On Sexuality and Power

Thus far I have tried to sketch a materialist theory of psychic life, drawing attention to the power hierarchies that dominate our relationships. While I have isolated gender, age, class, and race as the principal vectors of power, special confusions envelop the idea of gender.

The most disputed question in our historiography is whether there have always been lesbians and gay men, or whether we are a recent development—since the nineteenth century, according to Foucault, or, in some versions, since the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The former, universalizing position is taken by Rictor Norton and Terry Castle, who discover in the molly-house subculture and masquerading women of the eighteenth century a gay and lesbian history that is continuous with the present. Note, however, that these evidences of continuity depend upon gender identities.

Consider the mollies of the early eighteenth century, who set up clubs, cross-dressed, and took women’s names. One contemporary account describes them as “so far degenerated from all masculine deportment, or manly exercises, that they rather fancy themselves women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, cur[t]sy, cry, scold, and mimic all manner of effeminacy.”¹ This, surely, evokes a subculture organized around gender, not sexuality. According to Alan Bray, what “most scandalised contemporary journalists writing about the molly houses was the extravagant effeminacy and transvestism they could involve.”² The focus was on people who felt themselves, or behaved as if they felt themselves, to be the “wrong” gender—not on people having, or desiring, same-sex relations. Nonetheless, Bray reads the mollies as “homosexual”: “There was now a continuing culture to be fixed on and an extension of the area in which homosexuality could be expressed and therefore recognised; clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and particular public places—all could be identified as having specifically homosexual connotations.”³ Norton makes the same elision.⁴

My argument is that most cultures give primacy either to gender identity or to object-choice. One of these terms tends to serve as the primary interpretive instrument; the other is incorporated as a subordinate, and consequently incoherent, subcategory. Of course, this does not mean that the subordinate discourse will be entirely untenable; social systems are always complex, comprising residual and emergent elements. But it will be more difficult to hold, for the individual and for others.

Terry Castle adduces the diaries of Anne Lister, composed between 1817 and 1824, in pursuit of her contention that the lesbian is not a recent invention. Lister and her partners refer to her repeatedly as masculine, a man, gentleman-like and having manly feelings, and to her female partners as Lister’s wives or subject to her adulterous approaches. Lister fantasizes herself in men’s clothes and as having a penis, and models herself on Lord Byron. For Castle, and Norton also, this is evidence that the lesbian identity existed before 1869.⁵ However, as Judith Halberstam points out, it makes better sense to regard Lister as transgendered; she even rejected the label “sapphic,” the contemporary term for sexual relations between women, insisting on her own masculinity.⁶ The many eighteenth-century instances surveyed in Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women indicate that women who desired other women were persistently discovered to be of irregular gender—hermaphrodite, male-identified, or cross-dressed. Even romantic friendships might be structured as husband and wife, or involve cross-dressing. Donoghue wonders “why a woman who loved women would want to pass as a husband.”⁷ The reason is that she was male-identified; her object-choice was a consequence of that. Castle, indeed, introducing her collection of lesbian writing, remarks how, from the eighteenth century to Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, “the wish to associate female homosexuality with physiological oddities such as distended genitalia or supposedly masculine features … seems inevitably part of a ‘naive’ or reflexive response to the lesbian idea.”⁸ She supposes that the lesbian idea is prior, and then misrepresented; I think (alleged) masculine features dominated thought and action in this period. Generally, on through the nineteenth century, George Chauncey Jr. has shown, gender was the prior category. “Investigators classified a woman as an invert because of her aggressive, ‘masculine’ sexual and social behavior, and the fact that her sexual object was homosexual was only the logical corollary of this inversion.”⁹

Two distinct aspects of the sex/gender system are in play, then. One is structured in gender identity, and tends to look for signs of femininity in men and masculinity in women. The other is structured in object-choice, and depends upon sexual and/or emotional commitment to another person of the same gender. To be sure, they are bound to become tangled together; nonetheless, they are analytically separate, and by no means necessarily either homologous or in a permanent relation. Gayle Rubin, coming from feminism, reaches the same position; so does Eve Sedgwick.¹⁰ John Fletcher declares:

I want provisionally to hold apart, to separate at least analytically gender, sexuality and sexual difference, in order to interrupt the too easy assimilation of sexuality and the sexual into the question of sexual difference, male and female on the one hand, and the equally common and too ready assimilation of that sexual difference into the question of gender on the other.¹¹

Yet opinion is not settled. Tamsin Wilton remarks: “The interlocutions between discourses of gender and the erotic manifest a complexity that I suggest indicates that they may not usefully be distinguished one from the other.” William J. Spurlin makes a thorough case for this.¹² In his essay “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” the four premodern male traditions adduced by David Halperin (effeminacy; pederasty or “active” sodomy; friendship or male love; passivity or inversion) are derived empirically from particular times and places; they do not admit a primary distinction between gender identity and object-choice.¹³

The question with which I began, about continuity and rupture in lesbian and gay histories, is awkwardly posed, therefore: it runs together gender dysphoria and dissident object-choice. The confusion in these discussions may be traced to a reluctance to distinguish between desire-to-be and desire-for. Gender identity is a kind of desire-to-be, whereas object-choice is about desire-for. As I elaborated these categories in chapter 2, they involve two quite different kinds of dissidence. In model (rg), the relative gender model, the man constitutes a double affront to convention:

The man has a “wrong” gender identity and his object-choice is “wrong” as well, insofar as it is homosexual. Yet insofar as there is an “F” and an “M” in the model, he may be assimilated into a conventional binary formation. In model (c), the complementarity model, the dissidence is again in the object-choice (one male desires another), but without the offense of dissident gender identity and the consolation (as it is conventionally perceived) of a shadow of heterosexual desire:

When these matters began to attract scientific inquiry, in the nineteenth century, the reigning theoretical construct was degeneracy. This was a product of Darwinism—a kind of reverse evolution; it was a vehicle for anxieties about class, imperialism, and European racial superiority. So far from differentiating gender identity and object-choice, degeneracy subsumed both of them, along with perversion generally, into a very broad concept of weakness, debauchery, madness, and criminality, resulting from an alleged hereditary corruption.¹⁴

It was in reaction against the crudeness of degeneracy as a construct that more patient and sympathetic theorists, now often called “sexologists,” isolated inversion. They encountered self-confessed inverts who seemed admirable, and therefore attributed the condition to a congenital, but not necessarily pathological, abnormality. Both Havelock Ellis and Freud explicitly reject degeneracy as an explanation.¹⁵ Ellis supposed that upon conception everyone might have 50 percent of male “germs” and 50 percent of female ones, and that in “the homosexual person” and “the psychosexual hermaphrodite” something interfered with the business of sorting out which were to predominate;¹⁶ this is an elementary anticipation of Freud’s idea of a universal original bisexuality. Whatever else psychoanalysis did, Foucault remarks, at least it opposed “the political and institutional effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.”¹⁷ Martin Scherzinger and Neville Hoad remark that development correlates with evolution in Freud’s thought, and arrested development with degeneration.¹⁸

The sexologists’ investigations generally started from the most conspicuous form of dissidence: “wrong” gender identity. They tended to suppose that “wrong” object-choice would correlate, but quickly ran into instances where this seemed not to be the case. One response, as Chauncey says, was to be more careful with one’s terminology. “While ‘sexual inversion’ referred to an inversion in the full range of gender characteristics, ‘homosexuality’, precisely understood, referred only to the narrower issue of homosexual object-choice, and did not necessarily imply gender or sexual role inversion.”¹⁹ Halperin, in this vein, credits Ellis and Freud with the crucial discrimination: “That sexual object-choice might be wholly independent of such ‘secondary’ characteristics as masculinity or femininity.”²⁰ Ellis and Freud do make this distinction. Notwithstanding, their accounts of object-choice reinstall gender identity as a typical component.

