James Bohling: James Bohling is a graduate student in the Annenberg School for Communication's school of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Southern California. He holds a Master's Degree in French from the University of California at Berkeley and is an Assistant Lecturer at USC's Department of French and Italian. He is interested in media portrayals of gays and lesbians, and the origins of all kinds of sexuality.
Rarely have I felt more ambivalent about a book than I initially did about THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE, Daniel Harris' ambitious attempt to analyze the customs and iconography of the gay male subculture, and the vicissitudes he perceives therein. Harris observes, in detail, the trends that gay men have both originated and embraced over the past few decades in areas such as fashion, cinema, pornography, S & M, and drag. He also gives ample attention to the rhetoric of more “crucial” subjects, such as gay liberation and AIDS activism.
But what is more important than his examination of these dominant facets of the subculture is his reading of their transformation. As gay men are gradually accepted by society, Harris argues, they must necessarily discard those cultural markers that would impede their assimilation by the mainstream. With acceptance will come the erosion of drag, camp, sexual unconventionality, and a propensity toward the fine arts, all attributes that characterize the stereotype of the modern gay male.
Harris correctly affirms that all stereotypes contain a degree of truth. But in the case of the gay male sensibility, which he defines “strictly as a political response to oppression,” one finds the source of Harris' central and guiding theory, the one that he implicitly (and often, explicitly) hammers home throughout the book. Without oppression, gay men would have no distinctive culture; and as so on as oppression is ended, what culture they do possess will have disappeared.
In his opening chapter, “The Death of Camp,” Harris examines gay men's pervasive admiration of Hollywood actresses in grand, imposing postures. In relation to this phenomenon, he states his philosophy in a nutshell: “The grain of sand, our oppression, that irritated the gay imagination to produce the pearl of camp, has been rinsed away, and with it, there has been a profound dilution of the once concentrated gay sensibility.” (34) In other words, oppression maketh culture, and acceptance taketh it away.
When gay men act like gay men, it is because they are oppressed. However, in the following chapter, which studies the language of personal ads, when gay men act like straight men, it is because they are self-loathing. This leaves the gay male reader with two highly unattractive options considering his identity: he is either a wounded practitioner of the cult of camp, lashing out at his bigoted captors; or he is a bland, insecure bundle of doubts, ready and willing to do anything to appease the dominant culture.
While it may not be the most appetizing of theses, its accuracy is another matter entirely. By painting the gay sensibility solely as a by-product of oppression, Harris sets himself up in opposition to the essentialist notion that identity is predetermined to a great degree. To counteract this position, he takes it to an extreme, lampooning the non-existent assertion that “a diva chromosome in our DNA… produced a camp sensibility and somehow preceded our awareness of our homosexuality.” (21)
That Harris chooses to encapsulate a stance which contradicts his own through mocking and deliberate overstatement is unfortunate. He makes many genuinely convincing points about the diva archetype, as embodied by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, that support his argument. Women, another oppressed class, who heroically defy the heterosexist male power structure by exposing its inherent weaknesses, would seem a logical object of adulation for gay men.
But instead of articulating those observations that confirm his thesis to a reasonable degree, Harris feels compelled, throughout this first chapter, to mischaracterize the opposing point of view through caricature. He deals with it by not dealing with it. This smacks of overcompensation, and leads the reader to believe that perhaps the author isn't that certain of his bold and sweeping assertions after all.
Even more troubling is Harris' implicit suggestion, repeated over and over, that the mid-to-late twentieth century accounts for a historical and universal portrait of reality. Many of the practices to which he refers, such as drag and high camp, have a history connected to gay men that transcends centuries and Western culture. But the argument he is making is, with a few scattered, early-twentieth century references, confined completely to the American Hollywood era. By concentrating the totality of gay sensibility into such a narrow space and time, Harris leaves himself open to an enormous body of historical and anthropological scholarship that tends to undermine his position.
The author's observations lead, in most cases, to an analysis of post-Stonewall gay culture, and this is where the crux of Harris' argument lies. It is also in this area that he is at his most brilliant. In his irreverently titled chapter, “The Kitschification of AIDS,” for example, he tackles a subject that has traditionally been sacred and taboo in the gay subculture: the gap between the gay and mainstream worlds that AIDS has helped to bridge, and the eerie role that marketing and PR have played in making the connection.
