Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and Desire to Conform
Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Gay Pride in my city—at least the sanctioned public expression I experience on the street and inside establishments at Dupont Circle—consists of corporate sponsorship, rainbow beer ads, and scantily dressed, soused, screaming young people. It looks like normative American revelry, like the middle class enthusiasm of St. Patrick’s Day and July 4th. Politics and anger seem to be absent this joyful celebration. It’s not terrible, it can be kinda sweet just to see so many queer and happy kids. But what, besides visibility and fun, is the point? Are the parades fighting against the dominant culture or are they saying, “We’re just like you. We like to spend money and get fucked up.”
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is alienated by the assimilationist agenda and is fighting back, providing a corrective to the monolithic LGBT bloc represented by organizations like Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. This anthology of short essays addresses the raging disappointment with the gay liberation movement that has been co-opted by the corporate concerns of Diesel, Pottery Barn, and Absolut. As with the recommended middle class heteronormative trajectory, gays and lesbians are expected to drink and fuck and buy buy buy and then retreat to the suburbs or a nice safe condo with a doorman in the leafier part of the city and partner up, now with marriage and kids allowed!
The conflict between liberal and revolutionary groups is whether assimilation and compromise are the only routes to social acceptance and social change and if social acceptance guarantees authentic happiness. In “Slow Boil: AIDS and the Remnants of Time,” Eric A. Stanley uses the phrase, “the homophobic gaze of normative culture,” which says clearly that the system is the problem, that’s what needs to be changed, and LGBT people will never by free when trying to conform to the system’s inherently flawed rules, which are set up to punish them. Feminists and all other radical groups deal with these concerns as well. We need to be careful about not being absorbed by the normal.
If you look at polls, legal victories, and anti-bullying rhetoric, it might seem that gay liberation has succeeded or is at least on the right path. While marriage equality makes me happy, I understand frustration with its centrality in the battle for LGBT rights. LGBT people are still discriminated against, raped and murdered, harassed, and rejected by their families. There are lots of struggles left. Marriage equality seems to be important to privileged, wealthy people. If you’re fighting for your survival, then marriage is probably not the most important issue for you. A disproportionate amount of resources and press are poured into marriage equality, ignoring other issues. As Ali Abbas says in “Death by Masculinity,” “Rather than fight to uphold human rights and dignity, LGBTQ politics remain narrowly focused on civil rights and privileges linked to citizenship (e.g. gay marriage.) Liberal masculine gay men assume that gay marriage is a sign of equality because it allows for (limited) mobility in a system that distributes health and tax benefits based on that state-recognized relationship between two people.”
However, it is still amazing to me that single sex marriage is a possibility in the U.S. I could not imagine that ten and fifteen years ago when I was called a dyke in my high school, when my friends, who were not LGT, but maybe B & Q were harassed for the non-gender normative ways they looked and acted. We didn’t have a GSA in our school back then. There was no effort to include or create safe spaces.
Many of these essays have a nostalgic bent, looking back to the ‘70s and ‘80s as days of freedom and experimentation before AIDS took its toll, before the consumerist ‘90s and ‘00s. While LGBT people are from all backgrounds, in our so-called liberated times, the L & G are primary and the image today is usually affluent, urban, straight-acting, and concerned with appearance, products, and shopping. Some writers see that there is power in being marginalized, in not caring about rejection, in already being so rejected in so many ways by parents and society. There is more power in rebellion than in acquiescence.
Subcultures show us the true multitude of expression, identities, and alliances that are so hidden if we don’t look closer, don’t express honestly, and expose our shadows. One of the themes that comes up in these essays is that focusing on the preferences of the Othered sexual body rather than sex acts encourages racism, sterotype, body hatred, and objectification rather than active participation. The essays in Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? are depressing, erotic, angry, brave, and funny. They are about imagining possibilities beyond the binary and as Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes, “existing simultaneously outside queer and straight norms.”
