The Martin Duberman Reader (46 page)

We do not know. For the vast majority of people in the world, the “older” vision of freedom from material want is still so distantly utopian that perhaps only a citizen of the United States could be provincial enough to doubt its continuing centrality. Or arrogant enough to suggest that a more encompassing vision, the redefinition of gender and sexuality, awaits us, that the redefinition
cannot proceed without absolute freedom of inquiry and expression, and that it is in the presumed heartland of counterrevolution, the United States of America, that we are beginning to glimpse its emerging contours.

—from the Introduction to
The Havana Inquiry
(1974)

^*
For an updated bibliography and a fine reassessment, see Samuel Farber,
Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959
(Haymarket Books, 2011).

O
n his death, the mainstream media is sanctifying Ronald Reagan as a man of compassion, grace, and kindness.

Go tell it to the many thousands dead from AIDS because Reagan wouldn't lift a finger to foster research or to combat the mounting epidemic in any way. Mr. Compassion couldn't even say the AIDS word. And he's on public record, when governor of California, as declaring that homosexuality was an affliction and a disorder.

Go tell it to the thousands tortured, mutilated, and dead as a result of his support for the contras in Nicaragua.

Go tell it to the minorities in our own country, and in particular to African Americans, whose civil liberties he did so little to protect, and whose opportunities so little to expand.

You needn't tell it to the world's corporate heads, generals, and dictators. They felt in full Ronald Reagan's beneficence.

Historical truth matters. As a nation we care little for it, much preferring simplistic distortions that sustain our national myths about “freedom,” “opportunity,” and “democracy.” You can't grow into adulthood when you're fed pablum all your life. And that's why we remain a nation of adolescents, with a culture concerned far more with celebrityhood than with suffering.

—from
Waiting to Land
(2009)

I
n an essay in the spring of 2002, I elaborated on many of the views on gay life that I'd been developing over the previous decades. I started with a quotation from Herbert Marcuse (in
Eros and Civilization
) nearly fifty years ago, that had long been a kind of mantra for me: because of their “rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation,” homosexuals might one day provide a cutting-edge social critique of vast importance.

Marcuse's prophecy may be coming to pass. Or so some are claiming. There is mounting evidence that a distinctive set of perspectives has emerged among gay people (despite enormous variations in their lifestyle) in regard to how they view gender, sexuality, primary relationships, friendships, and family. One even increasingly hears the claim that gay “differentness” isn't just a defensible variation but a decided advance over mainstream norms, that gay subcultural values could richly inform conventional life, could open up an unexplored range of human possibilities for
everyone.
That is, if the mainstream was listening, which it isn't.

The mainstream's antennae remain tuned to a limited number of frequencies: that heterosexuality is the Natural Way; that (as we move right of center) lifetime monogamous pair-bonding is the likeliest guarantee of human happiness; that the gender binary
(everyone is either male or female, and each gender has distinctive characteristics) is rooted in biology. Those queers who look and sound like Normal People (or are at least able to fake it) are being welcomed into the mainstream in mounting numbers. But the armed guards at the gates continue to bar admission to the more transparently queer. The mainstream somehow senses that the more different the outsider, the greater the threat posed to its own lofty sense of superiority. Fraternizing with true exotics can prove dangerously seductive, opening up Normal People to possibilities within themselves that they prefer to keep under lock and key. . . .

In allowing increasing numbers of the clean-cut variety of gay white men into the clubhouse, there's a widespread assumption that at least
these
people are “normal” in their traditionally defined masculine values and behavior. But evidence to the contrary is building. According to one large-scale study, gay men volunteer 61 percent more time to nonprofit organizations than their heterosexual counterparts. Moreover, they consistently score higher than straight men on studies that attempt to measure empathy and altruism. We perceive discrimination against others more readily than other men do, and we're more likely to have friends across lines of color, gender, religion, and politics.

Many gay men, moreover, put a premium on emotional expressiveness and sexual innovation; we've reworked the rules governing erotic exploration, friendship, and coupledom. In the latter regard, for example, the community ideal (even if only approximated in practice) is one of mutuality and egalitarianism—which again sets it apart from stereotypical straight men, some of whom spout egalitarian rhetoric but few of whom carry their fair share of domestic responsibilities.

Whether the relationship, moreover, is between two men or two women, a growing body of scholarly evidence (a convenient summary is in the
New York Times,
June 10, 2008) suggests that same-sex couples significantly diverge in behavior from their heterosexual counterparts—and in ways that “have a great deal to teach everyone else.” Same-sex couples are (in the words of the
Times
) “far more
egalitarian than heterosexual ones” in sharing responsibility for both housework and finances—unlike heterosexual relationships, where women still do much more of the domestic chores (and live with a lot of anger as a result) and men are more likely to pay the bills. Perhaps in part as a result, gay and lesbian couples “have more relationship satisfaction”—though no less conflict between the partners. Yet when conflict arises, “belligerence and domineering” are less frequent when gay couples fight, the partners make fewer verbal attacks on each other, are better at using humor and affection to defuse confrontation, and show much greater ability at “seeing the other person's point of view.”

The larger point is that there really is a gay subculture, a way of looking at life and coping with its joys and sorrows that has much to offer the straight world—if it would bother to listen—and also to offer the multitude of gay people who prefer to claim that we're just like everybody else. We're not, and to insist that we are contributes to the destruction of a special set of values and perspectives that could do much to provide needed shifts in mainstream patterns. Gay people are entitled to all the
rights
straight people enjoy, but aren't carbon copies of straight people.

