Have Hipsters Broken Your Lbian Gaydar?

Contents:

• THE BT PORNOGRAPHIC GAY HIPSTER SHORT FILM I’VE EVER SEEN
• WHAT’S A GAY HIPSTER?
• HIPSTER GAYS
• HIPSTER, OR GAY?
• HAVE HIPSTERS BROKEN YOUR LBIAN GAYDAR?

THE BT PORNOGRAPHIC GAY HIPSTER SHORT FILM I’VE EVER SEEN

Butt exemplifi the changg nature of gay ntemporary masculy as marked the begng of a new era of queer fanz such as They Shoot Homos Don't They?, Kk, Kaiser, and Meat reflectg a specific smopolan gay liftyle the Wt of the 2000s. mt know how to throw up the blood sign and/or lean like a cholo, but is also very hipster somehowGet the gipster monly mistaken as a 'gay hipster', which is an impossibily due to the fact that hipsters are too gay even for gay people, a gipster is actually an agg hipster.

By nature, hipsters tend to be a fairly liberal-md lot, and among them exists a pantheon of characters, like the vegans, the tweedi (they look like Sherlock Holm), lumberjacks (real big beards), urban garners, stchers, bchers, microbrewers and, y, even gays and lbians (and a whole lot of bisexuals) some ways the hipster scene Philly, however straight and however whe and middle-class tends to be at tim, is also pretty acceptg of LGBT people. Wh their 80s-spired cloth plucked om vtage stor (and off the shelv of Urban Outfters) ’s not always easy figurg out who is and who isn’t gay or at least how do one scribe the gay hipster exactly?

Yet queerns exerts a set of disfortg thematic and semantic prsur on the story the novel wants to tell about the place of the hipster unterculture postwar Ameri In this rpect, Darkns exemplifi Eve Sedgwick's celebrated argument that the supposedly margal issue of homosexual/heterosexual fn fact stctur, and ed actur, virtually all morn Wtern cultural exprsn.

WHAT’S A GAY HIPSTER?

1 But while Sedgwick tak the closet to be the primary rhetoril maniftatn of the cris of meang cltered around sexual inty, Darkns prompts to nsir gayns relatn to another metaphor, the unrground. Darkns mak no explic reference to gay life as an unrground, but blatantly featur the then-new trope of the cultural unrground, this blatancy existg oddly wh diffens: the novel ploys the term unrground sistently and unsubtly, but also uncertaly and even quarrelsomely. I don't assume that the term straightforwardly not subversn but also mata that scty of the term's and their ramifitns help to track the changg place of gayns postwar Amerin cultural polics.

Like the hipster, the midcentury homosexual may also be thought of as posssg a kd of secret knowledge, if only about his own sexualy; and, as we'll see, he too was equently acced of actg, if not actually beg, "superr. " But gay inty was only ocsnally therefore unrstood as thentic; stead, gayns and the gay subculture were generally unrstood as flagrantly thentic, an unrstandg routed through the stereotype of gay effemacy. Willard Motley's novel of the Chigo unrworld Knock on Any Door (1947), for stance, appli a favore midcentury ephet for thenticy, "phoney, " to s gay male characters, ditg their sufficient masculy.

"23 Yet the followg discsn of Darkns and other reprentatns of bohemia, I want to turn om this faiar ncern wh the obscure or only partially visible aspect of the gay unrground to nsir the difference to culture that visible homosexualy mak. Darkns do not explicly clu gay life s pac unrstandg of the unrground, but like most other pictns of the bohemian world of the postwar perd, treats gay people as an lible feature of that world, and, so dog, suggts the shapg force of the gay llectivy on nomally heterosexual dividuals and a nomally heteronormative cultural settg. While many queer crics followg Sedgwick have strsed the universalizg aspect of queerns and disunted the importance of morized subcultural forms, Darkns's rendn of a bohemian unrground that is part-gay enabl to see how morizatn and universalism work dialectilly.

HIPSTER GAYS

His plight v terpretatn terms of the preoccupatn wh latent homosexualy stilled midcentury "sensive heterosexuals" that Norman Mailer wrote about his say "The Homosexual Villa" (1954); or, wing the theoretil aperture, terms of the paranoid homosexual panic to which, as Sedgwick argu, all straight men (ed, all men of any sexual orientatn) are subject morn homophobic culture.

HIPSTER, OR GAY?

This statement is ma relatn to the appearance of a gaggle of lghg men, whom Blake scrib knowgly as "havg such a gay time, " one of the characters' favore Village bars (47); "Delic, aren't they?

If gay men n th be easily regnized (no other fely gay men appear), the book do not que know what to do wh the possibily of an unobservable gayns suggted the character of Harry, an uncertaty rried to his fate on the fal page, which, stead of actually dyg the proverbial ath of the midcentury queer character, he only remas close to .

The ol prose style of the earlier novel is here replaced by one of high-octane tenntns, almost a chapter's worth of which is lavished on an appalled, enthralled acunt of a katabatic sojourn the gay unrground, or what lls the "ui' dank, nvoluted world. Edgar Frienberg wr that this episo "mt surely be unrstood as a brilliant portrayal of severely reprsed homosexual feelg and the hostily generat, " even as the amount of "lip-smackg over this queer-bashg... "44 If we put this novel's lip-smackgly homophobic scriptn alongsi the que sympathetic portrayal of the possibly homosexual Harry  Darkns, we beg to see that what troubl Brossard both the novels is not homosexual feelg per se but s unrground subcultural exprsns — the inti, behavrs, and argot that enable one to "spot [them] a e away.

HAVE HIPSTERS BROKEN YOUR LBIAN GAYDAR?

"47 As Cathare Stimpson put an important 1983 say, Beat thors like Gsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs "seem[ed] to be repudiatg the morn notn of homosexualy as an inty and brgg back the olr scriptn of as an event. "49 And a 1961 ethnography of San Francis's Beats siarly not that homosexual experience among men is mon but "overt exclive homosexualy is rare: certaly social homosexualy — 'gay bars, ' 'gay parti' — is not part of this scene.

Even as the Beats helped pave the way for gay liberatnist ias, they took pas to distguish their own same-sex forays om the gay subculture, fg those forays as not "really" homosexualy, or at least as a different, ls stigmatic homosexualy. In a study of male same-sex sexualy midcentury New York, Barry Reay not that John Clellon Holm's Go is "dismissive" of effemate homosexuals, "who seem to have no real role this celebratn of life lived on the edge. "54 Yet Holm distguish between a gang of "graceful, shoulr swgg" homosexuals enuntered at a bar "mcg, chirpg and tryg to b up agast everyone" and Stofsky, the sympathetilly prented Gsberg analogue, who challeng "his father's bigoted shock at his homosexualy.

"55 Reay argu persuasively that entrenched "hostily to homosexual effemacy crossed the gay/straight divi" midcentury culture, and utns that we should not "nfe antagonism to effemacy wh antipathy toward homosexualy.