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"Passing Notes in Class:
Some Thoughts on Writing and
Culture in the Ga(y)ted Community"
Wendell Ricketts
An Afterword from
Everything I Have Is Blue
I.
"We're here! We're queer! We're not going shopping!"
(Chant at an early Queer Nation demonstration at a California mall.)
I have a confession to make. As much as I reject the notion of collective identities, as much as I despise the Stepford Fag mass hallucinations of gay "community" rhetoric, and as much as I long to be the fierce and independent warrior of spirit that the label "queer" conjures, the genesis of this book was a much more fragile concept. We.
As in: Where are we? How do we imagine our lives and reconstruct our histories? Given the chance, what kinds of stories would we tell?
That last question intrigues me particularly. I am more and more convinced that imaginative literature--creative writing--possesses the ability to embrace ruction and rupture, union and invention, slippage and paradox in ways that are simply, inevitably absent from pride marches, consciousness-raising groups, "lifestyle" magazines, tavern guilds, gay churches, waves of same-sex couples lining up to get married at city hall, press releases, election campaigns, award-winning documentaries, civil-rights-litigation teams, queer-theory classes, gay-dad potlucks, town-hall meetings, square-dance clubs, and cadres of activists, no matter how pure of heart.
Short stories and novels capture the extemporary, plastic, kaleidoscopic, everything-at-once nature of being alive. They stand in marked contrast to those other mannerisms of culture and community whose goal is the reduction of reality to a proposition on which a majority can agree. It's not for nothing that works of fiction are never written by committees.
And that's why this anthology. Men who are working-class--who cannot or will not compromise that piece of their complicated selves--and who also love/fuck/pine for/build lives around/lust after/experi-ence themselves in common cause with other men, well, we don't see ourselves much in American gay fiction. Though perhaps that only begs another question: why bother to look there in the first place?
For someone coming out in 1976, as I did, what was remarkable about being gay was that you simultaneously knew so much about it and almost nothing about it. Before I came out, I had never read a book with a gay character in it; I had never seen a gay character on a TV show or in a movie. Even in the entire first year after I did come out, the number of gay or lesbian people I knew personally remained a single digit. Of course, I intimately understood every loathsome, despicable thing about queers that everyone else did, because in America you imbibe that much with your colostrum.
So what was a boy to do? Fortunately, I also came out at a time when it was still possible to give a friend fifty dollars, send him on his annual pilgrimage to San Francisco, and have him return with a copy of every new gay book of fiction that had been published during the previous year. Today, fifty dollars wouldn't cover the sales tax on a year's worth of queer stories.
The point is, my coming out, because it was essentially a small-town one, took place against the backdrop of the lives of the gay people (gay men, specifically) I found in books. I knew someone in those days who lived in Laguna Beach, and we read Tales of the City together long-distance, inspired by our reading to write each other long, gossipy letters in which we referred to Armistead Maupin's characters by their first names and pretended they were our buddies, boyfriends, neighbors.
Well, but wasn't that precisely the point?
Cliché as it sounds, I read in those days to discover myself and my "people," and the characters in novels and short stories were more real to me than the few flesh-and-blood queers I knew. Books offered alternative possibilities; they promised a world in which secrets were optional, in which longing was quite often requited, in which figuring out where "gay" was and going there was The Quest, was the answer to--well, to everything.
I don't know if that goes on anymore--whether seventeen-year-old American gay boys still look for their first glimpse of "community" between the pages of books or, indeed, if they even come to believe that such a thing as community exists, as I did, mainly because the gay men they read about appear to live in one.
I can report that something similar happened in Italy in 2003, where I happened to be when the publication of the translation of the first volume of Tales of the City (ironically enough) was greeted with both genuine delight and a certain samizdat zeal. If you were too embarrassed to walk into a bookstore to buy your own copy, a friend would slip you his. Everyone was talking about it--and fantasizing trips to the other edge of the world. I can't recall the last time a gay novel in America got that kind of reception.
The Italians, of course, were reading against invisibility and as counterpropaganda, just as I had done in 1976. (Anita Bryant mounted her "Save Our Children" campaign two months after I came out.) In a country where gay community--even in the restricted sense of gay-friendly physical spaces--barely exists, I Racconti di San Francisco described Oz.
But perhaps we have no need for that anymore in America. You can scarcely watch an hour of prime-time television these days without seeing a gay or lesbian character who's doing all right, and the producers of reality television are positively obsessed with gay men (though lesbians remain an unfathomable mystery), so we're not exactly invisible, right? (*1)
Or are we?
The "boom" in lesbian and gay writing, which began as a trickle in the mid-seventies and was already a flood by the mid-eighties, was related in major ways to the enormous social and political changes that were taking place then--the Anita Bryant campaign; the defeat of the Briggs initiative in 1978 (which attempted to outlaw gay and lesbian school teachers in California); the election (and later assassination) of San Francisco supervisor, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States; waves of movies with queer themes and more-or-less sympathetic characters (The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Naked Civil Servant in 1975; The Ritz, The War Widow, and Norman…Is That You? in 1976; La Cage aux Folles and Peter Adair and Rob Epstein's outstanding documentary, Word Is Out, in 1978; Making Love and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean in 1982); and prime-time television shows like That Certain Summer (1972), Soap (1977), and A Question of Love (1978). By the early seventies, in fact, talk-show hosts like David Susskind and Dick Cavett had interviewed so many homosexuals on the air that they had become the butt of newspaper cartoons and stand-up routines.
There was unquestionably a new national momentum in those years to organize, to lobby, to protest, but there was just as strong an impetus to publish, to produce movies and plays, to bring gay and lesbian literature and studies into the university. The two impulses, of course, were not separate. Literature is the propaganda of a culture, and a lot of people thought we needed better propaganda.
And that--if you can stand my mushing together more than a decade of complicated sociopolitical and sub- and mass-cultural phenomena--is how gay and lesbian literature up and married identity politics.
Now, for someone reading as I read in those early years of my initiation, it hardly mattered. Like so many readers then and even now, I firmly believed in role models and evaluated fiction on the basis of whether it provided "positive" images of gay and lesbian people. All I wanted in my reading was some reflection of myself and of my group. But if you had asked me who I thought that was, I'd have said "gay people" and cut my eyes at you for asking such a silly question. "We are here!" Horton hears the Whos chanting. For a long time, I wasn't much concerned with figuring out what I meant by "we."
II.
Hey, faggot. The Castro is that way!
------------------>
Hey, redneck. The trailer park is that way!
<------------------
(Bathroom graffito, El Trebol Restaurant, San Francisco)
But how long could that go on? As my sense of self grew more complex over the years--a process that comes to anyone who doesn't struggle too hard against it--I abandoned the naïve belief that all my contradictions and pluralities could be crammed into a single identity, and, when I went looking in fiction for my li(fe)(ves) to be reflected back to me, I did so with an increasing sense of disorientation.
