[Ed. note: I hope you had your coffee this morning…]
Like my boyfriend, I also logged quite a few grad school hours trying to pin down queer sensibility. Obviously, it can’t just be defined by sexual preference or even sexual activity: football players slapping one another on the butt and gay-for-pay porn stars fucking around on screen have very little to do with queerness (although they do represent interesting fissures in the binary hetero/homo system). Likewise, on the erstwhile Ellen, even after Ellen came out on-screen and off, I wouldn’t say the show had a particularly strong queer sensibility….
Were I ever to write another 30-page seminar paper on the subject (and let’s hope I don’t), here’s the way I’d argue it. Homosexuality (e.g. a love of kissing boys) is innate and learned; it is both genetic and a result of socialization. Queer sensibility (e.g. an appreciation of Dame Edna), however, is something we develop over time. In my case, it began when I accepted the fact that I was different from the other guys. For years I tried hopelessly to fit in, to no avail. Then I discovered John Waters (on USA Night Flight) and saw how hip it was to like him and the lights finally came on: why bother feigning interest in stockcar racing any longer? I dropped the beer/pussy/football routine like a wheel of hot brie.
To my mind, my appreciation of Waters and Divine and Pee Wee’s Playhouse and beehive hairdos and Christopher Durang put me intellectually and culturally head-and-shoulders above the straight boys: I got the jokes they didn’t get, I saw beauty and humor where they saw only strangeness. I laughed, they could only shake their heads. Ultimately, it’s that sort of mental/aesthetic one-upsmanship that most typifies queer sensibility to me.
Lo and behold, Sontag agrees. In “Notes on Camp,” she argues that the queer sensibility is key to the wide(er)spread acceptance of homosexuality. Just as Jewish intellectualism (grounded in a strong history of Talmudic study) has provided Jews entree into mainstream culture, so “Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense.” In that article, of course, she’s focused on camp, but her statements obviously apply to more than just that. In fashion and the arts, we’re always one step ahead of the pack, our inside jokes are the very source of hipness. It’s this state of being “in the know” aesthetes that’s at the root of our queer sensibility. It’s our secret language. (In pre-Stonewall Britain, polari was a very literal manifestation of this phenomenon.)
Now, it could be argued that all minorities use a sort of secret aesthetic language–in black literature or Latino art, for example. I’d argue, though, that the queer lexicon is the most highly developed of these, if for no other reason than that most of us can pass; I mean, just to look at me, a stranger might not know I liked to kiss boys (well, unless he saw me sucking cock). In fact for most of us, until we came out, passing was a way of life. So in response to our typically hostile environments, we’ve developed a litany of hidden meanings that allows us to communicate with one another without blowing our cover. For me, learning this secret language–watching Miss Yvonne do her schtick and recognizing a humor in that performance that my parents and siblings couldn’t see–kept me sane.
Summary: Ability for homos to pass in mainstream cultcha –> the development of secret lingo and hidden meanings (which feed into the queer desire to be different/aesthetically superior to hets) –> memorization of every line Joan Crawford and Mink Stole have ever uttered.
Does any of that make sense? That’s as articulate as I can be this early in the morning….
P.S. Little or none of this applies to lesbians. That’s an entirely different ball o’ wax.
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