Gay & Lesbian Philosophy

Lectures F 1996

The lectures in this file cover material up through the midterm. Minor updates have been made since the original posting.

For material after the Midterm go to part 2.

1. Course overview and motivation of the social constructivist notion through comparisons of modern gays and lesbians with Michelangelo, Wilde, Socrates & Alcibides. The Stonewall Riots.

2. What are Queers?

* Consider:

What is being claimed in such cases?

Compare them to

or

* Discussion of states vs traits and their conflation.

* What difference does it make whether homosexuality is a state or a trait, a behavior or an essence?

* The grounds for discriminating against those who are homosexual depend on whether it is seen as a state or a trait.

* Homosexuality is immoral

* Homosexuality is unnatural

* Homosexuals willfully are the way they are

All these lines presuppose a malleable state, not a trait. (Think of unmalleable states as traits.) Mohr's discussion of these sorts of objections including those gays/lesbians who claim it is a choice, hence a state.)

* If it is a state, how does one enter the homosexual state?

* Perhaps it is genetic or inbred, an essence.

* Perhaps it is a state imposed on some people - it is a social construct.

* Foucault's claim that The Homosexual was only invented in the 19th C.

"We must not forget that the psychiatric .... the homosexual was now a species" (Reprinted on pp. 17-18 of Stein, Forms of Desire )

If this is true, then the very construction of The Homosexual is a power move - a means of controlling people by categorizing, stigmatizing, stereotyping and marginalizing.

* Goffman's Labeling Theory, Szasz on Mental Illness, Weinberg & Williams test of these.

WELL! IS IT A STATE OR A TRAIT OR A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT?

Debates in the Literature we read:

Foucault argues it is a social construct.

Mohr argues that social constructivism is incompatible with discovering one is gay (coming out) - which seems to suggest it is a state.

Dyer argues that while labels and representations are social constructs, the ability to construct or impose these labels is restricted by reality.

"But because one can see reality only .... the possibility of change." "The case of lesbians and gay men ... coded, in other words, human" (Dyer, The matter of Images, pp. 3-4)

Dollimore finds that "Inevitably, then, the term homosexuality .... and changes across all of these." (Sexual Dissidence, p. 32).

CLARIFICATION OF THE ISSUES:

EXAMPLE: Race. What is a Native American? A Cherokee? A Black? Discuss wrt Chris.:

Point: His being native American is polydimensional. Some aspects of being native American are genetic or at least hereditary. Some are social/legal constructs, most are more like Dollimore's "neither an essential identity nor exactly the modern constructed identity postulated by Michel Foucault and others".

APPLICATION TO HOMOSEXUALITY:

All of these have been conflated with homosexuality, and when someone is labeled by others as homosexual, gay, or lesbian, the basis typically can be any of these or as Dollimore says, "a cluster of things with more or less specific cultural locations" reflected in "shifting connotations of the terms."

So, Are there really any homosexuals?

* Read "Some Queens" from David B. Feinberg, Eighty-Sixed (Penguin, 1989), pp. 96-97.

* Most of these refer to thing homosexuals are into, what turns them on, what they find erotic. And it is very diverse. We see in various of these different combinations of features in each of these dimensions of sexual identity - especially the social sex role, the sexual orientation, and the self-labeling roles.

* "Homosexual", "Gay' and `Lesbian' mask these differences and varieties. They conflate a host of different sexual orientations that at most have in common something about same sex involvement (and even that's not a fixed essence given different gender identities (e.g., Karl and Dave)

Example:

* A closer look at the self-labeling aspect of being homosexual: Coming out, alienation, self-labeling, the comfort of a sub-culture.

* Does one socially construct one's own Gayness or Dykeness or Lesbianness or Queerness by self-identifying with the gay or lesbian subculture or their identifiable sub-subcultures (like the leather subculture, the drag world, the macrobiotic lesbian or the lipstick lesbian subcultures.)

Self-Authenticity: "Coming out" is often described in terms of "stopping self-deception" "ceasing to live a lie", "accepting who you truly are". Yet if there is no homosexuality, how can coming out be an exercise in self-authenticity?

This is a focal issue Dollimore deals with, contrasting Gide and Wilde as two responses corresponding somewhat to the modern and the post-modern. {Preview to Dollimore Ch. 1, Gide vs. Wilde]

Pay special attention to Chapter 4 of Chauncey, Gay New York, which details the "construction " of homosexuality and heterosexuality around the turn of the century and the contrasts between working class and middle-class conceptions.

3. Historical Background: The Pre-Stonewall Gay.

The 1969 Stonewall Riots began the modern Gay & Lesbian rights movement. Gay liberation was a response to one of the most repressive episodes in American history - one during the 1950s and 1960s where it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public places, where it was illegal to serve drinks or food to homosexuals in bars or restaurants, where it was illegal to mention, represent, or depict homosexuals in plays, movies, on radio and the like. Where not only was homosexuality grounds for losing ones job, but extensive efforts were made to discover secretive homosexuals and destroy their careers. Repression was not limited to blatant homosexuality. It was not restricted to secretive engagement in homosexual behavior. Even the possession of unacted-upon "homosexual tendencies" were grounds for dishonorable discharge from the military. Indeed, there was a draft and you had to declare whether you had homosexual tendencies and if you did, you were socially stigmatized. And in case you would lie about your tendencies psychological tests were developed to uncover those who lied and stigmatize them. There was no place for homosexuals, however discrete or latent, in 1950s and 1960s America. So effective was the repression that most of society was unaware even of the existence of homosexuals or homosexuality. It was the "love that dared not speak its name."

This had not always been the case. George Chauncy makes a compelling historical case for a well-established, highly visible gay subculture in New York City.

"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries .... and briefly became the darlings of Broadway." (Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 355.)

Then in the 1930s began the enactment of a series of laws designed to ban gay visibility, making visibility and gay sociability a form or disorderly conduct, and made the very act of cruising or a trying to pick up a sexual partner a criminal offense.

" We lost sight of that world because I was forced into hiding .... and forced gay people to hide in it." (Chauncey, Gay New York, pp. 8-9)

This was the case both here and in England.

"For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal ... It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this." (Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 4.)

Such efforts at repression did not eradicate the gay world, but it drove its subculture underground. Gays continued to exist and connect despite the repression. Though the gay subculture went under ground and under cover, it provided resources for survival - gay cant and argot with its double entendre, even more oblique coded representations of homosexuals on the screen (like Edward Evert Horten, Eric Blore, and Franklin Pangborne), Liberache and Paul Lynde. If one was discrete, one could flourish in the 1930s as a gay - at the baths ,etc., - despite the oppression. The 1930s assault was on visibility.

After WW II the assault on gays intensified into a campaign against the very existence of homosexuals in America.

"The majority of cases of child `sex murderers' ..... more than three thousand a year in the late 1940s." (Chauncey, ibid., pp. 359-360)

When gays and lesbians finally said enough is too much and fought back, the post-Stonewall gay/lesbian subculture that emerged was in part a resurrection of the subculture that flourished earlier in the century, in part an intensification of it, and in part a reflection of the subcultural supports that had developed during the period of attempted extermination. For male gays, at least, the subculture centered round institutions facilitating frequent, highly promiscuous sex-the only kind of homosexual activity that was safe during the periods of intense repression and attempted extermination.

"It is no wonder that a generation in reaction should generate an orgy. It came as an antidote to repression. Heterosoc - because it controlled the media - would congratulate itself on it morals, its monogamy, and use this against us. It was all very well for the police to raid a `rotting' sauna and for that to be reported in the press, but the sauna was there because of the oppression." (Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 66.)

The gay Liberation chant, "We're here, We're Queer, Get used to it!" involved flaunting the differences that separated us from straight society. And for gay men, one was our sexual abandon and our rejection of monogamy. (Lesbianism would flaunt other differences in the path to liberation.) And we did it with a growing sense of superiority over the repressed monogamistic double-standard lives heterosexuals live.

"It eventually dawned on me that heterosexuality is an abnormal psychopathic state ... How could they be saved from themselves? Perhaps a nice clerical counselor sponsored by the Church of England" (Jarman, At your Own Risk, pp. 60-61; he is parodying the heterosexual homosexuality is a mental illness" theories used to repress homosexuals).

But, of course, this orgy of exchanged fluids made gay men especially susceptible to opportunistic infections. Not just the clap, syphilis, and the crabs for which cures existed, but also hepatitus then eventually AIDS. And AIDS did spread opportunistically beginning around 1982 and gay men died in droves -far more gay men died of AIDS the first decade than there were casualties in the Viet Nahm war. yet there is no AIDS memorial on the Mall, except during marches on Washington where the Quilt of Names is unrolled.

Over the semester we will fill in much of this historical outline and the analogue for lesbians. But for this and next week we want to outline the gay and lesbian cultures that emerged prior to the repressive movements of the 30s-60s. For they do much to shape the post-Stonewall gay culture that would emerge.

We have two concerns here: Understanding pre-Stonewall gay culture and a historical concern with the bases of oppression of gays. We will concentrate on the former first.

But before we do, a word on what it is to be a subculture: Out where I have a farm in rural Virginia there are a few gays but no gay subculture. In most urban areas, there is a gay subculture. What's the difference? Key to being a subculture is what J. Harry and W. B. DuVall (The Social Organization of Gay males NY: Prager, 1978)term "institutional completeness"-the degree to which the needs of its individual members can be met through other group members. having gay doctors, dentists, laundries, financial institutions, shops, bars and restaurants, cultural centers, retail or service organizations.)

