Not Gay

A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first centuryA straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other’s penises and stick fingers up their fellow members’ anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can—and do—have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity. Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward’s analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.

Wards book is confident and theoretically well-informed, and offers a rich, often counterintuitive and thought-provoking tour through straight white mens homosexual activities and their shifting meanings in history, in the military, in fan fiction, in French kissing among Hells Angel members, as well as in the accounts of pop psychological experts who assure straight men having sex with other men that they arenot gay. In short, this is cultural studies at its best., [Not Gay] provides a compelling and intriguing argument, that, rather than erasing queer identities, complicates the concept of identity itself., What I love about this book is that it expands our notions about what it means to be human., The title of Jane Wards book is not meant to be ironic. Her argument is that while sexual activity between straight white men does take place, it doesnt mean that the participants are gay. The book is about exploring the circumstances under which this situation can be said to arise., A key contribution of the book is its documentation of the freedom and power enjoyed by straight white men to define what 'not gay'and 'real'homosexuality looks like and in what circumstances these terms are applied . . . well-written and direct in both its presentation and synthesis of a range of materials.

Jane Ward is Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations.