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radiantfractureWelcome to the first Muñoz post of the day! If you're looking for the post where we draw fanart of Muñoz and Blackbonnet in a big queer hug, that's the next one.
This is part three of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz. We're looking at Chapter Three, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia.”
Note that this discussion of sexual avant-gardes includes mentions of sex work, AIDS, and police brutality.
* * * * * *
Remember how I mentioned Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water last week? This week’s chapter is all about it! I either had no idea that was the case or I forgot it was so.
(Somehow I no longer have my copy of Delany’s book. This makes me grumpy.)
In fact, Muñoz has four main texts, or objects of scrutiny, in this chapter: Delany’s memoir; a comparison of two gay clubs in 90s New York; political stickering; and violent police response to a protest march at the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard. He unifies these disparate texts as "sites of mass gatherings, performances that can be understood as defiantly public and glimpses into an ensemble of social actors performing a queer world" (49).
For historical context, it would be useful to remember that in the 1990s, with AIDS as the excuse, there was a huge crackdown on gay men’s public sex culture such as bathhouses and strip clubs. In New York, this happened under – yes, you guessed it – then-Mayor Giuliani.
*When I speak sarcastically here of health measures, I am not making any analogy to pandemic measures: I approve of pandemic measures and wish that stricter rules were still in force. Covid transmission is increased by gathering in groups and breathing on each other. HIV transmission is not. The attack on gay gathering places was much more a punitive "santization" of gay culture than any kind of health measure.
* * * * *
The Future is in the Present
Muñoz’s core premise, drawn from C.L.R. James’ analysis of factory culture, is that right now, in the present, there exist glimpses of what a queer utopia could look like in the future.
So we have moved from the idea of looking to the past for utopian visions, to looking at what exists in the present and asking "what right here could we use in our vision of the future?"
(My own example of “the future in the present” might be the pandemic responses in my neighborhood, city, and circle of colleagues. Pandemic response led to the addition of a shelter cluster for unhoused people and to the lifting of restrictions on sleeping in parks. There are many critiques and caveats available about these actions, which were insufficient and sometimes begrudging, but these two moves were in themselves productive rather than destructive, and they gave us glimpses of our ability to do things better.
Like Munoz, I'm not saying "look at my great city," but rather "this thing happened; it was real; therefore, it could happen again.)
Delany
From Delany, Muñoz draws two primary ideas: "seeing the whole of our [queer] masses," and a contrast of relations vs. networks.
Muñoz begins by considering the ideas of visibility and occlusion in Delany, examining several scenes: Delany’s description of the “happening” he attended, where he expected a plenitude of experience but instead encountered an aesthetics of obscurity and constraint; Delany’s half-glimpsed vision of the public sex available at the trucks; and the illumination of the bathhouse scene, where queer culture was suddenly visible to Delany en masse (49-51).
The first concept Muñoz offers us, from Delany’s revelation at the bathhouse, is “seeing the whole of our masses,” or being able to witness the size, extent, and complexity of queer communities. This bolsters queers against accepting as reality the shallowness of mainstream straight images of those communities, or the distortions more privileged queer communities impose upon themselves in order to access the mainstream.
Sex Clubs
The second concept Muñoz draws from Delany is a contrast between community connections as relations vs. connections as networking. Muñoz illustrates this through a contrast of two queer New York strip clubs, the Gaiety and the Magic Touch. The Gaiety, once a long-standing hub of erotic socializing, voluntarily “sanitized” itself in response to crackdowns on queer culture due to the AIDS epidemic.
(I'd like to pause and reflect on that for a moment. A community is besieged by a disease: the response is to attack that community’s gathering places and communal structures. How nefarious. How typical.)
This sanitization also took the form of hiring primarily white dancers with idealized body types and prohibiting any contact between dancers and patrons within the Gaiety. The Magic Touch in Queens, in contrast, hired mostly dancers of colour, celebrated a variety of performance styles and music, and allowed much more intimate connections between dancers and patrons (58-59).
