‘…bunch of lacy-drawered, limp-wristed people’ may look like a nice, juicy rhetorical flourish on paper, but it’s actually a bit of a tongue-twister, especially if you wear dentures. If you’re going to attempt it in public, particularly in a hot, dusty locale such as Yuma be sure to:
a) first remove 1970s hair build-up from upper lip and
b) try to avoid becoming too overtly excited about the idea of lacy-drawered limp-wristed people while denouncing them.
A bullet-pointed column in the NYT by Charles M. Blow examines a sea-change in attitudes towards homosexuality suggested by a recent Gallup poll which found that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as “morally acceptable” has crossed the symbolically important 50 percent mark.
Also for the first time, and even more significantly, more men than women hold that view. While women’s attitudes have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men over 50 who consider homosexuality morally acceptable rose by a by an eyebrow-raising 26% -and for those aged 18-49 by an eyepopping 48%.
What on earth has happened in the US since 2006? How did the American male lose his world-famous Christian sphincter-cramp and righteous loathing of sodomy? Have the gays been secretly putting poppers in the locker-room ventilation shaft?
Alas, Gallup doesn’t say. So Mr Blow does what you do at the NYT when you’re stumped: ask some academics. They came up with three theories:
As more gay people come out more straight people get to personally know gay people which makes it more difficult to discriminate.
Men may be becoming more ‘egalitarian’ in general, partly thanks to feminism.
“Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality”.
Now, the first two of these theories seem to me fairly plausible explanations for increased acceptance of homosexuality at any time, but not especially in the last few years – let alone that whopping 48% rise for 18-49 year olds. But the third theory about public homophobes being exposed as secretly gay perhaps goes too far in the opposite direction and is too current-news specific. As if the discovery that famous homophobe George Rekkers hired a rent boy to give him ‘special’ massages could transform attitudes towards man-love overnight – rather than just change attitudes towards George Rekkers.
So I give them all just a C minus.
And, as Blow points out, none of these theories address the main finding – that men now are more accepting than women, reversing the gender split on this subject that has held since pollsters started bugging people with questions about ‘homosexual relations’.
In my own speculative opinion, none of these theories can see the rainforest for the trees. Of course young men in the US are much more accepting of homosexuality – because so many of them are now way gaythemselves. It’s not really an issue of ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ of ‘otherness’ at all. It’s about self-interest – quite literally. About men being less down on the gays because they’re less hard on themselves now – in fact, rather sweet instead. It’s about men in general not being so quick to renounce and condemn their own ‘unmanly’ desires or narcissism – or project it into ‘faggots’.
Which from the point of view of today’s sensually greedy male would be a terrible waste of a prostate gland. Probably most young men are now doing pretty much everything that freaky gay men were once abhorred for doing – from anal play (both ways) to no-strings fuck-buddies, to crying over Glee, and using buff-puffs in the shower while demanding as their male birthright ‘comfortable skin’ (as the recent massive ad campaign for Dove for Men puts it).
And the timing fits almost as snugly as a finger or three where the sun don’t shine. It was after all only in 2003 that the Supreme Court finally struck down the anti sodomy laws still on the statute books of some US states as unconstitutional. It was also in the early Noughties that metrosexuality really took off in the US.
Despite a mid-Noughties anti-metro, anti-gay marriage backlash that helped re-elect Bush, in the Tweenies the male desire to be desired, and his eagerness to use product – and body parts and practises – once deemed ‘gay’ or ‘feminine’ or just ‘wrong’ to achieve this, seems to have become pretty much accepted amongst most American males under 45. It’s consumerism and advertising of course not the gays that has been putting the poppers in the men’s locker room.
Along the way, many young men have twigged that in a post-feminist world of commodified bodies and online tartiness there is decidedly no advantage to them any more in an essentially Victorian sexual division of labour in the bedroom and bathroom that insists only women are looked at and men do the looking, that women are always passive and men are always active – or in the homophobia that was used to enforce it. Men now want it all. Both ends.
And perhaps American women aren’t keeping up with men’s changing attitudes because some are realising how ‘gay’ their boyfriends and husbands are already and wondering where this is all leading.
There’s plenty to wonder about. After all, it’s the end of the road for that holiest American institution of all: Heterosexuality. Not cross-sex attraction, of course, or reproduction – but that system of compulsory, full-time, always-asserted straightness for men which straying from momentarily, or even just failing to show sufficient respect towards in the past could cost you your cojones. What, you a FAG?? If metrosexuality is based on vanity, retrosexuality, it needs to be pointed out, was based partly on self-loathing. ‘Real men’ were supposed to be repulsed by their own bodies at least as much as they were repulsed by other men’s. (If they were really lucky they might get away with passionate indifference.)
After a decade or so of metrosexuality a tipping point seems to have been reached. Men’s self-loving bi-sensuality and appreciation of male beauty, awakened and increasingly normalised by our mediated world, seems to be here to stay. Even in the God-fearing USA. And might now, if it’s in the mood and treated right, choose to be consummated rather than just deflected into consumerism again. When I first wrote about how the future of men was metrosexual, back in 1994, it was clear to me that metrosexuality was to some degree the flipside of the then emerging fashion for female bi-curiousness. I didn’t talk about this much at the time because I knew no one would listen if I did. (I needn’t have worried – they didn’t anyway.)
In this regard, one of the academics in the NYT piece was (finally) quoted as saying something interesting, right at the end:
‘Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.” They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but … the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.’
An A ++ to Dr Savin-Williams. Not so long ago, when Heterosexuality was a proper belief system that commanded round-the-clock obeisance, ‘mostly straight’ would have been a heretical contradiction in terms – like half pregnant. But in this Brave New World of male neediness it’s just a statement of where we’re at.
For today’s young men the fear of faggotry is fast being replaced by the fear of missing out.
Way back in the last century, before the Interweb swallowed everything, my friend and accomplice in literary crime Steve Zeeland were visiting, as you do, Camp Pendleton, the giant US Marine Corps base in Southern California with some jarhead friends. We spent the afternoon watching the Marine Rodeo – scores of grinning fit Texan boys in tight Wranglers and high-and-tights bouncing up and down on broncos and slapping each other’s butts. Perhaps you’ll understand why, after having seen this, the Details fashion shoot that was Brokeback Mountain left me cold.
We then headed to the enlisted men’s club for a much-needed and, I’d like to think, well-earned drink. While we were there, some Marines came in from a week’s exercise in the field, still in their combats, camouflage paint still on their young sunburned faces. They were in high spirits, enjoying their first beer of the week, and when the DJ played the opening fanfare of The Village People’s ‘YMCA’, like Pavlovs’ dogs they instantly and instinctively understood what was required of them: they flocked onto the dance-floor, scrambling to outdo one another in their 1970s disco dance moves, and joyously spelling out the letters of the camp classic extolling the pleasures of getting clean and hanging out with all the bo-oys. ‘Hey buddy,’ one jarhead shouted to me, slapping me on the shoulder and grinning in my face, ‘you having a good time?’
Oh yes.
At this point Steve produced his mid 1990s, large, cumbersome and very, very obvious camcorder and started filming the jarhead hi-jinks. ‘Steve,’ I hissed in his ear, palms moistening. ‘Don’t you think this might, er, get us into trouble?’
We escaped unscathed – though we did hear reports a year or two later that the Commandant of Camp Pendleton had ordered, like an angry Old Testament God, that enlisted men’s club be razed to the ground because it was ‘a cesspit of sodomy’.
I needn’t have worried about Steve’s camcording. But the Commandant did have reason to worry – his Biblical efforts proved in vain. In just a few years time, military boys would be enthusiastically filming themselves acting way ‘gayer’ than dancing to YMCA – and posting it on YouTube for the entire world to see.
You’ve probably already seen the video tribute to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ made by US soldiers in Afghanistan, which has gone virulently viral. It’s part of a well-established craze by dusty, bored and stressed military boys letting off steam, taking time out from buttoned-down masculine norms and channelling a little glamour instead. Having a scream, in other words. But the fact they are videoing it and putting on YouTube suggests that , like most screamers and like most young people in a mediated world, they want to draw attention to themselves.
Way back in the Twenieth Century again I wrote, only slightly tongue in cheek: ‘The problem with straight men is they’re repressed. The problem with gay men is they’re not.’ In the metrosexual 21st Century I think it’s pretty clear that even straight soldiers aren’t that repressed any more. While of course gays are getting married and becoming Tory MPs.
I don’t know about you, but the scene where the soldiers are standing around admiring one another’s home-made House of Gaga outfits will stay with me forever. There’s something about Lady Gaga that seems to make funny, flaming flamboyance – Gagacity - irresistible to men, women, children, civilians and soldiers and small animals. Gay or straight.
Quite rightly, hardly anyone has suggested that these soldiers being hyper and hilariously camp are ‘really gay’. Some might be, of course. But their appearance in a video of this kind doesn’t prove any such thing. Even the gay-banning US Army put out a statement approving the video, or at least trying to exploit its popularity.
Compare this with what happened a few years back when it emerged that some US soldiers had been ‘acting gay’ on video for private consumption rather than YouTube. Gay porn videos made by ActiveDuty.com. A global scandal errupted and several young soldiers were arrested, courts martialed, fined and dishonourably discharged. A lot of people – particularly gays – seemed convinced that the soldiers ‘must’ all be gay because they appeared in such videos. When in fact many did it like the soldiers in the ‘Telephone’ video – for giggles, for fun, for a dare. Or, in this case, for the not inconsiderable sums money they were paid.
Like the discharged soldier said to the shell-shocked waitress who recognised him from the ActiveDuty website and demanded to know how he could have done such a thing: ‘It was no big deal. And besides, I got paid.’
If you think my comparison far-fetched, consider that the soldiers courts martialed for ‘acting gay’ on video (Certificate 18) were paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne based in Fort Bragg. The same elite unit that the chaps ‘acting gay’ in the ‘Telephone’ video (PG) are in.
The latest YouTube video of soldiers ‘acting gay’ called ‘The Army Goes Gay’ (below) has been curiously claimed by some gay blogs as an example of straight soldiers ‘ridiculing’ Dont’ Ask Don’t Tell. There isn’t really any evidence for this reading however – and in fact it could be more easily read as an endorsement of the ‘Gay Bomb’ fears of the Pentagon. Almost certainly it doesn’t have any message at all. It’s just soldiers being silly and naughty. And ‘gay’.
The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact.
And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK. Even if Crisp said he hated England –and he did, over and over again –only England could have made Crisp and The Naked Civil Servant.
So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screenplay for the Thames TV adaptation glitter like, well, the icy aphorisms that Crisp filled his eponymous autobiography with. But it was Hurt’s breakthrough performance as Crisp which is most historic: rendering Crisp, as Quentin himself acknowledged — and welcomed — something of an understudy to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.
