at night the wind is a lonely sound:
soft, insistent, desolate.
the trees turn their faces from it;
the clouds, fringed with moon,
run from the wind, away to the darkness --
away to anywhere really.
and the wind walks ceaselessly over the hills,
between the trees,
stirring through the leaves on the ground,
whispering in its soft hopeless voice
words that no one can hear.
i shouldnt have to lie here alone,
looking at the stars on my ceiling,
thinking about this.
no there should be someone beside me,
and we breathing together,
listening together
to the wind wandring lost in the endless night.
--
Another poem from 1972 or 1973. I detect a touch of Whitman or Ginsberg here and there, but as I was typing it in I liked it better than I'd expected to. I was tempted to change some of the affectations -- the lack of capitalization, the Ginsbergish "wandring" -- but decided to leave it pretty much as I wrote it.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Turnabout Is Fair Play
I was pretty entertained by Jonah Goldberg's column attacking a No on 8 attack ad:
McCarthyism is a funny bogeyman for Jonah to invoke. No doubt Hollywood liberals do shout "McCarthyism!" all the time, but so do conservatives. One of the major themes of the culture wars of the past couple of decades has been the claim of the Right that Political Correctness and runaway liberalism constitute a New McCarthyism. Whenever I hear this claim, I want to say, "But I thought you guys like McCarthyism!" When did the Right suddenly decide that it's wrong to harass and persecute people for their political views? Why, when it affected them, of course! (To digress for a moment, I had the same reaction when right-wingers would accuse Bill Clinton or Al Gore of lying. The accusations were often true, but when did those who adulated Ronald Reagan decide that lying was a bad thing?)
Why not boycott Mormon businesses? There may be good reasons not to do so, but the boycott has often been used by what Jonah calls "traditional" religionists to try to get their way: for example, the Southern Baptists' attempted boycott of Disney for being too gay-friendly just a few years ago. It didn't have any detectable effect, of course, but is it only okay to field a boycott if it's going to be hopelessly ineffectual?
I agree with Jonah that it was perhaps unfair to pick on Mormons with that ad, considering that the Roman Catholic Church and other reactionary religious groups also supported Proposition 8. No doubt No on 8 targeted the Mormons, as Jonah says, because they "are the most vulnerable of the culturally conservative religious denominations and therefore the easiest targets for an organized campaign against religious freedom of conscience." Ahem ... why not attack a vulnerable target? But if No on 8 had also done ads showing a couple of nuns, or a couple of Orthodox rabbis, or a Southern Baptist, tearing up a gay couple's marriage license, that would be fine with me.
I must say, though, that Jonah's objection smacks of "But Mommmm! All the other culturally conservative religious denominations are doing it!" Just because other denominations are bigoted, that doesn't mean the Mormons are innocent. The Mormons have a long and unsavory history of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Consider writer and ex-Mormon Sheldon Rampton's memories of the not-so-distant past:
If conservative denominations are now on the defensive, it should not be forgotten that it wasn't always so, and that such denominations don't go after their targets with kid gloves on. The Religious Right in the 70s and 80s denounced not only homosexuals, but liberal denominations and "secular humanists" with abandon. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series is infamous for its hostility to non-fundamentalists, gay or straight, but it's nothing new. LaHaye wrote a series of books lambasting secular America, including The Unhappy Gays (1978), before he found his best-selling formula. Frank Peretti's million-selling novel This Present Darkness (1986) depicted liberal Protestants as conscious and willing agents of Satan. And so on; in general, religious conflict tends to be anything but civil, even when it isn't overtly violent.
A few weeks ago I criticized journalist-blogger David Ehrenstein for his gleeful endorsement of firing people who'd supported Proposition 8. What I objected to then was Ehrenstein's double standard -- I know he wouldn't like it if opponents of Proposition 8 lost their jobs. The double standard is on both sides, though, as Jonah Goldberg's lament shows. It's okay for conservative religious denominations to foster bigotry, but they are very sensitive to anyone turning their own tactics against them.
