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Category Archives: queer

The Day the Internet Surprised Me, or RPF and Rage

When I posted about Chaz Bono a while back, I said I don’t read the comments to online news stories, but now that I’ve said it I must confess I totally do. I’ve realized it’s more accurate to say that I don’t read the comments unless I am prepared to cope with the absolute worst of humanity.

A second confession: I have a Google Alert set for Lea Michele. So, when the PR folks (his? hers? I don’t know) announced that she and her boyfriend had broken up a few weeks ago, and it echoed through the gossipsphere, I got a lot of emails. And, I was a) curious what the response would be and b) prepared to see people being awful . . . so I took a look.

And the Internet surprised me.

Well, at first it didn’t. I went to the comments fully expecting to see a deluge of suggestions of who Ms. Michele should hook up with next—which were definitely there.

I also assumed that the Real Person Fiction (RPF) shippers would be there, pouncing on the opportunity to say that she would either soon be dating one of her castmates or secretly has been the whole time. And indeed, the story went up at 6:42 and at 6:50 someone commented “MONCHELE LIVES!! ” followed at 6:51 by “Achele is end game” and 6:54 by ” Achele* fixed it for ya **” A decoder ring: “Monchele” refers to Michele paired with her Glee costar Cory Monteith; the “Achele” portmanteau indicates a romantic relationship between Michele and Dianna Agron (who, as avid readers may recall, likes girls, but not in a sexual way).

I was, particularly, expecting the Achele shippers to be out in force, because they’re a vocal bunch. (Confession 3: I also happen to think they make a pretty compelling argument. Not that the relationship between the two is necessarily “real,” but I can see how it could be. I know that social norms for friendships between women allow some latitude in terms of acceptable levels of physical affection, but those girls are SNUGGLY. One of MANY videos, if you’re curious.) And, indeed, Achele was a pretty substantial presence in the comments.

I was prepared for the response to the Achele shippers to be somewhere between dismissive and ugly: A commenter named Emily said, “If I read one more comment about ‘achele’ I’m gonna flip Dianna and Lea aren’t gay Dianna has a boyfriend, respect people’s sexualities please.”

This kind of thing is pretty standard in how we make sense of sexuality. It’s got “straight until proven gay.” It’s got a complete lack of recognition that sexuality exists beyond a 100% hetero/100% homo binary, that Agron and Michele could have boyfriends today and girlfriends tomorrow, and that one needn’t “be gay” to date someone of the same sex. So, the greatest hits are all there.

But then the Internet surprised me.

Allison: “@Emily The Mo[n]chele/Lark comments are JUST as insulting…Lea has NEVER said anything about her sexuality for one thing, so if you complain about Achele complain about the other ships, because yes, your comment’s exclusive nature to only Achele is homophobic” (Ship, short for “relationship,” refers to advocating a particular coupling within a fan object, either of characters or actors)

Wow. Okay, some random person commenting on a gossip story the internet—a place usually chock full of venom, hysteria, and general inanity—has calmly and rationally pointed out that being offended at the suggestion that an actor might be in a same-sex relationship is homophobic. Maybe this is just my academic snobbery (of which I’ll admit I’ve got plenty), but I don’t usually expect that kind of sophistication in online comments. And who knows, maybe Allison is actually an academic herself and my snobbery needn’t be challenged.

Commenter Nicola replied, “@Allison Insinuating that Dianna and Lea are gay are just as insulting as saying that gay people should go straight.” And she had a relatively complex and valid point too, though I may be putting words into her mouth in my interpretation of it.

That is, to enforce an ideal sexuality on another person isn’t okay no matter what direction it goes. One ought not to police other people’s behavior and insist that they belong to a particular category that they haven’t chosen to join regardless of what categorythat is, as I argued with Marcus Bachmann.

Now, the thing did go off the rails after that.

 
The Kinsey Scale.
Graphic by Moni3.Moni3 at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Allison shot back, “@nicola…when exactly did I insinuate they had to be gay? I didn’t, my point is we have NO idea if they’re gay, straight or bi…It’s not fair to exclusively bash Achele just because it’s two girls. It’s not okay to ship Lark or Monchele any more than it is to ship Achele. “

And I think it’s absolutely right to resist default straightness. I also think it’s right to resist the erasure of the middle of the Kinsey scale—we’re not all zeroes and sixes.

