IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared October 25, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

IN A RECENT COMMENTARY circulated to the gay press, gay Muslim activist Faisal Alam laments the absence of gay voices from recent anti-war rallies. I, on the contrary, regard this as a sign of our community's maturity and good sense.

We have been here before. Twelve years ago, several fellow activists and I met with the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to criticize its formal opposition to the Persian Gulf War. In brief, we said that the war was not a gay issue, and that in any case appeasement was not the way toward peace any more than it was in World War II.

Then, to counter the radical gays who had joined the anti-war protests, my friend Barrett Brick and I formed a group called GAIA, which alternately stood for Gays Against Iraqi Aggression and Gays Against Isolationism and Appeasement.

With a large, hand-made placard, Brick applied the slogan "Silence = Death" to those who favored a passive response to Saddam's reckless aggression. This upset the radicals, but it also got the attention of other groups defending the war effort, who were surprised to find gays on their side. We told them that gays have been fighting for America since its founding. We cited polls showing that most gays agreed with the overwhelming majority of Americans who supported the war, not the few who opposed it.

This time around, with NGLTF thus far avoiding its earlier mistake, Alam has taken up the anti-war standard. Remarkably, he manages to write an entire column opposing war with Iraq without once mentioning Saddam Hussein. Instead, he complains that spending money on war would take money from "social welfare programs." But this is as arbitrary as pitting housing needs against mental health needs. Alam ignores the primacy of national defense as a responsibility of government, preferring to call for an unspecified "peaceful solution." The fact that Iraq has violated 16 United Nations resolutions does not convince him that peaceful efforts have failed.

Alam ignores Saddam's long record of international mayhem that brought us to this point. The only country he is willing to blame for anything is the United States. This upside-down worldview would be comical if Alam and others on the anti-American left were not in dead earnest. And because he includes every conceivable issue in the gay agenda, he declares the war with Iraq a "queer" issue, without showing the slightest awareness of which side actually treats gays better. (Hint: It's the one that allows gay Muslims to organize and publish op-eds.)

Alam writes as if gays who disagree with his anti-war stand are all going to "$250 tuxedo dinners" - ignoring the fact that these events are fundraisers for gay causes - and as if enjoying the fruits of our labor is disreputable. He gratuitously insults an extraordinarily generous community, while asserting that "the real fight for freedom" occurs elsewhere. How are the downtrodden helped by this ridiculous, mendacious class warfare?

Alam says we once "understood that single-issue politics would not win us anything." Here he falsifies the history of the gay rights movement in order to portray us as having fallen away from a nobler early period. In fact, some of our movement's pioneers, like DC's Frank Kameny (another critic of NGLTF 12 years ago), maintained a laser-like focus on gay issues.

Alam should check out the website of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC (of which Kameny and I are members) at www.glaa.org, and review our timeline for examples of how much a group singly focused on gay rights can accomplish.

Alam could also learn a lot from English gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who opposes war with Iraq but says, "It is disturbing the way the anti-war campaign is ignoring the Iraqi government's monstrous human rights abuses, and is offering no counter-plan for overthrowing the murderous regime in Baghdad."

To the extent that past American policies have contributed to the problem that now threatens the Middle East, we make a fine choice for the ones to do something about it. As even Tatchell says, "A democratic Iraq would be a beacon for human rights throughout the Middle East. It could give lesbian and gay people their first taste of freedom in a region that is dominated by brutal Islamic fundamentalist regimes."

Alam brazenly invokes an early flashpoint of our movement in support of his untimely pacifism. Pardon me, but at Stonewall they fought back.

Every movement struggles with the desire for the ideal and the need for the practical. A column I recently wrote addressed the fallacies in the argument that the gay civil rights movement must include protection for gender identity in gay civil rights laws because gays "owe" transgender activists some debt for drag queens' participation in Stonewall. I made three points:

1. the importance of Stonewall has been exaggerated;
2. the importance of drag queens to Stonewall has been exaggerated; and
3. even if I am wrong about #1 and #2, that doesn't mean we must include transgenders in gay civil rights laws, since there are numerous considerations of practical politics here.

