Letter From An Alien: The Scientist

Some of the righteous liberals have suggested that recent events should lead to some ‘soul-searching’ on my part. They have. But nothing in my soul regrets anything to do with my ‘critique’ of the liberal/gayist/feminist orthodoxy.

I have some regrets about how I have communicated with you. And far bigger regrets to do with my, shock horror: ‘real life’, that none of those liberalists give a monkeys about anyway. I have made some difficult phone calls and written some difficult letters.

I also have found myself thinking you and I were a bit – what? silly? romantic? – by never once speaking to each other like normal human beings. I helped you publish a book! In silence.

I’m no Coldplay fan but this song resonates with me today: Nobody said it was easy; it’s such a shame for us to part. Nobody said it was easy; No-one ever said it would be this hard. Oh take me back to the start….’

I’m sorry Mr [redacted]

QRG/Elly
Foucault’s Daughter

Confessions Of A ‘Homophobic Psycho’

This is an email I received – in reply to one from me to a few people working in the arena of gender and masculinity – a few months ago.  It is from professor Eric Anderson and as you can see it accuses me of being a ‘homophobic psycho’, a ‘wannabe academic’ with ‘mental illness’ and a ‘persecution complex’. Anderson also says I lack ‘dignity’ and ‘integrity’.

Below is screengrabs of comments by Mark Mccormack and Eric Anderson’s husband Grant Peterson, accusing me of ‘harassing gay academics’ and of ‘homophobic discourse’. These were part of a campaign by Mccormack, Anderson and Peterson to have my review of Mark Mccormack’s book on the Declining Significance Of Homophobia taken down from the website Sociological Imagination where it was published. They succeeded and it was removed.

Mccormack has also accused me on twitter of ‘harassing gay academics online’ and he tweeted his support of Paul Burston‘s  outing of me (as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’) back in March this year. Mccormack said:

Why am I writing about all this now? The reason is that a senior colleague of Mccormack, Professor Ian Rivers, who claims to be an ‘International authority on homophobic bullying & bystander mental health at school’ has just published an article on ‘cyber bullying’.

I left a comment underneath his post but it was not published, and the editors of the site said:

I am publishing this evidence to back up the comment I left under Rivers’ article, and to prove it is not ‘libel’ but is rather, the truth. My comment reads:
——————–

I find this article very simplistic.

I have been labelled a ‘cyber bully’ and a ‘homophobe’ including by Ian Rivers’ colleagues Mark mccormack and Eric Anderson. I was also ‘outed’ by Paul Burston a gay journalist, as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’.

But of course the police have not been involved at all, as in fact, I am not a bully. They just outed me because they disagree with my politics, and my criticisms of some of their work.

The police did though get involved when I received hate mail in the post I do not know who it is from.

So who is the ‘bully’ in this case? who the ‘victim’? and why was my ‘anonymity’ allowed to be taken away by Paul Burston?

Dr Elly Tams
Quiet Riot Girl
@Notorious_QRG

————————

If anyone I mention in that comment wants to argue about the truth of it, taking into account the evidence above, they are free to do so here.

The fact is, Mccormack especially is walking quite a confusing path here. His book, which I have read and reviewed, with approval from a number of academics including R Connell and K Plummer, is about declining homophobia. In his book he says homophobic ‘bullying’ is on the wane, and language is changing. People now use the term ‘gay’ to mean ‘rubbish’ often and it is rarely in a homophobic context. With that in mind, it is very odd that he and his ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson have rushed to accuse me of being homophobic and a bully of ‘gay academics’.

In his article on language, Mccormack is eager to point out that homophobia is now ‘stigmatised’ in our culture. People do not want to be seen as homophobic, it is looked down upon and challenged. So, I think he, Paul Burston, Eric Anderson and Grant Peterson are well aware that to label me as a ‘homophobe’ is to label me with a socially unacceptable trait. They know it tarnishes my name to call me such a thing. You could even argue, using Mccormack’s logic that these days, to call someone a homophobe is not dissimilar to calling someone a ‘fag’ in previous eras.

Another word that is stigmatised in our culture, that Mccormack does not mention, but that Paul Burston and others have called me is ‘troll’. When you think of a troll what do you picture? an ugly, inhuman creature? Yes, me too. Ian Rivers, in an organised  live chat on twitter recently, used the term ‘troll’ completely uncritically. For someone who is supposed to be a leading academic expert on bullying, this is worrying to me. The term ‘troll’ is used in a variety of contexts in relation to a variety of people and behaviours. One of the reasons it is a powerful insult, is the ambiguity of its meaning. On a recent programme on TV the broadcaster Richard Bacon, for example, highlighted the problem of ‘RIP trolls’ who left nasty comments on facebook tribute pages for people who had died. And yet I am also called a ‘troll’ simply for annoying some groups of people in academia and the media. This seems unfair to me.

Another issue that Professor Rivers seems unable to grasp, is that of power. A bully can only intimidate someone if they have power. In my interactions with him, Mccormack and Anderson and Peterson I don’t see how I have any power. They are established academics, two of them are professors, meaning they are high up in the hierarchy. And, more importantly they are a group. They know eachother and work together and socialise in real life. I am a lone individual and I have no status in academia, and no networks to use against my ‘enemies’ as they have to use against me. Ian recently ‘protected’ his tweets. Anderson has done this before too. As public academics trying to promote their work I think this is not a good move. I also think it is an attempt to take the ‘victim status’ as if Professor Rivers needs ‘protecting’ from someone like me.

Sometimes bullying can occur when a power dynamic at face value looks like it would go the other way. For example there is currently a case in the news of bullying of a teacher by students, which caused her to feel she had to leave the teaching profession altogether. But again I would say that those students formed a group against a lone individual. And they knew each other both on and offline, and probably knew how to use social media more expertly than the teacher. ‘Power is everywhere’ as Foucault said, and those young people had power in that situation.

I am aware that this Thursday is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO).  LGBT Groups are publicising it as a day of action. But again I find their presentation of what is in fact a complex situation, overly simplistic. I know plenty of Gay people who are actually transphobic (Julie Bindel springs to mind). Creating a day against ‘homophobia and transphobia’ seems to give all LGBT people instant ‘victim’ status, when life is not quite so clear cut. As I asked in my (unpublished) comment under Professor Rivers’ article, who is the victim in my situation? Who the aggressor?

Professor Rivers’ advice for people dealing with cyber bullies,  is to ‘block’ them. I think this is very convenient as it means if he does not want to engage with someone (e.g. me) he can label them a bully and then block them online. As I have pointed out in my 101 Wankers post, blocking is a very common way of blanking out opinions and perspectives and people you don’t like. I am blocked by over 80 people now. Have I bullied them all?

If I had, surely I’d have to have been an actual psycho. Someone like  Anders Breivik had ‘power’ over innocent victims because he used violence, in his case, murder. I am not a violent person and unlike some of my detractors, I don’t even use threats. I just say things that piss people off and am sometimes rude. That does not make me a psycho!

Someone else who has in the past been called all sorts of names, such as ‘the Gay Anti Christ’ and a ‘brainy thug’ is  Mark Simpson. He has kept very quiet in this situation whereby I have been outed, not only as a ‘bully’ and a ‘troll’ and a ‘homophobe’ but also as some kind of ‘Kathy Bates Misery’ figure in relation to him and his writing. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Some of his old friends have attempted to use him in their attacks on me and I can see why he has tried to keep out of it.

But. I know that Simpson is very familiar with the kind of ‘brickbats’ thrown at me, for they are the same kinds of things which have been said about him. And, if I do have any power in this situation, as Simpson knows full well, it can only be down to my intelligence and my ability to sometimes touch a nerve.

Once, when Simpson and I were still on friendly terms, he advised me to ‘wear my brickbats like bouquets’, to stand tall and be proud of my unusual position and perspective. And now, even when that friendship is faded and lost, I am taking his advice.

The gaylords who call me a homophobe can suck my metaphorical dick.