As I've said before, we must never forget that religion (including gay-friendly religion) is a lifestyle choice; by the Christian Right's standards, that makes them fair game for any tactics they use against gay people (or against other religious believers). But gay people who want to take advantage of this should ask themselves if stooping to the level of our worst opponents is something we really want to do -- if it will produce a world that celebrates human difference, as which most of us would say is our aim. I don't think so, which is one reason I'm so alienated from the mainstream gay community. And really now, that ad Jonah was decrying -- did the people who made it and aired it really think it was going to persuade supporters of Prop 8 to change their vote? If so, they're even dumber than I thought. No, they were preaching to the choir, which no doubt made them and the choir feel good, but Proposition 8 passed. Worse than a stupid campaign is a losing one.
... surely you saw the TV ad in which two smarmy Mormon missionaries knock on the door of an attractive lesbian couple. "Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!" says the blond one with a toothy smile. "We're here to take away your rights." The Mormon zealots yank the couple's wedding rings from their fingers and then tear up their marriage license. As the thugs leave, one says to the other, "That was too easy." His smirking comrade replies, "Yeah, what should we ban next?" The voice-over implores viewers: "Say no to a church taking over your government."Actually, no, I didn't see the ad, since I don't live in California. And thanks to Jonah's summary, I don't need to look for it on Youtube. But Jonah's upset: the scurrilous ad didn't get the condemnation he thought it deserved.
This newspaper [the Los Angeles Times], a principled opponent of Proposition 8, ran an editorial saying that the "hard-hitting ad" was too little, too late. The upshot seemed to be that if the pro-gay-marriage forces had just flooded the airwaves with more religious slander, things would have turned out better.Well, I certainly do not approve of vandalism or sending "envelopes containing white powder" to anyone. (I'm serious about that, though readers sensitive to nuance will probably detect just a wee smidgin of sarcasm, since it's common for public bigots to express their dismay and disapproval of any violence directed at minority groups, while allowing their inner satisfaction to leak out around the edges. But you can be sure that I'm serious about opposing violence or the threat of violence, even against the most degraded bigots, because I'm about to avow my support for harsh verbal criticism and economic pressure against religious and political groups that foster bigotry.) I wonder how accurate Jonah's list of offenses really is, though, because he also says that "bans on gay marriage have now passed in 30 states." The true number is over forty -- forty-five, according to Nancy Polikoff's Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon Press, 2008), and most of them ban civil unions as well.
At a pro-gay-marriage rally in Los Angeles after the vote, chants of "Mormon scum!" were reported. Envelopes containing white powder have been sent to Mormon temples in California and Utah; vandals hit other temples. Lists of businesses to boycott -- essentially Mormon blacklists -- have sprung up on the Internet. The artistic director of the California Musical Theatre resigned because of pressure after it was revealed he gave $1,000 to a pro-Proposition 8 group.
It's amazing. Hollywood liberals, who shout "McCarthyism!" as a first resort, see nothing wrong with this. ...
McCarthyism is a funny bogeyman for Jonah to invoke. No doubt Hollywood liberals do shout "McCarthyism!" all the time, but so do conservatives. One of the major themes of the culture wars of the past couple of decades has been the claim of the Right that Political Correctness and runaway liberalism constitute a New McCarthyism. Whenever I hear this claim, I want to say, "But I thought you guys like McCarthyism!" When did the Right suddenly decide that it's wrong to harass and persecute people for their political views? Why, when it affected them, of course! (To digress for a moment, I had the same reaction when right-wingers would accuse Bill Clinton or Al Gore of lying. The accusations were often true, but when did those who adulated Ronald Reagan decide that lying was a bad thing?)
Why not boycott Mormon businesses? There may be good reasons not to do so, but the boycott has often been used by what Jonah calls "traditional" religionists to try to get their way: for example, the Southern Baptists' attempted boycott of Disney for being too gay-friendly just a few years ago. It didn't have any detectable effect, of course, but is it only okay to field a boycott if it's going to be hopelessly ineffectual?
