The Culture of Queers

Richard Dyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415223751
• eBook ISBN: 9781134593637
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For around a hundred years up to the Stonewall riots, the word used for gay men was 'queers'. In The Culture of Queers, Richard Dyer traces the contours of queer culture, examining the differences and continuities with the gay culture which succeeded it.

Opening with a discussion of the very concept of 'queers', Dyer asks what it means to speak of a sexual grouping having a culture, and addresses issues such as gay attitudes to women and the notion of camp. From screaming queens to sensitive vampires and sad young men, and from pulp novels to pornography to the films of Fassbinder, The Culture of Queers explores the history of queer arts and media.

1

THE POLITICS OF GAY CULTURE

(co-written with Derek Cohen)

There are few moments of our lives when we are not assailed by the myriad forms of popular and select culture. Much of this is deemed superficial or a mere distraction, but whether it be television, theatre, music or advertising, culture at once shapes our identity, tells us about the world, gives us a certain set of values and entertains us. The purpose of this article is to examine gay culture and its politics.

Before doing this however we want briefly to consider a prior question – what are the politics of culture? All too often this phrase, familiar enough in recent years on the left, simply means drawing up a balance sheet as to how right-on such and such a work of art is. But this still leaves culture inert – an expression that we approve of (or not) from our political perspective, but not something that actually does political work in the world, alongside leafleting, demonstrating, lobbying, picketing and so on. Yet while culture cannot, as some cultural workers fondly hope, by itself change the world, as part of a programme of political work it has certain key functions to perform. To begin with, it has a role that necessarily precedes any self-conscious political movement. Works of art express, define and mould experience and ideas, and in the process makes them visible and available. They thus enable people to recognise experience as shared and to confront definitions of that experience. This represents the starting point for a forging of identity grounded in where people are situated in society, in whatever strata. This sense of social identity, of belonging to a group, is a prerequisite for any political activity proper, even when that identity is not recognised as political. This role for culture has perhaps a special relevance for gay people, because we are ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’. For many of us, reading about, say, David and Jonathan, or seeing The Killing of Sister George, is one of the few ways of identifying other homosexually inclined persons. Without that moment of identification, no other political practice is possible

Secondly, culture is part of that more conscious process of making sense of the world that all political movements are involved in. This process is the social group’s production of knowledge about itself and its situation. Cultural production is more orientated to the affective, sensuous and experimental, whereas theory and research are more concerned with the analysis of situation, conjuncture, strategy and tactics – but both are forms of knowledge. Traditionally, analytic work is upgraded relative to cultural production, usually because the latter is considered to produce less useful knowledge. We do not need to detail here how crippling this restriction of knowledge to the analytical and cerebral has been – for our purposes, it is enough to insist on the role of culture in a group’s total political intelligence.

Thirdly, all cultural production is some form of propaganda. We should not flinch at this word. While in practice much propaganda is simplistic and manipulative, it is not defined by these qualities. Rather propaganda is committed culture, which recognises its own committedness, and enjoins the audience to share its commitment. Political work is unthinkable without it. (All culture is committed, but most makes out that it is uncommitted. To be committed to non-commitment is at best fence-sitting and at worst acceding to the status quo.) Finally, related to but distinct from propaganda, culture is in general pleasurable. We tend to ignore pleasure as part of the business of politics – at our peril. At a minimum pleasure clearly allied to politics keeps us going, recharges our batteries. More positively, the pleasure of culture gives us a glimpse of where we are going and helps us to enjoy the struggle of getting there.

We shall be using these four concepts of the politics of culture – identity, knowledge, propaganda and pleasure – in the rest of this article. We begin by suggesting some working definitions of culture, and their particular relevance to homosexuality. In the next section, we look at what we term ‘traditional’ (predominantly male) gay culture and then in the following section consider contemporary ‘radical’ gay culture. In the final section we look at the relationship between these two modes of gay culture and what each has to learn from the other.

The distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘radical’ gay cultural modes, though conceptually and historically valid, also springs from our two different experiences. This difference can best be indicated by the contrast in how we come out as gay – one of us by learning and adopting camp behaviour and taste before the advent of the gay liberation movement, the other coming out straight into the gay movement and the already altered gay world. For this reason, in the section on ‘traditional’ gay culture (largely written by Richard Dyer) and ‘radical’ gay culture (largely written by Derek Cohen), we draw on our respective personal experiences of growing up and coming out into these different cultural situations. As the area we are dealing with needs considerable research to move beyond the tentative ideas put forward here, we hope these personal accounts may serve as testimony for more sustained work in the future.