Blue came about, then, because I understand something I once didn't: literature instructs us. We must be vigilant, then, as we take our pleasure in reading, because one of the main ways that literature instructs is by what it refuses to name, by what it omits, elides, or just plain fumbles. Literature is never neutral and it is never still.
In one of the first post-Stonewall gay novels that came into my hands, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance--a book that still haunts me--Holleran creates a mid-seventies world of Manhattan circuit queens who are rich, stylish, rapacious, desperate for sexual attention (which, paradoxically, they often reject), terrified of aging, and defiantly superficial. The main character, Sutherland, actually comes from a poor Southern family, but he affects such Ur-Blanche DuBois entitlement and regal scorn that he seems more like the heir of a de-posed czar. These, Holleran suggests, are the people participating mean-ingfully in gay life.
The one identifiable working-class character in the book is Frankie Oliveiri, an Italian American transit worker from Bayonne, New Jersey, who has left his wife and child to be with Malone, one of Holleran's gilded young men. Here is Holleran's description of him:
Frankie had never gone to a bar, had never wanted to, had heard of Fire Island but considered it "a bunch of queens" and lived a life that, save for the fact that he slept with Malone, was hardly homosexual. (82)
Frankie read the papers, asking Malone to pronounce for him the words he had never come across before, and tell him what they meant…. He came home with ideas and schemes. "Maybe I should be an electrician," he said, "we could move to Jersey and have a house. Just you and me and all those honkies…." [Frankie] wanted to improve his lot; he wanted to learn a skill, fix TVs, and move to New Jersey with Malone to a house in the pine barrens. He was a true American. (87-88)
In addition to being "hardly homosexual," Frankie is also pathologically jealous and becomes physically violent when he learns that Malone has cheated on him. Part of his macho charm is his lack of formal education (Malone tutors him in newspaper English); and his ethnic masculinity, while highly attractive, is ultimately incompatible with "real" gay life. Moreover, Frankie's "truly American" desire to escape Manhattan's gay scene for the suburbs is depicted as incomprehensible and when, toward the end of the book, he finds a more accommodating partner and does exactly that, Sutherland and Malone have this to say:
"He's bought a house in Freehold, New Jersey," said Malone, as they sat down for a moment and Sutherland slipped off his satin pumps…. "He's making twenty thousand a year now and he'll have a pension, too. Never say America isn't a worker's paradise."
"Oh, well, we lived for other things," [Sutherland] smiled…. "At least," he murmured in [Malone's] ear, "we learned to dance. You have to grant us that. We are good dancers," he said. "And what," said Sutherland, "is more important in this life than that?" (230-231)
Well, probably a lot of things, but the point of Dancer from the Dance is that there's something fishy about a homosexual who wants the things that Frankie wants--Frankie, in fact, is in danger of forfeiting his gay identity.
It would be an exaggeration to hold Dancer from the Dance responsible for the single-handed creation of a genre, but it is accurate to say that Holleran put his finger on the crack-that-would-become-a-chasm in gay male self-representation and -imagination during the 1980s. "Truly" gay men lived in cities (or fled to them) where they lived not lives but lifestyles. All other aspects of their identities fell into place beneath the capstone of gayness--a process, as any number of commentators have noted, that has only intensified in the years since.
III.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession
of a gay lifestyle must be in want of a fortune."
(With apologies to Jane Austen)
That's the way it happens in John Caffey's The Coming Out Party, originally published in 1982.
Sid and Calvin, bored and besotted with luxury and possessions in their West Hollywood mansion, decide that the solution to their malaise lies in finding a boy in need of gay metamorphosis and modeling, from his unlikely clay, "The Ultimate Homo." The more dubious the prospect, the more enviable the "rescue" effort. Thus, when they come upon nineteen-year-old Hal, broken down by the side of the road in Santa Monica, a pale, overweight "Hee-Haw reject" (20) from Xenia, Ohio, they've found their (im)perfect man.
The transformation begins (of course) with the physical: the gym, the personal trainer, Keratin masks, the starvation diet, contact lenses, the hair stylist, the fashion consultant. Hal is next made to read Gore Vidal and is instructed in the appreciation of classical music; he is taught how to engage "properly" in casual sex and drug-taking; and he is quizzed on his ability to identify the source of such quotations as "Jungle red, Sylvia!" and "I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers."
Up to this point, The Coming Out Party is a rather broad farce on gay male "community" mores at the time of its writing. What makes the plot timely more than twenty years later, however, is that the imperialist, colonizing energy of the bourgeois class and, in particular, of its avatar, the gay-male coming-out process, has not changed. Indeed, the comedy would fail if the serious truth behind it were not still fully legible.
The cultural imperatives evident in Sid and Calvin's "project" were, in fact, the running joke behind the four-part "Fagmalion" episode of the NBC sitcom Will & Grace, as recently as 2003. Barry, the dowdy cousin of Karen Walker, has come out at the age of thirty-five, but his "debut" as a gay man (at a black-tie Human Rights Campaign fundraising din-ner) is unthinkable until he undergoes a complete makeover. Jack and Will, guardians of the well of gay knowledge, serve as Barry's guides and renovators. (Significantly, it is Karen who arranges for--and funds--Barry's twenty-thousand-dollar crash course in gay, but faithful viewers will recall that the rich (by marriage) and eternally snobby Karen comes from a working-class background; in another episode, her shame regarding her past, and the revelation that her mother works as a bartender, are explored).
What Coming Out Party and "Fagmalion" share is the under-standing, manifest behind their "light-hearted" superficies, that the possession of a gay "lifestyle" is insufficient unto itself, but is required by its very nature to proselytize. Thus, though no one can take seriously the claim that gay men recruit sexually, the "community's" instinct is demonstrably to hegemonize culturally.
Gay-male identity, moreover, is revealed as an almost exclusively material site: Barry, like Hal, is marked as "ungay" by the brands of clothes he buys (he shops at Miller's Outpost), by being "twenty pounds overweight," by his unfashionable beard and bad haircut. Will's role in the tutelage of Barry is to "work on his mind"--that is, to teach him "things like gay culture, gay politics, driving up the cost of real estate in affordable areas." The success of Barry's acculturation finally begins to be visible when he buys his first pair of Gucci shoes and when he shows Will and Jack a photo of "fabulous abs" from Men's Fitness magazine, stating his wish to resemble the model:
WILL: [TO BARRY] Are those-- Is that Gucci on your feet?
BARRY: Oh, yeah. Aren't they great? They kill my toes and
cost a fortune, but what the hell? I'll take out another credit card.
WILL: [VOICE BREAKING] I think I'm gonna cry.
JACK: Will, do you know what this means? Unrealistic body expectations.
WILL: Choosing fashion over comfort.
JACK: Living beyond your means.
WILL: Boy George, I think he's got it!
