Political-economic construction of gay male clone identity.

Abstract

Social Construction is an ill-defined approach, lacking in specificity and poorly suited for solving problems of the real world. A concrete analysis of negative aspects of the Gay Clone Lifestyle, with a particular focus upon the premier gay clone drug, "poppers" (or nitrite inhalants), is contrasted to the desultory verbalizing characteristic of most social constructionist writing. The central point: Many features of the gay clone lifestyle were not created by or in the interests of gay men at all, but instead were economically constructed. The gay subculture largely evolved according to the profit-logic of an expanding sex industry. Over a dozen years ago, the sidewalks of my neighborhood, New York City's Lower East Side, were spray painted with the slogan, "CLONES GO HOME!" This was not an act of antigay bigotry. Gay men themselves had done the spray painting. Living in the Lower East Side-New York's traditional "melting pot"-these men had a way of life they wished to preserve from the encroachment of the "Gay Clone" lifestyle. Gay Lower East Siders considered themselves part of a diverse and vital community. They looked upon the newly emerging Gay Clone lifestyle as the product of a ghettoized mentality, an embodiment of commercialism, conformism, and vacuity. Living in a tough neighborhood, they were not impressed by leather queens with expensive wardrobes, nor by ersatz cowboys, nor by make-believe lumberjacks. They despised disco as an uninteresting species of submusic, referring to it as "Mafia Muzak." Nevertheless, the clone lifestyle came to prevail all over the world, so that an entire generation of gay men defined their own identities in terms of adherence to clonism: little mustaches; very short haircuts; plaid flannel shirts, boots, denim or leather jackets; a particular repertoire of movements, sounds, facial expressions, drug taking, and sexual practices. By the mid-70s there was a phrase in Frankfurt, "ein falscher Amerikaner" ("a fake American"), to describe a German gay man who had adopted the lifestyle of the American clone. At present, the clone lifestyle seems to be on the way out, though no doubt there are those who will carry it with them, as their identity, to the very end. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of social construction theory for understanding the clone episode in gay male history. I am particularly interested in the issues of continuity and specificity.