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Published in 2003 this lesbian feminist author addresses the masculinization of the gay liberation movement post-Stonewall from the ‘70s to the ‘90s. How previously it had been understood that sexism was the source of oppression of gay men and women. And that homosexuality and heterosexuality was a social construct, not a fixed identity from birth. And in order to change society coalitions needed to be formed with other marginalized groups. But the resulting temperance of the gay liberation movement that evolved from this premise came to be seen as oppressive and moralistic because it did not jive with the sexual desire that was the driving force of gay male identity at the time. Gay men wanted to celebrate sexual freedom in all its many forms i.e. public sex, sadomasochism and other transgressive acts including sex with underage youth. At the same time a gay sex industry sprung up to capitalize on this male sexuality, chiefly by producing gay male porn, operating bathhouses, sex clubs and bars.
Male sexuality the author states is based in dominance of other. There is always a “top” and a “bottom”. Hypermasculinity in gay porn forces gay men to commit to a male heterosexist power structure that is central to their oppression as well as the oppression of women. And gay sex in that sense reinforces the sexism of this dominance. Especially in the SM community. While public sex offers a rite of passage for initiates.
Lesbian feminists who objected to this dominance factor were ridiculed for being sexually boring, moralistic and prudish. Some lesbians decamped and took to imitating gay male sexuality including SM. They embraced this shift in identity by adopting the term queer and justifying it as revolutionary since transgression on the level of dress and performance will bring down the ‘gender’ system as Judith Butler put it. And the more types of performances the better from drag queens to butch/femme lesbians to transexuals.
The ideas of a French philosopher Michel Foucault who was a gay man and a sadomasochist who was also interested in lowering the age of consent, was sourced as the basis of queer theory. And in challenging the certainty of the binary gender system queer theory could ride in on the coat tails of post-structuralists thought, popular in universities at the time. This post-structuralist thought refused the certainty of identity of any kind.
Gay sociologist Stephen O. Murray took queer theory to task for being unoriginal in claiming that playing with gender was revolutionary and called it ineffectual intellectual pretension. Transgression (as it was embraced by queer theory) is a comfortable kind of night clubbing activism writes Sheila Jeffreys. One that doesn’t require any actual work like writing your congressperson or changing laws. She posits that queer theory, rather than abolishing gender maintains it by reproducing dominant and submissive behaviors with ever more diverse pairings. It maintains the currency of gender in opposition to the feminist project of the elimination of gender. Likewise transexuals maintain male dominance and female subordination by surgically correcting those persons who do not fit the standard sex stereotype. Transexuals joined with LGB in part because of the theory that homosexuals had brains of the opposite sex.
The most scathing criticism of queer politics is that it was trivial in its obsessions and antithetical to any politics of real change. Instead playing into neoliberal capitalism by creating ever more types of individuals with which to be commodified by the sex industry i.e. porn and supportive industries i.e. body piercings, leather and spike haircuts. This movement having come at a time when neoliberalism was having its heyday with Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. Lesbians felt excluded by queer theory rolling everyone under the same political umbrella because it kept them from asserting their differences as distinct from that of gay men.
The author illustrates these differences by pointing out the misogyny of gay men as expressed by what was known as the “ick factor”—the feelings of revulsion for women’s bodies that a third of gay men feel. Thus accounting for the epithet “fish boats” thrown at me and my girlfriend as we walked down the Castro at the time. Also the rejection of feminine men and Asian men as expressed in the request of want ads specifying “no femmes, fats, or Asians”. (Those with a fetish for Asian boys go to Thailand.)
She devotes a chapter to public sex becoming a part of the queer theory agenda. Previously public sex had been explained as an adaptation to oppression that forced gays to meet in parks and public toilets. This public sex then creating a market for the bathhouse culture, sex clubs, bookstores and bars all with back rooms for sex. Under queer theory public sex was reclaimed as part of the revolutionary acts that would liberate all of humanity from the shame of sex and forced monogamy as claimed in the 1972 book Homosexual Desire. And superior because everything is possible for bodies to plug in anywhere at any moment outdoors outside of the confines of domesticity. Lesbians not having a penis to plug in were not included in this analysis. And lesbians even under oppression did not seek sex in public. Public night time spaces being too dangerous for women of any persuasion.
Once AIDS struck, any writer trying to link the epidemic with the bathhouses and other sex venues was struck down and silenced. Nor did the bathhouses close until much later. In the 1990’s with a fresh wave of diagnosis gay male critics underwent investigation into gay male sexuality in an attempt to keep gay men alive. They proposed that gay men rejected from society were driven into the gay ghettos where they found themselves in the sex liberation cult of promiscuity supported by mafia run venues where they proceeded to embrace the lifestyle and cultivated a deteriorating health across the community including bowel diseases as well as all kinds of STDs.
Gay men investigating these alternate concepts to the party line were attacked as being fascist by Sex Panic an activism group formed to protest sex club regulation in New York City in 1997. Similar sentiments were voiced to protect gay male pornography as crucial to gay men’s identity. This sense of entitlement in promiscuous sexual liberation was also shared by straight men as an expression of biological forces beyond their control. Although it was further argued that this turns out not to be the case. That such urges are socially encouraged as a marker of masculinity and power.
A chapter is devoted to the rise in female to male transexuals in the late 1980s and 1990s. And how trans activists tried to make the distinction that there is no correlation between sexual orientation and gender identity. A study the author cites of FTMs does not confirm this distinction, but instead finds that many FTMs were alienated by the lesbian feminists of the day who criticized such role playing butch lesbians as aping patriarchal constructs. Also cited is the desire to avoid societal violence and disapproval by passing as men. This alienation from the lesbian community as well as the desire to pass is a theme of the book Stone Butch Blues.
An added dimension of SM was to cultivate a dissociative relationship with the body through the destruction of body boundaries. This dissociation explained by the male to female transgender Susan Stryker as a stepping stone to transitioning since such practices made his body “seem as inherently unstable as a blob of gelatin wrapped in rubber bands”.
As a reader who came of age during the time of the hyper masculinization of the gay movement my response to this book was filled with memories. At the time of the AIDS crisis I was shocked that anyone would suggest that the gay male lifestyle brought on the epidemic. Nor did I realize that fist fucking and rimming (analingous) were new practices that further eroded the body. I identified with gay male culture. I thought and still think that gay male sex is hot, especially between strangers. In my fantasies I participated as a gay man. All the stereotypes of hyper masculine men in Tom of Finland appealed to me (except for the fist fucking and rimming). I understood power sex and was turned on by it. I have an instinctual feel for it because of being raised by two hierarchal cultures with strict taboos. I was not interested in SM. That seems to appeal more to those who have been abused, dominated or incested as this book also claims.
I avoided lesbian feminists because they were tedious and no fun because they took themselves so seriously and didn’t approve of any role playing or drag. However when sex clubs became accessible to women on women’s only night I thought the public sex was laughable with all the monitors and their plastic baseball bats making sure women practiced safe sex licking pussy through a latex barrier. I thought the lesbian version of gay male porn was crude. Stripped of male power and the expression of male biological urges it seemed pointless and ugly. Love between women to my mind required lengthy stories with a heart connection and decent dialog with high cinematic production values.
I did not for a minute think that all these lifestyle choices would inform politics. I didn’t understand politics at the time beyond the desire for acceptance.
This book clarified for me the part lesbian feminism played in creating an opening for some feminists to split off and create queer theory for themselves as performers of butchness. Though few of these queer theory feminists became men. And their privilege protected them from any social need to pass as men i.e. Judith Butler. To understood identity as a performance is to see that it is just a game. These renegade lesbians once safely integrated into male academic society became the trans approved feminists (of the Butlerian Jihad) while the original lesbian feminists who still centered women became hated TERFs and were robbed of the support for women only spaces by this split.
