LGBT

Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.

Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?

We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.

So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?

“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.

But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?

Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.

Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn’t the people who were running around thinking, “Oh, I’m a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different,” who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, “I’m not a degenerate, I don’t want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that’s what I am. That’s what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously.”

This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.

Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].

So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?

I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that’s certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There’s this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you’re supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.

In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?

Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.

As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.

It’s more that marriage didn’t have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but  this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that’s great. But that’s not what you were in it for.

And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don’t support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that’s a huge change just in my lifetime. I’m in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women’s and men’s ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.

How do the successes of the women’s movement impact our concept of heterosexuality?

I think that referring to it as the success of the women’s movement is a little bit of a misnomer because there’ve been multiple women’s movements, and also because it’s not entirely to be credited to or blamed on organized feminism. There’s been a lot of other enfranchisement of women that’s gone on as well that has actually been not identifiably feminist, but definitely comes out of a very 18thcentury spirit of egalitarianism. But in general I think that equal rights egalitarianism has had an enormous amount to do with changing heterosexuality. Simply because once you give women and men equal or nearly equal rights to their own economic autonomy, political autonomy, social autonomy, you change the playing field, you change the dependency relationship.

Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of science arguing that there are physical differences between gay people and straight people, in their brains and even the direction of their hair whirls. You’re skeptical of this research. Why?

I question their validity primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don’t have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It’s really that simple.

All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to?  Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is?  When no one has actually established what that is.  That’s bad science.

OK. Then do you think it’s possible to establish what a heterosexual body looks like?

Well, you know, if you’re going to stipulate that it’s possible to establish what a non-heterosexual body is, it better damn well be possible to find out what a heterosexual body is.  And if one of those things is not possible, then, chances are, the other is not either.

I’m quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.

See, that’s the thing, no one is going to take that away from you.  No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed.  And that’s very, very different.  Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful.  It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street.  This is real.  It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic. 

Or innate. 

Or inevitable. 

But these categories have also been very practical. Gay rights wouldn’t be imaginable without them.

Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head.  I don’t know why that is.  I find it intensely frustrating.

Do you think the success of the gay rights movement is helping broaden our ideas of sexuality?

I think that it is having an interesting effect of making the boundaries of the categories more permeable.  Simply because we now have this doxa [omnipresent acknowledgement] of gayness in our culture where we believe that gayness is a thing, we believe that it exists, we believe that we know what it looks like, we believe that we know what it acts like, and therefore, when we see it, we’re actually very likely to say, “Hey, that over there, that looks really gay,” regardless of whether or not that person may be, in fact, gay.

Those boundaries are becoming more porous. The term “bromance” cracks me up, but it is also promising. For the past hundred years or so, a lot of men have found it very difficult to express affection and love for other men without having it assumed that that love is necessarily sexual.  And now we’re actually coming around to a place where at least some people, some of the time, are able to avail themselves of a category in which they can say, “Oh, OK, here’s a way that men can be affectionate toward each other and one another and love one another and we don’t have to assume that we know more about it than that.”  I think that that adds something to the conversation.

Women, in particular, seem to be eschewing the traditional between binaries of gay and straight these days, at least in pop culture. The same thing doesn’t seem to be true of men.

There’s a reason for that. Every queer woman I know — and I’m a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don’t consider what two women do together sexually as sex.  It’s a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you’re doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.

But men, for various other cultural reasons also seem to be more attached to categories. It functions partly as a sort of safety mechanism. 

I think there is a lot of safety in categories.  And there’s a hell of a lot of safety in a binary. When you can just say, you know, anything that is not this is automatically that.  You know, it frees up a lot of spare time.  

I have a number of friends who are negotiating the reverse of this, in that they for a long time identified as lesbians and have now started dating transmen and now have to negotiate the awkwardness of being in what ostensibly looks like a heterosexual relationship. I’ve been around several friends who, when they mention their boyfriend in a queer setting, reflexively say, “Oh, but he’s trans.”

And I think that really points as well to the fact that these are constructed categories.  This is about your subjectivity, it’s about your allegiance, it’s about where your social networks are, it’s about the kinds of cultural priorities that you embrace and that you endorse. This is not just what gets you hard or what gets you wet. This is not just about what kinds of sex you have, or the congenital configurations of the people you have sex with.  It’s very much about what cultures you participate in.  What cultures you ally yourself with, you know, whose flag you fly.

It’s interesting that transgender men and women could marry their partners long before gay people could get married, even though they are probably far more despised by conservatives in this country, simply because they fit into this heterosexual idea of marriage.