Without the gay-male diktat, of course, another show in which gay identity is synonymized with bourgeois consumption, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, would be unintelligible. The humor of Queer Eye frequently hinges upon the ridiculing of working-class men for their grooming, clothing, living spaces, and eating habits,(*2) while suggesting that the creation of "metrosexuality" (that is, homosexuality without the sex) depends upon the literal stripping of the classed body and its subsequent reconstruction. In every episode, then, the object of the makeover is shown all-but-naked at the moment of his transformation, just as he prepares to resignify his remodeled self with new cosmetics and new clothing.
In these precise terms, Hal is trained in The Coming Out Party that successful participation in male homosexual culture requires that he remove all traces--from his body, from his speech, and from his psyche--of his previous heterosexual (read: lower-class) life. That he has a home and a natal culture and may yet desire to remain fluent in their idioms is considered not only irrelevant but actively antagonistic to his homosexual rehabilitation.
Thus, the gay existence is one without a past-a life that begins de novo at coming out, the instant of queer conception.(*3) There can be no dispute that great potential exists for the release of creative and psychic energy in processes that result in self-acceptance, but the insistence that the newly inscribed "gay" or "queer" body must pass through the portals of the gay village by means of renunciation of previous moral, ethical, and cultural training and through abandonment of prior allegiances to geography and to clan is essentially to rob the individual of civilization. The indigenous baby, that is, is tossed out with the gay bathwater.
What emerges to "queer" Sid and Calvin's increasingly cruel regimen for Hal, however, is that most savage of all forces, desire. To the men's horror, their incipient creation falls head over heels in love with the decidedly déclassé Pool Man ("Not a penny to his name." [63]), and Calvin is particularly incensed by their liaison ("The Pool Man was a hunk, but Cal'd be damned if he'd have any daughter of his sleeping with the Hired Help." [65]).
It is at this point that Caffey inserts the only challenge to Sid and Calvin's project (other than Hal's own weak resistance to it), which comes, significantly, in the voice of Calvin's mother. Arriving for a visit, she accuses Calvin of "[using Hal] to be what you never were," adding, "Better the boy wants true love than what passes for it at the Club Baths"(100). By criticizing Calvin and Sid's treatment of Hal and, by extension, the entirely self-referential gay world the men occupy, Calvin's mother, like a relict of Calvin's "pre-gay" life, attempts to reassert into that world the moral, civilizing principles that were Calvin's birthright. It is to no avail, however, and Calvin's first act upon his mother's departure is to express his rage by deploying his capitalist power to fire the Pool Man.
In the end, Hal's love for the Pool Man triumphs, and they are married in a public ceremony attended by both their gay and natal families. Even Calvin comes to accept the relationship and, in a significant moment near the very end of the book, he finally asks the Pool Man his name (Beau). Just as in E. M. Forster's Maurice, which The Coming Out Party specifically references, Beau recognizes that his relationship with another man cannot survive in hostile surroundings (the heterosexual middle class in Maurice, the homosexual one in The Coming Out Party), and he immediately "whisks" Hal away (in his '71 Dodge van). They return, importantly, to the house where Beau was born-a place steeped in Beau's family and class histories--in Hawaiian Gardens, a largely Latino, working-class community in East Los Angeles.
The Coming Out Party is assuredly no manifesto of sustained proletarian resistance--Beau turns out to be the beneficiary of a large trust fund left to him in secret by an "eccentric aunt"--but it pointedly examines, in a way that perhaps only humor can (as Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton taught us), the class-inflected (and class-envious) demands of gay-cultural membership.
The question that The Coming Out Party raises humorously is the same one that Dancer from the Dance raises in deadly earnest: Does successfully entering the gay male community require the assumption of a market identity? In other words, does not "gay" resemble, more than it resembles anything else, a brand name?
IV.
Marketers worldwide are increasingly recognizing the importance and spending power of the gay community as a dynamic, fast growing economic force in the business world today. As a result of their unique lifestyles, gay men and women are by definition intensely brand loyal, and hyper acquisitive. They for the most part enjoy joint earnings, yielding them high disposable incomes.
(From a letter sent to gay businesses by the Millennium March On Washington's Millennium Festival Street Fair.)
Certainly, no one could blame a guy if he got that impression. But if Dancer from the Dance's answer to the question is probably yes, and The Coming Out Party's is probably no, Kirk Read stakes out a much more ambivalent position in his 2001 memoir, How I Learned to Snap. After living for several years in New York and San Francisco, Read received a contract to write a book about his experiences as an openly gay teenager in high school and, in order to focus on his project, moved temporarily to rural Lake County, California, home to "good country people, leftover hippies, and hardcore druggies" whose "prison tattoos and dirty fingernails make me wonder what in the world I'm doing around here" (vii).
Upon his arrival in a town where "Wal-Mart and K-Mart are the cultural epicenters" (vii), Read goes to the "ambitiously named" café at Wal-Mart for a hamburger. There, Read spots a boy he judges to be about fifteen, who is having lunch with his mother:
His well-conditioned hair hung over the left shoulder of his Calvin Klein tee shirt.... His fingers were covered with silver rings and he ate quickly.... His mother was a round woman dressed in an embroidered Guatemalan shirt I'd seen priced for a dollar at the Hospice Thrift Shop. He was chubby from sharing his mother's snacks. I wondered how long it would take him to reach her size....
I sat at the table behind his mother, catching pieces of their quiet conversation. Names like Pa and Aunt Junebug floated over to me.... [The boy] looked up from his food to throw glances at me. As he lifted his burger, his pinkies jutted out from the sides of the bun. He was a dainty eater and wiped the sides of his mouth with a small stack of napkins after each bite....
I went through high school dreaming of being rescued by an as-yet-undiscovered older brother who would adopt me and ask me why I looked so sad....
His eyes were full of a need for adoption. I wasn't cruising him, I was gently, carefully letting him know that his tribe was out there, beyond the cinderblocks and hubcaps that filled his front yard.... In that moment, I wished I could have handed him something ... more than a soft-eyed stare that said "hang in there" or "save your money." (viii-ix)
All of this takes place in the space of Read's two-and-a-half-page prologue, which, despite its brevity, nicely compresses the semiotics of class and homosexuality. Read cannot learn, during their silent encounter, the boy's actual sexual preference or class background, of course, so he describes neither literal gayness nor literal working-class status, but their signs. In interpreting such signs, moreover, Read assigns a valence to each that is either positive (the escape provided by coming out as gay) or negative (the culture from which the boy needs rescue). Thus, prisoners, dirty fingernails, obesity, thrift-store shopping, the presence of Wal-Mart and Kmart, relatives called "Pa" or "Aunt Junebug," and hubcaps in the yard are "coded" for their working-class (and, thus, contra-gay) character, while well-conditioned hair, dismay at prison tattoos and unscrubbed fingernails, Calvin Klein T-shirts, disdain for the absence of non-Wal-Mart- and non-Kmart-based culture, eating "daintily," and the "need for adoption" by an older (presumably gay) brother are coded for their antagonism to or differentiation from working-class milieux and thus, in favor of gayness.
