AS WE GATHER to celebrate, if not our pride, at least our enthusiasm for its possibility, it is natural for us to look back to see how far we've come. Fortunately, this retrospective reveals much to give thanks for. The public acceptance of gays and lesbians, while hardly complete, has reached levels undreamed by most of us when we were growing up. We blinked and now high school students are attending the prom with their gay lovers, and openly gay couples are moving to the suburbs to buy houses and raise children. Moreover, straight couples, their future contributions to the gay community packed in strollers, line the Gay Pride parade route to gawk and cheer on their gay friends. Frosty fraternization has given way in many urban centers to an active miscegenation of straight and gay societies.
You would think that these developments would be received with optimism by our best and brightest, would be recognized as welcome indications that our decades of activism, struggle and stairmaster have actually gotten us somewhere. You would be ever so wrong.
In fact, our community's intelligentsia (in the Starbucks sense of the word) is united in tight-lipped horror at the sight of gay people finding acceptance in the straight world. Waterman pens have been scribbling furiously these last few years, filling page after latté-stained page with jeremiads on our heedless assimilation into the faceless gray hordes of our breeder brethren. According to these theorists, what gay people should have been fighting for all these years, or in fact were fighting for until it slipped their minds sometime during the video for Justify My Love, was not admittance into the status quo, but the freedom to celebrate openly our repudiation of it without fear of retaliation . The acceptance that should have been our goal was the straight world's acceptance of our rejection of them.
Alas, instead we have become its gaudy, grasping clone. Our community has become Lolita's mother writ large, pathetically aping a culture we do not understand and that regards us with only the most thinly veiled contempt. Yet it is precisely this contempt that we embrace as approval.
This, in essence, is the party line among our pondering class, with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan. Perhaps its most engaging popularizer is Daniel Harris, whose recently published The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture weds a catty, bitter voice to the normally puritanical dourness of the anti-assimilationists. It stands as an exemplary statement of the anti-assimilationist position. As such, I will use it and its author as my touchstones for responding to its charges.
Harris's book is both an atlas of a lost world and an elegy for its passing. Like an anthropologist observing a once isolated tribe fed into the maw of modern culture, he takes copious notes, summons to memory the glories that once were, and resigns himself to the inevitable. Whether it's camp, drag, leather, personal ads, pornography, or gay self-help manuals, he finds exactly the same pattern. A brief period of florescence in the days of oppression, followed by a swift decline once "the market" assimilated gay people to its banal calculus. As he writes:
By looking closely at the changes that have occurred in gay culture in the past few decades, I attempt to represent the process through which a culture with unique traditions and rituals is submerged into the melting pot, its distinguishing characteristics dissolving into the grey (sic), flavorless gruel as its members are accepted by society at large.
Harris's perspective here relies quite heavily on a liberal flavor of Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. One of its central tenets is that modern mass culture, perfected in America, is one of the oppressing class's greatest tools for keeping the masses down, distracted from the struggle for liberation by Pop Tarts and The Spice Girls. This mass culture effaces all regional, ethnic and class differences through the relentless leveling effect of its technology (telephone, television, Internet, etc.)
As long as gay people were isolated from this mass culture, protected by our pariah status from its blandishments, we were able to maintain our saucy singularity. Armed with feather boas and Judy Garland records, we bravely held out against the silent spring of sameness. But gay liberation ended all that, and as a result we have become absorbed into the undifferentiated mass of polyester and Kraft cheese singles that is the "mainstream."
As Harris puts the matter succinctly, "Gay liberation and the gay sensibility are staunch antagonists."
Here is the gauntlet thrown down before us by Harris and his co-religionists. Do we want to be liberated, or do we want to be human? Because apparently we can't have both. Decisions don't get much starker than that. Like all myths of fall, this argument projects an image of uncompromising clarity, of a sword rightly dividing the word of truth, that makes it attractive out of all proportion to its truth or cogency.
In the face of such unanimous and scathing opprobrium, can anything be said in defense of assimilation? I would answer with an emphatic yes. In fact, I believe that assimilation is precisely what will create a more adult, humane and multi-faceted gay community.
Perhaps the first inkling that assimilation might not be all that bad comes when you examine the Garden of Eden that supposedly preceded it: The closet. Or for those few wealthy or talented enough, a hermetic fraternity dissimulating itself to the outside world through art and culture. What claim to superiority over assimilation could these crabbed modes of existence possibly possess? In what system of values could it be superior to live in unrelenting fear and self-hatred, circumscribed without by legal discrimination and within by the internecine conflict between the need to be authentic and the desire to belong?
