Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849350884 ISBN 13: 9781849350884

Publisher: AK Press, 2012

Synopsis

"You may have thought you understood human nature before you read this book; after reading it you will be humbled by all you failed to grasp until now."--Edmund White

"These essays come like a plunge into a forest pool of revitalizing joy, honesty, and common sense. Read them. Now. No--not tomorrow. Now!"--Samuel R. Delany

Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin' out," what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change.

About this title

About the Author

Called "startlingly bold and provocative" by Howard Zinn, and described as "a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda" by The Austin Chronicle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is undoubtedly one of America's most outspoken queer critics. She is the author of two novels, including, most recently, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, and is the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.

From the Back Cover

"These essays excavate masculinity, unearthing the complex and pervasive structures that police and construct it and exposing the beautiful resilience of its self-avowed refusers and failures." --Dean Spade

"Thanks, Mattilda, for the insights, intellectual rigor and the glittering ammunition with which to destroy and rebuild." --Mx Justin Vivian Bond

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, most recently the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and the editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, is the type of faggot many people seem to fear, but she's actually quite friendly.

From the Inside Flap

This book plumbs the most important question facing queers in the 21st century: how the hell did we go from forming a crucial part of the '60s 'lib' rainbow, and from mastering, refining, and successfully deploying nonviolent resistance with ACT UP, only to end up creating for ourselves a world of martial and marital law every bit as sterile, constricting, and amoral as the world we once fled like the plague?
--Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men

Edition details

• Publisher: AK Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1849350884
• ISBN 13: 9781849350884
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232
• Editor: Bernstein Sycamore Mattilda