Category: Gay Politics

There is a quite charming article on the Independent’s site today – Confessions of a Gaydar junkie – which is about one of the world’s most successful (and mostly unsung) pieces of social software: Gaydar. Like most truly dedicated social software enthusiasts, I have – of course – forced myself to investigate the service, although with a certain amount of disappointment and embarrassment I feel compelled to confess that I’ve never actually met anyone off it. I suppose that means that my dedication to the cause of computer-mediated social interaction has some limits. Either that or I’m too embarrassed.

Anyway, the article is particularly good value, which I suppose you might expect since Mark Simpson wrote it. Mark – you will recall – wrote the rather irritating/insightful book Anti-Gay. He writes of his experiences:

“Moralists who protest at gay e-promiscuity should be encouraging the Government to provide gays with grants for permanent broadband connections, since the internet not only keeps them off the streets and out of the parks, it turns all that messy sexual energy and appetite into … typing. Gays have become the unpaid secretaries of desire, filing and cataloguing human weakness. Promiscuity is now a form of bureaucracy. Tedious, eye-straining, number-crunching slave work. Don’t bother feeling jealous, all you sexually frustrated, non-online non-gays: internet cruising is its own form of punishment.”

Well obviously, I’m not really into a position to comment on all that stuff, being at least as inadequate at pulling on a site dedicated to the process as I appear to be in real-life (is it the beard, do you think?). But there are some other aspects to the piece which I think are interesting in terms of the relationship between the internet as a place for social interaction and as a means unto itself. I’ll give you an example to end with – which although perhaps presented in rather absolutist terms is certainly entertaining enough to be worth reporting as fact:

“You see, the real efficiency of online dating, just as with internet anything, is not the way it delivers you lots of pointless sex without leaving the house, but the way that it ensures that you will be spending more time on the internet.”

Yesterday (via new-favourite-weblog Let Me Get This Straight), I stumbled upon an article about a Bronx senator and a conservative legal group in Florida who are suing the Harvey Milk school in New York with discrimination. The Harvey Milk school is the target of this attack because it is ‘the gay school” – it’s being accused of discrimination because (apparently) it discriminates against straight students (Lawsuit challenges gay high school). Now the school is unlikely to have too much trouble with this threat because it’s actually open to students of any sexuality. It’s perhaps not too much of a shock, however, that only gay students really want to enter into a programme that’s marked as being particularly capable of meeting their needs of people who are experiencing problems at their schools on the basis of their sexuality. I’d love to see the barely-hidden smile when they say, “We’re open to anyone who’s having trouble at their schools because of their sexuality – so find me a straight kid who’s being beaten up and harrassed by an overwhelming force of gay students and is being failed institutionally by an entirely gay staff and they’re in…” In fact in many ways this whole enterprise is a really bad idea for the anti-gay people – they’re just providing a platform for gay activists to detail all the ways in which our education systems fail gay teenagers [cf. On Homophobic Bullying in Schools].

Now I’ve had a couple of conversations with friends about the Harvey Milk school and they’ve been quite surprised by my feelings towards it. They assume it’s a kind of ghettoisation and that we should instead be fighting to make all schools gay-friendly. Certainly, this isn’t an uncommon feeling among gay people – the respondents to the Let me Get This Straight post aren’t uncritical. But I’m not critical at all – in fact quite the opposite. First and foremost I’m supportive because the specifics of the functioning of the school aren’t really encapsulated in the phrase ‘gay school’ very well – I think there’s generally a misunderstanding about what the school is there to achieve and when you explain its function to people, they pretty much get it immediately. It’s not there because gay children are a problem, and it’s not there to try and detach them from straight people or ‘normal’ life in any way – it’s there because the kids are getting regular, daily harrassment in their current school – harrassment that is almost impossible to control, permeates everywhere and can be extremely dangerous. Of course these things should be fixed at the source – school shouldn’t be a homophobic environment – but while they are, in extreme cases, you can understand the reasoning…

The other aspect of this is more complicated and I think it’s got something to do with the geographic distribution of gay children. Now the most obvious grounds for discrimination are probably things like religion, race, background or gender. For every single one of those things, while there are some schools in which one religion, race, background or gender might be in a significant minority, there are other schools in which the same ‘type of person’ will be in the majority. In religion, race and background these things are likely to be geographically determined – what’s a minority in one place will be a majority elsewhere. And (all things being equal, as in fact they never are) that means that there’s always the possibility of moving to a place where your child will not be judged on the basis of that one signifier.