Manchester Is Not Paris – The Alcohol Years By Carol Morley

It seems appropriate that I should be writing this review of The Alcohol Years with a slight hangover. Carol Morley’s (2000) documentary is about a hangover to beat them all. Not only did she forget some of the events of a drunken night out, the experimental film-maker managed to lose track of pretty well a whole period of her life.

The film, about her late teens/early 20s in Manchester in the 1980s, is how she reconstructed herself out of other people’s memories and accounts, 15-20 years later. Many of the people Morley interviewed (off-camera, with no indication of what she asked them) were ex-lovers. So the stories they tell on film, in a set of seemingly one-sided conversations, are infused with sexual tension, or lack of it, or jealousy, or indifference, or love, or in one or two cases possibly, with hate. As you might expect conversations with exes to be.

I first saw The Alcohol Years when it was shown late at night on channel four, not too long after it had been made. It formed a lasting impression on me, and seeing it in the cinema in 2012 brought it all flooding back. Carol Morley was at the screening I attended, and in the introductory talk she said she herself had not seen it for years. So she was remembering a film about her memories! Meta.

One or two of the ‘characters’ in the film are indeed very memorable. A man is one of the first to speak (I don’t know his name, this is not a typical ‘talking heads’ documentary. The viewer is allowed to get to know the people on film gradually, as they might a character in a fictional drama). He is (well he was in 2000) in his mid 30s I’d say. He has dark hair and wears glasses. He looks as if he has swallowed a lemon. This man is angry. He seems to be angry with Carol for daring to make the film at all. For coming back to her past, to people and places she left in a hurry, without any warning or explanation. He seems to be angry that she has dared to make a film about herself. 

Why don’t you look at the world around you? he asks accusingly. Why don’t you make a film about that? Why does this have to be about you?

I remember when I first watched the documentary, taking an instant dislike to this man. I thought he was very rude, to someone who was actually doing something that seemed brave to me. Facing up to her past. Facing her exes. But he thought Carol was cowardly, by refusing to sit infront of the camera, refusing to be the one who was interrogated. I just thought she was clever. Twelve years on, I actually found him quite funny. Because in the youtube/Big Brother/facebook world we now live in, making a film about yourself is a VERY normal thing to do. In fact, one might ask somebody why they DIDN’T. So this sour-faced man ( or maybe he isn’t sourfaced anymore, let’s hope not) was placing the film very much in a specific time. He made it historical.

And The Alcohol Years is full of history. Manchester, so much to answer for, has a rich recent history, especially around the music industry and scenes. Footage shot in the Hacienda and the GMex centre, and interviews with Manchester musos such as Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (who had been in love with Morley) and Dave Haslam the DJ, brought that history to life. Even in 2000 when the film was made, the Manchester I knew, the one that caused me to apply to go to university there in 1990, was already faded and worn. Now it seems like a distant memory. The scenes of dark alleyways and grimy clubs and pubs are part of a pre-regenerated Manchester. It is much lighter now, cleaner. And arguably less interesting. ‘Manchester Is Not Paris’ , the slogan on the postcard (above) that advertised the film when it first came out, was said on screen by Alan Wise, when he described going for breakfast with Morley to a local greasy spoon, ‘the morning after’. He was older than Carol, a kind of ‘sleazy’ not hugely attractive man, who served to suggest that the young Morley was not always the most discerning of ‘experimental’ film makers. But he had some great lines. I just wonder if nowadays, Manchester, like most Western cities, IS Paris. You can get cappuccinos on Deansgate much the same as you can on the Champs Elysees.

Dave Haslam, who is a bit of a local historian* of all things Manchester and music, made some pertinent observations in the film. He said that Manchester is a city that is very good at mythologising itself. And he added that Carol Morley was mythologising her own life, as well as making a film about Manchester.  He, of all the interviewees, seemed the most self-aware, and the most aware that the film would be a permanent record of something. I got the feeling listening to him, that in his sections, Dave was talking to the future. He also seemed to be talking to a fellow artist. A lot of the people in the film treated Morley like a ‘slag’, an ‘ex’, a ‘fuck up’. But Haslam seemed to have always identified in her a fellow spirit and a quite driven, creative person. I suspect he might have been the least surprised of all the interviewees,  to find out that Morley has now made her first feature-length docu-drama, Dreams Of A Life.

But the ‘slag’ reputation is also fascinating, emerging as it does from these individuals’ accounts of their memories of Carol. I distinctly remember when I first watched The Alcohol Years, wondering what it would have been like, to hear the words that these people were saying about you, to your face. Hurtful words. Years later, now I fancy myself as something of a ‘sexuality expert’, I notice a few things about their words.

One is that it wasn’t just Morley’s promiscuity that caused people some discomfort. Though one of her exes, a woman, said Carol was ‘a role model for promiscuity’ in such a damning tone that I flinched in the cinema. Her bisexuality also caused some of them problems, and especially a few of the women she spoke to.

The ‘role model’ woman asked Carol at one point how many people she’d slept with (we never got to hear the answer of course. Like I said, she’s clever). Then she corrected herself and said ‘how many men? I don’t care about the women.’  It is as if for a woman to have sex with women is ‘not really sex’. It doesn’t count. This reminded me of Mark Simpson’s work, and his comments on trysexuality. He says women are more free than men to experiment with same-sex sex. If a man does it he is labelled as ‘gay’. Simpson and I have argued about this a few times. I agree up to a point. But I think Carol Morley shows that for a woman to step out of whatever box she has been put in (whether it is ‘lesbian’ or ‘heterosexual’), it is still not accepted wholeheartedly by many. In fact, Carol Morley shows that the ‘slag’ stereotype and the ‘greedy bisexual’ stereotype are alive and well – or they were in 2000. I personally don’t think that has changed.

Has Carol Morley changed? I guess we’d have to ask her that. Though again, in the introductory talk at the screening I went to recently, she said The Alcohol Years is about how we only really exist via other people’s versions of us. So maybe I am as well placed as anyone to answer that question. My view is yes and no. On one hand of course she has changed. It is clear that she could not sustain herself in the lifestyle depicted in the film. She has grown up and moved on. But The Alcohol Years provides us with an early glimpse of what is most definitely an impressive talent. I haven’t seen Dreams of A Life yet, but all reports tell me it is excellent, and is only a continuation of and a development of the ideas and skills shown in The Alcohol Years.

So if Morley was a role model in the 80s (for promiscuity, drinking, being young) she still is one now. But a role model for honest and challenging documentary film making. Long may she continue to be so.

*thanks to Dave Haslam for the top image, which he had filed in his archives. I told you he is a historian!

In Defence Of… Cultural Studies

The Reader Is The Writer

On her interesting, but sometimes rambling blog, The Autobiography Of A Soul, Elise Moore has written about cultural studies. Her piece is ostensibly about the work of the late, great, film critic, Pauline Kael, but it soon becomes clear it has another purpose. To lament the ‘death’ of the old-fashioned study of literature, and the onslaught of media and cultural studies in the academy (and everywhere else).

Moore writes:

‘Once the canon had been put on trial for the harm it had done women, colonial subjects, and minorities, it was difficult to justify why the standard works of Anglo-American literary studies should still be taught. The Cultural Studies approach took care of that: high culture, like pop culture, was significant for sociological reasons. Really, though, the canon is just a relic of the old way of doing literary studies: for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another. Courses in genre and popular fiction have already been introduced, and the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. Mostly they’re going to pay to take courses in the sciences that may lead to careers, but a few might pay to study the things they love: pop culture and new media. To, basically, get an education by being entertained. Which isn’t necessarily far removed from the attitude of the first students to take literary studies. I remember reading somewhere, probably on the internet, that when the novel was first introduced as a subject of university study, the old guard was appalled, since the novel had been considered a form of entertainment.’

