Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture

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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.

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".

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.

So much junk is written and published for gays that intellectual piffle is very much the norm. One purpose that this norm does serve, as Harris bravely observes, is to reinforce a certain insipid status quo in which nonfiction for gay men serves as existential affirmation rather than food for thought. Harris is difficult, and with all respect, I think that his book's critics here aren't grasping his very subtle argument and argumentation. I don't think he's endorsing a reactionary return to diva worship or, for that matter, to the de-assimilation of gays from mainstream American culture. However, he rightly points out that the fashions, postures, traditions, modes of communication -- gay culture -- of the past arose out of necessity and was enhanced and enlivened by that necessity. I don't feel comfortable trying to recapitulate his argument, it's too complex and is resistant to simplistic paraphrasing. The best thing I can say about this book is that it elucidated for me the very origins of many of my own attitudes and aptitudes--it put my very own sensibilities as a gay man under a microscope and made me rethink why I am the way I am. And what I have to gain--and lose--by not being that way any more. If a book can tell me that both I and a culture in which I participate are a certain way for reasons of which I was previously unaware, that book is more than worth my time. It's worth rereading, which I plan to do this summer, a year after I first delved into this enlightening, genuinely intellectual, and iconoclastic book.

According to a Newsweek article on 7 Feb. 2000, in the new novel by Saul Bellow based on the life of Allan Bloom, it is revealed that Bloom was gay and died of complications of HIV disease. So my earlier comment here that Harris was the Allan Bloom of gay life (a comment Harris took exception to) should read: "Allan Bloom is the Allan Bloom of gay life." My comparison was attempting to get at a hectoring tone and an idiosyncratic viewpoint I felt in both writers. Bloom, however, was a Platonist through and through, and Harris is a relativist who follows no party line other than his own. For that reason, he deserves to be read even when he's most vexing. I had to rethink a number of things I care about because of Harris, for which I thank him.

Harris is a gifted writer and manages to educate while entertaining. I enjoyed this book particulaly because of its examination of the historical evolution of many aspects/artifacts of gay culture: from personal ads & camp to underwear & porn. Many of the younger generation, as Harris explains, have probably never understood the context of their creation and the history of their evolution. However, I do not agree with Harris's basic premise that gay culture is somehow dissapearing or disolving into straight culture. The author seems intent on locating gay culture in the past and demonstrating how it has been obliterated. The book does not seem to take into account how every subculture naturally changes with the times and must absorb certain aspects of the dominant culture. Hasn't this been to our advantage in terms of the AIDS crisis? Isn't living isolated from mainstream culture in the gay ghetto really a life of intellectual and political poverty? Harris accurately portrays the double-edged sword of materialism which empowers the gay community and enslaves it simultaneously. I do not feel that this trend is any different, however, from current practice in the heterosexual world. What is new is the "exploitation" of gay men through the same means that Madison Avenue has seduced women, a recognition of one of the inherent characteristics of the modern gay man: plenty of disposable income. Though Harris seems truly alarmed and deems these changes "a fall", nothing could be further from the truth. The book fails to recognize that diversity and adaptation are the hallmarks of a vibrant empowered subculture, one that should be recognized as such by the dominant culture even as both sides realize that gay culture simply will never be completely absorbed into straight culture because of its intrinsic differences and economic viability. None of the important changes that have taken place post-Stonewall could have happened without altering the fabric of gay society, and if this means that drag queens are more masculine and kink is more feminine, that is a SMALL price to pay.

Bring out the boas-let the party begin! After a decade of pusillanimous, word-clotted academic eructations masquerading as "queer theory," Daniel Harris has single-handedly restored the reputation of gay intellectuals as bitches. His hateful new book, "The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture," is a shrewd and pitiless polemic on the current crisis of gay identity, and should be savored by every homo whose brain has not yet been cauterized by crystal or stultified by steroids. Harris' dissection of our so-called "culture" is intentionally lacerating-a Socratic slap in the face. Knowing oneself is rarely this much fun.

The complete review may be found at:
http://www.daimonix.com/fictions/harris.html

Allan Bloom issued The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, and since then has become a touchstone for the intellectual curmudgeons who object to the dumbing down of our culture (he's also been picked up by fundamentalists who read the book selectively and partially). Now here comes Daniel Harris, who apparently has decided to do the same thing for gay male culture (often sex culture). It would be easy to dismiss the book as trivial because it deals with mimeographed contact magazines of the 1940s, or the underwear ads in the back pages of Esquire magazine in the early 1970s. What is astounding about Harris is that he makes such issues seem important,subjecting them to points of intellectual pressure no one else has. That's the best part of the book. Now for the rest: Harris hates American culture, and by using the "assimilation" of gay culture by the larger society as his example, he attempts to show how what was unique about gay existence has largely been lost, and soon will be entirely lost. What are we losing? Our effiminacy, our worship of dead movie stars, our desire to get into drag and camp it up in bars. What a loss! On the other hand, anyone who wishes to affirm a gay masculinity is a straight wannabe (he bashes the bear movement among others). This book started out as a series of well-received essays in magazines (including Harper's), but at book length Harris repeats his ideas and his examples with numbing repetitiveness. He unearths enough unusual and little discussed artifacts of the pre-Stonewall era to merit a look, but this book is not the comprehensive reassessment of gay American life its publisher is trying to market it as being. One last note: there's no chance the fundies will read this one, selectively or otherwise.

Author Daniel Harris's book of critical essays is breath of fresh air for gay scholars in the field of gay studies. Harris looks critically at several different areas of gay culture: gay males and "diva" worship, gay romance in the personal ads, how gay men helped the underwear revolution, the AIDS "crisis", leathermen, gay pornography in both film and literature, gay magazines, drag and gay propaganda. Whiles Harris's book is now six years old, it is for me, relevant and fresh as he argues about the dangers in assimilation into heterosexual, mainstream culture. I wished he would have pointed out more clearly how gay men can stop and fight against assimilation through building our culture which I think for any scholar is a very blurry answer. Be prepared, this book generated quite a bit of debate in a book group that I belong to in Chicago and I feel that it gets similar reactions in any part of gay community when it is read. For me, though I wished more gay men would read such a fine work as this. If anything can be said for this work, it does generate thought and critical discussion which I think more and more people do not want to engage in, because it is so much easier not to. Plus society doesn't reinforce this; so much as it does the idea of the "status quo."

I had spotted Daniel Harris' "The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture" at a local bookstore and picked it up out of curiousity. I read it this summer when I had the chance. This semester at university, my sociology professor told us to choose a book about a subculture and discuss it, and I chose this book.

I think Harris is too bitter in his analysis of our current gay status. Sure, pride parades can be pathetic spectacles of leathermen, babies with rainbow patches, dogs with AIDSWalk shirts. But however much this culture has assimilitated, I doubt we should complain. To be able to confront issues concerning sexuality in all aspects of life is something that past generations of gays, specifically the gay men that Harris discusses, were not able to do. I appreciate his detailed analysis of certain aspects of gay male culture, such as the ads, bear culture, the leather movement--but I was disturbed by his characterization of AIDS as kitschified, and disagreed with many of his points. I think it's important to read this book critically, not openly. Taking what Harris says as verbatim would cause for much bitterness and, methinks, self-hatred. We don't need more of that, we have Jerry Falwell. There were certain things that Harris didn't cover which I wish he had, such as the rainbow as a symbol, the role of FTM transpersons, where Stonewall really fits, etcetera. Still, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in studying gay male culture from a subjective, critical perspective.