Category: Blog posts

This week I attended the symposium run by the ANU Gender Institute, How the Personal Became Political: re-assessing Australia’s revolutions in gender and sexuality in the 1970s.

Unfortunately I was quite busy with some other things over the two days of the event, so was only able to attend a few of the talks. However I saw some really great talks. 

I went to the excellent key note from Elizabeth Reid, in which she reflected on the birth of the women’s liberation movement and the integration (and the problems with this) of that movement into bureaucratic structures. I then went to a great plenary of ‘questioning gendered structures’. This involved talks from Amanda Laugesen on campaigns to change sexist language, a great reflection from Julie McLeod on introducing discussions of gender and sexuality into schools (something is very relevant for right now) and a really fascinating talk from Georgine Clarsen, where she spoke about working class women, particular those involved in trades, and their involvement in the feminist movement. Finally, on the second day I went to the final plenary, where I heard Jon Piccini talk about the legacy of Dennis Altman and his role in the liberation movements of the 1970s, and then ended the day with a talk from Carolyn D’Cruz on the origins of gender, sexuality and diversity studies in Australian universities (again something that is very relevant with the cuts to those studies today).

Overall, the small amount of this conference I went to was really interesting. Over forty years since the birth of the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1970s, it was quite fascinating to hear the perspectives of those who were at the forefront of those movements, in particular in the context of where we are today.

One of the most interesting parts of this was what I can only describe is a dominating feeling of nostalgia for those times. The speakers throughout the conferences often I feel reflected on these times not just as the birth of the gay and women’s movements, but also as the pinnacle of them. There was a clear perception from so many that things had gone backwards — both in terms of broader political debate, but also of the politics of the feminist and gay movements as they exist today.

This is something I’ve noticed a bit recently. At the Homosexual Histories Conference I went to in late November I noticed the very same feeling. A lot of the talks (naturally) focused on this era, with participants gleefully looking at that time as one they’d like to revisit.

My initial reaction this nostalgic turn was one of a bit of annoyance. Part of this feels a bit like a generational difference — one in which those of older generations look down in derision at those who have come after them, with a thought that basically says ‘we did this much better than you’. It feels a bit like folks throwing stones from the outside of movements that are currently happening.

But once I got over my generational insult, I looked at this with a clearer head. That is because I think there is a lot to be said about this nostalgia, it is a feeling we should certainly respect, and absolutely learn from. This is for two reasons.

First, it is because I think a lot of the politics, strategies, and tactics of the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1970s were significantly superior to those of the predominant identity politics that exists today. The language and politics of collective liberation is one that is much stronger, in my view, than the language of identity that exists today.

Secondly however, and more importantly, I think the nostalgia reflects very strongly on identity-based social movements today. This nostalgia represents, in many ways, an isolation and distance many feel from identity-politics. It’s not just the ‘old guard’ saying ‘we did this better than you’, but instead reflecting on the fact that identity politics puts up huge barriers to participation and collective action, even for those who have led these movements in the past. Identity politics has become one obsessed with political and identity purity, something that is not provided to early leaders of the women’s and gay liberation movements, whose politics are regularly questioned. Many of these leaders are therefore left out of identity-politics today, naturally making them feel isolate, and nostalgic for a past that was seemingly more inclusive. 

This is the real learning point, and the real shame, of this conference for me. What was presented was fascinating accounts of ground breaking movements. They provided essential lessons for feminist and queer today. But I fear these lessons are not being listened to — you just had to look at the age profile of the symposium to see that — largely because identity politics puts up so many barriers that the message will never get through. We all lose when that happens.   

Next week (yay!!) I officially start my PhD.

I’m hoping that as I get going I will be able to use this blog as an update on my work and the things I’m researching as part of this project. Naturally though, this opens up the question, what is your PhD on?

I’ve already been asked this multiple times, struggling to put into words my area of investigation. So I thought, before I get going, I’ll give it a shot — outlining at least the starting point of my research, of course acknowledging that this will change.

My PhD is born out of interest of two social phenomenon.

The first is the rise of identity politics. Benjamin Riley and I described identity politics in an article we wrote for Overland Journal like this: “Identity politics usually refers to a philosophy and practise of building political movements around identities based on race, gender, sexuality, sex, age – the list goes on. There is an implied essentialism to identity politics: you become defined by what you are, rather than what you do. Intersectionality, the idea that a person can ‘be’ many things at once (gay, trans, living with a disability, etc.), is sometimes used to rebut accusations of essentialism, but we would argue intersectionality is in fact identity politics par excellence. Far from freeing us of the shackles of identity, intersectionality simply gives us a more complex matrix to slot ourselves into. We still are; we are simply many things instead of one.” Identity politics has become a dominant form of organising in many left wing circles, and in a later discussion Ben and I also critiqued this approach, arguing that the essentialised nature of it has created an individualised form of politics that eschews solidarity, and ignores the essential class nature of capitalist society.