Ellis was aware of the potential for confusion. In Sexual Inversion (1897), he notes that Albert Moll has tidied up the terminology and recognizes only two terms: “psychosexual hermaphroditism and homosexuality.” This, broadly, is the discrimination that I have been broaching: between gender dissidence and “an inclination [in a man] toward men.”²¹ In the second edition of Sexual Inversion (1901), Ellis clarifies his account of Moll’s argument and remarks in a note that Moll now wants to reserve the term “inversion” for gender disturbance—for “those cases in which there is a complete turning around of the sexual instinct, the man feeling in every respect as a woman, the woman in every respect as a man.” Ellis concedes that there is something to be said for Moll’s distinction, but he prefers another. The term “homosexuality” he applies “to the phenomena generally,” reserving “inversion” for “those cases in which the sexual attraction to the same sex seems to be deep-rooted and organic.”²² This is more than terminology: Moll proposed two discrete conditions, whereas Ellis is positing two levels of intensity.

So if inversion is a “deep-rooted and organic” condition, as opposed to “the phenomena generally,” what are the signs of it? In practice, Ellis allows it to correspond to the presence of “wrong” gender characteristics. To be sure, he insists, the male invert need not be effeminate, he may just make a same-sex object-choice. Nonetheless,

it must be said that there is a distinctly general, though not universal, tendency for sexual inverts to approach the feminine type…. Although the invert himself may stoutly affirm his masculinity, and although this femininity may not be very obvious, its wide prevalence may be asserted with considerable assurance, and by no means only among the small minority of inverts who take an exclusively passive role.²³

In other words, the gender invert is the most complete type of homosexual. Object-choice is in a continuum with the model of “wrong” gender identity. So with women: “In inverted women a certain subtle masculinity or boyishness is equally prevalent.”²⁴

The key Freudian text here, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), is far closer to Ellis than is often recognized. Freud places same-sex object-choice at the forefront of his analysis. But, so far from maintaining a differentiation, he continues: “People of this kind are described as having ‘contrary sexual feelings,’ or better, as being ‘inverts,’ and the fact is described as ‘inversion.’”²⁵

Like Ellis, Freud dismisses fanciful theories of innate inversion, and refutes the anatomical basis claimed in such theories. However, also like Ellis, Freud cannot forsake the thought that gender identity and object-choice might line up after all. He maintains this especially, though not only, in the case of women. “The position in the case of women is less ambiguous; for among them the active inverts exhibit masculine characteristics, both physical and mental, with peculiar frequency and look for femininity in their sexual objects—though here again a closer knowledge of the facts might reveal a greater variety” (57).

This indeterminacy persists in a note added to Freud’s Three Essays in 1915: “Finally, it may be insisted that the concept of inversion in respect of the sexual object should be sharply distinguished from that of the occurrence in the subject of a mixture of sexual characters.” Yet the ensuing sentence is equivocal once more: “In the relation between these two factors, too, a certain degree of reciprocal independence is unmistakably present” (57–58). So sexual object and gender identity are to be sharply distinguished; yet there is a residual, unspecified interaction. In a further note, added to the Three Essays in 1920, Freud tries a new tack. Following Sandor Ferenczi, he posits two types of male homosexual: “‘subject homoerotics,’ who feel and behave like women, and ‘object homo-erotics,’ who are completely masculine and who have merely exchanged a female for a male object” (58). Only object homo-erotics, Ferenczi says, may be “influenced psychologically,” whereas for subject homo-erotics there can be no question of “struggling against their inclination” (58). Once again, the real homosexual, the one who cannot be reached through analysis, is the one who wants to identify across the gender divide. Freud, while accepting Ferenczi’s distinction, notes also that many people combine elements of both.

C. A. Tripp in his comprehensive survey of homosexuality, first published in 1975, dismisses psychoanalysis and declares, “Only in popular thinking are homosexuality and inversion synonymous.”²⁶ However, prominent commentators of our own time have allowed confusion to persist. As Sedgwick confirms, Foucault’s invocation of “a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood” is often invoked as charting the full emergence of a modern concept of sexuality.²⁷ However, Foucault says he is presenting “the nineteenth-century homosexual”—in fact, the invert. He specifies as the founding text Karl Westphal’s article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations,” in which the examples are a lesbian who dreamed she was a man, and an apparently heterosexual cross-dressing male prostitute. Indeed, “wrong” gender identity is central to the historical change registered by Foucault: “Homosexuality [L’homosexualité] appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.” This change is characterized “less by a type of sexual relations [that is, less by object-choice] than by a quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting [d’intervertir] the masculine and the feminine in oneself.”²⁸ Foucault is saying, in other words, that the modern homosexual is a blurred, composite figure, conceived in a confusion between object-choice and gender identity. Unfortunately, he does not explicate that confusion.

Gert Hekma, writing from the anthropological tradition, reviews the arguments of the classical inversion theorists (not including Freud), showing that their emphasis on inversion obscured object-choice, thus causing “additional problems and hesitations in coming out as homosexuals” for “more masculine boys.” Nowadays, however, “the spectrum of gender possibilities has broadened to include different options” and “feminine styles” are “part of the diversity of the gay world.”²⁹ Descriptively this is fair, though perhaps a bit eager to free the post-Liberation gay man from the stigma of effeminacy. But Hekma’s judicious empiricism forgoes any attempt at a theory, either of gender or sexuality. There used to be a theory—inversion—but it was wrong; now we just have all kinds of people doing all kinds of things.

At the other extreme, Kaja Silverman’s determination to retheorize these topics within psychoanalysis plunges her back into Oedipal conjecture and an assumption that gender identity is the key to homosexuality. After all, she avers, “human culture has to date shown itself to be stubbornly resistant to conceptualizing sexual positionality—and, more recently, object-choice—apart from the binary logic of gender.”³⁰ Indeed it has. Silverman is not interested in separating out gender identity and object-choice; she believes that the gay man has to accept that “an identification with ‘woman’ constitutes the very basis of his identity, and/or the position from which he desires” (344). Lately, Silverman notes, some gay men have tended to appear masculine, but she isn’t impressed: “It is by no means clear, anyway, that even the most committed practitioner of macho homosexuality can ever succeed in entirely extirpating the ‘woman’ within” (346). Even while abjuring “global pretensions,” and acknowledging that her theory may account only for “certain kinds of male homosexuality,” Silverman launches into her own reworking of the Oedipus complex as a mechanism for the acquisition of gender identity (346–47).

The most ambitious investigation of the thesis that the modern homosexual derives from the late nineteenth century is offered in Neil Bartlett’s creative documentary, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde. Once, Bartlett says, he experienced his gayness “in complete isolation”; now he is “connected with other men’s lives, men living in London with me. Or with other dead Londoners.”³¹ To establish this linkage, he ransacks nineteenth-century documents, especially around the Wilde scandal. An awkwardness, however, is that most of the available instances appear to involve effeminate men. This places them in specific discontinuity with contemporary gay subculture, the achievement of which, as Bartlett sees it, is to make us “handsome, masculine, demanding and unafraid of our pleasures” (219; my emphasis). The signals for gayness are historically variable, then: in the nineteenth century they centered upon effeminacy; today they are said to involve a relatively unremarkable masculinity.

