HOW TO BE GAY

David M. Halperin

Gay men have a particular, distinctive, characteristic relation to the culture of the
larger society in which they live. That phenomenon is routinely acknowledged as a fact;
it is just as routinely denied as a truth.
That gay men have a specific, non-standard attachment to certain cultural objects
and cultural forms is the assumption that underlies a lot of American popular humor. No
one will look at you aghast, or cry out in protest, or stop you in mid-sentence, if you dare
to imply that a guy who worships divas, who loves torch songs or show tunes, who
knows all of Bette Daviss best lines by heart, or who would never dream of dressing for
comfortno one will be horrified if you imply that such a person might, just possibly,
not turn out to be completely straight. How do you know if your cockroaches are gay?
(So runs the old joke.) You come home and all your furniture is rearranged.
If, however, you dare to assert in all seriousness that male homosexuality involves
a set of non-standard cultural practices, not just some non-standard sexual practices; if
you suggest that there is such a thing as gay male culture, or that there is a connection
between kinds of sexuality and specific cultural forms, people will immediately object,
citing a thousand different reasons why such a thing is impossible, or ridiculous, and why
anyone who says otherwise is deluded, completely out of date, morally suspect, and
politically irresponsible. Which probably wont stop the very people who make those
objections from telling you the cockroach jokeeven with their very next breath.
So my task today is to try and occupy for an entire forty-five minutes whatever
gap I can manage to prise open between the acknowledged fact of gay male cultural
difference and its disavowed truth.
Happily for me, significant cracks have lately appeared in this stone wall of casual
acknowledgment and determined denial. The success of the television series Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy has meant that it is now commonplace in some quarters to figure
male homosexuality not only as a specific sexual practice but also as a distinctive set of
social and cultural practices. Such an outlook, in fact, is not entirely new: already in
1954, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung noted that gay men may have good taste and an
aesthetic sense. By the late 1960s, Esther Newton could speak quite casually of the
widespread belief that homosexuals are especially sensitive to matters of aesthetics and
refinement. Many gay men, and a number of their straight friends and enemies, have
long suspected that what makes gay men different from the rest of the world is something
that goes well beyond matters of sexual preference.
Richard Florida, an economist and social theorist (as well as a self-declared
heterosexual), may have inadvertently documented the truth of that ancient suspicion. In
a widely discussed and sometimes controversial series of empirical studies of what he has
called the creative class, Florida has argued that the presence of gay people in a locality
is an excellent predictor of a viable high-tech industry and its potential for growth. That
is because high-tech jobs nowadays, according to Florida, follow the workforce and seek
out creative people wherever such people happen to live; the workforce does not move to
where the jobs arenot, at least, for very long. (Florida used to teach in Pittsburgh.)
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If cities and towns with lots of gay people in them are sure to prosper in the
Creative Age, Florida says, that is not only because the new class of creative workers
is composed of nerds, oddballs, and people with extreme habits and dress who
gravitate to places with low entry barriers to human capitalthat is to say, places
where the locals are generally open and tolerant of unconventional folk. It is also
because gay people, according to Florida, are the canaries of the Creative Age. Gay
people, in other words, can flourish only in a pure atmosphere characterized by high
levels of lifestyle amenities, coolness, culture and fashion, vibrant street life, and
a cutting-edge music scene. The presence of gay people in large numbers is an
indicator of an underlying culture thats open-minded and diverseand thus conducive
to creativity; it also signals an exciting place, where people can fit in and be
themselves, where the people climate is good and quality of place represents an
important community value. All of which would seem to provide empirical confirmation,
however flimsy, of the notion that homosexuality is not just a sexual orientation but a
cultural orientation, a dedicated commitment to certain social or aesthetic values, an
entire way of being.
That distinctively gay way of being, moreover, appears to be rooted in a particular
queer way of feeling, and that queer way of feelingthat queer subjectivityexpresses
itself through a specific, dissident way of relating to cultural objects and cultural forms.
Certain media figures become gay iconsthey get taken up by gay men with a peculiar
intensity that differs from their wider reception in the straight worldand certain cultural
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forms, such as Broadway musicals or Hollywood melodramas, are invested by gay men
with particular significance, attracting a disproportionate number of gay male fans.
