Out in culture: gay, lesbian, and queer essays on popular culture

545 Pages·1995·5.209 MB·English

by  Corey K. Creekmur, Alexander Doty

OUT IN CULTURE
Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on
Popular Culture
Edited by Corey K. Creekmur and
Alexander Doty
Duke University Press
Durham and London
1995
3rd printing, 2006
© 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Plantin with Gill Sans display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of
this book.
Contents
Introduction
Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic
Lesbians and Film
The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film
The Great Escape
There’s Something Queer Here
Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead
The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of Black
Widow
From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Mädchen in Uniform
Acting Like a Man: Masculine Performance in My Darling Clementine
Dossier on Hitchcock
Hitchcock’s Homophobia
The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s Homophobia
“Crisscross”: Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train
“I’m not the sort of person men marry”: Monsters, Queers, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca
The Queer Voice in Marnie
Flaming Closets
Men’s Pornography: Gay vs. Straight
Freud’s “Fetishism” and the Lesbian Dildo Debates
Tom of Finland: An Appreciation
Visible Lesions: Images of the PWA
Pee Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext
“In Living Color”: Toms, Coons, Mammies, Faggots, and Bucks
Dossier on Popular Music
In Defense of Disco
Crossover Dreams: Lesbianism and Popular Music since the 1970s
Immaculate Connection
The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music
Children of Paradise: A Brief History of Queens
The Politics of Drag
Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen
All Dressed Up, But No Place to Go? Style Wars and the New Lesbianism
Commodity Lesbianism
Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Popular Culture Bibliography
Acknowledgments of Copyright
Contributors
Index
OUT IN CULTURE
Edited by Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick
In Memory of Marlon Riggs
Introduction
Corey K.Creekmur and Alexander Doty
Out in Culture charts some of the ways in which lesbians, gays, and queers have
understood and negotiated the pleasures and affirmations, as well as the
disappointments and denials, of mass culture. As readings that challenge the
hegemonic structure of mainstream opinion and representation–what has been called
compulsory heterosexuality (Adrienne Rich), the heterosexual matrix (Judith Butler),
or the straight mind (Monique Wittig)1–the essays collected here develop
antihomophobic and antiheterocentrist critical approaches to some of the major forms
of contemporary mass culture: film, television, popular music, and fashion.
Homosexual men and women have always had a close and complex relation to
mass culture. Historians such as David Halperin, John D’Emilio, and Lillian
Faderman have argued, in fact, that the identity that we designate homosexual arose in
tandem with capitalist consumer culture.2 But, like all marginalized minorities or
(sub)cultures, gays and lesbians often found their cultural experience and participation
constrained and proscribed by a dominant culture in which they are a generally
ignored or oppressed, if logically integral, part.3 Certainly, gays and lesbians can
experience and make meaning of mass culture in ways the culture industries
encourage: consuming it “straight” as “just mere” entertainment.
Historically, however, gays and lesbians have also related to mass culture
differently, through an alternative or negotiated, if not always fully subversive,
reception of the products and messages of popular culture–and, of course, by
producing popular literature, film, music, television, photography, and fashion within
mainstream mass culture industries. As a result, many gay and lesbian popular culture
producers and consumers have wondered how they might have access to mainstream
culture without denying or losing their oppositional identities, how they might
participate without necessarily assimilating, and how they might take pleasure in, and
make affirmative meanings out of, experiences and artifacts that they have been told
do not offer queer pleasures and meanings.
Surrounding concerns like these are general cultural paradigms that have defined
gay and lesbian experience, most often through the metaphor of the closet–a private
(or “sub”-cultural) space one comes out of to inhabit public space honestly and with
one’s identity intact. As Diana Fuss argues, “The philosophical opposition between