Conclusions: The People of Drama

Chang Hall’s analysis of LGBT people as grounded in narration is a nicely elegant way to conclude our study together on contemporary LGBT history and experience in the United States. I think her piece brings together several strands of the conundrums of identity, the problems of organizing around a dynamic category like LGBT, and yet, acknowledges the power and force of identity for us in the contemporary world.

Outside of our classroom, the world is still viciously homophobic in myriad ways. Lesbians, gay men, and transgender people are everyday violently attacked physically, beaten and murdered, denied housing and economic opportunity, and struggle to survive on an emotional and spiritual level. At the same time, everyday, lesbians, gay men, and transfolk celebrate themselves, rejoice in their communities, experience true joy and happiness, and participate in varying degrees with dominant culture in collaboration and conflict.

This tension between quotidian joy and quotidian violence is reflective of the discursive struggle traced out by Chang Hall, between community and individual, between cliques and the larger idea of LGBT, and building coalition on diversity. True diversity, of course, is always fraught, and negotiating that diversity is also always difficult work. This is one reason as to why debates within the LGBT community over reflecting the diverse faces of the community are historically cyclical in their drama: the same questions keep coming up because the same diversity keeps presenting itself as a challenge to both the fantasy of universal community and the imaginary roles that LGBT folks play out, of outlaw and assimilationist, in our communities.

As we have discussed often, LGBT people fall into the middle of these debates, largely, live within the didactic structure, and therefore, any putative solution is also highly idiosyncratic, individual, and unique. Yet, that fact does not stop the desire and need for building effective coalitions within LGBT communities and with the dominant culture to press both a civil rights agenda as well as perhaps envision a Carpenterian role for LGBT people in the transformation of our world into someplace better.

Personally, I do feel that LGBT people, through their experience and insight, can offer dominant culture a new way of imagining love, relationships, and sexuality. This does not discount the often deep and divisive questions around those concepts within LGBT communities themselves. Especially for gay men, where we continue to be surrounded by a culture of narcissistic pleasure and profound ennui, these concepts of love and relationship have been lost in the fury of sexuality. Similarly, but differently, for lesbians, the notions of womanhood, femininity, and sisterhood often meet the trauma of patriarchy, and the challenges of building feminist consciousness and community under the aegis of misogyny can exemplify itself in strange, disconcerting, and painful personal politics. Debates among transfolk about alliances with lesbians and gay men, and whether or not trans is a medical-psychological disorder or a social identity create disagreements and antipathies within trans thinking.

All of this, of course, happens against the backdrop of dominant culture, which on one hand tolerates LGBT communities as part of the larger communitas, but simultaneously has deep suspicion and yes, loathing of LGBT people. Physical violence against LGBT persons is one indication of this loathing. Yet another aspect of this loathing, albeit a more civilized form, is the debate over extending civil rights protections to LGBT people. Dominant heteronormative culture is, however, not static, but as dynamic as LGBT identity in its shifting and changing nature, which only adds dramatic tension to the high-wire act of negotiating identities in a representative democracy such as our own, where collective identities are held in suspicion at the same time as they are deeply powerful.

Chang Hall’s perspective that identity is narration is a useful way of thinking through our various identity positions, whether they are sexual, gendered, economic, or racial. How we write our story of identity is both individual and collective, is grounded in the body and powered by our mind, and dependent on self-conception as well as social acknowledgment. The power of Chang Hall’s idea, however, and what is not to be lost, is realizing that on many levels we write ourselves into both our individual narrative and the larger dramatic project of collective identities. And if we are indeed the authors of our stories, than we can change direction, plot, narrative, and dramatis personae, if we want to badly enough or are forced to by circumstance or situation.

We are actors, not participants, in our own drama. The recognition of this narrative role has the power to change the world, and I would argue that it is exactly that recognition, that LGBT people can change their worlds, that has driven contemporary LGBT cultural politics since the 1950s, and continues to inform who we are, who we become, and where we are going today.

Trans and the Politics of Affinity

The question of transgender is one that is profoundly confounding for many lesbians and gay men. How the T fits into the L and the G directly confronts the reformist acceptance that lesbians and gay men have carved for themselves within dominant society, the discrete agreements that the progression of lesbian and gay politics and social organizing have made with heterodominant society. Following Bornstein, these agreements are grounded in a refusal to confront gender terror (the violent sustenance of the gender dyad), and I think on some level this is true, but works differently for lesbians and gay men.

