i was leaning out

"Axiom 1: People are different from each other.

It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.

Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of oppression or subordination who have most need to know it; and I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one's world. The writing of a Proust or a James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.

I don't assume that all gay men or all women are very skilled at the nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation. For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impoverishing to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to 'the sentimental' one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some justice. What is more dramatic is that--in spite of every promise to the contrary--every single theoretically or politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect of delegitimating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other."

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

"Much work in queer and transgender studies is governed by an epistemological framework that, as Robyn Wiegman has argued, “calls for scholars in identity studies to offer cogent and full accounts of identity’s inherent multiplicity in ways that can exact specificity about human experience without reproducing exclusion”. This version of an intersectional critical project faces an injunction to continually bifurcate the categories of identity it takes as its objects, driving toward a horizon beyond which the spider web of subaltern identity will be fully articulated and social justice (or at least its discursive possibility) will be achieved. The attempt to glimpse the other side of this horizon can lead to the fetishization of certain kinds of bodies—the contours of which change over time—as representing an Archimedean endpoint of radical otherness. Within queer theory and politics, rapid changes in the social location of gays and lesbians have forced these contours to shift quite rapidly. As a homonormative political vision has made its way to the center of liberal politics and concomitant rights have been granted to some—generally white, moneyed, and sexually respectable—gay and lesbian subjects, the L, G, and (more ambiguously) B in the bricolage of queer identity no longer appear to pose, in and of themselves, an existential challenge to social and political norms. A queer political discourse that remains beholden to the logic of identity has thus passed the buck along to the T, asking transgender subjects to hold down the fort of queer difference. The transgender subject—and particularly the figure of the trans woman of color—has come to figure within these coordinates as “a utensil to reference at will” when figuring the outer limits of political representability (Vidal-Ortiz). As Kate Millett once wrote of Jean Genet, trans women of color are seen within this discourse as having “achieved the lowest status in the world,” and through that “perfection of opprobrium” have “acquire[d] the pride of the utterly abject, a condition which turns out to be next door to saintliness”.

All of this has led to what we might call a politics of trans sincerity, in which the gender-nonconforming subject is celebrated as transgres-sive to the extent that her nonconformity can be read as serious —that is, to the extent that she rejects camp...

This new vision of transgender evokes David Halperin’s account of a contemporary homonormative sociality in which sex and desire have switched places with culture and sensibility as tokens of admission into gay male life. Whereas once, Halperin quips, gay men hid their porn collections in the closet and framed their Broadway playbills, now they hide their play-bills in the closet and frame their porn (). Yet this state of affairs—which, in the case of both transgender (particularly trans feminine) and gay male aesthetics, pivots on the status of camp—exists in tension with one that has been more often remarked upon: the self-conscious absorption of camp aesthetics into a wide swath of mainstream media productions, from Lady Gaga to RuPaul’s Drag Race, which in turn bear a complex and varied relationship to queer audiences. In Halperin’s account, such productions testify to the survival of gay culture, however disavowed, after several generations of denial that it still exists or still matters.

I would amend this argument to claim that, though camp performance is in fact ubiquitous, camp reading practices—techniques for interpreting a performance, cross-gendered or otherwise, as camp—have been pushed back into the closet. “What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character,’ ” Sontag writes, “understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing”. You may not be the gender you were assigned at birth, but according to the ontology of camp, you are really something. (And most likely you are—as my grandmother would say, with the emphasis on both words—really something.) Camp taste’s response to such incandescence may take on a range of affective and epistemological guises. It can appear as an intimate act of aggression, as in the drag spectator’s “read,” her knowing look at a performance that shows its seams (Butler, Bodies). But it can manifest, too, as what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls camp-recognition, in which the encounter with a tacky or overwrought object elicits a gesture of sympathetic identification from the viewer who, instead of distancing herself from the scene of aesthetic disaster, asks, “What if whoever made this was gay, too?". Either way, camp reading—forsaken or forgotten within much queer political discourse today—marks an attempt to grasp its object as a whole."

Marissa Brostoff, "Notes on Caitlyn, or Genre Trouble"

"And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel ([1967] 2006) in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. (It’s the sixth entry in The Transgender Studies Reader.) Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants (see, e.g., Preciado [2008] 2013: 380–89). What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher (Garfinkel 1967). If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.4) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her.

We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity (Wiegman and Wilson 2015). But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with anti-normativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival."