The second phenomenon that I’m interested in is the rise of anti-politics (check out Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphry’s excellent piece on this). Anti-politics is a form of anti-establishment politics that we’ve seen become extremely prominent in the last couple of years — whether it is the rise of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, or Pauline Hanson in Australia. This is a politics based on the rejection of the political establishment; an establishment that is increasingly, and rightfully, being seen as disconnected from the general population. 

My interest is in how these two forms of politics intersect. In particular there are two areas I’d like to investigate. 

First I want to know why particular forms of anti-politics — Trump, Brexit, Hanson etc. have much of their basis in the rejection and marginalisation of minority groups. How can a form of anti-establishment politics turn its ire on other groups who are also rejected by the establishment? Is it just because this establishment politics is, in part, based on right-wing reactionary bigotry, or, as I’ve argued before, is it about people increasingly seeing identity politics as a form of establishment politics, and in turn reacting against it in that form.

The second area of interest is how people who are engaged in identity politics have reacted toward the growing sense of anti-politics. In particular I think there has been quite a level of skepticism or hostility toward anti-politics, with people in minorities increasingly placing their faith in state structures over the general population. This was particularly clear in the marriage equality plebiscite debate that occurred in Australia recently, with one of the key arguments against the debate being, in essence, that we cannot trust the general population with such an important policy issue. Many raised the spectre of violence on the streets and increased suicides all because of a public discussion and debate on this issue. I want to know where this hostility to the public arises from, and in particular ask whether this hostility has actually reinforced the right-wing anti-politics approach, rather than repelled it.

So there you have it, my PhD interest summed up in short blog post. I hope to keep you updated as I go along and I look forward to looking back at this piece in four years time when I’ve finished to see where I’ve ended up.

Would love, as always, to hear your thoughts.

For queer communities the 1980s and early 90s were defined almost solely by the HIV/AIDS crisis. The disease rocked gay communities around the world, literally taking hundreds of thousands of lives in its wake.

While the immediate ramifications of the HIV/AIDS crisis are clear, there is also a lot more to it than just the loss of life that occurred. For a burgeoning community that was just finding its feet and its voice, the HIV/AIDS crisis didn’t just destroy human life, it also did a lot to destroy the growing political and social movements of the time.

This is a topic that Sarah Schulman explores in her excellent book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, which I read over the summer break. Part political treatise, part memoir, Schulman’s book presents a compelling argument that the HIV/AIDS crisis created a process of gentrification within queer communities that continues to have an impact to this day.

Schulman’s thesis starts with a description of physical gentrification. Using important historical analysis that documents the return of people returning to city centres in the 1980s following a range of economic shifts, she argues that the HIV/AIDS crisis opened up swathes of prime real estate (due to the deaths of so many people), allowing for the gentrification of city centres such as those in New York and San Francisco to occur. This was particularly pronounced as it was often the poorer and more sexually adventurous gay men who died during the epidemic, creating space from what was often poorer, gayer, neighbourhoods to be redeveloped.

But Schulman argues that this gentrification process went well beyond physical changes — it was also a process of the gentrification of the mind.

Schulman discusses this thesis in a number of ways, focusing on what she calls the ‘gentrification of creation’ and the ‘gentrification of our literature’, but it is on the gentrification of politics that I’d like to focus briefly. What Schulman argues is that the 1980s saw a significant loss of vision and creativity within queer movements. A radicalised edge was loss with a desire to be banal. Schulman argues that this very process was one caused, at least in large part, by the HIV/AIDS. She argues, for example:

I think it is obvious, though unexplored, that this terrible moment of lost vision is a consequence not only of America’s lost vision but also of the unexplored impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay and lesbian self. Contextualise this with the homogenization of cities where gays and lesbians’ political imagination once thrived. And most importantly, with the relationship between these two events: the unexplored trauma of the AIDS crisis, and the loss of the radical culture of mixed urbanity. Set it all against the backdrop of the Reagan/ Bush years, and we discover how we got here. To a place where homosexuality loses its own transformative potential and strives instead to be banal.

Schulman argues that this gentrification was the result of the very thing that gays were fighting for at the time: increased recognition. HIV/AIDS made it impossible for the general population to ignore gays and lesbians any longer — we were on TV shows and in newspapers every single day. To deal with this the mainstream sought out “representative homosexuals with whom they were comfortable, and integrate them into some realm of public conversation.” Because, as Schulman argues: “if they didn’t, the gay voice in America would be people with AIDS disrupting mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

This, Schulman argues is a clear process of gentrification:

This is a classic gentrification event. Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, the people who have built the formations and institutions of survival, become overlook by the powers that be. They are too unruly, too angry, too radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change in order to accommodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. The dominant culture needed gay people who would pathologize their own.

This gentrification however did not just occur due to external forces, but was internally driven as well. While many queers fought back against this process, for many others HIV/AIDS became a way (not necessarily on purpose) to mainstream queer communities and queer fights.

Part of this was due to a physical reality. Those queers who were more sexually adventurous, and therefore more likely to be sexually radical, were also those who were more likely to die, leaving more conservative or mainstream counterparts to take their positions within the movement.