Bartlett was writing in that period—which developed from the mid-1970s and held the field through the 1980s—when it was most difficult to appreciate gay femininity: in the heyday of the “clone” gay image. It was the time when Gregg Blachford and Jamie Gough could write, almost without reservation, of the masculinization of the gay world.³² Dennis Altman observed: “The long-haired androgynous look of the early seventies was now found among straights, and the super-macho image of the Village People disco group seemed to typify the new style perfectly.”³³ Richard Dyer, in an essay first published in 1981, confirms “the current ‘masculinization’ of the gay male style.” However, he saw something else in the Village People: “all the stereotypes of ultramasculinity in a camped-up flauntingly gay way.”³⁴ Even at this point, gay effeminacy has not gone away.

In fact by no means all Bartlett’s contemporary gay Londoners were macho, but in Who Was That Man? he accepts the image. He himself wears Doctor Martins, 501 jeans, a check shirt, and a moustache: “I look like, or rather hope that I look like, a lot of other gay men” (205). Again, at the start of a section mainly transcribing nineteenth-century notions of effeminacy, he remarks how in his masculine gear he may pass as straight, while still being visible to other gay men (63). This is the image he presents on the BBC2 television program The Late Show (1993). There he urges upon gay men eclectic subcultural appropriation: the system scarcely acknowledges us, but we are piecing together our own lives. He offers his own outfit as an instance. Some might say that he is not entitled to wear it—he is not one of those “regular guys.” But he has “earned the right,” he says, through the (manly) confidence with which he carries it off.

Who Was That Man? makes much of the famous transvestites, Fanny Park and Stella Boulton, who often passed as young women until they were arrested in 1870. Bartlett sees them as demonstrating “the existence of our culture in London,” though the charge was “being men and dressed in female attire” (143, 132). Significantly, he stops short of actually identifying with them: “I would applaud the men who wore them in their determined efforts to use their frocks to create public space for themselves,” he says (137–38). Such a combination of affiliation and distance occurs again when Bartlett remarks: “I always enjoy asking a friend, in all drunken seriousness, how’s the wife? We both know that there is no useful comparison between heterosexual marriage and the relationship being referred to.” There is a point, though: “in using the word, I recall the house at 46 Fitzroy Street” where the police arrested a group of transvestites on August 12, 1894 (85; Bartlett’s emphasis). The connection is awkward, but Bartlett believes it encodes a historical affirmation that is worth making.

Such strategic effeminacy has partly informed Bartlett’s extravagant deployment of camp and drag in the theater, particularly in plays from that time, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep and Sarrasine. In an interview, Simon Fraser questions him: “But this is 1991. Is drag really important to gay men?” Bartlett’s reply is not that lots of gay men are feminine really, but that drag is an emblematic part of the culture of British gay men: “Almost all the things that are now traditionally gay are very important for that fact alone, and they represent gay space. They are a cultural space which we can inhabit.” The value lies in “seeing a gay entertainer in a room full of gay people, speaking a language that no one else could understand.”³⁵ We do drag, then, not because we are really feminine, but because it’s been one of our things; it is a matter of subcultural affiliation and respect.

In my view this is a fair proposition, but insofar as it subsumes gender dissonance into gayness it tends to marginalize men for whom femininity is the primary factor. In fact Bartlett’s work, despite his apparent privileging of the macho image, has contributed significantly to the recovery of subcultures of effeminacy. As regards camp and drag in his stage work, he evidently has been intrigued by their theatrical potential. In Bartlett’s novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, Mother gets Boy into drag, but at an intense moment “his white-powdered female face and livid red lips were suddenly split open by a masculine grin of triumph.”³⁶ This grotesque juxtaposition may remind us that drag is not about women, it is about gender boundaries; theater is not about display, but appearance and reality. Boy’s triumph consists partly in the quality of his masquerade, partly in his maintenance of maleness. An ideology does not require the suppression of its other, but its productive management.

The Bar in Ready to Catch Him rehearses these issues. Boy is introduced as conspicuously masculine: “Keep him strong, keep him young, and, whatever his colouring, keep him gorgeous.” The narrator invokes an allegorical figure of “Strength” (14–15). The Bar regulars appear to belong to another generation. Their culture is insistently feminine and centered upon gender identity. They have girls’ names, camp talk, and a penchant for cross-dressing. Boy is not like them. At one point he is said to imagine leaving The Bar with a husband, but the narrator checks himself: “(Of course, Boy would never have used that word, Husband, that’s my word. But then, I’m old-fashioned, I mean, we used to talk like that all the time. What word do you use, then?)” (49; Bartlett’s emphasis). When Boy is being prepared to celebrate his union with O, he is dressed in drag, as a smalltown queen, and as a woman by Madame and Stella. However, he is also attired as a schoolboy, a soldier, and a black man. For the wedding Boy is not in drag; there is “no priest and no frock, this being an actual ceremony and not some party or parody” (207).

Yet, in practice, few of us want unremitting machismo. Bartlett remarks in Who Was That Man?: “I too often require of myself and my partners a female nature—sexually available, domestic, a surprisingly good cook and at all times attractively dressed—inhabiting a male exterior—sexually aggressive, potent, financially successful, socially acceptable” (63–64). In his attempt to reconcile the contradictory concurrence of (what he takes as) masculine and feminine norms, Bartlett comes unexpectedly close to the idea of Ulrichs and the sexologists: our souls may be partly female, but the male body is crucial.

Of course, not all gay men became clones; camp and drag continued to thrive; clone got described as a kind of drag. The position was not coherent, but it seemed to suffice, until the mid-1990s when transgender people, by declaring themselves, made the illogicality blatant. Lately, under the regime of Queer (regarded either as a political intervention or as a capitulation to capitalism), almost all styles are welcome. Augmenting the standard menu to “LGBTT” prompts a recognition that we still haven’t sorted out the relations between sexual orientation and gender identity.

Given the persistence of confusion over object-choice and gender identity in the thought of the most prestigious theorists of dissident sexuality, it is hardly surprising that gay men and lesbians have not readily clarified these matters. In the late nineteenth century some men, appealing to Walt Whitman, David and Jonathan, and the Theban Band, sought to establish that, so far from being effeminate, same-sex love might be quintessentially masculine. In Germany in the early twentieth century manly homosexuality was celebrated by the group around the journal Der Eigene. They abjured the notion that homosexuals were feminine in disposition, reasserting sexuality in chivalric love and the love of friends.³⁷ In terms of the models I have proposed, they posit males desiring other males, without relinquishing their masculine gender identities:

They manifest a conventional gender identity alongside a dissident object-choice.

However, this was not the dominant ideology. In Gay New York, Chauncey has shown that until the 1930s men were not divided by object-choice, into “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals”: this was not the primary axis of identification. A man displaying a committed feminine manner got called a fairy, but “the ‘man’ who responded to his solicitations—no matter how often—was not considered abnormal, a ‘homosexual,’ so long as he abided by the masculine gender conventions.”³⁸ Donald Webster Cory, writing in 1951, cited a report from a U.S. sailor who believed that “the stranger who performed fellatio” was “homosexual,” but not the man on whom it was performed. “The performer was a ‘fairy.’ The compliant sailor, not.”³⁹ Still, between 1930 and 1960, gender dissidence is found by David K. Johnson and Allen Drexel to be the organizing principle of gay subculture in Chicago.⁴⁰ A similar story is told by Edmund White’s friend Lou in The Beautiful Room Is Empty: homosexuals divide into boys, men, and vicious old queens. “The boy felt a natural affinity to girls, with whom he was always exchanging makeup tips. The man had once fucked girls but now had no further use for them.” Tragically, “whoever succumbed to homosexual desire became immediately undesirable.”⁴¹ In Britain, John Marshall has shown, gender inversion remained the dominant paradigm on into the 1970s; it “effectively eliminated the need for a homosexual concept.”⁴²

This analysis has consequences for the mythology of Stonewall. Who, when we liberated ourselves, came out? Not the man who presented himself as inverted, effeminate; he was always visible. The ultimate instance is Quentin Crisp. He says in The Naked Civil Servant (1968) that people such as he “must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine.”⁴³ Crisp was never not-out: continually he is propositioned, harassed, and beaten, on sight and by total strangers; employers and the army reject him out of hand. The distinction between manifest and closeted gay men is urged by Peter Wildeblood, writing with unprecedented boldness after his trial and conviction in 1954: “Everyone has seen the pathetically flamboyant pansy with the flapping wrists, the common butt of music-hall jokes and public-house stories.” Such people, evidently, were not hiding. However, Wildeblood adds, “Most of us are not like that. We do our best to look like everyone else, and we usually succeed.”⁴⁴ The object-choice men strive to distance themselves from the pansies. It is to these men, the ones who managed to look “like everyone else,” that the 1970s offered a new identity.

