A Reader on Reading

It was not an auspicious beginning. Grant’s usage reflected a stereotype: that being gay somehow involves dressing up in women’s clothing, wishing to be the other sex, and consequently becoming an involuntary parody of a woman. Certainly some gay men dress up in drag, but all transvestites are not homosexual, and all homosexuals are certainly not transvestites. Society, for the majority of Grant’s audience, appeared to be an immutable reality in which men and women fulfilled certain specific roles, dressed in specific ways, and reacted in a specific manner, and the questioning of the necessity of these roles and styles was seen as deviant — and therefore wrong. Today, some of these perceptions have changed, but the changes have been mostly superficial. Beneath the apparently tolerant manners of Grant’s new audiences, the same traditional standards continue to rule and the same old discomfort continues to be felt.

The historical origins of this meaning of the word gay are somewhat dubious. Gai savoir meant “poetry” in thirteenth-century Provençal, and as some troubadour poems were explicitly homosexual, it is possible that the word came to designate this particular aspect of their repertoire. Other inquisitive etymologists have traced its origins to Old English, where one of the meanings of the word gal was “lustful,” as in modern German geil. Whatever the sources, by the early twentieth century gay was commonly used in English homosexual subculture as a password or code, and quickly gay or gai became the usual term for “male homosexual” in French, Dutch, Danish, Japanese, Swedish, and Catalan.

Gay is usually reserved for male homosexuality. Female homosexuality—lesbianism, to use the term still ignored in the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary—has a vocabulary and career of its own. In spite of the prejudice that views all unconventional sexualities as part of the same herd of sinners, and in spite of the common political force that results from being the object of such a prejudice, male and female homosexualities differ in their public image, their vocabularies, and their histories. Lesbianism, for instance, is empowered by its association with feminism—gay males have no such support from any equivalent male group—and lesbian acts are ignored in certain heterosexual codes of law; Britain’s notorious anti-homosexual laws of the past century were designed exclusively for males, as Queen Victoria (tradition has it) refused to believe “that women did such things.” In most countries, female couples are considered “respectable” while male couples are unthinkable except as an abomination, perhaps because in the heterosexual male imagination that dominates most societies, two women living together do so only because they haven’t been able to acquire a man and are either to be pitied for this shortcoming or praised for undertaking on their own tasks that are normally a man’s responsibility. Similarly, lesbian images are accepted — in fact, encouraged—in heterosexual male pornography, the fantasy being that these women are making love among themselves in expectation of the male to come. The heterosexual male code of honor is thereby preserved.

A person not complying with these preset codes seemingly threatens the received identity of the individuals who uphold them in their society. In order to dismiss the transgressor with greater ease, it is best to caricature him (as the success of such pap as La Cage aux Folles seems to prove), thereby creating the myth of the Good Homosexual. The Good Homosexual, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torchsong Trilogy, is the man who deep down inside wants to be like his mother—have a husband, have a child, putter around the house—and is prevented from doing these things by a quirk of nature. Underlying the myth of the Good Homosexual is the conviction (upheld by the American Psychological Association until 1973) that a homosexual is a heterosexual gone wrong: that with an extra gene or so, a little more testosterone, a dash of tea and sympathy, the homosexual will be cured, become “normal.” And if this cannot be achieved (because in some cases the malady is too far advanced), then the best thing for the creature to do is assume the other, lesser role designed by society in its binary plan, that of an ersatz woman. I remember a psychological test set for my all-boys class by a school counselor concerned with “particular friendships.” A previous class had warned us that if we drew a female figure, the counselor would assume that our fantasy was to be a woman; if we drew a male figure, that we were attracted to a man. In either case we would be lectured on the terrors of deviancy. Deviants, the counselor had told the other class, always ended up murdered by sailors on the dockside. When my turn came, I drew the figure of a monkey.

THE FOREST IN HISTORY