GAY AND AFTER by Alan Sinfield (Serpent’s Tail)
Towards the end of this riveting study, Alan Sinfield evokes “an almost forgotten moment, the early 1980s – when the pop charts featured Boy George, Divine, Marc Almond, Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. You couldn’t get into Lesbian and Gay Soc discos (as we called them then) for straight men checking out the scene and slopping their beer around. Then HIV and Aids gave opportunity to the tabloids, the bigots and the New Right, and suddenly we were fted no more. We cannot assume that current prospects are any less precarious, should history take a new turn against us.”
Sinfield’s main focus is on Britain and North America, but his cautionary note is one that South Africans should hear too. Major recent gains in gay and lesbian rights do not mean that what Sinfield (borrowing from Nicholson Baker) calls the straightgeist (on the analogy of zeitgeist) has suddenly cleaned up its act and become ineradicably gay- friendly.
The following four examples are all from the local media in recent months. The Johannesburg chairman of the International Islamic Movement berates The Star for its “support of homosexuals, gays, lesbians, perverts and what have you”. Stephen Mulholland objects to outcomes-based education in part because it teaches that homosexuality is normal (I think he means “natural”). He considers it “immoral and dangerous to teach kids that aberrant behaviour is normal”. (His gruesome fantasy appears to be of a planet occupied normatively by grey- suited Mulhollands.)
A Sunday Times reviewer of Shaun de Waal’s These Things Happen thinks she is praising his short stories by claiming that they “transcend their gay territories”. (Transcend to what? As Sinfield argues, this idea of art “tends to subordinate other cultures: [art] is defined as not special to a locality, gender, sexual orientation, race. It `rises above’ such matters – and, in so doing, it pushes them down.”) And even this newspaper felt able to carry a nauseating piece of heterosexist gloating, by Ed Vulliamy, in response to George Michael’s arrest in a Los Angeles public toilet. Straightgeist indeed.
How have gay identities been constructed and how adequate are these in a market-ruled global structure? How might gay communities respond to their present, frequently contradictory positioning by the straightgeist (for example, they are represented as intolerable and vilified over Aids – and yet courted with increasing explicitness as consumers)?
Addressing these questions, Sinfield’s range is exhilaratingly wide. The first chapter puts Michelangelo (“let’s have the big names on at the start”) alongside the Pet Shop Boys. Metropolitan sex-gender concepts and practices are relativised and unsettled by a consideration of marginalised cultures (Taiwan and Latin America in particular, though South African moffies, skesanas and injongas get a look-in too).
Gay and lesbian artists and theorists such as Jean Genet, Derek Jarman, David Leavitt, Monique Wittig and Camille Paglia are among several resources critically re-assessed for their sexual-political potential now.
Two main arguments run through the whole book. First, lesbian, bisexual and gay people would do well to recognise the processes of subcultural work through which they become who they are. Lesbian and gay subcultures, Sinfield argues, are the aggregate of what lesbians and gay men do: “They are where we may address, in terms that make sense to us, the problems that confront us … The alternative is the continuing dominance of straightgeist accounts of ourselves.”
Second, he explores how the historically constructed idea of gayness, and perhaps lesbianness too, might now be hindering rather than helping. Metropolitan concepts of sex and gender have framed sexuality as less diverse and mobile than for many people it is, so a conceptual move into “post-gay” should be entertained, in which “it will not seem so necessary to define, and hence to limit, our sexualities”.
Sinfield admits that these two arguments pull against each other: more purposeful subcultures against more diverse sexualities. But it is not his case that subculture denotes ethnic-type “purity”, far less does he want a party line. Rather, the aim is to “build on the diverse strengths of our constituency, to enlarge it, and to politicise it”.
Diversity should be celebrated; it can also be problematic. With bracing honesty and unsentimentality, Sinfield observes that “Les/bi/gay subcultures confer no spontaneous immunity to oppressive attitudes and practices … We experience among ourselves serious racism, misogyny, ageism, snobbery.”
Equally, respecting cultural, political and social differences means that no universal gay politics can be insisted upon. So, even as Sinfield delineates limitations in metropolitan gay and lesbian models, he acknowledges Zackie Achmat of South Africa’s National Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Equality. Citing the example of the woman who, because of her relationship with another woman, is being imprisoned and beaten by her husband, Achmat calls for a stronger presence of metropolitan models for sexual dissidents here.
Gay and After is witty, erudite, warmly humane and astonishingly lucid and accessible. It should be read by anyone the straightgeist affects -in a word, everyone.