Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International Heidi J Nast The International Studies Program, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, US; [email protected]

This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sectors that depend structurally and implicitly upon white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, heteronormative patriarchies, shoring up pre-existing racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit-accumulation. Former cultural investments in a fatherhood defined by biological procreation are accordingly dislodged by investments in fatherhoods abstracted from procreation, which circulate in a variety of commodity forms. Motherhood is geographically and socially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is geopolitically reconstituted, with the proprietary reach of patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother-father-son and into extrafamilial, and often transnationalized, domains of racialized and classtransected procreational purchase. Sister, sister where did we go wrong? Tell me what the fuck we’re doing here Why are all the boys acting strange? We’ve got to show them we’re worse than queer (Lyrics from Bikini Kill’s song “Suck My Left One”)

Procreational Economies and Biological Fatherhood

Freud defined the prototypical nuclear or oedipal family in terms of three elements: a father, a mother, and a child, normatively cast as a son—all implicitly white. The nuclear family ideal and form were not restricted to the household, per se, but were invested in, and mirrored throughout, many material and imaginary-symbolic levels of industrial society (see Figure 1; Nast 1998; Nast 2000; Nast and Kobayashi © 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

940

Antipode

Figure 1: Schematic triad of the ideal nuclear family, a triad that infuses other triadically dispersed social imaginaries, involving, for example, the state, capital, and science

1996). Many businesses and companies of the 19th and early 20th centuries depended upon images and practices of the white father-led nuclear family to subordinate and legitimate the presence and position of white, male, filialized labor. Investors, corporate heads, and financiers were cast as father figures, kind men who took the interests of childlike laboring sons to heart. Similarly, the prototypical scientist assumed paternal attributes, a disembodied “brain” wed to industry, a connection satirically depicted in Chaplin’s (1936) filmic critique of industrial capitalism, Modern Times. In god-the-father-like fashion, the manfather of science works diligently alongside paternal capitalists to understand and incorporate the bodies of dependent, child-like, human subjects into machinic operations of capital accumulation—for their own sake. Even the nation is imagined in terms of a white nuclear family writ large. In the United States, we speak of state fathers, the First Family, and the iconic White House. Here, governed subjects are positioned rhetorically as children of a white-father-led nation, a god-like authority of the nation mirrored in a 1794 Enlightenment idealization of the nuclear family painted by Asmus Jacob Carstens, “The Birth of Light” (Figure 2; Nast 1998).

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

941

Figure 2: “Birth of Light” (1794) by Asmus Jacob Carstens

The white-oedipal or nuclear family of industrial times, culturally specific and economically and politically conservative, was (and is) overdetermined, many social structures shoring it up and reaping meaning and benefit from it. Over the past three centuries, many social groups have been invested in sustaining its imaginary-symbolic form, especially those invested in colonial and industrial economies of desire (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1992; Young 1995). Here, a large labor force was (and is) disciplined through colonizing violence, explicit and cultural, that justified itself through a language of family. Men’s laboring bodies were paternalistically1 employed in Chicago— for example, in factories and stockyards (Wade 1987)—rendering them unnatural profit-making machines, a degradation attacked in classic films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ([1925] 1994), Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (1958), and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), among others. At the same time, railway and telegraph systems were built across faraway colonized contexts using forced labor (infantilized as boys and sons), raw materials extracted and processed for the benefit of European metropoles.

942

Antipode

White-identified families in Europeanized industrial times were not as large as they had been in rural, non-mechanized farm contexts, but they were still substantial, procreation practically and symbolically central to the creation of labor (cf Hennessey 2000). In Western industrial contexts, labor was reproduced and made to look innocent and asexual through the oedipal family schema, a highly specific libidinal social form (Figures 1 and 2). Ideologically pivotal was the iconic white mother, who enjoys bearing children and tutors and disciplines society’s familial sons and daughters in ways appropriate to their working and nonworking futures (Nast and Wilson 1994). The father, in contrast, is positioned to instill in his children a sense of law and hierarchy, maintaining these realities through family-directed violence and coercion. The white-oedipal family worked and continues to work precisely because it has a lot of work to do, its cellular triadic structure emanating out from the family and home to embrace science, nation, and, in Christian contexts, God—the Father and the Son. Fatherhood is linked here to biologistic notions of the male seed and its primary importance in impregnation (cf Laqueur 1990). Two points are key here. First, the system of biological reproduction was contained ideologically and sociospatially by the nuclear familial unit. This geographical arrangement allowed fatherhood and patriarchy to be scripted and enabled through the biologized familial home, a system of containment dependent on and libidinized through private property and nationhood. Secondly, racialized black bodies and lives were not the stuff out of which imaginary-symbolic ideals of the (white) oedipal family were shaped and encoded (Figures 1 and 2). Bodies of color, especially black bodies, were rendered animalistic and childlike, requiring that they be held at sociospatial bay. No longer held in legal bondage after 1863, African-American lives were undervalued and forbidden entry into idealizations of the nuclear family. African Americans were systematically excluded, for example, from laborunion ideologies and structures, as they were marginalized spatially, politically, and economically through white-nationalist segregationary practices (McIntyre 2002; Nast 2000).

Biological Racism

As I have argued at length elsewhere (Nast 2000), the idyllic whiteoedipal family of industrial times was ideologically and practically sustained by positing black men as that family’s most dangerous threat. Referred to in infantilizing or filial terms as “boy” or “son,” respectively, African-American men were characterized as irretrievably beyond the lawful world of the white adult paterfamilias. The patriarch of industrial times was grounded in biologistic understandings of fatherhood, attached to child-bearing and a heterosexualized dynamic of localized family production. White industrial heteropatriarchy

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

943

became the norm, normative, normalizing, normal (Hennessey 2000). In the US, white familial normalcy guided post-WWII swellings of white suburbs, white flight, white romanticization of exurban wilds tied to the isolation and domestication of white women’s reproductive labor, and huge suburban real-estate markets subsidized by the federal government (Massey and Denton 1993; Venkatesh 2001). White moms were what every normal industrial dad desired romantically and practically; marriage, homeplace, and penetrative procreation made the man. White racist nostalgia for the procreative mother still informs postindustrial imaginaries, evident, for example, in mainstream reminiscences of the doting mother-lover (Figure 3). It also infuses postmodern aesthetics of home and home life, circulated through a burgeoning sector of consumption that includes Home Depot, Crate and Barrel, Pier One, Cost Plus, and Room and Board (Luke forthcoming). But how is the oedipal family actually faring in an ideologicalmaterial sense, in postindustrial worlds of wealth-generation that do not value labor for production but that value, rather, consumption intensely focused? Worlds that value rapid redeployment of an elite service-based labor force to metropoles around the world, ones that value rapidity generally, quick exchanges of information and wealth? Where children are, in a technical sense, a frictional drag on mobility and accumulation; where women, historically and structurally underprivileged along lines of education and class, are still stuck with the majority of child and elder care—or can hire persons of color (usually women, but also students and generally the underemployed) to do the work for them? And where persons of color, regardless of gender, occupy the lowest rungs of an increasingly internationalized service-based labor force? This paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, heteronormative patriarchies, shoring up preexisting racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit-accumulation. I use the word “patriarchy” to refer to two distinct and overlapping processes: first, the construction of paternity through market virility; and secondly, the construction of a paternal law that controls the products of reproduction, that is, children.2 During industrial times, for example, white fathers were iconically depicted as patriots who put food on a table, the table anchoring a nuclear family the father lawfully named and ruled. In this case, women’s procreational abilities were transacted across a rather limited ideological space, the “biological home.” I argue that today a different regime of patriarchies is gaining legitimacy, one grounded only partially in what might be called “normative” gay white male masculinities. Though not invested in biological procreation, the contours of these patriarchies are similar, involving a virility assumed

Figure 3: Various service-sector ads showing the disbursement of the oedipal and, particularly, the infant-son relationship in various white male “adult” commercial domains. On the left is a sex worker’s business card, taken from a London phone booth about ten years ago, that portrays the fetishistic desire to once again be the center of maternal attention. The center image, from a Four Seasons hotel ad placed in the Economist several years ago, speaks to similar desires, as does the image on the right—a British Airways ad (in the television commercial, you could watch an adult business man transform into an infant)