But HIV/AIDS also had a mainstreaming effect for those who survived. This likely occurred at two levels. First it left many queers stuck putting all of their energy fighting for their lives, making it far more difficult to be radical and imaginative when it comes to queer liberation. We were forced to appeal to Government forces for medical help, making it far more difficult to be able demand the overthrow of these very institutions. More importantly the HIV/AIDS created increased space for people to be able to attack the very sexual freedom that was the backbone of much of the queer liberation movement. It became easy to blame sexual liberation, and in turn sexually free people for the crisis (strangely ignoring the role of Government, for example), creating a backlash against these movements and sexual practices. Sexual liberation had not just failed, according to this thesis, it had created an epidemic that almost wiped out an entire community. It was therefore something queers must reject.

This, I believe, is an extremely compelling thesis and does a lot to explain how queer movements and communities have changed and developed since the HIV/AIDS crisis. Through the framing of gentrification Schulman provides a unique perspective on the HIV/AIDS crisis and its long term impacts. She does so through a moving narrative that is full not just of political insight, but of her own grief and attempts to deal with what occurred.

For anyone interested in the HIV/AIDS crisis and its long term impacts this is very well worth the read. 

On New Year’s Day Jacobin magazine published a short piece by Atonio Gramsci called “I Hate New Year’s Day”. In the article Gramsci argues:

“I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit. You end up seriously thinking that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning; you make resolutions, and you regret your irresolution, and so on, and so forth. This is generally what’s wrong with dates.”

It was a compelling and interesting piece, and one I connected with immediately. The idea that society turns our lives into set dates and markers, making us “lose the continuity of life and spirit” is  an interesting way to look at dates such as New Years, and the rigidity that it creates. This I thought was particularly true given much of the angst around 2016 and the happiness many people had with its departure. More than ever this year New Years provided a sort of a breaking point — a time when people could leave some of the horror of the past behind, with an aim to start afresh and relish in challenges of the new year ahead.

It’s almost the end of the first month of 2017 but I still have Gramsci’s article in my head. While I connected with the spirit of his writing, in the physical reality in many ways I don’t connect at all. Because while it has almost been a month I still feel I am easing back into a new year, preparing myself slowly for the challenges ahead. I still see New Years as a defining line, one I continue to reflect on as we enter 2017 fully. 

It’s an interesting dynamic and one I hadn’t thought of until this time. January always feels like this for me. I ease back in, enjoying the heat, and the cricket and the tennis, trying desperately to avoid work and ‘real life’. And I make plans and resolutions, hoping to fix things I don’t like, and achieve things I want to achieve. I feel this is a common experience of this month, particularly in Australia where so many people have such time off to enjoy the Summer months.

So I end up in a dilemma. While I agree with Gramsci that these sorts of dates can “turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management” at the same time I feel myself relishing in this opportunity. I feel a desire to have break in the continuity of life to reevaluate, assess and move forward.

That is what has happened once again this year. It is only now that I feel the desire to truly get back into normal life, and I do not regret that. In fact I feel liberated by the opportunity to sit back and evaluate in this way.

But then maybe that is the real point Gramsci was making. Why does this have to be considered a break from “real life”. Why must real life be the thing we hope not to have to return to? Why are our real lives so difficult that we need to designate a time every year to have a break from it? Shouldn’t our lives be one of continued “life and spirit” so that we can have the time for holidays, relaxation, and enjoyment, at all times, not just once (or maybe twice) a year. Why must going back to ‘real life’ be such a pain?

Gramsci I think outlines this thought perfectly in his piece, saying:

“That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigor.

No spiritual time-serving. I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed.”

Maybe that is the reality of the joy of New Years and the months that precede and follow it. Is it maybe that these months are those that represent what we really want out of our lives? Are they the periods that represent the true spirit of life — ones that give us a genuine sense of feeling refreshed and excited for the challenges to come.

This is what I’m thinking about as I ease back into 2017. How do I make this feeling last for an entire year? How do we do that for an entire society?

Last weekend my partners and I drove to Sydney to see Peaches live in concert.

I am not much of a concert-goer, and so it often takes someone I really love to get me out to a gig. This year Peaches was that person. When we saw she was touring we jumped on tickets , and I did not regret it one moment during the show. In doing so I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is about her that I love so much.

Peaches’ concert was raw, and totally energetic. She did not rest for a single moment, pumping a mixture of her hits and some new music with energy that just continued unabated. She did so in really creative ways, with a cool mixture of props, costumes and back up dancers that created what was a really coherent show that in itself had somewhat of a narrative.

At one point for example the stage crew blew up a giant condom, which Peaches walked into to sing Dick in the Air. At another time she literally walked out onto the crowd, balancing herself on people’s hands while performing.

