CHAPTER 1

Some Boys' Romance

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Track 1: Near the beginning of the American television show Queer as Folk,there is a Moment. Brian, the cynical advertising executive, has left thereigning dance club to meet his friends for the drive home. He was beingfellated in the "back room," but he got bored. Meanwhile, Justin approachesthe gay clubs for the first time. He is seventeen and an aspiring(high school) artist. It is his First Night Out. Brian is about to jump into hisjeep with his friends when he sees Justin. The young man emerges like a divinityfrom a cloud of golden steam. The camera makes a snap, swervingzoom into Brian's face. A strobe flashes. A sound effect: low and indistinct,something buried down inside a dance hit. Cut back to Justin. Then toBrian, who is hit by the strobe and the sound effect again. The street is adance floor. Noticing Brian at last, Justin leans against a lamppost and staresback at him. So of course Brian approaches him and of course the two roaroff in Brian's jeep to his magnificent loft, leaving the friends to find anotherway home.

The Moment is the assurance of desire, cruising-and-hooking-up combined.It is also the sacrament of true love. In that suspended instant,Mr. Right meets Mr. Right. If the search for Mr. Right has lasted only minutesrather than years, and if his rightness persists for scant hours ratherthan a lifetime, still the moment of erotic connection remains an episodein the melodrama of true love. Any given trick may turn out to be a soulmate.Any dance tune may become "our song." Brian's friend Mike remarksin a voice-over just before the Moment between Brian and Justin: "Knowingthat at any moment you might see him—the most beautiful man whoever lived." The most beautiful man who ever lived is the steam-haloed godmeant for you.

Track 2: In the mid-1990s, Sandra Bernhard released a remake of Sylvester'sdisco hit, "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)." Sylvester's original tells thestory of a dance-floor encounter that leads back to a home and its eroticpossibilities. Hot kisses in the dark, the right background beats: you feelreal good—you feel "real." Bernhard rewrites the disco tune as a balladabout coming out in the Castro in the 1970s. Her version opens with straypiano chords. Bernhard hums a dedication to (invocation of?) Sylvester.Then the kick of the bass and drums: time to dance. The lyrics in Bernhard'sversion fill in narrative details, but the plot of rapture remains.

    It's your first night out, you aren't sure what you're about
    But tonight something's going down....
    You looked across the room and your heart went zoom
    He walked right over, said "I'll treat you right."

This is just the story of Justin and Brian. This is the Moment again. Or againand again, because we are listening to a perennial fairy tale, a persistentreverie. What Bernhard sings to her unnamed "you" (Sylvester himself?) isthe story of Cinderella, only the Prince will not have to search tomorrowfor his mysterious beauty. The beauty will already be in his bed.

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In Christian churches and (other) queer cultures, discussions about marriageor mating are controlled not only by enforced institutional silences,by forbidden topics and discarded histories, but also by the endless cyclingof mass images of romance. The images appear in many predictable places,from wedding homilies to "date" movies. They also figure where one mightnot expect them—say, in advertisements for gentrifying condos or TVspots for erectile dysfunction. It is remarkable how regularly the old romanticplots write themselves out in contemporary stories of desire, queerand not. The "romance novels" sold on supermarket racks are echoed byanthologies of erotica on the shelves of gay bookstores. Bodices are rippedhere and jockstraps there, but the plots are identical. True desire becomestrue love, or true love was true desire. Either redeems. And this redemptionis now widely marketed to queer lovers too.

Images for romance come to us in uncountable forms and with impossiblymany genealogies. The forms and histories juxtapose or mix Christianand non-Christian elements. Even a short study of the mass images forhappy erotic relationship will make clear the impossibility of segregatingthe religious or specifically Christian from the "secular." Romantic lovepossesses sacred power: it is supposed to complete us and transform us, tomake us happy and secure our place in the world. Language of divine creationand providence is borrowed for the tritest declarations: "We weremeant to be together." "We were made for each other." So too are the greatmotifs of conversion: "I was drifting until I met you. You brought purposeto my life." "Being with you has given me a new life." Soon enough, eventhe images of redemptive suffering have their place: "He's tearing me apart,but if I can just stick it out, I know that we'll come through on the otherside." These motifs are not only Christian, but so far as Christianity is thereligious vernacular for many Americans (including non-Christians), themotifs are still standardly figured as Christian.

