Lectures F 1996
Part 2
Click here to go to part 3: Minority gays and lesbians to end of course.
6. Gay Liberation: Stonewall and its Aftermath.
Martin Duberman begins his book STONEWALL (NY: Plume, 1994):
"`Stonewall' is the emblematic even in modern lesbian and gay history. The site of a series of riots in late June--early July 1969 that resulted from a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar., `Stonewall' has become synonymous over the years with gay resistance to oppression. Today, the word resonates with images of insurgency and self-realization and occupies a central place in the iconography of lesbian and gay awareness. The 1969 riots are now generally taken to mark the birth of the modern gay and lesbian political movement --that moment in time when gays and lesbians recognized all at once their mistreatment and solidarity. As such, `Stonewall' has become an empowering symbol of global proportions." (p. xvii)
Yet, we have seen that the emergence of gay and community had been going on for 80 or so years by then, and that even before Stonewall there were fledgling and fairly ineffectual political activism groups such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. What needs to be explained is why the Stonewall riots were not a flash in the pan, why they had continuing impact. One has to treat seriously the idea that the time was ripe, that had it not been a raid on Stonewall some other police atrocity would have sufficed to spring the trigger.
What is it for the time to be right? I'm no sociologist, but let me hazard some guesses: First, a critical mass of gays and lesbians massed in many cities across the country. Second, substantial numbers of gays who were economically well off but closeted at work with sufficient disposable income to support political activism. Third, a growing feeling of disparity between their other socially upwardly mobile stature and their marginalization as queers. Fourth, having relative institutional completeness - and the strong economic base underlying it that ensured the gay community would not just go away. Fifth, the growing ability of minorities as a deliverable single-vote constituency that could become the swing vote in many elections. [This happened in DC when the gays vote toppled Mayor Walter Washington putting in underdog Marion Barry.] Sixty a growing dissident society including Hippies, the Drug culture, and mounting opposition to the View Nahm War.
In short: the real basis was a large-enough economically viable subculture. And we have seen how that depended so centrally on visibility.
While the history of gay politics is interesting, if what I just suggested is correct the gay and lesbian communities with critical size and economic resources is more crucial than the political activities of what always were a distinct minority of gay men.
So rather than directly purse gay/lesbian political history, I want to look at what happens to the gay and lesbian communities in the aftermath of Stonewall. In fact, they are quite different.
[In class we would see some film clips from "Last Call at Maude's" that included a number of gay and lesbian political activist events, demonstrations, and even still pictures of the Stonewall riots.]
A. Gay Community:
The gay community had a rich variety of support organizations such as the baths and gay bars. Gays, typically having more disposable income than their heterosexual social class counterparts [because of no children and possibly the combined earning power of two men], were able to buy into or rent in fashionable areas thus creating gay ghettos - which in turn triggered greater economic investment in the community and a proliferation of establishments catering to gays.
Overwhelmingly these establishments centered on casual promiscuous sex: either providing curing grounds in bars or on-site sex places such as the baths. For gay men the aftermath of Stonewall was one giant orgy. To quote Derek Jarman again,
"It's 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 its morals, its monogamy, and use this against us."
And it was not merely a temporary eruption of free sex which then waned back to some approximation of heterosexual monogamy. No, casual promiscuous sex became the very center of gay male society. The institutions of the subculture evolved into optimized instruments for efficient, nonentangling, casual sex. No dating, no preliminaries, no entanglements. Simply casual sex. If you wanted affectional intimacy, well there were "sisters" and lovers. One didn't have sex with one's "sister" (gay "incest taboo") and lover relations were nonexclusive if they lasted (and many did). It was a subculture committed to sexual freedom, to sex as a recreational activity, to severing the heterosexist bonds tying sex to intimacy, affectional relationships, matrimony, family, and reproduction. For gay men sex was a new ball game - more like tennis than like marriage.
Increasingly gays saw the focus of gay liberation as not being mere toleration for gays who were willing to live in queer imitation of monogamistic heterosexist morals, but rather as a demand for sexual freedom.
Richard Dyer, "Identity and Pleasure in Gay Cultural Politics", in his ONLY ENTERTAINMENT (London: Routledge, 1992), writes:
""There is a definite fit between the gay movement's basic concern with sexuality and the centrality of culture to its political practice. Both are to do with pleasure." (p. 166) ""Queer-bashing, police harassment, discrimination in employment .... manipulation and hypocrisy" (p. 167)
The social mores of the emerging gay subculture centered on high-volume promiscuous sex surrounded by erotically-charged discos and other cruising grounds. In gay bars and discos the sexual energy just cracked. When one came out as gay, one had to throw off indoctrinated predispositions towards monogamy and sexual exclusivity. To come out was to emerge as a whore, a slut, a fuckhole or suckhole. And how comfortable one was with that was a measure of the extent of one's reacculturation.
The readings for Week 10 (Nov. 5) illustrate what gay life was like. The stories by Ethan Mordden about male gay life in NY and on Fire Island give an accurate portrayal what promiscuous big city gay life was like then. The excerpt from Larry Kramer's FAGGOTS is an accurate description of the old Everard Baths in NYC, a particularly wild and sleazy bath, and is set on the evening the baths caught on fire and in real life killed a number of gays. Both of these sets of readings illustrate the sexually-charged promiscuous party atmosphere of post-Stonewall gay culture. The Mordden books give a good idea how the promiscuous casual sex was integrated into peoples larger lives, and how it often was quite rewarding. The Kramer portrayal makes it seem more desperate and strikes me as overdrawn in that respect (perhaps in the manner that the film The Boys in the Band overemphasizes loathing and self-hatred by gays). The film clips for Week 10 do a better job than Kramer of portraying what casual bath house sex was like - it's casual, playful, recreational nature. [Although they illustrate points that come up here, I have placed these readings later so that they occur just before we look at the impact of the AIDS crisis on gay culture and life. For it is these promiscuous practices that enabled AIDS to spread so opportunistically through the gay population.]