In both cases, some dancers negotiated sex work with some patrons, but in the case of the Gaiety this took place as “networking” – they could make a contact at the Gaiety, but sex had to take place elsewhere, in an isolated / atomized context; whereas at the Magic Touch there was a “VIP Lounge” (the basement) where sex could take place (59), meaning that the space created the opportunity for “relations,” for sex work not as isolated acts but as part of the activities of the community. Doing sex work did not remove the dancer from acceptable, sanitized public gay culture.
Again, Muñoz includes critiques of sex work and age, racialized, and classed differences between patrons and dancers, so he isn’t idealizing sex work or clubs that allow it; he’s pointing out the breakdown of existing community relations and alternate economies under “health restrictions.”
Stickering
As his next example of queer performance, Muñoz talks about political stickering. I appreciated this consideration of stickering as performance and as pedagogy. (I was going to say I’m more a sticker person than a striptease person, but in fact I have done both; still I appreciate his appreciation for the smaller public gestures.)
Muñoz praises a queer stickering campaign he observed. The campaign critiqued homonormativity and the culture of surveillance evolving in 90s / 2000s New York. The group seemed to be decentralized and to have no fixed name. Muñoz notes that the sticker campaign responds to “modalities of difference that include race, class, gender, and sexuality” (61) rather than the whitewashed campaigns of gay culture trying to make itself acceptably “clean” for white middle class consumption.
The stickers point out “the state’s machinations of power,” to passersby, providing “counterpublicity” (62). I like that Muñoz notices that the stickers, though they are standalone objects, “solicit a response,” in the form of tearing down the stickers or writing on them (61).
Mourning Through Militancy
“The point of seeing the whole of our masses did not become salient to me until I witnessed … an uprising that was put down with brutal force by the New York City Police Department,” writes Muñoz in the final section of this chapter (63).
How does it feel to read that, in 2022?
In 1998, 5000 people protested in New York over the murder of Matthew Shepard. Despite the numbers, “police insisted that this massive group walk exclusively on the sidewalk,” and since this was impossible, “people surged onto the streets,” feeling for once the force of their collectivity: “it became a moment when queer people, frustrated and sick of all the violence they had endured, saw our masses” (64, emphasis mine).
Of course, the police used this contrived disobedience and real resistance as an excuse to become violent. Muñoz’s outrage is palpable as he lists the unjust and violent actions of the police in response to a peaceful protest.
And they are, of course, outrageous actions: they always have been. To Muñoz, they seem to be unusual actions; I hope now, at least, no one thinks of police violence as unusual, and more people recognize it as policy against what Muñoz calls "citizen-subjects ... debased within the ... public sphere" (56).
(I notice that Muñoz uses a lot of passive voice when he talks about police violence, and I wonder if that’s an intentional echoing of official speech or an unconscious one.)
Nevertheless, Muñoz finds an echo of utopia in this moment: although “the utopian promise of our public performance was responded to with shattering force,” he concludes by asserting that “even though this impromptu rebellion was overcome easily by the state, the activist anger, a productive, generative anger, let those assembled in rage glean a queer future within a repressive heteronormative present” (64).
I don’t know, Muñoz. I hope so.
In affinity to his perspective, I think of Jesmyn Ward’s “Of Witness and Respair,” in which seeing the mass Black Lives Matter uprisings was so healing for her, though she knows as wellanyone all the possible critiques of such moments.
Notes and Reflections
Of all the chapters so far, the echoes of our present are strongest in this chapter for me.
This is because the chapter is about policing: of queer sex cultures, from inside and outside; of public spaces; and of public protest. This policing has only increased with the advent of the Internet, and the substitution of networking for relations has spread into many other communities.
At the risk of sounding incredibly precious, until I read this chapter I did not realize, even having had so little direct connection to the protests at Ferguson and since, how viscerally those moments still resided in my body.
