How to be gay book
How to be gay book
How to Be Gay by David M Halperin – review
The favourite diva? Malaysian singer Fish Leong with her MTV trophy, 2012. Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
The favourite diva? Malaysian singer Fish Leong with her MTV trophy, 2012. Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
A student of mine once told me that his favourite film – or, as he put it, «the best film ever» – was Sliding Doors, in which John Hannah woos Gwyneth Paltrow by repeating Monty Python sketches. It was made in 1998. On hearing this, I knew immediately that the student was heterosexual. It could not be otherwise. My favourite films, on the other hand, are The Leopard, West Side Story, Celine and Julie Go Boating, A Touch of Mink, Even Dwarfs Started Small and the bit in Dil Se where 50 dancers do the cancan on the roof of a moving train.
I don’t think anyone, hearing this list, would be under any illusions.
David Halperin has written an over-long book, more localised in its application than he seems fully to appreciate, about the aspects of being gay other than sexual choice. His thinking arrives courtesy of a course he teaches at an American university. Naturally, when a course in «How to Be Gay» was announced in the American mid-west, an army of enraged family-first campaigners rose up in taupe leisurewear to denounce Professor Halperin for wanting to recruit the innocent. The passages recounting this provide the most amusing sections of the book, as taupe leisurewear and its mental equivalents so often do. He admits that «American» is an unspoken adjective in much of what he has to say, including the title of the book – I guess «How to be an American Gay» would be an even more uninviting subject than the one he has chosen. Outside America, he reliably gets things wrong, suggesting that Bollywood musicals may represent the same sort of gay cult to Indian gay men that Sex and the City does to Americans – he’s clearly never seen a film in a Calcutta cinema, or he would have noticed that the appeal is not a gay thing at all at its source. He’s not even very good on opera, bringing up Aida as his prime example – if he knew any opera queens, he’d know that we are much more likely to be going to Tristan, Salome and Janacek. When I last saw The Makropoulos Case, the stalls were like Lo-Profile on a Friday night, packed with queens waving at each other, opera glasses in hand.
Those old movies are the backbone of the book, and especially ones starring, or about Joan Crawford. The book would have been much stronger if it were a disciplined 120 pages about Mildred Pierce, and its off-shoots – Mommie Dearest and various drag-show reconstructions – specifically examined from the viewpoint of a middle-aged gay man. That is not a subject without its interests, but Halperin’s attempts to shift Crawford into the centre of what gay culture means and meant is plain old weird. No wonder many gay men feel left out when they read accounts like this, and wonder what they look like, having no interest in shopping for soft furnishings, Dusty Springfield, saying «Miss Thing!» or the perfect white shirt. I feel pretty much left out, never having seen Mildred Pierce, as it happens.
In a blissfully funny book about homosexuality in the 19th century, Strangers, Graham Robb provided a list of things that at the time were thought to cause or to indicate homosexuality. His list included a lack of physical exercise, or on the other hand excessive riding of horses; too much meat-eating, or possibly anaemia; impotence or sexual overindulgence; plebeian brutishness or aristocratic refinement; too many available women leading to satiety or too few leading to lack of opportunity; lack of parental love or excess of same; celibacy or marriage. It was surprising, in fact, that anyone ended up heterosexual, so all-encompassing were the causes.
Among the qualities Halperin identifies with gayness are being «a great dancer or cook, that you have a weakness for mid-century modern, or that you drive a VW Golf» – a VW Golf? Really? Elsewhere, lists of gay-connected activities can stretch to surprising places: «being gay had something to do with liking Broadway musicals, or listening to show tunes or torch songs or Judy Garland, or playing the piano, wearing fluffy sweaters, drinking cocktails, smoking cigarettes and calling each other ‘girlfriend’.» Playing the piano? Smoking cigarettes? Some cocktails, I can tell you, are more gay than others – the Cosmopolitan very much so, the Negroni, not so much. Elsewhere, Halperin wonders whether gay culture is dying out, on the basis that – he claims – straight people bought up the houses of gay people after they died of Aids in the 1980s and 90s, and that the numbers of gay bars in major cities are on the decline from peaks in the 70s. He blames online hook-ups, which seems quite plausible. But is this really evidence of gay culture dying out? After all, those millions hooking up on Grindr are forming powerful connections with hundreds, sometimes thousands of other gay men, tossing each other aside afterwards with savage abandon, and are doing it without the aid of commercial bars. That doesn’t seem like such an awful thing.
