"Show Me," Said the Spectator: Chronicles of the Backlash, Episode the Eleventh

I'm not sure whether I'll finish reading Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago, 2007). The writing is low-level academese, with an inordinate fondness for alliteration, but I could overlook that. What makes me wonder if it's worthwhile to read more is the (you should pardon the expression) thought.

Herring's subject is what he calls slumming, especially the sensationalistic media which promised to reveal the dark side of city life in America to respectable audiences, but also those non-poor people who for whatever reason lived among the poor themselves. His first case study is Jane Addams (1860-1935), the philanthropist and founder of Hull-House in Chicago. Addams never married, and her longest and most serious relationships were with other women. She lived at a time when nineteenth-century patterns of romantic friendship between women were being overtaken by pathologizing medical models, though it should be remembered that women who sought to live outside of male control had always been suspect.

Addams not only loved other women (and "love" was her word for it), she lived with another woman for decades, shared a bed with her, bought a house with her, compared their relationship to marriage. Whether she "had sex" with her beloved Mary is something we'll never know; whether she would have accepted the label "lesbian" seems unlikely from what I've read about her, and I consider it unimportant because labels come and go. In my own lifetime I've seen "gay" go from an in-group code word to a self-consciously chosen public name to a homophobic putdown, and it has been rejected by homosexual and bisexual people for a variety of reasons. In some circles, "lesbian" is rejected as a label by women who love and have sex with other women, in favor of other, equally specific alternatives. Jane Addams's contemporary Radclyffe Hall called herself a "congenital invert," not a lesbian. And so on. To hang too much on "gay" or "lesbian" as a label is a waste of time.

This shouldn't be too much of a problem, certainly not for a professional scholar. Unfortunately Herring can't seem to keep from doing what he accuses others of doing, namely imposing his categories and agenda on his material. So, for example, he quotes on page 33 "an unpublished, undated poem inscribed to fellow reformer 'M.R.S.'", presumably Mary Rozet Smith, the woman Addams was coupled with for forty years. In this poem, Herring says, "the slummer congratulates herself and her close friend on inhabiting a settlement house relation far beyond the bounds of recognizable attachments such as an opposite-sex coupling or even a Boston marriage:"

The “mine” and “thine” of wedded folk
Is often quite confusing
And sometimes when they use the “ours”
It sounds almost amusing.

But – You and I, may well defy
Both married folk and single
To do as well as we have done
The “mine” and “thine” to mingle
(Jane Addams Papers, reel 113.45.1572)

To nitpick first: it is Herring and not Addams who (repeatedly, throughout the chapter) calls her a "slummer." How odd that it's not acceptable to call her a lesbian (only her "critics" do so, according to Herring [31]), but okay to pin another pejorative term on her. The same goes for "settlement house relation," which appears to be Herring's own coinage, as though it were a "sexual taxonomy" of its own. As far as I can tell, it isn't; certainly Herring makes no effort to establish it as one.

Herring goes on:

In this pithy love poem, Addams praises herself and Smith for sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications. Against all odds, she suggests in this correspondence, the two have managed to carve out an affective space enabling “mine” and “thine” to conjoin into something foreign. Traditional relational spaces, Addams informs Smith, both perplex (“often quite confusing”) and please and are laughingly conventional. In contrast to such standard forms of intimacy, Addams and Smith inhabit a different form of coupling, something more akin to a relational terra incognita rather than a closeted liaison, since there is no suspicious sexual group identity to hide. Situated outside conventional Anglo-American marriage, and far removed from being “single,” the two gleefully – and defiantly – “mingle” in Hull-House without any relational fusion. Eschewing men, they are adamantly not married to each other for life. Instead they “have done” well when their relationship could have been construed as perverse and pathological given the Progressive Era’s increasing intolerance for passionate same-sex relations of any kind. In brief, their settlement intimacy is beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy like the mannish lesbian: it is instead a love that does not speak any name [33-4].

In the poem, Addams doesn't congratulate herself for "sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications"; she doesn't even mention them. Herring appears to assume that when she writes of "single" people she's referring to queers, but I see no reason to make that assumption. Remove that assumption and his entire reading collapses. Addams situates herself and M.R.S. between, or perhaps outside, the (heterosexual) married and the (heterosexual) single. They are neither, but they are still a couple who successfully "mingle" "'mine' and 'thine'". I don't see "to conjoin into something foreign" as a justifiable reading of the poem; I think it's at least arguable that, far from being "beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy," the relationship can be classified quite easily.

If this poem were all we knew about Addams and Smith, Herring's (mis)reading might be understandable. But Addams's life is well-documented, from scrapbooks of clippings to personal correspondence. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (Columbia, 1991), a book Herring cites and quotes, Lillian Faderman wrote:

They thought of themselves as wedded. In a 1902 letter, written during a three-week separation, Jane remarked, "You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together." In 1904 they purchased a home together near Bar Harbor, Maine. "Our house -- it quite gives me a thrill to write the word," Jane told Mary. "It was our house wasn't it in a really truly ownership," and she talked about their "healing domesticity" [26].

According to Faderman, Addams and Smith "always slept in the same room and the same bed, and when they traveled Jane even wired ahead to be sure they would get a hotel room with a double bed" (25). None of this proves that they were Lesbians As We Know Them Today -- they didn't wear Doc Martens and never went to Michigan -- but that they were a loving and devoted couple, in a way that makes homophobes uneasy, is certain. (I should add that I'd like to see more evidence that Addams and Smith "thought of themselves as wedded"; maybe I'll pursue that. What Faderman provides, though, is enough to undermine Herring's epistemological certainties.)

