WHO AM I? PART 2
Or
Better than Peyote!
This whole issue of how we homos define ourselves becomes very important, at least to me, because I think it is very much at the root of how we successfully address the issue of HIV prevention in the long run and baby we are in this for the long run! Having said that I am now going to ask your indulgence as I delve into the quicksand of “Queer Theory”! Trust me this should be of particular interest to those of you in Public Health currently under attack as unrepentant Nazi’s who just want to lock up all the fags! I really think you can’t help it because you do not know who we are and you therefore tend to get your panties all in a bunch about all the wrong stuff i.e. sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Don’t assume that is the whole trip! When you address gay men in sexual terms around sexual issues only you are feeding a homophobia that I truly believe fuels the AIDS epidemic.
The High Road:
“Homosexuals do not understand themselves and thus it is not surprising that heterosexuals do not understand them either”. Harry Hay, 1951.
A Higher Road:
“We must disenthrall ourselves of the idea that we differ only in our sexual directions and all that we want or need in life is to be free to seek the expression of our sexual desires as we see it.” Chuck Rowland. Mattachine Convention, April 1953.
The Highest Road:
“As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one’s self and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one’s own nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep where there is no mind, one should know one’s self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form “Who am I?” is the principal means.” Ramana Maharshi, mid-1800’s.
I would like to begin this discussion of “Queer Theory” with another quote of Harry Hay’s, with the message being I think: talk the language of the people, always something important to remember in HIV prevention efforts! “What passes for ‘theory’ today – clever essays in arcane terminology with the word “queer” in the title – rarely offers points of articulation for daily life struggles.” (Emphasis mine) Simply saying to someone “use a condom every time”, offers very few points of articulation for the daily life struggles of gay men.
Hay and anthropologist Will Roscoe are very strong proponents of the cultural minority model of the lesbian/gay community. This is a view shared by most gay men and lesbians. Not a view shared however by most folks today identifying themselves as gay theorists. The cultural minority model is essentialist in nature whereas most queer theorists would consider themselves to be contructionalists. Before I precede a word of caution, remember Hay’s comment above. Perhaps none of us gay folk have a real tight handle on who the hell we are so if this gets confusing, that is my out!
Constructionist view: “In social constructionist theory, the introduction and deployment of labels is the central fact of Gay identity and history-specifically the label “homosexual” and its use by the dominant institutions of society, by medical doctors, psychiatrists, educators, social workers, police and so forth starting in the late nineteenth century. For constructionists, contemporary Gay identities are just that – modern inventions arising from social forces and labeling practices unique to Western societies.” (Roscoe, Radically Gay.) Another way to approach this point of view might be to deconstruct the many gay male cultures with a phrase like “men who have sex with men”, and then I suppose a prevention message consisting solely of “condoms every time” might make some sense. I know there are some prevention messages more sophisticated than the “condom code”; individual “client centered counseling” for example comes to mind. This very resource intensive intervention has yet to show positive results, and I do not think it addresses the root issues that result in this person being at major risk for HIV infection, more on this when I get to the punch line.
Let me give you one example of this theoretical (constructionalist) approach in action as I interpret it and my apologies to Michael Warner if my heads is up my ass on this one, but I don’t think so. The last chapter of Warner’s 1999 book “The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life” (a must read for all in the field of HIV prevention whether you think he’s full of shit or not-he does have things to say worth reading) is titled “The Politics of Shame and HIV Prevention”. Let me quote from the last page of this chapter and the book: “Rather than specifying the form that other people’s sex should take, or reinforcing hierarchies of shame and stigma, or pretending that those hierarchies do not exist, the best work in HIV prevention begins by acknowledging the unpredictability of sexual variance (I, and many others, of course believe that being gay involves a bit more than “sexual variance”!) and working toward a world in which people could live sexual lives as part of a shared world. Prevention activism of this kind attempts to do the one thing that public policy has always tried to ban, even when policy makers have known that lives would be lost in the process: promote queer sexual culture”. Jesus, Michael, even if your analysis had extensive merit try and get the CDC to fund the “promotion of queer sexual culture”. Take a look at San Francisco right now and see what sort of turmoil this approach is causing. I am not saying that this viewpoint is totally worthless just off the mark; I would broaden queer culture to include a lot more that dicks and assholes and I definitely do not want some hetero health professional telling me who I am as a queer man!
The larger issue here for me is why depend at all on “public policy”. Even though what is involved are our tax dollars in part, when you ask “them” to pay for something, no matter how right you think it is, they have a say in the final product. An important question here then is can the various gay communities and public health departments work together around issues of HIV prevention? Unfortunately what little in the way of gay HIV prevention is occurring today is often though not exclusively originating out of health departments and/or their funded activities. The turning of this prevention responsibility over to the medical establishment has been historically a tragic mistake.
This brings me around to one of my major points. We need to bring AIDS prevention back into the gay community and incorporate it into a broader context of gay men’s health and quit running to local health departments with our hand out or worse expecting them to do it for us! (Thank you, Eric Rofes. See and read: Dry Bones Breathe, Harrington Press 1998).
So where was I? Oh yes on to my favorite world view!
Essentialist view: This view says that homosexuality is not a construction but rather “a profound ongoing motivation”. To quote Will Roscoe a bit more extensively: “…for most Lesbians and Gay men homosexuality is not a construction, not something acquired, not an accident of childrearing, but a profound ongoing motivation.”
My own experience facilitating gay men’s coming out groups in the seventies confirmed repeatedly that “Gay men trace their sense of difference to their childhood and to primarily non-sexual experiences”, again from Roscoe in Radically Gay. Some more from Roscoe; “But homophobia does not arise from beliefs about the cause of homosexuality, it comes out of irrational hatred and fear of homosexuality. Where the difference between theories of origins becomes salient, however, is in their application to the political project of mobilizing sexual minorities, in which case Hay and I argue that a theory that uncovers commonalities and builds strong identities is more useful than one which deconstructs them and offers nothing in their place”. I believe the ultimate deconstruction is “men who have sex with men”! We really can do better than this folks!
When you paint a people with the shallow stroke of “men who have sex with men” you have deconstructed them to nothing more than genitalia, homophobia at its worst. This alone is not viable enough to build a strong and healthy identity, the basis of which I believe leads to behavior indicative of respect for self and others, and just maybe a “lifestyle” that does not fuel alcoholism, drug abuse and lots of HIV.
We need to be able to mobilize the gay community around the appropriate urgency of HIV prevention. It needs to be incorporated into a much broader message of gay health and it needs to be on going. This is not going to be a one shot deal. We did this in spectacular fashion in the 1980’s essentially taking advantage of fear, but the horror of it all became so overwhelming and quite frankly boring (remember, nobody stays on high alert all the time) that we were quite glad to hand the baton over. Unfortunately the problem did not go away and seems to have crept back up on us in the past couple of years.