Twenty
years ago, at the college where I used to work as a lecturer
(professor), I was having lunch with some colleagues. A student had
suggested the setting up of a gay society for staff and students. One
of the lecturers at our table was outraged, saying there were no gay
people in the college. Three of the people lunching with him were gay.
He was, needless to say, the sports lecturer
Nowadays most of us would be "out" but passing for straight is
something most gay people have done at one time or another. Aware from
a very early age of how other people see us, we manage our identity
accordingly. Most of us avoid being found out before we out ourselves.
We are so conscious of
being looked at that we lose sight of how we ourselves look at the
straight world. I realised this recently whilst trying to write an
account of my school days. My family and friends commented on the
clarity of my memory and acuteness of observation.
To help me, I logged on to the website Friends Reunited. School
reunions are practically unknown in England, year books don't exist
(which is as well. Most people would be hard put to tell you what year
they belonged to). School is something most people of my generation
prefer to forget so the success of Friends Reunited has taken everyone
by surprise. No longer do you wonder "what ever became of old Jones".
All you have to do is log on to the website and, provided old Jones has
registered too, you can find out or even get
in touch. Surely enlisting the help of people not seen for years, I
thought,
would help me flesh out my account still more.
I couldn't have been more mistaken. Although I knew I'd kept a low
profile at school, it turned out to have been positively subterranean.
Few people remembered any detail at all; fewer still remembered me.
They scarcely remembered anybody! This set me wondering about why I had
remembered so much. I've decided it's because I'm gay. I never played
any games or ran in any races, so was never thought of as a participant
in life as it's seen by school kids but I observed a great deal. Being
gay means that not only do you look at the world very differently from
the way straight people look at it, you look
at it far more intently.
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Straight
society puts gay people in a false position. We see ourselves as one
thing, society as another, so we inevitably see from a different angle
from the majority. Our intuitive sense of self forces us to interpret
ourselves on our own, not society's terms. This puts us in a
paradoxical position, in society
but out of sympathy with it, like a secret agent in hostile territory.
Being
strangers in a strange land affects us in several ways: we either
de-emphasise or ignore the paradox, live with the paradox ironically,
or question and
challenge the societal myths that created the paradox in the first
place.
Consequently gay sensibility is not so much a way of looking at the
world as a mode of being, a means of re-creating culture so as to live
safely
within it. Where gay people have differed from straight is in the
ability
and need to adopt a variety of social roles, re-forming and
re-contextualising
our identity, seeming to conform to society's norms, i.e.
de-emphasising
the paradox so as to make it harmless. We make our own world.
This fluidity of role-playing leads to a questioning of the apparent
solidity of orthodoxy as against paradoxy. This impinges directly on
our
creativity. The gay person's experience of cultural norms is ironic;
nothing
is as it seems. As a paradox in an orthodox world, the gay person is
ironically
detached from prevailing cultural myths, especially of sexuality, and
has
a deep appreciation of the nature of appearance as appearance. The gay
person
knows that he/she is not as commonly described and consequently is
driven
to question all aspects of conventional wisdom. This can result in the
subversion
of accepted forms, the "sending up" of straight conventions. Any
appreciation
of art produced by a gay person must be alive to the possibility that
conventional forms may be being used in an ironic manner. All need not
necessarilly be as it seems; it probably isn't. To the gay person
eternal truths are merely contingent, a comfortable shoring up of the
convenient (for the straight) status quo. For the thinking gay person
heresy is the norm. The whole mechanism of gay sensibility derives from
a self-conscious questioning of accepted norms and an ironic
apprehension of them. The discrepancy between appearance and reality
is, for the gay person, an ever-present conundrum.
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follows that the outlook of a gay person will resonate differently from
that of one who does not share the same mind set. Life is invested with
a different meaning from that it is given by others. Within this
context the gay outlook functions as both a channel of communication
and a creator of meaning, providing the subject with the data to be
processed in order to create that meaning, the subject's mind set
determining what data are chosen and how they are interpreted.
Given that this is so, it becomes possible to argue that there is such
a thing as a distinctly gay point of view. Gay people are forced to
reprocess all the material that the straight world hands them. In
literature this has produced works that constantly expose the soft
underbelly of straight society, demonstrating how it oppresses not only
gay people but all who march to
the sound of a different drum. Going beyond this, we can say that Art
does
not simply reflect reality but possesses the power to shape it. Art
produced
within a homosexual context contributes to Society's discourse; it has
something to say to those who understand the language in which it is
couched. This
ability to speak the language, to "pick up the signals", is crucial in
grasping
the meaning of any art.
That this requires gay-coloured glasses may be obvious to gay people,
yet the straight world remains obtuse. Leon Edel managed to read all
the works and letters of Henry James without it dawning on him that
James was gay. Where was he looking? Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, we are
told by critics, is not a gay reinterpretation of the story but is
about relationships. Where are they looking? It is amazing how much
goes unnoticed.
When I come across instances like these, and there are dozens of
others, I realise that I do wear gay-coloured glasses; I do look at the
world sideways when compared with straight society and I'm thankful
that far from fostering illusions, these glasses show me the real
world. The problem is, when is the real world going to catch on too?
I am grateful to M. Foucault, E.
Goffman, E.
Husserl,
B. Pronger, and T. Mowl, whose writings helped shape this article. The
final mixture is my own.
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