Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997.*

The central claim of this book is that since Stonewall, whatever it is that has formed and shaped gay culture has transformed. Well, of course; such a thing is inevitable when the people that make up a culture move from being hidden and shameful to being public and proud. Harris's argument, though, is that such gay cultural artifacts as diva worship, camp, drag, kink, and pornographic film and literature have become inversions of their former selves. Whereas gay men once worshiped Hollywood divas for the strength and wisdom in their over-the-top performances, now those divas are lampooned. Whereas porn directors edited sex scenes such that the rhythm of the cuts replicated the sexual experience in the point of the view of the men having sex, now video-porn is structured with extended takes that create (rather than replicate) a distant, voyeuristic experience.

These transformations are for Harris lamentations, but complexly so. For much of the book, it seems he's a kid of gay Andy Rooney wondering where the good, simple times of the 50s and 60s went. It's almost as though he's sad we've fought so hard to be assimilated into the mainstream. "[A]s oppression decreases," he writes, "[t]he unfortunate consequence will be that our need to produce art will begin to wane, and we will feel less inclined to assert ourselves as the proverbial tastemakers of our society" (7).

It's a ridiculous claim, but one thing he's right about is that gay culture seems stuck (well, U.S. culture seems stuck; and that's really one of the problems with these essays: how much of porno's POV transformations can be seen as a result of increased gay liberation, and how much are really just a factor of the switch from film to video?) in a kind of perpetual adolescence. Harris twins the coming-out narrative with the coming-of-age narrative, and for him the surplus of such novels since 1980 has kept gay literature in a kind of thematic rut, or as he terms it, "an emotionally stagnant state of euphoria." "Homosexuals," he writes, "are not permanent intellectual convalescents," and while it's a good point to make, Harris doesn't try to locate any means of salvation for gay culture. Re-adopting the poses and practices of our pre-Stonewall culture of fear and exile isn't any kind of solution.