Although, that’s not uniformly true and there have been cases, like Littleton v. Prange in Texas — which still to this day breaks my heart — where jurisdictions refused to uphold the legality of marriage or partnerships involving a trans person, because they basically take the stance that you can’t change genetics and this is person was never a whatever.  And therefore the marriage is not valid.  So it does cut both ways.  I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives.

In his new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” novelist Christopher Bram uses a series of complex portraits of America’s most influential gay literary lions to argue for their position in the pantheon of American culture. The book covers expansive territory, charting the tumultuous relationship between Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, whose passionate hatred for one another lasted until the latter’s death (Vidal called it a “good career move”). It describes Tennessee Williams’ tortured relationship with his sexuality and gradual descent into alcoholic misery, James Baldwin’s struggles against racism and Edmund White’s eloquent reactions to the terror of AIDS. For anybody interested in gay culture, “Eminent Outlaws” offers a crucial and fascinating overview of  decades of American literary history. It also raises the question: In an era when being gay is considered mainstream, does gay writing still matter?

Salon spoke to Bram (who is also the author of “The Father of Frankenstein,” which was later turned into the film “Gods and Monsters”) over the phone about Gore Vidal’s importance, the death of the gay bookstore and the problem with gay men today.

As you point out in the book, literature has had an outsize role in the evolution of gay culture. Why do you think that is?

For the longest time, there were no gay characters or story lines in television or in the movies, so people had nowhere else to go but books for stories of gay life. After WWII there was suddenly a slew of them. It was surprising how many came so quickly. People could and wanted to write about it and the publishers would publish it. In my book I emphasize Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar,” but there were others. The mainstream houses backed away from gay material in the ’50s but it was picked up by smaller presses, like Greenberg and Guild. Once it started it couldn’t stop.

Why do you think the gay literary explosion happened right after World War II?

It was partly WWII itself. Gay boys who had grown up in the middle of nowhere entered the service, and found out they weren’t alone. Alan Berube, in his book “Coming Out Under Fire,” does a great job of painting this sudden awareness and huge change. Gay people also wanted to read about each other, and after WWII censorship for books loosened. Before, cities would ban any book with sexual content, and after WWII people could write about sex, even gay sex.

Gore Vidal is the major thread connecting the book. Do you think he’s the most important figure in gay literature of the last 50 years?

Yes, but almost by accident. It’s not a role he wanted. “The City and the Pillar” is a very gay book published early on in 1948. It sold very well but he got kicked in the teeth for writing it, and after that he played a little more coy. He adopted the strategy that there’s no such thing as a homosexual, there’s only a homosexual act; homosexual is an adjective and not a noun. He wrote “Myra Breckinridge” in the ’60s, which is this wonderfully polymorphously perverse novel about a transsexual who rapes a straight man at one point. It’s over the top and out there and was a huge bestseller. Then he started writing historical novels, which hardly dealt with homosexuality. But one of the most amazing things he wrote from a gay political point of view is the essay “Pink Triangle, Yellow Star,” which was sparked by a very foolish bizarre essay by Midge Decter about gay men and their identity. He tore her essay to shreds, but he also argued that  Jews and homosexuals had a lot in common, that they were both minorities that are in the same boat.

In the last few years we’ve seen the disappearance of a lot of gay bookstores around the country. What do you think this says about the state of gay literature?

That is a major change and it’s an important and worrisome one. There are a couple of factors causing it. Independent bookstores have been in trouble for a while, struggling to compete first with super-chains and then Amazon and the Internet. Now the whole book business is going to transition, and even the super-chains are in trouble. Gay bookstores were always just keeping their heads above water. But I don’t think it says so much about gay books in particular as it does about the book business.

Edmund White once wrote that “‘Will & Grace’ killed gay literature.” Do you think he’s right — that the rise of gay TV and movies has made gay writing less appealing?

I think it’s reduced the gay readership by 10 or 15 percent — not a huge amount. And those were the people who didn’t really enjoy reading anyway. For them, it was their only way to get gay stories. Now they don’t have to. Independent film has dried up the same way indie bookstores have, so there’s not as much gay film as there used to be just 4-5 years ago, but the change in TV is phenomenal. These shows matter-of-factly include gay story lines and characters and do really good jobs with them. They’re not just here as comic relief, they’re really fully fleshed out, well-drawn characters. These TV shows are following in the footsteps of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” by including gay characters in this larger world.