944 Antipode

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

945

by differentially profitable engagement in market-based investments and transactions vis-à-vis women and persons of color and, in some cases, heterosexually identified elite white men.3 These engagements are enabled largely through white male privilege cemented historically, and from a differentially greater ability both to accumulate and consume, given the general lack of dependents. At the same time, the products of reproduction (children), while not created in the biological home, can be obtained through market-based arrangements, procreation taking place outside the nuclear home and often outside the nation. Crudely put, paternity is acquired through the (re)assumption of breadwinner status and paternal authority. Queer paternal attributes are represented in a number of symbolic ways that depend on the masculinized attributes of heteropatriarchy from the biologized and familialized industrial past—with one important difference: the physicality of the attributes is abstracted away from the localized and biologized centers of procreation and nation and levered onto commodity forms and aesthetics. These latter circulate in and across national contexts in a number of representational and material forms, such as the gay white “daddy” and cowboy (below). Motherhood is sociospatially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is in this sense geopolitically reconstituted, the proprietary reach of gay patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother-father-son and into extrafamilial —and often transnationalized—domains of racialized and classtransected procreational purchase. In the remainder of this paper, I argue that certain EuroWhite-identified gay men—relatively youthful, of some means, and typically childless—are well positioned to take advantage of key avenues of exploitation and profiteering in postindustrial world orders. In this context, white male homosexuality, like the white oedipal heterosexuality of old, has structural opportunities others do not have, with the potential of some to become (in all their specificity) bastions of economic conservatism. The issues raised here are difficult and complex ones. While gay men occupy all racialized social strata; only certain of these men are represented in mainstream queer media (not all men act or look like those on the gay white malecentric TV series Queer as Folk). Media images are often tied to profiteering and marketing, rather than to realistic portrayals of a broad spectrum of gay men’s lives. In this sense, certain gay men have been colonized by the market, their buying powers representing a potential niche that businesses are eager to cultivate.4 At the same time, these men would not be targeted if not for their potential as investors and consumers. Moreover, many elite (mostly white) gay men have access to the means by which to

946

Antipode

consolidate and shore up previous rounds of patriarchal white privilege accumulation, predicated in part upon such images.5 Considerable profits are made from circulating these restricted representations, begging larger questions as to how and why these images are desirable and who benefits. What and whose material investments are implicated and sustained, for example, in the circulation of images of gay white male couples touted imagistically in certain (often mainstream) real-estate market and retail sectors? What sorts of choices are involved and effected, and who participates in the professions? In other words, images are tied to profiteering practices that are mediated through, but ultimately in excess of, the imagistic. For example, a highly racialized group of “real” gay men owns, runs, and frequents the gay businesses and spaces that make up most “gay” real-estate areas across the US. As in all class-riven contexts, idealistic images of home, nation, family, community, and so on are hegemonically produced in the interests of those who can afford or benefit from them. In this sense, images circulated of queer white male elites are unreal in that they represent a small fraction of gay men; yet they are also real in that they are produced for profit and pleasure, embodying material interests geared toward creating hegemonic queer identities and norms. These interests may involve those identifying as gay or straight, the former not a passive victim of the latter. The material interests embedded within the images cannot, therefore, be seen as merely secondary, or even economic. Rather, materiality and image are complexly insinuated into one another through a complex of cross-cutting cultural, economic, political, and historical interests traversing queer and straight lives (Alexander 1998; Boone 2001).6 What follows is an essay exploring, somewhat polemically, how these interests variably intersect constructions of race and gender and the geopolitics of reproduction. Where “power” lies in all of this is complicated, for there are no simple explanations of who manipulates whom, who has agency in constructing markets, and who is represented or colonized (see Marchand 1985). What is certain, though, is that market forces are human forces hierarchically sustained, queer folk not excluded. Individual agency is often obscured in discussions of how power circulates. Moreover, consumption patterns do not collapse easily into class categories. Hence, whether gay white patriarchy is a question of class politics, inflected by sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, or whether it is a question of consumer politics resistant to procreational economies based on nationhood and the biological home is an important analytical distinction to explore. Questioning where the dominance of certain gay white men derives vis-à-vis other queers and other groups allows for greater precision in understanding what makes a group “radical” and what constitutes “liberation.”

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

947

Non-procreational Economies and the Dysfunctional Family

Far from being radical, the queer white patriarchy discussed here promotes the status quo, often operating in leisure and labor capacities that traverse national boundaries, cyberspatially and/or physically. Given previous historical rounds of white male privilege accumulation, many gay white men are well poised to take advantage of higherpaying service-sector jobs and transnational opportunities where relocation is frequent; many also lack dependents, making them prime candidates for target marketing and recruitment, not unlike initiatives directed at other “diversity” groups.7 In fact, these men’s economic and cultural attributes, though at times hysterically inflated by a defensive and fearful heteronormative public (Bell and Binnie 2000:97) are nonetheless valued enough to be cultivated and even championed by significant sectors of business and political communities. Richard Florida (Carnegie Mellon) has of late been conducting heavily corporately sponsored research on the importance of gay men in high-tech urban-growth regimes. In a recent study published by the Brookings Institute (Florida and Gates 2001:1), he and Gary Gates argue that “[T]he leading indicator of a metropolitan area’s hightechnology success is a large gay population,” “gay” being defined elsewhere in the article as gay male couples legible from 1990 Census Data. Remarkably, their study problematically conflates high correlation coefficients with causality to create what they call a Gay Index that can be used as a predictive indicator for urban success. They (2001:4) write: “A metropolitan area’s percentage of gay [male] residents provides the only [statistically] significant predictor of hightech growth in a region when we factor in other regional characteristics such as talent, foreign-born residents, bohemians [musicians and artists], several measures of lifestyle amenities and population.” Problematic science aside, what is sociologically and geographically key here is the systematic, corporately sponsored valorization of gay men’s presence and lives. Many corporate resources were mobilized to conduct Florida’s research, and the findings have been published and circulated amongst highly prestigious corporate and academic institutions. *** Gay white male “liberation” in certain postindustry contexts capitalizes on freedoms gained by dis-investing in the procreating nuclear family. After all, the oedipal family is not as easy to re-situate internationally as are queer monadic units of labor. Might the triadic cellular and libidinal structure of the oedipal-old be comparatively disadvantaged in some transnationalizing situations where relative

948

Antipode

permanence of place and job do not exist? The oedipal family is dysfunctional in certain postindustrial contexts because it can do less work in a transnationalizing and racialized body politic in which mutability, speed, and mobility better support a white male homosexual libidinal economy. Whereas the oedipal family is subtended by the (a) detached home and nation, (b) biologized racism and biological fatherhood (or biologized patriarchy), and (c) groundedness in place, contemporary forms of gay white male associations in postindustrial contexts often support (a) non-biologically-based social contracts, (b) transnationalism and geographical mobility, and (c) commodity racism (McClintock 1995; see below) and what I call commodity patriarchy. In the latter case, fatherhood, family, and home are constructed through representations and commodity flows largely outside imaginary-symbolic contexts of the biological and the nation. The phrase “commodity patriarchy” is informed theoretically by Anne McClintock’s (1995) work on two genres of racism that evolved in EuroWhite-identified colonial-industrial contexts. The first, biological racism, existed prior to the late 19th century and depended on Western science to create mythologies of racialized biological differences. When science could no longer find support for its racisms, racist control was exerted anew through circulating images and commodities that denigrated blackness. McClintock (1995) focuses on how various commercial representations of modern soaps and cleaners depended upon constructing blackness as filth (see also McClintock 1994). What was black (often depicted through African bodies, especially children) needed to be washed away and whitened. Today, racist images of blackness are sold and circulated through various media and commodity flows, the racism of filmic depictions poignantly parodied in Spike Lee’s recent film, Bamboozled (2000). Analogous to McClintock’s (1995) argument that commodity forms rescued a supremacy that had previously been biologized, thereby rescuing racialized forms of exploitation, I argue that gay-white-maleoriented commodity forms are rescuing a previously biologized patriarchy. In the latter case, the geographical scale context of patriarchal iconography has changed: from industrial nation-state and biological home to postindustrial, transnationalized places and affiliations where fatherhood is obtained through market virilities and masculinist commodity forms. In gay white patriarchal contexts, being a “daddy” no longer requires a direct investment in procreational-industrial economies. Instead, certain cultural and economic advantages allow postindustrial patriarchy to register its fatherhood through new commodified aesthetics and symbolics and through the creation of places of white gay male production and consumption. From the lucrative West End in Vancouver and the Castro district in San Francisco to the gay white areas of Montrose in Houston, South Beach in Miami, Boys

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

949

Town in Chicago, Mykonos in Greece, and enclaves in London and Amsterdam, gay white male consumers and aesthetics are “in.”8

