Tag Archives: queer

Mourning, Melancholy, and “Paris is Burning”

Queer Culture, Queer Film Theory, Queer Filmmaking, queer pedagogy, Queer Theory (General), , ,

I recently taught Jennie Livingston’s famous documentary Paris is Burning to a group of undergraduates.  As I was watching the film, a number of realizations struck me at once:  most of my students were not born when the film was released, let alone shot (1990 and the 1980s, respectively); the particular iteration of the subculture brought to life in the documentary has faded into history; many of the participants are also no longer with us.  These realizations, commonsensical as they may seem, struck me with a particularly intense force, evoking a profound sense of melancholy that has haunted me frequently of late as I have begun to think about the ways in which contemporary gay politics, and gay culture more generally, seems determined to forget the eras that preceded the present.

In some ways, such deliberate amnesia is completely understandable.  It’s no secret that the 20th Century was, in many ways, incredibly homophobic, and LGBT people lived precarious lives, with the threat of death and violence never far away.  Indeed, part of what makes Paris is Burning such a powerful and evocative film is that it manages to capture that, showing us a world in which parody and irony are a means of coping with a world that cares little for the lives of the poor, people of colour, or LGBT folks (or, gasp, someone who occupies all three positions simultaneously).  The death of Venus Xtravaganza, briefly yet viscerally alluded to in the film, serves as a potent reminder of just how fragile queer life was (and remains).  The film continually asks:  how do you cope with life, knowing that it can be snuffed out at any moment?  That question is just as pertinent, and just as difficult to answer, now as it was then.

Though I am, by most standards, a fairly young ga-y man, I’ve always felt a peculiar affinity to the generations that preceded me.  Unlike so many young LGBT people, I do not see my elders as hold-overs from the bad old days before we had gay marriage and gay people all over television, from the relatively asexual Cam and Mitch of Modern Family to the hyper-sexual Connor of How to Get Away with Murder (which, I’m sad to say, is the implicit if not always stated position adopted by all too many in the younger generation).  Perhaps this is a result of my own social position as a queer person originally from Appalachia, which has lagged behind the coasts in terms of queer acceptance.  Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that my undergraduate queer experience was shaped by several older homos who still had a foot in that older world.

It also has to do, however, with my own sort of melancholic temperament, which helps explain why films such as Paris is Burning and even a more recent film such as The Normal Heart strike such a chord with me.  There is something profoundly affective about these types of films, that provide us a glimpse into a world forever gone, yet which they allow us to touch, even if just for a brief time.  Films set or filmed in the 1980s in particular always carry this sense of mourning and melancholy for me; I can’t help but remember the generation that came of age during the height of the AIDS pandemic, when I was just a child and had no true consciousness of the scale of the conflict.  Films like Paris is Burning allow me, as a younger gay man, to gain at least a temporary access to the world that preceded mine, even as it reminds me that that world has forever vanished.

Watching this film, I am powerfully reminded of the dangers of forgetfulness that perpetually haunt us.  When I hear comments like those recently made by Russell Tovey about his gratitude about not being effeminate, I can’t help but think that part of what makes his comments possible is a terrible bout of amnesia that keeps him, and others like him, from remembering the key roles played (and still played) by “effeminate” gay men.  Let’s not forget that the riots at Stonewall were started by drag queens who had had enough of the bullshit, and that it has long been the more “effeminate” gay mean leading the charge in terms of challenging patriarchy and homophobia (which almost always work in tandem).  Watching Paris is Burning is, for me at least (and I hope for others), a way of both remembering and mourning the queer past.  Rather than strenuously disavowing the melancholia that such mourning inevitably brings with it, I think that perhaps it would do us all a collective good to embrace this side of ourselves, to experience the uncomfortable, and sometimes painful, aspects of our past so that we can truly grasp the nature of our present, and the possibilities of our future.

What We Mean When We Ask “Are You SURE You’re Gay?”

