Heteronormativity, Again; or, The Experience of Reading Twilight

I may have mentioned to you by now, dear reader, that my English professor lectured this morning on Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight, and that our discussion section in the afternoon also dealt in large part with that book. I read it (okay, most of it) earlier this week, after spending the past few years trying to avoid doing just that. As I read the reviews of Twilight, its sequels, and the ensuing movie, I remained profoundly troubled by something amorphous about the way the series portrays its protagonist’s relationship to sexuality and to other non-sexual interpersonal reactions. When talking to others, I repeated the reviews’ sentiments: Bella (said protagonist) is not a real character; she’s just a conduit for desire. The books push pretty hard some themes about chastity, traditional notions of feminine motherhood, male chivalry, and other aspects of a conservative construction of gender, sexuality, and family. I said again and again, particularly when thinking of girls I know who are in the books’ target age range: is this the sort of universe, with the sort of values, that we want to encourage our girls and young women to take pleasure in?

Being asked to take the books seriously for class this week, and to consider them as a work of literature and a social statement, did revise how I thought about them. Actually reading them did, too. My impression of Bella is not entirely that she is a conduit for male desire: in fact, her identity as a shy know-it-all, who becomes obsessed with not just Edward’s charm, but a smartness and quickness that can match her own, came perilously close to echoing my own adolescent experience. In fact, I became profoundly uncomfortable with just how much I could recognize my own teenage fetishization of that one kid in my classes whose maturity, exoticism, eccentricity, and wit would always stand out to me. The knowledge that I might have been like that, like the Bella the reviews demonized, was enough to make me stop reading at points.

By contrast, when my professor lectured this morning, I hung onto every word (she is such a brilliant woman). She had some interesting things to say about how race and class are represented in Twilight, but what really grabbed me (of course) was her discussion of sexuality. She dwelt on the way that bodily fluids and bloodletting play out in this novel about vampires: Twilight dwells on childbirth, but there is no mention of menstruation (which you would think would be a pertinent issue in a universe where blood is something of a sexual stimulant). My professor discussed moments of defloration, comparing Bella’s impregnation to the point at which she is turned into a vampire. She brought up a very interesting and kind of disconcerting point about what Bella’s “change” into a vampire could be saying about menopause and the loss of fertility. And, she said, Twilight is oddly hygienic, for a universe that should revolve around blood. There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Twilight—a fact that stuck out to me for the reasons this blog probably demonstrates. There is no threat of AIDS.

My professor went on to talk about the polymorphous perversity (best phrase EVAR) of vampiric sexuality, its infantile nature, the inherent necrophilia in loving a vampire (which Meyer describes as “a walking corpse”), the oral sadism of the vampire’s bite. But, of course, there is no homosexuality in Twilight. Despite the obvious ambiguity of Edward’s sexual appeal, there are no gay couples in Forks, WA. There are no explicitly gay vampires. Bella herself doesn’t experience same-sex attraction. My professor suggested (and I thought this was really interesting) that closeting a standard social construction of homosexuality and gayness in the Twilight world allows Meyer to be freer with the polymorphous perversity, and with the other transgressive aspects of vampiric sexuality.

But I still feel as if the degree to which key aspects of sexuality are omitted from Twilight problematizes the aspects which are left in. And that’s consoling, in a way, because it means I don’t have to fear relating entirely to Bella and her experience of sexual awakening. Bella has no crisis of sexual identity. Neither do her vampire friends and lovers (but maybe that’s just because they’ve had hundreds of years to construct an identity). There are no labels in Twilight. There are no communities of sexuality. And when my class was discussing this series of books, and some folks in my class were talking about how much they could identify with Bella, I didn’t—entirely—feel as if I could contribute. For all that it confuses clear-cut sexualities; for all that it builds upon and complicates our traditional notion of the innocent love story, it is still profoundly and aggressively heteronormative. It excludes those who acknowledge anti-heteronormativity, and only includes those for whom transgressive sexuality unravels along with the thread of Meyer’s plot by the time the fourth book comes along.