The United States produces equivalent instances. Michael Bronski observes: while “most homosexuals could choose to ‘pass,’ the majority of homosexuals who formed this visible subculture were effeminate men, butch women, obvious queens, and the drags.”⁴⁵ Kenneth Marlowe in a popular book of 1968, The Male Homosexual, distinguishes the “effeminate” and the “masculine” homosexual. The former, “because of his physical appearance, is sometimes labelled ‘queer’ from the start of his life”—everyone can see at once that he’s different. Meanwhile, “the masculine homosexual,” according to Marlowe, “is usually referred to as the latent homosexual, the closet queen.”⁴⁶ Either way, he’s not visible; hardly queer at all. Todd Butler, recalling New York in 1960, conjoins out-ness and effeminacy: “It was unusual for somebody to be fully ‘out’ and leading a gay lifestyle to be that butch. Usually, if you met somebody who was gay and butch, they were very uptight, closety types and very, very neurotic.”⁴⁷ That sounds like Michael, Donald, and most of the men in Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band. Alan can hardly tell that he’s crashed a gay party. But he knows about Emory: “Faggot, Fairy, pansy … queer, cocksucker! I’ll kill you, you goddam little mincing, swish! You goddam freak! FREAK! FREAK!” Emory admits: “I’ve known what I was since I was four years old.” “Everybody’s always known it about you, Emory,” Michael quips, unhelpfully.⁴⁸

It is the straight-acting types who had a new opportunity: to come out. The 1970s are often presented as the birth of the modern gay man, his (self-)definition founded purposefully in object-choice, as a consequence of (partial) decriminalization in Britain, the Stonewall Riots, the founding of the Gay Liberation Front and other activist movements, and the burgeoning of a purposefully sexualized gay subcultural economy. The larger outcome was a reversal in the organization of the sex/gender system. Homosexual, lesbian, and gay got defined in terms of object-choice, and gender identity was subsumed, more or less uneasily, into that. Thus, for instance, we know that drag artistes are not invariably gay, but in practice tend to assume that they are; in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994), everyone is shocked that Tick (Mitzi) is planning to return to his wife and child.

Lesbian awareness was complicated by other priorities in the women’s movement; yet, here too, the attack on butch/femme styles and identities tended to validate object-choice rather than gender dissidence.

This has made better sense for many people, personally and politically. But, by the same token, people whose primary sense of themselves is strongly founded in gender dissidence—effeminate men, butch women, transvestites, transsexuals—have been marginalized. They have endured the dominance of a sex/gender model in which they hardly figure, or only as incidental, unintelligible, out of date, embarrassing. Leslie Feinberg in hir novel Stone Butch Blues shows butches being excluded by lesbians in the gay liberation movement.⁴⁹

For many gay men, the post-Stonewall reliance on object-choice has afforded opportunity for a denial that effeminacy is a necessary part of gayness. Andrew Sullivan is notorious for his insistence that gays are “virtually normal”; for him this actually means not effeminate. Sullivan denies that he has ever experienced insecurity about this, though he recalls that when he avoided team sports at school a girl did ask him, “Are you sure you’re not really a girl under there?”⁵⁰ Sissy boys are the problem, according to Sullivan. It is they who vindicate right-wingers, suffer identity conflict, and provoke explanations from psychologists. He is excited by the masculine tone of a gay party:

While the slim and effeminate hovered at the margins, the center of the dance floor and the stage areas were dedicated to the most male archetypes, their muscles and arrogance like a magnet of self-contempt for the rest. But at the same time, it was hard also not to be struck, as I was the first time I saw it, by a genuine, brazen act of cultural defiance, a spectacle designed not only to exclude but to reclaim a gender, the ultimate response to a heterosexual order that denies gay men the masculinity that is also their own.⁵¹

This craven yearning to appease the sex/gender system that has marginalized us leads Sullivan to boost his manhood with injections of actual testosterone. Apparently this bestows a Nietzschean, Superman buzz: “What our increasing knowledge of testosterone suggests is a core understanding of what it is to be a man, for better and worse. It is about the ability to risk for good and bad; to act, to strut, to dare, to seize.”⁵² Somewhat defensively, Sullivan puts down gays who can’t or won’t normalize as “prone to adult dysfunction and pathology,” and as “insecure gay adults” who “will always cling, to a greater or lesser extent, to the protections of gender mannerisms.”⁵³

Paul Monette takes a more thoughtful approach in Halfway Home. Tom has been assaulted as a child by his father and brother (Brian), both of whom see him as a sissy and a wimp. Still, in his mid-thirties, he is “a terrible sissy when it comes to crawling things.”⁵⁴ He has internalized this view of himself; indeed, he has made it productive by leaving his hostile, smalltown, Irish/Italian-Catholic origins and becoming a performance artist in California (outside Malibu). His star turn has been his camp version of Christ on the cross, “Miss Jesus.” As he faces death from AIDS, Tom’s memories are reactivated when Brian appears, under pressure in a racketeering inquiry, with his wife (Susan) and son (Daniel).

This turns out to be the opportunity for Tom to revise his relations with manliness. This is accomplished initially through a bond with Daniel (who is seven), founded in Tom’s awareness that his own childhood traumas are being reenacted in Daniel by the damaged Brian. Daniel evidently likes being with Tom—a man who is not going to become violent. As they walk together Daniel falls into step; Tom is gratified to be a model of manhood. He comes to realize that manliness is a precarious masquerade: “there was no special dispensation” in “the secret to being a man.” It was not a natural gift, possessed by his father and brother and withheld from himself, but something continuously improvised and mimicked, “a waltz on the lip of the void” (199). This (relative) demystification of manliness frees up Tom’s anxieties. He finds he is imitating Brian’s “unconscious swagger,” and thinks:

This was how straight boys learnt to be men, mimicking and preening, stimulating the butch gene. As I trotted down in Brian’s wake, I thought about Daniel following him and following me. Somewhere there had been a trade-off, gentling my brother and toughening me. Brian stopped at the bottom of the stairs while I hovered a step above him, four inches taller now. And I prayed to the nothing I didn’t believe in: Let the kid have it both ways. (238; Monette’s emphasis)

Perhaps the next generation of men will be able to incorporate something of the sissy.

For this reader, the determination in Halfway Home to negotiate an acceptable form of manliness betrays a persisting anxiety. Brian doesn’t give much ground; excessive hopes appear to be placed in alternative counseling sessions as a way of dealing with his violence toward Daniel. The brothers admit their youthful sexual activities together, though in Brian’s case it appears to have been circumstantial and temporary (he was between girlfriends), whereas for Tom it was formative and continuing. “‘You know what I used to think?’” Brian asks. “‘That I made you gay. Like it was all my fault.’ He spilled out a soft self-mocking laugh, and his fingers rustled my hair. ‘Like I tempted you’” (177). This somewhat arrogant thought is not repudiated. The idea seems to be that the men, between them, engender, or anyway foster, the gay boy; he is a by-product of their manly maneuvering, and hence not to be unfairly despised and condemned. There is little room in this for Susan, the wife and mother. As a nonmasculine influence she is barely effective; her protectiveness toward her son leads Tom to compare her to Medea (121). Tom does have a supportive lesbian and gay family of choice, but they are edged to one side while patriarchal business is transacted (compare the emphasis on the brother in Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart).

