[NYTr] Winning Queer Culture Wars

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

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ZMag Online  70:7/8- Jul/Aug 2007 
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2007/bronski.html

Gay & Lesbian
Community Notes

Winning Queer Culture Wars

By Michael Bronski

Having just come back from the 2007 Z Media Institute where I taught
classes on Queer Theory, Queer Organizing, and Pop Culture, I am
reminded of how much of progressive politics happens is connected to
popular culture. Social change happens in all sorts of ways, but one of
the most important ways that queer issuesfrom acceptance and
accommodation to equality and overt influencehave become manifest in
the mainstream has been through various facets of popular culture.
Indeed, to a large degree, gay and lesbian influences in popular
culture have completely changed how many people in the U.S. (and in
many parts of the world influenced by American culture) not just think
about queer people, but how they think and act about their own lives.

Since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the underground gay counterculture
has consistently, and vitally, influenced mainstream popular culture in
style, music, fashion, language, sexual mores, and politics. Maybe this
was a homosexual agenda about which the right wing complains endlessly,
but it was embraced by many middle Americans who were happy to enjoy
something that was different from their own lives. More important, it
liberated them from the constraints of their own imaginations and
self-imposed limits.

To celebrate this progression, here are ten decisive moments that chart
the gradual queering of U.S. culture.

1970: Bette Midler

Although she has turned into a nice liberal who sings songs like The
Wind Beneath My Wings, in 1970 Bette Midler, mixing an outrageous blend
of camp, sex talk, and Andrews Sisters tunes, began performing at
Manhattans gay Continental Baths. Within six months, she was one of
Johnny Carsons favorite guests and in early 1973 her LP The Divine Miss
M went gold. Midlers enormous popularity brought a gay male camp
sensibility to a huge audience and made it okay for women to talk
blatantly about sex in public. Midler showed mainstream culture that
the gender and sexual threats of gay culture was also its enduring
promise and liberation for everyone else.

1972: Ziggy Stardust

If the Rolling Stones shocked middle-class sensibilities with their
rough, thrusting swagger, it was Ziggy StardustDavid Bowiewho in 1972
singlehandedly invented glam rock, making androgyny, glitter, face
paint, and ambi-sexual posturing the newest threat to red- blooded
American youth, spawning artists such as KISS and Boy George. Bowie
claimed in 1972 that he was bisexual and then ten years later claimed
that he did that just to get attentionmore attention than
cross-dressing, wearing make-up, kissing men on stage, and singing
about alien sex? But it didnt really matter, for millions of young
listeners Bowies image and message was that imagination and sexual
desire mattered more than gender and sexual orientation.

1977: The Village People

In 1977 producer Jacques Morali manufactured the disco sensation the
Village People, who satirized butch gay-male stereotypes. What began as
an insider parody sold more than 85 million albums and YMCAa testimonial
to anonymous gay-boy sexis now a staple of summer camp sing-a-longs. It
was followed a year later by the satirical Macho Man and a year after
that by In the Navy, whose message about sex between men was even
clearer. The Stonewall Riots were only eight years old and the movement
had made such enormous cultural advances that AM radio could now play a
barely coded song about gay sex that little kids sang along with. Was it
any surprise that an enormous anti-queer backlashspearheaded at first by
Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children campaignbegan at this cultural
moment?

1984: Madonna

Her impersonations of Marilyn Monroe in her 1984 Material Girl video and
her 1990 hit Vogue made Madonna a premiere conduit of gay culture to the
young masses who may not have known the exact origins of her images and
dancing, but had no problem emulating her. Along with pushing the
envelope in discussions of gender and sexshe and Sandra Bernhardt went
on late night TV numerous times claiming that they were lovers. Madonna
insisted that people take her notion of being a possibly post-feminist,
liberated woman seriously. She sang songs about being like a virgin
(quite different from being one) and was vehement in her endorsement of
gay rights.

