How can someone be gay without having seen “Mildred Pierce” or “The Wizard of Oz”? To answer that, you first have to know what such movies have to do with being gay. Halperin observes, as others have before him, that gay boys often display stereotypical tastes long before sex enters the picture. As he points out, sexuality is the area where gay men differ least from straight men: the male in heat is a uniform animal. Gay taste is something more singular, probably linked to incipient feelings of dissimilarity from one’s peers. This alienation can happen in class, or in the locker room, or at a friend’s house when straight porn is unveiled. However these experiences unfold, they have a lasting impact, equivalent to a trauma with no visible cause. One common response is preëmptive withdrawal. The boy buries himself in some obscure aesthetic pursuit. One self-help book calls it “velvet rage.” My ignorance of “The Wizard of Oz” didn’t save me from becoming a typical case: at the age of ten, I developed a peculiar predilection for Austro-German symphonies.

Of course, a love for Golden Age movies or interior design is not necessarily a telltale sign. Plenty of straight kids flee from the locker room to the Drama Club, and plenty of gay kids thrive at sports**.** Yet the anecdotal evidence for the early onset of gay taste is vast. In retrospect, my mania for Beethoven may have been a way of forestalling a reckoning with my sexuality: rather than commit myself, I disappeared into a fleshless realm. Halperin sees another dimension to this kind of engagement—a willful resistance to the male-adolescent herd, a form of quasi-political dissidence. It’s a heady idea to attribute political motives to gay children, but Halperin is on to something. The fanatical twelve-year-old aesthete displays something like cultural disobedience.

The trickiest component of gay-male culture is the role of women in its midst. Feminist critics have long detected misogynist mockery in drag acts and in gay men’s howling response to melodramatic scenes that were not intended to be funny, such as Joan Crawford’s verbal annihilation of her aloof, ingrate daughter in “Mildred Pierce.” Halperin, like many before him, sees a more complex identification at work. Crawford maintains a flawlessly high pitch as she gyrates between “feminine glamour” and “feminine abjection,” and the typical gay male viewer may feel at home at both extremes: so many gay kids work at presenting a perfected surface to the world, and so many are hounded by the fear that some grotesque exposure will tear it down.

At the same time, the plunge into abjection can be liberating—“the politics of emotion,” Halperin calls it, of “losing it,” of “righteous, triumphant fury.” (That young man at the Jack in the Box, despite his frat-boy affect, had a Joan Crawford quality.) Furthermore, as the feminist theorist Judith Butler has argued, these extravagant diva turns, and, more particularly, the drag acts that perpetuate them, reveal the artificiality of conventional gender roles, the “hyperbolic status of the norm itself.” As Halperin puts it, “every identity is a role or an act.” It’s just that straight-male performance is granted instant authenticity. Super Bowl Sunday, seen from a certain angle, is a pageant as intricate and contrived as the annual invasion of the drag queens on Fire Island.

Having plausibly defined gay culture, Halperin ponders its fate. Its demise has been prophesied many times, often with eagerness: already in 1944, Robert Duncan sounds fed up with the rites of camp. In the nineties, there was a vogue for the phrase “post-gay,” signifying life outside the ghetto, and in 2005 Andrew Sullivan announced the “end of gay culture.” Yet, like Sarah Bernhardt, camp always seems to be coming around for one more farewell tour. Chris Colfer, the fearlessly swishy young actor who has become the star of “Glee,” has revived the cult of Judy and Babs for the post-millennial generation. Curiously, Halperin doesn’t mention “Glee,” but he says that his gay students lap up all that antiquated lore, effortlessly unravelling its codes. He also notes that the gay audience tends to lose interest when coded messages give way to explicitly affirmative ones. Lady Gaga tried to write a new gay anthem with “Born This Way,” yet the song failed to ignite the clubs and bars as “Poker Face” had before it. Subtext is sexier.

In the straight world, meanwhile, the mortal fear of being mistaken for gay is weakening. Halperin could have added a chapter on the semiotics of “Call Me Maybe,” the pop ditty by Carly Rae Jepsen that became a monster hit this past summer, thanks in part to YouTube videos where everyone from Justin Bieber to Colin Powell was seen singing along. The official video gave the song a queer vibe from the outset: the singer sees a half-naked young man mowing the lawn, requests a possible telephone connection, and then discovers, to her dismay, that he prefers his own kind. (His “Call me” pantomime to another guy is more than a bit camp.) The most popular of the lip-synch videos features members of the Harvard baseball team, in all their macho splendor. Such gayish cavorting would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Likewise, you knew that the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were numbered when soldiers stationed in war zones uploaded videos of themselves prancing suggestively to Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” and other dance hits. At certain moments, straight people can seem gayer than the gays.