I had very little immediate connection to these events of brutality – I saw them in footage, I attended rallies and protests here, I knelt with others on the legislative lawn, masked and spaced out by six feet – but I was very far away from the specific events, and never at high risk myself -- and similarly distanced by privilege from acts of brutality in my own city.
I have put my body into other contexts of danger during protest, but always with the knowledge that this particular body, or the body it appeared to be, made that gesture safer. Yet those acts of brutality echo still in even this distanced and privileged body. What tools do I have to even imagine what it is like for people who were there, or who have had direct experience of police brutality?
(My main experience of direct police aggression against my own protesting body was pretty trivial, definitely inflected by privilege, and largely pointless. I wasn’t even really afraid, though in retrospect I probably should have been, since we were alone in a parking garage for part of the time.)
I appreciate how Muñoz always acknowledges the available criticism and then shows how this criticism is beside the point.
Something I appreciate a great deal about Muñoz is his ability to reply to critique with "Yes, and yet."
For example, Muñoz makes sure to include critics of Delaney, though he makes it clear that he thinks they have weird takes.
When I took an honours seminar to bump up my theory for graduate school, we must have read one of these critiques that Muñoz mentions. I clearly remember the critic’s objection to Delaney’s ecstatic claim that there was a kind of equal mirror-world of homosexuality, as extensive as heterosexuality. The critic’s point (and, weirdly, my professor’s) was “no, there isn’t,” which is not wrong, but also bizarrely reductive; there have been and are rich and extensive cultures of queerness. It feels like a very straight reading to me now – if straight people didn’t see it, it must not have been there.
Anyway, the extended quotes from Motion made me want to re-read that vivid and indelible book.
In 2022, this chapter ends up reading bleaker than the first two. Though Muñoz sets out looking for the utopian future in the present, there are other, grimmer futures also visible – including parts of our own moment. If you are worried about state violence, surveillance, and the destruction of community relations – yeah. That hasn't become more utopian.
Anyway, on to the communal queer visions of Our Flag Means Death. Let's see what it can do for us.
{rf}
This is part three of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz. We're looking at Chapter Three, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia.”
Note that this discussion of sexual avant-gardes includes mentions of sex work, AIDS, and police brutality.
* * * * * *
Remember how I mentioned Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water last week? This week’s chapter is all about it! I either had no idea that was the case or I forgot it was so.
(Somehow I no longer have my copy of Delany’s book. This makes me grumpy.)
In fact, Muñoz has four main texts, or objects of scrutiny, in this chapter: Delany’s memoir; a comparison of two gay clubs in 90s New York; political stickering; and violent police response to a protest march at the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard. He unifies these disparate texts as "sites of mass gatherings, performances that can be understood as defiantly public and glimpses into an ensemble of social actors performing a queer world" (49).
For historical context, it would be useful to remember that in the 1990s, with AIDS as the excuse, there was a huge crackdown on gay men’s public sex culture such as bathhouses and strip clubs. In New York, this happened under – yes, you guessed it – then-Mayor Giuliani.
*When I speak sarcastically here of health measures, I am not making any analogy to pandemic measures: I approve of pandemic measures and wish that stricter rules were still in force. Covid transmission is increased by gathering in groups and breathing on each other. HIV transmission is not. The attack on gay gathering places was much more a punitive "santization" of gay culture than any kind of health measure.
* * * * *
The Future is in the Present
Muñoz’s core premise, drawn from C.L.R. James’ analysis of factory culture, is that right now, in the present, there exist glimpses of what a queer utopia could look like in the future.
So we have moved from the idea of looking to the past for utopian visions, to looking at what exists in the present and asking "what right here could we use in our vision of the future?"
(My own example of “the future in the present” might be the pandemic responses in my neighborhood, city, and circle of colleagues. Pandemic response led to the addition of a shelter cluster for unhoused people and to the lifting of restrictions on sleeping in parks. There are many critiques and caveats available about these actions, which were insufficient and sometimes begrudging, but these two moves were in themselves productive rather than destructive, and they gave us glimpses of our ability to do things better.