I agree with Jonah that it was perhaps unfair to pick on Mormons with that ad, considering that the Roman Catholic Church and other reactionary religious groups also supported Proposition 8. No doubt No on 8 targeted the Mormons, as Jonah says, because they "are the most vulnerable of the culturally conservative religious denominations and therefore the easiest targets for an organized campaign against religious freedom of conscience." Ahem ... why not attack a vulnerable target? But if No on 8 had also done ads showing a couple of nuns, or a couple of Orthodox rabbis, or a Southern Baptist, tearing up a gay couple's marriage license, that would be fine with me.
I must say, though, that Jonah's objection smacks of "But Mommmm! All the other culturally conservative religious denominations are doing it!" Just because other denominations are bigoted, that doesn't mean the Mormons are innocent. The Mormons have a long and unsavory history of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Consider writer and ex-Mormon Sheldon Rampton's memories of the not-so-distant past:
On this point, I remember my own experience as a teenager in the 1970s, a time when Mormons continued to cling to another discriminatory value -- the so-called "Negro doctrine" which excluded people of African descent from the Mormon priesthood. As justification for the priesthood ban, a number of pernicious theories were popular in Mormon culture. I own a book from that era titled Mormonism and the Negro (co-authored by a vice president at BYU), which patiently explains that Negroes are "descendants of Cain" and therefore subject to "Cain's curse" because their spirits were "less valiant" than the spirits of white people. (Although I didn't know it at the time, even these ideas were an improvement over the statements of Brigham Young in the 19th century, when he declared as a "law of God" that "If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot.")Rampton also quotes a book (still promoted by the church, he says) by a former president of the Latter Day Saints, Spencer W. Kimball, who wrote that "[P]erhaps as an extension of homosexual practices, men and women have sunk even to seeking sexual satisfaction from animals. ..." This is a reminder of the days, which are not yet gone, when gay people were perhaps the most vulnerable of minorities, and conservative religious denominations could attack us in the most shamelessly extravagant and dishonest terms. And if we're going to talk about trying to stifle freedom of religious conscience, where would Jonah Goldberg put the bitter struggle over the consecration of a gay Episcopalian bishop? Within religious bodies, it's not at all clear who are the aggressors in the culture wars -- gay believers and clergy and their allies, or the antigay believers and clergy who are trying to subordinate and expel them. (If Jonah really thinks that conservative religious denominations should be allowed their little quirks, how does he feel about traditional Christian anti-Judaism?)
If conservative denominations are now on the defensive, it should not be forgotten that it wasn't always so, and that such denominations don't go after their targets with kid gloves on. The Religious Right in the 70s and 80s denounced not only homosexuals, but liberal denominations and "secular humanists" with abandon. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series is infamous for its hostility to non-fundamentalists, gay or straight, but it's nothing new. LaHaye wrote a series of books lambasting secular America, including The Unhappy Gays (1978), before he found his best-selling formula. Frank Peretti's million-selling novel This Present Darkness (1986) depicted liberal Protestants as conscious and willing agents of Satan. And so on; in general, religious conflict tends to be anything but civil, even when it isn't overtly violent.
A few weeks ago I criticized journalist-blogger David Ehrenstein for his gleeful endorsement of firing people who'd supported Proposition 8. What I objected to then was Ehrenstein's double standard -- I know he wouldn't like it if opponents of Proposition 8 lost their jobs. The double standard is on both sides, though, as Jonah Goldberg's lament shows. It's okay for conservative religious denominations to foster bigotry, but they are very sensitive to anyone turning their own tactics against them.
As I've said before, we must never forget that religion (including gay-friendly religion) is a lifestyle choice; by the Christian Right's standards, that makes them fair game for any tactics they use against gay people (or against other religious believers). But gay people who want to take advantage of this should ask themselves if stooping to the level of our worst opponents is something we really want to do -- if it will produce a world that celebrates human difference, as which most of us would say is our aim. I don't think so, which is one reason I'm so alienated from the mainstream gay community. And really now, that ad Jonah was decrying -- did the people who made it and aired it really think it was going to persuade supporters of Prop 8 to change their vote? If so, they're even dumber than I thought. No, they were preaching to the choir, which no doubt made them and the choir feel good, but Proposition 8 passed. Worse than a stupid campaign is a losing one.
Monday, December 8, 2008
I Can Has Democracy?