Significantly, Read desires to communicate to the boy that his "tribe" is "out there," the expression of a vision for the boy's life that is entirely hegemonic. Read seems to imagine homosexuality as a physical place (the boy must save his money in order to travel there), a "land," if you will, where the boy's true breed resides. His home culture, meanwhile--the boy's birthplace and blood family--is presumed to be an error and a detriment: the boy, "sharing his mother's snacks" (that is, her literal and metaphoric nourishment), threatens to become like her. This is pointedly not his tribe, and it is the discovery of that fact that legitimates escape.
To be fair, there is every reason to consider Read's concern for the boy to be completely genuine, but the question of "tribe" (that is, of community, of belonging, of membership) lies so deeply at the core of the problematics of gay-male cultural (re)presentation--both as a literary theme and in our real-life experiences--that the term cannot be passed over lightly.
To further complicate matters, the body of Read's book, in which he describe his coming out as a high-school student in the small town of Lexington, Virginia, demonstrates an even more profoundly conflicted relationship with the place and people Read left behind:
I never wanted to abandon Lexington altogether.... I loved the people I'd grown up with and even when they scared me, I held out hope that they'd come around on gay issues....
It can be a challenge to go home and explain to them what I'm doing with my life, because their realities are so entirely different from mine. My exposure to sexual adventure, college, and radical politics has created painful cultural differences between us. But they're my people, and I can't give up on them. (111-112)
What is notable about this passage is Read's inclusion of the term sexual adventure in his tripartite explanation for the cultural differences that have arisen between him and the people in his hometown. Although a university education and exposure to political paradigms diametrically opposed to those of one's natal environment may lead to conflicting, even incompatible understandings of reality, they do not rewrite one's origins, dissolve personal history, or replace preexisting culture with an alternate version.
Read's addition of "sexual adventure" to his list is thus especially intriguing, containing, as it does, the premise that embedded within (homo)sexual practice lies culture or, to put it more specifically, a culture in which Wal-Mart cafés, thrift stores, and unmanicured lawns, acceptable in one's naïveté, are revealed to have been improper all along.
My point is not to criticize what is, in the end, a rather touching memoir, but to call attention to the polarities of class and (homo)sexuality that have become so deeply ingrained that we are virtually helpless to avoid speaking in their language.
V.
"I must constantly assert my difference."
Gloria Anzaldúa, "To(o) Queer the Writer: Loca, Escritora, y Chicana"
I refer deliberately in the sections above to gay men. Huge differences exist between the ways in which "gay" men were consolidating a national, public (and literary) identity in the post-Stonewall era and what many queer women and lesbians were doing. One of the most striking contrasts between lesbian and gay male community and cultural production in the post-World War II period, in fact, has been the insistence by many lesbian writers, scholars, and organizers on keeping the issue of class (and, more broadly, of economics) in constant intellectual and cultural play. Much of the work of writers like Judy Grahn, Dorothy Allison, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Amber Hollibaugh, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and many others, for example, has been devoted to the working-class-lesbian theme, particularly as class intersects gender, race, and butch/femme dynamics.
In one of the early anthologies dedicated to surveying the state of lesbian fiction (entitled, descriptively enough, Lesbian Fiction), editor Elly Bulkin (1981) takes special care to underscore the important contributions of working-class women writers to the expansion of the lesbian short-story form:
Through much of this century and the end of the last one, lesbian literature has been almost exclusively the province of white lesbians--or of white women of indeterminate or unknown sexual/affectional preference--who are either middle- or upper-class. Only fairly recently has this situation even begun to change: white working-class characters are depicted in some of the fiction in The Ladder and of the pulp novels of that period [1956-1972], and a growing number of lesbians of color and poor and working-class lesbians of all races have written much poetry since the late sixties and are, along with other lesbians, producing a growing body of powerful fiction. (xii-xiii)
Bulkin, like many of the women who edited lesbian anthologies in the seventies and eighties, introduced her book with a kind of framing statement in which she expressed the writer's and anthologist's obligation to combat the silencing of lesbian voices within the culture, including the ways in which failed considerations of class, race, and disability (to name the categories that Bulkin names) served as exponents of that silence. Literature--what Bulkin called "fictional truth," evoking Audre Lorde's famous formulation, "biomythography"--was thus no mere entertainment, but was a dynamic and vital tool for change. Writing and publishing, in other words, were essential cultural work in the larger project of creating and transforming political consciousness, including consciousness about class.
Lesbian Fiction, thus, is no less remarkable for the high quality of the work it contains than for the respect it pays to working-class writers and to the importance of working-class themes in the development of the literature Bulkin saw emerging around her; and working-class-inflected stories like Dorothy Allison's "A River of Names," Audre Lorde's "The Beginning," or Judy Grahn's "Boys at the Rodeo"--each one a classic in its own right--ultimately form something like a fourth of the anthology.
The working-class dyke,(*4) meanwhile, was becoming a lesbian literary imago, celebrated in such classic novels as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Frankie Hucklenbroich's Crystal Diary. Both books revolve around blue-collar, "stone butch" lesbian protagonists in the 1950s (Feinberg) or 1960s (Hucklenbroich) and, though often painful, are tales of ultimate survival and perseverance that present working-class experience as both valuable and heroic.
"Underground" writer Red Jordan Arobateau's dozens of largely self-published experimental novels and short-story collections, which date back to the mid-seventies, similarly center the experiences of what Arobateau calls "street dykes." Arobateau's characters live at the margins, moving in and out of homelessness, unemployment, jail, prostitution, and drug use. The lives of Arobateau's protagonist butches are marked by violence, rage, alcoholism, and a restlessness that is only temporarily lulled by rough, marathon sex, which Arobateau describes in eidetic detail. If Arobateau's characters often lack emotional depth, the work remains interesting for its unapologetic focus on a "queered" underclass, for its exploration of gender and racial dynamics, and for its explicit centering of sexual agency as a mechanism by which powerless people experience power (and, thus, engage with the reparative function of sex).
Lesbian fiction writers' work, then, was firmly joined within a tradition of scholarly inquiry that includes such nonfiction studies such as Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis' Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), an ethnography of working-class lesbians in Buffalo, New York, and any number of Lillian Faderman's foundational books and articles on lesbian literary and social history. Such work--and what I've mentioned here is merely the tip of a substantial iceberg--is evidence of a sustained, concerted, dedicated effort on the part of lesbian writers, poets, publishers, journalists, and scholars not to allow working-class lesbians simply to be named tokenistically in a litany of oppressions, but to insist that their experiences be brought to the foreground. It is no more than a reflection of that effort, I think, that the important 1997 anthology, Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write about Class, was edited by a woman who identifies as queer and that the majority of the contributors were women.
