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Okay, everyone knows who Harvey Milk is by now. Back in the day, only people "in the know" or who were from the Bay Area had seen the wonderful documentary about him, "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk." But once Sean Penn became Harvey Milk, Milk became a celebrity in his own right. So it isn't a huge surprise that along side Stephen Hawking, Ted Kennedy, and Desmond Tutu, Harvey Milk will be posthumously honored with a Medal of Freedom.
The White House - Blog Post - 2009 Medal of Freedom Recipients.
But what if Milk's incredibly brave insistence that he would live his life as an out gay man and that the very process of coming out will set gays free was a trap? What if, without realizing it, Milk and an entire generation of gay liberationists did not increase freedom, but the sexual imprisonment of a rigid and binary sexual identity politics?
These are the rather perverse questions that Michel Foucault sets out to examine in his
History of Sexuality. Foucault suggests that such "liberation" politics do not transcend oppression, but are in fact within systems of oppression. Judith Butler continues Foucault's insistence that identity is not liberation, but a dead end, a fracturous, disasterous dead end in her
Gender Trouble.
The basic point of these theorists is that identity politics are a trap- whether it's about liberating gays or women or Blacks. Identity politics promise liberation, but in fact often just make more "real" the very categories of oppression upon which they're based. In other words, by making "gays" real, Milk helped make "straights" safe. One is either gay or straight. Straight men don't have to "come out" because we all know that they don't really have homoerotic desires or find the anus pleasurable or have sexual encounters with other men (even if they do). As a group, straight people exist without outing, but also without a lot of critical analysis of what they really do and really desire. For the most parts, straights are an unmarked category- hardly worthy of observation. That's why when I first started teaching "Sociology of Hetoersexuality" it was considered one of the 10 stupidest courses in America by the ultra-conservative
National Review. How stupid? There's no sociology to heterosexuality. It's "natural" and not worthy of investigating.
Further, as Butler points out, the "trouble" with identity politics as a path of liberation is that you must end up in endless wars of definition: who gets to claim "gay" as a status? who is a "woman" in need of feminism? Is a gay man who is also attracted to a woman really gay? Is a woman who was born a man really a woman?
The real result of "gay liberation" has not been a sexual or gender identity liberation, but rather a locking down of categories. In the past twenty years, Americans have returned to an earlier sexology notion of desire. Like the Victorians, we believe no one chooses to be gay (or straight), but that such desires are written on the body- visible through genetic testing or the size of your hypothalomus or the length of your fingers. Furthermore, heterosexual rituals and behaviors have come to dominate gay culture as well.
Harvey Milk's dream that gay liberation would liberate all of us to be more open about our complicated and messy desires turns out to have had the opposite effect. Now everyone--gay and straight-- is supposed to want to confine their sexual impulses to marriage.
Perhaps Foucault and Butler were right and identity politics are the logical Yang to the Ying of oppressive sexual and gender hierarchies? Perhaps if Milk were still around, he would have put gay liberation aside to be a radical fairie or a sexual anarchist of some sort. I'd like to believe that he would have never succumbed to the sort of sexual repressiveness of gay marriage and monogramy as the only model for organizing desire.