But, as a queer theorist, a fan studies scholar, and a fan, I’m uneasy about throwing out the RPF shipping with the bathwater, which Allison does by saying that no shipping is okay. That is, I would argue that it’s perfectly acceptable to interpret people’s behavior selectively and subversively for one’s own pleasure, whether that person is a fictional character or a real human.

However, one should not then impose that interpretation on the body of that actual person and demand that they comply with it, which is where I draw the line with some of the more enthusiastic and dogmatic Achele shippers.

But that’s because one shouldn’t impose and demand in general, not because it’s somehow wrong to imagine what kind of sex other people have.

Or, rather, not because it’s wrong to admit we all routinely imagine what kind of sex other people have, or would have if they did. Sometimes in great detail. (If you’re curious, check out http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Glee%20RPF/works — but read the tags carefully. You’ve been warned!)

Chaz Bono, (In)Sanity, and the Gender System

Ordinarily, I have a “don’t read the comments” policy. People are, generally speaking, impressively hateful and cruel online because the relative anonymity means that there are few repercussions—I’m sure we’ve all been on the receiving end of this.

But with the controversy around Chaz Bono being cast in Dancing with the Stars, I’m finding myself unable to help looking at the comments—much like one can’t look away from a horrific car crash. And, even if I had not been reading the comments, when there’s this much controversy the same sort of extreme viewpoints tend to end up in the articles themselves as “telling both sides of the story.”

Predictably, it’s awful up one side and down the other. People are going around refusing to respect Bono’s self-definition and using his birth name “Chastity” and the pronoun “her” and insisting that “His/Her chromosomes haven’t changes [sic] since birth and never will” (which, as my Fausto-Sterling-savvy Gender in the Media students can now tell you, doesn’t actually mean as much as people think). And, of course, they’re hysterically screeching about the Bible. The thread at the ABC blog has all of these strategies in play.

And in relation to those people I take Bono’s side. I think it’s ludicrous to argue that casting him somehow makes DWTS not safe for children because it’ll make them turn out trans or gay or serial killers or whatever it is they’re arguing. I absolutely think they’re wrong to treat being trans as some sort of mental illness—comparing it to being an elective amputee, really?

I have to fight my knee-jerk response to think that these are bad people—or, as Chaz’s mother Cher put it, “stupid bigots”—and instead think of them as just lacking knowledge. But I still feel superior to them and their bible-thumping, same-sex-sexuality-hating ways. (That’s not me collapsing gender identity and sexual object choice; they’re the ones saying “it is CLEARLY stated in the Bible,,, [sic] men are not to lay down with other men, same for women.”)

But beyond that moment of support, things get tricky. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that being inclined toward certain behavior or having certain feelings means your body needs to look a certain way. I think that ultimately this rigid correlation between body and behavior is something we have to resist rather than try to shape our bodies to fit into.

But of course, that behavior = body sentiment is exactly what we all hear all the time, though usually as body = behavior. “You’re a girl (body) so you should act like it (behavior).” The idea that your body is your destiny is so completely ingrained in us that we can’t think anything else. My students argued this about athletics even after reading and hearing that bodies are socially constructed.

So the arguments that Bono is going to destroy gender, or whatever, are totally off base. Transitioning, when done as a complete “I really am this other category on the inside and I need to fully move into that category” process, is actually very much about obeying and supporting gender rules. Changing the shape of one’s body requires a pretty serious commitment to playing along.

This isn’t to paint transfolk as dupes, by any means. The ways in which bodies get shaped in these processes are the product of medical institutions deciding what counted as transitioning. This matters because being able to count as transitioned is what makes you able to be able to change your state identity documents. In order to work in a mainstream, above-board kind of job, one has to have those documents, and unless you happen to have a particularly progressive employer they have to match the way you look when you walk in the door (and with the USA PATRIOT Act’s insistence that terrorists might have fake documents that don’t “match” their gender it may not matter what your boss thinks). I get that this is all very real and at times a matter of survival.

I also get that it can be a site of resistance, since transpeople routinely bend or break the rules. When the law says that in order to transition one has to have to have surgery to reassign their sex, that statute is intended to refer to genital surgery that will more or less render them both sterile and unable to experience sexual pleasure. But with a sympathetic doctor, someone can get a letter certifying that surgery to change sex has occurred without saying exactly what—that it was top surgery and not bottom surgery, say. There are ways to work the system, and people do.