That, as they say, is a very interesting question, and its answer even more so. The superiority of assimilation over what preceded it is immediately apparent the minute the distinction is framed in terms of justice, politics, and individual freedom. There's no contest.
This superiority, however, disappears, or at least becomes less obvious, the minute the issue is examined in purely cultural terms. And it is in these terms that Harris et al. frame their arguments. Granted, in the old days millions of people were subjected to torment and injustice, but this system created a cultural elite of tastemakers, artists and ironic observers of the world that hated them. "Gay life" was not a given, doled out to everyone who just happened to be homosexual. On the contrary, it was a crucible of refinement that only the chosen few could endure, much less flourish in.
Paradoxically, Harris's ideal world is fundamentally an aristocratic one. This will seem surprising to those seduced by the neo-Marxist analysis that is the manifest content of his book. But Marxism has for decades been the acceptable mask worn by closet aristocrats in Western society. This is harder to see in the United States, since, lacking its own aristocratic traditions (the Old South excepted), there's really nothing to compare Marxist cultural snobbery to. However in England and France, where aristocratic class systems are still living memories, this ruse is both more widely practiced and more easily detected.
The eternal malaise of the middle class has always been its self-hatred. Middle class people can claim neither the heroic struggles of the proletariat nor the cultural hauteur and effortless savoir faire of the aristocracy. They have so completely absorbed the contempt coming from both above and below at a life lived solely for making money, that one of the main activities of middle class people now consists of trying to atone for their cultural vapidity by proving to the world that they're not middle class. This goes ten-fold for the middle class's intelligentsia.
The middle class responds to its self-hatred either with frantic efforts to imitate aristocrats (the sole reason Jaguar cars are still in production, by the way) or with uncritical idolization of blue collar authenticity (Bruce Springsteen, Harley-Davidson, etc.) If they know too much about working class life to indulge in this latter self-deception, they identify some non-Western indigenous people, preferably in the end stages of cultural or actual genocide, to hold up as an ideal of the authentic life they so sadly lack (Tibet, any American Indian tribes within driving distance of Santa Fe, etc.). It is the genius of Marxism considered as a jeu d'esprit to allow both processes to occur simultaneously. It hallows the authenticity of the proletariat , but on the basis of an aristocratic ethos.
And this creates the great unspoken dilemma that faces the middle class Marxist. The proletarian-worshipping side of her soul hates the poverty and cultural marginalization of the workers; yet her efforts to alleviate these injustices, if successful, lead directly to the embourgeoisment of her erstwhile heroes. There is no disillusionment so cruel as that experienced by the middle class Marxist intellectual when he discovers that the workers (or Tibetans?see above) he idolized as the ultimate antidote to his own middle class mediocrity, once freed of their chains, proceed immediately to the nearest mall to buy Nikes and projection TVs of their very own. They want Disney World, not the classless society.
This is a painful moment for the Marxist theoretician, for the impulse that causes him to recoil from this discovery is irreducibly aristocratic, and thus can only be acknowledged obliquely. The rage the middle class Marxist feels at being deprived of a marginalized group to provide him with vicarious authenticity can only find expression as a theoretical insight into the fiendish duplicity of the capitalist system. Concepts like "repressive desublimation" and "false consciousness" are then dutifully confected to explain the ingratitude of the masses, and to mask the narcissism of their unrequited savior.
If you replace "workers" in the paragraphs above with "homosexuals", and "capitalists" with, well, capitalists, you have reproduced almost exactly Harris's argument and have described the psychological mechanics that produce it. The proletarian/aristocratic dichotomy is in full force, and pre-Stonewall gay life is easily accommodated in either mode. Under the aspect of proletarian virtue, gay life is recast as Hogan's Homos, where a hardy band of streetwise POWs, establishing clandestine lines of communication with the outside world, "much like prisoners rapping in code on the pipes of their cells", manage to hoodwink their captors at every turn. Under the aspect of aristocratic superiority, gay life is presented as Queen Acres, where unspeakably sophisticated gays tutor their hillbilly cousins in the wilds of straight America. Different shows, same network.
Once we delve beneath all the Marxist theoretical blather, we discover that his argument boils down to the simple claim that gay liberation has been a disaster not because it is ineffective, not because it is immoral, but because it is vulgar. This is a word that appears often in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, the bearer of a telling ubiquity.
