Introduction Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty ut in Culture charts some of the ways in which lesbians, gays, and queers O have understood and negotiated the pleasures and affirmations, as well as the disappointments and denials, of mass culture. As readings that challenge the hegemonic structure of mainstream opinion and representation-what has been called compulsory heterosexuality (Adrienne Rich), the heterosexual matrix Gudith Buder), or the straight mind (Monique Wittig)l-the essays collected here de­ velop antihomophobic and antiheterocentrist critical approaches to some of the major forms of contemporary mass culture: film, television, popular music, and fashion. Homosexual men and women have always had a close and complex relation to mass culture. Historians such as David Halperin, John D'Emilio, and Lillian Faderman have argued, in fact, that the identity that we designate homosexual arose in tandem with capitalist consumer culture.2 But, like all marginalized minorities or (sub)cultures, gays and lesbians often found their cultural experi­ ence and participation constrained and proscribed by a dominant culture in which they are a generally ignored or oppressed, if logically integral, part.3 Certainly, gays and lesbians can experience and make meaning of mass culture in ways the culture industries encourage: consuming it "straight" as "just mere" entertainment. Historically, however, gays and lesbians have also related to mass culture differently, through an alternative or negotiated, if not always fully subversive, reception of the products and messages of popular culture-and, of course, by producing popular literature, film, music, television, photography, and fashion within mainstream mass culture industries. As a result, many gay and lesbian popular culture producers and consumers have wondered how they might have Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/663666/9780822397441-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 Introduction access to mainstream culture without denying or losing their oppositional identi­ ties, how they might participate without necessarily assimilating, and how they might take pleasure in, and make affirmative meanings out of, experiences and artifacts that they have been told do not offer queer pleasures and meanings. Surrounding concerns like these are general cultural paradigms that have defined gay and lesbian experience, most often through the metaphor of the closet-a private (or "sub"-cultural) space one comes out of to inhabit public space honestly and with one's identity intact. As Diana Fuss argues, "The philo­ sophical opposition between 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual; like so many other conventional binaries, has always been constructed on the foundations of an­ other related opposition: the couple 'inside' and 'outside.' "4 But the inevitability of the symbolic and social "limits," "margins," "borders," and "boundaries" maintaining these oppositions has been continually challenged by the unconven­ tional participation of gays and lesbians in mainstream culture. For the writers collected in this anthology, a central issue is how to be "out in culture": how to occupy a place in mass culture, yet maintain a perspective on it that does not accept its homophobic and heterocentrist definitions, images, and terms of anal­ ysis. This issue involves the considerable difficulties not only of living as a les­ bian, gay, or queer consumer inside mass culture but also of responding as active producers of intellectual work-as a writer or, in many cases, as a teacher­ within a mainstream culture that seduces as often as it repels, and frequently does both at once. For some time (at least since the model embodied by Oscar Wilde), this queerly "different" experience of mass culture was most evident, if coded, in the ironic, scandalous sensibility known as camp-perhaps gay culture's crucial con­ tribution to modernism. An attitude at once casual and severe, affectionate and ironic, camp served to deflate the pretentions of mainstream culture while ele­ vating what that same culture devalued or repressed, thus providing a strategy tor rewriting and questioning the meanings and values of mainstream represen­ tations. Camp was also, for some time, an "insider's" attitude and knowledge, a means not only of disturbing dominant cultural values but also of disseminating information about who (or what) was in-that is, in the life (homosexual), in the know, au courant, avant-garde, or, to use a later term, hip. From a camp perspective, anyone "out of it" is not only culturally conserva­ tive or reactionary but implicitly also straight, not homosexual. Through this dramatic redefinition of the outsider's status as being "in," camp may have been the first intellectual (although highly aestheticized) approach to indicate the potential for gays, lesbians, or bisexuals to reverse, or at least question, the terms of dominant cultural production and reading. Camp also illuminates the user's "queer" status in relation to dominant culture, for, throughout this century, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/663666/9780822397441-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty 3 camp has been one way in which many gays and lesbians have dealt with a mass culture that avoided and repressed the explicit representation, not to mention the affirmation, of homosexuality as a practice and, even more radically, as a per­ spective. In other words, camp has the ability to "queer" straight culture by asserting that there is queerness at the core of mainstream culture even though that culture tirelessly insists that its images, ideologies, and readings were always only about heterosexuality. To take a privileged example from camp's (counter)canon, MGM'S whole­ some children's fantasy The Wizard of Oz and its child star, Judy Garland, could be elaborated in terms of their camp functions: The Wizard of Oz is a story in which everyone lives in two very different worlds, and in which most of its characters live two very different lives, while its emotionally confused and op­ pressed teenage heroine longs for a world in which her inner desires can be expressed freely and fully. 5 Dorothy finds this world in a Technicolor land "over the rainbow" inhabited by a sissy lion, an artificial man who cannot stop crying, and a butch-femme couple of witches. This is a reading of the film that sees the film's fantastic excesses (color, costume, song. performance, etc.) as expressing the hidden lives of many of its most devoted viewers, who identified themselves as "friends of Dorothy." For all camp's potential as a strategy of resistance for certain gays and lesbians (who either learned gay camp or viewed certain aspects of their own culture campily, like butch-femme styles and roles), camp largely remained a private, subcultural form until the early 1960s, when Susan Sontag, among others, rec­ ognized its growing influence on a "hipper" general population, the generation that would soon be called the counterculture.6 Camp's increasing exploitation in broader cultural contexts was perhaps facilitated by its tendency to remain coy about explicitly acknowledging its homosexual cultural connections. For exam­ ple, from the 1950S to the early 1970s, the film critic Parker Tyler wrote in a style that can only be called flamboyant high camp. But his work never says outright what all but its most obtuse readers understood: that this was the work of a man whose gayness directly informed his cultural evaluations and prose style. 7 Rich­ ard Dyer also noted the tendency of the British journal Films and Filming consis­ tently and covertly to appeal to gay readers in the 1960s, particularly through its selection of "beefcake" stills and references to cult stars like Judy Garland, with­ out ever directly identifying itself as a gay magazine.8 So, although camp is, in Philip Core's phrase, "the lie that tells the truth," it was for many decades still a veiled form of "the love that dare not speak its name" in film and popular culture criticism and reception.9 As such, it was a strategy that was criticized as "clos­ eted" and apolitical by many within the "gay liberation" movement of the 1970s. In its "closeted," less overtly political forms, camp has frequently been deni- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/663666/9780822397441-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 Introduction grated and maligned as self-oppressive and misogynistic ever since the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 made gay culture more publicly visible on the evening ofJudy Garland's funeral. By the late 1960s, influenced by the civil rights and women's liberation move­ ments, the politics of gay liberation centered around the radical imperative of making the once-hidden visible. Among other things, gay liberation would en­ courage an explicit account of the once "secret" relation between gays and lesbians and mass culture. The groundbreaking work of critics like Robin Wood, Vito Russo, Jack Babuscio, Caroline Sheldon, and Richard Dyer, often writing for the emergent gay and lesbian press in the United States (The Advocate, Chris­ topher Street), England (Gay News), and Canada (The Body Politic), demon­ strated, in Wood's term, the "responsibility" of gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers to acknowledge the ways in which their sexual and political identities influenced their critical perspectives. 10 In other words, these critics' work on film and other media "came out" along with them as they replaced rhetorical strategies depen­ dent on coded insider references with direct assertions of group identity (the marked use of the pronoun we replacing they, e.g.). Along with this, these critics began unapologetically to introduce into their writing autobiographical accounts of their erotic and emotional investments in such things as Hollywood cinema, physique and muscle magazines, Broadway musicals, and drag. Even with this new critical visibility, however, camp was not discarded or lost: it was often brought forward as something explicitly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or, more recently, queer.