Such an observation in no way mitigates the historical and ongoing struggles of working-class lesbians, and especially of working-class lesbians of color, against what Lynne Uttal (1990) called "inclusion without influence" in lesbian- and feminist-centered scholarship, literature, and community life, but it is meant to hold the lesbian-feminist "example" up for purposes of contrast--and by so doing to make the point that the counterpart in American gay-male cultural commentary barely exists.
VI.
The workman started pulling tools from his belt and making adjustments here and there. At last Billy had a man, a sweaty he-man day laborer and not those polite and gentlemanly teenagers at school. This was, he was sure, what they called "rough trade." He knew it was for him.
Boarding House Chicken, 1978
Except perhaps in pornography. Boy, are we present in pornography. (As we are in "erotica," the name given to the genre that now constitutes approximately one-third of all fiction published for gay men each year in America.)
I hardly need to recite the names of internet porn sites and listservs or the plots of "adult" novels to make the point that there's no gay sexual iconography quite so tried and true as the sex object who is a truck driver/ prison guard/ construction worker/ ranch hand/ Army grunt/ auto mechanic/ street hustler/ beat cop/ jailhouse rapist/ squaddy/s kateboard punk. In each case, of course, the "consumer's" gaze is assumed not only not to be working-class but to be inexorably drawn to the fetish quality of sex with a (class) difference.
In the pornographer's imagination, moreover, working-classness in men means masculinity and lots of it, such that, in queer porn, the fetish category "laborer" is indistinguishable from the fetish category "he-man." And masculinity, of course, means insertion. The exec in the three-piece suit could screw the scruffy bike messenger, but he virtually never does.
There's a good deal more to be said about gay male pornography's obsession with race and class as markers of iconic masculinity and, indeed, about gay-male pornographers' profound ambivalence regard-ing masculinity in the first place, but I want to focus here on two non-pornographic examples of the ways in which working-classness is fetishized in a gay-male cultural context.
In November 1999, that stop-calling-me-gay magazine, Men's Health, published a two-page spread entitled "Blue-Collar Brawn," which described, complete with color photos, a "blue-collar workout for men." The exercises, which include the "Sandbag Lift," the "Shovel Lift," and the "Car Push," purport to duplicate the "real life" activity of guys who "spend [their] days moving big stuff around for a living" (118). The magazine's call to reproduce a (fantasized) working-class male body invites the reader to envision the musculature (and masculine attractiveness) that may result from physical labor, but simultaneously requires the reader to annul all knowledge of the actual blue-collar man who "moves big stuff around for a living." That man--whose "blue-collar brawn" is a mechanism of survival and not a form of recreation; whose literal body ages prematurely, is often scarred and burned, and is plagued by early arthritis, bone degeneration, and tendonitis; and whose pain and injuries not infrequently go unattended for lack of health insurance--is rendered invisible by the need to re-imagine "blue collar" as a commodity category.
J. G. Hayes' fine short-story collection, This Thing Called Courage: South Boston Stories, suffered a similar "re-invention" when it was published in 2002. Michael Lowenthal, whose "prepublication review" is included in the book's front matter, lauds Hayes' work:
Though they're only blocks apart, there's a world of difference between Southie, Boston's blue collar Irish stronghold, and the South End, its gentrified gay ghetto. Likewise, there couldn't be a greater gap between Hayes' authentically muscular storytelling and the steroidal puffery that passes as some gay fiction. Unlike so many gay characters whose heroism depends upon fleeing their origins, Hayes' heroes prove their courage by staying put. From the tectonic violence of his hometown's class conflict, Hayes' voice thrusts to craggy heights.
Lowenthal could certainly not have known, when he wrote his comments, that his words would occasion a strange irony, because "steroidal puffery" describes precisely the image Hayes' publisher chose for the cover: the nude torso in profile of a young, muscular white man, his right deltoid decorated with an obviously fake tattoo in which the words "South Boston" (and not "Southie") surround a Celtic cross.
That such a body is chosen to represent--indeed to embody and exemplify--the blue-collar or working-class "condition" of Hayes' writing exemplifies the ways in which mainstream gay-male cultural representation actively refuses to acknowledge working-class men, even when they are gay, beyond the fetishized, sexualized category.
The flawless, evenly tanned skin in the cover image--entirely free of hair and entirely free of scars--marks the body in question as the opposite of a working-class body and, indeed, inscribes its owner unequivocally as a denizen not of Southie but of the "gentrified South End." It is a body created not through the physical demands of working-class labor but through the decidedly middle-class exploitation of the leisure time and disposable income necessary to belong to and attend a gym, to eat well, to spend time in the sun.
Like Men's Health, Hayes' publisher sought to evoke the real working class by "quoting" an imaginary working-class body--one, in this case, onto which fantasies of young, sexually attractive, tough (meaning masculine) Irish kids in South Boston were meant to be projected. That the photo is cropped at the neck seems significant as well: robbed of the individuality of a face, the body becomes more generic and, thus, more pornographically available.
It is essential, however, to underscore the fact that none of Hayes' stories has anything to do with the cover image; his work is by no stretch of the imagination "erotica," and Hayes is not particularly concerned in his seven stories with his characters' sex lives. But his publisher could not release itself from the rapture of the commodified, pornographized fetish-consciousness to which contemporary gay urban middle-class sexual culture is in thrall, literally could not read the nonerotic experi-ences that Hayes' book sought to illuminate.
This, I would argue, is a peculiarly gay-male alexia. A few years before This Thing Called Courage appeared, Beacon Press published Michael Patrick MacDonald's heartbreaking memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. Though All Souls is nonfiction and though MacDonald is heterosexual, he and Hayes traverse corresponding territory. There is not the remotest possibility, however, that Beacon Press would have considered a cover similar to the one that appeared on This Thing Called Courage; indeed, in a nongay context such imagery would have been viewed (correctly) as vulgar in light of the book's serious content. For a gay men's publisher, however, the appeal to the (perceived) interests of gay-male consumers trumped concern about whether the sexualized cover art neutralized the working-class gay voice within.
That transaction, too, recapitulates the familiar power dynamic in which the products of the labor of working-class people (creative writing, in this case) comes to be "owned" by the holder of capital. (Many people don't realize that writers do not control the cover and design of their books and are, in fact, typically required to sign contracts to that effect.)
Once writing is transformed into a physical object destined for the marketplace, to be sure, it necessarily becomes subject to the laws (or, rather, the superstitions) of advertising: that is true of any book. What is instructive about the example of This Thing Called Courage is the publisher's assumption that a sexualized, idealized male image was required both to invoke working-class men as the subjects of fiction (that is, was tied to the content of the book) and to render that content attractive to the consumer (that is, was tied to the gay-male buyer's inability to "read" without the mediation of beefcake).
