Gay is just one of the things about me.Īnd gay culture isn’t. I see myself first and foremost as a theorist, a creator of cool lenses for looking at the world, a teacher, an ‘outside the box’ constructor of new visions. I identify less with that Italian-American culture than with the intellectualism that got me out of there. Those I date refer to themselves as gay.Īnd yet, having come out of the closet late, I don’t identify much with what is often termed ‘gay culture.’ I grew up in a very rather homophobic, machismo inflected Italian-American community on an island in the suburbs of New York City. Others refer to me as gay, and I refer to myself that way to simplify things in many circumstances. Like it or not, I am interpellated by gay culture. But I see identification as shorthand, no matter what.īut then there is gay culture. So when pushed, I tend to identify myself as a queer person, or someone who generally dates men, or something like that. This is why I think we need something like a ‘discourse of the oppressed’ (a term inspired by the work of Paulo Friere), a form of political speech against oppression as such.
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Queer studies is a shift in this direction, but fails to incorporate anti-racism, anti-mysogyny, anti-anti-immigrantism, and other forms of anti-oppressive politics within its structure. To use terms employed by Deleuze and Guattari, we’ve got to learn, all of us, to not think as ‘subjected groups’ (‘I want rights for myself’), but as ‘subject groups’ (‘How do we make freedom possible for all, and dismantle not only the forms of oppression current today, but work to limit oppression as such?’). Queer critique argues that we’ve got to fight not only against specific norms, but the process of normalization as such. Queer studies evolved as a response to all this. Fictions of identity allow for political projects to more easily form, but they also lend blindspots to these projects, blindspots which often exclude those who don’t fit into such neat categories.
Lady gaga gay pride quotes series#
People exist in states of continual flux, and notions of identity create a fiction of ‘essence’, some notion that we ‘are’ something pre-existent or true that is then ‘expressed’ in a series of characteristics. Furthermore, I think the very notion of ‘being’ gay, or ‘having’ a ‘sexual identity’ is problematic.
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I don’t believe in sexual identity, or any other sort of personal identity, as anything more than useful fictions. I have only dated men for many years, and see that generally being the case for the future.īut if you ask the philosopher/theorist in me, you get a different story. It allows you to be categorized, and as a form of ‘strategic essentialism’, it allows you to easily slot yourself into certain places in discourse, to take up a ‘voice’ which easily aligns with particular political and social projects. The term ‘gay man’ also describes me fairly well, at least from ‘common sense’ usage of the term. I describe myself as a gay man in many situations because I feel it is a shorthand, and a useful one. When I ask what it means to ‘be’ a ‘gay man’ today, or the relation between these notions and ‘gay culture’, I put these terms in quotes because I find them problematic. Some Philosophical and Queer Studies Disclaimersįirstly, a few disclaimers. Lady Gaga is a symptom of a huge problem. And by us I mean all of us – gay, straight, and others. Let me just say this: I think Lady Gaga is ruining ‘us.’ I think its time we get over her, and get over gay culture. What might it mean to ‘be’ a ‘gay man’ today? What is ‘gay culture’, and how does that relate to what it might mean ‘to be gay’ today, in 2010? And as is usual this time every year, I’m filled with deep ambivalence.
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So tomorrow is the day of the LGBTIQ Pride day in New York City, where I live.