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Chapter 1 Straight Panic and American Culture in the 1990s In 1991 I was a closeted undergraduate at the University ofWisconsin—aware of my gay sexual orientation but fearful that others were as well.That year the campus gay and lesbian student organization (no doubt inspired by the direct-action strategies employed by ACT UP and Queer Nation) coordinated a Jeans Day as part of its coming-out-week activities. Overnight they covered campus sidewalks with impromptu chalk messages and plastered kiosks with flyers that called upon gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to show their pride by wearing jeans to school the next day. In those final years before the Gap-led khaki craze, jeans were as much a standard part of the average college student’s uniform as a sturdy backpack and a fake ID. Walking to class the following morning, countless Levis-clad students like myself were shocked to discover that we had been unwittingly outed—to use a term quickly gaining currency in 1991. For the rest of the day, I was overwhelmed by anxiety.As I sat in class and walked across campus, I wondered if people knew I was gay. Of course, my panic was illogical.After all, just about everyone on campus was wearing jeans. But the constant insecurity of the closet overrode my reason. Every casual glance my way seemed to be an accusation about my sexual identity.When a woman sitting next to me in lecture asked what I thought about “the jeans thing,” I was certain she had figured me out. I didn’t come out to her or to any one else during that coming-out week. I only did so after the cultural curve was behind me, after Clinton was in the White House, after Jerry Seinfeld told me there wasn’t anything wrong with it, after the gay nineties really got going. Nevertheless, Jeans Day did work on me.The flyers and signs all over school offered tangible evidence of something I knew only in theory—that I wasn’t the only gay person on campus .And although the experience was disquieting, the day gave me a trial run at being out of the closet. Jeans Day, however, was really targeted at my straight classmates. Like me, many heterosexuals showed up at school only to discover that their Levis had suddenly become symbols of gay pride. Despite their best efforts to dismiss 13 Becker_Ch01_Pgs-13-36.qxd 10/10/2005 11:46 AM Page 13 the flyers, they had to have felt self-conscious, wondering, if only for a moment, what those around them were thinking.Within the event’s carnivalesque ground rules, they became closeted heterosexuals, and I clearly remember many students anxiously finding ways to out themselves as straight. For those unsure about the stability of their sexual identity, Jeans Day must have been a particularly anxious experience. But even for those secure in their heterosexuality, it was likely unsettling. For if it did anything, the event forced heterosexuals to recognize their heterosexuality—to acknowledge that being straight wasn’t the only way of being.As they did with me, the flyers and signs all over campus offered straight students tangible evidence of something many of them likely knew only in theory—that they weren’t alone. Gay people were in their midst.And in making homosexuality the norm du jour, in making heterosexuals feel marginalized by their sexuality (if even for just a minute), Jeans Day’s logic stripped heterosexuality of its ex-nominated privilege . Being straight couldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, by playing on the idea that anyone in jeans could be gay, Jeans Day made it perfectly clear that the boundary between being straight and being gay was anything but clear. Such realizations, no doubt, engendered a discomforting mix of lost naïveté, paranoia, and defensiveness. Although Jeans Days may have been limited to college campuses, the cultural politics at stake and the social anxieties they stirred up certainly weren’t. On the contrary, I’d argue that by the early 1990s, American culture was caught in the grip of what might be called a straight panic. My straight classmates would not be alone in feeling uneasy during a decade marked by intense struggles over sexual identity. Over the next few years, the gay and lesbian civil rights movement and the dramatic increase of gay and lesbian cultural visibility would repeatedly force Straight America to think about homosexuality, heterosexuality, and the...

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