I think there is a difference. We can trace the history of the accordion and how it became a part of Mexican culture. But there seems to a difference with the gay culture thing. And we can even find reasons why and a history to how certain things became a part of a gay culture. .
But many gay men will say liked show tunes and camp before they even realized they were gay. Or people like yourself that liked opera without any real connection to a gay culture. This seems fairly common.
It would not be weird if a kid in Mexico liked accordion music. It also would not be that weird if a Mexican kid that was adopted and raised in a non-Mexican environment liked accordion music because it could just be a coincidence. But if a high percentage (higher than a random control) of similar adopted Mexicans liked accordion music that would be weird and cry out for an explanation.
That’s like asking what French food has to do with being French. Why should the people in a particular hexagonal country in western Europe favor creamy sauces, socialism, and animosity toward the English? Other countries have those things too. It’s just that over the course of time, those became considered ingredients of French culture. The study of French culture is primarily learning what those things are, and why they are considered authentic. Examining how things came to be that way is a secondary (though important) part of cultural study.
Tying the analogy to my point if it’s not already clear, gay culture has a collection of attributes common to other cultures (as well as its own unique ones), and as such it is a valid subject of a cultural study.
But if you read the course description, that’s explicitly what this course seems to be arguing against. It’s about INITIATION – the way that young gay men join (or refuse to join) a culture that they have not previously been a part of.
I’m sure that some gay men have liked show tunes since they were wee babes. But some straight men have as well. (For example, I know all the lyrics to Oklahoma, but I’m not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ) If I’d grown up queer I might feel it was destiny since I used to listen to The Music Man on the hifi when I was 5. But it would just be coincidence.
Could it actually just be that heterosexuals don’t have so much of a culture? - I know it’s not an absolute/universal thing on either side, but heterosexual people quite often get themselves into this situation where they have one or more infant humans demanding a huge portion of their attention and resources. Culture takes a back seat.
Sure, heterosexuals have a culture . . . and so much of it, especially in the arts, originated with gays or blacks.
Unless you mean (U.S.) football, NASCAR and John Wayne movies. I have tried to force myself to watch John Wayne movies, just like I tried to force myself to eat haggis and limburger cheese. With the same result. (Where is that vomit smilie?)
I think you’re confusing culture with appreciation of the arts. Just because one doesn’t go out to the symphony doesn’t mean one doesn’t belong to a group of people with distinguishing characteristics of belief and behavior. Though I might agree that there’s no distinct “hetero” culture for a variety of other reasons. In particular the childbearing and rearing experience is so overwhelmingly common that one’s other cultural identification eclipses it completely. There’s just no distinctive power in saying “I’m one of the people who makes babies” as compared to being one who doesn’t, or being French, or an Esperantist, or whatever.
Having a culture is not the same thing as being cultured. Of course heterosexual people have one. It’s usually called “mainstream”.
Consider how much of the contemporary American standard of heterosexual masculinity is defined by such iconic figures as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Steve McQueen. During the 2004 elections George Bush was consistantly judged to be the more macho candidate (despite John Kerry’s war record) because he better matched the heterosexual culture’s current definition of masculinity. That’s the heterosexual culture in action.
One of the values of studying “homosexual culture” is that it makes you aware that there is a “heterosexual culture” going on around you all the time. You just don’t think about it, just like you don’t usually think about the air you’re breathing.
Well, part of it is the fact that you outnumber us, and are so completely surrounded by your culture that you don’t even see it. You don’t see straight culture as something apart from yourself, the way I do. When I visit my family for Thanksgiving, the women congregate in the kitchen and the men watch football. I’m equally out of place in both rooms, though I feel more comfortable in the kitchen. And I can’t help noticing how the next generation is being systematically “initiated” into straight culture. I know exactly how they treat a boy who’s not interested in sports, and I know exactly what they’ve always said about me, behind my back.
But I have to point out that I’ve known many gay men who are into sports; what major city doesn’t have a gay softball league and bowling league, etc.? And yes, there are even lesbians who are ***not ***into sports.
And I don’t buy the childbearing explanation. For one thing, we are different way before anyone is at a childbearing age. And it really has nothing to do with “the arts” anyway. Most of my artist acquaintances happen to be straight.
On the other hand, there is a certain amount of hypermasculinity in gay culture as well. Google “Tom of Finland” sometime (not at work, though). The leather subculture and the bear subculture (though I defy anyone to actually manage a coherent Venn diagram of the two) tend to also emphasize traditional masculinity. Many, many, many gay icons are hypermasculine: James Dean, Steve Reeves, the entire stable of Colt models/actors, for example.
The truth is that there is no “gay culture”. There are a LOT of them. They range from the glam drag of RuPaul to the leather drag of Tom of Finland. They range from hard-core trance rave to coma-inducing folk. They range from Judy Garland to John Holmes (who made gay porn as well as straight).
There IS a nerd/geek culture, the growth of which has only been accelerated by the internet. There are actually several nerd/geek cultures, each with its own particular cant and recognition signals. Just because something hasn’t existed for 100 years doesn’t make it nonexistent.