Note the moral inversion here: The core of gay subculture and life was what the law branded as disorderly conduct, Christianity branded as perversion, and psychiatry branded as psychopathology. It is no surprise that the early foci of gay liberation were: legal protection against discrimination, decriminalization of gay sexual activities and practices, theological and institutional challenges to religious discrimination, and the removal of homosexuality from the catalog of mental disorders.
In lectures to come we will focus on these aspects of post-Stonewall gay liberation. For they raise very interesting philosophical issues.
But before we do, what was the emerging post-Stonewall lesbian community like?
B. Lesbian sense of Community
First, lesbians generally had lower earning power (even if upwardly mobile for women), they could less afford to congregate in the central city gay neighborhoods, and so the range and quantity of institutional supports was more limited. Indeed, much of the institutional support for lesbians came from the larger feminist movement. In general lesbian subculture was less concentrated, less visible, more "virtual" than male gay culture.
Genital sex was not central to the constitution of the lesbian subculture, which contained many women who had become lesbians as a separatist political statement. In general the lesbian subculture was less individualistic, more communal and more politically constituted.
Lilian Fadderman, in ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS: A HISTORY OF LESBIAN LIFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA (NY: Penguin, 1991) notes that after Stonewall the older butch-fem polarized lesbian subcultures persisted, but to it was added "another lesbian subculture ... created by young women who were willing to publicly proclaim their lesbianism, and whose upbringing in the unisex 1960s made the polarities of masculine and feminine particularly alien to them." (p. 187)
Fadderman has a good discussion of the emerging lesbian political movement in her Chapter 8, 9. Her discussion tells us some of the male gay political side, but mostly of the lesbian side of Gay/Lesbian liberation. In particular she discusses the socio-economic class of these new lesbians (p. 197), the brief experiment in casual promiscuous sex that fades away into more traditional lesbian serial monogamy (pp. 201-204), the emergence of the Lesbian-Feminist connection especially in a separatist mode leading to lesbian communes and the like. (pp. 204-214 and much of Chapter 9). But what it is most important to see in Fadderman's discussion is the extent to which the very lesbian community was at the core politically constituted. See, for example, her discussion of being "Politically Correct" and "Politically Incorrect" on pp. 230-235 and the striving for consistency and consensus with nobody in a power-dominating position (pp. 235-245).
[Note: Fadderman was not assigned; but she is a source for things I talked about in class.]
A good friend of mine, Noretta Koertge, has written as wonderful novel, VALLEY OF THE AMAZONS, dealing with these political correctness battles and the establishment of the lesbian community in Bloomington, IN. (It is a sequel to her earlier novel, WHO WAS THAT MASKED WOMAN?) She is a philosopher of science (like I am) and her novel in part reflects the concerns academic philosophers have had with these political issues central to lesbian community and the connections of lesbian community to feminist concerns.
But sexuality, too, was important to much of the lesbian community, and serial monogamy (divorced increasingly from butch-fem roles) was the lesbian norm. Chapter 7 of BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD provides a detailed account of serial monogamy in the Lesbian community. They stress that the lesbian community created "an alternative system of emotional bonding with its own logic and ruses, a system we designate as serial monogamy" (p. 232)
They note this serial monogamy was quite unlike heterosexual coupling: "Despite the centrality of the sexually intimate couple ... in the economic or social sense" (pp. 233-235; in class excerpt the key portions of the five points and selected subsequent commentary).
They offer the following assessment of serial monogamy's benefits: "Living within the system ... from each of their partners" (p. 276) and " "Socializing with other lesbians ... and often practice nonmonogamy." (p. 277)
[Again, though I discuss this chapter here, in the Syllabus it is placed just before the AIDS crisis so as to look at AIDS with a clear understanding of differences in gay and lesbian sexual practices - which result in quite different vulnerabilities and responses to AIDS in the two communities.]
Lesbian bars also were important social institutions distinct from feminist activism.
[Film clips from "Last Call at Maude's with women discussing the importance of the Lesbian bar to their lives and coming out.]
C. Tensions between Gay and Lesbian Liberation.
Fadderman writes, "Although lesbian-feminists and gays occasionally worked together in the face of grave threats .... lesbian feminists generally found it disruptive to be with gale males..... Lesbian-feminists most often chose to dissociate themselves from gay concern and work on issues that were specifically feminist, because they felt gay men wanted to use them only as mediators between gay male interests and society. They pointed out with anger that they had nothing to do with washroom sex or public solicitation, and yet those were historically the problems on which women's energies were spent in coalitions with gay men. Lesbian-feminists insisted they were not the 'ladies auxiliary of the gay movement.' Their slogan became, 'We're Angry, not gay.'
"For many lesbian-feminists the problem stemmed from gay men's lack of a radical analysis over the questions of sex and sex roles. . They accused gay men of being merely reformist - defining the issue of homosexuality as a private matter about with whom you sleep - instead of understanding the deeper political issues such as questions of domination and power. They complained that gay reformists pursued solutions that made no basic changes in the system that oppressed lesbians as women and their reforms would keep power in the hands of the oppressors. ......
"They were especially repelled by gay male culture because they believed that lesbians, as women, would not naturally do as gay men did, with their dominant-submissive modes of sexual relating and their separation of sex from emotional involvement..... Because a general disenchantment with and suspicion of all males was central to lesbian-feminist doctrine, the gay man was naturally seen as being no less an enemy than any other human with a penis, and lesbian-feminists could make no lasting coalition with gay men in a gay revolution."(pp. 211-212)]
[We saw a video clip in class from "Last Call at Maude's in which a more restrained version of the same sentiments were expressed.]
Fadderman is expressing the radical lesbian-feminist position. Not all lesbians of the time agreed. Particularly contentious was the lesbian-SM community which claimed to be lesbian and feminist and into dominant-submissive games with each other. Yet there is considerable truth to her portrayal.
For example, Richard Dyer writes ("Identity and Pleasure ....", op. cit., in ONLY ENTERTAINMENT):
"It was clear from the start that the gay movement .... None of this could be said of the gay movement." (pp. 166-167); "The problem again was one of definition : how to define sexuality ... that separates genital sexuality from the rest of the body."
Especially divisive were the emergence of hypermasculinity as central to post Stonewall gay identity and the centrality of porn to gay liberation , especially in the Leather/SM version, and the emerging lesbian/feminist condemnations of pornography and sadomasochism. [The debates here within the lesbian community are especially strident, perhaps vicious.]
