Oh my god this fork in my eye is so much better than reading about PoMo bullshit "queerness".

Really? This piece irked me on so many levels. Especially when compared to Christopher Bram's concurrent piece that covered much the same terrain of the 'assimilation crisis' without as much of Halperin's essentializing and Utopianism.

I mean, I'm as sorry as anyone that people seemingly aren't reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots, but yeah, if I have to hear queerness or gay culture compared to "surfaces" or "indeterminate signifiers" (Warhol's fucking glitter Shoes) one more time I'm going to smash a keyboard.

Aaaanyway, my takeaway:
Old hipster academic upset that gay men aren't identifying purely through structuralism anymore.

I suspect many homosexuals are more interested in living the lfe they want than being reduced to objects of style.

I never used the word 'gay' for myself, even though our commune's approval of it as the 'official' word for same sex guys is what cemented that word in place in the media way back in the Stonewall riot days. The women's communes wouldn't go along with it and preferred to be called 'dyke' or 'lesbian'. But they were ignored by the media because, after all, they were just women. It was a choice between gay or 'homophone', 'homophile', etc. - you get the point? As if to live up to the word so many of the personalities portrayed in the media known as 'gay' portray themselves and go along with being superficial, ditzy, tra la la, space cases, etc. I do not want to be thought of as the same as Joe Sixpack nor Brucie Femmquean, I want them to move over so that social awareness can get past them. The whole gay term is similar to the 'n' word conundrum. First it was negros, then spades, then blacks, and now african-americans. As if Americans have an attention span that last through that many syllables. I can remember when calling someone an african or an afro would be sure to get you into a fight. Now it is just a liberal code word for people we should feel sorry for. What's wrong with 'queer'? It means that I ain't the same as you and don't want to be.