Then Herring makes a significant mistake. He argues that "Faderman’s supposition that the signifier 'lesbian' may not have been in widespread circulation during Addams’s time could be reconsidered, given that Progressive Era U.S. discourses coded intense same-sex female relations across class lines as fundamentally degenerate" (35). Faderman's supposition rather was that Addams and Smith could rely on "the protective coloring of pearls and ladylike appearance and of romantic friendship, which was not yet dead in America since the works of the sexologists were not yet widely known" (Odd Girls, 28). Despite the sexologists, Eleanor Roosevelt's friendship with the butch Lorena Hickok could benefit from the same "protective coloring" even decades later. I know personally some "spinsters" who did the same into this century. And more important, Addams and Smith did not bond "across class lines", so Herring's objection collapses.

Weirdly, Herring writes that Addams's poem describes "an intimate same-sex relation that refuses the epistemological certainty of lesbian or heterosexual identity, primarily because Addams’s Hull-House relations fail to conform either to a burgeoning twentieth-century binary that now marks what Faderman marks as 'our day' or even a nineteenth-century romantic friendship that may have marked hers" (33). Leaving aside the question whether Addams rejected the category of romantic friendship -- for which Herring provides no evidence -- it's as though Addams could see into the future, and rejected concepts of same-sex love that would not exist, on Herring's assumptions, for almost a century! (In the same way, I refuse Herring's 25th century epistemology of same-sex mind-melds! It is narrow and constricting and craves epistemological certainty!)

Herring's historical sense is consistently a little off. He cites "another heated exchange that, unwittingly or not, verges on typing the Progressive female slummer as a modern-day lesbian, Helen Gould addresses the question, 'Are Bachelor Maids Useless to Humanity,' sensationally "CALLS MEN TIRESOME," and presents 'a list of ten world-famous' bachelor aunts that begins with Sappho, 'Grecian poetess,' and ends with 'Gould, philanthropist' and 'Jane Addams, sociologist'" (37-8). Herring then sneers:

Linking the Isle of Lesbos to Chicago’s Hull-House settlement and denouncing what Adrienne Rich would later call “compulsory heterosexuality” …, Gould would have made a fine revisionist historian … [38].

He has also called Faderman "revisionist," though on his own account Herring is a revisionist too, presenting a new picture of the history of "U. S. homosexual group identity." But it's odd to see him yank Helen Gould out of her historical context this way, as though she were a Second-Wave time traveler who'd gone back to 1916 to sow discord and confusion. Sappho, of course, was according to legend a woman who ran a school for younger women, an educator and therefore a benefactress to humanity in Gould's terms. Her image was controversial in the Victorian era and in Gould's day, as it is still. But Helen Gould wasn't casting Sappho, let alone herself, as a late 20th-century Lesbian. If Gould could denounce compulsory heterosexuality in 1916, it was not because of future-vision goggles or a time-traveling backwash from Adrienne Rich, but because she was a woman of her time, rebelling against the society she had to live in. It is Herring's picture of Addams and her circle that needs adjustment, I'd say, not Gould's.

I'll give Herring props for writing of "homosexual group identity," since he seems to recognize that gay "identity" is the declaration not of individualism but of membership in a collective. But maybe not; like so many of his peers he seems confused about what "identity" means. A bit later he recounts a story Addams told in her autobiography, about an "Anglo-American" committee woman who approached her after a Hull-House performance by Italian immigrants. "Do you know I am always ashamed of the way I have talked about 'dagos,' they are quite like other people, only one must take a little more pains with them," the woman told Addams. "I have been nagging my husband to move off M Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying while and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them" (41-2).

Here's how Herring reads this anecdote:

For the reformer, cosmopolitan interactions at Hull-House between Anglo [sic] middle classes and immigrant working classes ... are akin to entering a new “region” where particularized persons tend to become abstracted citizens where overcoming the habit of stifling “differences” becomes paramount.

To their surprise, Addams informs her readers, immigrants, philanthropists, reformers, and Hull-House visitors often find themselves cultivating these abstract spaces of anonymous social pleasure, a brotherhood where one “judge[s] their fellows by a more universal test” (207). The settlement house’s interclass transpositions, that is to say, fantastically begin to unsettle national as well as personal identifications, cherished prejudices, and particular taxonomies [42].

As far as I can tell, Herring has it exactly backwards here, though Addams may have been similarly mistaken. The "spaces" are not "abstract" but concrete and personal, and it appears that Addams and her fellow reformers wanted them to be so. The Anglo-Saxon (as she probably would have called herself -- certainly not "Anglo"!) woman had "abstracted" Italians as the Other, but through interacting with them personally she came to see them as "particularized" individuals, no longer "anonymous" but named, not "dagos" but Maria or Sophia or Loretta. Of course the individual is also an abstraction, as is "American" or "quite like us" or any other such specific label, but Herring seems not to see that. In general he prefers to see Addams and his other subjects as "slummers," a taxonomical abstraction that needs to be unsettled.