Which is why a gay or straight friend of yours, when he or she discovers that you
are a great dancer or cook, that you love Madonna or Kylie or Beyonc or Lady Gaga,
that you have a weakness for mid-century modern, or that you drive a VW Golf or a Mini
Cooper convertiblehe or she says to you, Gee, I guess you really are gay! (BTW,
Im not making up that bit of popular wisdom about gay cars, just citing the NYTimes.)
What is the logic behind such an exclamation? What does male homosexuality
have to do with dancing, or cooking, or the music you like, or the car you drive, or the
clothes you wear, or your attachment to period design? Are these just stereotypes about
gay men? Are they expressions of a kind of sexual racism? Is there anything at all to
these stereotypes, or anything behind them?
If we could discover what male homosexual desire has to do with specific cultural
forms, modes of feeling, and kinds of discourse, we might be in a position to understand
the larger relations between sexuality and culture, to grasp the sexual politics of cultural
form. That is my project in How To Be Gay, both in the infamous class I used to teach
here at U-M and in my forthcoming book of the same title. Im going to share with you
now a few of the things Ive been able to figure out about the relation between sexuality
and cultural form. (For the rest, youll have to buy and read my book.)
For starters, its important to recognize that a culture is not the same thing as a
collection of individuals. Almost any generalization one can make about a culture will
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turn out to be false as soon as it is applied to individuals. For example, French culture is
characterized by a particular relation to the production and consumption of wine. But
that doesnt mean that wine holds the same significance or value for all French
individuals. Although the French in general may indeed care more about wine than
Americans do, some people in the United States care a great deal more about wine than
do many people in France. Just because youre French doesnt mean you have to like
wine, and you can refuse to drink a drop of wine and still be French. It also takes more
than liking wine to be French. Liking wine, however passionately, will not in itself make
you French. At the same time, certain social practices pertaining to wine are distinctive
to French culture, and though not all or even most French people necessarily take part in
those practices, to be French is to be alert to the cultural meanings of wine-drinking, to
have at least some kind of attitude to the practice of wine consumption and appreciation,
even if it is an attitude of total indifference or rejection. (Cf. gay men and Judy Garland.)
So the kind of coherence that a culture has will not be reflected in any uniformity
of attitude or belief on the part of a population. And yet cultural differences between
France and the United States certainly do exist. It is hardly an accident that some friends
of mine from Paris, who were making their first trip to the United States, and whom I
took directly from the Detroit airport to Zingermans Road House here in Ann Arborit
was no accident that they wrongly inferred from the effusive and familiar way the server
greeted us, and inquired about our feelings on various subjects, that she must have been
an old friend of mine. As that example indicates, cultural differences are captured less
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easily by descriptive sociology than they are by the pragmatics of discourseand,
specifically, by the pragmatics of genre. It is evident that the generic conventions
governing what a server can say to a client in Ann Arbor without causing surprise, shock,
or consternation differ from those governing a similar interaction in Paris.
I am well aware of all the reasons why it might seem hazardous even to speak of
gay male culture. The foremost danger is that of essentialism, of seeming to imply that
there is some defining feature or property of gayness that all gay men share. But to make
such an objection is to confuse a culture, and the practices that constitute it, with the
population of individuals who belong to it. There is such a thing as French cultureIm
a strong believer in cultural particularitybut it does not extend either universally or in
its totality to all the individuals who happen to reside within the borders of the French
nation or who define themselves as French. Similarly, in the case of what I insist on
calling gay male culture, gay male cultural practices are not shared in their totality by
all members of the gay male population in the United States, let alone the world, whereas
at least some of those practices are shared by many people who are not gay themselves.
My account of gay male culture, then, refers to genres of discourse, and of social
practice, not to individuals. Not every man who happens to be homosexual necessarily
belongs to gay male culture or displays a characteristically gay sensibility: the merest
peek into any shop or clothing catalogue catering to gay men is enough to shatter forever
the stereotype that gay men instinctively have good taste. (Sad, but true.) Conversely,
many non-gay people take part in gay male cultureand they are surely the better for it.
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Being homosexual, then, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for
membership in gay culture. I have no interest in debating such essentialist questions as
whether gay men are different from other peopleor whether my description of gay
culture applies only to certain classes or races or generations or nationalities. Its not that
I dont care about the politics of class or race or nation, its just thatfor the purposes of
understanding gay male cultureI am necessarily concerned not with kinds of people but
with kinds of discourse and kinds of interaction, irrespective of who happens to be the
subject of them. I want to bring to light certain pragmatic features of gay male culture
and to describe the forms of subjective experience, or the collective structures of feeling,
that underlie them.