The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Dennis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey in 1908, sometimes sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vintage car tyre losing air ve-ryslow-ly. And was almost as immobile. Hetero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rakishness – a hint of phallicism, even – to Crisp’s defiantly passsssive persssssona that came across rather more invigorating and sexy than he actually was. Hurt rendered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he probably wasn’t even up for a waltz. When Hurt repeatedly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other People and Desire in general – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggressive than passive.
(And for me, Hurtian Crisp was further improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the performance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage runaways to London’s bedsit-land he would perform key moments from TNCS mid conversation about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix. David always succeeded in making these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flashbacks to his earlier life. Which, since he grew up a sensitive boy in working class Blackpool in the 1970s watching a lot of telly, they were.)
TNCS, book and the dramatisation, is criminally funny precisely because so much of what Hurt/Crisp says/declaims is so shockingly true.
The line whispered delicately in the ear of the leader of a 1930s queerbashing gang is now almost a cliche, but still has hilarious force: ‘“If I were you I’d bugger off back to Hoxton before they work out you’re queer.” Some toughs are really queer, and some queers are really tough. Crisp’s truths, particularly about human relationships, are the truths told by someone who has nothing to lose – largely because they’ve already lost everything to the bailiffs of despair. This is the ‘nakedness’ of the Civil Servant.
Because it was one of the first TV dramas to depict a self-confessed and unapologetic — flaunting, even — homosexual TNCS has been frequently misrepresented as a ‘gay drama’. But Crisp’s sexuality is not really what TNCS is about – or in fact what Crisp was about.
To a degree it is about being ‘out and proud’, or at least determined to inflict oneself on the world, but not so much as a homosexual, and certainly not as ‘a gay’, in the modern, respectable, American sense of the word. It’s not even, thankfully, a plea for tolerance. Rather it’s a portrayal of the heroic self-sufficiency of someone who decided to stand apart from society and its values, henna their hair and work as a male street prostitute – and then, lying bruised in the gutter, turn a haughty, unsentimental but piercingly funny eye back on a world which regards him as the lowest form of life. It’s the blackest and cheekiest kind of comedy — which is to say: the only kind.
‘I am an effeminatehomo-sex-u-alll’, declared Crisp to the Universe, over and over again. And the Universe had no choice but to agree. By being utterly abject Crisp forced the Universe to do precisely as he instructed. A blueprint for celebrity that was to be repeated many, many times by others before his death in 1999 and even more times after — though usually rather less wittily.
Crisp added that as an effeminate homosexual he was imprisoned inside an exquisite paradox, like some kind of ancient insect trapped in amber: attracted to masculine males – the famous Great Dark Man – he cannot himself be attracted to a man who finds him, another male, attractive because then they cannot be The Great Dark Man any more. Hence the famous, Death-of-God declaration in TNCS, after many, many mishaps and misrecognitions: ’”There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man!”’
Strictly 19th Century sexologically speaking, Mr Crisp was probably more of a male invert than a homosexual and often said that he thought that he should have been a woman, and even wondered whether he was born intersexed (this despite famously dismissing women as ‘speaking a language I do not understand’ — perhaps because he didn’t like too much competition in the speaking stakes). Either way, he doesn’t appear to have been terribly happy with his penis or even its existence – something homosexual males, like heterosexual ones, are usually delirious about. But then again, perhaps rather than expressing some kind of proto-transsexuality Quentin’s Great Dark Man complex was merely setting up a situation in which he could remain ever faithful to his one true love. Himself.
In Thames TV’s TNCS, which begins (at Crisp’s request) with a pretty, pre-pubescent boy as Quentin/Dennis dancing in a dress in front of a full-length mirror, Hurtian Crisp is an out-and-proud narcissist, who simply refuses to take on board the shame that such an outrageous perversion should entail. When he attempts to join the Army at the start of the war he causes apoplexy in the recruiters for being completely honest about his reasons for doing so: he doesn’t mouth platitudes about ‘doing his duty’, ‘his bit’ or ‘fighting Nazis’. He just wants to eat properly and the squaddies he knows seem to have quite a nice time of it, loading and unloading petrol cans in Basingstoke. His openness about his homosexuality is palpably less shocking to the Army officials than his honesty about his self-interestedness. About his interest in himself.
Or as Hurt/Crisp replies as a preening adolescent youth when asked by his exasperated, buttoned-up Edwardian petite-bourgeois father: ‘Do you intend to admire yourself in the mirror forever?’
‘If I possibly can.’
And boy, did he. TNCS, which aired slap in the middle of the 70s, was probably more of an inspiration to the glam, punk, new-wave and new romantic generation than to gays in general. Hurtian Crisp and his hennaed hair and make-up sashaying the streets of 1930s London symbolised in the 1970s the idea of an aestheticized revolt against Victorian ideas of proper deportment and dullness that had dominated Britain for much of the Twentieth Century. The best British pop music had always been a form of aesthetic revolt, and Crisp seemed very much his own special creation, which is what so many teens now aspired to be. Crisp was taken for a real original and individual in an age when everyone wanted to be original and individual. Or as Crisp put it himself later: ‘The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.’
TNCS changed Crisp’s life and made him very famous indeed. A reality TV winner before such a thing existed, his prize was the chance to move to America. Since he had loved Hollywood movies from childhood and was later treated like a Hollywood starlet (albeit in air raid shelters) by American GI’s in London during the Second World War, no wonder he grabbed the opportunity with both hands.