Harris points out that, unlike other diseases, AIDS has tapped into unique sensibility that has allowed a whole slew of factions, from New Age gurus to Hollywood powerhouses to transform it into “a trite melodrama, a cozy bedtime story narrated in a teary singsong for the edification of the American public.” (221) He cites the grotesqueness of coffee table books and Benetton ads that capitalize upon the disease by tapping into public sympathy. He illustrates one of the most bizarre paradoxes of AIDS rhetoric, the simultaneous need to render its victims pitiable yet heroic, capable yet helpless, if it is to sell to the public successfully.
While Harris acknowledges that much of the “selling” of AIDS became necessary in light of underfunding in the 1980S, this does nothing to placate his discomfort about its rabid commercialization. That his overt analysis of a phenomenon that has made many gay men (among others) privately uneasy for a number of years has such a startling effect is a testament to an understandable form of censorship: the widespread reluctance to criticism of any method that fosters compassion or increases funding, no matter how morbid or disturbing it might be. Harris' thoughtful interpretation of the epidemic's delicate rhetorical dynamics is as bold as it is necessary.
He performs a similar feat in the book's final chapter, “Glad-to-Be-Gay Propaganda.” In tracing the roots of books and manuals that interpret and advise gay readers about gay identity, Harris offers an interesting study of the pre- and post- Stonewall styles of self-commentary. While early publications such as ONE and THE MATTACHINE REVIEW pleaded for understanding, by the early 1970s a radical left-wing culture voicing contempt for the bourgeois heterosexual and his conventions had emerged.
But Harris produces his most stinging and lucid insights in his discussion of contemporary writing. He criticizes the inanity of self-help manuals currently offered to gay men with perception and wit. The gay reader is not really looking for advice, he says, but eagerly devours “propaganda that affirms the goodness of being gay and mesmerizes him with a constant flicker of subliminal messages attesting to the normality of gay life.” (263) Harris is absolutely correct in exposing this crop of therapeutic literature for the intellectually facile wasteland it represents.
Other chapters, particularly Harris' examination of the development of the S/M element of gay culture, likewise reveal the self-conscious focus on therapy and self-affirmation that has become such a force in the packaged gay sensibility. What makes Harris' arguments even more appealing is his aptitude with words. He expresses his opinions precisely and eloquently, but punctuates his style with a caustic and sometimes hilarious wit that makes his work both intellectually stimulating and an entertaining read, a noteworthy accomplishment in and of itself given the droning and simplistic tone of most gay scholarship and cultural commentary.
His content, however, runs the gamut. In two separate chapters on pornography (film and literature), Harris sheds light on a topic that, as he points out, has largely inspired less-than-illuminating standoffs between defenders of free speech and overreactive feminists. His discussion of the aesthetics of gay male pornography is mercifully free of the mindless ranting of such erotophobic theorists as John Stoltenberg and Andrea Dworkin. However, he does identify pathogenesis in gay porn, and his examination of the waning element of intimacy, in both film and literature, in favor of a “superhero” archetype, is intriguing to consider.
Unfortunately, Harris makes the same mistake as some of the “hysterical” anti-porn feminists from whom he presumes to distance himself by conflating image too heavily with reality. In portions of his chapters about pornography, and in a section on the rise of the glossy gay magazine, Harris echoes the delusional aspects of early 1990s pop feminism by overdetermining the link between the images gay men are exposed to and the standards they set for themselves. He does this by free association and without any statistical data to back it up, thus ending up with a condensed echo of Naomi Wolf's THE BEAUTY MYTH in which gay men are substituted for women as the hapless victims of tyrannical and unrealistic standards of attractiveness.
To sum it up, in THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE, Daniel Harris is strong and convincing on the fall, weak and sloppy on the rise. His analyses of current trends are sharp, perceptive and meaningful. However, his insistence that oppression is the be-all and end-all of gay sensibility is a tiring argument that he fuels with style rather than substance and research. Furthermore, it is not at all crucial to the more central issue, the erosion of gay culture through assimilation, that Harris dissects and describes so eloquently. It is entirely feasible that gay men are changing their image, consciously or otherwise, in order to speed up their overall integration into mainstream society, but the origins of this sensibility do not have to stem exclusively from oppression in order for Harris' other arguments to hold.
But while I may find the substance of some portions of his theory to be inadequate, much of what Harris writes needs to be written. The disappearance and transformation of the gay male sensibility is a phenomenon as real as it is anxiety-provoking for many gay men. And although some of it is done unconvincingly, much of it is done with incredible insight. And all of it is done with an engaging and deliciously caustic tone that makes THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY CULTURE an immensely readable book that will give the thoughtful reader, even if he largely disagrees with Harris' premises, pause for reflection.
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