President-elect Barack Obama has managed to surprise me: he has expressed approval of the plant takeover by laid-off workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago. That's one more bit of hopeful news from him, and since I've been so critical of him I feel obliged to note when he does something I can approve of. That doesn't erase the things I disapprove, of course: he did support and help push through Bush's bank bailout, of which $15 (some sources say 25) billion went to the Bank of America, whose refusal to extend Republic's line of credit led to the layoffs. For now, the Chosen One can only cheer from the sidelines, but that's a good start. Meanwhile, politicians at the city, county, and state levels are working to stop giving government business to the Bank of America. (Video here.)
We could be in for an interesting four years -- in a good way. I certainly wouldn't mind.
P.S. Another good account of the situation (via). Plus this article from Counterpunch, which quotes evidence that the owners of Republic didn't really want the Bank's money -- they were sneaking out of Illinois to open a new, non-union plant in Iowa.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
A Is For Ay-leet
(Not work-safe. You have been warned:)
Jeez, so much is on my mind and I don't know where to begin. I guess there's nothing to do but pick a place and dive in.
Details is a fashionista magazine that began its existence in the 1980s with, as I recall, an eye to the gay male market. After a few issues it began to tone down gay content (whatever that might have been) to pursue a fashion-conscious straight male readership, sort of proto-metrosexual. Those who've read this blog for any length of time will probably guess that I never paid Details much attention, any more than I do to Opera News or GQ. I noticed the flap over a hopefully satirical 2004 piece called "Gay or Asian?", because the diversity managers at my university passed the word along, but beyond that Details has not been in my radar.
This past week, though, some of the gay blogosphere got excited about an article on the magazine's website (I don't know whether it appeared in print) called "The Rise of the A-Gay." The writer has, like Columbus, discovered a whole new gay world: like, omigod! there are like these totally hot, totally rich gay men! They vacation at Gstaad! They wear perfectly tailored Savile Row suits instead of off-the-rack! And even though some of them are opera queens, they are like totally butch, which will cause you straight guys to develop a "man crush" on them, making your wives go Hmmm. And although the writer claims that these guys don't want to be part of a "closeted group or velvet mafia", he names no names. "And they can pull off having much-younger boyfriends without looking creepy."
The only source quoted by name in the piece is one Laura Gilbert, a pop-culture maven with her very own personal A-gay, whom she drags to gay bars and uses to torture other straight women. "A-gays mark measurable societal progress ... People can now be out without being expected to swish. It's the Neil Patrick Harris/Portia de Rossi brand of gay."
I love trendoids. They're always discovering the newest big thing that on second thought turns out to have been around since the dawn of time. Armistead Maupin wrote about a clique he called "A-gays" in his first Tales of the City book, published in 1976. There've always been upscale homos and their circles -- W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, various Hollywood and Broadway circles and so on -- and I daresay Natalie Clifford Barney and Radclyffe Hall would have thought of themselves as A-dykes if the terminology had been available to them. "We are everywhere" is a durable gay-movement slogan, and "everywhere" includes living La Vida Rich and Famous.
And this notion that "People can now be out without being expected to swish"? Of course that's an evergreen too. Gay men who came out (as opposed to being pigeonholed as queens from childhood) have always rejected the expectation to "swish," which comes from straights no less than gays. As long ago as 1971, then-closeted sociologist Laud Humphreys published an article in a professional journal, Transaction, entitled "New Styles in Homosexual Manliness." Nor were those styles exactly new then. To combine both themes, consider this quotation from one of Humphreys's informants, speaking of a park "near the heart of a metropolis on the eastern seaboard":
"This isn't just an expose on the new gay elite, it's a hit piece on sissies everywhere," he bellows in boldface, then delivers another ringing, butch "Fuck you!" to Details: "I haven't ever picked up your trashy excuse for a magazine, and I won't be anytime soon." (Cancel my subscription! Oops, I don't have one. But if I did...) I can't help but recall that the sissies of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, whom the Details writer dismisses as the old public face of American queerdom, now in the dustbin of history, were also denounced by PR-conscious Homo-Americans for collaborating with the patriarchy. Or whatever. As a hit piece on sissies, I don't see the A-gays article as having much of a punch. Any self-respecting sissy, including me, is most likely to deliver a sassy Snap! or two to the writer and the magazine, while recalling what one of the openly gay sociologist Martin Levine's clone informants told him: "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."