Any full definition of culture encompasses the products and practices of what Raymond Williams calls ‘a whole way of life’ (1961: 56). However here we confine ourselves to that area more or less loosely referred to as ‘the arts’. These tend to be those things that are either produced (e.g. sculpture) or performed (e.g. dance), rather than experienced or transmitted (e.g. ways of talking).

There are two qualifications. First, we want to use the word ‘culture’ to avoid the snob connotations of the word ‘art’. Second, culture in the narrow sense in which we are using it nevertheless depends upon and is part of culture in the wider sense of a whole way of life. Specifically in relation to gays and culture, and gay culture, what particular artefacts and performances mean, how they feel, depends upon how they are situated within the gay subculture(s). Drag acts depend for their appreciation upon an understanding of the semi-closeted gay atmosphere of many of the pubs and clubs where they are performed, and the ambiguous relationships of the men in the audience to the man/pseudo-woman on the stage. Many lesbian singers refer to aspects of gay life in their songs, and the powerful resonances come from the way they are touching on the lives of women in the audience.

In trying to do a review of gay culture it becomes apparent that there are other divisions within society which overlay gay people. The differences between lesbian and gay male culture reflect the different positions of women and men in society. Gay men have, for all their oppression, gained practically all the advantages of men generally. Men’s work is valued above the work of women, even when that work is identical (men are chefs, women just cook), and this is also true of cultural production. Men have always had greater access to culture, both as producers, where their greater material assets have enabled them to have a greater access to resources, and as consumers, with men having more leisure time as compared with the all-consuming domestic labour of women. Thus while we may be able to identify, through history, homosexual tendencies in artists, sculptors, writers etc., these are far more often men. Lesbian culture has suffered from the same invisibility as women’s culture generally, and is emerging within that framework.

Class is another largely determining factor in culture. If we use definitions of culture which preclude those things which are at the same time associated with work, which concentrate on the fine arts, theatre, opera, ballet etc., working-class culture becomes invisible. Once we extend into work-associated culture, we find many examples of working-class culture, from barge-painting to ornamentation in architecture to street cries and drinking songs. We know about the historical development of culture by what lasts, and by and large what is made to last is élite culture. Gays seeking their roots are bound to use élite cultures as part of their so-called heritage, and the lack of working-class culture in this heritage reinforces the tendency to upwards mobility among gay men.

Traditional gay male culture

If one turns to the centre pages of Gay News,¹ one finds the ‘culture’ section. Anyone unfamiliar with the gay scene might be forgiven for finding this section puzzling in some regards. It’s obvious enough why there should be reviews of plays, books and films that deal with homosexuality in their subject matter, or else are known to have been produced by gay people. But why all these other reviews, page after page of reviews of classical records, ballet, cabaret artists etc.? Although it is certainly the case that gays have no more instinct for culture than any other group in society, Gay News moved swiftly and unerringly to this broad coverage of its pages, as indeed have other gay publications. Such publishing ventures grew out of the tastes of a metropolitan male gay milieu; Gay News and the rest helped to solidify and define this culture as gay culture itself, and hence to reinforce the notion that this culture, very narrowly rooted in social terms, is what gays turn to spontaneously.

In literature, the characteristic mode of gay cultural production has been that of the minor literati, e.g. Christopher Isherwood, Robin Maugham, J. R. Ackerley. These are gay men working within established middle-class literary modes, and writing very ‘well’ within them, but always restricting their literary ambitions to the small-scale and exquisite.

The arts of opera, ballet, certain painters and sculptors and antiques, have for so long been thought of as gay preserves that, for instance, Noel Coward could make a risqué reference in his adaptation of Cole Porter’s song ‘Let’s Do It’ by singing ‘Nice young men who sell antiques/Do it’. These arts have, like that of the minor literati, an ambiguous place in bourgeois high culture. Recognised as Art, and subsidised as such, there is still a strong current of opinion that does not quite take them seriously as Art – not compared to the kind of non-musical theatre subsidised by the Arts Council or the kinds of art hung and displayed in national and municipal galleries. Ballet – with its association with women as well as gay men – has suffered particularly from this ambiguity.

Not all traditional gay male culture is highbrow, however. Show business traditions, especially cabaret and musicals (stage and screen), are part of the canon. Among the most characteristic icons here are the flamboyant/tragic singers such as Judy Garland, Diana Ross et al. (compare the repertoire of Craig Douglas in the film Outrageous! (Canada 1977)). Central here are drag and camp, the most well-known and obvious aspects of traditional gay male culture in its showbiz inflection. Finally, somewhere between highbrow Art and showbiz come the areas of ‘taste’, such as couture, coiffure and interior decoration.