Most replies to that column, as usually happens when one writes critically about the "T" in "GLBT," consisted of name-calling. Many responses called the column "transphobic" or "elitist" because it would "leave some people behind," as if every law doesn't do that in some fashion.

There were, however, a couple of rational responses that challenged me on substantive grounds. These responses argued that there is a close connection between gay and transgender issues that ought not be ignored by gay civil rights laws. These responses raise important issues.

There are two separable questions when it comes to inclusion of gender identity in gay civil rights laws. First, is inclusion warranted as a matter of principle? Second, if it is warranted as a matter of principle, is it sensible as a matter of practical politics?

On the first question, I am not convinced that gay and transgender issues are so connected that principle dictates they be dealt with together in all legislation. The standard argument from principle seems to be that gay issues are a subset of all gender issues because gays, by having same-sex mates, transgress traditional gender/sex boundaries.

There are many things to say about this argument, but let's focus on one basic point. Since the beginning of the gay civil rights movement, there have been people trying to claim the cause is really about something other than homosexuality. For some 1960s and 1970s activists, it was really about ending an unjust capitalist system, or supporting movements for national liberation, or ending racism, or eliminating poverty. For many (especially male) activists, it was really about sexual liberation generally, as if we were fighting for the right to fornicate in the streets or with children.

I distrust claims that gay civil rights is really about something else (like poverty or gender). To me, such arguments seem like another way of erasing gay lives and concerns by subsuming them to some other cause favored by the advocate.

Such arguments are also reductionist: they reduce the gay experience to one aspect of life. Take the issue of our supposed "gender transgression." Many gay people see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in their mates. Is this in itself wrong? I don't think so, any more than it's wrong to prefer tall lovers to short ones or brown-haired ones to blondes. Does having a same-sex mate transgress traditional gender expectations? Of course, but this singular act of rebellion does not make a gender revolution of the type transgender activists seek.

On the second, practical issue, even if I were convinced that as a matter of principle gay and transgender issues are linked, I would still hesitate before adding "gender identity" to gay civil rights legislation.

As a legislator, I might personally support protecting transgenders from much private discrimination. But unfortunately, very few of my fellow legislators (in most places) would share my view. I could, of course, take the time and effort to explain it to them, but that period of education might add years to the final passage of my gay civil rights law. In the meantime, gay people will continue to face discrimination.

Not every law has to address every problem. Progress means that you get what you can while you can get it. Then, when you can get more, you do so. Progress comes by degrees, not (usually) by revolutions. The black civil rights movement did not fight to protect people from age discrimination. Was that ageist?

In almost every jurisdiction in the country where both gays and transgenders are protected, the protection for gays preceded the protection of transgenders by many years. This gap allowed people an opportunity to see that the world didn't end by protecting gays and that taking the additional incremental step of protecting transgenders also wouldn't cause it to end. This pace may be unsatisfying but it's preferable to waiting for a perfectly inclusive law that may never come.

I suppose one could respond that there is a very practical concern for gays involved here: if gender expression is not protected by law some gays will face discrimination for their gender presentation (butch women, effeminate men) rather than for their sexual orientation (gay) and yet will not be protected by the law.

This scenario is theoretically possible, but is not very likely. Almost any gay person subjected to discrimination for being gender variant will have been subjected to explicitly anti-gay abuse and thus will have some legal recourse under a law that protects sexual orientation but excludes gender identity. I certainly would not hold up the passage of a gay civil rights law to reach extraordinary cases.

We need to begin a reasoned, substantive, open discussion of these issues. The inclusiveness of "GLBT" might make us feel good, but it shouldn't become a talismanic barrier to progress.

Originally appeared August 8, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

WHEN A LEAKED MEMO about the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney indicated that the event might be cancelled because of mismanagement and a financial shortfall, there were headlines but not much surprise.

And why should we be surprised? We've seen this before.

We need to think back only as far as last year, when the controversial Millennium March on Washington hovered on the brink of cancellation. To save it, organizers had to scurry to secure an extra $600,000 in last-minute loans from corporate sponsors and individuals.

Most of us also remember when money from the affiliated Millennium Festival went missing - did an insider stuff $500,000 into his or her pockets before he or she left for the night? Or was attendance not as high as organizers thought?

