How Queer Theory Turned Its Back on Gay Men

Was AIDS activism fueled by male “entitlement”? Does the American government try to prevent gay suicides in order to sustain capitalism? Does “coming out of the closet” turn gay men into oppressors of the more marginalized?

Such paranoid thinking comes not from right-wing pundits like Chris Rufo (who has waged a war against queer “indoctrination” in education). The authors of these conspiracy theories are leftist queer theorists within the academy, and their critiques supposedly promote the interests of sexual minorities, including gay men. The field of queer theory has become peculiarly animated by apparent hostility to some of its own objects of study. The denunciation of gay men as agents and dupes of neoliberalism is now routine.

Gay men, of course, were some of the chief figures in the making of queer theory, as it emerged three decades ago in dialogue with gay and lesbian studies — which it eventually consumed. They have also been the special targets of some queer theorists’ most characteristic resentments, made to bear the symbolic burden of the ills of capitalism, racism, imperialism, etc. to other member groups within an imagined coalition of sexual minorities. Even as they face, as they historically have faced, particularly intense challenges of homophobic violence, discrimination, and sexual health, gay men are made to appear as living emblems of privilege and dubious political action — just as they had earlier in the discourses of the communist left and nationalist right. The academic field dedicated to overcoming our vast inheritance of homophobia ironically perpetuates it.

Queer theory came into existence some three decades ago, as the AIDS crisis brought gay men and lesbian women together in unprecedented ways. Its academic iteration had two interconnected, but potentially contradictory, aims. On the one hand, it laid the intellectual groundwork for the social and legal legitimation of same-sex relationships. On the other, it ascribed positive meanings to gays’ and lesbians’ experiments with alternative ways of living, and to their “marginal” status outside of conventional gender norms. According to Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term “queer theory” in 1990 (and who has since distanced herself from it), the field was an attempt to explore “gay sexuality in its specific female and male cultural forms … claiming at once equality and difference, demanding political representation while insisting on its material and historical specificity.”

Queer theory, in that sense, inherited the tensions between “equality” and “difference” that had marked the feminist movement, out of which many lesbian and some gay male activists had emerged. For many activists and some academics, the most urgent task was to overcome marginalization through political demands on the state, particularly for civil rights and health care. At the same time, the pariah status of those minorities — symbolized by the term queer — became valorized as a unique resource for social revolution. If few in the American academy followed the Deleuzian French writer Guy Hocquenghem in promoting sodomy as inherently revolutionary (in a context where working-class revolution now seemed definitively forestalled), many at least agreed with Michel Foucault’s argument that what Foucault called the “slantwise” position of male homosexuals relative to dominant norms made the new gay culture a site of inventiveness and potentially a model of political resistance.

Present-day scholars like Samuel Clowes Huneke chide queer theory for its supposed lack of pragmatism and its hostility to traditional politics, but such criticisms depend on a kind of amnesia, a refusal to grapple with the tensions that earlier queer theorists understood as characteristic of the field. From the first, queer theory was constituted by often confused and implicit disagreements over whether activism and scholarship were meant to serve the material interests of sexual minorities, or, in contrast, sexual minorities were meant to be a kind of resource for a broader radical politics, supplying it with practical examples of new forms of living. In both public activism and in the academy, however, queer theorists tended rather to position their varying politics as constituting one pole of a binary by which sophisticated and radical thinkers opposed mainstream, conservative, assimilationist members of sexual minorities who merely wished to be considered “normal.”

Factions formed inside and outside academe. The conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, for example, called for mainstream acceptance of homosexuality in Virtually Normal (1995) on the grounds that there exists no significant difference between homosexuals and their heterosexual counterparts that could justify the former’s marginalization. In contrast, the activist lawyer Urvashi Vaid emphasized in Virtual Equality (1995) that gays and lesbians should remain sensitive to various types of marginalization such as race, gender, and sexuality, which she saw as intimately interconnected.

Queer theorists tended to erode the possibility of productive dialogue between such points of view, underwritten by a common investment in the flourishing of sexual minorities with distinct but related interests. Instead, they generally accepted the terms of the binary between normal and anti-normative, defining gay men and other sexual minorities by their relation to social norms about sexuality and gender rather than in terms of their characteristic experiences and history as minorities. Michael Warner, for example, attacked Sullivan’s pioneering advocacy for gay marriage in The Trouble With Normal (1999), framing the “putative ‘right to marry’” as an escape from marginality into the heterosexual mainstream (which is indeed how Sullivan had seemed to understand it) rather than as a contribution to the preservation of gay lives, relationships, and culture.