"In [1982] San Francisco, for example, a highly visible Lesbian and Gay community exists that includes many institutions and group activities: educational, religious, social, and medical institutions; cultural institutions for poetry, theater, athletics, dance, music, and literature; professional, academic, business, and youth organizations; and community centers and social service agencies. .;.. other cities rival or have equaled San Francisco in the diversity of their Gay institutions." (P. 357 of William Paul, "Minority Status for Gay People", pp. 351-369 in W. Paul et al, Homosexuality: Social, Psychological, and Biological Issues (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982).

Geographical concentration usually is regarded as crucial to obtaining institutional completeness, hence being a subculture. So, too, is marignalization of its members, merely on the basis of membership in the group, by the majority culture.

Bisexuals, transgendered and other sexual minorities, lack this institutional completeness, and so are not genuine subcultures. Although one hears references to things such as the "tattoo subculture" it lacks institutional completeness and does not qualify as a subculture in this strict sociological sense. Not every group of socially marginalized people forms a genuine subculture. Most religious groups similarly are not, though some groups such as the Amish do enjoy institutional completeness and qualify as genuine subcultures. Ethnic and racial groups that cluster together in Ghettos do tend to have institutional completeness and thus are genuine subcultures. Not all members of a subculture live in proximity to the culture, yet may identify with it. Thus my primary cultural identification is with the gay subculture, even though one of my homes is in rural America with virtually no gay institutions and my other is in Bloomington, IN where there are a number of gay/lesbian institutions, but institutional completeness is not achieved. The point here is that genuine subcultures center round geographical centers having sufficient concentration of members and resources to achieve institutional completeness. Before World War II, New York City - especially Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Times Square, and Harlem - provided that core for gay subculture.

A. Pre-Stonewall Gay (sub-)culture (based on Chauncey, Gay New York)

Chauncey documents that New York enjoyed a full, flourishing gay subculture possessing "institutional completeness" in the half-century before WWII:

"In the half century between 1890 and the beginning ..... and saloons with back rooms where men met for sex." (Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 1)

Let's look at some of these social institutions, paying special attention to the interplay between these social institutions and the attempts of moral reformers to suppress prostitution and homosexuality.

[It is important to stress that the origins of these social institutions was rooted in working class/immigrant society, not middle class society. Need to discuss how the WASP ruling class generally disapproved of what others did and attempted to enforce a constraining morality on others through legislation and through compulsory education of children and control of curricula. This was especially focused at the Italian and Irish Catholic working classes (e.g., compulsory education to potestantize, countered by Catholic parochial; schools, countered by attempts to prohibit parochial education such as the KKK-sponsored Oregon Constitutional amendment later struck down by the US Supreme Court). Prohibition, birth control laws, abortion laws, and the regulation of liquor/bars after prohibition all were instances of these moral-enforcement practices that go back to the Pilgrim's and Quaker sumptuary laws. Need to stress that this is the context in which current conservative Protestant attempts to enforce "family values" agenda and eliminate sex education that treats homosexuality as an "natural" form of sexuality needs to be understood.]

Rooming houses, etc.

To accommodate a large unmarried population, rooming houses emerged, then residential hotels (apartment buildings) which gave a fair degree of privacy for bringing tricks home. Also, the concentration of gays in some of these locales.

The emergence of the Y etc. by moral reformers as a moral alternative to the vice of the rooming houses, backfires as the Y becomes very gay. (Village People, "YMCA" song.)

The Raines Law hotels as a precursor to the baths, etc.

Cafeterias and restaurants:

Where business men encouraged late night gay clientele to attract gawking tourists.

"The dramaturgical language ... that mocked the conventions of heterosexuality." (Chauncey, op cit., p. 168)

Reactions of moral reformers to these leads to widespread use of disorderly conduct laws to put such places out of business or to intimidate homosexuals from attending them.

""New York City's police ... but they always had to contend with the possibility of such penalties." (ibid., p. 173)

Note also the extent to which moral reformers would manipulate the law unfairly against queers:

"Once it had prevailed upon the inspector to raid the place ... dependent on a sympathetic judge for successful prosecution." (ibid., p. 171)

Bribery of the police kept such episodes to a minimum. And many more restaurants catered to discrete gay clientele and avoided persecution. The result was the emergence a number of restaurants and cafeterias that served as gay meeting places and social centers.

Outdoor Cruising areas

Outdoor areas were harder for police and moral vigilantes to control, and gays made them their own "cruising grounds" A variety of codes and conventions for recognizing each other emerged, with argot to negotiate sexual encounters. Especially in areas where other forms of street trade and vice were allowed to flourish, save occasional crackdowns, gays too could cruise and hustlers hustle with fair safety.

But people lacking private accommodations to bring tricks home also would use the bushes in parks, etc. as locales for having sex al fresco. Others engaged in it simply because they found public sex exciting. Public washrooms also were convenient sites. (ironically public restrooms had been built by moral reformers as an alternative to the saloons as the only public toilet facilities). The safety of tearooms (ease of warning of someone approaching). Police surveillance.

But gays' sexualization of public spaces was part of a larger working-class street culture that took the "private" into "public space."

"The men who ought ......a difference that troubled middle-class reformers deeply." (Chauncey, ibid., pp. 202-203)

Again, we see gays gravitating to working class neighborhoods and institutions which were more tolerant of them and their practices.

"The efforts of the police .... on its diverse communities." (ibid., p. 204).

[Somewhere here I need to stress the extent to which the progressive era is an attempt to defend "native" middle class values against the perceived degeneracy associated with immigrants - e.g., the criminalization of abortion and contraception, the attempts to coerce public schooling, etc.]

The Baths

the baths were the first exclusively gay institutions and served many important functions. They also were relatively safe.

"Gay baths were few in number and served a more limited .... came to depend on them in a variety of ways" (ibid., pp. 223-224)

Gay enclaves (significant gay presence but not that critical mass that sets the tone of the area).

In Greenwich Village and Harlem we see the emergence of visible, tolerated gay enclaves and especially the emergence of gay owned and operated speakeasies and clubs (precursors of the gay bars). In both locales, we see an association with the emergence of gay enclaves and a kind of cultural renaissance, with many of the artists and writers gay. Of particular note is the extent to which, in Harlem, we find recapitulated the position of social tolerance and acceptance of gays and lesbians with the opposition of moral crusaders such as Adam Clayton Powell (later to be a member of the House of Representatives eventually ousted for various illegal activities).

Also of note are the increasing visibility of gays and lesbians in both locales - especially in the various Drag Balls in the Village and in Harlem. Insofar as there is racial integration of gay and lesbian subcultures it takes place in Harlem, but even then with fairly careful awareness of various racial and social class boundaries. Just as white middle class differentiated itself from the working classes with a repressive sexual mores, so too we find the same pattern within black Harlem. But because Harlem was black, there was less attempt of the white moral reformers to control vice and so gay life in Harlem could flourish more openly than white gay life in the Village. All in all, Harlem was more open and wilder. And it drew the more adventuresome white as well to its offerings. In many respects things get magnified in the Hamilton Lodge Ball, from the beginning a drag event, that increasingly became dominated by gays. First black, then later white gays as well.

"The balls became a site for the projection .... to see whether a black or white queen would be crowned." (p. 263)

Gay bars

Although today the most visible of gay institutions, they were late in appearing, emerging only in the late 1930s and 1940s as an inadvertent consequence of the state policing of bars created after the repeal of prohibition. Gay speakeasies in the Village and Harlem were 1920s precursors.

B) The emergence then repression of Gay culture.

As theses institutions proliferated, gays became more visible. Prohibition was especially important, and it led to the "Pansy Craze of 1930-31 which marked a high point in gay visibility.

"The pansy craze .... social purity forces for the first time." (Chauncey, op. cit., p. 327.)

Yet as this was happening repressive forces were mounting. In 1923 the NY State Legislature had prohibited homosexual "lewdness" or cruising. Then in 1927, in reaction to such lesbian gay plays on Broadway as The Captive , Mae West's Sex, and her The Drag which was on its pre-Broadway out of town tryouts, the NY State legislature amended the public obscenity code to include a ban on any play "depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion" (ibid., p. 313)

Prohibition was especially critical. During prohibition , speakeasies were run by lower immigrant classes, and middle to upper class had to mix with them to get drinks. Speakeasies took on an air of "slumming" and entrepreneurs quickly exploited this - with Black acts imported from Harlem, then the pansy acts. Gay speakeasies emerged, but they were controlled by the mod. A mob shoot-out at a gay club was the impetus for a crackdown, as did clean-up campaigns mounted in defense of the rising Tammany Hall political scandals. The elimination of prohibition led to state liquor laws aimed at preventing a return to the rowdy pre-prohibition saloons of the working class. Such legislation typically proscribed degenerate or lascivious behavior, and that quickly was codified into excluding all homosexual behavior. State liquor boards typically were detective, judge, and jury, and prosecutor, and it quickly became the de facto policy, upheld by the courts, that serving even a single homosexual would cost you your liquor license. The policies were ruthlessly pursued. ironically, the only bars that could survive serving homosexuals were mob-controlled ones ion the pay off, so gay bars did flourish. Unlike pre-prohibition where working class gays and straights would drink at the same saloons, these became exclusive gay bars . And the gay bar emerged as the central institution of the gay subculture even in the face of efforts to eradicate the public presence of gays. Liquor laws prohibited even hiring homosexuals in restaurants, bars, and the like. With the exception of the secretive gay bars on the payoff, the liquor laws and their enforcement "served to exclude lesbians and gay men from the public sphere and amounted to a virtual ban on public assembly." (ibid., p. 347) Even wearing of "gay clothes", drag, even too tight pants, or mere mannerisms thought to be associated with homosexuality were grounds for arrest. Essentially, gays and lesbians were tolerated only to the extent they were invisible.

