Abstract
I consider Jane Ward’s Respectably Queer one of the best sociological LGBTQ studies books published over the last ten years, so I approached this book with a great amount of excitement. On my first skimming of the text, I found myself disappointed, mistakenly thinking that the text was a superficial exploration of this topic. As I delved more deeply into the book, however, I found much to admire: it’s a text with a lot of provocative ideas and a strong overarching argument likely to change how many people view straight white men’s sexuality. Despite the book’s title, it’s really about male sexual fluidity, and all of the work that goes into downplaying its prevalence. When straight white men engage in sexual acts with other men, common responses in the United States include many things—the men must be closeted homosexuals, situationally deprived of women, or simply behaving like juvenile boys—and yet we rarely think of it as something they enjoyed, much less something endemic to heterosexuality.
Ward’s major contribution is that she ultimately offers a new way of thinking about heterosexual masculinity—not, as is commonly thought, as the absence or opposite of homosexuality, but as something where same-sex sexuality remains a ubiquitous feature of straight white men, who use their same-sex relations to bolster their heterosexuality, masculinity, and whiteness. Their same-sex relations, paradoxically, serve to prevent charges of authentic gayness, as they draw attention to how they endure or repudiate sex with other men. While the prevailing logic of male sexual rigidity underlies much of the conventional wisdom—when women do the same acts, it’s not forced into a hetero/homo binary in quite the same way—Ward also demonstrates the importance of whiteness. After all, Black men engaging in the same acts are typically pathologized with references to the “down low.” At the same time, when straight white men cross the interracial boundary, that’s more serious business—it’s no longer “not gay,” but very seriously gay.
Another one of Ward’s major contributions is bringing in cultural considerations around sexuality, as she argues that the dividing line between normal and queer sexualities could more productively be viewed in terms of cultural attachments—the extent to which one remains invested in heteronormativity, in particular—rather than biological drives. This contribution has been made by other scholars as well, but Ward relates these ideas to the subjects of her book, who point to their disinvestment with gay cultures, identities, and ways of life as evidence of the meaningless of their same-sex acts. Ward does not let the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement off the hook, either, as she critiques the politics of sameness that has pervaded much of this work, instead calling for a political critique of gender and sexual normativity rather than an unrelenting emphasis on gay love. If I have one criticism of the text, it’s that the ideas here are occasionally stronger than the research. Obviously, sexual fluidity is hard to account for when the group in question does not always want their practices to be seen, but some readers will likely remain skeptical that straight men are just as sexually fluid as heterosexual women based on the evidence presented. Ward doesn’t have to convince me, or many Gender & Society readers, of men’s sexual fluidity. Skeptics, however, may still finish the book thinking that straight guy-on-guy action is not pervasive, especially the “extreme,” albeit titillating, examples of anal eating and male fingers in male anuses outlined here. If we’re supposed to be convinced that male sexual fluidity is all around us, it seems dubious to undermine this idea with capricious data—the use of Haze Him in Chapter five, while immensely readable, seems particularly susceptible to these methodological critiques, given that most of these videos, in which straight men get hazed into performing gay sex acts, are likely staged.
The book as a whole might work best for graduate classes, or advanced undergraduate ones, given that a fair proportion of the text refers to other scholarly works. Still, several of the chapters—I found one, five, and six the strongest—would make excellent additions to an introductory gender or sexuality class. With a lot of nuanced arguments and a provocative, corrective thesis, Not Gay is undoubtedly a book that demands to be read.