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hroughout this book, I have attempted to demonstrate the possibilities of aesthetic and emotional engagement with movies while also demonstrating why I find critical approaches that proceed from identity politics frustrating and delimiting. As a gay man with a multiracial , immigrant, and working-class background, I am particularly bewildered, at times, by the number of earnest critics who have told me what kind of art and popular culture I should love. At the same time, however, I believe that I speak from queer theory and feminist perspectives. It is important to consider ideological and political matters in any critique of representation. To fail to do so is to ignore, obfuscate, diminish, blunt, and otherwise denature the importance of representation to human life and understanding. To fail to do so is to enter into the kind of aggressive and willfully insensitive traps of critics like Camille Paglia, who take an understandable opposition to leftist academic dogma to such a thoughtless degree of rhetorical extremism as to be largely useless as an oppositional voice. In other words, Paglia isn’t the answer, and I say this despite my love for her early work. It is important, I feel, to establish why I wouldn’t want criticism to embrace her principles, such as they are, while also taking another opportunity, for the sake of clarity, to articulate my positions in this book. Paglia announces in her collection of occasional pieces Vamps & Tramps that she wants “a revamped feminism.” She’s not thrilled with queer theory, either. C O D A I D E O LO GY AT A N I M PA S S E P S Y C H O S E X U A L 248 I also want a revamped feminism and queer theory. I don’t, however, want the same versions of either that Paglia does. Her 1990 book Sexual Personae continues to thrill me in its range and daring. Paglia’s subsequent work, however, especially in a popular vein, has been notable chiefly for its brazen incoherence but, more frustratingly, its irresponsible politics, a lurid blend of the perverse and the reactionary that isn’t always as much fun as it sounds. Take, for example, Paglia on the murdered young gay man Matthew Shepard and the significance of cruising, which seems particularly relevant to this book: Cruising isn’t love; it’s hunting—where the stalker can suddenly become the prey. This game is sensationally exciting, but it comes with heavy risks, including death. As a lesbian with a male brain, I see the hypnotic allure of cruising and have indeed celebrated it as gay men’s heroic act of defiance against (as D. H. Lawrence would put it) home and mother and everything in morality and custom that enslaves the sex impulse. But let’s get real. On the biological level, constant cruising illustrates Mother Nature’s profound sex differences: Men do it, and women don’t. On the psychological level, cruising shows that gay men are perpetually hungry for a masculinity that should reside confidently within them but clearly does not. What exactly was Matthew Shepard looking for when, after living in Europe and on the East Coast, he returned to his father’s macho alma mater at the University of Wyoming? What symbolic family drama of reconciliation or profanation was at work? Until gay activism gets some psychological depth (available to us through great literature and art), it will have nothing persuasive to say about gay life.1 While I agree with Paglia about the importance of art to understanding human experience, and while I also agree with her that bland liberal pieties often blunt the vitality of art as well as sexuality, her politics seem driven by an incessant need to shock her presumably complacent audience. Moreover, she exhibits so little compassion for the subjects she speaks of that she ends up brutalizing them anew. The murdered Matthew Shepard neither needs nor deserves Paglia’s attempt to enthrone him as a Genet-like sexual outlaw. This seems to me an entirely obvious point to make, but one that seems lost on the increasingly erratic Paglia: an enormous distinction exists between art and life. Life isn’t a movie—thank God. I may feel enraptured by the darkly, disturbingly sensual allure of a work like Cruising, but I wouldn’t want what it has to “say” about sexuality, gay men, or its titular activity to legislate the human experience of these realities. We go to...

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