Customer Reviews

Anti-Gay (Sexual Politics)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This brief book confirmed my private suspicions about so much of "Gay" life: that it is reckless, vulgar, mindless, irresponsible, a ghetto, etc. If you read this, you will be offended - or you will acquire the independence of mind to stop trying to be a clone in order to be homosexual. Many gay men and women (and I speak as a gay man) do not have the wit to understand how they can love members of ther own sex without buying into the usual boots/buzzcuts/anti-femininity (if you are a lesbian) mindset or the catalog X/camp humor/bar culture (if you are a gay man) mindset/prison. There are a great number of acidic and very funny (and correct) observations here. Yes, it is negative. How could it not be? Some have complained that this book offers no solutiions or alternatives. I do not see why it should when the answer is very simple. We need to grow as human beings and not define ourselves and validate ourselves with the trappings of a trash culture that has only existed for a generation or so. Voluntary self-confinement to a cultural ghetto is even worse than being forced into a concentration camp by the homophobes because it is freely chosen and self-limiting. Have the backbone to think for yourself and to talk back to the gay culture cops when you don't "fit in" (god help anyone who does want to fit in). Forget about being "gay." Love who you choose - and don't worry if you are "living the gay lifestyle" or not. Quite frankly, it isn't worth worrying about, defending, or investing in. If anything, it can kill you. Openly criticize those who claim to speak for us (usually because all opposition has been shouted down). In summary: live your life - not some life designed for you by the gay culture. It is nothing but a strait jacket.

It's funny how a book about why homos don't need to be `gay' is attacked for not being gay enough and for failing to offer us the New Mince Forwards. It's as if gays are too delicate and fragile to be exposed to self-criticism and dissent without being immediately soothed and reassured by a vision of The Emerald City. It's precisely because this book doesn't have anything to sell us that it is so refreshing. Odd how a book with `Anti-` in the title turns out to be CRITICAL, isn't it? The various books which have appeared in the US since 'Anti-Gay' (a UK book, please note) appeared have pretended to be critical but have all been way too gay. All of them have been written by pink snake-oil salesmen who want to convince us that they have patented the `right' way to be homo - e.g. Signorile and Sullivan squabbling over who should have the keys to the Gay Community pulpit. Their `critical' dimension has turned out to be mere moralism. Funnily enough, the most `political' statement in regard to contemporary homosexuality turns out to be an attempt, however unlikely, to free homo-ness from political imperatives (which anyway have just become a branch of consumer politics). 'Anti-Gay' does this with humour and wit, and also with real balls - an organ that sheep-like contemporary gays wouldn't know what to do with, besides shaving and hanging weights from.

This is not a book for the over-PC Queer activist crowd. Its meant for anyone who has felt alienated being an out and proud homosexual in the contemporary 'gay community' (in fact, the very term 'gay community' will sound like a misnomer after you read this book).
I liked all the essays in the book... however, it does ignore an important issue - the rampant racism in the gay community. I can't speak for the lesbians but any gay man of color like me can tell you from his own personal experience that 'white' is the gold standard in the gay community and the whole community is clearly segregated along ethnic and racial lines. The book does not address this topic head-on. This book also does not talk about the misogyny of some gay men (I mean the hatred directed towards heterosexual women and NOT women who are lesbians or bisexuals). However, its still a pretty good book. It raises issues that no one in the mainstream media has dared to raise far. It may not solve any problems or answer any questions but its still a start.

Each essay in this book is disgustingly vituperatively critical, narrow, when it's not being speciously academic and nearly all of the essays contain matter that is now dated, merely fashionable at best, and irrelevant fifteen years after its initial publication if you are an adult.

Reading this book was like being with someone quite young who will not stop complaining and bad-mouthing in foul language and who simultaneously thinks himself or herself quite special and talented in being clever at languaging invented put-downs of others.

Gays are a minority, well-hated by Christians and Libertarian conspiracists and televangelists to the best of my understanding, and these essayistic anti-gays are a minority within that well-hated minority. Imagine the conversation such a mini-minority can have with YOU should you not be thirty or younger, not identify as either a member of the "gay community" or as an "outlaw," and rather admire the writings of Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden (to say nothing of Walt Whitman) over the recommended "transgressive" (i.e., "good") writers like Denis Cooper, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet (in other words, drug advocacy and petty criminality).