Then there was the 1990 Vancouver games and the 1994 New York games, both of which ended up with deficits. The 1998 Amsterdam games turned out to be a financial disaster, requiring the local government to pony up $2 million so that they could continue.

So now it's Sydney. The gay money curse strikes again.

Trouble is, the curse seems to strike so frequently that many of us have stopped noticing. Who cares if newspapers fold because they lose ad revenue, if vendors are forced to take loans to keep their businesses afloat, or if sports teams are stranded on the other side of the world?

What does it matter if a local government has to bail us out, as long as we get to bask in the gay pride glow we get whenever thousands of us converge together. As long as people have a good time, as long as the community is burnished with an extra polishing of fellow feeling, an event is successful, right?

Wrong.

It is shameful that we refuse to take fiscal responsibility for ourselves, especially now that we are a maturing movement. Perhaps in our movement's childhood and adolescence it was forgivable to live the dream and damn the consequences, but 26 years after Stonewall, we need to think a little first.

If we want to throw a party or put on a competition, we need to pay for it ourselves and not expect others to bail us out. They don't owe us money; they don't owe us in kind donations. The world owes us nothing but rights and respect.

This is important, because the numbers we throw around - $2 million to bail out the Amsterdam games! - represents real money that has an impact on real people. That $2 million could have gone to public transportation, or housing, or health care, or even stayed in tax payers' pockets. Instead, it paid off businesses that would have suffered had they not gotten their expected return. After the Millennium March fiasco, one festival vendor described how he was forced to sell his jeep to pay salaries. Food vendors, it seems, were collectively owed $300,000.

When our special events organizations are not financially responsible, we hurt our supporters - generous individuals, gay and lesbian owned businesses, supportive legislators, friendly corporate sponsors. And when we hurt our supporters, we hurt ourselves.

Why is this happening? Perhaps because our organizations are built on the shoulders of visionaries who dream a world independent of real costs. We depend on people like that; without them, we could never have broken through the brick wall that sealed our closets.

But it is time to silence our inner children who demand extravaganzas and instead cultivate our inner grown-ups, scaling events back to what can be accomplished responsibly. We must hire people who have the experience to manage mammoth, complex events. More, we must take a close look at the events we take for granted and re-evaluate their purpose.

For example, as the world, country by country, is becoming more open to gays and lesbians, we should think about whether we need a Gay Games modeled on the Olympics. Since the Games are more about brotherhood than about international competition (everyone gets a medal, after all), perhaps we should model the Games on the AIDS ride instead, requesting that athletes who wish to participate raise their own funds through local support. Or maybe we should simply have smaller global competitions for sports that are not in the Olympics - like same-sex couple ice skating.

But we also need to ask how necessary it is that we have any national or international gathering that doesn't pay its own way. Once, these events served as proof to the world - and ourselves - that we existed in large numbers. Now they are just places to spend our disposable incomes acquiring rainbow-themed merchandise. Is it possible that these events are financial failures because not enough of us are interested in attending?

It's true that for those newly out or for those living in conservative areas, these gatherings serve to reassure and strengthen. But our local pride events serve the same purpose. Doesn't it make more sense for someone in conservative southern Illinois to seek out a gay presence in Chicago or St. Louis than to travel to Sydney, half a world away?

We must ward off the gay event money curse with fiscal responsibility, experienced management and honest evaluation. We need to play fair with our supporters and sponsors and prove to them that it is worth investing in our movement. It's only sporting.

Originally appeared June 27, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

As riots go, the June 1969 "Stonewall riot" was a fairly small affair. If we did not have a parade to commemorate it, it would probably not loom large in our collective memory.

But at some point, New York gays, delighted that some of them had stood up to abusive police, decided to hold an annual demonstration to commemorate that fact and promote gay pride.

We know how that came about.

Beginning in 1965, Washington gay activist Dr. Frank Kameny and New York's Craig Rodwell had organized a July 4th "Annual Reminder" picket at Independence Hall in Philadelphia as a reminder that gay Americans were deprived of fundamental human rights.

But in the fall of 1969, a few months after Stonewall, Rodwell, who by then had opened his Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, proposed that the "Annual Reminder" be changed to a New York "demonstration" commemorating gay resistance to be called Christopher Street Liberation Day.