Censorship laws forbade depiction of homosexuals or homosexuality on the stage. The Hayes Office and the Motion Picture Production code allowed depiction of adultery, murder, etc. (provided the person got his/her due in the end), but the very depiction of homosexuals or homosexuality was prohibited for over 30 years. Still there were venues where gays could be open. The opera was so associated with the upper class that police dared not raid them, and so gays could be flamboyant and outrageously campy at the Metropolitan "all stops were pulled out as far as costume and grooming. The hairdos and outlandish clothes many gays wore were not to be equaled until the punk era." (ibid., p. 351). Gays flocked to concerts of the likes of Judy Garland.

Summarizing these "backlash" developments, Chauncey (ibid., pp. 353-354) writes.

"The revulsion against gay life ... Times Square nightclubs needed to be protected from them."

Such efforts were reinforced by cultural forces D'Emilio discusses: Religion, medical science/psychiatry, and the law provided rationales for marginalizing gays and lesbians-defining their inferiority as sinners, psychopaths, or criminals.

"On the eve of World War II .... of a gay emancipation movement." (D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 22.)

World War II on the one hand intensified the discrimination against gays, with psychiatric screening to prevent gays and lesbians from serving and the stigmatizing of those who did not serve for being unpatriotic. Yet many gays and lesbians evaded screening out and did serve. In a particular, the navy and the WACS had disproportionate gay and lesbian representation. Through the service many rural homosexuals had their first exposure to gay culture in the big cities like NY and Paris. And many a service man had his first sexual encounters with the marginalized fairies the selective service had screened out. As Quentin Crisp said, "Never have so few serviced so many so willingly." (approximate quote.) And the war served to make rural Americans more sophisticated in the ways of the word, including homosexual worlds. The demands of war work led women left behind to assume traditionally mannish roles and to don trousers. The strict gender segregation in the military encouraged deep emotional bonding among men and among women, and in this setting discreet but rampant homosexuality did flourish.

One might have expected this to sow the seeds of a sexual liberation movement. And in a sense it did in that it initiated so many to the ways of homosex and the associated subculture. However, WWI was followed quickly by the Cold War with Russia, and homophobic forces led by closeted J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, aided by closeted Roy Cohn and others, began the witchhunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee that propelled Nixon to fame and the Army-McCarthy hearings. The latter were directed primarily at ferreting out homosexuals wherever they were in the federal government or American society.

"The widespread labeling of lesbians and homosexuals as .... pervaded the lives of gay men and women." (D'Emilio, op cit., p. 49.

Some of those targeted, especially astronomer Frank Kaminy, would become leaders of the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1960s.

In a climate of repression and hostility, Gay and Lesbian Bashing was socially acceptable behavior, as it is to an extent even today.

C.) The Lesbian community.

While focusing more on gay culture in NY, Chauncey in fact has extended discussions of lesbians and lesbian institutions as well. Nevertheless, there are important differences between gay and lesbian subcultures. For instance, _promiscuous_ sex and its facilitation has always been central to gay social culture and institutions, but not of the lesbian subculture where serial monogamy is more the norm. In some respects, lesbians were less criminalized since they were women and women were so marginalized in society. Thus lesbian sexual acts often were not criminalized though male gay acts were because lesbians and women weren't important enough to even outlaw what they did. Nevertheless, as the Tough Bar Lesbian emerged in the 1950s, refusing to accept or play by society's "women must be feminized" rules, and holding their own against men in bar fights, they increasingly were subjected to police harassment, state liquor board activities, etc.

It is important to note that while PROMISCUOUS sexuality was not central to the emergence of lesbian community, sexuality was.

"Lesbian feminism's ..... through the entire feminist movement." (P. 11, BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD.)

""we were identifying sexuality ... Expression of sexuality." (IBID., P. 13)

It is important that we look, then, at distinctly lesbian portions of homosexual subculture. And to do so we turn to a history of the lesbian community in Buffalo, NY. That we do is striking, for during these periods male gay subculture flourished with institutional completeness only in larger metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or smaller cities like San Francisco noted for a bohemian quality. However in smaller cities we see emerging the same sorts of central social institutions such as gay bars and the building of community in a manner that does not involve institutional completeness. Yet even there we see some people living mostly in the lesbian or gay subculture. For example the Tough Bar Lesbian of Buffalo who lived with marginal employment, sometimes would work (as bar tender) and live almost entirely in the subculture. Lack of institutional completeness was compensated for by diminished demands on society including the emerging subculture.

Although the focus of Kennedy and Davis's BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD, is on lesbians in Buffalo, they give a fair amount of insight on small city gay male life and community-much as Chauncey does with New York life for lesbians. Both also pay considerable attention to racial minority life in both settings. From the two sources we see some major themes emerging: First, for both lesbians and gays the social institutions emerge out of working class situations/institutions and social practices, not middle or upper class ones. Bars are important for both gays and lesbians.

"In the 1930's .... crucible for politics." (Ibid., p. 29)

And in both cases we see a progressive differentiation: First gays and lesbians socialize privately or in mixed bars serving queers and straights, later the locus is queer establishments serving gays and lesbians where the straights there are outsiders or intruders. Then we find bars increasingly becoming gay bars or dyke bars.

"The emergence of the tough bar lesbian own strategies of resistance." (Ibid., p. 113)

One needs to ask whether this segmentation and separation is itself a reflection of the growing emergence of homosexuals and heterosexuals, heterosexuals and gays and lesbians as distinct social constructs. If so it suggests the process of social construction is a far more gradual process than people like Foucault would maintain. And that what it is to be in the construct changes and evolves as the construct firms and emerges as a distinct, differentiated type.

For gay males, we saw that there was a real blending of social class. For lesbians, things are much more stratified. Working class Dykes and middle class lesbians don't mix a lot, and initially there is limited racial mixing though always more than in the larger society. Gradually though, the lesbian community becomes much more integrated racially than the surrounding society, though more among the working class bar crowd than the middle class crowd. Yet as increased freedom is fought for and gained by queers queer society becomes more segmented as reflected by less social interaction of gays and lesbians, of black and white lesbians, and working class vs. middle class lesbians. (Social class continues to this day to be less significant in gay subculture than in lesbian subculture.)

"Lesbian history provides ... a political movement in the future." (Ibid., pp., 64-66.)

And this differentiation was reflected in different social institutions - the brawling bar society of the working class Dykes, the house parties of Black

lesbians, the respectable genteel bars of the Upwardly Mobile Lesbians and the closeted informal activities socialization of the professional lesbians.

"Why should class division emerge .... culture of class relations." (Ibid., p. 139).

Another contrast is the relation of stereotype-conforming queers in gay vs. lesbian society and where they figure in time. Fairies and pansies are prominent from the beginning in Chauncey's New York, though they become more marginalized as time goes on. As gay society becomes fuller, more visible, the Drags and the swishes are more marginalizzed within the subculture. For lesbians, the Diesel Tough Bar Dyke emerges in the 50s, as a later stage in the formation of community and subculture. As Gay liberation begins to be successful, the place of the gender-benders in both the gay and lesbian communities becomes a matter of controversy and is decisive politically. Do Drags and Biker Dykes march/ride in Gay Pride parades? But the gender conformity issues are not just ones of inversion. Exaggeration also is controversial. For both men and women, there become at various times "costumes of the day": The Castro Clone and Dyke wear which eschews skirts and dresses but isn't cross-dressing as a man either. (I don't know a good code name for it.) And those who radically deviate - the gay in full leather drag and the Drag Queen in feather boas and rhinestone tiara, the Lipstick lesbians and the Diesel Dyke - are viewed as more respectable queers as an embarrassment to the gay liberation movement. Yet, the gay subculture is big enough that the differentiation into sub-sub cultural groups continues, and we have further segmentation and separation within the community. The leather subculture, the macrobiotic lesbian subculture, etc.

For both gays and lesbians, those who most visibly bend gender conformity are especially central to the creation of the subculture.

"Beginning this research at a time .... culture from an insider's perspective." (p. 5, BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD)

For they are the ones who were out of the closet, who insisted on visibility, and were the catalyst for the emergence of bars that catered more and more exclusively to visible gays and lesbians. And it is out of this visible segment that gay liberation emerges - despite quieter, more respectable efforts of more closeted and "respectable" gays and lesbians such as those who founded the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitus. In a sense the Tough Bar Dykes and the Drags were the marines of Gay Liberation (and in the case of the Dykes, many of them were es-Marines!). One of the interesting things about the 1950s-60s with McCarthy era witch hunts was that it made many of these closeted respectable people's homosexuality public which allowed the emergence of an in-your-face political movement

such as GAA (in contrast to the more secretive mattachine Society). The point is that there is a deep connection between visibility and the emergence of gay/lesbian subculture, and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement.

"During this period [1930s-1950s], manipulation .... women's sexual love of women." (Ibid., p. 6.)

When, for whatever reason, one's homosexuality is visible, one has more to lose and more to fight for, and the more central gay liberation and being gay or lesbian becomes to one's own life. Visibility breeds subcultural identification and queer self-identity. It is out of visibility that activism and the Gay liberation movement emerges. And as the diversity of those out increases, the centrality and importance of the queer marines diminishes. And yet, with visibility and increased respectability and acceptance there are these pressures to marginalize the more extremes who were the catalysts of it all. It is important to understand that gay liberation began as a fight for space for these extremes, and pressure for respectable conformity is to sell out. [This is an explicit political statement by me, and intended to be contentious.]

Chapter 3 of BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD, details the bar brawling behaviors of the Though Bar Dykes. It is mind-boggling stuff.