The gay world Harris memorializes so reverently was an elitist institution that only the best could belong to. It was a bastion of discrimination in both senses of the word. But then gay liberation came along, and the cozy connoisseurs club, that tweedy home of recondite perceptions and unerring apercus, was crashed by hordes of unwashed parvenus who couldn't tell the difference between purple and aubergine. The illuminati were replaced by sans culottes in culottes, and gay life just hasn't been worth the trouble since.
One can almost see Harris's lip curl with disdain as he surveys the wreckage wrought by the democratization of gay life. Here he is, for example, fuming about the picture of gay relationships conveyed in gay self-help literature:
The propagandistic fictions surrounding the Uxorious Gay [the word means excessively deferential to one's spouse?NL] operate by reenacting the rituals of heterosexual courtship and by deliberately de-exoticizing gay relationships, turning homosexual lovers into glamorless hausfraus who wash socks, entertain in-laws, pick up laundry from dry cleaners and agonize over dish-pan hands.
It would be futile to point out to Harris that what "de-exoticizes" relationships is familiarity, not false consciousness, and that doing laundry and entertaining relatives is the everyday reality even of single people, because it is precisely the ordinariness of it all that Harris can't stand. It's just too common. He can't feel special in such a world, therefore it must be wrong.
Harris gives the game away right at the beginning of the book when he writes, "Sometime in my early adolescence, I acquired, while living in the very heart of Appalachia, a land of lazy southern drawls, a British accent... my peers were budding good old boys whose fathers drove tractors and pickup trucks and spoke in an unmusical twang that I, a pompous fop in my teens, found distinctly undignified." The only odd thing about this passage is that it is written in the past tense.
He then goes on to describe how he became utterly captivated by the Hollywood divas of the day, completely entranced by "the patrician inflections of characters who conversed in a manufactured Hollywood idiom meant to suggest refinement and good breeding."
Exactly.
One way to look at The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is as a long, tortuous attempt to justify these aristocratic longings to their owner, without having to subscribe (overtly) to aristocratic politics. Make no mistake, Harris is still sneering at the uncouth accents of his compatriots, except now he calls them consumers instead of hicks and they live in a subdivision instead of a holler. And the esoteric world of European neo-Marxist theorizing has replaced the ballrooms and summer homes of Manhattan high society. Different shows, same network.
If that were all that was going on, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture would be at best an eccentric collection of insights into gay life, both marred and catalyzed by a central, if indispensable, self-deception. Unfortunately, there is a darker side to the phenomenon.
The attentive reader of Harris's book will be immediately struck by a curious feature of its argument. Though gay life is its putative subject, at every opportunity Harris defines it in such a way as to make homosexuality itself disappear. Whenever he analyzes a particular feature or tradition of gay life, he is immediately at great pains to point out that it has nothing whatever to do with sexuality per se, but is merely an artifact of an alienated consciousness or a marginalized social reality.
For example, when Harris discusses camp and drag, he writes, "the preciousness of the aesthete... reflects less the homosexual's innate affinity for lovely things, for beauty and sensuality, than his profound social discontent, which we attempt to overcome by creating flattering images of ourselves as connoisseurs and Epicureans." And later, "the homosexual's love of Hollywood was not an expression of flamboyant effeminacy, but, rather, in a very literal sense, of swaggering machismo."
Likewise, in his discussion of the leather and S&M subcultures, he makes the rather astounding claim that, "since the inception of the S/M movement, the cult of leather has served as a way for the gay man to identify himself to others and to engage in ostensibly illicit practices that, far from representing an epidemic of sexual pathology, have become simply a pretext for a perverse act of networking." [italics added]
Networking? Networking? The thesis is so preposterous that Harris himself has to abandon it, and scant pages later is cataloguing with disdain the acts of bootlicking, mummification, flogging, wholesale dildo invasion etc. that define S/M practice. By the end of the chapter he is even mocking the members of the leather community who have tried to portray S/M as primarily a form of self-actualization instead of the pursuit of sadistic sex, his own earlier and identical claim conveniently forgotten.
It becomes all too clear that for Harris, gay identity is completely constituted by its oppression. This in turn becomes the way Harris explains away aspects of gay life that he finds uncomfortable. If gay men idolize divas as a protest against social marginalization, then it can't be used to prove that they are effeminate. If they devote their lives to S/M out of a need to "network", then it can't be because they like to get beat up or beat someone else up. Oh no.