This is especially noticeable when—as Halperin writes, in his acidulous final chapter—gay people are “preening themselves on their dullness, commonness, averageness.” He also laments the rise of online hookup sites, which, he says, are erasing the messy diversity of gay bars. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people,” Halperin says, with what I take to be a Bette Davis scowl. Other academic writers have inveighed against the New Gay Normalcy. The most influential of them is the Yale professor Michael Warner, whose 1999 book, “The Trouble with Normal,” attacks the constraints of straight and gay marriage alike, celebrating instead porn stores, sex clubs, cruising grounds, and other sites of what he calls “the queer ethos.” These scholars also maintain that imagery of wholesome relationships and talk of the power of the “gay dollar” signal a collusion with social conservatism, with market capitalism, even with an imperial American foreign policy.

As a married gay man with three cats, I’m chastened by this critique of domesticity, but I’m not entirely swayed by it. The queer ethos has its own confinements, its own essentialism: the implication is that anyone who goes in for marriage is betraying the bohemian essence of gayness. Both sides of the debate tend to reduce the dizzying variety of gay lives to an ideal condition: either you’re prowling the bars or you’re gardening in the Berkshires. It is possible to do both, or, perhaps, to transition gently from one to the other as time goes by. There are riddles of love and lust that ideology will never solve.

Still, Halperin is right to defend the old rituals and the lingo and body language that go with them. Those who fit the classic stereotypes—the ones who get called queer, faggot, pansy, sissy—have been abused in one society after another, whatever the prevailing attitude toward same-sex acts. The insult “magnus cinaedus”—essentially, “big fag”—can be found on the walls of Pompeii. Sadly, gay men are capable of using such language against one another. A Web site devoted to culling obnoxious messages from gay hookup sites includes the following: “Don’t be gay,” “No fats or fems,” “If you have a broken wrist keep movin’.” Fleeing stereotypes, gay men too often fall into a deeper conformity—the rigid choreography of the average male.

So long live camp, and all the other cultural pursuits that gay people have traditionally embraced. Perhaps the historic devotion to theatre, opera, high fashion, and other venerable disciplines will wither away, but it seems likely that many gay kids will still feel the trauma of difference and go on seeking refuge in artier spheres. Halperin speaks of a “tension between egalitarian ethics and hierarchical aesthetics” in gay taste; he sees it as a snobbery not of class but of knowledge, open to all who can hold their own. It stands in opposition to a society that joins egalitarian aesthetics—the notion that the perfect cultural product appeals to all—to an economic system whose inequalities become more glaring by the day. Gay culture’s long memory, its arch sympathy for fading worlds, is a check against the razing of the past.

IV. JESUS AND THE CENTURION

To read through the seismographic record of the gay movement, with its sudden waves of repression and its equally abrupt forward leaps, is to confront the unpredictable dynamics of bigotry. In the fifties, the prejudice seemed monolithic, yet its effects were arbitrary, destroying some lives and leaving others untouched. A man fired from the State Department blows his brains out on the corner of Twenty-first Street and Virginia Avenue; Truman Capote swans across late-night TV. Intolerance has a way of dissolving in one place and becoming feral in another. In large cities, being gay has never been easier; in some devout small towns, it may never have been harder. As American gays chatter of victory, their Iranian counterparts inhabit a medieval world of floggings and public hangings.

“Though you be a villainous scoundrel, fairness demands I inform you that’s your cell.” Facebook

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An elemental question kept crossing my mind as I browsed dozens of volumes of gay history and theory: Why has this small part of the population caused such vexation across the centuries? What inspires such profound contempt, contempt that is inscribed in the texts of several world religions? I grew up in the Greek Orthodox church, serving for a time as an altar boy, and attended an Episcopalian high school. Although I don’t recall hearing denunciations of homosexuality in either place, I certainly became aware of the most vehemently anti-gay passages in the Christian tradition, and they both scared and mystified me. St. Thomas Aquinas could be found saying that the “sin against nature” was among the gravest of offenses, because it entails “the corruption of the principle on which the rest depend.” The response is disproportionate, as if Aquinas were carpet-bombing an elusive target. There is much evil under the sun, and Rosie O’Donnell’s gay-family cruise is not the prime cause of it.