Nevertheless, despite these tensions there were common causes: Moral condemnation as perverts, legal discrimination against homosexuals, and the diagnosis of homosexuality as mental illness all were use used not only to justify harassment and discrimination against gay men, but also to deny child custody to lesbians. And on such targeted issues gays and lesbians could fight even if one could not agree on larger political philosophy or joint goals for Gay and Lesbian liberation. (Curiously AIDS, with the subsequent emphasis on safe sex including reduction in numbers of partners, which decimated the Gay community but which touched the lesbian community less than any other part of society, seems to have reduced the political friction stemming from differing concepts of sexuality and made for more effective gay/lesbian political cooperation in recent years. Lesbians have carried significant burdens in nursing gay men dying from AIDS.)
7. Gay Liberation II: Taking on Religion and Psychiatry
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ("How to Bring your Kids Up Gay" pp 69-81 in Michael Werner FEAR OF A QUEER PLANET: QUEER POLITICS AND SOCIAL THEORY (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) indicates what is at stake here: "the number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay persons ... at even the recourse to invasive violence." (P. 76)
a. psychiatry
In my paper, "Medical and Psychiatric Perspectives on Human Sexuality" I show how the notion of sexual pervert enters the medical/psychiatric literature as the embodiment of a particular late Victorian Middle-Class social mores and does not clearly differentiate different forms of sexual perversion. The very psychiatric classification of sexual perversion as a disorder thus is moralism masquerading as objective science and medicine. Homosexuality, effeminitism, transsexualism, transvestitism are lumped together with many other objectionable behaviors and the so called research concerning these categories is worthless since the class of perverts are not a homogeneous kind. Only with the scientifically reputable work of Kinsey and others do we begin to get reasonable behavioral differentiations of these various sexualities and a disentangling of them from the more generic and moralistic perversion. But even when differentiated, the research basis for classifying and diagnosing them as mental disorders is absent or unsatisfactory. For example, the diagnostic conditions for transsexualism turn out to be based on a single case, Christine Jorgensen, as reported in her serialize AMERICAN WEEKLY autobiography. [This would be analogous to a NATIONAL ENQUIRER serialized autobiography today]
Thus, with respect to the sexual categories used to condemn homosexuals as unstable psychopaths, they have their origins in the moralistic notion of perversion. Ion the McCarthy era that supposed psychological instability was tied to being a political threat to society during the communist scare witch hunts of the 1950s. This was no mere opportunistic expropriation by deeply disturbed and closeted homosexuals Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. For Jonathan Dollimore trances back the notion of perversion far earlier to Shakespearean times and even to early Christianity and finds that perversion was and remains a concept bound up with insurrection. It is this fact that enables the perverse (through transgressive reinscription) for being a powerful tool of gay liberation in unperverting queers.
Dollimore's arguments are subtle, and involved, and turn on much literary analysis which probably is not all familiar to you. In class we did not work through them in detail because we were behind schedule. However, I will try to extract some of his main themes here which later will be used to fuel his discussion and treatment of homophobia. You should use the discussion in these notes as a reading guide for working through Dollimore's discussion (chapters 8-9, 16-17).
SUMMARY OF DOLLIMORE CHS. 8-9:
"I shall show how ... perverse dynamic and transgressive reinscription." (p. 103)
The key issue is "why an erring/deviation from something should be construed as a contradiction or subversion of it." (p. 106)
His answer turns on the transgressive reinscription notion: "I formulate here a process ... for the disruption occurring elsewhere." (P. 112)
Re the common theme in moral and psychiatric writers that "culture involved a necessary control or repression of nature" (p. 113), although "for many within the civilization ... notoriously difficult to dismantle." (p. 113-114).
Here perversion comes in: "Perversion reactivates .... the fear of undifferentiation." (p. 116)
There are two paradoxes of perversion:
First paradox: " "In theological discourse ... that which it subverts." (p. 120)
2nd paradox of perversion: "the most extreme threat ..... categories with obvious destructive potential" (p. 121)
These lead to the paradox of perversion as internal division and how the Christian theory of evil is essential to the concept of perversion. But the concept is also political. "I suggested earlier ... what it would exclude or define itself against." "So perversion is doubly insurgent - a threat from outside in, and from inside out." (p. 125)
Next (Ch 9) Dollimore explores the connections between perversion and the Christian problem of evil where "essentially perversion becomes the negative agency within, at the heart of, privation. Perversion thus mediates between evil as agency and evil as lack; in bridging this contradiction perversion takes on its own paradoxical nature - which is also the basis of its disturbing power" (p. 140)
"From these paradoxes of the perverse is the perverse dynamic born .... as radically other." (p. 141)
This is important, because it is part of his larger argument that "with the emergence of the sexological ... be especially at risk." (p. 144) [connections to AIDS responses, etc.] Yet, concludes, Dollimore, the Christian concept of Evil - Augustine's at least - has "the happy consequence of making God rather than Satan the ultimate or original pervert." (p. 146).
He concludes: "Pursuing the paradoxes of the Perverse .... violence against them for centuries to come." (P. 147)
[End of Dollimore study guide portion.]
Eventually a combination of good research by Evelyn Hooker and others and targeted political activism, the psychiatric hegemony of homosexual condemnation was challenged and eventually by a vote the American Psychiatric Association voted, with much rancor and politicking, to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. However, a new category was created, ego dystonic homosexuality (being homosexual and not liking it) so that psychiatrists could keep on raking in $ for their supposed "cures" of homosexuality. This itself was the subject of much controversy. But it was a political victory. One no longer could turn to psychiatry and automatically brand all homosexuals as mentally ill.
How much a victory did declassification bring? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ("How to Bring your Kids Up Gay" pp 69-81 in Michael Werner FEAR OF A QUEER PLANET: QUEER POLITICS AND SOCIAL THEORY (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) suggests not far enough.
