Exactly right! [[or not]]
“Advances” such as gay marriage and the increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it — the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable others. Social negativity clings not only to these figures but also to those who lived before the common era of gay liberation — the abject multitude agaist whose experience we define our own liberations. Given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to foget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.
— Heather Love, Feeling Backwards
So: because some people had problems once, and some people still do, no one’s allowed to be happy or live their lives until some far future date when things finally turn out well (i.e. 100% gold-backed currency, a gay marriage in every pot, molecular nanotechnology, light-roast coffee)?
In my personal life I’m all about mental self-flagellation, but this is getting ridiculous. Do we really need the Heather Loves of the world to constantly remind us of the Troubles, lest we crack a smile now and then? This choir has quite enough preachers already, thanks.
Frankly I find it hard not to read this passage in the maximally cynical way. On the basis of style and content, I guessed correctly that this Heather Love is an academic (specifically an assistant professor of English at Penn). Specialties include queer theory and gender studies. Hm.
Who, do you think, feels most threatened by the prospect of widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities? A) Some crazy people with some weird beliefs about God? Yes, probably. But what about B) people who make a living speaking at great length about how there is no such acceptance, never was, and never will be, so please give me money and print my writings to prove that you feel bad about all this? B is certainly a far smaller group in terms of numbers, but they have A beat six ways till Sunday on status and fashionability.
It is impossible to prove this, but I believe it all the same: the actual mental algorithm that led to the composition of the quoted text was, basically, “Hm. Gay marriage is starting to go through in a lot of places, and demographically speaking it seems like a fait acocompli that in the near future homophobia will be a very marginal sentiment indeed. That…seems like a good thing. Shit, think, shit, think, shit, quick: what can I say to make this good thing seem bad?” This is not a reliable method for arriving at the truth. It is, however, a very reliable method for coming up with new topics for journal articles and preserving one’s sense that one is on the losing (but still fighting!) team, which many people seem to view as the only way they can continue to be cool. (Apparently Love’s Ph.D. dissertation was entitled “Failure as a Way of Life.” Precisely.)
This nagging anxiety about possible future irrelevance or uncoolness is also what motivates the silly, haphazard references to “the fat…and a host of unmentionable others.” It’s a rhetorical ultimatum — accept my argument about how all gay “”“”“advances”“”“” to date are fake and shallow, or I’ll barrage you with a list of sad people and/or losers, and then you’ll realize how oblivious and square you’re being (and also be forced to fund my Department of Fat and Unmentionable Studies).
Put differently: Heather Love is short gay people, even though she pretends to be long. If things keep going well for gay people, she is exposed to the risk of potentially infinite loss, so she works to disseminate the notion that it is immoral, ignorant, and superficial to perceive that things are going well at all. In trader-speak there is a term for self-interested sophistry masquarding as informed analysis, and it applies just as well to the world of academia: talking your book.