An old friend, and fellow writer, chided me gently not long ago when I'd been ranting about another book that affected me as Queering the Underworld does. Why, I fumed, does stuff like this get published? She said she preferred to see as many different viewpoints published as possible, so that they can be argued with. I agreed with her on that -- I wasn't advocating censorship -- but the fact remains that publishers have limited resources to invest; they don't publish everything that is submitted to them. And one argument that is made for traditional publication, as opposed to self-publication on the Internet, is that what gets into print through respectable publishers has to meet some standards of quality. What I was complaining about is how low those standards often seem to be. In acknowledgements writers offer fulsome thanks to their editors and to academic advisors, colleagues and friends who read and commented on drafts of the material, spotting errors and infelicities. The results are too often underwhelming. Doesn't anyone ever say, "You keep using that word 'identity' -- I do not think it means what you think it means"? Or "Foucault didn't mean that literally, and if he did, he was probably wrong." Or "Laura Mulvey was very tentative in her first paper on the Male Gaze; why do you refer to it as if it were unquestionably true?"

It's not that I object to Theory; as Kath Weston wrote in an excellent short paper, everybody theorizes about the world and how it works; the question is how to do it well. All too often it isn't being done well.

"Show Me," Said the Spectator: Chronicles of the Backlash, Episode the Eleventh

I'm not sure whether I'll finish reading Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago, 2007). The writing is low-level academese, with an inordinate fondness for alliteration, but I could overlook that. What makes me wonder if it's worthwhile to read more is the (you should pardon the expression) thought.

Herring's subject is what he calls slumming, especially the sensationalistic media which promised to reveal the dark side of city life in America to respectable audiences, but also those non-poor people who for whatever reason lived among the poor themselves. His first case study is Jane Addams (1860-1935), the philanthropist and founder of Hull-House in Chicago. Addams never married, and her longest and most serious relationships were with other women. She lived at a time when nineteenth-century patterns of romantic friendship between women were being overtaken by pathologizing medical models, though it should be remembered that women who sought to live outside of male control had always been suspect.

Addams not only loved other women (and "love" was her word for it), she lived with another woman for decades, shared a bed with her, bought a house with her, compared their relationship to marriage. Whether she "had sex" with her beloved Mary is something we'll never know; whether she would have accepted the label "lesbian" seems unlikely from what I've read about her, and I consider it unimportant because labels come and go. In my own lifetime I've seen "gay" go from an in-group code word to a self-consciously chosen public name to a homophobic putdown, and it has been rejected by homosexual and bisexual people for a variety of reasons. In some circles, "lesbian" is rejected as a label by women who love and have sex with other women, in favor of other, equally specific alternatives. Jane Addams's contemporary Radclyffe Hall called herself a "congenital invert," not a lesbian. And so on. To hang too much on "gay" or "lesbian" as a label is a waste of time.

This shouldn't be too much of a problem, certainly not for a professional scholar. Unfortunately Herring can't seem to keep from doing what he accuses others of doing, namely imposing his categories and agenda on his material. So, for example, he quotes on page 33 "an unpublished, undated poem inscribed to fellow reformer 'M.R.S.'", presumably Mary Rozet Smith, the woman Addams was coupled with for forty years. In this poem, Herring says, "the slummer congratulates herself and her close friend on inhabiting a settlement house relation far beyond the bounds of recognizable attachments such as an opposite-sex coupling or even a Boston marriage:"

The “mine” and “thine” of wedded folk
Is often quite confusing
And sometimes when they use the “ours”
It sounds almost amusing.

But – You and I, may well defy
Both married folk and single
To do as well as we have done
The “mine” and “thine” to mingle
(Jane Addams Papers, reel 113.45.1572)

To nitpick first: it is Herring and not Addams who (repeatedly, throughout the chapter) calls her a "slummer." How odd that it's not acceptable to call her a lesbian (only her "critics" do so, according to Herring [31]), but okay to pin another pejorative term on her. The same goes for "settlement house relation," which appears to be Herring's own coinage, as though it were a "sexual taxonomy" of its own. As far as I can tell, it isn't; certainly Herring makes no effort to establish it as one.

Herring goes on:

In this pithy love poem, Addams praises herself and Smith for sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications. Against all odds, she suggests in this correspondence, the two have managed to carve out an affective space enabling “mine” and “thine” to conjoin into something foreign. Traditional relational spaces, Addams informs Smith, both perplex (“often quite confusing”) and please and are laughingly conventional. In contrast to such standard forms of intimacy, Addams and Smith inhabit a different form of coupling, something more akin to a relational terra incognita rather than a closeted liaison, since there is no suspicious sexual group identity to hide. Situated outside conventional Anglo-American marriage, and far removed from being “single,” the two gleefully – and defiantly – “mingle” in Hull-House without any relational fusion. Eschewing men, they are adamantly not married to each other for life. Instead they “have done” well when their relationship could have been construed as perverse and pathological given the Progressive Era’s increasing intolerance for passionate same-sex relations of any kind. In brief, their settlement intimacy is beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy like the mannish lesbian: it is instead a love that does not speak any name [33-4].

In the poem, Addams doesn't congratulate herself for "sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications"; she doesn't even mention them. Herring appears to assume that when she writes of "single" people she's referring to queers, but I see no reason to make that assumption. Remove that assumption and his entire reading collapses. Addams situates herself and M.R.S. between, or perhaps outside, the (heterosexual) married and the (heterosexual) single. They are neither, but they are still a couple who successfully "mingle" "'mine' and 'thine'". I don't see "to conjoin into something foreign" as a justifiable reading of the poem; I think it's at least arguable that, far from being "beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy," the relationship can be classified quite easily.