But if there’s anything to be learned from An Englishman in New York, the sequel to TNCS broadcast on ITV recently, it’s that it may all have been a terrible mistake. Even if Mr Crisp never thought so.
Although Hurt turns in a technically fine performance, he seems to have become more Crispian and less Hurtian. Perhaps that’s inevitable with the passage of time (Hurt is nearly 70, the age Crisp was when he first played him). Or perhaps it’s simply that his acting skills have increased. Whatever the reason, it’s not a welcome development here. And I’m sure Crisp would have agreed.
But much, much worse is the redemptive reek of this sequel. Everything is made to turn on Crisp’s ‘AIDS {upper case back then, remember} is a fad’ quip made in the early 80s and the trouble this got him into in the US – and why he was a good sort, really. Despite the things he actually said. So we see him adopt a gay artist dying of the ‘fad’, fussing over him and arranging for his art to be exhibited. We discover him sending secret cheques to Liz Taylor’s Aids foundation. We even hear him explain what he meant by ‘fad’ (supposedly it was a political tactic: minimize the gay plague to avoid a hetero backlash).
Now, this obsession with redemption may be very American and has of course, like many American obsessions, become more of an English one of late – especially when trying to sell something to the Yanks, as I’m sure the producers of this sequel are hoping. But if there was any point to Crisp at all it was that he was utterly unsentimental – except where royalty were concerned – and relatively free of the hypocrisies of everyday life. This sequel supposedly about him is full of them. So forgive me if I’m unconvinced.
Crisp was invincible in his determination to regard the US as the dreamland of the movies of his youth made real: America was as he put it ‘Heaven’ where England was ‘Hell’. And why not? If you’ve spent most of your best years deprived of almost every single illusion that comforts most other people, why shouldn’t you have one big one in your retirement?
And to be fair much of what he had to say about the friendliness and flattering, encouraging, open-hearted nature of Americans compared to the mean-minded, resentful, vindictive English is quite true, even today. But Crisp’s whole approach to life was even more at odds with American culture, even in its atypical NYC form, with its emphasis on self-improvement, aspiration, uplift and success. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style,’ said Crisp, who regarded himself as a total failure. Could there be a more un-American worldview? Apart that is from, ‘Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’. Try to drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.’
In an early documentary from the 1960s Crisp, sitting in his London bed-sitting room sipping an unappetizing powdered drink he takes instead of preparing food, which he can’t be bothered with, that ‘has all the vitamins and protein I need but tastes awful’ he describes himself as a Puritan. Actually Crisp was a Puritan with an added frosting of asceticism. Crisp was deeply suspicious of all pleasure (save the pleasure of being listened to and looked at) and most especially sex, which he described as ‘the last refuge of the miserable’. And four years of house dust is a very good way of showing how above the material world you are.
It’s a very middle class, middle England, middle century Puritanism – just like Crisp’s background. But Crisp was also his own kind of revenge on himself, or on the world that had made him — of which he was a living parody. Ultimately none of us are really our own special creations. The most we can hope for is a special edition.
Crisp’s Puritanism was part of the reason why he could never embrace Gay Lib (‘what do you want to be liberated from?’). He was recently subjected to a stern posthumous ticking off by Peter Tatchell, an original Gay Libber, in The Independent newspaper prompted by what he sees as the ‘sanitising of Crisp’s ignorant pompous homophobia’ in An Englishman in New York. Post-60s Crisp was apparently jealous of a new generation of out queers who were stealing his limelite: he wasn’t the only homo in town any more.
This broadside was a tad harsh and Tatchell sometimes sounds as if he’s on the Army board that rejected Crisp (while accusing him of ‘homophobia’ threatens to make an absurdity of the word) but I agree that the sequel does ‘sanitise’ Crisp, though I think this a bad thing for different reasons to Mr Tatchell. I also suspect there’s some truth to the accusation of ‘jealousy’, but I’d be inclined to put them in another form. Maybe Crisp didn’t want homosexuality to be normalised because if it were it would undo his life’s work. Likewise, I think Crisp would have loathed metrosexuality.
And as the sequel suggests, in one of its few insightful moments, one reason for Crisp’s failure to answer the gay clarion call was simply that he didn’t believe in causes, or the subjugation of truth and dress-sense to expediency that inevitably goes with causes. Unless that cause is yourself.
Besides, like many ‘inverts’, Crisp was a great and romantic believer in Heterosexuality — the ideal kind, of course, rather than the kind that heterosexuals actually have to live, and which they execute very, very badly. He used to call heterosexuals ‘real people’ (as opposed to ‘unreal’ homosexuals), but I suspect he thought he was the only real heterosexual in town. And in a sense, he was.
I can’t leave you without pointing out that while Quentin Crisp may have dismissed Aids as a ‘fad’, Hurtian Crisp became more associated with ‘the gay plague’ than almost anyone save Rock Hudson: literally becoming the sound of the seriousness of the subject. In 1975 hetero Hurt plays the most famous stately homo in England. The success of this gets him to Hollywood, where four years later in 1979 he is cast in an even more globally famous role – as ‘Patient Zero’ in Ridley Scott’s Alien: the first host for the terrifying unknown organism that enters his body by face-raping him and which proceeds to kill-off in horrifying, phallic-jackhammer fashion his shipmates — two years before the first identified Aids cases in NY.