American etiquettes for romance necessarily transgress on religious territory.Consider some constitutive elements. In true love, you find theone right person and give yourself entirely to him, to her. Don't think ofconditions or time limits. Hold on to no secrets, no unforgiven insults, nounhealed wounds. The total gift of yourself to the other completes you,makes you for the first time who you were really meant to be. You giveyourself up to find yourself forever. Your gift to each other creates a couplethat can stand against the cruel, uncomprehending world of those who opposeyour love. If the world doesn't understand, God will understand, becauseGod made your love. You sacrifice yourself for your love. Your loveis God. In the cycling codes of romantic etiquette, true love not only relieson religious terms and notions, it ends by arrogating to itself the place ofthe divine. The heart's secret is idolatry.

Marriage has an ambiguous role in romantic cycles. On the one hand, aromantic comedy is supposed to end at the wedding chapel. On the otherhand, the wedding really is an epilogue and not a beginning. True lovescorns marriage as it completes it. Loving is supposed to be the motive formarriage, but it often displaces any wedding. The consummation of truelove in erotic encounter is its own sacrament of union. No priest but Love.No communion but the mingling of hearts, glances, lips, bodies. A weddingcan be added on as a sort of final punctuation, but the action has alreadytaken place. The indissoluble bond of true love will hold through anynumber of other relationships—through any number of attempts to contractother marriages. Or so the images repeat to us.

There is no need to rehearse one or another story about how Christianityspawned European notions of romance or caused mutations in notionsalready there. Nor do I have to reiterate what any contact with the Americanmarket makes plain: Sex sells, but so does romance. (Or, rather, thecoupling of sex and possession in marketing imitates romance as the desireto have and to hold.) The thing to notice is that mass images of romance areby now fully deployed in queer submarkets and queer lives. Indeed, their(religious) power and their (Christian) provenance may be seen perhapsmore clearly in gay male marketing, which is newer, smaller, and less familiarly,omnivorously religious than its "straight" counterparts. In effortsto sell gay relationships, latent Christian imagery must appear—and notonly by jealous or condemning reference to heterosexual marriage. It mustappear because it is still essential to any mass representation of Americanromance.

Of course, things are not quite so simple as billboards make out. Gaylovers are not just target markets; they are members of a stigmatized minority.Gay couples that profess Christianity can be doubly stigmatized. Tothem, the mass images of Christian romantic love are interrupted by imagesof violent church condemnation. Both find resistance in lived experience."Christian" persecution is projected across the cheery loops of a"Christian" happily ever after. One advantage of the double stigma is that itcan disrupt both the romantic etiquettes and the howl of church outrage.Same-sex Christian couples are sometimes accused of being less queer becausethey are the willing victims of homophobic churches. Their situationcould better be seen as providing them with more critical perspective onmass images than nonreligious couples regularly have. Bruce Mau writes ofa world in which "less terrain falls outside of the regime of the logo and itsimage.... Attempting to declare the discrete boundary of any practice,where one ends and another begins, has become arbitrary and artificial. Onthe contrary, the overlap is where the greatest innovation is happening."The hunch about media innovation applies as well to media critique. Thesafest place for reflecting on mass etiquettes of romantic love is the pointwhere they meet interference from contrary etiquettes. The most hopefulplace for reflection on church practice and its theological suppositions iswhere a self-righteously "orthodox" Christianity encounters the chemicallywhitened smiles of the perfect couple. The point of interference, of static,is the point at which many queer Christians find themselves.

Observing the interference of competing etiquettes is not escapingthem. Watching yourself be instructed simultaneously by solicitations andcondemnations, by illusions and delusions, is not the same as having a mindstrengthened against sophistry. What one can hope for from the vantagepoint is a more revealing view of the particular power of their codes ofetiquette—and so a more skeptical assessment of programs for radicalreform, whether of our "hearts" or the words we use to give them away.

UNDER THE DISCO BALL; OR, FICTIONS OF LOVE

In an aging idealization of gay urban life, the dance club serves as the publicsquare. You go there to display your citizen status, to join factions, andto share in civic ritual. It is also where you go to find love—or to shop forit. Sylvester, Sarah Bernhard, and the writers of Queer as Folk understandthat perfectly. The constant accompaniment of time spent in this publicsquare is "dance music." Dance music is not a genre so much as a ritual element.It serves its ritual function by keeping an inescapable beat. On topof that beat, various musical styles can be deployed: anthem, bubblegumjingle, rap, techno, and so indefinitely on. Often the most successful dancetracks recur to the original form of "House music": the deep bass linedoubled by drum, percussive and rhythmic complications, electronic modulations,then "samples" or snippets of a soaring voice. In the classic"dance diva" mix, the powerful voice belongs to a woman. She may useGospel riffs or the techniques of ballad, but almost always she sings of love.Indeed, older connoisseurs may already have recognized that the title of thischapter is a pun on a line from that arch-diva of the dance floor, Madonna.In "Material Girl," she (or She) sang, "Some boys romance, some boys slowdance...."