Andrea Long Chu in conversation with Emmett Harsin, "After Trans Studies"

"Homophile organization publications had always looked at their more daring physique counterparts with envy. In the wake of the Manual v. Day decision, they had already begun to resemble physique magazines. After 1967, with the threat of prosecution removed, they adopted a similar racy format. Vector, published by San Francisco's Society for Individual Rights, offered its first nude male centerfold in June 1969, and a few months later full-frontal nudity had migrated to its cover. Soon Mattachine Times in New York followed suit, featuring cover images of young men in posing straps...

This tendency to combine gay news, nude images, and raunchy classified advertising continued until magazines sought to attract large, mainstream advertisers. New York's GAY felt pressure early on from advertisers who objected to the use of nudes, particularly on the cover, forcing editor Nichols to moderate their use. Thus began a movement away from a sexual liberation ethos to a more sanitized, corporate look. Like lots of gay periodicals, GAY abandoned its cor gay business in search of mainstream acceptance.

The Advocate resisted this trend at first, keeping its racy classified ads but segregating them to a pullout section. "I like them; their fun," the Advocate's editor-in-chief Richard Rouilard proclaimed. "This is the way gays and lesbians talk to each other worldwide. And if you are going to compromise this community for advertisers or so that your mother can read the magazine, go buy yourself a copy of 'Catch-22.'" But even the Advocate eventually had to succumb to the demands of larger advertising dollars, spinning off its classifieds and naked images into a separate magazine. With the rise of upscale publications such as Genre and Out in the 1990s, the realms of homoerotic imagery and gay news have become increasingly divided. In many ways this represents a return to a politics of respectability practiced by the homophile organizations, a trend reinforced in the twenty-first century as the LGBTQ movement became dominated by the political struggle for gay marriage.

The current bifurcation in LGBT media between the political and the erotic makes it difficult for us to see that the worlds of gay commerce, sex, and politics were once mutually reinforcing. Today gay men go to smart-phone apps like Grindr to hook up but to news websites or an LGBT advocacy organization to catch up on civil rights issues and community affairs. But historically it was the desire to connect and find one another that gave rise to such community publications. It was [gay physique photographer] Bob Mizer's classified ad in Strength & Health that had alerted him to the large reservoir of gay men seeking contact with one another. Gay men had pleaded with physique and homophile organizations to allow them to connect, but the first tentative steps in that direction were met with swift and decisive state suppression. Gay men went to prison and others lost their jobs merely for participating in a gay pen-pal club. But thanks to physique entrepreneurs such as Lynn Womack, the correspondence club was able to thrive and morph into the classified ad, which was soon replaced with phone sex lines, followed by AOL chatrooms, and now hookup mobile applications such as Grinder and Scruff. The technology may have changed, but the business of connecting gay men has a long and rich history.

Today the term "gay power" is remembered as a political slogan shouted at the 1969 Stonewall Riots, but in the beginning it was understood largely in economic terms. Two years before the riots, Vector inaugurated a new column called "Gay Power" featuring information about its advertisers. The idea came from a young but vocal SIR member, Pat Hallinan, who suggested that it was time to invoke "our secret weapon, GAY POWER, upon the economic world." As the column advised, "When you visit our friends and advertisers, tell 'em you saw it in Vector--that's GAY POWER!" A few months later, the founder of the Los Angeles Advocate similarly advised readers, "You can do much to strengthen and promote power in the gay community because you wield the great deciding weapon: The Almighty Dollar." He defined "gay power" as "buying power, selling power, voting power...No dear, it isn't a queen with muscles," he joked.

...

Even when shouted at Stonewall, the cry for gay power was largely about the desire of gay men and women to have control of their own commercial spaces. "Get the Mafia and the Police Out of Gay Bars," proclaimed one of the first pamphlets in response to the raid of the Stonewall Inn. Craig Rodwell called for "gay businessmen" to open bars and shops to create a healthier social atmosphere than bars like Stonewall. And he simultaneously encouraged customers to support them and "Buy Gay."...

For many gay liberationists, especially in New York City, physique magazines also came under attack as exemplary of the negative effects of a gay ghetto. In contrast to previous generations of young men who found comfort in images that glorified the male body, gay liberationists saw exploitation. "These magazines crudely showed men as nothing but sex objects; if they were objects, I could be one too," remembered John Murphy. "That frightened me then, and it infuriates me now," he wrote in 1971. Some worried that the "masculine mystique" depicted in these magazines was so inaccessible and exaggerated that it constituted a form of self-hatred. "Those male idols so worshiped cannot possibly be faggots!" they complained. Following the Black Nationalist, Black Power, and feminist movements, they envisioned a world where gay men and women owned and managed their own, more equitable and inclusive, businesses.

