Nothing New Under The Sun, No. 6,384,202

What must we do? We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it. I know the ears of the American people have become very sensitive to ... complaint of late and profess to dislike whining. Let that worry none. No nation on earth ever complained and whined so much as this nation has, and we propose to follow the example.

--W. E. B. DuBois, "The Niagara Movement," Voice of the Negro 2 (September 1905), 621; quoted by Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, 2007), 177. (A pretty good book itself, by the way.)

I should probably explain (O, briefly!) why I like this quotation, to avoid its being misunderstood. It's good to be reminded that Americans have always wanted the downtrodden to shut up. I think it was sometime in the 1960s that I began to hear whites saying that they were tired of hearing The Negro complain all the time. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, this gripe might be accompanied by, "They've got their rights, what do they have to complain about?" Even as an adolescent, I knew this was crap. The passage of those laws didn't in itself give anyone rights; only enforcement could do that, and enforcement was slow and inadequate.

That was also around the time I read Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age, about his experiences as a substitute teacher in an inner-city Boston school. It made me realize very forcefully how easy it was for whites to want to put all these unpleasant thoughts out of their minds. Black people too were no doubt tired of the conditions in which they lived, but they couldn't make those conditions go away by changing the TV channel. (Ever heard the old joke about the guy who'd read so much about the harmful effects of smoking and drinking that he decided to give up reading?) Even worse, the children stuck in substandard schools would never get back the time they'd wasted there, even if American society tried very hard to mend its ways and provide good schools to all its children. And of course, that wasn't going to happen.

So, as DuBois said, the remedy is to make noise, to complain, to whine and bitch and gripe -- and call mainstream America on its hypocrisy and dishonesty for not wanting to listen. This principle generalizes nicely beyond questions of race. And seeing DuBois's words from a century ago is helpful, because those of us who want to complain can see that the mainstream has been evading its responsibilities in very familiar terms all along.

Some People Go Mental Over Billboards Signed "God" ...

Some people go mental over billboards with messages signed “God.” This is the sort of thing that gets my goat:

In fact, another activist, Anjali Gopalan, points out, that although there are gay men in India as well as something called gay-identity, “identity is sort of a luxury that doesn't extend beyond the educated upper-classes. The majority of men who have sex with men don't see themselves as gay or even homosexuals. ... we don't have a sense of self in our culture..." She adds that she was once indignantly corrected by a MSM when she made the mistake of asking him if he was "samalaingik" (homosexual) -- saying that he was a mard (man) not a chhakka (fag).

This quotation comes from Suparna Bhaskaran’s book Made in India: decolonizations, queer sexualities, trans/national projects (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), page 100. Bhaskaran is an anthropologist, and she says she’s trying to do something new, somewhere beyond the stereotypical Bwana anthropologist explaining the natives to you on one hand, and the participant-observer who goes too native on the other. But as far as I could see, Made in India is an utterly typical work of academic cultural analysis. Bhaskaran has an advantage, of course, in coming from India herself, but she’s far from the first South Asian to go native in US or UK academia, or the first anthropologist to study an urban commercial culture, or the first cultural critic to deploy the slash (/) mark for purposes of grimly earnest semiotic play. Not that it’s necessary to be the first, but since she’s walking a trail that by now is paved in four lanes, her self-advertisement in her own text is a bit sad in its disingenuousness.

But what's got my pants in a bunch here is the stuff about the supposed novelty of “identity” and “sense of self” in Indian culture. This is shown to be false by the example she gives, a MSM (Man who has Sex with Men) who insisted that he is a man and not a fag. This fellow is emphatic about his identity (he’s a man, dammit!) and he sure seems to have a rather vigorous sense of self. In fact, his sense of masculine identity is strikingly similar to that of many males in the US and elsewhere, who are fully capable of having sex with men without seeing themselves “as gay or even homosexuals.” It even turns out that, although this man doesn’t use English words, he knows local terms and identity-concepts that cover the waterfront of male-male sex and masculine adequacy. They may not correspond exactly to American concepts, but they are not absolutely incongruent either. But even if they were vastly different, having a different sense of identity, with different boundaries and content, is not the same thing as having no identity at all.

