Yes! I remember when all those movies about Oakland came out, and I was like...wow, was living in Oakland in the 2010s kind of a thing? Here we thought we were just bored kids going to shitty house shows.
Blake's essay is good, but he ignores the counter-argument--is there actually anything interesting or revolutionary (anything 'queer', so to speak) in being a man attracted to men?
Personally I'm left very cold by the trans theorists who see being trans as inherently revolutionary--that's very much not the way I see it or experience it. At its core being trans is very boring--you wear different clothes, talk differently, some (but not all) flip a switch and start seeing you as a woman. It's interesting to me, but less inherently revolutionary than, say, being a goth (which at least is _intended_ to shock and unsettle people)
I don't think Blake would say there is anything inherently *revolutionary* about being a gay man (revolution isn't his bag, anyway). But there is something interesting and distinctive that comes out of romantic/sexual relations between two people of the same gender, and the historically specific (and at least partly political) community/movement that created. For him, that includes the rejection of the previous campy, queer style among gay men, and a kind of forceful, aggressive insistence on our normality; and finally, a literary tradition of exploring both those relations internal to the gay male community (sex, love, friendship, etc) and their relations to the outside culture. This is the root of his resistance to the dissolution of gay male specificity into anything else, whether a general leftist revolutionary movement (as in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s) or a kind of 'woke' queerness that ranks according to marginality (today).
I need to explore in a later post my precise sympathies and skepticisms of this line of argument. But for now I'll just say that I do want some kind of gay male *culture* where we talk/write to each other about issues that are *ours*, and are not forced into some kind of pious performance of "centering trans women of color" or some such. But on the other hand, I see our actual *political* interests as absolutely aligned with those of, say, trans women of color. And unlike people like Andrew Sullivan who are very territorial and whiny about this, I am not the least bit annoyed or bothered by sharing a tent with them, or, indeed, "centering" them when they are the particular focus of political violence.
just a note in passing--I don't personally have, either ideologically or in my personal style, any beef with camp, but do just observe how historically (and in the present) one could be a proponent (Sontag) or practitioner (O'Hara) of camp while being totally closeted or apolitical... and that the now much-decried 'clone' etc style is in some ways more politically/culturally confrontational and interesting. But what's great about say, Faggots or Dancer from the Dancer is their play with both registers, shuttling between camp and clone in a heteroglossic way that isn't quite (as Greenwell says of Holleran) 'ambivalence' but rather the vitality of the diverse gay world in which the texts participate... as for 'our' political interests and how they align with 'trans women of color' or whoever, I suppose all sorts of people might weariedly and sadly hope for Biden to win again, or for some prospect of social democracy in America, and we could all rally around that--but having that sort of 'interest' in common doesn't prevent me from thinking I also have a political interest in not having, for example, to legitimate my identity as 'interesting' 'revolutionary' etc to trans woman of color Naomi Kanakia! I imagine indeed I have the same real, material, political interests as the 99.9% of non-oligarchs; nevertheless, except for occasional moments of strategic solidarity, nobody lives their actual lives as members of such a vast and heterogeneous coalition, but as a member of smaller subcultural groups... Michael Denneny had a line in his 1981 Manifesto on Gay Politics that pointed out a group can have an allies, but it shouldn't confuse itself for them.
Anyway, I very much appreciate your engagement with the essay!
Yes but if you take away the aspect of being a gay man that is against society, taboo, etc, is what's left particularly interesting in itself? I mean losing my virginity in a sex dungeon in tel Aviv is certainly an experience that is unique to being MSM, but can it really sustain a whole queer studies and queer lit apparatus?
I don't especially care about sustaining an apparatus of queer studies. What I care about is a cultural space for gay men to explore things about "us" that may *not* be of much interest to everyone else. I don't think that uniqueness is limited to our unusual sex practices; I think it includes some pretty distinctive tensions between love and sex, desire and duty, ways of creating lives (friends, social relations, etc), things that have been explored in the gay lit canon. Although I am interested in exploring those on an intellectual level, I also think it's important on a practical level, when I see how many young gay men still, even now, don't really know how they should live and struggle with being outside the groove. I think we should continue producing a (sub)cultural conversation and leaving a literary heritage for them. *That*, to me, is the real argument against just ceding everything to a generalized 'queerness,' not that I think gay men are so special and are being shut out of the LGBT movement or some such (i.e., the whiny anti-woke version).
this and your other (generous!) thoughts on my essay are much appreciated--especially the insistence that what might be most worth exploring is precisely what isn't obviously 'interesting' or 'transgressive' to broader audiences (isn't the point of academia, and of minoritarian spaces, in part to be able explore topics that are hardly of interest to anyone else? with maybe sometimes in the back of one's mind the wager that, well-explored, they might end up being somehow in an unpredictable way the things that others might most benefit from)... it would be a grim world indeed if one had to be either 'against society' or 'uninteresting'!
That makes sense, that just seems to be more limited than what Blake wants, which is to retake the academy and win back whatever cultural capital is associated with being gay--its the idea that being gay or lesbian or trans should constitute cultural capital at all (with attendant material benefits in terms of professorships etc) that I find dubious
while I take it all of us in our darkest hearts might want a monopoly on cultural capital, I really can't guess where you get the impression that I'm publicly calling for anything so ambitious! I don't think the project of having something like 'gay studies' as people tried to configure it a generation ago constitutes a 'retaking' of the academy or seizing the commanding heights of culture... but it's interesting to be read as if I were a gay Chris Rufo waging such a Gramscian struggle!
But even in your comment you are quite literally talking about a form of cultural capital, which you call gay studies, and who should control it? Perplexed you don't see that...