The age of the camp persona, the biting comment, the ironic allusion is not passing, exactly, but it is moving towards a particular section of a particular gay community at a particular point in time. It would be good to know what proportion of gay men identify with that. An interesting book about gay culture would spend time with a range of gay men, of different ages and classes and backgrounds, finding out how their social networks were formed, as well as investigating how they liked to be entertained.
Of course, that would be a great deal harder than just going on about a couple of scenes from 40s movies that you and your friends simply adore. You’d hardly guess, from Halperin’s account, that gay culture was anything but owned and demonstrated by late-middle-aged white men in about four American cities.
This cultural confidence is driven on by its usual fuel, money – some time soon the crucial gay diva will not be Lady Gaga, but Fish Leong. And there are 18-year-old black boys within a mile of David Halperin who have never heard of Joan Crawford. They have their culture too, and their own ideas, hugged however secretly to their hearts, of how to be gay. If they ever read this book, which they won’t, they would probably put their hands to their throat in the gesture known to German gays as «the necklace of pearls», roll their eyes, and say what we always say of a tragic effort all round – «Pur-lease.»
Philip Hensher’s Scenes from Early Life is published by 4th Estate.
How To Be Gay, By David M Halperin
This mammoth account of gay identity defers too much to the passing fads of pop culture
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This parable doesn’t feature in David Halperin’s mammoth study of the relationship between homosexuality and contemporary American culture, but could have. His subject is the enduring appeal of female (invariably deeply feminine) role models, forms of behaviour, dress and speech to gay men today, and the apparent rejection of the «liberated» models of gay culture which emerged in the 1970s. These men, Halperin claims, were supposedly reformed out of identifying with strong-but-vulnerable heroines. An assertive identity politics should have empowered them to be legitimised and assimilated. Yet instead, gay men have drawn back, culturally, from the opportunity afforded by social advances, in large number preferring still to co-opt feminine manners and affinities.
It’s an arresting thesis, and Halperin has revealing insights. How to be Gay ranges spiritedly across broad terrain – from Edward Albee to Annie Proulx, from Desperate Housewives to La Cage aux Folles. Its author – Michigan’s «WH Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality» – is deeply read. Yet ultimately, this behemoth of a book cannot fully convince. «Mother» Auden, moreover, would squirm.
Reflecting on his failure to excite even queer undergraduates about gay literary fiction, Halperin concludes that their distractedness betrayed indifference. But any tutor knows what it means to face an uninterested class. You devise superior methods of engagement. You instruct; you don’t simply defer. In terms of evidence, a handful of feckless Midwestern teens can scarcely support a 500-page thesis.
As for anyone still worrying over the Village People-Madonna stand-off, there are surely alternatives to seeing gay men’s identification with women and their sense of self-acceptance in strict opposition. What of fruitful exchange, or the likelihood that creativity can blur fixed sexual categories? Heterosexuals – Pat Barker, John Irving – have brilliantly imagined gay subjectivity. And, curiously, for those chiefly responsive to pop culture, «Like a Virgin at the YMCA» makes for a great mash-up.
Richard Canning’s new edition of Ronald Firbank’s ‘Vainglory’ is published by Penguin Classics
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How To Be Gay
David M. Halperin
Product Details
$24.00 • £19.95 • €21.50
Publication Date: 03/31/2014
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
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No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis’s best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype—ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.
David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men’s cultural difference to the social meaning of style.
Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.
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How to Be Gay
No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis’s best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis’s best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype—ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.
David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, «How To Be Gay» traces gay men’s cultural difference to the social meaning of style.
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Kinda obsessed with this already. How can Halperin manage to make queer theory engaging— even breezy?! I don’t know, but I love it.