"Although most of the fighting ... which lesbians were bristling for a fight." (Ibid., p. 91)

The tough bar lesbians' participation ... and they would walk!' (Matty)" (Ibid., p. 92)

But it is a mistake to view such actions as either sensationalistic or embarrassing. For it is indeed rather central to the emergence of gay culture. "not being born into the community ...... difficult to distinguish which characteristics it has created and which have been forced upon them." (Ibid., p. 14)

"Lesbians should be placed among civil-rights ... others of which developed independently." (Ibid., p. 112)

Indeed, to some extent it was the larger society which in the 1950s by trying to invent and impose an extreme form of gender conformity inadvertently produced instead the visibility minorities needed to emerge and collect and fight back.

"On the surface the 1950s .... than in any other period of U. S. History." (Ibid. p. 69) "Such active persecution .... including moral and sexual deviance." (Ibid., pp. 69-70)

"The juxtaposition of the three Buffalo communities ... certainly not improved upon." "The steady harassment of the bars ... and psyches battered," (Ibid., p. 150)

4. Gay Sensibility I: Wilde vs. Gide

So far we have looked at the emergence of queer subculture out of working/immigrant class institutions, and how the attempts to marginalize and render invisible gays and lesbians became so regressive as to trigger REVENGE EFFECTS where specialized gay institutions such as gay and lesbian bars arose to provide safe havens for queers in the increasingly repressive times of the 30s-60s, which in turn added a new visibility to queers, resulting in a critical mass of visible queers who increasingly fought for space and territory.

[We want to pause and say more about Revenge Effects since they recur frequently in the history of people attempting to repress gays and lebasians (and other "undesirable" minorities) especially in the name of morality. The term comes from Edward Tenner in his recent book, WHY THINGS BITE BACK: TECHNOLOGY AND THE REVENGE OF UNINTENDED EFFECTS ( Knopf, 1996): Revenge effects are "unintended, ironic consequences of attempts to improve society and life through technological or social engineering". In particular one kind of revenge effect is the regenerating effect where attempts to eradicate undesirable organisms or social groups or practices actually promotes their growth and increases the extent to which they have their "undesirable" effects. (p. 9) And there are reverse revenge effects where new innovations produce unexpected effects of things adopted for different reasons - some of which may prove beneficial. The notion of revenge effects is illuminating in understanding a number of junctures in gay and lesbian history, and we will employ the noton when it is illuminating.]

But the fight for queer space was not only fought with fists in lesbian bars, the rapier wit and chorus-line kicks of Drag queens, and Molotov cocktails at Stonewall. Beginning back in Victorian times there also are intellectual and cultural assaults. Queers, especially but not exclusively gays, had a disproportionate influence on the culture and arts of the 20th century. As Elizabeth Taylor once said,

"Without homosexuals there would be no theater, no Hollywood, ..... No Art!"

And the cultural and artistic contributions of queers were decidedly subversive, countering attempts to smother gays and lesbians into cultural invisibility with films, plays, literature, music and art that revealed and made public a GAY SENSIBILITY that spoke to queers everywhere even when the plots and vehicles used to deploy that sensibility were disguised as heterosexual. Thus most of Tennessee Williams plays--especially CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF and STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE - focus on struggles with homosexuality in a very straight society. And completely heterosexual movies such as the cult favorite HAROLD AND MAUDE (Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles) are heterosexualized reworkings of homosexual stories (in this case, it is based on a French play about an older queen helping a younger mad come out as gay; Ruth Gordon was the heterosexual replacement for the older queen.)

As Oscar Wilde wrote: "Art is individualism and Individualism is a distrubing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit." ("Soul" p. 272) "What is Abnormal in life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in life that stands in normal relations to Art." ("Maxims" p. 1203.)

There are two issues that arise here: First the role of CULTURAL SUBVERSION in the emergence of gay culture and hence as a contributor to gay liberation. Second, there is the issue whether the centrality of the arts to gay culture is a reflection of some peculiarly artistic or esthetic sensibility possessed by or associated with gays? These two issues of gay sensibility are so intertwined that it is difficult to disentangle them. Many of our readings entangle them, others attempt to sort them out in various ways, and other seek to keep them dynamically related. We will go as our readings take us, though we will attempt some differentiation.

As preparation, let's first note briefly how a disproportionate representation of queers in the arts contributes to the visibility of gays, to the building of gay subculture, etc. From Chauncey it is fairly clear up through the 20's Drag Balls, plays and films dealing with queer themes, and the Pansy Craze all gave greater visibility to queers. But what is more important, perhaps, is how the arts contributed to gay visibility and the building of community in the repressive 30s-60s as it gradually became illegal to represent homosexuals, homosexual culture, and homosexual behaviors, institutions, and the like on the stage (NY State laws applying to Broadway), in films (The Motion Pictture Production Code administered by the autocratic Hayes Office), in literature (where postal and custom laws branded as obscenity any works dealing with homosexual themes, persons, etc., and in music where radio broadcasting laws imposed "decency" and obscenity restrictions.

To get some idea of the extent of queer artistic and cultural contributions, consider the following lists (which are not comprehensive and one's I just created off Internet resources accessed through the Class Homepage):

Literature: James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Lillian Helman, Radcliffe Hall, Samuel R. Delany, Allen Ginsberg, Essex Hempell, Rod McKuehn, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Gertrude Stein, Brendan Behan, Emily Dickensen, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Langston Hughes, Christopher Isherwood, Summerset Maughm, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yukio Mishima, Marcel Proust, Daphne DuMaurier, E. M. Forster, Joe Orton,

Playwrights: Edward Albee, Harvey Fierstein, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, Thorton Wilder,

Painters: Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Don Bicardy, Francis Bascon,

Dance: Rudolf Nureyev, Nijinsky, Serge Diaghilev, Merc Cunningham

Fashion Designers: Calvin Klein, Yves St. Laurent

Composers: Benjamin Brittan, Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, Giancarlo Menotti, Virgil Thompson, Elton John, Cole Porter, Tchaikovsky

Actors and Actresses: Dirk Bogarde, Marlin Brando, Sir John Gielgud, Grace Jones, Dick York, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Tune, Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Evans, Charles Laughton, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Paul Lynde, Liberache, Tony Curtis, James Dean, Tallulah Bankhead, Alan Bates, Louise Brooks, Raymond Burr, Richard Chamberlain, Montgomery Clift, James Coco, Greta Garbo, Danny Kaye, Sal Mineo, Ramon Novarro, Anthony Perkins, Tyrone Power, Rudolph Valentino, Clifton Webb, Monty Wooley

Film makers: Peir Paolo Pasolini, John Schlesinger, George Cukor, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Kenneth Anger, Dorothy Arzner, Jean Cocteau, Sergi Eisenstein, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Colin Higgins [Harold & maude, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, 9 to 5], Derek jarman, Mitchell Leisen, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Ken Russell, Gus Van Sant, Luchino Visconti, John Waters, ranco Zefferelli, Gregg Araki,

Cook books: Craig Claibourne, James Beard, Alice B. Toklas.

[The status of the above is that they have been identified publicly as gay, lesbian, bisexual or highly suspect. The reliability of the list is questionable in the sense that the evidence is limited in some instances and may be mistaken in some cases. However, many of the identifications are secure and it seems clear that most of the listed people belong on the list. The point is not whether this or that person is or isn't queer or semi-queer (bi) but rather that the list is indicative of the presence and importance of queers in American culture this century. And that point should not be obscured by debate whether any specific individual really belongs on the list.]

The lists are seriously incomplete. But what is striking about them is the number of these artists who defined or became the icon for a generation (Brando in THE WILD ONE, James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE; Allen Ginsberg for the Beat Generation; Andy Warhol for Pop Art; William Burroughs for the drug culture; Gertrude Stein for the 1920s ex-patriot France). Each of them had a charisma that typified their era - and gave a queer twist to their time.

More subtly we can see the same impact - where queer artists bring a special something to their medium that shapes, redefines, and renders things more queer. Think what Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Dirk Bogarde did to redefine what was male. Think what James Baldwin did to propel a queer black sensibility into literature for whites, or what Langston Hughes did for poetry. Twentieth century Classical music has been disproportionately influenced by the likes of queer Benjamin Brittan, Tchaikovsky , and John Cage; and Leonard Bernstein pimped and promoted their modern and post-modern music as Director of the oft-televised New York Philharmonic. Earlier Cole Porter had populated Broadway with the lyrics of his very queer musicals such as ANYTHING GOES.

And the impact of HOLLYWOOD!

My point is simple: Much of what is most noteworthy about 20th Century Culture is queer, and this is especially so during the repressive 30's-60's. If you were queer or proto-queer and at all intellectual, certain writers "spoke to you" and you empathized with certain actors and their portrayals. And one came to know of other authors of similar sensitivity that would be recommended . "Well, if you like Christopher Isherwood, well then you'd like E. M. Forester, too." In my own case, I came out at 24. Yet when I look back at the films that spoke to me, the artists I especially liked, the novels I read they were disproportionately queer. I read literature heavily as an undergraduate and graduate student, and when I go into my library and look at the literature that so captivated me then, I am struck by the fact that more than half the novels and plays I own from that period are queer - queer authors writing works that spoke to other queers while not portraying overtly homosexual themes.

In short, legions of gay and lesbian authors translated queer experiences, queer sensibilities, and queer insight into more or less heterosexualized vehicles - be they writers, playwrights, actors or actresses, film makers, composers, choreographers, or performers. And by so doing a peculiarly gay sensibility was spread among the unsuspecting world in a social climate bent on repressing and rendering invisible everything homosexual. The arts were subversive in two ways: The queer sensibility that pervaded the arts spoke eloquently to may queer consumers of the art, uniting them as they spoke to isolated and scattered closeted queers. But at the same time that queer sensibility redefined heterosexuality and the dominant culture in ways that gave more space for queers and ultimately created pockets of tolerance and even understanding for queers. Queer contributions to the arts thus were doubly subversive.