Commodity Fatherhood

In the so-called Boys Town of Chicago, flower shops, real-estate offices, fire-engine-red phone booths from London, chi-chi cafés and restaurants, home-decorative salons, and bars litter a spine-like milelong stretch of prime real estate (Figure 4). The area is so lucrative that the city of Chicago expressed desire to capitalize on it by featuring it in city guidebooks and by hanging rainbow flags in the area so that tourists would know that they were passing through a queer zone. The largely gay white male community objected to the gesture and instead opted, in concert with the city father (Mayor Daley) and the city of Chicago, to erect their own more dignifying markers: a halfmile stretch of 23-foot-high phallic bronze pylons, clad in rainbow cock-rings, placed along either side of the main Boys Town artery, Halsted Street, an area known for racial profiling (Windy City Times 1998).9 The pylons were built as part of the North Halsted Beautification Project, begun in May 1996, and sponsored by a Halsted Street merchant group and the city of Chicago (Banchero 1997). The most concerted objections came from queer and straight homeowners in the area who claimed the pylons would decrease property values (Edwards 2000). Queer to the Left, a recently created left organization critical of gay capital’s participation in gentrification, also objected, but for different reasons, arguing in a broadsheet that the pylons represented a marginalizing exercise of capital. The phallic rimming of Boys Town speaks of a masculinist virility, strength, and control that are increasingly contested. Besides their organizing against the pylons, Queer to the Left has worked in concert with the Color Triangle (see below) on class- and race-related issues. Both groups have questioned, for example, why the Gay Pride parade is organized by a Gay Pride Committee made up largely of gay white male business owners, and why it traverses only Boys Town. The two groups have also objected to the steep costs involved in marching in the parade, the costs prohibitive for many queer persons who are of color or poor.10 Yet the colonial aesthetics and practices associated with Boys Town are not unique; they inform many EuroWhite-identified gay communities internationally. One new consumer image that speaks of marketing-virility’s relation to the paternal is the so-called daddy (Figure 5), a gay white male figure whose fatherhood operates in the realm of image-commodity production, uniquely blending the two normative masculinities that were historically distinct: those of father and son (Figures 1 and 6). The white daddy is not only buff (the laboring son of old), but smokes the paternal pipe. Like the father of My Three Sons, he is in control, there to take the white male-filial-you

Figure 4: Boys Town on Halsted Street in Chicago. The image on the left shows the pylons bearing the rainbow-colored rings in front of a realestate office. The center image shows another pylon in front of a home-interior store and club. On the right is a Boys Town phone booth from London

950 Antipode

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

951

Figure 5: A recent special issue of Spurs devoted to daddies

Figure 6: Another daddy image from the same issue of Spurs shown in Figure 5

in hand, filial aspects haunting (in that they are incorporated into) his visibilized persona. The iconic guidance and discipline of the oedipal daddy are eroticized in relation to a bad-boy son, as is the belt, both commoditized and consumed for their own desirous money-making sake.11 Gay white patriarchal images, encapsulated parodically and

Antipode

952

explicitly here through the “daddy,” are not innocent. Just as the industrial-procreating dad represented a patriarchy of violence fueled by racism, colonialism, and industrial profit-seeking, the gay white patriarch is similarly overdetermined, albeit through postindustrial avenues of colonization, racism, and misogyny. An aesthetic genre of queer white male culture that more explicitly exposes its colonial roots is the queer cowboy (Figure 7).

Commodity Cowboys

What turns a man to roaming? Under the outstretched sky? What makes him ride and wander? And forsake the days gone by? He has no destination. He has no reason why. He’ll be a lonely hunter Until the day he dies. (Anonymous gay-cowboy poem in Out’s April 1999 special issue, “Lonesome Cowboy: How the West Was Worn”)

The virility of the gay white cowboy image is intelligible culturally because it relies on previously cemented images of virile white heterocowboys and frontiersmen of Manifest Destiny who conserved and shored up the white-supremacist, misogynist nation.12 Unlike the cowboy-frontiersman of heterosexual old, the imagistic virility of the gay white cowboy-frontiersman does not come from physical endurance or uncouth wranglings with Injuns, but from the economic (Hunt 1987:46–91). His frontier is an abstracted one, dependent on previous exploitations, racism, and misogyny; his genealogy is rooted in popularized heterocowboy figures romanticized in mainstream film and US history books for children. In either cowboy case, the history of frontier politics is obliterated and fetishized. Now, instead of John Wayne creating a celluloid US homestead against all odds, queer cowboys are part of commodity networks roving transnationally, selling all manner of cowboy paraphernalia, especially cowboy hats and boots (Figure 8).13 Frontier violence, once buried in idyllized cowboy might, now talks queerly from under a fetishized cowboy hat, remasking what has already been covered over, namely the (wild) West’s misogyny and racialized supremacy.14 Yet the cowboy is not merely imagistic: the image is consumed and performed. The roving gay white cowboy is alluded to in other commodifying contexts, such as gay men’s rodeo circuits and the queer travel industry.15 In Bangkok, for example, a new club called the Apache Club catering to wealthy gay men features young Thai boys, dressed up like Apache Indians, who perform “Native-ness” on stage, inviting conquest, the Far East

Figure 7: A gay cowboy centerfold in the mainstream gay magazine Out. This particular issue was devoted to “Lonesome Cowboys: How the West Was Worn”

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International 953

954

Antipode

Figure 8: An ad in the same issue of Out shown in Figure 7. The caption in white lettering lists all of the various items the cowboy is wearing, the designer who makes them, and their price: “Black linen suit by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Smoke-colored shirt, $150, by Orfi. Navy felt hat, $475, by Rand’s. Sterling silver bolo tie, $425.” It goes on to note similar information for the two cowboys pictured on the following page

collapsing into a Wild West (Figure 9). While there may be liberatory, parodic gestures within these performances, the racial and class politics of such enterprises are complicated, tied up in highly inequitable networks of power. As scholars have noted, men of color have often been colonized through circuits of queerly racist and patriarchal commoditization and fetishism and are frequently excluded from gay male community building, including gay white male responses to the AIDS epidemic16 (eg Alexander 1998; Almaguer 2001:420–421; Cochran and Mays 2001:429–430; Fung 2001; Riggs 1989; Schwartz 1993).17 The aestheticized virility of the postindustrial daddy and frontiersman is also registered in desires to serve in the military, a desire most prominently portrayed in terms of white gay men (Figure 10). This desire to serve is a conservative one, its realization reflecting not so much radical acceptance by straight heterosexual society as the coming political and economic age of gay white men. Desire for popular acceptance of gay white men in uniform, one that haunts queer S/M

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

955

Figure 9: One of the many promotional Web pages devoted to the Apache Club (photographed in 2001)

Figure 10: A 1998 cover of Out featuring “An American Hero,” a gay white man in military uniform

Antipode

956

(sadomasochistic) erotics, affirms the sense that the US is still a “white man’s country” (Figure 11; cf Bell and Binnie 2000).18

Transnationalizing Queers and Queerness

… i’ve long been the “it” in a “rice queen phenomenon”/ that’s burned faster than gin bottles/thrown at the black of my skillet/ games so old as jason & hercules/men fucking my body like freshgolden fleeces/they ride my boyhood on bikes in the woods/’ then rape/n’kill it/with leashes/spit words in personal ads/ those clever written puzzles for fun/they blood-brother baptize my emotions/then martyr my sisters in the back room basements i am beyond being poker-faced/mysterious/submissive/wanted-byyou or a being who’s glossy & “g.q.”-queen gorgeous you wanna play freeze-tag? I’m frozen already touch me you’ll swear I’m the ice-man’s ice monkey hit me/&watch where the mah-jongg chips land play with me then/if you think/ the sweet that’s left to the taste in my tongue is enough & not bitter/ love me for this/I forfeit the game/remove my makeup/ & call you the winner (excerpt from “Game Boy” by Regie Cabico, reprinted in Alexander [1998:302])

The increasing economic and political power of queer white patriarchy has allowed for considerable touristic consumption across national contexts, perhaps most potently embodied and symbolized in international ecstasy raves, known as circuit parties,19 initially created as benefit parties for (primarily white) men with AIDS.20 What I want to focus on here, though, is touristic travel of a longer durée. I begin with a personal anecdote and the presupposition that autobiographies can be used to unpack how structural inequities register and feel. In August 1998, using federally funded, research-related “frequent flyer miles” accumulated over several research years (accumulation years unfortunately no longer allowed by the travel industry), I visited the gay-male-identified island mecca of Mykonos. A white-identified and US-based gay male friend who is Greek had just bought a vacation home there and wanted me to visit him.21 When I arrived I felt somewhat alienated, not by the sexuality of the men involved, but by the high level of commercialized pleasure (not unlike that which I

Figure 11: An ad for the club/bathhouse Man’s Country, featured in one of the main gay newspapers in Chicago, Outlines, and in the newspaper for the gay black community, Blacklines. Note that the same male figures are used in both ads, the figures on the right colored in to resemble persons of color. The racialized representational politics here are complex. Over time, Man’s Country has become a place frequented by many men of color, yet the ad in the black medium is smaller and made up of persons not having much phenotypic resemblance to most African Americans. At the same time, Man’s Country shares building space with Chicago Eagle, a leather club frequented almost entirely by gay white men. A small step down separates the two, as stipulated by certain municipal bylaws (entertainment and drinking cannot be on the same level). As one gay white male friend explained to me, the leather and S/M scene is largely made up of whites. During the annual International Man of Leather event in the city, these men take over the bathhouse, African American men returning to the tubs upon their departure. The politics of such sociospatial dynamics need to be explored

