It's not the State - it's the culture, Stupid !

It's not the State - it's the culture, Stupid !

The frenzy of attacks on Sex Panic have focused on whether or not the State (various governmental units: city, state and federal) is being repressive and on the childishness of men thinking only of immediate phallic pleasure (Larry Kramer's term: "sex-centrism"). These discussions pass quickly over what the term "sex panic" might mean.

A number of scholars, such as Jonathan Weinberg, George Chauncey, Lillian Faderman and John D'Emilio, have made clear that the much ballyhooed "gay liberation" has not followed the American script of "ever onward, ever upward." It turns out that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was, in some cities and even at this cultural outpost in Vermont, a flourishing, though thin, lesbigayer culture - ranging from a wide variety of balls and baths to art, music, Broadway shows plus well used cruising spots for men - a much queerer culture than exists now in most parts of America. Yet by the end of the 1940s, this nascent queering of a few niches of American culture had been pushed underground into invisibility by the spread of an American Queer Panic.

This Panic had several identifiable roots:

1. It is difficult for us in the 1990s to imagine the enormity of the disruptions, the transformations in family life, in what it meant (for Euro-Americans) to be male and female and in what it meant to be a worker from about 1880 to about 1930. One example: at this time a major redefinition of what it meant to be male occurred. In the early nineteenth century, what made a man a man was largely that he knew he was no longer a boy. By the end of the 1800s, however, middle-class men began to see their distinctness to consist of not being female.

2. A key symptom of this changed thinking was the spread of new pejoratives tied to women (e.g., sissy, pussy-foot, pussy) used to mock a man. This redefinition of "male" was especially significant for men who increasingly had supervisorial or office jobs rather than physically demanding work that proved their masculinity. Misogynistic taunts became a staple for attacks on these men by working-class males.

3. Middle-class men's efforts to embrace the newly minted concept of "heterosexual" got special urgency as the parallel concept, the newly minted diagnosis of diseased condition, "homosexual," was pushed by doctors and assorted types of workers in what we now call "social services." Men increasingly wanted to prove they were "normal" by making clear they were interested only in women. Anything with possible homoerotic connotations had to be blatantly rejected: homophobia spread like an epidemic.

4. These mighty social tremors were followed by the Great Depression which made the question of maintaining "social order" very real. The big media of the time, the newspapers, stumbled onto a lightening rod for this deep social anxiety of the 1930s: "unregulated male sexuality and violence." There were a number of murders of children at the end of the 1930s and 1940s which got big play in the press and which were labeled "sexual" by police. This led to a panic over sex crime.

5. In the 1930s, reacting to the threat of a boycott organized by the Catholic headed Legion for Decency, movie studios in Hollywood established the Production Code Administration which enforced into the 1960s a ban on any reference to homosexuality or "sex perversion."

What was happening in the first half of this century was the evolution of a new way of thinking, a new, language-based system of forming connotations and inferences. And in this new system (what Foucault called a "discursive system") queer changed from being thought of as occassional, reprovable-or-tittering-causing acts to being the most odoriferous "human nature," an "intrinsic" diseased condition. This enormous transformation in our culture's thinking was not dictated by the government - indeed, the experience of the Soviets and Maoists shows that such efforts are transparent to the people subjected to them and so are easily rejected and compensated for. Rather, this lingual transformation (what Jean Genet termed a "poetic revolution" - "a new way of feeling the world and expressing it") occurred through the vast number of voluntary, loosely overlapping, partly random interchanges between ordinary human beings: newspaper people, doctors, clergy, social-purity do-gooders, gay bar and bath owners, YMCA's, boarding-house owners, workers, buyers, …

This is not to say that Big Government stood idly, innocently on the sidelines, merely watching the spectacle of the polity creating new "causes." But its role was secondary; e.g., 1923 was the first time the New York Legislature specified homosexual solicitation as a specific kind of disorderly conduct. Government's starring role only came in the second stage of the Great American Queer Panic after the freely individualistic first stage described above had proceeded for half a century:

6. In 1950, when the Red Scare was growing, a State Department witness at Congressional hearings on the loyalty of government employees noted that "most of ninety-one employees dismissed for moral turpitude were homosexuals." Senator Joseph McCarthy's loud governmental rhetoric then amplified this anxiety over sexual perverts being a threat to the nation's safety.

7. Of course, since the new connotations of dangers associated with "queer" were by then in place, politicians quickly found they could make use of this: the head of the Republican Party in 1948, Guy Gabrielson, mailed out a party newsletter pointing to a new "homosexual angle:" "sexual perverts have infiltrated our Government" (quotes are from D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities).

8. Prohibition and its institutional consequences also contributed strongly to the American Queer Panic: at its onset, the hotel industry lost its liquor-related profits which encouraged some hotels in Manhattan to permit sex workers and speakeasies to use these hotels. This then justified fascistic police instruments being assigned to Alcohol Beverage Control authorities at the end of Prohibition. The Courts permitted the State Liquor Authority in New York "to rule that any behavior coded as homosexual was ipso facto disorderly" and so to revoke a bar's license - a serious financial penalty for the owner (quote from Chauncey's Gay New York). This was the beginning of publicly enforcing the Closet as official policy, a public policy recently reiterated at the highest levels of our country.

Current efforts by Sex Panic! must be put in this American context. Recent media attention to pederasty, recent laws mandating public "warning" of "sexual predators," attention to "irresponsible" sex spreading HIV, rezoning to clean out sex shops, raids by local police on queer sex - on "private" institutions (whose property rights conservatives should be protecting instead of betraying to local police) as well as at "public" locations well shielded by darkness and time from children and most adults, attempts to impose censorship on the Internet (my website's pictures by Duncan Grant make me a lawbreaker) - all these have raised warning flags for those of us who are aware of this country's history.

Could the recent reactionary politics of this country lead, as it did earlier in this century, to another full fledged Queer Panic comparable to the wave that Joe McCarthy rode? Many of us, unlike Larry Kramer, are not willing to lie down and promise to look like synthetic straights. We want to sound the alarms now to prevent another massive homophobic tidal wave from sweeping this land.

Much as I applaud Urvashi Vaid's many good works, I am alarmed that she describes (The Advocate 9 Dec 97) this current tempest as "Panic or Panacea" and only acknowledges the threat of "state regulation of sexuality" as an issue at this relatively early stage; it is to resist the efforts of the Larry Kramers and Pat Robertsons of the world who seek to erect "Sex-Centrism" as the Big Bad for media to invoke whenever their audience drops off. To do this we must strongly articulate our own efforts to queer our own cultural institutions; e.g., to seriously work out positive ethics for erotic interaction of HIV positive and negative men of exactly the sort that occurred at the recent Sex Panic workshops at the NGLTF meetings in San Diego.

And, by the way, ethics and all cultural values are inherently what economists call "public goods." This is not to say they must be imposed on anyone, but their articulation and their credibility must be shared widely within the "public." The classical Greek (activist) philosopher Diogenes saw this when he committed the "scandalous gesture: when he needed to satisfy his sexual urge, he would relieve himself in the marketplace." (quoting from Foucault's History of Sexuality, vol. 2) Diogenes intended to mock the high ethical value Greeks placed on privacy.

The dialogue sparked by Sex Panic! is exactly the positive type of exchange we must have to articulate queer alternatives to heteronormative culture, to redefine what "respectable" and "responsible" might mean. So wake up: It's not the State - it's the culture, our heteronormative culture, Stupid!