In saying ‘for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another’ Moore is accusing cultural studies, and the study of semiotics, of relativism. In reviewing a recent (sociology) book, I read a very similar accusation, this time in relation to ‘poststructuralism’, and, like Moore’s assertion here, it did not come accompanied with any references or evidence. It seems to be just a truism that is making its way into people’s minds. Well. It’s not true!

‘Semioticians’ such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, are some of the most ‘discerning’, opinionated writers I have ever read. Sure, their opinions are not limited to literature. The word I might use to describe them is ‘interdisciplinary’. But they are not relativists.

In his brilliant essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes treats the famous Parisian landmark as a ‘text’. So, in that sense, Ms Moore is right. His semiotics are not showing much respect for the ‘majesty’ of the ‘book’ or the ‘novel’ or the ‘poem’ as something more worthy of study than anything else. BUT. He has not chosen any old building to study. He has not walked out into the 7th arrondissement and picked out whichever edifice he first encounters. No. He writes about the Eiffel Tower because it is an amazing, important, mythical, aesthetically imposing structure.

And that’s the problem. According to Moore, semiotics ‘ignores aesthetics’. And ‘semiotics is an inadequate substitute for aesthetics because it ignores the dimension of pleasure’. Roland Barthes, author of The Pleasure of the Text, might disagree.  In his stunning book A Lover’s Discourse, he wrote:

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

For me, the writing of Barthes, and that of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, is pleasure made flesh. The words themselves become solid entities, that I ‘rub against’, as a frotteur might rub against his beloved Tour Eiffel. In a world where ‘sex’ has become commodified, democratised, sanitised, the dirty, rough, beautiful, aesthetic writings of Barthes et al, are one of my few intense pleasures left!

Susan Sontag agreed. In her heartfelt love letters to Barthes, she called him a ‘radical aesthete’ and celebrated the tension in his work between his sheer joy or ‘jouissance’ (as he called it in a psychoanalytic way), of writing and reading, and his more political, critical project.

In amongst her ‘aesthetic’ assertions, Moore says something very political herself. She claims that ‘the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. ‘ I found this comment a tiny bit insulting. That is because my (late) step-father was one of the founding members of the original cultural studies department, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. One of the early words I learned as a young child was ‘university’. But I pronounced it ‘wistywersity’. And not long after the ‘Centre’ joined my lexicon.

Birmingham really was the ‘centre’ of the emerging Cultural Studies discipline in the 60s and 70s. My step dad worked with one of our great living ‘intellectuals’ Stuart Hall.  But their department, despite its ground-breaking research, and its ‘star’ graduates including Dick Hebdidge, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, was forced to close in 2002. Why? Because its intellectual rigour, its inclusive policy in the recruitment of students, and its ‘semiotic’ approach to critical theory had no place in ‘new corporate-capitalist model for universities’.

I have written before that the intellectual is O.V.E.R. But I see absolutely no link between the subject of Cultural Studies and that demise. Indeed, my step-dad and many of his colleagues were literature students and teachers once. Raymond Williams, who was one of the ‘fathers’ of cultural studies, was a novelist, as well as a literary and cultural theorist. And no novelist thinks one text is of the same aesthetic value as another!

Yes, ‘Media Studies’ has become one of those ubiquitous, what some call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ at universities across the globe. And some media studies degrees are not very good. There is potentially an argument that Media Studies has ‘watered down’ semiotics, but that is not an argument against semiotics, just the way it is sometimes taught and learned.  I have taught media studies myself, and I cannot think of one thing about the subject in and of itself that would speed on the death of the intellectual. I CAN think of things like students having to take out loans to pay for their degrees, the lack of inspiring alternatives for young people, so that university becomes more like school, a necessary rite of passage that has to be endured, and the explosion of the internet and related technologies which seem to make it harder and harder for all of us to think.

It will come as no surprise to Elise Moore, or indeed to anyone else reading this, that one other living ‘intellectual’ who I admire and whose work I advocate, is Mark Simpson. I have named him ‘a Roland Barthes for the i-pod generation’, because he is one of very few writers I know who has continued the discipline of ‘semiotics’ as Barthes practised it, and as was celebrated and continued at the Birmingham Cultural Studies Centre.

Simpson is a good example of how semiotics and aesthetics are never far apart. His important essay Sporno takes the male sporting body and shows how it is a ‘sign’ that becomes a ‘signifier’ when it is photographed, filmed, placed on the sides of buses and billboards. Having read his 1994 book Male Impersonators, whilst Simpson doesn’t refer all that often to Barthes himself, the ‘cultural studies’ theory is all there in that seminal work that led to Sporno. And in a recent talk Simpson gave in London, where he explained how Tom Of Finland was a ‘blueprint’ for the metrosexual buff boys we know and love today, I was enthralled by his ‘semiotic’ understanding of his subject. I could not help but picture Barthes himself, stood in that lecture hall with his powerpoint slides, demonstrating convincingly, the importance of the ‘image’ to the ‘text’. And the importance of both to what we internet-agers now dismissively term, ‘RL’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fyBcXKbFXt8

I don’t see a conflict between ‘literature’ and ‘cultural studies’, partly because of my own background and how those two lived side by side in my own household growing up. Partly because I see how they have been combined by academics such as David Halperin, a theorist and teacher of literature, who applies a ‘cultural studies’ and ‘semiotic’ analysis to much of his work. And does so in a most ‘aesthetically pleasing’ way. Another cultural studies academic who values (and indeed writes) literature is Jonathan Kemp. He spoke at the same event (above) as Mark Simpson, where he related the ‘aesthetics’ of the male body to cultural theory.

I have said too, that we are now witnessing, not just Barthes’ prediction of ‘The Death of The Author’ but also the death of the reader. Nobody reads. But that is not Cultural Studies’ fault. My discovery of the work of Mark Simpson has reminded me of the importance of the Cultural Studies I have been immersed in since I was a small child. I think there are only two Simpsonists in the world at the moment, but they are as intellectually sound as any literature boffin. I also think, inspired by Simpson, and Barthes, and Foucault, that my novella Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls is a testament to the literary, aesthetic value of cultural studies.

Elise Moore said her last piece may be her farewell post on her blog. I hope it isn’t. But I also hope she takes a bit more account of those theorists who do not fit into her existing literary mindset. She might realise just how beautiful some of them are.

A Nice Line In Neckerchiefs – John Wayne As Metro-Icon

When did metrosexuality begin? It is an impossible question to answer. The phenomenon, that seems as natural to us now, as Gucci manbags and orange man-tans, has crept up on us.

This following exchange between masculinity ‘experts’ Mark McCormack and MetroDad Mark Simpson, shows some of the confusion about the origins of metrosexuality, and what being a ‘real man‘ might mean:

@_MarkMcCormack US much more attached to trad ideas of masculinity than the UK. They had a national nervous breakdown over metrosexuality.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

@_MarkMcCormack He didn't have very flexible hips. But he did have a nice line in neckerchiefs.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

I of course agree with Simpson. John Wayne did indeed have a ‘nice line in neckerchiefs’. And, however rugged and American he may have been, he, like all men film stars, ‘desired to be desired’ as much as their women counterparts. His ‘star’ quality, like Tony Curtis’ and Elvis’, meant he was a precursor to the tartymetrosexuals we know and love today. Oh, and, he also did some dancing on screen!

*

Going In – By John Weir (1996)

This will kill my parents and ruin my career, but listen, I take it back: I’m not gay. I don’t mean I don’t still fall in love with guys, or that I wouldn’t be willing to go to a gay rights demonstration if I thought it would enhance someone’s civil liberties. I never said I was straight. However, for most of my adult life I’ve insisted on being thought of as a gay man, and I just want to say right now that I’m over it. Big deal, I’m homosexual. According to identity politics, however, my sexuality is all important. It sets me apart from the mainstream. Well, duh, I never felt like part of the mainstream anyway. Not when it seemed to be filled exclusively with scary straight men, and not now, either, when it’s making room for scary gay ones.

