Hey Noah. Your symposium’s topic is timely and intriguing. But one thing troubles me: why the heck is it called gay utopia? Since it doesn’t belong as a utopian project to gay men, nor is same-sex orientation, male or female, what's at the center of its content. Rather, the title's resonance depends on the recent schoolboy sense of "gay" as embarrassing, not-quite-right, etc., and more generally on how gayness functions as a put-down in milieux in which you and Bert enjoy playing and ventriloquizing.
If I choose not to enter this frame, your gayness reads not as self-mocking utopian aspiration but as misguided minstrelsy, a
topsy-turvy misunderstanding of a world actual people are building. Let me illustrate.Last Thursday, Rebecca and I went to see Dan Savage speak at Reed. He talked for a while about how gay folks need to have less sex than they can (because 1970s-level germ-swapping isn't “biologically sustainable”), how he doesn't go down on men in airport bathrooms (other than his boyfriend) because he has too much self-respect, and how he'd like to instill in his fellow gay men a healthy sense of cooties. And in this regard he positions himself as a reformer, I'll grant you, rather than as speaking for his fellow gay men. But he also talked about how when he first moved to Seattle he had 5 lesbian friends, of whom 3 are now married to men, and 2 are men; and how this simply doesn't happen to his gay male friends.
(He then went on to say that he thinks this is a result of human genetic evolution –- you may be able to get Rebecca to write down for your blog a rant (with many chunks of anthropology) about why this is a dumb theory, if that's something you're interested in.)
Anyway, the point is, calling what you're talking about “gay utopia” rather than "bi-trans-androgynous free-love utopia" (or just "bi utopia", if it's brevity you're after) comes off as rather naively bigoted, because it suggests that the only way to have a gay utopia is for people to have more hip, postmodern flexibility & freedom in their sexuality -- as if there weren't folks whose set-in-stone identity is gay, or stone butch, or what have you.
And that's surely not what you meant, nor want to promote more of in the blogosphere.
A minor note: in your message you use as examples of “gay utopia” Susie Bright and The Left Hand of Darkness. Whereas plenty of Bright's buy-more-vibrators cheerleading encourages us to think of ourselves as living in a pomo consumer paradise, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is not a sexuality-is-freedom utopia, nor a gay utopia (hello, all the sex is het sex!), nor the sort of utopia that exists only as a hermetically sealed elsewhere, rather than being imbricated in explicit, politically problematic links to the author’s society. I actually found the book really confusing and disconcerting the first time I read it, because of how much it violated my philistine genre expectations. What made the book make sense to me was M. Suzanne Menair explaining it’s a tragic love story. And the tragic androgynous hero certainly isn't shown experiencing sexuality as freedom when he gets trapped during his change with a manipulative politician, nor for that matter with the human explorer. Your invitation mentions you “find any utopian project a little ridiculous”; but I reckon utopian projects are truly ridiculous insofar as they seek to hop into an elsewhere and pull up the rabbithole behind them, or think change will bring us into a socially unmediated world, where good intentions map transparently into good results, etc. -- and am glad to know Kroeber's daughter was smarter than that.
Cheers,
Anne
PS: Yes, actually, Tibetan monks who find themselves living in exile in northern India do speak of "the Middle East". The sun never sets on the British Empire!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Anne Lorimer:
Do Tibetans Think Iran Is In The Middle East?
Or: From What Direction Is This Utopia Gay?
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