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When I hear the word Culture I reach for my Revolver;
or, Is that a pistol in your pocket?
The Culture of Desire:
Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today
by Frank Browning
New York: Crown
241 pages
$20.00.
A Review by Gene Roland
Is there or isn’t there a “gay culture”?
That’s one of those philosophical ques
tions that can never be conclusively resolved.
Considering some possible answers, this gay
National Public Radio reporter explores the
endless variations of (mostly) gay male life.
There he discovers, at any rate, certain attributes
of aculture—shared values, shared tastes, shared
language. Yet these cannot speak even for all
urban white gay males, much less for other
kinds of gay men, or for lesbians.
Could there really be a “culture” based
on nothing more unifying than a “desire” for the
same rather than the opposite sex?
So again we ask: is there or isn’t there
a “gay culture”?
In search of one, Browning looks at
modem day Queer Radicalism and finds that,
indeed, many gays who aren’t radical—and
don’t care for the term “queer”—nevertheless
resonate at the idea. Alternatively, Browning
describes the phenomenon of mass white boy
events like the Hollywood Boy Party and the
Hotlanta Raft Race, contrasted with the sub
subculture of Drag as personified by Atlanta’s
Charlie Brown. He looks at “assimilated” Cu
ban gay men, living far from Miami’s Little Ha
vana, who remain very much a part of extended
Cuban families and enjoy vocalizing during sex is
street Spanish—and at gay black men who sud
denly realize they don’t have any black friends.
He even ends up at a “Jacks & Jills” gay/lesbian
sex party at which some of the men and women
present actually end up having sex with one an
other, surely the ultimate defiance of convention.
Where is the common culture in all
this? It’s a fair question.
There is always our Shared Sense Of
Oppression. But then, gay people even feel differ
ing degrees of oppression, and they perceive even
that as differently from one another as they do
everything else.
What gays and lesbians of all varieties
have most in common, Browning suggests, is a
“perverse attitude” towards all identity and all
Page 36
culture—a view described in La CageAux Folks as
“at an angle. ” Gay men, for example, are certainly
men but we are not confined within that identity
as it is commonly understood. Perhaps what we
have in common is the awareness that people
cannot be described by any single identity: we
may wear banker’s suits and power ties to work,
leather or cowboy drag to the bars, and some
thing else entirely at home or at meetings of our
favorite community organization—and yet we
need not be “pretending” in any of these roles
more than any other.
Straight people somehow sense this
fluidity in gay identity, Browning says, and see
implicit in it a threat to their own secure selves.
There are, after all, just enough circumstances
when straight men have sex with one another to
make a straight man really nervous. People who
are heavify invested in particular gender roles or
. cultural roles find it alarming when they see that
oth# people shift among a series of identities
with no apparent loss of self. In other words, if we
aren’t who you think we are, you may not be who
you think you are.
Perhaps that explains why straights
often seem more frightened by committed gay
couples than by back alley cocksuckers; more
upset by some patriotic gay or lesbian kid who
wants only to join the Army than by a shrieking,
red-faced queer activist. What they fear is fanta
sies that come too close to home.
Paradoxically, this may also explain
why boldly erotic advertising for Calvin Klein
underwear doesn’t frighten straight guys away;
why gay sensibility still sets fashion that others
merely follow—a situation recognized and duly
deplored in a recent GQ article. In fashion, at
least, fantasy is clearly fantasy.
Homosexuals are the last truly despised
minority, because we are the only out-group
that cannot be readily fenced off from the rest of
humanity, which would rather see one than be
one. A white teenager may find himself enjoy
ing a spring roll without entertaining a panic
that he is turning Vietnamese. But let him find
the body of some guy in P. E class more fascinat
ing than he did last week and he’s bound to
begin agonizing about Whether He Might Be
Gay.
Browning may have exposed the final
Catch-22 for gay assimilationists. The more we
try to look and act like straight people—all the
while continuing to insist on our gay identi
ties—the more frightened many straight people
become. It’s like the old saying that white
southerners never cared how close blacks got as
long as they didn’t get too big, while northern
whites never cared how big they got as long as
they didn’t get too close. For the most part,
though, there was little doubt about who was
black and who wasn’t. Apparently a lot of
heterosexuals don’t mind us being either close or
big so long as they are allowed not to know about
it.
Could this tension launch straight
people into their own journeys of self explora
tion, or will itsimply turn them into homophobes?
It all depends on whether or not they personally
know any gays who might put a human lace on
the abstraction of gayness.
Culture of Desire does not ultimately
answer its question about gay culture. Reading it,
you will likely end up with more questions than
answers. But the questions Browning raises are
exactly the ones our own “community" must
consider as we face the prospect that we may not
remain outsiders forever. And they are questions
straight society will have to deal with as they
consider on what basis they might accept gays
and lesbians into the social contract. ▼
Pme 1993
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