A feeling that Monette is protesting too much is strengthened when Tom manages to prove himself in more traditional fictive manner by disarming a gangster. So the gay sissy is allowed to run with the men, at least up to a point; and, correspondingly, the heteronormative system can be humanized, such that the gay man can love his birth family (as it seems he must), as well as his family of choice. The trouble is that reconciling elements of the sissy with elements of the macho still leaves the true sissy exposed—and, for that matter, the true macho.

What Halfway Home does show is that manliness is learned. Again, in Joseph Hansen’s novel, Steps Going Down, Cutler meets a young man. “The boy shakes hands limply, awkwardly, like a little kid who hasn’t learned the knack. Or like a girl. Cutler’s handshake is strong, manly. His mother made him practice. A good, firm handshake makes people respect you.”⁵⁵ Cutler’s manly stance projects dominance; the young man may be correspondingly boyish, or even girlish. Masculinity is something boys acquire, if they are lucky. Hence a central dictum in queer theory, as enunciated especially by Judith Butler: all gender is performative. “Everyone is passing; some have an easier job of it than others,” Kate Bornstein observes. Again: “Arnold Schwarzenegger does male drag perfectly, only he doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor about it yet.”⁵⁶

The triumphant revelation that the gruff-looking man in the hard hat speaks with a high-pitched voice, loves Bette Midler, and wants to be dominated in bed is repeated again and again in gay stories, as though it encapsulated a fatal truth. The persistence of gay male femininity, in the face of such discouragement, indicates that it is fulfilling some important functions in sexual dissidence. My larger thought here is that gender hierarchy is not something that gay men and lesbians have arbitrarily got stuck on: it involves one of the basic structuring ideologies in our societies and, like class and race, it is not going to go away.

What makes this topic so complex is the mobility, fluidity, ubiquity, and inexorability of gender typing. Historically, as I tried to show in The Wilde Century, effeminacy didn’t always correlate with queerness; in the time of Shakespeare and Milton it meant paying too much attention to women. In the nineteenth century anarchists were termed effeminate, and Jews.⁵⁷ Still, today, all kinds of sensitivity, consideration, colorfulness, and exuberance may be stigmatized as failures in masculinity. Writers have often struggled to articulate sensitivity while denying effeminacy. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche says her young husband had “a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate-looking.”⁵⁸ Probably many boys and men who exhibit femininity are mainly concerned to disaffiliate from the grosser aspects of conventional masculinity; they may simply be registering that a real man is not a very nice person.

These uncertainties about gender may be tracked in John Rechy’s writing. In City of Night (1963), the narrator is a male hustler who self-consciously asserts his own macho performance, in contrast to the adoring johns and queens, without admitting his own gayness. This is a precarious stance; one of the narrator’s clients rejects him when he leafs through a book: “‘really masculine men don’t read!’”⁵⁹ However, the queens come into their own in the later, Mardi Gras chapters. Twenty years later, in Bodies and Souls, Rechy is looking for more positive potential in a reconciliation of masculine and feminine qualities. Billy and Stud are hustlers and presumptively not gay, but an affair develops between them. Stud’s manliness is not at issue; he’s not even gay, he says. Nor is Billy “effeminate”; he objects to being referred to as “she.” Notwithstanding, Billy is said to be “beautiful,” and Stud “couldn’t think of anyone being that beautiful and not a girl.” The narrator interprets: “Billy was beautiful. He had a slender blond body that turned golden instead of tan, eyes so misty at times they looked painted with water colors, and long eyelashes. It was true he was not effeminate—he was gracefully boyish, looking radiantly younger than his eighteen years.”⁶⁰ As Stud begins to fall for Billy, he finds that “Billy’s body was not softly formed; where had he got that idea? It was slim, yes—but very solid looking” (318). In fact, “he was becoming more masculine all the time” (323). So they are worthy of each other. Billy is represented as retaining, miraculously, both the feminine attributes that make him initially attractive, and the masculine attributes that make him an acceptable partner. Still Rechy is unable to get masculinity, femininity, and sexual attraction into the same frame without anxiety and contradiction.

In the purportedly documentary book The Sexual Outlaw (1977), Rechy’s narrative voice assumes a purposeful gay liberationist stance. He asks whether gays are appreciating “their particular and varied beauty? From that of the transvestite to that of the bodybuilder? The young to the old? The effeminate to the masculine? The athletic to the intellectual?” He praises queens as “true hero-heroines of our time, exhibiting more courage for walking one single block in drag than a straight-looking gay to ‘come out’ on a comfy campus.”⁶¹ However, Ben Gove points out, the effeminate queens don’t get much sex in The Sexual Outlaw; they are excluded from the masculine world of promiscuous cruising.⁶² They appear what they are—left over in the post-Stonewall era which they helped to inaugurate.

Whether it is true that effeminate gays don’t get much sex is unclear. Edmund White’s writings do not support the idea that the destiny of the effeminate gay man is inevitably lonely. In The Farewell Symphony, he presents his desires as feminine—“I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straitlaced of marriages. I wanted to cook his breakfast and bear his babies. I wanted him to be my boy-husband, my baby-master.”⁶³ However, Kevin is in love with the handsome Dennis. Nonetheless, White gets plenty of fun, friendship, and sex in diverse roles; The Farewell Symphony has been criticized for excessive reporting of tricks turned. The predicament of and opportunities for the feminine boy are displayed in Joseph Mills’s Glasgow story, “Dreaming, Drag.” We first see David with his best friend, Joan, a lesbian: he has orange hair, and is wearing a “working class housewife’s coat.”⁶⁴ He doesn’t want to be a transsexual: he loves inhabiting the male body, and the male orgasm. On the other hand, he disidentifies with “the men in macho drag—gay or straight—who were in love with the male physique and all that went with it.” He is uncomfortable when he realizes that, between these positions, there seems to be “no place for himself” (151).

David’s manner had quite pleased Walter, now his ex-boyfriend: “He thought being with a camp guy made him more masculine, less gay. He was easing himself into a hetero relationship” (88). Walter can’t stand the stigma of gayness. David gets into a fight and decides that his cuts and bruises suit better with a masculine style, so he attires himself in denim, with a leather jacket and studded belt. “Clothes make the man,” he remarks (90). He falls heavily for Billy, who doesn’t see him as camp; not that he’s against camp, he thinks it very funny: “‘But I don’t find it sexually attractive. I mean I like a man—otherwise why be here?’” (106). David deals with the mismatch by dressing himself in exactly the same clothes and dying his hair the same color as Billy. He finds himself elaborating contradictory fantasies about Billy and taking the “active” role in bed. However, Billy doesn’t want a twin either. David goes back to feminine styles, abandoning “‘all that macho stuff…. Yes, we need to complement each other’” (117–18; my elision, Mills’s emphasis). However, Billy is not convinced. He takes up with a man who has “‘the sort of Clark Kent, well-groomed executive look’” (123). David is left railing against “‘your little hierarchy of homosexuals … with the just-like-everyone-else-Walter type on top and the deviants like me on the bottom’” (130; my elision). He exclaims:

“God what a freak. Billy’s right. I would never go with someone as effeminate looking as me.” … Handsome, masculine gay guys don’t fall in love with camp gay guys. Camp gay guys don’t fall in love with their own kind…. David had tried and tried again to be “normal,” but he resigned himself to the fact that camp was normal for him most of the time, whatever the consequences. (138; my elisions)

However, it is not true that David doesn’t attract men, and it is doubtful whether Billy’s Clark Kent can turn into Superman. David remains irrepressible, like the divas he admires, and lives to fight another day.