Let me begin with an observation made forty years ago by our esteemed colleague
Esther Newton. In her book, Mother Camp, a path-breaking ethnographic study of
female impersonators and drag queens in Chicago and Kansas City, Newton remarks that
one of the most confounding aspects of my interaction with the impersonators was their
tendency to laugh at situations that to me were horrifying or tragic. According to her
own admission, then, Newton was confounded by a queer violation of the boundary
between genres. Situations that are horrifying or tragic should not elicit laughter from
those who witness them. Thats what comic situations do. (That is a good example of
how literary genres can coincide with pragmatic genres, or genres of social interaction.)
When tragic situations elicit laughter, normal bystanders are confounded, because their
social and discursive expectationsfar from being methave been turned upside down.
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Gay male culture has in fact a long history of laughing at situations that to others
are horrifying or tragic. One must have a heart of stone, Oscar Wilde said, to read the
death of Little Nell without laughing. By means of such flamboyant skepticism,
cynicism, and moral or emotional resistance, gay male culture gains a certain critical
leverage against the sort of straight sentimentality whose claims to seriousness depend on
the importance of being earnest. But the technique of switching from horror to humor
and back again has an even wider use and application. Here is Neil Bartlett, Oscar
Wildes modern avatar, describing that technique with reference to a moment in the play
Camillle by Charles Ludlam. Ludlams Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York
specialized in pastiche as well as in outlandish drag restagings of various classics from
the history of world dramain this case, Garbos 1936 film Camille, based on La Dame
aux camlias and La Traviata. Heres what Bartlett says about one scene in that play:

I think the blow-job gag in the final act of Camille is the funniest thing ever
performed. Its this absolutely great moment where youre really crying
its the final act of Camille and shes in bed [dying of consumption] and
Armand [her lover] is there. . . . [I]ts very moving and youre going, I am
about to be terribly moved, this is really going to get to me. And she starts
coughing, and [the actor] reproduces precisely Maria Callass cough, and
Armand is sitting by the side of the bed, and she starts coughing and coughs
more and more, and eventually collapses into Armands lap, and everyone
thinks that shes coughing, and then the maid comes in and goes, Oh! Im
sorry! The leap from Camille to this terrible, terrible gag ... And the maid
communicates this delicious sense of, Oh, theyve got back together again,
she cant be too bad, things are looking up. Its heaven! That is one of the
great moments of world theatre.


That wrenching switch from tragic pathos to obscene comedy leaves the horror of mortal
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agony intact, but it does not hesitate to interrupt the tearful sentimentality that might
attach to it. Bartlett even describes the gagand never was that term more aptas
the funniest thing ever performed, although by his own account it occurs at a moment
of tragic poignancy where youre really crying. This crossing of genres between
tragedy and comedy is rooted in longstanding practices of gay male culture, including
drag performance, as Esther Newton had observed long ago.
Without taking into account those practices, or the ways they have taught us to
violate systematically the generic boundaries between tragedy and comedy, you simply
cannot comprehend the gay male cultural response to HIV/AIDS. For that response has
featured works of outrageous impertinence, even apparent heartlessnessranging from
Robert Patricks 1987 play Pouf Positive, with such lines as Its my party and Ill die if I
want to, to the Sodomy Players 1991 show AIDS! The Musical! to John Greysons 1993
musical comedy film Zero Patience to Tony Kushners play Angels in America.
The gay Australian activist artist David McDiarmid, who died of complications
from HIV/AIDS in 1995, took up this attitude. In 1994, for example, McDiarmid created
a computer-generated laser print on craftwood, now in the collection of the National
Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, featuring against a rainbow-colored background a
contrasting rainbow-colored text that reads, IT'S MY PARTY, AND I'LL DIE IF I WANT TO,
SUGAR. McDiarmid also produced a mock-up of a pornographic magazine for HIV-
positive gay men, an equivalent of Playboy, called Plagueboy, which purported to feature
such articles as Half-Dead and Hot and Sex and the Single T-Cell. The obituary he
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wrote for his best friend and collaborator, Peter Tully, began with the following headline:
Moody Bitch Dies of AIDS.