It used to be an insult to accuse a guy of acting gay. Lately, it’s discreet praise. It means he’s sensitive, really well-dressed and probably friends with someone who knows Barbara Streisand. Accepting an Oscar for his role as a dying fag in Philadelphia, Tom Hanks even managed to make homosexuality sound patriotic. ‘God bless America’, he said, weeping for dead gay men like they were Veterans of Foreign Wars. Recently, the most unlikely people to have been cashing in on queer visibility, from Robert Altman, who is planning  a screen version of playwright Tony Kushner’s homo-anthem Angels In America, to Stephen Spielberg who produced the drag extravaganza To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar as if it were an all-American family entertainment.

Homosexuality is being repackaged and resold to Americans as a traditional family value. And homosexuals are emerging as the yuppies of the 1990s. They’re the new class of urban professionals with money to spend and aggressively marketed products to choose from. Absolut vodka, Ikea, Benetton, Dewar’s, Calvin Klein, Levis 501s, Brad Pitt and Nine Inch Nails are just a few of the commodities secretly or openly aimed at upwardly-mobile, straight-acting, white-appearing gay guys and the handful of lesbians with comparable economic power. It’s not enough to say that these people are patsies to a culture that takes their money without granting them their rights. The sad fact is that homosexuals are desperate to be exploited.

If you read any of the new or newly mainstream advertising-laden gay magazines, Out  or The Advocate or Genre, or if you saw the thousands of identically clad homosexuals who flooded New York City during the June 1994 Stonewall 25 celebration, you know where the gay community is headed. It’s not moving towards legal rights. It’s not focused on mourning its dead, or insisting self-preservingly on safer sex, or on finding a cure for breast cancer or AIDS. The collective impulse of the chic lesbians and the brave young gay Republicans who captivate the media today and titillate each other is shopping.

That’s what the gay magazines are for, to target and create a consumer demographic. Their interest isn’t politics of sexuality. Indeed, they’re so worried about offending their few loyal corporate advertisers with copy that is too sexy or political that the only thing homosexual about them is their shame. They tell the world that the characteristic homosexual act is compulsive spending. Otherwise, they’re merely a cheerleading squad for anything gay or remotely gay-friendly, no matter how banal. If Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered in the gay press. Then there are the ‘gay leaders’ who show up on the covers of gay magazines: Roseanne. Bill Clinton. Barbara Streisand. Marky Mark. During New York’s 1995 Gay Pride week, The Advocate put New York Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on its cover, which is like putting Joseph Mengele on the front page of Hadassah magazine on Yom Kippur.

Streisand of course is ubiquitous. Does everyone who has ever had a homosexual impulse owe her a personal thank-you? For what? For directing George Calin to play a sissy girl faggot in The Prince Of Tides? For leaving out of the film the lesbianism that was central to the book? Homosexuals are suffering from a collective case of Stockholm Syndrome – falling in love with our tormentors. How else to explain what makes Marky Mark a gay icon, except that he looks like the guy from high school gym class who spent half his time exciting your ashamed desire, and the other half shutting your head in his locker? Self-identified gay men lament that they have no national leaders, that the community can’t ‘support’ its leadership, that the gay rights movement is too diverse and mistrusting, too ‘hurt’ to walk behind a representative figure. But I don’t know a fag who wouldn’t follow Marky Mark into a firing squad if he so much as winked.

Gay magazines still arrive in your mailbox in discreet wrapping if you request it. But it would be far more startling for your neighbours and mail carriers to learn that you subscribe to truly politically radical and sex-obsessed journals, like bulletins from the religious right. Actually, there are a lot of similarities between the gay rights movement and Christian fundamentalism. Like homosexuals, Christians are increasingly open about their practices. Like some fervent queer activists, many Christians are shrill, dogmatic, paranoiac, combative and separatist. The difference is that while Christians rally round God, homosexuals only have sex. You don’t have to look your best to win God’s love, but if you’re searching for a gay man you’d better have tits. Gay men are such a straining, susceptible horde of self-loathing, hump-happy pleasure seekers that anyone with a decent set of biceps and a smidgen of media savvy could lead them where no fascist, or televangelist, has ever gone before.

The entire gay male community seems at times to be colluding against the possibility of independent thinking. The gay rights movement, too often, is focused on theatrics rather than on discourse: we want to be entertained and flattered, not criticised. As a group, self-identified gay men are especially resistant to thinking about issues of class and race, and they steadfastly deny their sexism. The irony of gay liberation is that it has made room in the mainstream only for those white men who are already privileged, and disinclined to share their wealth. This is the charge that many Christian fundamentalists make against us: that we are a bunch of affluent men who think our homosexuality shouldn’t interfere with our God-given right to rule the world. Fundamentalists aren’t exactly strangers to feeling both martyred and entitled, of course. Maybe that’s why, in vilifying us, they’re  partly right.

There was a time in my early twenties when being gay meant everything to me. I felt like my sexuality explained my entire life. It was the missing puzzle piece which, clicked into place, finally brought the whole picture into focus. The ten years after I came out, at age twenty-three, were a very heady time. I marched in Gay Pride celebrations throughout the 1980s. I got arrested for protesting because homosexuals weren’t allowed to join New York City’s St Patrick’s Day Parade. I went to ACT UP meetings and networked with all the smartest, cutest, most energetic dykes and fags in Manhattan, and thus, I thought naively, in the world. I hooked up with Queer Nation and raided straight bars. I remember one night precisely: we went to a skinhead dive in East Village and kissed each other every fifteen minutes. There were no skinheads in the bar that night  – the bar, in fact, was nearly empty – but it was a thrilling thing to do. It felt redemptive. It felt like I was facing down everyone who had ever called me ‘faggot’ in high school and saying ‘Yeah, so?’

That part of my life was important to my self-respect. I won’t disavow the years when I wore ‘QUEER NATION’ T-shirts or pinned pink triangles to my lapel. Lately, however, I want to trade all my gay paraphernalia for a button that says ‘NOT ME’. I’m postgay, a counterqueer, the ungrateful beneficiary of the gains of gay liberation. It’s not just that I’m frustrated with the mindlessness of the gay male community, and the elitism of its leadership. I’ve decided to reject the whole category of ‘gay’. Lately, I’ve been agreeing with Gore Vidal. In his introduction to the 1963 edition of his famous 1948 homo novel The City And The Pillar, he says, ‘There is of course no such thing as a homosexual. Despite current usage, the word is an adjective describing a sexual action, not a noun describing a recognisable type’.

Theoretically, Vidal is right. Effectively, however, there is currently no more recognisable type than the self-identified, politically active, sexually predatory gay American man, the kind of guy who wants, not equality for everyone, but entitlement for himself. And big pecs. If gay men ruled America, there would be tax credits for joining a gym. This was abundantly clear to me at the New York Stonewall 25 celebration, the twenty-fifth anniversary if the uprising that inspired the gay rights movement. It was a week-long festival of pod people twirling their multi-coloured freedom rings. There were so many hairless young men in nipple-hugging white T-shirts wandering the streets, that I began to wish it was 1969 again and paddy wagons would come and take them all away.

I spent the week with my best friend, the writer David B. Feinberg, who was dying of AIDS. He was having a hard time eating. Parasites were wearing away the undulant walls of his intestines, and he couldn’t keep anything down. Wherever we went, our main concern was finding the john. As it happened, when I wasn’t with David, I was reporting a magazine article about aspiring gay male porn stars. I went from club to club with members of my community, bare-chested men in cut-off blue jeans and black combat boots. Gay liberation had made it possible for every male homosexual in America to look the same and act too beautiful to talk to. If David had come along, he would have looked around the dance floor and said, ‘cute boy, cute boy, cute boy’. But David was home shitting his beauty into the toilet, and the cute boys he might have wanted were busy trying to look like storm troopers.

