Harvard University Press Blog

Gay Marriage and Gay Culture

“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.” So writes David Halperin in How To Be Gay, expressing the contentious notion behind his controversial University of Michigan course of the same name. “‘Gay,’” he continues, “refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do... Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.” American gay male life, he argues, is reflective of “a common culture” and “shared sense of self” that must be acquired, a “characteristic relation to mainstream culture” that must be “discovered” by gay male subjects who “resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”

To Halperin, gay culture is something of value, able to enhance or enrich the perspective of people of any sexual orientation. But for Halperin, as for others, the gay rights movement seemed to have prioritized “normality” in ways that both denied and jeopardized gay culture, perhaps nowhere more so than in the effort to legalize gay marriage. With the U.S. Supreme Court having deemed same-sex marriage a right, we look to Halperin’s take on what “gay marriage” might mean for “gay culture.”

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When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation—that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole. It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage equality, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now become struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. They are reframed to center around social recognition, the definition of citizenship, the meaning of patriotism, the practice of religious worship, the idea of family. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in the rhetoric of the movement, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.

In such a context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, intangible, nebulous, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate. What would gay people want nowadays with a separate culture anyway? Such a thing might have made sense in the Bad Old Days of social oppression and exclusion. Now it is simply a barrier to progress. It impedes the achievement of assimilation. No wonder we keep asking, with barely suppressed impatience, why gay culture doesn’t simply disappear. Surely social acceptance and integration will spell the end of gay culture. Since gay people are no longer so oppressed, there is little reason for them to band together in separate social groups, let alone to form distinct cultural communities. The assimilation of gay people into straight society has put an end to all that. Gay culture is a vestige from an earlier time. It is archaic, obsolete. Gay culture has no future.

These predictions, I believe, overlook a crucial consideration. Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance.

Still Separated by the Length of Two Swords

Like set pieces of life, duels and their drama have starred in Western literature for centuries, a history presented by John Leigh in the newly-published Touché: The Duel in Literature. “Writers are drawn to duels,” Leigh explains, “in the interests of discovering something fundamental about human beings and the way they variously organize and delude themselves, the way they face one another, their fears, and, ultimately, death.” Fiction’s many famous bouts have helped the duel to sustain a cultural heft resonant of both honor and absurdity, able at a mention to evoke intense and complex emotions of a nature known to every era, as Leigh shows below.

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In the weeks before last month’s General Election in Britain, politicians had begun to look bored by their own campaigns. The Premier League had already been won, the royal baby was refusing to appear, and the weather was dull. Suddenly, however, a challenge to a duel was made public, and a nation stirred. Yanek Zlinski, who was identified by the media as a Polish “Prince” (the application of the scare quotes has yet to provoke any further challenges), had invited Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), to cross swords in Hyde Park.

The proposed duel, of course, never took place. But Zlinski had made his point. He wished to suggest that UKIP’s stance on immigration, which comes largely from the poorer nations of Eastern Europe, constituted an affront rather than an argument and did not deserve to be dignified by opposition in dialogue. Furthermore, by challenging the Englishman to a duel, he intimated that Poland remained a no less honourable member of old Europe, enjoying with Britain a common allegiance to a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture.

The stunt would indeed appear to hark back to noble traditions of political antagonism, when campaigns (honouring the etymology of that word) would take politicians out onto the field in order to sort out their differences. Of course, the opposing sides in the House of Commons are still separated by the length of two swords. Yet this direct appeal to one of the party leaders may actually be a symptom of the Americanisation of British politics, for television debates, recently introduced into the UK after considerable debate about their form, appear to have encouraged the electorate to envisage leaders as more presidential personalities.

Not So Dismal After All

“Not so dismal,” ran the headline in The Economist. Early every summer, the city of Trento in the Italian Alps hosts a four-day festival of economics that punctures the idea that economics has to be a “dismal science.” Banners of famous economists hang over the medieval and Renaissance streets, huge orange tents host temporary bookstores, politicians (this year the Prime Ministers of Italy and France) rub shoulders with journalists, and a gigantic screen broadcasts lectures to crowds in the square outside the cathedral—a necessity considering the overflow from the packed palazzos, theaters and public buildings that host the free talks.

HUP was well represented at this year’s festival, which ran from May 29th through June 2nd. Tony Atkinson (pictured on the banner above) talked to a full house on the subject of his book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Julia Cagé spoke about her forthcoming book on the economics of the media, and Thomas Piketty (on screen below) not only spoke on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but was featured in “The Factory of Inequality,” a theatrical event that combined readings from Balzac and Austen with accordion music and charts from Piketty’s book.

A Century of Widener Library

This month Harvard commemorates the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, the university’s flagship and still the largest university library in the world. Along with lectures and events celebrating the library’s life, the university offered the following “ode,” narrated by actor and Harvard alum John Lithgow:

 

To mark the completion of an extensive five-year Widener renovation project in 2004, the Harvard College Library published Widener: Biography of a Library. The book, written by then-Harvard Library Bulletin editor and current metaLAB Associate Director Matthew Battles, tells the story of Widener as that of higher education itself in the midst of the social, political, and cultural tumult of the twentieth century. It’s above all, though, the story of an unsung institution at the center of all that the university was and has become:

The story of Widener is as much the tale of the students, staff, and scholars who used it as it is the record of benefactors and collections. In the life of a library so richly faceted as Widener, one dimension is as irreplaceable as the other. The life of Widener emerges from the archival traces of those people who worked in and used the library; in library rules and regulations; in the letters of students and staff; in the notes and reports of its caretakers; in the photographs and drawings of it, inside and out. Amid its products—the stream of publication, lectures, and courses that flow from it—traces of Widener and its history are obscure. In our historical sensibility, libraries are transmitters not subjects, of historical knowledge. Historian Alistair Black has called the library a transparent institution—its condition is that of medium, not message, and still less messenger.

Battles’s metaLAB home has done much to further our thinking on libraries lately, from The Library Beyond the Book, by Battles and his metaLAB colleague Jeffrey Schnapp, to Cold Storage, a terrific documentary look at Harvard’s offsite book depository, to the drone-shot footage documenting the very scale of Harvard’s collections, as seen in both Cold Storage and Lithgow’s ode above.