A few of years ago (probably four years ago, in relation to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics) I read an article about young male figure skaters in the U.S. Seems they are subject to harrassment and even gay bashing because they skate. There was an interview with a teenage skater who had come here from Russia, and he just couldn’t understand it. In Russia, skating is a sport like any other.
Indeed, this is something that strikes close to home, as my son is a heterosexual dancer, and while there has been no bashing or danger, there have been…remarks. And for him, there was a difficult choice: His love of dance won out over the discomfort of being thought gay; not an easy experience when you’re eleven or twelve.
There’s a wonderful article in the New York Review of Books that said a great deal of what I want to say about whether or not Brokeback Mountain is a “gay movie.” A parenthetical remark in that article really struck me:
Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn’t be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its “universal” themes.
One of the things I like about Queer Eye is that every episode breaks the stereotype. Every episode, we start with this vision that only gay men can groom, decorate, dress, cook, and dance, and at the end of each episode, we find that not only can straight men do these things, but they like to, they’re happier doing so, and by golly, they’re still straight.
So where do these “gay enclave” stereotypes come from? What’s gay about figure skating, or dance, or interior design? Why are these stereotypes American? (I mean, if anything ever proved that there’s nothing inborn about dance=gay, it’s that only U.S. dancers are supposedly gay!)
I agree with Dan Savage, that homophobia is fundamentally misogyny in drag. These supposedly “gay” things are also supposedly “girly.” They are graceful, pretty, fussy, and (in the case of cooking) nurturing.
A couple of weeks ago, I wondered if the rejection of grooming didn’t fall into the same sort of homophobia as the dance-figure skating-decorating enclave. And Tom made this very interesting statement:
[A]mong heterosexuals of my acquaintance, those who are most fastidious about their appearance are (without exception) those who were raised in the most patriarchal, homophobic cultures.
So I’m thinking. I’m thinking; What purpose does the ghetto serve? Ghettos perpetuate prejudice, for sure. They marginalize, they punish, they isolate, they disenfranchise. But they also protect. Placing the oppressed in a ghetto is a kinder punishment than killing them (until the pogroms roll around). I think it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg sort of acceptance of diversity that in the U.S., fashion and dance are gay, gay, gay, whereas in, say, Ecuador, fashion and dance are as much the province of the heterosexual man as anything else, leaving gay Ecuadorians with absolutely nowhere to go. (I use this example because some years ago I was friends with a gay Ecuadorian who was driven to multiple suicide attempts by the fear of being outed.) The ghetto gives you someplace to go.
In Rubyfruit Jungle, Molly goes to Greenwich Village because that’s where the gay people are. It’ll be great when people don’t have to go someplace to be gay, but it’s better than no place to go.
In Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis have no place to go.
The New York Review of Books article goes on to say:
It is surely significant that the film’s only major departure from Proulx’s story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack’s and Ennis’s bona fides as macho American men
The author of the above quote is complaining; he thinks these scenes are meant to make Jack and Ennis seem “less gay.” In fact, it makes them seem more isolated. If they were people who could become decorators, or go to Greenwich Village, their situation would not be so tragic. They’d have a place to go. Brokeback Mountain is about having no place to go and still be who you are.
Ultimately, ghettos self-select. Some macho men who want to dance will choose not to, and so the men who become dancers will primarily be those with less macho-points to lose. Thus, in my son’s dance studio, girls outnumber boys by ten-to-one, and about half the boys are gay. (Again, this isn’t what you’d see at a Russian dance studio, and so from the starting gate we can eliminate any inherent gay or straight or male or female quality as the explanation. )
Clearly, as much as ghettos are a nice way station between true equality and violence, they diminish all of us. Gay enclaves diminish gay ranch hands, and Russian figure skaters who get gay bashed, and young straight dancers, and, indeed, all of us. Stereotypical enclaves play into the hands of the psuedo-religious right, who want us to believe that homosexuality is a “lifestyle” and a “choice,” and point to liberal New York hairdressers as proof.