Larry Kramer has very forcefully argued that young gay people these days don’t respect their elders or their history. Do you get the sense that young gay men today are less interested in gay culture and literature than they were in the past?

Not really. I don’t think the current younger generation is different from mine or even Larry’s. In my generation, we hated our elders. We might like Christopher Isherwood, but there was a dislike of the older generation: “They got it all wrong, we’re going to get it right.” I think that’s a natural generational dynamic; as time goes on you learn to keep what was good from the older generations and drop what was bad. I like the generations being different. Every generation wants to carve out their own space and to some extent it’s going to mean rejecting the older generation.

But Larry Kramer isn’t alone in feeling hurt by this. What do you think spurs this particular kind of anger among older gay men?

You’re getting older and you know you’re going to die, and you’re not happy about that, so you take out your anger on the generation coming behind you. I teach at NYU, so I work with people in their early 20s and I expect us to have nothing in common but I’m always surprised by the books they like, the movies they like, the things we do have in common.

I also think older gay men are pissed off that young gay men seem entitled and don’t seem to know what gay life was like in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and especially the ’80s, during the first wave of the AIDS crisis.

Why should they know it? When they are aware of it, I’m pleased but I don’t expect them to. They’re lucky they didn’t grow up with the hardships Larry’s generation grew up with. My generation didn’t have it as harsh as Larry’s did, but I had it a little harsher than yours. It’s only natural. You just kind of have to accept that.

In his famous essay in the Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan argued that we’re witnessing the “end of gay culture,” that it’s splintering and dissolving as a result of mainstream acceptance.

Old gay culture wasn’t that solid to begin with, and [literary gay men] were always a minority within a minority. Even when gay books were the only game in town, there were plenty of gay people who didn’t read. For them being gay was about sex and going to bars and dancing. There’s still gay culture around and it takes different shapes and forms. Gay bars don’t play the same role in gay life they once did 10-15 years ago. The Internet has changed that too. I miss the gay bookstores, but I like the difference and the variety.

Do you think there’s such a thing as a gay sensibility in literature?

When Jeff Weinstein, the New York culture critic, was asked if there was a gay sensibility and if it affected culture, he said, “No, there’s no such thing as a gay sensibility and yes, it does affect culture.” I feel that way. The only thing holding these men together is that these were men who were sexually attracted to men who would write about it and about how that mixed with the rest of their lives. For some writers, [their gayness] was just one more ingredient in the stew, like Armistead Maupin. For some, sex and love with other men was everything, like Edmund White. But even he mixed things up. His new book is about the friendship between a gay man and a straight man (though I think his best writing is his sexual writing).

Speaking of Edmund White, he has very strong feelings about writers, like Susan Sontag, who were famous but did not come out of the closet.

I think if she had actually written as a lesbian about lesbian life it would have given a whole other dimension to her work and she would have been a much more interesting and exciting writer than she was. But I just think of her as a writer [not a gay writer]. The other writer he talks about is Harold Brodky. Being unable to write directly about gay life made his prose weird and baroque and really blocked him as a writer. For me, their being in the closet becomes its own punishment.

A friend of mine recently told me that he thought we just don’t have the kinds of great gay literary writers that we used to. I think we do, they’re just not known as primarily gay writers. Do you think that’s true?

There’s good stuff being done by younger writers than the old war horses. It just hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Paul Russell just did an amazing book last year called “The Unreal life of Sergei Nabokov,” following Vladimir Nabokov’s gay brother from pre-revolutionary Russia to Paris in the time of Cocteau to Nazi Germany. Peter Cameron’s last book, “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You,” was very smart and beautifully written. Bob Smith, a comedian, did a wonderful novel called “Remembrance of Things I Forgot,” about a gay man who travels through time to help his family and discovers he’s been pursued by that arch-villain Dick Cheney. And then there’s Rakesh Satyal, and the novel he published two years ago, “Blue Boy,” about a gay 12-year-old boy in an Indian family in Cincinnati.

What gay books would you recommend as must-reads to a gay kid coming of age right now.

You could do far worse than Armistead’s Maupin’s “Tales of the City”; the entire series would be a great education in itself. Maupin imagines and records this world in San Francisco where gay people are just one more piece of the puzzle and accepted as such. And there’s “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. It’s set in Paris in the 1950s, about a gay man who almost comes out but doesn’t. It’s very painful, beautifully written and it would show him what we’ve come away from. I’ll be selfish and recommend one of mine, “Surprising Myself.” It was my first novel, published in like 1987, and it’s set in New York in the ’70s — the sexual golden age.