+++
Update: this book is amazing. Halperin provides us with a trenchant, accurate framework to understand gay male subjectivity, and yes, «gay culture» (whose existence he makes a strong case for). By using a few well-chosen cultural artifacts as examples (Joan Crawford, «Mildred Pierce,» and «Mommy Dearest»), he builds a rhetorical structure that is flexible enoug Kinda obsessed with this already. How can Halperin manage to make queer theory engaging— even breezy?! I don’t know, but I love it.
+++
Update: this book is amazing. Halperin provides us with a trenchant, accurate framework to understand gay male subjectivity, and yes, «gay culture» (whose existence he makes a strong case for). By using a few well-chosen cultural artifacts as examples (Joan Crawford, «Mildred Pierce,» and «Mommy Dearest»), he builds a rhetorical structure that is flexible enough to accommodate the many other manifestations of gay sensibility— other divas and camp classics, as well as entirely different bits of heterosexual culture that gay men appropriate and recode with a queer meaning. Especially strong are his points about the constant generational struggles over «gay culture» (akin to those of feminism), the simultaneously aristocratic and democratizing sensibilities in camp aesthetics, and the persisting relevance of camp for gay men in the post-Stonewall age, where explicit, uncoded images of gays are supposed to have supplanted the shameful identification with melodrama and caricatures of female power (ha!).
But this review wouldn’t conform to gay male sensibility without some bitchy asides, right? Though he uses his chosen examples to maximal effect— and he is right to eschew current cultural artifacts— it’s a bit tiring to read over and over about these old movies that I’ve never seen. A few of the chapters don’t live up to the high intellectual standard he sets, especially the facile/weirdo «family struggles» section (Mommy Queerest). It’s odd that he ends the book with a pat recapitulation of Mark Warner’s radical queer politics (which are already looking a bit dated, right?). And I would’ve so loved to see Halperin unleash his intellect on how race plays into this— for both black and white gay men, the additional power structures and appropriations that exist. But he justified his non-engagement with race, so it’s not fair to fault him for a book he didn’t write.
Let me start by saying that as far as I can see, the statement above, that ”gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are” has nothing to do with the book that I just finished reading. David Halperin seems to me to be saying the exact opposite. He spends many pages explaining exactly how pre-pubescent boys destined to become gay men came to our love of various gay stereotypical activities and obsessions, whether it be Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, grand opera, historic build Let me start by saying that as far as I can see, the statement above, that ”gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are” has nothing to do with the book that I just finished reading. David Halperin seems to me to be saying the exact opposite. He spends many pages explaining exactly how pre-pubescent boys destined to become gay men came to our love of various gay stereotypical activities and obsessions, whether it be Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, grand opera, historic buildings, arranging furniture or flower arranging, and clearly we did not learn these things from one another at such a tender age. So I am mystified by this blurb, which is copied from the Harvard University Press catalogue at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.ph. and pasted both here and to Amazon.
I am not only mystified but also disappointed, because this fact (and I accept it as fact) has always confused me. The correlation between certain physical activities involving the dangly bits, and an early interest in grand opera, is not obvious to me. I was hoping for an explanation and found none here. Or almost none, keep reading.
I found the book difficult to read and was beginning to worry about early onset Alzheimer. It is a s0mewhat difficult book, but I used to be able to read those. Am I losing it? I came to suspect that it’s not just about me. I think there are two things going on:
First, the book is backwards. I would have preferred that the author start with the last chapter and tell us where he is coming from. It was only on reading the last chapters that I understood that Halperin does not actually approve of the subcultures that he spends 300 pages describing. What he approves of is the contemporary out-and-proud consciously gay sensibility. I guess that should have been obvious from the fact that he is a professor of queer studies, but I missed it. More evidence of Alzheimer perhaps. My guess is that it is backwards for a reason, which is that it is actually the beefed-up notes for a university level course, the audience for which is still his students, and he expects his students to think. The problem, Dr. Halperin, is that I am not your student.
Second, he never tells us what he really means. He expects us to work it out for ourselves. In other words, he expects me to write the little essay that I am now writing, and if I really were his student, he would assign it. He is being didactic in the non-pejorative sense and he is using the Socratic method.
