Editor’s Note: In the generational shift from a model of sexual liberation to one of identity politics, a small number of astute observers—such as Frank Browning, author of the bestselling book The Culture of Desire (1994)—took pointed note of the transition. The fervor of the early 70’s was already fading by the end of the decade, and while the AIDS epidemic had revved things up again in the 80’s, the movement was becoming institutionalized in the 90’s, what with the rise of well-funded GLBT lobby groups such as the Human Rights Campaign Fund. This article captures in sometimes mournful tones the passing of the more sweeping agenda of gay liberation and the adoption of an identity model whereby gay people would be defined as a “minority group” analogous to blacks or Jews, deserving of equal rights for themselves but laying no larger claim to social change.
This piece is from the Spring 1998 issue of the HGLR. Browning would go on to have a distinguished career as a journalist in the Paris bureau of National Public Radio.
DISSIDENT DESIRES win tolerance and respect in America only after they have been rendered and processed into the language of politics, law, and commerce. The subtle, shifting force of desire itself is seldom defended except in spiritual terms. Homosexual sex—indeed sex at all—remains untouchable territory for public discourse. We can use its dressing, its symbols, to sell blue jeans, power drills, and Chevies, but the thing itself remains oddly embarrassing even in the flourishing gay press. Nowhere in the major gay magazines do we read writing that dares to be as psychologically rich and sexually evocative as Genet or Proust or even Lawrence. (Indeed, general interest magazines like The New Yorker, Harpers, and Granta are the only commercial magazines that publish first rank fiction or poetry on homosexual themes.) Instead, the gay media publish heroic or disturbing stories of marriage, career, adoption, entertainment, health, and business—the public benchmarks of an emerging social constituency. These are, of course, valuable stories, and I have written or reported on radio my share of them. Even so, none of these stories would have any meaning at all, the narratives could not even exist, but for the rumbling dissidence of desire.
Desire, however, scares us. As much as they were driven by their own sexual appetites, the often heroic men and women who made the movement powerful have understood that the shadowy, psychological labyrinths of human desire cannot be directly discussed in America—any more than the appetites of Bill Clinton, Pamela Harriman, or Jack Kennedy could be acknowledged so long as they wished to be politically effective. Ours is a culture—and has been since its founding—that requires not merely the sublimation of desire (what Judeo-Christian society does not?) but the active, concentrated suppression of public discussion of sex.
By desire I do not mean floodlit descriptions of sex acts. Instead, I mean the demons, the shibboleths, the fantasies, the dreams, that carry us hungrily toward the flesh of another human. In the vital political campaign for “rights,” in the personal campaigns for “pride” and self-improvement, we have, I fear, discarded the wondrous and terrible embattlements of desire—the very stuff of Æschylus or Shakespeare, O’Neill or Capote—for a promotional politics of public respect. That may be necessary, for us, in America. Andrew Sullivan, the Tory revisionist, has argued persuasively that in a modern society, the only legitimate political movements are those that seek to remove state barriers to private acts. Æsthetic, psychological, and cultural concerns should be excluded from political discourse lest all art degenerate to the vulgar standards of the majority. Sullivan, as well as war horse activists like Larry Kramer and David Mixner or younger “zapsters” like Michelangelo Signorile, seem to share with the major gay rights organizations the belief that public discourse should restrict itself to the legal and economic interests of identifiable actors and groups.
The liberationist and transformational objectives of the early gay movement, and even the brief “queer” cultural insurgency of the late 80’s and early 90’s, have dissipated. The pursuit of sexual pleasure as a legitimate social concern has disappeared from the movement’s public agenda. In its place have come the right to participate in war, the right to marry, the right to adopt children, and so on. Front-line gay activists rally for the sacredness of the homosexual while dismissing sexual desire. Rather than press the society to enlarge and enrich its sexual culture, they argue, agitate, and seek to legislate for the rights and interests of gay people as any other identity group.
