Dyke Methods: A Meditation on Queer Studies and the Gay Men Who Hate It

This essay examines critical responses to the author’s 2015 book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, with a focus on claims about the illegitimacy of queer and feminist methods. Positing Not Gay as evidence of the proliferation of elitist pseudoscience at odds with the lived experiences of the gay general public, critics of Not Gay depicted a significant divide between “average gay men” and “Queer Theorists,” the latter of whom they named as frivolous and out-of-touch feminists “obsessed with intersectionality.” This essay uses these responses to examine white gay men’s resistance to queer, feminist methods and to consider what this resistance tells us about the generative possibilities of dyke-centric queer methods.