Fifth Annual Gayness Cure Walk

From The Onion:

raising funds and awareness to help cure, and eliminate, 

the "debilitating psychosexual disease" of gayness.

Calvin Klein's Male Underwear Models

Nice vid from the New York Times.

See: Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, "The Gay Marketing Moment: Leaving Diversity in the Dust," Dollars and Sense, November—December 1993.

One of the most famous of the models: Marky Mark (later better known as Mark Wahlberg). This is from the early 90s:

Cynthia Nixon on homosexuality as a choice

From the wonderful blog, A Paper Bird.

Recently, Cynthia Nixon gave a speech in which she said that her sexuality (gay) is a choice. This set off a lot of criticism from within the LGBT community. A Paper Bird defends here. Here are some excerpts.

"First of all, no one should be forced to surrender their personal identity to political obligation. That’s the antithesis of a liberal society, and has nothing to do with any campaign for human rights. Second, no one has the right to decide or define anybody else’s sexuality for them — to select, for God’s sake, what you can say about yourself...

The problem is that, in the US, we — the LGBT movement — have staked all our rights claims on the analogy with race. We are a people; we have our own culture and history, even though the categories that define us (so we contend) don’t; and, most importantly, our selves, like our skin colors, cannot change. Sexual orientation is something deep, unalterable, basic. It’s because it’s unchangeable that discrimination predicated on it is so wrong. And so we’re not defending people’s freedom; we’re defending their imprisonment in themselves.

It’s when people try to escape that prison, even for a day’s parole, that we treat them as traitors to the cause.

Of course, this kind of argument is absurd — even about race. It ignores the innumerable historical experiences of “passing,” the different ways that white as well as black people have been defined, the differences in race’s definition around the world...

supposing “sexual orientation” is unchangeable ignores the fact that the category itself has changed since it was invented, and that it was only invented a hundred years or so ago. Sexuality, as Foucault grasped, doesn’t reveal some “truth” about us...

In the politics of identity, bisexuals are hated because they stand for choice. The game is set up so as to exclude the middle; bisexuals get squeezed out. in the “LGBT” word, the “B” is silent...The business of “outing,” of which Aravosis has been an eloquent proponent, also revolves around the excluded middle...

What, moreover, if sexual orientation itself is not “a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being,” one that people miraculously started feeling in 1869, when the word “homosexual” was coined?...

What if our model for defending LGBT people’s rights were not race, but religion? What if we claimed our identities were not something impossible to change, but a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it?"

Gay Parenting in the South

"Parenting by Gays More Common in the South, Census Shows" by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, January 18, 2010

A fascinating article. Here are some excerpts:

...as demographers sift through recent data releases from the Census Bureau, they have found that Jacksonville [Florida] is home to one of the biggest populations of gay parents in the country.

In addition, the data show, child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gay couples in Southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than their counterparts on the West Coast, in New York and in New England.

The pattern, identified by Mr. Gates, is also notable because the families in this region defy the stereotype of a mainstream gay America that is white, affluent, urban and living in the Northeast or on the West Coast...

Black or Latino gay couples are twice as likely as whites to be raising children, according to Mr. Gates...They are also more likely than their white counterparts to be struggling economically.

Experts offer theories for the pattern. A large number of gay couples, possibly a majority, entered into their current relationship after first having children with partners in heterosexual relationships, Mr. Gates said. That seemed to be the case for many blacks and Latinos in Jacksonville, for whom church disapproval weighed heavily...

About a third of lesbians are parents, and a fifth of gay men are. Advocacy groups argue that their children are some of society’s most vulnerable, with fewer legal protections and less health insurance than children of heterosexual parents.

Even so, their ranks have been mostly left out of national policy debates, because the Census Bureau did not conduct its first preliminary count of same-sex couples until 1990. This year, the bureau will count married same-sex partners for the first time.

Read the entire article here.

"Love Supreme: Gay Nuptials and the Making of Modern Marriage"

Adam Haslett, writing in The New Yorker, May 31, 2004. An excellent account of the debate, the issues, and the modern institution of marriage, to date.

According to the 2000 census, the first to collect such data, there are five hundred and ninety-four thousand same-sex couples living in the United States (and that’s no doubt an undercount, given people’s reluctance to report their sexual orientation to the government). But marriage requires the consent of a third party—namely, the state.

The Straight State

Review of Margot Canaday's The Straight State in The Nation, by Steven Epstein. Excerpts follow:

For some time now, scholars of sexuality (following in the footsteps of those who have studied and challenged the race and gender hierarchies embedded in state policies and actions) have professed the analytical goal of what historian Lisa Duggan, writing in 1994, called "queering the state." These scholars have argued that the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple, and the unnaturalness of alternatives, is presumed and reinforced in the ordinary workings of government. Canaday's substantial contribution is to trace, in gripping and at times horrifying detail, exactly how the United States came to operate in this fashion over the course of much of the twentieth century. The Straight State provides a compelling history of the designation of "the homosexual as the anticitizen."