If this poem were all we knew about Addams and Smith, Herring's (mis)reading might be understandable. But Addams's life is well-documented, from scrapbooks of clippings to personal correspondence. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (Columbia, 1991), a book Herring cites and quotes, Lillian Faderman wrote:

They thought of themselves as wedded. In a 1902 letter, written during a three-week separation, Jane remarked, "You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together." In 1904 they purchased a home together near Bar Harbor, Maine. "Our house -- it quite gives me a thrill to write the word," Jane told Mary. "It was our house wasn't it in a really truly ownership," and she talked about their "healing domesticity" [26].

According to Faderman, Addams and Smith "always slept in the same room and the same bed, and when they traveled Jane even wired ahead to be sure they would get a hotel room with a double bed" (25). None of this proves that they were Lesbians As We Know Them Today -- they didn't wear Doc Martens and never went to Michigan -- but that they were a loving and devoted couple, in a way that makes homophobes uneasy, is certain. (I should add that I'd like to see more evidence that Addams and Smith "thought of themselves as wedded"; maybe I'll pursue that. What Faderman provides, though, is enough to undermine Herring's epistemological certainties.)

Then Herring makes a significant mistake. He argues that "Faderman’s supposition that the signifier 'lesbian' may not have been in widespread circulation during Addams’s time could be reconsidered, given that Progressive Era U.S. discourses coded intense same-sex female relations across class lines as fundamentally degenerate" (35). Faderman's supposition rather was that Addams and Smith could rely on "the protective coloring of pearls and ladylike appearance and of romantic friendship, which was not yet dead in America since the works of the sexologists were not yet widely known" (Odd Girls, 28). Despite the sexologists, Eleanor Roosevelt's friendship with the butch Lorena Hickok could benefit from the same "protective coloring" even decades later. I know personally some "spinsters" who did the same into this century. And more important, Addams and Smith did not bond "across class lines", so Herring's objection collapses.

Weirdly, Herring writes that Addams's poem describes "an intimate same-sex relation that refuses the epistemological certainty of lesbian or heterosexual identity, primarily because Addams’s Hull-House relations fail to conform either to a burgeoning twentieth-century binary that now marks what Faderman marks as 'our day' or even a nineteenth-century romantic friendship that may have marked hers" (33). Leaving aside the question whether Addams rejected the category of romantic friendship -- for which Herring provides no evidence -- it's as though Addams could see into the future, and rejected concepts of same-sex love that would not exist, on Herring's assumptions, for almost a century! (In the same way, I refuse Herring's 25th century epistemology of same-sex mind-melds! It is narrow and constricting and craves epistemological certainty!)

Herring's historical sense is consistently a little off. He cites "another heated exchange that, unwittingly or not, verges on typing the Progressive female slummer as a modern-day lesbian, Helen Gould addresses the question, 'Are Bachelor Maids Useless to Humanity,' sensationally "CALLS MEN TIRESOME," and presents 'a list of ten world-famous' bachelor aunts that begins with Sappho, 'Grecian poetess,' and ends with 'Gould, philanthropist' and 'Jane Addams, sociologist'" (37-8). Herring then sneers:

Linking the Isle of Lesbos to Chicago’s Hull-House settlement and denouncing what Adrienne Rich would later call “compulsory heterosexuality” …, Gould would have made a fine revisionist historian … [38].

He has also called Faderman "revisionist," though on his own account Herring is a revisionist too, presenting a new picture of the history of "U. S. homosexual group identity." But it's odd to see him yank Helen Gould out of her historical context this way, as though she were a Second-Wave time traveler who'd gone back to 1916 to sow discord and confusion. Sappho, of course, was according to legend a woman who ran a school for younger women, an educator and therefore a benefactress to humanity in Gould's terms. Her image was controversial in the Victorian era and in Gould's day, as it is still. But Helen Gould wasn't casting Sappho, let alone herself, as a late 20th-century Lesbian. If Gould could denounce compulsory heterosexuality in 1916, it was not because of future-vision goggles or a time-traveling backwash from Adrienne Rich, but because she was a woman of her time, rebelling against the society she had to live in. It is Herring's picture of Addams and her circle that needs adjustment, I'd say, not Gould's.

I'll give Herring props for writing of "homosexual group identity," since he seems to recognize that gay "identity" is the declaration not of individualism but of membership in a collective. But maybe not; like so many of his peers he seems confused about what "identity" means. A bit later he recounts a story Addams told in her autobiography, about an "Anglo-American" committee woman who approached her after a Hull-House performance by Italian immigrants. "Do you know I am always ashamed of the way I have talked about 'dagos,' they are quite like other people, only one must take a little more pains with them," the woman told Addams. "I have been nagging my husband to move off M Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying while and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them" (41-2).

Here's how Herring reads this anecdote:

For the reformer, cosmopolitan interactions at Hull-House between Anglo [sic] middle classes and immigrant working classes ... are akin to entering a new “region” where particularized persons tend to become abstracted citizens where overcoming the habit of stifling “differences” becomes paramount.

To their surprise, Addams informs her readers, immigrants, philanthropists, reformers, and Hull-House visitors often find themselves cultivating these abstract spaces of anonymous social pleasure, a brotherhood where one “judge[s] their fellows by a more universal test” (207). The settlement house’s interclass transpositions, that is to say, fantastically begin to unsettle national as well as personal identifications, cherished prejudices, and particular taxonomies [42].

