The End of the Homosexual? by Dennis Altman

Author:Dennis Altman [Altman, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Queer Moment and Reborn radicalism?

The April 1992 issue of Outrage posed a question on its cover: ‘Queer, Gay or Homosexual?’ The accompanying story was written by the British cultural critic Simon Watney, who pointed to the emergence of groups such as Queer Nation in the United States and Outrage in Britain as signs of a reborn activism, critical of the more accommodationist style that seemed to have taken over the lesbian and gay movement.

Interestingly, Simon read this as, in part, a generational debate, a rejection by younger ‘queers’ of older men and women. Indeed, there was in the flush of radical enthusiasm in that period an element of ‘slaying the father’, as I experienced rather unpleasantly when I was booed while speaking at a Sydney Gay Lobby dinner in April 1991. It was never clear why this incident occurred, and it probably meant no more than that a group of diners was uninterested in an after-dinner speech, but it epitomised a time in which the community was both tense and angry. There were echoes of this mood in Melbourne the following year, when drag queen Barbra Quicksand ran for state parliament as an independent and was repudiated by a number of ‘community leaders’, who were quickly termed ‘ALP daddies’.

Perhaps unconsciously, I acted out Simon’s analysis, rejecting queer as anything but useful for aesthetic reasons, and arguing strongly that it undermined the need to organise specifically around our common homosexuality. Ironically, given my own history, I was also troubled by the unproblematic import of an American fashion, which to me seemed less relevant in the local context. (Looking back, I recognise that the same could have been said of the desire to insist on a specific ‘gay liberation’ movement in the early 1970s, as distinct from the groupings around CAMP.)

In any case, ‘queer’ quickly took on a variety of uses, united by the desire to escape specific identities while retaining a sense of opposition to the dominant sexual and gender order. It remains useful for avoiding the ever-growing ‘alphabet soup’ terminology (usually cut back to ‘LGBTI’), and it’s a term that I have used throughout this book.

For a number of younger homosexual intellectuals, queer theory was an electrifying revelation, offering a new perspective from which to interpret the ways in which their sexuality intersected with broader social and cultural streams. It built on the radical ideas of gay liberation (often without acknowledgment), but melded them with other strands; post-modernism and deconstruction, were, after all, the dominant themes of the humanities in the 1990s. Steven Seidman summed up the aspirations of queer theory as seeking ‘to transform homosexual theory into a general social theory or one standpoint from which to analyse social dynamics’.1

Now, a couple of decades later, it is easier to see that queer theory was far more useful as a theoretical and scholarly device than as an organising principle, even though the term remains in events such as queer film festivals, where it acts as a catch-all term for sexual and gender dissidence.

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