Bhaskaran goes on to say:

Although Khan does recognize the simultaneous importance of self-identified categories co-exiting [sic] with the more fluid meanings, the contemporary-indigenous fluidity discourses about MSMs create the binaries of indigenous sexuality/India versus "westernized" sexuality. Indigenous [!] sexuality equals unnamed, unconscious, playful [!] behaviors, and sometimes problematic gender role fluidity. A fluidity that is more marginalized (inequalities of income, cultural capital, and career options) but somehow more Indian in essence especially since it does not involve individuality.

Well, let’s see. First, “unnamed” and “unconscious” (?) behaviors do not necessarily equal “playful” – they can, and often do, equal furtive, shamefaced, and depersonalized. One of her sources, the dread Jeremy Seabrook, made this clear in Love In a Different Climate, which a lot of queer South Asians cite for its romantic, even Orientalist, picture of Indian exceptionalism, while ignoring its unflattering picture of the actual lives of those Indian MSMs. Second, “gay” life in the West is not monolithic: “inequalities of income, cultural capital, and career options” are mirrored in different qualities and styles of life among even the gay-identified – does Bhaskaran really believe that, for example, all American queers own houses on Fire Island? -- and “sometimes problematic gender role fluidity” is a much contested issue even here in the Great Satan.

We also have a large MSM population in the West, and not all of them are first-generation immigrants from the global South. Indeed, the term MSM itself originated in the West. This is really only problematic for people who dream of an Indian queerness that is “Indian in essence,” but calling MSM "a culturally appropriate term (versus the Westernized and elite term gay)" is tripping.

According to queer Foucauldians, we're not supposed to call people "gay" or "homosexual" if it's not the identity they prefer, or if "gay" or "homosexual" wasn't in use in their time and culture. "MSM" is an identity, but I'm not sure anyone actually uses it of himself ("I am an MSM"). Isn't it cultural imperialism to apply it to people who haven't adopted it? Seabrook wrote in Love in a Different Climate that Indian men who have sex with men generally don't think of what they're doing as sex; so it's certainly illegitimate, by these criteria, to call them MSMs.

The word “identity” turns up a lot in what I’ve been reading about sexuality in the West and non-West. As Cindy Patton has pointed out, “Current theory and …especially queer theory have become confused about the issue of identity because there are a range of competing populist and academic concepts of identity, as well as important differences between European and U.S. political experiences of calls to identity” (“Tremble, Hetero Swine!” in Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet [Minnesota, 1993], 161). Relevant here is the frequent claim, or accusation, that identity is an individualistic concept, at odds with the supposed non-individualist East. While this is true of the kind of identity attested by, say, an ID card (which those Asian-values authoritarian states don’t seem to mind using), it is totally false of the kind of identities I’m discussing here. To claim an identity is to assert oneself as a member of a group, defined by that group’s collective qualities and practices. (Foucault’s notorious and much-misunderstood quip, “The homosexual became a species”, recognizes this. So does "coming out," which in its debutante and gay senses means joining a community.) Of course, everyone has multiple identities, which often conflict; some are ascribed, some are adopted; this is what makes identity so complex.

“Identity politics” is just about everybody’s whipping boy these days. I once had a conversation with a gay East Asian graduate student, trained in the US, who believed that “identity politics” referred only to the narcissistic activities of white, privileged gay men. I tried to explain that African-American racial consciousness is the paradigm case of identity politics in the US, but that the term also covers Asian-American and Latino identities, feminism, a variety of nationalisms around the world, sectarian religious identity (like Hindutva or radical Islam), and so on, but without much success. To see his own identity concerns as stigmatized “identity politics” was too threatening, but that’s understandable. Just in the US, the old-style Left blames identity politics on “postmodernists,” while postmodernists blame it on the old-style Left and other essentialist ideologies – all the while ignoring their own practice of identity politics.

