We All Can’t Die in Bed: Part I

What follows is the first of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the introduction.

(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part III: The First Response)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

I have recently become conscious of a particularly annoying type of person that operates in some circles I have become involved in: the gay yuppie. I suppose I am the one who, in fact, invaded their social spaces, but it perturbs me that I would find any kind of yuppies in any social circle I frequent.

I deplore yuppies for all the normal reasons — their wishy-washy appreciation of whatever “culture” is fashionable that particular month, their unblinking embrace of consumerism, their safe jokes, boring jobs, pressed clothes and blindingly white teeth. I work in a neighborhood that’s rife with yuppies, but never interact with them at any level above the sidelong glance I cast in their direction in response to nods or smiles they use in attempt to affirm some kind of kinship between us as we pass on the sidewalk. I imagine the Puerto Rican public-housing dwellers in my neighborhood feel somewhat the same about me.

The gay yuppie is more detrimental to my life on a tactical level than the straight yuppie simply because I have to deal with the gay yuppie more often and on more intimate terms — although I still prefer the house show, loft party, dive bar and city street over any respectable establishment as a venue for social shenanigans, my tastes have grown somewhat more “adult” with age and I find myself occasionally in places suitable to people who would never haunt the haunts I normally haunt. Despite my new-found (relative) refinement, I still hardly ever go places where typical (straight) yuppies would feel readily welcome, but I have begun to venture where one can find, as the article that prompted this series of blog posts puts it, “gracious members of Club Med who have gone a little farther than [straight squares], with a horizon of pleasure slightly broader than that of his average contemporary.”

The gay yuppie, although not described by that term, is a subject of concern in Guy Hocquenghem‘s essay, “We All Can’t Die in Bed.” The gay yuppie, the Club Med queer, the “modern young homosexual with mustache and briefcase,” is the counterpoint to the homosexual criminal, embodied in Hocquenghem’s essay by Pier Pasolini, a gay Italian filmmaker who was murdered in 1975 (allegedly) by a 17-year-old hustler he picked up on the streets. “So much less stupid than a highway accident,” Hocquenghem writes of Pasolini’s death. “In a way, I would want it for myself and for all of my friends.”

The essay expounds upon Pasolini’s death to discuss the situation in which homosexuality found itself in the late 1970s. Hocquenghem dreaded the decline of what he saw as a multifaceted, vibrant and utterly radical subculture as it was co-opted into normalcy, with the advantages of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality by society severely outweighed by the disadvantages of that subculture losing its potency as an alternative to the boring plague of typical, impotent Western culture. He calls the new situation a “White” Homosexuality: a term purposeful in its implications that the dominant white, capitalist, Christian structure will leave you alone as long as you act as if you’re part of it, but understand — since you don’t meet certain criteria of race, privilege and/or orientation — that you’re still ultimately a victim.

Hocquenghem published his essay over 30 years ago, but as the following responses suggest, it still resonates among young people who are concerned with its topic today. The two friends I asked to write about it are Scott Ries and Lee Wharf. Scott is an old friend of mine who I met in college in Salt Lake City, with whom I’ve traveled on three separate occasions to the West Coast, each trip more traumatizing and delightful than the last. He also lived with me in Lawrence, Kan., where we survived a tornado. Lee is a much more recent acquaintance, though a compelling one on each subsequent occasion we meet. Scott is a budding academic currently studying digital poetics (or something equally difficult and obscure) at SUNY Buffalo, and Lee can be found on any given night cavorting around the South Side of Chicago among the plentiful subversive delights that part of the city provides. Both are incredibly smart, as well as fitting choices to comment on the present topic. Lee replied rather deftly to my faux-unassuming query as to whether he would participate in this project: “I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to ‘answer thoughtfully’; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual.”

The next post contains the full text of Guy Hocquenghem’s essay, “We All Can’t Die in Bed.” Subsequent posts contain responses to the essay by Scott Ries and Lee Wharf.