Abstract
Jane Ward’s new book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, challenges the conventional wisdom that women are more sexually fluid than men and draws attention to the way whiteness operates as a normalizing force for ‘deviant’ sexual practices. While black and Latino heterosexual men who engage in sex with other men are consistently portrayed by mainstream culture as repressed by their homophobic racial/ethnic culture, straight white men (SWM) are allowed to engage in homosexual contact with other men without losing their privileged heterosexual identity – as long as they provide certain ‘alibis’. When explained with the cultural scripts of necessity, homosociality, or accident, SWM’s homosexual behaviours go unmarked and unmarred by homosexuality.
Working with Sara Ahmed’s (2006) re-reading of the concept of orientation, Ward develops a theory of heterosexuality as a cultural orientation to normalcy, at times even a fetishization of the normal, in contrast to queerness, which she sees as an orientation to non-normative lifestyles and desires. Ward argues that we should take the homosexual desires of SWM seriously, but we should not confuse this desire with sexual identity. Ward further argues that homosexuality is not merely co-existent with heterosexual identity, it is constitutive of heteromasculinity.
Chapter 2 gives a 20th-century history of SWM’s homosexuality, including public sex in tea rooms, and Hell’s Angels’ displays of rebel hypermasculinity through public kissing. In Chapter 3, Ward confronts popular science with its own illogical assertions. She agrees with arguments that men who have sex with men can still be heterosexual. However, she refutes the underlying premise of this argument – that unlike women, men’s sexual identities are ‘hard wired’ – and shows how the ‘alibis’ for SWM’s homosexual behaviour can be applied to the sexual situations many people find themselves in, regardless of the sexual or gender identities of those involved. Ward argues that the power of these explanations for SWM lies in the normalizing force of whiteness. The whiteness of these men allows their claims to normalcy to go unchallenged so long as they maintain an allegiance to heterosexuality.
Chapter 4 analyses posts by ‘Str8’ identified men in the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Posts reference the cultural scripts of necessity and homosociality and use tropes of normative white heteromasculinity in order to assert a heterosexual identity. These are not repressed gay men; rather, they are heterosexual men drawing on the available resources of heteromasculinity and whiteness in order to pursue sexual contact with other men. Furthermore, in their construction of this desire they actually bolster their claims to heteromasculinity. Ward points to other cultural scripts of homosexual contact between SWM in the context of joking homosociality and masculine risk taking, such as in the show Jackass. Straight white men in these contexts build bonds with each other through sexual contact that is understood not as evidence of sexual identity, but as ‘boys will be boys’ behaviour.
In Chapter 5, Ward shows that the homosexuality of hazing rituals in hypermasculine institutions such as the Navy and college fraternities is not only compatible with the heterosexuality of the SWM who engage in them, it is central to the collective production of heteromasculinity. Like the daredevil stunts of Jackass, and the aggressive language of many Str8 dudes on Craigslist, the Navy’s crossing the line rituals build masculine bonds. Rather than point to latent homosexuality or argue that the military, as a total institution, is violent and coercive, Ward demonstrates that these types of behaviours happen elsewhere, outside of total institutions and under circumstances that cannot be interpreted as coercive. Hazing rituals are not exceptional in their use of homosexual sex acts to construct heteromasculinity.
In short, Ward rejects the assertion that gay sex makes someone gay, but disputes the discourse of heteroflexibilty and its reliance on a binary between meaningless homosexual sex between heterosexuals on the one hand, and ‘sincere queers’ on the other. In the final chapter, Ward suggests this binary is actually harmful, limiting the sexual possibilities of both straights and queers. Not Gay disproves the myth of men’s sexual rigidity, offers a racial critique of popular explanations for men’s (homo)sexual behaviours, provides an alternative reading of hazing rituals, and challenges us to consider the political stakes of embracing the discourse of heteroflexibility. Not Gay is a key work in the growing field of heterosexual studies and a welcome intervention in the current discourse on sexual fluidity. It is useful for the classroom as a way of pushing students to think beyond the gay/straight binary.