Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

I'm in the middle of a reading push, as I think you could call it, trying to get through a pile of books that I've had out from the library for too long. (Not overdue; I've just been renewing them a lot.) It's been successful in that I'm making good progress, but I've found it difficult to make time to write. You'd think that retirement would have eliminated such time conflicts in my life, but it hasn't.

Tonight I just began reading Loretta Wing Wah Ho's Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China (Routledge, 2010), which looked promising in the library because it is based on many interviews with gay and lesbian Chinese. First, though, I have to get through the introductory material, which is heavy with theory and some drearily typical generalizations about "Western" gay life. For example, from page 10:

There is, however, little copying of the mainstream Western gay politics of employing the rhetoric of human rights as a claim to assert the legitimacy of sexual diversity, and push for visibility and social change in China. This is because this politics, central to Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities ...

Not true – Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities are based on the same medicalization of sexuality that Ho shows to be dominant in China. Rights-based rhetoric and strategies are a relatively recent development here, and though they're certainly well dug-in in the US, that's because they conform to "mainstream" American notions of politics.

... is considered by some non-Western gay activists, including some of those in China, to be in conflict with local cultural traditions. Furthermore, same-sex politics in contemporary China is complicated by rivalry and conflict among elite same-sex groups.

Omighod, that’s like so different from the way it is here! (Sarcasm Alert! for the irony-impaired.)

There is a competition for foreign funding and international representations among these local networks: gay-oriented website operators, tongzhi (a same-sex attracted Chinese man or woman) hotline organisers, NGOs, a few voluntary groups and informal social groups.

A major factor in US gay life that really does differ from Chinese gay life, on Ho's account, is the commercial sector: bars, discos, magazines and other publications, and the like. Most of this, I believe, is still grass-roots and close to everyday life.

On the whole, the politics of identity in China rejects the "confrontational" idea of disrupting family and community ties as a result of coming out – that is, Chinese traditions prescribe that primacy should be given to family ties and social harmony over an individual’s sexual identity or pleasure.

On the other hand, Ho concedes in an end note (161, note 15) that "'pride parades' in Western societies are no longer seen as confrontational ... Pride parades are increasingly called 'festivals', while Western gay men and lesbians are now targeted as a desired market and a potential voting bloc." She doesn't seem to realize that this undercuts her theoretical framework, since it shows that "Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities" are not monolithic. Confrontation has only ever been one facet of gay politics in the US.

One seeming difference between Ho's approach and that of many other non-American writers on emergent gayish life around the world is her embrace of "identity" and "the politics of identity," both of which are dirty words in most academic writing on the subject, including writing on gayish life in the US. (I think "gayish" could be a useful word in this context, certainly better than Ho's essentializing "same-sex", which makes sense only some of the time.) Her concept of identity comes, she says, from Stuart Hall, which made me try to think of how much queer academic work has come from the Cultural Studies approach Hall epitomizes. Not much that I know of; really only a few Afro-British writers like Kobena Mercer. (Maybe I should reread Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle now that I've read Raymond Williams, who was Stuart Hall's teacher. But it seems to me that Cultural Studies, despite its pedigree, is mostly unlike the kind of work Williams did.)

On page 11 Ho writes,

In short, many same-sex attracted Chinese in China are still exposed to great vulnerability.

Which is interesting: how can they be “exposed,” in light of everything Ho has said about their low profile? It's a reminder that, as David Halperin wrote in Saint Foucault (Oxford, 1995),

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them [34].

Unfortunately, it seems Ho has only listened to a narrow part of the discussion of these issues in the West.

It is this vulnerability [Ho continues] that both binds and splits the local Chinese and global same-sex networks, and witnesses a struggle for representing an “authentic” Chinese same-sex culture among the diasporic Chinese same-sex communities. This vulnerability reinforces the formation of a decentred identity, expressed through an incomplete but dominant model of Western homosexuality, which is overlapped with culturally determined notions of Chinese gayness.

This too will be familiar to anyone who remembers or has studied the recent history of gayish life in the West. Before the early 1960s, when the American homophile movement began to constitute itself as a national presence with increasing militance, Ho's description could apply just as well to American queers. There was considerable resistance even after Stonewall to the idea that gay people had common interests, even if these were limited simply to an end to police harassment and antigay violence, whether official or freelance.