I think there is little doubt that the Arts transmitted a queer sensibility, or perhaps a number of queer sensibilities, and thus subversively contributed to creating the space and climate in which gay liberation could emerge and flourish. And like the Drags and the Bull Dykes, some gays in the arts were among the Marines of Gay liberation. People like Liberace, Paul Lynde, James Dean, Marlene Dietrich, and Cary Grant.

Yet stronger theses have been claimed about this Gay Sensibility. In her classic paper, "Notes on Camp" Susan Sontag argues for the centrality of homosexuality to modern culture, portraying queers as creators of sensibilities - of a sensibility that of which "camp" is the essence. It is much stronger to claim that there is A QUEER SENSIBILITY. And if one does, numerous questions remain as to its nature, which Jonathan Dollimore well articulates:

"is this sensibility transcultural or historically ... possess/express it?" (Dollimore, SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, p. 308.)

These are some of the philosophical questions we want to answer about this alleged gay sensibility. And we will do so from multiple perspectives.

We begin by looking at two pivotal literary figures, Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, both exceptional literary figures, who openly confronted their homosexuality and then proceeded to portray a queer sensibility in their subsequent literary productions. Their careers ended quite differently, Wilde broken in spirit while imprisoned for his homosexuality, Gide receiving the Nobel Prize for literature. Moreover, both not only incorporated and transmitted a gay sensibility, but each wrote somewhat systematically about homosexuality, reflecting radically different political philosophies of SEXUAL DISSIDENCE. We might, thus, in the first approximation view them as both promulgating a queer sensibility in their literary work, but self-consciously doing so in manners that reflect quite different explicit philosophies how the presentation of that sensibility is to become subversive in the cause of homosexual liberation.

And the queer aesthetic has been remarkably powerful in transforming society.

"in our own time the negation of homosexuality .... this paradoxical position" (Ibid., p. 28) "But the more homosexuality emerges as culturally central ... enemy without?"(Ibid., p. 30)

"And the elusive, probably non-existent, gay sensibility perverts the categories of the aesthetic and the subjective, restoring both to the cultural and social domains which, in the modern period they have been assumed to transcend, but which in the early modern period they were always known to be a part of." (Ibid., p. 34)

Dollimore introduces the notion of a TRANSGRESSIVE AESTHETIC (literally an aesthetic that transgresses or goes beyond the limits of the prevailing moral order).

and then portrays Gide and Wilde respectively pursuing it via an ESSENTIALIST and a CONSTRUCTIVIST approach - approaches that can be likened to the Modern and the Post-Modern in contemporary literary criticism.

Gide's transgressive aesthetic works within the essentialist apparatus of heterosexual society, arguing that some people have a HOMOSEXUAL ESSENCE and thus for them to transgress Protestant morality is legitimate. It is an INDIVIDUALISM defined by differing essences. In CORYDON he maintains homosexuality is intrinsically natural, that heterosexuality prevails merely because of custom, that historically homosexuality has been associated with great artistic and intellectual achievement whereas heterosexuality is indicative of decadence. (slight paraphrase from Dollimore, ibid., p. 12.)

It is important to appreciate that essentialist conceptions of selfhood have been crucial in gay and other liberation movements. (see, Dollimore, p. 39). To redefine what is viewed as deviant or morally inferior as one's essence, allows one to view one's deviance as authentic self. And through most of western philosophy from antiquity on, there have been close connections between morality, freedom, and self-authenticity. Whether we talk of Plato or Aristotle, of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, Hume or Sidgwick, etc. Once we factor in differences in conception of what that morally autonomous self is, we see a remarkable constancy of position: That to be free behavior must be authentically one's own - must originate from the self. And that morality is free behavior in conformity with one's nature or what one's true nature dictates. The differences in the moral views are in the nature of the self (is it rational, emotional, physical, some combination; are there fixed essences or idiosyncratic ones that define one's essence).

Thus it is in basic conformity with the accumulated wisdom of 2500 years of Western moral deliberation for morally-condemned minorities to challenge these restrictive moralities with a strategy of redefining what the authentic, morally responsible self is. If queers have different essences than straights, if blacks have different essences than whites, then it is morally inappropriate to impose conformity to white or straight essence upon blacks or gays. Differences in nature make different behaviors natural. natural in the sense of conformity to one's nature. And hence different moral standards apply.

It thus is good liberation strategy to redefine the essence of minorities, to redefine the minority self. But merely saying, "From now on we are going to define homosexual to mean ...." is as impotent as semanticist (later Senator) S. I. Hayakawa's proposal that the solution to racism in America was to redefine the meaning of `Nigger'. (In the first edition of LANGUAGE IN THOUGHT AND ACTION.)

No, one has to convince people - to convince the condemning majority (or at least enough of them) that homosexuals are really and intrinsically different, that Blacks are really and intrinsically different. Different in ways one is not responsible for. Different in an unmaleable, ESSENTIAL way. And the most powerful way to do this is through literature and the arts - to portray a different lived reality foreign to the oppressor yet accessible - at least in empathetic glimpses. Whether it be the Art of Renaissance Harlem to which whites flocked, or the literary torment of Tennessee Williams, straight white people came to appreciate that their were sensibilities different than their own, sensibilities they never could participate in other than vicariously. Art makes the dominant Voyeurs of the deviant and thereby brings them to understand that however fascinating, exotic, and exciting, "I never could be like that."

This is transgressive aesthetic in action. And, historically, its transgressive power is rooted in an essentialist conception of the autonomous, morally authentic self. Yet, the very success of this literary strategy renders it problematic.

"the realization that dissidence may not only be repressed by the dominant (coercively and ideologically), but in a sense actually produced by it, hence consolidating the powers which it ostensibly challenges. This gives rise to the subversion/containment debate, one of the most important areas of dispute in contemporary cultural theory." (Ibid., p. 27)

The fact is, before there were homosexuals there were no heterosexuals (See Jonathan Katz's new book, THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY [APPROXIMATE TITLE]). And, as we have seen, there is good reason to question whether there is A homosexual sexual orientation. And we also have seen the extent to which race itself also is a social construct.

The political success of the essentialist transgressive aesthetic strategy requires that we construct a homogeneous minority group out of a discriminated mongrel assemblage - groups constituted out of a common heritage of discrimination and a collective refusal to continue accepting that discrimination. And when we realize that we understand there was no essence after all.

[We need to stress here that the social construction of the heterosexual and the homosexual, the Black and the white, requires the cooperative interaction of oppressors and their targets. It is a mutual process of interactive definition that constitutes both the oppressor group and the oppressed, giving the oppressed minority an essentialist identity while defining the oppressing majority as leftovers whose essence is primarily the negation of minority essences.]

Politically, then, the essentialist transgressive aesthetic has power, but ultimately self-destructs. Alternatively one can reject the very notion that people have essences - which is to reject the very notion of the autonomous self and the correlative definition that morality is rooted in the struggle to be faithful to one's essence. That is the transgressive aesthetic of Oscar Wilde - which presages Post-Modernist Theory.

Wilde's transgressive aesthetic is an individualism of social potential and disobedience , not essence.

"In Wilde's writing, individualism ....which Wilde reiterates elsewhere." (Dollimore, Ibid., p. 8)

"The public voice which Wilde ..... class and ruling ideologies." (Dollimore, Ibid., pp. 8-9.)

"Individualism joins with socialism ... bourgeois subject;" (Ibid., p. 9)

"Nature and reality signify ..... through the forms which art offers it." (Ibid., pp. 10-11)

At the center, then, of Wilde's transgressive aesthetic is and Anti-Essentialism that centers on the repudiation or deconstruction of the soul - "that lawful sense of self which kept Gide transfixed within the law", a self that functions for "moral constraint" (Dollimore, p. 4).

The contrast, then, between Wilde and Gide is this: Wilde's transgressive aesthetic is one that repudiates the morality of "Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigor and repression that generates a kind of conformity." (Ibid., p. 3), whereas Gide seeks to stay within the confines of that morality by redefining the moral constrains. Gide's essentialist analysis of homosexuality is key to doing so in a manner that retains the soul, the self, as the locus of moral conformity. Yet each is transgressive of the existing moral order. And both pursue, explore, and proselytize for their transgressive moral orders via their literature.

In terms of today's intellectual climate, Gide's essentialist ("Modernist") approach has been supplanted by "Post-Modernist" rhetoric that repudiates the morally conforming self. "As the autonomous self disappears, so the dialectic between law and desire, dominant and deviant, becomes much more complex." (ibid., p. 27)

Yet are they so far apart after all? Is not Wilde's Individualism mostly the denial that there are SHARED essences. The insistence that essences are idiosyncratic? And so viewed can one not then view morality as individualistic fidelity to oneself? What is being rejected, then, is the idea that there is any general moral truths, that one can codify true restrictive moral principles governing specific behaviors to which one ought to conform? Think here of Jean Genet in THE THIEF'S JOURNAL discovering his essence was traitor, thief, and pervert and seeking moral perfection - SAINTHOOD -by attempting to become the consummate traitor, thief, and pervert - by being true to his nature, his essence, no matter how it deviated from what society and others demanded in the name of conventional morality.

And from this perspective, when imprisonment for his homosexuality breaks Wilde's spirit and causes him to write DE PROFUNDIS in which he retreats to, does not this signal Wilde's true moral failing - which is to turn away from his authentic self in an exercise of pathetic conformist redefinition. (See Dollimore, Chapter 7, pp. 95 ff.)