As far as I can tell, Herring has it exactly backwards here, though Addams may have been similarly mistaken. The "spaces" are not "abstract" but concrete and personal, and it appears that Addams and her fellow reformers wanted them to be so. The Anglo-Saxon (as she probably would have called herself -- certainly not "Anglo"!) woman had "abstracted" Italians as the Other, but through interacting with them personally she came to see them as "particularized" individuals, no longer "anonymous" but named, not "dagos" but Maria or Sophia or Loretta. Of course the individual is also an abstraction, as is "American" or "quite like us" or any other such specific label, but Herring seems not to see that. In general he prefers to see Addams and his other subjects as "slummers," a taxonomical abstraction that needs to be unsettled.

An old friend, and fellow writer, chided me gently not long ago when I'd been ranting about another book that affected me as Queering the Underworld does. Why, I fumed, does stuff like this get published? She said she preferred to see as many different viewpoints published as possible, so that they can be argued with. I agreed with her on that -- I wasn't advocating censorship -- but the fact remains that publishers have limited resources to invest; they don't publish everything that is submitted to them. And one argument that is made for traditional publication, as opposed to self-publication on the Internet, is that what gets into print through respectable publishers has to meet some standards of quality. What I was complaining about is how low those standards often seem to be. In acknowledgements writers offer fulsome thanks to their editors and to academic advisors, colleagues and friends who read and commented on drafts of the material, spotting errors and infelicities. The results are too often underwhelming. Doesn't anyone ever say, "You keep using that word 'identity' -- I do not think it means what you think it means"? Or "Foucault didn't mean that literally, and if he did, he was probably wrong." Or "Laura Mulvey was very tentative in her first paper on the Male Gaze; why do you refer to it as if it were unquestionably true?"

It's not that I object to Theory; as Kath Weston wrote in an excellent short paper, everybody theorizes about the world and how it works; the question is how to do it well. All too often it isn't being done well.

Faggot!

Every so often I hear straight men claiming that epithets like “faggot” don’t really refer to homosexuals. Rather, they say, it refers to ineffectual men who can’t take care of themselves or anyone else, who can’t give a woman what she needs, men who are cowardly and despicable, men who aren’t Real Men. (I don’t have any links at the moment, though I’ll try to add some the next time I encounter the claim online. I think I’ve seen Eminem and some other rappers saying such things, and I've read similar rationalizations about maricón in Mexican culture. Someone is playing a racist variation on the game here. To see how homophobic epithets are actually used by normal red-blooded American males -- haw haw haw! I can't believe I wrote that with a straight face! -- read some of the comments to this video. I'm still trying to figure out why it generated such hysteria.)

Since “gay” became a schoolyard epithet, soon after we queers mainstreamed it as a more-or-less neutral, non-clinical term for ourselves, I’ve heard the same thing about it as well. It’s true, some of the people who say “that’s so gay” are gay-friendly at other times, have gay friends, and pay liberal lip service to gay issues. And since we did claim the right to use “gay” for ourselves over the protests of our generation of genteel homophobes, I suppose we can’t really say that it has only one fixed meaning, and we shall stop linguistic change from happening in this one area forevermore.

That might even be the best response to “that’s so gay”: to recognize and, as necessary, point out that in that context, it has nothing to do with either the pre-1970 “gay” (“Don we now our gay apparel, fa-la-la fa-la-la la-la-la”) or the post-1970 homosexual “gay” (Gay Pride Now!).

Still, I don’t think any gay man who’s ever been called a fucking faggot (which means pretty much all of us) will take this claim seriously. “Faggot” refers not only to despicable, ineffectual men of any sexual orientation, but to men who have sex with other men, because in masculist culture men who have sex with other men are assumed to be despicable, ineffectual, etc. -- and fucked, in various senses of the word. There’s nothing more horrible in the masculine imagination than being penetrated anally: it takes away a man’s manhood as effectively as castration. For a man to enjoy being penetrated, to seek out the experience, is not thinkable (even if it’s not unknown to the men who deploy homophobic epithets). Gay liberationists were correct that shouting one’s fagitude to the world was a powerful challenge to the male supremacist order; that’s why gay liberation is now history, and today’s gay movement ambivalently calls for gender conformity, except for its reliably successful drag fundraisers.

“Faggot” and its synonyms are the equivalents for males of “whore” and its synonyms for women. What the Faggot and the Slut (as mythic figures) have in common is that they have been penetrated, and are therefore polluted, unclean. In both cases, the target of the epithet may not literally have been penetrated: boys may be targeted because they don’t fit in with other boys, regardless of their sexuality, and girls ditto – a girl may be called a Slut simply because she’s begun to develop breasts earlier than her age mates. But the words are (I think this the right use of the term) performative: by calling you a faggot or a whore, I symbolically penetrate you, establish my manhood, earn and reinforce my membership in the men’s house. (Girls call each other “slut” too.) There are some interesting books on the words for women, starting with Leora Tannenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (Seven Stories, 1999) and Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (Scribner, 2002), but they don’t go deeply enough – I could sense the authors drawing back from the abyss. I don’t know of any books (or any significant writings at all) which deal with the words for men, though Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Polity Press, 1995) has some useful discussion, as does Geng Song’s The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong UP, 2004). There’s a lot more thinking to be done about this; I’m just trying out some ideas now.

Meanwhile, what about the males who say that “faggot” refers to somebody else, the cowardly, ineffectual, effeminate guys – and not to their Homo-American buddies? It’s tempting to point out that effeminate men, the sissies who got harassed and beaten up by the Real Men all their lives, are fundamentally tougher than any macho man – but that would be a mistake, partly because it plays into their ritual of competitive toughness and partly because at best it can only send the bullies off in search of someone they can still feel entitled to degrade as a not-man. That’s probably the core point right there: “faggot” does not say anything about the man who’s called one – it does say volumes about the fears and inadequacies of the men who use it as a token in their pathetic dominance games.