The attractiveness of this theoretical sleight of hand becomes clearer when we discover that Harris himself was quite the sissy in his youth, "sashaying around the house in brightly colored caftans," and giving regular drag performances in his high school gym to no doubt bewildered students and faculty. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Harris' theoretical commitments are designed to explain away a feminine side that perhaps even today troubles an unquiet virility.
Harris explicitly links the two concerns, when he writes:
I was not attracted to Hollywood stars because of their femininity, nor did my admiration of them reflect any burning desire to be a woman... as if diva worship were simply a ridiculous side effect of gender conflicts. Instead it was their world, not their femininity, that appealed to me, the irrepressibly madcap in-crowd of Auntie Mame, of high spirits and unconventional characters....
Um, sure. Saying that a diva's femininity plays no part in the world she creates for others is heartbreakingly naive, not to say sexist. And the fact that dressing up in caftans and imitating Bette Davis is a form of social protest taken up only by homosexual men, not migrant farm laborers or Native Americans?groups one would think suffer from equal amounts of alienation and cultural displacement?is a puzzle Harris still needs to resolve, at least for me if not for himself. One gets the distinct impression that much of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is simply Harris repeating obsessively to himself "I am a man I am a man" as he changes into a clean caftan.
It would be easy to dismiss Harris's necessary illusions as yet another example of self-hating homo hokum if they did not so vividly illustrate a tendency at work in most anti-assimilationist thought. One of the submerged purposes of the often arcane political theory used to justify these positions is, simply put, to make homosexuality disappear. Homosexuality ceases to be anything in or for itself and becomes instead a style of radical will or a stray emanation from the penumbra of the class struggle or a behavioral artifact of alienated consciousness?anything, that is, except homosexuality. Anything but what it really is.
Hidden beneath the exterior of radicalized theory lies yet one more example of what I call the "homosexuality plus" method of justifying homosexuality. The method assumes that homosexuality all by itself cannot be justified; it can only be justified by drawing attention away from its horrible reality and towards something else, something supposedly good that homosexuals are as well. "Sure, they're homosexuals, but they're so refined!" or "They're not just pansies, they're great artists, too!" The goal of this method is not to have homosexuality accepted, but to have it overlooked. It is apology masquerading as affront.
This, in a nutshell, is Harris' strategy. The subtext of his argument is that homosexuality can only be acceptable if it is serving a larger, and emphatically non-sexual, end, in this case cultural authenticity understood as resistance to "the Market." Though he mocks the attempts of the Mattachine Society and modern gay-marriage advocates to sanitize homosexuality by assimilating it to some higher moral ideal, he is guilty of the same charge.
The truth of the matter is that there is no escaping assimilation. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. The alternatives to "assimilation" offered by its vehement opponents are themselves merely avenues of assimilation into other parts of heterosexual culture?either assimilation into bohemianism or assimilation into the culture of left-wing activism. But neither of these alternatives are uniquely gay modes of feeling and acting. They were both created by heterosexuals, just like malls and monogamy. The perverse truth Harris points out in his book is that the only mode of existence that can truly be said to reflect a unique gay identity and culture is the closet! His reduction of moral issues to culture politics allows him to heroicize the world of homosexual men and women, cut off from one another, living lonely lives of terror in small towns all across America, because it produced exotic modes of cultural resistance.
At this point I think it is legitimate to ask Harris why gay people should feel obligated to fulfill his cultural fantasies at the expense of simple justice and freedom in their own lives. He needs to justify the pursuit of an intellectual mirage?the Garden of Eden where primitive gay culture exists untainted by money or heterosexuality?at the expense of (and as a replacement for) equality with heterosexuals in all aspects of life. He needs to explain why we need to feel guilty because we have not met his need to feel special.
The anti-assimilationists also fail to recognize that assimilation is a two-way street. It is not simply a matter of gay people surrendering their transgressive identities to the Borg collective of straight society. An obvious, but often overlooked, fact about assimilation is that it can only occur once gay people have actually come out of the closet. A married homosexual man who presents a faultless heterosexual fa?ade to the world, tells fag jokes at work and cruises forest preserves and truck stops at night is not assimilated, for he offers nothing that requires assimilation. He is making no claim for acceptance on behalf of his sexuality, because he does not believe it is acceptable in the first place. Assimilation is the antithesis of the closet.
