Pink Triangles
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Pink Triangles

Radical Perspectives on Gay Liberation

Pam Mitchell

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eBook - ePub

Pink Triangles

Radical Perspectives on Gay Liberation

Pam Mitchell

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About This Book

Though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, between the personal and the political, vary across this spectacularly wide ranging collection, each essay shares two fundamental premises. First, that the oppression of gays and lesbians is not an isolated case, and therefore their struggle is necessarily part of a larger movement for social liberation. And second, that the experience of gays and lesbians uphold the basic tenants of a foundational marxism, and that they are uniquely placed to contribute to a revitalization of marxist theory.

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Information

Publisher
Verso
Year
2018
ISBN
9781788732352

I.

Culture and Politics

Christine Riddiough
Culture is one of those vague terms that tends to mean everything and nothing. Is culture simply aesthetic and intellectual endeavors like opera, ballet, painting — the fine arts and their allies? Does it include the more popular expressions of art like movies, TV, and disco music? Is culture even more than this? And what of culture and politics: do they interact only when a political group sponsors a concert as a way of raising money? Too often these limited views of culture and its relationship to politics are the ones held by socialists. In his paper “American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle” Jimmy Durham describes this very accurately:
For example, a group of white leftists decide to hold a conference. They know in an abstract way that they have been robbed of their culture and that culture is important in revolution. Therefore, they set aside one or two evenings during the conference as “cultural evenings.” Songs are sung and poems are read, but these “cultural activities” are not integrated into the conference itself — instead they are isolated as special events. More important, and more to the point, no one really sees and analyzes the ways in which the conference itself is a cultural event. (p. 1)
In order to act politically, to be effective and to understand the society in which we live, we have to have a fuller sense of culture. Durham goes on to say:
…all human beings are cultural beings; we cannot operate outside of society as “natural animals.” Our societies, our culture, define us, in large part, and our way of experiencing the world is through our culture. Politics, economics, science and technology, language, etc. are all cultural phenomena, finally, of course, political phenomena. (p. 2)
In the United States our culture is shaped by many forces including those things not often thought of as culture, like TV and popular music and shopping centers and political campaigns. And while all of us live to some extent in that culture — the world of MacDonalds and Christmas and cars — many of us also live in another culture, the culture of our social group. For while straight white men in the U.S. generally live in and define the ruling culture, those outside that group have brought with them and developed a culture of their own within the dominant one. Among these groups are gay men and lesbians.
Gay Culture
What is “gay culture”? Webster’s describes “culture,” in general, as “the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action and artifacts and depends on man’s [sic] capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. [It is] the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group.” Gay culture, then, includes institutions such as bars, centers, papers; it includes the language, humor and ideas of gay people.
In looking at gay culture, it is important to note first of all its unique relationship to mainstream culture. Gay people are both the most integrated and most isolated minority in this country. Unlike other oppressed groups, gay people are not relegated to certain jobs, social strata or neighborhoods. While there are some occupations and communities that are disproportionately gay, nonetheless gay people can be found in every workplace and neighborhood. We can also be found in every family. Because of this, gay culture is in several ways different from other minority cultures within the U.S. Gay people are not born into gay culture — it is something we enter as adults or young adults. Gay culture is not passed down with the family tradition, but is distinguished by being outside the family structure. Nonetheless, gay/lesbian culture does have a historical tradition (as documented particularly in Katz’s Gay American History).
Because of the aforementioned diversity of gay people, gay/lesbian culture has less of a geographic focus than most minority cultures, though in large cities there is likely to be a “gay ghetto” — an area where many gay people, especially gay men, live and work. Furthermore, gay/lesbian culture has a greater focus on social and personal institutions and, except for those few people who actually live and work in the community, has only limited connections to people’s work lives. In fact, for many gay people, a lot of energy goes into keeping the two parts of their lives separate.
These factors have shaped gay/lesbian culture; some non-gay people might even question its existence, but a rich and varied culture does exist. A full examination of it is not possible here (for that see, in particular, Jay and Young’s Lavender Culture), but we can look at some of the most important aspects of it.
The Bars
The concrete institutional focus of gay and lesbian culture is the bars. In The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren, one of the main characters, Harlan Brown, is near the Stonewall bar in June 1969. Seeing what is going on, he becomes angry and sad. He thinks, “I didn’t drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could understand how precious they were to us.” (p. 31) The bars have been the cornerstone of gay/lesbian culture and community. They are a place to meet friends and lovers, a place to dance, play pool, talk. They have provided a family for those who, having come out, no longer have families. They have provided a refuge from the straight world — little gay islands in a hostile sea.
Of course gay bars are at the mercy of that sea: frequently owned by straights (though less so now than in the past), they are subject to pressure from the police, organized crime and local “queer-baiters.” As primary meeting places for gays, they have clear limitations — most notably the alcoholism they promote.
