(the strand, NYC, 25 Nov 2016)

One of the two books we lost in the great apartment flood of July 2017. (It could've been a lot worse.) Now I need another copy, though. :(

Within this admittedly over-long book is a slim but forceful gym-bunny of a tract against both essentialism and identity politics; there is, alongside it, a gossipy ageing queen of a treatise about Hollywood melodrama; and there is a wider exploration - inoffensive, so it seemed to me - of the rather queer nature of gay femininity, or 'femininity', and, indeed, of what those inverted commas themselves might denote. Not - [silent screams] - that David Halperin thinks any of his readers might themselves be 'inverted': no, no, NO!!!
Let me at this juncture avow my own machismo: I only ever once watched 'Mildred Pierce', and loathed it. I understand why so many middle class and middle-aged gays, in their country sitting rooms, and in (sometimes very shrill) asides across the weekend newspapers to their husbands, have protested - as if all homophobia is past - that NONE of what David Halperin describes in this book relates to them. So let me say it: much of this made me cringe too.
It is that process itself - that instinct to cringe - which seems to me to be the focus of quite a lot of what this book is all about. Some of us, clearly, have a sense of having grown out of the stereotypes which the book describes; but there are still young men who use them as a means to grow into their own gayness now. That's what struck me most: I was reminded - rather fondly, in fact - of younger gay men among my friends who, with the piercing bitchiness through which affection sometimes becomes more real, continue to adore Bette Davis (yes: they do!) and those films which we all know to be absurd. That made me laugh: the French ( - and David Halperin occasionally remembers a world beyond the USA - ) might even have spoken of 'jouissance'....
But I would have laughed more had the book been only half the length; and I would have been persuaded more completely had the slightly overwrought final chapters been omitted altogether.

[I think it right to add, as I write this on World AIDS Day, that I am moved not least by the eloquence of David Halperin's reflections on the impact of HIV and AIDS on the issues which his book describes.] ( )