Lesbians, of course, have a critique of gender, flowing from their status as women as well as the effects of second-wave feminism on lesbian consciousness. How that critique meets transgender has been, in the past, controversial (the idea of a woman-born woman), but also actively engaged in difficult questions, such as what is the meaning of the transman? The phenomenon of butch lesbians transitioning into men has triggered concerns over the effects of dominant culture on women’s thinking, as well as the future of the community in the face of increasing sophistication and social acceptance of the trans as a legitimate choice for natal (born) women.

For gay men, who famously lack a coherent critique of gender, our unquestioned and relentless fetish of masculinity in our sexual subcultures does not provide the most ideal environment for questioning gender terror. While putatively the question of trans has been more engaged in lesbian communities (with the debates over woman-born women, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, women-only space, Butches into transmen, etc.), gay men confront the challenge of trans as well, on one hand in the increasing number of gay transmen who have no penis (a sexual conundrum?), and on the other more largely in the question of what is contemporary gay sexuality in relationship to bisexuality, down low culture, and the use of the Internet to bring thousands of putatively straight men into the gay sexual milieu.

For both lesbians and gay men, the larger question of how trans meets lesbian and gay experience is the macro question, but the micro questions of individual desire, choice, and the body are perhaps the more important questions in forcing lesbian and gay people to rethink their relationships to gender and desire. Both lesbians and gay men construct their erotic regimes around differing but powerful ideas of gender and desire, and the trans body disrupts these natural and invisible processes in an obvious way. For lesbians, this is primarily through the essentialist focus on femininity and womanhood following Stonewall, and similarly for gay men, the rise of the masculine macho/clone model in seventies sexual hedonism. But lesbian-feminism in particular as the bogeyman of this debate is a misapprehension, I think. Dominant cultural streams that instruct us/"hail" us on gender normativity are much more important and central to why we would think of the trans body as "sick" (in ways in which we lesbians and gay men can also think, on occasion, of our sexual practices as sick).

Kailey makes the elegant point that because so much of what we understand as sexual orientation discrimination is actually written through gender, this forms the basis for political organizing at the very least. And I think this is true, on a personal level. Gender performance and mimesis is as important among gay men as anything else, and how successfully one mimics dominant culture guarantees one’s sexual and social success, as well as one’s punishment (as someone who was regularly called faggot from second grade onward for gender variant behavior, long before that term had any tangible meaning in relation to actual sexual practice). Lesbians exhibit more flexibility in their erotic regimes, more fluidity in their desires and their relationship to the body, but this malleability has not precluded troubling questions from sparking debate among lesbians over the body, desire, and trans. If anything, it may have exacerbated the questions, which for both lesbians and gay men seem located along community, identity, and survival: does trans threaten our particular identities and choices as gay men and lesbians, our sense of ourselves in relation to dominant society?

In the end, one’s opinion on the T within the L and G seems to come down to a politics of affinity:

“A politics of affinity... is about abandoning the fantasy that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state form should act as the arbiter of who gets what.” (p. 188)

If one is able to understand that our erotic regimes are a house of mirrors, a stage set to perform (and conform), that one’s gender is fluid and changeable, then one is more likely to welcome transfolk into the fold. Similarly, if one is attached to the outlaw model of lesbian and gay identity, then there is an identification with others who find themselves on the marginalia of social acceptance. Also, there is the evident historical fact that transfolk have been part of lesbian and gay satellite cultures since the end of the 19th century, in conflict and collaboration. Often times this has not been a happy marriage, but in many ways is no different from the tensions between gay men and lesbians in LGBT social and political organizing. Where does the trans belong other than with us, in our struggle against a society that actively loathes those of us (lesbians, gay men, transfolk, and even straight people) who deviate, on some level, from the gender norm? As Kailey points out, it is not the gender of our object of desire, but our own gender, that is the problem.

I think the T belongs with us in the L and G because I agree with Kailey and Bornstein’s assessments on gender terror and the role of gender in lesbian and gay experience. For me personally, making the tent bigger, when one can, is more important on a social and cultural level than questions of either propriety or political strategy. But then again, I believe in the politics of affinity, which on some level are related to the ability to empathize. Empathy is a little-respected concept in our socio-political universe, unfortunately, but it brings humanism and care for others, interest in the state of others, to the table in ways that I think speak to all the potentials of gay and lesbian people from Carpenter onwards. This, for better or worse, is not a universal sentiment among lesbian and gay people, or heterodominant society, for that matter. But it is a state of grace we can strive to attain.

