The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture
Hybook
Poet and translator Richard Howard calls THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY
CULTURE "brilliant," "much more entertainingly written than any
other book of this kind," and argued with "an energy that is
remarkable." Alexander Cockburn calls it "savagely intelligent
and well-written," "marvelous," and "worthy of Adorno."
America's preeminent essayist Philip Lopate has called Daniel Harris "one
of the sharpest observers of American culture -- gay or straight -- on the
scene today."
Village Voice writer Gary Indiana says THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE
contains "the clearest analysis of gay culture I have ever seen
in print . . . this book is a triumph of thinking over
sentimentality and weak-mindedness." Bernard Cooper, the author
of the prize-winning book Maps to Anywhere, says that THE RISE
AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE is "often breathtaking in the humor and
beauty of its prose" and is "the most provocative and
entertaining overview of gay culture, of any culture, you will
ever read." New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm calls it
"astonishing," "delightful," "provocative," and "entirely
unpredictable." Dale Peck calls it "quietly but determinedly
brilliant."
Check out Daniel Harris's website at
http://www.geocities.com/westhollywood/heights/4130/
Daniel Harris can also be seen and heard reading from THE RISE
AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE on the Internet's latest talking literary
magazine, VoiceChannel:
http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~knafo/VoiceChannel/
SELECTIONS FROM THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE:
On gay bitchiness:
The fantasy of the vicious, back-stabbing vagina dentata, always
quick on her feet, always ready to demolish her opponent with a
stunning rejoinder, is the fantasy of a powerless minority that
asserts itself through language, not physical violence. Straight
men express aggression through fist fights and sports; gay men
through quick-witted repartee and caustic remarks. Straight men
punch; gay men quip. Straight men are barroom brawlers; gay men,
bitches. Given the centrality to the subculture of the image of
the arch queen, it is not an exaggeration to say that gay
politics grew out of gay wittiness. Wittiness was the first very
tentative step towards gay liberation, a vitriolic expression of
discontent, of our disdain for American prudery, which we reviled
through verbal protest, a compulsion to denigrate, to engage in
cutthroat bickering,which eventually reached critical mass and
led to concrete political action. Bitching, in other words, was
a form of protopolitics.
On camp:
Camp is rooted in the gay man's profound disillusionment with
celebrity culture. It expresses betrayal. It is the gleeful
sadism of the fan who has been tricked, who discovers he has been
complicit in an elaborate swindle, a monstrous lie, who realizes
that his youthful cinematic fantasies are false. Out of this
loss of innocence, homosexuals have created a macabre form of
ethnic humor in which they dance upon their former role models'
graves, reliving again and again the hilarious realization that
the diva was not a goddess, that she was flesh and blood, that
she got fat just like they did, that she got wrinkled just like
they did, that she had a miserable life and horrid children and
crippling diseases. Gay diva worship is a cult that requires the
blind faith of credulous fans who are content to kowtow and
genuflect and never to even think of peeking behind the curtain.
Camp is what happens when the curtain is lifted.
On the Kitschification of AIDS:
While all terminal illnesses are prone to sentimentalization,
AIDS propaganda has been particularly heavy-handed because of the
unusual circumstances in which activists were initially forced to
raise money to pay for the enormous costs of research, treatment,
and education. In the absence of federal support in the earliest
stages of the epidemic, doctors, as well as leaders of the gay
community, had to convince the private sector to bear the
financial burden of hospital costs, a task they undertook by
devising representations of AIDS that appealed to the broadest
possible audiences. Because the American public was at best
ambivalent, at worst actively hostile, to the first casualties of
the disease, it had to be wooed, seduced, and placated with
kitsch which activists used as the detergent in which such
forbidden topics as anal sex, promiscuity, "bodily fluids," and
recreational drug use were laundered. The need for kitsch was a
direct consequence of the need for funding, and the more money
that was needed, the kitschier the disease became. By packaging
the epidemic in cliches, activists reduced potential donors to a
state of maximum susceptibility to the plight of the disease's
victims, who were paraded before us like mistreated animals at a
carnival.
On the gay man's vs. the straight man's body:
In contrast to the gay body, the straight man's body has an
extremely short period of perfection, coming to fruition for a
few brief years in his teens and early twenties and then quickly
sliding into a state of irreversible decline in which he gains
weight, loses muscle tone, and then, within months, spreads and
sags into premature old age. The speed with which the
heterosexual's body goes to seed testifies to his lack of vanity
and self-preoccupation, the girlish narcissism that leads the
homosexual to mummify himself in the quack cures of consumerism.
In contrast to the careless blue-collar slob, gay men are
timeless vampires, Dorian Greys who flaunt their perennial good
looks even as their once youthful portraits, locked away in their
attics, shrivel and turn to dust. Having become the slave of
consumerism, which fed his fears of getting old, the gay man
launches a restless, lifelong effort to rid himself of his guilty
sense of fakeness, of artificiality, and to recover his
"naturalness," which he restores through a series of elaborately
costumed impersonations.
On the origins of gay liberation:
Long before homosexuals were accepted by mainstream society, we
had become so financially useful to the business world that our
integration as respectable Americans was inevitable, for how
could any ethnic group that contributed as heavily as we did to
the nation's economy be ostracized forever? Gay men achieved
economic viability years before they achieved political
viability. Indeed, the question arises whether gay liberation
would even have occurred had society not first recognized our
potential as a source of revenue and therefore realized that,
because we were less profitable as second-class citizens, it had
a vested interested in our assimilation. Liberation happened,
not only because drag queens hurled Molotov cocktails, set trash
cans ablaze, and uprooted parking meters at Stonewall, but also
because we had become too valuable to corporate America to be
ignored, relegated to the exclusive fiefdoms that the Mafia had
established in every major city. . . .We are inclined to look
at gay liberation as the sole factor leading to our acceptance
into society, as if we had achieved the progress we have made in
gay rights exclusively by locking horns with our enemies and
putting up stiff resistance in the face of brutality, when in
fact the preconditions for the strides we have made are far more
complex. It is not an accident that we were accepted by
mainstream America first as consumers and only second as morally
respectable citizens. The one did not simply precede the other,
it made it possible.
On nostalgia for the gay sensibility:
As the gay sensibility begins to collapse, a tremendous amount of
nostalgia is generated among certain homosexual purists who want
to protect their ethnic heritage from cooptation, from the
pillaging of grave robbers. They cling sentimentally to relics
of their history like curators and archaeologists bent on
salvaging indigenous subcultural rituals from their destruction
at the hands of careless tourists. Sentimentalization is a
symptom of the subculture's decline. It represents the wistful
longings of a group witnessing the sunset of a sensibility,
seeking to intervene in its preservation long after the
irreversible process of its absorption by straight society has
been set in motion. Our exasperated cries of protest are a
requiem for gay culture, an elegy composed by a community in
mourning for itself, lamenting its own passing, beating its
breast and tearing its hair as stately pallbearers carry the
casket into the mausoleum.