Subject: BOOK REVIEW: A Queer Geography
From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 16:55:46 -0400

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Frank Browning's most recent book, A Queer Geography, explores his ideas of a
gay culture that developed as a result of the American culture. While he
recognizes that homosexuality exists in all cultures and species, he notes
that "gay" people exist only in America. Browning, the author of The Culture
of Desire, presents well-founded and compelling arguments, and this review
captures Browning's ideas well.

ART IS AVAILABLE! Please contact Gip Plaster, the review's author, at
[email-masked], to have a print of the book jacket and a photo of Frank
Browning mailed to you immediately.

If your publication normally pays for articles and reviews, please contact
the author, Gip Plaster, prior to publication at [email-masked]. If your
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ARTICLE BELOW:
755 words, ART AVAILABLE
by Gip Plaster
Copyright (c) 1996 Gip Plaster

Frank Browning.  A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward A Sexual Self. New York:
Crown, 1996.  240 pages, index, $24.00 cloth.

        The gay and lesbian movement in America collectively presumes a gay
and lesbian community; that further presumes gay and lesbian people exist.
        In A Queer Geography, Frank Browning asks in chapter one, "Do gays
exist?" Browning doesn't doubt that homosexuals -- people attracted to others
of the same sex -- exist; in fact, he doesn't really doubt that 'gay' people
exist. He does question, though, how 'gay' is created.
        For Browning, whose 1993 book The Culture of Desire detailed the
emergence of the contemporary gay culture, being gay is a singularly American
experience.  He notes same-sex activity and male-to-male relationships in
other cultures, but he does not call those 'gay.' America, with all its
preconceived ideas about sex, family and marriage, has created and continues
to create the gay identity from the homosexual, or simply 'queer,' people who
live here. In other words, he presents the idea of a gay identity as a part
of a global spectrum of homosexual lifestyles and manifestations.
        "Homosexuality is eternal, but what the activist and the press call
the 'gay identity' is something new, distinctively American, and pretty
bizarre to the rest of the world," Browning says. "It's a longing for
certainty and stability whose story is all about uncertainty and
instability."
        Browning uses Edmond White as an example.  White, whom Browning calls
"the most prominent gay essayist in the English language," confesses in one
of his works that "I myself might have been bisexual had I lived in a
different era."  Browning comments that this person who epitomizes the gay
identity admits he might have been bisexual under different circumstances,
 and that surely many people must have been socialized into roles created by
their culture.
        Browning takes readers from the present to the past and soaring ahead
to the future.  A Queer Geography leads those who interest themselves in his
radical and controversial ideas from Italy to tribes in New Guinea.  Then he
drops the almost overwhelmed reader back into the middle of a nationalistic
and narrow-minded country that boxes people into roles they may not have any
interest in assuming.
        Through vignettes wrapping around examples of his argument, Browning
draws his abstract ideas into real-life situations.  He introduces people
like Paul in New York, who finds the gay culture a "community predicated on
sexuality." He also considers the femminielli, transvestite prostitutes who
are an accepted part of the culture in Naples. He cites both as examples of
queer but not gay people in other cultures.
        He also writes about the gay culture in America developing since the
riots at the Stonewall Inn almost three decades ago.  "[The gay culture] is a
haven, a defensive zone of experimentation and growth in a culture that has
long been marked by panic around sexual matters," Browning writes.  He uses
the example of a tribe in New Guinea to illustrate that point.
        "[Sambian men] believe that boys cannot become men unless they suck
out male essence -- semen -- and fill up their 'semen organs,'" Browning
writes.  He wonders how the American gay culture he describes relates to this
behavior in New Guinea that Americans may consider child abuse or, at the
very least, bizarre.
        "It's the entire Sambian organization of sex and sexual identity that
makes my gay friends fidget," Browning observes about gay Americans who he he
says often recognize their culture as the only expression of homosexuality
instead of one of many representations.  And the Sambian experience in New
Guinea is only one of his examples.
        Browning's arguments and language are vivid and compelling. He forces
readers to think; many will also be offended by the openness with which he
discusses delicate matters.  Eventually, though, what readers see is an
examination of a gay community created by its country. 
        This book may seem a little confusing, and that's because it is.
Simply put, though, the author says gay language, attitude and culture is a
uniquely American product of the unique American culture.  He supports his
argument with examples of queer but not gay people in other cultures.
Ultimately, Browning tries to make readers see what can be learned from and
shared with other queer people around the world.
        "Contrary to our usual nation impulses, I believe, we would be well
advised to look with generosity and forbearance at the sexual geographies
that are organized in other ways, which may in fact change the way we come to
see ourselves in future days," Browning says.
        A Queer Geography will compel readers to expand their view from an
American one to a human one.
END