In Leo Bersani’s view, the matter is structural: as Quentin Crisp said, gay men are attracted sexually by machismo, not camp.⁶⁵ Bersani does admit that not all gays are the same, but he is committed to a Freudian supposition that sexuality must be reducible to a binary gender structure. This leaves gay men desiring from the position of the woman, while entertaining a simultaneous and contradictory wish to imitate “those desiring subjects with whom we have been officially identified: other men.”⁶⁶ With heterosexual women, therefore, we have (reluctant) identity; with men only (respectful) imitation. As Patrick Paul Garlinger suggests, Bersani’s celebration of the subversive impetus of the man with his legs in the air may be designed to manage the stigma of effeminacy.⁶⁷ While Bersani’s organic model leads him ultimately to the idea of gay men as feminine and desiring the masculine, mine anticipates also a symmetry. If

Social surveys indicate that there certainly are men who experience desire-for camp and cross-dressing men; Tim Bergling in his book Sissyphobia finds some; the “sissy boys” interviewed by Richard Green report sexual partners.⁶⁸ Gove concurs in respect of Miss Destiny in Rechy’s City of Night, and mentions the films Stonewall (Nigel Finch, 1995) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.⁶⁹ Bernadette in the latter had a boyfriend who recently died (the boyfriend had a thing about transsexuals—“a sort of bent status symbol”); at the end Bernadette teams up with Bob. Divine and Our Lady of the Flowers attract masculine types in Genet’s novel.⁷⁰ In the film comedy To Die For (Peter Mackenzie Litten, 1994), Simon loves and desires his camp partner Mark, in life and in death, but is blocked in the expression of his feelings by his relationship with his father. We are given to understand that Albin in La Cage aux Folles (Edouard Molinaro, 1978) and Albert in The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) have been beauties in their time.

Eddie is young, innocent, dreamy, and effeminate in The Fruit Machine (scripted by Frank Clarke, released on video in North America as Wonderland; Philip Saville, 1988). He watches musicals and romances on video with his mother, is given to what she calls “girly mannerisms,” and is victimized by his father. He is plainly in love with his streetwise friend and protector, Michael, who regards himself as a straight rent boy and Eddie as a “best mate.” They are both sixteen. When Eddie approaches the point of a declaration, Michael is embarrassed and shuts him up. Eddie claims them for femininity: they’re “just a pair of little queenettes,” he says. But Michael counters: “No we’re not, we’re lads, we’re young men.” Gove remarks the division between “gushy queen and defensive lad,” and that the film assumes the latter to be the more sexy.⁷¹ However, the viewer’s sense of Eddie’s erotic potential is probably enhanced when, after appearing somewhat awkward hitherto, he swims gracefully among dolphins. Michael finally admits his love when Eddie is dying.

In some of these instances, femininity may be attractive because of a conflation with boyishness. A choice of an older man between his wife and a camp boyfriend figures in John Hopkins’s play Find Your Way Home.⁷² However, this is not always so. An older feminine person may be protective (motherly), to either a masculine or a feminine boy. This happens in the film Stonewall, where Matty Dean, the new boy in town, is drawn both to the masculine, assimilationist Ethan, and the established drag queen, La Miranda.⁷³ In Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, camp drag-artiste Arnold is attractive both to Ed, who is older and so straight-acting that he insists on cultivating his affair with Laurel, and to Alan, who is a young model and hustler. Arnold is obscurely diffident about the relationship with Alan, and the text evades its outcome through the boy’s violent death; we may conclude that fate is against such a liaison. Arnold goes on to foster and adopt a teenage gay boy, and the return of Ed, finally unable to resist Arnold, constitutes an explicit family of choice with Ed as father and Arnold as wife and mother. This secures an upbeat ending, though Arnold has to fight off his own homophobic mother, who assumes that his interest in the boy must be predatory (these homosexuals will stop at nothing). From a queer viewpoint, it is perhaps disappointing that Arnold’s integrity depends on the implication that sexual love between a man of thirty and a boy of sixteen (now the age of consent in England) must, by definition, be out of the question.⁷⁴

It would hardly be surprising if the attractions of male femininity were understated in our cultures. Richard Goldstein may, in many cases, be right: “butch is the face many gay men show to each other, but not the one they reveal to their lovers.”⁷⁵ Gays may be reluctant to admit the attractions of being the feminine man, and the rewards of desiring him, but he is not without his admirers. Fergus vomits in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) when he sees Dil’s penis—the sign that the femininity that had attracted him is attached to a male body. Notwithstanding, Fergus is drawn to Dil. To keep him safe Fergus makes him look like a boy and hides him away; he says it’s their honeymoon night, and surely a sexual act takes place (nothing less would placate Dil, and in the ensuing scene it is morning, Dil is asleep, and Fergus looks decidedly pensive). At the end, Dil visits Fergus in prison, along with the other wives and girlfriends though in more exuberant style. Dil’s idea, for one, is that they are an ongoing couple: “I’m counting the days.” “Stand By Your Man,” the music comes up. To take care of Dil is in his nature, Fergus says.

In summary, if our dominant story encodes male femininity as misfortune, we have also a counter discourse, in which the feminine man may be a turn-on. The problem, I suspect, is not that he is unattractive, but that he has difficulty in establishing a belief in his own worth, in the face of the gross stigma that attaches in our societies to effeminacy. In A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund observes that it is his own dislike of himself, endorsed by the prevailing ideology, that impedes his love life. “I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual.”⁷⁶ The narrator in White’s later work, The Farewell Symphony, observes: “what the Stonewall uprising changed was not love so much as self-esteem, upon which mutual love depends.”⁷⁷ In White’s The Married Man, Austin attracts a partner who is masterful to the point of sustaining a conventionally sexual marriage.

While there may be a symmetry, whereby a man with desire-to-be F is matched by a man with desire-for F, the person in the subordinate position is likely to be the more vulnerable. He puts himself at the greater risk, psychologically, when he offers himself in a relationship. The problem—men with an element of dissident gender identity getting to feel good about themselves—still has a long way to go. James Kenneth Melson, informing his mother of his positive AIDS diagnosis, reassures her: “‘Mom, to me my sexual preference is only that. I’m not a fag, sissy or queen.’”⁷⁸ AIDS we can cope with, effeminacy is beyond the pale.

The prospect of rewarding sexual encounters may not be the priority for gender-dissident people. Todd, age seventeen: “That’s the basic problem. I want to be a woman before I want to have sexual relations with a man.”⁷⁹ Trans people have good reason to distinguish desire-to-be and desire-for. “Gender identity for me answers the question of who I am. Sexual preference answers the question who do I want to be romantically or sexually involved with,” Kate Bornstein declares.⁸⁰

In other societies there are conventional roles for transgender people. The fa’affines of Samoa are apparently biological men who dress and largely live as women; they are recognized and reared as girls and appreciated as domestics and entertainers. Their sexual partners, they claim, are 99 percent of Samoan men. Some use them casually, some are ready for relationships. Young, articulate fa’affines have visited Australia and know that in other countries gay men sleep together. However, fa’affines don’t have sex with each other; they are sisters; that would be two queens. They classify themselves as “women,” and don’t accept that the terms gay, transvestite, and transsexual fit them.⁸¹ Again: skesana boys, in the single-sex context of mine-labor in South Africa, glory in their femininity and assume that their roles will be confirmed by their masculine partners:

MARTIN: I think in a relationship the woman must attend to her man. Like a woman she must clean the house, and he must be treated like a man.