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International 957

958

Antipode

felt in a recent visit to the US urban shopping mecca, Houston, Texas); here, hundreds of thousands of young gay men, mostly whiteidentified, annually party collectively, consuming large quantities of food, alcohol, and each other. The racialized economic and political privilege of the men involved was significant. Most were EuroWhiteidentified, many whom I met coming from Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In my case, my friend’s home, a cottage on the Aegean sea, is part of a development complex of villas consisting mostly of vacation homes for white wealthy gay men from numerous international locations: lawyers, interior designers, doctors, professors, consultants, diplomats, and investors. My own network of friends who passed through Mykonos that summer were borrowed; I had made most of their acquaintances through my Greek-American friend and host earlier while in Chicago. It included two men working with the World Bank, a wealthy Ivyleague-educated (white-identified) Japanese-American partner in a major investment firm,22 a professor of theology, and a diplomat serving in the Caribbean. Interestingly, since my visit three years ago, all of these men have changed jobs and international locations. One man went to Tokyo for two years (he moved out of Chicago), and now resides in San Francisco, while another man moved from Washington, DC to Chicago and shortly thereafter to Singapore to take up a lucrative job in the private sector.23 The relative spending power of these and other similarly positioned gay white men whom I met that summer was, for me, remarkable and presumably registers the kind of spending power sought after by conservateurs of postindustrial profit-seeking. A 1998 BBC Online article, “The Pink Pound” (Quest 1998a), for example, speaks to the acceptance of gay men in popular venues of marketing, discursively collapsing them into a specific class: As society has relaxed the laws on homosexual life, more people are prepared to identify as being part of that class—and with that, of course, companies are more easily able to target that sector. And what a sector! In the battle for business, the campaign is on to identify and sell to homosexuals as never before. And for good reason. Because of family circumstance (or more precisely lack thereof) the gay community tends to have much more disposable income to spend.24

The article goes on to elaborate on the corporate sponsorship of gay male activities, pointing out that It is 10 years since IKEA famously ran an advert showing two men choosing furniture for their home. In Britain “The Kiss” made news,

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

959

when two men kissed over a beverage, as the brewer kissed up to the emerging market. Much of the market is directed towards entertainment. In Britain, Bass discovered that the average gay [male] spends £10 in a bar which is twice the national average. Hence its decision to invest $4.5m in the scene. Bass is on the record as saying “we are optimistic this sector will continue to grow.” In Soho, the old [hetero]sex shops around Wardour Street and Brewer street were cleaned up years ago. Now the area has been taken over by trendy shops selling distressingly small underwear and useless nick-nacks. All with a rainbow twist. Boys Magazine estimates that 80% of its readers go to a pub or club at least once a week. … Gone are the blacked out windows to protect the identity of those within … Big names like American Express, American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Apple Computers have recognised the sectors [sic] spending. (Quest 1998a; emphasis added)

Another BBC report, “Gay travel boom” (Quest 1998b), informs us that gay male tourism is big business in New York, Miami, Montreal, Sydney, Paris, and Amsterdam, noting additionally that American Airlines estimates gay ticket sales at $150 million dollars annually. It also notes that the London Tourist Board runs ads in appropriate American gay magazines touting London as an ideal vacation site (cf Binnie 1995).25 The article closes by noting that within the industry, it is “every man for himself” (Quest 1998b). The pernicious masculinism and racism of the industry is regularly seen in ads from magazines that supposedly cater to lesbians and homosexual men under the dissimulating, universalizing rubric of “gay.”26 In these cases, typical broadsheets advertising gay destinations in lesbigay gay magazines, such as Gay Chicago and Out, consistently feature gay, white, young men only.27 Rather than arguing that white gay men are victims of target marketing (“the market made me do it”) or that their exclusion from the political sphere differentially propels them into consumption circuits, I would argue, in tandem with Alexander (1998:288) that: gay capital mobilizes the same identity and operates through a similar set of assumptions as heterosexual capital. These systems not only mutually construct each other, but also simultaneously compete for a market each is willing to colonize. Both segments are engaged in nativizing and colonizing moves that I had assumed earlier were generated by processes of heterosexualization alone.

Procreation

“Married?” said Alfred. “I’m sorry, sir, that’s a German word I don’t know.”

960

Antipode

“It’s a lost word. It occurs nowhere except in von Hess’s book. Being married means living in a house with one woman and your children, and going on living continually with her until one of you dies. It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? That men ever lived with women. But they did. “The women were different,” said Alfred. “You can see that from this photograph.” “You can,” agreed the Knight. “Many a time I, and probably every other von Hess, have gone out after looking at that picture and seen how different women are. Thank God we were all very practical men. There had to be sons. There were sons. But about marriage, Alfred, you may not know it, but the Christians in their communities don’t live like we do, men and women separately. They live in families, that is the man, the woman, and their children, sons and daughters, all together. I don’t know how they do it, because their women look just like ours.” “I know they do, said Alfred absently. “I found out about Christians years ago. It’s part of their religion to live with women.” (Emphasis in original. Passage from Swastika Night ([1937] 1985) a feminist novel set in a post-Hitlerian, postmarriage, postfamily state seven centuries hence. Women are secluded into breeding herds and ruled by men, who consider male homosociality and male–male love to be superior)

Just as McClintock (1995) theorizes a shift from scientific to commodity racisms, I have posited a shift from scientific to commodity patriarchies in certain postindustrial contexts—not everywhere and not in all places, but patchily across important cultural avenues and times. I have argued that the “familial” of postindustry may be postoedipal, but white daddies can still rule the signifying roost. The normatively oedipal family, depicted by Carstens as Holy using Christian images of God the Father and Son (Figure 2), is being sexually reworked, this reworking in turn impinging upon normative portrayals of the Holy Family, one effect of which is recent popular queries about Jesus’ sexuality.28 The youthful, celebratory focus on nonprocreational gay white male bodies appears to be tied to a slight shifting of procreational activities offshore, persons of privilege in metropoles commoditizing the biological products of the largely poor and dispossessed through the adoptive purchase of their children. Privileged metropole adoptions of newborns from China, Russia, and Latin America (still not many from Africa) are now commonplace, middle-aged, middle- to upperclass white heterosexuals, lesbians, and—less so—white gay men capitalizing on the activity. In the process, the procreating family once encapsulated in the ideological home has in this instance become internationalized, the feminized labor of reproduction located

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

961

elsewhere. The oedipal order, once cellularly contained and stabilized within the ideological (and, commonly, practical) confines of home, neighborhood, and nation here has burst out of its former geographical confines, in keeping with postindustrial deterritorialization of libidinal investments generally. This partial geographical shift in sites of reproduction is inextricable from the fact that most postindustrial exploitations are fueled by high rates of consumption, pleasures deriving increasingly from aggressive, narcissistic investments and activities that center on the individual (Blum this issue; Luke forthcoming). Within these narcissistic contexts of the deterritorial, wealthy gay white men hold a competitive edge: With no necessary ideological-material ties to biologically based householding and the attendant mobility frictions these entail, they share the potential for considerable, if ironic, patriarchal advantage that is relational and cuts across lines of class.29 If children are increasingly commoditized (as possessions and as concentrated sites for expressions of wealth, to wit the retail explosion of children’s goods) and privileged white heterosexual and gay men hold a competitive edge in their purchase, what sorts of politics will emerge in future around poor women’s bodies and ownership over their reproductive products? Will a queerly patriarchal scenario similar to that depicted by Burdekin ([1937] 1985) obtain hundreds of years hence (see also Anonymous this issue)? My place in Chicago, a city that has agonistically traversed the industrial (stockyards and steel mills) ! postindustrial (tourism and banking) divide, has prompted me to rethink how larger libidinal shifts in production and consumption have affected me, other than through the emergence and phallic fortification of (white) Boys Town. It seems to me that Chicago has always been a (white) Boys Town, the only difference being that the sexed identification and political economic activities of the boys have differed. It is in this recognition of a common-but-different racialized patriarchy that inspires me to turn to Luce Irigaray’s work. Irigaray asserts, in part, that homosociality is foundational to heteropatriarchy, what she punningly calls in French hom(m)osexualité (see also Papadopoulos this issue). She (1985:171–172) writes: [A]ll the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal societies and all the modalities of productive work are men’s business. The production of women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men (when a man buys a girl [in marriage], he “pays” the father or the brother …) … The law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men. What the anthropologist calls the passage from nature to culture thus amounts to the institution of the reign of hom(m)osexuality.

962

Antipode

Not in an “immediate” practice [male homosexuality], but in its “social” mediation. From this point on, patriarchal societies might be interpreted as societies functioning in the mode of “semblance” [of the heterosexual]. … Reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)osexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself, of relations among men.

