Shame and White Gay Masculinity

Abstract

When I first received an invitation to speak at the University of Michigan's " Gay Shame " conference, I felt immediately that this conference was not for me. The idea of gay shame felt anachronistic, even though I knew about the activist groups who organized under this rubric to critique the consumerism of gay pride festivals. 1 The more I thought about the confer-ence and its theme, the more I became convinced that gay shame, if used in an uncritical way, was for, by, and about the white gay men who had rejected feminism and a queer of color critique and for whom, therefore, shame was still an active rubric of identification. A quick glance at the list of participants a few months before the conference confirmed this notion, as at least seventeen white gay men were scheduled to speak out of a list of about forty-five participants and only a handful of people of color were listed for the entire event. I considered sending an e-mail to the conference organizers to ask about their understanding of the place of race in queer studies today, but I thought better of it and presumed that the list of participants was still under construction and would look very different when the conference began. As it turned out, the list of participants did change slightly; one of the queer people of color invited, Samuel Delany, could not attend, and so Hiram Perez was one of two people of color at the event who was speaking on a panel (as opposed to moderating a panel). At a conference where disability studies was given a panel all its own (and an excellent panel at that) and the scope of the discussion was supposed to extend beyond the university and into activist and performance communities, the omission of people of color, or at the very least of queers explicitly working on race, was ominous. How do we explain the absence of both a panel on race and sexuality and queer people of color at a major queer studies conference in the year 2003? Is it the case that gay shame is not a rubric that relates to racializa-tion? Has there been no relevant work recently on gay shame and race? Is queer studies white? Is queer activism white? Is race somehow not an important rubric for queer studies? Obviously, the answer to each of these questions is " no " : there has been a huge amount of work recently that fore-grounds racial processes and indeed implicates shame in producing queer ST84-85-13_Halberstam.indd 219 10/19/05 2:34:39 PM