Gender is different of course – there isn’t (for example) a massive geographical clumping of women around Nottingham. But still – there’s a roughly 50/50 split in boys and girls in pretty much every reasonably sized area in the world, so any places where there are lots of boys will mean a different place with lots of girls nearby. And of course – in terms of gender and schools – there are more often than not only really three stable states – girls only, boys only or roughly 50/50 (with exceptions of course for schools that place different emphases on subjects that attract one gender more than the other but are open to both – not uncommon, but also normally evened out by the presence locally of schools that complement them).

Now gay kids are in a different situation. Firstly, they’re not in any way geographically clumped. If living in a specific area would normally mean that the people you go to school with would be on average more similar to you on all the axes of religion, background, income and race (language even), it bears no relationship to whether or not they’re going to be gay or not. This makes it quite distinct from the geographical spread of gay adults, who tend towards cities where there’s more opportunity to clump into interest communities and lifestyle communities. But gay parents don’t necessarily have gay children, if they have children at all – so even in the most gay areas on the planet, there are still going to be no more gay kids than the 0.5% – 10% seem worldwide.

So they’re not geographically clumped, but nor are they evenly balanced like the genders. Gay kids represent a disreet chunk of the school-attending population – but not a particularly large chunk. The figures for the incidence of homosexuality among adults vary dramatically depending on which study you believe, but the consensus is that it’s probably somewhere between 0.5% and 10%. At school, the figure of kids who are out to their friends and families (let alone to the world at large) will be considerably smaller than this figure.

So what does this mean? It means, fundamentally, that gay kids will pretty much always be in the minority at their schools. They’ll pretty much always be considered the freaks and they’ll pretty much always have to see themselves as strange, different or abnormal. In this they probably have much more in common with groups with unusual inherited mental or physical attributes that have the potential to ostracise – and that’s everything from severe physical handicaps all the way to the unusually bright. Some of these groups we don’t have second thoughts about schooling differently – autistic children or the insanely clever for example. Others (those with physical problems for example) we try to integrate into local schools – because we believe that whenever possible a physical problem shouldn’t be a reason to stop an individual having the same options and opportunities as anyone else.

So that brings us to gay teenagers – what group are they in? Do they deserve access to the same options and opportunities as everyone else – clearly yes. But do they also have needs that aren’t likely to be met in a school in which they’ll always be in a radical minority. I’d say yes to that too. A gay teenager should have the opportunity while at school to realise that there are loads of other people like themselves, to forget – for a while at least – that they are not like everyone else. They should also have the opportunity to meet and date and flirt with other teenagers without wondering if they’re going to get beaten up. They should have the ability to have crushes on people without it being statistically inevitable that they’d have them on straight people. They should have the opportunity to do all that learning about relationships and going steady that are open in principle to straight people in general (even if many straight kids don’t feel able to take advantage of them).

So where does that leave us? Clearly the Harvey Milk model isn’t right for every gay kid or – indeed – even every big city. Nonetheless something needs to be done. There has to be some way for all gay teenagers to have someone to advise them without worrying that their secret will get back to their families before they’re ready to tell them themselves. And there has to be a way for gay kids to have those Dawson’s Creek moments that their straight friends wander through without realising how lucky they are. Maybe better guidance counsellors and gay summer-camps are the answer – who knows… But let’s not close our minds to the option of schools that advertise themselves as gay-friendly just yet, eh? The situation’s too grim at the moment to shut any options completely off…

So through the magic of a constantly updating Google News RSS stream to NetNewsWire¹, today I stumbled upon a piece in the Orange County Register called Manly Images. It’s an article about how John Ibsen – a researcher into early photography and masculinity – has discovered that men before the 1930s were much more intimate with one another:

“From the dawn of photography before the Civil War through the 1920s … it was customary for two or more American men to visit a photographer’s studio to have their portrait taken together,” he writes. “Posing for the photographer, the men would often drape their arms nonchalantly around each other and would sometimes hold hands.” These days, he notes, a more common way for adolescent men to spend time together is to go to the movies on a Saturday afternoon – and even then, they are likely to sit with an empty seat between them.

Immediately I was reminded of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of the relationship between homosocial relationships and homosexual relationships. She argued that man-on-man friendships have been structured around the continual disavowal of any gay component – that the neurotic denial of any sexual component either was recently or has always been one of the most significant structuring principles of society’s conception of how men can relate to one another. And indeed, if you read the article further, this is one of the assertions of the article itself.