Faggot!

Every so often I hear straight men claiming that epithets like “faggot” don’t really refer to homosexuals. Rather, they say, it refers to ineffectual men who can’t take care of themselves or anyone else, who can’t give a woman what she needs, men who are cowardly and despicable, men who aren’t Real Men. (I don’t have any links at the moment, though I’ll try to add some the next time I encounter the claim online. I think I’ve seen Eminem and some other rappers saying such things, and I've read similar rationalizations about maricón in Mexican culture. Someone is playing a racist variation on the game here. To see how homophobic epithets are actually used by normal red-blooded American males -- haw haw haw! I can't believe I wrote that with a straight face! -- read some of the comments to this video. I'm still trying to figure out why it generated such hysteria.)

Since “gay” became a schoolyard epithet, soon after we queers mainstreamed it as a more-or-less neutral, non-clinical term for ourselves, I’ve heard the same thing about it as well. It’s true, some of the people who say “that’s so gay” are gay-friendly at other times, have gay friends, and pay liberal lip service to gay issues. And since we did claim the right to use “gay” for ourselves over the protests of our generation of genteel homophobes, I suppose we can’t really say that it has only one fixed meaning, and we shall stop linguistic change from happening in this one area forevermore.

That might even be the best response to “that’s so gay”: to recognize and, as necessary, point out that in that context, it has nothing to do with either the pre-1970 “gay” (“Don we now our gay apparel, fa-la-la fa-la-la la-la-la”) or the post-1970 homosexual “gay” (Gay Pride Now!).

Still, I don’t think any gay man who’s ever been called a fucking faggot (which means pretty much all of us) will take this claim seriously. “Faggot” refers not only to despicable, ineffectual men of any sexual orientation, but to men who have sex with other men, because in masculist culture men who have sex with other men are assumed to be despicable, ineffectual, etc. -- and fucked, in various senses of the word. There’s nothing more horrible in the masculine imagination than being penetrated anally: it takes away a man’s manhood as effectively as castration. For a man to enjoy being penetrated, to seek out the experience, is not thinkable (even if it’s not unknown to the men who deploy homophobic epithets). Gay liberationists were correct that shouting one’s fagitude to the world was a powerful challenge to the male supremacist order; that’s why gay liberation is now history, and today’s gay movement ambivalently calls for gender conformity, except for its reliably successful drag fundraisers.

“Faggot” and its synonyms are the equivalents for males of “whore” and its synonyms for women. What the Faggot and the Slut (as mythic figures) have in common is that they have been penetrated, and are therefore polluted, unclean. In both cases, the target of the epithet may not literally have been penetrated: boys may be targeted because they don’t fit in with other boys, regardless of their sexuality, and girls ditto – a girl may be called a Slut simply because she’s begun to develop breasts earlier than her age mates. But the words are (I think this the right use of the term) performative: by calling you a faggot or a whore, I symbolically penetrate you, establish my manhood, earn and reinforce my membership in the men’s house. (Girls call each other “slut” too.) There are some interesting books on the words for women, starting with Leora Tannenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (Seven Stories, 1999) and Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (Scribner, 2002), but they don’t go deeply enough – I could sense the authors drawing back from the abyss. I don’t know of any books (or any significant writings at all) which deal with the words for men, though Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Polity Press, 1995) has some useful discussion, as does Geng Song’s The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong UP, 2004). There’s a lot more thinking to be done about this; I’m just trying out some ideas now.

Meanwhile, what about the males who say that “faggot” refers to somebody else, the cowardly, ineffectual, effeminate guys – and not to their Homo-American buddies? It’s tempting to point out that effeminate men, the sissies who got harassed and beaten up by the Real Men all their lives, are fundamentally tougher than any macho man – but that would be a mistake, partly because it plays into their ritual of competitive toughness and partly because at best it can only send the bullies off in search of someone they can still feel entitled to degrade as a not-man. That’s probably the core point right there: “faggot” does not say anything about the man who’s called one – it does say volumes about the fears and inadequacies of the men who use it as a token in their pathetic dominance games.

There Won't Be A Problem Till The Girls Go Home

I don’t make any claim to historical completeness in what follows; I’ve not mentioned numerous performers who’d be relevant in a complete discussion of queer popular music. I don’t follow music and journalism/criticism as I did before the early 1990s, so I’m not sure I’m right about the trend I describe; this is just how it looks to me. With that in mind….

For me personally, how little has changed for gay people in the US can be summed up in one question:

Where’s the gay popular music?

It may be a generational thing. I know from gay.com that gay performers are releasing CDs. The ones who get attention on gay.com are, of course, mostly young, male and photogenic. Whether their music is any good or not, I can’t say. More important, I can’t tell how much of it has gay content – that is, whether they sing love songs to other males.

We have some out gay and lesbian performers, but few of them actually sing same-sex love songs. Has Melissa Etheridge recorded any love songs explicitly addressed to women? I’ve heard some live recordings by her covering other singers’ songs, like a magnificent dyke version of “Piece of My Heart,” but her own material? How about k. d. lang? Has Elton John sung any lyrics addressed to a male since “Daniel”? Rufus Wainwright will talk about his life in “gay hell,” but can he record a love song to a cute boy? (This is a generational thing, I’m sure. I found Wainwright’s first album boring, hate his voice and his preening performance style, and refuse to spend money on his later work.)

