De-Centering Sexualities

Richard Phillips, David Shuttleton, Diane Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134648238
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book of critical rural geography breaks new ground by drawing attention to sex and sexualities outside the metropolis. It explores sexualities and sexual experiences in a variety of rural and marginal spaces with international contributions from a wide range of disciplines. These include: literary and cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, geography, history and law. Among the topics uncovered are: * a lesbian in rural England * sexual life in rural Wales * sexuality in rural South Africa * scandal in the American South: sex, race and politics * nature and homosexuality in literature * Derry/Londonderry as a sexual space * how 'country folk' are sexualised in popular culture.

Part I
NON-METROPOLITAN SEXUALITIES

1
THE PRODUCTION OF GAY AND THE RETURN OF POWER

Alan Sinfield

The scope of ‘metropolitan’ at the present time is not altogether precise, but that, I think, makes it the right term:

1. It refers to a city in relation to its colonies; lately, in post-colonial contexts, it means the global centres of capital.
2. However, it is used also to designate a capital or principal cities in a nation-state, and thus permits an awareness that global interaction has produced local versions of the metropolis in large cities all over the world—so the metropolitan gay model will be found in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi, as well as New York and London, in interaction with traditional local, non-metropolitan, models.
3. Conversely, subordinated groups living at or near the centres of capital, and specially non-white minorities, may be in some aspects nonmetropolitan; a Filipino living in New York may share some ideas and attitudes with people living in the Philippines.

Overwhelmingly, we sense the metropolitan as powerful and imperialist, but actually there is movement in both directions. For we are talking about a relation. Metropolitan and non-metropolitan define each other—not just semantically, but in the real-world circulation of imperialism, commerce, tourism, and cultural exchange.

I want to explore some of the possibilities that appear when we bring into focus the junctures between metropolitan and non-metropolitan. This will entail abstracting from the fulness of experience, and dealing briskly with sensitive and intimate matters. If such a project can be justified, it will not be through its fidelity to people’s immediate lives but in terms of the extending of the conceptual frameworks through which diverse peoples organize their experience.

If there is one thing that characterizes metropolitan lesbian and gay identities, it is ‘coming out’. However, the term is misleading, in so far as it allows the supposition that this kind of gayness was always there, waiting to be uncovered. It suggests that we really always knew about it, individually and as a culture, but failed to own up to it. However, for Filipino culture, as Martin F. Manalansan IV has observed it, coming out is not the move that people are waiting to make; it is specifically foreign. Filipinos regard declarations of sexual involvements as not just shaming but unnecessary; one informant says: ‘I know who I am and most people, including my family, know about me—without any declaration’ (Manalansan IV 1995:434). A similar point is made by Connie S.Chan about lesbian relations among East-Asian American women, for whom there is no identity outside the family and ‘no concept of a sexual identity or of external sexual expression in the Asian part of the culture beyond the familial expectation of procreation’ (Chan 1997:244).

It is easy to see the limitations in this way of thinking, but in Chan’s view there may be some advantages: ‘the East Asian cultural restrictions upon open expression of sexuality may actually create less of a dichotomization of heterosexual versus homosexual behavior. Instead, given the importance of the concept of having only private expression of sexuality, there could actually be more allowance for fluidity within a sexual behavioral continuum’ (p. 247). Provocatively, Chan deploys in her title phrases used to prevent gays in the US military from coming out: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Know’.

My thought here is not that these ways of regarding same-sex passion are better, or even that they are properly described. But they do indicate that non-metropolitan modes of relating may be validated in other cultures. Metropolitan gay and lesbian concepts should be regarded, therefore, not as denoting the ultimate achievement of human sexuality, but as something we have been producing—we homosexuals and we heterosexuals—in determinate economic and social conditions. Filipino and East-Asian modes also, of course, are produced. The means of this production is that urgent circulation of contested representations which we call culture. I approach my topic initially through a text set in the metropolitan heartland of New York: David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes. This influential novel was published in 1986 and filmed for television in 1992; Leavitt’s evident project is to sort out the good gays from the unfortunate approximations.

The older generation in the novel finds it hard to benefit from recent improvements in gay selfhood. Owen, who is married to Rose, is unable to talk to anyone about his yearning for gay sex; even at a pornographic cinema, which he visits regularly, he is too ashamed and frightened to speak to anyone or to follow up potential contacts. Two less prominent characters, Derek and Geoffrey, are old-style queens reminiscent of Oscar Wilde; they cultivate British accents, speak of men as ‘girls’, prepare a dinner in which all the food is blue, and include in their circle cultured Europeans who go to Tangiers where it’s easy to buy young boys.