Bhaskaran laments – again, it’s a familiar trope, one that was deployed against American feminists and gay activists from the late 60s by our own indigenous Left – that she has often been asked, “Is Khush Sexuality a Luxury in the Geographic [?] Third World?” “Khush” is an Urdu term that has been appropriated by queer South Asians as an identity-politics label.

As such it appears to be one of those “elite” concepts that are a luxury for poor folks, but apparently are okay when the elites are educated South Asians, or when the word at least isn’t English.

Of course it's an absurd question, since "Khush sexuality" under whatever name has always, on Bhaskaran's own account, been part of Indian culture without doing it any detectable harm. I would answer that question with one of my own: Isn’t bigotry a luxury in the Third World, or anywhere? And while I'm on the subject, isn't ignorance -- of the much more culturally aware work of scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Reddy, Ruth Vanita, Saleem Kidwai, Amartya Sen, Steve Derne, Vijay Prashad, and many others -- no less a luxury for queerfolk anywhere and everywhere?

Wicked

Paul Krugman (via) ought to know better! He says that “during those years [1964-1972] America did indeed become the land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred”, thanks to the wickedness of Richard Nixon and his malevolent campaign tactics. Nixon sowed the wind, and we now reap the whirlwind. “In fact, these days even the Democratic Party seems to be turning into Nixonland.” Krugman’s an economist, not an historian, but then I’m neither, and I know better.

Yes, the dirt that’s already being flung in this year’s campaign is dirty. But it’s not an artefact of the Nixon era, though Sleazemeister Richard Nixon did set new 20^th-century standards for political vitriol, contumely, venom, and spleen. (There’s a name for a law firm for you.) American politics has always been about throwing acid in the face of your opponent and his supporters. (Until the 21^st century, you and your opponent were always “he.”)

I learned this in my high school American history class back in the 1960s, for heaven’s sake, from Thomas Nast cartoons reproduced in the textbook. I think I even remember my 6^th grade teacher quoting the immortal jingle “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, haw haw haw!” from the 1884 Presidential campaign, referring to the out-of-wedlock son fathered by the bachelor Grover Cleveland. The cartoon above, showing the Irish as unassimilable lumps in the American melting pot, is one of the milder examples of racial hatred from the good old days of American peace, freedom, and brotherly love. Those were the days when gangs of thugs, armed with clubs, would roam the streets, trying to keep members of the other party from voting. (More details can be found in Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward’s Why Americans Don’t Vote, and Why Politicians Want It That Way [Beacon Press, 2000]).

But suppose for the sake of argument that Krugman (and so many others like him) are right: that we live in an unprecedented Nixonland of eternally springing hate. I don’t see the point of sitting around wailing about it. I argued earlier that it’s self-serving for atheists to call recalcitrant theists “postmodernists” – the charge is bogus to begin with, and amounts to a declaration of one’s incompetence to debate them. I think something similar is going on here. I’m not sure why politicians (and their defenders) answer the goon squads by yammering about “hate” and lack of civility – did their consultants clear this tactic with focus groups? Whatever the reason, it doesn’t work. The attacks continue, probably because the outraged yelps tell the goons that they found their target. I don’t recommend responding in kind either, though of course the liberals have their own goons, as Krugman and Avedon admit (and I pointed out before), who go after their enemies. So the cycle of abuse continues, which is clearly what the political mainstream wants. It makes it easier to avoid addressing issues, which neither party really wants to do.

I’ve always found that the best way to deal with bigots is to take them apart rationally, taking their stupid slogans and abuse as if they were meant seriously, and answering them point by point. This frustrates them no end, and they usually end up complaining that they’re being picked on, that they didn't mean what they said seriously, so lay off awready. In the case of David Shuster’s stupid remark about Hillary Rodham Clinton ‘pimping out’ her daughter Chelsea by using her in her campaign, for example, it would have sufficed to point out (as Krugman does in his column) that Chelsea is an adult, that politicians’ children often work in their parent’s campaigns – indeed, that nobody flaunts their private lives like campaigning politicians. Instead there was outrage, and Shuster was suspended from MSNBC, though as far as I can tell, “pimp” no longer is as negative a word as it was in Hillary’s and my youth. Half the profiles on MySpace, it seems, announce that they were “pimped out” – decorated and enhanced – with this or that software package. Hiphop has made the word ubiquitous, and drained it of much of its former punch. I suspect Shuster was trying to show that he is Hep and With-It, which doesn’t mean that he isn’t too stupid to live, but then so are most of the major-network news anchors and pundits.