OK Dr. Halperin, you win. I am writing. I should be out shopping in preparation for this afternoon’s opera performance and tonight’s party at my local gay B&B, but instead I am writing a book review, and how gay is that? Touché! Dr. Halperin, I’d love to meet you at a party sometime. You sound like a fun guy.
And so finally, WHAT DOES HE MEAN? I think that the heart of book is contained in one sentence.
In any case, if it is an ironic position that gay men share with women, and if it is our ironic identification with women that enables us to extract lessons in political defiance from Joan Crawford’s glamorous performance of maternal martyrdom and abjection, then perhaps those feminine identifications of ours are identifications that, far from attempting to closet, we should be eager to claim for our own—to understand, to appreciate, and to cherish.
Halperin, David M. (2012-08-21). How To Be Gay (p. 298). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition
Yes. The IRONIC identification with women, also known as camp, is the heart of the matter. He says elsewhere that it has nothing to do with biological women (I think he is being a bit defensive at that point, against Lesbians who really, really hate drag etc. because they think we are mocking them). And this is as close as he comes to the explanation I was seeking all along. He hints at it, he states it several times in several throw-away lines like the one above, but he never really comes out and explains it. I guess his students do that in their essays and class discussion.
“I have wanted to discover the source of so much gay discontent.”
“Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people.”
So much to say on 450 pages of text.
I must admit that I bought How to be Gay because I thought it would be funny to read in public and say “thought I needed a brushing up,” and then place on my bookshelf for visitors to perhaps spy and comment on.
Halperin’s addressing of some trans issues, from grammar to style, is a little dated.
There were definitely things I learned about “I have wanted to discover the source of so much gay discontent.”
“Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people.”
So much to say on 450 pages of text.
I must admit that I bought How to be Gay because I thought it would be funny to read in public and say “thought I needed a brushing up,” and then place on my bookshelf for visitors to perhaps spy and comment on.
Halperin’s addressing of some trans issues, from grammar to style, is a little dated.
There were definitely things I learned about gay subculture from this book that I did not know before. The strength of this book, however, is not in its in-depth analysis of Joan Crawford, but in its dedication to detaching gay culture from gay identity, and to show how gay culture attempts to take down the patriarchy.
I shall say this. Halperin’s book is readable. Plenty of queer theory and gender theory is especially unreadable but Halperin isn’t.
As to Halperin’s thesis, that I’ll have to mull over. I mean, here I was thinking that a predilection for cocksucking was all I needed to be in the gang, but apparently I have to watch Broadway musicals too.
On the few occasions I leaped into the footnotes, I did find the occasional leap that, were I to have made it back when I was still hanging around the corridor I shall say this. Halperin’s book is readable. Plenty of queer theory and gender theory is especially unreadable but Halperin isn’t.
As to Halperin’s thesis, that I’ll have to mull over. I mean, here I was thinking that a predilection for cocksucking was all I needed to be in the gang, but apparently I have to watch Broadway musicals too.
I’m honestly oscillating between 4/5 and 5/5 (see the end, that I do have some issues with what Halperin argues in places), but I’m just going for the gold, 5/5. Even today I’m still thinking about it, and Halperin’s arguments, and especially my own existence, life, and cultural interactions as a gay man. That certainly warrants it. But let me say more:
One of the reasons why I’m giving it the best rating possible is largely because of just how impressive a project the whole thing is. Halperin tr I’m honestly oscillating between 4/5 and 5/5 (see the end, that I do have some issues with what Halperin argues in places), but I’m just going for the gold, 5/5. Even today I’m still thinking about it, and Halperin’s arguments, and especially my own existence, life, and cultural interactions as a gay man. That certainly warrants it. But let me say more:
One of the reasons why I’m giving it the best rating possible is largely because of just how impressive a project the whole thing is. Halperin tries to broadly outline certain gay male (with like thirty qualifications, of course) cultural values through analyses of very particular phenomena, including the middle 250-or-so pages dedicated to analyzing two scenes from two movies either starring or about Joan Crawford (with a good 50-or-so pages qualifying that this is a really preliminary attempt at just scraping the tip of one of the thousands of icebergs that make up gay male culture and subculture). What’s more he is presenting what he takes to be (and I by and large agree is) a heterodox view, which he even self-consciously questions as being potentially «reactionary» in Part Six: What Is Gay Culture?.