To cite "current" examples would date this discussion much too exactly.Lists of hot "dance music" numbers change weekly, and nothing is so worthyof scorn as last month's Number 1. Regular patrons of a dance club canchart a song's progress by where it falls on the evening's program. A mixappears, tentatively, as a sort of experiment, in the first hour. If it works,if it is "hot," it makes its slow way through the schedule slots to the apex ofthe evening—to the hour when the floor is sweatily crowded with thehippest patrons. If the floor isn't crowded when the song begins, it fills almostinstantly after the first recognizable measures. Then, inevitably, aftera week or six, the song disappears from the roster altogether. And woeto the unwary rube who requests it of the presiding DJ. Humiliation is anart required of DJ's as much as of drag queens—or bishops who want tobe lords.

The melodrama of a dance hit's rise and fall cannot conceal the greatsameness from week to week. Sameness of beat, but sameness in the lyricstoo: most diva mixes are love songs with almost interchangeable texts.Their shared song-form is just the form of our discourses about love. Tomake love-talk, we "sample" romantic discourse as rapidly and as predictablyas this week's hit. We pick a phrase here, an image there. We citeand combine etiquettes for the heart. Then, in our discourses as in thedance floor hits, we persuade ourselves that the repetitive mix of quotationsis our truest passion. Or the one true passion, because it is always thesame. If each track has its "hook," or gimmick, all are torn from the singlesong book of romance.

The book is not evidently queer. Dance-floor songs are remarkably heterosexualin their presentation. The women who sing them are not presumedto be lesbians—far from it. Music videos that illustrate the songs almostalways feature other-sex couples. The lyrics are inscribed quite explicitlyinto the main canon of romantic love. So gay men are supposed tobe drawn to them by a sort of gender inversion or emotional drag. Afterall, gay men are famous for being adept at putting on the role of the femaleromantic lead. The cliché becomes almost irresistible when the dance flooris filled with a hundred young men mouthing Madonna. Sometimes theylook at each other as they lip-sync the words, with sentiment or ironicsmile. Sometimes they lift their arms and sing to the light-array on the ceiling—Imean, to the stars above. On the video screens, Madonna can be indrag herself as Marilyn Monroe. She is performing a Hollywood musicalnumber; she is pretending (?) to be a star pursued by dapper, dancing men.I'm dancing and singing. I inhabit Madonna, who inhabits me. The linesprescribed for romance can be taken up by so many voices and such differentbodies. Put on the costume and sing the words. Or sing them as yourcostume.

Do we locate the queerness of gay romance here, in the camp or drag of"straight" romance on a "queer" dance floor? Many do so. Madonna's greatode to the dance floor, "Vogue," borrows the term and the references froma practice in the drag balls more fully documented by the film Paris Is Burning.To vogue at the drag balls was to dress and gesture like a glossy magazine'ssuper-model. Madonna endorses the practice for all genders andraces. Then gay men on the dance floor mimic Madonna singing the song.Gym boys perform a former leather-lace girl who now sings in glamorouslysultry tones, borrowing words and images from a drag competition thatmimics publicity stills or upscale advertisements. Who's camping what?Analyses of drag or other camp tend often toward infinite regress, becausetheir imitation refers not to an original, but to an equally stylized social performance.Recall the category "Real" at the drag balls. A young, poor, AfricanAmerican, gay man is applauded for performing a Wall Street broker."Wall Street broker" is in turn a role that cites a series of antecedents thatwould prove, on closer examination, to be codified artifacts. Queers performingstraight love songs are camping, but then the straight love song isalready camp.

Ample room for queer appropriation is opened by the ambiguous pronouns."I" sing love to "you." Queer desire can inhabit that relation, as closetedqueers can make and market versions of it. Yet the very indefinitenessof the pronouns also means that queer desire can be elided with ease, as itis presumptively elided in the dominant use of romantic language. Campingromantic professions may reveal their ambiguities, but they are then liableto be "camped" back into a slightly hipper normative reading. The genderfluidity of dance music remains fluid. Gay dance clubs are (re)colonizedby straight couples.