Ho admits that in the past decade or so "the spread of the Western-oriented concepts of 'gay assertion' and 'gay identity' in urban China has been extraordinary" (13); could it be because gay Chinese have found these supposedly alien ideas useful? There was a similar explosion of gay organization in the US after Stonewall: suddenly almost every college or university and every city of any size had a gay group. I concede that some of it was mere copycatting, that only after groups were founded did people begin to think about what they were for. But that didn't make them illegitimate or inauthentic.

Gay netizens in China are increasingly exposed to the transnational gay scene via the internet, where notions of “coming out”, “gay rights,” “gay marriage” or “individualism” [whoa, Tessie!] are widely promoted. These notions enhance general [?] awareness of identity and community, and yet they lead some gay netizens in China to imagine the Western gay world as a gay haven, where gender or sexual variation is the norm [14].

The second sentence is true enough: even before I set foot in Korea (the only Asian country I've visited so far) I encountered gay Asians online who had an unrealistic picture of American gay life: they had no idea of the extent of antigay violence here, or of organized homophobia and bigotry, or even that most American states had laws against sex between males. It's understandable, of course, but scholars should know better, and many don't; Ho at least seems to, though she still has a distorted view of the lives most of us lead.

I objected to "individualism" because I don't recall having encountered that word in much American gay discourse, at the popular or scholarly level. "Widely promoted"? Not a bit of it. As I've pointed out before, gay identity is not individualistic but situates the individual in a category, a community, a collectivity; "coming out" is double-edged, referring to self-avowal before straight society but also to emerging into gay society, joining with others in the same boat. Far from rejecting the family, most American gay people are trying to get their parents to keep them. In a remarkable number of cases, they succeed; there's no good reason in principle why they shouldn't. Another phenomenon of American gay life that Ho should be aware of is PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national organization in which supportive heterosexuals come together to protect their gay and lesbian family members.

That's where I am so far, still in the first introductory chapter. More to come, maybe.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

I'm in the middle of a reading push, as I think you could call it, trying to get through a pile of books that I've had out from the library for too long. (Not overdue; I've just been renewing them a lot.) It's been successful in that I'm making good progress, but I've found it difficult to make time to write. You'd think that retirement would have eliminated such time conflicts in my life, but it hasn't.

Tonight I just began reading Loretta Wing Wah Ho's Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China (Routledge, 2010), which looked promising in the library because it is based on many interviews with gay and lesbian Chinese. First, though, I have to get through the introductory material, which is heavy with theory and some drearily typical generalizations about "Western" gay life. For example, from page 10:

There is, however, little copying of the mainstream Western gay politics of employing the rhetoric of human rights as a claim to assert the legitimacy of sexual diversity, and push for visibility and social change in China. This is because this politics, central to Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities ...

Not true – Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities are based on the same medicalization of sexuality that Ho shows to be dominant in China. Rights-based rhetoric and strategies are a relatively recent development here, and though they're certainly well dug-in in the US, that's because they conform to "mainstream" American notions of politics.

... is considered by some non-Western gay activists, including some of those in China, to be in conflict with local cultural traditions. Furthermore, same-sex politics in contemporary China is complicated by rivalry and conflict among elite same-sex groups.

Omighod, that’s like so different from the way it is here! (Sarcasm Alert! for the irony-impaired.)

There is a competition for foreign funding and international representations among these local networks: gay-oriented website operators, tongzhi (a same-sex attracted Chinese man or woman) hotline organisers, NGOs, a few voluntary groups and informal social groups.

A major factor in US gay life that really does differ from Chinese gay life, on Ho's account, is the commercial sector: bars, discos, magazines and other publications, and the like. Most of this, I believe, is still grass-roots and close to everyday life.

On the whole, the politics of identity in China rejects the "confrontational" idea of disrupting family and community ties as a result of coming out – that is, Chinese traditions prescribe that primacy should be given to family ties and social harmony over an individual’s sexual identity or pleasure.