Experiencing a high degree of mismatch between oneself and the social norm is a bad situation, and people like Chaz Bono are making the best of it.

But here again, like with 9/11 or with gay marriage, I see it on two levels simultaneously, and considering individual people as opposed to large-scale structures produces a dramatically different response. I almost wish I had less appreciation for subtlety and could be more dogmatic. It’d be easier.

That is, though I completely appreciate why people find it necessary to comply with the medico-legal framework to get access to the resources they need, I ultimately don’t think it’s a good idea to go appealing to the state for validation for one’s body image any more than for one’s sex life.

We all have a set of really narrow options of what bodies are supposed to look like and what it’s appropriate to do with them, options that don’t conform to the configurations people actually come in (however it is that you think we come to have a gender and a sexuality and a body that’s a particular shape).

And we all have to work and struggle and cram ourselves into boxes—some more than others, of course—to find a place that’s comfortable within that. Chaz Bono got a bad deal out of the boxes of the gender system. Or, we all get a bad deal out of the gender system, but Bono and other transfolk more than most.

These are real pressures with real consequences, but I simply cannot feel that the solution is to accept the boxes.

We have to expose the boxes as artificial, as constraining, as sometimes deadly. We have to work to dismantle the ways that the boxes hold the power they do over who gets jobs and how people get medical care and all kinds of other services and resources and opportunities.

We have to work toward some different way to configure people, such that you can feel however you want on the inside and look however you want on the outside, with no demand that those fall into a set of patterns, much less a rigid equation.

But, in the meantime, Bono’s decision to get his body surgically altered to move him into a different category than the one into which he was born doesn’t make him crazy, no matter what the fever pitch of think-of-the-children might say. Instead, the system is crazy. And even though I wouldn’t choose the same way of coping with it, trying to make it work for you is a perfectly sane thing.

The Marcus Bachmann Gay Rumors: It’s the Principle of the Thing

I’ll admit it; I’m kind of fascinated by Michele Bachmann. It’s gotten to the point that those close to me are tired of hearing about all the crazy stuff she does.

Every time there’s a headline about some new cringeworthy gaffe she’s made or outlandish position she’s taken, my schadenfreude sense gets all tingly. I totally eat it up and click through and give the news outlet the eyeballs on their page that bring ad dollars that they were hoping to get by focusing on the most outlandish facets of the news in the first place.

But reading the story “Jon Stewart (with help from Jerry Seinfeld) mocks Marcus Bachmann’s gay therapy… as he ‘seems so gay,’” the usual glee I take in the absurdity of the Right vanished.

My first thought was: We’re not doing this. I don’t want to play this game. This is something they do. I like living on the moral high ground, and I want to stay there, thank you very much. No matter how odious the other side may be, no matter how appealing it is to think of giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Of course, as Michelle Cottle at the Daily Beast pointed out, this is

about more than critics lobbing generic bombs at a fiercely conservative presidential combatant. Michele Bachmann has long been one of the most aggressive anti-gay-marriage crusaders in politics, while Marcus runs a Christian-based therapy clinic accused of dabbling in “reparative therapy,” a controversial counseling technique premised on the notion that you can “pray away the gay.”

And there is something compelling about the turnabout here. If people like the Bachmanns didn’t insist that being gay was so horrifying, it wouldn’t be a big deal if he is. So it’s his own fault, too bad, so sad.

Also, the idea that someone is “profoundly antigay” out of gay panic makes a certain amount of sense.The idea that this is a form of protesting too much (and Shakespeare’s original opposite meaning be damned) is well-established. Popular culture has explored it: look at Karofsky bullying Kurt in Glee (or, I know I’m hung up on it, but seriously, Quinn’s mistreatment of Rachel. See skywarrior108’s The Truth About Quinn Fabray.)

But if Karofsky kissed Kurt and Quinn drew a picture of Rachel with hearts around it, where’s the smoking gun with Marcus Bachmann?

It’s his apparently “effeminate manner and ‘center-square gay’ voice” (Cottle). That’s right, they’re reading his sexuality off from his gender. The same way gender non-conforming people have been persecuted as sexual deviants with surprising consistency across time and space (though clearly not everywhere or everywhen).

Seriously? Sexuality doesn’t follow immediately from gender any more than either of them follow immediately from sex. If Marcus Bachmann is swishy, it doesn’t mean he likes men. The same people trying to call him out now have surely defended tough and supposedly “manly” women like Hillary Clinton against accusations of lesbianism, so how is this different?.