Gender, Queer Culture, Queer Theory (General), Subjectivity, , , , , , , ,

We’ve all either heard or it said it.  Upon hearing that our gay friend doesn’t like musicals, or has never seen The Golden Girls, or doesn’t like and/or has not heard of Judy Garland, we inevitably ask that unfortunate person, “are you sure you’re gay?”  Now, most of us probably say this in good fun, and most of us are guilty of it (even as we pretend outrage when someone else says it), but the important question is, what do we mean when we ask it?  (Let me be clear at the outset that this post will mainly deal with gay men, as it is that experiential position with which I am most familiar.  I welcome gay women to share their experiences in the comments section).

As with any expression that gets bandied about, it raises a host of questions that have multiplicitous and often contradictory answers.  The simplest answer is this:  when we ask someone if they are sure they are gay, what we are really asking is whether they have been adopted into or trained in the ways of gay culture.  Not whether they, in fact, desire and have sex with men, but whether they have, as it were, learned what it means to be gay, i.e. learned the ropes of what constitutes the gay way of life.

As numerous scholars—including such queer theory luminaries as David Halperin, Alexander Doty, Steven Cohan, and Brett Farmer—have observed, gay men, as a result of their marginal place in 20th (and, to a lesser extent, 21st) Century culture, have developed strategies for appropriating straight mass culture in ways that make it meaningful for them.  These have, typically, included such “gay” staples as Judy Garland and her films, the Hollywood and Broadway musicals, glamorous female stars like Dietrich, Crawford, and Davis (if you don’t know their first names, you might not be, ahem, gay), and female-centered television series such as The Golden Girls and Designing Women.  Though obviously and primarily intended for straight audiences, these texts and personas have become objects of gay male worship, to the extent that liking them has come to be equated with being gay, or at least to having a gay sensibility (after all, there’s no law stating that a perfectly heterosexual man can’t love Judy or Dorothy or Bette as much as a gay man).

“Gay” has, however, come to assume an ever-increasing number of cultural functions and desires, including fashion, design, and all things tasteful.  Again, part of the reason may be that these professions were often relegated—and by this I mean the dominant, patriarchal culture saw it as such—to women or those who, because of their gender performance (not, necessarily, their object choice) failed to live up to the masculine standard.  What better way to make one’s way in a patriarchal/homophobic world than to master those arts that have been denigrated as beneath the notice of the masculinist dominant order?

Of course, all of this has begun to change, as gay men have become increasingly visible and increasingly mainstreamed.  There is a persistent denial of “gayness” within gay male culture, which usually translates, in the world of online dating at least, into:  “Masculine guy here.  No fems or queens.”  Read:  DON’T REALLY BE GAY, ‘CAUSE I’M NOT THAT, DUDE.  I MAY DIG OTHER GUYS, BUT I’M A REAL MAN, NOT A PUSSY FAG.  As has happened numerous times in the past (as David Halperin notes, this was a common sentiment among young gay men in the 1980s), there is a persistent disavowal of femininity in the gay male community, and that usually includes those trappings of gay life that have, for better or worse, usually served as identifiers and signifiers of precisely that collective cultural identity.

All of this is not to suggest that gay men have to do these things.  It is merely to point out that it is and has been a strong current in gay male culture for most of the 20th and, for some, the 21st.  And, more importantly, that we should not forget and should definitely not condemn this way of life as being somehow abhorrent.  Hard as it may be for these “straight acting gays” (and I hope my loathing of that term shines through the quotation marks) to comprehend, there are still those of us who like to sing along to showtunes, worship the ground that Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Joan Crawford walk on, and even enjoy Glee and The Golden Girls.  And, believe it or not, some of us also enjoy typically “masculine” pursuits as well.  Hell, some of us even like sports and, gasp, even play them.  And all while singing a line from Chicago and thinking about our nice outfit that we’re going to wear to the theatre, too.

Thus, although it may be offensive/irritating when people ask the pointed question “Are you sure you’re gay?” in many ways the question captures the complexities of contemporary gay identity.  This is not to suggest that gay male subjectivity has not always been complex and contradictory; it is to suggest, as David Halperin does in his recent book How to Be Gay, that there is a cultural initiation.  Perhaps we—and by “we” I mean straight, gay, queer, and everyone else—would be better off accepting the multiplicity and the sheer diversity of lived gay male experience.  Or, at the very least, we should be a little more self-reflexive about what we mean when we ask that most dangerous and irritating (and, let’s face it, most gay) of questions.