On the other hand, Ho concedes in an end note (161, note 15) that "'pride parades' in Western societies are no longer seen as confrontational ... Pride parades are increasingly called 'festivals', while Western gay men and lesbians are now targeted as a desired market and a potential voting bloc." She doesn't seem to realize that this undercuts her theoretical framework, since it shows that "Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities" are not monolithic. Confrontation has only ever been one facet of gay politics in the US.

One seeming difference between Ho's approach and that of many other non-American writers on emergent gayish life around the world is her embrace of "identity" and "the politics of identity," both of which are dirty words in most academic writing on the subject, including writing on gayish life in the US. (I think "gayish" could be a useful word in this context, certainly better than Ho's essentializing "same-sex", which makes sense only some of the time.) Her concept of identity comes, she says, from Stuart Hall, which made me try to think of how much queer academic work has come from the Cultural Studies approach Hall epitomizes. Not much that I know of; really only a few Afro-British writers like Kobena Mercer. (Maybe I should reread Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle now that I've read Raymond Williams, who was Stuart Hall's teacher. But it seems to me that Cultural Studies, despite its pedigree, is mostly unlike the kind of work Williams did.)

On page 11 Ho writes,

In short, many same-sex attracted Chinese in China are still exposed to great vulnerability.

Which is interesting: how can they be “exposed,” in light of everything Ho has said about their low profile? It's a reminder that, as David Halperin wrote in Saint Foucault (Oxford, 1995),

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them [34].

Unfortunately, it seems Ho has only listened to a narrow part of the discussion of these issues in the West.

It is this vulnerability [Ho continues] that both binds and splits the local Chinese and global same-sex networks, and witnesses a struggle for representing an “authentic” Chinese same-sex culture among the diasporic Chinese same-sex communities. This vulnerability reinforces the formation of a decentred identity, expressed through an incomplete but dominant model of Western homosexuality, which is overlapped with culturally determined notions of Chinese gayness.

This too will be familiar to anyone who remembers or has studied the recent history of gayish life in the West. Before the early 1960s, when the American homophile movement began to constitute itself as a national presence with increasing militance, Ho's description could apply just as well to American queers. There was considerable resistance even after Stonewall to the idea that gay people had common interests, even if these were limited simply to an end to police harassment and antigay violence, whether official or freelance.

Ho admits that in the past decade or so "the spread of the Western-oriented concepts of 'gay assertion' and 'gay identity' in urban China has been extraordinary" (13); could it be because gay Chinese have found these supposedly alien ideas useful? There was a similar explosion of gay organization in the US after Stonewall: suddenly almost every college or university and every city of any size had a gay group. I concede that some of it was mere copycatting, that only after groups were founded did people begin to think about what they were for. But that didn't make them illegitimate or inauthentic.

Gay netizens in China are increasingly exposed to the transnational gay scene via the internet, where notions of “coming out”, “gay rights,” “gay marriage” or “individualism” [whoa, Tessie!] are widely promoted. These notions enhance general [?] awareness of identity and community, and yet they lead some gay netizens in China to imagine the Western gay world as a gay haven, where gender or sexual variation is the norm [14].

The second sentence is true enough: even before I set foot in Korea (the only Asian country I've visited so far) I encountered gay Asians online who had an unrealistic picture of American gay life: they had no idea of the extent of antigay violence here, or of organized homophobia and bigotry, or even that most American states had laws against sex between males. It's understandable, of course, but scholars should know better, and many don't; Ho at least seems to, though she still has a distorted view of the lives most of us lead.

I objected to "individualism" because I don't recall having encountered that word in much American gay discourse, at the popular or scholarly level. "Widely promoted"? Not a bit of it. As I've pointed out before, gay identity is not individualistic but situates the individual in a category, a community, a collectivity; "coming out" is double-edged, referring to self-avowal before straight society but also to emerging into gay society, joining with others in the same boat. Far from rejecting the family, most American gay people are trying to get their parents to keep them. In a remarkable number of cases, they succeed; there's no good reason in principle why they shouldn't. Another phenomenon of American gay life that Ho should be aware of is PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national organization in which supportive heterosexuals come together to protect their gay and lesbian family members.

That's where I am so far, still in the first introductory chapter. More to come, maybe.