Despite his "Buy Gay" campaign, Craig Rodwell refused to sell "sexploitative" magazines in his own Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, offended by both the high price-tag for nude male images and what he found to be an over-emphasis on sex. He was unaware of how physique publishers such as Bob Mizer were among the oldest gay businesses around and had been created with precisely the same goal of fostering community. But Mizer's crusading mission had waned as many straight and gay publishers had since entered the market with an eye toward making a quick buck. Rodwell and other gay liberationists tarred them all with the same brush. They did not appreciate the tremendous struggles they had encountered in the face of government censorship. They increasingly saw physique businesses as part of the problem of, not the solution to, community empowerment."

David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

“Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich have argued for an understanding of erotics that transcends procreative sexual contact and extends to the communities of women that emerge in response to oppressive regimes. In their view, heterosexist erotics are part of the compulsory heterosexuality that limits the full articulation of non-procreative desire and in which women lose many of their basic rights as property passed among men for the propagation of a phallocentric order. Sometimes, the relationships forged between women in response to oppressive regimes become physically sexual; sometimes they do not. From this perspective, sexual desire is not just a physical act but the root of all desire for action and unity and can exist in familial bonds (mother/daughter, sister/sister), among friends, and among all women. This desire should be viewed as a continuum that erases sexual stigma to allow for a larger sense of union and community forged through bonds between members of the same sex, which can always move toward sexual union and often are originally rooted in sexual desires suppressed by the regimes of compulsory heterosexuality. Lesbianism, thus, ceases to be pejorative to define a union of two women, usually presented in a butch-femme dichotomy, as something perverse or unnatural. In these formulations, lesbianism is a form of protest in which women find erotic fulfillment in each other and outside the confines of an erotics that must be focused on reproduction with a member of the opposite sex and is codified in heterosexual institutions such as marriage.

…

The obvious problem with transferring this premise to male homosexuality is that Rich’s use of Freud is too gendered to allow for that transference. It seems unlikely, however, that Rich intended to uphold Freudian sexual theories, which are generally deeply problematic for all queer and even non-queer identities. More likely, she was attempting to deconstruct the premise that Freud’s theory apply across gender lines, and in so doing she implicates the degree to which those theories fail to have universal applicability and, therefore, any applicability at all. If those theories lack universal applicability, then they must only have contingent and exceptionally specific application, which is to say that they have no applicability except for strictly within a limited Freudian perspective that does very little to explain the complexities of desire that circulate among members of lesbian and gay communities in the contextual ways that those communities conceive of themselves. Basically, she uses Freud to dismiss him, but she nonetheless proceeds to explain a version of Eros applicable to lesbian desire. She offers a theoretical framework to justify Lorde’s earlier theorizing about the multiple bonds that form between women, which Lorde places under the umbrella term erotic and in which she finds a source of power for women to define and shape their lives beyond being bound to men. Lorde and Rich claim Eros as a term for lesbian-identified women, and in so doing, they free it from its negative associations with Freud’s heterosexist rhetoric and make it a term with applicability to a broad range of desires beyond strictly heterosexual confines.

Though he never calls it Eros or erotic, John Howard, in Men Like That, effectively delineates the same concept for rural gay men when he attempts to explain the dynamism and movement that give “shape and scope” to the “queer life” of mid-century Mississippians (15). Though Mississippians had easy access to the nearby gay community in New Orleans, Howard pauses to explain that for gay men in rural Mississippi,

This articulation of “human desire” reads as a version of gay erotics applied to male same-sex identity. This version of gay erotics uses sexual identity and desire to imagine and create new, nonheterosexist communities in a specific place and time. Howard explores how men in rural Mississippi fashioned means of interaction with each other in their seemingly isolated environment. Their erotic desires for unity created a distinct sense of identity. They found each other. They created connections. They did not simply waste away into death.