Who goes to the bars? At some point almost every gay person does. Some people never feel comfortable in the bars, while for others they become a second home. In between is a large group of people who go to the bars on occasion — with friends, when visiting a new place or when looking for a new lover. It’s not unusual to see a group of people come into a bar after a feminist newspaper meeting, or a gay church service, or a women’s concert.
Thus while there are those who don’t like the bars, there are still enough people who go to them for every city of any size to have at least one. In the cities with the largest gay communities, there may be upwards of one hundred bars. In these places each bar will have its own particular atmosphere and clientele. Where there are many bars, some of them (10 to 20 percent) will be women’s bars, while the others will be primarily men’s. There are black and Latino bars, discos, leather bars and drag bars.
While there may be a generalized “bar crowd,” each bar will tend to have its own specific crowd. In Chicago, for instance, there is one bar that most appeals to feminist women, another where most of the women are over forty and/or have been out fifteen years or more. The first bar plays disco and feminist music on its juke box, while the second includes Bobby Vinton and the Beer Barrel Polka.
Going to the bars means learning bar behavior. There aren’t guides to bar behavior, nor formal rules of etiquette like Amy Vanderbilt or Emily Post, but there are informal rules. Many bars have rules, often unwritten, about what is proper attire. Bar owners will sometimes ban someone from their bar for what they consider improper behavior. And there are some unwritten rules for interactions among the customers — who you look at, buy a drink for, ask for a dance. Much of this sets the standards for cruising, especially in women’s bars where it may be less open than in men’s bars. That cruising is an important part of bar behavior for both women and men cannot be overemphasized. While in a straight bar the customers are usually sitting facing the bar, watching the TV or talking to the bartender, in a gay bar customers will frequently be turned at least partly away from the bar and looking at the customers. Since gay bars have been one of the few places where gay people can meet potential lovers, this cruisiness is no surprise.
The bars have been and remain, even now, the focal point of the gay and lesbian community. They are the most stable institution in a frequently unstable world. As such they shape the culture of gay life, even as they are shaped and changed themselves. They contain within them all the contradictions and weaknesses of gay life. Nonetheless, they are our territory, even with all the control that the outside world exerts. While political gays, especially feminist lesbians, often criticize the bars (and rightly so) for their weaknesses, their importance cannot be denied.
The Arts
Gay people have often been associated with the arts — theater, dance, literature, painting. We have often been thought of as shapers of art and fashion. At the same time the arts have often shaped the lives of gay people: from the salons of Paris in the ’20s and ’30s, to the “piss elegant” apartments of today. Art is the arena in which gay people have frequently been the most accepted and at the same time most ghettoized. There is a certain amount of glamour attached to the arts that somehow softens the impact of gayness for many non-gay people. An early issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation had an article on lesbianism that included the statement that “lesbians in Paris are exotic. Lesbians next door are perverted.”
The impact of gays in the arts goes beyond the “high culture” of ballet and theatre to the more popular forms like disco. Disco is the latest music craze in the U.S. One of its characteristics is that its popularity comes not so much through radio as through cabarets, bars and clubs. In this way it is made for the gay scene which also has a focus on the bars. Disco stars often got their starts in gay bars and still have gay followings. Some of the music, like the Village People or Disco Queen, is openly gay — at least to those in the know. The Village People’s title cut on their first album is not only a gay song, but actually a gay liberation song. Non-gay audiences seem to avoid making these connections no matter how obvious they are. Disco has roots in other cultures as well, as Kopkind has pointed out in a recent article; it comes from black and Latino music as well as the gay scene. But gay culture helped shape disco — gave it much of its emotion and energy and sensuality; and those characteristics are more apparent now in a gay disco than in a straight one. As disco has become more popular, it has become whitewashed and straightened out, but the original elements are still in it.
Disco also wrought changes in gay culture. It reinforced the role of the bars and at the same time opened them up. Many ’50s and ’60s gay bars hadn’t allowed dancing; disco changed that. It also made it more possible to dance in an emotional and sensual way without attaching that to a particular person; it is not a romantic form of music.
Another musical expression that has roots in gay, and specifically lesbian, culture is women’s music. Unlike popular music, women’s music is rarely played on the radio; records are often difficult to find. Nonetheless, there is a growing audience for it among lesbians and feminists (frequently overlapping groups). While the music itself is pretty much “middle of the road,” with occasional hints of country, rock and other styles thrown in, the lyrics are powerfully political — feminist, and often lesbian, oriented. The best example of lesbian music is the album Lesbian Concentrate, which is a collection of lesbian-oriented songs by many of the best known individuals and groups in women’s music. Alongside the music itself has developed a women’s distribution and production network, so that much of women’s music exists completely outside the “established” music hierarchy.
Both in content and production women’s music parallels other women’s art, particularly writing. There are more and more feminist novelists, poets, essayists; and in the production end there are feminist printers and publishers and bookstores. Though most of these feminist networks, and the artists and producers in them, are identified with labels such as “women’s music,” “feminist writers,” “women in distribution,” clearly many of the individuals are openly lesbian. More importantly, the tone and content of much of their work is lesbian, and belongs as much to lesbian culture as to women as a whole.