The Way of a Man With a Lad ...

There are three things too wondrous for me, yea, four things which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way people keep talking about homosexuality as an "identity," though they have no idea what an identity is. Or homosexuality, for that matter.

I've just begun reading the new, uncensored, annotated edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published this year by Harvard University Press. The editor, Nicholas Frankel, has gone back to the magazine publication and Wilde's typescript, which apparently contain more obviously homoerotic content than the book version. That should be interesting, since even some very sensible queer scholars have doubted that Wilde intended sodomitical interpretations of his characters.

But so far I'm still in the introductory material, and damned if Frankel didn't put his foot in it almost immediately. From page 7:

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in the Victorian era, sexual preference was less clearly seen as an identity; indeed, the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, when it was used adjectivally in a translation of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (it was first used as a noun in 1912). Wilde and the other men who participated in London’s homosexual subculture, many of them leading secret double lives, would have been viewed by the majority not as homosexuals per se but as men indulging in “unclean” vices. Even so, homosexual acts were generally considered repugnant and deviant – and for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

Here we have the usual confused and contradictory thrashing around. If it is so significant that "the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892," if it marks some kind of sociocultural watershed, how could London have had a "homosexual subculture" before 1892? How could "homosexual acts" be considered repugnant if they didn't exist before they bore that name, and how could "homosexuality" be criminalized by a law passed seven years before the word entered the language?

Yes, I'm being deliberately pedantic here, but I think it's justified. If "homosexual" uniquely denotes "identity" (a word that neither Frankel nor most other scholars who use it bother to define), it can't be applied to anything that occurred or existed before it passed into the language. It would also be nice if someone explained how the advent of the word "homosexual" magically produced "homosexual identity." As I've said before, talk like this is generally based on a misreading of Michel Foucault, and is more of a genuflection to his influence than a well-founded historical statement.

And no, I'm not being too hard on Frankel. Look again at the latter part of the quotation above:

... for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

This is clumsily written, but on its face it's false. What changed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (often called the Labouchere Amendment after the Member of Parliament who introduced it) was that a wider range of genital contact between males became unlawful. Henry VIII's statute made "Buggery either with Mankind or with any Animal" a capital crime; there wasn't absolute agreement as to what constituted buggery, whether it extended to oral-genital contact or was limited to anal penetration -- the law required proof of penetration, and was generally interpreted to refer to the latter. The death penalty was abolished for most crimes in 1828. (I'm drawing here on H. Montgomery Hyde's The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid Look at Homosexuality in Britain [Little, Brown, 1970], pages 91-93 and 134-136.) If by "homosexuality" Frankel means "sexual relations between males," then homosexuality had been criminalized centuries before Labouchere; if he means "acts labeled 'homosexual,'" then Labouchere didn't even touch on them.

It can be, and has been, argued that buggery doesn't equal "homosexuality," so under that rather strained interpretation "homosexuality" wasn't criminalized before the Labouchere Amendment. But it it wasn't criminalized after it, either: what the Amendment criminalized were acts, however vaguely specified, not identities. And so matters remained as far as the law was concerned: the "sodomy" laws overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003 also were about acts, not identities. Most of these laws penalized sodomy between males and females, as well as between males, so they didn't criminalize homosexuality either.

Besides, "bugger" is also an identity. I think it was in a biography of Virginia Woolf that I read that when she began meeting her brother's male friends who loved other males, she had to learn to refer to them as "buggers," not "sods." Despite their bugger identity, several of them married and sired children; despite their heterosexual marriages, most of these men continued having it off with other men. Probably "sodomite" had functioned as an identity long before that, as Mark Jordan suggested in his The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997).

Nor is it clear what homosexual or gay "identity" means today, or why it matters. That's what bothers me about discussions like Frankel's: there doesn't seem to be any point in invoking identity here. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't make much sense.

The Way of a Man With a Lad ...

There are three things too wondrous for me, yea, four things which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way people keep talking about homosexuality as an "identity," though they have no idea what an identity is. Or homosexuality, for that matter.