Although framing marriage as a problematic institution for all, Warner and other queer theorists were not particularly interested in abolishing heterosexual marriages (who has campaigned for that?) but rather in critiquing gay marriage as a political project for gay men. Without an alternative form of relationality that would confer similar legitimacy, however, gay relations would simply remain powerless and unstable. Neither the conservative nor the radical appeared able to imagine that gay marriage might be desirable for gay men because it might help gay men to flourish not only as individuals and couples but also as a particular community with its own material interests.

It seemed that for both Sullivan and Warner, for conservative pundit and queer theorist alike, gay men, lacking a specific and legitimate collective identity, will eventually have to either disappear into the “normal” or merge into a coalition of the oppressed. Such patterns of argumentation, in fact, remain visible to this day in such commonplace statements as “I’m more than my sexuality” and “labels are limiting” employed by conservatives and progressives alike. Both groups summon gays to disappear.

Indeed, the ’90s saw the emergence of something like a doxa among queer academics: Politics should not be based on the notion of shared material interests and lived experience (concepts that post-structuralist thinkers seemed to have made obsolete, even reactionary). Politics, rather, was defined by one’s position relative to norms and identities imposed by power — and good politics meant flexibly, painstakingly keeping up performances of anti-normative resistance, not least to the very categories by which traditional politics had been conceptually organized. Judith Butler, for example, asked in Gender Trouble (1990) whether it was not, after all, “the category of woman,” as employed by the feminist movement, that was the real culprit in women’s oppression. This sort of rhetorical indirection, which suggests (without actually stating) an argument, is characteristic of Butler’s sometimes frustrating style, a style that contributes to their work’s peculiar influence beyond its literal claims.

Such thinking, which found traditional interest-group advocacy tainted by its dependence on supposedly rigid concepts like “woman,” had an understandable appeal not only to lesbian feminists like Butler but also to many gay men in and out of the academy. After all, the argument that identity functioned as a tool of social oppression could not fail to make some sense to people for whom being “identified” often meant stigma, fear, and even death. And while gay men are a small minority in American society (a minority that, during the AIDS epidemic, was perhaps halved), a post-identitarian “queer” coalition could form, Butler theorized, a possible future majority.

In response, a foundational contingent of gay male queer theorists, including scholars like David M. Halperin, Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, and Leo Bersani, tried to reconcile this understandable suspicion of “identity,” along with the political and theoretical appeal of joining a larger “queer” coalition, with their sense that gay men did, nevertheless, constitute a distinct group. “We’re here, we’re queer,” in other words, “and we’re gay men.”

Explicitly taking issue with Butler, Bersani argued in Homos (1995) both that gay men had a “queer,” oppositional relation to sexual norms but also — pace Butler — that they were not merely “parodying” or subverting such norms. Rather, they were enacting embodied desires and participating in a shared culture. Such attempts at defending a version of gay male specificity compatible with queer politics and postmodern queer theory was later denigrated by José Esteban Muñoz (a founder of the “queer of color” critique that has since become dominant in the field) as complicit in “tedious white normativity that characterizes most of North American gay male culture.” For Muñoz, Bersani’s concession to critiques of identity categories, and particularly his argument that gay male sexuality involved a “self-shattering” disruption of any coherent identity, were only disguised apologias for a particular white gay sexual minority. Bersani’s investment in analyzing the oppression of homosexuality as a unique form distinct from that of women and people of color, on the other hand, was a hindrance to “coalition politics.” If, as de Lauretis claimed, there once seemed to be a productive tension between articulating the specificity of sexual minorities and making broader political claims, now it seemed that gay male queer theory could be faulted for being, as it were, too gay.

Once the focus of queer scholarship effectively shifted from particular, historically constituted communities of sexual minorities to the figure of the anti-normative outsider as such — the abstract queer — it became increasingly common for scholars to express disdain for objects of study taken from gay and lesbian life as failing to meet their standard of radicality. Paradigmatic of this tendency is Muñoz’s introduction, with Jack Halberstam and David L. Eng, to a 2005 issue of the journal Social Text, denouncing queer theory’s focus on “the domestic affairs of white homosexuals” and calling for a more radical critique of “empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism.”