That determination to treat as funny what is undeniably heartbreaking, while
hardly universal in gay male responses to HIV/AIDS, is also not untypical, and it
expresses an attitude that may well be distinctive to gay male culture. Many stigmatized
minority groups fashion an identity and a sense of collective solidarity for themselves in
part by constructing from the history of their persecution a number of defining tragic
episodes. Such episodes tend to be sacrosanct, off-limits even to in-group parody. Think
of the Holocaust. Or slavery. There have been a few irreverent treatments of themby
Mel Brooks, Kara Walker, Isaac Julienbut they are exceptional. A Broadway musical
comedy about the Third Reich is unimaginableand when Mel Brooks does imagine
such a thing, in his 1968 film The Producers (complete with an opening number called
Springtime for Hitler), he presents it as calculated almost scientifically to flop, to invite
an ineluctably certain rejection from New York Jewish audiences (the shows ultimate
success is a perverse, comic accidentand an unanticipated tribute to its camp aesthetic).
Whereas the gay filmmaker Isaac Julien, in his brilliant 1993 short film, The
Attendant, does not hesitate to explore the history of slavery, its representation, and its
afterlife in contemporary Britain by staging gay interracial sadomasochistic scenes in the
Wilberforce House Museum, an institution in the city of Hull that celebrates the life and
work of the anti-slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce and contains some of the most
celebrated art objects produced by the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. In
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Juliens eerie, witty exploration of this hushed institutional space, the characters in the
paintings come to life; the unstable relations of authority, domination, submission,
control, and surveillance that characterize the interaction among the staff and the visitors
to the museum get theatricalized, played out, and reversed, and the mode of documentary
realism, typically employed to expose historical atrocities such as slavery, is shattered
when the sequences shot in black and white are suddenly infiltrated by tiny, hunky
technicolor cupids or cross-cut with erotic tableaux in extravagant color. This is not your
standard approach to the legacy of slavery or the politics of racial inequality. This is not,
despite all the supernatural elements, the devastating tragic vision of Toni Morrisons
Beloved. Julien attends to the erotics of both slavery and abolitionism, exposing the
sentimental pornography of abolitionisms propagandistic anti-slavery art. And he draws
on the aesthetics of gay male culture for his camp depiction of social, institutional, and
racial domination. In this remarkable and original queer film, as in the gay male
responses to HIV/AIDS I have just reviewed, nothing is sacred.
As these examples indicate, subscribers to gay male cultural practices make fun
first and foremost of their own suffering. If they laugh at situations that are horrifying or
tragic, that is not because they do not feel the horror or the tragedy of them, but because
they do. They laugh in order not to cry, in order not to lapse into maudlin self-pity.
Their self-mockery works to drain their suffering of the pain that it also does not deny.
That is why horror can cohabit with hilarity in the pragmatics of gay male discourse and
human calamities like the HIV/AIDS epidemic can become vehicles of parody without
the slightest implication of cruelty, distance, or disavowal.
To make your own suffering into a vehicle of parody, to refuse to exempt yourself
from the irony with which you view all social performances, all social roles, and all
social identities, is to level social distinctions. By disclaiming any pretense to be taken
seriously and by forgoing all personal entitlement to sympathy, sentimentality, or
deference, you throw a wrench into the machinery of social depreciation. For when you
make fun of your own pain, you anticipate and preempt the devaluation of it by others.
You also invite others to share in your renunciation of any automatic claim to social
standing and you encourage them to join you amid the ranks of people whose suffering is
always subject, at least potentially, to devalorizationand whose tragic situations are
thus always susceptible of being laughed at. You imply that no tragedy, not even yours,
can or should claim so much worth as to presume an unquestionable entitlement to be
taken completely seriouslythat is, to be taken straightin a world where some
peoples suffering is routinely discounted. You thereby repudiate hierarchies of social
worth according to which modern individuals are routinely classed. You build a
collective understanding and sense of solidarity with those who follow you in your
simultaneous pursuit and defiance of social contempt. And in that way you lay the
foundation for a wider community.