We Heart HAART

The development of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART) therapies to manage HIV infection has changed our understanding of the meanings and metaphors of HIV infection. As we have studied, the sudden emergence of HIV infection in the gay community in the late 1970s and early 1980s was like a sudden disaster, the end of a social and cultural world with little precedent in contemporary American life. The fact that gay men and lesbians rose to the occasion to care for their own and force the government and the medical industry to respond to the crisis was a watershed event in the development of LGBT communities, insofar as faced with a deadly health crisis, divisive discursive debates fell before the community’s desire to save itself from self-immolation. And the effects of that period can arguably still be felt today, as a welding of communal identities around a solid if simultaneously ephemeral notion of LGBT identity, one still open to debate but that exists nonetheless.

As Sullivan notes in his piece, the louche moral position of gay men (and by extension lesbians) was enabled by disinterest on the part of heterosexual America, a sort of open secret in which heterosexual America didn’t acknowledge the gay and lesbian communities rapidly developing since the 1950s, a sort of moral stasis that refused to either assimilate or completely reject LGBT people, a position Sullivan associates as akin to the role of Jewish communities in gentile societies before the Holocaust.

One of the themes of Sullivan and many others who write about HIV infection and gayness is the notion of “the recall to nature,” the grounding of gay men to the body through disease, and its effect of maturation on the community. I feel uncomfortable with this reading for several reasons, not the least of which is some sort of implicit (or explicit, as the case may be) critique of rising above embodiment. While on the face of it, the argument of the recall to nature through disease/epidemic impact is of course true (we all exist in physical bodies that are vulnerable to infection and mortality), the tone of the observation seems trite, especially in the face of the thousands of HIV-related deaths in the LGBT community since 1980. A way of colloquially summarizing this recall to nature argument could look like this— “Before AIDS, gay men were disco-dancing, drug-taking, sex-hungry pod people who had no care for the world. Now, they’ve risen up to the challenge of humanity by demonstrating that humanity through care and tragedy.”

Again, in some ways, this reading may be true. It certainly is sentimental. But to argue that gay communities before AIDS were so facile is a misreading, I think, or at the very least ungenerous. In other words, it is a particular analysis with social and political implications, which are apparent in Sullivan but also in some of the other writers we’ve looked at, in particular Larry Kramer. As we’ve studied, in fact gay and lesbian communities before HIV were engaged in rigorous and vociferous debates around identity, parthenogenic culture, and the relationship of LGBT people to dominant heterosexual society. Gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s did represent, on some level, an absconding of some of this work, but the sexual hedonistic culture was fueled and supported by themes in mainstream culture (capitalism and consumerism being two of the most prominent). Also, that hedonistic culture did not exist in a vacuum, but was actually documented, examined, and critiqued by gay men and lesbians alike at the time and subsequently.

Another bone of contention I would have is what is so wrong with resisting embodiment? Why was it/is it wrong for gay men to want to transcend the body (here body means the literally physical as well as metaphorically social, cultural, political, what have you) into fantasy, projection, illusion, image, and potential? Some of this is obviously problematic, for instance in the ways in which some gay men can become, like Narcissus, enamored by image alone. But doesn’t the desire to transcend embodiment also represent, on some important level, the desire to achieve something beyond what the world has given you, especially a hatefully homophobic world? I think the “recall to nature” argument has, within it, some dangerous potentials, not only for LGBT people but for everyone who has dreamed of being something and someone different.

Reading the 1970s from the perspective of the HIV crisis is, in some ways, the worst sort of presentism. The trends and themes of gay male subcultural (or satellite culture, to invoke Newton) streams remain today in a critical tension with dominant culture, centered around the complicated nexus of masculinity, identity, sexuality, and self-conception. HAART therapies provide, in the maw of these irresolvable and continual debates, a pause in mortality, and perhaps a shift in perspective, although as Sullivan remarks, whether this is farce, tragedy, or something altogether different remains to be seen.

One thing is for sure, and that is the relative success of HAART therapies in managing the spiraling death rates that decimated the community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV remains, I would argue, both a challenging public health problem for gay communities, as well as continuing to provide unwanted and continual messages of disease, pathology, and death associated with gayness. The thousands of gay men whose lives have been ameliorated or extended through HAART therapies are testimony enough to the positive effects of anti-retroviral drugs on the stability and “normalization” of the community after a period of intense crisis. Whether the challenges and traumas of the HIV crisis have been absorbed and resolved successfully within the community remains, for good and bad, an open question. But I would rather live in a gay world troubled by the questions and conundrums HAART (ironically) produces than one without it. We've seen that world, and it is not for the feint of heart.

