Transatlantic Cruising

Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation. Keith Harvey. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003. 273 pp.

"Translations," writes Keith Harvey at the end of Intercultural Movements, "not only produce themselves as contingent, but they expose their originals as inhabited by a comparable level of contingency too" (244). The French translations that occupy his attention are those of Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978), John Rechy's Rushes (1979), and Larry Kramer's Faggots (1978). Holleran's novel was translated by Philippe Mikriammos as Le danseur de Manhattan in 1980. Rechy's, translated by Georges-Michel Sarotte, appeared as Rush in 1980. Kramer's, translated by Brice Mathieussant, became Fags in 1981. The contingencies that Harvey pursues have to do with different French and American discourses on gay male identity formation from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He is concerned with two processes during the cultural moment in question: "Firstly, those of negotiation with a cultural other; secondly, those concerned with the constitution of an identity—and the elaboration of a community that is concomitant with it—founded upon same-sex desire" (1). Harvey is interested in how a particular set of French journalists, writers, translators, intellectuals, and activists ("intercultural agents," he calls them [96]) respond to what he refers to as "American gay."

Harvey takes the term American gay from Stephen O. Murray, who in a book of that name associates it with group consciousness, some degree of cultural separatism, egalitarian relationships (in terms of gender role and age), and exclusivity of object choice (11).¹ Harvey limits the term to "a more restricted configuration of ideas and practices characteristic of the homosexual dimension in discourses of liberation . . . from the 1960s . . . up to the crisis precipitated by the AIDS epidemic in the early- to mid-1980s" (11). The key elements in "American gay" are "a specificity of homosexual desire" and the belief that "this specificity of desire speaks an essential truth about a selfhood, i.e. that is constitutive of an identity" (11–12). Harvey observes that the notion becomes during this period "a largely male, middle-class and white phenomenon whose locus is almost exclusively the sprawling urban centers of the East (New York) and West (San Francisco, Los Angeles) coasts of the United States" (12).

In the first part of Intercultural Movements Harvey tracks both the attraction and the resistance felt by his intercultural agents for this American phenomenon. His survey of French reactions to "American gay" is organized around reactions to a "gay community" located in a "ghetto," gay consumerism and commercialization, the status of effeminacy, and the functions of camp. He analyzes writings from Arcadie, the monthly review of a homophile organization of the same name, published from 1954 to 1982; Gai Pied, a magazine published monthly from 1979 to 1982 and then weekly until 1992; and Masques: Revue des homosexualités, published quarterly from 1979 to 1986. Harvey also mixes in books by Guy Hocquenghem, Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe, Roger Peyrefitte, Patrick Mauriès, and Renaud Camus. Why these figures in particular? What are their social profiles? To what extent are they exemplary? Do they cover the whole social field? This kind of information is not sufficiently forthcoming.

In fact, I kept wishing for more precision in Harvey's analyses. He knows that the French discursive field in question, like the corresponding field in the United States, is traversed by all sorts of other social divisions. I would have liked to hear more about the larger structural forces at work in the field he surveys. How could the texts Harvey cites and analyzes, how could the figures he takes (sometimes too hastily) as exemplary, how could the journals and publications he scrutinizes be more precisely positioned not only in the field of discourses on gay male sexuality but in the larger field of social beliefs and antagonisms? I wanted more information on political differences, generational differences, discursive shifts and evolutions, unexpected alliances, and economic...