Johann Hari on Bronski and the Great Gay/Queer Divide

How can the equality movement reach our destination if we don't agree on where we should go? The perpetual splits -- gay/queer, same/different, assimiliationist/ separatist -- are at the heart of today's thought-provoking 2,700-word essay by Johann Hari [right] in the Independent. After the most comprehensive review yet of Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States [[Kindle]], fluidly parsing 500 years of American history though he is a 32-year-old Swiss-Scot raised in London, Hari plunges into the divide:

"The most decisive turning point arrived when gay people began to band together to demand to be treated decently. The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950...but it couldn't agree on its central goal. The battle in that society – which created a deep split in the group within three years – runs through gay history from that point on and eventually breaks apart Bronski's book. It boils down to this. Is the point of the gay struggle to say we are essentially the same as straight people, or is it to say we are different and glad to be so?

"My view – since reading Andrew Sullivan's masterpiece Virtually Normal [[Kindle]] when I was a teenager – is that the point of the gay-rights struggle is to show that homosexuality is a trivial and meaningless difference. Gay people want what straight people want. I am the same as my heterosexual siblings in all meaningful ways, so I should be treated the same under the law, and accorded all public rights and responsibilities. The ultimate goal of the gay-rights movement is to make homosexuality as uninteresting – and unworthy of comment – as left-handedness.

"That's not Bronski's view. As he has made more stridently clear in his previous books, he believes that gay people are essentially different from straight people. Why is his book called a "Queer History" and not a "Gay History"? It seems to be because the word "queer" is more marginal, more edgy, more challenging to ordinary Americans.

"He believes that while the persecution in this 500-year history was bad, the marginality was not. Gay people are marginal not because of persecution but because they have a historical cause – to challenge "how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture".

"Their role is to show that monogamy, and gender boundaries and ideas like marriage throttle the free libidinal impulses of humanity. So instead of arguing for the right to get married, gay people should have been arguing for the abolition of marriage, monogamy and much more besides. " 'Just like you' is not what all Americans want," Bronski writes. "Historically, 'just like you' is the great American lie."

Two problems with the very, very premature 'left-handed' view are that it degays 3,000 years of queer culture and ignores the reality that centuries of animus creates a separate, identifiable class of people. So while I bristle at calling the gay/straight difference "meaningless," I do think Hari's essay is worth reading.

Michael Bronski reads tomorrow, Thursday, June 23, at the Strand at 7:00pm.

Comments

[edoliver]

Did he really use "Andrew Sullivan" and "masterpiece" in the same sentence? I haven't seen it but some of what I've read makes it sound like Bronski's book might be a bit of a mess. What I resent is the ideaological stance of Hari and the ungainly assumptions he makes regarding political and cultural assimilation. Twit.

[Arthur Durkee]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/24franke.html?_r=2&hp

Here's what I feel is a relevant quote from an essay in the NYTimes about same-sex marriage. I think calling my experience as a gay man "trivial and meaningless" because I'm supposed to be just like the straights not only misses the point, it is utter BS. And here's one reason why:

"What’s difficult to explain is that for some lesbians and gay men, having our relationships sanctioned and regulated by the state is hardly something to celebrate. It was only a few years ago that we were criminals in the eyes of the law simply because of whom we loved. As strangers to marriage for so long, we’ve created loving and committed forms of family, care and attachment that far exceed, and often improve on, the narrow legal definition of marriage. Many of us are not ready to abandon those nonmarital ways of loving once we can legally marry.

Of course, lots of same-sex couples will want to marry as soon as they are allowed to, and we will congratulate them when they do even if we ourselves choose not to. But we shouldn’t be forced to marry to keep the benefits we now have, to earn and keep the respect of our friends and family, and to be seen as good citizens."

[supra for boy]

Liked you on Facebook, too. =)