Arts
Lucie Blue Tremblay:
Folk Concert Benefits Pride
Queerly Pursuing the Wiccan Path
Rocking and Writing Against Depression
Navel Gazing Author Predicts the 'End of Gay'
 | Navel Gazing Author Predicts the "End of Gay" |
Reviewed by Scott Sherman
| The End of Gay by Bert Archer Vision Paperbacks, 2003. |
Unfortunately, throughout most of The End of Gay I felt stuck on that patio, listening to a tipsy solipsist sloppily over-intellectualize. It’s not that Archer isn’t smart, but his narcissism, bizarre takes on pop culture, and lack of focus make it hard to discern his message.
Archer has big goals for his book. “The End of Gay (and the death of heterosexuality),” he writes in his introduction, “is a tool to be used to redefine the role sex plays in our lives and in our sense of ourselves.” He wants to tell us that there is no such thing as straight and gay. We’re all basically bisexual, and it’s only because of the particular place and time in which we live that we have this social construct of gayness around which we form a (false) identity and community. At least this is what I think he’s saying – his fuzzy thinking is not always easy to follow.
Archer uses his own experiences, historical research and references to movies and TV shows to make his case. However, his claims are often too broad to have any meaning, and the examples he gives are so specific to his own life that they prove nothing.
For example, in the overly broad category, Archer compares the imminent “death” of gay to the morbidity of other “movements.” He happily proclaims Christianity not quite dead, but “mortally wounded.” “Only Christians could have defeated something as enormous, as all-encompassing, as Christianity. And they have, despite some rather noisy holdouts – one by one, family by family, generation by generation – by noticing that it doesn’t make our lives better.” I certainly hope that no one shares this information with the Pope, or with the millions across the globe who follow him; it would ruin their day.
Archer looks forward to the end of gay. “Unlike the death of most people, the death of a movement, of a way of thinking and being, is usually a good thing.” He explains, “sexual identity... is in the end a house built on sand, the living in which makes us, through omission rather than commission, more anxious, less happy people than we might otherwise be.” I don’t know about you, but my sexual identity doesn’t make me particularly anxious or unhappy. Sweeping generalizations like these, however, make me nervous for the author, whom I worry is telling me more about himself than he might realize.
Archer implies that we don’t need a gay community to fight for our civil rights anymore. After all, the gay rights movement is “a battle that was once against the threat of torture and death, and that is now mostly against things like insensitivity and relatively mild social exclusion.” This will come as news to those who have lost jobs, housing, children, and, in some cases, even their lives because they were LGBT. Or, as Archer would posit, because they thought they were LGTB.
Archer uses pop cultural references to make his case. But he starts out badly when the first analysis he conducts is between William Friedkin’s Cruising and James Burrow’s Partners, two bad movies whose “innate interconnectedness” he dissects in two pages that feel like 20.
Other pop culture references throughout the book are similarly overwrought, reaching an apex for me during an unbelievable five-page discourse on – of all things – Dawson’s Creek. “Is it possible,” Archer wonders solemnly, “that Dawson’s dichotomy is a false one, that he shouldn’t feel the need to set up such solid divisions between his relationship with Jen and his relationship with Joey?”
He goes on to say, in the overwritten style typical of his prose (he’s never met a run-on sentence he didn’t love), “By looking into that perceived gap between friendship and love and exploring the possibility that the best friends make the best lovers, as the show began to do in its second season when Dawson dumps Jen in favour of Joey, it also goes some way towards implying that there is no necessary boundary between the two, that there is no magic ineffable separating one from the other, that this particular je ne sais quoi is more of a pas de quoi, that in fact good relationships are good relationships, and all we’re doing by abnegating responsibility of will in the realm of sexual attraction – saying ‘sorry, he/she just doesn’t do it for me’ – is roadblocking what could be some of the most fulfilling, complex, and, if we like, lasting relationships of our lives.”
Crash! Sorry, I just jumped off the patio.
Archer’s chapters on the historical development of the concept of gay are the most educational in the book. He’s well read, and he’s a good summarizer. Here too, though, things are somewhat jumbled. History is best told chronologically, but in his chapter on Nineteen-Thirty-Three, he verges off into discussing films like Cruising (again!) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Archer’s last line of argument is personal, sharing anecdotes from his own life to prove his points. While interesting, they are also the book’s biggest weaknesses.
I don’t know what to make of Archer’s contention that at one point in his twenties “fully half the men I’d had some form of sexual intercourse with identified as straight...” And while I enjoyed his titillating tale of seduction by his heterosexual friend Josh, I don’t know that a few romps with playful straight boys truly portend “the death of heterosexuality.”
Archer is so impressed with the universal truthfulness of his own experience that he decides that his few heterosexual impulses and actions somehow prove that everyone is bisexual. (Although, and I hate to sound catty – well, more catty – but the infrequency of his attractions to women would seem to prove the exact opposite.)
“And although there are oodles of people out there ready to tell stories of an utter lack of interest in members of the opposite sex or the same sex from the delivery room onwards,” Archer asserts, “I’ll simply have to disagree with them; disagree with them on the basis of personal experience and introspection – which, since polls and statistics are utterly unreliable is, I am certain of it, the only way into such issues.”
By then I went from being frustrated with Archer to actively disliking him. How arrogant is it to tell someone you “disagree” with his or her experience? Especially when you base it on nothing but your own navel-gazing? Archer’s final conclusions aren’t much different from those of social conservatives who want to turn us straight. Like them, he presumes to know better what’s in our hearts and souls than we do.
By the end of Archer’s book, I no longer wanted to throw myself over the patio. I wanted to throw him.
Scott Sherman lives with his partner and son in Richmond.