Like Munoz, I'm not saying "look at my great city," but rather "this thing happened; it was real; therefore, it could happen again.)
Delany
From Delany, Muñoz draws two primary ideas: "seeing the whole of our [queer] masses," and a contrast of relations vs. networks.
Muñoz begins by considering the ideas of visibility and occlusion in Delany, examining several scenes: Delany’s description of the “happening” he attended, where he expected a plenitude of experience but instead encountered an aesthetics of obscurity and constraint; Delany’s half-glimpsed vision of the public sex available at the trucks; and the illumination of the bathhouse scene, where queer culture was suddenly visible to Delany en masse (49-51).
The first concept Muñoz offers us, from Delany’s revelation at the bathhouse, is “seeing the whole of our masses,” or being able to witness the size, extent, and complexity of queer communities. This bolsters queers against accepting as reality the shallowness of mainstream straight images of those communities, or the distortions more privileged queer communities impose upon themselves in order to access the mainstream.
Sex Clubs
The second concept Muñoz draws from Delany is a contrast between community connections as relations vs. connections as networking. Muñoz illustrates this through a contrast of two queer New York strip clubs, the Gaiety and the Magic Touch. The Gaiety, once a long-standing hub of erotic socializing, voluntarily “sanitized” itself in response to crackdowns on queer culture due to the AIDS epidemic.
(I'd like to pause and reflect on that for a moment. A community is besieged by a disease: the response is to attack that community’s gathering places and communal structures. How nefarious. How typical.)
This sanitization also took the form of hiring primarily white dancers with idealized body types and prohibiting any contact between dancers and patrons within the Gaiety. The Magic Touch in Queens, in contrast, hired mostly dancers of colour, celebrated a variety of performance styles and music, and allowed much more intimate connections between dancers and patrons (58-59).
In both cases, some dancers negotiated sex work with some patrons, but in the case of the Gaiety this took place as “networking” – they could make a contact at the Gaiety, but sex had to take place elsewhere, in an isolated / atomized context; whereas at the Magic Touch there was a “VIP Lounge” (the basement) where sex could take place (59), meaning that the space created the opportunity for “relations,” for sex work not as isolated acts but as part of the activities of the community. Doing sex work did not remove the dancer from acceptable, sanitized public gay culture.
Again, Muñoz includes critiques of sex work and age, racialized, and classed differences between patrons and dancers, so he isn’t idealizing sex work or clubs that allow it; he’s pointing out the breakdown of existing community relations and alternate economies under “health restrictions.”
Stickering
As his next example of queer performance, Muñoz talks about political stickering. I appreciated this consideration of stickering as performance and as pedagogy. (I was going to say I’m more a sticker person than a striptease person, but in fact I have done both; still I appreciate his appreciation for the smaller public gestures.)
Muñoz praises a queer stickering campaign he observed. The campaign critiqued homonormativity and the culture of surveillance evolving in 90s / 2000s New York. The group seemed to be decentralized and to have no fixed name. Muñoz notes that the sticker campaign responds to “modalities of difference that include race, class, gender, and sexuality” (61) rather than the whitewashed campaigns of gay culture trying to make itself acceptably “clean” for white middle class consumption.
The stickers point out “the state’s machinations of power,” to passersby, providing “counterpublicity” (62). I like that Muñoz notices that the stickers, though they are standalone objects, “solicit a response,” in the form of tearing down the stickers or writing on them (61).
Mourning Through Militancy
“The point of seeing the whole of our masses did not become salient to me until I witnessed … an uprising that was put down with brutal force by the New York City Police Department,” writes Muñoz in the final section of this chapter (63).
How does it feel to read that, in 2022?
In 1998, 5000 people protested in New York over the murder of Matthew Shepard. Despite the numbers, “police insisted that this massive group walk exclusively on the sidewalk,” and since this was impossible, “people surged onto the streets,” feeling for once the force of their collectivity: “it became a moment when queer people, frustrated and sick of all the violence they had endured, saw our masses” (64, emphasis mine).