I've just begun reading the new, uncensored, annotated edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published this year by Harvard University Press. The editor, Nicholas Frankel, has gone back to the magazine publication and Wilde's typescript, which apparently contain more obviously homoerotic content than the book version. That should be interesting, since even some very sensible queer scholars have doubted that Wilde intended sodomitical interpretations of his characters.

But so far I'm still in the introductory material, and damned if Frankel didn't put his foot in it almost immediately. From page 7:

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in the Victorian era, sexual preference was less clearly seen as an identity; indeed, the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, when it was used adjectivally in a translation of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (it was first used as a noun in 1912). Wilde and the other men who participated in London’s homosexual subculture, many of them leading secret double lives, would have been viewed by the majority not as homosexuals per se but as men indulging in “unclean” vices. Even so, homosexual acts were generally considered repugnant and deviant – and for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

Here we have the usual confused and contradictory thrashing around. If it is so significant that "the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892," if it marks some kind of sociocultural watershed, how could London have had a "homosexual subculture" before 1892? How could "homosexual acts" be considered repugnant if they didn't exist before they bore that name, and how could "homosexuality" be criminalized by a law passed seven years before the word entered the language?

Yes, I'm being deliberately pedantic here, but I think it's justified. If "homosexual" uniquely denotes "identity" (a word that neither Frankel nor most other scholars who use it bother to define), it can't be applied to anything that occurred or existed before it passed into the language. It would also be nice if someone explained how the advent of the word "homosexual" magically produced "homosexual identity." As I've said before, talk like this is generally based on a misreading of Michel Foucault, and is more of a genuflection to his influence than a well-founded historical statement.

And no, I'm not being too hard on Frankel. Look again at the latter part of the quotation above:

... for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

This is clumsily written, but on its face it's false. What changed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (often called the Labouchere Amendment after the Member of Parliament who introduced it) was that a wider range of genital contact between males became unlawful. Henry VIII's statute made "Buggery either with Mankind or with any Animal" a capital crime; there wasn't absolute agreement as to what constituted buggery, whether it extended to oral-genital contact or was limited to anal penetration -- the law required proof of penetration, and was generally interpreted to refer to the latter. The death penalty was abolished for most crimes in 1828. (I'm drawing here on H. Montgomery Hyde's The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid Look at Homosexuality in Britain [Little, Brown, 1970], pages 91-93 and 134-136.) If by "homosexuality" Frankel means "sexual relations between males," then homosexuality had been criminalized centuries before Labouchere; if he means "acts labeled 'homosexual,'" then Labouchere didn't even touch on them.

It can be, and has been, argued that buggery doesn't equal "homosexuality," so under that rather strained interpretation "homosexuality" wasn't criminalized before the Labouchere Amendment. But it it wasn't criminalized after it, either: what the Amendment criminalized were acts, however vaguely specified, not identities. And so matters remained as far as the law was concerned: the "sodomy" laws overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003 also were about acts, not identities. Most of these laws penalized sodomy between males and females, as well as between males, so they didn't criminalize homosexuality either.

Besides, "bugger" is also an identity. I think it was in a biography of Virginia Woolf that I read that when she began meeting her brother's male friends who loved other males, she had to learn to refer to them as "buggers," not "sods." Despite their bugger identity, several of them married and sired children; despite their heterosexual marriages, most of these men continued having it off with other men. Probably "sodomite" had functioned as an identity long before that, as Mark Jordan suggested in his The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997).

Nor is it clear what homosexual or gay "identity" means today, or why it matters. That's what bothers me about discussions like Frankel's: there doesn't seem to be any point in invoking identity here. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't make much sense.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

Never the Twain Shall Meet, One More Time

I'm still reading Mark J. McLelland's Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan, and still finding contrasts between Japanese gay life and "Western" gay life that don't seem to work. In his discussion of Japanese gay male media, for example, he says that

Gay media in Japan do not, on the whole, address issues of lifestyle and tend to avoid discussion of homosexuality in terms of legal reform or human rights -- issues which take up considerable space in gay media in Europe and the United States. ... Thus the American Advocate, the British Gay Times and the Australian gay newspaper Sydney Star Observer, although containing a few erotic pictures, are mainly news and lifestyle oriented whereas pornographic magazines such as or Honcho or Torso focus more specifically upon erotic fantasy. Japan so far has no nationally distributed glossy magazines similar to the Advocate or Gay Times which, directed at gay men, lesbians and transgender individuals, focus on issues of gay identity, lifestyle and rights, although as I point out in the current chapter, such articles are occasionally sandwiched in between the pornography in Japanese gay magazines [127].