Some of my fears about what this book says about our culture were allayed by reading it. I think I might moderate my ranting against it from here on out. But in other ways, I’m still very confused and somewhat disconcerted by what aspects of human sexuality Stephenie Meyer has chosen to put in, and what she has chosen to leave out.

(cross-posted)

In Which Rachel Maddow and I Have Something in Common

Jason Mattera (of kicking your faithful correspondent out of the Young America’s Foundation conference fame) didn’t limit his comments about his political opponents’ physical appearance to the Campus Progress editorial intern with a relative lack of power or social capital who wanted to cover his conference this past summer. He also thinks he’s going to win back conservatism’s power by making remarks about the appearance of one of the most popular news hosts on TV, as Sarah Posner reported on Monday:

But targeting Millennials through pro-life appeals mixes sexuality with chastity. During the panel, Mattera took the David and Goliath metaphor another perverse step: If conservatives (David) smite liberals (Goliath), they will be rewarded with the hot conservative women, just like King Saul promised his daughter to the warrior who slew the evil giant. “You know his daughter must have been beautiful because there’s no guy whose gonna die for an ugly girl,” Mattera chortled. “Our women are hot. We have Michelle Malkin. Who does the left have, Rachel Maddow? Sorry, I prefer that my women not look like dudes.”

Mattera, who doesn’t seem to see the inherent problem with criticizing women’s appearances instead of their ideas, responded on his blog:

Okay, okay. I’ll admit it: Not all lib women look like dudes. I’m sure there are some who don’t. Maybe. But folks, can we at least agree on Rachel Maddow? Some bipartisanship, people?

Posner refers to the college activism panel that I participated in at Family Research Council’s conference over the weekend. What did hot women have to do with my talk? Not much, actually, despite Posner making it the basis of her piece. It was just a casual reference—me noting that even if I weren’t an activist, I’d probably still wander to the conservative camp because our women don’t look like the picture [of Maddow] above.

Rachel Maddow is an extraordinarily talented and successful woman, and it’s not too often that I get to be in the same category as her, so I’m sort of perversely excited that Mattera thinks I’m as worth calling a guy as Maddow. Seriously guys, I’m milking this for all it’s worth.

But what I find interesting and puzzling about folks’ reaction as I’ve told them about this is how eager they’ve been to assure me that Ms. Maddow is incredibly attractive, or that conservative women aren’t attractive, or to insinuate that the fact that Mattera put me in the same category as Maddow says something good about my physical appearance. I’m interested and puzzled because I would have thought the answer to this would be to challenge Mattera’s (and the conservative movement’s) sexism. This conversation shouldn’t be about which side of the aisle has the nicer-looking women. This has nothing to do with “Newsflash! Dykes can be hot too!” This has to do with the fact that we all—Maddow, Mattera, myself, Michelle Malkin, and everyone—should be judged on the basis of our ideas, not our appearances.

I think there are plenty of interesting things to be said about how confused the conservative movement (as represented by Mattera) seems to be about engaging with women on an intellectual level. Mattera seems rather challenged by the notion that women could contribute more than their appearances to the political sphere, and doesn’t even address the ideas of the women on his own side. It’s as if we’re mascots in his universe, and that speaks volumes about what his universe consists of and how he interacts with it. That’s a social phenomenon we could analyze at great length if we wanted to.

But I really have too many other papers to write to bother with unpacking that one, and I think maybe our time could be better served in the long run by not letting Mattera make this a discussion about physical attributes. Yes, it can sometimes be challenging to sit there and watch someone make sexist and implicitly homophobic comments about you, without challenging him on his premise. But if we don’t void the premise entirely, we’re not going to get anywhere. I think I’m going to focus on hoping that one day Rachel Maddow and I will have something in common that isn’t the length of our haircuts.

UPDATE: Ironically, Maddow has one of the best summing-ups of this whole “conservative movement” thing.