Judith Butler, in her 1993 book Bodies that Matter points out that “homophobia often operates through the attribution of a damaged, failed, or otherwise abject gender to homosexuals” (p. 238). People like Dan Savage and Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan would probably reject the idea that they’re homophobic (though at least a few queer theorists would disagree about Sullivan), but reading “failed” gender as a sign of homosexuality is the same thing.

That’s because it is based in the (heterosexist) idea that if you like someone of the “same” sex, it means you’re really sort of the “opposite sex” on the inside, because there can only really be cross-sex attraction. This argument is objectionable because it makes heterosexuality central and homosexuality a failed imitation.

Meghan Daum of the LA Times adds an interesting spin to this: “from the looks of things, it isn’t acting gay that Bachmann deplores; it’s gay acts. And there’s no evidence he’s broken his own rules about the latter.” Though problematic in assuming that there’s such a thing as “acting gay,” Daum’s piece usefully preserves the ways in which behaving a certain gendered way is distinct from having particular kinds of sex.

So even if Mr. Bachmann does really want to engage in gay sex—which we have no evidence of—the evidence that we do have points to him not actually doing it. Thus, “even if there were truth to the innuendo, how do you pin hypocrisy on someone who practices what he preaches?” (Daum).

The New York Times had a really interesting article about homosexuality, religion, and therapy recently that talked about the ways that both one’s sexuality and one’s religion tend to be integral parts of one’s identity. Gays assume you can just chuck your religion, and churches assume you can just chuck your gayness, but when people genuinely find both important to them, therapists are finding, the solution is exactly like Daum suggests Bachmann’s practice might be—you can have your desires or your gay identity, but maintain your religious identity by not acting on them. Food for thought, at least.

Self-loathing and unconfessed same-sex desire makes for gorgeously angsty and potentially hot fan fiction in which authors can really explore what it must be like to really want to have gay sex but be unable to reconcile it with your faith or your self-image (it’s a staple of the Quinn character in Rachel/Quinn fiction in the Glee fandom, and some of it is really beautifully done). But we don’t get to play with real people that way.

Okay, we do in Real Person Fiction (RPF). So if it’s really that important to these people, they can write a character study of a fictionalized Marcus Bachmann wracked with same-sex desire and crying himself to sleep at night. They can explore the darkness and pain of that place if it helps them reconcile the things that don’t make sense about his behavior, just like people do with other figures and characters.

But that isn’t news. It’s fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with asking these kinds of “what if?” questions, but it belongs on FanFiction.net or Archive of our Own or whatever political figure fan fiction LiveJournal community.

Because frankly, harassing someone on the basis of sex they do or don’t have, or sex they do or don’t want to have, isn’t okay, no matter who’s doing it.

Hey all, I might miss next week because I’m moving this weekend and then my mother-in-law (out-law?) will be here. But I’ll try.

On Gay Marriage

A blog about same-sex marriage was in the queue, but given the recent developments in New York it’s suddenly extra timely . . . so here it is now ahead of schedule.

I find that the straight people I know are way more excited about gay marriage than the people I know who might actually enter into one. Maybe it’s just the very queer lot I hang out with, and maybe I should just speak for myself: I am decidedly ambivalent about same-sex marriage.

“It must be admitted from the outset that there is something unfashionable, and perhaps untimely, about any questioning of marriage as a goal in gay politics.” After all, “at this point the only public arguing against gay marriage, it seems, are those homophobic dinosaurs,” the usual, selective-Leviticus-reading suspects, so “why join them?”

Michael Warner wrote this in 1999 (on pages 119-120 of his “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage“), but it’s still quite true. Robert McRuer points out in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability that, “according to the liberal consensus,” gay marriage “is not only ‘progressive’ but unequivocally a Good thing” (p. 79).

Despite the current gay marriage cheer fest, however, there are ways in which it’s not such “a Good thing.” After all, as Warner notes, “there were cogent reasons that the gay movement for decades refused to take the path on which it is now hell-bent,” and it’s not like these have gone away (p. 123). Warner lists a dozen reasons, but here are my two:

One, battling this one issue out in legislatures and courts is absolutely the wrong thing to be expending the entirety of activist energy and funding on. Achieving same-sex marriage seems to be eclipsing activism around AIDS and healthcare and repealing laws that criminalize consensual sex. These latter are far more important things than helping white, middle class people access the white, middle class privilege of property ownership and other financial benefits.