THAMI: There must be a “man” and a “woman” in a relationship. A man must act mannish in his behaviour and his talks and walks. But a female must be queenish in every way.

The skesana (like a wife) gains protection and favors in a violent and uncertain system; also, Hugh McLean and the late Linda Ngcobo add, he “attains pleasure by flirting with power.”⁸²

There is no comparable framework for men in Britain and the United States for men who want to be women, but there is the amazing possibility, through medicine and psychiatry, of gender reassignment. In the face of the priority accorded to object-choice in our cultures, activists have put transgender on the agenda. Leslie Feinberg in Stone Butch Blues and Kate Bornstein in Gender Outlaw have published powerful and successful books based on their experience. Fiction on this theme includes Trumpet by Jackie Kay, The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff, and James Miranda Barry by Patricia Duncker. Barry is the subject also of Rachel Holmes’s study, Scanty Particulars. We have the disconcerting photographs of Del LaGrace Volcano.⁸³ Films in general release include: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (Beeban Kidron, 1995), Different for Girls (Richard Spence, 1996), and Ma vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997). I’ve already mentioned The Crying Game, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Typically, these films depict transvestites and transsexuals enduring hostility and winning over ordinary, decent folk.

Academic studies have appeared, and the popular media are close behind. By early 1999, Polly Toynbee was writing in Radio Times (February 13–19) that “programme after programme seems to be obsessed with people of confused, indeterminate or wrong sex.” She mentions a transsexual prostitute in the BBC1 series Paddington Green, a transsexual in Granada’s soap opera Coronation Street, and a program in the BBC1 science series, QED. “There is a questioning and a redefining of sex roles going on and these cases are just the most extreme manifestations of a more general and diverse debate,” Toynbee avers. Subsequently, Channel Four has presented a very positive, two-hour view of four female-to-male trans people in different circumstances (Make Me a Man: Katie Buchanan, 2002), and in 2003 broadcast an American documentary, Sex Change, showing the details of gender-reassignment surgery. Halberstam reports the interest of American talk shows in drag kings, but is disappointed by the sensational treatment.⁸⁴ To be sure, visibility is not necessarily power—otherwise, scantily clad young women draped across automobiles would be ruling the world.

The trans phenomenon challenges customary ideas about how gender and sexuality may interact. It is not just that a male-to-female transsexual may desire either a man or a woman, or both. When a person who has been assigned at birth a male gender experiences desire-for a male, while declaring hirself to have desire-to-be a female, it is impossible to say, definitively, whether that person has made a same-sex or a cross-sex object-choice. It depends on whether hir story about hirself is credited.

Transgender invites a reconsideration of The Well of Loneliness, which has traditionally been regarded as a classic account of “the mannish lesbian.” Stephen does have desire-for other women, but her main anguish and affirmation resides in her desire-to-be male. “‘Do you think that I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard—or prayed?’” she asks her father.⁸⁵ Radclyffe Hall is drawing on ideas from the sexologists—she persuaded Ellis to write a preface. Jay Prosser suggests that Hall prefers Ellis, Ulrichs, and Krafft-Ebing to psychoanalysis, and also to the kinds of lesbian self-concept being developed by Natalie Barney and Renée Vivienne, because they focus more on the invert and thereby fit better with her own project.⁸⁶ Stephen’s father has been reading the sexologists, and it produces in him the humane sympathy that Hall wanted in her own readers. However, it remains unclear how far Stephen’s desire-to-be male is due to her upbringing (her father treats her like a boy and her mother rejects her), or congenital (in her physique, “her nature”; 29–30, 165). Both versions can be supported from the text.

While Stephen’s condition is entirely mysterious to her mother and herself, all the neighbors can see it: “they feared her; it was fear that aroused their antagonism. In her they instinctively sensed an outlaw, and theirs was the task of policing nature” (123). What they see is aberrant gender. A hotel porter can discuss it with his wife: “‘Have you noticed her, Alice? A queer-looking girl, very tall, wears a collar and tie—you know, mannish. And she seems just to change her suit of an evening—puts on a dark one—never wears evening dress…. I dunno, there’s something about her—anyhow I’m surprised she’s got a young man.’” (181; my elision). This last inference is derived from the fact that Stephen is watching out for a special letter; it doesn’t occur to the porter that she might be homosexual and looking for a letter from a woman. Stephen’s condition is, at once, utterly opaque and devastatingly obvious, virtually inconceivable and cruelly policed. While she has to be ignorant in order to emphasize her bewilderment and perhaps her innocence, her transgression has to be communicated as the basis for her social rejection.

This rejection is grounded in her masculine appearance; her sex life is scarcely inferred. It is her body and clothes that are the offense, not her choice of partner; even the dog recognizes Stephen’s maleness and longs for “that queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him” (382). As Laura Doan has demonstrated, this failure to register sexual dissidence is plausible historically since, before The Well, boyish and mannish garb did not register any one, stable effect; if anything, they signified modernity. It was Hall’s accomplishment to change this.⁸⁷

Mary, on the other hand, is all right because she looks feminine. A fashionable hostess takes a great fancy to her, but sees in Stephen “only an unsexed creature of pose, whose cropped head and whose dress were pure affectation; a creature who aping the prerogatives of men, had lost all the charm and grace of a woman” (465). The fact that Stephen and Mary are both lesbians hardly figures. Halberstam remarks that The Well manifests an epistemology not of the closet (for Hall, like Crisp, was never not-out) but of the wardrobe: male clothing is fetishized as the badge of gender.⁸⁸ The tragedy is that Stephen is not allowed fully to inhabit that desire-to-be by becoming the master of Morton Hall and protector of hir partner.

So with the culminating affair with Mary. Stephen’s initial doubt concerns whether she should respond to the innocent love of a younger woman who is not herself aware of inversion. (This dilemma recurs in Mary Renault’s novel, The Charioteer.) The ensuing predicament, however, is that having accepted Mary’s love Stephen declines to take her seriously. Stephen manages their joint affairs and gains success as a writer, but Mary has nothing to do. She has no work; she cannot go into Society, or to Stephen’s family home; Stephen doesn’t share her anxieties with her—hardly trusts her to go out by herself. In short, Stephen envisions herself and Mary on a husband-and-wife model, and hence their downfall. It is because they cannot play that game convincingly that Stephen pushes Mary into an opportune marriage. This was not the inevitable outcome for the invert: Hall herself seduced two women away from wedlock.

The confusions that invest The Well, we may suppose, were needed and desired. We should not be looking for the right reading, but observing how this protean text has been deployed for diverse purposes by diverse constituencies. Esther Newton highlights its importance in the mid-twentieth century to women who valued the overt sexuality of the mannish lesbian as pointing beyond the Victorian romantic friendship.⁸⁹ The dominant ideology, meanwhile, was ready to deploy gender dissidence to stigmatize object-choice, and vice versa. Today The Well is still available to new constituencies. While Prosser discovers there a depiction of transsexuality, Halberstam finds a portrait of the “masculine woman.”⁹⁰ Comparable arguments may be developed in respect of Gertrude Stein: “Though she’s been widely regarded as a lesbian, the fact is that she saw herself, in essence, as a man,” Jean E. Mills observes.⁹¹

“‘Is that a boy or a girl?’” people keep asking about young Jess in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues.⁹² Like Neil Bartlett’s Boy in Ready to Catch Him, Jess finds hirself in a bar, where s/he is supported and appreciated as a baby butch. The downside is vulnerability to raids and gross assaults by the police. Jess, like other he-shes, works in a factory, but takes up with Theresa, who has a clerical job in a university and knows about the Daughters of Bilitis, the Ladder, Stonewall, and lesbian and gay pride. However, butches and femmes are not welcome among liberationist lesbians, and Jess doesn’t feel there is a place for her in the women’s movement. It is no simpler for Edna, a femme: “‘I know I’m not a straight woman, and lesbians won’t accept me as one of them. I don’t know where to go to find the butches I love or the other femmes. I feel completely misunderstood. I feel like a ghost, too, Jess’” (214–15).