(cross-posted)

Mary Travers

Celebrities die seemingly every day, but I was enough of a nerd that those who do didn’t have a formative enough influence in my life that I’m really affected by their death. Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary is a different matter. She died today, the AP says, and I feel bereft, because she’s been a reassuring presence over the past few years. She and Peter and Paul would play a concert at Carnegie Hall, or occasionally even put out a new album, just to let us know that they were there, that they still cared, that they were there making their slow way through the Bush years just as we were. I have their 2003 album In These Times, whose title alone says enough about the sociopolitical context in which it was released. And it can’t have been too hard for Peter, Paul, and Mary to reopen the floodgates of song, as experienced as they were with performing to audiences marching against Vietnam. But when there is an anger and a sadness and a fighting spirit to their music, there is also innocence and whimsy and play—we learned and sang some of their songs in my Montessori preschool class. One of their albums, a cassette that we often played in the car when I was little, contained both the sweet, childlike “The Garden Song” and Woody Guthrie’s migrant workers’ anthem, “Pastures of Plenty.” They sang songs by Tom Paxton, by Guthrie and Seeger, by John Denver. They quietly incorporated progressive Christian themes into some of their music, particularly later in their career, but it would have been impossible for our atheist household to find fault with their themes of unity and friendship and love.

I always thought it was Mary who got the best parts in the group’s three part arrangements. She sang melody more often than harmony, and when the three would take turns singing the verses, she always got the best ones. She sings lead on “Pastures of Plenty” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Her verse of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is my favorite: “Mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don’t criticize what you can’t understand…” She often gets a verse later in the song, I think, the one at the critical juncture of the lyrics’ plot. In “Puff the Magic Dragon,” she sings the verse when Puff realizes Jacky is gone forever. It’s arguably the most important verse in the children’s song that is so much more than a children’s song, which says so much about the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century.

If you’re listing “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” Mary comes last. It was never “Mary, Peter, and Paul.” But her voice stands among those of Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell as belonging to one of the strong women of conscience who popularized the antiwar songs and union songs and above all songs of a mass cultural movement written by less accessible folk artists. Mary Travers’ voice is instantly recognizable, and even though it’s a mellifluous alto, it always rises above those of her male colleagues. It’s strident. It’s beautiful. It believes in something.

I’m part of a group at school that gets together once a week to sing together: folk, country, blues, that sort of thing—anything that’s found in this book. We sing more than a few songs Peter, Paul, and Mary popularized—some of our favorites are “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Marvelous Toy.” We’re not a very political group, and most people didn’t grow up singing left-wing political music like I did. My attempts to teach the union songs and peace songs Peter, Paul, and Mary sing haven’t always gone over well. But I guess it’s just as well, then, that Peter, Paul, and Mary have had songs for every occasion, every mood, every political moment.

Here’s one of my favorite songs in the whole world, “If I Had a Hammer.” Now I’ll shut up, and you’ll watch that video. And listen to that Mary Travers’ voice. And see how much she believes what she’s singing—as may we all.

(cross-posted)

The Greatest Thing I Have Seen in a Very Long Time

… is this sketch from The Muppet Show, featuring Peter Sellers:

Sellers’ voice always makes me think of The Goon Show, which is of course one of the greatest things ever to come out of what would become BBC Radio 4. It’s interesting that, for all that Americans are not supposed to be able to understand strange British things like The Goon Show, this sketch is hilarious, and the studio audience thinks so too. Then again, The Muppet Show seems to be an anomaly in American TV for its inclination to be simply weird. It almost makes it seem not entirely American. As if to prove the point, here’s more Goon Show influence in the form of a totally bizarre Spike Milligan sketch:

People sometimes find it perplexing that I’m totally obsessed with Sesame Street, but early Sesame Street had a lot of Muppet Show crossover, and the same way of appealing to adults—even though Sesame Street is specifically a children’s show, while The Muppet Show never intended itself that way. The surreal was allowed to exist in early Sesame Street in a way it simply isn’t today. In a comedy show, the freedom to just devolve rapidly into silliness is a wonderful thing, and something you don’t see very much in a genre that—in this country, anyway—seems to prefer either scatological one-liners or storylines about sex, dating, and relationships. It seems incredible that an American laugh track should go that crazy over Spike Milligan—but hey, they did. Maybe someone should think about bringing The Muppet Show or its moral equivalent back. I’d watch.