As McRuer points out, “most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry” (p. 82-3).

This sort of privilege tunnel vision didn’t have to happen. “The mere posing of the issue was a jolt. It made the heterosexuality of marriage visible, to many people, for the first time. It drew attention to the exclusions entailed by marriage, through provisions for inheritance, wrongful death actions, tax rates, and the like” (Warner p. 122).

That is, the discussion about gay marriage had great potential to really interrogate what this institution ought to mean, but ultimately the way it has gone down it “fails to challenge the bundling of privileges that have no necessary connection one to another, or to marriage; indeed, if successful, it will leave that bundling further entrenched in law” (Warner p. 143).

The fact is that the way we attach immigration benefits and health care access and all kinds of miscellaneous financial benefits to this institution has exactly nothing to do with whether people love each other and have a commitment, and this would have been a great time to hash out what we want marriage to be, but we didn’t.

Instead, the cry has been: We just want to be able to have the same private (but state-ratified) contract as anybody else, why must the state intervene to prevent us? Or, put differently: This heteronormative institution is great! It works! Let us in!

This, of course, begins to get at the second reason I’m not ready to board the Gay Marriage Express. I’m really not comfortable with perpetuating the state legitimation of relationships.

Among those dozen reasons Warner lists for not pursuing gay marriage are two that are relevant here: “queer thought both before and after Stonewall centered on the need to resist state regulation of sexuality”; “it especially resisted the notion that the state should be allowed to grant legitimacy to some kinds of consensual sex but not others or to confer respectability on some people’s sexuality but not others’” (123).

Contrary to these positions, pursuing gay marriage insists that it is exactly the state’s job to regulate and legitimate and make respectable people’s sexuality. The argument is that without state recognition couples are subject to deprivation, such that that recognition must be extended if there is to be equal protection under the law—and never you mind the fact that formal equality rarely translates into substantive equality unless you are those white, middle class, resource-having folks.

But here’s the problem: “squeezing gay couples into the legal sorting machine will only confirm the relevance of spousal status and leave unmarried queers”—or unmarried people in any other category—“looking more deviant before a legal system that can claim broader legitimacy” because it is inclusive of more and more people (Warner 143).

That is, “even though people think that marriage gives them validation, legitimacy, and recognition, they somehow think that it does so without invalidating, delegitimating, or stigmatizing other relations, needs, and desires” (Warner 133)—which clearly isn’t true.

Same-sex marriage perpetuates the privilege of a very narrow set of relationship configurations as legitimate and as having access to resources. That’s a problem. Also, by increasing the legitimacy of that position, it means that not participating is deviance by choice rather than normativity being denied to you.

However, there’s a flip side to this, which is among the some reasons I’m not ready to totally condemn same-sex marriage. If gay marriage is legal, refusal, on one hand, makes you deviant, but on the other it now means something, politically, to not get married. The same argument looks different when you look at it from this direction.

I’m not the only one to notice this. As RichardKimNYC tweeted (which came to me through an indeterminate chain of retweets): “Yay! Now my decision to never ever get married is a choice reflecting my belief in marriage’s banality. #NYM”

Or, also, Warner: “introducing the mere possibility of marriage would vastly broaden the meaning of gay couples’ refusal to marry. In fact, it would make gays’ rejection of marriage a more significant possibility than it is now, by making it a free act” (157-8). I think that this is compelling. Not compelling enough that this should be all we work toward, but compelling enough not to condemn the attempt altogether.

And then there’s the fourth reason. Though I don’t think trying to secure the rights was the best thing, and though other people are excluded, I’m not sure whether that means I should forego the rights on principle. Hospital visitation or social security or health insurance would be pretty nice. Everybody should have them, but given how they’re apportioned right now should I turn my back on them in a gesture that nobody will even be able to see?

In the end, I’m not going to rush out and get married (or civil unioned). I’m not going to march for it or throw money at it. But if it came down to it and I needed the resources state recognition provides, I think I’d do it. I’d feel a little guilty, but I’d do it.

So, You like Girls: Dianna Agron, Meet Adrienne Rich

So there I am, minding my own business the Sunday before last, when the Internet goes crazy. Or, rather, one of the corners of the Internet that I keep an eye on went crazy.