First she notes that the acceptance by psychoanalysts of homosexuals is limited:
"Revisionist analysts seem prepared to like some gay men .... should be understood as falling into the latter category'." (p. 71) She then discusses the therapeutic atrocities these effeminate boys are put through with parental blessing. She observes, "The books cited above, and the associated therapeutic strategy ... the very image of serene self-acceptance?" (pp 76-77)
She concludes: "And in this unstable context, ..... theoretical home for a concept of gay and lesbian origins." (p. 79)
More generally, there continues to be an ongoing enterprise of research attempting to find causes for homosexuality - which, of course, raises the specter of "cures" What is most surprising is that much of this research today is being done not by homophobes, as in the earlier days, but by queers themselves. And the research is just as dubious. Both for the reasons that Sedgwick mentions and from the fact we have seen that homosexuality is not a single condition or property of persons. Thus it is not the sort of trait that could have a biological or genetic cause.
b. Religion
Dollimore mentions the deep connections between Christianity and the notion of perversion. Before medicine homosexual behavior or sodomy was condemned by Christianity and Judaism. One basis for this is various scriptural passages - such as in Leviticus, Romans, and the Sodom and Gomorra story. The past thirty or so years has seen great advances in scripture scholarship, and out of that emerges challenges to the standard interpretations of these passages as condemning homosexuality.
Some strands of challenge:
I. John Boswell (CHRISTIANITY, SOCIAL TOLERANCE AND HOMOSEXUALITY) argues on historical grounds that these anti-homosexuality interpretations only come into Christianity around the 13th C and as part of a general consolidation of priestly power over the people.
II. He also adduces evidence that prior to this period there was general acceptance of homosexuality within Christianity.
III. There are firm scriptural exegesis reasons for considering alternative interpretations of these passages that do not condemn homosexuality. (e.g., the sin that destroyed Sodom probably was inhospitality towards angels -emissaries from God).
IV. For Christians, at lest, there is a notion of Christ producing a new Covenant that supersedes the Old Testament law, and thus it becomes problematic what of the OT law is binding on Christians. Christianity has rejected much of the Leviticus law, so what reasons are there for insisting on a select few such as reduced roles for women in Temple and condemnation of homosexuality? Jesus has precious little to say about sex at all, and only Paul in the OT writes in a way that can be interpreted as condemning homosexuality.
V. With respect to Paul's supposed condemnations, first, they are borrowed verbatim from various writings of pagans or extreme ascetic/pharisitical sects found in the Diaspora, and so are suspect as to their Christian authenticity. Second, even if authentically binding on Christians, the notion of homosexuality our society is concerned with is a modern one, having no analogue in Paul's cultural and temporal setting. Thus whatever Paul; is condemning it is not homosexual people acting in accordance with their homosexual nature.
Such theological/hermeneutical/historical investigations provided a wedge for Judeo-Christian denominations to begin to rethink their attitudes towards homosexuality. Typically, gay dissident priests, nuns, and ministers used modern scholarship to forge queer-affirming theologies and to create special queer congregations, temples, or even denominations (such as MCC). In many cases these are dissident and not sanctioned by parent denominations, and indeed may preach a liberationist theology that is condemned by the Church hierarchy (e.g., in Catholicism.) In other cases, battles are drawn over the ordination of homosexuals into the clergy.
Many queers have fled organized religion. Some, as Fadderman notes, have embraced things like Wicca, many are just atheists. Some have elected to stay, as dissidents. Yet there often is tension in doing so. It is the question whether to remain inside and try to subvert an institutionalized Church that is a main political enemy of Gay liberation and a main source of oppression. (We will see the rage that oppression triggers later when we red David Wojnarowicz's CLOSE TO THE KNIVES.) I know I feel the pressure as a practicing Gay Catholic - between the value I see in the Mass and the loathing I have for the Institutionalized Catholic Church's hierarchy and the rank immorality it trades in.
c. Homophobia
In their respective condemnations of homosexuality, both Psychiatry and Organized Religion institutionalize HOMOPHOBIA. Richard Dollimore has interesting things to say about the nature of homophobia and its close ties to perversion. Again, we did not go over this in class in detail. As with Dollimore's discussion of the origins of perversion, the notes that follows should be used as a reading guide for working through Chapter 16-17.
Dollimore makes several points:
The meaning of perversion is context dependent
the history of perversion makes it clear that "at a certain stage it is no longer homosexuality, or the perversions as ordinarily understood, which need explanation, but ... the classification of heterosexuality as the norm with homosexuality as its perverse other, and the splitting, displacements, and paranoia which accompany that division?" (p. 233)
Homophobia is the key to that reversal, "a kind of reverse discourse facilitated by the dynamic of perversion itself." (ibid.), "whereas it once was the homosexual who was viewed as sick, now it might be the heterosexual who is charged with pathology" (attributed to K. Plummer) (p. 234)
Drawing from the history of perversion and its relation to Christian concepts of evil (see Section a above) Dollimore notes that in periods of intensified social and political conflict "crisis is displaced on the deviant , the process only succeeds because of the paranoid instabilities at the heart of dominant cultural identities. Further, such displacements of non-sexual fears on top the sexual deviant, be he or she actual, imagined, or constituted in and by the displacement, are made possible because other kinds of transgression - political, religious - are not only loosely associated with the sexual deviant, but `condensed' in the very definition of deviance" (p. 237) He illustrates this with homosexual political scandals in England, just as the McCarthy era and today's religious right exemplify it here in USA.
This is a continuation of earlier scape-goating of sodomites : `Sodomy
was associated with witches , demons, .... not a part of the created order, but
an aspect of its dissolution ." "But so extreme was the sodomite's
construction that most of those actually engaging in `Homo/sexuality' ...
prevailing categories were so far removed from how they saw themselves, that
apparently the connection was not made." (p. 238)
Dollimore then shows how Wilde's transgressional aesthetic was made possible by, and exploited the "pre-sexological theories of perversion, condemnation and displacement [that] are enabled by the view of perversion as an inimical threatening absence. What is not often recognized is the extent to which this theological sense of perversion as the negative agency at the heart of privation, hence an inverted positivity, survives into the `modern' sense of perversion/homosexuality as a profoundly inimical vitiating lack (or normality, of truth)." (p. 240)
That notion of perversion as evil was reflected in the British popular Press's vilification of Wilde as the personification of evil after the trial. He goes on to describe how this notion and the psychoanalytic/sexological redefinition of perversion come together, though with tension. Quoting with approval Eve Sedgwick's observation that "homophobia being `a mechanism for regulating the behavior of the many by the specific repression of the few'" (p. 245) "a theoretical conflict indicates that we need to pluralize the notion of repression , as we need to pluralize that of homophobia, and even that of desire itself. There are different kinds and the differences are crucial, helping to mark the otherwise indistinguishable overlaps in historical actuality and the crucial difference made by historical factors." (p. 247) Thus, "while it may be that specific instances of homophobic panic are provoked by repressed homosexuals (in the Freudian sense), the panic may only `take' socially, because of the other kind of repression - exclusive identity formation - as it affects a far greater number." (p. 246) The latter bears more the heritage of perversion as evil.
