‘Oh, we’re post-gay” — that was a reported comment in the wake of last weekend’s lesbian and gay Pride parade, from a couple who didn’t attend. It was doubtless said light-heartedly, and may have expressed no more than a lack of any desire to go parading.
But ”post-gay” is also a new addition to the heap of slippery terms people use to define their sexualities, in the same way as ”post-feminist” has come to indicate attitudes allied to classic or mainstream feminism but also in some way deemed to have moved beyond it.
”Gay”, like ”lesbian”, denotes a sexual identity. It began to replace ”homosexual” in the middle of the 20th century, coming up from demi-monde slang into the common parlance. ”Homosexual” was invented in the late 19th century, as the disciplines of medicine and psychology gave birth to sexology — and so an identity was born.
This meant that the emphasis had shifted from sinful acts that potentially anyone could commit to the delineation of a specific group of people, the essence of whose being was their propensity for such acts.
But the emergence of a homosexual identity also made resistance to oppression possible. Once you have an identity, and you are certain that it is innate rather than chosen, you can begin to fight for your freedom on that basis. This has been called the ”ethnic model” — along the lines of people who agitated for their rights as black people or as ethnic minorities, gay and lesbian people mobilised for their rights.
And it worked. In South Africa, at least, we have a Constitution that protects citizens from discrimination on the basis of ”sexual orientation”.
The Pride parade celebrates a battle won, though the fight for legal recognition of our marriage-type relationships is the new frontier. This really enrages conservatives: it’s as though they are deeply annoyed that the moffies want to be more like them.
In any case, identity politics all around the world are under strain. Particularly in the post-colonial world, identities assigned by cultural and ethnic histories and traditions are shifting as cultures develop and the world changes. Identities themselves, we realise, are not immutable essences but historically contingent constructions.
Traditional gay activists may baulk at this — it feels like the Christian view that sees homosexuality as a sin the individual has deliberately committed. (Why? To bring down Western civilisation, perhaps.)
There is some distance, however, between having feelings of attraction to a member of the same gender and assuming the identity ”gay” or ”lesbian”. To name oneself is a political act, and the beginning of agitating for one’s rights.
But it’s not the end: naming is always a problem. The word and its meaning keep slipping away from each other.
Look at how the gay rights movement has had to keep adding words to be as inclusive as possible. ”Transgendered” and ”intersexed” are now added to ”gay”, ”lesbian” and ”bisexual”. The awkward portmanteau ”lesbigay” was floated at one point, but it didn’t survive long.
”Post-gay”, then, could mean a number of things. It could mean that in the lives of the individuals concerned being ”gay” isn’t as important as it once was.
Perhaps it has become tedious to keep harping on such a self-definition. At a certain point, even we moffies have to let the banners fall and get on with our lives — doing our jobs, having and raising children, that sort of thing.
We can do that, though, because we are relatively free already. And for many in our society, that freedom has still to be fully realised. If identities such as ”gay” and ”lesbian” help them, I’m all for them. But I’d hate those very identities to be prisons, too.
A recent book titled Post-Gay discerned a contemporary movement away from rigid categories of sexuality, a greater tendency and capacity to play across the boundaries.
Even those who have affirmed their identities as a way of demanding their rights must acknowledge that one’s sexual desires and responses are fluid, and that to be defined as a person only in terms of one’s sexual orientation is restrictive and reductive. Identity can be as much a burden as a boon.
The idea of ”post-gay” also points in the direction of the way the word ”queer” is now often used. This former insult has been turned around, as it were: it is a self-chosen celebration of any sexuality that opposes the norm. It is not an identity so much as an anti-identity; it accepts its own indeterminacy.
”Queer theory” is a loosely allied body of critical work that resists identity itself; as Michel Foucault saw it, instead of clinging to our sexual identities and the relationships determined by them, we should be seeking out entirely ”new relational possibilities”.
Take the notion of ”queer” as anti-normative further, and one begins to see that norms themselves are hopelessly fractured from within.
Even Freud saw that what was deemed to be the standard heterosexuality of the human majority had its imbedded fetishes and perversities. The norm may not be very normal after all.
Yes, we need identities (and sexual identities) if we are to fight for our rights. And we must be acknowledged in all our difference and diversity.
But why insist on neat oppositions like ”straight/gay”? We’re more complicated than that, surely. Why stay in the boxes of even our own self-definitions?
We make and remake ourselves — that is freedom.