In effect, the gay movement has adopted the social and legal strategy worked out by the racial and ethnic minorities that have eventually found a voice in the American story—such as the Irish in Boston, the Jews in New York, the Italians in Chicago, the Chinese in San Francisco, or the Japanese in Los Angeles. It is a model with a proven history. More to the point, gay men and lesbians of my (40+) generation, as well as dissident young queers, have benefited enormously from this most American of strategies. That is why those of us in mid-life, especially those of us who are finally accumulating the social accouterments of respect, grow so upset at any incipient challenge to the sanctity of gay identity. Gay Pride, surely the movement’s most cherished slogan, rests on the idea of a group identity.
The adoption of “Pride” as the gay slogan of choice displays how fundamentally American this movement really is. Merged with pink triangles and rainbow flags, Pride has become America’s global gay export. Other cultures have fought to remove oppressive laws, to defend homoeroticism in art and literature, even to build gay bohemian enclaves. But it took the land of 10,000 self-help manuals, the nation where pop psychologists convinced legislators that “self-esteem” is a legitimate public policy objective (California even established a state commission on the promotion of self-esteem), to elevate pride into a civil rights campaign.
Pride as the alternative to shame carries a simple, common-sense utility in a society that regards certain people as less than fully human. That has been true for both black people and gay people in this century. But reciting the word repeatedly bears a cost. Pride itself has no necessary political meaning. It tells us nothing about what we want from life, and, as the Greeks understood 3,000 years ago, pride tends eventually toward inward self-absorption. Seldom do the self-absorbed see the peculiarity of their own position, and almost never do they recognize and respect others who hold different values, display different behaviors, or understand their sexuality in different terms.
Elsewhere, in parts of Italy and Brazil, in much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as among many Native American tribes, homosexual behavior has been just that: behavior. As Gilbert Herdt has shown with the Sambia of New Guinea, homosexuality may even serve a provisional purpose during training for manhood, and then disappear among adults. Or, as numerous anthropologists have demonstrated, homosexual identity may be honored for its exceptional contribution to community life. In all such cases, however, homosexual behavior is not so much a matter of private, individual eroticism—and certainly is not concerned with “pride” or “shame”—as it is eros chained to the dictates of community preservation.
In America, and to a growing degree in the Americanized sectors of the globe, we go about our affairs in just the reverse manner. Having sacrificed the sure rituals of local community life for the lures, opportunities, and individual mobility offered by the modern city, we find ourselves in a social geography where we label and map our psychological identities and then go about the self-conscious enterprise of constructing temporary public communities based on those accumulated personal identities, to wit the organized gay worlds of the Castro, Provincetown, Chelsea, South Beach, the Marais in Paris, Earl’s Court in London, or Nollendorfplatz in Berlin. These homo-communities are the peculiar gift of America, the earth’s largest collection of individually displaced people.
Slightly more than a hundred years of “scientific” psychology, compounded by a Protestant religious tradition that allies the individual directly with God and a free market economic system that confers ultimate autonomy on the individual, have all but destroyed identities based on enduring communities or tribes. We are so steeped in the assumptions of personal agency and private volition that our theories of the psychological self are almost exclusively rooted in individual analysis, indeed increasingly in an analysis of self that explains our personhood in fundamentally genetic terms. Why should our comprehension of the homosexual self be any different? The modern gay movement has tried to build a sense of tribalism based on “coming out,” but this is still a private, interior recognition that leads us to discover kindred souls who have experienced similar, solitary epiphanies. These atomized, isolated rites of recognition are at the root of what Herdt and the anthropologists call our “sexual lifeways,” shaped not merely by our physical appetites but also by forces of family duty, child-rearing expectations, public and private fetishes (Levis, bikinis, thick leather belts, fleshy bundas), stated and silent taboos (felony status for sex between nineteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds, fear and rejection of widows and divorcées by still married wives), conventional roles of men and women, monogamy and polygamy, and other societal constraints. Western social and religious sanctions against homosexual desire are rooted deep in the Judeo-Christian ethos, where almost any nonprocreative sex has been seen as sinful. Where the flock of the faithful and obedient retain group identity, the sinners usually have been cast out as individuals, a further influence, Herdt argues, on “how sexual identity has become a permanent identity marker that separates the individual from the group in Western tradition.”