Eight years later, Hurt was the unforgettable fey-gravelly voice for those terrifying tombstone ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ ads (complete with jackhammers) that ran in rotation on UK TV, urging people to read the Government leaflet pushed through their letterbox and practise safe sex.
In other words, The Naked Civil Servant had become a rubber-sheathed civil servant.
Old Spice: interview Crisp gave Andrew Barrow of the Independent a year before his death.
Crispisms
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.
The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, “I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing.”
Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.
Someone asked me why I thought sex was a sin. I said, “She’s joking, isn’t she?” But they said, “No.” Doesn’t everyone know that sex is a sin? All pleasure is a sin.
I’ve always liked Edmund White’s refusal to get with the contemporary gay hypocrisy program and shrewishly condemn promiscuity in the hope that this will deliver lots and lots of wedding presents. In contrast to that pasteurised movie Milk, which lied shamelessly about gay men’s sex lives in the 1970s to make it easier to lie about their sex lives today, White, a veteran gay-libber who first started libbing around that time – in bath-houses, back rooms and along the piers – insists on telling it as it was, genital warts and all.
That said, I’ve frequently found his work to be insufferably gayist. Edmund is a five star, old school gay chauvinist – so literally fucking proud to be gay and so obsessed with ‘coming out’ (and attacking those that refuse to join his party) that sometimes I just want to slap him.
Which is why I laughed out loud when frail old Gore Vidal, veteran dissenter from the orthodoxies of sexual identity politics, recently reached out of his wheelchair and did just that, repeatedly, in The London Times. Asked about White’s fictionalised portrayal of Vidal’s letter-writing relationship with the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in the play ‘Terre Haute’, The Gore lambasted White for portraying him as ‘another queen’, only writing about how ‘being a fag is the greatest thing on Earth’ and – in a fantastic phrase that will stay with White forever, like an immortal red handprint on the side of his face – ‘vulgar fag-ism’.
Probably it was the ‘vulgar’ part that stung White most (his prose, especially the earlier efforts, sometimes looks as if it’s been fisted by a thesaurus) and provoked the bitchy response in an interview in Salon this week (‘Edmund White comes out swinging’). Ed describes Gore as a ‘nasty, awful man’, claims sorrowfully to have tried to help him in the past by inviting him to dinner to introduce him to ‘cute boys’, very kindly reminds us of his great age, the fact that he’s wheelchair-bound, his alcoholism, his loss a few years ago of his life-long companion, practically spelling it out for us in a campy stage whisper: Bitter. Old. Queen.
But apparently this isn’t enough. He also tells us that Vidal is a ‘complete lunatic’ and that ’it doesn’t bother me what he says about me.’ Yes, dear, but if it doesn’t, why go on so? And on, and on….
‘I don’t know what he’s famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. “Myra Breckinridge” was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends — but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they’re all so topical that they’ve all aged terribly. I don’t know where his work is.’
Ed, sweetie, even if everything that you and your terribly important literary friends have to say about that ‘nasty awful man’ were true, bitter old alcoholic crippled Gore would still be ten times the writer you are.
Yours truly will be giving talk on ‘Sporno: How sport got into bed with gay porn – with Mr Armani taking pictures ‘ in Berlin on Thursday 18th June – i.e. tomorrow – at 8pm at the Dorrie * Priess Gallery (details below), courtesy of Manner-Magazin, CSD and Queer Nations. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
It will be richly illustrated.
Sorry for the very tardy notice….
Dörrie * Priess Berlin
Ulrich Dörrie / Holger Priess
Yorckstr. 89 a
D-10965 Berlin
Tel. (+49) 030/ 7889 5533
By Mark Simpson (shorter version originally appeared on Guardian CIF)
‘The more things a man is ashamed of’, wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘the more respectable he is.’ Gays must now be terribly respectable since, forty years on from the Stonewall riots started by drag queens, hustlers and homeless youths high on drugs – outsiders with nothing to lose – gays have moved up in the world, become middle-aged and promptly found plenty of things to be ashamed of. Like all arrivistes, and like Shaw’s most famous creation Eliza Doolittle, they’re particularly ashamed of their past.
Stonewall itself was recently ‘upgraded’ to ‘Stonewall 2.0′ – the name given the current wave of gay marriage activism. Which is a bit like updating ‘Querelle’ into ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Meanwhile, gays are now so ashamed of their dead heroes they dig them up and assassinate them all over again. The gay-adored, gay scripted, gay directed film ‘Milk’ was so popular precisely because it bumped off the actual historical Harvey Milk and his shamefully shameless sex-life, unloading a revolver of revisionism into his chicken-hawk head, replacing him with a serially-monogamous imposter who used to be cute and married to Madonna.
In the same way, earlier this year ‘Milk’ also replaced the promiscuous, bathhouse-happy 1970s San Francisco that Milk eagerly embraced – and shagged silly – with something much more real-estate agent. Scripted by a gay Mormon, San Francisco looks less like 70s answer to Sodom and Gomorrah than a gayted community for Gap wearing gay couples. No wonder Lance Black mentioned marriage and God more than once in an Oscar acceptance speech that had more uplift than even his decorous hairdo.
