Backwards, In High Heels

I read "How to Be Gay." I've been doing it all wrong!

Way back in 2005 I was up late one night, drinking alone as one does, and I wrote this thing… this act of cultural criticism, you should pardon the expression:

the past and the future are both gayer than the present …

of the five senses, sight is the least gay
(but watching and looking are very gay indeed)
wanting what you get is gayer than getting what you want

more I guess

Creatures, I’ve been away for a while, partly because work heated up and partly because I was reading this vast tome called How to Be Gay, by one David Halperin. For years you people have been telling me to read this thing, and I’ve resisted. Don’t I… how to put this… already know?

But no, Halperin’s whole thing is basically: What does it mean that the list I came up with back in 2005 is mostly right? Like not entirely right, there’s dumb stuff and things I’d change, but… watching and looking are gay! Wanting what you get is gayer than getting what you want! But why, and how did I know?

That’s an interesting question in itself, and Halperin uses a delightful mix of rigor and vibes to analyze questions like, “Why on earth is Mildred Pierce such a touchstone for generations of gay men?” And… why does every succeeding queer generation reject gay culture as sad and silly, only to slowly discover that campy ol’ gay culture offers something that an out-and-proud identity can’t?

He begins with the insight that gay identity and gay culture are distinct and even opposed experiences. Gay identity is an assertion about the direction of one’s sexual desires. It’s linked to sex, politics, and other attempts to get what you want. Gay culture is the entire apparatus of meaning, symbolism, psychedelia and phantasmagoria, the whole dream logic constructed around experiences many gay people share long before they start to desire sex or justice. You can have gay identity without any real relationship to gay culture; and, conversely, you can be fully enculturated to a particular part of gay culture and be desperately straight. (Halperin knows he’s talking about the culture of gay men, but it’s v. v. familiar to me despite the fact that I’m physically and spiritually a lesbian.)

Gay culture begins in childhood: in the experience of difference, the longing for escape, the perception of oneself as an actor or even a traitor. Somehow other people seem to have faces, whereas I have this ill-fitting mask. Unlike most racial and religious minorities, gay people almost all grew up in straight families, and all grew up in a culture created by the hopes, dreams, and fears of straight people. And so children who find themselves in some way crosswise to this mainstream culture develop a different, or (in Halperin’s word) “dissident,” relationship to it. They repurpose stories to fit their different dreams.

There are a bunch of gay cultures—Halperin notes that the gay culture of historical preservation and antiquing is different from the gay culture of the Broadway musical. Both do share an attentiveness to surface and style, and a love of “period”: the past and the future, maybe because they can’t present themselves as the world and are simply a world, really are gayer than the present. But the Broadway musical adds an escapist element, or rather, the opposite of escapism: fantasy breaks in and transforms the everyday world, and suddenly everybody’s breaking into song! All those childhood bedroom-window soliloquies are being spoken, in a form that’s both stylized and achingly sincere.

There are no gay people in the classic Broadway musicals. But there is a gay dream.

What are those early presexual realities of gay experience that adult gay men today are supposed to have outgrown? Miller identifies three related queer affects that the gay cult of the Broadway musical once expressed, distilled, preserved, and now mercilessly exposes to view: (1) “the solitude, shame, secretiveness by which the impossibility of social integration was first internalized”; (2) “the excessive sentimentality that was the necessary condition of sentiments allowed no real object”; and (3) “the intense, senseless joy that, while not identical to these destitutions, is neither extricable from them….”

There’s a deep resonance in Halperin’s work with the theology of the body. I said this when I wrote about Notes of a Crocodile:

There was a way of being queer, once, in which it meant or could be thought to require being lovelorn. Pope St. John Paul II got quite intense about the way our “original loneliness” reveals to us the nature of eros as lack—love’s earthly satisfactions become most important for your soul when they reveal their limits.

