Fifty Books Project 2023

 

How To Be Gay by David Halperin

 

Halperin is a classics scholar who teaches cultural history and literature in the English Department of the University of Michigan.  He became somewhat notorious in the early 2000s when he taught a class at UM with the title “How to be Gay.”  The class was an examination of gay culture, but was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who claimed it was an attempt to convert straight students and Halperin became a target of right-wing ire.  This volume combines the vision of gay culture that he was teaching in that class with a good deal of personal history and storytelling.  The analysis of what gay culture is, where it comes from and why it is important is full of fascinating observations about sexuality and its relationship to culture.  He is upfront about the limitations of his study – he is almost entirely focused on white gay men and understands that his work has little of any specificity to offer black men, trans people or lesbians.

 

Halperin’s chronological story actually begins a decade earlier than the Limbaugh story.  He describes himself as a young professor eager to use the new freedom the Stonewall rebellion had afforded him.  In the mid 90s, he offered a course in gay literature, to offer young gay men the chance to see themselves within the confines of the literature classroom.  The class had a large enrollment and there seemed to be universal excitement around the class’s purpose.  Halperin was surprised over the next few weeks to discover that the students were bored with the discussion and did very little of the reading. (He does not supply a syllabus from that class.). However, he noticed that there was a great deal of interest among these young men around the career of Joan Crawford and her 1945 movie Mildred Pierce.

 

Up to that time, Halperin was of the opinion that the stereotypes around gay culture – that gay men loved Hollywood musicals, opera, and the careers of certain women including Judy Garland and Ms.Crawford – had become irrelevant with the gay rights movement and the sexual revolution.  Young gay men of the 90s were no longer forced to hide their sexuality and seek out coded ways of expressing themselves.  They could have relationships and pursue sex openly rather than sublimate through old movies or home furnishings.  The reaction to his gay lit class made him rethink those assumptions and the relationship of gay men to pop culture.  His insights are fascinating:

 

According to Halperin, being gay is not simply a matter of sexual object choice.  Despite what Halperin sees as a concerted effort on the part of the gay marriage movement to portray gay men as the same as other men in all ways except their choice of sexual partners, Halperin argues that none of us, gay or straight, is a sexual being in a vacuum.  All of us develop our sexuality within families and within the culture as a whole.  Straight people are not simply responding to their hormones as children and adolescents – they are responding to the messages about how to pursue romance, relationships, sex and partnership that permeate the music they listen to, the movies and TV shows they watch and all of the other methods the culture has of sending messages.  Straight people, in other words, learn how to be straight.  The obvious problem is that gay boys and young men also learn how to be straight.  They must find a way to express their sexuality within a straight culture.  As Halperin puts it, “Before they have sex, they have genre.”  

 

His argument is that young gay men need to find aspects of straight culture that offer them the chance to express their place within the culture before they can begin to come out or develop relationships.  Those aspects must offer both legitimate avenues of emotional expression and a critique of pop culture’s modes of cultural expression – a way for gay men to be both inside and outside the culture, to use it and also critique it.  Two of these avenues are camp and melodrama.  Much of drag, according to Halperin, is camp, giving gay men a chance to both express emotions and mock the stereotype of women as emotionally overwrought.  Certain pop culture figures have become gay icons (he focusses on Joan Crawford) because they are at once authentic and mockable.

 

The need for a complex approach to culture carries on as gay men form relationships.  Halperin points out that for straight people, falling in love is at once passionately spontaneous, marking them as individuals separate from the mass of society and  totally conformist, fulfilling society’s very well-communicated expectations of them.  For gay men (and, presumably, lesbian women), falling in love can only fulfill one of these purposes – it is a passionate, individual expression that marks them as outsiders, incapable of conforming.  He argues that even the expanded inclusion of gay characters within pop culture – in movies, music, TV, etc, simply mark gay men’s extreme minority status.  He argues that there will always be a need for gays, lesbians and trans people to mediate their relationship to mainstream culture – in his words, to “queer” the culture.

 

Halperin’s title refers to the importance of this process and of gay culture to gay adolescents – boys and men her refers to as “proto-gay.”  Each gay youth does not have to find his own way of managing this relationship to the culture on his own.  Finding a gay community is often accompanied by an introduction to aspects of gay culture.  He recounts his own introduction to Broadway musicals as part of his transition to an open life.  This view of gay culture may be based on stereotypes, but, Halperin argues, those stereotypes not only contain some truth, but carry some purpose and value.  

 

Part of his argument is that the post-Stonewall has ignored the importance of this culture.  His generation, and those younger than him, act as if the availability of sex is all that mattered, that  the elimination of the closet eliminated the need for gays to manage their relationship to the culture.  He argues that there is more to sexuality than sex, that there is more to being gay than sex.  Gay culture expresses how gay men relate to mainstream culture and, Halperin believes gay men will always need to find a way to queer that expression.

 

The book was published in 2012, before gay marriage was legalized nationwide.  Much has changed in the culture since then, and it remains to be seen how Halperin’s observations will be changed as mainstream culture makes more and more room for gay life.  Certainly, ten year old gay boys are managing their relationship to a very different mainstream culture than they would have in 2012.  However, it seems to me that Halperin’s arguments may be more universal than he realizes.  He discusses the fact that gay boys are taught how to be straight men by their families and by our culture and need to find a way to manage the ways that they are different than the straight role models they are offered.  Of course, straight boys are also taught to be straight men and need to manage the ways that they are different than the role models they are offered.  To the extent that those role models are narrowly athletic, emotionally limited, perhaps overly macho – or to the extent that the role models offer an unrealizable ideal – straight boys will also need a way to queer that experience:  to find ways that their individuality fits within the culture that pressures them to conform.  Perhaps gay youth are not the only ones who should be open to gay culture.