Straight society cannot accommodate openly gay people without making radical changes to its own consciousness and values, something straight people themselves have always acknowledged. Indeed, the claim to moral equality with heterosexuals explicit in the drive to assimilate is far more disquieting to straight society than any amount of transgressive street theater taking place in a gay ghetto far, far away. If you doubt this, just ask yourself which spectacle panics and outrages the straight world more: the International Mr. Leather competition, or a gay wedding ceremony. The latter makes a claim to legitimacy wholly lacking from the former. In this matter, the Christian Coalition possesses a better understanding of the subversive implications of gay assimilation than our café intellectuals.
What Harris and his ilk fail to realize is that assimilation is the solution to many of the problems they identify in modern gay life. The gays who want to flee the ghetto for the suburbs are precisely the people who, like Harris, are sick and tired of a "community" whose sole values are a hot body, eternal youth and a fabulous wardrobe. It is their way of thumbing their noses at the Hunky Golightlies who hold sway in Boy's Town, and the mind-numbing superficiality of the culture these have created. In other words, assimilation is a sign of maturity among gay people, both individual and communal.
For the shocking truth about gay men is that they never shine more brightly than when they are in the company of heterosexuals. A gay man among heterosexuals is often witty, cultured, sensitive, engaging on all levels. But the minute gay men are alone together, the IQ suddenly plummets at least 500 points. Conversation ceases and the desperate posing and primping begins, the endless game of you're-not-hot-so-I-don't-have-to-talk-to-you. Ph.D's in art, philosophy and literature suddenly can speak of nothing beyond the gym, the bar or the bathhouse. Plato's cave becomes the Valley of the Dolls.
I'll say it loud and proud: We need assimilation to free us from slavery to our own oppressive social structures and sex roles.
Lastly, assimilation answers the original need created by growing up as gay people in a homophobic society. The pain we felt when we realized we were homosexual was the pain of separation from the culture and traditions that we were born into. We wanted to belong, not stand apart. The rage we feel at homophobia is rage at all it has kept us from, whether that is the religion of our people, the communal life of our neighborhood, or the vital traditions of our forebears. We were right to refuse the phony integration offered by the silence and shame of the closet. Our unrelenting campaign to force recognition of who we really are, without apologies, is entirely just. But it would be foolish for us to recoil from the world around us at the moment when it is finally beginning to see that we are in fact valuable members of any community. Having been involuntarily excluded by homophobia, we should not voluntarily exclude ourselves through heterophobia.
Since I do not believe that the gay sensibility is an accidental artifact of our oppression, I do not fear that assimilation will erode the sprightly spark that is our hallmark. Even in the very heart of the ghetto, where the only oppression we face comes from our friends, gay men still dress up in women's clothes and worship divas. All the "networking" opportunities in the world haven't emptied the leather bars. That won't change any time soon. But it needs to be recognized that we will have achieved true liberation only when we no longer have to justify our sexual orientation by carrying anyone else's moral baggage, whether that be Daniel Harris's aristocratic Marxist snobbery or Ralph Reed's puritanical Christian snobbery. We don't have to by gay and liberal or gay and free-market patriots in order to justify who we are.
Contrary to the fantasies of the Left and the Right, there is no necessary connection between homosexuality and morality or immorality. It is a sexual orientation, a pure capacity, nothing more. It can be deployed in the service of any lifestyle or ideology we choose. There are certainly good reasons for rejecting the materialism and banality of much of our culture, but homosexuality isn't one of them. The task of leading the examined life is a human burden, not a sexual one.
At the beginning of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Harris states that his main goal is to free gay culture from its adolescence. Yet Harris' view of gay history is the best example of the problem he is trying to solve. Adolescence is the age of heroes, of Golden Ages and secret societies, of the willful enchantment of life's banal realities. It is the flight from the responsibilities of adulthood into a cocoon of fantasy where all one's inadequacies are reborn as marks of divine favor. So it is with the gay world Harris wants to hang on to. He can't bring himself to leave the exclusive clubhouse where he and his childhood friends played at being glamorous ladies of high society, uttering secret passwords in perfect patrician dialect. The fact that his fantasy does not involve Star Trek does not make it any less adolescent.
Assimilation will cost us certain things that we now treasure. Our sense of specialness, of superiority, of safety behind the walls of the ghetto?all these will have to disappear or undergo extensive facial reconstruction. But in the end we will gain more than we lose. Becoming part of the wider community will ennoble both our humanity and that of the straight people who accept us as equals. To grasp this opportunity requires merely our willingness to leave behind the childhood of the closet and the adolescence of the ghetto to embrace the possibilities of adulthood, like a flower opening to the sun.
Copyright © 1997 by Niall Lynch. Reprinted with permission. Reproduction in whole or in part requires prior written permission.