Abstract
Jane Ward’s Not Gay explores sexual contact between straight white men by looking at several case studies of the phenomenon: hazing rituals, public restrooms, and among strangers advertising on Craigslist. At first blush, it is tempting to make the assumption that these men are actually gay—either not realizing it or being deceptive. Looking past this superficial assumption, Ward theorizes sexualities and a series of social, cultural, and political commitments that situate the young white men she examines as just what they say they are. But Ward is not only interested in documenting sexual contact between straight white men; she also investigates the stories people tell about same-sex sexual intimacy among straight white men. Ward’s real brilliance in this book involves explicitly not treating her case studies and sites as sexual outliers among straight white men. Rather, Ward theorizes white, heterosexual masculinity as constructed in and through a remarkable amount of homosexual contact.
To set the stage, Wade charts same-sex intimacy and sex between men over the course of the 20th century. It is an incredibly well-organized treatment that not only culls some of the best-known scholars, but also collects some research that was new to me. She traces a slow process by which sex between men went from being ‘normal’ at the turn of the century, to ‘deviant’ around mid-century, to scandalous around the end. Alongside this, Ward charts the history of ‘exceptionalizing logics’ used to make sense of straight men’s engagement with homosexual sex.
Next, Ward examines the popular science that seeks to make sense of men’s sexual fluidity, deftly summarizing a complex, illogical, and contradictory collection of information, science, and pseudoscience. She shows how the logic of ‘innate sexuality’ works to implicitly authorize sexual experimentation and play at odds with one’s sexual identity. In addition to the frame of experimentation, Ward summarizes a collection of discursive alibis that situate homosexual encounters as consistent with heterosexuality and masculinity, a process she refers to more generally as ‘hetero-exceptionalism.’ Establishing homosexual contact as a constitutive element of heterosexual masculinity allows Ward to answer a more complicated question of what homosexual sex actually accomplishes for heterosexual men and heteronormativity.
Ward then turns to investigating the intersections between gender, race, and sexuality that enable young, straight, white men to benefit from hetero-exceptional frames from which other groups are excluded. One of my favorite aspects of the book is Ward’s humanistic social science approach. For, instance, Chapter 4 begins with a deep reading of the film “Hump Day”—a movie about two straight, white men who decide to film themselves having sex with each other as a form of radical art—and proceeds to connect central themes from film and popular culture to a critical analysis of advertisements posted on Craigslist in which straight, white men seek sex with each other. Through this collection of popular and salacious material and data, Ward shows how these men draw upon whiteness in framing themselves and their actions as distinctly not gay.
In the chapters that offer deep readings of the data, Ward shows her frames of hetero-exceptionalism in practice. The fifth chapter addresses hazing rituals in the military and connects them with fraternity hazing. Here, a critical reading of high profile military hazing ‘scandals’ is offered alongside an analysis of internet porn that sexualizes such practices. She examines the ways in which institutional forces collide with discursive frames to resignify sexual contact between heterosexual men as not only not gay, but signifying hetero-masculine resilience and brotherhood. Ward suggests that power, dominance, and disgust are often used to suggest that this behavior is not sexual. Yet, as Ward argues, ‘the orientation toward grossness, anality, and the homoerotic is not a departure from normative white hetero-masculinity, but among its central ingredients’ (p. 169). Yet, this works to deny the possibility of sexual fluidity among men, something Ward theorizes as central to the maintenance of heterosexuality.
In the conclusion, Ward offers a critique of mainstream LGB politics, homonormativity, and theories of exclusive and hard-wired sexual orientation. The line between straight and gay, Ward offers, is not a line drawn by sex acts alone. Rather, the symbolic and social boundaries between gay and straight have much more to do with context, circumstance, and discourses regarding motivation. She argues that homonormativity offers straight men a new framework for emphasizing their own heterosexuality as beyond reproach—one that privileges identity and political and cultural fit above all else. Yet, these resources are not available to all men. Straight, white men draw upon whiteness to assign heterosexual meaning to homosexual acts and avoid homophobic stigma. This book challenges a great deal of theory, research, and popular wisdom concerning sexuality and men’s relationship with the homoerotic. It will be important to consider as we continue to study continuity and change in the relationship between masculinity and homophobia, and cultural shifts in sexual identities, cultures, behaviors, and politics.