A 'Good Enough' Reader

The problem with the HBO series Heated Rivalry and the Game Changers book series it’s based on—and with M/M literature in general—is not a problem of representation. In many ways, arguments about representation among gay/bi men* boil down to us arguing with each other from our varied individual experiences of surviving heteronormative and homophobic environments and trying to form our own gay/bi identities. In my research on gay/bi men of the 1950s and 60s, I found out just how old these kinds of arguments are—at least as old as the end of World War II. But in those years, representation was a simpler problem, because representations of gay/bi men were nearly exclusively from the perspective of a disapproving and inevitably disgusted hetero world. When gay/bi men argue with each other over representations, we are often still working through our own internalization of the very heteronormativity and homophobia we have been trying to escape our whole lives. And in so doing, we are participating in an ongoing, interactive experience of making our gayness meaningful to ourselves and each other.

In many ways, the first season of Heated Rivalry represents well a few relatively expected experiences of how homophobia functions to constrain and contain queer men’s emotional, relational, expressive, and behavioral lives (with some differences among Scott, Ilya, and Shane). Colton Underwood, for example, has written eloquently about how the show’s representation of the closet mirrored his own experience as a closeted football player.

I do not mean to say that there aren’t problems with the representations we got in the books and the show. My own experience of reading the book Heated Rivalry was like being trapped in an abusive relationship between two people who hate themselves so much that they hate and torture each other for years. The closet is always controlled from the outside by the heteronormative world, and queers have long known that it has the power to distort and twist us in disturbing ways—and it was unbearable to read. Both the book and the show made this experience doubly distasteful for me, because the intention was clearly that I find this fucked up relationship hot. I wanted them to work through their own internalized hatred and move on from each other. But that would break the romance enemy-to-lovers trope.

Equally clearly, if social media is any indication, thousands upon thousands of gay/bi men disagree with me completely and vehemently, loving and rooting for Shane and Ilya. For me, gay men arguing about whether or not Ilya and Shane’s representations are authentic, real, identifiable, positive, helpful, or joyful, is the exact kind of arguments and conversations gay/bi men ought to be having with each other about representation. That kind of discussion and disagreement can be fruitful and meaning-building, and it’s one of the things that art, especially popular art, is for.

The problems with the book series (and M/M lit) and the show is a larger structural issue within the culture industry and with the minority groups it seeks to represent: Who gets to tell gay/bi men’s stories, who profits from them, and what impact does it have when gay/bi men themselves aren’t the ones telling, creating, and profiting from their own stories? At least as early as Showtime’s version of Queer as Folk, the North American culture industry realized that there was money to be made by (re)shaping gay/bi content to the cis-het women who made up the overwhelming majority of viewers (compare the UK and North American versions of QAF to get a taste of what I mean). As if to underscore this discovery, HBO’s series Looking failed to garner a similar viewership; it was produced, directed, and written by, for, and about gay men. Again, representation isn’t the problem: gay men have had and will continue to have heated disagreements about the quality and authenticity of the representation of gay/bi men in both of these series.** But one thing that is hard to deny is that the art created by, for, and about gay/bi men themselves can be quite different from art that is about gay/bi men created by, for, and about cis-het women.

To understand why I think the issue of who gets to tell gay/bi men’s stories is of vital importance, I need to go back in time a few decades. As I was researching the emergence of what we might today think of as “gay men’s culture” in the 1960s, something that became undeniable was how central the process of meaning-making among gay/bi men was, more so, I would argue, than political organizing and activism (although the two were very difficult to tease apart in this period). As I combed through gay publications and ephemera from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, I confirmed what scholars before me had found, that nascent gay organizations grew out of and combined with the existing underground communities of the bars and clubs and bathhouses. But for me, what was more significantly was how this created an emergent kind of gay public that existed both as actual social spaces that gay/bi men could move in and out of, as well as political spaces, communal spaces, and more abstract cultural spaces in the form of local gay periodicals, which serving as means to communicate and organize as well as for debate and struggle over values, meanings, feelings, behaviors, etc. In short, over gay/bi men’s culture. You’ll notice here that I do not think of culture as a fixed, unified thing; but rather, culture is an ongoing, emergent effect of a group’s interactions with each other and with and among other groups. In this case, in the 1950s and 60s, gay/bi men worked out what they wanted their gayness to mean and what they wanted their relationship to the larger (homophobic) culture to be with each other.

I would argue that it was the growth of gay/bi men’s ability to create meaning in direct interaction with each other in public spaces that created the necessary foundation for and, indeed, a sine qua non of the full range of gay liberation/freedom/pride movements from World War II through the first years of the 21st century. That’s when we get what Lisa Duggan called the rise of homonormativity, when same-sex love and relationships were brought under the heteronormative umbrella, with the strict requirement that LGBs look, act, feel, express, and live their lives in ways that are virtually indistinguishable from cis-het lives, except that one little thing (the genitals involved, which should always remain discretely hidden).

