How To Be Gay by David Halperin

David Halperin says he wrote his new book How To Be Gay, out this week from Harvard, to "make clear the genuineness of the intellectual stakes in [his] inquiry into gay male culture." 

PW: Halperin argues "there’s far more to gay male American identity than a same-sex preference. Halperin interprets gayness through traditional pop culture preoccupations like golden age Hollywood, opera, and Broadway musicals, focusing on Joan Crawford (in particular her role in Mildred Pierce) and Faye Dunaway’s notoriously over-the-top portrayal of the star in Mommie Dearest. Identifying the source of the camp appeal exerted by these ostensibly serious films, Halperin asks why gay men continue to be drawn to coded representations of their experience. He arrives at an apologia for such clichéd signposts of gayness in an era of domestic partnerships and Born This Way. Halperin persuasively defuses charges of misogyny lobbed against gay male culture, but may alienate some by too narrowly defining his vision of what that culture should be. Nonetheless, this book should appeal to specialists and general readers alike with its academically rigorous but accessible argument."

Sarah Schulman says: "Distinguished scholar David Halperin's long-awaited manifesto delivers on its promise. Macho, faggy, queeny, butch diva, opera-swilling, Broadway-loving, gourmet, sex-fascinated, beauty-appreciating, love-desiring, rough trade, high art, race- and class-inflected but not exclusive, generationally situated but not entirely, intellectual, open-hearted, politically minded, leather chaps! Mary!"

Mark Simpson writes: "I've always been a big fan of Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Doris Day. Though it was a secret, shameful love. David Halperin's wonderful, wildly ambitious masterpiece has given me the courage to come out about it. And even tell the golden daffodils. As Halperin eloquently explains, desire into identity will not go, even with plenty of poppers and lube. What's more, the dignified, proper, and very particular gay identity really doesn't deserve the giddy, gushing, world-grabbing gay sensibility. And vice versa."

Comments

[Duncan]

"Halperin interprets gayness through traditional pop culture preoccupations like golden age Hollywood, opera, and Broadway musicals ..." I guess I'm not gay then? Reminds me of the review of Brokeback Mountain I read, which explained that although Jack and Ennis had a passionate, not to say obsessive sexual affair for twenty years, they weren't gay because they'd never danced shirtless in a Pride Parade.

[Edward]

You only have to take a look around you to see the thinning of the ranks of Judy-adorers among "us." I agree Duncan, although it speaks to a (historical) part of me, it's become an anachronism (obviously with the exception of those in academia) to disseminate yet more obsolete theories regarding "camp." Fran Liebowitz dispatched her own form of the gay deathknell years ago with her take-down of Sontag with "Notes on Trick." I don't mind reading this sort of thing, especially in the capable hands of someone like James McCourt, but it's obsolete in any real sense. After nearly 40 years of being out, I've never known any gay man who has treated this sort of sensibility with anything short of irony. Maybe I need to get some real and true gay friends.

[johnny]

Halperin's "book" shows an attitude from a generation of gay men that is, thankfully, ready for the nursing home. Gay men broke away from those horrible stereotypes and learned behaviors a long, long time ago.

Why did we break away? Because the stereotypes and affectations are no longer necessary. Gay is about genetics and sexual attraction, not what you're wearing, who your watching, where you're going or what you talk like.

He posits (from his idiotic NY Times article): "And yet gay culture is not just a superficial affectation. It is an expression of difference through style — a way of carving out space for an alternate way of life. And that means carving out space in opposition to straight society."

Gay people need to eschew this type of thinking. For one thing, Halperin's definition of gay culture is PURELY superficial, as any "style" would naturally be. As well, it defecates on the word "we" and desperately holds onto an "us vs. them" paranoid psychosis. As long as gay people keep this outdated attitude up, being gay will never be considered simply a variant-but-normal outcome of birth by society. I believe we can carve out our own space without it having to be in opposition.

Halperin's entire positioning is nonsense and is reminiscent of the "separatist" thinking that many hardcore radical lesbians had in the 80s. Are we supposed to go backward and divide up into disparate groups again? This is idiocy.

[Arthur Durkee]

What does such a book do but reinforce stereotypes? And by its standards I guess I'm not gay. Or gay enough, whatever that means.

Mainstream straight culture will of course rush to embrace such a book, because it reaffirms stereotypes, and will completely miss the fact that "men who sleep with men" is a culture so diverse that this represents only a small segment of it. But the issue of style is indeed superficial. Most gay men I know play with style ironically these days, not seriously. CAn we talk about substance rather than style, for once?—which of course we will be ignored if we do so, because that doesn't reinforce the stereotypes.

Plus I doubt he even mentions the genuine alternatives to even mainstream gay life, such as the Radical Faeries.