All this is regarded with a mixture of distaste and disbelief by the younger generation, represented centrally by Philip, the gay son of Owen and Rose. He had difficulty coming to terms with himself as an adolescent but, the narration suggests, he’s doing it more or less right now. He postpones coming out to his parents until he believes he has achieved a gayness he can be proud of: ‘I wanted to wait until I could show you that a homosexual life could be a good thing’ (Leavitt 1987:169). This involves, above all, having a presentable partner—‘he had counted on Eliot’s presence in their living room to justify all he had said to them, to justify his life’ (p. 198). For Philip finds little satisfaction in cruising or porn movies; he meets partners among friends at dinner parties. He has a favourite gay bar, but there is no backroom. It is ‘a friendly place, very social, a place where people go who really are comfortable with being gay, and know it’s a lot more than a matter of who you sleep with’ (p. 155).

Eliot, Philip’s prized partner, proves unreliable. Probably he is damaged by a prematurely queer upbringing—it is possible to become too casual about gayness, to the point of irresponsibility. Also there is unease around Eliot’s superior wealth and connections. However, the resolution, for Philip, is already to hand. Brad, an old school friend, is of the same age, class, race and educational background; they enjoy spending time together. In due course they find that sex is a natural part of that, so no sticky, sexually explicit pick-up scene is required. When they first kiss, ‘long and lovingly’, it is ‘spontaneous, without thought’ (p. 311).

In outline, the same principles are disclosed through Jerene, who is African-American. Her adoptive parents—black, middle-class Republicans—reject her when she tells them she is a lesbian. She remains none the less nice, good and wise. However, her new partner is perceived by Philip and Brad as rather a pain, in the manner of characters in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: ‘If Laura’s looks were Laura Wingfield—fragile and transparent as a tiny glass animal—her temperament was pure Amanda: loud and brash and indiscreet; full of hype and bombast; good-natured, loving, easy to hurt’ (p. 251). This positions Laura as dominating mother posing as needful daughter; Jerene is subdued and silenced by her. These women have not yet (the reader is likely to conclude) arrived at a fully compatible, happy-ever-after partnership.

Meanwhile Owen, prompted by Philip’s coming out, does his best to catch up. He tries out the idea that everyone is bisexual. No, Philip says; some people are, but ‘I think this whole bisexual thing can become an excuse, a way of avoiding committing yourself, or admitting the truth. It means you can duck out when the going gets rough’ (p. 232). Owen comes out to Rose. It goes badly, but he is now determined, and takes up with another married man of comparable age and class. So he too has an ‘appropriate’ partner. He wants to go on living with Rose nonetheless, but it seems unlikely that she will allow this. Philip, before he knew of Owen’s gayness, told him: ‘you’re basically heterosexual, and that should be what defines your lifestyle’ (p. 233). If Owen is going to be gay, his lifestyle will have to change accordingly.

If Leavitt’s version of the metropolitan gay model appears strenuously devised, it is because he is promoting one position in a cardinal, ongoing dispute. The contrary position values multiple and anonymous partners. The two poles may be schematized as:

monogamy vs. promiscuity

lifestyle vs. sexual explicitness

assimilation vs. the ghetto.

Currently in the metropolis the dispute is often framed as a question about ‘gay marriage’.

Positive representations of the right-hand column are not so easy to find as one might suppose. Pornography tends to promote the idea of multiple and anonymous partners, but it does so from a less prestigious sector of the gay cultural apparatus, thereby allowing the inference that the opposition is between good and bad, or at least respectable and dissolute. Samuel R. Delany, in The Motion of Light in Water, seeks to validate the right-hand column. There was a bar, cottage and truck scene in the 1950s, he says, but a post-Stonewall orgy at the baths was qualitatively different:

what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered, or that those encounters could be human and fufilling in their way—not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.

(Delany 1990:267)

Leavitt’s pitch is that we should have grown out of all that now, though he and Delany share a supposition that gays are a distinct population and that they can and should justify themselves.

Of course, these matters have become considerably more difficult since the onset of HIV and AIDS. Oscar Moore’s A Matter of Life and Sex (1991) is one of many texts which suggest a correlation between the delights of multiple and anonymous partners and the fate, as it appears in the novel, of infection and death. For this reason, the most impressive anti-Leavitt representations are principled reassertions of multiple and anonymous partners in the face of AIDS. Larry Kramer, despite his own hostility to sleeping around, lets Mickey in The Normal Heart voice the case against abstention:

I’ve spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever… And you’re telling me that all those years of being what gay stood for is wrong…and I’m a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don’t you remember how it was? Can’t you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt?

(Kramer 1986:67)

Thom Gunn in his poem ‘The Missing’, in The Man with Night Sweats (1992:80), reasserts a vision of unfettered sexual congress:

Contact of friend led to another friend,

Supple entwinement through the living mass

Which for all that I knew might have no end,

Image of an unlimited embrace.

