A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture
by Will Fellows
University of Wisconsin Press.
280 pages, $30.
Steve: We don’t have children.
Adam: We have taste.
— Paul Rudnick,
The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told
WILL FELLOWS’ A Passion to Preserve is really two books. One looks at living gay men who have devoted their lives to restoring and preserving old houses and other American antiquities. The other documents some similar men who did the same sort of work in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Much of the contemporary material consists of oral histories in the manner of Fellows’ earlier book, Farm Boys (1996), and is fascinating to read.
A Passion to Preserve is national in its scope, with its material grouped by region starting in the Northeast and moving clockwise around the United States before moving down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Fellows’ subjects are a varied lot. Some fit the stereotype that Fellows would lead you to expect: nice young men looking for a fixer-upper to fill with antiques and turn into a bed and breakfast; or Scarlett O’Hara wannabes who want to restore the lost glories of Tara. Some collect old typewriters, “found” photographs, player pianos, or vintage washing machines. But there are also men like Dana Duppler, who appreciates “the common, utilitarian structures built by average people who didn’t have a lot of money” and thinks that “historic preservations should cover a broader field than just the wealthiest five per cent of the population.” In a section titled “Generations of Gentlemen Keep Cooksville, Wisconsin,” Fellows traces several generations of gay men who preserved buildings in “an unincorporated village of fewer than one hundred people,” beginning with a bachelor teacher named Ralph Warner, who bought a house there in 1911. Warner’s “House Next Door” drew visitors and paying guests, whom he served home-cooked meals and entertained at the piano. By the 1930’s he’d attracted media attention, including reporters from House Beautiful and The Ladies’ Home Journal. Some of Warner’s visitors were gay men who followed his example and bought houses in Cooksville, working to preserve the village’s past down to the present day. Fellows exhibits the same talent he showed in Farm Boys for drawing out his subjects and bringing their stories alive on the page, while taking pains to represent them fairly. As someone who’s always enjoyed reading about other people’s lives, I found this part of A Passion to Preserve a pleasure to read. However, the other book in A Passion to Preserve amounts to a rambling, rather incoherent defense of the sissy as the paradigm of the gay man. This is a valid project, but Fellows’ considerable skills as a researcher are not matched by his skill as a theorist. He begins by describing five traits he identified among his subjects: gender atypicality; domophilia or the love of houses and domesticity; romanticism or emotional identification with the past; æstheticism; and connection and continuity-mindedness, which really seems to restate his concept of romanticism. But, as Fellows says, “These traits are related to one another in complex ways,” and “gender atypicality seems to comprise the others to a large degree.” The fact that “preservation-minded gay men” tend to exhibit these traits should not be surprising, or they wouldn’t be preservation-minded gay men. But from this tautology Fellows makes the great leap to posit what he calls a “larger view of gay men,” a “third-sex concept” that defines gayness primarily in terms of these traits. To do this he has to ignore all the gay men who don’t fit his model—though he’s aware of their existence, having talked to at least one man who was perplexed by his boyfriend’s “antiques queen” tendencies. He tries to explain away these non-æsthetic gay men with a false-consciousness model: they’re suffering from “effeminophobia” and caving into society’s oppressive gender norms. Bears and leathermen also bother him, because he fails to recognize these images for the æsthetic constructs that they are. As one of sociologist Martin P. Levine’s clone informants said, “Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls.” Fellows finally goes off the rails in a rant against “the social-constructionist, assimilation-minded voices that currently dominate mainstream gay culture in this country: those who insist, despite great heaps of living evidence to the contrary, that there are no differences between gay males and straight males.” I’m wary of over-generalizing here, but the gay assimilationists I’ve seen tend to be staunch essentialists and biological determinists—Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan are well-known examples. Conversely, the most prominent critics of assimilation tend to be social constructionists like Michael Warner or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (whose “How to Bring Your Child Up Gay” is an angry defense of gender-atypical gay children). Fellows makes much of gay men’s “taste” and fondly quotes the famous line from The Boys in the Band: “Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty.” I had to keep reminding myself that Fellows is referring to the Homo-American culture that gave the world Liberace, RuPaul, gay men’s choruses, and the women’s topless bathing suit. While RuPaul and even the topless bathing suit are arguably worthwhile contributions to culture, they are hardly examples of good taste. “Gayness comprises much more than sexual partners and practices,” Fellows declares. Well, yes. But there remains the question of why æstheticism and domophilia should impel a man to lurk around highway rest stops, looking for truckers to fellate. Fellows quotes Larry Kramer’s demand for “recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual … and all our creative contributions to this earth.” But Kramer (or more accurately, his surrogate in The Normal Heart) was talking about geniuses like Michelangelo and Wittgenstein, whose accomplishments the rest of us were supposed to emulate instead of having sex. The nice thing about the illustrious dead is that we usually don’t know the gamey details of their sex lives, but Fellows’ subjects mostly seem to see little if any conflict between the æsthetic and carnal sides of their lives. I’m genuinely grateful for the light Fellows has cast on the lives of his subjects; but his narrow vision is just as limiting as its “straight-acting” counterpart, which accuses sissies of false consciousness and embodying stereotypes. His rigid concept of gender atypicality takes for granted the prevailing masculine and feminine stereotypes, ignoring the rich complexity of real people. A truly “larger view of homosexuality” has to account for all of us, not just some.
Duncan Mitchel is a writer living in Bloomington, Indiana.
