Fear, Flesh, and Pixels: Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?
More : AK Press, Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, Gay male sexual health, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Online dating, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
The new must-read from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore questions the top/bottom dichotomy, and all those other gay discontents, in Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
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Like all of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s books, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?is an anthology you’ll keep under your pillow to ward off the twin nightmares of assimilation and conformity. It’s piercing—a crack in the duplicitous veneer of homonormativity. It’s incendiary accelerant for anyone trapped in the stagnancy of mainstream gay desire.
In this timely anthology, the whitewashed and fetishized vision of straight masculinity finally gets thrown from its pedestal with one swishy kick. Nick Clarkson challenges a leather daddy on his transphobia. Harris Kornstein shares a poignant look at childhood, adolescence, and The Spice Girls. Kristen Stoeckeler honours the power of drag kings, and Chris Bartlett celebrates the legacy of gay men from a pre-AIDS era.
The Internet plays a reoccurring role in these essays. Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco advocates for flesh rather than pixels, and calls for an end to the sanitization of queer sex. There’s a flaming re-imagining of the web, courtesy of D. Travers Scott. Most inspiring is the dialogue between Michael J. Faris and ML Sugie in “Fucking With Fucking Online: Advocating for Indiscriminate Promiscuity” which will make you think about where and why you click. In a realm that normalizes racism, body fascism, ageism, and misogyny as “just preferences,” all sex acts are reduced to the top/bottom dichotomy. Faris and Sugie suggest an alternate form of cruising that is radical in its simplicity: focus on the kind of sex you want to have, not the kind of body doing it with you.
We still have the potential to celebrate and explore all the complexities of desire, and to reconfigure our understandings of love. Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is the perfect guidebook for this expedition.
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification, and the desire to conform
Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
AK Press, 2011
232 pages, $19.99
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