The distinction between the kind of humor that is socially inclusive and the kind
that is socially exclusive is what defines the generic difference between camp and kitsch,
according to the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The application of the kitsch designation,
Sedgwick argued, entails a superior, knowing dismissal of someone elses love of a
cultural artifact, a judgment that the item is unworthy of love and that the person who
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loves it is the unresistant dupe of the cynical manipulation that produced it. When I
label an object kitsch, I treat the appreciation of it as a fault, as a lapse of taste, as
evidence of a debased sentimentality that I myself have transcended and that I do not
share. I thereby exempt myself from the contagion of the kitsch object. Kitsch, then,
is never a word one applies to objects of ones own liking but only to the bad,
sentimental, uncritical object-choices made by other people.
Whereas a judgment that something is camp, Sedgwick contended, does not confer
any exemption. Camp is not about attribution but about recognition. It declares your
delight and participation in the cultural subversions of camp: instead of asking, What
kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle? it asks,
What if the right audience were exactly me? Camp ascription produces the exactly
opposite effect from kitsch labeling, then: it marks the person making the judgment as an
insider, as someone who is in on the secret of camp, already initiated into the circuits of
shared perception and appreciation that set apart those who are able to discern camp and
that create among such people a network of mutual recognition and complicity. It takes
one to know one indeedand that, camp implies, far from being shameful, is fabulous.
The ability to identify an object as camp, and to induce others to share that
perception, creates a basis for community. It inducts those who appreciate and savor
camp into a common fellowship of shared recognition and anti-social aesthetic practice.
Unlike kitsch, camp allows no possibility for distance, disidentification, self-exemption.
On the contrary, the recognition of something as camp is in itself an admission of ones
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own susceptibility to the camp aesthetic and of ones willingness to participate in a
community composed of those who share the same loving relation to the ghastly object.
Camp is not criticism, then, but critiquein this, it differs from satire, which
would be an appropriate way of responding to kitsch, since satire functions as a criticism,
as a put-down of inferior objects and practices. Camp does not make fun of things from a
position of moral or aesthetic superiority but from a position internal to the deplorable
condition that it lovingly elaborates and extends so as to include everybody. Camp
doesnt preach; it demeans. But it doesnt demean some people at other peoples
expense: rather, it takes everyone down with it together.
That instinctive race to the bottom, that impulse to identify with the outrageously
disreputable and the grotesque may explain why, as feminists sometimes complain, camp
particularly delights in and systematically exploits the most abject, exaggerated, and
undignified versions of femininity that a misogynistic culture can devise. Such
caricatures of femininity constitute the epitome of what our society regards as unserious,
and they dramatize the full consequences of social and symbolic violence, but for camp
the unserious is not just a disqualificationit is also a strategic opportunity. By seizing
that opportunity, camp endows its anti-social aesthetics with a political dimension.
To embrace the unserious is to challenge the hierarchies of value that determine
relative degrees of social dignitythat demean style in favor of content, that elevate
masculinity to the rank of seriousness (since it is concerned, supposedly, with reality and
the true content of things) while downgrading femininity to the status of triviality (since it
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is concerned, supposedly, with such frivolous matters as style and appearance).
Furthermore, by putting everything in quotation marks, especially everything serious,
camp opens a crucial gap between actor and role, between identity and essence, which
undercuts the seriousness and authenticity of all naturalized identities, including the
inferior identities attached to stigmatized persons. Forgoing your claim to dignity is a
small price to pay for undoing the seriousness of the hierarchies of value that debase you.
There is now a vast theoretical and critical literature on camp, along with much
quibbling over how it should be defined. I want to stay clear of all that. I will say only
that I believe the distinctive characteristics of camp make particular sense when they can
be brought into relation with the longstanding gay male cultural practice of laughing at
situations that are horrifying or tragic as well as the practice of refusing to exempt oneself
from social condemnation. Esther Newton, once again, helps us to see the connection.

At any given homosexual party [she wrote, forty years ago], there will be
two competing, yet often complementary people around whom interest and
activity swirl: the most beautiful, most sexually desirable man there, and
the campiest, most dramatic, most verbally entertaining queen. The
complementary nature of the two roles is made clearest when, as often
happens, the queen is holding the attention of his audience by actually
commenting (by no means always favorably) on the beauty and on the
strategies employed by those who are trying to win the beautys favors
for the night. The good party and the good drag show both ideally will
feature beautiful young men and campy queens. In neither is it likely that
the two virtues will be combined in the same person. The camp, both on
and off stage, tends to be a person who is, by group criteria, less sexually
attractive, whether by virtue of advancing age or fewer physical charms or,
frequently, both. Whatever the camps objective physical appearance, his
most successful joke is on himself. [Here we see, once again, the same
refusal of self-exemption that was already implied by the gay cultural
practice of laughing at ones own suffering.]