I think most impressive though were the use of her back up dancers. She had two dancers that appeared throughout. The two first showed right at the start and then re-entered during Vaginoplasty wearing giant vaginas on their heads. As the concert continued they slowly stripped their clothes, revealing themselves the crowd. In the end the two were wearing matching pink leather harnesses, embracing each other in the last songs in deep, and highly sexual, embrace. In one of the encores, the two, both with long flowing black hair, came out with hair dryers, blowing their hair around from the front. It was, strangely, one of the most sensual things I’d seen.

This is the thing I realised I love about Peaches. Peaches has built her career off being shocking — her top hits are songs like ‘Fuck the Pain Away’, ‘Two Guys for Every Girl’ and ‘Tent in My Pants’. She revels off being risqué, and I love her for it.

However, going to her concert, part of me feared what that would look like. The show was heavily choreographed, and in doing so it had a real potential to look staged. I worried about a concert where Peaches went ‘what shocking thing can I do now?’. I worried she’d be doing it for the shock value, not because it suited the music, the crowd, or even the show itself.

But it was nothing like that at all. The show was not a ‘shock for shock sake’. Im fact it was less shocking, and more sensual and sexual. The choreography, and sexuality, all fit within the setting of the stage and the music. Yes, she did come out in a giant condom, and it was amazing, but she also designed (or had designed) amazing costumes, and dance moves, and props that all worked together to create a highly entertaining show.

It was raw, it was real, and it was naturally. Most importantly it was natural to her. It was not contrived, or designed just to ‘shock’, but to entertain, and I suspect in many ways, just to have fun. And have fun and entertain she did.

That is what I love about her. She does sex but she does it because she loves it, not because it’s what makes her career (at least that’s my perception). And that is the Teaches of Peaches — she teaches us how to make sex real, and not just a thing to put us into shock and awe.   

In very exciting news, last week I was officially offered a scholarship to start a PhD in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU) next year. I will be starting in around February or March.

A PhD is something that has been in the back of my mind for a while now. It has been a niggling thought, something I thought I may do eventually, sometime down the track. I think now seems like the right time and I’m excited about the opportunity.

For me the opportunity of PhD offered me some really valuable things.

I love my work as a writer and really enjoy what I do. However, working freelance has some major downfalls. For me, most importantly, I’ve struggled both with a lack of a community, and with a lack of stability. My work is very isolated, which at times makes motivation and intellectual stimulation difficult, and can often sew the seeds of self doubt in my mind. This I think often plays directly into my anxiety.

A PhD I think will help change some of this. I’m really excited about the opportunity to be working on a campus and with a community once again. I’ll be able to bounce ideas off others, and have an office I can go to every day. Even just the idea of having colleagues close by excites me a lot. Most importantly this community will be stable for at least three years, which, when I think about it, is longer than any job I’ve ever had.

I still intend to continue my writing. I’ll be keeping up my column with SBS Sexuality, will be blogging and podcasting, and will keep chugging away at my books. While obviously a PhD will be a lot of work, I do not intend for it to detract from all of that. In fact my hope is that it will enhance it — it will give me the opportunity to formalise research I’ve been working on for years. In many ways I feel like I’ve been living a bit of a PhD life for years now (I may regret saying this down the track), but this will just formalise it with more structure and more community. Obviously it will be different as I will have things like deadlines, which for my big projects at least at the moment are non-existent. But I think that will be good for me as a motivator.

So that is where I’m headed next year! I will be keeping up the writing life, just in a different kind of way. I am really excited about it!

This past weekend I went to the Homosexual Histories Conference, Beyond the Culture Wars, in Melbourne. I tried to keep a note of the different parts of the conference I found interesting in Facebook posts as I went along, and these posts are all copied in below. I’ve also added one more at the bottom that I was too tired to write up and post when the conference was over.

Day One:

Homosexual Histories conference, half way through day one!

Just before lunch I went to a session titled “Think of the Children!” largely about right-wing reactions to Safe Schools and other campaigns in particular around the gender binary.

What I found interesting was that a number of times a couple of speakers spoke about how the creation of “new identities”, particularly around gender, does nothing to challenge the existence of other identities. In fact they seemed bemused at people who felt that discussions around gender binaries challenged the existence of standard ‘woman’ and ‘man’ identities.

This befuddled me. Much of the discussion around gender is specifically designed to challenge historical identifiers and the cultural expectations and practices of this. Campaigns against “toxic masculinity” for example are directly designed to challenge many of the masculine norms around being a man.

How can we therefore claim that ‘new identities’ do not challenge the existence of old ones?

For me this highlights many of the limits of identity politics. In creating a politic framed around the idea that ‘everyone should just be able to express their identity however they want’ we ignore the social and material constructions of these identities, the norms they enforce, and the often very negative impacts of these constructions.

It perpetuates the idea that ‘everyone should just be able to be whoever they want’, but then gets confused when people get defensive when we start to challenge the constructions of their identity. It is a clear contradiction and one that identity politics cannot overcome.