This new reticence, he noted, coincided with the introduction of a new way of thinking about sex. “The notion of people having a specific sexual identity is a modern notion. People weren’t nearly so much inclined to think of sexual identity before the late 19th century,” he says, noting that the word “homosexual” comes from a German word that was coined only in 1869. But in short order, homosexuality and homophobia came to be intertwined with the concept of masculinity and what it means to be male.

But if men used to be more comfortable with one another’s bodies and the physical expression of affection, could they be so again? It’s quite possible that this comfort was directly connected to the invisibility and complete suppression of concepts of homosexual relations. Or it could be that there simply wasn’t as much anxiety associated to such relations. But I’m afraid I think that it’s more likely that having a free and non-disenfranchised gay community probably means (at least in the short-term) a greater degree of anxiety for straight men. Until – that is – we move even further from the stereotypes and the repression and find a place where people no longer feel ashamed even to be suspected of being gay…

Note 1: Courtesy of voidstar you can get a bespoke Google News RSS-feed via this incredibly simple basic format: http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?q=gay&num=15 – where in this case ‘gay’ is the word I want regularly updated news about…

I suppose this is an example where a politically neutral examination the transmission of a viral entity through a network suddenly takes on a huge weight of real-world issues and commentary and ends up looking totally different. Jason Kottke has written an intelligent post about the spread of HIV through the gay community outlining some of the areas that one would have to examine more fully before it would be possible to make a statement like: “Although he was considered part of a high-risk group, HIV is host agnostic. With just a slight twist of events, the virus could have first found its way into the straight communities of North America.”

All well and good, except that analysing anything to do with as emotive and politically volatile as HIV or ‘gay culture’ – however indirectly – may end up accidentally buying into some of the language and unspoken ideologies that have been weighed against same-sex relationships. I’m just going to highlight a few of the unspoken assumptions and issues that I see emerging from Jason’s post – while appreciating as I do so that it clearly wasn’t his intention to say anything politically dodgy.

Jason asserts of Gaetan Dugas, alleged Patient Zero within American soil: “since Dugas was a homosexual, he probably got it from another homosexual who got it from another homosexual, etc. By the time it got to Dugas, AIDS was probably already established in the gay community; he just accelerated its progress.” Clearly being in a high-risk group (gay men having unprotected anal sex with a variety of partners) it is likely that he would have contracted the disease through his relationships. But the assertion that since he was gay he caught it from other gay people doesn’t follow and gets dangerously close to supporting the ‘gay plague’ position that was prevelant when I was a frightened teenager growing up in rural Norfolk. In fact he or one of his partners may very well have contracted it from another person or species of animal of sexuality unknown. More importantly large numbers of people contracted the disease through infected blood transfusions or by blood contact via injury.

And if he did contract it from another gay person that doesn’t mean it was established in the gay community. If it was a disease that jumped species, then it’s just as plausible that he contracted the disease from a gay member of the ‘farming’ community. All these community structures have frayed edges and bleed into one another.

Which brings me to another point of argument, the stereotype of a community of ‘promiscuous homosexuals’ as if this group existed world-wide as a uniform monoculture. Actually instead this community was to a large extent culturally isolated among a particular metropolitan liberal west coast culture of gay men – and even then probably amounted to just the most visible and socially active component of the gay people in that area.

This gets even more complicated when you bring time into the equation as well – because it’s not promiscuous homosexuals that spread diseases – it’s nothing but particular exchanges of bodily fluids – and in the age of the readily-available condom, that translates to the statement that it’s ignorance and lack of information that spread diseases (not the gender or sexuality of the people concerned at all). I know for certain that there’s a generation of gay people today who have loads of sex with a large variety of people but manage to do so while being very much less likely to contract or spread STDs simply because they are more careful.

