Assimilation and its
discontents
A literary tour of gay
San Francisco, from bohemian bacchanalias to fascism disguised as matrimony
By Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore
BACK IN THE day when my best friend in San Francisco started going out with my first boyfriend and I got over it, sort of, or not really – well, anyway, in 1996 the three of us went to see the movie I Shot Andy Warhol at the Embarcadero Cinema, and we all agreed on one thing: it was awful. Make that two things: Lili Taylor couldn't act.
In I Shot Andy Warhol, Taylor plays Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in real life, in 1968, after she wrote the SCUM Manifesto, which declared, "The male has a negative Midas touch – everything he touches turns to shit." SCUM stood for Society for Cutting up Men, and Solanas mimeographed the manifesto and sold it on the street. She tried to get Warhol to produce her play, Up Your Ass, but he was only interested in giving her a few small film roles. When she shot him, for allegedly stealing her play and demeaning her life, she became an immediate icon in an emerging feminist movement.
Solanas, in SCUM, is at her most brilliant when she declares the obvious: "Life in a society made by and for creatures who, when they are not grim and depressing are utter bores, can only be, when not grim and depressing, an utter bore." One is tempted to think that Solanas could have found a home with hippie-freak drag troupe the Cockettes, who erupted in San Francisco while Solanas was languishing in a series of New York prisons and mental wards, but it is more likely that Solanas would have ended up shooting Hibiscus, the Cockettes' communal centerpiece, instead of Warhol, the art world's silk flower. For Solanas reserves her harshest criticism for hippies, stating, "The male [hippie] cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gang-banging."
Pam Tent, author of Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette, gives us a glimpse of her 19-year-old hippie worldview in a letter she writes her parents in 1969:
Last week two of my friends died. Brenda jumped out of a window at Gough Street. I guess she just couldn't exist happily inside her body. Nelson, another friend, got pushed off a roof in New York. I realize now that the only change that occurred was a release of their spirits from the third (physical) dimension.
Though Midnight at the Palace is primarily a celebration of the extravagance, creativity, and glamour of the Cockettes, so many people die throughout – first from drug overdoses, suicide, murder, and even an undisclosed "sexual misadventure," and later from long-term drug addiction and AIDS – that it could also be read as a cautionary tale.
Midnight at the Palace chronicles a lost San Francisco of communes in abandoned Victorians and thrift stores filled with socialites' opera gowns. Scattered throughout Tent's "collective memoir" are reminiscences of early gay-liberation events virtually unknown today, such as a Berkeley "come together" party at a gay community center called Sherwood Forest in 1969 that drew 500 people, or the yearly Aquarius Day Parade down Folsom Street, which predated Gay Freedom Day (which became Pride). But the memoir is primarily about the Cockettes, who performed regular pageants at the Palace Theater in North Beach in the early 1970s for ecstatic late-night crowds high on glitter, sequins, hallucinogens, and come.
The best moments in Midnight at the Palace capture the Cockettes' relentless pursuit of beauty through excess and transgression. During one Halloween show, Cockette Goldie Glitters shows up at the theater high on MDA and dressed as the third bride of Frankenstein (there are already two in the show) and is wrestled off the stage only to have a real-life seizure. Strapped to a stretcher by paramedics, Goldie waves to the crowd like she's departing royalty. Later that same night, fellow Cockettes find Hibiscus incapacitated on the basement floor underneath the Palace stage, unable to breathe after inhaling too much glitter.
The '70s was a decade of excess and also of excessive appropriation, and the Cockettes certainly did their share. Though they renounced blackface after an offending diva was physically confronted by a black audience member, their very next show featured a stage version of Madame Butterfly performed entirely in "fake Cantonese." A performance soon thereafter featured Hibiscus on-stage "as a savage temptress in jungle headdress and coconut tits ... conjuring up the tropics like a Shaman in heat." And one performance of Pearls over Shanghai, perhaps the Cockettes' most popular show, featured "an Apache dance in Egyptian drag" and a cast in orientalized whiteface, parading through Chinatown. Though Tent says, "We often exaggerated stereotypes in a silly way to show their absurdity," it is unclear whether she or the rest of the Cockettes were fully aware of the racist potential of some of their pageantry. Tent does quote an audience member at a later performance as shouting, "This is the most sexist, racist piece of shit I've ever seen!" Perhaps the ensuing fight between audience members was a testament to the Cockettes' powers of instigation.