In the Twenty First century, respectability is fast shaping up to be the New Closet. Or The Closet 2.0, if you like annoying software references. And the custodians of the New Closet are not paddy-wagons and queer-bashers, but gays themselves, itching to conform to standards of hypocrisy more and more straight people are abandoning. As a result, we can look forwards to many more outings such as that of Sam Adams, mayor of Portland, Oregon, once dubbed ‘The New Harvey Milk’, who repeatedly denied rumours of an affair with a teenager, denouncing them as scurrilous lies playing to base stereotypes of predatory homosexuals, but was recently forced to admit that, erm, they weren’t scurrilous after all. Or in fact, lies.
In their headlong pursuit of respectability – and let’s not pretend that marriage privileges are not at least as much about respectability as about equality – most gays that aren’t ‘cult’ writers like Bruce Benderson or Michael Warner seem to have forgotten that gay sex isn’t terribly respectable, and that it never will be no matter how much you talk up gay domesticity. Unless you plan on making medical history with a successful womb transplant, gay male sex is always going to be improper, inappropriate, non-procreative sex-for-sex’s sake rather than the Pope’s, Uncle Sam’s or Mothercare’s. And that is, if you’re honest, probably part of the reason why you enjoy it.
Even the word ‘gay’, now invested with so much golf-club decorum by social-climbing sodomites, doesn’t have a very decorous history. Despite the complaints of retired colonels about homos hijacking their favourite word, gay’s original meaning of ‘joyful’ and ‘carefree’ was pretty much an antonym for respectable. Which may be why in the 17th Century a ‘gay woman’ was a prostitute, a ‘gay man’ a womanizer, and a ‘gay house’ a brothel. In the early 20th Century, even before it commonly became associated with homosexuality, ‘gay’ meant ‘single’ and ‘unattached’ – ‘straight’ meant ‘married’ and ‘respectable’. In the Twenty First Century those meanings have of course been reversed.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising that gays turned out to be like everyone else – given the chance, they’ve grabbed any propriety they can lay their hands on and with it their chance to look down on others (‘Miss California those topless photos are a scandal and an outrage! Hand your crown back immediately, you hussy!‘). After all, like the sandal-wearing Shaw, I’m looking down loftily on those who want to be respectable. But really, as a Stonewall drag queen might have put it looking around the gay world today, smell her!
Ironically – or e-ronically – it’s the unlimited, anonymous sluttiness of the net that helps sustain the New Closet. Now gay men can move to the suburbs with their partner, present a front of monogamous chastity to the world, but also have discrete sex outside their relationship without having to access the urban gay scene, or even cruise draughty parks and rest stops. For quite a few gay men Manhunt and Gaydar take on the role prostitution played with the Victorian gentlemen of Shaw’s era: a disreputable institution they strongly disapprove of that makes their own respectability possible. (I know I’m not supposed to talk about this in public, but oops, I just have.)
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the nice middle-aged lady on the Clapham Omnibus needs to know what I got up to last night – but on the other hand, I don’t want to have to pretend to be the nice middle-aged lady on the Clapham Omnibus.
Respectability is not to be sneered at, though. It can change history. It’s probably just a matter of time before the date of Stonewall is itself revised to 1968 or 1970. After all, 1969 plays far too easily into straight prejudices about gays being obsessed with perverse sex….
The very widely-reported story of the Avon firemen disciplined for bringing the Fire Brigade into disrepute and unauthorised use of their fire engine (and torches) is both fnarrr funny and funny peculiar. But the most peculiar aspect of it, and certainly the most serious, is the light it casts on the minds of newspaper editors.
The ‘bare’ facts that can be ascertained from the various reports are these: on their return to their fire station, four on-duty firemen from Avonmouth Fire Station’s ‘Blue Watch’ (no kidding) drove out of their way at night in in a fire engine to a remote cruising/dogging area and shone their very powerful Fire Brigade torches into some bushes, supposedly revealing a group of four men involved in ‘a gay sex act’. According to the newspaper reports, one of the participants in this night-time tryst in the bushes illuminated by the firemen’s torches complained to the THT who then contacted Avon Fire Brigade. Avon Fire Brigade suspended the men on full pay for three months before finding them guilty of bringing the service into disrepute, demoting, fining and moving them to different stations and compelling them to undergo ‘gay awareness’ training.
The Sun, for whom the story was almost tailor-made, devoted most of a page to it: ‘Firemen expose gay doggers’, with the strapline ‘Four firemen have been carpeted after disturbing an outdoor gay sex romp.’ The Sun suggests of course that the case was an example of ‘political correctness gone mad’ (and some of the details, such as the ‘re-education’ of the firemen appear to lend themselves to this). It also makes a meal of the ‘criminal’ nature of the acts these public-spirited firemen witnessed.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the Sun, unlike most other newspapers, made some effort to avoid whipping up indignation at the very idea of men having sex with other men outdoors – e.g. the use of ‘gay romp’ (‘romps’ used to be strictly hetero in the Sun; gay sex was ‘sordid’ or ‘sleazy’ or ‘perverted’) and the interesting phrase ‘gay dogging’ (when dogging, a very recent phenomenon, might actually be described as straight cruising).
Funnily enough, The Sun’s sister-with-a-degree-paper The Times, the UK’s paper of record, ran a report that was much more misleading, right down to the headline: ‘Firemen are disciplined for disturbing orgy in bushes’, which in its very ambiguity is rather ‘revealing’. The piece failed to make it clear that the firemen had quite literally gone out of their way in council taxpayer’s time in a fire engine bought and fuelled with taxpayers money to shine their taxpayer-purchased powerful torches on this ‘criminal activity’ – when they should have been back at the fire station awaiting a call from a member of the public whose chip-fan was on fire.