He continues his examination of homophobia in Ch. 17, "Theories of Sexual Difference" where he begins
"`Difference' is a fashionable concept. So too is `the other', that highly charged embodiment of difference. I propose a distrust of both concepts. ... The homosexual is significantly implicated in both sexual and cultural difference, and for two main reasons. First because he or she has been regarded (especially in psychoanalytic theory) as one who fears the difference of the `other' or opposite sex, and, in flight from it, narcissitically embraces the same sex instead." (p. 249) "The second reason .... he or she has in historic actuality, embraced both cultural and racial difference. The relationships to these other kinds of difference has, for some homosexuals, constituted a crucial dimension of their culture. .... in some contexts they interrelate."
He turns to the first, fear of other and its relations to homosexuality. His first observation is "we begin to understand that the masculine fear in the early modern period of being effeminized - .... by excessive contact with women." (p. 152) then notes "several facts relevant to what follows ..... before `sexual difference' the woman was once ... feared in a way in which the homosexual now is .... the woman then, as the homosexual now in modern psychoanalytic discourse, is marked in terms of lesser or retarded development." (p. 253)
Detailed analyses of the connections between homosexuality as perversion and gynecaphobic tendencies in psychoanalytic theory lead him to remark, "`homophobia' is an inadequate term to describe all this since what is at issue is not personal phobia so much as the recurrence in mutated form of structures integral to cultural identity and social formation That much is apparent from ... the negative construction of homosexuality within a psychonalytically informed account of sexual difference." (p. 259)
He then analyzes a number of other homophobic theories, including Norman mailer's, and concludes "To consider the rationale of such explanations is to suspect that , rather than homosexuality being a fear of the other (sex), heterosexual masculinity involves at least intense anxieties about, and probably fears of, the same (sex), and constructs/explains homosexuality in terms which project, disavow, and legitimate those anxieties. This fear of the same,, or of the proximity of the same, or the threat of the same, structures the violence not only of the homosocial, but of sexual difference itself." (P. 267)
He draws the following important conclusion, in a section titled "Kinds of Hating" where he draws them all back to the Augustinian notion of privation: "I have outlined a handful of sexual difference theories wherein homosexuality is associated with, or seen to be expressive of ... an imical absence which provokes paranoia and on to which id projected the fear of the difference inherent within sexual difference."
[End of Dollimore study guide portion.]
Dollimore's analysis not only indicates why hatred of homosexuals is so vehement, but also indicates why transgressive reinscription and associated transgressive aesthetic are potentially so powerful as counter-offensive tactics. For homophobia becomes reinscribed as a heterosexual perversion, one deeply rooted in and essential to the very definition of heterosexuality. And to the extent homophobia becomes unacceptable because of its perversion, the only hope for escape from the yoke of perversion rests in the transgressively reinscribed notions of hypermasculinity and hyperfeminity that queers offer. Here Mohr's notion of the homosexual as a new priesthood class looks all the more compelling. For homophobia is Evil and the job of a priestly class is to lead the masses away from evil.
8. Gay Liberation: Sexual Liberation, Sexual Liberation.
In section 6 we looked at the differences in the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian communities and we examined the extent to which the agendas of gay and lesbian liberation were quite different in their political goals - especially as they related to sexual liberation - where gay liberation was much more centrally focused on sexual freedom whereas lesbian liberations was more tied to feminist concerns and Gender liberation. Yet we have seen how, through transgressive reinscription, notions of hypermasculinity and hyperfeminity emerged that loosed the notions of gender roles from their heterosexist power-dominance foundations.
But for the most parts, those concerned the politics and the sociology of gay and lesbian liberation. How did the emergence of gays and lesbians as a politically active, visual, mad, discriminated minority fighting back affect the lives of the individual gays and Lesbians.
For gays, it became one big floating sexual orgy of high promiscuity sex with hundreds of partners, etc. With lesbians it became the lives of serial monogamy already discussed. The readings of Week 10 are designed simply to give some feel for what typical lives were like in both gay and lesbian communities of the 70s and early 80's.:
Ethan Mordden has written several novels tracing the gay careers of NY gays and other gays who gravitated to the NYC gay Mecca. The selections from his EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY and BUDDIES are intended to highlight that life, giving a real glimpse into the way in which the life centered around, and was driven by, enormous sexual energy, manifested in constant cruising and tricking, and how one even metamorphised into willing participants in that lifestyle.
Gay culture provided the means for efficient, causal, nonentangling sex integrated into careers, lovers and the like. The baths were in many ways the ultimately efficient institution for enabling casual sex. In Larry Kramer's FAGGOTS we see a fairly accurate description of what it was like at the old Everard Baths in NYC, though I think there is a negativity in he discourse that makes the baths seem a bit desperate, whereas they were great fun for most.
[Film clips from "A Night of Halsted's" (1982)]
Kennedy and Davis's Chapter 7 of BOOTS OF LEATHER.... provides a number of glimpses of the quieter serial monogamy lifestyles of lesbians during the same time.
Two things need to be noted in these readings: First the extent to which high-volume promiscuous sex with causal trading of fluids was the norm in gay life, whereas a much lower volume of partners (though more than heterosexual females on average) with little exchange of fluids (far less than even in heterosexual life) was the norm. These behavioral differences indicate why the gay community was such an efficient opportunistic vehicle for infection then spread of AIDS, whereas lesbian behavior offered little opportunity.