Midnight at the Palace follows the lives (and deaths) of various members of the Cockettes up until the present, but it focuses more on individuals than on shifts in the culture at large. Paul Robinson (a Stanford University history professor) begins Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics by identifying a generational shift between queers who came of age in the early days of gay liberation and the new gay conservatives who came of age a decade later and made themselves visible in the late '80s and early '90s: Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rotello. Indeed, with their focus on sexual restraint and fidelity, adherence to traditional gender roles, and anti-left rhetoric, their ideology is a world away from the Cockettes' polysexual performance orgies (even if Tent and Bruce were only born six years apart).
Though Robinson acknowledges early on that "writing a book about gay conservatives has proved a challenge to my tolerance," his account is remarkably evenhanded. He describes Bawer's major philosophical planks: that homosexuality is a biological fluke; same-sex desire is inborn, but effeminacy in men and masculinity in women are pathologies; there are no structural ties between homophobia, sexism, and racism; and monogamy and marriage should be the goal of all gay relationships. Bawer describes a sudden epiphany in 1976, around his 20th birthday, when he perceived his own homosexuality while hugging a friend. Robinson points out that though Bawer would be loathe to admit it, his epiphany occurred a decade into the sexual revolution, and "the account of his breakthrough as a kind of immaculate conception testifies to his unexamined essentialism and his anemic sense of history." Nonetheless, Robinson closes the chapter by describing Bawer's "manifest sincerity, his cheerful willingness to say unpopular things, his genuine skill as a storyteller."
Nowhere does Robinson describe Sullivan, the most famous of gay conservatives, as "cheerful." Instead, he skillfully exposes Sullivan's endless inconsistencies, even when forced to engage tediously with Sullivan's warped logic. Nowhere, of course, are Sullivan's inconsistencies more apparent than in his actions, such as the contrast between his tirades against sexual permissiveness and his online profile for bareback sex, with the screen name "RawMuscleGlutes."
Robinson's most compelling argument is that the central preoccupations of gay conservatives, most notably gay marriage and gays in the military, have become the dominant goals of the national gay movement. Robinson blames this in part on the gay left, and he skewers Urvashi Vaid, author of Virtual Equality, a book written as a challenge to Sullivan's Virtually Normal. Robinson writes:
Like the "big tent" Republican centrists, Vaid invites gays of all political stripes to participate in the movement without concern for ideological consistency or even coherence.... However unintentionally, her book is as much a tribute to the newly acquired clout of gay conservatives as it is a defense of the familiar agenda of the gay left.
Though Robinson notes that most of the new gay conservatives were born within a few years of 1960, a bit later than the Stonewall generation, he fails to account for newer generations of queer activists politicized not just by ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers, but in activism against multiple wars against Iraq, organizing against racist state/police terror, and anticapitalist direct-action mobilizations.
Robinson's methodical analysis continues to waver in the final section of Queer Wars. He does track Signorile's path from ACT UP poster child to outing spokesmodel to denouncer of gay promiscuity and celebrator of suburban "postmodern monogamy." Yet some of Signorile's observations about body fascism and the cult of masculinity in gay male culture remain keen, and Robinson prefers to challenge Signorile's motives rather than his logic by saying, "I've learned to distrust the motives of the middle aged when they complain about the young, especially about their appearance and sexual behavior." The problem with Signorile's arguments is that he presents a false dichotomy between the bacchanalia of circuit parties and the sanity of the suburbs. These are two sides of the assimilationist coin, two choices for white, affluent gay men; in Signorile's world, no one else matters, and Robinson doesn't seem to notice.
Similarly, Robinson becomes waylaid by Rotello's "carefully reasoned" argument that the promiscuity of gay men in bathhouses in the 1970s caused the AIDS epidemic, stating paradoxically, "There might well be a Darwinian logic at work to limit sex to its necessary biological task." Has Robinson lost his mind? Is he really implying that reproduction is the "necessary biological task" of fucking? When Robinson declares, "From this perspective the contention of sex radicals that we can pursue our bliss seems naïve and utopian," he has been seduced to such an extent by Rotello's pop science about "anal multipartnerism" that he fails to confront Rotello's and Signorile's roles as mid-'90s pundits who harnessed straight fears of gay men spreading AIDS in order to enforce chastity through shame. Condoms aren't enough – close the sex clubs, their logic went – gay men are killing each other, bisexuality is on the rise, and any American housewife could be next.
