The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture [Paperback]

Daniel Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

Though many in the gay community strive to be accepted into mainstream society, assimilation is watering down a once vibrant culture, rendering it as bland as a production of Streetcar without Blanche Dubois. As corporate America opens its arms and the gay population comes running, the commercialization of gay culture makes it conventional--imagine Valley of the Dolls with M&M's.

In this provocative, brilliantly reasoned book, charged throughout with a penetrating eye and stinging wit, Daniel Harris examines the many shadings of the gay experience as they have evolved over time, including the demise of camp and kink, the evolution of personal ads, the origins of the underwear revolution, the changing face of porn and glossy magazines, the morph of drag queens and leathermen, and the marketing of AIDS as commodity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Daniel Harris comes on strong: "For far too long, the book trade has provided gay readers with nothing more than the literary equivalent of a warm glow, a soothing linguistic salve for the walking wounded, as if we were all still 13 and were all still mustering the courage to come out, as if, after 25 years of gay liberation, we all still needed to be scolded and cajoled into self-acceptance.... Homosexuals are not permanent intellectual convalescents. They are thriving, mentally, if not physically, and it is time that they remove their bandages, raise themselves off of the soft, snug, and commodious bed of uplifting ideology in which they have slept for decades, and face some important truths about a culture desperately in need of being shaken out of its complacency."

Harris musters an impressive body of evidence to show how many of the elements of gay culture are rooted not in a "psychological fetish" for, say, Bette Davis movies or shiny leather boots, but in a "social fetish"; gay men, in other words, bonded together over Hollywood divas and kinky sex because it's something they could do together that set them apart from their heterosexual peers. But as society becomes increasingly more tolerant of queerness, Harris argues, gay men feel less need to be culturally unique. And their culture slowly disappears into the mainstream. With its analyses of the deterioration of camp's hold over the gay community, the evolution of drag queens and leathermen, and the kitschy commodification of AIDS, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture quickly became one of the most controversial gay-themed nonfiction works of the '90s when it was first published. It remains as provocative today. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal

Defining gay sensibility "strictly as a political response to oppression, and not as an innate characterological predisposition for the arts and aestheticism," Harris measures the effects of assimilation on the white, middle-class, male homosexual community. Characterizing the propaganda of gay liberation as a unique juxtaposition of political statements and psychological self-acceptance bromides, he posits that "the economic exploitation of homosexuals has involved a painfully protracted courtship," during which they have become victims of cultural erosion. Harris compares various aspects of the pre- and post-Stonewall subculture, ranging over topics such as underwear ads from Ah Men and International Male catalogs; pornographic literature and film; After Dark and Out magazines; the transformations of hypermasculine S/M leather culture and hyperfeminine drag; and, finally, "The Kitschification of AIDS." Harris's astute observations, though often undermined by overbroad generalizations and his own self-acknowledged ambivilence, make this provocative cultural criticism and fascinating reading.?James Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 034542672X
• ISBN-13: 978-0345426727
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,651,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cruelty Without Beauty, July 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (Paperback)

This book is not without its pleasures. Harris writes with a breathless malice that is sometimes hysterical, in every sense of the word. But his targets are easy ones, and his jeremiads are for the most part devoid of nuance. Ultimately, it seems that everything that was GOOD about gay culture just happened to coincide with Harris's lost youth. Before the 1970's everything gays did was an example of their all-encompassing self-hatred; since the 1970's, everything gays do is crass, commercial, and rabidly assimilationist. These themes have been tackled more intelligently in other works, e.g. Mark Simpson's "Anti-gay." Sadly, by the last pages of "Rise and Fall" one cannot help but see Daniel Harris as an angry unloved child locked out in the rain, hammering snails on the sidewalk.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Glory Days of the Closet, April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (Paperback)

Take notes now: oppression is good, diversity bad, pretentiousness a virtue, modern gay relationships insipid, and images of happy, successful gay men and women are sure signs of "a demoralized age." Got it? Well, maybe not.

In this book, which explores the effects of the increased acceptance of homosexuality on gay lives and culture, Daniel Harris often comes across like my grandfather crankily chanting about the 14 hour work days and 12 mile homeward walks of his youth, back when folks really knew what life was about. Clinging desperately to an old, one-dimensional view of gay men based on the fact that they once pretty much universally shared tastes for Hollywood divas, ballet, and brawny heterosexual men, Harris is surprised and saddened to find that those similarities--all of which resulted more or less from pigeonholing by an intolerant society and some of which (even according to Harris himself) were little more than defense mechanisms against that hostility--are now fading away. He grudgingly admits the reason for this, which happens to be an overwhelmingly positive one--i.e. greater freedom, acceptance, and social contact for gay men than ever before. Once admitted, however, this fact is repeatedly lost in Harris' lengthy ode to the good old days.

A jacket blurb for this book calls Harris' insights "bravely critical". Well, certainly critical at any rate. Reading this book, the average homosexual will be enlightened to learn that not only is he boring, superficial, shallow, greedy, and conformist, but he is also incapable of romance--which is just as well, really, since he soon discovers that he doesn't know how to have sex correctly anyway. And even some of those "insights" seem . . . well, not terribly insightful. We learn that gay mens' worship of divas has nothing to do with the divas' femininity, an insight which is accompanied by references to Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and characters like Holly Golightly and Auntie Mame, but, astonishingly, not a single reference to a male actor or character. Harris goes on to bemoan the increased diversity and economic power of gay culture, as a result of which it is now possible to market magazines to a specific portion of the population, including some directed at younger gay men which Harris accuses of "perpetrating pictorial genocide on men over the age of 40"--which is much like criticizing "Young Miss" for not featuring a lengthy interview with Eartha Kitt. He slashes magazines like "Out" for idealizing gay life and squelching the real stories of our gritty, dark, horrible lives; which, apart from being a questionable accusation, suggests that gay culture is far too advanced to harbor its own escapist equivalents of "Vanity Fair" or "People". Harris does, however, eventually let us into the secret that pretentiousness is one of the main defining characteristics of gay men, a statement which sheds a lot of light on Harris' viewpoints and on the rest of the book.

There's little question that the gay community could use the kind of shaking-up this book promised to give it. To be effective, however, a shake-up needs to jolt people into the future, not push them into the past. For now, we'll just have to take as a sign of progress the fact that the gay community is now diverse enough to have its own brand of fogies, led by Daniel Harris, tsk-tsk-ing and fearing that today's irresponsible young people are, as my grandfather would have put it, "going to hell in a handbasket".

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't Agree With Everything Harris Says, But ..., March 3, 2000

By 

Randy A. Riddle (Mebane, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (Paperback)

I can't say I agree with everything Harris says in the book, but I extend a hearty "thank you" for bridging some issues that need to be talked about. His analysis of Gay pornography's progression from films of the 70's that portrayed sex as something that happened to everyday people in real places to today's videos where sex resembles some kind of sterile medical procedure among bodybuilders is probably the best summation of his thesis. His book examines the creation of the prepackaged, instant, just add water Gay male that has occurred as target marketing and image building has taken precedence over the needs and feeling of people.