Homosexual Histories Conference, part two:

Just went to a fascinating discussion on a backlash against LGBT people (using LGBT language here specifically as it is important) in the last year in Indonesia. Over the past here there has been a ‘competition’ between politicians to make the most homophobic remarks, with armed gangs roaming different parts of the country, at times evicting gays and lesbians from their homes and public places.

What was interesting is the role the Western Homo Agenda has played in all of this. Much of the backlash has been about politicians arguing LGBT Rights (that language specifically) have been a form on cultural imperialism in the country. That this is a form of ‘neo-colonialism’ — a way for the West to import a cultural agenda into the country.

This is a new thing, with one of the speakers discussing how previous gay activism in the country specifically trying to have an “Indonesian flavour”, using Western concepts, but localising them. However those approaches have been overrun in favour of a LGBT Rights narrative.

This is really challenging! The reflection that one speaker made was that “the program in the West can sometimes be detrimental to us.”

How we deal with this, I do not know! But it is a challenge. And to me it really highlights how queer activism and anti-colonialism are inherently interlinked. I must think more!

Homosexual histories, part three:

A really great first day. Some amazing speakers and a lot of great people with great discussion.

I’m going to finish off the day thinking about one thing.

The final plenary, focused on the culture wars today, descended somewhat into a discussion of the LGBTI movement (for want of a better term) as it exists today. In particular, the question debated was, are LGBTI people in Australia better off today than ten years ago.

There were many in the room that argued that at least in terms of legal rights and social acceptance LGBTI people are certainly better off than we likely ever have been. Despite some tinkering here and there we’ve seen a steady advance of legal rights that has yet to be reversed. The only clear area I think this is not true would be in the treatment of gay asylum seekers, which is clearly getting worse.

That does not mean everything is okay, or even good, for all or many people. Let us be very clear about that.

As you would all also know I have many critiques about how we define this ‘better’, in particular the assimilationist approach to it. But I know that I feel safer and more comfortable living as a gay man now than I would have ten, twenty, thirty or forty years ago. And I suspect that is the case for many LGBTI people (I obviously cannot talk for all).

What is interesting to me is that this was not the general feeling of much of the room. Many looked at the seriousness of the fights that exist now (and they are serious), and saw this as a clear reversion back into a far more dangerous situation. We had this conversation earlier on in the day as well when we discussed the role of ‘creativity’ and ‘fun’ in queer activism — why has this disappeared? Many of the answers were that the fights are more serious now — we have much more to lose.

I think there are clearly major fights to be had. But I also think in many cases progressives have won, or are winning, the equality-based agenda that much of the LGBTI movement has been based on for the last decades. It is outside of this space — in the realm of class politics, race, policing, security, public service etc — that things are really going backwards.

So I’m left wondering whether queers are, as someone suggested, reverting to a space a victimhood? Are we projecting the reversions elsewhere in the world onto equality, when it does not exist? Or am I just seeing things wrong, and there is actually a huge pickup in homophobia out there, that I just cannot see? That’s what I’ll go to bed thinking about tonight.

Day Two:

Homosexual Histories, part four:

Just had an amazing presentation on the homonationalism and the police.

In the presentation Emma Russell talked about the way the police (in Victoria in particular) have rebranded themselves to be more ‘pro-queer’ in recent years. This is something that is relatively well documented, a process of the police making themselves look more ‘pro-queer’ while still implemented the same forms of surveillance, discrimination and violence.

What I think interested me the most was that Emma spoke about this process as a way of the police, and the state more broadly, as being reconstructed as ‘queer friendly’. She spoke for example about apologies to the 78ers and to queers being convicted of anti-sodomy laws as a way of ‘drawing the line’ between an anti-queer past and a pro-queer future. These are the ways to close the door on a shameful past and to move forward.

What Emma argued however is that whole this has transformed the image of the police (who are now welcomed with open arms at Pride Marches and the Mardi Gras), it has not transformed their practices. While violence at Mardi Gras does not occur at the same level in 1978 for example (except for events like that in 2013), we now see control in the forms of surveillance and dog sniffers.

Police in this sense are at the pointy end of recent attempts to remake the state and incorporate the gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans community. While this could be seen as a true transformation, like Emma, I am far more skeptical. The very nature of the controlling police force suggest that queer incorporation is just a way of incorporating us into a violent system — something I am not very happy with!

Homosexual Histories, part five (not published on Facebook as I ended up being too exhausted):

The final session I went to today was on psychiatry and sexology. There were some really interesting discussions on the origins of sexology, particularly in Germany and Austria, and how this impacted our understandings of sex and sexuality. It was fascinating to hear about how concepts of medicine were used in the early days as a way to create acceptance for same-sex desires, very similar to discussions around the ‘gay gene’ today.

The one talk that really took my interest though was one titled The Curious Case of Dr Neil McConaghy by Kate Davison.

Basically Dr Neil McConaghy was the most prolific aversion therapist in Australia during the 1960s and early 70s. He developed aversion therapy in the country, working closely with well known psychiatrists from around the world. Yet he also did so while proclaiming himself to be a Marxist and trying to reach out to left wing and liberationist groups in Australia.