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For a good illustration of the opposition between the beauty and the camp that Newton
observed, consider a scene towards the end of the first act of Matt Crowleys 1968 play
The Boys in the Band, the first break-through theatrical hit that explicitly and successfully
put gay male social life (as it was being lived in New York City) onto the international
stage. The Cowboy, a stunningly handsome male hustler who has been brought to a
birthday party as a sexual present for its guest of honor, happens to complain about and to
seek sympathy for an athletic injury he had lately incurred at the gym: I lost my grip
doing my chin-ups, he saysno one is much interested in the details, but he rattles on,
with endearingly clueless self-absorptionand I fell on my heels and twisted my back.
Emory, the camp, remarks, You shouldnt wear heels when you do chin-ups.
The camp and the beauty are not just opposed: each is also the others eternal
competitor and antagonist. Camp is understood best when it is restored to its original
social context and referred to its original social functionas a weapon that gay male
culture has fashioned in a hopeless if valiant effort to defeat the power of Beauty.
Beauty, because it is the object of sexual desirebecause it is hothas nothing
intrinsically ironic about it. Gay men take it very seriously. Beauty evokes literal,
witless, pathetically earnest longing, the sort of longing that has no distance on itself and
no ability to step aside and look critically at itself from an alienated perspective.
That is what camp is for. The camp takes revenge on the beauty for beautys
power over gay men (which is why it is fitting that he be unattractive himself), and he
does so on behalf of the community of gay men as a whole, with whom he shares a cozy
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if ambivalent complicity. The camps role is to puncture the breathless, solemn,
tediously monotonous worship of beauty, to allow the gay men who desire and who
venerate beauty to step back ironically from their unironic devotion to it, and to see it
from the perspective of post-coital disillusionment instead of anticipatory excitation. For
at the moment that a man first arouses your desire, he appears to you as a pure archetype,
as an embodiment of the masculine erotic value that makes him attractivethe jock, the
paratrooper, the boy next door. But, as soon as you have him, he becomes an individual
instead of an essence, an ordinary queen instead of a Platonic idea. In other words, he
ceases to be pure beauty and starts to become camp. He may still frequent the gym, but
he might as well be working out in high heels, so far as you are now concerned.
The camps job is to remind you of that. As a practice, camp is about cutting
everyone down to size, especially anyone whose claim to glamour threatens to oppress
their less fortunate comrades, such as the camp himself. It is about deflating pretension,
dismantling hierarchy, and remembering that all queers are stigmatized and no one
deserves the kind of dignity that comes at the expense of someone elses shame. That is
why camp is inclusive, why it implies a world of horizontal rather than vertical social
relations. That is also why it both presumes and produces community.
The function of the beauty, by contrast, is to promote a different and conflicting
value, one that gay male culture cherishes no less than it cherishes the value of
community. Beauty holds out the possibility of transcending shame, escaping a
community of the stigmatized, acceding to the rapt contemplation of pure physical and
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aesthetic perfection, leaving behind all those sad old queens, forsaking irony for romance,
attaining dignity, and achieving true and serious worth, both in your own eyes and in
other peoples. Beauty is noble, heroicqualities associated not with humor or comedy
but with tragedy.
If gay male culture teaches us to laugh at situations that are horrifying or tragic,
that is because it strives to maintain this tension between egalitarian ethics and
hierarchical aestheticsbecause it insists on keeping those mutually opposed values in
permanent equipoise. It is only by preserving that polarity, promoting that contradiction,
and making each set of values balance the other out, that it can preserve the right and
necessary doubling of perspective that keeps everybody sane. The tension between
egalitarian ethics and hierarchical aesthetics structures all of gay male culture, spanning
its democratic and aristocratic tendencies, its feminine and masculine identifications, its
division between femme and butch, between queens and trade. It also accounts for gay
male cultures peculiar, distinctive, characteristic love of certain cultural objects, for its
transformation of those objects into icons and into vehicles of cultural resistance. (I try to
spell out the exact logic behind some of those connections in my forthcoming book.)