It’s certainly not pleasant to be called names, but I can’t help thinking of all the people who’ve worked for political causes in the face of physical attacks by thugs or police, long imprisonment, torture, and (often quite horrible) death. I don’t mean only dissidents in the old Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany, or Iran under the Shah (and after), or Israel, or the many vicious dictatorships the US has supported around the world. I mean also labor, feminist, and African-American activists right here in the United States. (Think for a moment of the coward John Kennedy, who cravenly refused to act for as long as he could while people were being beaten and murdered in the Deep South; and then think of the courage of the Civil Rights activists who went on resisting even though they knew they were on their own.) The threats, and surely their own fear, didn’t stop them from talking back boldly to their captors and would-be masters. I’ve often wondered what I’d do in such conditions, and I don’t assume I’d be brave. But I think it’s a safe bet that our politicians, and their supporters, who crumble in the face of verbal insults, wouldn’t last a second; indeed, they are already collaborators with Bush. What use are they, then?

Fortunately, In America At Any Rate, Education Produces No Effect Whatsoever

I’ve been trying for a while now to fit this quotation into a posting, so here it is upfront:

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism, as Gellner ought to know, is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

The quotation comes from Paul Feyerabend’s reply to Ernest Gellner’s review of Feyerabend’s Against Method, reprinted in Science in a free society (London: Verso/NLB, 1978), p. 148. I like it because it sums up neatly what I was trying to say in yesterday’s posting, though I confess it feels odd to realize that by this definition, I’m a liberal. But I can live with that: words for political positions are imprecise, and change. I’ve always liked this 1895 exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest:

Lady Bracknell. [interrogating Jack, the would-be fiancé of her daughter] What are your politics?

Jack. Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

In the 1952 film version, “Liberal Unionist” was changed to simply “liberal.”

I wish I knew enough Japanese to understand what the Takarazuka Flower Troupe did with it:

What That Word It Means To Me

If you have been privileged to travel the highways of these United States, you’ve probably seen the billboards with cutesy quips from God. (And if you haven’t, read on: I have video!) White text on black background, featuring bon mots like:

Don’t make me come down there.

-- God.

Which is funny, you know, because Christians are supposed to want God to come down here. “Even so, come, lord Jesus!” Christians in the mainstream churches stopped praying for the speedy arrival of the Kingdom over a thousand years ago; only the fringe sects still keep that part of the traditional faith. But really, you’d only want to put off the judgment if you were, maybe, a bit nervous about your prospects of salvation, wouldn’t you?

I find these billboards no more obnoxious than most, and superior to most religious roadside advertising. They beat “It’s not a choice, it’s a child!” hands down. And some of them were witty enough to make me look forward to the next one.

But of course, not everyone agrees with me. Once I stumbled on Bill Maher ranting about them on some TV show, though I don’t remember his exact objections. And then Greta Christina, bless her heart, put this video on her blog:



“Comedian and videographer Mario DiGiorgio shows what his billboard replies would be if he had the money.... and his replies are freakin' hilarious,” writes Greta Christina. I beg to differ: I wouldn’t advise this comedian to give up his day job. “Eye-for-an-eyesore” is as good as it gets. Especially revealing was the author’s claim to have written his material with “love,” just like a conservative Christian would claim, and his closing admonition, “it doesn’t matter what you believe in … just keep it to yourself and we’ll all get along handsomely.” Freedom of speech (and religion too, evidently) for me, but not for thee. As a faggot, I’m used to hearing the same thing from liberal straights: Do whatever you want in private, but why do you have to broadcast it to the whole world?

