When I read The End of Gay some time ago I was impressed at the new insights I got into how we as gay men relate to each other and the larger society. I was concerned that any of my friends to whom I’d recommended it would find it tedious, cumbersome, and a little dull. I was surprised to learn that most found it readable, lucid, and interesting.
The thrust of this book has to do with the end of labeling, not the end of same-sex behavior. The author’s point is that labels become meaningless and unnecessarily restricting.
One central point was for me so profound that it changed the way I view both my gay community and the straight world in which I live. That is: Sexual orientation is determined less by your physical sexual contacts (where you put your dick) and more by the community with which you identify. Absorbing that thought suddenly explains how the college jock may “play” with a teammate, sometimes often, yet still claim to the world at large that he is heterosexual. It makes clearer, or at least understandable, how a young black man, living with his wife and children can go out with the guys on the weekend, have homosexual sex yet believe that he is “straight” (on the down low). This apparent dichotomy has always seemed to me to be a supreme rationalization…a kind of…“You’re only fooling yourself.”
The author relates the situation on 20/20 in 1998 when Barbara Walters interviewed a woman who was happily married to a man, in love with him, and had children with him. She was not having a same-sex relationship yet she considered herself lesbian. This makes no sense whatever unless you consider that the community you consider yourself part of determines what your orientation is.
This perspective is less strange when you consider that we accept as a matter of fact that a person is Roman Catholic (or Episcopal, or Jewish etc.) not based on church/synagogue attendance but on how the person sees himself.
Much of Archer’s thesis is supported by information from the surveys done by jackinworld.com, a reliable and useful website full of accurate, straightforward information about masturbation and male attitudes toward sex generally. Here a group of surveys done in the last four or so years indicates that men generally don’t tend to label themselves as much as in the past…a sort of “I am who I am” thought process.
This “Popeye” mindset, leaning as it does, toward the Zen view of the sexual self has much to recommend it. Indeed it can liberate all men to be who they are and act sexually as they wish (so long as no one is hurt) without regard to labels.
As important as this concept is for me, Archer is not without a little goofy reasoning. At one point he argues that the now famous Kinsey scale of sexuality (0=straight; 6=gay) has no meaning and that it does not exist. He postulates rather that the extremes are asymptotes and that all in between is thus negated. Ha! While there may not be an absolute “straight” or an absolute “gay” there is certainly a range which from the behaviorist standpoint is measurable and thus can define, at least subjectively, degrees of bi-sexuality. Since the Kinsey scale is a self-assessed view of personal orientation, the same can apply to the “community identification” categorization.
So should you read this book or not? While the ideas presented were, for me eye-opening, I thought the book was far too long, repetitive, pseudo-intellectual, and in some cases just plain wrong. Better to have someone extract the salient points, write up a three-page summary then sit around (with or without drinks) and discuss.