Gay erotics are a response for all queer-identified people to the oppressive regimes of compulsory heterosexuality that compel individuals into preset gender expectations and sexual roles. In the case of women (and men) who define themselves as, or find themselves defined as, queer/lesbian/homosexual, these erotics powerfully shape the way that we define ourselves in relationship to our surroundings and articulate our senses of self in relation to our own understanding of community and connection. Eros is at the heart of homosexual identity, only this Eros is not one of compulsory reproductive utility but of seeking likeness in an environment that defines one’s erotic drive as different. It is an oppositional drive, but one no less committed, and in fact driven, to unity than the heterosexual erotics articulated by Freud. In that formulation, gay desire is death. In this, it is life. And the outcome of gay desire is neither corrosive nor inhuman; it is, rather, a powerful drive simply to exist.”

— Phillip Gordon, Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond

“The queerness of Mother 3 is a complicated thing. It’s ever present but just how much is supposed to be played for jokes and just how much is to be taken sincerely remains unclear. At the center of this is our protagonist, Lucas. Lucas is an absolute softy, a total mama’s boy. He is not fast, strong, or brave. All of those qualities are held by his adventurous twin brother, Claus. When their mother, Hinawa, dies, Claus swears revenge and embarks on a journey, but Lucas just cries. He visits his mother’s grave daily. He’s not looking for adventure or vengeance, he’s just sad.

It’s through these early sections of grief that Lucas’s queerness begins to appear. He’s incredibly close with his mother. His father, Flint, is generally absent and when he is present seems more concerned with finding Claus than raising Lucas. Lucas is sensitive to a fault and in opposition with the world around him, one where boys play outside trying to tackle dinosaurs all day. As his village, Tazmily, leaves behind its early idealism in favor of a more commercial existence, its citizens become darker, more sinister. They’re meaner, harder, and also apathetic to the changes around them. The more they change the more it highlights how different Lucas is. He stays soft, he cares so much, he just wants to help.

…

Lucas’s greatest strength is his softness, his kindness. …In the final battle of the game we see him, alone, fighting a brainwashed Claus with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Claus launches attack after attack, but Lucas will not hit him back no matter what the player does. Instead Lucas can guard, he can heal himself, and he can believe in his brother. He can even cry a little.”

— Dave Tomaine, “Mother Is Mothering: Grief, Queerness, and Softness in Mother 3”

“Camp undoes the solemnity with which heterosexual society regards tragedy, but camp doesn’t evade the reality of the suffering that gives rise to tragedy. If anything, camp is a tribute to its intensity. Camp returns to the scene of trauma and replays that trauma on a ludicrously amplified scale—so as to drain it of its pain and, in so doing, to transform it. Without having to resort to piety, camp can register the enduring reality of hurt and make it culturally productive, thereby recognizing it without conceding to it the power to crush those whom it afflicts. In this way, camp provides gay men with a cultural resource for dealing with personal and collective devastation: a social practice that does not devalue the suffering it also refuses to dignify.”

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

“Official, public, out-and-out proud gay identity has no tolerance for shame, solitude, secretiveness, and no patience for those who choose to wallow either in an abject state of emotional isolation or in the compensatory, manic joys of a solitary queer fantasy life.

Nowadays, proud gay men do not ground their identity in their loneliness, lovelessness, hopelessness, isolation, and sentimentality. Quite the opposite. We fashion a gay self (to the extent that we do) by proudly affirming a common, collective gay identity, claiming this gay identity openly, visibly, unashamedly, and communally, constructing on that basis a shared culture and society--full of opportunities for emotional and erotic expression--and thereby attaining to a healthy gay sexuality, defined by our eroticization of other gay men as gay, and ultimately crowned by the successful achievement of a relationship. And, by the way, we don’t want to be reminded that ‘twas not ever thus.

...“No gay man could possibly regret the trade” of pre-Stonewall gay abjection for post-Stonewall gay pride, [scholar D.A. Miller] acknowledges. No gay man “could do anything but be grateful for it--if, that is, it actually were a trade” (26; italics added). The problem, it turns out, is that instead of winding up in triumphant possession of a gay pride and freedom that we can wholeheartedly call our own, we have constructed a gay identity that actively represses both the pathos and the pleasure of those residual queer affects that we prefer to think we have liberated ourselves from and that we claim have simply vanished from our consciousness. Instead of transcending the secret shame and solitary pleasures of our sentimentality, as we would like to think, we have assiduously closeted them.”

