If you can tune out Halperin’s shrillness and grope though his pseudo-philosophical miasma (“Every thing is a ‘thing’,” he tells us at one point), you may be able to trace an argument I happen to consider reactionary and disreputable. By teaching the young to adore old-time divas like Crawford and Garland, Halperin hopes to persuade them that gayness is about culture not sex, about solitary, subjective taste not shared identity. In his nostalgia for the heyday of giddy effeminacy, he denounces the campaign for marriage rights as a concession to “heteronormative” society; political protests about discrimination are waved away by his silly insistence that “camp is a form of resistance to power” or his astonishing notion that maleness is a mode of “terroristic surveillance and enforcement,” a symptom of the “lethal dose of unironised masculine histrionics that the world has had to absorb since September 11, 2001.” This swishing makes me wonder whether al-Qaida’s fanatics may have a point about the decadence of the west.
Back in the 1960s, Susan Sontag — whose Notes on Camp articulated in a few fleet aphorisms most of what Halperin spends more than 500 pages paraphrasing — welcomed a new gay formalist style in criticism by declaring: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
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