In our fervour to be part of the mainstream, we are creating stereotypes about ourselves that are just as clichéd as anything the religious right might dream up. This is evident in openly gay playwright Terence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, a recent Tony Award winning Broadway hit. The play concerns some upwardly mobile, well-dressed gay white men – artists and performers and urban professionals- who spend summer weekends together at a lovely country house in Upstate New York. They swim, play tennis, make meals, serenade each other on the piano with Chopin Waltzes, sunbathe nude, lament about AIDS and finally, triumphantly, dress up in tutus and dance to Swan Lake.

The play is full of sentimental notions of gay male solidarity: all gay men, except for the ones who know about musical comedy, have beautiful bodies; they are all epicures; they love to sit outside in the sun; if they’re bitchy, it’s only because they’re wounded; if they die it’s somebody else’s fault. Their pain is cured by women’s clothing. Their desire is aroused, most fervently, by Puerto Ricans. Of course, there is an equally sentimental and misleading version of the 1990s male homosexual as an angry young queer. Picture a line of brave protestors confronting police officers in riot gear. The activists’ faces are contorted in rage. ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’ they chant, their voices raised as one in agonised  lament.

I have been such a radical queer, and I have spent cosy weekends at some rich man’s country house, eating gourmet food and talking politics and art. It’s easy for me to spend time in both camps because they are essentially the same. Nevertheless, critics from both sides support a false distinction between them. In A Place At The Table, self-identified ‘conservative’ gay writer Bruce Bawer contrasts ‘subculture’ gays with conservative ones, ‘elegantly turned out’ gay men who go to church on Sunday. Radical queer says Bawer is self-loathing and anti-sex. But the two groups are haggling over style, not ideology. Both Bower and Queer Nation belong to the privileged upper tenth of the gay community, the class of urban artists and professionals who dictate gay politics to the rest of the country. There are no statistics to prove it of course, but if mainstream means ‘majority’, I bet the mainstream of homosexuality in America today is in the Marines.

And in the Navy. And living on public assistance in Idaho. And leaving Latin American enclaves in Los Angeles to cruise for gringos wearing beautiful sweaters in gay bars lining Santa Monica Boulevard. The mainstream of homosexuality in America today is living with Mom and Dad in a two-family house in Whitestone, Queens, acting ‘straight’ all day with friends held over from high school, but getting on homosexual phone-sex lines at night and saying things like, ‘Anybody out there like a lot of body contact?’ Mainstream homosexuals are straight guys who go to gay bars once a week on Fridays and warn their girlfriends not to ask them what they’re doing on their one night out. They are lesbians whose order of preference for sexual partners is 1) straight women, 2) bisexual men, 3) other lesbians.

Yet the gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of a couple of middle-class white guys out shopping for furniture, is the one that has been identified as the mainstream. It’s a lie. It is a lie for which radical dykes and fags are just as culpable as assimilationist lesbians and gays. The true division in the gay community is between entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges who feel represented more by Reader’s Digest and Soldier of Fortune magazine than by The Advocate or Genre or 10 Percent or Frontiers or Deneuve or On Our Backs or Out. If indeed they have even heard of them.

Nothing reveals the self-absorption of the gay ruling class more patently and damningly than its response to the problems of being homosexual in the military. Radical gays, hiding behind a veneer of pacifism, are especially guilty of classism and elitism in this instance. During the 1993 debate about President Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military, radical queers very nearly colluded with the anti-gay politicos, like Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who organised the Congressional hearings on tolerating homosexuals in the armed forces. ‘If they’re in the military they get what they deserve’, homo radicals told me, over and over, throughout the hearings.

Knee-jerk anti-military feeling dictated the radicals’ official response. And a widespread and often petty mistrust of journalist Randy Shilts prevented the homo community from taking into account Shilts’ devastating 1993 study of gay life in the military, Conduct Unbecoming. Shilts recounts severe and repeated civil rights violations, inflicted by military brass on gays or suspected gays, most of them women and/or African-American. The practice of homo witch-hunting actually intensified during the 1980s, roughly paralleling the AIDS crisis and ruining thousands of lives. But the activist gay community largely ignored the evidence in Shilts’ book, because many gay men were still sulking over Shilts’ role in closing gay bathhouses in San Francisco in the early 1980s.

It’s more important to get blown by a grunt in public than it is to defend his civil rights. Fags like to fetishise marines, in part because of their mostly working-class appeal. But if somebody in the armed forces complains about how the military treats him, a lot of gay men tune out. ‘Abolish the military altogether’, radical fags say, overlooking the fact that enlisting  in the armed forces is often the most viable economic alternative for working-class young men. If you’re seventeen years old and you don’t like musical comedy, and you don’t want to move to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and you don’t have enough money for college; and if you know that you like sweaty, male environments; and if you want to get the hell out of your small town, why not the Marines? Not every gay man in America is a chorus boy or a sensitive poet or a Harvard MBA.

Of course there were plenty of gay lawyers and Washington lobbyists who did try to help gays in the military. But they were defeated by a false sense of security. They assumed that because they were middle class white guys they would naturally get what they wanted. The gay rights movement, from radicals to conservatives, is crippled by a sense of entitlement. Sometimes I think the difference between the two factions is just a question of contrasting fashion statements. In either case, I’m no longer dressing for either party. I’m sick of gay men. The next time I see a bunch of dudes from Jersey beating on a faggot from Greenwich Village, I’m going to cheer them on. Being gay used to feel like an expression of difference, but I lost my otherness and now I want it back. I’m not gay anymore. I’m not even queer. I’d almost rather be mistaken for a registered Republican. After all, there’s no distinction anymore between conservative Republicans and self-identified homosexuals. A conservative is someone who wants to keep what he has. So is a gay man. The gay rights movement is largely helmed by white men who crave what they were promised as children, but denied as adults because of their sexuality; they want their guaranteed access to power. And they’re not necessarily interested in extending that power to you, just because you happen to like having sex, sometimes, with guys.

by John Weir (Chapter Three of Anti-Gay (1996) ed. Mark Simpson –Freedom Editions, p26-34).

ACT UP! And ‘Radical’ Gay Elitism

I have already posted about a recent photography exhibition of AIDS activism. 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the start of Act Up! the ‘radical’ queer organisation that campaigned on AIDS/HIV issues in the 80s and 90s.  Larry Kramer, who worked for Act UP! writes a quite empassioned piece in Huffpo this week. He says:

‘I’m an ungrateful sonofabitch. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which helped save my life, is 25 years old, and I am going to be 77 years old come June, and I should be grateful, right?

It’s difficult to be grateful when the AIDS plague is worse than ever all over the world and the two organizations I helped found to stop it are, if not no more, then in such pathetic shape as to almost be no more.

It’s hard to blame these remnants of former greatness when the gay population of this country continues to be so passive, so apathetic, so shut-the-fuck-up-with-all-your-message-queen-shit…

At the height of the AIDS plague, from 1990 to 1995, when we were dying so fast we couldn’t keep up with the count, of all the gays in the United States — be it 10 million or 20 million (will we ever find out?) — no more than 5,000 of us at the most fought in ACT UP’s 100 or so chapters to save the lives of our brothers and sisters. All the rest of the 10? 20? million gays would not fight to save their own lives. I never could figure that one out. Still can’t.’

