there’s a gene that causes you to have a Canadian subjectivity, or a gland in your brain that makes you Canadian. Now kids aren’t raised to be gay, the way they’re raised to be Canadians, so what I’ve done in my book is try to describe a different, non-standard process of cultural formation: I have to understand the workings of the kind of counter-acculturation that imparts to some boys an instinctual responsiveness to gay culture, including the usual gay icons, from an early age. OUTLOOKS: You said you want to explain gay identity from a cultural perspective rather than through sexuality itself. Could you elaborate? DH: Homosexuality is usually thought of as a sexual orientation. It’s defined as a sexual object-choice. Which is not wrong. But so long as you define it in sexual terms, you will never be able to understand all of its non-sexual dimensions: the partic-
“BEING GAY IS LIKE BEING CANADIAN OR MIDDLE CLASS: IT’S A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE. IT’S NEITHER A NATURAL CONDITION NOR AN INDIVIDUAL QUIRK.” ular attraction that gay men feel to certain divas (Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Lady Gaga), cultural forms (opera, Broadway musicals, techno music) or activities (fashion, design, style, witty put-downs). Not all gay men are attracted to these things, of course, and being attracted to them doesn’t make you gay (though if you do love them all and still claim to be straight, you may have some explaining to do). But gay identity is associated with a queer tendency to be passionately engaged with certain cultural objects in certain ways that are not generally shared with members of mainstream culture. I wanted to approach male homosexuality from the perspective of its investments in these cultural objects in order to see whether we might understand gayness differently, or better—whether we might even learn something about it as a sexual orientation—if we shifted our point of view and looked at it from the vantage not of sexuality but culture. OUTLOOKS: What role does the casual use of “queer” among gays and lesbians (and your use in the book) play in the gay identity at the heart of your book—even if used to describe cinema, studies, etc.? DH: My use of the term “queer” is not casual. I don’t use it as a synonym for “gay” or “lesbian.” The opposite of “gay” or “lesbian” is “straight,” just as the opposite of “homosexual” is “heterosexual.” The opposite of “queer” is “normal.” “Queer” refers, 30 OUTLOOKS SEPTEMBER 2012
therefore, to a departure or deviation from the norm. In sexual politics, it refers to people who are, or who feel themselves to be, marginalized or stigmatized because of their sexual practices, but there is no sexual practice in particular to which the term necessarily refers. Queer points to an entire field of resistance to the established social order. When I use it, I intend it to mean “non-standard” and to refer to sexual outlaws of various kinds, including (but not only) lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people and gay men in their deviation from accepted social forms. And since gay male culture consists in a non-standard relation to mainstream cultural objects, the notion of queerness is fundamental to my approach. OUTLOOKS: At one point in the book, you declare that much of what you say about homosexuality could also be said about heterosexuality. Could you briefly explain that? DH: Heterosexuality is also a culture that straight people have to learn. They aren’t born that way either. But they don’t call learning to be straight a form of cultural initiation. They call it grade three, or going to the movies, or raising the kids. Because learning how to be straight is so taken for granted, it can hide in plain sight and escape being seen as a social process. OUTLOOKS: Interesting point. You make the provocative statement that gay pride could be keeping us from knowing ourselves. Are you saying that, politically speaking, the idea of pride is full integration, and with integration comes loss of the elements of being gay? DH: To achieve gay pride often seems to involve, at least nowadays, making a political claim for social integration. And that means representing our gayness as something that does not make us different from normal folk. It also means thinking of ourselves as just like everybody else, insisting on various forms of social belonging and on our reputable identities as good citizens, professionals, parents, patriots, soldiers, priests, ordinary guys and gals. In such a context, it becomes very upsetting to inquire into the unique ways we feel, into our distinctive emotions, intuitions, perceptions—into the peculiar fabric of our inner lives. Into anything about us that is not exactly normal. That is what I mean when I say gay pride has imposed a kind of blackout on all inquiry into gay male subjectivity and may be keeping us from knowing ourselves. OUTLOOKS: Do you understand the critics of your work from within the gay community, their notion that integration equals salvation for gays and lesbians? DH: Sure. I mean, centuries of homophobic discourse have portrayed lesbians and gay men as sick, abnormal, criminal, sinful and a threat to civilization. So it’s perfectly understandable that lots of folks within the gay community should want to insist that we’re normal, that we’re exactly like everybody else. And it’s reasonable to suppose that progress consists in our complete integration and assimilation into straight society. In the face of homophobic claims that we’re deviant, that we’re unnatural monsters and outlaws, it’s important for us to be able to insist that we’re just like you. But even if we have to argue