These new difficulties for the he-she are reverberations from the major shift I have been discussing in this chapter—the moment when gender identity is decisively superseded by object-choice as the key category for understanding sexual dissidence. Like Crisp, these women appear to be left over from the old conceptual regime, where gender dissidence was the main factor. Jess in fact seems not to get much sex; everyone is too exhausted just keeping going, and stone butches hate to be touched.

To resolve the indeterminacy Jess decides to begin hormone treatments with a view to passing as a guy. Theresa cannot tolerate this: “‘I’m a femme, Jess. I want to be with a butch…. I don’t want to be with a man, Jess. I won’t do it’” (151; my elision). With the treatments, Jess passes as a man quite effectively. Hir problem is that s/he now has no social context: intimacy threatens personal exposure and lovemaking seems meretricious. S/he has to leave a job when hir gender history is revealed. S/he stops the hormone treatment; “Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes” (224). Prosser is disappointed at Jess’s turning back. It shows two things: that Jess is not at home in any version of hir body—radical indeterminacy is hir fate; and that society has difficulty accommodating a transsexual even when s/he is trying to regularize hir gender.

Transgender promises to unsettle established items on the agenda of queer theory and activism. The dialectic of passing versus coming out works differently for trans people, who confirm that they are indeed the person whom they believe themselves to be when they pass undetected in public. Drawing attention to their special gender characteristics defeats the purpose. However, it is difficult to build a movement when its members keep vanishing into the crowd. Sandy Stone has urged transsexuals, instead, to come out as transsexual, foregrounding thereby the constructedness of all gender categories. Stone actually has two main arguments. One is that passing forecloses “the possibility of authentic relationships.”⁹³ This was Jess’s problem: she felt unable to present hirself to other people—until she wrote the book, that is. The other is that by aspiring to be essentially a woman or essentially a man, the trans person colludes with the gender system that has oppressed hir in the first place; whereas refusing to pass calls into visibility and mistrust the criteria that delimit the binary sex/gender system.

That camp and drag may have potential to subvert the sex/gender system has often been proposed, most famously by Judith Butler, who seemed to suggest in Gender Trouble that “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity.”⁹⁴ Butler’s insistence that gender can never afford stable identities is surely right. However, there are two main problems with arguments that conceptual instability leads to insight.

First, such theory, which is a kind of poststructuralism, has supposed too readily that to demonstrate indeterminacy in a dominant construct is to expose its weakness and its vulnerability to subversion. In practice, gay pastiche and its excesses may be all too easily pigeonholed as illustrating that lesbians and gay men can only mimic true manliness and womanliness. Dominant ideologies are able to turn almost anything to their advantage; that is the sign of their dominance. Whether an instance is subversive or incorporative has to be assessed in its particular contexts. The Stonewall queens instigated gay liberation not because they were camp or wore drag—there was nothing new about that—but because they fought the police.

Second, many individuals are already having a difficult time with their gender identity, and don’t want their mannerisms co-opted into a political argument. This point is made by Prosser, who emphasizes that many trans people experience their gender “precisely as a disorder, a physically embodied dis-ease or dysphoria that dis-locates the self from bodily home and to which sex reassignment does make all the difference.” Transsexual passing is like gay coming out in one respect: it is not a once-and-for-all accomplishment: it may have to be renewed many times each day. Prosser calls for a “politics of home” which “would not disavow the value of belonging as the basis for livable identity.”⁹⁵

Belonging in the gender system is not the resolution that is offered in Stone Butch Blues. Jess reaches a stance of peace and productivity not by changing her body or her attire, but by finding other sex and gender dissidents in New York’s West Village in the queer 1980s. Despite continuing horrific street violence, s/he finds acceptance and purpose in a new world of bookshops, drag queens, farmers’ markets, Christmas, other ethnicities, AIDS campaigning, people who can talk about how they hurt and need, a gay rally where s/he feels able to speak about gender, and a future as a political activist. In a final dream Jess envisages a new world in which innumerable people of indeterminate gender are happy together. However, the message for the present seems to be: if you want to be different, find an alternative scene. Don’t try to make your home in Middle America. The dangers are grimly confirmed in The Brandon Teena Story (Susan Musca and Greta Olafsdottir, 1998), and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999).

Eve Sedgwick has warned against uncoupling homosexuality and effeminacy—“effeminophobia,” she calls it. “After all, ‘everyone already knows’ that cross-dressing usually at least alludes to homosexuality”: culturally they belong together. Further, the persecuted “effeminate boy” is left without the support of adult gays, who perhaps eschew him as an embarrassing remnant of their own childhood trauma.⁹⁶ Sedgwick is right to mistrust the motives of gay men who would jettison effeminacy, but the logical and experiential impetus of transgender has surely justified the isolating of gender identity as a category. A task now is to avoid any consequent marginalizing of yet other groups. Some butch/femme women have said to me that they experience, in the current emphasis on transsexuality, a de-legitimization—an imputation that butches are settling for a halfway position, as if they lacked the courage of their convictions.

Meanwhile, straight cultures today make their own stories out of our lives. A recent study of sexual bullying in an English secondary school finds that boys regarded as insufficiently masculine are called “gay” and “poof.” However, they are not thereby supposed to be homosexual; the idea that real homosexuals might actually exist in the school is greeted with incredulity. “Nearly all the boys had knowledge of the existence of homosexuality but could not relate this knowledge to their school experience or people whom they might one day meet.”⁹⁷ In this setting, “gay” signals only gender anomaly; the boys are using it to support their concern with male bonding.

The same case is put by the misogynist, homophobic, and popular white rapper, Eminem:

“Faggot” to me doesn’t necessarily mean “gay person.” “Faggot” to me means “pussy,” “cissy.” If you’re a man, be a man, know what I’m saying? That’s the worst thing you can say to a man. It’s like calling him a girl, whether he’s gay or not. Growing up, me and my friends, “faggot” was a common word, like “you’re being a fucking fag, man.” Nobody really thought “gay person.” I don’t give a shit about gay men. If they wanna be gay, then that’s their fucking business.⁹⁸

In both these accounts, actual gay boys are invisible. The boy who suspects that he is gay is not just stigmatized; the compensations of gay belonging and subcultural resources are withheld from him. Wendy Wallace confirms that gay has become a general term of bullying abuse for any outsider in schools, while retaining the link with its homophobic roots. Ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was repeatedly taunted at school with the word “gay” before being killed in a knife attack.⁹⁹ In The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman’s play about the death of Matthew Shepard, the murderer says Matthew looked “like a queer. Such a queer dude…. Yeah, like a fag, you know?”¹⁰⁰ We know.

In propounding a primary distinction between gender identity and object-choice, my goal is not to interfere in the lived experience of people; this is not a call to individuals to sort out who they want to be. Rather, I am hoping to contribute to a better analysis of what we have been doing. The case for retheorizing the extant combinations of gender identity and same-sex passion rests not on an attempt to tidy up desire, but on enabling diverse peoples to respect themselves and each other. If there have been tensions among sexual dissidents—caricatures, appropriations, repudiations—that is because we are accustomed to constructing sex/gender identities contradistinctively. Reassessing these processes may help us to rebuild a more elaborate dissident coalition, beyond binary organizations of difference. The rest of this book is about ways of reading sexuality that are not organized primarily around gender difference. Yet gender, we will see, proves remarkably persistent.