You don’t think there’s such a thing as nerd culture? Shared cultural touchstones like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Firefly, or Mystery Science Theater 3000? Shared nerd values and prejudices? Overlapping constellations of creative activities like filksinging, roleplaying games, cosplay, and fanfic? A nerd aesthetic that revolves around technophilia, a love of the obscure, and a disdane for middle class norms? How do you talk about the cultural forces that produced something like Burning Man without engaging with the idea of nerd culture?
I don’t want to derail the discussion of gay cultural into a debate over nerd culture. What I wanted to point out was that cultural movements don’t need to have first causes. We can talk about black culture without having to root its existence in the genetic imperatives of race. Gay culture exists as a thing not because there’s something inherent in homosexual attraction that led to it, but because homosexual attraction acted as the seed crystal that allowed many other cultural practices to adhere together.
Or, as I like to say: “In fandom’s house are many mansions.”
And I agree with you that the same is true of gay culture (from what I know of it as an outsider looking in). I’d argue that all cultural movements are fractal like that. Look at them from a distance and they seem fairly unified, but as you zoom in they fragment into sub-genres and sub-sub-genres until eventually you get down to individuals just doing their thing.
Although an enlightened person today can well imagine that there have always been Gays and Lesbians throughout history, a lot of Gay culture has been lost over the years due to fear of being outed or, back in the day, of being jailed or even executed. Even today, there are cultures where even the mention of the subject is taboo, let alone a written history. My guess is that even in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and Salt Lake City there are still places where men go to meet men, and women to meet women, be it a park or cafe or at secret gatherings. Will that ever be recorded in history? How many heterosexuals even know what the Pink Triangle is, and what it represents?
There are stories of pirate ships that had only Gay men on board, of secret homosexual societies and sub-cultures that flourished throughout history, but with only subtle references and few, if any, real artifacts or details.
So yes, there is a Gay culture - with all of the humor and tragedy, of urban freedom and small town fears (with exceptions in both localities) along with trends and fashions and cultural habits. Not only opera and Broadway musicals, but Gay rodeos are the popular in Texas and throughout the US. There are the Gay Games (aka Gay Olympics but legally forbidden to use the phrase by the Olympic Committee) that are held world-wide every four years. Annual Gay Pride festivals are also held world-wide and there are numerous other events that don’t fall into the traditional stereotypes.
So yes, a college course for Gay Culture is no more ridiculous than African American Studies, or Native American Culture, or Hispanic History, or any other cultural study group. I wish I had had such a course to take when I was at the university. It would have been nice to know that even though as a Gay man I am most certainly in a minority, not only was I not alone, but there were generations of men and women who lived happily together and felt like I do.
For every heterosexual reading this, think back to your high school years and how well you fit into the jock/cheerleader/in-crowd…now multiply that 100 times and imagine being Gay or Lesbian in the same high school. Welcome to our world.
insisting that unless and until a person formally adopts the traits and habits of that culture they are “not really gay”.
That’s ridiculously offensive!
It’s all very well to say that “redheads like detective novels”, and to study why that might be so, but this course is effectively saying “unless you like detective novels, you’re not a real redhead” which is so far beyond daft I’m amazed people are taking it seriously.
Perhaps it’s the difference between “gay” and “Gay”… where “gay” simply means “I am sexually attracted to members of my own gender”, and “Gay” is “I consciously affirm and embrance the collected norms that currently attach themselves to this particular cultural subset, defined substantially (but not wholly) by my particular sexual preferences”.
I guess the question at the heart of the debate is:
“Can a person be gay without conscious affirmation of their participation in ‘gay culture’”?
Women’s Studies and Black Studies seem to be received by many people with skepticism or even animosity, so it is only expected that any track of study that increases gender and sexuality understanding is received with equal misgivings shrug
I agree with Carol Stream. Nerd culture doesn’t quite fit the multicultural schema. I don’t think of Nerds as a socially, economically, or politically oppressed group.
Why does oppression enter into it? While I do not thiknk there is a single, monolithic “white culture,” there is very definitely a (sub)culture associated with high society, with members only golf or athletic clubs, with formal ball fund raisers, and such. I would not consider the participants in those cultures to be oppressed in any way.
If you can sing “Carol of the Old Ones” without cue cards, you may be a Nerd/Geek.
If you know the actual titles of three original series Star Trek episodes (other than “The Trouble With Tribbles”), you may be a Nerd/Geek.
If you know where “All your base are belong to us” actually came from, you may be a Nerd/Geek.
If you know what “w00t!” means, you may be a Nerd/Geek.
Oppression doesn’t need to come into it. As tom said, uppercrust society has a niche culture, and they’re hardly oppressed. Just because it’s the historically oppressed cultures that get academic facetime doesn’t mean that one has to have been historically oppressed to form a subculture distinct from the mainstream one.
I was alluding to the nerd culture as an academic study track. Studies designed to learn about a specific cultural group are a result of the group not being represented, underrepresented, or misrepresented in the dominant culture. Discrimination and some form of oppression are always the catalyst for the misrepresentation.
I am sure there is a nerd culture, a country club culture, a blue collar culture, etc., but these are accepted often revered groups.
) If I’d grown up queer I might feel it was destiny since I used to listen to The Music Man on the hifi when I was 5. But it would just be coincidence.