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Book Review: Not Gay
Oct. 5th, 2020 12:39 pmElizabeth Jane Ward’s Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men is a bonbon of a book. I didn’t end up agreeing with all of its arguments, but then, I’m not sure the book always agrees with its own arguments; there’s a certain “let’s throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” aspect which I found appealing, a fundamental pleasure in making the reader go, “Wait. What?”
Take this sentence, for instance, which I can only imagine that Ward typed with a gleeful shit-eating grin: “The long history of straight men’s sex with men, and the varied places where it occurs and the varied forms it takes, requires an expansive view, one that illuminates the all-too-often ignored probability that straight men, as a rule, want to have sex with men.”
“Doesn’t that fly in the face of the entire definition of straight?” wails the discombobulated reader.
And this is of course Ward’s point: the definition of straight is basically bullshit, and maps poorly on real human sexual behavior. Not Gay “is based on the premise that homosexual contact is a ubiquitous feature of the culture of straight white men,” Ward explains. “White straight-identified men manufacture opportunities for sexual contact with other men in a remarkably wide range of settings, and that these activities appear to thrive in hyper-heterosexual environments such as universities, where access to sex with women is anything but constrained.”
It really struck me that the behavior of these straight white men hearkens back to the fairy/trade dynamic, which was the dominant understanding of men’s sexuality until the homosexual/heterosexual binary crept in like kudzu over the middle decades of the twentieth century… at least in textbooks and medical discourse and, more slowly, in the popular imagination as well.
But clearly the takeover of the popular imagination was far from complete, because in fraternities and the army and anywhere else that straight white men congregate, there’s still a powerful sense that a man can have loads of sex with men and still be a “real man” as long as its the right kind of sex (he’s not being penetrated, or if he is it’s in context of a hazing ritual or something like that) in the right kind of setting: at sea! in prison! in the army! Anywhere where it’s hard to get access to women! Which could be stretched to include a night on the town where you’re just striking out with the ladies! The really important thing seems to be that it’s just for fun, purely physical, or if it does have an emotional component that component is group male bonding (to the fraternity, or the army unit) rather than individual and romantic.
Ward quotes this beauty of a want ad from a straight dude lookin' for a straight dude to jack off with: “No gay sex, I am looking for legit male bonding, masturbating in the hot sun only.”
(There’s a whole chapter on these want ads from straight guys looking for male bonding through side-by-side masturbation or occasionally blowjobs. They are fascinating. I was particularly struck by the fact that so many of the ads specify “straight or bi” for the partner.)
So what defines straightness in men, if it is not, in fact, characterized by an exclusive interest in sex with women? Ward comments, “people who identify as heterosexual, unlike gay men and lesbians, are generally content with straight culture, or heteronormativity; they enjoy heterosexual sex, but more importantly for the purposes of this book, they enjoy heterosexual culture. Simply put, being sexually ‘normal’ suits them. It feels good; it feels like home.”
Or, to sum it up more succinctly: “this book works from the premise that heterosexuality is, in part, a fetishization of the normal.”
Now obviously those words “in part” are doing a lot of work here. Occasionally Ward seems to forget that a person needs to take pleasure in both normalcy and heterosexual sex in order to make straightness work, and those parts for me where the times when the spaghetti stuck most poorly.
It also occurred to me that this “fetishization of normalcy” paradigm offers a new angle the tension between homonormativity and queer radicalism. I tend to see this cast as a difference of philosophies or politics, but maybe it’s fundamentally a difference of temperament. Maybe some people simply get pleasure from experiencing themselves as normal and other people don’t feel that pleasure and, because they don’t personally experience it, fundamentally don’t see it as a real thing.
At any rate, even if I didn’t always agree with Ward’s framing of certain situations, the book definitely made me think. And you can feel that Ward had a blast writing it, and that’s a rare, rare thing in an academic text.
Take this sentence, for instance, which I can only imagine that Ward typed with a gleeful shit-eating grin: “The long history of straight men’s sex with men, and the varied places where it occurs and the varied forms it takes, requires an expansive view, one that illuminates the all-too-often ignored probability that straight men, as a rule, want to have sex with men.”
“Doesn’t that fly in the face of the entire definition of straight?” wails the discombobulated reader.
And this is of course Ward’s point: the definition of straight is basically bullshit, and maps poorly on real human sexual behavior. Not Gay “is based on the premise that homosexual contact is a ubiquitous feature of the culture of straight white men,” Ward explains. “White straight-identified men manufacture opportunities for sexual contact with other men in a remarkably wide range of settings, and that these activities appear to thrive in hyper-heterosexual environments such as universities, where access to sex with women is anything but constrained.”
It really struck me that the behavior of these straight white men hearkens back to the fairy/trade dynamic, which was the dominant understanding of men’s sexuality until the homosexual/heterosexual binary crept in like kudzu over the middle decades of the twentieth century… at least in textbooks and medical discourse and, more slowly, in the popular imagination as well.
But clearly the takeover of the popular imagination was far from complete, because in fraternities and the army and anywhere else that straight white men congregate, there’s still a powerful sense that a man can have loads of sex with men and still be a “real man” as long as its the right kind of sex (he’s not being penetrated, or if he is it’s in context of a hazing ritual or something like that) in the right kind of setting: at sea! in prison! in the army! Anywhere where it’s hard to get access to women! Which could be stretched to include a night on the town where you’re just striking out with the ladies! The really important thing seems to be that it’s just for fun, purely physical, or if it does have an emotional component that component is group male bonding (to the fraternity, or the army unit) rather than individual and romantic.
Ward quotes this beauty of a want ad from a straight dude lookin' for a straight dude to jack off with: “No gay sex, I am looking for legit male bonding, masturbating in the hot sun only.”
(There’s a whole chapter on these want ads from straight guys looking for male bonding through side-by-side masturbation or occasionally blowjobs. They are fascinating. I was particularly struck by the fact that so many of the ads specify “straight or bi” for the partner.)
So what defines straightness in men, if it is not, in fact, characterized by an exclusive interest in sex with women? Ward comments, “people who identify as heterosexual, unlike gay men and lesbians, are generally content with straight culture, or heteronormativity; they enjoy heterosexual sex, but more importantly for the purposes of this book, they enjoy heterosexual culture. Simply put, being sexually ‘normal’ suits them. It feels good; it feels like home.”
Or, to sum it up more succinctly: “this book works from the premise that heterosexuality is, in part, a fetishization of the normal.”
Now obviously those words “in part” are doing a lot of work here. Occasionally Ward seems to forget that a person needs to take pleasure in both normalcy and heterosexual sex in order to make straightness work, and those parts for me where the times when the spaghetti stuck most poorly.
It also occurred to me that this “fetishization of normalcy” paradigm offers a new angle the tension between homonormativity and queer radicalism. I tend to see this cast as a difference of philosophies or politics, but maybe it’s fundamentally a difference of temperament. Maybe some people simply get pleasure from experiencing themselves as normal and other people don’t feel that pleasure and, because they don’t personally experience it, fundamentally don’t see it as a real thing.
At any rate, even if I didn’t always agree with Ward’s framing of certain situations, the book definitely made me think. And you can feel that Ward had a blast writing it, and that’s a rare, rare thing in an academic text.