To return, then to the idea of a transgressive aesthetic: The Arts promulgating a "gay sensibility" was crucial to gay liberation. But not in a way that actually requires there be a unified gay sensibility.

"[With respect to ] significant instances of homosexual representation I do not .... occasionally, liberation"

To an extent the gay sensibility contributes to the creation of HOMOSEXUALS as am essentially-constituted minority. But that does not require that there be an essence, and hence does not require that there be a unique gay sensibility. Also, we have stressed the importance of VISIBILITY in constituting a queer subculture of sufficient critical mass to achieve institutional completeness. That requires that the queer arts present a gay sensibility that speaks to closeted, isolated queer individuals informing them "I am alone. There are others like me and I can seek them out and join with them." But that ability to slice through the alienation of the closet does not require that there be a unique gay sensibility that speaks alike to all who are or come to define themselves as queer.

Wilde's challenge, then, is that we do not have to posit a queer essence to legitimate our sexual dissidence. But even if we do not have to, there still are factual questions: Is there A queer sensibility? If so, what is it? And even if there is not A queer sensibility, there appear to be queer sensibilitIES. Might not "gay sensibility" be a FAMILY RESEMBLANCE relationship. While there is no essence of gay similarity they are linked together on the basis of shifting resemblances much as the category of `games" is constituted.

5. Gay Sensibility II: Style and Camp

So we will now turn to these questions, beginning with the notion of CAMP -

"the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques." (Sontag, "Notes on Camp" in AGAINST INTERPRETATION, p. 275.) It's hallmark is "the spirit of exaggeration" "an outrageous aestheticism" "art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is `too much"."(pp. 293, 283, 284). Sontag tells us there are three great creative sensibilities: "The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extremes of feeling, represented in much contemporary `avant garde' art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic." (p. 287) "Style is everything. .... What counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. ... The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to `the serious.' One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious." (p. 288; Think here of "The Forgotten man" number in Gold Diggers of 1937)

PARADIGM EXAMPLES OF CAMP: Classical ballet, opera, movies are saturated with Camp.. Exaggerated sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms of Jayne mansfield, Gina Lollobridgda, Jane Russell, Steve Reeves, Victor Mature, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Edward Evert Horten, Eric Blore Art Nouveau, Busby Berkeley Musical Numbers, the plays of Noel Coward, THE MALTESE FALCON.

"Camp is an invasion and subversion of other sensibilities, and works via parody, pastiche, and exaggeration." (Dollimore, p. 311). Camp thus is a transgressive aesthetic. And it has been alleged (by Sontag and others) to be essence of homosexual sensibility deployed transgressively. (cf., e.g., Dollimore, p. 310).

The Movie we are going to see next week, THE GANG'S ALL HERE is, perhaps, the most perfect instance of Camp I know of.

A. What are the connections between gay sensibility and camp?

Richard Dyer notes that "A major fact about being gay is that it doesn't show." (The matter of Images, p. 19) and then notes that the "typification (visually recognizable images and self-preesntations) is not just something wished on gay people but produced by them, both in the pre-political gay sub-cultures and in the radical gay movement since 1968." (ibid., p. 21) and then stresses that homosexual typification is closely associated with the desire for sub-cultural identification and has practical advantages - e.g., in "cruising". "The prevalent fact of gay typification is determined by the importance of a social category whose members would be invisible did they and the culture not provide lifestyle signs with which to make recognition possible." (p. 24)

Dyer goes on to stress there are "four predominant gay types":

"Inbetweenism" - the queen and the dyke which represent queer sexuality as if they were inbetween the two genders of male and female.

"Macho" - an exaggerated masculinity that marks it off from conventional heterosexual masculinity. "It is moreover, a consciously erotic look. The practical, instrumental connotations of working-class clothing are transformed into pure signs of eroticism." (ibid., p. 40)

"The sad young man" (a martyr figure, young and soft (not having achieved assertive masculine hardness) hence not yet a real man

Lesbian feminism which sees "women as having a special and even mystical relationship to nature" a way to "achieve full recognition of ... repressed or despised femininity without the repressive, destructive presence of masculinity and male sexuality" (p. 45)

These four gay types illustrate "the importance of gender and biology/nature in gay [self-]representation and the pressure from both dominant and cultural forces to produce gay types" so that "the same types may have different meanings in mainstream and sub-cultural contexts." (p. 29). Thus Chauncy stresses how the dominant culture's marginalization of gays by branding them as less than real men, less than real women, being some sort of intersex. But gays took control over the margenalizing stereotypes of "Inbetweenism " and made them their own, transforming them into a "refusal of rigid sex role playing" (Dyer, Matter of Images, p. 37) - a public "recognition of the artificiality of social roles - of the cultural contingency and radical unnaturalness of the social order - that grew out of their personal struggles with those contradictions and their recognition that conventional `masculine" roles were `unnatural' to them.... Such a realization had highly subversive implications at a time when the social order represented itself as natural and preordained, for it allowed gay men to question the very premise of their marginalization. The social order denounced gay men as `unnatural' and .... gay men highlighted the unnaturalness of the social order" [Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 290] by adopting Dyer's sorts of representational types.]

Chauncey goes on to stress that Gay men created cultural institutions and rituals that fostered a sense of collective identity, much as the ethnic theater and dances of the immigrant groups did" and that the drag or transvestite balls were a key vehicle for doing so. Noteworthy and fascinating is the case Chauncey makes that these Drag Balls, were a "queering" of the Masquerade balls of the dominant (heterosexual) culture. Just as gays took over and made their own the marganalizing stereotypes of inbetweenism and used them to further visibility and forge queer identities, so too gays took over the masquerade social institutions of straights and queered them into transvestite, drag gender-fucking masquerades with tuxedoed dykes and flamboyant drags. Such adoption of types and their exaggeration through drag balls, "inverted and undermined the `natural' categories ...., reinvesting them with meaning..... Like other aspects of gay culture, gay men ... struck a delicate balance between violating and reaffirming the conventions of the dominant culture." (Chauncey, p. 291).

A common denominator of all of these four representational types is GENDERFUCK. Whether it be the inbetweenism of the queen or the dyke, the exaggerated manliness of the macho, the pubescence of the "sad young man" or the lesbian feminism separatism, the predominant styles are a rejection of the prevailing natural order of masculine and feminine, of male ad female. Drags, masculine dykes, macho leatherfags: All are travesties of conventional masculinity and femininity. All are a subversion and perversion of the social order. They are STYLES OF ARTIFICE. They are a redefinition of the nature of male and female, removing the social essences of masculine and feminine gender role conformity from the essence of gender. But just because they are artifice they are not Gide's queer essentialism. Rather they are Wilde's version of transgressive aesthetic where essences are denied. If there are no essences, there are no truths about gender. Without essences, there is only ARTifice and STYLE.

"So art runs to meet the liar, kissing his `false beautiful lips. knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style'. Truth, the epistemological legitimation of the real, is rhetorically subordinated to its antitheses - appearance, style, the lie - and thereby simultaneously both appropriated, perverted, and displaced. Reality, also necessarily devalued and demystified by the loss of truth, must imitate art, while life must meekly follow the liar." {Dollimore, op. cit., p. 11, paraphrasing Wilde's essay on "Decay".

Drag - whether the queen, the Dyke, or the Leatherfag - then becomes attacks the masculine and feminine essences of heterosexual men and women. So, too, by divorcing femininity from it's masculine origins - wherein the feminine is inferior our unrealized masculinity - the fourth lesbian separatist type emasculates heterosexual men.

Genderfuck then is at the heart of homosexual emancipation. Genderfuck is an inversion and subversion of conventional sensibilities. And it is played in public before an audience. Ideally a straight audience - for whom it is most threatening.

There are two ways to go about Genderfuck. First, it can be a deliberately chosen ATTITUDE. An Attitude rooted in "choosing to be free of convention, to be relatively autonomous, self-determining" and "Taking ... responsibility for one's sexuality ... [by] noticing things about oneself, identifying one's attitudes ... evaluated as authentic or inauthentic. They can be honest or dishonest, responsible or irresponsible." (Claudia Card, Lesbian Choices, pp. 44-45). And if we do, Card argues we will find many different kinds of authentic lesbians - \

amazons

sapphists

passionate friends

"One of the implications of the view that being lesbian is a matter of attitude is that lesbians do not form a natural kind. And for the same reasons, neither do heterosexuals." (Card, ibid., p. 46.) Genderfuck attitudes deny essences of gender and associated social roles..

"An attitude can be a pose, a position, a stance, a disposition." (ibid., p. 43). But not all attitude is the deliberate choice Claudia Card discusses. Not all ATTITUDE is so intellectualized. Card notes connections between attitudes and tastes. Once can HAVE ATTITUDE and the ATTITUDE of Genderfuck is a matter of taste, a matter of STYLE

In the second way to Genderfuck essences are replaced by STYLE that parodies, mimics, mocks, and ultimately undermines heterosexualist essentialism from within. It is a STYLE that takes the purported essences and performs it to excess so that gender essentialism is "undermined by being taken to and beyond it own limits ... a kind of attack .... [making] untruth a virtue." It is the Genderfuck of the Drag Queen. (Think here of THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT where in the outback the older transgendered Queen, BERNADETTE, with rapier-tongue cuts to the quick, defuses a homophobic bar scene verging on violence, in the process reducing the wood-be instigator to utter humiliation..) "Refashioning as a weapon of attack an oppressive identity inherited as subordination, and hollowing out dominant formations responsible for that identity in the first place." (Dollimore, p. 311.) Think of Titania, THE Drag Queen who self-styles herself and other drags as "old revolutionaries." But more than that, she preaches a message of STYLE. Her comparison of how she humiliated Carl who was a hustler swindling johns, and how she utterly destroyed ,him with STYLE, whereas the Duchess of Diva wanted to do a far less affective brute force "heterosexual" approach lacking STYLE.

