A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture

Rating:
Summary: Behind the Drywalls, Secrets about Gender Role Identity
Review: Will Fellows is himself a sort of preservationist writer. His first book, Farm boys, recovered the childhoods of rural gay men in scholarly-memoir format. This time, he painstakingly identified gay men nationwide who seek to "keep culture" by restoring historically-valuable old buildings. The body of the book consists of the recorded testimonies of 29 individuals (or couples) by region, plus cameos of still others.

But this body is not the book's "soul" perhaps. Which is to help clarify "what it means to be gay." "Even more than culture keeping, that's what this book is about," Fellows confirms. Specifically, he scrutinizes the suspect stereotype of gay men as gender-role atypical or noncomformist, let alone effeminate. He finds it may be an accurate image or a "sociotype" after all. That is, an image based in reality. Florists, hair stylists, interior designers? Yes, but also house restorers and antiquarians. And joining women in "fields that revolve around creating, restoring, and preserving beauty, order, and continuity." Gay men flourish in those concerns, sometimes outnumbering women. The image is true, it seems.

Fellows usefully clarifies key terms. "Homosexual" refers to sexual orientation: behavior, self-identification, fantasy and arousal. (And, I would add, emotional spiritual adhesion...) But then "gay" encompasses not only that but gender identity. Which can include gender-atypicality-being "psychologically and perhaps physically androgynous." And also "effeminacy," although this surpasses "a swishy, limp-wristed prissiness. It encompasses "qualities or characteristics generally possessed by girls and women" and may involve not only speaking gesturing walking, but also interests aptitudes values emotions. Such as the passion to conserve, preserve. As Fellows puts it, "Males have great inclination and capacity for creating and building new, but females and gay males possess the greater inclination to re-create, rebuild, restore, preserve." Due to "a decidedly feminine ethos" that values "continuity of identity, maintaining connections, remembering."

So this thrust usefully helps balance clarify this contested issue of gender-role-identity. Stereotypes, Political Correctness, social consructivism, essentialism. Now we can point to this culture-keeping quality of gay males as due to more than-more disposable income plus oppression!

So the book serves at least two audiences. Specifically, preservationists and their camp followers. Generally, those interested in gay male identity, gender-role-identity.

I could quibble only with the statistics? Does a "sampling error" raise its head here? Gay men into preservation, the sample, does not examine all gay males. So it might be insufficient, unrepresentative for the generalization about gay men? But it does echo prior research finding that childhood gender-atypicality and homosexuality are correlated. And indeed we recall those "special" farm boys, mavericks or outliers before puberty, amateur family genealogists, raisers of fancy poultry, and the rest...

I could also wish for more meat with the potatoes? I could wish the interviews had been less storytelling and more conceptual. In Telling Our Stories concretely, we sometimes miss the interesting conceptualities behind it all. I felt yoked to the plowing team (so to speak) of autobiography on the lower field. I wished to ascend to the hilly heights of ideas about preservation, keystone issues in it. Perhaps a separate essay to learn about problems, pitfalls, potentialities, levels of competence, etc.

But the reviewer shouldn't condemn a book for not doing what the reviewer personally preferred. All told, Fellows' contribution to the social psychology of sexual-role identity is really valuable. In the glut of print today, what justifies "yet another book"? Well, something truly new on an important issue, or at least not just repeating the known but advancing and clarifying it. As I found here.