Fair enough, but McLelland seems not to be aware that the Advocate used to have a big personal-ads section, known as "Trader Dick," that probably kept it afloat financially. The balance between politics, "lifestyle," and the erotic was always controversial. By 1992, Trader Dick was spun off to a separate publication, as the "gay market" caught on and it became easier to sell ad space to non-gay publications. The word "lesbian" was added to the Advocate's masthead only in 1990, which made many of the magazine's male readers throw hissyfits, writing angry letters denouncing the lesbian writers who'd been hired. Political papers like Gay Community News that refused to take sex-oriented advertising always had trouble surviving financially, however prestigious their content was. (And I say that as one who preferred, subscribed to, and wrote for the political papers.) I don't know much about the relative circulation of The Advocate and Honcho, but I wouldn't assume that Honcho moves fewer copies.

As for movement politics and "identity" (a word that always bugs me for some reason, partly because it's stressed so much in books like this without much clarity about what it means), politics and the social/sexual have always jostled each other for space in the American gay movement, with the latter usually winning out. Daughters of Bilitis, the first successful lesbian organization in the US, founded in the 1950s, was primarily a social organization for many years, until second-wave feminism politicized many lesbians. Mattachine, founded in 1948 by the ex-Communist Harry Hay and a few other politically minded gay men, was soon purged of its politicos and became largely a social club. Most American gay men really aren't that political. If Japanese magazines don't contain much political content, that could have something to do with the fact that there is no Japanese gay movement to speak of.

The most noteworthy difference I observe about the Japanese gay monthlies McLelland describes is their high price (1500 yen, or about $12 at the time he was writing) and their size: 500 pages. That's much bigger than any American gay magazine I've ever seen. The table of contents for one such magazine McLelland describes, Barazoku for April 1994, doesn't appear until page 54, "suggesting that the magazine is bought more on the basis of the boys in the pictures than the articles listed in the contents!" (130) Duh! This made me think of Playboy; the boys and men who bought it never hung its articles on the walls of their dorm rooms either.

The April 1994 issue of Barazoku also contains "54 pages of personal ads (777 in total)", and "259 pages of ads headed 'Barazoku men's town guide'", ranging from "'Gay nights' at major disco venues (few Japanese gay bars are large enough to permit dancing)" to "a huge number of adverts for both domestic and foreign videos (with stills) covering the usual gay fantasy figures ... Telephone sex is also on offer", along with "ads offering sexual services" (133). All this is roughly what you'd find in the classified ads of the Village Voice, it seems to me.

In the personal ads McLelland analyzes,

In keeping with the general lack of opportunity for developing or expressing a 'gay identity' many of the men placing ads describe themselves as ordinary ... or manly ... and are looking for other men like themselves who are cheerful ... and honest ... Very few men except those with a fetish for transgendered men, specifically request feminine or effeminate partners ... Many ads definitively reject them along with smokers, guys wearing glasses, fat men and foreigners. In fact, such men are rejected so often in the ads, that some ads make a specific mention of not minding such things as glasses or foreigners. Activities are the mainstays of Japanese recreation: driving, karaoke, going eating/drinking, travel and sports. ... The majority of writers are thus men who see themselves as being honest and ordinary, seeking other men to consult about problems as well as relax in very ordinary Japanese ways [145].

Again, this sounds exactly like gay personal ads in the US, where one constantly reads of "normal guy looking for normal guy" and "masc seeking masc", no fats fems or freaks plz. McLelland doesn't make any explicit comparison between cultures in this part of his discussion, except for that bit about the lack of opportunity for developing a "gay identity" -- but evidently even here in the land of Gay Identity, gay men want to see themselves as "ordinary," except compared to other gay men. "I'm not like most gay guys, hate the gay scene" is a familiar refrain in American personal ads and online profiles, so common that you'd have to conclude that most gay guys are different from most gay guys. Isn't that what the dread pirate Assimilation (which takes no prisoners) is all about, the claim that except for what we do in bed we're no different from anyone else? And it appears to be true; seventy-five percent of Americans consider themselves above average, so why should gay Americans be any different in that respect?

