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.