His idea, he wrote, was to encourage gays and lesbians to "affirm our pride, our life-style and our commitment to each other. Despite political and social differences we may have, we are united on this common ground."

He also suggested that gay organizations around the country hold similar demonstrations on the same day: "We propose a nationwide show of support."

The idea spread rapidly. That first year, 1970, both Chicago and Los Angeles held similar marches. San Francisco held a "gay-in" in Golden Gate Park and finally started holding a parade in 1972.

Now virtually every large city and many small ones hold gay pride parades as gays in smaller and smaller cities take the initiative to become publicly visible in their home towns.

Some gays and lesbians criticize the parades, or affect to be "beyond all that." Maybe so, but it is important to keep in mind what the parades accomplish.

-- The parades are an opportunity to gain visibility and publicity for gays even when there is no specific grievance and political goal at stake. They are pro-active rather than reactive, gay-affirming, not gay-defensive.

-- The parades get the attention of politicians and the mass media (newspapers, television). Neither group would believe there are so many gays and lesbians if not for the parades. That forces them to take us more seriously when we do have an issue.

The Stonewall riot itself got six short paragraphs deep inside The New York Times but the first gay pride parade made the front page. Out of the closets and into the headlines.

-- The parades show the general public the fundamental normality of most gays and lesbians. Except for the occasional drag queen, most of the people in the parade look pretty much like their friends and neighbors.

Conservative gays and lesbians sometimes fear that men in leacher jock straps or go-go boys in day-glo bikinis harm "our" image. But except for religious zealots who dislike us anyway, spectators are probably more impressed that the men are healthy, good looking and in such good shape.

-- The parades give a wide variety of gay groups an annual chance to publicize themselves and push their members to be more open by participating in the parade

And the sheer variety of non-sexual gay interest groups has to impress anyone watching: from Presbyterians to softball leagues, from high school students to parents of gays, from interracial couples to political groups.

-- But most of all, the parades enable gays to see lots of other gays, more gays than they have seen anywhere else, more than they can imagine seeing. That can be enormously encouraging, inspiring and even deeply moving for many gays and lesbians.

It is, in fact, one of our chief "recruiting" techniques.

According to Nagourney and Clendinen's "Out for Good," that first march in New York started off from Greenwich Village with just a few hundred people. But as the marchers walked rapidly up Sixth Avenue they would recognize friends watching from the sidelines and urge them to join.

When march leaders reached Central Park and mounted a bluff overlooking the grassy Sheep Meadow area, they looked back "and behind them - stretching out as far as they could see - was line after line after line of homosexuals and their supporters, at least 15 blocks worth. ...

"No one had ever seen so many homosexuals in one place before. On top of the bluff, many of these men and women, who had grown up so isolated and alone, stood in silence and cried."

Notice the logic of the argument here. The parade is what is important, not the "riot." Stonewall was an excuse for the march, but the decision to have a march was the key element in producing the rapid proliferation of gay visibility and activism that followed.

Remember that the next time someone criticizes the parade. No gay person must ever feel alone again.

Originally appeared August 30, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

America's most highly regarded Twentieth Century composer of classical music, Aaron Copland, was beloved for his skill at refining into art music the native sounds of America, from Shaker and Appalachian music to rodeo songs and jazz. "The secret of his wisdom," wrote critic Harold Clurman, "can be traced to his utter acceptance of himself at an early age."

ON NOVEMBER 14, 2000, some of us will celebrate the 100th birthday anniversary of Aaron Copland, America's best known and most highly regarded composer of modern "classical" or "serious" music.

The event is worth celebrating. Copland did more than any other single person to create and promote an authentically American sounding style of classical music and make it accessible to the general public.

The music he created was easily distinguishable from its European counterparts by its folk-style melodies, open harmonies, bright orchestral colors, and the often syncopated, jazzy rhythms. The tempo marking for one piece is "With bounce."

Although he could write complex concert pieces and chamber music, he also sought to bring American music to a wider audience by writing tuneful ballets, Hollywood film music, background music for plays and pieces for high school bands and orchestra. He even wrote a Clarinet Concerto for jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman.

