REALLY THEY'RE ALL JUST QUEER

From Real Art comments about my post lauding Willie Nelson's new ode to gay cowboys:

At my blog I explain why the lyrics to this song are stereotypical and not worth taking seriously.

"Well, okay," I thought, so I clicked through and found this from Blogging Gay Cowboys:

Willie Nelson and That Gay Cowboys Song

At the very least, the lyrics convey the incorrect (but widely held) idea that being a gay male means being feminine and letting the woman inside the man come out. In the parlance of all things country, that kind of thinking is just plain bullshit. Back in the good ole 1980s, Rock Hudson died shattering that stereotype.

There are plenty of gay men around in real life who prefer to emphasize masculine qualities. Yeah, there also are gay men who like to emphasize feminine qualities, too. But, come on. If you’re a gay man and you want to emphasize a feminine mystique, the very last thing you do is dress up like a cowboy.

The songwriter chose to reiterate the false but popular stereotype that to be a gay man is to be both “strange” and feminine. I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with a gay man who wants to be feminine. But, it is stereotyping to call any gay person “strange” merely for being gay. And the reality is that there are gay men in real life who are masculine and somehow are also very happy with their masculinity.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I cut my teeth on the issue of stereotyping when I was studying RTF at the University of Texas back in the 90s, so I could go on and on about this, but it's getting late, and I think I can make my point concisely, anyway. So I'll try to be brief.

For starters, I agree with a lot of what this fellow has to say. Being gay isn't necessarily the same thing as gender-bending or transexualism or being in touch with one's feminine side, whatever you want to call it. There are, obviously, as many different kinds of gay people as there are straight people. On the other hand, I think that his analysis of the song is something of a knee-jerk reaction. That is, upon a second reading of the lyrics (see above link to my original post), the song does not at all appear to be attempting to straightjacket gay men into some kind of narrowly defined picture of what it means to be gay. In other words, the song seems to be about one guy's take on one kind of gayness, and doesn't really try to present itself as anything but that. I mean, he's obviously not writing about all cowboys, so I think it's unfair to assume that he's writing about all gay men.

But then, there aren't that many pop songs about gay themes out there, either. Consequently, songs and other cultural artifacts containing gay themes that manage to break through into the mainstream are often put under a microscope and end up, whether intended or not, as representative of all gays in many people's eyes. Like it or not, that seems to be the cultural environment in which we live. Unfortunately, this presents a dilemma for artists who wish to deal with gay themes. Because such works of art will most certainly be taken as speaking for or about all homosexuals, it becomes almost impossible to artistically examine gay subpopulations or gay individuals in ways that are honest and thorough: artists dealing with gay themes are virtually forced to be universal.

But then, there are competing ideas about what is universally gay, competing ideas about what is universally masculine or feminine, yadda, yadda, yadda. In other words, gay art, transgendered art, etc., are problematic in our society from the get-go. Indeed, the concept of homosexuality, and heterosexuality, too, for that matter, is problematic itself, as is the concept of gender. What, exactly, does it mean to be gay? Clearly, one can engage in homosexual behavior, but not listen to Judy Garland records or go to gay bars. What, exactly, does it mean to be a woman? Clearly, one can posess female biological traits, but not enjoy cooking or sewing or children. Same thing with men in reverse. So it's not just cultural behavior, not just biology, not just sexual orientation. It's an extraordinarily complicated discussion to which, at this point, there are no clear cut answers.

Indeed, the complexity of the issues here have been understood for the last decade or so in academia, where all these issues have been bundled into one bigtop subject area known as queer theory.

From Wikipedia:

Queer theory

Queer theory is an anti-essentialist theory about sex and gender within the larger field of Queer studies. It proposes that one's sexual identity and one's gender identity are partly or wholly socially constructed, and therefore individuals cannot really be described using broad terms like "homosexual," "heterosexual," "man," or "woman." It challenges the common practice of compartmentalizing the description of a person to fit into one particular category.

In particular, it questions the use of socially assigned categories based on the division between those who share some habit or lifestyle and those who do not. Instead, queer theorists suggest complicating all identity categories and groups.

Additionally, queer theory also analyzes the "queer" aspects of a humanist work (such as in literature, music, art, etc.) that are not necessarily sexual. In this regard, "queer" is used to mean "strange" or "different" in the sense that a particular work does not fit within the general rules of a particular genre or category, yet is still classified as being a part of that genre or category.

Click here for the rest.

So I think what this blogger is hitting his head against is this kind of complexity arising from the paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities that arise from our culture's understanding, or lack thereof, of sex and gender. Ultimately, the bottom line for me with Willie's new song is that it clearly celebrates alternative sexuality, clearly celebrates gender exploration. It's not only pro-gay, it's pro-queer. Whether or not the song's writer is on whatever is ultimately decided to be the right page, as far as these subjects are concerned, is, for the moment, irrelevant: this is a song that makes it okay to be gay, and okay for a man to be a bit girly, and the fact that Willie is performing it means that a lot of Americans are going to hear that message.

Surely that's a concept that gay-friendly people can get behind.

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