The comments were educational too. One commenter was apparently pleased that “somebody actually burned one [of the 'God' billboards] down during rush hour about 2 years ago”, and another wrote, “The desire to take a road trip with a bucket of white paint is alarmingly strong.” I’m sure they’d be just as tolerant if a Bible-thumper were to burn down or deface a secular-humanist billboard. But that’s why we don’t have such things, right? Because we don’t want to offend others by stating our beliefs in public? I do love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. These folks aren’t as different from their religious opposite numbers as they like to think, and that’s why the human race is doomed. Getting rid of one’s religion, or exchanging one’s Koran-belt fundamentalism for a kinder, gentler sect doesn’t seem to change the dynamics of discomfort with different beliefs.

DiGiorgio begins by lamenting the lack of “reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs”, which I think is overreacting just a tad, but where’s the reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs in this video? He admits the contradiction in putting a video on the Internet that tells other people to “keep it to yourself,” but a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so just shut up, awready, you narrow-minded intolerant bigots out there!

And then there's the question of why I, an atheist, would be interested in showing “reverence” to anything?

A good many people confuse “respect for another person’s right to free speech” with “respect for the content of another person’s speech.” They are not at all the same thing. Of course you’re entitled to your own opinion, but I’m not required to agree that it came from God’s mouth to your ear, any more than you are required to agree the same of my opinion. But like it or not, the First Amendment guarantees your (and my) right to be offended; if you don’t like it, I hear that other countries (Canada, Iran) are more concerned for the tender sensibilities of the thin-skinned.

I don’t respect Christianity, but then I don’t respect Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam either. (Well, I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for Judaism – cute Jewish boys, y’know – and a remarkable number of the writers who’ve influenced me most have been Jewish: Walter Kaufmann, Ellen Willis, Bob Dylan, Paul Goodman, Joanna Russ, Noam Chomsky right off the top of my head; but none of them have been observant, so if I respect anything, it’s the absence of religion in their work.) But lately I’ve come to realize that many of my fellow atheists get so worked up over stuff like these billboards because they don’t get respect, and they want it bad. I don’t respect atheism, let alone demand “reverence, recognition, and tolerance” for it, and I’m an atheist.

The philosopher Michael Neumann wrote an interesting essay on respect, in the wake of the furor over the Danish ‘Mohammed’ cartoons. It reads like a rough draft, written at white heat, but Neumann makes some worthwhile points, like:

...it really flies in the face of reality to hold that all persons or cultures or religions are worthy of respect. Is this supposed to be some absolute truth? What is inconceivable about the notion of a contemptible person, culture, or religion? Not long ago, and not only in Western culture, the great sin was pride, and self-esteem was considered quite inappropriate to so insignificant and paltry a thing as a human being. You need not go nearly so far to the surely reasonable idea that some people really haven't done or been anything of which you should stand in awe.

…Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

Worse yet, it seems that many of my fellow atheists really want to act like the Bible-thumpers they despise so vocally. They want to work themselves into a frenzy of indignation over other people’s perceived misconduct, to try to silence those who disagree with them, to demand that the landscape be scoured of any messages that could conceivably offend them, and to see themselves as normal, decent, respectable citizens of the Greatest Nation in the World.

Eeeeuuuw. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m reminded of the old joke where a man asks a feminist, “Are you a lesbian?” and she comes back with “Are you the alternative?” These folks are not the alternative to theism. It’s hard for me to see them as being on the same side as me (dividing up into “sides” isn’t a good idea anyway), let alone as the Great Rational Hope of Humankind’s Future. I mean, how can they demand “tolerance”, let alone “reverence,” from theists if they go around having conniptions over freakin’ billboards on the public highways?

This Post Is Not A Defense Of George W. Bush...

…okay?

Every morning after BBC World Service, my community radio station plays a couple minutes of Texas snark by Jim Hightower, who bills himself as America’s #1 Populist! The late Molly Ivins liked him, enough to quote his Wildean epigram “The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos” every chance she got. Sorry, Molls, wherever you are, but it’ll never replace “I can resist anything except temptation” in my heart.