And although it is heterodox, I don’t think this book is polemical at all in terms of tone, except for maybe in the chapters «Judy Garland versus Identity Art» and «Queer Forever» in Part Six, where he does adopt a bit more of a combative tone. Rather, Halperin is a very careful and conscientious writer—for instance, he spends the first 129 pages of the book, Parts One (B+ Could Try Harder) and Two (American Falsettos) simply justifying the book’s project and preemptively offering and accounting for all of the qualifiers, restrictions, and problems with it. He does this again briefly after this main analysis of gay culture. If there is any radicalism here, it is simply in Halperin’s content, not his form. This might seem like a really small thing that makes this book so good for me, but I think that this attitude, even (and especially) with particularly nonstandard or radical arguments, is vital to good academia and good nonfiction more generally. I think that the short Goodreads and back cover descriptions are a little bit misleading in that regard: Halperin is daring, but not in an aggressive way.
With that, this book was also packed with moments of powerful insight and a surprising number of emotionally moving passages. I said in one of my reading updates for this that I felt emotionally uncomfortable reading this, but I never really said why: Halperin makes his personal stake in the study clear. He tells the impetus for the book by talking about the personal controversy surrounding the class of the same name he taught at the University of Michigan. He admits that throughout his life as a gay man, he’s been told that he has been inadequately gay. He includes very oddly literary moments where he describes an aspect of growing up gay that resonated deeply with me on the level of the heart. Just as much as this book is intellectually engaging, it is emotionally compelling. Just as much as it is academic, it is personal.
I do have my misgivings with a fair amount of what Halperin argues, and I think at some point he collapses terms that he previously would make distinct—eg, ‘gay culture’ and ‘gay men’—and at others he makes distinctions between terms that to me don’t seem to be sufficiently differentiated—eg, ‘romantic love’ and ‘gay love’—and I suspect that it’s this practice that explains some of my problems. To enumerate a bit more explicitly two specific (but in the same category) issues I have: I think that Halperin is mistaken on his criticisms of both romantic love (which I don’t see as being different than what he describes as the ostensibly different ‘gay love’) and authenticity or sincerity, both of which he characterizes as somehow deeply detrimental or bad, which aspects of gay culture (particularly camp) work to correct. I simply don’t agree—or maybe I just don’t see—his justification for these evaluative judgments.
I had this book on my shelves for years before I finally got around to reading it. The sheer number of conversations that it instigated when people noticed the title make the purchase price well worth it.
Halperin looks for answers by doing a deep dive into a single cultural artifact, exploring various ways gay men have found meaning and identification by adopting and adapting Joan Crawford specifically, and position of abjected-yet-powerful femininity broadly. As a deep reading of Mildred Pierce, it’s excellent. As an explanation or exploration of gay culture, it’s unsatisfactory.
In a book that attempts to explore and entire culture, it’s reasonable to employ stereotypes and tropes, but Halperin relies too heavily on flimsy evidence to make his argument. He continually refers to the camp/trade dichotomy, taking for granted gay male fascinating with masculinity and rejection of camp, never bothering to prove this assertion. He states up front that the gay male culture that he is describing is not exclusively created or shared by gay men, but he locates all of the meanings within a specific set of experiences that he assumes to be universal among gay men (growing up in a culture to which we don’t belong, feeling that masculinity is inaccessible yet desirable, feeling shame about the way other gay men act, etc). Again, no evidence.
He shares fascinating histories of specific lines from films and plays, but largely ignores the broader history in which the culture he’s attempting to describe came into being (with notable exceptions in the final chapter and his continuous notes that the Stonewall generation’s attempt to break with their camp past was unsuccessful). As a scholar who is well versed in queer history, his largely ahistorical analysis was perhaps his most surprising and disappointing choice.
How to Be Gay
No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis’s best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis’s best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype—ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.
David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, «How To Be Gay» traces gay men’s cultural difference to the social meaning of style.