Before proceeding, it is worth stressing that this set of cultural artefacts and practices is not identical with the work of gay artists and cultural workers. On the contrary, some of the above may have been produced by non-homosexual women and men, while much culture produced by gay men clearly stands outside, or in an ambivalent relationship to, the gay subcultural mainstream under discussion here. The many gay male ballet dancers and choreographers do not seem to have made many inroads on the hetero-sexual assumptions of most ballet scenarios and forms of movement. Traditional gay culture essentially refers to a distinct way of reading and enjoying culture, and hence involves both gay and non-gay products.

For me, growing up gay and getting into this sort of culture felt like the same process, namely the process of establishing an identity. It was summed up for me in the word ‘queer’. Being queer meant being homosexual, but also being different. It is easy to see how easily I formed an equation between this and being interested in culture. In an all-boys school in the late fifties and early sixties, culture was as peculiar, as ‘other’, as being queer. To begin with, the connection between culture and queerness was spatial: culture seemed to be a place where you were allowed to be queer. This is partly because I had picked up on the folklore about cultural milieux being full of, or tolerating, queers. Ballet and hairdressing above all, but coteries of painters and writers, for instance, were supposed to be very queer. At a minimum, the world of culture just seemed to be a place you could go if you were queer.

My sense that this was a place for me was confirmed by three people. One was a teacher at school, whose shelves were full of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Death in Venice, books which he lent me and I read avidly as I have never read books since for their revelations of decadence. But the real point was that they were Penguin Modern Classics – they were Art, not just books. This teacher also implied a knowledge of gay cultural circles and when he got married (an event which rather confused me) I went to the wedding party and met a poet, a composer, an actor, all queer. The culture-queerness connection was made, and it was confirmed by the first man who ever picked me up. He took me home to a flat in Chelsea full of books and paintings. He and his flatmate discussed cultural matters that meant nothing to me, but impressed me. Eventually I asked him what he did for a living. ‘I’m a writer,’ he replied. ‘What sort of things do you write?’ I asked. ‘Novels.’ ‘What sort?’ ‘Surrealist.’ (Again, not just books.) ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘Do you know Kafka?’ ‘Ye-es.’ ‘Well, it’s like that.’ Third, my first real friend who was gay had been in the theatre, although he then ran a coffee bar. In a way, Michael was different because what he was really into was showbiz, but the point was that he was from the world of culture. All queers were in those days.

Culture was the place to go – and a way out. The attraction of culture, to begin with, was just that it was an apparently liberal, tolerant milieu, where you could be queer. That much I had picked up from gossip and the mass media, as well as my few encounters with other queers. (The gossip included the usual dirt on Shakespeare, Wilde, Tchaikovsky, Gielgud and the rest; but I also remember eagerly reading Freud’s book on Leonardo da Vinci, without any knowledge of psychoanalysis, while on a school trip to Italy.) Homosexuality was also the subject-matter of a fair amount of literature, to an extent that was not true of the kind of films I had access to, or of television. (I remember the curious sense of pride I felt when in my first term at university the lecturer spoke about the importance of homosexuality in understanding André Gide.) There was no place else that I could identify as ‘riddled with it’, no place that seemed at least to accord queerness recognition.

Culture was also attractive in ways that went beyond the fact that its practitioners and subject-matter were queer, but ways which were still crucially related to queerness. Culture was beautiful, sensuous, fun. This is true anyway, as is people’s use of it as escape. My involvement in culture certainly included enjoyment and escape, but the kind of culture I got into accorded more precisely with what I thought about being queer. I was into high culture. Actually, I found this quite an effort – I was really into the idea of high culture, while in practice preferring Michael’s showbiz. I didn’t come from an artistic or even particularly cultured background, and although I got myself into ‘serious’ music and literature, I never had any spontaneous response to painting and sculpture. But nevertheless I thought of myself as someone capable of appreciating high culture. I would sit painfully through Antonioni films and assure everyone of how ‘beautiful’ they were. I was keen on things being beautiful.

All this was connected to being queer; indeed, it was part of being queer. Queerness brought with it arti...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 The politics of gay culture (with Derek Cohen)
• 2 Believing in fairies: the author and the homosexual
• 3 Gay misogyny
• 4 It’s being so camp as keeps us going
• 5 Dressing the part
• 6 It’s in his kiss!: vampirism as homosexuality, homosexuality as vampirism
• 7 Queer noir
• 8 Coming out as going in: the image of the homosexual as a sad young man
• 9 L’Air de Paris: no place for homosexuality
• 10 Charles Hawtrey: carrying on regardless
• 11 Rock: the last guy you’d have figured?
• 12 Reading Fassbinder’s sexual politics
• 13 Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography
• 14 Homosexuality and heritage
• Index