More importantly, like most reports, it also conveyed the impression that the (disturbing) act the firemen witnessed was of course illegal and seemed founded on the absurdity that they should be punished rather than the uppity criminal ‘gay’. (If you think I misread the piece, see the indignant comments about ‘criminal gays’ posted at the end – e.g. ‘I am astounded. Fine upstanding citizens, hardworking firemen who risk there lives to help people, disturb people in an ILLEGAL act and it is they who get into trouble, not the individuals who are behaving in an ILLEGAL and immoral way. This country is going to the tubes’.)
The Daily Telegraph, which doesn’t pretend to be as metropolitan as The Times does these days, managed a better fist of it, despite their equally confusing/revealing headline: ‘Firemen reprimanded for disturbing gay sex act’. The article seemed like the others to presume the ‘illegality’ of the disturbing gay sex act, and the outrageousness of the uppity gay who complained, but, crucially, included (in the print version) a small box at the end by their legal correspondent which contained the rather important point – neglected from all the other reports I saw – that reforms to the law in recent years, doing away with discriminatory laws that criminalized only sex between men, and introducing the concept of ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’, mean that consensual sex between men – or anyone of any gender – in a remote place (in the bushes, in the night) isn’t illegal.
So the angle presented in the Sun, The Times, the Telegraph (main story) and the Mail, and in countless Richard Littlejohn style ranting blogs – criminal gays get off (arf) while upstanding straight firemen are punished; strewth, what’s this country coming to? – wasn’t an angle at all.
Even the ‘gay-friendly’ Guardian, in a lengthy report, failed to mention this rather salient fact and conveyed the same erroneous impression, despite quoting prominently, as most if not all of the reports did, an ‘unnamed firefighter’ (who wasn’t present on the Downs that evening) complaining: “This is a complete farce. All four officers have been let down by their senior officers when they needed their support the most. They have been treated as the criminals in this case and it has been completely forgotten that they witnessed criminal activity occurring in a public place.”
Umm, nice try mate, but they didn’t. And they didn’t report what you now say they claim they saw, either.
The Telegraph’s useful little box also mentioned that unwanted voyeurism was potentially illegal. In other words, if you want to get all hoity toity and talk about ‘criminal acts’ the firemen should perhaps consider themselves lucky that they weren’t disciplined and prosecuted.
It’s difficult not to conclude that the firemen, homophobic or not, were in that place at that time of the night shining their torches around in the bushes because they wanted a cheap thrill. They were dogging themselves – but on our time. (Though of course we now get to dog as well by reading the newspaper reports.) If they had observed the usual etiquette of such places and not shone their bloody torches in everyone’s eyes to get a better butchers no one would have complained and they wouldn’t have got into trouble. As someone who has been cruising in such places myself in the past and know how long it takes to get your night vision back after being blinded by some idiots undipped headlights, I think they deserve everything they got.
But the newspapers deserve much, much worse for their dereliction of duty.
As part of the same misrepresentation of the story, most of the reports refer to the (anonymous) four men supposedly involved in the public sex scene unequivocally as ‘gay’ or (in The Times) ‘homosexual’.
How do the newspapers know this as a fact? Were they there in the bushes themselves? Would this have even helped? This was, after all, a pick-up area, we’ve been told, popular with ‘gays’ and ‘straight doggers’. Even exclusively ‘gay’ cruising areas, if there are any left now that straight dogging has become so popular, are not that gay, which is, after all, the point of them: they appeal to married and bisexual men and men who regard themselves as straight but like a bit of cock every now and again.
And from what I’ve seen of dogging, quite a few ‘straight doggers’ will get involved to some degree with the all-male action if it’s a slow night – or at least have a good look if someone’s putting on a show. Dogging by its very nature tends to wander outside the the usual boundaries of ‘straight’ and ‘gay’.
Besides, the claim that the firemen witnessed any sex at all, let alone a ‘gay orgy’, is just that, a claim, not a fact as presented by the newspaper reports. A claim which seems to have been made only after the firemen were disciplined, and by a disgruntled firemen chum who wasn’t even present that evening. In other words, it’s about as dubious a claim as you could imagine.
So the widely-reported ‘fact’ that it was one of the ‘gays’ taking part in the ‘illegal’ ’public’ ’gay orgy’ who contacted the THT - and the basis of all the torrents of righteous indignation - is actually pure fantasy. Nothing is known about the man who wanted to know what the firemen where doing there at that time of night other than what the THT has put in the public domain as they were the ones who presented his concerns to the Avon Fire Brigade. They have made no statement about his sexuality – and the THT doesn’t ask anyway, or what he was doing on the Downs, and he didn’t report any sexual activity to them.
So:
a) the sexuality of the ‘gay’ who rang the THT and was subjected to national villification is as unknown as his identity and
b) the only source for the ‘fact’ that he was part of a ‘gay orgy’ is the disgruntled chum of the disciplined firemen who wasn’t there that evening. And even if he had been, how on Earth would he know who had contacted the THT?
It seems to me that on this one, everyone’s in the dark, thrashing around the bushes with their pants down.
—–
An excellent piece by Rachel Johnson dissecting the farrago, setting the legal record ‘straight’ and and going some way to restoring The Times’ honour appeared the day after I posted this blog.