Now, the association of masculine beauty and glamour with social superiority,
seriousness, sexiness, dignity, and romance may strike you as sexist and politically
retrograde, probably because that it is exactly what it is. But it is unreasonable to expect
gay male culture to undo the dominant social and symbolic system of which it is merely
the lucid and faithful reflection. Gay male cultures virtue is to register eloquently forms
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of social stratification that modern liberal societies routinely deny, and that a host of
contemporary hypocrisies and pieties, including popular, sentimental varieties of
feminism, typically work to obscure.
Gay male culture teaches us how to confront the gendered and sexual stratification
of the social world. Dominant social roles and meanings cannot be destroyed, any more
than can be the power of beauty, but they can be undercut: it is possible to learn how not
to take them straight. Their claim on our belief is weakened, their preeminence eroded
when they are parodied or punctured, just as sex and gender identities are subverted when
they are theatricalized, when they are shown up as roles instead of as essences, treated as
social performances instead of as natural identities, and thus deprived of their claims to
seriousness and authenticity, of their right to our moral, aesthetic, and erotic allegiance.
But to derealize dominant heterosexual or heteronormative social roles and
meanings, to disrupt their unquestioning claims to seriousness and authenticity, is not to
do away with them or to make their power disappear. It is to achieve a certain leverage
in relation to them while acknowledging their continuing ability to dictate the terms of
our social existence. That explains why gay male culture refuses to take seriously,
literally, or unironically the very things that matter most and that cause us the most pain.
It also explains why gay culture encourages us to laugh at situations that are horrifying or
tragic. Just as camp operates to puncture the unironic worship of beauty whose power it
cannot rival or displace, so gay male culture struggles to suspend the pain of losses that it
does not cease to grieve.
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Gay male culture refuses the solemnity with which heterosexual society regards
tragedy. But it doesnt evade the reality of the suffering that gives rise to tragedy. If
anything, it pays tribute to its intensity. It returns to the scene of trauma and replays that
trauma on a ludicrously amplified scale, so as to drain it of its pain and to transform it
into a source of collective strength and defiance. Gay male culture provides its adherents,
be they gay men or straight people, with a resource for dealing with personal and
collective devastation, an ironic attitude that does not devalue the suffering it also refuses
to dignify. Without having to resort to piety, gay male culture acknowledges the enduring
reality of hurt while refusing to concede to it the power to crush those whom it afflicts.
Gay male culture, according to the very incomplete portrait I have sketched of it
today, is a way of coping with powerlessness, of neutralizing pain, of transforming grief.
Perhaps that is why the very idea of gay male culture produces so much aversion and
elicits so much denial. Who nowadays wants to feel powerless, to think of himself as a
victim? Who even wants to admit to vulnerability? Liberalism is over, people! Its no
longer fashionable to portray yourself as oppressed. Our society requires its neoliberal
subjects to butch up, to maintain a cheerful stoicism in the face of socially arranged
suffering. It teaches us not to blame society for our woes but to take responsibility for
ourselvesto find deep personal meaning in our pain and moral uplift in accepting it.
So it is understandable that a set of cultural practices designed to cope with the
reality of suffering, to defy powerlessness, and to carve out a space of freedom within a
social world acknowledged to be hostile and oppressive would not only fail to appeal to
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many subordinated people nowadays but would constitute precisely what most of us
including women, gay men, and other minoritiesmust reject in order to accede to a
sense of ourselves as dignified, proud, independent, self-respecting, powerful, and happy
in spite of everything.
In the case of gay men, gay culture is what many of us disavow in order to achieve
gay prideat least, a certain kind of gay pride. Its not that gay pride reflects a different
and less agonizing social experience of homosexuality: in its own way gay pride, too, is
a response to continuing stigmatization and marginalization. Rather, gay pride offers a
different solution to the same problem, by aspiring to a better futurebetter, that is, than
the world as we know it. That is of course a worthy aspiration, and it helps to explain the
continuing appeal of utopianism in queer theory. But it also indicates why traditional gay
male culture, which reckons with the world as it is, with the way we live now, affords
such an important emotional and political resource, not just to gay men but to any
socially disqualified persons whose irredeemable wrongness makes them willing to pay
the achingly high price for it.