I remember reading a joint interview with Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin, laughing derisively because their 1973 song “Daniel” had been interpreted by some people as “homosexual.” “Daniel” was included on the 1996 Love Songs compilation, which seems to concede that those people were right. Jackson Browne wrote some ambiguous songs of male friendship that I added to my own repertoire, like “Song for Adam”; I also appropriated his “For a Dancer,” whose subject isn’t gendered, but which always made me think of a gay male friend I used to dance with. In that vein there’s also Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.” And I hear Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a love song to a man; that’s how it makes most sense, as Dylan’s most open-hearted and generous love song to anyone. Whether it’s “gay” is another question, though “Ballad of a Thin Man” surely is. (So blatant as to be almost invisible: “Jailhouse Rock” and the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”)

Glam rock and genderfuck never interested me much. I was haunted and tantalized by a 1974 album on Apple, “Brother”, by two Dutch brothers, Lon and Derrek Von Eaton. The cover showed the two young men, shirtless, cuddled together. I never cuddled like that with my brothers.

Here’s the ironic thing: there seems to have been more gay/lesbian/queer pop music recorded and released on major labels in the 1970s and 1980s than there is now. Much of that music is admittedly problematic in terms of “positive images”: David Bowie’s queer songs often depicted (male) homosexuality as decadent, doomed, deadly. The same is true of Jobriath, or Gary Numan, or Mitch Ryder, the Ramones, or The Smiths. But often the songs were ambiguous and ambivalent: is Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” a positive or negative song? Ryder’s “Cherry Poppin’”? Others were simply matter-of-fact, like some of the Buzzcocks’s work and Pete Shelley’s witty, wicked “Homo Sapien.” For many gay people, just the fact that the songs had been recorded and released was positive, and the music was important in their coming out.

There was also lesbian music, not just on Olivia and other small women’s labels, most notably Nona Hendryx, both as a member of LaBelle and in her solo work; and more recently Toshi Reagon. But the women’s music movement and festivals were important in giving exposure and space to women-loving women. Gay men preferred drag queens – men impersonating this or that diva, ventriloquizing their desire for other men through a female mask. It was Gloria Gaynor's version of "I Am What I Am," the draq-queen manifesto from La Cage aux Folles, that was played in the gay clubs; I'm not aware of any version by a male singer that was even released, aside from the Broadway cast album. (I'm not complaining because a woman recorded it; only that gay men evidently weren't interested in hearing it sung by a man.)

I’ve found that most gay men I’ve talked to about this are at best apathetic about hearing men sing love songs to men, and a surprising number are homophobically hostile. (When I’ve performed before gay audiences, the men’s faces would contort into disgusted grimaces when they realized I was singing gay material. I got a much better reception from straight audiences, probably because they didn’t realize what I was doing.) The gay male tradition involves identification with female actresses or singers, whether popular or operatic.

I was already out when this music appeared, so it whetted my appetite for more. At the time I took for granted that these beginnings would be followed by more and better. To my surprise, it was the opposite: the seventies and eighties were the high-water mark of queer pop music, and since then gay/lesbian material has been pushed back to the margins. This is at least partly because gay people don’t seem to be interested in it, but there actually was a backlash in the male pop music mainstream. Lester Bangs (who’d coined the term “punk rock”, maybe unaware that a punk is the kid who gets punked – fucked – in jail) called Bowie “the chicken-headed king of suck rock” (a great name for a band, I think). When the Ramones emerged in the 70s, the Village Voice celebrated their leather-jacketed scrawniness with a front-page tribute: They’re Not Queers. (Which didn’t keep them from recording the odd love song to boys. And I admit, I bought their first album just for the cover photo.) There was the whole “Disco Sucks” thing, and then hip-hop’s overt homophobia gave white – not to mention black – boys license to yell “fag” as much as they wanted. (It gave their misogyny free rein too.)

Yes, I know that gay people are a minority, quite a small one. But there are lots of niches in pop music. Does it matter how many people listen to klezmer, for instance? And homosexuality, construed as failed manhood and butt sex, obsesses straight males, especially the younger ones who are the main constituency of pop music.

I don’t demand constant overtness. I like ambiguous material, like Elvis Costello’s “Secondary Modern”, which may or may not be about a high-school boy pitching covert woo to another boy at a party: “But there won’t be a problem till the girls go home.” But I do also want overtness, by which I don’t mean necessarily sexual explicitness but rather unmistakable expression of love, romantic passion, what have you. (See Pete Townshend’s amazing, ambivalent, aggressive “Rough Boys”, from 1980.) The play Falsettos didn’t impress me much, but I was still thrilled and moved to tears by the sight of two men singing duets of love to each other. I want more; can I have a little more? Evidently not -- or, as Harvey Fierstein might say, Not enough.

There Won't Be A Problem Till The Girls Go Home

I don’t make any claim to historical completeness in what follows; I’ve not mentioned numerous performers who’d be relevant in a complete discussion of queer popular music. I don’t follow music and journalism/criticism as I did before the early 1990s, so I’m not sure I’m right about the trend I describe; this is just how it looks to me. With that in mind….

For me personally, how little has changed for gay people in the US can be summed up in one question:

Where’s the gay popular music?

It may be a generational thing. I know from gay.com that gay performers are releasing CDs. The ones who get attention on gay.com are, of course, mostly young, male and photogenic. Whether their music is any good or not, I can’t say. More important, I can’t tell how much of it has gay content – that is, whether they sing love songs to other males.