The name of this Genderfuck STYLE is CAMP. As Chauncey notes,

"Camp was at once a cultural STYLE and a cultural STRATEGY, for it helped gay men .... ..............camp was a style of interaction and display that used irony, incongruity, theatricality, and humor to highlight the artifice of social convention, sometimes inverting it to achieve the same end. The drag queen thus epitomized camp, and any verbal play that questioned gender categories ... embodied it." [full quote on p. 290]. We see this captured in the episode from "Interview with the Drag Queen" where through camp Miss Titania utterly humiliates the hustler Carl who is ripping off johns.:

"He even pulled this on a queen. Well, ..... bathroom and he wouldn't come out." [pp. 6-8]

Camp is not the exclusive provinance of queers, just as not all parodies of women are Drags. mae West is camp, a parody of femininity and woman's sexuality. The Opera Diva is every much a parody of women as are Drag Queens - a fact made evident when at Gay Liberation Benefits at the Kennedy Center the entire box circle would be populated by 6+ foot drags in floor length gowns and rhinestone tiaras every bit as resplendent and flamboyant as the Divas strutting and performing on stage. Is the Diva a drag imitation of the Drag Queen, the Drag Queen of the Diva, of both of Royalty?

Chapter 3 of Koestenbaum's The Queens Throat is a kind of duet between the Diva inventing herself and queers inventing themselves. The comparison is rooted in the common denominator of camp and drag.

"These meditations are pro-butch, pro-femme, pro-drag. I want to use the particulars of dival conduct to chart a method of moving the body through the world, a style that gay people, particularly queens, have found essential. It is a camp style of resistance and self-protection, a way of identifying with other queer people across invisibility and disgrace. I am not sure whether we must prove queenly conduct useful and efficient to justify our idolatrous over of its decor. The milieu of divas and queens is a cultural movement worth of our respectful, nostalgic revisitation. it is possible that the era of the queen is past, though the homophobia that made such conduct necessary is still blistering and present.

Although the Diva is most closely associated with opera, Divas are found elsewhere. Without fanatical fans, there are no Divas. Divas and their followers invent each other. In many respect the essence of Divahood is rooted in that larger-than-life relationship to one's fanatical fans together with the adoption of STYLE embodying the transgressive aesthetic of style. Other Divas having large gay followings include the likes of Judy Garland and Bette Midler.

Some quotes and insights about the connections between opera and camp:

"Our Pleasure derives from her [the Diva's] acting insufficiency .... do not disturb the regime of my desires." (p. 110.)

"Susan Sontag defined `cam' ... fragments held hostage by everyone else's indifference." (p. 117)

"Codes of Extravagant female behavior ... to help the stigmatized self-image it is received, believed, and adored. " (p. 133)

And when I read this my mind brings of the image of Bette Midler's entrance in THE DIVINE MISS M video, redolent of the campy entrances at the drag balls and then think of Ester Newton's description of the dyke parody of it on Fire Island:

"One group of `girls ... ... recalled was a great Reward" (Ester Newton, "Just One of the Boys" p. 532.)

This brings me to the point that opera is not the only stage/musical medium that centrally embodies the Camp aesthetic. Much of Musical Comedy is camp. Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney in ANYTHING GOES is every bit as camp as she was in THE ETHAL MERMAN DISCO ALBUM - which was every bit as mind-boggling as Busby Berkeley's THE GANG'S ALL HERE. (We need to keep in mind that the extravagant Hollywood Musical was an outgrowth or evolution of the Music Hall spectacle - the Ziegfield Follies and the like.)

Wayne Koestenbaum asks what is the fate of the Opera Queen .

"We consider the opera queen to be a pre-stonewall throwback because we homophobicly devalue opera love as addictive behavior and as displaced eroticism. The opera queen is a dated species: very 1950s. I am an anachronism. After sexual liberation, who needs opera?" (Koestenbaum, The Queens Throat, p. 31.) "this book is an elegy for the opera queen. I am an opera queen, but I am also mourning him." (p. 41)

Is Gay Liberation really the Death of the Opera Queen.

Miss Titania asks the same question about the Drag Queen, that paradoxical perversion of stereotypical heterosexist Beauty: "I lived for Beauty. That was my choice. .... Someone asked Miss Titania once, `What is beauty?' You know what she said? ... `Beauty is the death of the drag queen.' THERE! .... She lit another cigarette, `It's true. We had to die so you cowboys could live. Not that we wanted to. No one asked us, regardless. But people who believe every horrible insult are of no use to anyone now. That is not part of survival." (Mordden, "Interview with the Drag Queen", p. 8.)

The deeper question here is this: As Gay liberation succeeds and gays and lesbians gain freedom, tolerance, space, and acceptance, will the result be an assimilation of gays and lesbians into the mainstream and thereby destroys everything that is distinctive of queers and queer culture. With acceptance will gays abandon style and queer types, lose that identity rooted in the transgressive aesthetic o camp deployed as a weapon against discrimination. Well the success of queer liberation ultimately deconstruct the homosexual? Will it thereby also deconstruct the heterosexual.

When we talk about a gay sensibility, we need to ask what part, if any Lesbians had in it. We have two sources: The discussions about Buffalo lesbians during the same periods we are considering - especially 30's to 60's (in BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD) and we have ester Newton's description of gay-lesbian relations in Cherry Grove, the Fire Island gay resort community. (Op. cit.)

Newton highlights how different the gay and lesbian cultures were when they confronted each other on Fire Island. She documents how lesbians were viewed as an intrusion.

"The complex counterpoint between ... equal partners with gay men in Grove life." (p. 539).

Part of the clash was over the extent to which things revolved around sexuality.

"A second area of potential friction .... Subtly the Donut rack had disappeared." (pp. 536-537)

This brings up issues of place of sex in Lesbianism. In BOOTS OF LEATHER Kennedy and Davis take exception to attempts of some feminist lesbians to write the history of lesbianism not centering on sex (they specifically attack Lilian Fadderman's ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS ... see pp. 12-13), arguing that sex was very much at the center of working class lesbians. (See earlier lectures re this.) But we will see in Ch. 7 that the normal sexual venue was serial monogamy for lesbians.

Interestingly, Newton argues that the decline in property values due to AIDS and gay men not wanting the temptations of the meat Rack environment, was what depressed property values to the points lesbians could buy into Cherry Grove in substantial numbers. A reflection of the quite different sexual values.

But, I think, camp also was an important different. Already, into the earlier quote re the "Arabian Nights" ball, a quintessentially "camp" event, the lesbians "paid their dues" Newton says by joining in ONCE in the "camp frolic. But it is clear this was a gesture for acceptance, a coming over to their camp. [Pun intended.]

We do not find much evidence of camp aesthetic in BOOTS OF LEATHER. If camp is a queer sensibility, it is a decidedly male gay (though opera and musicals show it is not exclusively male) :Ethel Merman's deadly serious Disco Album is a paradigm of camp.

So, if there is a queer sensibility, it is a gay one. And we have seen good reason earlier to conclude that, yes, the transgressive aesthetics did transmit queer sensibilitieS. But not every artistic or other transgressive production embodied camp as its driving aesthetic. There is not a single queer sensibility; there is not a single gay sensibility.

Here we find ourselves agreeing with Jonathan Dollimore that,

" Steiner and Sontag are in a sense correct about the centrality of homosexuality to modern culture. But the argument of this book is that its centrality is quite otherwise than they suggest ... [as] questionable at virtually every turn, as indeed is the very notion of A homosexual sensibility" (SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, p. 308, emphasis added.)

What Dollimore does stress about camp is that its transgressive nature, how its parodistic perversity was so powerful

There are gay sensibilities and queer sensibilities and they at best bear a family resemblance to each other. But it is clear that collectively they were transgressively very effective. Camp does this by a process of inversion. Not necessarily gender inversion (op. cit., p.312), but rather what Dollimore CALLS TRANSGRESSIVE REINSCRIPTION. He notes that camp and machismo are tow different kinds of transgressive reinscription within gay culture (p. 319) and he relates this to Richard Dyer's discussion of types (above), Judith Butler's "defense of practices like drag, cross-dressing, and in lesbian culture, butch/femme sexual stylization." (p. 319)

"Butler sees deviant sexualities more generally ... theatricalizes and demystifies it." (Dollimore, p. 320.)

Here we can relate the lesbian experience to camp. Kennedy and Davis go a great pains to describe the styled sexual practices of the Butch who pleasures the fem but will accept no reciprocation - which they argue was the social norm or more of the lesbian culture of the 40s and especially the 50s. But they argue it was not the aping of the prevailing heterosexual role strictures, but subversive and transgressive of them. A reinscription:

"The key to understanding ... ... expressions of women's sexual love for women." (BOOTS OF LEATHER, .....P. 192-193)

Dollimore continues:

"The transgressive dynamics of transgressive reinscription ... deviant (e.g., homosexual identities." (pp. 321-322)

[here there is a connection with the exercise of reading THE GANGS all here as a gay text - of a reinscription of the text, a queering of the text. Something increasingly common in queer studies. "To liberate desire from oppression is not .... Included there is a history of heterosexuality hardly known to itself." (Dollimore, p. 325).

Next, I want to look at what lesbian culture and male gay culture can tell us about masculinity and femininity, and especially the relations between masculinity and femininity. Continuing their discussion of the very restrictive butch-fem sexual roles of the 1950s they discuss what Dollimore would call the transgressive reinscription involved:

"The butch fem erotic system .... concern for her own fulfillment."