All of this, to be sure, can be overdrawn. Experimental patterns in sexual behavior and partnership relations date at least from the countercultural 1960s—not to mention the nineteenth-century Oneida community, the Bloomsbury crowd, or the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1920s. It's also vital to acknowledge notable shifts in attitude among many of today's younger generation of heterosexuals (especially in urban areas): a “what's the big deal” view of same-gender sexuality, and a willingness to ask “what's a ‘man,' what's a ‘woman,' what constitutes a ‘family' or a ‘good' relationship?”

Besides, a segment of the gay male community aims at a “harder,” not a softer, self-definition of masculinity, wants to outmacho the macho straight male. Though I try my best to follow a “let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom” philosophy, I confess to the view that the gay man striving to outlift his straight counterpart—and to match
him in emotional constriction as well—seems to me misguided. The toned and healthy body, yes. But the plaster-cast Hercules, devoid of mere mortal feeling, no. To me that's literally a disfigurement. It's also a denial of the dominant cultural differences, past as well as present, between gay and straight men.

In regard to the past, I follow the views and findings of that currently towering figure in Talmudic studies, Daniel Boyarin of the University of California at Berkeley. His 1997 book,
Unheroic Conduct,
is a work of immense importance, all at once erudite, witty, playful, and boldly speculative. Boyarin's basic thesis—though this summary won't do justice to its supple byways—is that traditional Ashkenazic Jewish culture produced, in opposition to the Roman model of the powerful, aggressive, violent warrior, a cultural ideal of masculinity that valorized gentleness, nurturance, emotional warmth, nonviolence, inwardness, and studiousness. These characteristics were associated with sexual desirability, not sexlessness—in contrast to the somewhat comparably pacific early Christian model of maleness associated with the
de
sexualized St. Francis. This doesn't mean, Boyarin emphasizes, that orthodox Ashkenazic culture was sympathetic to women (who were excluded from power) or to homoeroticism (male sexual attraction seems to have been considered abnormal).

Boyarin's Ashkenazic Jews—men whose avoidance of what we call “rough and tumble” play would, by contemporary standards, be branded as “sissies”—were in their own culture esteemed as ideal representations of maleness. But by the nineteenth century, the now stereotypic figure of the “feminized” Jewish man had become, in the minds of many Jews, a roadblock to assimilation, and a successful effort (joined by Freud and Theodor Herzl, among others) was made to discredit the once privileged model of a gentler, more nurturant masculinity as either the pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of the anti-Semitic imagination.

Boyarin wants to reclaim that earlier tradition. He believes, and I agree, that restoring the once-revered model of gentle, nurturing masculinity would greatly help to destabilize binary notions
of gender, would emancipate men
and
women from roles that currently constrict their human possibilities. “The critical recovery of the past” would, in Boyarin's words, “make for the redemption of the future.” The implications of Boyarin's work are breathtaking. By reclaiming a radically different—and socially constructed—model of masculinity, he all at once wreaks havoc with simplistic biological determinism and offers us a previously unsighted path toward social change.

As a champion of the gentle, inward male, Boyarin has to confront the macho muscularity of the gym culture, and does so in a typically nuanced way. Himself an openly gay man, Boyarin has no trouble appreciating, on one level, the beauty of the well-built male body. But Boyarin warns that the emphasis on powerful muscularity reinforces “the dimorphism of the gendered body and to that extent participates in the general cultural standard of masculinity rather than resisting it.” In contributing to the notion that only one kind of male body is desirable, the gym stud-bunny is helping to reinforce the valorization of “topness” over receptivity that already dominates our culture, sexual and otherwise.

The macho-looking gay male is also serving another negative function. The gym-built body, imitative of stereotypical maleness, all but announces that “No Sissies Live Here,” thereby encouraging gay men (including the stud-bunnies themselves) to bury and deny the gender-discordant traits that made so many of us feel painfully different in childhood, to repudiate, in other words, “woman-identified” aspects of the self.

In a 1999 paper in the journal
Psychiatry,
Richard Isay insists that all of the several hundred gay men he's treated over the past thirty years exhibited gender-discordant traits in childhood. Such traits, it should he pointed out, are not confined to children who later develop a same-gender erotic preference: some thirty-five years ago, Richard Green, in a much-contested book,
The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality,
found that roughly a third of the gender-discordant male children he studied became, as adults, heterosexual in orientation.

Leaving aside that segment of the gay male population that wants nothing more than to be seen as hyperstraight, the differences between gay culture on the whole and that of the mainstream are real and consequential. But it doesn't follow that those differences are hardwired—even if most of the LGBT world would itself concur—that biology, not culture, is the root source of the differences. Even the summary notion that lesbians are “tougher” and gay men “gentler” than their straight counterparts needs complicating. Gay men, having been subjected for generations to street bashing and police brutality, have learned, out of prudence and fear (not genes), to restrain their anger publicly. Tellingly, it does show in private: the rate of domestic violence among both gay men and lesbians approximates that of heterosexual violence. (The latest of many studies to confirm that is
No More Secrets
by Janice Ristock.) We're not devoid of rage; as a survival tactic—especially before Stonewall—we became adaptively passive-aggressive (a central ingredient in classic camp as well), taking out the aggressive side in the comparative safety of our homes—or on ourselves, through the abuse of drugs and alcohol.

At any rate, the widely and stubbornly held view that sexual orientation is hardwired flies in the face of most of the known evidence. A number of “scientific” studies (like Simon LeVay's on the hypothalamus, or the various hormonal and twin studies) have proclaimed themselves “proof” of the genetic theory, but on further inspection have turned out to be unduplicative or based on shoddy methodology. As the biologist Joan Roughgarden has put it, “Nature abhors a category.”