Ten Dangerous Queer Books

by Troy Williams in Columnists, Queer Gnosis | 0 comments

The most dangerous threat to patriarchy and globalized capitalism is the queer intellectual. These are the queers that the Christian Right is warning America about. They offer an oppositional response to heterosexual tyranny. They demand dynamic social change.

The following are the most dangerous queer authors I’ve read. Their ideas dare to transform the world — offending conservatives and liberals alike.

10) Selling Out, Alexandra Chasin (2001). A thoughtful critique of the gay-oriented niche consumer market that perpetuates the very economic system that disenfranchises women, people of color and the poor. “There are gay men and lesbians for whom sexuality is not the primary source of their difference from the universal ideal; the insistency on the primacy of sexual identity ignores other identity features, such as race and/or gender and/or religion, and thus generates an assimilationist politics that reduces diversity to a superficial value, a matter of choice in the food court.” Anybody have their HRC Visa Signature card handy?

9) Nobody Passes, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (2006). This raw collection of essays violates everything we believe about power and identity. Mattilda wants to “make people reach too far, to roll into critical, complicated, dissonant essays that grumble with uncomfortable revelation.” You will meet Nico, the mixed-race, transgender butch defying the “tyranny of identity,” and Stacey, the BDSM feminist who proclaims, “I have been endlessly educated and I still yearn for a firm grip on my throat.”

The Invention of Heterosexuality, Jonathan Ned Katz (1995). Before the 1900s, “people did not conceive of a social universe polarized into heteros and homos.” Katz argues that the “heterosexual ethic” is actually a modern invention. “Heterosexual and homosexual refer to a historically specific system of domination — of socially unequal sexes and eroticisms. It makes as much sense, then, to look for the cause of heterosexual or homosexual feeling in biology as it does to look for the physiological determinants of the slave’s mentality or the master’s. Biological determinism is misconceived intellectually, as well as politically loathsome. For it places our problems in our bodies, not in our society.”

7) Sexual Fluidity, Lisa Diamond (2009). Discussions centered on the origins of homosexuality are often reductive appeals to “nature” or “nurture.” Diamond’s research challenges old arguments and expands our notions of desire, behavior and identity. “Our ability to understand the complex phenomenon of sexual orientation and its multiple manifestations in men and women at different ages and in different cultures and contexts depends directly on our willingness to confront those aspects of orientation that most confound us.”

6) God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb (2006). Religious hate speech has positioned queers as the “quasi-enemies of the state.” The United States “continues to evolve into a coercive, extralegal empire that needs enemies inside and outside its borders.” For the Christian moralist, we queers embody the “social ills and impurities” of the nation. Cobb argues that queers should embrace hate speech to inspire a new radical politics.

5) The Queer Child, Kathryn Stockton (2009). “This book scouts the conceptual force of ghostly gayness in the figure of the child.” More specifically, the fictional gay children that haunt all childhoods. As we explore the “sideways” growth of the protogay children of literature, Stockton helps us recognize our own lateral movements through life. Where do we grow when we can’t “grow up” into legal queer adults?

4) Homocons, Richard Goldstein (2003). Goldstein skewers the conservative rhetoric of “the new gay mainstream” promulgated by gay authors like Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer and Camille Paglia, who Goldstein describes as “attack queers.” “If there’s a motive for this assault, it has less to do with gay rights than with assimilation. Job number one for homocons is promoting the entrance of gay people into liberal society. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights, and precisely because its image is a pretense, it must be upheld by shaming those who won’t play the part. Attack queers target these unassimilable homos, thereby affirming the integrity of heterosexual norms.”

3) Love the Sin, Ann Pellegrini and Janet R. Jakobsen (2004). The authors reject “tolerance” as a desirable social condition for queers. They argue that tolerance reinforces hierarchies of inequality. _Love the Sin_ is an unapologetic appeal to value sexual freedom. “If a lesbian or gay does good, then the good it performs is not for homosexuals alone.” In their book, sexual and religious freedom come together to provide a “deeply ethical vision of the work sex can do to open up new horizons of possibility between people.”

2) Smash the Church, Smash the State, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca (2009). This subversive collection of essays from the early queer voices of the 60s and 70s will both shock and inspire. Radical trailblazers from The Gay Liberation Front, Third World Gay Revolution and Dyketastics “were not looking for marriage and corporate jobs or acceptance into the military or the church. They were into communal living and multipartnered sexual arrangements outside of the jurisdiction of the state and the family.” These are the writings of revolutionaries. “We truly believed that a united front with all oppressed peoples would help us create a better world, one built on inclusion and an equal distribution of wealth and resources.”

1) Twilight of Equality, Lisa Duggan (2004). Queer liberation collides with “neoliberalism” — the ideology of unregulated free-market global capitalism. It’s a philosophy with a major objective: dismantle the progressive social gains of the New Deal, feminism and the civil rights movement. Duggan illustrates how mainstream gay activists are now buying into the larger neoliberal project. We no longer hold a “vision of a collective, democratic public culture, or of an ongoing engagement with contentious, cantankerous queer politics. Instead we have been administered a kind of political sedative — we get marriage and the military, then we go home and cook dinner, forever.” Duggan reminds us that there will never be meaningful queer equality without redistributive economic justice first.

Troy blogs at queergnosis.com.