Like the matador’s cloth, then, women’s bodies were (are) used to hide men’s bullish desires for themselves. To some degree, Irigaray’s work is problematic in that she does not consider racial hierarchies, the exigencies of political economy, or male homosexuality per se. If we were to incorporate such things, we might conjecture that the hom(m)osexual urges of which she speaks were partly cultivated and veiled in specifically Western agrarian and industrialized contexts for reasons of labor: children were needed to reproduce a largely nationalized labor force. Hom(m)osexualité is freed from the heterosexual, however, in certain postindustrial places of white privilege because the need for a national labor force is much less pressing: much US agriculture has been industrialized and key industries have been relocated to places offshore; moreover, migrant labor now performs many of the most arduous agricultural tasks. Postindustrial fathers and sons, fathers and fathers, and sons and sons can therefore now engage freely in hom(m)osexuality without the artifice of woman. Procreation is at least partially optional, with reproduction’s products (children) purchasable, if so desired, from the elsewheres of the poor. The body of woman, synecdotally collapsed into the womb, is open for rent or temporary purchase; in gay white male patriarchal contexts, there is greater potential for the maternal body to be excised from memory altogether (Anonymous this issue). Lesbian-identified film writer and producer Lizzie Borden dissected white supremacy, misogyny, and male privilege in futuristic, paranoid fashion in Born in Flames (1981). The film opens in a mythical time, after a global Marxist revolution that has placed young, pontificating white men in power over a worldwide socialist state. Women and lesbians, especially those of color, are angered by their postrevolutionary exclusion, and the bulk of the film centers on their plot to overthrow the state violently. Borden’s 20th-century lineup of straight, dour, misogynist Marxists might today more accurately include elite gay white patriarchs whose racist and classist hom(m)osexuality is overt.

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

Paranoia

963

My paper might be seen as playing paranoically and quite roughly with hyperbole and structuralist absolutes, suggesting that the real telos of Western History is an erotics of racism and misogyny libidinized multifariously through differently sexed regimes of white Father and Son. The harshness of my paper’s tone contains and emerges out of the harshness of many women’s and people of color’s experiences with racism, colonialism, and patriarchy. To move beyond harshness requires thinking through how intersubjectivity can be made central to queer politics and practice (Blum this issue).30 The tone simultaneously begs a certain critical line of questioning. First, why are certain “gay” white patriarchal spaces and images gaining popular acceptance, and are spatialities and sexualities innocent or “radical” simply because they are anormatively “different”? As geographers, we have considerable analytical means with which to theorize where and why alternatively sexed diversities are emerging in the interstices of the sexed binaries of Enlightenment and modernity. We also have the means to explore what kinds of work alternatively sexed bodies and places do, and what informs their variously libidinized geographical force and logic. If industrial exploitations, colonization, and nationalism were produced by and fueled certain kinds of white supremacist investments and desires centered around the nuclear family, what sorts of desires are produced and effected by postnuclear patriarchal arrangements? How are motherhood and the family in certain postindustrial contexts being reimagined and sustained in more aestheticized, commoditized ways?31 What sorts of sexualized social contracts inform present-day postindustrial exploitations? Are alternative sexualities merely effects of larger postindustrial processes, or implicated in them? White-identified lesbians are not exempt from such questioning and have been open to similar charges of racism and classism (see, eg, Alexander 1998; Anzaldua 1998). Lesbian participation in the adoption market has been largely unproblematized, something that needs to be addressed, since lesbians adopt in more instances than gay men. Problematic hierarchies, moreover, exist in all non-heteronormative communities. Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (2001), for example, examine how white heteronormativity inheres in certain lesbian pornography. Here, some same-sex practices, popularly understood to be outside the reach of heterosexuality, reproduce similar contours of power, particularly in sadomasochism, where dominance is modeled on nested hierarchies: someone holds the phallus (power, mobility, desire) while the other is lacking. Their analysis suggests that what I have called “commodity patriarchy” has transgendered purchase, opening up new reflexive possibilities and allowing us to question

964

Antipode

what racialized and class-based politics exist in any sexed community and where lines of identification are drawn and why. In the end, how might we analyze, cultivate, and broaden the radical impulses within sexuality-based movements? Many have begun to challenge these colonizing impulses. In Chicago, the Color Triangle, a network of queer activist organizations of color across the city interested in addressing racism, was established in the late 1990s, involving groups such as Affinity (for AfricanAmerican lesbians), Horizon (for lesbigay and transgendered youth), Khulizaban (for South Asian lesbians and bisexual women), and Mujeres Latinas. It has attempted to work on a number of fronts: it created the People of Color Leadership Institute; it has held informal dinners to discuss racism in the city; it created a Forum Committee to develop public forums addressing racism in Chicago (police brutality) and in Chicago’s queer community (hate crimes); and it inspired the creation of Queer White Allies against Racism. We need to recognize anticolonial efforts such as these more fully in geographical research, recognizing in addition that the struggles in which they engage are not new. The growing gap between rich and poor affects all peoples, albeit differently across social groups and place. Interrogating new sociospatial possibilities for the future requires exploring how all sexualities (including those that are heteronormative) are complexly constructed, articulated, and insinuated into different sorts of transnationalizing empires, creating new challenges and resistance movements.32

Postscript

Last week (week of 8 July 2002), a flurry of press coverage occurred concerning the behavior of leading officials of the most visible AIDS facility in Chicago, Howard Brown. A front-page article in the Chicago Free Press (10 July 2002) read “Howard Brown hit with charges of racism, sexism” and outlines longstanding grievances concerning the center. Perhaps this kind of press and this collection will help initiate a more open assessment of the structural inequalities within the community, inequalities in keeping with those at large.

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from the input of many persons and public airings. I thank Francois Debrix and Patricia Price for inviting me to give this paper as one of two keynote addresses at Florida International University’s “Space and Polity in Transnational Context” 2001 Symposium and to Dianna Niebylski for the invitation to present the work as one of the two plenary papers for the Midwest Modern Language Association’s 2001 annual meeting. I am also grateful to Matt Farish and Alex Vandusevan for inviting me to give the first

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

965

draft of the paper in 1999 at the University of British Columbia’s Green College. I benefited much from the thoughtful comments of Paul Jaskot, Darrell Moore, Timi Mayer, Eugene McCann, and Ann Russo. Additional thanks to Ann, who discussed with me her experiences in various antiracist activist queer organizations in Chicago, calling my attention to the presence and importance of these groups. Thanks also to Alexis Papadopoulos for his support and encouragement throughout the paper-writing process, to Megan Maurer for her assistance with the graphics, and to Glen Elder and the other two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Endnotes

I use the word “paternalistically” to connote how employers encoded themselves as company fathers of laboring sons, certain rituals in some cases reinforcing this paternalistic relationship (company housing, Christmas turkeys). I foreground this paternal– filial relationship in part to underscore how differently masculinity was encoded in each case: the father is disembodied and cerebral; the son is muscular and a bit dull (see Figure 1). 2 This definition of patriarchy overlaps with Hennessy’s (2000) who similarly analyzes the coexistence of heterosexual and homosexual patriarchies in late capitalism, claiming (as do I) that the latter, in some cases, displace the former. Hennessy focuses more on gender (patriarchs are men), whereas I center my analysis on procreation and related Hegelian mythologies of the master’s right to provide. She (2000:23–24) writes: 1

As I understand it, patriarchy refers to the structuring of social life—labor, state, and consciousness—such that more social resources and value accrue to men as a group at the expense of women as a group …. In advanced capitalist countries, public or postmodern patriarchy has recently begun to emerge as the prevailing form. It is characterized by the hyperdevelopment of consumption and the joint wage-earner family, the relative transfer of power from husbands to professionals in the welfare state, the rise of singlemother-headed and other alternative households, and sexualized consumerism. … While any one patriarchal formation may dominate, it often coexists with other contesting or residual forms. Policy debates like the controversy over lifting the ban on gays in the US military and the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as cultural narratives of various sorts, can be read as articulations of the struggle between bourgeois patriarchal formations (and their accompanying moral ideologies) and postmodern patriarchy’s newer forms of family, gender, sexuality, and work. 3 Here I think I am more in accordance with Hennessy (2000) than with Alexander (1998) who argues that white gay male capitalistic ventures are to some degree victims of what she calls “heterosexual capitalism.” That is, they are often forced to operate in certain ways to negotiate what is an immanent and hegemonically heterosexual logic within capitalism. While we share the project of unpacking racisms and patriarchies within the queer community, I would argue that white gay male patriarchy articulates rather nicely with its heterosexual counterpart. And while there may be violent frictions generated from the fall of old heteronormative mythologies of affection and desire, there is also considerable gay white male agency in formulating the transition. Evidence for this is present even in Alexander’s own work. For example, she (1998:289) writes that “There has been an acceleration over the last five years in the commercial interests investigating ‘gay and lesbian niche marketing,’ some of it spurred by white