I essence Dr McConaghy argued that while he hoped for liberation for queer people, he could not see that happening in the near future. Therefore it his duty as a psychiatrist to try and help ‘change’ lesbian and gay identified people if that is what they wanted. The pain people faced from social stigma was enough to force him to act.

This opened up an interesting discussion about whether Dr McConaghy was someone who was a very complex individual who was in many ways a creature of his time, or if he is just a ‘bad guy’. There’s no doubt in my mind that his treatments did a lot of harm, but at the same time it is hard to just make him out to be inherently ‘evil’ — it is far more complex than that. This is particularly true if we live in a society (based in identity politics) that says people should be able to express their identity however they want. What if the identity they desire is one as a ‘reformed homosexual’? While acknowledging that this is based in a homophobic society, is this something we must deny a consenting adult? This is something Ben and I have discussed on our podcast recently.

I’m certainly not in favour of conversion therapy and it is something that is historically based in bigotry. But the case of Dr McConaghy highlights once again to me how complex the issue is.

Last week I published a piece in The Guardian titled In Challenging Homophobia Gay Men Have Become Our Own Oppressors. The piece looks at increasing homophobia, sexism, racism and body/personality shaming within gay male communities, questioning why this is happening and what we can do to stop it.

As part of the piece I referenced an article I read a while ago titled “The Class-Inflected Nature of Gay Identity” from Steve Valocchi (if anyone wants a PDF just comment or send me an email and I’ll send it through). I probably first read this piece a couple of years ago (taking notes which I used for the Guardian article) and this week I decided I’d read it again as it is really relevant to my work on Sexy Capitalism.

In Sexy Capitalism I’m looking at oppression of two key groups — women and queer people (in a broad category). This is then interlinked, naturally, with straight-male sexuality, which I would argue is oppressed in other ways (a post for another time!). I’ve done a lot of reading on the impact on changes in capitalism on standard nuclear family types and in turn on the impact on women, but it is often harder to get a sense of queer sexualities. This article is useful for that.

The key theory that I work from when it comes to queer sexualities (and that I’ve written about before) is that capitalists have worked to shape gay identities in order to suit their needs. When industrial capitalism broke out in the late 1700s lots of people moved into cities to work in factories. With new population density people starting forming new social groups, and social identities. New homosexual identities (including the terms homosexual and heterosexual) began to arise. This is in sharp contrast to much of our modern understanding which sees homosexual identities as almost as old as society itself (because we are “born this way”).

What Valocchi’s piece provides though is an important sense of nuance to this theory. It would be really easy to see the identities of homosexual and heterosexual appearing at the start of the growth of global capitalism — new markers based on sexual identity instead of sexual practice. We can sometimes look back to the ‘homosexuals’ of the 19th Century (think Oscar Wilde) to reaffirm this theory. But as Valocchi points out there is much more nuance to this.    

Valocchi points to research from the early half of the twentieth century to investigate these arguments. He states that in this period “men were not gay or straight but pansies, husbands, trade, jockers, and queers. These were not different labels for the same group imposed from outside, but internal demarcators of consciousness and culture.” The same can be said for women. Throughout these periods there were many different modes of what we would now call lesbianism. As Valocchi states, “there were the romantic friendships that dominated the middle class of the early part of the century, as well as the middle class ‘kikis’ who were defined by sexual object choice, secrecy, and respectability. There were also the hutches, femmes, and “crossing women” in working class communities in the twentieth century who were defined primarily by gendered role playing rather than sexual object choice.”

The important defining feature, for Valocchi, in many of these differing identities is class. Those that we would now identify as “gay” or “lesbian” did not coalesce around sexual identities, but rather their class. In working class communities for example, the most visible ‘lesbian’ women were the hutches, femmes and ‘crossing women’, while for gay men it was the pansies and the fairies. Both of these groups were distinguished “not on the basis of sexual object choice or preferred sexual activity but on the basis of their…gender inversion.”

The question we have to ask then is what led us to our sexual identity markers of today, and why?

Valocchi provides a class based analysis, arguing effectively that middle-class queers began to shape sexual identities and in turn enforce these upon our community. As he states:

“It was in middle class communities in the first half of the twentieth century that the core idea of sexual object choice emerged as the defining feature of a homosexual person. Growing up beside the working class gay communities of fairies, trade, and husbands were middle class homosexuals who used these groups as “negative examples” for their own identities; they constructed their consciousness and associations explicitly on the basis of sexual object choice and not on the basis of their gender persona.

This focus on homosexual as being ‘defined primarily by sexual object choice’ occurred due to a number of reasons, the most important being the changes in nature of work and gender relations post the second world war. In this time many middle class men (straight and queer) lost autonomy in the workplace and increased specialisation in their mental labour. Added to this women were gaining more power, particularly due to their entry to the workforce. Middle-class men therefore experience a “crisis of masculinity”. In doing so they turned their attention to the fairies, who were represented by the working class. As Valocchi stated:

Middle class men, both ‘queer’ and ‘straight,’ began to direct increased hostility to the fairy- a sexual style represented in working class homosexual culture. In this climate of change in economic and gender arrangements, the fairy came to embody “the very things middle class men feared about their [now supposedly imperiled] gender status” (Chauncey 1994:115).