The retreat of anti-gay feeling in the secular West probably has much to do with the realization that homosexuality is not a choice, a “life style,” but, rather, a life. I knew I was gay before I consciously met a gay person; I came out before I had sex. No life style drew me in; if anything, the life style kept me away. Recent scientific research has presented murky evidence of a genetic basis for homosexuality. The neuroscientist Simon LeVay, in his 2010 book, “Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why,” informs me that the third interstitial nucleus of my anterior hypothalamus is probably smaller than it is in most straight men. If, indeed, gay people are born this way, as Lady Gaga avers, it becomes a little harder to call them sinners or beat them up.

Yet most gay historians resist any depiction of homosexuality as a fixed category transcending time. Ever since Michel Foucault published the first volume of his “History of Sexuality,” in 1976, sexual identity has often been portrayed as a “social construction,” as the jargon goes. David Halperin made his name as a Foucauldian; his 1990 book, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” shows in ripe detail how the mores of ancient Greece differed from our own. Same-sex acts were considered normal within set bounds: an adult male could impose himself on boys, foreigners, or slaves, but to submit to another of equal status was shameful. It appears that countless Greeks indulged in such behavior not because they were genetically distinct but because so many others were doing it. Aspects of that old regime persist in prisons, in same-sex schools, and in societies where women are segregated from men. In Kandahar, for example, Pashtun men make a cult of teen-age boys. Even if genetics predict certain desires, social forces can transform them.

If, as Halperin and others insist, it is nonsense to speak of a gay-straight dichotomy in Greco-Roman times, it is also nonsense to insert the word “homosexuality” into the Old and New Testaments, as some modern translations do. Bishop Gene Robinson’s “God Believes in Love,” a slender book that carries blurbs from Barack Obama and Desmond Tutu, makes this point repeatedly. Robinson is the gay Episcopal priest who helped to set off a semi-schism in the Anglican Church when he was elected Bishop of New Hampshire, in 2003. He opens his essay with familiar tales of a confused childhood and early adulthood, but says that his struggles never caused a crisis of faith. Rather, he came to believe that by hiding his sexuality he was being untruthful to God.

When Robinson examines Biblical passages that condemn gay acts, he emphasizes, in social-constructionist fashion, gaps between ancient and modern practices. St. Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, inveighs against all manner of fornicators, including men and women who act “against nature.” Elsewhere, Paul employs the word arsenokoitai, which he evidently coined: “man-liers” would be a literal translation. In all likelihood, Paul was talking about attachments between older men and boys, since those were the most prevalent same-sex pairings in his time. He almost certainly did not have in mind anything like, say, the twenty-seven-year relationship between the late astronaut Sally Ride and her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Robinson asks, “Do we really want to base our condemnation of an entire group of people on a shaky translation of an unknowable Greek word?”

Paul’s vague strictures hardened into dogma in the early Christian era. St. John Chrysostom reached the dire conclusion that sodomy was worse than murder: “The murderer dissevers the soul from the body, but [the sodomite] ruins the soul with the body. . . . For I should not only say that thou hast become a woman, but that thou hast lost thy manhood.” The problem with gay sex, in other words, is that it undermines the dominance of the male. Ironically, the Greeks and the Romans followed the same logic in censuring effeminate males. The pagan and Christian worlds had more in common than the church fathers might have liked to admit—especially when you look at the persistence of pedophilia in the priesthood. Jesus Christ did not speak the same hierarchical language. Why did Mosaic law allow men to divorce their wives while women could not divorce their husbands? “Because of the hardness of your hearts.”

Jesus is famously silent on the subject of same-sex love. “If homosexuality is such a heinous sin against God, why does Jesus himself never refer to it?” Robinson writes. “Why no mention of an issue now causing entire churches to split?” This silence has not stopped some on the Christian right from locating an objection to gay marriage in Jesus’ disquisition on divorce: “He which made them at the beginning made them male and female. . . . What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Here is the source of the slogan “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But the context for Jesus’ statement points up an underlying hypocrisy in the history of homophobia. The American divorce rate climbed steeply in the first part of the twentieth century, hitting an early peak in 1945. In this same period, homophobia intensified into official policy. The two developments may not be unrelated: a largely Christian nation, having abandoned Jesus’ teachings on divorce, reinforced its moral credentials at the expense of a friendless minority.