966

Antipode

gay men themselves who work in the corporate sector.” Elsewhere, she quotes Grant Lukenbill, who wrote the 1995 business guide Untold Millions: Positioning Your Business for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Revolution, asserting that gay and lesbian businesses need not be fora for negotiating larger political issues. In this way, she (1998:292) suggests, solidarity politics across sexuality formations are foreclosed. Catherine Nash (2002) cogently captures some of the complexities of patriarchal investments in the context of the gay white male community in Toronto. She shows how what may have originally been radical strategies of investment in gay areas by gay white men (that is, producing sites of safety, sociality, and organizing) became conservative exclusionary sites of gay white male assimilation, creating rifts (businessas-usual versus working-for-change) within Toronto’s gay male community. 4 Evans (1993), in particular, has argued that the intensity of consumption by gay men is predicated on the fact that they are disallowed full entry into political domains in which citizenship rights could be expressed. Instead, they are forced into forms of expression that shore up domains of the private. What I am interested in, though, are the differential abilities and prerogatives of certain gay white men to invest in these domains and the tensions amongst the queer community that result. 5 Again, for the sake of brevity, I do not discuss the complexity of desires for gay white male advantages in postindustrial business sectors. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that acceptance is patchy and uneven, itself riven by the differently sexed ideologies of industry (heterosexual) and postindustry (gay male). The construction and real-estate development industries, for example, are rife with cultural allusions to the working-class heterosexual man and remain grossly homophobic. In contrast, consulting, architecture, interior design, and real-estate marketing are welcoming of queers, especially homosexual white men. 6 Morton (2001) makes a similar point in his analysis of Persky’s text on political change in Eastern Europe, Then We Take Berlin, written from an explicitly gay viewpoint informed by Persky’s sexual adventures. Morton’s complaint is that Persky disengages with history, in the end conflating communism with sexual repression and capitalism with sexual freedom, abandoning politics to focus on pleasure. He (2001:229) writes: On the one hand, the book is an elaborate nostalgic description of the “failed utopia” of Eastern European communism, and on the other, a paean to a homosexual utopia (… the central chapter is the one that turns Berlin into Boyopolis). When challenged during the writing of the book by a straight leftist about the economic conditions enabling the “fulfillment of his erotic dreams” (that he pays the Eastern European sex workers hard cash for the pleasure they provide him), Persky first evades the economic issue by diverting attention to subsidiary issues (the relative differences between heterosexual and homosexual prostitution, the fact that he was not engaged in pedophilia, …) before finally confessing that he is indeed exploiting the young men. 7 Arthur Anderson and Boston Consulting, for example, have special recruiting arms for gays and gay incentive packages that include domestic partnership benefits. I am saying here not that gay white men are the most marketable of any employable group, but that many have highly valued demographic characteristics. Having special gay male recruiting arms in the 1950s was unthinkable. Why is it thinkable today? Simply because they represent one of many “diversity” groups that corporations somehow feel compelled to attract? 8 Again, I do not want to collapse class onto consumption, nor do I want to say that class is irrelevant in matters of consumption (see Bell and Binnie 2000). Rather I would argue that a variety of class-positioned consumers may enter an establishment and invest in it very differently, buying only a beer, for example, or a beer and a prime rib. Gay male cruising areas, moreover, do not necessarily require a certain class status to enter.

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

967

Informal racial quotas are commonly instituted in many clubs in the area. Information pertaining to antiracist activism in the community is taken from discussions with Ann Russo, a colleague and scholar involved in numerous antiracist queer initiatives in the city (see elsewhere in this paper and Russo and Torres 2001). 11 Daddy and “daddy-boy” relations involve consensual power exchanges and intergenerational imagery. In some contexts, the relationship is playful, the overt incest themes being veiled or fetishized through commodity forms: the daddy does not really imagine he is penetrating his own son. There is a subgroup, however, for which incest is an explicitly desired event, commodity forms shoring up this alternative of the family romance. See, for example, HandJobs, a daddy-boy erotica fiction magazine. 12 Alexander (1998:294) similarly notes that the racism of much white gay male tourism to the “Third World” is rife with history. She argues that gay white male tourism oftentimes traverses and reproduces 9

10

the same geographies that were established during the earlier phases of imperialism. Travel guides … elaborate a certain historically intransigent colonial relationship in which a previously scripted colonial cartography of ownership and production, consumption and distribution all conform to a “First World/Third World” division in which “Third World” gay men get positioned as objects of sexual consumption, rather than as agents in a sexual exchange. If colonialism fetishized, racialized, and sexualized the “native,” and tourism … produces commodities as nativized fetishes, then in this instance white gay tourism becomes … co-implicated in the elaboration of these very processes of nativization and recolonization of which heterosexual tourism is the originator. Ironically, Hollywood sexualized a group of men who were not invested in procreational economies but who worked nomadically in all-male environments for long periods of time, the absence of women perhaps being what makes cowboy life attractive to gay white men. Thus, John Wayne depictions of cowboy life are less historically correct in some ways than romantic gay male images. 14 For a wonderful exposition on the differences between queer theatricality and performativity, see Harper (1994). 15 The increasingly popular queer white male rodeo circuit in the US and Canada is sponsored by major corporations such as Bud Light, Instinct magazine, American Airlines, and Enterprise and Avis car rentals. Todd Heibel, a doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University, is studying this phenomenon in the context of the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA). In an unpublished work, he (ongoing:10) writes that “[T]he [annual] Grand Entry event in particular reinforces a latent sense of national identity when riders enter the arena bearing the flags of participating states accompanied by both US and Canadian national anthems.” Though IGRA calls itself international, its members derive only from the US and Alberta. And while it welcomes persons from all racialized groups, Heibel notes its all-white composition and the racialized problems the organization has posed for persons of color. An analogously imperializing collapse of the “international” into a membership world of largely privileged white men is discussed by Alexander (1998:298) in the context of the leading gay (white) male tourism guide, the Spartacus International Gay Guide, a “hefty 1000+ page compendium encompassing close to 900 countries, mapping a wide geography from Albania to Zimbabwe … [and printed] in four of the major colonizing languages: English, German, Spanish, and French.” Similarly, the International Gay Travel Association is based in the US, with an associated office only in Germany. Despite its claims to the international, Alexander (1998:295) notes that 13

the primary flow of the Association’s resources is directed at travelers in the United States and Europe where the bulk of the membership is based … The

968

Antipode

getaway place is located elsewhere, outside the “West,” envisioned as having something that can be used, however, temporarily. This elsewhere can be coveted, then, for its use value, its serviceability (a strip of beach, a hotel, a club, a muchneeded place for cruising). See Cochran and Mays (2001) for an analysis of how AIDS research up through the 1980s focused almost exclusively on the sexual risk-behaviors of white gay men. 17 Almaguer (1993:420) writes, for example, of the decided racialized class prerogatives that allowed a distinct “gay” male community to develop in the US: 16

The gay identity and communities that emerged [after World War II] were overwhelmingly white, middle class, and male-centered … [T]he new communities founded in the post-war period were largely populated by white men who had the resources and talents needed to create “gilded” gay ghettos. This fact has given the contemporary gay community—despite its undeniable diversity—a largely white, middle class, and male form … [T]he unique class and racial advantages of white gay men provided the foundation upon which they could boldly carve out the new gay identity. Their collective position in the social structure empowered them with the skills and talents needed to create new gay institutions, communities, and a unique sexual subculture. Almaguer (1993:240) also notes how racialized class privilege allowed for a relatively homogeneous white gay male identity to emerge: Despite the intense hostility … they faced … as white gay men, they were in the best position to risk the social ostracism that this process engendered. They were relatively better situated than other homosexuals to endure the hazards unleashed by their transgression of gender conventions and traditional heterosexual norms. The diminished importance of ethnic identity among these individuals, due principally to the homogenizing and integrating impact of the dominant racial categories which defined them foremost as white, undoubtedly also facilitated the emergence of gay identity among them. (emphasis in original) Colonizing activities also inhere in such apparently innocuous practices as the tonguein-cheek identification of queer men of color using food metaphors: a rice queen is a white gay man who favors Asian lovers; a taco queen is a white gay man who prefers Latin men; other whites favor chocolate (Africans). White men who prefer whites are said to favor vanilla. The offensiveness of the food epithets is alluded to by Regie Cabico in his poem, “Game Boy,” reproduced later in this text. 18 All militaries of the European Union and Canada allow lesbians and gay men to serve, the US in this regard being substantially less forthcoming. Nonetheless, the fact that homosexuals are serving in the armed forces has become a publicly debated issue in the US is historic and speaks to a new politically, economically, and culturally mediated openness. See Fung (2001) for a critique of the trenchant racism in much white gay male porn in which S/M inheres in the racialized casting of characters. Where men of color are included at all, they figure in, not as men of action and desire, but as prone, penetrated, and feminized objects existing for the white man’s fucking pleasure. The scenario reproduces the sadomasochism that has long been theorized as informing modern, normative heterosexual relations (see also Almaguer 1993). 19 See the cover story of the Chicago Windy City Times (Peregrin 2001) of a US government report on circuit parties. The opening line reads, “What is it about circuit parties that continues to attract thousands of gay men to these decadent, weekendlong events, like so many moths drawn, uncontrollably, to the dangerous, blue glow of a bug zapper?” According to the study, 98% of the 295 gay and bisexual men who participated in the survey reported that they went to “listen to music and dance.” The