Meanwhile, over at Christopher Hennessey's Outside the Lines blog, where the Details piece was linked, one commenter fumed, "Jesus H with the A-Gay crap. Basically, they are creating a class system within the Gay 'community'". I'm not sure why she felt the need to put "community" in quotes, which suggests that she doesn't take gay community seriously to begin with; but more important, class divisions among gays are nothing new and don't need Details to 'create' or maintain them.
Another commenter declared the article "a big steaming turd" and its subjects "the fags who have decided they need to be butch or lipstick lesbos to fit in. They can kiss my big, fat sissy ass." This is more serious. I've noticed that a good many people (not just gay ones) assume that anyone with a different style of self-presentation is motivated by false consciousness: those who dislike gender nonconformity denounce sissies and bulldykes for "fitting the stereotype" out of a wicked desire to give decent gay people a bad name, while gender nonconformists accuse their counterparts of covering up their difference out of a desire to "fit in." No doubt both groups had moms who accused them of Just Behaving Like This To Drive Me Crazy. My mother used that line on me too, yet I managed somewhere along the line to realize that other people's behavior, no matter how much it annoys or offends me, is not born of a calculated desire to annoy me, but of other reasons that probably have nothing to do with me. (It should also be noted that gay communities, which are not much more tolerant of difference than the straight, have their own peer pressure aimed at controlling behavior and style. And incidentally, "Kiss my ass", no matter how sissy it is, is also a homophobic putdown.)
Much of this goes back to the great debates over whether gay people should "assimilate" or not. The thing is, we are born assimilated. Almost all of us had straight parents and grew up in a heterosexual milieu. At some point we emerge from the great Babylonian exile of gay childhood, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called it somewhere. Of course, we no more leave behind all of our parents' folkways than than the children of Israel left behind all the customs of Babylon, or of Egypt before that. Nor should we try to, if only because we'll always be ambivalent about what we reject. It takes serious work to reach the point where one can think about what of theirs to keep and what to abandon, and what to accept in the exile communities our foreuncles and aunts built.
Can it really be news to anyone that there are rich queers and bourgeois queers and blue-collar and pink-collar and poor queers? I guess it can, which doesn't inspire confidence in their knowledge of the world generally. The gay men I've known over the past several decades have been pretty ambivalent about class, often haunted by a desire to rise to the level of the people they imagine to be their betters. Remember the poor brown and black drag queens of Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning whose dream was to become rich white women? Gay men's culture has always had this aspect, exemplified by the way our slang borrows from High Society, with its "coming out" (derived from debutantes' emergence into the marriage market), "tearooms" (public restrooms used for cruising), "queens" and so on. Coming out for me also meant leaving the working-class (with aspirations to shabby-genteel) background of my childhood and adolescence for the world of the University, with academia's own special ambivalence about the status of the scholar in society. I didn't have Raymond Williams's class consciousness, but I recognize something of myself and some of the people I met in his account of his first years at Cambridge in the 1930s:
Maybe I should be angrier about the Details piece -- it seems to have been written as a provocation of some sort -- but I don't see it as having any bearing on me. There are rich gay men? They've always been there. Will they let me play with them? Who cares? I'm not much interested in their world, nor do I care if they're interested in mine. I can't help suspecting that the anger the article inspired is born of envy and a sense of exclusion from a world of Savile Row suits, fairy-tale weddings, refinement, and class -- that these writers nevertheless identify with and aspire to. Right now I think there are more important things to worry about. But what do I know?
Jeez, so much is on my mind and I don't know where to begin. I guess there's nothing to do but pick a place and dive in.
Details is a fashionista magazine that began its existence in the 1980s with, as I recall, an eye to the gay male market. After a few issues it began to tone down gay content (whatever that might have been) to pursue a fashion-conscious straight male readership, sort of proto-metrosexual. Those who've read this blog for any length of time will probably guess that I never paid Details much attention, any more than I do to Opera News or GQ. I noticed the flap over a hopefully satirical 2004 piece called "Gay or Asian?", because the diversity managers at my university passed the word along, but beyond that Details has not been in my radar.
