The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture

Author Daniel Harris's book of critical essays is breath of fresh air for gay scholars in the field of gay studies. Harris looks critically at several different areas of gay culture: gay males and "diva" worship, gay romance in the personal ads, how gay men helped the underwear revolution, the AIDS "crisis", leathermen, gay pornography in both film and literature, gay magazines, drag and gay propaganda. Whiles Harris's book is now six years old, it is for me, relevant and fresh as he argues about the dangers in assimilation into heterosexual, mainstream culture. I wished he would have pointed out more clearly how gay men can stop and fight against assimilation through building our culture which I think for any scholar is a very blurry answer. Be prepared, this book generated quite a bit of debate in a book group that I belong to in Chicago and I feel that it gets similar reactions in any part of gay community when it is read. For me, though I wished more gay men would read such a fine work as this. If anything can be said for this work, it does generate thought and critical discussion which I think more and more people do not want to engage in, because it is so much easier not to. Plus society doesn't reinforce this; so much as it does the idea of the "status quo."

So much junk is written and published for gays that intellectual piffle is very much the norm. One purpose that this norm does serve, as Harris bravely observes, is to reinforce a certain insipid status quo in which nonfiction for gay men serves as existential affirmation rather than food for thought. Harris is difficult, and with all respect, I think that his book's critics here aren't grasping his very subtle argument and argumentation. I don't think he's endorsing a reactionary return to diva worship or, for that matter, to the de-assimilation of gays from mainstream American culture. However, he rightly points out that the fashions, postures, traditions, modes of communication -- gay culture -- of the past arose out of necessity and was enhanced and enlivened by that necessity. I don't feel comfortable trying to recapitulate his argument, it's too complex and is resistant to simplistic paraphrasing. The best thing I can say about this book is that it elucidated for me the very origins of many of my own attitudes and aptitudes--it put my very own sensibilities as a gay man under a microscope and made me rethink why I am the way I am. And what I have to gain--and lose--by not being that way any more. If a book can tell me that both I and a culture in which I participate are a certain way for reasons of which I was previously unaware, that book is more than worth my time. It's worth rereading, which I plan to do this summer, a year after I first delved into this enlightening, genuinely intellectual, and iconoclastic book.

Harris's book is a witty, fiercely argued, often frightening, and entirely viable work of cultural criticism . . . I suppose I should be forthright and just say that I think Harris's book is quietly but determinedly brilliant -- not to mention long overdue. Dale Peck

Savagely intelligent and well-written. Marvelous. Worthy of Adorno

Bring out the boas-let the party begin! After a decade of pusillanimous, word-clotted academic eructations masquerading as "queer theory," Daniel Harris has single-handedly restored the reputation of gay intellectuals as bitches. His hateful new book, "The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture," is a shrewd and pitiless polemic on the current crisis of gay identity, and should be savored by every homo whose brain has not yet been cauterized by crystal or stultified by steroids. Harris' dissection of our so-called "culture" is intentionally lacerating-a Socratic slap in the face. Knowing oneself is rarely this much fun. The complete review may be found at: http://www.daimonix.com/fictions/harris.html