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Abstract:
This essay examines critical responses to the author's 2015 book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, with a focus on claims about the illegitimacy of queer and feminist methods. Positing Not Gay as evidence of the proliferation of elitist pseudoscience at odds with the lived experiences of the gay general public, critics of Not Gay depicted a significant divide between "average gay men" and "Queer Theorists," the latter of whom they named as frivolous and out-of-touch feminists "obsessed with intersectionality." This essay uses these responses to examine white gay men's resistance to queer, feminist methods and to consider what this resistance tells us about the generative possibilities of dyke-centric queer methods.
In the late 2000s, when I was writing Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (2015), mainstream LGBT political discourse was dominated hy aspirations for legal rights and hioevolutionary legitimacy (Duggan 2004; Spade 2015). The political future of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people seemed to hinge on the biological origins of same-sex desire, and considerable excitement was built around research projects that could provide evidence of these origins (Whisman 1995; Jordan-Young 2011; Walters 2014). Queer and feminist scholars were experiencing pressure to redefine interdisciplinarity as a partnership with neuroscientists and others who might deepen our understanding of the hormonal and genetic causes of "same-sex" desire-as if "same-sex" were a transparent concept. It seemed as if no one was paying attention to sociologist Vera Whisman, who, in her prescient 1995 hook Queer by Choice, made the compelling case that "horn this way" arguments typically serve gay men-politically and culturally-in ways that they do not serve queer women. And if people were thinking about the gendered implications of the sociohiology of sexual orientation, they were listening to evolutionary psychologists like Lisa Diamond, who explained women's sexual fluidity as a congenital condition, an evolutionary adaptation (2008).
It was in this context that I wrote Not Gay, a hook about sex practices that, to my mind, begged for attention to the constraints of sociohiological accounts. Several sociologists have conducted empirical studies of sexual contact between straight-identified men (Anderson 2008; Anderson 2010; Reynolds 2015; Carrillo and Hoffman 2016; Silva, forthcoming). There was no urgent need for more empirical research on this subject. What had not yet...