And he wrote patriotic works like "A Lincoln Portrait" and the now famous "Fanfare for the Common Man," a piece which turns up on television occasionally and which he later incorporated into his optimistic and outgoing Third Symphony.

Of his 100 or so compositions, nearly a dozen are now part of the standard concert repertory. Many are fun to listen to; some are easy to whistle. Perhaps no other American composer except Samuel Barber is so often performed and recorded.

His best known works may be the three American-themed ballets "Billy the Kid," "Rodeo," and "Appalachian Spring," the ballet which popularized the old Shaker song "Simple Gifts."

Forty years ago, one foreign critic called "Appalachian Spring," "the most beautiful score to come out of America." It would be hard, even now, to think of more than two or three serious rivals.

Copland has a particular interest for us beyond the merits of his music because he was gay.

Copland's homosexuality was quietly known but little advertised during his lifetime. It has now been elaborately documented, however, in Howard Pollack's recent biography, "Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man."

Despite being born in less tolerant times, after a brief late adolescent period of discomfort Copland apparently accepted his homosexuality with equanimity.

Music critic Paul Moor, a former lover, decided, "By some miracle Aaron remained as free of neurosis as anyone I've ever known." Later Moor added that Copland was "one of the dearest, kindest, most thoughtful and fundamentally good human beings I've ever known."

Copland's friend Harold Clurman added that "The secret of his wisdom can be traced to his utter acceptance of himself at any early age. He made peace with himself and so could be at peace with the whole world."

And Composer David Del Tredici recalled, "In private he was very open about being a gay man. He'd joke about it. It was perfectly natural."

But for Copland being gay was never a political issue. Even after Stonewall (1969), when his friend composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein urged him to "come out" in some public way, Copland grinned and replied, "I think I'll leave that to you, boy."

According to Pollack, Copland had a series of relationships over the years, mostly with young artists and musicians in their early twenties whom he befriended and mentored. The young Bernstein himself apparently was one of them in the early 1940s.

Copland seemed to enjoy being a teacher and father figure, but he also clearly valued the young men's energy and enthusiasm. When David Diamond criticized one of Copland's young lovers for exploiting him, Copland responded, "He's young, he's fresh, he's a lot of fun."

In other words, Copland knew he was getting something out of it too.

The question always arises of whether any artist's homosexuality influences or is detectable in his work. For visual artists and writers, the question may be easy to answer. For composers it seems more doubtful.

Certainly a composer's sexuality can influence the texts he chooses for songs or the stories he makes into operas or writes music about. But is the homosexuality in the music itself?

Erik Johns, one of Copland's lover from the early 1950s, suggested that there might be something there:

"Aaron felt that his sexuality was there in the music ... but also that it was incidental to his major theme. He also knew that homosexual themes may be there in the music, but in a way so abstract that it is very difficult to pinpoint."

Biographer Pollack himself notes that some of Copland's works are infused with a kind of romantic tenderness and relates that once after a good-looking student walked by, Copland, who had written three symphonies remarked to a friend, "There goes my Fourth Symphony."

Finally, some writers have suggested that gay American composers wrote more conservative, accessible music than their heterosexual modernist counterparts. They point to men like Copland, Barber, Bernstein, Menotti, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem and others.

But there are so many heterosexual American composers of conservative, tonal music that the idea seems doubtful.

The question is probably not answerable in any very specific way. But if raising it makes us listen to any composer's music more carefully, then it serves a purpose.

In any case, Happy Birthday, Aaron, and many happy returns.

Originally appeared in the Chicago Free Press on May 3, 2000.

Susan Sontag put gays on the cultural map in her magisterial 1964 essay, or so the familiar story goes. In hindsight, however, "Notes on Camp" can be seen as neither as impressive nor as gay-friendly as it seemed at the time.

IN 1964, A VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN 31-year-old named Susan Sontag made something of a slow motion splash with a 20-page article titled "Notes on Camp."

With a great display of learning, dozens of wide-ranging examples, and a host of distinctions and unexpected connections, Sontag's article took the notion of "Camp" seriously enough to analyze it - to explain what it was, where it came from, how it worked, and what its effects were.