Sunshine, and Metaphors Involving It

My friend Jim wrote recently about his experience going to see the Tony-winning Broadway revival of Hair (which I saw last April). Jim has a very interesting critique of how the revival stages the final song of the show, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In,” which you should definitely read, and so I’ve had the song floating around in the back of my mind for the past few days.

I realized a while ago that it was pretty impossible to categorically rule on what my “favorite” things are (my Facebook profile notwithstanding), but if there were ever a contest for Emily’s Favorite Song, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In” would be a strong contender. I think it’s because it represents to me what is so intoxicating about the hippies and their version of counterculture: they’re one of the very few countercultural movements I can think of which, in addition to acting against the dominant society, offers up its own alternative portrait of what dominant society could be (it may not have been a truly viable alternative, but it was an alternative all the same). “Let the Sunshine In” is a prayer born out of anguish and betrayal, out of the built-up anger of a generation sent to die in a needless war and denied any institutional voice. The hippies and other disaffected late-’60s youth made their own avenues for communication, their own ways to speak out. And while I’ve written many, many words about the degree to which Hair actually reflects the counterculture it commercialized, that final plea the cast makes to the audience is an echo of an alienated counterculture’s voice, getting through.

But the late-’60s youth counterculture is such a tragic entity because its various visions were never realized. Every time I listen to “Let the Sunshine In” I think—in a totally secular sense, mind you—about how prayers go unanswered, and after a while we just stop asking. I think about how the world I’m living in is full of insanity, equal to that which produced the war and the generation gap which drive Hair and the culture it reflects. I admire the resolve of fictional characters from a halcyon time when someone thought it was still worth asking, and I wonder why, today just as 40 years ago, we need actors in a Broadway musical to say, “Let the Sunshine In”—is it just such a ridiculous premise to broach in any more “serious” setting? (1975’s Government in the Sunshine Act notwithstanding. Joke. See what I mean?)

Because I’m from San Diego, getting anywhere in my adolescence necessitated driving. My mom and I have spent a lot of time in the car, and we’ve spent a lot of it listening and singing to music, and talking politics. I have vivid memories of the times my mom and I have listened to the Hair soundtrack (original Broadway cast) and sung along, and the times my mom has used the songs to launch into one of her nostalgia trips, longing for a better, more optimistic time that even she knows may not have really existed. I have equally vivid memories of our discussions of all-too-current events: in the aftermath of 9/11, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, during presidential and midterm campaign seasons alike for the past ten years. I cannot tell you how often my mom has drummed the steering wheel in anger and I’ve stared flatly out the window as one or the other of us intoned, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” And then maybe one of us would put Hair in the CD player, and skip to track 32, and sing, “Let the sunshine in!”—willing for it to be true.

But Generation Y’s answer to some hippies who may never really have existed except in the minds of a couple out-of-work actors who decided to write a book and lyrics based on their times as they saw them is that the clouds don’t part. The sunshine doesn’t shine in. All the prayers in the world won’t cause our country to live up to its ideals of justice and fairness and freedom; all the cries and pleas and all the singing won’t (to quote Ginsberg) “end the human war.”

It doesn’t seem inappropriate to appropriate Christian terminology to express how I feel about the never-realized ideal of the country I call home. I’m returning to the US in two days, and I guess you could say I’m having a crisis of faith. You can shout “Let the sunshine in!” from the rooftops, but who will hear you? Love, peace, and justice don’t make a good headline.

At the time of the inauguration in January, when Pete Seeger sang all the verses to “This Land is Your Land” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I believed that I could see the sun shining at last. But while I do still cry when I watch that video, and I do still cry when I hear the last song in Hair, it’s more because of my present feeling: no matter whom we put in office, the winds of change are never really more than a rhetorical device. They aren’t strong enough to blow the clouds away and let the sunshine in.

