Gay Men And The Forms Of Contemporary Us Culture (Queer Interventions)

This book is about the literal and figurative place(s) of what the author calls 'gay historical ambivalence' in post 1960s US cultural forms and formations.The author closely and critically interrogates a variety of forms through which this ambivalence presents itself in popular and everyday culture, including: gay male video bars; jokes about AIDS; landmark post-social problem films from "Philadelphia" to "Brokeback Mountain"; all-male pornography across the transition from film to video to the internet, and from its early 1970s nationalisms through its rigorous globalization since the 1990s; and, questions encircling the notion of a gay face.Products of the present are approached as forms of/from the past when the past is seen, through the presence of gay historical ambivalence, as partially commodifiable form and content. The book attempts to contribute to the development of methods for approaching the present as an archive of the past, and the past as an archive of the present, while accounting for details of the gay male US case over the past 40 or so years.Demonstrating a series of approaches to seriously rethinking commitments to historical narrative in relation to contemporary sexual cultures, its ultimate goal is the invention of updated modes through which contemporary cultural forms in general can be approached as material and immaterial cultural products wherever, whenever and however gay men might be concerned.