Happiness as (False) Performativity for the 21st Century Gay

For my final project, I’m interested in the realm of negative affect and gay performativity, including queer-specific psychopathology that is slowly disappearing/being dismissed in the gay rights movement of the 21^st century. The social media campaigns of late are largely responsible for looking to eradicate the unhappy gay and create a community of “happy queers,” in reference to Lisa Blackman. I want to look at these campaigns as a whole—specifically, things like “You Can Play,” focused on gay athletes, The It Gets Better campaign started by Dan Savage which aims at bullied teens, NoH8, which somehow looks to solve homophobia through a simple slogan, and even popular gay anthems of the past few years—Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Macklemore’s “Same Love,” which champion gay acceptance through the rhetoric of sexuality not being a choice (and thus, people should just get with it). I want to argue that the gay rights movement(s) of the 21^st century leaves no space for negative affect, and (whether consciously or not) diminishes the value of shared negative emotionality that belongs to the gay community.

The “gay experience,” whatever that can be defined as, will always share a level of negative affect—for no matter how accepting society becomes of non-heterosexual orientations, the process of “coming out,” of being an invisible minority and discovering oneself to be involuntarily different from the “norm” will always carry it with it a level of isolation and questioning that is not exactly understood by heterosexuals (though this isolation is not limited to the realm of sexuality, of course). But these emotions have no room in the “happy gay” of the 21^st century—who can play sports if he wants, who is told that it will get better, who now has marriage and family as the ultimate dream. While this is not in and of itself a problem, instead of liberation, the gay rights movement is moving into a fixed, homonormative paradigm of existence, in which the only difference between gay and straight people is, for all intents and purposes, whom they love. But this undoubtedly diminishes queer-specific (and often negative) experiences that are “watered down” so as to make the gay movement palpable. This juxtaposition of trying to squeeze the “happy gay” into a neoliberal, heteronormative society while simultaneously not allowing any room for the expression of negative affect, in the simplest of explanations, can cause LGBT people shame for feeling suffering.

In the second half of my paper I want to explore how the commodification and monetization of gay performativity (which in addition to these social media campaigns can even include popular “coming out” videos on Youtube, which is now a monetized experience) has moved it firmly away from the realm of resistance and community and places it within the interests of a neoliberal society. We are in an age in which drag has moved from a genderbending celebration and critique of the performativity of gender and into competition (RuPaul’s Drag Race), where the most prominent and “talented” drag performers find themselves aiming for sponsorship and a $100,000 cash prize. We are less “Paris is Burning” and more “Paris is a Nice Vacation Spot for Gay People with Money.”

This fundamentally alters the way that drag and other forms of gay performativity (vogue on America’s Best Dance Crew, for example) can be looked at and understood—in line with the self-serving, individualistic and competitive edge of a neoliberal society, it loses its emphasis on challenging the norms of heteronormativity and heterosexism and instead the focus becomes (at least for the show) consumerist-based (in which your level of drag and the authenticity of your performativity is judged by the makeup and clothes you can afford) and thus is inherently non-resistant. In reference to Volter Workersdorff in “Paradoxes of Precarious Sexuality,” fringe practices belonging to specific sexualities become forms of work in and of themselves—all in line with the trappings of a consumerist/capitalist society.

Through the two halves of this paper I hope to communicate how the rhetoric of gay rights in the last decade or so, and the increasing exposure of specific kinds of gay performativity to the general public, are working not to liberate sexual identities in the Western world, but instead to pigeonhole LGBT people into very specific parameters that only work within a homonormative framework (within a larger, still heteronormative society).