These changes had different impacts for lesbian women. The crisis in masculinity for men was counterpointed by woman having more resources to affect changes in their own identity. In particular “erotic interest became divorced from procreation, and ‘normal’ women were now seen as sexual beings.” Previous perceptions of lesbian women saw them as those who were ‘hypersexualised’, a stereotype that could no longer work if all women were seen as active sexual agents.

“Thus, particular sexual interest, rather than sexuality, began to define lesbianism. With women of the middle class, as with men, the categories of association became defined by sexual object choice and the boundaries around those categories started to harden.”

Here where we can see the growth of the use of homosexual as identifiers for both men and women. For women it was a process of dealing with the changing perception of female sexuality, and for men it was an identity enforced upon us in order for straight (and queer) men to deal with their crisis of sexuality.

Valocchi then discusses how, post the second world war, these new identities were oppressed and pathologised, particularly through the medical profession. The medicalisation of homosexual identities (particularly for gay men) reinforced middle class ideals, confirming their own sexualities as the proper way to be. There is a lot more to this that I may be able to explore in another blog post.

I find much of Valocchi’s argument compelling and as I said before it adds an extra layer of nuance to my work (something which I even missed to an extent from my Guardian piece last week). But at the same time I think there is something missing . Why is it that these identities won out, and in particular what did they provide to the capitalist class? Valocchi places a lot (too much I think) of agency onto queer communities ourselves, ignoring what I think are likely to be some of the key economic and external influences that lead to these changes. In particular I think we need to see a greater discussion on the economic imperatives of the post-war period, which demanded growth both of the economy and of the population. This saw shifts back to the home for many women and what some describe as the “golden age of traditional marriage”. Defining queer communities solely through sexual identifiers (gay and lesbian) was useful — a way to create clear demarcations and to pathologise those who fell on the wrong side of that line. This not only made the oppression of gays and lesbians easier but it discouraged others from exploring those boundaries, and in turn encouraged a proper nuclear-family existence.

Either way Valocchi provides some important analysis and I’m glad I went back to him. I’ve now got another long list of references to explore and look forward to getting better insight into this period.

It’s just over a week now since David Bowie died and the reaction to his death, and his legacy, is ongoing.

Naturally one of the biggest discussions has been the impact Bowie has had on sexual politics and our ideas of sexuality, gender and identity. This was actually something I wrote about just days before his death. Bowie was a chameleon, living a life of fluid sexuality, gender and identity.

Yesterday I recorded a podcast (to be uploaded soon) about Bowie and his sexual legacy. A big part of our discussion was about the fluid nature of Bowie’s sexual identity, something which lead me to ask the question, could Bowie be Bowie today?

This question came to my mind after my fellow podcaster Ben asked me — how would Bowie have identified himself sexually? The answer is not simple.

Bowie first ‘came out’ as gay in 1972, just before the release of Ziggy Stardust. He did so whilst married to his first wife, Angie. His ‘coming out’ however did not seem to affect his marriage and in fact they stayed together until 1980. Over time this label of ‘gay’ changed and soon Bowie spoke more about himself as being bisexual. Ziggy Stardust, who I reckon was a strong reflection of how Bowie saw himself at the time, was identified as ‘bisexual rock superstar’.

But this changed as well. As Bowie got older he seemed to drop the bisexual label, whilst at the same time not denying his sexual past. In an interview later in his life Bowie  was asked “you were gay for a while?” to which he responded “I was just happy… I got me leg over a lot.” Bowie goes on to talk about his promiscuous ways and how that promiscuity extended to people of all different genders.

It is this fluid identification that really defines Bowie as an artist, performer and human being. It is his lasting legacy on sexual politics. Yet at the same time it is reasonable to think there is no way he would have gotten away with similar shifts if he were performing today.

Since the sexual revolution of the 1970s, in which Bowie played a major part, our perceptions of gender and sexual identification have become deeply essentialised.

When it comes to sexuality this has been framed largely through the lens of the ‘gay gene’ and the idea that we’re all ‘born this way’. Sexual identity has become fixed — you are born into one and any variation is an abnormality. Even within chunks of the gay community bisexuality is still seen as a ‘phase’ someone goes through until they decide on their real sexual identity. If people divert from our understandings of sexual identity (i.e. straight identified dudes having sex with men) then you are quickly ridiculed and told to ‘just admit’ that you are gay. Even worse if you dare suggest that your sexuality can be fluid you are quick to be chastised. Probably the most famous example of this being the reaction to Cynthia Nixon and her declaration that she chose to be a lesbian. Nixon was told by many that her statement was hurting the cause of gay rights and in turn forced to backtrack.

