, in serious discourse, you are not entitled to play Humpty Dumpty -- especially if you're unaware you're doing it.  I found this example in an academic book on "making schools and communities welcoming to LGBT youth" by three concerned teachers.

Language is a tool. As such, we believe that speech is performative – it does things. Words invite or exclude, recognize or erases, empower or intimidate. Far from what the children’s chant would have us believe, words are sticks and stones.*

As authority for these assertions, they cite J. L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words, which introduced and popularized the concept of performative speech acts.  But Austin didn't, as far as I can tell, say that all speech is performative, as the authors above claim.  He argued that certain types of speech are performative, as distinct from other ways in which language can be used.  Saying flatly that "we believe that speech is performative" and citing Austin is like saying that "everything is relative" and citing Einstein's paper on Special Relativity.

*Vaccaro, Annemarie; August, Gerri; Kennedy, Megan S.. Safe Spaces: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming to LGBT Youth (Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2012), p. 95.

A Man Going 'Round Taking Names

I’ve been reading William Anthony Nericcio’s Tex[t]-Mex: seductive hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America (University of Texas, 2007), and just finished the chapter on Rita Hayworth, baroquely titled “When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor.” One of the leitmotifs of his text, you see, is the protracted and very painful course of electrolysis Hayworth (born Margarita Cansino) was forced to undergo by the movie studio to raise her hairline and make her look less “Mexican.” Before she was “discovered” by Hollywood, like America by Columbus, she had performed as a dancer in Tijuana with her father, who dyed her hair black to make her look more “Mexican.” Another leitmotif is the name change, adding a “y” to her mother’s maiden name (Haworth) so that movie audiences would know how to pronounce it.

So, I’ve been wondering about this obsessive focus on things like names. I realize, of course, what a minefield I’m tiptoeing into just by saying something like “things like names.” Is a name a “thing”? What other “things” are “like” names? And so on; even to acknowledge such questions is to adopt the manner of the style of academic writing Nericcio practices. He has a major boner for the late Jacques Derrida, whom I have not yet begun to read, and I often sensed, while reading “When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential,” that Hayworth was just grist for Nericcio’s application of Derrida – that he was using her no less than Harry Cohn did, or her first husband Ed Judson, or her incestuous father, or her second husband Orson Welles. Nericcio is aware of this on some level, but that doesn’t keep him from doing it. In all of this he’s typical of his profession, though he’s more entertaining than most: a frothy, name-dropping writer, indeed something of an academic gossip columnist -- given to sometimes amusing and informative asides and digressions. There’s one, for example, involving a chat-fight among Derrida, John Searle, and Michel Foucault (pages 100-102), and a brief mention of fellow-scholar Rosario Castellano’s gruesome death that could have appeared in the National Enquirer (88), to say nothing of Cansino/Hayworth’s sexual abuse by her father (89).

But I, too, digress: I meant to talk about names. What with her brutal father and the tortuous regime of electrolysis, I’d say changing her name was the least of Cansino/Hayworth’s problems. Reading Nericcio you’d get the impression that only “Latins” were expected to assimilate their names; maybe he assumes that his readers would know how routine this was and is in the entertainment industry. But of course Jews had to do it too. To name just a few: Jacob Julius Garfinkle, Mendel Berlinger, Nathan Birnbaum, Allan Stewart Konigsberg, Betty Joan Perske, Bernard Schwartz, Issur Danielovitch, and especially interesting in this context, silent film star Jacob Krantz, who Hollywood figured would sell better as “Latin lover” Ricardo Cortez. (This pattern isn’t limited to actors, as exemplified by screenwriter, novelist and pseudo-philosopher Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.)

Anglo goyim were put through the same meat grinder, not just of renaming but of cosmetic adjustment: Marion Robert (or Michael) Morrison, Virginia Katherine McMath, Ruby Catherine Stevens, Myrna Adele Williams, Norma Jeane Mortenson / Baker, Leonard Franklin Slye and Frances Octavia Smith, Frances Ethel Gumm, Archie Leach, Lucille Fay LeSeuer, and Roy Harold Scherer Jr. (More recently, the young American actor Kalpen Suresh Modi found that he got more work by shortening his Indian name to Kal Penn. And this sketchy Wikipedia article is a reminder of the different uses that pseudonyms have had, historically and cross-culturally.)

As a child of the Sixties, I must also cite the great riddlemaker Robert Zimmerman, a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota who entranced folk-music purists with his "authentic" performance as the reincarnation of Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie -- before he changed masks again and became a gothic rocker, a country singer, a born-again Christian, and finally the institution Bob Dylan himself. On October 31, 1964, he told an audience that had grown restive at some of his newer, non-protest songs, "It's just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on."

I’ve noticed that a lot of people (including me, to be scrupulously fair) are intensely ambivalent about Hollywood. On one hand it’s the great maker of myths that shapes and inspires our fantasies and taught us how to dream, a cornucopia of imagination and glamour and spectacle; on the other hand it’s a narrow ambit of lies, with its small-town America that never was, its bigoted stereotyping of women, foreigners, people of color, and gay people. On the third hand, some would claim Hollywood as reality and role model. In the documentary The Celluloid Closet, Tony Curtis declares: “Movies are part of my life, part of everybody’s life. That’s where we learn about life. Watching Cary Grant taught me how to behave with a woman, how to get dressed at night, how to go to a restaurant and order dinner.” The Celluloid Closet is an especially vivid case of this ambivalence, exalting Hollywood as “that great maker of myths” only in order to complain that Hollywood was a bad mother who never really loved us.

Tex[t]-Mex, I think, is similarly confused. Insofar as Margarita Dolores Cansino wanted to get into Hollywood, she was entering a maze of mirrors as disorienting as the one she’d later inhabit in The Lady from Shanghai. One didn’t sign a contract with a major studio in order to fulfill oneself, but to lose oneself; not to express one’s true being but to be made over; not to become a human being but a star, the product of a huge commercial enterprise; to be redefined by that enterprise and fenced in by it (with all the constraint and protection the term implies); to have not a self but an image. Cansino would have had some idea what she was getting into, having appeared in numerous B-movie vehicles under her own name before the big boys took her on and took her over. It was a Faustian bargain.

It seems strange to me that people would demand authenticity, reality, integrity from Hollywood -- or from entertainment generally. There’s a reason why Puritans have always denounced the theatre, even apart from its historical association with lewd displays and prostitution: what offends them most profoundly is people pretending to be someone they aren’t, wearing masks, using fake voices and accents, parroting words written for them by others. Men pretending to be women, women pretending to be men. Often the artificiality is an end in itself.

So it becomes odd to insist, or even to suggest, that the studios should have let Margarita Cansino keep her father’s name, her natural hairline, her natural hair color. Should she also have been forbidden to play Anglos? I sympathize with those who have demanded that “Asians” should play “Asians,” and earlier the objections to white performers in blackface playing blacks, and nowadays there is controversy over straight actors playing gay or lesbian characters. There are social, political dimensions to these questions that I don’t mean to brush aside. But I still think that these criticisms ultimately lead to a cul-de-sac, a literalism that is at odds with the worlds of fantasy that art and entertainment are supposed to open for us. And if those of us who have previously been marginalized are allowed into the Magic Kingdom and given the controls, will the dreams and fantasies we create be any better?