Of course, the police used this contrived disobedience and real resistance as an excuse to become violent. Muñoz’s outrage is palpable as he lists the unjust and violent actions of the police in response to a peaceful protest.
And they are, of course, outrageous actions: they always have been. To Muñoz, they seem to be unusual actions; I hope now, at least, no one thinks of police violence as unusual, and more people recognize it as policy against what Muñoz calls "citizen-subjects ... debased within the ... public sphere" (56).
(I notice that Muñoz uses a lot of passive voice when he talks about police violence, and I wonder if that’s an intentional echoing of official speech or an unconscious one.)
Nevertheless, Muñoz finds an echo of utopia in this moment: although “the utopian promise of our public performance was responded to with shattering force,” he concludes by asserting that “even though this impromptu rebellion was overcome easily by the state, the activist anger, a productive, generative anger, let those assembled in rage glean a queer future within a repressive heteronormative present” (64).
I don’t know, Muñoz. I hope so.
In affinity to his perspective, I think of Jesmyn Ward’s “Of Witness and Respair,” in which seeing the mass Black Lives Matter uprisings was so healing for her, though she knows as wellanyone all the possible critiques of such moments.
Notes and Reflections
Of all the chapters so far, the echoes of our present are strongest in this chapter for me.
This is because the chapter is about policing: of queer sex cultures, from inside and outside; of public spaces; and of public protest. This policing has only increased with the advent of the Internet, and the substitution of networking for relations has spread into many other communities.
At the risk of sounding incredibly precious, until I read this chapter I did not realize, even having had so little direct connection to the protests at Ferguson and since, how viscerally those moments still resided in my body.
I had very little immediate connection to these events of brutality – I saw them in footage, I attended rallies and protests here, I knelt with others on the legislative lawn, masked and spaced out by six feet – but I was very far away from the specific events, and never at high risk myself -- and similarly distanced by privilege from acts of brutality in my own city.
I have put my body into other contexts of danger during protest, but always with the knowledge that this particular body, or the body it appeared to be, made that gesture safer. Yet those acts of brutality echo still in even this distanced and privileged body. What tools do I have to even imagine what it is like for people who were there, or who have had direct experience of police brutality?
(My main experience of direct police aggression against my own protesting body was pretty trivial, definitely inflected by privilege, and largely pointless. I wasn’t even really afraid, though in retrospect I probably should have been, since we were alone in a parking garage for part of the time.)
I appreciate how Muñoz always acknowledges the available criticism and then shows how this criticism is beside the point.
Something I appreciate a great deal about Muñoz is his ability to reply to critique with "Yes, and yet."
For example, Muñoz makes sure to include critics of Delaney, though he makes it clear that he thinks they have weird takes.
When I took an honours seminar to bump up my theory for graduate school, we must have read one of these critiques that Muñoz mentions. I clearly remember the critic’s objection to Delaney’s ecstatic claim that there was a kind of equal mirror-world of homosexuality, as extensive as heterosexuality. The critic’s point (and, weirdly, my professor’s) was “no, there isn’t,” which is not wrong, but also bizarrely reductive; there have been and are rich and extensive cultures of queerness. It feels like a very straight reading to me now – if straight people didn’t see it, it must not have been there.
Anyway, the extended quotes from Motion made me want to re-read that vivid and indelible book.
In 2022, this chapter ends up reading bleaker than the first two. Though Muñoz sets out looking for the utopian future in the present, there are other, grimmer futures also visible – including parts of our own moment. If you are worried about state violence, surveillance, and the destruction of community relations – yeah. That hasn't become more utopian.
Anyway, on to the communal queer visions of Our Flag Means Death. Let's see what it can do for us.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2022-04-05 08:39 pm (UTC)Have you read "A Paradise Built In Hell"? There's a similar theme of disruption as an opening through which a utopian future can be imagined.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 05:04 am (UTC)Right? It was a hard read.
I have not! Tell me more.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 10:45 am (UTC)