How Sontag, Baldwin, and Vidal contributed to gay liberation.
Toward the end of 2018, Newnownext, like many other LGBT-focused websites, featured a listicle tallying celebrities who had come out that year. The celebrities listed had variously come out as gay, bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, and queer and included Janelle Monáe (pansexual), Broad City star and creator Abbi Jacobson (queer), pro soccer player Collin Martin (gay), and star of Scream and Arrow Bex Taylor-Klaus (non-binary).
The article is headlined #20GayTeen: 26 Celebs Who Came Out in 2018—an allusion to a hashtag tweeted out by American out lesbian pop star Hayley Kiyoko on the 1st of January of the year. Kiyoko tweeted: “It’s our year, it’s our time. To thrive and let our souls feel alive. #20GAYTEEN #expectations2018.” The #20GAYTEEN hashtag quickly went viral, tweeted out by fans and other LGBTQ celebrities as a proclamation of queer pride.
In an article from December of the same year entitled How 2018 Became the Year ‘20GAYTEEN’, Vice writer Daisy Jones enthused that Kiyoko had been right in her optimistic prediction, given the number of overtly queer pop hits that the year had seen, as well as the number of out queer characters in films and other media. She concluded,
“it's really cool that teenagers today who might not identify as totally straight (which is a lot of them, apparently) have a pop culture landscape that increasingly speaks to the specifics of their own life. Because that's exactly what pop culture should be. It should be a vehicle for you to make sense of the world around you, of the relationships you'll get lost in, the structures you'll have to navigate, the loves you'll gain and lose and gain again, the years that will fly behind you. And if pop culture is a mirror, it makes sense that it would (and it should) hold more than one type of person's reflection.”
These days it’s a fairly uncontroversial proposition, at least in mainstream culture, that representation of people from the LGBTQ community is a good thing. It’s seen as promoting self-validation for members of that community and enabling their acceptance by the wider society. "Representation matters” is the accepted wisdom—and that representation is importantly manifested in popular culture representation (pop songs, movies, TV shows) and in celebrity culture.
But if this is the conventional view, the academic field of queer studies has long been suspicious of the politics of representation. Scholars have argued that representation is not enough—it doesn’t address the material and structural aspects of inequality and discrimination to which some LGBTQ people may be subject. It may even distract from them. Think of how media treated the coming out of the wealthy white transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, celebrating it as a milestone for transgender rights, and downplaying or not mentioning at all the disproportionate poverty and violence suffered by the transgender community more generally, and transgender people of color especially.
Many queer critics go even further than this in their criticisms of the politics of representation, arguing that visibility is actually bad for queer people. For these scholars visibility is associated with assimilation and commodification, meaning a dissipation of the subcultural innovations and institutions that queer people have developed outside the mainstream. Other scholars argue that visibility actually enables the surveillance and policing of sexual and gender minorities.
In Categorically Famous I accept that there are risks associated with the integration or assimilation of queer culture into the so-called mainstream, but I challenge the well-established criticisms of the politics of representation in queer scholarship. I investigate not the queer celebrity culture of today, but its prehistory, focusing on the literary celebrity of James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. I look at the tensions and connections between the careers of these three writers and the gay and lesbian liberation movement that took shape over the 1960s and that really took off around 1969, the year of the riots at New York City’s Stonewall Inn (in the popular imagination, the beginning of gay liberation in America). The gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s promoted coming out as its fundamental political act.
The decade preceding Stonewall, however, in which Baldwin, Sontag and Vidal all achieved or consolidated their fame, was the era of the “closet” or, at most, the “open secret” for the majority of queer celebrities (and queer non-celebrities). Celebrities were certainly not expected to be open about their homosexuality and the media did not usually explicitly identify famous people directly as gay (though reporters could and did engage in innuendo). Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal were all strongly same-sex attracted but they did not come out in ways we would recognize today. Indeed, all three writers had serious reservations about the project of gay liberation and about the idea of “exclusive” gay and lesbian identities.
Nevertheless, they all wrote frankly and sympathetically about gay experience and gay culture. Though their work as well as through their celebrity personae they contributed to the greater openness around homosexuality that was an important precondition for the gay liberation movement. I argue that these three writers need to be understood as “proto-visible” gay celebrities, their objections to that identity notwithstanding. The work they did, sometimes unwittingly, to promote liberationist ideas, was valuable, I argue, in opposition to the entrenched anti-liberationist and anti-identitarian assumptions of queer theory. Indeed, we would not have queer theory without the liberation movement. Liberation is the direct if distant ancestor of contemporary queer theory—a fact that I argue queer theory all too often disavows, to the detriment of its own analytical capacities. Furthermore, liberation is not over. It remains a driving force in queer life, as exemplified by the celebrity comings out listed by Newnownext. While these comings out are undoubtedly part of a highly commodified media culture, they are also for many fans important sources of queer affirmation.
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