Coded Language

As I read more and more about what it meant to be a gay man in any decade of the 20th century, I become immersed in a language. Sometimes that means just picking up enough in context, or inferring enough from the slang of our own era, to know what someone means when he talks to another man in a bar, using words the undercover cops wouldn’t know. Sometimes I see someone give me a funny look in conversation, and I realize I’ve used a turn of phrase natural in the 1950s but completely anachronistic—and perhaps offensive—in our time. And sometimes—as happened just yesterday—it’s not so much basic comprehension that I gain, but a sense of what greater significance simple words had to someone living in a different time and place and social context.

I’ve read, or listened to a recording of, Ginsberg’s “Howl” more times than I can count. My iTunes says I’ve listened to my favorite recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” (yes, I have more than one) 19 times, but I’m sure that’s not accurate. It doesn’t count the number of times I’ve listened to just Part I, my favorite part, and stopped before I reached the end of the track. It doesn’t count the times I listened to one of the other versions instead, for a change (though I find the other versions jarring, because I’m so used to Ginsberg’s cadences in the first version). And it doesn’t count the times that I’ve opened one edition or another and stared at the pages, passing my eyes over words obscene and sublime, or perhaps sublimely obscene; the times I’ve typed those words out on an electric typewriter, or quoted them in conversation, or added them as epigrams at the start or finish of my essays as they happen to take on temporarily a significance that informs what I’m trying to get across.

Last night I was listening to Part I of “Howl” again, trying to fall asleep, as I do at least a few nights a week. I tune out a bit, usually, when I do this—sometimes I murmur along with my favorite parts, but usually I just let Ginsberg’s voice lull me. I tuned back in for this part:

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning and the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

This passage is preceded by a section about young political radicals, and alludes to their naïveté without condemning it; it is followed by a hymn to the heterosexual essence of Neal Cassady, Ginsberg’s great unrequited love. And in looking for details about the political movements or characters that made up the Beat Generation, I’ve never really paid much attention to that above passage. Despite its prurient nature, it never struck me as particularly interesting.

But all it takes is some conversance in stereotypes of gay culture (not to put a negative connotation on “stereotype”; it’s just what they are), and you realize how exciting it is that Ginsberg is including all these things. He puts a humorous, light-hearted, camp spin on being arrested in a police raid. He applies the same sense of joie de vivre to bikers and sailors, and to sex in parks and bathhouses—marred only by that sob in the “Turkish Bath.” And then, of course, the poem turns to the essentially pathetic (in the sense of pathos, though maybe I’m not using that word correctly) underbelly of this whole situation; it invokes loss and traitorousness and all that other stuff Ginsberg must be feeling as he goes on to sing to “N. C., secret hero of these poems.” This was 1956. Ginsberg hadn’t yet morphed into the Great Icon of Homosexuality he would become. His journals from both the period in which he was writing and the period he was writing about reek of that tortured self-psychoanalysis that characterizes how a lot of gay men in the ’40s and ’50s tried to make sense of their lives. But still. Still there is this sense of what fun, what larks, what silliness can be had if you giggle your way through the maneuverings of your tortured soul. And still he was not afraid—even in 1956—to share that bubbling of joy.

On the live recording I have, there’s a ripple of laughter in the background when Ginsberg, then in his mid-60s, solemnly intones lines like “scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,” and in the past when I heard that laughter I thought they were giggling because he said “semen.” I thought they were behaving the way most people do when a prurient subject is raised. But knowing what I know now, being conversant in some tropes, I’m not so sure of that. This time the laughter sounded entirely different: it sounded relieved, this outburst of held-in breath that is thrilled this sagacious, bearded man proposes to “scream with joy” when engaging in a bout of anal sex; that in 1975 (whence the recording dates), it is finally possible to publicly agree on delight in bikers and sailors. It’s almost as if they’re screaming with joy with him.

