George warned the CGM Reading Group that The End of Gay was going to be long and tough. I braced myself for another Andrew Sullivan-like Virtually Normal. Luckily, this book is easier to read than that, because Bert Archer, who appears to have researched this book quite heavily, what with his 104 footnotes and all, actually quotes as readily from television and movies as from books, so much of his reference material is familiar. He also makes generous use of examples to make his points more visual and easier to understand.
That said, and having completed my read of this book, its screaming front cover still gives me the willies. A bit too much drama in its choice, perhaps. Fear not, though, Archer isn’t saying that homosexual impulses are falling out of the gene pool. There aren’t going to be fewer men breaking out into a sweat over the bulge in another’s jeans. In Archer’s perfect world, however, the man is no longer confined to the behaviors that made him seek out the gay community in the first place. And, more importantly, the community itself no longer imposes punishment or ridicule on the man for exploring other attractions.
To get here, though, Archer takes you on a long historical ride of gay through the ages. Along the way, he quotes and reviews a great amount of published work, sometimes harshly, including a full chapter on Kinsey. He gives you a hint on how he will be treating Kinsey early on, when he refers to the famous scale as “infernal.”
Archer also provides a number of personal anecdotes from interviews conducted during the research of the book. I found the Rafe/Renee story to be superb fodder for a support group discussion, which I held at CGM. I read how Rafe dressed as Renee, visited straight bars, picked up straight men, brought them to his house, revealed himself as a man, and then managed not only to steer them all the way to bed, but top them too, dozens of times, with never any violent reaction. For the discussion, I turned the tables and asked to imagine being picked up by a woman in a gay bar whom you think is a man, who wants to have heterosexual sex. We mostly concluded that we’d lose our erections, and spent most of our time on the original story instead. We wondered how “straight” this bar (and these men) really are. One attendee suggested that Renee, still a man, would still emit bits of maleness that would be attractive only to men receptive to that...perhaps closeted gays who wanted to be picked up by a man and still live in their comfortable and very straight setting.
Alas, we proved that we are bound and live by the rules of our community, where the mention of a woman draws snarls and, elsewhere, ugly open forum discussions. We could not imagine a borderless society where attraction is allowed to be fully explored.
Yet perhaps it is coming without our realizing it. Anyone remember the New Hampshire Pride parade and festival? Originally, its demise was blamed on a lack of volunteers needed to make it happen. But in the four years since, how much has it been missed? More importantly, if Pride is gone because the NH gay community no longer needs it to feel connected, is SGM next? If you accept that the board has done all it can do and yet membership is still down by 30 percent, is the inevitable already in motion?
Yikes! Don’t mind me. The End of Gay is thought-provoking and, if you can deal with its slow, non-fiction pace, a good read.