Spurned as solitary outcasts, we have built a culture of sexual resistance that relies on personal pride in our individual difference. We have accomplished extraordinary gains, won unimaginable successes, beaten back the forces of ignorance and bigotry. But strategies that have proven effective and fulfilling for middle-class Americans or their European counterparts do not necessarily address the dreams and desires of all Americans, and surely not of all the world. A system of gay identity politics may well sweep the world, like so much of Western commercial culture, but it may also prove as repressive and imperial as the old bigotries already in place.
PAUL RUSSELL’S 1995 compendium, The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present, includes: Socrates, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Hadrian, Johann Winckelmann, Tchaikovsky, André Gide, Byron, Rimbaud, and Allen Ginsberg. Whether “gay” is a term that has any meaning in describing the lives they led is surely questionable, even for Allen Ginsberg. More to the point, all of these men would be considered felons by nearly all major American gay leaders today because they were, by contemporary American standards, pederasts. Many if not all their lovers were adolescents, and most wrote or spoke about them. Today, the gay consensus—as well as federal law—suggests that such men suffer a mental disease that must be treated by medicine and suppressed by the state. Each year state and federal prosecutors indict thousands of men on either child abuse or child pornography charges for having sex with males under age eighteen or purchasing photographs purportedly of under-age males. Many of these men are indeed child abusers who should be prosecuted; many, however, are not, for inter-generational love remains as real at the end of the millennium as it was in the time of Antony and Cleopatra. Such men, however, are not, according to gay orthodoxy, truly “gay,” and the relationships they have had would certainly not be thought suitable for matrimony by the gay marriage advocates—which leads to the second critical question: What should we want of a marriage?
Divorce, spousal battery, and child abuse are hardly new events in family life. The dissolution of families even when they are protected by marriage has proven deeply disturbing to the entire society. The modern nuclear family based on two working parents who spend no more than two or three evenings a week with their children, who themselves disappear by age eighteen has proven an increasingly barren institution, neither terribly effective at child rearing nor of care for the elderly. Whatever symbolic and legal advantages the marriage contract may confer on those who would make a family, surely only the blind, deaf, and insensate can be unaware of the frail status of the conventional modern family.
Those of us who yearn for the sanction of marriage, who imagine in its contracted monogamy a balm for the emptiness and banality of the circuit, will likely find ourselves in line for the disappointments that always accompany nostalgic naïveté. Pederasts or peers, our most attractive longings are for solidarity, fulfillment, and love. That said, peers and pederasts alike are also motivated by insecurity, ambition, and the will to dominate—as a week spent in divorce court will easily reveal. Marriage itself guarantees no particular blend of our darker and brighter motivations, but the substitution of marriage campaigns for a collective inquiry into our genuine family needs seems likely to produce little more than a gay shadow of the mindless family values shibboleths already flooding the airwaves. Compounded with a boilerplate code of sexual conduct based on the panic of middle age and a nostalgic longing for simplistic solutions, these new preachers of sexual reform promise anything but a progressive civil rights agenda. Their movement seeks, as nearly all identity politics movements eventually do, to police rather than to liberate, to supplant reaction for comprehension, to turn inward toward the security of convention rather than outward toward the complexities of human desire. Theirs is, indeed, a queer movement, but it takes as its ultimate target the soul of genuine queerness.
Discussion1 Comment
Thanks for a reminder of just how smug and insufferable Browning was – and I imagine still is. How can a writer be both cynical and romantic at the same time but for exactly the wrong reasons, all which come back to his disdain for modern america. On second thought, maybe it was just a typical midlife crisis – that would explain the odd solidarity with the “pederast” – wishful thinking perhaps?