I read books where anonymous interviewees talk about holding papers over their faces in police raids of New York bars. I read accounts of gay life at mid-century written in the 1990s, where the participants are still afraid to reveal themselves. I watch old movies filled with references so coded they got through the Hollywood censors; I read the letters and diaries of famous figures, some of whom were closeted until they died and those letters and diaries were revealed. And I follow the news religiously and sometimes despair that America will ever change, that gay public figures will ever have any civil rights, much less be able to admit that they have sex lives like straight public figures do.

But 52 years ago, when he published “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg launched himself onto the national scene with an obscenity trial about what continued for the rest of his life, and long after, to be his most famous work. He stood in a witness box and defended his right to “scream with joy.” He read “Howl” again and again, and in my recording he reads for a group of students, decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in this country. And yet he asserted his right to “scream with joy” and the students laughed—not at him, as I’d once thought, but perhaps with him.

That, to this cynical blogger and proto-historian, is incredible. It’s been nearly three years now, my relationship with Ginsberg and with “Howl,” and I’m so glad that after all that time the tools that I gather, and the codes that I learn, continue to dig up more things inside the head and the life of that wonderful man.

High School Movies

There’s something about high school movies (and TV shows, and books) that captivates the American imagination. Even when I was in high school, I would stay up late into the night, taking out my frustration at not being allowed out after midnight by watching my illegally-downloaded copies of The Breakfast Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I longed to become the Stoner or the Popular Girl or even the Goth, one of the characters who had awkward, furtive early sexual experiences or who appeared to roam a small Midwestern town unsupervised. Or, at least, I could have been one of the characters who had a car. Like so many other high school misfits, I knew where I really did fit in the stereotyped class strata: I was the Nerd, plain and simple, and I knew that, according to my favorite movies, such a status relegated me to a lifetime of loneliness and misery. The movies gave me hints for how to change, and for a time I did, trying on a few of the other labels. I watched Freaks and Geeks, and I identified ridiculously closely with the protagonist of that show, who copes with her misfitedness by joining a group of kids who don’t try especially hard in school, but who are exciting because of it, and who are silly and into music and put up with a little social awkwardness. That story, in fact, became not dissimilar from my own high school experience. And while you can’t ever shed a label like “Nerd” once you’re given it, and when it’s been yours for over a decade, I certainly tried pretty damn hard.

But when I got to college, as this blog no doubt indicates, I embraced “Nerd” for all it was worth; I embodied it and owned it. Unlike in the movies, I decided, Nerds do have productive and fulfilling lives, and it’s okay to be better at school than social relationships. It’s not a curse, at any rate, the way it is on celluloid. So now I deal with high school media a little differently: when I rented Clueless from iTunes to watch on a plane last week, or made my way through Skins on Hulu last school year, I spent every second of the movie or the episode with fingers crossed, hoping that the characters would suddenly decide not to adhere to their stereotypes: that the romantic subplot would not work out happily ever after, that the gay character or the black character would provide more than just comic relief, that the naturally pretty characters would not be made over into stylized, painted caricatures, ’80s hairdos and all.

Of course, it never does work out that way, and that’s the beauty of high school movies and part of why, I think, they’re so engrossing to those of us who have, quite definitely, moved on—physically, anyway. As I myself try to psychologically process the weird world that high school was, and to understand why things worked out the way I did, I do find myself looking to the movies and their truisms. If I had changed the way I look, I could have had a more lasting romantic relationship. If I hadn’t tried hard in school, I would have had more fun. If I had been more prone to making bad jokes, or indeed if I had conformed better to gender roles, I would have had more friends.

I obviously don’t really wish those things, and I obviously know the difference between cinema fiction and reality—where it is possible for a Nerd to lead a fulfilling life. But high school is this imaginary halcyon time, when we were all supposed to be happy, and yet—I am increasingly beginning to suspect—none of us were.We were all tortured by our own individual adolescent dramas and traumas—and whatever stereotype we ascribed to ourselves, we never embodied it as fully as characters on-screen do. We all look to them for the elusive promise of what could have been, what happiness and self-confidence we could have accorded ourselves. But high school being what it is, and the surreality of film being what it is, it will never come. We might as well get on with being who we are, and with taking solace from the knowledge that life really does get better when you have your diploma in hand.

