By way of preface let me mention that I heard an interview with Katie Stelmanis, of the band Austra, who talked about how her fellow band mates wanted her to get more “political.” Now, by “political” they didn’t mean that she should address herself to partisan politics, nor economic policy, nor criminal justice, nor any of the myriad functions of government. No, they meant “gay politics.” But sexuality is not a political issue; it is a cultural issue.
This is not to say artists should not address issues of sexuality. Far from it; culture is the exact purview of the artist. Very few creative artists have actually addressed politics in a way that had artistic integrity. Upton Sinclair is the past master of this, while Gore Vidal is perhaps the inverse, a political figure that has artistic achievements to his name. Aristophanes, Franz Falada, Ernst Junger, the Marquis de Sade, Woodie Guthrie, and the poet Mayakovsky might just complete the list of those who could consistently integrate politics and art without becoming pedantic. Even Jack London and Pete Seeger are at their best when they were not being overtly political. For that matter, authors we often think of as being political, like Sinclair Lewis or Larry Kramer, were usually dealing with cultural concerns (conformity, mass psychology, homophobia) not economics or government. Of course, there is no shortage of dreadful political polemic masquerading as art. Need I mention Atlas Shrugged, an immensely successful piece of libertarian agitprop that fails on every level as a work of art?
Let us contrast a work about slavery, a political issue, with one about racism, a cultural matter. Which of these works has lasting value: the anti-slavery tract “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or the disquisition on race, “Huckleberry Finn?” I think the question answers itself.
Again, issues of sexuality are cultural not political. So it is entirely in keeping with the proper role of the artist in society that the members of Austra express their lesbian perspective: that’s what an artist does! If you want cultural change, then you have to push for it through cultural modes. When Mary Richards (i.e. Mary Tyler Moore) allowed a lover to spend the night at her apartment it probably did more for promiscuity than any governmental action ever could have. When Murphy Brown chose to have a bastard child it simply pointed up how idiotic were the government’s efforts at “reducing teenage pregnancy” when the problem was one of blood-feeling and simply not amenable to a logic of consequences. (Of course, this is not to say that art addressing cultural concerns is always better than political art. Contrast, if you will, the humanity of Upton Sinclair’s stridently political “The Jungle” with the paste-board phoniness of the “Left Behind” series.)
And so, while it is not surprising that an history museum should take up a cultural topic, it is disappointing to find that it deals with it in not merely a political way, but from a stridently bourgeois political perspective.
The Exhibit
Last weekend I chanced to visit the opening of the exhibit “Out In Chicago” with a comrade. Though she is bisexual, she is as sick of the politicization of cultural issues as I am, and the only reason I was able to persuade her to attend was that she wanted to meet Chuck Renslow, who was expected to be there. (He wasn’t, and now my friend is mad at me for wasting her afternoon.)
Probably the first thing we noticed was the pervasive capitalist bias. Much was made of “pioneering” nineteenth century gay and lesbian figures, yet nothing was said about how the working class homosexuals were in constant trouble with the law while the bourgeois homosexuals were not. Clearly, sexual consumerism has always been the prerogative of the rich and the change that has come in our time is not one of “morals” but rather of our owning classes realizing that the social control of sexuality was unnecessary to their continued economic exploitation. In fact, it could be turned into just one more consumer item. It was probably the most profound thing that John Lenin ever said when he pointed up that:
“they keep you doped with religion and sex and TV. And you think you’re so clever and classless and free. But you’re still fuckin’ peasants as far as I can see.”
Was anybody else appalled when one of the taped segments commented that “in the nineteenth century capitalism allowed ever increasing numbers of people to live on their own, away from extended families?” Capitalism? I don’t think so. Clearly it was industrialization that allowed people to live in ever smaller economic units. Marx actually says it best:
“Industrialization has allowed the mass of the population to escape the idiocy of rural life.”
And then the exhibit goes on to enthuse about how gays formed their own “families.” But this is an abuse of language. “Family” indicates a blood connection, either through shared ancestry or common progeny. What these people were forming was “households,” that is, a group of people living in close if not intimate connection, regardless of blood connection.
At this point the game is up. As we National Bolsheviks know, Blood Feeling is the exact antithesis of the mercantile spirit, and this exhibit perfectly encompasses a materialist world view. This explains the whole world-view of the exhibit, for within a materialist perspective there can be no distinction between culture, which is spiritual, and politics, which is practical, because the spiritual has not real existence so all must be subordinated to the practical.
Of course, my friend was disgusted at the confounding of “gender issues” with sexuality.
“Gender,” in the bourgeois understanding, is how you conceive of your sex. That is to say, regardless of whether you are a man or woman, what do you feel that you are? In the bourgeois conception, such things are fluid. One could conceivably be a “man trapped inside of a woman’s body” as opposed to being someone so alienated from themselves as to have failed to connect with the material reality of their existence. What are we to make of it when someone claims to be a “lesbian trapped inside of a man’s body,” as some 25% of M2F transsexuals claim nowadays? Or that Ernest Aron, the real life trans-sexual portrayed in Dog Day Afternoon, had surgery to become Elizabeth Debbie Eden, only to die of aids in 1987: how did that happen to a straight woman released from the trap of a man’s body?
What happened to the notion that the well adjusted person accepts and deals with the material realities of their existence? If a working class girl were to insist that she were a “princess trapped inside of a proletarian body” we would tell her to get over it, wouldn’t we? At best, people with “gender issues” are confused, at worst, they are delusional.
And what does this have to do with sexual attraction? I have always been utterly at peace with being a male, comfortable in my body, vain of my appearance, never have I felt there was some sort of submerged “feminine side” struggling to make itself felt. And yet I have, since coming to sexual awareness in my early teens, been attracted both to men and women. In fact, just as the women I am attracted to are archetypal feminine (broad hips, round faced, nurturing), the men I favor are just as strongly masculine (lean, hard, dominant).
The problem with confounding gender issues with sexuality issues is that straights think of gays as being “faggy” already. What I want is an exhibit where someone could come out thinking, “Gee — not all men who sleep with men are soft little fairies; some of them are really manly!” But this exhibit does exactly the opposite, not only failing to distinguish between cross dressing and homoeroticism, but lumping profoundly confused transsexuals in with well grounded leathermen.
Finally there are the issues of Situational Sexuality and Bisexual Erasure.
Historically, a tremendous amount of homoeroticism has been situational. Probably almost everyone is familiar with “what men do in prison” as Archie Bunker once referred to it but, before the wide-spread use of contraception (and the subsequent sexual availability of women), homoeroticism was widespread among young boys (who routinely swapped hand-jobs, the so-called “circle jerk”), while working class men knew which bars to go to if they wanted to get a quick suck from queers who were glad to perform the service. An older friend of mine actually blames “all that political crap after Stonewall” for ruining this for, by politicizing sexuality, activists forced people to pick-sides, to declare themselves as either straight or gay, thus driving away straight and bisexual men who might otherwise have indulged in homoeroticism.
“Our In Chicago” is also bisexual free. Aside from the “B” in the ubiquitous “LGBT” designation there is not a single reference to bisexuals, bisexuality, or anything except monoramic sexuality. This absence thus achieves the political aim of forcing people to choose sides, when the simple fact is that our society will never come to any kind of well functioning sexual milieu until we make bisexuality the norm.
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