The same can be said about gender. As trans* issues, rightfully, enter the mainstream, discussion of gender is becoming essentialised. Instead of being a social construction, gender is framed as an essential part of one’s being, with gender becoming increasingly naturalised in what can be seen as a very conservative way.

Altogether this is creating a culture, particularly within queer communities, that I’m not sure Bowie would have survived in. With a growing essentialisation of gender and sexuality, it is easily possible that Bowie would have been seen as ‘playing’ with gender and sexuality, something I think many would consider to be mocking gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans* folks. We can see this play out with those who don’t fit these essentialised norms, whether it is some of the reaction to Brooke Hemphill’s “Lesbian for a year” (which did genuinely have a lot of problems) or the controversy over the banning of drag queens at a pride event in Scotland last year. In both of these examples those who didn’t fit the essentialised notion of gender or sexuality were attacked by other queers for daring to do so.

This leads me to ask a number of questions. Would we, for example, accept a man who comes out as gay while remaining married in today’s culture? Or would we tell him that his identity is wrong and that he’s using our sexual identifier as a way to boost his career, at the expense of our community?  Would the idea that Bowie was performing differing genders, as he often did throughout his career, be seen as insulting to the trans* community? Would we let someone get away with such open promiscuity without criticising him for hurting the political chances of other gays and lesbians?

I ask these questions as I think they could say a lot about the impact of essentialising sexuality and gender identification. These questions highlight to me where we’ve come as a movement and a community, and in ways that deeply concern me. Bowie was clearly not perfect but he had such a deep impact on the ways in which we think about gender, sexuality and identity. He shaped much of our modern thinking, and for the better.

It concerns me deeply that we would likely attack anyone who tried to do the same. And that their influence could be lost.

I first heard the news in the car on the way to the gym. At the time it was not official, just rumours. By the time we got inside it was real. David Bowie is dead.

My partner and I spent a few minutes getting ready but then I just stopped. In the middle of the gym I burst into tears.

He is my hero. And now he is gone.

***

I first discovered David Bowie when I was an eager teenager exploring the world of music. Talking to my mum one day she pulled out the one album of his she owned — his best of from 1969 – 1974. I’d never heard of him but was willing to give it a try.

The next day, studying at school, I put my headphones on, put the CD into my discman, and gave it a whirl.

I was immediately transfixed. The music was unique. The lyrics inspiring. His voice mesmerising. I loved every song.

It’s no coincidence Bowie hit me at a time I was struggling. As a confused gay teenager I went through bouts of depression in high school and suddenly here was someone who could speak to me. I didn’t really know about his gender-bending queerness at the time (I was just learning), but I knew somehow that he got it. He gave me a world where I could escape. A place to get away from it all, and where everything was okay. He taught me, just like he taught every one else, that it was okay to be different. That you didn’t have to change you were. 

But somehow he also taught me the opposite. He’s famous for his gender fluidity but I think his influence was much more than that. He was identity fluid as well — identities changing every year, or maybe even every month. And that was okay too. It was exciting actually. He said that creativity meant pushing the barriers. Sometimes it may not work, but that doesn’t matter. It’s great actually. Because you went there. You gave it a shot.

More than anything else this came out in his music. I love Bowie for who he was but I loved him for his music even more. The first ever album I properly owned was Young Americans — a huge departure from his previous glam rock era. When my parents gave it to me I was kind of disappointed. It had none of the hits that I knew at the time. But as I listened I quickly realised what kind of legend I had stumbled upon. A man who could switch everything in a heart beat and still be the best in his game. Who else (apart from the Beatles) could come close to achieving that? How could I not fall in love?

***

It’s over ten years later now and I don’t know to explain what Bowie means to me. It feels impossible to put it down in words.

Bowie to me was not just a musician. He was not just a great rock star. He was not just a creative genius. He was…everything.

Bowie is the person I listen to when I’m going through a rough time. He’s the person I listen to when I’m having a great time. He’s the artist I always think they should play more at parties. He’s the man I know I will always turn on at the big events of my life — birthdays, births, weddings, even my own funeral (yes, I have thought of that).

But even more than that, Bowie for me is an inspiration to do better. Earlier this year I went to a tribute show while in Berlin. When it was done, and I was beaming from ear to ear, my partner Martyn asked me why I enjoyed his music so much. I replied that he inspires me to be a better writer. To be a more beautiful writer. If I could come close to him, just for a day, I would be proud of myself.

Yesterday, my partner James posted on his wall “Lives are not measured in years, but in the impact they make on the lives of others.” The post came with a picture of me, dressed as David Bowie from Labyrinth, at my first ever David Bowie party.

That is the impact David Bowie has had on my life. He is my inspiration. A person who got me through tough times, and one who pushes me harder every day. 

My aim from today is to be a little bit more like David Bowie every day. A little bit more creative. A little bit more bold. A little bit more out there. 

I feel so lucky today that I managed to spend 27 years of my life being on the same planet as David Bowie. I’m terrified now that I have to spend the rest without him. But he will always be there. He will always be my inspiration. My hero.