Thus, flawed as it was. their point is that it was the subversive breakthrough that opened the possibility of a fully embraced femininity not defined as inferior maleness, but rather one that was heading towards embracing femininity in a thoroughly nonsexist matter.

In "`Knights, Young Men, and Boys'": Masculine Worlds and Democratic Values" Richard Mohr explores much the same idea and argues that a gay notion of hypermasculinity provides an excellent role model for embracing a fully nonsexist masculinity. Thus we find both lesbian and fay proposals to the effect that the potential homosexuality has for a culture (or two cultures) built around a full embracement and celebration of hyperfeminity and hypermasculinity can free both maleness and femaleness from vying sexist and provide a role model for a HETEROSEXUAL society enjoying a thoroughly nonsexist embodiment of masculinity and femininity, of hyperfeminity and hypermasculinity. That is, both propose a transgressive reinscription of masculinity and femininity that converts them into a hypermasculinity and a hyperfeminity devoid of sexism.

Mohr's essay is utterly brilliant. is brilliant, interweaving tight philosophical argument with penetrating analyses of Opera (especially Parcifal and Die Frau ohne Schatten), literature (especially Moby Dick, Walt Whitman, Paul Goodman), high and low art (George Bellows, George Luks, Duncan Grant, Grant Wood, Lynn Davis, Man Ray, Joanne Leanard, Robert Mapplethorpe, George Platt Lynes, Joel-Peter Witkin, Tom of Finland, Rex, Newsweek covers and AIDS posters, Keith Hennessy), Architecture (Richardson, Sullivan), and post-modernist/social constructivist themes (Foucault).

[I should add, that I think the readings in this course have an extraordinarily high level of brilliance for academic writing. part of the fun of the course is reading an playing off against each other so many brilliant and insightful pieces. These queers can write!]

Mohr's essay, which must be read, savored, and experienced for itself to be adequately appreciated, argues three theses:

1. "Gender's appearance, its phenomenological presence, and so in part its social significance, is to a degree biologically determined." [p. 139]

Through analysis of art, especially art figuring cross dressing and gender inversion, he concludes

"The proper alignment of ... male homoeroticism."

2. That the hypermasculine is not necessarily morally objectionable, that a male-identified male need not be sexist, so long as the hypermasculine is simply the development of natural capacities, and not drawing for its force on social tropes that are traditionally associated with domination over women or with the exclusion of women in ways that degrade them, either by denying them equal worth as persons or any prejudicially limiting their liberty. Further that gay hypermasculinity is precisely such morally legitimate hypermasculinity which, while excluding women from sex, romance, and marriage, undercuts rather than draws its force from objectionable heterosexist social tropes and challenges the heterosexual presumptions on which much of sexism and exploitation of women is based.

His argument echoes themes we have seen before: that gay male hypermasculinity is a transgressive reinscription of heterosexist tropes or stereotypes:

"What I want to suggest generally, .... Tom of Finland and Rex." (P. 165) as well as Maplethorpe and many other painters and artists.

3. Hypermasculine interactions can serve as models of equality. Specifically, male homoerotic relations, if institutionalized in social ritual, provide the most distinctive symbol for democratic values and one of their distinctive causes. They can help stabilize the always teetering basic structures of democracy by serving as a model for the idea of equality. When serving as a model of equality, male homosexuality, although limited to some, promotes the likelihood that equality is an ideal that will be had by all. Thus gay liberation is more than the removal of repression. "Democracy will be firmly grounded only when male homosexuality is seen and treated in social ritual as a fundamental social model, when male homosexuality is, as it is in some cultures, treated as a priesthood." It ranks among those forms of human experience that can serve as models for democratic liberalism.

He concludes, "Plato thought that the problem with heterosexuals ... I say that the problem is that it is not homosexual enough." (p. 218).

UPDATE: Included here is an account of how we discussed the Mohr essay in class. It replaces the original paragraph originally included at this point.

In class we first discussed this essay using pictures by Tom of Finland and Mapplethorpe (from the Mohr volume) to illustrate the ways in which the very notion of top and bottom get subverted in leather sm hypermasculinity, thus undercutting the sexist power relations of male domination of females.

Next we considered the extent to which Mohr's three main theses or claims (above) applied to lesbian transgressive reinscription of feminity and masculinity relations. As with Mohr's essay, we proceeded with lots of graphics, including taking a "Guess their Gender" quiz. The general thrust of the discussion was that the central claims of Mohr's analysis applies comparably well to both gays and lesbians.

B. Comments on some of the Audio-Visual Presentations on Opera and Camp.

This was ommitted because we were behind schedule. However, some of the film clips were incorporated earlier into the lectures (e.g., the Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Flying Down to Rio, ) or Audio Visual Assignments (Peter Grimes). The account given follows my 1995 presentation.If you wish you may skip to the continuation of the lesctures in part 2.

As the above indicates, there are deep connections between the transgressive aesthetic of Camp, Hollywood Musicals, and Opera. Just as the Drag Queen parodies women, so too the likes of Eric Blore and Edward Evert Horton parodied homosexuals when they could not directly be represented.

I want, first, to let you see two excellent examples of the queer-surrogate parodies of queers on film. Both involve two such character actors, Eric Blore and Edward Evert Horton.

Clip from Top Hat where Horace Hardwick (Horton) brings Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) to his apartment to spend the night despite the fact that he and his "man" Bates (Eric Blore) are not on speaking terms over a dispute about what sort of tie to wear with evening dress.

Clip from SHALL WE DANCE? where Cecil Flintridge (Eric Blore) has gotten himself in jail due to a mix-up caused by Jeffrey Baird (Edward Everett Horton) and Cecil calls Jeffrey to bail him out. (The hilarious "Susquehanna" routine that probably is the basis of the lisping stereotype for gay men.)

These parodies of queers are themselves Camp. And many of the numbers that the musicals embody are themselves camp. (I had wanted to show you the finale from FLYING DOWN TO RIO - an Astaire/Rogers movies with Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and Franklin Pangbourne [a third queer surrogate character actor] but my copy is in Indiana and we couldn't find it in a rental store.)

Think of the banana number in THE GANG'S ALL HERE. [Stress the point that Camp is hilarious - all the more so for taking itself so very seriously. I really want you to enjoy the films, to crack up, break out laughing and not let the fact the films are for the course get in the way of ENJOYING them.]

Turn now to Opera - which itself generally is Camp. Here I wanted to do several things.

First: Expose you to fairly typical opera with some scenes from queer composer Benjamin Brittan's opera PETER GRIMES.

Second, I want to acquaint you with the DIVA: The Diva, the Opera "star" has a voice trained to be most unnatural. The Divas are larger than life, masquerading as regal;

"And yet the diva masquerades as regal. .Queens and divas understand each other. The diva believes - and this may not be grandiose delusion but truth - that she and the queen are secret sharers, conversing in weeks and nods." p. 108. "The diva pretends to be royal, and at any moment her illusion might be shattered. She is a carnival queen, queen-for-a-day, and ordinary woman indulging in a detailed drag of queenliness." (p. 108) Divas are flamboyant, narcissistic, self-divided, grandiose, excessive. "Divas aren't afraid to praise themselves. Divas talk like Oscar Wilde. Or Oscar Wilde talked like a diva. The diva TURNS a phrase and reverses it -substitutes praise for blame, pride for chagrin, authority for vacillation, salesmanship for silence." (Divaspeak) (p. 131.)

Now, I want to illustrate a couple of points Koestenbaum makes about the Opera Queen and his Diva:

"The opera queen must choose one Diva. The other Divas may be admired, enjoyed, even loved. But only one diva can reign in the opera queen's heart." (p. 19). For many years my Diva was Birgit Nielson.

"One is not supposed to pay attention to what a diva wears But divas themselves have adored the art of masquerade, even if it means upstaging the loftier pleasures of music and drama....

"All I remember from a Janet Baker recital was her electric blue gown. All I remember of Hildegard Behren's Tosca was her gowns noise." (pp. 122-123).

Relate to the Birgit Nielson recital.

"But I made it far enough through the first act to be struck, when Anna Moffo entered, with a sensation I've tried to describe before, and may never adequately name. her timbre was separate from her surroundings. Her voice .. entered my system with a vector so naive, unadulterated, and elemental, so unpolluted by the names I would later impose on the experience, that my drab bedroom shifted on its axis." (p. 11)

Relate to listening to the Jessye Norman "Es gibt ein Reich" from Richard Strauss's ARIANDE AUF NAXOS - which I did not know and rushing out to buy the whole opera special ordering the Jessye Norman, Fisher-Dieskow recording.

We want to understand both Opera and the Diva are Camp.

[Read excerpt from queer novelist E. M. Forster's WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD, pp. 119-123 (excerpts).

Musically, opera blends into Broadway musicals, Divas into Musical stars. We see this in two bites from Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha and two cuts from the 1934 production of ANYTHING GOES by gay composer Cole Porter (a musical with lots of gay double entendre): "You're the Tops" and "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" (sung by Ethel Merman, 1934 recording).

Jessye Norman "Es gibt ein Reich" from Richard Strauss's ARIANDE AUF NAXOS - which I did not know and rushing out to buy the whole opera special ordering the Jessye Norman, Fisher-Dieskow recording.

We want to understand both Opera and the Diva are Camp.

[Read excerpt from queer novelist E. M. Forster's WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD, pp. 119-123 (excerpts).

Musically, opera blends into Broadway musicals, Divas into Musical stars. We see this in two bites from Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha and two cuts from the 1934 production of ANYTHING GOES by gay composer Cole Porter (a musical with lots of gay double entendre): "You're the Tops" and "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" (sung by Ethel Merman, 1934 recording).

Go to Part 2 of the Fall 1996 Lectures.

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