Yes! I remember when all those movies about Oakland came out, and I was like...wow, was living in Oakland in the 2010s kind of a thing? Here we thought we were just bored kids going to shitty house shows.
Blake's essay is good, but he ignores the counter-argument--is there actually anything interesting or revolutionary (anything 'queer', so to speak) in being a man attracted to men?
Personally I'm left very cold by the trans theorists who see being trans as inherently revolutionary--that's very much not the way I see it or experience it. At its core being trans is very boring--you wear different clothes, talk differently, some (but not all) flip a switch and start seeing you as a woman. It's interesting to me, but less inherently revolutionary than, say, being a goth (which at least is _intended_ to shock and unsettle people)
I don't think Blake would say there is anything inherently *revolutionary* about being a gay man (revolution isn't his bag, anyway). But there is something interesting and distinctive that comes out of romantic/sexual relations between two people of the same gender, and the historically specific (and at least partly political) community/movement that created. For him, that includes the rejection of the previous campy, queer style among gay men, and a kind of forceful, aggressive insistence on our normality; and finally, a literary tradition of exploring both those relations internal to the gay male community (sex, love, friendship, etc) and their relations to the outside culture. This is the root of his resistance to the dissolution of gay male specificity into anything else, whether a general leftist revolutionary movement (as in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s) or a kind of 'woke' queerness that ranks according to marginality (today).
I need to explore in a later post my precise sympathies and skepticisms of this line of argument. But for now I'll just say that I do want some kind of gay male *culture* where we talk/write to each other about issues that are *ours*, and are not forced into some kind of pious performance of "centering trans women of color" or some such. But on the other hand, I see our actual *political* interests as absolutely aligned with those of, say, trans women of color. And unlike people like Andrew Sullivan who are very territorial and whiny about this, I am not the least bit annoyed or bothered by sharing a tent with them, or, indeed, "centering" them when they are the particular focus of political violence.
just a note in passing--I don't personally have, either ideologically or in my personal style, any beef with camp, but do just observe how historically (and in the present) one could be a proponent (Sontag) or practitioner (O'Hara) of camp while being totally closeted or apolitical... and that the now much-decried 'clone' etc style is in some ways more politically/culturally confrontational and interesting. But what's great about say, Faggots or Dancer from the Dancer is their play with both registers, shuttling between camp and clone in a heteroglossic way that isn't quite (as Greenwell says of Holleran) 'ambivalence' but rather the vitality of the diverse gay world in which the texts participate... as for 'our' political interests and how they align with 'trans women of color' or whoever, I suppose all sorts of people might weariedly and sadly hope for Biden to win again, or for some prospect of social democracy in America, and we could all rally around that--but having that sort of 'interest' in common doesn't prevent me from thinking I also have a political interest in not having, for example, to legitimate my identity as 'interesting' 'revolutionary' etc to trans woman of color Naomi Kanakia! I imagine indeed I have the same real, material, political interests as the 99.9% of non-oligarchs; nevertheless, except for occasional moments of strategic solidarity, nobody lives their actual lives as members of such a vast and heterogeneous coalition, but as a member of smaller subcultural groups... Michael Denneny had a line in his 1981 Manifesto on Gay Politics that pointed out a group can have an allies, but it shouldn't confuse itself for them.
Anyway, I very much appreciate your engagement with the essay!
Yes but if you take away the aspect of being a gay man that is against society, taboo, etc, is what's left particularly interesting in itself? I mean losing my virginity in a sex dungeon in tel Aviv is certainly an experience that is unique to being MSM, but can it really sustain a whole queer studies and queer lit apparatus?
I don't especially care about sustaining an apparatus of queer studies. What I care about is a cultural space for gay men to explore things about "us" that may *not* be of much interest to everyone else. I don't think that uniqueness is limited to our unusual sex practices; I think it includes some pretty distinctive tensions between love and sex, desire and duty, ways of creating lives (friends, social relations, etc), things that have been explored in the gay lit canon. Although I am interested in exploring those on an intellectual level, I also think it's important on a practical level, when I see how many young gay men still, even now, don't really know how they should live and struggle with being outside the groove. I think we should continue producing a (sub)cultural conversation and leaving a literary heritage for them. *That*, to me, is the real argument against just ceding everything to a generalized 'queerness,' not that I think gay men are so special and are being shut out of the LGBT movement or some such (i.e., the whiny anti-woke version).
this and your other (generous!) thoughts on my essay are much appreciated--especially the insistence that what might be most worth exploring is precisely what isn't obviously 'interesting' or 'transgressive' to broader audiences (isn't the point of academia, and of minoritarian spaces, in part to be able explore topics that are hardly of interest to anyone else? with maybe sometimes in the back of one's mind the wager that, well-explored, they might end up being somehow in an unpredictable way the things that others might most benefit from)... it would be a grim world indeed if one had to be either 'against society' or 'uninteresting'!
That makes sense, that just seems to be more limited than what Blake wants, which is to retake the academy and win back whatever cultural capital is associated with being gay--its the idea that being gay or lesbian or trans should constitute cultural capital at all (with attendant material benefits in terms of professorships etc) that I find dubious
while I take it all of us in our darkest hearts might want a monopoly on cultural capital, I really can't guess where you get the impression that I'm publicly calling for anything so ambitious! I don't think the project of having something like 'gay studies' as people tried to configure it a generation ago constitutes a 'retaking' of the academy or seizing the commanding heights of culture... but it's interesting to be read as if I were a gay Chris Rufo waging such a Gramscian struggle!
But even in your comment you are quite literally talking about a form of cultural capital, which you call gay studies, and who should control it? Perplexed you don't see that...