How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [4]
The Three Civilized Books: Heart, Body, and Soul
There’s nowhere to run,
I have no place to go,
Surrender my heart, body, and soul . . .
—Backstreet Boys, “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely”
Every culture has three components: heart, body, and soul. If we are to see how dramatically mainstream American culture has been influenced by male homosexuality, we must look at all of the components of the gay culture.
Heart is that culture’s very way of thinking, its emotional core. How does this group of people see the world and internalize it? How does it communicate its ideas? What is most important to the people of this culture—what is “gut level,” or at its heart? What are its rituals and celebrations?
Body is the way in which a culture addresses the funda mentals of life: food, shelter, and sexual activity. What is the native cuisine? How do the citizens adorn their homes? What do they wear? What constitutes the culture’s sense of the physical body, of sexuality and sexual roles, and what are its sexual practices?
Finally there is soul, or the spiritual essence of a culture, expressed in its art, literature, drama, and music. What distinguishes this culture’s thoughts about life and death? How is its art expressed, and what are the most popular forms? How have the culture’s arts been influenced, and how do they influence other societies and groups?
Here, then, are the heart, body, and soul of influential gay culture. Here are the gifts gay culture has brought to straight civilization.
Book One
Heart
Chapter 1
I Know It When I See It: Camp, Irony, and the Gay Aesthetic
Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
—Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
In fact, queerness is so pervasive . . . that it prompts the question: What’s left that’s truly hetero?
—Simon Dumenco, New York Magazine
Some years ago, New York’s New Museum sponsored a
forum called “Is There a Gay Sensibility and Does It Have
an Impact on Our Culture?” After a lot of evasive huffing
and puffing about everyone from Marcel Proust to Patti
Page, journalist Jeff Weinstein said, “No, there is no such
thing as a gay sensibility and yes, it has an enormous im
pact on our culture.”
—Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet
Defining the gay aesthetic is difficult. It’s particularly tricky when discussing artists or thinkers who were “pre-homosexual,” existing in cultures in which homosexuality was not thought of as a lifestyle but as an occasional sexual option. Countless books and articles have been written on the probable homosexuality of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Tchaikovsky. I had a lively conversation with a gay history professor about this topic. We agreed that it was silly to label artists as homosexual before the term or concept even existed. (The word “homosexual” was coined in 1869 but did not catch on as a term for decades. It was first uttered in a public forum on a BBC broadcast in 1953.) So how can we anachro nistically interpret artists’ works, burdening them with a “gay” label, when in fact in their day and time what they did with their bodies at night probably had nothing to do with the way they lived daily? Leonardo da Vinci, who even in liberal Flo rence was prosecuted for homosexual acts, would have been considered a sodomite, but that definition would have carried moral, not social, connotations.
Yet there is a certain gay sensibility in the works of painters such as da Vinci and Michelangelo. “I can definitely