It is important to note not only that AIDS has been rampant and epidemic among gays, it has had its lowest incidences among lesbians. Consider this data (Table 7 from Bell and Weinberg, HOMOSEXUALITIES, Simon and Schuster 1978):
[I have not found comparable figures for heterosexuals for the same period, but looking at data re premarital, marital, extra marital, and post-marital coitus for the same period suggests that the heterosexual numbers for men and women more resemble those of the lesbians. E.g., the median number of extramarital partners in several studies were around 2-3.]
Furthermore, being the fluid recipient in unprotected anal intercourse is the most effective sexual means of becoming infected and 67-78% of males in the Bell-Weinberg sample were recipients; use of condoms was virtually unheard.
So the social structure of gay life and culture provided a venue for opportunistic transmission of the then unknown AIDS virus. As AIDS became rampant (killing more people than causalities in the Vietnam war), it had profound effects on, and precipitated restructuring of the Gay community and associated subculture. To this we next turn:
9. AIDS: History; the transformation of Society.
Histories of AIDS tend to be unreliably contentious as they tend to be promoting some sort of controversial theory or political stance wrt AIDS. Thus I have not assigned historically suspect accounts such as Randy Shults AND THE BAND PLAYED ON. It is too near the present for objective history. To get a "objective" view one has to piece together and evaluate many different sources. We simply don't have the time this semester to do that (it would be a course in itself).
The basic facts are clear: AIDS/HIV has been around for some time, but so rare as to not be medically noticed, especially since it manifests itself by facilitating so many other diseases. (Had there not been epidemic deaths of an unusual sort in the gay community, it still might not be recognized as a disease.) The promiscuity, involving exchange of fluids through anal intercourse, provided a fertile breeding ground in which the virus could get a hold on the population, and it has reached epidemic proportions - first among gays, now among the entire population. Not only had AIDS "killed more young men in the States than the Vietnam war" by 1992 (Jarman, AT YOUR OWN RISK) but presently it is the largest single cause of death among young people 17-24 regardless of sexual orientation (Statistic from an article in the Indiana University Daily Student newspaper a year ago). The medical profession and the government were slow to aggressively pursue the disease and a cure until it became more widespread in the larger population, a few celebrities died from it, and a great deal of gay political activism erupted (e.g., ACT UP founded by Larry Kramer which was portrayed in the film ZERO PATIENCE). And original research was naive and homophobic, including the infamous claim (on the cover of TIME and NEWSWEEK that a single promiscuous French Canadian airline steward brought it to the US from Africa where he caught it from sex with black Africans who originally got it from copulating with monkeys. (Again, ZERO PATIENCE constitutes a serious treatment of this issue.) Right now AIDS is spreading to other portions of the population and gays are becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the HIV+ and AIDS population, though still (given the incubation time) it still has disproportionate gay representation. Various drugs for treatment of AIDS have been developed, and they tend to be expensive and of questionable value. There have been controversies over the testing of these drugs vs. releasing them to the infected with limited testing on the grounds that something unproved is no worse than nothing when the fuse is so short. And there are controversies over the high costs of these unproved drugs. (ZERO PATIENCE again deals well with a lot of these concerns.) There is controversy whether the forms of the HIV virus allow for a vaccine against it, and even controversy over whether HIV really causes AIDS.
Beyond these generalizations, little is clear. Indeed, there is little good documentation how AIDS has altered or transformed gay sexual behavior. My own hunch is that gays still tend to be fairly promiscuous, though the specific acts have changed. There is more mutual masturbation, more telephone and Internet sex. There probably is less anal intercourse, and certainly less unprotected anal intercourse. The very question of what safe sex is becomes problematic since the only well documented means of homosexual transmission is via unprotected anal intercourse. All other means of sexual transmission are largely based on speculation not adequately controlled research. Thus one has to make some fairly difficult decisions what sexual acts with what partners one will engage in, where the scientific research gives one little firm to go on and most of the advice is hysterical or conjectural rather than substantiated.
[Film, "Song from an Angel" from "Since Stonewall video - Rodney Price, dying of AIDS, sings "I've got less time than you" to the tune of Kurt Weil's "One Life to Live."]
How, then, to present AIDS in this course's readings. It is best to approach it at the level of individual stories and experience and by films:
The film ZERO PATIENCE presents a lot of personal aspects of AIDS experiences as well as the larger issues addressed mentioned above.
The film PARTING GLANCES is a touching and realistic portrait of queers dying of AIDS and how it touches and relates to other gays, directed by Billy Sherwood who himself had AIDS.
Look at the AIDS Quilt in the Class Web Site Picture Gallery and keep in mind that each large square is a patchwork of many other quilts each memorializing a specific gay who died of AIDS with many personal touches lovingly stitched in tears by those who survived him. I cry when I recall at the march on Washington, where the quilt was on display, looking to find my cousin's patch. There are so many personal stories stitched into that quilt - quilt now so large that it cannot be shown at once.
Derek Jarman's AT YOUR OWN RISK: A SAINTS TALE. Jarman, an extremely gifted albeit controversial British gay film maker, recently died of AIDS. This book is a memoir written part way through the AIDS journey. I have often quoted from it over the course of the semester. It is a personal history of growing up as gay in Britain during the repressive periods, of living through the emergence of gay liberation begun at the NY Stonewall bar, the era of AIDS, getting diagnosed, and living and coping with that fact. It is brilliantly idiosyncratic - just as his films are (in his SEBASTIAN St Sebastian is coveted by a Centurian but Sebastian the Christian refuses his advances. The Centurian begins to torture Sebastian which causes him to go into sexual ecstasy fantasizing he is having sex with Jesus. Sebastian would rather be tortured to those fantasies of sex with Jesus than give into the Centurian, which prompts the Centurion to get more brutal in this tortures, until ultimately Sebastian dies in Jesus-sex ecstasy. Thus is the Christian martyr born thus is Jarman's twist on themes raised by Richard Dyer when he views St. Sebastian as the homoerotic sad young man. (Note that the idea that religious fervor involves an erotic relationship akin to marriage to Jesus goes back to various Christian Monastic traditions, especially St. Bernard of Clairvoux, in his meditations of the "Song of Songs" in the old testament.. Jarman thus is exploiting themes that have a historical basis within Christianity in this brilliant but disturbing cinematic commentary on Christianity and homosexuality.)