...For Canaday, "the state" is no abstraction. Taking a fine-grained approach, she insists that the state is "what officials do," whether it's worrying about what transient men get up to when the lights go out or deciding which men and women who served in World War II should be issued the "blue discharges" that made them ineligible for benefits. (There were about 9,000 cases of the latter.) In particular, it seems, what officials did was develop elaborate screening mechanisms to police the boundaries of belonging. Early twentieth-century immigration inspectors were warned to watch for what were described as "striking particularities in dress, talkativeness, witticism, facetiousness...flightiness...unnatural actions, mannerisms, and other eccentricities" that might serve as the telltale signs of sexual perversion to be excluded at the port of entry. (The all-too-common "hidden sexual complexes among Hebrews" merited special vigilance, according to the Marine Hospital Service doctors who lent their expert gaze to the task; they also pointed to the "beardless face [and] the high pitched feminine voice" that were so often found among Italian men.) Around the same time, examiners of military recruits were instructed to screen out those males who "present the general body conformation of the opposite sex, with sloping narrow shoulders, broad hips, excessive pectoral and pubic adipose deposits, with lack of masculine [hair] and muscular markings." Especially in these early years of state attention, the array of suspect perversions was diverse and diffuse, but the markers of excludability were written on the skin for the trained observer to detect at a glance. As the bureaucracy grew and officials adopted more varied and sophisticated tools for what anthropologist James Scott has called "seeing like a state," officials strove to recognize forms of abnormality unbecoming to citizens that only gradually came into focus as what are now taken to be gay and lesbian practices and identities.

Canaday's argument is that in the United States, the processes of state-building, the exclusion of sexual minorities from the ranks of citizenship and the definition of a modern concept of homosexuality were mutually reinforcing...

Modern notions of homosexuality and the modern US bureaucratic state grew up together, Canaday argues. And this coincidence of timing, she suggests intriguingly, may even help explain why the state became, and remains, more officially homophobic than many of its counterparts in Europe, where the bureaucracy was already consolidated before homosexuality emerged as a concern to be reckoned with....

The larger argument, however, is that a history of the modern American state is simultaneously a genealogy of what we now take to be homosexuality. In the early period covered by the book, immigration and military personnel spoke not about homosexuals but about perverts, mannish women, men who displayed (in a curious turn of phrase) "feminism," "wolves" who preyed on younger men and the "lambs" who were their prey. This mix of bureaucratic, medical and colloquial lingo described a hodgepodge of varieties of gender inversion and nonnormative sexual practices. Over time, though, homosexuality took shape in its modern guise, defined less exclusively by gender roles and more by what psychoanalysts called "sexual-object choice": the sex of the desired partner. At the same time, "the homosexual" stabilized as a type of person defined by a knowable preference or orientation that was manifested in its "tendencies" even when behavior was absent. The story of this shift has been told before, but Canaday's innovation is to emphasize the role of the state, and not just medical and psychiatric experts, in these redefinitions...

Importantly, though, Canaday does not imagine that the state was in a position simply to etch its categories and meanings onto individuals, as if the latter were blank slates. Instead, she describes a complex process of mutual reinforcement and resistance, similar to what the philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls "looping effects," whereby powerful institutions categorize what they see people doing and present those understandings to the categorized, who may then internalize them, change them or reject them in ways that influence categorization down the line. Canaday describes how many of those caught in the spotlight of state scrutiny ended up reconceiving who they considered themselves to be...

It's worth underscoring the novelty of Canaday's approach. Much recent LGBT history, following in the footsteps of historian George Chauncey's pioneering book Gay New York, has been resolutely local...a focus on the state also allows Canaday to go further in linking the politics of sexuality to those of gender and race. On the one hand, she suggests how state administration of sexuality both resembled and differed from its management of gender and racial categories. On the other hand, she is attentive to the intersections, analyzing, for example, how the treatment of queer immigrants by federal authorities varied according to the immigrants' race or national origin, and considering how the attempts to drum lesbians out of the military accelerated precisely as women began making stronger claims for inclusion in the institution...

A crucial question to ask, however, is, What impact did all of this policing have on those who were not caught directly in its web? After all, most gay people (or people who engaged in homosexual behaviors) never brushed against it, and many of those who could have been trapped were never even spotted by military, immigration or welfare authorities...

What were the ripple effects of state action? Canaday argues, plausibly enough, that what is "individually devastating" can also be "broadly powerful"--that policies about immigration, military service and welfare eligibility sent clear messages that permeated the whole society. Yet she misses opportunities to prove the point or analyze this saturation in any detail...

J-Setting: Beyoncé revises Madonna

For now, this post on J-Setting will have to serve as a kind of place-holder. Beyoncé famously used J-Setting in her "Single Ladies" video. Another black gay dance style, this one, Southern, brought--for a moment--into the mainstream.



The March 2009 issue of Vibe has a longer and very useful piece on J-Setting, but it's not available on the web, and the links to Southern Voices on the Rod 2.0 Beta post are...down. More later, hopefully. But here's a teaser.

J-Setting, according to Vibe, originated at Mississippi's Jackson State, with the Prancing Jaycettes, the female dance line of JSU's marching band. In 1970, the Jaycettes (later, Jaysettes), abandoned their batons and began dancing in formation, but keeping their signature moves.

In 1997, DeMorris Adams joined the JSU as a baton twirler, the first male to do so. So developed the male, and eventually gay, cross-over...

Lisa Duggan, on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall

Very important interview, from Democracy Now!

"...many grassroots organizations, like the Audre Lorde Project, which was just represented here, have very broad goals and define queer issues as being the issues that affect most of us, rather than the issues that affect only gay people. So, for instance, healthcare and access to healthcare is a big issue for queer people. The access to homeless shelters that are queer-friendly is very important for queer youth. A very large proportion of homeless youth are LGBT."

See Duggan's article in The Nation about trend-setting Utah here.

Photo by me, of exhibit in window of the Stonewall In, West Village, New York City. (Original here.)