This past week, though, some of the gay blogosphere got excited about an article on the magazine's website (I don't know whether it appeared in print) called "The Rise of the A-Gay." The writer has, like Columbus, discovered a whole new gay world: like, omigod! there are like these totally hot, totally rich gay men! They vacation at Gstaad! They wear perfectly tailored Savile Row suits instead of off-the-rack! And even though some of them are opera queens, they are like totally butch, which will cause you straight guys to develop a "man crush" on them, making your wives go Hmmm. And although the writer claims that these guys don't want to be part of a "closeted group or velvet mafia", he names no names. "And they can pull off having much-younger boyfriends without looking creepy."
The only source quoted by name in the piece is one Laura Gilbert, a pop-culture maven with her very own personal A-gay, whom she drags to gay bars and uses to torture other straight women. "A-gays mark measurable societal progress ... People can now be out without being expected to swish. It's the Neil Patrick Harris/Portia de Rossi brand of gay."
I love trendoids. They're always discovering the newest big thing that on second thought turns out to have been around since the dawn of time. Armistead Maupin wrote about a clique he called "A-gays" in his first Tales of the City book, published in 1976. There've always been upscale homos and their circles -- W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, various Hollywood and Broadway circles and so on -- and I daresay Natalie Clifford Barney and Radclyffe Hall would have thought of themselves as A-dykes if the terminology had been available to them. "We are everywhere" is a durable gay-movement slogan, and "everywhere" includes living La Vida Rich and Famous.
And this notion that "People can now be out without being expected to swish"? Of course that's an evergreen too. Gay men who came out (as opposed to being pigeonholed as queens from childhood) have always rejected the expectation to "swish," which comes from straights no less than gays. As long ago as 1971, then-closeted sociologist Laud Humphreys published an article in a professional journal, Transaction, entitled "New Styles in Homosexual Manliness." Nor were those styles exactly new then. To combine both themes, consider this quotation from one of Humphreys's informants, speaking of a park "near the heart of a metropolis on the eastern seaboard":
Back around 1930, when I was a very young man, I had sex with a really old fellow who was nearly 80. He told me that when he was a youngster -- around the end of the Civil War -- he would make spending money by hustling in that very park. Wealthy men would come down from the Hill in their carriages to pick up boys who waited in the shadows of the tree-lined walks at night.So there you are: homos with money, homos who don't "swish", a writer who hopes some of that money and class (but maybe not the homo part) will rub off on him. BFD. Yet this little squib drove some gay bloggers right off the deep end. "Fuck You, Details Magazine!" is the title of a post by one, a self-described "gay men's health activist and thinker", who was so enraged by the "heteronormativity, embodied" of the piece that he neglected to think about the heteronormative, homophobic/misogynistic aspects of using "Fuck you" as an insult. His fury was inspired by the article's opening claim that A-gays are "smarter, sexier, and far more successful than you'll ever be." Y'know, there are literally dozens of people who are smarter, sexier, and more successful than I'll ever be. It's not something that keeps me up nights, but then it's not news to me either.
"This isn't just an expose on the new gay elite, it's a hit piece on sissies everywhere," he bellows in boldface, then delivers another ringing, butch "Fuck you!" to Details: "I haven't ever picked up your trashy excuse for a magazine, and I won't be anytime soon." (Cancel my subscription! Oops, I don't have one. But if I did...) I can't help but recall that the sissies of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, whom the Details writer dismisses as the old public face of American queerdom, now in the dustbin of history, were also denounced by PR-conscious Homo-Americans for collaborating with the patriarchy. Or whatever. As a hit piece on sissies, I don't see the A-gays article as having much of a punch. Any self-respecting sissy, including me, is most likely to deliver a sassy Snap! or two to the writer and the magazine, while recalling what one of the openly gay sociologist Martin Levine's clone informants told him: "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."
