Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
"As Deadline .com bluntly put it, 'Kevin Spacey Apologizes to Anthony Rapp for Alleged Sexual Advances; Chooses to "Live As A Gay Man."' The outraged response of progressive intellectuals, activists, and cultural critics to Spacey’s twofold tweet has demonstrated, inter alia, the resilience of old school assumptions and expectations about coming out and about gay identity and gay identifications. These outraged responses have come especially from younger generations of intellectuals, activists, and critics, but also across generations, genders, and sexual orientations. Despite decades of attacks on models of gay identity that center on teleological narratives of coming out, and critiques of the privileging of coming out as the apotheosis of a triumphalist gay identity as racist and ethnocentric in that privileging’s assumption of identity as coherent and univocal, and the assumption of a safe space to come out into (#BlackLivesMatter has served as a forceful reminder of the illusion of such safe spaces for black men, in particular), here we are again at a coming out crossroads, at a coming out as crossroad."
Recommended Citation
Barnard, Ian. "Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?" Invited Contribution to Forum on Kevin Spacey. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5.2 (2018): 105-11.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Michigan State University
Included in
Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons
Comments
This Article originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Vol. 5, Iss. 2, 2018, pp. 105-111.