Postcscript 2008: PCC Complaint
I decided to shine a torch of my own around and referred this widespread misreporting to the PCC. Surprisingly, the secretariat took up my complaint. They don’t usually do this if you are not the party concerned (in this case the party concerned would be the doggers and/or the anonymous man who contacted the THT). But I explained that as someone who has visited such places in the past the widespread misreporting of the state of the law in regard to outdoor sex criminalised me – and made me and others more likely to be attacked by vigilantes etc. As a result, a few offending newspapers including Metro and The Yorkshire Post printed letters from me correcting their reporting. The Daily Mail of course refused any such resolution. Despite being the biggest offender – and running a column by Littlejohn on the matter which stated as fact that ‘outdoor sex is illegal’ and essentially encouraging attacks on men who have sex with men outdoors.
In the case of the Daily Mail, the PCC Commission (i.e. a panel of national newspaper editors, including the editor of the Daily Mail) ruled against me – stating that there was not a ‘significant’ breach of their regulations – and anyway, I was a ‘third party’.
In other words, they couldn’t deny that the story and the legal position had been misreported, but it wasn’t worth upsetting one of their chums over.
Oh, and the Commission insisted on referring in its judgement repeatedly to the ‘gay men’ taking part in ‘an orgy’, despite it having made it quite clear to them that neither of these statements were fact but merely loaded opinion. Their response to that was to state that ‘because these men were men having sex with one another [sic it is reasonable to assume they were gay’.
Fallacy based on falsehood is quite an irresistible force. At least when it comes to the great British press.
Look out! Take cover! Backs to the walls, boys! It’s the Gay Bomb!
No, not a bomb with fashionably styled fins or one that can’t whistle, but rather a proposed “non-lethal” chemical bomb containing “strong aphrodisiacs” that would cause “homosexual behavior” among soldiers.
Since the United States Air Force wanted $7.5 million of taxpayers’ money to develop it, it probably involved more than the traditional recipe of a few six-packs of beer.
According to the Sunshine Group, an organization opposed to chemical weapons that recently obtained the original proposal under the Freedom of Information Act, a U.S.A.F. lab seriously proposed in 1994 “that a bomb be developed containing a chemical that would cause [enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another.” The U.S.A.F. obviously didn’t know how picky even horny gays can be.
Despite never having been developed, the so-called Gay Bomb is a bouncing bomb or perhaps a bent stick-it keeps coming back. The media have picked up the story of the Gay Bomb more than once since 2005-after all it’s a story that’s too good to throw away, and, as this article proves, it’s a gift for dubious jokes.
Mind you, it now seems to be the case that the Pentagon didn’t throw it away either, at least not immediately. In the past the Pentagon has been keen to suggest it was just a cranky proposal they quickly rejected. The Sunshine Project now contradicts this, saying the Gay Bomb was given serious and sustained attention by the Pentagon and that in fact they “submitted the proposal to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider.” The Gay Bomb was no joke.
So perhaps we should seriously consider probing-however gingerly-what exactly was in the minds of the boys at the Pentagon back then.
The date is key. The Gay Bomb proposal was submitted in 1994-the year after the extraordinary moral panic that very nearly derailed Clinton’s first term when he tried to honor his campaign pledge to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the U.S. military and that ultimately produced the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) compromise that allows them to serve so long as they remain closeted and are not reported.
The newly sworn-in commander-in-chief was successfully portrayed by the homo-baiting right wing-and by the Pentagon itself in an act of insurrection-as a dirty pinko Gay Bomb that was seriously weakening the cohesion of the unit and molesting the noble, heterosexual U.S. fighting man’s ability to perform his manly mission. “Why not drop Clinton on the enemy?” is probably what they were thinking.
The Pentagon’s love affair with the Gay Bomb also hints heavily that ticking away at the heart of its opposition to lifting the ban on gays serving, which involved much emphasis on the “close conditions” (cue endless TV footage of naked soldiers and sailors showering together) was an anxiety that if homosexuality wasn’t banned the U.S. Armed Forces would quickly turn into one huge, hot, military-themed gay orgy – that American fighting men would be too busy offering themselves to one another to defend their country. I sympathize. I too share the same fantasy – but at least I know it’s called gay porn.
Whatever its motivations or rationalizations, the DADT policy of gay quarantine has resulted in thousands of discharges of homosexuals and bisexuals from the U.S. Armed Forces, even at a time when the military is having great difficulty mobilizing enough bodies of any sexual persuasion and is currently being publicly questioned. But the Pentagon seems unlikely to budge its institutional back from the proverbial wall. Its top commander, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, recently defended the policy in outspoken terms, saying: “I believe that homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” (The good General probably didn’t mean to suggest that homosexual acts involving only one person or more than two were not immoral.)
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that even Joseph Heller would have had difficulty satirizing, may be confused and confusing, and it may or may not be repealed in the near future, but it clearly shows that the U.S. remains dramatically conflicted about itself and the enormous changes in attitudes and behavior that its own affluence and sophistication have helped bring about.
After all, the Gay Bomb is here already and it’s been thoroughly tested-on civilians. It was developed not by the U.S.A.F. but by the laboratories of American consumer and pop culture, advertising, and Hollywood. If you want to awaken the enemy to the attractiveness of the male body, try dropping back issues of Men’s Health or GQ on them. Or Abercrombie & Fitch posters. Or Justin Timberlake videos. Or DVDs of 300.
Or even the U.S.’s newly acquired British-made weapons system for delivering global sexual confusion and hysteria known as David Beckham.
To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington: I don’t know whether they frighten the enemy, but by God they scare the Bejeesus out of me.
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