By the late twenty-aughts, homonormativity supplied the political direction for the entire LGBT political apparatus and its campaign slogans. “Same love” and “love is love” drove the struggle for the acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, in many ways “same love” short-circuited and transformed the ongoing intra-communal dialogues and arguments about the meaning of gayness. In other words, homonormativity functioned either by intention or effect as a means to contain and control the range of meanings that gay/bi men (and lesbian/bi women) could make of their gayness. [As a vitally important aside, the consequences of reducing LGBT politics to “same love” has had dire and deadly consequences for our trans siblings and served to separate them further from LGBs, both a moral and cultural failure.]

Homonormativity and its concomitant cultures has brought with it the dissolution of gay neighborhoods and LGBT social and cultural spaces and the marketing of LGB cultures to cis-het people in ways that wrest control of the meanings of gayness (and transness) from LGBTs, forestalling or distorting the kinds of intra-communal meaning-making. Because LGBTs by definition do not inherit our LGBT cultures, we do not and cannot inherit them, rather we have to create and recreate our own cultures and social spaces over time or accept the mass-produced meanings fed to us by the cultural industry (including most especially the high-tech industry and all the problems that received culture delivered through hyper-mediated means entails).

I actually think there is much to be said and analyzed about cis-het women’s use of gay/bi men’s lives, bodies, and cultures for their own erotic and cultural pleasure—and this could be its own really interesting line of inquiry. But that is not really my point here. (And in fact, if two guys fucking turns a straight woman on, gurl, I feel you!) Rather, the problem here is larger and structural, beyond the women who have RuPaul viewing parties or who read their M/M lit on the subway or write and share their slashy fanfiction on internet fora.

Given the fragmentation and hyper “customization” of mass culture in our times, I conceive of the culture industry in broad terms, comprising everything from “indie” M/M presses and Amazon’s “self” publishing racket, more mainstream romance publishers (particularly those of YA fiction (side-eye Heartstoppers), as well as film and tv producers and writers. This culture industry has placed cis-het women at the center of both sides of the gay/bi men’s cultural equation: they both produce and profit from it, as well as consume and take pleasure in it. That both cis-het women and gay/bi men are caught up in patriarchal systems of misogyny (homophobia is in fact a subspecies of misogyny) makes the relationships and dynamics particularly tricky to untangle. Is Heated Rivalry a fair, authentic, good representation of gay/men’s lives? I think the show (produced by a gay man and acted by at least one bi man) is an infinitely better representation of gay/bi men’s experience than the book, which was clearly following women’s romance conventions and which treated the trauma of the closet as an erotic fetish.***

If what I discovered in gay/bi men’s culture making in the 1960s remains true, then a world in which gay/bi men’s meaning-making happens primarily in cis-het women’s art, profit, desires, tastes, and consumerism is to deny gay/bi men’s vital power to make our own lives meaningful, to decide for ourselves what love, sex, relationships, friendships, masculinity, femininity, gender, aging, emotional well-being, etc., mean to us, and for us, as gay/bi men. Although sexuality and gender are not the same as race and ethnicity, bringing to mind an analogous situation in which representations of, say, indigenous people have been controlled by settlers can help really emphasize the point I’m making. The quality of this kind of gay/bi art made by/for/of cis-het women — be it M/M romance or of gay porn — and whether or not it is actually good for gay/bi men is not an easy or obvious question. Yet not to ask the question is to concede the battle for the meaning of gayness to people who can be and often are oppressors. What does gayness mean to, say, a young gay/bi boy who when, because of the fragmentation of community, the rise of social media and hook-up apps, and the omnipresence of popular culture, the only meanings of gay/bi men’s lives available to him are not even made by or for gay/bi men?

Of course, in reality, we still do have the remnants of neighborhoods and some LGBT social spaces survive and there are LGBT art and cultural spaces and producers. But they are demonstrably fewer, and less powerful. Also many thousands of gay/bi men continue to participate in those cultures, in opposition to the dominating culture industry. And as I’ve already described above, one of the complexities of mass-produced culture is that gay/men continue to argue about its meaning among ourselves. But in the world created by homonormativity, with the social fragmentation created by social media, and with our sex and relational lives reduced to hook-up app algorithms, the questions feel all the more urgent: Who gets to tell our stories? Who gets to create the representations of our lives and loves? And who gets to profit from them?

Notes and Bibliographic Do-Dads

* Naming and language are always tricky with us queers. For my purposes here, I chose to stick with gay/bi because I think they are more specifically what I’m talking about; that is, I’m not talking about a generalized queerness here. And I use the word men, here, to denote all male/masc-identified folks who love and fuck other male/masc-identified folks.

** Ru Paul’s drag race underwent a similar transformation when it made the jump to VH-1. And over the last 15-20 years, as women have become a larger and larger portion of the consumers of porn, something related is also happening within the gay porn industry.

*** There is some online chatter about Rachel Reid identifying as bisexual. If that is the case, we are into a new but related morass: How much ownership and right do queers have to each others’ lives and stories? This gets particularly dicey with cis-hets who identify as queer.

Duggan, Lisa. The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2014). See especially

Ormsbee, J. Todd. The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Community and Publicity among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010).

——— “The Tragedy and Hope of Love between Gay Men: Boys in the Band and the Emotionality of Gay Love in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Matthew Bell, editor, The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016): 266-291.

— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry

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