Get A Copy
Friend Reviews
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Be the first to ask a question about How to Be Gay
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Kinda obsessed with this already. How can Halperin manage to make queer theory engaging— even breezy?! I don’t know, but I love it.
+++
Update: this book is amazing. Halperin provides us with a trenchant, accurate framework to understand gay male subjectivity, and yes, «gay culture» (whose existence he makes a strong case for). By using a few well-chosen cultural artifacts as examples (Joan Crawford, «Mildred Pierce,» and «Mommy Dearest»), he builds a rhetorical structure that is flexible enoug Kinda obsessed with this already. How can Halperin manage to make queer theory engaging— even breezy?! I don’t know, but I love it.
+++
Update: this book is amazing. Halperin provides us with a trenchant, accurate framework to understand gay male subjectivity, and yes, «gay culture» (whose existence he makes a strong case for). By using a few well-chosen cultural artifacts as examples (Joan Crawford, «Mildred Pierce,» and «Mommy Dearest»), he builds a rhetorical structure that is flexible enough to accommodate the many other manifestations of gay sensibility— other divas and camp classics, as well as entirely different bits of heterosexual culture that gay men appropriate and recode with a queer meaning. Especially strong are his points about the constant generational struggles over «gay culture» (akin to those of feminism), the simultaneously aristocratic and democratizing sensibilities in camp aesthetics, and the persisting relevance of camp for gay men in the post-Stonewall age, where explicit, uncoded images of gays are supposed to have supplanted the shameful identification with melodrama and caricatures of female power (ha!).
But this review wouldn’t conform to gay male sensibility without some bitchy asides, right? Though he uses his chosen examples to maximal effect— and he is right to eschew current cultural artifacts— it’s a bit tiring to read over and over about these old movies that I’ve never seen. A few of the chapters don’t live up to the high intellectual standard he sets, especially the facile/weirdo «family struggles» section (Mommy Queerest). It’s odd that he ends the book with a pat recapitulation of Mark Warner’s radical queer politics (which are already looking a bit dated, right?). And I would’ve so loved to see Halperin unleash his intellect on how race plays into this— for both black and white gay men, the additional power structures and appropriations that exist. But he justified his non-engagement with race, so it’s not fair to fault him for a book he didn’t write.
Let me start by saying that as far as I can see, the statement above, that ”gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are” has nothing to do with the book that I just finished reading. David Halperin seems to me to be saying the exact opposite. He spends many pages explaining exactly how pre-pubescent boys destined to become gay men came to our love of various gay stereotypical activities and obsessions, whether it be Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, grand opera, historic build Let me start by saying that as far as I can see, the statement above, that ”gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are” has nothing to do with the book that I just finished reading. David Halperin seems to me to be saying the exact opposite. He spends many pages explaining exactly how pre-pubescent boys destined to become gay men came to our love of various gay stereotypical activities and obsessions, whether it be Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, grand opera, historic buildings, arranging furniture or flower arranging, and clearly we did not learn these things from one another at such a tender age. So I am mystified by this blurb, which is copied from the Harvard University Press catalogue at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.ph. and pasted both here and to Amazon.
I am not only mystified but also disappointed, because this fact (and I accept it as fact) has always confused me. The correlation between certain physical activities involving the dangly bits, and an early interest in grand opera, is not obvious to me. I was hoping for an explanation and found none here. Or almost none, keep reading.
I found the book difficult to read and was beginning to worry about early onset Alzheimer. It is a s0mewhat difficult book, but I used to be able to read those. Am I losing it? I came to suspect that it’s not just about me. I think there are two things going on:
First, the book is backwards. I would have preferred that the author start with the last chapter and tell us where he is coming from. It was only on reading the last chapters that I understood that Halperin does not actually approve of the subcultures that he spends 300 pages describing. What he approves of is the contemporary out-and-proud consciously gay sensibility. I guess that should have been obvious from the fact that he is a professor of queer studies, but I missed it. More evidence of Alzheimer perhaps. My guess is that it is backwards for a reason, which is that it is actually the beefed-up notes for a university level course, the audience for which is still his students, and he expects his students to think. The problem, Dr. Halperin, is that I am not your student.