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

“In speaking of archetypes and essential gay differences, [scholar Will] Fellows goes further than I would go...But he is certainly right to note the perennial defensive reflex that is immediately triggered nowadays by any suggestion that ‘gender variance’ or ‘gender-atypical’ behavior might be a part of gay male identity--a transphobic reflex. Fellows knows that routine by heart. He both anticipates it and reproduces it unerringly: “’I’m homosexual,’ they will protest, ‘but I’m not effeminate.’” More controversially, and more intriguingly, Fellows counters those claims by contending that the mere failure to appear effeminate does not support such a defensive assertion on the part of a gay man, since gender variance “may be manifested more internally in his interests, aptitudes, values, emotional constitution, and communication style.”...

Unlike Fellows, I do not regard gender variance as the key to understanding gay male subjectivity. But the project of my class and of this book agrees with his insofar as it bucks the historical trends that are responsible for making gay male culture a permanent embarrassment to gay men--and that do so by constituting gay culture as inherently backward, archaic, unmasculine, unsexual, and therefore inassimilable to modern, normative gay identity. These are the same historical trends that have made the denial of any and all non-sexual differences between gay and non-gay people, including differences in culture or gender style, an article of faith in the ideology of the post-Stonewall gay movement. Such a denial lies behind the insistence that younger gay men, healthy and untouched by homophobia, have no need of gay male culture--and certainly no need of a gay male culture that implies some sort of female identification or effeminacy.

A similar denial persists, more surprisingly, throughout much writing in the academic field of ‘queer theory.’ There it assumes the protective coloration of an axiomatic opposition to ‘essentialism’--the stubborn but ultimately untenable belief that social identities are grounded in some inherent property or nature or quality common to all the members of an identity-based group. The rejection of essentialism did not prevent the original founders of queer theory from asking, ‘What do queers want?’ or from exploring the particularities of gay culture. But as queer theory has become institutionalized, the understandable reluctance to accept essentialist assumptions about lesbians and gay men has hardened into an automatic self-justifying dogmatism, a visceral impulse to preempt the merest acknowledgment or recognition of any cultural patterns or practices that might be distinctive to homosexuals.

...The very attention that queer theory has lavished on difference, intersectionality, and comparison has ended up screening out the question of how, for a large segment of homosexual American men during the past century or so, being gay has been experienced through highly patterned forms of embodied sensibility--even as those patterns tend routinely to be disavowed by gay men in their efforts to escape ‘stereotypes’ and ‘labels.’...

Unlike the kinds of hostile stereotypes that are intended to demean and denigrate the members of a minority group, the stereotypes about gay male culture and identity that I am interested in here are stereotypes that have been elaborated and propounded by at least some gay men themselves. That alone makes them worthy of being treated with seriousness, respect, curiosity, and analytical rigor--even though certain proud gay men...find them ‘skewed’ or even self-hating...

In the case of gay men, it is not only (or even chiefly) homophobes who think that gay men like Judy Garland. Gay men themselves--or, at least, some gay men in the United States and Great Britain during the past sixty years--have thought the same thing. We are not dealing with a hostile stereotype, then. We are dealing--at least, within certain historical, geographic, racial, and generational limits, with a collective self-recognition, though a self-recognition that admittedly continues to occasion a good deal of shame and therefore to produce a considerable amount of unease, and even outright denial.

In order to face down that shame and resist that impulse to denial, it is tempting to be shameless, to throw caution to the winds, to go all the way to the other extreme and to entertain, if only for a moment or two, the assumption...that just because one is gay, one must like certain things, such as particular works of art and music. That assumption is plainly indefensible when it is put in those terms. But what if we tried to discover what was behind it? What if it were possible to connect the experience of gayness with particular cultural tastes, with the love of certain cultural objects? What if there actually were a certain logic to that connection? What if we could derive the characteristic themes and experiences of gay culture from the social conditions under which that culture arises and is reproduced? What if we went even further and considered the possibility that gay male tastes for certain cultural artifacts or social practices reflect, within their particular contexts, ways of being, ways of feeling, and ways of relating to the larger social world that are fundamental to male homosexuality and distinctive to gay men, despite gay men’s many differences from one another? What if gay male subjecthood or subjectivity consisted precisely in those ways of being, feeling, and relating?

What if, in short, post-Stonewall gay male attitudes were wrong, and it turned out that male homosexuality was less about sex and more about culture, as well as the feelings, emotions, and complex combinations of affect (as epitomized by some gay men’s love of Judy Garland) that cultural practices imply?...

Which brings me back to my original, hazardous hypothesis. Perhaps there really is such a thing as gay male subjectivity. And perhaps gay men’s cultural practices offer us a way of approaching it, getting hold of it, describing it, defining it, and understanding it.”