Language/Camp
In order to communicate, people within a culture need language; gay culture is no exception. While the language in the U.S. is English, there are words and phrases that have taken on different meanings, meanings that are only known to those within the gay/lesbian community (though of late some “gay words” have become popularized). Many of these “gay words” have obscure origins. An effort to compile a gay dictionary and trace word origins has been made in the Queen’s Vernacular. The meanings and uses of words vary from place to place and from time to time, but some words have been in use for a relatively long period. For example, “gay” itself has a long history, as do the phrases “coming out” and “in the closet.” These phrases have no equivalent in straight vocabulary because they describe the common experiences of gay people that are not a part of straight life.
Gay language has also been used as a way to communicate with and seek out one’s gay companions without revealing the subject matter to any non-gay people. The entry of “gay words” into everyday vocabulary — in the press, on TV — has many positive aspects, in terms of greater openness about gays. It also has some negatives, both in terms of preventing use of gay words as code words and in terms of corruption of the language. An example of the latter is the ads for a Chicago radio station asking country music fans to “come out of your closets.” Obviously this use of the phrase has corrupted its special gay meaning; it does not have, in this usage, the kind of powerful meaning that it has for gay people.
With the rise of the gay and women’s movements, there has been a lot of controversy around the use of language. For example, do words like “queer,” “dyke,” “faggot,” long used by gay people to defuse the derogatory meaning given to them by non-gays, constitute the language of oppression, or does gay use turn them into words of pride? Should women in the community be called “gay women,” or “lesbians”? Should people outside the community be referred to as “straight,” or as “non-gay”? (Even within this article there is some inconsistency on these issues.)
Closely related to these issues of language is the issue of camp and gay humor. It would be impossible to write about gay culture without discussing camp; yet camp, as many have suggested, is difficult to discuss. One author who has discussed it is Susan Sontag in her “Notes on Camp” which appeared in her collection, Against Interpretation. Sontag describes camp as a sensibility:
[Camp] is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. (p. 275)
She goes on to describe camp as an aesthetic, a vision of the world, a love of the exaggerated, “of things-being-what-they-are-not.” (p. 279) The camp taste in persons responds to the androgyne, to the feminine in virile men, to the masculine in feminine women; and, conversely, to the exaggerated masculinity in men and femininity in women. Camp sensibility is “alive to the double sense in which some things can be taken” (p. 281); it is to “understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”(p. 280)
Sontag further describes the theatricality, the extravagance of camp. Her notes are, in fact, very helpful in understanding camp, but they are flawed in one respect. Sontag is unwilling or unable to fully relate camp to gay culture. She first mentions homosexuality in Note 50, where she describes homosexuals as the “aristocrats of taste, the bearers of camp.” She draws an analogy between the relationship of homosexuals to camp and the relationship of Jews to morality and politics:
“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony…. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, camp taste is much more than homosexual taste…. Yet one feels that if homo-sexuals hadn’t more or less invented Camp, someone else would.”(pp. 290-1)
Simply stated, this is wrong; camp is much more inextricably linked to gay culture than Sontag was willing to admit. Because of this the full impact of her other comments is diffused. Esther Newton begins to address this in her book Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America. She describes camp as a homosexual ethos, a strategy for the situation. It signifies:
…a relationship between things, people, and activities or qualities, and homosexuality. In this sense, ‘camp taste,’ for instance, is synonomous with homosexual taste…. It is possible to discern strong themes in any particular campy thing or event. The three that seemed most recurrent and characteristic to me were incongruity, theatricality, and humor. All three are intimately related to the homosexual situation and strategy. Incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy. (pp. 105-6)
Taking Newton’s identification of camp with gay culture, our perceptions of camp come alive; now Sontag’s notes begin to make sense. Sontag’s description of camp — its “unnaturalness,” its love of things being what they are not, its response to androgyny, its love of playing roles, and so on — can be seen to have their origin in the life situation of gay people. For most gay people, living and staying alive require an ability to be what one is not, to play a role. Gay language, as we have seen, is often based on double meanings. And homosexuality, on some level, explodes the myths of the naturalness of masculinity and femininity and reveals them for the exaggerations they are. Newton’s third point, that the strategy of camp is humor, is well taken; for along with having its origins in the gay life situation, camp is also a strategy for dealing with that situation so that one can continue to live. As Newton says, “[Camp] is a system of humor. Camp humor is a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying. That is, the humor does not cover up, it transforms.”(p. 109)
Finally, camp is generally taken to be part of gay male culture and not particularly relevant to lesbians. While it is undeniably true that gay men have been the moving force in the development of camp, it does have a relationship to lesbian culture. Lesbians have been, to a greater or lesser extent, a part of gay culture and thus have participated in camp. For many lesbians who came out before the gay and women’s movement, their community was and often remains the gay community, including men. Furthermore, in looking at lesbian feminist culture we can see elements of camp as described above. For example, what could be more campy than Meg Christian singing “Sherry Baby, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” or the song “Leaping Lesbians”? So, like much of gay culture, while camp is male dominated it is ...

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