So, this morning’s snark was about a painting George W. Bush keeps in the Oval Office. No, it’s not a portrait of Jeff Gannon in Rambo drag, it’s “A Charge To Keep” by the German-American illustrator W. H. D. Koerner:

Bush believes that this here is a pitcher of a Methodist circuit minister, keeping his charge through mountaintop, tree roots, snow and sleet and hail and dead of night. I don’t know who the fellas riding behind him are supposed to be. As it happens, the painting was originally commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 to illustrate a short story called “The Slipper Tongue,” and that rider is a horse thief fleeing a lynch mob.

Now, I agree that’s a horse laugh on Dubya, who everybody knows is (in one of Molly Ivins’s better phrases, though she wrote it about another Texas pol) smarter than a box of rocks. It seems that this story first broke big last month when Timothy Noah wrote about it on Slate, though Scott Horton of Harper’s has links to other stories going back to early 2004.

You can imagine the hilarity that ensued in the blogosphere, about Bush’s delusional tendency to hear what he wants to hear and believe what he wants to believe. Horton’s and Noah’s articles were much linked to and clucked over. And of course, Bush does hear what he wants to hear and believes what he wants to believe. But there was a catch, if you read far enough in Noah’s article – and children, always read to the end of news stories, or at least jump ahead to the closing grafs, because that’s where the good parts usually are.

The painting was subsequently recycled by the Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a nonfiction story. The caption that time was, "Bandits Move About From Town to Town, Pillaging Whatever They Can Find." Koerner published the illustration a third and final time in a magazine called the Country Gentleman. On this go-round, it was indeed used to illustrate a short story that related to Wesley's hymn. But the story's moral was a little off-message. According to Weisberg, it was "about a son who receives a legacy from his father—a beautiful forest in the Northeast and a plea to protect it from rapacious timber barons." Apparently nobody ever got around to notifying Bush's Interior Department.

Y’see, Hightower and the others who’ve written about this story seem to believe that a picture can have only one meaning. That wasn’t obvious to the Post or to the artist himself, who sold the same picture to “illustrate” a very different story. And it could probably have illustrated a range of other tales and situations – even that of a Methodist circuit preacher, though I admit I can’t see that one myself. I find all this ironic, given the way liberals like to accuse Christian fundamentalists of literalism, because of the obsessive literal-mindedness involved in this insistence that Bush is illegitimately imposing the wrong meaning on this painting. (The title “A Charge to Keep” is Bush’s own, apparently, not Koerner’s, but that’s not exactly a hangin' crime either. Many works have titles by which they’re popularly known, like “Whistler’s Mother” or “the Mona Lisa” or “The Lone Ranger Theme.”) If Bush were an art historian, his reading would be risible, but he’s not.

And given the enormity of Bush’s real crimes and most Democrats’ (including liberal ones’) complicity in them, I must say this reminds me of something that an Iowa waitress named Anita Esterday told the New York Times in November:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Or whether George W. Bush has correctly identified the subject and theme of an early 20^th century Western kitsch painting. But I suppose it passes the time until the Democrats get to take their turn in the Oval Office again.

Everybody Is Unique -- Except Me

What keeps me skeptical about “born gay” theories is that I’m not attracted to Men, that is, to males as a sex. I’m attracted to various individuals who happen to be men. I don’t say this to be coy, like the gay writers who claim that they’re not gay writers but writers who happen to be gay, because this is a distinction that makes a difference, namely that I’m not attracted to most men. Neither are most other gay men, as far as I know. I’m not talking about men whose lack of appeal most people might find obvious -- old, fat, ugly trolls like myself, for example; I’m talking about ordinary, healthy, guys-next-door whom most other men would find Hawt, even Totally Hawt. Yet they leave me totally cold.

I think this is true of most people: the people we’re attracted to are an island in an ocean of people we’re not attracted to. For many, this is a point of pride: a person has to have standards, you know! I get the impression that for many gay men, at least, “I’m attracted to men” means “Any male I’m not attracted to isn’t a man.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I don’t mean to harsh anybody’s buzz here. My point is that even for monosexuals – those of us who are attracted to people of one sex only – the basis of attraction doesn’t seem to be a person’s sex, but something more specific, something more personal.

