All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (review)

Suzanne Danuta Walters's All the Rage makes an important contribution to the "rich and deep treasure trove" (x) that is the growing field of gay cultural studies, a field that includes the works of Alexander Doty, Joshua Gamson, Steven Seidman, Amy Gluckman, Betsy Reed, and Alexandra Chasin, among others. Popular culture, Walters argues, is an important site for exploring contemporary debates, in part because "mass culture is always in the process of cannibalizing, reusing, appropriating selective aspects of minority and subcultures for its own, uneven, use" (291). Walters's prologue juxtaposes the nationally televised coming out of Ellen DeGeneres with the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, both media "iconic events" (xvii), suggesting that, though the new gay visibility is a significant and, in many ways, positive cultural shift, battles remain to be fought. Walters focuses on the paradox of being gay in the new millennium, and she cautions throughout this work against reading the increased visibility of gays "as an unambiguous sign of real and meaningful social integration, celebration, or even benign acceptance" (24). In addition, Walters claims that the United States (and this text is very much about U.S. culture) struggles with an omnipresent tension between goals of assimilation and respect for diversity.

All the Rage begins with the "explosion of gay visibility" (3), a phenomenon that includes openly gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered (GLBT) athletes, celebrities, and film and television characters. Advertisers target gay markets; gay-themed films win awards at mainstream film festivals; "queer theory" has become a reputable part of the academy; and new laws protect GLBT people and their relationships. These changes, not surprisingly, have also triggered intense homophobia and violence against gays. Even as Walters acknowledges progress, she seeks a more subtle analysis of conflicting cultural phenomena beyond "celebratory high-fives" (10) that examines the quality as well as the quantity of gay images. Do these images increase understanding of the realities of gay life? Or "[c]an visibility be a . . . road to nowhere, a deceptively smooth path that can knock us off the course of meaningful change" (12)? Walters sees contradictions in both cultural and political environments; "both realms coexist and interact in an uneasy mix of opportunity and opposition, inclusion and exclusion" (14). The increased visibility of gays has tended toward the "normalizing" of gays and a turn toward "gay chic" that may ultimately deflect attention from the substantive political concerns of GLBT people, mute diversity within the gay community and between gays and straights, and lead to the commodification of gayness.

Walters focuses more on television than on film, and that choice is deliberate; television, she argues, has a more pervasive and mainstream influence on culture and offers a more varied collection of representations of gay life. Walters also integrates race and gender analysis into her argument; as she points out, assimilationism effaces racial difference as well as sexual nonconformity. Walters also demonstrates how sexism and homophobia intertwine to render lesbianism either invisible or demonic. Her examples make clear that the explosion of gay images on television and film has foregrounded images of white, middle-class gay men.

Walters's analysis includes an investigation of cultural discourses relating to coming out and to the gay marriage debate. At her most lively and provocative in these sections, Walters notes the few (if any) "private" subcultural spaces in this age of mass media. Once-invisible gay and lesbian subculture is now mediated through the proliferation of cultural representation. Coming out discourse has receded and transformed. Whether these changes signal the end of gay culture itself remains to be seen. Walters hypothesizes that the fading away of coming out discourses may ultimately benefit gays, as it moves away from tortured images of gays "finding themselves" to portrayals of gay life post-coming out and sans anguish. Further, the multiple meanings of gay marriage represent a story of "simultaneous victory and retrenchment" (212) and her analysis in...