User:Tom Morris/How to Be Gay

How to Be Gay is a 2012 book on the nature of gay male subjectivity and culture by the American queer theorist David M. Halperin, a professor at the University of Michigan. The book focuses on being gay as a cultural practice.

Synopsis
Halperin begins the book by describing how in March of 2000, the website of the conservative publication National Review discussed in critical terms a course he was offering at the University of Michigan entitled "How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation". Halperin goes on to describe how he had previously taught courses on gay male literature that dealt frankly with gay sex and identity, but that his gay students ended up preferring camp humor, drag and "appropriating and queering works of mainstream, heterosexual culture" such as The Golden Girls and Steel Magnolias. In the book, Halperin analyses a number of cultural works that have been appropriated from mainstream culture and "endow[ed] with queer value" and notes that such mainstream/straight cultural works that have been appropriated and 'queered' are often more representative of gay culture than specifically gay works.

Halperin sets as his goal the rediscovery and analysis of a distinctively gay culture, separate what Halperin describes as a post-Stonewall "gay liberation" identity which was built partly in reaction to an older gay culture—Halperin describes how he believed that effeminate gay men who adhered to said pre-Stonewall attitudes were "victims of self-hatred, internalized homophobia, social isolation, and state terror", and saw gay culture as redundant, and as a substitute for liberated sexual relationships.

Halperin argues that despite the cultural difference of gay men being the basis for jokes and stereotyping, many now seek to fervently deny that gay men have a particular and distinctive set of values or attitudes. But, he argues, gay culture is important to understand as it reflects and expresses gay desire and gay subjectivity, including aesthetic and non-sexual desire. The success of the LGBT movement as a political force has made it harder to analyse the subjective and emotional aspects of being gay so as to avoid charges that gay people are psychologically abnormal. Additionally, according to Halperin, gay male culture requires initiation and practice, and one can be better or worse at "being gay" (in the sense of appreciating and participating in gay culture) —and that straight observers of gay culture may be more savvy with such a culture than gay men who have not been properly initiated into it.

Reception
The historian Richard Davenport-Hines, in the Times Literary Supplement, was extremely critical of Halperin, who he believes exhibits an "obtuse insularity" and disinterest in perspectives from outside of the United States. Davenport-Hines suggests that the political importance of equal rights is ignored in Halperin's book in favour of "epicene group narcissism and rejection of manly stereotype". Some of Halperin's assertions in the book, Davenport-Hines says, "are astonishing twaddle plucked from a peculiarly deluded universe: the dogmatic nonsense has a battering effect", while Halperin's laments for contemporary gay life (the decline of gay bars in favour of hookup sites like Grindr, for instance) makes him "a grumpy pensioner complaining that pubs have changed to wine bars in which he feels unwelcome" according to Davenport-Hines. Davenport-Hines concludes that Halperin represents a negative trend in queer studies: "the subject is dominated by inhumane pedants who pride themselves on meretricious mental perversity and teach their pupils to use words such as virtuous, self-respecting and dignified as pejorative epithets".

Dennis Altman, reviewing the book for the Brisbane Times, argued that Halperin seemed to have a "solipsistic concern with middle-class white gay life in American cities" and his nostalgic attitude causes him to fail to recognise modern incarnations of gay culture, such as the television series Glee.

Sources to integrate

 * Observer
 * Guardian
 * Independent
 * NY Times
 * NY Review of Books
 * Slate
 * Inside Higher Ed
 * lambdaliterary.org
 * Out.com
 * BeigeUK.com
 * edgeboston.com
 * cherwell.org
 * wicn.org