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

969

expenditure involved in participating is considerable, many men flying from city to city and even country to country for these all-night events. The report highlighted the high level of drug use. 20 One of the reviewers pointed out with great dismay that I largely ignore the AIDS crisis as an explanatory frame for gay male consumption patterns, arguments having been recently made that these high consumptions rates are somewhat compensatory; they reflect a celebratory quality of survival and/or anxieties over that survival. Yet, if I had chosen to discuss the crisis, I would have chosen a different tack and charted the racialized and classist ways the “AIDS industry” emerged and catered primarily to gay white men. Such a charting, however, has already been accomplished by long-time AIDS activist Ruth Schwartz. I use this footnote to foreground what I find most relevant here: namely, the racist patriarchal responses of the gay community to the crisis. Schwartz (1993:237–238) writes: I had entered AIDS work with a bargain basement mentality. Having worked at a women’s newspaper and a women’s crisis center, I was used to thrift-store furniture and mimeographed flyers. Gay [white] men brought with them greater access to money and other resources from the start … It was great to be able to order all the supplies we needed, to feel a sense of relative plenty … [Yet] I … found that some of my most basic assumptions about the world, understandings I shared with other feminist lesbians about the role of class, race, and gender in people’s lives, were brand-new and highly disputed concepts for many [white] gay men. The AIDS Foundation scheduled what was to have been a series of antiracism workshops for staff; during the first of the workshops, some white gay men were so offended by the suggestion that many of their actions could be racist that the remainder of the sessions were canceled. In the spring of 1987, at the National Lesbian/Gay Health Conference held at a swanky hotel outside Los Angeles, many lesbians voiced our discomfort with the white, upwardly mobile, increasingly professionalized AIDS-work “culture.” Many of us were infuriated when a plenary session on “lessons AIDS service providers can learn from the women’s health movement” drew only a handful of male attendees. We asked ourselves and each other some hard questions … [including whether ] if AIDS was not a “gay disease,” why were the gay white men in charge of most AIDS organizations so loath to build coalitions with groups based in the communities of women and people of color? … Veneita Porter [a lesbian of color working in AIDS organizations] describes her sense of divided loyalties. “I got shit from the black and people of color community (‘What are you doing around all these white men?’). I got shit from women (‘What are you doing talking about sex with men?’), and I got shit from other men (‘We don’t need lesbians or women doing this work’).” Before AIDS, Porter says, she had watched people die from “drug abuse, from stupidity, from bad health care because they were poor.” For lesbians of color, perhaps even more than for white lesbians, the issues raised by AIDS were familiar ones. But even between white middle-class gay men and lesbians, there were often stark differences in perspective. Amanda Newstetter recalls receiving phone calls from desperate-sounding clients and feeling “my heart go out to them.” But on home visits, finding that these same clients “lived in these incredible castles with views and sunken bathtubs,” she found herself struggling with anger, envy, and a sense of contradiction. “The men think AIDS is all there is,” she thought. “Now that these white men are getting sick and having bad health care and having to deal with being ostracized—now they know how lesbians feel, or people of color, or women who have tried to get decent health care … . I felt like saying, Hey,

970

Antipode

wait a minute here, this is not so new. You are not the only ones who are suffering.” Schwartz goes on to talk about the different social geographies of AIDS on the east versus the west coast and the creation of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the late 1980s (generally, more poor persons, drug users and persons of color). She (1993:240) describes how lesbian activists once again found themselves in awe of resources that white gay men could muster. Tensions similar to those evident on the west coast soon emerged: The sides rarely divided strictly along lines of gender. Instead, in both service organizations and activist groups, an alliance of women (both lesbian and straight) and people of color often faced off against an “old guard” of white gay men … Lesbians not involved with AIDS often asked us: If the AIDS epidemic had primarily affected women, would gay men have mobilized in the same numbers to help us? We had often asked the same question of ourselves; always, the answer was a resounding no. Not one of us believed our efforts would have been reciprocated, yet this in itself was not a reason to withdraw. Schwartz relays how many lesbian activists have since gone on to work with women with cancer. Though breast cancer affects one out of five women, it is a disease that white gay male activists have largely ignored. 21 Frequent-flier miles are fictitious “miles” accumulated by flying on a particular airline. After so many flights with the same company, you are awarded a free flight. How far you can fly depends on how many miles you have accumulated. In my case, I had been accumulating for over five years, and I was warned that I had to spend my miles or they would be eradicated from the database! I provide this caveat because I think it situates me in very important ways in relation to the men I met on the island. At the same time, I went to Istanbul with my Greek friend, at his wealthy and homophobic father’s expense. He thought we were a heterosexual couple and he wanted to travel with us from his home in Thessaloniki, which we did. After his father left, my friend went on to stay in the most expensive hotel in the city, where he would meet up with wealthy gay male friends from the US and go on a cruise up the Bosphorus. I went to the equivalent of a youth hostel and eventually left Istanbul earlier than planned because of constant gender harassment. My capital was mostly human and cultural (my frequent-flier points derived, for example, from several trips to Africa, funded by the Canadian government as part of my dissertation research), such that our consumption patterns are not collapsible onto class. In all cases (the Canadian government, the father, the son), I was rather parasitical, ostensibly enjoying the fruits of other men’s labors. Simultaneously, the patriarchies from which I benefited were sexualized differently: my friend and I both worked the heteropatriarchal system by passing as normative heterosexuals; whereas I worked the queer patriarchal system alone by living without charge for an extended period of time in my friend’s queer island home. 22 See Almaguer (1993) for a discussion of white-identified persons of color, an identification enabled by wealth. 23 One of the reviewers implied that my remarks in the Mykonos context are unethical, comparing me to Laud Humphrey [sic], the famous student of Irving Louis Horowitz at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and author of The Tearoom Trade. For his dissertation research, Humphreys went to the cruising area of St. Louis in Forest Park, where he wrote down license-plate numbers, later searching out the owners of the cars and contacting them under false premises. He used the information gathered to show that most of the men who cruised were married and lived in the suburbs. In contrast, my conversations with my host and many of his friends were open and critical, my host highly sympathetic to thinking through issues of patriarchy, racism, and

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

971

classism in queer contexts. In fact, we have gone on many trips together exploring the inequitable contours of various landscapes and how to address them. That the reviewer sees my participation in the queer community as one of interloper and informer points to precisely the kinds of exclusions I am critiquing here. Moreover, he sets up the men with whom I have interacted as victims or, worse, as disclosing things they are meant as “insiders” to hide. 24 Here, the word “homosexuals” refers largely to gay white men (see Adler and Brennan 1992; Puar this issue). 25 The masculinism not only of the tourism industry but of reporting on it is evident in the fact that the BBC article cites a single source: the tourism company “Men on Vacation” (Quest 1998b). 26 The term “gay” is a universalizing masculine term purportedly used to refer to lesbians and gay men. The contexts in which the term is employed, however, usually refers to the activities and persons of gay men only. This postmodern conflation is equivalent in many ways to the purported ability of the universal category of Man to apply to all people, including women. See, for example, Altman (2001). 27 A recent US-based queer tourism industry survey found 94% of queer travelers to be gay men, largely a result of their differentially higher incomes and the kinds of travel measured (see Puar this issue). 28 Recently, British Muslims issued a fatwa against playwright Terence McNally because of his play Corpus Christi, playing in London, which depicts Jesus as a homosexual. For a while there was also a hoax, promulgated on the Web, decrying the creation of a “gay Jesus movie” (AFU & Urban Legends Archive 2000). When I searched the Web using a single Web browser and the words “jesus gay,” 158,120 sites of relevance were located. I initiated this search because a theological acquaintance of mine had earlier told me he was writing a book tentatively titled Was Jesus Gay?, and I wanted to check if it had been published. 29 Discussions with married colleagues in my university shows that couples with children (generally, but not always, heterosexuals) lose in terms of advancement and individual pleasures: No quick trips for the weekend; few options to stay as late as you’d like in the office; sick children who call you home; and the time-consuming rituals of procreational life, such as baby showers, children’s schooling and activities, and so on. Children appear to be a drag, even though conspicuous displays of parenting have increased. Having childcare at parties is considered a liberal or even radical gesture, most faculty members having few, if any, children. Gay men typically do not have children and therefore seem disinterested in working for child care or women’s reproductive rights, in sharp distinction to lesbian activism in AIDS-related endeavors. Recently, the only gay white male in attendance at an organizational Association of American University Professors (AAUP) meeting at our university left in a huff after hearing that the majority of persons present wanted the first organizational battle to center on institutional provision of subsidized childcare. None of the lesbians present had children, but all were committed to the issue. While this example may “only” be anecdotal, I think it is nonetheless understandable in terms of larger structural, social tensions. 30 Alexander (1998) similarly ends her critique of the racism and classism of white gay male tourism with an agenda for intersubjectivity and new sorts of sociospatial engagement. She (1998:301) writes: It takes a great deal of work to figure out who we are and who we wish to be for each other. Actively refusing racism is a necessary beginning, but we would need to build politicized spaces in which Orientalism (broadly defined and understood) is actively refused as well. Speech is indeed dangerous, for the homogenized queer “native” can and will speak back in his new home, out of the specificity of rage and bitterness such nativist practices have produced.