The most confusing section of Queer Wars is undoubtedly the epilogue about the Showtime series Queer as Folk, which Robinson calls a "cultural watershed" and a "foil to the conception of gay life advanced by the conservative intellectuals." Though Robinson does not claim that Queer as Folk is representative of queer life, he does describe an early scene, where a "glamorous, stylish, and successful advertising executive" fucks a 17-year-old boy on-screen, as "revolutionary." When Robinson uncritically describes the depiction of Gay Pride Day in the show as "the most intense moment of solidarity," he fails to note Queer as Folk's central role in target-marketing a gay lifestyle, presenting a vapid, consume-or-die, only-whites-need-apply version of gay identity similar to that posited by Budweiser-sponsored Gay Pride parades. Robinson, born in 1940, seems unwilling or unable to critique the market-driven lusts of younger generations, preferring to wax nostalgically about "the aristocracy of youth" and the "homoerotic ideal" than to confront the tyranny of gay male beauty myths.
In one of his more cogent moments, Robinson states, "In a sense, even gay progressives now find themselves fighting for conservative causes – causes that found no place in the original platform of Gay Liberation." Nothing could be stronger proof of this assertion than George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality. Chauncey's first book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, challenged two widely accepted myths about gay culture: that it started with the upper classes and then filtered down, and that no open gay culture existed before Stonewall. In Gay New York, Chauncey revealed the roots of gay culture in the streets and among the working classes, and displayed a fascinating and widely varying gay world existing in New York as early as the 1890s. Though Chauncey uses his previous research to bolster his arguments in Why Marriage?, he does this more to foster the illusion that gay assimilation into the status quo is inevitable than to challenge preexisting assumptions about gay life. Thus, Chauncey writes, "Erasing the history of gay political disenfranchisement makes it easier to vilify gay people as a powerful, conspiratorial class whose struggle for full equality threatens the American dream instead of fulfilling it." Whose American dream?
In Chauncey's introduction, he describes President George W. Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage as a "stunning spectacle" that would "inscribe inequality into the fundamental law of the land." In this case, the only stunning spectacle is that a historian of Chauncey's stature would choose to ignore the United States' historical legacy as a country built on slavery and genocide in order to promote an unquestioning version of the "American dream" of full equality. When Chauncey invokes Gay New York to describe the history of antigay discrimination as an invention of the 20th century, he is using genuine historical insight as cover for specious assertions such as "the harsh discrimination once faced by gay people has virtually disappeared from popular memory." As Robinson says of Bawer, this "testifies to his unexamined essentialism and his anemic sense of history."
Chauncey, however, as a gay studies pioneer, is neither an unexamined essentialist nor someone ignorant of historical tides, so his description of continuing injustices as if they are safely relegated to the past becomes all the more virulent. His false neutrality as an eminent historian masks a disturbing agenda of erasure. When Chauncey declares that victory over police harassment in gay life is "by now so nearly complete that it is almost forgotten," he ignores highly publicized sting operations in public cruising areas, such as those detailed in nationwide sweeps-week TV news stories about public restroom cruising on college campuses in 1998. Most notably, Chauncey fails to mention rampant police violence against queer youth of color, homeless queers, transgendered people, and sex workers in virtually every large U.S. city. Often this violence is instigated by more privileged, whiter gays (and lesbians) in their never-ending quest to "clean up" the neighborhoods they've gentrified. Chauncey is more interested in passing off the experience of gay gentrifiers as universal than in exploring the continued marginalization of non-assimilated queers.
When Chauncey writes that "marriage was one of the primary social institutions through which gender difference and inequality were produced [italics added]," he acts as if increasing flexibility in gender roles means that marriage no longer exists as a central site of antiwoman, antichild (and antiqueer) violence. Though Chauncey is allegedly talking about marriage equality, he fails to address marriage's key role in preserving the wealth and property of upper-class white families. Chauncey prefers to declare that the "freedom to marry and secure their families was one of the most palpable freedoms claimed by former slaves" than to confront the misogynist assumptions about black men "securing their families" as property or to confront the historical legacy of slavery, which continues today through mass incarceration of black people (and the use of their labor while imprisoned) and rampant police brutality in neighborhoods of color.
In one of Chauncey's sloppiest passages, he asks, "How did we get from the San Francisco of 1960, where the mayor launched a sustained crackdown on gay bars, to the San Francisco of 2004, where the mayor issued thousands of marriage licenses to same-sex couples?" Chauncey fails to note that just a few months before Mayor Gavin Newsom directed the city to issue same-sex marriage licenses, undercover cops from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control culminated a six-month operation by handcuffing and detaining gay men in the midst of sexual play inside My Place, a South of Market cruise bar open for decades. The bar was subsequently shuttered by the ABC, and neighboring bars began hiring "sex police" to root out deviants while smiling gay couples lined up outside City Hall in the rain.
