Page 177 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 147

serious subtext beneath the piquant humor. In the Manifesto’s
every joke and jape and jibe lies a kernel of recognizable truth.
It’s as if O’Hara, maybe more than he knows, has assimilated by
osmosis from the bars and baths and bistros something coming,
but not yet fully realized, in what he would call “man-to-man
homomasculinity” as practiced by men who have gone beyond
their initial gayness to a vision of their own maleness that must be
defined in terms wider than generic homosexuality and specific
gayety.
O’Hara’s erotic prose in Maneuvers is often experimental.
Sometimes succeeding. Sometimes not. At least for this reviewer.
If the reader can get around his constant coining of new terms—
some are chic; some are cheeky; some fall flat on their butts—
then homomasculinism, which is his key conceptual coinage, can,
for queer identity’s sake, work nicely to define for homosexual
men a new way to be, as O’Hara would say, “beyond gay,” into
“post-gay.”
Ironically, the minute the straight media finally feel at ease
with the popular euphemism gay, a newer, second-wave corps
of homosexual men has been rejecting the word as a trivializing
label. Perhaps, for all his bumptious arguments, O’Hara’s on to
something. Gayness seems these days defined by bars and baths.
There’s more to homosexuality than that. While this reviewer
finds much of the Manifesto a bit bizarre and very much too
aggressive, I would have to agree that gay liberation’s commercial-
ized, politicized Castroid lifestyle has forgotten what pure, radi-
cal homosexuality is essentially about: men preferring other men
sexually and socially. As O’Hara says, “Gay men have lifestyles.
(In fact, the word lifestyle has become the new euphemism for
homosexuality.) Straight men don’t have lifestyles. Straight men
have lives. Homomasculine men have lives.”
“Co-opting the old slurs against us,” O’Hara writes, “some
of us take perverse pride in calling ourselves queers, faggots, and
homos—anything but gay. We are not gay. We are men. The
essence of men. A homomasculine man and a heteromasculine
man have more in common, in all areas, except the one of their
sexual preference, than homomasculine men have with the new
cloned species of gays.”

The Market Street Gay Men’s Glee Club was insulted and went flat

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