972

Antipode

Here I am thinking of a recent issue of the teen magazine US Weekly (2001) featuring photographs of five glamorous elite white “Hollywood” women (Nicole Kidman, Katie Couric, Calista Flockhart, Jodie Foster, and Camryn Manheim) under the bolded headline: “The New Single Moms and How They Do It.” Three of these wealthy women chose motherhood through adoption and another through artificial insemination. The related article also discusses Rosie O’Donnell’s (an “out” lesbian who is cast as single though she has long been in a committed relationship) and Diane Keaton’s adoptions, most of the women concerned choosing single motherhood. What is so new, however, about single motherhood? That some white famous women chose it? That some wealthy divorced and widowed white women are doing well as mothers? What is clear is that motherhood is here again aestheticized and idealized in terms of whiteness and wealth, in this case the mothers now being single, their single status made into a sign of prestige and independence. Similarly, the idealized nuclear white family of the West has in many ways become a sign of its former self, child-rearing, for instance, becoming an option chosen and managed in ways that minimize incursions into one’s leisure time and labor. While marriage rates are increasing in Europe, for example, as many persons choose to marry later in life, women are choosing to bear far fewer children than was needed or expected in the past (see, eg, Ford 2002; Hewlett 2002; Weir 2002). At the same time, much of the Moral Majority’s angry rhetoric of Family Values is reactionary and nostalgic, occluding the fact that the white nuclear family is indeed dysfunctional to the extent that it is not as economically, ideologically, or politically useful as it once was to the state or related systems of exploitation. 32 Interrogations of modern sorts of heterosexuality also need to be made. How has heterosexuality’s material expressions changed in postindustrial contexts? How are wealthy heterosexuals in the US participating in similar transnationalizations of family structures—through adoptions, for example, adoptions that similarly elide questions of class and maternity? 31

References

AFU & Urban Legends Archive (2000) Available online at http://www.urbanlegends. com/ulz/gayjc.html (last accessed 11 July 2002) Adler S and Brennan J (1992) Gender and space: Lesbians and gay men in the city. International Journal of Urban and Rural Research 16:24–34 Alexander M J (1998) Imperial desire/sexual utopias: White gay capital and transnational tourism. In E Shohat (ed) Talking Visions (pp 281–305). New York: MIT Press Almaguer T (2001) Chicano men: A cartography of homosexual identity and behavior. In M S Kimmel and M A Messner (eds) Men’s Lives (pp 415–428). Boston: Allyn and Bacon Altman D (2001) Rupture or continuity? The internationalization of gay identities. In J C Hawley (ed) Postcolonial, Queer (pp 19–41). New York: State University of New York Press Anzaldua G (1998) Bridge, drawbridge, sandbar, or island: Lesbians-of-color hacienda alianzas. In P M Nardi and B E Schneider (eds) Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies (pp 527–536). New York: Routledge Banchero S (1997) Gay theme toned down in Halsted Street plan. Chicago Tribune 2 November:13 Bell D and Binnie J (2000) The Sexual Citizen. Malden, MA: Blackwell Binnie J (1995) Trading places. In D Bell and G Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire (182–200). New York: Routledge Boone J (2001) Vacation cruises; Or, the homoerotics of Orientalism. In J C Hawley (ed) Postcolonial, Queer (pp 43–78). New York: State University of New York Press

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

973

Borden L (1983) Born in Flames. Film. Icarus Films Burdekin K ([1937] 1985) Swastika Night. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press Chaplin C (1936) Modern Times. Film. United Artists Cochran S D and Mays V M (2001) Sociocultural facets of the Black gay male experience. In M S Kimmel and M A Messner (eds) Men’s Lives (pp 429–435). Boston: Allyn and Bacon Deleuze G and Guattari F ([1977] 1992) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Edwards J (2000) Gay gentrification and the politics of hate. Windy City Times 11 May:17 Evans D (1993) Sexual Citizenship. London: Routledge Florida R and Gates G (2001) Technology and tolerance: The importance of diversity to high-technology growth. The Brookings Institution Survey Series June:1–12 Ford P (2002) In Europe, marriage is back. Christian Science Monitor 10 April:1 Fung R (2001) Looking for my penis: The eroticized Asian in gay video porn. In M S Kimmel and M A Messner (eds) Men’s Lives (pp 515–524). Boston: Allyn and Bacon Harper P B (1994) “The subversive edge”: Paris is Burning, social critique, and the limits of subjective agency. Diacritics 24:90–103 Heibel T (ongoing) Project overview. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University Hennessy R (2000) Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge Hewlett S A (2002) Hidden costs of career success. Christian Science Monitor 10 April:10 Hunt M H (1987) Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Irigaray L (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Laqueur T W (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Lang F ([1925] 1994) Metropolis. Film. Allied Artists Lee S (2000) Bamboozled. Film. Newline Productions, Inc Luke T W (forthcoming) Site improvements: Direct-mail retail and “B2C” industrial democracy. In F Debrix and C Weber (eds) Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Lukenbill G (1995) Untold Millions: Positioning Your Business for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Revolution. New York: Harper Business Marchand R (1985) Advertising the American Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press Massey D S and Denton N A (1993) American Apartheid. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press McClintock A (1994) Soft-soaping empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising. In G Robertson, M Mash, L Tickner, J Bird, B Curtis and T Putnam (eds) Travellers’ Tales (pp 131–154). London: Routledge McClintock A (1995) Imperial Leather. London: Routledge McIntyre M (2002) The coproduction of race and class in the United States and Brazil. Antipode 34(2):168–175 Morton D E (2001) Global (sexual) politics, class struggle, and the queer left. In J C Hawley (ed) Postcolonial, Queer (pp 207–238). New York: State University of New York Press Nash C (2002) Disciplining the homosexual subject: Toronto’s gay ghetto, 1969–1984. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, 17–23 March, Los Angeles, CA. Available from author Nast H J (1998) Unsexy geographies. Gender, Place, and Culture 5(2):191–206

974

Antipode

Nast H J (2000) Mapping the “unconscious”: Racism and the oedipal family. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(2):215–255 Nast H J and Kobayashi A (1996) (Re)corporealizing vision. In N Duncan (ed) BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (pp 75–97). London: Routledge Nast H J and Wilson M (1994) Lawful transgression: This is the house that Jackie built … Assemblage 24:48–56 Out (1999) Special issue: “Lonesome Cowboy: How the West Was Worn.” April Peregrin T (2001) First of its kind study takes a look at the drugs, sex behind circuit parties. Windy City Times 11 July. Available online at http://www.outlineschicago. com/0outlines/01711/circparties.html (last accessed 11 July 2002) Quest R (1998a) Business: The economy: The pink pound. BBC Online Network 31 July. Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/the_economy/ newsid_142000/142998.stm (last accessed 11 July 2002) Quest R (1998b) Business: The economy: Gay travel boom. BBC Online Network 2 August. Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/the_economy/ newsid_143000/143179.stm (last accessed 11 July 2002) Riggs M T (1989) Tongues Untied. Videorecording. Frameline Russo A and Torres L (2001) Lesbian porn stories: Rebellion or resistance? In A Russo (ed) Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement (pp 101–118). New York: Routledge Schwartz R (1993) New alliances, strange bedfellows: Lesbians, gay men, and AIDS. In A Stein (ed) Sisters, Sexperts, Queers (pp 230–245). New York: Penguin Books Tati J (1958) Mon oncle. Film. Public Media Home Vision US Weekly (2001) The new single moms and how they do it. 23 April [Au: if available, need author and pp. for this article, taken from your text.] Venkatesh S A (2001) American Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Wade L C (1987) Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press Weir F (2002) Russia’s population decline spells trouble. The Christian Science Monitor 18 April Wigley M (1992) Untitled: The housing of gender. In B Colomina (ed) Sexuality and Space (pp 327–389). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press Windy City Times (1998) Pylon power. 17 December:2 Young R (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge