Wayne Koestenbaum’s Seriously Campy, Anti-Dandy, Big Gay Collection of Essays

The virtuoso of queer theory’s rhetorically playful and nuanced prose on AIDS, Lana Turner, and the ‘imminence of nothingness’

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

In her classic essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Susan Sontag suggests that camp is to gays what liberalism is to Jews: “Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a particular affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp.” The analogy, in Sontag’s argument, goes even deeper. Jews and homosexuals are both traditional outsiders in Western culture, and the artistic and political agendas they pursue are means of emancipation and integration. With their liberalism, “Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense.” With Camp—which Sontag always capitalizes, as though it were an ideology—“Homosexuals have pinned their hopes for integrating into society on promoting the aesthetic sense.”

Seen in this way, these two sensibilities are opposites, Sontag writes. “Camp is a solvent of morality,” evaporating Jewish earnestness into playfulness. Yet these opposites have worked together to powerful effect in modern American pop culture, which is to a remarkable extent a product of Jewish and gay creativity. Sontag herself is an example of how the two sensibilities, and the two identities, can inhabit the same person. To straddle irony and sincerity, camp and liberalism, is to occupy a privileged vantage point on the world, not despite but because of the fact that historically it has meant being doubly excluded, doubly vulnerable.

In My 1980s & Other Essays, his new collection of short prose pieces, Wayne Koestenbaum gives a master class in this kind of creative straddling. The word is not idly chosen: When it comes to metaphors, Koestenbaum prefers bodily images, drawn if possible from the domain of sexual experience. This is one of the things that marks him as a product of “queer theory,” an academic movement that, like all such movements, enjoyed its subversive youth and is now passing into serene establishmentarianism. (Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at CUNY.)

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Getting Married... Again

Brought to you by RAC.org

By Rabbi Victor S. Appell

Gay and lesbian couples love to get married. Again and again. Rather than marrying other people each time, we tend to marry the same people again and again. As some same-sex couples have moved from one location to another, they have registered as domestic partners in each of the cities that offered this. They have traveled to states that offered civil unions. They have journeyed to Canada to get married. And as various states in the United States have adopted marriage equality, gay and lesbian couples have trekked around the country in order to get married in these states.

Up until recently, while most of these marriages had plenty of symbolic value, they offered little real value. They conferred a few rights, but none of the major rights and benefits that accompany marriage. And those few rights were limited. A marriage in Canada had no standing in the United States. While a couple could be married in Massachusetts, they were not recognized in Pennsylvania.

My partner, Colin, and I are typical of such couples. In 1998, as students living in New York City, we registered as domestic partners when that became available. Along with another couple, we went to City Hall, filled out the paperwork, received our certificates, and went to lunch at a nearby restaurant.

A year later, we had our wedding on January 23, 1999. Officiated by a rabbi and a cantor, and taking place in a Reform temple, we considered ourselves to be married and this became our anniversary. Though it had no legal standing, it was the Jewish wedding we wanted.

When we lived in Evanston, IL, domestic partnerships had not yet been instituted. However, we like to say that we have been domesticated and civilized by the state of New Jersey. Shortly after moving to New Jersey, the state adopted domestic partnerships in 2004, and Colin and I registered as such. It offered a few benefits, including hospital visitations and the right to make legal decisions if one partner was incapacitated. Fortunately, we never had to avail ourselves of these benefits. Sadly, many hospitals in New Jersey did not follow the new law and a number of couples were not permitted to see each other when one was in the hospital.

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If you want to beat the bigots, Twitter is your tool

Social media users raised the perfect arms to combat a U.K. councilman's attack on gay marriage: @UkipWeather.

By Joel Braunold / Jewish World blogger for Haaretz

Social media can, all too often, be the bigot’s best friend. From cyberbullying to conspiracy-fueled racism, the Internet has allowed hatemongers to spread their filth worldwide.

The Internet also has the power to let us destroy bigotry - through mockery.

Last week, a local politician from the UK Independence Party blamed the recent flooding across the United Kingdom on gay marriage. David Silvester, the councilor in question, held the prime minister accountable for the floods, saying they were occurring due to the recent legislative progress toward gay marriage in Britain. "It is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods," Silvester was quoted by BBC as saying.

How did Silvester justify his claim? "The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war."

Silvester’s proclamation was motivated by his Baptist faith. We, in the Jewish community, have our own fair share of members who blame meteorological events on the LGBT community.

Rabbi Noson Leiter is one of them. In 2012, he reportedly blamed superstorm Sandy on New York State’s support for gay marriage. One year earlier, Rabbi Yehuda Levin reportedly blamed the Haitian earthquake on the island nation's high AIDS rates, and an earthquake in Virginia on gays.

Such is the power of the LGBT community that they can literally move mountains and flatten cities.

What peaked my interest in this story however, was less the religiously-inspired bigotry on display, but rather the collective response of the good people of Britain. The story broke on January 19. Some prankster created @UkipWeather to tweet about the weather patterns that the LGBT community was causing. Just five days later, @UkipWeather had over 109,000 followers.

Jewish Suitmaker Wins Accidental Gay Following

By Michael Kaminer for The Jewish Daily Forward

Three years ago, Toronto-born Daniel Friedman was a newly minted architect whose livelihood evaporated when the economy crashed.

Today, hundreds of people are living in Friedman’s designs — but sewing machines and measuring tapes are his work tools.

With business partner David Kusy, Friedman runs Bindle and Keep, a New York-based bespoke mens- and womenswear company whose custom suits and shirts are drawing a rabid following. Meticulous tailoring drives the company’s success. But Bindle and Keep also makes house calls, which has helped it carve a distinctive niche in a fiercely competitive field.

Friedman, 34, spoke to the Forward’s Michael Kaminer about growing up Orthodox, the long thread connecting Jews and apparel and the former Jewish archivist who helped spark Bindle and Keep’s accidental gay following.

Michael Kaminer: You were an architecture major who never studied fashion. How did the business start?

Daniel Friedman: I was an undergrad at McGill in Montreal, and studied architecture at Penn. I got another Master’s degree at Columbia, and thought, “I’m moving up in the world”. Then the economy fell out. I’d graduated at the top of my class, had no money, and was living on a friend’s couch.

At Penn, I’d had a classmate whose family had a small factory. They were retiring. My classmate and I always joked that if architecture didn’t work out, we could go into clothing. I’m a small guy, about 5’6”, and I need to wear custom suits. When the economy went to hell, we looked around at the custom business and said, “Let’s give this a go. We can do it better.”

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