From D. Agron’s Tumblr at http://felldowntherabbithole.tumblr.com/post/6453072763

I’ll admit it: I have a Google alert set for Dianna Agron. It’s what I do these days when I like an actor (which others, I’ll never tell!). So when the actor in question—who’s female and heretofore evidently heterosexual (Achele shippers notwithstanding. Also, check out Urban Dictionary’s Acheleography definition; it’s hilarious!)—wore a “Likes Girls” t-shirt to perform a Glee Live show in Toronto, my inbox became a popular destination—15 news stories in the first 24 hours, then 16 more over the next 3 days (many thanks are due to threaded emails that it didn’t actually fill).

There were questions: Did Glee’s Dianna Agron come out as bisexual with a tshirt? and dry factual headlines: Glee’s Dianna Agron “Likes Girls” T Shirt in Toronto and (not-so) subtle digs at fans: Dianna Agron Wears “Likes Girls” T-Shirt, Gleeks Freak Out.

And there was squee. Oh dear God was there squee. Some of my favorites from the tumblr tag “dianna agron come out riot”:

angelsfallenknight: I AM DYING. JEEEEESUS. CAPS LOCK WON’T GO OFF. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! ‘I LIKE GIRLS’ AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

chikaru: so dianna agron likes womenin other news water is wet, pope is catholic etc

Then, about 12 hours after the first alerts had come through, the tone shifted. The second set of headlines included: Dianna Agron explains ‘likes girls’ t-shirt worn during live show and Dianna Agron Talks About Gay Issues.Basically, these stories said: “Ha ha, just kidding, she doesn’t have the gay. No worries!”

Along with this batch came Agron’s own essay, published at her tumblr, which is what the walking back of the gay speculation was drawing on—as far as I know, she hasn’t given any interviews on it yet. The piece was sort of a “gay pride month is really important because clearly it’s still not that awesome to be gay, so I’m going to stand up for gay rights” statement.

And honestly I still can’t decide how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s like, “Well, that’s easy for you to say. You get to go back to having heterosexual privilege when you take the shirt off.” But on the other hand, she is putting herself on the line in some sense, because she is choosing to stand with (and temporarily as) a category that’s socially devalued. And putting herself—her career, perhaps—“at risk” in that limited sense is certainly better than no sense at all.

But what really stood out to me about her essay was the logic by which she counted herself among those who like girls:

I love my family, my friends, my co-workers…and they all consist of girls AND boys. I do tell them that I love them. Yesterday, during our second show, Instead of wearing my usual shirt during “Born This Way” I decided to wear one that said “Likes Girls”. It should actually have read, “Loves Girls”, because I do. The women in my life give me things that the men in my life can’t. And vice-versa. No, I am not a lesbian, yet if I were, I hope that the people in my life could embrace it whole-heartedly. And let me tell you, I can easily spill (quite comfortably) what I admire, respect and think is beautiful about any of the women in my life. Piece of cake!

Last night, I wanted to do something to show my respect and love for the GLBT community. Support that people could actually see. Which is why I decided to change my shirt for the show.

Reading this, I had a total sense of déjà vu. I’d read this before:

I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support [ . . .].

The above quote is from Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (from the version in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, p.239), and the resemblance is sort of uncanny.

There’s the same move to relate loving and supporting women with having same-sex sex—deliberate and political on Rich’s part, not entirely elaborated on Agron’s.

At the same time, both authors also insist that they aren’t identical. Agron says “I love girls. Just not for fucking.” Rich distinguishes between the above “lesbian continuum” and “lesbian existence,” which she defines as “both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence”—meaning that this is where we get literal, actual lesbians (p. 239).

Rich, then, would argue that Agron is actually sort of a lesbian, sex-free love of women notwithstanding, since she’s on the lesbian continuum.Indeed, Rich wanted to “consider the possibility that all women [ . . . ] exist on a lesbian continuum,” because this would let us “see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not” (p. 240).

What Rich wanted to do in the essay, as the title suggests, was figure heterosexuality not as a “natural” disposition—either for all women, in which case lesbians are unnatural, or for most women, which makes lesbians natural (whatever that means) but unusual—but something that had to be imposed to make women identify with men’s interests rather than their own (which has its own set of problematic assumptions—I’ll get there).

She questioned “why species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other,” contending that, however related they seem to us now, there was nothing inevitable about this outcome (p. 232).