The omnipresence of such subcultural cryptography may serve to illuminate another phenomenon. If there was one kind of story I rejected more than any other for this collection, it was the one with the implausible soft-porn plot featuring (and I am not making this up) construction workers. The fact is amusing, but also telling. Writers find it no simple matter to project working-class men into the imagination, especially if they are sexually and emotionally tied to other men. When we look there, we see clichés and advertisements, Stanley Kowalski and the Marlboro Man, the inflated (and inflatable) cops and cowboys of Tom of Finland, the generic white boy with gym muscles who is trans-formed into a "he-man laborer" by the strategic application of a tattoo or a smear of axle grease. So successfully have our own minds been colonized that what we do not much see are full-fleshed characters with complex lives.
Because most people who write are readers first, and because reading so often leads directly to writing, there's little mystery here. Fiction writers, particularly when they're starting out, tend to copy what they see being published, and queer fiction that is commercially rewarded with publication (which is, to be fair, very little of it), often follows formulae in which, as Larry Kramer famously argued, "the goals of gay fiction (are) so small" (1997, p. 60). The one current growth industry in gay fiction, in fact, is the surprisingly successful subgenre--but I'm probably the only one who's surprised--that unashamedly characterizes itself as "beach reading" and whose entire point is to publicize the fabulous lives and fabulous romances of fabulously young, assimilated, and consumer-very-friendly gay men.(*5) Literature is, after all, the propaganda of a culture, and working-class queer men have been propagandized right out of the picture.
VII.
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years
and have hardly made a rent in it.
Henry David Thoreau, from Journals, February 9, 1841
You don't do much better with nonfiction. Visit the HQ section at your local library (or the 305-306s, if they're on the Dewey system) and glance at the tables of contents and indices of the scores of books on LGBT "culture," "politics," and "studies"--books with titles like Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, Ethnic and Cultural Diversity among Gay Men and Lesbians, The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia, The Culture of Queers, and Inside the Academy & Out: Lesbian-Gay-Queer Studies & Social Action.
You will not find in these five books any discussion of class, nor are you likely to find much analysis of the subject in the billions of words published over the last decade on the dissection of male homosexual "culture." David Bergman, in his otherwise excellent study, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (1991), includes chapters on camp, race, AIDS, family formation, and gender, but cannot manage to wrap an analysis around the way that gay-male self-representation in literature is classed. Suzanna Danuta Walters, in her All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (2001), devotes two chapters ("Consuming Queers" and "If It's Pink We'll Sell It") to a consideration of gay wealth and entrepreneurship--and brings herself to use the word "class" once, on the last page of the last chapter, without a word of comment.
When Michael Bronski, writing in The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (1998), congratulates popular culture for creating the space in which gay and lesbian liberation could finally succeed, he sidesteps the classed nature of pop culture's idioms. "The politics of popular culture," Bronski writes, "is the politics of pleasure and personal freedom" (36).
On the contrary. American commodity culture--a more accurate name for it--is diametrically opposed to personal freedom (except as that freedom is expressed in consumption), discourages the unfettered expression of pleasure by valorizing heterosexual coupling above all other forms, and actively corrodes human(e) interaction by insisting that only those able to meet unreasonable standards of beauty, youth, and wealth are eligible to participate. Pop culture does not--cannot--exist outside of economics, nor does gay (male) participation in it. Here again, however, scholarly discourse on the nature of queer life cannot admit of class.
Bronski is absolutely correct that pop culture and the gay "community" can barely keep their hands off each other, but to confuse liberation from oppression with "open, celebratory displays of gay sexuality and the gay body" (108) is simply sinister (not to mention misogynist and racist, since that "celebratory" body is invariably male and white). To assert, finally, that "because gay and lesbian identity is defined by sexual attraction to members of the same gender, sexuality is, necessarily, at the heart of gay culture" (54) is to iterate the middle-class insistence that gay cultural membership is open only to those who are willing and able to place sex-object choice at the center of their lives. If class (or race or gender or any one of a number of other subjectivities, or perhaps all of them together) lies closer to my heart, am I admissible then only to the queer auxiliary?
And then it sometimes happens that we disappear even when we appear. In 2001, Alyson published Dan Woog's Gay Men, Straight Jobs, a collection of interviews with gay men who work in what Woog identified as "'heterosexual jobs,' as most people--gay as well as straight--would call them" (vii). Leaving aside the curious process by which Woog operationally defined occupations like judge, public- relations executive, investment banker, and doctor as "heterosexual jobs," I turn to more vexing questions.
First, more than half of the men Woog interviewed are employed in working-class occupations (prison guard, oil rig mechanic, trucker, forklift driver, mason, lumberyard man), though he never engages with that fact. Second, the sole job-related issue that interested Woog in his interviews was whether or not the man was "out" at work:
[A]ll out gay men--no matter what profession or job--share certain experiences that straight men never can. These experi-ences revolve around overcoming homophobia, be it subtle or overt, in the workplace.... Some of the men I talked with...are not out, or are semi-out at work and way out at home; for them, every day is a demanding, energy-draining balancing act. (viii)
A "demanding, energy-draining balancing act" because of "homophobia," but presumably not, for the working-class men, because of the nature of their jobs, their lack of control over their time and their work, or the stress of financial insecurity. I scarcely need to add that the cover of the book is decorated with a handsome, hunky guy wearing a sweaty undershirt and a hard hat. One wonders whether he is the straight man emblematic of the "heterosexual job" or the gay man who holds one; he is, in any case, visually marked as working-class, a juxtaposition that conflates the categories of "working class" and "heterosexual" in a way that Andrew Holleran's Sutherland and Malone would have grasped instantly.
VIII.
"Excuse me for saying so but isn't gay and working-class
kind of a contradiction in terms?"
Posted to the Working Class Academics listserv in response to the
Everything I Have Is Blue call for submissions, November 22, 2002
"There's no such thing as a working-class gay man."
The best-selling Manhattan-based gay author of some seven novels and
numerous books on theater, in an April 28, 2003 telephone conversation
"The great thing about gay is that it erases class."
Ditto
Perhaps that helps explain why it is so hard to find legitimate contemporary American queer fiction--meaning the kind that appears in those semiannual "best" anthologies or which is recognized with publication by mainstream houses (including mainstream gay houses)--in which the boys in question aren't spending the fall at a villa in Tuscany (or summering in Provincetown, or taking a three-month excursion through the "ruins" of Mexico); aren't decorating their lofts in SoHo (or their getaway home in Vermont or their Victorian in Pacific Heights); aren't pulling out credit cards to pay for first-class flights to Bangkok (or a new set of Baccarat bibelots or dinner at Elaine's); don't have cleaning ladies (or real-estate agents or personal trainers). They are white-collar professionals--or, if they aren't, they either don't need to work or are merely working their way up. They have taste and culture and subscriptions to Architectural Digest, but they have no politics (or would have no politics were it not for AIDS). They are products of the queer Diaspora, and they have come to the urban centers where "we" are presumed to thrive and (significantly) to prosper.
