Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned
History of Radical Gay Sexuality
by Patrick Moore
Beacon Press. 232 pages, $25.
FOR THOSE OF US over forty, it’s pretty obvious by now that the gay political movement that leapt forward so astonishingly after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 is dead and buried. Current ballyhooing around the issue of gay marriage—as around the issue of gays in the military a decade ago—is nothing but a sideshow, driven by insiders with an assimilationist agenda who are intent on valorizing homo-consumerism, gym bodies, SUVs for all, and endless episodes of Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Meanwhile, most gays under forty are too intent on getting laid or buying expensive shirts to know or care about our history.
Unlike this reviewer, Patrick Moore still has hope that something can be—as his subtitle reads—“reclaimed.” Beyond Shame is a unique and strangely moving account of what went right—and what went wrong—with gay life in America over the past 35 years. He places the blame squarely on “shame” in gay life, indeed on the predominance of shame in American life itself. Why else would Bush be president, unless Americans were deeply ashamed of our unprecedented wealth, our uncontested power, and our pampered narcissism? Moore points out that in the decade following Stonewall, tens of thousands of queer people came out of the closet intent on overcoming this culture of shame and on constructing in its place a culture of sexual liberation and experimentation. This was the subculture that quickly spread into the bisexual, and then into areas of the heterosexual, populations of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with many other cities following their example.
Because in the early 1970’s so many American lesbians opted to involve themselves in feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women, this groundbreaking anti-shame work was done chiefly by gay men. And it was done in all-male contexts with few precedents: gay bathhouses, glory-hole clubs, back-room bars, fist-fucking coteries, jack-off associations, porn movie theaters, dirty bookstores, and S&M fraternities. It was done in private, alcohol-free (if drug-rich) dance clubs that reached its apotheosis in Manhattan’s the Saint, a place of such eminence in 1981 that when I met visiting journalist-author Randy Shilts, he said, “I’ll do anything you want, if you take me to the Saint!” I did—and he did.
Other spaces of this anti-shame experimental culture were gay resorts like Laguna Beach, Russian River, Provincetown, and especially that gay Eden, Fire Island. Artists arose in the 1970’s at once to invent, document, and fuel this social experiment. Today, scholarly texts are published every month focusing on the queer novelists, poets, photographers, artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and entrepreneurs of that era who have become the uncontested markers of international gay culture.
Moore chooses to discuss the work, lives, and enduring influence of a handful of these men and places: Bruce Mailman, owner of the New Saint Marks Baths and the Saint; Joe Gage, whose film LA Plays Itself lifted macho porn into art; and San Francisco’s infamous S&M club, the Catacombs. He also references many others, including Robert Mapplethorpe and the Jamaican-American poet Assotto Saint. Moore shows how these men worked amid a rich, fluid context of many other gay men (today known as “clones”), most of whom lived by the philosophy expressed in a 70’s disco hit: “You’re a shining star, no matter who you are.”
Like all epiphanies, their blaze was glorious, bright, and brief. The West Village experimental scene gave way to the East Village art scene even as one after another of the culture-builders was stricken by AIDS. Men like actor-playwright Charles Ludlam exchanged daily blow jobs in movie booths at the Christopher Street Book Store for a bed in an AIDS hospice. The beautiful, revolutionary, orgasm-inducing images of Richard Locke rimming Al Parker gave way to clown shows like Lady Bunny cavorting onstage at Wigstock in a polka dotted apron and three foot pink coiffure. Mapplethorpe’s elegant but hard-to-take photographs were replaced by Keith Haring’s featureless, bouncy-figured kindergarten wall art. And Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance was supplanted by the neutered sitcom prose of David Sedaris. Those works—and the endlessly similar Kensington beach books—are what pass for art in gay life today. No wonder some people think gay-bashing is too good for us!
Moore correctly places the return of shame culture in gay life to the advent of AIDS and to the eminence accorded such puritanical figures as Larry Kramer. Kramer had already written one well-known homophobic jeremiad, the novel Faggots, during the glory days of the late 70’s, and he led the attack on gay sex in the 80’s, a position for which he was granted liberal access to The New York Times op-ed page. Meanwhile, real authorities such as Dr. Charles Silverstein were continually denied similar access. Kramer has never retreated from his anti-sex position. Naturally enough, new generations grew up afraid of sex and even more afraid of the previous generation—resulting in everyone losing out in too many ways to elaborate here.
Unconcerned with political correctness, Moore quotes lesbian figures important to act-up, like Anne Northrup and Sarah Schulman, whose newfound power and prominence was due in some measure to the disappearance of so many gay men. The author goes on to detail how shame continues to keep our gay and bisexual male population at risk of AIDS, which continues to decimate African-American and Hispanic men and women in steadily rising numbers. He implores us to “own” HIV as a gay disease, a first step toward bringing down infection rates in the gay community.
Beyond Shame is an incisive and important book, but thus far a largely ignored one. It looks back honestly and soberly, if a little romantically and ruefully, at our recent past. Because it does, and because it represents a 180-degree turn away from today’s mainstream gay media view of where we were and where we are now, I would not expect a large number of journals to review this book. Patrick Moore isn’t afraid to glamorize the early period of gay and lesbian liberation. And why not? This was a period in which a relatively small group of gay men held such cultural power that a few weeks after a song, dance step, fashion, or verbal fad hit the dance floor at New York’s Flamingo or LA’s Studio One, half of straight America had adopted it. Will that ever happen again? Probably not; and so we are left, in the words of Robert Frost, to reflect on “what to make of a diminished thing.”
Felice Picano, whose novel Dryland’s End has recently been republished, is the co-author of a new edition of The Joy of Gay Sex.