Among her host of examples were Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, "Swan Lake," "King Kong," old Flash Gordon comics, Noel Coward plays, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Oscar Wilde's epigrams (the essay quotes several), feather boas, Ronald Firbank novels, and "All About Eve."

Sontag argued that there was more to Camp that just silliness or pretense or fake elegance. According to her, Camp is a whole sensibility that evaluates the world strictly in aesthetic terms.

More specifically Camp is characterized by a love of the theatrical, the artificial or exaggerated, which "converts the serious into the frivolous." It represents "a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality," producing a kind of moral and political disengagement.

Perhaps most significantly for the time - five years before Stonewall - Sontag pointed to gay men as the primary conduits of Camp taste, its "vanguard" and its "most articulate audience." In fact, she said:

"Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. ... The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

Sontag's article, widely read and discussed in the next few years, certainly popularized the idea of camp, both the awareness and the use of it. The article even achieved enough notoriety to be parodied by humorist Fran Lebowitz in a piece called "Notes on Trick."

In retrospect, Sontag's essay does not hold up well. The show of graduate school learning seemed forced, more intended to impress than illuminate, and limited to the parochial knowledge base of the literary elite of her time. The categories often seem arbitrary, the generalizations too sweeping, the distinctions artificial, and examples often ineptly chosen.

For instance, Sontag seems unable to recognize her subject matter. Despite her claim, "Swan Lake" is hardly Camp. That it is so often parodied should prove that; how could you parody Camp? Samuel Barber's fine opera "Vanessa" is hardly Camp just because gay men wrote it and it contains stylized elements.

No one could say Alexander Pope's poetry was Camp if he read more than "The Rape of the Lock," which maybe Sontag didn't. Nor would anyone who loves music say that "much of Mozart" is Camp. Where did she get these bizarre notions?

At some point you begin to suspect that Sontag's knowledge is limited and her appreciation is shallow. In short, she does not know what she is talking about. And the essay begins to fall apart.

Nevertheless, reading the essay in pre-Stonewall America, many gays felt that Sontag was their champion. They felt she had put them on the cultural map, so to speak, and given them legitimacy. They had always wanted to believe they were an important and valuable creative minority and now Sontag seemed to affirm to everyone that they were the bearers of a major sensibility.

No doubt too many gay men found the article useful as a guidebook to social climbing. They picked up useful tips on what to read and see and what to think and say about what they read and saw, regardless of their own personal reactions.

But gays who felt affirmed and legitimized, even lionized, by "Notes on Camp" overlooked several troubling facts.

For one thing, Sontag's essay was published in "Partisan Review," at the time perhaps the premier organ of moral seriousness in political and cultural matters, Camp's chief rival sensibility. In short, "Notes on Camp" was intended as a reconnaissance map of the enemy's territory.

For another, Sontag acknowledged that although she felt drawn to Camp, she also found it offensive and even felt "revulsion" from it.

Further, the analysis of Camp seemed rooted more in many then-current, condescending stereotypes about gays rather than in any serious inquiry into the basis or coherence of Camp's purported properties. For instance:

Gays are playful because they are immature and refuse to grow up and become responsible adults. They are duplicitous and devious, always posing, not wishing or able to be authentic. They exhibit "the psychopathology of affluence" - too much money, too easily bored, too little purpose for living. They are frivolous and shallow, lacking emotional depth and attracted only to the superficial.

Then too, many casual readers failed to notice that Camp turns out to be not really an independent sensibility at all, but derivative and ultimately parasitic on the whole natural, moral basis of human existence, including serious art, undermining and destroying what it depends on.

Finally, Sontag viewed Camp as the core of what might now be called "the homosexual agenda," that is, a concerted effort to undermine morality so people would have no basis for objecting to homosexuality.

"Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense," she wrote. "Camp is the solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation. ..."

A decade later Sontag viciously attacked Camp and its aesthetic sensibility because it was corrupting and "the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous." But for those who read carefully, that was her view from the beginning.

Originally published April 5, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

Young gay people often embark on a crash course to learn everything they can about gay culture, which unlike (say) ethnic culture, is something they seldom have absorbed growing up from parents and siblings. Despite misgivings about whether "gay courses" belong in universities, careful scholarship does have a legitimate role to play in illuminating what gay culture is and how it has changed over time.