Which brings us right down to the crux of the matter – when Jason asks whether the partners of straight people are “more or less likely to spread the disease through their own promiscuity than the partners of promiscuous homosexuals” he makes at least one implicit accidental move that throws his whole post into question. Because if we are isolating homosexuality as a risk-factor in the spread of veneral disease then we also have to consider that gay women are far far less likely to contract or spread HIV than almost anyone else. Because the issue here is not that promiscuous homosexuals spread disease, it’s that people who have had unprotected anal sex are more able to transmit HIV than other people – whether they be straight, gay, men, women or anywhere in between…

So the story goes like this… A friend of mine who used to work at The Express is talking with some friends in the office. She happens to mention me in conversation. A passing acquaintance of hers stops with a start… “Tom Coates?” she asks… “You know Tom Coates from Time Out?” My friend nods… The acquaintance gives a disapproving look… “I’ve heard things about him,” she says. “He’s supposed to be incredibly homophobic…”

You have to laugh. But then you also have to stop for a moment and look around nervously. How did I get here? My tendency to jokingly call other people poofs has got me into considerable trouble in the past, although my habit of referring to myself a great big poof has got me out of just as many… I always assume that the joke is understood – that people get that because I have strange trouser-feelings towards other men, I can say the word ‘poof’ when other people can’t… As a result it feels strangely liberating, and weirdly a bit like it’s challenging some entrenched conceptual positions somewhere down the line… So in one way, I suppose, it’s a statement of personal resolve with a little bit of overt confrontationalism thrown in for good measure.

More interestingly, perhaps is the way this kind of behaviour acts as a weird kind of bonding agent between traditional advantaged (straight) and disadvantaged (gay). I don’t know if it’s a collusive, mutually-useful, atmosphere-reducing strategy though or whether it’s all that and also a weird kind of selling-out. Does it buy into or even support our culture’s nervousness about the potentially sexualised aspect of man-to-man friendships? [check out Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet if you’re interested in this stuff]

Here’s another example for you… An old (straight) friend once looked mischievously towards me just as I beat him in an argument and said – in the most school-boy style that he could manage – “Yeah, well maybe, but you’re … a big homo!” After I’d spat my drink out of my nose, and howled in delighted outraged glee, I did the only thing I could do in the spirit of the occasion – I said, “Am not! Take it back! Take it back! You’re a big gay homosexual…” As I look back at this I can see more clearly than ever that this episode was basically a disavowal of any sexual component that might exist in our relationship. The fact that each of us felt capable to declare in turn, and comfortably, that we weren’t big homos – even when we both knew quite clearly that one of us was and was pretty comfortable with it – was evidence that our relationship had become easy, comfortable and free. But at the same time, in retrospect you wonder if this is an appropriate way to structure your sexual identity.

When I look at my relationships with gay men, they’re strained at best. I have a few very close gay friends in London – many less than I had in Bristol. Some are close as family to me, some of these ponced off to New Zealand and deserted me and I don’t see why I should forgive them. But while I’ve always found overly heterosexual posturing tedious, after a flirtation with gay identities, I’ve also come to find the trivial assembly of scene-based identities in London deeply irritating – even repulsive. There’s more honesty in the basic down-and-dirty sex that happens continually around London than there is the posing and posturing of the gay scene. Or at least so it seems to me at the moment.

I suppose, at thirty, I’m finding myself at a weird crossroads. Am I a self-hating gay man who finds himself unable to feel anything but repulsed by the community of my fellow poofs? I don’t think so.. But there’s something wrong, somewhere… Else why would I feel so invisible? Why would my sexuality have deteriorated so fundamentally in importance to me. Most people I meet don’t know I’m gay. Many people who read this site don’t know I’m gay. Despite being best poof in the world once, significant gay sites have just not even noticed my man-friendly tendencies… But this is wrong! They should know. It’s important to me. Maybe the answer comes from another story… I’m walking down a street with a straight friend of mine, and we’re watching the hot boys walk by, and I’m lamenting my lack of relationship (for the thousandth time) and asking if they thought I was just criminally fucked-in-the-head and they reply… “Tom, I don’t know how to say this, but I hope you’ll take it as a compliment… I don’t think you’re in the slightest bit fucked up about being gay, I think you’re fucked up about everything else…”

I had a really nice evening last night. Really cool. But I don’t want to talk about that. What I want to say is that wandering through Soho last night I experienced my first public piece of badgering because of being gay. First ever. I don’t mean by this that I’ve never had people wander past a bar I’ve been at and shout stuff in – because I have. And I don’t mean by this that I’ve never met people who don’t think that being gay is evil or stupid or disgusting, because I have.

But this was the very first time ever that I’ve actually experienced a group of people outside name-calling and being physically intimidating and aggressive. Except they weren’t really that intimidating at all. The whole event was startlingly stereotypical – but also very brief, and – I think – easy to rise above. You can almost understand it – insecure teenagers trying to assert their heterosexuality to their friends, trying to look hard. It’s a bit sad, but not particularly worrying.