St John of the Cross, earthly forms of love (whether friendship or marriage) as mere allegories for the love we’ll know in Heaven; all Creation yearning, laboring, trusting in a promise, waiting by the phone. I recognize the specifically gay aspects of what Halperin describes. But it’s quite powerful to me to reflect that this feeling of longing for a kind of home you’ve never experienced is, on the Catholic account, the universal human condition. To be human is to be queer. To be “demented,” “treasonous,” in Halperin’s words; “optimized for pining,” in Crocodile’s. Halperin sketches a “homosexuality of one,” defined by unfulfillable yearnings, and like, if you’re not unfulfillable you’re not paying attention.

When sex finally enters the picture, it inevitably brings disappointment (this is Halperin! take it up with him!). But that doesn’t make sex special. There’s a post-coital tristesse of gay politics, too; and for, he argues, “identity-based” art and culture. Go ahead and watch “Heartstopper,” nobody’s heartstopping you, but something is missing….

Gay pride is a reaction to a gay experience “defined by failure, disappointment, or defeat.” It is (he’s quoting somebody here) the denial of the “unconsoled” within us. And so it’s inevitably sort of a letdown, because “adult satisfaction cannot quite make up for a previous history of unfulfillment.” There’s a psychology here, a Velvet Rage “why your relationships always go awry” self-help element, and I enjoyed what he said there and hope it’s helpful to many. But Halperin’s most interested in what we might want more than wellness.

---

The specific gay culture Halperin focuses on most tightly is the kind I personally like most: camp, the collision of “glamour and abjection (that is, extreme, degrading humiliation).” The “deliberate crossing of tragic and comic genres”; “[t]hat wrenching switch from tragic pathos to obscene comedy.” One artist headlined his obituary for his best friend MOODY BITCH DIES OF AIDS.

That isn’t (obviously???) a denial of pain. Just as in Plautus’ “tragicomedy,” Halperin connects the distinction between the two genres to social hierarchy: pain that is epic vs. pain that is laughable. The “Fire Island widows” were gay Italian-American men who, having lost their life partners, dressed in the black dress of Italian peasant widows. They performed real grief through parody of socially-recognized grief: “over-performing” grief, “clamor[ing], Mommie Dearest–style, for the respect they were entitled to.”

Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce embodies both glamour and abjection. So too Aida, a gay touchstone for many reasons, but partly because she’s “both a princess and a slave.” So too the peasant widow, majestic and harrowed in her loss.

So too—you knew I would do this!—Jesus Christ, king and God and sacrifice, dying like a slave gemmed with sacred Wounds.

---

Gay culture’s “bad attitude” is partly because it’s for people who feel shut out of normality. But it’s also partly a matter of identifying with the wrong abject actor. The camp attitude identifies with Joan in Mommie Dearest rather than Christina—both suffering, but only one’s suffering is disrespected by the narrative itself. Camp is a shared “loving relation to the ghastly object.” And a recognition of oneself as a ghastly object that wants to be loved.

(It seems pretty clear from what Halperin quotes that the camp villainesses who identify with Joan also see something of themselves in Christina. Layers of self-laceration! Nuances!)

The Fire Island widows gathered together as a spectacle, “challeng[ing] the monopoly of dignity” in which some mourning is an honor and some a disgrace. Camp is like voluntary poverty, but for dignity. Camp rejects dignity for one’s own suffering—because nobody should have it and yet I, too, deserve it.

Michael Warner writes about gay camaraderie born of shared and “bedrock” shame: “No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself on generosity, but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you.”

That sounds like AA. And when Halperin’s chapter on misogyny names this camp impulse to “dismantle others’ claims to dignity” as something feminist critics tend not to understand, I was reminded of the ways Women for Sobriety talked about its model’s difference from AA. You can kind of tell that AA’s founders had a lot of societal privilege by the way they constantly say you’ve gotta be humbled. There are people who have had too much dignity, and people who have never been granted any, and it can be hard to tell the difference between humility and complicity if you’re the latter.

Well, you see how hard I find it to sustain a mood of irony—to write about camp in a camp way. The siren song of self-seriousness! Halperin too sometimes needs a little ironic distance. He’s occasionally too desperate for camp to be constructive or wholesome. Other times, though, he lets himself yowl, “Tina! Bring me the axe!”

Next week

A much shorter newsletter! With queer punk anecdotes, links losers like, and more.

Cosplayers dressed as the Golden Girls photographed by Clinton Steede, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.