The art of being gay, are we sufficiently gay? • The mere

Titre : The art of being gay
Auteur.ice : David Halperin
Editions : Gallimard
Date of publication: June 19. Similarly, 2024
Genre : Essay

Halperin is interested in a very particular art, The art of being gay. However, But what is he talking about, exactly? Similarly, The university researcher tries to understand how the collective and cultural socialization of a certain American homosexuality is created. Similarly, Thus. Furthermore, he seeks to understand why, for example, gay men in 2025 can read cultural works produced before decades before, works which, a priori, represent, a priori, nothing homosexual in its content, and which are nevertheless decoded, and even claimed as objects of gay pride.

The art of being gay is a complex and ambitious book, initially published in the United States of America in 2014. Moreover, 530 pages of art being gay, we sufficiently writing in fly legs, 100 pages of notes. Moreover, It is a sum that is not intended as such, neither by his content nor by its author. Halperin is clear: everything remains to be done. He is not interested in gesturein the ways of being, in the voice. He is not even really interested in Lady Gaga, the contemporary queer cultural scene or the music hall. No, all that interests him is Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.

The 500 pages of the book revolve around a film, no, a scene from a film. Mildred Pierce. therefore, released in 1945, in black and white, directed by Michael Curtiz, in which the eponymous character, played by Joan Crawford has a heated discussion with his daughter, Veda. This scene, this film, taken up, parodied, is the heart of his project. Meticulously. page after page, Halperin will explain to us why a scene art being gay, we sufficiently from a 1945 film where two women, a mother and her daughter, are arguing, is a treasure of a certain gay culture.

To do this. Halperin, himself a gay, of a seventy-year-old, will trace the history of American homosexuality in the twentieth century, revolving around these fundamental events that were the riots of Stonewall, at the end of the 1960s, where gay people claimed their right to exist in the face of the police. These demonstrations allowed many homosexuals to “free themselves”. Some say that “gay” art was then doomed to disappear. In fact. why keep gay codes hidden in family works, mainly intended for a heterosexual audience, while everything was now possible, and without hiding: getting married, kissing or standing by hand in the street.

It is there that the search for halperin becomes fascinating when it details. basically, two gay “movements”: there are those who want art being gay, we sufficiently to do at all costs like the “heterosexuals”, to assimilate, to make family, that the “effeminate” before Stonewall take the tangent and disappear. And there are the others. those who, despite Stonewall, continue to claim deviant, latent, a culture homosexuality campwhich claims the injury, excessively quips, in fact too much to never lower your head (or only to suck).

The art of being gay is a masterful work of Halperin. which allows, from a scene from a film from the 1940s, to open the heart of American gay cultures, to dissect it, while never trying to complexify excessive, or to simplify the subject. It is a work written by an academician. an academic, pro-Queer in his remarks, with a certain blissful gullible perhaps for this culture, and which takes a position for the bizarre, the indecent, the camp in the fight against the hetero-normativity of relations and the world.

art being gay, we sufficiently