Jarman's account of AIDS is intensely personal and at times harsh in its judgments. Consider his remarks, "The slow-witted approach to the HIV epidemic was the result of a thousand years of Christian malpractice and the childlike approach of the church to sexuality.... those of us who are HIV+ are in another kind of concentration camp." (pp. 102-103)
pay attention to his various many, often penetrating, sometimes vehement observations on HETEROSOC (his term for heterosexist society) including "I'd always been under the impression that Heterosoc was pretty dim. Now I know that I was right. Actively or through indifference they murdered us." (p. 116)
Consider the personal remarks about living with AIDS such as " How to survive as a reasonably intact human being undamaged by popular preconceptions and misconceptions." (p. 121) and his sadness that later generations would be denied the sexual freedom his generation had enjoyed "In Dancing Lodge, which I wrote in 1982-83, there's a mention of HIV ... I suggest that prudence is a good thing rather than abstentions. I was dismayed that another generation might be denied ..... The great value about being Queer was that you could join a group. Anyone could be in it. It was a support system." (p. 123)
In "Love Me Tender, Fuck Me too" Jarman recounts how, after having abstained so as to not infect others since being diagnosed as HIV+ he finds it too much and goes to the heath, a notorious outdoor cruising spot, where people still are having unprotected anal intercourse sex despite knowing full well about the epidemic. And Jarman has sex. (pp. 123-127).
Pay attention to the Appendix with its reproduction of political flyers, especially the "Flyer Picked up at Heaven, October 1991" 142-144.) which assaults various conservative responses in the gay community calling for queers to start emulating the monogamy of heterosexual, essential abandoning the fight for sexual liberation, the Gay Liberation agenda and all it had won. .... For a while it looked like the Christian and conservative moralists might exploit the "wages of sin" perspective on AIDS and do the gains hard won by Gay Liberation. But it seems not to have turned out that way. To many heterosexuals got AIDS, too many celebrities, too many hemophiliacs, too many children.
One of Jarman's main themes is that Heterosoc's response to AIDS brings out the dark side of Heterosoc and shows just how morally and humanely bankrupt Heterosoc -especially its institutions of government and organized religion really are. Dollimore amply has documented the deep connections between Christian concepts of perversion and today's Homophobia. And Jarman documents the playing out of that Homophobia in Heterosoc's response to AIDS. A response that makes Heterosoc's charges of sexual immorality and wages of sin pale compared to the moral bankruptcy so casually deployed by Heterosoc. The vary same moral degeneracy that fuels racism, sexism, and the likes of nazism (the connections were well demonstrated by Dollimore).
What exactly has been the response? A good indication is to compare what was known scientifically about the transmission of AIDS/HIV with the content of safe sex advice. Basically the situation is that when something started killing gays, gay activists began advocating "safe sex" where the advice was common sense advice based on the supposition that whatever it was, it was sexually transmitted, interpreted through gay political agendas. Assimilationists and separatists gave different safe sex advice. The government largely ignored AIDS until there was a heterosexual AIDS panic. By then AIDS management and "safe sex" advice was taken over by professionals. And then the response included the Helms amendment prohibiting any safe sex advice "promoting the homosexual lifestyle." In the US, but not in the rest of the world, there was a growing disparity between the safe sex advice and the realities of transmission. In essence, US advice advocates a sexual restraint that is not warranted by the scientific facts. CDC advice is especially at odds with the scientific findings. (Click here to see a time line of what was known about HIV/AIDS transmission and associated political events. For more detailed support of these claims, see the Suppe, "The Moral Irrelevancy of Safe(r) Sex" which is optional reading. It contains a detailed content analysis of many safer sex pamphlets and compares them to the scientific facts at the time they were issued.) In places like Boston the Catholic Church actively worked to successfully prevent public dissemination of safe sex advice in public transit ads and the like. Pharmaceutical companies were slow to work on cures or treatment drugs, and the Government withheld experimental drugs from people dying of AIDS. Other Christian leaders tried to exploit AIDS as "the wages of sin" in a transparent attempt to reverse what limited gains gay & lesbian liberation had won.
[Film Clip, "A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M" from "Since Stonewall." ]
The assignments from Rofes, Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic provides a good overview of these developments. It also details how the disingenuous "safe sex" campaigns are not working and a resurgence of gay infections. In a decade the average age of HIV infection among gay men has dropped from the thirties to the early twenties.
What is the reasonable response to such wholesale Heterosoc moral bankruptcy? RAGE! Moral outRAGE! Outrage like Americans had when we learned of the nazi deathcamp atrocities where Jews, gypsies, gays and other undesirables were exterminated in the name of purifying the race. (The inverted pink triangle is the Death Camp symbol gays were forced to wear - marking the "justification" for their extermination.) Well, the outrage of gays against Heterosoc was precisely the same moral outrage - directed at a dominant culture that in this country exterminated Aboriginal American (My Husband's nation, the Cherokees has its "Trail of Tears"), enslaved blacks and used Chinese coolies as virtual slave labor to build the railroads, and reduced women to the semi-human, and did their damnedest to eliminate queers. And now that a virus was doing their dirty work for them (much as disease had been at their service in the extermination of native Americans) they stood by in moralistic smugness as Queers dropped by the thousands. (To capture the image look at the, "Institutional Homophobia" image in the web site Picture Gallery - from Jarman's film Queer Edward II.)
If you do not understand the AIDS rage against Heterosoc, then you simply do not understand the AIDS crisis. If there is anything approximating a common denominator to the queer AIDS experience it is this RAGE.
Among the very best of the AIDS Rage literature is that by David Wajnarowicz (see picture in the course Web site Picture Gallery) who was a gifted photographer and writer who died of AIDS. We read tow of his essays, "Postcards from America" [which has been made into a film] and "Close to the Knives" from his book, CLOSE TO THE KNIVES: A MEMOIR OF DISINTEGRATION . In it he talks bout how being HIV positive transforms one's life, being something that intrudes on your life every day, being in the background and then erupting.