Second, he never tells us what he really means. He expects us to work it out for ourselves. In other words, he expects me to write the little essay that I am now writing, and if I really were his student, he would assign it. He is being didactic in the non-pejorative sense and he is using the Socratic method.
OK Dr. Halperin, you win. I am writing. I should be out shopping in preparation for this afternoon’s opera performance and tonight’s party at my local gay B&B, but instead I am writing a book review, and how gay is that? Touché! Dr. Halperin, I’d love to meet you at a party sometime. You sound like a fun guy.
And so finally, WHAT DOES HE MEAN? I think that the heart of book is contained in one sentence.
In any case, if it is an ironic position that gay men share with women, and if it is our ironic identification with women that enables us to extract lessons in political defiance from Joan Crawford’s glamorous performance of maternal martyrdom and abjection, then perhaps those feminine identifications of ours are identifications that, far from attempting to closet, we should be eager to claim for our own—to understand, to appreciate, and to cherish.
Halperin, David M. (2012-08-21). How To Be Gay (p. 298). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition
Yes. The IRONIC identification with women, also known as camp, is the heart of the matter. He says elsewhere that it has nothing to do with biological women (I think he is being a bit defensive at that point, against Lesbians who really, really hate drag etc. because they think we are mocking them). And this is as close as he comes to the explanation I was seeking all along. He hints at it, he states it several times in several throw-away lines like the one above, but he never really comes out and explains it. I guess his students do that in their essays and class discussion.
“I have wanted to discover the source of so much gay discontent.”
“Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people.”
So much to say on 450 pages of text.
I must admit that I bought How to be Gay because I thought it would be funny to read in public and say “thought I needed a brushing up,” and then place on my bookshelf for visitors to perhaps spy and comment on.
Halperin’s addressing of some trans issues, from grammar to style, is a little dated.
There were definitely things I learned about “I have wanted to discover the source of so much gay discontent.”
“Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people.”
So much to say on 450 pages of text.
I must admit that I bought How to be Gay because I thought it would be funny to read in public and say “thought I needed a brushing up,” and then place on my bookshelf for visitors to perhaps spy and comment on.
Halperin’s addressing of some trans issues, from grammar to style, is a little dated.
There were definitely things I learned about gay subculture from this book that I did not know before. The strength of this book, however, is not in its in-depth analysis of Joan Crawford, but in its dedication to detaching gay culture from gay identity, and to show how gay culture attempts to take down the patriarchy.
I shall say this. Halperin’s book is readable. Plenty of queer theory and gender theory is especially unreadable but Halperin isn’t.
As to Halperin’s thesis, that I’ll have to mull over. I mean, here I was thinking that a predilection for cocksucking was all I needed to be in the gang, but apparently I have to watch Broadway musicals too.
On the few occasions I leaped into the footnotes, I did find the occasional leap that, were I to have made it back when I was still hanging around the corridor I shall say this. Halperin’s book is readable. Plenty of queer theory and gender theory is especially unreadable but Halperin isn’t.
As to Halperin’s thesis, that I’ll have to mull over. I mean, here I was thinking that a predilection for cocksucking was all I needed to be in the gang, but apparently I have to watch Broadway musicals too.
I’m honestly oscillating between 4/5 and 5/5 (see the end, that I do have some issues with what Halperin argues in places), but I’m just going for the gold, 5/5. Even today I’m still thinking about it, and Halperin’s arguments, and especially my own existence, life, and cultural interactions as a gay man. That certainly warrants it. But let me say more:
One of the reasons why I’m giving it the best rating possible is largely because of just how impressive a project the whole thing is. Halperin tr I’m honestly oscillating between 4/5 and 5/5 (see the end, that I do have some issues with what Halperin argues in places), but I’m just going for the gold, 5/5. Even today I’m still thinking about it, and Halperin’s arguments, and especially my own existence, life, and cultural interactions as a gay man. That certainly warrants it. But let me say more:
One of the reasons why I’m giving it the best rating possible is largely because of just how impressive a project the whole thing is. Halperin tries to broadly outline certain gay male (with like thirty qualifications, of course) cultural values through analyses of very particular phenomena, including the middle 250-or-so pages dedicated to analyzing two scenes from two movies either starring or about Joan Crawford (with a good 50-or-so pages qualifying that this is a really preliminary attempt at just scraping the tip of one of the thousands of icebergs that make up gay male culture and subculture). What’s more he is presenting what he takes to be (and I by and large agree is) a heterodox view, which he even self-consciously questions as being potentially «reactionary» in Part Six: What Is Gay Culture?.