Meanwhile, over at Christopher Hennessey's Outside the Lines blog, where the Details piece was linked, one commenter fumed, "Jesus H with the A-Gay crap. Basically, they are creating a class system within the Gay 'community'". I'm not sure why she felt the need to put "community" in quotes, which suggests that she doesn't take gay community seriously to begin with; but more important, class divisions among gays are nothing new and don't need Details to 'create' or maintain them.
Another commenter declared the article "a big steaming turd" and its subjects "the fags who have decided they need to be butch or lipstick lesbos to fit in. They can kiss my big, fat sissy ass." This is more serious. I've noticed that a good many people (not just gay ones) assume that anyone with a different style of self-presentation is motivated by false consciousness: those who dislike gender nonconformity denounce sissies and bulldykes for "fitting the stereotype" out of a wicked desire to give decent gay people a bad name, while gender nonconformists accuse their counterparts of covering up their difference out of a desire to "fit in." No doubt both groups had moms who accused them of Just Behaving Like This To Drive Me Crazy. My mother used that line on me too, yet I managed somewhere along the line to realize that other people's behavior, no matter how much it annoys or offends me, is not born of a calculated desire to annoy me, but of other reasons that probably have nothing to do with me. (It should also be noted that gay communities, which are not much more tolerant of difference than the straight, have their own peer pressure aimed at controlling behavior and style. And incidentally, "Kiss my ass", no matter how sissy it is, is also a homophobic putdown.)
Much of this goes back to the great debates over whether gay people should "assimilate" or not. The thing is, we are born assimilated. Almost all of us had straight parents and grew up in a heterosexual milieu. At some point we emerge from the great Babylonian exile of gay childhood, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called it somewhere. Of course, we no more leave behind all of our parents' folkways than than the children of Israel left behind all the customs of Babylon, or of Egypt before that. Nor should we try to, if only because we'll always be ambivalent about what we reject. It takes serious work to reach the point where one can think about what of theirs to keep and what to abandon, and what to accept in the exile communities our foreuncles and aunts built.
Can it really be news to anyone that there are rich queers and bourgeois queers and blue-collar and pink-collar and poor queers? I guess it can, which doesn't inspire confidence in their knowledge of the world generally. The gay men I've known over the past several decades have been pretty ambivalent about class, often haunted by a desire to rise to the level of the people they imagine to be their betters. Remember the poor brown and black drag queens of Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning whose dream was to become rich white women? Gay men's culture has always had this aspect, exemplified by the way our slang borrows from High Society, with its "coming out" (derived from debutantes' emergence into the marriage market), "tearooms" (public restrooms used for cruising), "queens" and so on. Coming out for me also meant leaving the working-class (with aspirations to shabby-genteel) background of my childhood and adolescence for the world of the University, with academia's own special ambivalence about the status of the scholar in society. I didn't have Raymond Williams's class consciousness, but I recognize something of myself and some of the people I met in his account of his first years at Cambridge in the 1930s:
The myth of the working-class boy arriving in Cambridge – it has happened more since the war, though the proportion is still quite unreasonably low – is that he is an awkward misfit and has to learn new manners. It may depend on where you come from. Out of rural Wales it didn’t feel like that. The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunately enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people.Within a few years I had stopped wondering if I'd find a place among the gay men I met in the University, because I'd realized that I didn't want a place among them. I had my own sense of entitlement, based not only on high SAT scores but on my parents' love and encouragement (though it took me some years longer to realize what a foundation of confidence and optimism they gave me, and how much I owe them for that). When I encountered gay people whose sense of entitlement was based on their middle-class background and professional status, despite their aggressive ignorance and complacency (to say nothing of their racism and sexism) I found that I didn't recognize their superiority, and wandered off in directions more interesting to me. Whether those directions are superior generally is not for me to say; I only know that they're better for me.
Maybe I should be angrier about the Details piece -- it seems to have been written as a provocation of some sort -- but I don't see it as having any bearing on me. There are rich gay men? They've always been there. Will they let me play with them? Who cares? I'm not much interested in their world, nor do I care if they're interested in mine. I can't help suspecting that the anger the article inspired is born of envy and a sense of exclusion from a world of Savile Row suits, fairy-tale weddings, refinement, and class -- that these writers nevertheless identify with and aspire to. Right now I think there are more important things to worry about. But what do I know?