McLelland describes

H-san, an editor of the gay magazine G-Men and an AIDS activist, who, although a macho 'bear' himself, has been trying to get a variety of homosexual people together for the purposes of socializing. ... H-san was quite clear that for him the 'bear' type was a fantasy (specifically a sexual fantasy) figure that he did not want to be limited by in his personal interactions ... He would particularly like to see increased visibility for women in the Ni-chome scene as he clearly feels a solidarity with all people, irrespective of their sexual orientation, who are marginalized in Japanese society through their refusal to abide by normative understandings of sex roles [127].

I'd like to meet H-san, who sounds like an interesting person. But he's clearly no more typical, or representative, of most gay Japanese men than an American with similar ideas would be of most gay Americans. It sounds, from McLelland's description, as if gay life in Japan and the US are converging: what with the Internet, it's possible to have a gay sexual life without ever having to set foot in a physical space full of gay people. One can specify one's type -- McLelland has a lot to say about the "typing" of gay men in Japanese gay media and bar life, which mirrors the proliferation of sexual types in the US: bears, leather daddies, clones, twinks, and so on -- and stick to it, or him, as exclusively as one wishes. Though there are evidently more gay political activists in Japan than there were, say, thirty years ago, it's American gay life that is becoming more like the Japanese: a hive of commercialized niches based on sexual types, humming invisibly beneath a bland conformist surface.

(Santa Muscle Bear by the Japanese artist Jiraiya, via Bearotic)

Never the Twain Shall Meet, One More Time

I'm still reading Mark J. McLelland's Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan, and still finding contrasts between Japanese gay life and "Western" gay life that don't seem to work. In his discussion of Japanese gay male media, for example, he says that

Gay media in Japan do not, on the whole, address issues of lifestyle and tend to avoid discussion of homosexuality in terms of legal reform or human rights -- issues which take up considerable space in gay media in Europe and the United States. ... Thus the American Advocate, the British Gay Times and the Australian gay newspaper Sydney Star Observer, although containing a few erotic pictures, are mainly news and lifestyle oriented whereas pornographic magazines such as or Honcho or Torso focus more specifically upon erotic fantasy. Japan so far has no nationally distributed glossy magazines similar to the Advocate or Gay Times which, directed at gay men, lesbians and transgender individuals, focus on issues of gay identity, lifestyle and rights, although as I point out in the current chapter, such articles are occasionally sandwiched in between the pornography in Japanese gay magazines [127].

Fair enough, but McLelland seems not to be aware that the Advocate used to have a big personal-ads section, known as "Trader Dick," that probably kept it afloat financially. The balance between politics, "lifestyle," and the erotic was always controversial. By 1992, Trader Dick was spun off to a separate publication, as the "gay market" caught on and it became easier to sell ad space to non-gay publications. The word "lesbian" was added to the Advocate's masthead only in 1990, which made many of the magazine's male readers throw hissyfits, writing angry letters denouncing the lesbian writers who'd been hired. Political papers like Gay Community News that refused to take sex-oriented advertising always had trouble surviving financially, however prestigious their content was. (And I say that as one who preferred, subscribed to, and wrote for the political papers.) I don't know much about the relative circulation of The Advocate and Honcho, but I wouldn't assume that Honcho moves fewer copies.

As for movement politics and "identity" (a word that always bugs me for some reason, partly because it's stressed so much in books like this without much clarity about what it means), politics and the social/sexual have always jostled each other for space in the American gay movement, with the latter usually winning out. Daughters of Bilitis, the first successful lesbian organization in the US, founded in the 1950s, was primarily a social organization for many years, until second-wave feminism politicized many lesbians. Mattachine, founded in 1948 by the ex-Communist Harry Hay and a few other politically minded gay men, was soon purged of its politicos and became largely a social club. Most American gay men really aren't that political. If Japanese magazines don't contain much political content, that could have something to do with the fact that there is no Japanese gay movement to speak of.