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

“Each of these categories has its own temporal scaffold, which also reinforces a notion of developmental time. (For example, race has historically, and continues to be to some extent, structured via the oscillation between the primitive and the civilized; sexuality has tended to be organized through a heterosexual reproductive mandate.)

And temporality, of course, is part of the technology that distinguishes ‘rural’ from ‘urban.’ The ‘rural’ is often temporally naturalized (not unlike reproductive time). What constitutes the rural is a sense of being apart from the whoosh of progress that fills time so that the rural gets marked by either the absence of time or the slowness of time, by its anachronicity, it’s status as stuck in time, it’s backwardness, or it’s engagement with mythical, seasonal reproduction, which is often read nostalgically as outside of capitalist time.

The process of stratification and flattening and disaggregating that theories of intersectionality attempt to interrupt can too easily slip past what a focus on the intersections themselves seeks to arrest. The struggle to name the temporalities of these categories, to hail them as mutually constitutive, and thereby to un-name them as categories and rename them as processes necessarily encounters the elegant temporal ruse of modernity. As Walter Benjamin notes, ‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.’ This homogeneous, empty time vacuums up the variegated temporalities at work in all these sociohistorical-discursive processes that come to appear as solidified, discrete, and given categories. The collapsing of processes into categories—units of analysis—masks the temporalities these processes engage and perpetuate. As categories of modernity, the temporal structures for race, class, gender, sexuality, and the rural, are unevenly placed in flat-space relation, erasing their temporal contradictions and altercations. Taking time into account allows us then to see how spatial practices that racialize bodies and temporal narratives that render the rural fallow and obsolescent share a particular repertoire of technologies engaged with but hidden in time. A series of Manichean dyads (rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban) seemingly stand tautly opposed, their binary structure tempered and tautened by the Western frame of time. Theories of intersectionality seek to countermand the impossibility of narrating simultaneity and highlight the ways in which processes are transformed into categories; unfortunately, the term itself limits its own ability to undo the serialization and linearity its very expression requires.”

— Mary Pat Brady, “The Waiting Arms of Gold Street” in Queering the Countryside

“The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, on an infinite reservoir of naïveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent? As Peter Sloterdjik points out, cynicism or “enlightened false consciousness”—false consciousness that knows itself to be false, “it’s falseness already reflexively buffered” —already represents “the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers” (5). How television-starved would someone have to be to find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don’t have originals, or that gender representations are artificial? My own guess is that such popular cynicism, though undoubtedly widespread, is only one among the heterogeneous, competing theories that constitute the mental ecology of most people. Some exposés, some demystifications, some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated kind). Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all, however, and as long as that is so, we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)

“The film [The Boys in the Band] produces a distinction between the cultivated practice of gay male judgmentalness (or “bitchiness”) and the faculty of critical judgment. Yet it does not place these categories in a developmental narrative, in which an individual evolves out of the former into a mature, “adult” capacity for objective judgment. Rather, The Boys acknowledges the conceptual power of both judgmentalness and judgment in gay male social life, while stressing the importance of distinguishing them. In the narrative, judgmentalness ironically functions as a form of gay male community building. It is a highly developed code of verbal sparring that requires common cultural references and the recognition of others’ personal characters. When deployed outside the gay male collective, judgmentalness is a useful weapon against homophobia, a cultivated condescension toward straight culture and its banal, normalizing force; within the gay male social milieu, it often functions as a loving form of social antagonism among friends that implies an intimate “knowingness” of one another’s flaws... The Boys takes this willingness to express judgmentalness to the extreme, making accountability, rather than nonjudgmentalness, its central value.

…

If gay male judgmentalness can produce alternative intimacies outside the gaze of societal and clinical homophobia, critical judgment serves as a tool for holding other gay men accountable for their speech and actions. Critical judgment involves the capacity to take in multiple viewpoints on the same circumstances to form substantive about them that have qualitative weight—that is, not simply pointing out inadequacies or problems but suggesting what should be done about them…. Critical judgment then, is about the production of normative standards of social conduct. If a certain loving bitchiness brings gay men together, a clear-eyed critical judgment allows them to stand apart, call one another out, and hold others accountable. According to The Boys in the Band, both are crucial to the maintenance of heterogenous community; it is their conflation, or the inability to distinguish between them, that is destructive of collective life.”

Ramzi Fawaz, “Beware the Hostile Fag,” Queer Forms

Metronormativity’s six analytic axes:

Taken from the Introduction to Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism by Scott Herring