Many born-gay advocates have no difficulty explaining this fact away. They postulate “sexual orientation” – which sex a person is attracted to – as a genetically programmed condition, the ground of sexuality as it were; which individuals a person is attracted to – his or her “type” – is something learned. (One gay man I used to debate online defined this latter category as a person’s “sexual preference,” though that is not of course how the term is generally used.) I think this begs the question. There’s no evidence that I know of to support the distinction, and it contradicts the main born-gay assumption/claim, that because we don’t remember having “learned” our desires, they must be inborn. This gets tricky when someone complains that other people are too shallow, and should open their minds to different types (usually the complainer himself) than the limited, narrow media images we are brainwashed to want, etc., etc. But men I’m not attracted to might as well be women for all the desire they arouse in me; why should I suppose that this is something I learned, rather than something inborn? And if I can be expected – or expect others – to change my inborn desire for one man instead of another by main force of will, then why can’t I be expected to desire women instead of men?

At the very least, we need an explanation of how our specific sexual attractions are “learned”, if they really are learned. I don’t expect an explanation anytime soon, of course, because those individual attractions aren’t generally seen as a problem, the way “sexual orientation” is. Language is a good analogy here, I think, because it’s certain that we learn the specific language we speak. Yet the fact that English, or Russian, is not innate doesn’t make it feel any less natural to us, and many people have prejudices about other languages, or dialects, or accents, that to me are very reminiscent of the (often hostile) incomprehension people have about others’ sexual attractions. (This might be a good place to mention that I’m similarly skeptical when researchers talk about a “gay accent” as a sign that homosexuality is inborn. Accents are learned, not inborn. For more information see Rosina Lippi-Green's English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States [Routledge, 1997].)

Of course, there are other theories of “sexual orientation.” I once read an interview with an elderly Chilean poet in Gay Sunshine, who recalled how in certain 1920s artistic circles, some men claimed that they loved men because men are inherently more beautiful than women. The poet considered this nonsense: a black panther, he reasoned, is more beautiful than either a man or a woman, but you wouldn’t want to go to bed with it.

Some lesbian-feminist writers in the 70s said the same thing: men are ugly, hairy, and gross, so of course women would rather make love to other women, who are beautiful and delightful. I’ve encountered straight men who agree – they can understand lesbianism, because women are beautiful, but who could love a dirty, hairy guy? Some even concede that they can’t understand female heterosexuality, for just that reason. Like the Chilean poet, I think this notion is absurd; but many people believe that sexual attractiveness is an objective, universal trait. When I first came out I spent a fair amount of time comparing notes on passersby with other gay men, and I quickly found that they liked men who left me cold, or even repulsed me; and of course they felt the same way about many of my choices. That experience makes me feel confident in asserting that sexual attractiveness is in fact subjective and personal. I believe that our attractions are learned (though not taught) or acquired, rather than something we’re born with – and I include the male-female divide known as “sexual orientation” in this belief -- but I also believe that we have a right to them, as idiosyncratic as they are.

In particular, I don’t believe that “sexual orientation” is determined, either by genes or by environment. (There should be snigger quotes around “environment” too, of course.) The first males I was attracted to, in first grade, were two other first-grade boys. Unlike many other gay men, I’ve never been interested in “princes” or “angels.” The appeal of Homecoming Kings has always escaped me. Those first boys came from families poorer than mine, but I was drawn by their vulnerability, not their toughness. (One had one leg in a brace, this being the 1950s, when polio was still a threat.) Miss Manners once wrote apropos school dances that “There is no such thing as a thirteen-year-old whose affections have been aroused by the charm of vulnerability.” Maybe not, but I was one, and I doubt there’s a gene for it.

So, maybe I’m totally unique? I doubt that too. One thing I learned early on as a writer was that when I spoke from my most weirdly personal experience, a surprising number of other people would feel that I was speaking for them too. And if enough other people recognize themselves in my account, then there’s a flaw in the concept of “sexual orientation” that needs to be thought about some more.