Well I might be able to help Larry figure out why the majority of non-straight people do not support ‘radical’ organisations like Act UP!(his aside that ‘will we ever find out?’ how many gays there are in America alludes to the fact many people have same-sex sex without being ‘out and proud’ gays) . I am using a chapter from Anti Gay (ed Mark Simpson), written in 1996, when Act UP! was at its height. It is by John Weir and it is quite illuminating. He writes:

‘The entire gay male community seems at times to be colluding against the possibility of independent thinking. The gay rights movement, too often, is focused on theatrics rather than on discourse: we want to be entertained and flattered, not criticised. As a group, self-identified gay men are especially resistant to thinking about issues of class and race, and they steadfastly deny their sexism. The irony of gay liberation is that it has made room in the mainstream only for those white men who are already privileged, and disinclined to share their wealth. This is the charge that many Christian fundamentalists make against us: that we are a bunch of affluent men who think our homosexuality shouldn’t interfere with our God-given right to rule the world. Fundamentalists aren’t exactly strangers to feeling both martyred and entitled, of course. Maybe that’s why, in vilifying us, they’re  partly right…

I spent the week with my best friend, the writer David B. Feinberg, who was dying of AIDS. He was having a hard time eating. Parasites were wearing away the undulant walls of his intestines, and he couldn’t keep anything down. Wherever we went, our main concern was finding the john. As it happened, when I wasn’t with David, I was reporting a magazine article about aspiring gay male porn stars. I went from club to club with members of my community, bare-chested men in cut-off blue jeans and black combat boots. Gay liberation had made it possible for every male homosexual in America to look the same and act too beautiful to talk to. If David had come along, he would have looked around the dance floor and said, ‘cute boy, cute boy, cute boy’. But David was home shitting his beauty into the toilet, and the cute boys he might have wanted were busy trying to look like storm troopers…

Both Bawer and Queer Nation belong to the privileged upper tenth of the gay community, the class of urban artists and professionals who dictate gay politics to the rest of the country. There are no statistics to prove it of course, but if mainstream means ‘majority’, I bet the mainstream of homosexuality in America today is in the Marines…

And in the Navy. And living on public assistance in Idaho. And leaving Latin American enclaves in Los Angeles to cruise for gringos wearing beautiful sweaters in gay bars lining Santa Monica Boulevard. The mainstream of homosexuality in America today is living with Mom and Dad in a two-family house in Whitestone, Queens, acting ‘straight’ all day with friends held over from high school, but getting on homosexual phone-sex lines at night and saying things like, ‘Anybody out there like a lot of body contact?’ Mainstream homosexuals are straight guys who go to gay bars once a week on Fridays and warn their girlfriends not to ask them what they’re doing on their one night out. They are lesbians whose order of preference for sexual partners is 1) straight women, 2) bisexual men, 3) other lesbians….

Yet the gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of a couple of middle-class white guys out shopping for furniture, is the one that has been identified as the mainstream. It’s a lie. It is a lie for which radical dykes and fags are just as culpable as assimilationist lesbians and gays. The true division in the gay community is between entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges who feel represented more by Reader’s Digest and Soldier of Fortune magazine than by The Advocate or Genre or 10 Percent or Frontiers or Deneuve or On Our Backs or Out. If indeed they have even heard of them…

I’m not gay anymore. I’m not even queer. I’d almost rather be mistaken for a registered Republican. After all, there’s no distinction anymore between conservative Republicans and self-identified homosexuals. A conservative is someone who wants to keep what he has. So is a gay man. The gay rights movement is largely helmed by white men who crave what they were promised as children, but denied as adults because of their sexuality; they want their guaranteed access to power. And they’re not necessarily interested in extending that power to you, just because you happen to like having sex, sometimes, with guys.’

The Softer They Come – Review of The Declining Significance Of Homophobia

The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality  By Mark McCormack  New York: Oxford University Press 2012.

This book, The Declining Significance of Homophobia[i], is, according to its author, a ‘Good News story’(p xxv). I capitalise ‘Good News’ for reasons that shall become clear. But focusing first on the main thrust of the thesis (and there is no reference to it but I am certain this is a book written out of a PhD thesis), the ‘good news’ is how teenage boys in the UK are less homophobic than in previous eras. Good news indeed.

McCormack’s research, with the fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2009, consists of ethnography in three school sixth forms in the South of England. He used participant observation and semi-structured interviews with teenage boys/young men between the ages of 16 and 18. The argument he makes is clear:  in line with Eric Anderson (2009)’s theories of ‘softening’ or ‘inclusive’ masculinities, McCormack tells us that the young people he studied do not marginalise and discriminate against each other on the basis of sexual orientation, or even perceived orientation. And this is because homophobia has declined in our culture, since the ‘homohysteria’ that characterised the 1980s and 1990s (Anderson 2009) (p32-36).

There are some positive aspects to this book. One is simply that I always value qualitative research, and especially ethnography. In this age, that McCormack himself describes as being ‘a world in which the social sciences must demonstrate their impact and pay their way’ (p 9), in-depth studies that focus on people rather than numbers are refreshing. I am also pleased that he overtly challenges what he calls a ‘victimisation framework’ (p130) often adopted by people from LGBT communities. McCormack acknowledges the ‘agency’ (p32) people have to contest their and others’ oppression. This goes against recent research, for example by the UK LGBT organisation, Stonewall, (p61) that I have found to be scare-mongering about bullying and the hopeless ‘plight’ of LGBT youth.

Another plus to The Declining Significance of Homophobia, is that even in 2012, feminist-dominated gender studies does not adequately cover the experiences and accounts of boys and men. As Tom Martin’s[ii] recent (failed) attempt to sue the Gender Institute at the LSE for discrimination against men[iii] suggests, whilst the name ‘women’s studies’ has been lost from most university gender departments, the bias against men and masculinity remains. McCormack rightly puts his book in the context of a small amount of existing research on men, boys and masculinities in the field of education, citing work (p xx –xxv) by academics such as Mac an Ghaill (1994, 2007), Epstein and Johnson (1994) and Rivers (1995). In doing so he critiques the concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, developed by R Connell (2005). I have criticisms of Connell’s theories, not least because they reinforce the misguided, in my view, notion that ‘patriarchy’ continues to allow ‘orthodox’ ‘masculine’ men as a group to dominate and discriminate against women (and ‘effeminate’ men) as a group (p39). McCormack does not let go of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, or of a feminist perspective (p xxix). But at least he is critiquing Connell’s ideas, not accepting them unquestioningly.

Unfortunately I have some major problems with McCormack’s book. My biggest issue is with his statement that this is a ‘Good News story’. Whilst McCormack  is very critical of the historical role in religion in reinforcing homophobic attitudes (p59), and in particular ‘evangelical Christianity’ (p59),  I think his book reads like an ‘evangelical’ tract itself, spreading the ‘Good News’ that homophobia is on the decline. There are two main reasons for my feeling. One is that his book relies incredibly heavily on the ideas of one man: his former- PhD supervisor, and ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson ( pvii). McCormack refers to Anderson’s ‘vision’, his ‘academic critiques’ and his ‘exciting theoretical developments’ in awe (pvii). The other reason I think the book is ‘evangelical’ is that McCormack also dismisses out of hand some very important work by other theorists in the field. It reads to me like this is Anderson’s Good News, and ‘academic critique’ of Anderson’s work is not encouraged by McCormack at all.

Anderson’s theories are used by McCormack to explain everything! Whilst I can see that McCormack is using Anderson’s theories of ‘inclusive’ and ‘softening’ masculinity to explain the demise in homophobic language and behaviours amongst contemporary teenage boys, I am less clear as to why he also relies on Anderson almost alone, to explain the homophobic cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, including the devastating impact of AIDS on people’s lives and attitudes. Other writers who are missing from McCormack’s book who have carefully examined the recent history of homophobia (including AIDS), include Mark Simpson (in Male Impersonators 1994 and in Anti- Gay 1996), David Halperin (In How To Do The History of Homosexuality, 2002), Steven Seidman et al (in Queer Theory/Sociology 1996), Steven Zeeland (in Barrack Buddies 1993) and Keith Boykin (in Beyond The Down Low 2005)[v].

The implied ‘defence’ made by McCormack for ignoring and/or dismissing other theorists and writers is in itself worrying. In part, his logic consists of his assertion that poststructuralism is invalid as an epistemological and theoretical basis for research on gender and sexuality. With a grudging concession to what he calls ‘soft’ poststructuralism (p8), that he says maintains that social identity categories have some use, McCormack is damning about poststructuralist theory. He writes:

‘…poststructural scholarship, being wedded to transgression and subversion, cannot theoretically legitmate particular forms of anti-assimilation; it must valorise all or none. That is, postructuralism does not have the conceptual tools to distinguish (‘bad’) sexist and homophobic norms from (‘good’) normative ideals such as antidiscrimination and law-abidance (Nussbaum, 199a) (p7).