And although it is heterodox, I don’t think this book is polemical at all in terms of tone, except for maybe in the chapters «Judy Garland versus Identity Art» and «Queer Forever» in Part Six, where he does adopt a bit more of a combative tone. Rather, Halperin is a very careful and conscientious writer—for instance, he spends the first 129 pages of the book, Parts One (B+ Could Try Harder) and Two (American Falsettos) simply justifying the book’s project and preemptively offering and accounting for all of the qualifiers, restrictions, and problems with it. He does this again briefly after this main analysis of gay culture. If there is any radicalism here, it is simply in Halperin’s content, not his form. This might seem like a really small thing that makes this book so good for me, but I think that this attitude, even (and especially) with particularly nonstandard or radical arguments, is vital to good academia and good nonfiction more generally. I think that the short Goodreads and back cover descriptions are a little bit misleading in that regard: Halperin is daring, but not in an aggressive way.
With that, this book was also packed with moments of powerful insight and a surprising number of emotionally moving passages. I said in one of my reading updates for this that I felt emotionally uncomfortable reading this, but I never really said why: Halperin makes his personal stake in the study clear. He tells the impetus for the book by talking about the personal controversy surrounding the class of the same name he taught at the University of Michigan. He admits that throughout his life as a gay man, he’s been told that he has been inadequately gay. He includes very oddly literary moments where he describes an aspect of growing up gay that resonated deeply with me on the level of the heart. Just as much as this book is intellectually engaging, it is emotionally compelling. Just as much as it is academic, it is personal.
I do have my misgivings with a fair amount of what Halperin argues, and I think at some point he collapses terms that he previously would make distinct—eg, ‘gay culture’ and ‘gay men’—and at others he makes distinctions between terms that to me don’t seem to be sufficiently differentiated—eg, ‘romantic love’ and ‘gay love’—and I suspect that it’s this practice that explains some of my problems. To enumerate a bit more explicitly two specific (but in the same category) issues I have: I think that Halperin is mistaken on his criticisms of both romantic love (which I don’t see as being different than what he describes as the ostensibly different ‘gay love’) and authenticity or sincerity, both of which he characterizes as somehow deeply detrimental or bad, which aspects of gay culture (particularly camp) work to correct. I simply don’t agree—or maybe I just don’t see—his justification for these evaluative judgments.
I had this book on my shelves for years before I finally got around to reading it. The sheer number of conversations that it instigated when people noticed the title make the purchase price well worth it.
Halperin looks for answers by doing a deep dive into a single cultural artifact, exploring various ways gay men have found meaning and identification by adopting and adapting Joan Crawford specifically, and position of abjected-yet-powerful femininity broadly. As a deep reading of Mildred Pierce, it’s excellent. As an explanation or exploration of gay culture, it’s unsatisfactory.
In a book that attempts to explore and entire culture, it’s reasonable to employ stereotypes and tropes, but Halperin relies too heavily on flimsy evidence to make his argument. He continually refers to the camp/trade dichotomy, taking for granted gay male fascinating with masculinity and rejection of camp, never bothering to prove this assertion. He states up front that the gay male culture that he is describing is not exclusively created or shared by gay men, but he locates all of the meanings within a specific set of experiences that he assumes to be universal among gay men (growing up in a culture to which we don’t belong, feeling that masculinity is inaccessible yet desirable, feeling shame about the way other gay men act, etc). Again, no evidence.
He shares fascinating histories of specific lines from films and plays, but largely ignores the broader history in which the culture he’s attempting to describe came into being (with notable exceptions in the final chapter and his continuous notes that the Stonewall generation’s attempt to break with their camp past was unsuccessful). As a scholar who is well versed in queer history, his largely ahistorical analysis was perhaps his most surprising and disappointing choice.