Ultimately, through proposing this continuum, Rich wanted to help women “feel the depth and breadth of woman identification and woman bonding that has run like a continuous though stifled theme through the heterosexual experience,” with the goal being “that this would become increasingly a politically activating impulse, not simply a validation of personal lives” (p. 227).

That is, it isn’t just to get women to come together and identify as or with lesbians for a round of kumbayah, but to further feminist action. That part remains unrealized in Agron’s rendition, and that possibility is a danger Rich herself realized about the term.

Rich wrote an addendum to “Compulsory Heterosexuality” the following year–when it was to be anthologized in Powers of Desire, in order to respond to some queries from the editors of that volume–in which she addressed this issue: “My own problem with the phrase is that it can be, is, used by women who have not yet begun to examine the privileges and solipsisms of heterosexuality, as a safe way to describe their felt connections with women, without having to share in the risks and threats of lesbian existence” (249).

This definitely gets at what makes me uncomfortable about Agron’s statement.She can be edgy and wear a “Likes Girls” shirt as a way to proclaim her love for the women in her life because she has enough privilege–as heterosexual, but also as white, as normatively gendered, as meeting standards of attractiveness, as wealthy, and as a celebrity–to insulate her from what that would entail were she someone else.

Rich wanted to make it “less possible to read, write, or teach from a perspective of unexamined heterocentricity” (p. 228), but 30 years down the line being unexamined is clearly still possible. Certainly, Agron’s post did not succeed at really examining her own positionality, since the larger argument is grounded in a presumption that straight people ought to be nicer to those poor queers.

I’m sure she doesn’t realize it, but this relies on an assumption of heterosexual superiority. They are apparently in a position to tolerate us because we are the lesser objects of tolerance in the equation (see Wendy Brown’s2006 book Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire).

This isn’t to pick on Agron. These are things I think about because it’s my job. These are ways of seeing I am trained in. Her job and her training are something else. She did ok. She really did. For a young person (though, I have to remind myself, not as much younger than me as it feels like) whose fame has led to her opinion—about anything—being news, she’s doing pretty well.

But it is to temper the praise she’s getting for being SO progressive. Seriously, you’re going to ask “Is Dianna Agron more supportive of LGBT rights than the rest of the “Glee” cast?” on account of one blog post? And this blog post? She’s not some kind of new gay patron saint.

I’m also not trying to hold up Rich as the true homosaint. I will be the first to tell you that there are a number of problems with her piece—I was, literally, when we read this in my Queer Theory class a couple years ago. Rich wants to open the arms of lesbian feminism to heterosexual women and express that, though heterosexuals get more privilege, it’s the structure of the system that makes that so and not necessarily heterosexual woman going around acting to oppress, which is great.

But, like many a second-wave feminist, Rich doesn’t get that men aren’t the enemy. They benefit from the unequal distribution of power, sure, but they don’t completely control it. In fact, men can be allies to change things—just like Rich argues that heterosexual women can.

Rich seems to mistake the situation as one in which men are running the system in a smoky room somewhere, trying to trick women into heterosexually identifying with men’s interests rather than their own true female/lesbian continuum interests. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, not least because women don’t inherently care about the same things.

Indeed, the assumption that all women share interests simply by virtue of their membership in the category demonstrates that at that point Rich did not understand her own race or class privilege all that well—I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she does now. She makes offhand references to the importance of race and class, but they aren’t a substitute for a thorough and integrated understanding of how gender and sexuality are racialized.

In the end, what’s interesting about both Agron’s essay and Rich’s is that they both want to trouble or push the boundaries of categories but end up reinforcing them instead.

Agron wore a tshirt that was meant (when it was printed) to indicate same-sex attraction to proclaim both her platonic love of the women in her life and her support for those who do have such attractions. That’s a blurring of boundaries that had a great deal of potential to make things queer–but she contains it by making an unequivocal statement that “I am not a lesbian.” Why not refuse the question altogether as irrelevant? Or, why not refuse the privilege or the position of superior tolerate-er of the tolerated?

Rich wanted to insist that lesbians and heterosexual women had something in common, breaking down the hetero/homo divide, which again had potential to reorient us away from hard binaries to something more complex. However, in recognizing only hetero and homo–and especially in holding on so tightly to male vs. female as precisely an antagonism–she stopped short of the radical intervention her piece could have made to thinking systemically about power, inequality, and change.

Putting these two pieces side-by-side, then, produces an interesting look at how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go.