This is an inaccurate and unfair interpretation of poststructuralism. What McCormack is doing, is equating all poststructural theory, with ‘relativism’. But many poststructuralist writers have grappled with the potential for their work to become ‘relativist’, and have shown clearly why it is not. Writers and theorists such as Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Bordo and Butler have all explained why their interest in the ‘deconstruction’ of meaning, does not and should not necessarily lead to a belief in the dissolution of meaning. And we only have to read accounts of Foucault being influenced by the Mai 1968 ‘manifestations’[vi], or watch youtube footage of Butler addressing the crowds at the 2011 Occupy demonstrations in New York[vii] to be convinced of their commitment to social justice and political activism. Even Baudrillard[viii], who was less resistant to the idea that deconstruction might lead to a complete obliteration of meaning, seems to me, to have actually very potently and politically predicted the ‘internet age’ with its cacophony of voices, its rows and rows of flat screens, and its ‘hyperreal’ imagery. If it has not disappeared altogether, then in the 21^st century, surely ‘reality’ is much harder to grasp , to analyse and to categorise than it was in previous eras?

But it is Judith Butler who McCormack saves most of his anti-poststructuralist ‘zeal’ for. He uses her as a reference to state how ‘obscure’ a lot of poststructuralist writing is:

‘…the writing style of many poststructuralist theorists is so dense and obscure that it is understandable to only a subgroup of academics (Butler,1990). And they only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

He goes onto cite those (including, of course, Eric Anderson), who have criticised Butler’s writing:

‘… In a searing and accurate critique, Martha Nussbaum (1999a) argues that this writing is a wilful attempt to ‘bully’ readers into docility, and Anderson (2009) calls it a ‘violent, shameful act of academic exclusion’ (p33).’

Whilst McCormack calls Gender Trouble (1990) ‘impenetrable’, he provides no evidence in the form of quotes from Butler’s seminal work to back up his statement. We the readers are expected to trust McCormack implicitly in his analysis. And, if we may have been so foolhardy as to have read Butler ourselves, McCormack tells us confidently that those who read and understood her work, ‘only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

McCormack  is using his book in part to challenge the queer (and poststructuralist) ‘turn’ (p6) that took place in gender and sexuality theory, and is attempting to replace it with something different, something better, something more ‘Good News’. He writes, towards the end of the book:

‘The consolidation of heterosexual identities in these settings means that decreased homophobia does not necessarily result in a dissipation of sexual identities. This would suggest that, and that deconstruction has its emancipatory limits (Anderson, 2009; Kirsch 2000; Weeks 2007) (p133).

Having earlier dismissed postructuralist queer theory as ‘obscure’ and ‘elitist’, McCormack is able to assert his belief that ‘identity-movement politics’ is the way forward for LGBT young people. I strongly disagree with this perspective, partly as a result of my PhD studies and post-doctoral research into ‘identity politics’[ix], and partly as a result of my own personal, very negative experience of ‘identity politics’ in action.[x] [xi]

The way in which McCormack’s attachment to Gay identity politics is shown in the book, is via his endless use of the word ‘gay’ to describe young people who do not identify as ‘straight’. He talks about ‘gay discourse’ (p114), ‘gay-friendly schools’ (p121), ‘gay students’ (p130), the ‘gay rights movement’ (p57) and ‘gay men’. McCormack mentions at the beginning that some of the young men at the sixth forms (UK equivalent of American High Schools) he studied, identify as bisexual, and one identifies as trans. But throughout the text he prioritises the term ‘gay’ to cover all LGBT young people, and in doing so, I believe, does most of them a great disservice.  The theoretical justification he uses for this is worrying to me. Not satisfied with rejecting poststructuralism’s insights into problematic identity categories, he uses biological determinist theory to ‘close down’ the debate about how we come to be who we are. In particular he uses uncritically the widely-contested[xii] (see also: Simpson 1994) work of sex ‘scientist’ Simon Le Vay. McCormack writes:

‘Post-structuralism and social constructionism both recognise that current conceptions of gender and sexuality are socially constructed and historically situated (Foucault 1984, Weeks 1985). This means that although one’s own sexual orientation is biologically determined (Le Vay 2010, [emphasis mine]), the way society understands forms of sexuality is determined by the politics and people of the time, and this will vary across cultures.’(p6).

This ‘born this way’[xiii] version of sexual identity is gaining traction in the 21^st century. Of course the subject is still debated, but the dominant view seems to be one which I find highly conservative, and indeed oppressive: that our sexual orientations are determined before birth, and the rest of our lives are somehow enslaved to them. I personally don’t identify my sexual orientation, not out of some political ‘stunt’, but because, aged 41, I still don’t know what it is! And that is not through lack of having tried to find out, in both ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ ways[xiv].

By privileging ‘gay’ terminology in his book, I think McCormack, even on his own ‘identity politics’ terms, is not helping bisexual, trans, asexual and non-identified young people find their way in the world, or indeed find their voices and experiences in the literature.  Another of my criticisms of McCormack’s exposition of his research findings, is that he does not give enough space to the accounts of the young people in the study. Apparently he conducted over twenty semi-structured interviews in the three research sites (p15), but hardly includes any quotes from those interviews. When he does quote the students he is very quick to impose his interpretation of their words, rather than giving them a chance to speak for themselves. [xv]

I have one final criticism of McCormack’s book, which extends to a general criticism of masculinities theory and research overall – it relates to what could be seen as an unmentioned, under-researched, unacceptable great big pink ‘elephant in the room’.[xvi] The elephant’s name? Metrosexuality. McCormack makes one single, cursory reference to metrosexuality in his book, in relation to work by David Coad (2008) on metrosexuality and sports (p64). But I think his whole thesis and his research would be improved immensely by giving serious consideration to this ‘21^st century’ phenomenon, of men expressing their ‘desire to be desired’ via consumer and media culture (Simpson 2011)[xvii]. According to Mark Simpson, originator and key theorist of the concept of metrosexuality,

‘Con­trary to what you have been told, met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is not about flip-flops and facials, man-bags or man­scara. Or about men becom­ing ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’.  It’s about men becom­ing every­thing. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sex­ual divi­sion of bath­room and bed­room labour.  It’s the end of sex­u­al­ity as we’ve known it.’ (Simpson 2011)[xviii]

And there lies a clue as to why McCormack ignores Simpson’s ground-breaking theories. Because, according to Simpson, metrosexuality, including ALL men’s display of ‘feminine’ traits such as narcissism and passivity, marks the beginning of the end of sexual identity categories[xix]. And it is sexual identity categories that McCormack is so keen to hold onto. Also, McCormack’s mention of young men using facebook and the internet for example, would make much more sense if put in the context of Simpson’s theories of ‘mediated’ and ‘commodified’ masculinities (Simpson, 2011).

McCormack and Anderson are not only holding onto gender and sexuality categories. They seem very attached, additionally, to ‘binary’ notions of gender. They talk about masculinity in terms of (having once been) ‘hard’ and now becoming ‘soft’. McCormack  seems to be uncritical of the categories used by both theorists and young people themselves, of ‘masculine’ men being ‘hard’ and ‘effeminate’ or ‘camp’ men being ‘soft’. This view is critiqued comprehensively by Mark Simpson, who highlights how machismo is actually often ‘camp’[xx], and how men who attempt to appear ‘uber-masculine’ often display very ‘feminine’ traits.[xxi]

The final paragraph of McCormack’s book is a defence against imagined ‘critics’ of his work. He says that if readers accept his position that homophobia is declining amongst young people, they will accept his research as a valid addition to the literature, documenting this ‘changing social zeitgeist’. Well, this reader does and doesn’t accept the validity of McCormack’s Good News. On one hand, as I stated above, I see it as a valuable (if flawed) addition to the qualitative and ethnographic literature in masculinity in education studies. On the other hand, I see it as an ‘evangelical’ sermon on the importance of Eric Anderson’s theory of ‘softening’ and ‘inclusive’ masculinity, that, ironically, is not inclusive at all. For it dismisses the proven value of most poststructuralism to the study of sex and gender, it clings on to sexual identity categories that are becoming less and less relevant as the 21^st century progresses, and it ignores the ‘social zeitgeist ‘ of metrosexual masculinity that has been clearly documented by Mark Simpson since 1994. In short, I found this Good News story somewhat depressing, and am much relieved, having finished reading it, to return to the ‘exciting theoretical developments’, not of Eric Anderson, but of wonderful writers such as Simpson, Butler, Foucault and The Daddy of sex and gender theory himself, Freud.