We have some out gay and lesbian performers, but few of them actually sing same-sex love songs. Has Melissa Etheridge recorded any love songs explicitly addressed to women? I’ve heard some live recordings by her covering other singers’ songs, like a magnificent dyke version of “Piece of My Heart,” but her own material? How about k. d. lang? Has Elton John sung any lyrics addressed to a male since “Daniel”? Rufus Wainwright will talk about his life in “gay hell,” but can he record a love song to a cute boy? (This is a generational thing, I’m sure. I found Wainwright’s first album boring, hate his voice and his preening performance style, and refuse to spend money on his later work.)

I remember reading a joint interview with Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin, laughing derisively because their 1973 song “Daniel” had been interpreted by some people as “homosexual.” “Daniel” was included on the 1996 Love Songs compilation, which seems to concede that those people were right. Jackson Browne wrote some ambiguous songs of male friendship that I added to my own repertoire, like “Song for Adam”; I also appropriated his “For a Dancer,” whose subject isn’t gendered, but which always made me think of a gay male friend I used to dance with. In that vein there’s also Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.” And I hear Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a love song to a man; that’s how it makes most sense, as Dylan’s most open-hearted and generous love song to anyone. Whether it’s “gay” is another question, though “Ballad of a Thin Man” surely is. (So blatant as to be almost invisible: “Jailhouse Rock” and the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”)

Glam rock and genderfuck never interested me much. I was haunted and tantalized by a 1974 album on Apple, “Brother”, by two Dutch brothers, Lon and Derrek Von Eaton. The cover showed the two young men, shirtless, cuddled together. I never cuddled like that with my brothers.

Here’s the ironic thing: there seems to have been more gay/lesbian/queer pop music recorded and released on major labels in the 1970s and 1980s than there is now. Much of that music is admittedly problematic in terms of “positive images”: David Bowie’s queer songs often depicted (male) homosexuality as decadent, doomed, deadly. The same is true of Jobriath, or Gary Numan, or Mitch Ryder, the Ramones, or The Smiths. But often the songs were ambiguous and ambivalent: is Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” a positive or negative song? Ryder’s “Cherry Poppin’”? Others were simply matter-of-fact, like some of the Buzzcocks’s work and Pete Shelley’s witty, wicked “Homo Sapien.” For many gay people, just the fact that the songs had been recorded and released was positive, and the music was important in their coming out.

There was also lesbian music, not just on Olivia and other small women’s labels, most notably Nona Hendryx, both as a member of LaBelle and in her solo work; and more recently Toshi Reagon. But the women’s music movement and festivals were important in giving exposure and space to women-loving women. Gay men preferred drag queens – men impersonating this or that diva, ventriloquizing their desire for other men through a female mask. It was Gloria Gaynor's version of "I Am What I Am," the draq-queen manifesto from La Cage aux Folles, that was played in the gay clubs; I'm not aware of any version by a male singer that was even released, aside from the Broadway cast album. (I'm not complaining because a woman recorded it; only that gay men evidently weren't interested in hearing it sung by a man.)

I’ve found that most gay men I’ve talked to about this are at best apathetic about hearing men sing love songs to men, and a surprising number are homophobically hostile. (When I’ve performed before gay audiences, the men’s faces would contort into disgusted grimaces when they realized I was singing gay material. I got a much better reception from straight audiences, probably because they didn’t realize what I was doing.) The gay male tradition involves identification with female actresses or singers, whether popular or operatic.

I was already out when this music appeared, so it whetted my appetite for more. At the time I took for granted that these beginnings would be followed by more and better. To my surprise, it was the opposite: the seventies and eighties were the high-water mark of queer pop music, and since then gay/lesbian material has been pushed back to the margins. This is at least partly because gay people don’t seem to be interested in it, but there actually was a backlash in the male pop music mainstream. Lester Bangs (who’d coined the term “punk rock”, maybe unaware that a punk is the kid who gets punked – fucked – in jail) called Bowie “the chicken-headed king of suck rock” (a great name for a band, I think). When the Ramones emerged in the 70s, the Village Voice celebrated their leather-jacketed scrawniness with a front-page tribute: They’re Not Queers. (Which didn’t keep them from recording the odd love song to boys. And I admit, I bought their first album just for the cover photo.) There was the whole “Disco Sucks” thing, and then hip-hop’s overt homophobia gave white – not to mention black – boys license to yell “fag” as much as they wanted. (It gave their misogyny free rein too.)

Yes, I know that gay people are a minority, quite a small one. But there are lots of niches in pop music. Does it matter how many people listen to klezmer, for instance? And homosexuality, construed as failed manhood and butt sex, obsesses straight males, especially the younger ones who are the main constituency of pop music.

I don’t demand constant overtness. I like ambiguous material, like Elvis Costello’s “Secondary Modern”, which may or may not be about a high-school boy pitching covert woo to another boy at a party: “But there won’t be a problem till the girls go home.” But I do also want overtness, by which I don’t mean necessarily sexual explicitness but rather unmistakable expression of love, romantic passion, what have you. (See Pete Townshend’s amazing, ambivalent, aggressive “Rough Boys”, from 1980.) The play Falsettos didn’t impress me much, but I was still thrilled and moved to tears by the sight of two men singing duets of love to each other. I want more; can I have a little more? Evidently not -- or, as Harvey Fierstein might say, Not enough.