Gay Culture; or, In Which a Nerd Tries to Talk About Lady Gaga

While I don’t really know anything about or take the least bit of interest in Lady Gaga, I was interested by something she said in an interview with OUT Magazine:

That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. “I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,” she says, “It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.”

I have had some awfully strange conversations in my time about whether there is in fact such a thing as gay culture, but let’s for a second accept that there is, since it’s my main research interest (if I may be so presumptuous as a college sophomore as to have a “research interest”). In any case, as much as I admire this liberationist sense of bringing gay culture to the masses and therefore making a space for it in a hostile world (and I do think it’s interesting that what we’re talking about here is gay culture, in its historical, pre-liberation, campy sense, not LGBT culture), I don’t think that’s going to work. Gay culture has always been a subculture, an underground culture, a counterculture. So many of the hallmarks of this culture—its language, its celebrated heroes, its sense of fashion, its codes of behavior—are based in the need to remain visible to people in the life (to appropriate an early 20th century term) but invisible to those outside it. The construction of a heterosexual identity may have come in response to the construction of a homosexual identity; the straight state may have emerged in response to gender and sexuality nonconformity, but gay culture has always been in the position of subverting the mainstream, undermining it, reacting to it, questioning it, parodying it, etc.

An easy example is the phrase “coming out,” which long preceded the metaphor of the “closet”: it was appropriated from upper-class socialite lingo, where it meant a young woman’s introduction to high society, such as in the form of a debutante ball. It was only one of many ways in which early urban American gay culture parodied high society and its social functions, and thus it subverted the expectations of gender roles, marriage, and domesticity that pervaded how that culture regarded young people, particularly young women. While some of this is wrapped up in the way that homosexuality was sometimes interpreted as an issue of gender identity rather than sexual object choice, and involved a lot of men whom we would now regard as gay identifying with an explicitly feminine-centric image for that reason, it is as clear an indication as any of how gay culture has an identity that is inherently anti-mainstream.

Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first person to seek to bring gay culture into the mainstream public eye, and it’s undeniable that young urban culture in particular has appropriated a number of pieces of culture that were once exclusively gay. But as much as I believe that what we call “gay culture” is and has always been about so much more (as someone once tried to tell me) than anonymous sex in bathhouses, and therefore ended with AIDS, I do think that it will cease to be unique if it becomes sufficiently mainstream that it no longer has a different culture to react against.

However, what I do see happening already, and which I think will continue as homosexuality becomes less stigmatized and more incorporated into western democracies’ legal frameworks, is the separation of “gay culture” from exclusive identification of “men who have sex with men.” There is a whole trend of straight men who have an affinity for gay culture tropes, and of course (all that “gay best friend” talk aside), a lot of women who are increasingly taking part in a culture that has had a tendency towards quite a lot of sexism. Gay culture is also more welcoming to transfolk these days, and while I’m hesitant to make broad cultural declarations based on limited personal experience, I know a few transmen who, whatever their sexual orientation, have a strong relationship to pieces of gay culture and gay aesthetic. And as gay culture becomes about something more, or something different, or something that is anti-mainstream but not underground (an important distinction, I think), it becomes a radically different mode of identification from that which typifies the gay cultures of, say, the 1920s and ’30s. The gay New York of George Chauncey’s book would, I think, seem very foreign to today’s gay New Yorkers.

So is that what Lady Gaga intends to do? To make gay culture something accessible and identifiable to people who aren’t homosexual men? (I hope you see why I’m using the word “homosexual” here, even if it’s not the preferred term.) It’s understandable given what little I know of her career and her cultural aesthetic, but it means that we may have to start considering to what extent gay culture ever really was about sex—and what purpose it serves if it is no longer an identity for the outcast, the marginalized, and the underprivileged.