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Dr Elly Tams is an author and freelance researcher. She also publishes and blogs under the pen-name, Quiet Riot Girl. Her debut novella, Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls, is about a world in which Foucault, the famous French homosexual philosopher, in fact (in fiction) had a daughter.

An edited version of this piece originally appeared at The Sociological Imagination: http://sociologicalimagination.org/

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NOTES

[i] McCormack, M (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, New York: Oxford University Press

[ii] https://twitter.com/#!/Sexismbusters/status/179639793880281088

[iii] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/rights-feminism-gender-british

[iv] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/dear-feminism-the-end-of-the-road/

[v] Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators (Cassell), Simpson, M (1996) Anti-Gay, Freedom Editions

[vi] Foucault. M (2000) [1980]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press

[vii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ

[viii] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

[ix] http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_gendering_of_work_in_Sheffield_s_cul.html?id=PPNeHQAACAAJ&redir_es

[x] http://graunwatch.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/bona-drag-paul-burston-and-his-naff-polari-prize/

[xi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/against-feminisms/

[xii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_LeVay

[xiii] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/born-this-gay/

[xiv] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unethical-Sluts-ebook/dp/B005ZU10HW

[xv] Also, as his research is not ‘action research’[xv] it is not clear how young people could use his findings to improve their lives. That task seems to be left to academics, educators and adult ‘activists’.

[xvi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/the-metrosexual-elephant-in-the-room/ Mark Simpson first described metrosexuality to me as ‘the elephant in the room’ but this is anecdotal. I have used his phrase since.

[xvii] Simpson, M (2011) Metrosexy, Amazon Kindle

[xviii] http://www.marksimpson.com/metrosexy/

[xix] Simpson, M ‘The End of Heterosexuality As We’ve Known It’ (2010):

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/11/the-end-of-heterosexuality-as-weve-known-it/

[xx] http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/11/15/america-to-machismo-how-do-i-quit-you/

[xxi] http://deathatthemall.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/big-tits-masochism-and-transformation-in-bodybuilding/

AIDS Activism Past And Present

December 14, 1985

San Francisco AIDS Vigil: The 49th continuous day of people with AIDS and their supporters chaining themselves to a federal building in Civic Center to demand attention to the AIDS crisis.

© 1985 Daniel Nicoletta

http://www.queerty.com/art-san-franciscos-militant-aids-activism-in-black-and-white-20120318/#ixzz1pYRPdAVA

I have been reading some AIDS history recently, and one thing that strikes me is just how recent it is.

Michel Foucault died in 1984, and the cause of his death was initially not publicised. This photo, from the following year, is a reminder that it was down to ordinary people, some of them very ill, and their activism, that the disease became known and understood, and, in the West at least, became quite easily treatable.

AIDS and HIV activists continue on throughout the world, trying to bring the same level of awareness, care and treatments globally as exist in America and the UK.

Matt Greenall who works in this area, in international development writes a great blog called, poetically: ‘epidreamiology’.

http://epidreamiology.posterous.com/

Wilhelm It Was Really Quite Something

 

This is Mark Simpson on Morrissey, his long-term lover and anti-life partner, at the Spectator Arts Blog

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Because the 80s is the decade that actually ended the 19th Century – the 90s was just an after-party clean-up operation – it’s also the decade that never came to an end itself. In fact, the 80s just won’t go away.

Economy in (‘Big Bang’) recession. Tories in power. Cuts on the table. Riots on the streets. Royal weddings on the telly. The Falklands becoming a fighting issue. And my mother complaining about Morrissey. (‘I see that chap you like so much has been in the papers again. Ridiculous man! And he still can’t sing!’)

As Madonna might put it, it’s all a bit reductive.

Everyone has been enjoying moaning about Morrissey lately – just like the good old days. In case you somehow missed it, at a performance in Argentina last week, his band appeared in t-shirts printed with the charming message ‘WE HATE WILLIAM AND KATE’ (remember 80s protest t-shirts?).

Perhaps worried this might be overlooked back home, the former Smiths front-man also offered this bouquet to his Argentine fans about those bitterly contested, sparsely-populated rocks in the South Atlantic: ‘Everybody knows they belong to you’.

The Times, Mirror, Telegraph, Sun and Mail all dutifully denounced Morrissey’s big mouth.The Guardian for its part ran an earnest discussion between two music critics titled: ‘Is Morrissey a national treasure? (The answer seemed to be ‘yes – but a very naughty one.’)

Not bad for a 52-year-old crooner currently without a record contract. But then, just like that other 80s diva keen on hairspray and frilly-collared blouses, we’ll never entirely be rid of him.

The British experience of the 80s is forever dominated by two very difficult personalities. Both from the north, both unafraid to speak their mind, and both possessing a gender all of their own.

And while one was a working class militant vegetarian anarchist Sandie Shaw fan with a flair for homoerotic imagery, and the other a bossy petit bourgeois social Darwinist and devotee of General Pinochet who famously outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, both of them were radicals on a revenge trip.

But, while Margaret Thatcher owned the 80s, Steven Patrick Morrissey stole its youth. Or at least, the youth that didn’t want to be a part of Thatcher’s 80s. The Smiths were not just an ‘alternative’ band: they were the alternative that Maggie said didn’t exist.

In fact, The Smiths were reviled by almost everyone at the time – Fleet Street, the BBC (they were effectively banned from daytime Radio 1), the record business (they were signed to a teeny-weeny Indie label), and indeed most of the record buying public (their singles struggled to even get into the top 20).

But they have become the heart of a decade that didn’t have one. They are now the band that everyone liked – two or three decades after the event.

Including, most famously, David Cameron, who used The Smiths and Morrissey as a Tory rebranding and detoxifying tool at least as important as those melting glaciers he went to gawp at. Declaring The Smiths his favourite group not long after gaining the leadership of the ‘Nasty Party’, he was even pictured, if memory serves me right, with a copy of Morrissey’s 2005 album Ringleader of the Tormentors on his desk.

Cameron, the former Carlton PR, was telling us that the Tories were now cool and sensitive, that they had assimilated the social and cultural anti-Thatcher reaction.

But Morrissey, whatever you may think of him, isn’t a man to be assimilated lightly. Especially by a Chipping Norton Tory.

When, in 2010, his estranged former Smiths collaborator Johnny Marr tweeted that he ‘forbade’ David Cameron from liking the Smiths, animal rights activist Morrissey endorsed him, adding:

‘David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence.’

No-one can be genuinely surprised that someone who called an album The Queen is Deadis fiercely anti-Royalist. No-one can be shocked that the man who sang ‘Irish Blood English Heart’ is no fan of the remnants of the British Empire.

And let’s not forget his famous 1984 quip: ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed’, or the track ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ for his 1988 album Viva Hate.

Unless, that is, they hoped that Morrissey had mellowed with age and become some sort of singing Stephen Fry with a quiff. Morrissey’s views haven’t changed. Morrissey hasn’t changed. He hasn’t grown up.

Still an adolescent curmudgeon, an otherworldly prophet from Stretford, he’s just older and thicker around the middle. He did after all promise us again and again that he wouldn’t change, couldn’t change.

It’s we, his fans, who have changed. If we’re embarrassed by his antics it may be because we’ve finally become the people we used to hate.

Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/7714548/morrissey-hasnt-changed.thtml