Conversely, although characters in The Lost Language of Cranes mention AIDS, it doesn’t bulk as large as one might expect. I think this is because Leavitt does not want readers to conclude that companionate sexual relations are good just because of the AIDS emergency.

Metropolitan lesbian and gay identities are strung out between these two extreme positions, then. However, I want to point out that the two parties share underlying beliefs. First, gayness should be boldly declared as an identity—contrary to, for instance, the Filipino and Asian assumptions I briefly invoked above. Second, this identity is so compelling that it makes difference irrelevant and inappropriate—at best invisible, at worst undesirable.

In The Lost Language of Cranes the ideal partner is similar to oneself—same class, background, income, age, ethnicity. In this respect, the Leavitt model is very like the dominant ideology of straight sexual pairing: the companionate marriage, as it has evolved from the 1920s endorsement of reciprocity in sexual pleasure through the 1950s pram-pushing hubby to the 1980s new man. Jerene is expected to have the same priorities as Philip. She does experience more difficulty, because unfortunately (as it appears) black families may be even less enlightened than white ones. Jerene takes on a white partner, but that is not presented as an issue or shown as creating any tension.

The counter-position, which I have elaborated through Mickey, Delany and Gunn, is strangely similar. Gayness is, again, an absolute condition, and the abundance of multiple and anonymous relationships submerges the particularity of this or that partner. Of course, among so many people there must be innumerable differences, but they are not significant. Not everyone is rich or beautiful on the dance floor in Andrew Holleran’s pre-AIDS novel, Dancer from the Dance, but it doesn’t matter:

Archer Prentiss, who had no chin or hair; Spanish Lily, a tiny, wizened octoroon who lived with his blind mother in the Bronx and sold shoes in a local store—but who by night resembled Salome dancing for the head of John the Baptist in peach-colored veils; Lavalava, a Haitian boy who modeled for Vogue till an editor saw him in the dressing room with an enormous penis where a vagina should have been; another man famous for a film he had produced and who had no wish to do anything else with his life—all of them mixed together on that square of blond wood and danced, without looking at anyone else, for one another.

(Holleran 1979:43)

There may be plenty of difference, but it doesn’t make any difference.

It is not incidental that the examples I have adduced are ‘American’. The metropolitan imagery of gayness derives generally from the United States—or, to be more exact, from major cities there. It is common to observe that the word for ‘gay’ in countries such as Mexico is ‘gay’; so it is in Europe, including Britain: the word was imported gradually, initially through privileged travellers such as Noël Coward, and then via GIs in the Second World War. Blue-jeans and T-shirts, short hair and moustaches are appropriated in the USA from ordinary male usage and specifically ‘American’ imagery—pioneer, rural, working-class, military. In Europe, these accoutrements of male gayness are second-hand, from ‘American’ gay culture. Drinking beer out of a can or a bottle is another recent instance. When the BBC got round to financing a gay film, in 1992, it was The Lost Language of Cranes, transposed by director Nigel Finch into a London context. Metropolitan/nonmetropolitan, I have said, is a relation, and north-western Europe, even, is relatively marginal. Conversely, part of Philip’s discovery of a proper gayness is the repudiation of English and European influences manifested by Derek and Geoffrey.

‘America’ supplies the ideology for the metropolitan gay model. The effacement of difference is founded in an ideology of opportunity, democracy and rights, which crosses into gay culture all too conveniently via Walt Whitman in the guise of a comradely, manly, sexual democracy. I argue in my book Gay and After (Sinfield 1998: chapter 2) that lesbians and gay men, in the USA particularly, have constituted themselves as something like an ethnic group claiming rights. As Steven Epstein observes, this ideology of rights appeals to ‘the rules of the modern American pluralist myth, which portrays a harmonious competition among distinct social groups’ (Epstein 1992:282). How far that myth is to be trusted is a question far wider than queer politics: it is about how much we expect from the institutions through which capitalism and hetero-patriarchy are reproduced.

Lesbians have developed these topics in distinctive ways. The notion that women should be basing their relationships in reciprocity comes from some of the same sources and also, more importantly, from negotiations with feminism. In the 1970s feminists defined lesbianism as the way for women to abrogate traditional dependence on men and male power. ‘Women-loving-women meant gentler, non-possessive, non-competitive, non-violent, nurturing and egalitarian relationships’, Lynne Segal says (Segal 1994:51–2). In the early 1980s still, Judith Halberstam observes, women

tended not to represent their sexual practices, in lesbian feminist venues at least, as anything other than thoroughly proper, romantic, mutual and loving…. Even radical and fringe feminists like Valerie Solanas tended to cede sex to men, eq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I Non-metropolitan sexualities
• PART II: Beyond the metropolis
• PART III Deconstructing metropolitan models
• PART IV: Devolving sexualities
• Author Index
• Subject Index