This feud carries on to this day successfully black listing all of those (including this author) who dare to exclude men who identify as women from women’s spaces even those who still have male genitalia as 72 to 90% do. Such lesbian feminists have been effectively silenced, robbed of their opinion and analysis. Even the category of lesbian is suspect. Now it is straight women academics and journalists who are stepping up. They are chiefly alarmed by the dominance of trans ideology and its impact on children burdening them with the ideological concept that they may be born in the wrong body. The consequences of which are just beginning to come out in the form of regrets by young women who transitioned to trans men and back again. As well as being increasingly alarmed at the violation of women’s sovereignty.
From a non Western point of view looking at this Western cult of the individual, people sure are having a hard time being incarnate in human bodies. Their identities have become so politically important that very little perspective is left if any to actually make sensible public policy for the collective society. And the gay community has become an all or nothing high stakes political football that suffers no temperance, aggressively policing everything anyone says that might impede the trans agenda. What happens to a society that no longer listens to women who voice concerns about women? I await what karma may befall such an imbalance.
Tono came to Europe to contact resellers of his hats. He posted a message in the Queer Couchsurfers group and decided to put Holland on his visit list and stay with me for a few days. Tono is a very relaxed guy, who knows how to enjoy and take the most out of life. We became friends while we were having lots of fun partying, walking with the dog, sightseeing, making dinner and we shared some serious talks too. I took him out to a multicultural gay party in Basta, where he met several other latin guys. They danced so cool and hot! Two guys wanted to join us in the taxi back home, we found out that one of them is living just around the corner of my house. It was already 3 am but the guy invited us for a drink at his place. After drinking a beer the latin guys started taking off their and our pants.... I realized they wanted to make a naughty home party. Although the guys were really good-looking and hot I was not in the mood for this kind of fun, as I had to get up at 7 am to be in time at my work. So I went home to sleep. Tono stayed as he was enjoying himself very well. A few weeks later Tono came back to The Hague again, to visit me before flying back to Ecuador.
Totally unique in the history of Vancouver’s LGBT community, Queer as Funk brings together some of the city’s hottest musicians in an explosive, high-energy dance band.
With repertoire ranging from beloved funk, soul and motown classics of the 60’s and 70’s (Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder) to contemporary favourites (Amy Winehouse, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars), Queer as Funk is also the sharpest-dressed suit-and-tie band in town.
I was at a cupcake workshop, and they were doing all these "CUTE" kinda things, and I thought, "what if I made queer cupcakes??" Like the hanky code on a cupcake? A bear claw on camo backround? A red flagging and of course..the Leather Pride flag.. Don't think the teacher got me.
Based on the British series of the same name, Showtime's 'Queer as Folk' presents the American version. Following the lives of five gay men in Pittsburgh, 'Queer as Folk' is a riveting drama full of sex, drugs, adventure, friendship and love. Although the creators of 'Queer as Folk' wanted to present an honest depiction of gay life, it is by no means a comprehensive depiction. In addition to the usual sexual escapades and relationships of the five friends, the show explores critical gay political and health issues...
Sub-Zero, Kano and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat at Flamecon 2022.
To see my other cosplay pictures, including all previous Flamecons, click here.
Queer Zine show opening - the show is up through August 2009.
"Yes I Am, But Who Am I Really?"
Queercore zines and ephemera from the late 80s through 90s
QUEER LIBERATION MARCH arrival at Central Park Great Lawn in New York City, NY on Sunday afternoon, 30 June 2019 by Elvert Barnes Photography
Before Start of Rally
Follow Reclaim Pride Coalition NYC Sunday, 30 June 2019 QUEER LIBERATION MARCH & RALLY at www.facebook.com/events/2124948934418624/
Elvert Barnes 2019 QUEER LIBERATION MARCH docu-project at elvertbarnes.com/NYCQueerMarch2019.html
49th NYC LGBTQ WORLD PRIDE 2019 docu-project at elvertbarnes.com/NYCGayPride2019.html
Queer Master Tapes is a collection that rescues iconic album covers and reimagines them through a luminous, contemporary queer lens. Each image feels like a secret recording finally brought to light, honoring classic vinyl aesthetics while bending them with desire and identity.
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