[LINK] "What Was Gay?"

[rfmcdonald]

J. Bryan Lowder's long article in Slate, grounded in his biography and historically informed, is a fascinating exploration of the distinctions between sexual orientation and the cultural elements associated with said. What happened? What might happen yet? Strongly recommended, all of it.

[A]nyone who’s even eavesdropped on the long-running debate over “gay identity” among homosexuals will know that this position—that gayness might be located in sensibility or style as well as sex—is currently anathema. We live in the era dominated by a born-this-way, “it’s-a-small-part-of-me” ethos that minimizes gay difference to sexual attraction. The current dogma among mainstream LGBTQ advocacy organizations and the majority of gay writers and public figures sees gayness as little more than a hazy accident of biology that shouldn’t be legally or socially disadvantaging. Any notion of some inherent cultural affiliation (“gays love Gaga”) or unique sensibility (“fags get fashion”) has been pretty much disavowed within the community—imagine the uproar if some naive network executive tried rebooting a minstrelsy-driven show like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2015—and many straights have gotten the memo as well.

This move away from broad-brush gay stereotypes is wise to a point. Ascribing an obligatory cultural component to homosexuality has caused a range of problems, from the merely annoying Oh you’re gay? Let’s go shopping!–variety to the more pernicious example of admission to safer, queer-only housing in prison being determined based on tests of “gay insider” knowledge or behaviors that not all queer people necessarily possess. Clearly, a person’s homosexuality should not be taken as evidence of any special affiliation, just as heterosexuals, united only by their sexual connection and propensity for procreation, are never assumed to share anything else. This has been one of the key arguments in the “we are normal” case for equality—and it’s been largely successful. Though the job is not totally complete, it feels like we are working as fast as we can to build what gay academic and activist Dennis Altman imagines in his provocatively titled The End of the Homosexual?: a world in which we no longer see “homosexuality as a primary marker of identity, so that sexual preference comes to be regarded as largely irrelevant, and thus not the basis for either community or identity.”

However, any serious “post-gay” triumphalism would seem a touch premature. For one thing, folks on the ground are not as uninterested in gay cultural practice as the “gay culture is dying” headlines suggest. Enthusiastic audiences tune in to RuPaul’s Drag Race for lessons in a certain school of gay “herstory” on a weekly basis, and homos of a less glittery make clamored to HBO’s Looking in a desperate search for images of “real gay life”—implying that it must indeed be distinct from the straight life portrayed on other programs. And politically, there’s a sense in which minimizing gay difference now, right at the moment when the majority of Americans are actively grappling with it, amounts to a cop-out: “Americans are uniquely hasty to assert a ‘post-’ right before we approach the finish line,” Suzanna Walters notes in The Tolerance Trap, “effectively shutting off the real and substantive public debate needed for that final push.”

Instead of “post,” a more accurate diagnosis of our moment might be schismatic. History shows that the divide between gays who reject any cultural embroidery on their sexual orientation and those who spend evenings hand-stitching it has been around since homosexuality, as a human category, was invented. But the ascendancy of the former position, tied as it has been to the civil rights achievements of the past 20 years, has left us culture queens so embattled that a conscious uncoupling is starting to sound like a good idea. A “gaybro” doesn’t want to camp it up with a “stereotype” like me? Fine—it was never fair to assume that he should (or could) anyway. Nate Silver wants to identify as “sexually gay but ethnically straight”? Great. Let’s make that split an option for everyone.

To Silver’s credit, the notion of gayness as an “ethnicity” that one might choose to invest in or not is actually very useful if schism is your goal. On a post about super-gay Internet sensation Brendan Jordan, the wonderfully flamboyant young queen who rose to fame last year for voguing in the background of a local news report, a Slate commenter offered a similar sentiment: “One of the reasons I so dislike identifying myself as a gay man,” he wrote, “is that I don’t want people to hear that word, gay, and link me in their mind to someone with a personality and manner like this kid or, say, a Jack McFarland. Homosexual actually feels more comfortable to me than gay.”