Chauncey is more interested in telling us the shocking news that "fifty years ago, there was no Will & Grace or Ellen, no Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Chauncey acts as if the militancy of ACT UP in challenging government complicity in killing people with AIDS and Bill Clinton's promise to allow gay people to serve openly in the military are part of the same trajectory. When Chauncey describes how "a million people gathered in New York to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion [and] took over Yankee Stadium for a celebratory concert," he acts as if the closing ceremony of the Gay Games (complete with performances by Patti LaBelle and Cyndi Lauper) was an activist milestone. Many would argue that "Stonewall 25" was a watershed event specifically because corporate sponsorship blatantly outweighed any celebration of resistance, history, or culture. But Chauncey directs our attention to Clinton's appointment of openly gay "quiet activist" James Hormel (think baloney) as ambassador, not to his systematic dismantling of welfare. This is all the more unsettling when balanced with Chauncey's invocation of the struggle for legalization of interracial marriage as the predecessor to the fight for gay marriage. Chauncey's interest lies more in connecting current struggles for gay white privilege to past struggles for African American civil rights than to addressing current racist U.S. policy or acknowledging any issues facing queers of color.
Chauncey endlessly points out the exclusion of same-sex couples from benefits – health care, visitation rights, inheritance rights, et cetera – but he fails to talk about the majority of queers, single or coupled (but not desiring marriage), monogamous or polyamorous, jobless or marginally employed, as well as those not entirely "male" or "female," who would still be excluded from these benefits if gay marriage were legalized. Chauncey waits until more than halfway through Why Marriage? to indicate that many queers oppose marriage not only because of its central role in perpetuating patriarchy but also because of the way gay-marriage proponents want to erase decades of queer struggle to create new ways of loving, lusting for, and caring for one another in favor of state-sanctioned Tiffany wedding bands.
Chauncey spends much more time addressing the concerns of Christian fundamentalists than those of anti-assimilationist (or anti-imperialist) queers, preferring to engage with the Christian right's view that "homosexuality is a sinful choice instead of a minority status." Chauncey weighs in on the side of minority status, which is particularly shocking given the efforts of queer activists, radicals, and academics to supplant this notion with a view of queerness as a radical potential to choose one's gender, sexual, and/or social identities. By confronting the Christian right on its own terms, Chauncey furthers the false polarization between gay assimilationists and Christian fundamentalists instead of taking the more radical approach that homosexuality and all other deviancies could be "sinful" choices that dismantle dominant systems of oppression. Or, as Robinson writes, "if gay identity is a function of society and history, friendlier social and historical circumstances could encourage more individuals to embrace it." Chauncey favors this social constructionist perspective with respect to antigay discrimination, but he chillingly silences this view on sexuality. Instead, he tells us in a footnote that Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con: A Reader, edited by Andrew Sullivan, is a "good place to start for people interested in following the intricacies of the early debates over marriage." By "early," Chauncey means those in the Bible and Plato, among others.
For a more liberating perspective on marriage, politics, and the classics, one could turn to Tricia's Wedding, the Cockettes' satire of the wedding of President Richard Nixon's youngest daughter to David Cox in 1971. The movie featured over-the-top portrayals of Phyllis Diller, Mamie Eisenhower, Yasser Arafat, Rose Kennedy, Eartha Kitt, Golda Meir (played by Pam Tent), Indira Gandhi, Jacqueline Onassis, Coretta Scott King, Mahalia Jackson, the pope, Queen Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Taylor. Eisenhower falls into a wedding cake, Kennedy thinks she's at a funeral, and disco diva Sylvester plays Scott King, belting out "I Believe" while dabbing away fake tears. When Kitt spikes the punch with acid, the celebration degenerates into an orgy of culture clash and messed-up wigs.
Tent relates a hilarious real-life account of how the Nixon administration hired a burglar to break into the film lab and steal a print of Tricia's Wedding for a secret screening in the White House basement, in order to decide whether to suppress the film. The brilliance of Tricia's Wedding lies in the Cockettes' willingness to spoof an endless assortment of luminaries. By bringing together the liberal and conservative elite with world leaders, religious authorities, and cultural deities – and trashing everyone – Tricia's Wedding exposes the pageantry of fascism disguised as matrimony. Nothing could be more relevant today.
Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the editor, most recently, of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies of Resisting Assimilation. Go to www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com.
Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette
By Pam Tent. Alyson Publications, 372 pages, $17.95 (paper).
Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics
By Paul Robinson. University of Chicago Press, 192 pages, $25.
Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality
By George Chauncey. Basic Books, 200 pages, $22.