The most noteworthy difference I observe about the Japanese gay monthlies McLelland describes is their high price (1500 yen, or about $12 at the time he was writing) and their size: 500 pages. That's much bigger than any American gay magazine I've ever seen. The table of contents for one such magazine McLelland describes, Barazoku for April 1994, doesn't appear until page 54, "suggesting that the magazine is bought more on the basis of the boys in the pictures than the articles listed in the contents!" (130) Duh! This made me think of Playboy; the boys and men who bought it never hung its articles on the walls of their dorm rooms either.

The April 1994 issue of Barazoku also contains "54 pages of personal ads (777 in total)", and "259 pages of ads headed 'Barazoku men's town guide'", ranging from "'Gay nights' at major disco venues (few Japanese gay bars are large enough to permit dancing)" to "a huge number of adverts for both domestic and foreign videos (with stills) covering the usual gay fantasy figures ... Telephone sex is also on offer", along with "ads offering sexual services" (133). All this is roughly what you'd find in the classified ads of the Village Voice, it seems to me.

In the personal ads McLelland analyzes,

In keeping with the general lack of opportunity for developing or expressing a 'gay identity' many of the men placing ads describe themselves as ordinary ... or manly ... and are looking for other men like themselves who are cheerful ... and honest ... Very few men except those with a fetish for transgendered men, specifically request feminine or effeminate partners ... Many ads definitively reject them along with smokers, guys wearing glasses, fat men and foreigners. In fact, such men are rejected so often in the ads, that some ads make a specific mention of not minding such things as glasses or foreigners. Activities are the mainstays of Japanese recreation: driving, karaoke, going eating/drinking, travel and sports. ... The majority of writers are thus men who see themselves as being honest and ordinary, seeking other men to consult about problems as well as relax in very ordinary Japanese ways [145].

Again, this sounds exactly like gay personal ads in the US, where one constantly reads of "normal guy looking for normal guy" and "masc seeking masc", no fats fems or freaks plz. McLelland doesn't make any explicit comparison between cultures in this part of his discussion, except for that bit about the lack of opportunity for developing a "gay identity" -- but evidently even here in the land of Gay Identity, gay men want to see themselves as "ordinary," except compared to other gay men. "I'm not like most gay guys, hate the gay scene" is a familiar refrain in American personal ads and online profiles, so common that you'd have to conclude that most gay guys are different from most gay guys. Isn't that what the dread pirate Assimilation (which takes no prisoners) is all about, the claim that except for what we do in bed we're no different from anyone else? And it appears to be true; seventy-five percent of Americans consider themselves above average, so why should gay Americans be any different in that respect?

McLelland describes

H-san, an editor of the gay magazine G-Men and an AIDS activist, who, although a macho 'bear' himself, has been trying to get a variety of homosexual people together for the purposes of socializing. ... H-san was quite clear that for him the 'bear' type was a fantasy (specifically a sexual fantasy) figure that he did not want to be limited by in his personal interactions ... He would particularly like to see increased visibility for women in the Ni-chome scene as he clearly feels a solidarity with all people, irrespective of their sexual orientation, who are marginalized in Japanese society through their refusal to abide by normative understandings of sex roles [127].

I'd like to meet H-san, who sounds like an interesting person. But he's clearly no more typical, or representative, of most gay Japanese men than an American with similar ideas would be of most gay Americans. It sounds, from McLelland's description, as if gay life in Japan and the US are converging: what with the Internet, it's possible to have a gay sexual life without ever having to set foot in a physical space full of gay people. One can specify one's type -- McLelland has a lot to say about the "typing" of gay men in Japanese gay media and bar life, which mirrors the proliferation of sexual types in the US: bears, leather daddies, clones, twinks, and so on -- and stick to it, or him, as exclusively as one wishes. Though there are evidently more gay political activists in Japan than there were, say, thirty years ago, it's American gay life that is becoming more like the Japanese: a hive of commercialized niches based on sexual types, humming invisibly beneath a bland conformist surface.

(Santa Muscle Bear by the Japanese artist Jiraiya, via Bearotic)