THE MICHIGAN CHAPTER of the American Family Association is disturbed. More than usual.

It seems that University of Michigan professor David Halperin scheduled a course for the fall semester titled "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation."

"Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one," Halperin explained.

That set off AFA state chair Gary Glenn.

"It is wrong," Glenn said, "that taxpayers are being forced to pay for a class whose purpose is to recruit and initiate teenage men into the homosexual lifestyle."

And, he added, "Nobody has to take a class in how to be African-American or Irish." Take that, Halperin!

Glenn might be on solid grounds if he criticized all taxpayer-funded education. After all, it is nothing more than a forced subsidy for people with children by people who have no children - which would include a majority of gays.

But Glenn conveniently ignores the fact that gays are forced to pay taxes too. In fact, every single time religious right advocates get upset about the use of taxpayer money, they act as if no gays or lesbians ever paid taxes. We need to keep reminding them that we pay taxes too and we expect some representation for our taxation.

So long as I pay taxes, I think I would like my taxes to help pay for this course, or a similar one here in Illinois.

As for Glenn's sparkling observation that no one has to take a class in how to be African-American or Irish, the answer is: Of course not, because they already learned it at home from their parents and family.

For instance, most black children learn their family's history with its stories about slavery, forced segregation, and encounters with prejudice in the United States. They learn about the civil rights struggle, about civil rights leaders and important black people in science, the arts, politics.

They learn where they can go safely and where it is dangerous, how to behave with hostile police, how to cope with prejudiced people, how to cope with random insults and dismissive treatment. They may pick up different ways of talking with blacks and whites, different rules about eye contact, different body languages.

They learn - we might say absorb - these various facts and coping skills from their family as they are growing up.

By contrast, little gay children seldom grow up in a home where they learn information about gays or absorb the nuanced skills of being gay in a skeptical, not to say hostile world.

Most of us grow up alone, without a clue, keeping a furtive eye out for elements of the general culture that will reflect our own developing self-awareness and might, if we are lucky, validate our existence.

Young gays are often surprised to discover both how much gay history and culture there is and how the courtesies and modes of social conduct differ subtly from their previous experience.

When you track down Halperin's course proposal itself, it turns out this is exactly what he wants to explore: How the gay community teaches homosexuals how to be gay.

Halperin posits a number of "cultural artifacts and activities" that play a role in learning how to be a gay man: e.g., Hollywood movies, opera, Broadway musicals, certain classical and popular music, camp humor and drag, diva-worship, body-building or "muscle culture," fashion and interior design.

He says he wants his course to explore whether there are certain classical "gay" works and practices that all gay men need to know, what makes them so essential and what explains why gays are drawn to those things. These are good questions to ask.

Halperin's idea is not new, of course, but his questions are more probing than usual. And he deserves credit for treating gay male community and culture separately and not as part of some imaginary "LGBT community."

But the question is whether Halperin's example of gay "artifacts and activities" are any more than mere stereotypes. Although stereotypes often have a basis in fact, it might be worth asking how widespread those interests actually are or were and exploring whether his examples are limited to a certain time, place and social level.

All that cultural bric-a-brac was often present in pre-Stonewall middle and upper-middle class urban gay communities: At one point every gay home seemed to have a statue of Michelangelo's David and a Judy Garland record.

But the post-Stonewall gay culture saw many of those things dwindle into targets of bemused ridicule, especially among younger gays.

There is another difficulty. Gay men in Berlin in the 1920s, who surely count as gay, were probably not much interested in Broadway musicals or Hollywood movies. That would be even more true of the men in St. Petersburg's gay community at the turn of the last century.

What were they interested in? What did they find in the broader culture that reflected their interests? What did they borrow and adapt to legitimize their existence and tastes? It would be interesting to know.

Perhaps if "gay culture" is at least partly a response to hostility and prejudice, then gay men may adopt not so much specific things, but general types of things. For instance, they might adopt elements of high culture in order to assert some sort of intellectual superiority to compensate for social stigmatization.

Or they might be attracted to stylized or exaggerated elements of the general culture that implicitly offer the comforting thought that the source of oppression is faintly ridiculous.

If so, as gays achieve equality much of "gay culture" may become obsolete.