1985: Rock Hudson

Rock Hudson, the 1950s most vital, masculine, heterosexual heartthrob,
died of AIDS-related infections in 1985, making his long-rumored
homosexuality visible. His ravaged face on the cover of People and
supermarket tabloids brought home the horrors of the AIDS epidemic to
millions who had chosen to ignore it. If this could happen to Rock
Hudsonone of Hollywoods pantheon of gods and goddessesAIDS must be a
serious problem. But more than the culture shock that was the result of
his illness and death, there was also a new understanding that life
beneath the tinsel of Hollywood was queerer than moviegoers had
previously suspectedand that the women and men you welcomed into your
hearts over the years were not what you thought them to be.

1992: Calvin Klein

Mens bodies have always been sexualized in gay-male culturePhysique
Pictorial of the 1950s became the template for male bodies everywhere.
But in 1992 photographer Herb Ritts upped the ante with his Calvin
Klein ads, which brought a gay-porn sensibility to Vanity Fair. With
Calvin Klein using huge images of near-naked men on billboards in Times
Square, mass culture had to admit that the passive sex appeal that had
always been consigned to the female form was now granted to the
traditionally less-fair sex. While well- filled briefs and prominent
nipples became the erotic currency for ads for mens clothing and
colognes, they also indicated that the appeal of being the sexual
objectthe body being looked at, the body being objectified, the body
being desiredwas socially and culturally permissible.

1997: Ellen

In 1997 Ellen Degeneresthe most famous soft-butch in Americacame out
on her TV sit-com. The show was cancelled a year later, but Ellen made
Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Queer as Folk, and
The L Word possible. While none of these shows are great (Will and
Grace could be funny; Queer Eye is product placement for hair
conditioner), they were all part of a massive television normalization
process by which likeable queer people became as American as Lucy and
Desi Arnez, June and Ward Cleaver. The ultimate effect of this was not
simply to bring gay people into our living rooms every night, but to
destabilize the very notion of televised normality that U.S. culture
had promoted for decades.

1998: Dennis Rodman

Dennis Rodmans 1998 autobiography Bad as I Wanna Be was as revealing as
his flagrant display of body art. Rodmans fondness for tattoos,
piercings, flamboyantly colored cranial plumage, and wedding dresses was
shocking to not only sports fans, but most of mainstream America. But
Rodmans imagery came straight out of queer male subculture. A triumph of
mix-messaged drag/punk/biker gay sensibilityit was a precursor to the
milder metrosexual, but a throwback to the dangerous sexual deviant.
Sure, in many ways, Rodman was a fabulous freak, but he was also a major
contradiction to traditional ideas of what it meant to be a man.

1998: Sex and the City

Its no surprise that critics thought Sex and the City (1998-2004) was
the ultimate integration of gay-male sensibility into TV. It was written
by gay men and its edgy sexual dialogue and plots were gayer than Will
and Grace. Is this what heterosexual women really sounded like in
private? Only their screenwriters knew for sure. Sex and the City gave
birth to the idea that women could chat about desire and sex as much as
men, the message that Bette Midler was preaching to the newly converted
in 1972. The public voice of women speaking about sex was deeply
connected with gay male life and culture. Heterosexual freedom, once
again, turned out to be a copy of queer life and love.

2006: Mark Foley et al.

In September 2006 Florida Republican Congressperson Mark Foley resigned
amid allegations of improper behavior toward male pages. Heterosexuals
breathed a sigh of relief that it wasnt, yet again, one of them. When
evangelical big-shot Ted Haggard admitted to having a three-year
relationship with male call-guy Mike Jones in November 2006, it became
clear that the undies of fundies were not always where they should be.
The popular press promoted this as though it was just another Brad Pitt
break-up or one more Paris Hilton breakdown. Foleys indiscretions
evinced another crack in the facade of Republican respectability and
Haggards queer dalliances proved that the rapture was closer than
people thought. Both of these incidents proved the old gay lib adage:
we are everywhere. But, aside from the gossip value, the idea of the
gay conservative provided popular culture with another, always
evolving, model of the sheer instability of queerness. There were no
real, sturdy walls between gay and straight between the immoral and the
righteous. From Bette Midlers breezy camp talk to Madonnas gal pals to
big, tough bruisers in white wedding gowns, America is increasingly
becoming (at least metaphorically) the land of the free and the home of
the queer, whether you were queer or not.

Z

Michael Bronski is the author of Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden
Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martins Press).