Posts tagged gay stuff

I just read Patrick Moore’s Beyond Shame and really enjoyed it (despite not being totally sold that one of the major artistic movements that gay men created in the ’70s was the hypersexual fetish subculture of the leather scene). I highlighted a ton of passages, and I’ll probably post a bunch of quotes here eventually. But I really like this one:

In the late 1970s, we begin to see a cultural acceleration that was originally generated by the media but has become the central force in American cultural life. This tendency is deeply destructive: a kind of addiction to images that requires higher and higher doses but yields ever-decreasing highs. The flipping of subcultures once they have been drained of their novelty has the strange effect of never discarding the past but continuing to recycle it in a parasitic way, leaving just enough blood for the wasted thing to regenerate a few years later. So one continues to see punks with Mohawks in the East Village to this day, worn by children with absolutely no idea what they indicate. Young straight couples saunter down the streets in full leather regalia completely denuded of its gay history. While fashion designers have been particularly guilty in the juicing and rejuicing of fashions from the 1960s and 1970s (fashion has tried to revive the 1980s but seems to find it a greater challenge), they can hardly be blamed for looking back to a time that was so much more inspiring than the present. What persists from 1969s youth culture and 1970s sexual explorations are not the ideals but the images—what the performer Penny Arcade has described as the gentrification of ideas.

Moore refers to the “Clones” a lot in this book, mostly referring to the groups of men who populated certain bars and scenes and dressed accordingly, and I find it fascinating because that still happens. There are the Hells Kitchen gays and the West Village gays and the Fire Island gays and so on, and they all look exactly like the other people within their adopted social scenes. I notice this a lot in Chicago, too, both when I come back and when I check in with friends on Facebook. There are the Sidetrack gays and the Roscoe’s gays and then the Chances gays. The west side indie-queer scene has always fascinated me, firstly because I thought they were more attractive and interesting when I lived here. Now I find the queer sensibility in that scene to be really interesting, because it’s gotten much “less gay” (in their terms, really) and more focused on a blurring of the gender lines, and it really is indicative of a trend, the same way that in some summers there are more deep-Vs at the Boystown bars than others.

Like all children, the gays of the East Village tended not to acknowledge their historical debt to the Clones, unaware that in a few years a new type of clone would arise from ACT UP that would be just as rigid in definition as any leather man cruising Christopher Street. Perhaps the relative invisibility of gay men in the East Village art scene derives from the fact that any kind of gay visibility was seen as relating to earlier Clone culture.

I don’t really have a point here, but I am really interested in the concept of the various Clones within the gay community and how the styles and aesthetics are now being shaped by gender politics. 

And, additionally, an interesting take on drag culture, one that I don’t completely agree or disagree with:

Using drag as a nonthreatening way of indicating gay life in popular culture allows mainstream America to avoid their more difficult feelings about actual gay male sex. I believe that in fifty years’ time we will look back at drag and camp as the minstrel shows of gay culture—amusing but ultimately sinister and degrading, an easy way for straight culture to avoid the realities of our sexuality… What does it mean that gay men can accept drag queens as an integral part of their culture but still stigmatize transgendered men and women? Drag queens and the desexed gay men of pop culture reassure us by allowing us to avoid the complexities of actual sexual behavior.

I already posted a link to this article this morning, but I implore you to read Ian Parker’s piece about Tyler Clementi’s suicide and the impending trial of his roommate, Dharun Ravi. It took me about five hours to read it, not just because it was long but because I was at work and it was so upsetting that I couldn’t read it too long at a time. This is extremely powerful stuff and should be required reading. 

He used his hands to work out the intricacies of the slacks and undershorts and brought Affenlight out into the open - Affenlight, strange synecdoche! - and bent and kissed him on the tip of the penis in a womanly way.

A WOMANLY WAY?

After folding the sweater neatly he placed it on the warped wooden floorboards between Owen’s two-toned shoes, which looked like saddle shoes of old, and, with the limberness of a man no older than forty, the soundly thrumming heart of seventeen, slid down from his chair and knelt upon it, a hand on each of Owen’s knees. Kneeling, whatever the circumstances, could hardly fail to remind him, however ironically, of childhood bedside prayer, the old Latin Mass - he’d hardly been since Vatican II - and, given the hour, vespers, ad cereum benedicendum, as they used to say.

This fucking book, I swear to God. I had to read that second passage a second time before I realized what was going on: Harbach is overwriting to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t actually detail a homosexual oral sex scene. Instead, he compared it to a Catholic prayer. Sure! 

If these homos don’t fuck at some point in this book! I don’t know what I will do! Well, nothing! But I will be mad! The dudes are figuratively blowing each other out on the baseball field but God forbid the actual homosexuals (well, the faggot and a half, I guess) ACTUALLY BONE. Never before have I had so many thoughts about the politics of homosexual sex in popular literature! Ugh! 

That thing when you and your coworker are talking about the last Groove Armada album and you both admit that you only know it because one of the songs was featured in an “artsy porno.”