One can witness the perverse consequences in the Rutgers professor Jasbir K. Puar’s concept of “homonationalism,” in which gays and lesbians co-opted by “normative” state policies are no longer even considered “queer.” Her analysis designates “masculine” and “white” gays as sinister agents, oppressors of her metaphorical “queers” — who themselves are defined however she wants them to be at any given time. In Terrorist Assemblages (2007), for example, Puar interprets Osama bin Laden as a “queer” figure, represented as a racialized “fag” or a “feminized” and “pedophilic” threat to the American nation. She finds particularly problematic that the gay rugby player Mark Bingham, a passenger on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, was depicted in a “homonationalist” framework in which he was both an “American” and a “patriot.” That Bingham was a homosexual and bin Laden was not has no relevance to Puar’s analysis. Such a binarization of gay men against metaphorical “queers” invites anyone who would identify as “queer” to disparage gay men and their hard-won access to social and political power, which made them less “marginalized.”

This resentment of gay men as the stand-in for the “normative” power has been expressed most clearly perhaps by Sarah Schulman, a lesbian activist at Northwestern, who made the astonishing claim in the documentary Pride Divide (1997) that AIDS “allow[ed] someone like myself to be able to have a kind of visibility or platform for my voice that historically the sexism of gay men would have not allowed for … there has been some material equity that’s been able to be achieved because of the mass death” of gay men. Emboldened by the current state of academic discourse, she has reiterated her position against gay men in her book Let the Record Show (2021), where she laments how the history of the radical movement ACT UP was “shoved into the gay male trajectory,” supposedly wrested from its rightful place with the other members of the queer coalition.

The mass death of gay men was Schulman’s professional opportunity, and its memory remains a source of symbolic capital too valuable to be left to gay men themselves. Indeed, a primary function of queer theory, and the notion of queerness, in the academy today is to transform the actual experiences, practices, and histories by which gay men have been constituted as a distinct community into an abstract, symbolic, infinitely manipulable intellectual resource that can be mobilized by theorists for their own purposes. This resource is then often directed against gay men, who find themselves in something like the position of first-century Jews faced with a universalizing, antagonistic new faith that had somehow arisen from their midst.

This was not always the case. In the foreword to a short-story collection published in 1991, the gay writer Edmund White expressed his astonishment at the rise of gay and lesbian studies across America. While there existed no such thing as a social, political, and aesthetic consensus among gay writers and intellectuals, the institutionalization of gay life, he argued, signified a vision of hope that gay culture would continue to be “written,” “published,” and “recognized.”

Gay male writing, a central element of the emerging (and imperiled) gay culture was, as White and other members of his onetime literary circle the Violet Quill understood, something both important and, in a real sense, new. Part of the mission of gay scholarship within the academy was, in parallel with Black studies, Asian-American studies, etc., to formalize gay fiction’s entry into the research and teaching that shapes and perpetuates the canon. The gay literature it sought to transmit was not, crucially, the historical, pre-Stonewall literature of homosexuality, in which individual closeted or possibly homosexual writers wrote texts that, from the ’90s on, have increasingly been read “queerly.” Rather, gay studies was concerned with novels like Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance or Larry Kramer’s Faggots (both 1978), books that represented and addressed the cultural world of a self-conscious and organized minority.

As White wrote these words, conservatives like Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom were lamenting the rise of so-called grievance studies as a subversive type of pseudo-scholarship that aimed to overturn existing institutions on behalf of minority groups for whom its practitioners advocated (as if the study of the Western literary canon, the Great Books, etc., were not also advocacy for a way of life!). But amid continuing struggles over “canon wars” and “politically correct” teaching, an important shift has taken place. Unlike other new fields linked to the academic and social-political inclusion of minority groups, gay and lesbian studies, upended from within by queer theory, was set in opposition to the very idea of articulating the historical specificity and legitimate aspirations of the minority population that it allegedly advocates for. If this is grievance studies, its grievances are directed chiefly against itself.

What will sustain modern gay life, in and out of the academy, is the exploration of continuities and diversities between its varying forms. That the refusal of queer academics to make such concrete connections has hindered building a sense of community and amassing political power — that is, has failed even on the political and activist terms that originally motivated the formation of these new fields — becomes clear when we look at the status of gay literature in the academy. With the rare exception of the literary scholar David Bergman, few academics are interested in American gay literature. Compared with the remarkable success of African American literature, established both as a distinct object of study and as part of the American canon, gay male literature especially remains at best a fleeting presence. If gay men still have humor, they might, with a bit of camp irony, take this “queer” exclusion as a new opportunity — signifying a return to a “queer” homosexuality, uninstitutionalized and untheorized.