I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you might think. The publishers' descriptions of recent gay men's fiction tell the story (the last two quotes are actually from Publishers Weekly):
* …a funny, playful, endearing slice of life from the late-20-something Chelsea crowd in Manhattan's fast lane…
* …four young, image-conscious New York gay men...attempt to recalibrate their out-of-whack love lives while looking their best in the latest designer fashions…
* The boys are looking forward to Rex Gifford's Red Party, which promises to be even bigger than the White Party on the gay party circuit…
* …a young posse of preppy Upper East Siders with a taste for high fashion, top-shelf liquor and other men…
* Nigel Adams and cynical, aristocratic Nicky Borja...are accidentally thrown together in a Tuscany villa…
* …filled with bright and sympathetic 20-somethings trying to make their way in the world…
* …a blissful bachelorhood of drugs, circuit parties and dance floor groping in Boston…
* …bittersweet romance in Provincetown with Eduardo, twenty-two and a vision of gorgeous, wide-eyed youth…
* …a younger, prettier set who spend their time at resorts with names like Babylon and clubs with names like Universe…
* Powered by the same type of giddy, clichéd fluff that is common to so much contemporary gay fiction…
* …adheres to the flourishing genre of gay pulp fiction, simple stories churned out to affirm gay souls and pass the time on beaches and couches.
To my mind, it is no coincidence that the invisibility of nonurban, non-middle-class, unfabulous, and unwaxed queers in the agendas of our national political organizations and in gay journalistic coverage of "our" community exactly parallels the absence of such images in "our" fiction.
And so. A working-class queer man comes out and enters a/the gay "community" (almost always a physical place, a neighborhood, a social milieu). Apprehending the pressure to leave behind/disguise/transliterate his life as he knows it, he is presented with a choice: if his kind is not there--well, he'll need to change his kind. The magazines he leafs through, the television he watches won't tell him much different. Neither will the books he reads.
The part of the title of this anthology that lies east of the colon--the "more-or-less gay" part--is no accident. It's an attempt to represent linguistically a failure of thought. It's an accusation. I don't pretend to speak for the other writers in Everything I Have Is Blue, and I don't presume to know how they have, over the course of their lives, managed their relationship to that vexed and freighted notion, "gay." But I'll bet there's not one of them who hasn't at one time or another in his adult life been in serious conflict over the label, hasn't worn it sometimes not because it fit or was flattering but because it was the only shirt in the closet.
I can say this: I have experienced my most profound moments of bonding with other men when I have worked in prisons and jails in Texas, New Mexico, and San Francisco, places where poor and working-class men are not the majority, they are quite simply the whole. As a teacher, I have entered without fear rooms full of murderers and gang members with the fanciful intention of interesting them in poetry, but I no longer have the guts to walk unescorted into a party full of gay men I do not know. In theory, the one group might injure my body, but the distinctly nontheoretical wounds inflicted by the second group threaten, like Philoctetes' snake bite, never to heal.
And I will say this: the point of an anthology like Everything I Have Is Blue is not to elevate working-class "identity" to a place in the catechism of oppressions recited by good liberals and by smug moderates, eager to do the least they can to disguise their Darwinian politics. It isn't to ask for a place at the table or a slice of the pie, for what would be the point? The queer bookshelf already groans beneath the weight of books by, for, and about people raising their voices to be heard: gay, lesbian, and bisexual Jews, Chicanos, African Americans, Italians, Native Americans, and Cubans; lesbians with disabilities; transgendered couples; lesbians and gay men who are deaf; queer youth; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people with developmental disabilities; lesbians who are fat; gay men who are elderly.
Almost all of this writing speaks in some measure, just as I have done, about invisibility, about silences; almost all of it attempts to stake out a plot of land on the landscape of queer public consciousness. I have not even considered the dozens of books (like Mark Simpson's Anti-Gay [1997]), the scores of magazine and scholarly articles (like Ian Barnard's "Fuck Community, or Why I Support Gay-Bashing" [1996]), or the uncountable numbers of websites (like www.gayshamesf.org) that critique, with varying degrees of bitterness, the institutions, agendas, and cultural products of the mainstream gay community.
Increasingly, the response to such expressions is to view them as churlish, exaggerated, and naïve; to dismiss them as what majority-group members like to call "political correctness" (on the theory, I suppose, that to be incorrect in matters of human interaction is the more principled position); or to characterize them, the way Village Voice Executive Editor Richard Goldstein did in The Advocate in 2000, as disloyal "backbiting."
"For every three gays there are four acronyms," Goldstein quips. "At this rate there will soon be more divisions in the lesbian community than there are lesbians." Such "constant carping," he continues, "threatens to turn our movement into an activist equivalent of the Balkans" (39).
I want to suggest an alternative reading of those divisions. I want to ask how it is possible that such a shining place as the "gay commu-nity"--that redoubt, as Michael Bronski would have it, of unrestricted personal expression and uninhibited sexual freedom; that "tribe" as Richard Goldstein also calls it; that rainbow culmination of decades of struggle--has become the site of so much resistance from within, the locus of so great a sense of being disregarded, constricted, altered. I want to ask, in short, how many points determine a line.
IX.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes…
Wallace Stevens, from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
In the end, Everything I Have Is Blue came about because I'm still trying to figure out who and where "we" are, because I wonder whether there is ever any way to stop, during the great bullet-train ride of our lives, to say, There! That's what I am!--or whether the slippage of successive moments past the window is the whole story: the constant lap dissolve, never the freeze-frame. Reading is like that as well: the skein of words plays itself forward, and no single page tells you everything.
And yet, to freight the metaphor a little further, we are also what-ever we carry with us on the train.
This project, this collection of stories I find so powerful, answers in part my need for a response--not so much to the silence, but to the noise. A reminder (again) of the qualities of experience, of the subjec-tivities that are elided, obscured, overlooked, manipulated, misunderstood, or simply out-shouted. It was a way, simply, to feel less alone.
There was always plenty of occasion for that--something I found out the moment I began to circulate the idea for this book. The language I used in the call for submissions, I was immediately informed, would "turn working-class people off." My insistence on short fiction (as opposed to essays or "life writing") was bourgeois. I sounded like an academic (or, worse, an "intellectual") and so couldn't really be working class. The project was impossible because, by definition, literature "excludes working-class subjectivities." The very idea of a book was anti-working class because everyone knows that working-class people don't read. I was perpetuating historical exploitation by making money off the backs of the working class (anyone who thinks the editor makes money off a project like this has never done it).
If I rejected someone's work, I was an imposter who knew nothing about the "real" working classes; if I asked for revisions, I was elitist because I was trying to "control the language of" working-class people.
Of course, comments like these hurt (and all of them are real), but they were also familiar. In these criticisms I heard the echoes of my own family's cautionary mantras and ever-ready willingness to find fault: You'll never be able to make that work. You're getting above your raising. Who are you to even try?
That, of course, is the essence of capitalist injury: if the ruling class can get you to participate in holding yourself back, they are free to deploy their resources elsewhere.