Friday, December 5, 2008
Poetry Friday -- a woman's geography
a woman's geography
trying to understand breasts
through your sweater,
how different a landscape i would find
under your fly;
a woman's geography --
a different country than a man --
like traveling with margaret mead
to tanganyika.
not really. what i mean is,
the soil is different,
some landmarks are missing,
others are present in their place.
i don't really understand.
i can almost sleepwalk
in the country of a man,
the map is written that deeply in me.
but a woman --
well i don't know.
i guess i'm afraid
i might get lost there.
12/1/71
-----------
I wrote "a woman's geography" in Bloomington, during my first year there.
trying to understand breasts
through your sweater,
how different a landscape i would find
under your fly;
a woman's geography --
a different country than a man --
like traveling with margaret mead
to tanganyika.
not really. what i mean is,
the soil is different,
some landmarks are missing,
others are present in their place.
i don't really understand.
i can almost sleepwalk
in the country of a man,
the map is written that deeply in me.
but a woman --
well i don't know.
i guess i'm afraid
i might get lost there.
12/1/71
-----------
I wrote "a woman's geography" in Bloomington, during my first year there.
Militant Flaunting Heterosexuals
(via Stop Me Before I Vote Again; incidentally, I finally found the photo from the New York Times that Fovver Smiff analyzed in that post, and it's not nearly as intimate as he'd led me to believe)
(Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel, image via Pundit Kitchen, where it was captioned "Is That the Constitution in Your Pocket ...?"
Monday, December 1, 2008
If I Can't Think of Anything Mean to Say
There is actually some good news about the Obama administration-to-be. Jim Hightower reports today that Obama "has pulled together a transition team of four dozen experts, and they've been studying the regulatory favors that Bush has done for his political backers. Already, the team has identified some 200 of these overtly-political regs that Obama can quickly reverse after his inauguration." That's good news, especially since as Hightower also reports, the Bush regime is scurrying to get rid of as much environmental-protection regulation as they can before Bush leaves office. (It occurs to me that while, yes, it's important to protect the environment, laws like the Clean Air Act are primarily people-protection laws, to enable to us to breathe and eat and drink in reasonable safety.) Oddly, though, Hightower's source for this information is an article in the Austin American-Statesman, which turns out to come from the Washington Post of November 6. Much more attention has been paid, rightly enough, to Obama's regressive foreign policy and economic teams. But if he does undo some of the damage that the Bush gang have done to people's health and safety, I won't feel that my vote for Obama was totally wasted.
P.S.: My ambivalent Obama-supporter friend passed along this link to an article which lists some genuinely progressive appointments Obama has made. They're not as high-profile as Hillary Clinton and the other center-rightists, but they look like good people who might very well do some good. For example:
In the past two weeks, Obama has tapped Melody Barnes, of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, to serve as his domestic policy director; Patrick Gaspard, a political organizer for the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, as his politics director; Ellen Moran, of the liberal fund-raising group EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women candidates, to run his communications shop; and Phil Schiliro, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, to serve as the White House’s liaison with Congress.
On the other hand, this looks to me like triangulation: don't pay any attention to the reactionaries Obama has appointed -- he's also brought in some liberals and progressives! I prefer to be aware of both groups, and whether their virtues outweigh their defects has to be shown, not assumed.
P.S.: My ambivalent Obama-supporter friend passed along this link to an article which lists some genuinely progressive appointments Obama has made. They're not as high-profile as Hillary Clinton and the other center-rightists, but they look like good people who might very well do some good. For example:
In the past two weeks, Obama has tapped Melody Barnes, of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, to serve as his domestic policy director; Patrick Gaspard, a political organizer for the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, as his politics director; Ellen Moran, of the liberal fund-raising group EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women candidates, to run his communications shop; and Phil Schiliro, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, to serve as the White House’s liaison with Congress.
On the other hand, this looks to me like triangulation: don't pay any attention to the reactionaries Obama has appointed -- he's also brought in some liberals and progressives! I prefer to be aware of both groups, and whether their virtues outweigh their defects has to be shown, not assumed.
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