"when I was out west this summer standing in the mountains of a small....helping thousands and thousands to their unnecessary deaths." (pp. 113-114)
"Or I wake up from daydreaming of tipping Amazonian blowdarts in infected blood ... spiritually or physically every chance I get. " (p. 104)
"And then you get these self-righteous walking swastikas ... of this murder from most of my friends" (p. 108) "and I want to throw up because.... gestures of loving after lifetimes of all of this." (109)
"I am a bundle of contradictions that shift constantly ... Sexuality defined images gives me comfort in a hostile world. They give me strength." (pp. 117-120; long but intensely powerful.)
Interestingly, Wojnarowicz experiences a rediscovery of self - a kind of reversal of the post-modernist displacement of self, in his illness: ""I came to understand that to give up one's environment ... and the sight and sound of friends are way back there in the distance" "I see myself seeing death." (pp. 108-109).
Finally he offers insight for the political strategy that has converted AIDS from a political liability to a political asset for Queers, via a kind of transgressive reinscription, with remarks on the personal prices that conversion takes: "To make the private into something public is an action... It would be comforting to see those friends ... place and history in such a public way." (p. 122)
Such rage is a recurrent part of Gay life today. (For another excellent example of the genre see David B. Feinberg, QUEER AND LOATHING: RANTS AND RAVES OF A RAGING AIDS CLONE. NY: Penguin 1995).
To return to Wojnarowicz: It is interesting that he experiences a rediscovery of self - a kind of reversal of the post-modernist displacement of self, in his illness: ""I came to understand that to give up one's environment ... and the sight and sound of friends are way back there in the distance" "I see myself seeing death." (pp. 108-109).
Finally he offers insight for the political strategy that has converted AIDS from a political liability to a political asset for Queers, via a kind of transgressive reinscription, with remarks on the personal prices that conversion takes: "To make the private into something public is an action... It would be comforting to see those friends ... place and history in such a public way." (p. 122)
It is not always that easy to make An AIDS death transgressively reinscriptive - as the case of Max Robinson
10. Transition: Ethnic Gays and AIDS
Max Robinson was a local news anchor before being tapped to be a triple-co-anchor on ABC Nightly News (with Peter Jennings and Frank Reynolds, I believe). He Died from AIDS, having hidden that fact during the course of his disease yet on his deathbed asked that his life and death be a "statement" and object lesson to blacks about the dangers of AIDS. Although brief mention of his AIDS sometimes was made, it was in the context of a massive cover-up to hide or even preempt the question whether he was queer.
Brian Harper, "Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Imperative in Response to the Death of Max Robinson" [optional reading] not only documents the massive cover-up that negates Robinson's attempt to be the Black analogue AIDS-icon to white Rock Hudson, but also does so in a manner that situates the issue in cross-cultural tensions between the gay subculture and the black subculture. In it we get a vivid introduction to the cultural forces within the black community that make it more socially acceptable to be an AIDS victim due to drug abuse than due to homosexual activity.
Several of the essays in Joseph Beam's IN THE LIFE: A BLACK GAY ANTHOLOGY deal with AIDS within the Black Subculture. .. I have to admit that as I prepared these lectures and reread the sources here, I cried. Just as I cried at passages in Richard Rodriguez's DAYS OF OBLIGATION, Ch. 2. I find the rejection of those dying of AIDS especially moving, and I cry as I read comments how cultural prejudice prevents people from even embracing their own issue as they die. I have seen this first hand among whites, and now I read it among Blacks and Hispanics. And I want to scream. It is the ultimate homophobic insult.
I remember as a youth going to a family reunion between two factions of my family that had feuded for decades. I gradually came to realize the point of the reunion was for the patriarchs of the two factions to meet on neutral territory, neither conceding anything germane to the feud, and getting through an elaborate "roast pig" meal without either side erupting, a kind of symbolic burying of the hatchet but not the differences. The point, I realized, was to enable the two sides of this moribund feud t o attend each others' funerals and cry on the casket.
What disturbs me about these AIDS rejection accounts - in our readings in Black and Hispanic settings but repeated so often in White/Anglo settings - is that for a queer they wouldn't even attempt the face-saving gestures my feuding relatives managed to perform. I find it hard to imagine hatred greater than those factions in my family, but they had at least a sense of what was the proper "show." And beneath that I have always felt was a sense of tragic loss. Why cannot queers even be shown that tragic sense of loss.
It is no surprise that the readings for this part of the course repeatedly come back to the theme that queers, forsaken by their families, forge new family identities and much of the time the ones one dies of AIDS with is this newly found, not biologically based, family.
I cried when I read Craig Harris's account of attending his Black Lover's funeral as a disenfranchised ex-lover. (IN THE LIFE, " Cut Off From Among Their People"--not assigned). But I balance those tears against those for an elderly gay white man I helped see though non-AIDS related cancer death where his long-estranged brother came as next of kin to "take over and show last respects" and cut off that man from the closest persons in his adult life left after his lover's death a decade before - from the surrogate family he had built in the absence of his biological family.
So I wonder about universality and cultural-specificity of death... queer death. Are the experiences we read and see analyzed so culturally specific? Or are they different cultural manifestations of a universal homophobia? I do not know.
But homophobia callously deployed in response to AIDS death returns my mind to the AIDS rage literature, reminding me that it is focused rage - focused at what Derek Jarman calls Heterosoc. It also is important to understand what it is NOT: It is not inner directed self-hatred or loathing. It is not an angry repudiation of the sexuality, even promiscuous sexuality, that led to the HIV infection. That casual promiscuous moments can be more treasured by an AIDS victim than anything his biological family offered. Richard Rodriguez captures it well (DAYS OF OBLIGATION: AN ARGUMENT WITH MY MEXICAN FATHER. NY: Penguin, 1992) while discussing his friend Cesar dying of AIDS:
"It was then I saw that the greater sin against heaven was my unwillingness to embrace life. Cesar said he found paradise at the baths." "The baths were places of good humor, that was Number One.... Each satisfied, dear, Cesar corrected." (p. 43.)