How To Be Gay

Halperin's book is a tour de force. He's making an important contribution to new ways of thinking about what it means to be gay in America. In this book, Halperin works from the premise that there is a recognizable gay male culture (e.g., Broadway, drag, camp, love of certain female icons, architectural restoration) that was created initially to provide a means of self-expression when no explicit representations, at least no stigmatizing ones, were available. Although the details change over time, and post-Stonewall liberation has afforded a bevvy of positive gay male cultural objects, Halperin argues this practice of appropriating straight cultural objects still continues. His question is: if this practice continues, then why? What might it say about the experience of being gay in a society that is still culturally straight (i.e., heteronormative), no matter what political or legislative inroads have been made? He also wants to know how we can describe and account for the way it feels to be gay without resorting to psychology or essentialist ideas (i.e., that we are "born this way."). Halperin isn't interested in whether or not people are born this way, or how they get gay, but how they engage with gay culture (which may be to not engage it) and why. Some gays aren't very gay, to say it differently.Halperin is clear that the gay culture he describes in this book is American, white gay male culture. Beyond the scope of this book, he encourages others to pick up this project, if they are so inclined, and use it for other aspects of gay culture (e.g., while he uses a scene from _Mildred Pierce_, and discusses the cult of Joan Crawford, he acknowledges that examining the interest gay men have of Bette Davis may produce different insights) and with other gay populations (e.g., gay men of color, non-American gays, lesbians, trans people). He is not making totalizing claims about gay experience--or positing that gay men have some kind of inherently superior experience or existence. In fact, he notes that many gay men, or men who are attracted to other men, don't "do" gay as well as some straight men and women. Gay, in the way Halperin discusses it, is a cultural practice, not a sex-object choice, and so anybody can do or not do gay, regardless of their sexuality.Halperin asserts that, if it's true that being gay in a straight dominated world produces a certain kind of subjectivity,then gay people do themselves a disservice by denying and underplaying that difference. Gay culture makes a contribution--understanding the world differently, gay-ly (whether one is homosexual or heterosexual), provides a way of undoing limiting and harmful norms that will stay in place (and are still in place) no matter how many equality gains are made on a political or legal level. Understanding gay subjectivity through cultural appropriation may open up freedoms not available through the lens of identity.I find this work masterful and a necessary intervention in queer studies. As a gay man (and a gay nerd), I find it compelling and a welcome response to modern gay identity politics. This is an inventive, rigorous piece of academic work, although Halperin's language is very accessible. Readers will benefit, however, from some familiarity with lesbigay or queer studies, particularly Michael Warner's _The Trouble with Normal_. I strongly recommend this to anyone who has ever felt queer, or different (regardless of your sexuality), from the rest of society. Halperin's methodology doesn't have to be limited to gay men, but following his lead, one can think differently about the cultural objects one picks up and what they might say about how you feel to be queer.

"Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one." Or, at least, so read the description for David Halperin's University of Michigan class, How to be Gay, on which his book is based. Halperin is an "utterly hopeless" gay man, one that is incapable of dressing well. The idea that specific interests - Hollywood musicals, interior design, fashion, Broadway, or Lady Gaga - define gay male culture is "routinely acknowledged as a fact" and "just as routinely denied as a truth." The very idea of a gay culture is anathema to many in the gay community who see themselves as simply a sexual orientation, one that makes them, fundamentally, "no different from anybody else."Initially, Halperin agreed, saying that he didn't see why his "sexual practices identified (him) as a member of their group," one that required him to adopt "their" tastes. No longer, though, as he now believes "there really is such a thing as gay male subjectivity," a gay culture encompassing much more than just homosexual sex. Indeed, being homosexual doesn't necessarily mean you're gay, and anyone can participate in "homosexuality as culture." This reminds me of a line from the Simpsons, in which the gay character "Grady" says, in effect, `practically anyone who's even seen a play is gay!' I don't think that Halperin would disagree: to him the "gay" love of Broadway, to which the entirety of chapter 5 is devoted, takes place "in childish queer pleasures that don't come directly from sex."Not only sexual but emotional and romantic bonds between men, Halperin argues, were once conventional. As the idea of heterosexuality slowly entered existence, and men feared being considered deviant, these bonds began to unravel. Deviancy entrenched the idea of "normative" gender styles, from which the "straight-acting and -appearing gay man" emerged. To be gay was simply to have a sexuality, not a culture, and the femininity that once identified traditional gay male culture was shunned. Then, in the 1990s, the "queer moment" reclaimed the ideas of tops and bottoms, twinks and bears, butch displays and "high-femme theatrics," and gender styles.Every generation thinks it's "the first gay generation in history to see nothing of interest or value in inherited, traditional culture." It is in this repudiation of the previous gay culture that a new gay culture is ultimately born. We must "learn how to be gay," that is, learn gay culture, since our birth families cannot teach us how to be gay. "Older" gays - those outside their 20s - are then marginalized by the new culture. He admits that his ideas of gay identity were once trendy and defined gay culture before detailing changing mores and norms of the culture and bemoaning the fact that it has changed.His main hypothesis is that gay men are more willing to appropriate and find meaning in "straight" culture rather than exclusively "gay" culture. (He argues that "Desperate Housewives" is more popular than "Queer as Folk" in the gay community and that Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" will not stand the test of time as a gay anthem because it is explicit in its 'gayness.') But isn't this true of everyone? Most people would rather subscribe to a universal culture and then assign importance to what they find to be personally meaningful. Tailoring culture feels somehow cheap, as though, instead of finding meaning, meaning is ascribed and forced upon you by its author.While I agree with his hypothesis, I disagree that gay people are somehow different than straight people, that they contain some "subjectivity" that "straight" people don't that make them more creative or wealthy or more likely to enjoy musicals than anyone else. His ideas are merely thoughts and opinions, backed up by the thoughts and opinions of others. Maybe it's simply my misanthropy, but I would not subscribe to the idea of a homogeneity of homosexuality Halperin attempts to put forward. His argument does not speak to the fundamentally conservative fight for gay marriage, nor is it true of gays of color or of low socioeconomic status or, really, anyone who is gay who isn't also American, white, and in their twenties.

Amazing analyses, great way of putting fact together, and even as a non-native English reader absolut understandable. Definitely recommendable. Great.

Appeared to be a library book....a little odd, but arrived as otherwise expected, when expected.