David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet), 1990
1.
Hipster irony appeals to overly earnest straight people, especially straight men (and their sometimes adoring queer fans).
Here’s one version of straight hipsterism: Acceptance of homosexuality and homo marriage occurred relatively quickly in the U.S. because homosexuality and homo marriage aren’t really hip.
The homo who desires to marry and build a family wants nothing more, according to the hipster, than to be “one of the boys.” In other words, the legal/political recognition of homos and their family values is not real political change.
2.
Hipsters aren’t wrong, to be fair, for having some fun at the expense of homos who, like hipsters, want to keep their position high up the ladder of respectability and be cool.
Some homos want nothing more than to be straight (but not that straight).
The problem is that hipster self-righteousness requires a sacrifice: homo difference and dignity.
3.
To the hipster, homoness is the enemy of coolness. Homoness is the recapitulation of normie-cis-white-male-straightness.
That’s why I think hipster irony is just really fucking dull. It’s more of the same: straight (male) resentment and self-righteousness masquerading as progressive politics.
Nothing irritates hipsters more than homo joy and affluence.
4.
That’s why, to riff on David Halperin’s description of straight hipster irony in How To Be Gay (2012), straight hipsters just love to turn homos and their family values into the new normie straight dude. Homos become “fodder for [hispter] irony”:
By acknowledging straight hipsters’ affection for such quaint cultural forms and practices [like marriage], while refusing to express that affection except in a grotesque, exaggerated fashion, in case someone should get the wrong idea, straight hipster irony maintains and consolidates (though it’s much too cool to flaunt it) a distant and disengaged position for hipsters—that is, a position of relative social privilege (395-96).
Straight hipster irony enables you to distance yourself from your straightness while castigating the desires of homos who want to marry and build families of their own.
5.
Here’s an example of hipster homo (but not that homo) love: “It is weirdly possible to imagine a scenario,” writes one Substack hipster, “where the United States becomes a violently misogynistic white ethnostate, but gay marriage still remains the law of the land.”
Is our hipster arguing that the reason homos and homo marriage gained relatively quick cultural acceptance is that they fit, hand in glove, within the normie logic of “a violently misogynistic white ethnostate”?
Is our hipster asserting that homos and their family values enjoy popular support in the U.S. because they are entirely compatible with normie-cis-white supremacy-straight-guyness (pronouns: he/bruh)?
Who needs enemies when you have allies like the hipster!
6.
In his view, homos and their family values have achieved quick legal/political victories because they have chosen to suck the cock of cis-white-straight-dudeness.
“Pointing out that context,” our hipster claims, “is not a critique of the movements that succeeded as being ‘secretly’ conservative or oppressive, but instead a critique of the society that only lets itself do good things for bad reasons” (emphasis added).
Who needs enemies when you have neighbors like that!
7.
Anyway, according to the hipster view, Pete Buttegig won the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa in 2019 because he just loves sucking white dick.
Any evidence to the contrary is evidence of a cover-up.
Yasmin Nair, for example, asserts that even the Buttigieg kids are part of a secret, oppressive conservative plot to win white-normie-straight-bruh political power:
Given their talent for curation, it’s hard not to wonder if the Buttigieges didn’t also choose their [biracial] children as carefully as Melania Trump chose her outfits. This doesn’t mean that the pair don’t love their incredibly adorable children, but given that even Chasten looks like he was chosen from a catalog of ‘Good Gay Men,’ it’s safe to say that even the most seemingly personal details of Pete’s life are carefully chosen.
8.
Hipster paranoia (i.e., nothing good can happen in people’s hearts or society) may also explain why our hipster fails to mention the HIV/AIDS crisis in his essay.
While the hipster does recognize that straight opposition to homo love was (remains?) violent and horrific, extending well into the 1990s before giving way to growing support for homos and their family values starting in the early 2000s, he does not seem to know that the 1990s were also the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in, for example, Chicago.
The hipster can’t even entertain the idea that witnessing homos suffering and dying in large numbers because of a demonic virus, which our government was too slow to address, might have been a bridge to compassion that led to a genuine change of heart among our fellow citizens.
9.
And because any legal/political recognition is necessarily a form of assimilation, the hipster can’t risk acknowledging (or take seriously) the substantial legal/political recognitions won by Black and Trans* people over the past few decades.
So, he doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Americans support some form of police reform. Likewise, the hipster doesn’t seem to realize that most Americans do support Trans* people. Our hipster, however, dismisses the very real gender dysphoria experienced by Trans* youth, categorizing it as a common experience for all youth going through puberty.
Also, our hipster doesn’t mention that it was a conservative Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, which declared it unconstitutional to discriminate against Trans* people in the workplace.
Finally, the hipster’s faith in the straight coddling of homo desire likely blinds him to the fact that the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to relitigate the constitutionality of same-sex marriage on Friday, November 7th, 2025 (Thankfully, the Court chose [for now] not to relitigate homo marriage. It sure must be nice not to have one’s dignity up for routine legal review.)
10.
Homos and their family values gained quick acceptance, according to sophisticated hipsters, because they offered a lifeline to normie-cis-white-straight-maleness.
In reality, it was the other way around.
Homosexual activists made surprising use of a straight male invention: the concept of homosexuality.
Homo identity politics was so successful (like all forms of Black, Trans,* and Women’s respectability/identity politics before and after it) precisely because it compromised with the protocols of the dominant masculinist culture, the culture—then, now, and for the foreseeable future—in power.
Specifically, homo identity politics accepted the conservative logic that sex(uality) is gender and gender is sex(uality).
The idea that homoness is anything more than a sexuality, anything other than a sexual orientation/identity—like a culture, a specific lifestyle, or a uniquely “feminine” way of relating to women, men, and the world—remains a controversial subject in homo circles.
Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal (1996) and Horace Griffin’s Their Own Receive Them Not (2010)–very different versions of homo identity politics.
In How To Be Gay (2012), Halperin cogently analyzes the history of homo identity politics—the history, that is, of what Judith Butler calls a “necessary error” (Bodies That Matter [1993], 175).
11.
Homo political gains have, indeed, come at the expense of a different history: the history of (homo)sexuality.
The concept of homosexuality was created in the late 1800s (and with the publication of the RSV, incorporated into various biblical texts in the 1940s), but I am more interested in the history of what terms like “homosexuality” are meant to describe—namely, desire.
We are, in a sense, “born that way.” We are born as wild and wildly desiring animals, entirely dependent on the care of our parents and society—the very “institutions” that frustrate our desires.
Although no one knows what causes one’s sexual orientation, David Halperin offers a promising idea. He claims that “[l]ong before they ever have sex . . . young people have genre” (343).
Briefly, genres are formal rules that govern specific social interactions. Halperin explains that what a server might say to a complete stranger in Ann Arbor differs from what a server in Paris might say in a similar situation without causing a scandal (131).
Genres are also pragmatic. “[T]hey provide people, in their daily practices, with concrete means of interacting with one another and negotiating specific social situations—and they instruct them in the right ways to do so (132).
Halperin suggests that genre might be all that’s necessary to create consistent, persistent, and insistent non-standard or queer relationships with mainstream cultural forms, including marriage, masculinity, authenticity, abjection, and so on. Halperin writes,
[Genre] may be all [children] need in order to forge certain non-standard relations to normative sexual and gender identities. For by making non-standard emotional connections to cultural forms, they effectively refuse the pressing social invitation to assume a conventional, heteronormative positioning and they effectively acquire non-standard sexual and gender identities, identifications, and orientations (343).
Once acquired, a non-standard relationship to cultural forms becomes, like everything experienced in our youth, difficult to change in adulthood. There are no “fresh starts.”
The second chance that is your adult life is an opportunity to change, to the extent possible, your biological and cultural heritage. If you’re lucky, your adult life is a question: What am I interested in?
12.
Our hipster believes homos have failed to launch. For him, homos and their family values easily fit into the standard mold of normie-cis-white-straight-family values. Acceptance of homo family values is not, according to hipsters, a genuine legal/political change.
Queer theoretical differences, like those between Leo Bersani and Judith Butler (1995), David Halperin and Leo Bersani (1996), Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and How To Be Gay (2012), are all about the character of and possibilities for real political change.
In a forthcoming essay, I argue that Martha Nussbaum misjudges Judith Butler’s politics as “hip quietism.” Instead, I argue, Butler’s politics is a subtle form of compromised resistance to the norms of straightness.
To be clear, Nussbaum is not opposed to resistance as a political strategy. She is not a radical political figure. For example, Nussbaum does not believe, as Michal Warner does, that “marriage is unethical” (The Trouble With Normal [1999], vii).
In her review of Warner’s book, Nussbaum highlights the importance of cultural forms and routines for most people (232). Still, I believe she is too optimistic about the kind of change humans can achieve to appreciate the subtlety of Butler’s queer politics.
13.
It is manifestly true that Butler’s theory is highly pessimistic about the potential for legal/political change. Our being here is premised on being subject to the desires, norms, and influences of the dominant culture.
Even so, Butler clearly has faith in the possibility of change. Performativity is their term for a limited but creatively resistant form of freedom.
“The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality,” Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990), “does not mean that those constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality nor that gay and lesbian sexuality are derivable or reducible to those constructs. . . . The presence of these norms not only constitute a site of power that cannot be refused, but they can and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality” (158, emphasis original).
The Butlerian subject is us. It is normal and queer.
14.
In the essay on Butler I hope to finish soon, I also argue that How To Be Gay may be read as a redescription of Butler’s political ambition, as initially described in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.
Halperin’s understanding of the politics of homo subculture perfectly captures the character of Butler’s queer politics.
Their queer politics “reckons with the world as it is, with the way we lived and still live now, and [seek] less to change the world than to resist its inflictions (even at the cost of appearing reactionary, rather than progressive)—[thereby offering] an important emotional and political resource . . . to many different kinds of socially disqualified people, at least to those whose sense of irredeemable wrongness makes them willing to pay the achingly high price for it” (219-220).
15.
In summary, participation in what’s normal is not a matter of personal choice.
You can’t choose your sex(uality) or gender (realities created and enforced by the dominant culture before we come into the world and learn to speak its language).
That comforts some homos. And why should homos be different from nearly everyone else?
In any case, it is also true that the dominant regime can’t completely control what you do with its normative categories.
As Fester from the Addams Family reminds us, “Normal is difficult to achieve.”
That’s why queer politics also appeals to many homos. Failing to take “normal” too seriously is the point of queer politics.
16.
But our hipster advises us to embrace a politics of fluidity. We are advised not to stress about sex(uality) and gender norms.
I guess we are to entirely forget our hipster’s essay, wherein he ranks similarly situated minority groups on a ladder of value. If homos are even on his ladder, we are farthest away from the heavenly clouds of political coolness.
17.
The hipster seems to believe that recognizing the legitimate suffering of the hip and queer, Black communities, and Trans* people requires a sacrifice: the difference and dignity of homos.
If that’s right, the hipster’s argument collaborates with HIV/AIDS. It collaborates with evil.
Meanwhile, the option of carefully attending to admittedly uncool forms of queer desire remains available, if seldom considered and even less often taken—at least by straight (male) hipsters and their adoring queer fans.