Like every book, however un-extraordinary, there are a couple of good ideas in this one, but these certainly do not recommend this book be required reading by a long shot. Sure, the "gay culture" that's been invented since Stonewall is rife with gay clones, is commercial, and is as bland as it might be beautiful. Certainly there is no one way of being gay no matter how many gay institutions want to depict gay lives to be otherwise. That bisexuals are not well-represented in gay culture is another idea that has some steam, but the amount of denigrating done to gay men and women for the bisexual "cause" here is unmanly and unwomanly.

The manner, tone and content of the writing here is generally disgusting: irritable, vexatious, restive, contumacious, condescending, narrow. Here's just two examples from a cornucopia of distasteful and vile things written for this book: "The next time I see a bunch of dudes from Jersey beating on a faggot from Greenwich Village, I'm going to cheer them on." John Weir's "Going In," Chapter 3 The second example involves an extended serious discussion about a statement by Sue Golding (who?) and a type of lesbian dyke characterized as "James Dean with a clit" -- along with philosopher Judith Butler's views on drag. How's that for cutting-edge profundity and truth to transcend the ages?)

Somewhere at the start of the book there's a reference to Gore Vidal and his statement that there is no such thing as the noun homosexual; homosexual is an adverb describing an action. This is the main idea of the book, no more, no less. You can cut out all the disgusting parts right off by simply adhering to this essential which comes straight, not bent, from the book. The last of ten chapters contains a play written by Bruce LaBruce and Glenn Belverio (who?) called "A Case for The Closet." Yawn.

This book is great even in 2010 and I would say almost calls for a new round of essays, ala Anti-gay 2010.

It managed to find and expose a large collection of thoughts I had in my own experiences with "feel-good" 'gay culture'. Although many things have changed significantly- notably the status of gays in movies and television and Queer/ expanded acronyms such as LGBTIQ etc., most of the books salient points still ring pretty loud and clear.

One of the books main points about how awful most "gay publications"(such as the Gay news) and "gay art"(Things such as Gay poems etc.) are and yet seem to receive praise/acceptance just because of their 'gayness' still definitely rings very clear. In fact with increased development of the internet we have a large variety of new terrible, terrible gay websites and blogs that fit this mold.

"Forbidden Fruit" by Lisa Power, which analyzes the bizarre, hilarious and often intense negative reactions gays and lesbians in a lot of LGBT organizations/scenes face if they 'celebrate diversity' by gasp, sleeping with someone of the opposite sex, still seems very relevant- Especially the note about the climate of silence about heterosexual encounters in the supposedly 'diverse & accepting' community.

This is just the best book about homosexuality I've ever read. Why? Because it tells the truth.

And because it offends everyone. Especially stupid people. It's also very funny. Refreshingly, it doesn't pretend to offer any answers, or new identities. It just asks lots of difficult questions.

If you want to get over being gay and get on with being human, this is the book for you.

"The essays gathered in anti-gay represent the earliest onslaught by the new guerrillas and petroleuses of what might be termed the post-gay era, savaging imported american pc pieties, lambasting the sex-and-shopping body-fascism of gay clubland ....in some niftily subversive snips at the barbed wire along the hetero-homo divide. Their leader is the brilliantly buccaneering Mark Simpson whose opening parodic monologue `Gay Dream Believer' satanically debases the coinage of substance abusing disco-chic.' - Jonathan Keates, The Spectator, 1996

If you don't especially like modern gay culture and want a club to beat it down with, this is your book. I also like gay culture, so I was much less favorably inclined. On the whole, the book is humorless and fairly boring; the authors never really wrap their minds around the full implications of gay culture for modernity. The essays vary in quality, but most of them are competent. Only on occasion are they genuinely thought-provoking. Actually, a few of the "reviews" from other reviewers strike me as better critiques than anything in this book. As for the view that we are entering a "post-gay" age, that's pretty much whistling in the dark.

I was excited about what this book had proposed, a big slap in the face of the moribund state of Gay Culture (coming soon to a circuit party near you!) However, tiresome political essays and bland essays make this book sound more like a rambling bitch fest. They (the various authors spotlight a lot problems with the so-called gay community but don't offer much to put in it's place.

For a book that attempts to smack the politically correct around the head and neck, it retains it own precarious sense of political correctness.

faeryboy@yahoo.com (see review below) has obviously not read this book or he would not have written what he did. Not only didn't he read the book but he didn't even bother to read the reviews listed here or he would have gathered that this book was not homophobic but a self-critique of the gay suburban culture by gay men and women. It is quite a feat to attack the supposed ignorance of others while flamboyantly parading your own but faeryboy manages to do it.