Wedding Bell Blues

Marriage and its connection to romantic love and individual fulfillment, as we discussed in class, remains one of our most enduring and powerful socio-cultural myths. Wherever we may fall individually on the spectrum of marriage for ourselves, we relate to the concept of marriage in a manner almost as strongly as we relate to family, nation, and law. In other words, marriage is one of the cardinal directions of adult life, whether in acquiescence or refusal. This is one of the reasons as to why the debate over gay marriage is so vociferous and can seem, at times, like a lot of energy spent over something that, to the critical eye, seems rather exhausted if we think about the crises of heterosexual marriage in the modern period (divorce, dissonance, unhappiness).

Marriage, as mentioned in class, is not an ahistorical, transcendent state, but rather a human institution that has shifted in meaning and metaphor through time. The rise of romantic love in the 19th century and the association of marriage with feeling marked a decided shift from the proprietal and patrimonial notions of marriage before the industrial age. But like most tools of ideology, we don’t see these changes in marriage, instead thinking that marriage, like other ideological states (economy, politics, nation-state, race, etc.) is unchangeable and static, that people loved each other in marriage in the ancient world as we love today, which of course is patently untrue. But such fantasies are increasingly reassuring in a changing and scary world.

Social change can often happen rapidly and unexpectedly. The case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage, is an example of how long-held and legally sanctioned limitations and discriminations can change in an instant. And to a certain extent, “gay marriage” may or may not be such a moment. The desire for the legalization of marriage for LGBT people has been driven, largely, from the grassroots of non-organizational lesbians and gay men who believe deeply in their right to legally sanctioned relationships under the aegis of marriage (as opposed to other categorizations, such as domestic partnerships). This desire speaks, obviously, to the connection many LGBT people feel to parent culture norms, which in itself is not surprising, although may cause us to question differential socialization and the effects of discrimination on consciousness. Perhaps another way to go about talking about this is the phrase “Hope Springs Eternal,” and the efforts of LGBT people to legitimize their relationships before the state are an example of this optimism.

E.’s question in class over the role of the state in sanctioning certain relationships while discounting others remains at the heart of the debate over gay marriage, to a certain extent. Social conservatives claim that gay marriage threatens the foundations of society. Yet, the astute observer would note that heterosexuals themselves have made a mess of contemporary marriage, with little or no help from LGBT people. This “mess” would include divorce, unhappiness, legal and social battles around marriage, children, and property, as well as the problematic complex infrastructure of romantic love, capitalism, and consumerism, that surrounds both marriage and the married state for people of all classes. These crises of marriage are predicated on a number of factors that begin to shift gender relationships in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the greater economic and social emancipation of women, the rise of industrial economies and the move away from family-labor economic models, and media cultures that transmit meanings of marriage that obscured and transformed the meanings of marriage within a rising culture of economic individualism.

The desire to deny LGBT people the right to marry is, on some level, representative of the fantastical return to the past for many heterosexual critics. But like Pandora’s Box, there is no going back to some halcyon day of perfect marriage and love, which never existed anyway. The other question, for many LGBT critics of the desire to marry for LGBT people, is why would we want to invest in such a problematic institution anyhow? But feeling is rarely accountable to rational or political drive, and the desire to marry on the part of many LGBT people is just that, a feeling that in many ways is driving a movement.

The positive aspect of this "feeling movement" is that LGBT people may shift and change the meanings of marriage and partnership away from economic and socially-sanctioned procreative roles and property towards a more holistic meaning of love in the contemporary age, towards a more inclusive sanctioning, in other words, of diverse coupling and relationship dyads. The risk of course is that LGBT people will fall into the same problematic patterns of many heterosexual marriages, based in consumerism, fantasy, and ennui, and therefore become a more reactionary force.

We won’t be able to tell for awhile what the outcome of these debates will be, but in conclusion I would direct you to the eloquent and beautiful statement by Mildred Loving, one of the plaintiffs (along with her late husband Richard) in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, issued this past spring on the 20th anniversary of the case. Change is possible, and change will occur. How that change happens is, to a large extent, within our own hands.

Will You Marry Me?

Now, for a wedding interlude...

Abbalicious: 'nuff said



The 5th Dimension: Git 'er done, Bill!



The Carpenters: If you're feeling suicidal yet groovy