So the difficult question is not: how do we get rid of sexual shame? The answer to that one will inevitably be: get rid of sex. The question, rather, is this: what will we do with our shame?
In this important quote from the opening pages of The Trouble with Normal, Warner discusses the inevitability of shame. We will always experience shame in sex, no matter how much we try to cover it up with euphemisms like “making love.” But if shame is universal, then what matters are its effects rather than its existence. Warner worries that most people, when confronted with their own shame, try to get rid of it by making sure others experience even more shame than they do.
One reason why people do not unite against shame is that there are some real differences among them. Here perhaps we should make an elementary distinction between stigma of the kind gay people endure and shame of the kind that dogs Clinton.
In this quote, Warner discusses the difference between stigma and shame. Everyone experiences shame in sex, which also means that if your sex life is talked about in public, like Clinton’s was in the impeachment trial at the end of his presidency, you are shamed by it. But some shame is more intense than others, and it is more indelible, which means it won’t go away and it will follow you your whole life. Shame of this kind acts like an identity, and Warner calls it stigma, which means something that leaves a mark on you. Gays and lesbians experience stigma because their sexuality forms an identity in a way that Clinton’s sexual indiscretions do not.
Pin it on the fuckers who deserve it: sex addicts, body-builders in Chelsea or West Hollywood, circuit boys, flaming queens, dildo dykes, people with HIV, anyone who magnetizes the stigma you can’t shake.
In this provocative quote, Warner discusses a strategy that many gays and lesbians have adopted to deal with their experience of shame. The strategy is to purify the gay identity by shaming the most non-normative within it, and here Warner provides a list of the typical scapegoats. His profane language represents the contempt that many “respectable” gays and lesbians have for the queer members of their community they see as the cause of their collective experience of stigma.
In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated, the ground rule is that one doesn’t pretend to be above the indignity of sex.
This quote attempts to define the queer relation to shame, in contrast to mainstream society or the “official” gay rights movement. Warner’s argument is that sex always produces shame; there’s always something dirty, or “indignant,” about it. Most people try to pretend this shame away, either by euphemizing sex (“making love”) or by shaming other people instead. In this way, there is a hierarchy in which some sex looks more indignant than others. In contrast, in queer publics, shame is recognized as a common condition shared by all. There is no kind of sex without it, hence no way to avoid experiencing it.
If sex is a kind of indignity then we’re all in it together. And the paradoxical result is that only when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human.
Warner argues that shame is universal in sex: everyone who has sex experiences shame. In this quote, Warner advocates for acknowledging shame rather than repressing it. He says that shame can be a powerful tool for building community, since it is something people share. This is a more productive use of shame than repressing it, because it builds connections rather than severing them.
The term “queer” is used in a deliberately capacious way in this book, as it is in much queer theory, in order to suggest how many ways people can find themselves at odds with straight culture.
In this quote, Warner defines what he means by “queer.” He does not mean queer as an umbrella term or synonym for LGBT, or the group of people with lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identities. Sexual deviations from the norm can happen in more ways than these identities cover. For instance, sex workers, pornography consumers, people who have intergenerational sex, and people who enjoy BDSM (bondage, domination, and sadomasochism) might all finds themselves “at odds with straight culture,” and therefore to have a queer relation to society.
Through such a hierarchy of respectability, from the days of the Mattachine Society to the present, gay and lesbian politics has been built on embarrassment. It has neglected the most searching ethical challenges of the very queer culture it should be protecting.
In this quote, Warner suggests the history and breadth of “respectability politics” in the gay rights movement. It keeps coming back, whether in the early days of the 1950s or in the current affairs of the 1990s. In every case, the movement is more interested in being accepted by society in order to reduce shame than it is in changing society altogether.
The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations.
The “vocabulary” Warner talks about here refers to the different ways in which mainstream American culture, or “straight culture,” talks about relationships. He says that straight culture lacks a way of talking about meaningful adult friendships or social networks that aren’t made through marriage. In contrast, Warner says that queer culture is full of different kinds of intimacy that aren’t just about spousal partnership. We need to develop ways of talking about and promoting these kinds of relationships as well.
Queer theory cannot counteract this narrative by insisting that we are inevitably, permanently queer. To do so is to give up the struggle for the self-understanding not only of individual queers—who may be persuaded despite their best instinct and the evidence of their daily lives that their sense of world alienation is their private moral failing rather than a feature of dominant ideology—but also of the gay world’s media and publics, which increasingly understand themselves as belonging to a market niche rather than to a counterpublic.
In this quote, Warner disputes the argument that queer people can transform the institution of marriage if they are allowed into it. This is different from the argument made by “official” gay politics that letting gay people marry will help gay people be accepted in society. Instead, the queer argument is that letting gay people marry will change marriage, and this is a good thing. Warner is skeptical of this argument, because he thinks marriage is more likely to coerce gay people into traditional relationships than, as an institution, to be transformed by nontraditional relationships.
The very concept of public sexual culture looks anomalous because so many kinds of privacy are tied to sex.
In the final two chapters of The Trouble with Normal, Warner argues for the importance of queer publics. This refers to institutions and spaces in which queer people can come together and form community, sometimes with the aim of sex. Warner thinks a public sex culture is particularly important in promoting safe sex, because in publics, people can share information and resources. In this quote, he acknowledges how counterintuitive this seems, since we tend to think of sex as a private act. Warner’s argument is that public institutions always make sex possible, because it is in public that straight people, too, meet each other, date, and so on.
