Baffled Hopes and Bad Habits: Men, Marriage, and Conformity in Queer Theory and Gay Representation

Abstract

The gay community has always been divided between gay assimilationists and queer radicals, that is, between those who seek integration within mainstream culture as part of an equal-rights agenda and those who reject such integration as an erasure of their subcultural (and indeed countercultural) difference. The split widened and turned ideological in response to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s, which saw an upsurge in systemic homophobia, proving to many queer-identified homosexuals that all gay-liberational progress was revocable. In the early twenty-first century, the internal division of the gay community manifests most vociferously in the debate on gay-marriage and copartnership law. To the queer-identified, gay marriage looks like a ploy by the homophobic mainstream to abolish gay cultural difference. For a homosexual to welcome marriage must lead to what Michael Warner has described as “a kind of social suicide” (59). To the gay-identified, by contrast, marriage is the liberation movement’s pinnacle of achievement, a triumphant victory in the ongoing struggle for equal rights.