My fear, if we don't root out such tendencies, is that we will never get out of the business of shrinking the world. I don't want to be told that I'm not queer enough, and I don't want to be told that I'm not working-class enough. I'd never say that my experience of either one should be anyone else's, but I do say that the issue of "realness" ought to be left to drag contests, where it still makes some sense.
And I do want to read literature about a world that's as complex as what I know in my bones. In Brown, the third and final installment of his memoirs, Richard Rodriguez writes that:
American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew--only that--a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony. (11-12)
Everything I Have Is Blue strikes me as a good argument for building a brand-new bookshelf. And what better project--one that involves both interior decorating and power tools--for a collaboration between the myth of the modern homosexual and the archetype of the working class. Not matter and antimatter, but iron and carbon. I can't think of anything queerer than that.
(*1) Lance Loud, of course, was television's first "real" gay man. He came out on national television in 1973 during the broadcast of An American Family. When sections of the series were shown again in 2002, on the occasion of a documentary about Lance's death, what struck me was how deeply the Louds' story is rooted in class. Lance himself characterized his childhood as "drowning in the luxury of late-'60s suburbia," and Shana Alexander, reviewing An American Family in Newsweek in 1973, described the Louds as "nice-looking people [who] act like affluent zombies. The shopping carts overflow, but their minds are empty." Lance's decision to "run away from home" at age twenty, meanwhile, in order to exist in faux poverty in New York City's Chelsea Hotel, strikes me as way glam and très boulevardier, but not especially daring, in precisely the way that Thoreau is not daring when he goes to live "deliberately" in the woods--fully cushioned by his family's money and the comfort of the knowledge he could return at any time to the mansion in Concord. Still, one understands Lance's desire to escape the WASP-y, relentless, and slightly creepy impassivity of his natal home, though the adult gay life he constructed for himself in Manhattan proved to be no less superficial, consumer-driven, lonely, and spiritually empty. Gay, in other words, couldn't save him.
(*2) Food frequently emerges as a potent marker of class. The four-part 2001 PBS documentary, People Like Us: Social Class in America, devoted a segment ("The Trouble with Tofu") to a controversy over the building of a new grocery store in Burlington, Vermont. Low-income and middle-class residents clashed viciously over whether the new store would stock "regular" food or only more expensive "health" and "gourmet" lines. Queer Eye episodes frequently depict refrigerator and cupboard raids in which unacceptable food is discarded with evident disgust. In The Coming Out Party, Sid and Calvin are able to convince Hal to participate in their scheme because they first seduce him with a meal made entirely of frozen Stouffer's TV dinners and Sarah Lee desserts. Later, Calvin tells Hal that it's Perrier for him from then on, no longer "Cragmont soda."
(*3) "Families belonged to that inscrutable past west of the Hudson," Holleran writes in Dancer from the Dance, "and when a queen walked out a window, and you heard the family had come east to claim the body, it was like hearing that some shroud had come out of the darkness to pick up the dead and return whence the Three Fates sequestered, in the hills of Ohio or Virginia." (235-236)
(*4) Anthropologist and social historian Esther Newton (1993) notes the class-inflected use of the term "dyke" in the lesbian summer community of Cherry Grove, New York, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though the early lesbian arrivals to the Grove were wealthy and professional women, many of whom bought homes, working-class Irish and Italian women began arriving in the 1960s. "The remaining 'ladies' [as they called themselves] intended an ethnic and class slur by calling the new women 'dykes,'" Newton writes. "The working-class women identified with the word." (529)
(*5) My own unscientific survey of new (i.e., not reprinted or reissued) fiction published for gay men between 1998 and 2004 breaks down this way: literary fiction--45.2%; erotica--30.1%; romance and "beach" reading--14.6%; genre (mystery/sci-fi/horror)--10.1%. Since the figures are averaged, they don't show some interesting trends: the number of new gay romances and "beach" titles (Wearing Black to the White Party, Trust Fund Boys, Man of My Dreams), e.g., which came in at only 5% during the 1998-2000 period, nearly tripled between 2001 and 2004. These figures are based on information available from the Library of Congress catalog and Amazon.com and exclude self-published and print-on-demand books.
REFERENCES
Alexander, Shana. (1973, 22 January) "The Silence of the Louds." Newsweek, pp. 28+.
Barnard, Ian. (1996) "Fuck Community, or Why I Support Gay-Bashing." In Renée R. Curry & Terry L. Allison, Eds., States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. New York: New York University Press, pp. 74-88.
Blue-Collar Brawn. (1999, November) Men's Health, 14(9), 118-119.
Bronski, Michael. (1998) The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. New York: St. Martin's.
Bulkin, Elly. (1981) "Introduction: A Look at Lesbian Short Fiction." In Elly Bulkin, Ed., Lesbian Fiction: An Anthology. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, pp. xi -xxxviii.
Caffey, John. (1982) The Coming Out Party. New York: Pinnacle Books.
Feinberg, Leslie. (1993) Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Press.
Goldstein, Richard. (2000, 15 February) "Cease fire!" The Advocate, 805, pp. 36-40.
Hayes, J. G. (2002) This Thing Called Courage: South Boston Stories. New York: Southern Tier Editions/Harrington Park Press.
Holleran, Andrew. (1978) Dancer from the Dance. New York: William Morrow and Company.
Hucklenbroich, Frankie. (1997) Crystal Diary. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Press.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky & Davis, Madeline D. (1993). Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge.
Kramer, Larry. (1997, 27 May) "Sex and Sensibility." The Advocate, 734, pp. 59+.
Newton, Esther. (1993) "Just One of the Boys: Lesbians in Cherry Grove, 1960-1988." In Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, Eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 528-541.
Raffo, Susan (Ed.). (1997) Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write about Class. Boston: South End Press.
Read, Kirk. (2001) How I Learned to Snap: A Small-Town Coming-Out and Coming-of-Age Story. Athens, GA: Hill Street Press.
Rodriguez, Richard. (2002) Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Viking.
Simpson, Mark (Ed.). (1997) Anti-Gay. New York & London: Freedom Editions/Cassell.
Uttal, Lynne. (1990) "Inclusion without Influence: The Continued Tokenism of Women of Color." In Gloria Anzaldúa, Ed., Making Face/Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, pp. 42-45.
Woog, Dan. (2001) Gay Men, Straight Jobs. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
Wendell Ricketts is a writer, editor, and translator currently living in the ruins of San Francisco. He has worked as a cocktail waiter, a teacher, a house painter, a telephone solicitor, and a Kelly Girl, among many other day jobs. His fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism have appeared in such publications as The Advocate, Out, Spin, James White Review, Salt Hill, Mississippi Review, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, and the anthologies Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, and Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools. He was born on Wake Island, an atoll that is slowly sinking into the Pacific Ocean, and raised in small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.
Go back to the Everything I Have Is Blue page.
"Passing Notes in Class"
from Everything I Have Is Blue
© 2005 Wendell Ricketts
This work is under copyright protection and may not be
duplicated or reprinted without permission.
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