I
look around me and it seems that gay has gone away. I tried to create my own ungay
movement a couple of years ago but it didn’t seem to stick. I guess I’m just
too old and will always be gay.
All
around me herds of young gay men are looking frighteningly natty. They sport
charming spectacles, perfectly tailored suits, bow ties, and well-kept beards.
They are often to be found holding hands with their adopted children, running
in Cancer marathons, or buying expensive appliances for the condo.
This is not the ‘gay’ I grew up
with. What happened?
A
young friend of mine recently gave me a copy of The Velvet Rage. Now everything is clear. This self-help book by Alan
Downs Ph.D. was published in 2006 and apparently all the young fags are reading
it. Many seem to be changing their lives because of it.
I
had mixed feelings about The Velvet Rage.
But mostly, I hated it. On the one hand, it was nice to see a book that
actually attempts to deal with homophobia and gay self-hatred. The Velvet Rage focuses quite
extensively on the notion that gay men are damaged by the homophobia directed
against them, and attempts to help gay men love themselves, and reach a much
vaunted ‘third stage’ of self-acceptance.
Yes
it would be fabulous if we could each arrive at a place where we could love
ourselves. But many of the methods this book recommends for achieving that are resolutely
homophobic.
When
I teach queer theory in my classes I talk about the three most important ideas
that queers bring to straight culture, which are:
a) gender
play
b) alternative
relationships
c) camp
Gender play means the notion that men can be feminine and
women can be masculine. Alternative relationships mean all the different types
of bonding that are possible for loving people to engage in that are alternatives
to marriage: promiscuity, polyamorousness, ménages, open relationships, the
single life, etc.. Camp is the
self-defensive brittle wit that so many queers bring to their lives and ultimately
to their art, which has produced masterpieces from artists like Oscar Wilde,
John Waters, Gertrude Stein and many others.
The Velvet Rage pretty well ignores male effeminacy, except to trash it. Downs buys into
an age old psychiatric cliché (is he really
a Ph.D.?), one I presumed went out of fashion when homosexuality was removed
from the DSM back in 1973: the idea that gay men were ignored by the fathers and
overindulged by their mothers. He
says we “ingratiate ourselves to our mothers, and distance ourselves from our
fathers.” This is simply bullshit. There are, I’m sure millions of gay men who
were closer to their fathers than their mothers – and such associations have
nothing to do with homosexuality. He criticizes “the stereotype of the bitchy
bitter queen…. ‘Don’t mess with me sister, cause I’ll bite back and I’ll bite
back hard.’” He recommends that gay men not “act on every emotion that you
feel” and warns us “others are put off by perfection.” But most significantly, Downs does not celebrate effeminacy, and seems to
see it as something to be overcome. I certainly don’t think all gay males are
effeminate (or that all lesbians are masculine) but I do think that this happy
gender confusion many of us embrace is something we can offer the straights. Something that will help them become more human, and humane.
Downs
also exhibits a complete lack of sympathy with (or understanding about) gay liberation. In one short
paragraph he trashes The Mattachine Society and Harry Hay by dismissing the
radical fairies and queer nation: “There are even some gay men, such as those
involved in queer nation or the radial fairies, that suggest that gay men are
not meant to be in committed relationships.” First of all, Downs gets it wrong.
What I think (along with many of the original gay liberationists) is that
monogamy is not for the majority of people period – gay, straight, male,
female, whatever, and that we should all open
ourselves up to the possibility of relationship alternatives. For Downs, only
monogamy exists. This precipitates a horrible shame cycle for the many who try
and fit themselves into a system that does not work for them, and never will.
It’s
all very sad really. The book seems to be working from the outside in. It’s as
if the author did a poll of all the characteristics that straight people find
most appalling about the gay male stereotype -- promiscuity, excessive drug
use, effeminacy, crankiness, and a designer-fag mentality -- and decided to
root them out of our culture.
I
really couldn’t care less if straights think we are all temperamental, gender-bending sluts. Queers with those qualities are the ones who shouted down the cops at
Stonewall in 1969. They are the best we have to offer, not the worst. And,
trust me, we won’t learning anything about homophobia or self-hatred by hating
them, or the aspects of them that we find in ourselves.