Will Fellows is the author of Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, and the forthcoming Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s. Producing a heartfelt written compliment to Jeff Pearcy’s powerful photography, Will completed the gay-straight collaboration that made The Shall Not Be Recognized project happen.

Arno: After I left the white power movement, I ended up diving straight into the rave scene. One of the halmarks of that subculture is that it celebrates gay contributions. The rave scene revolved around house music, which was an offshoot of disco after it was forced underground by a wholesale vicious rejection on the part of mainstream society during the early eighties. That underground consisted largely of gay bars, where the beautiful liberty of dancing with complete abandon kept the disco vibe alive until proper raves emerged in the early nineties.

My experiences in the rave scene involving gay people were integral to my turnaround. In my circle of party friends, we were very much like a family. You would see people at parties and get to know them and there was this really positive vibe where everyone looked out for each other. One of those people was a flamboyantly gay black man. I’d see him at parties and found out we had the same friends and I would just think, “…this guy is awesome!” He was a lot of fun to hang out with and just an incredible personality. And most of all he knew who I had been and he didn’t even bat an eye about it. He didn’t think twice about accepting me, when the disgusting fact was that if my old friends and I would’ve caught him in an alley five years earlier, I really shudder to think what would have happened. That kind of forgiveness was an extremely powerful influence on me.

As time went on, a friend of mine who was straight ended up with a DJ residency at a gay bar in Milwaukee and we would go dance while he was playing. As you were talking about generational issues that gay men and lesbians have gone though, it reminded me of when we would go to that bar to dance. I was there with a girl and my buddy was too. It was obvious we were straight and the bulk of the regulars were very accepting of that. We would have shots with them and have a great time together, but there were a couple of older guys at the bar who seemed really put off that we were there.

Will: I can see how that would happen, partly as a reflection of the fact that in some ways the whole notion of a gay bar is sort of fading because the issue of having to be segregated from mainstream society and the mainstream community isn’t that important—in fact, it doesn’t appeal to some people anymore. They don’t necessarily identify as gay. I’m not saying the label has lost its meaning; it may be a totally accurate description of them from a certain perspective. But the idea of having to go to a specific “gay place” when they want to go socializing and dancing is becoming dated. Whereas the older guys have a sense of “…hey, this is our space!” It puts a damper on things for them to feel like it’s invaded and not safe and homogeneous in the same way it used to be.

Arno: That was how it felt. I try to empathize with people without putting words in their mouth so at the time I reminded myself that those guys were in their 40′s and 50′s and I try to think about what these guys had to deal with growing up. In that light, I could understand how important it would have been for them to have places they could go were they wouldn’t be excluded and ostracized—and we invaded it.

Continuing on the thought where you were saying that anti-homosexual sentiment has a lot more to do with the people throwing it out then the targets of it; last night as I was thinking about our conversation, I jotted down that there’s too much emphasis on sexuality and not enough on humanity throughout this issue. People who feel threatened by LGBT relationships seem awfully fixated on the sex itself and not the human beings involved. Would you agree with that, and if so what is some of the logic—if it can be called that—behind such fear and fixation?

Will: I think if you look at the general kind of antagonism towards the gay and lesbian vibe in our culture I think it is a combination of a couple of strands running side by side. One of them has to do with kind of a fixation on with the sexual side of it. When it comes to that it tends to be males who have a greater problem with it than women. It has to do more with imaging same-sex activity between men and not women that they have a problem with. Generally, gay women don’t have the same problems in our culture that gay men do; not saying they don’t have any problems, its just not anywhere near the same degree. You look at lists of victims of hate crimes and assaults and the vast majority of the names of people listed are male names—there just aren’t as many female victims of hate crimes.

There is that preoccupation I mentioned earlier that grows out of anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty—a nebulous-sort-of-lurking-whatever for a lot of guys and it manifests a lot more then just hostile jokes. Sometimes it results in enough—depending on the personality of the individual, it results in a person not being able to talk about the topic at all, like its something that needs to be completely avoided. In some cases it manifests—if they’re in the right setting with the right cohorts—it can result in ganging-up to cause trouble for someone. There are various ways that it plays out. Sometimes it just results in a quiet going-along with homophobic attitudes in culture; reading magazines and things you see on television that come from an unfounded, biased, flawed, hateful perspective. If not hateful, then antagonistic and not doing anything about it—not seeing a problem with it.

You know how we were talking about that small flamboyant man you knew? That also is a real button-pusher for most guys. There are some cases when people are more bothered by that gender nonconformity than they are by any notions of what the person might be doing sexually. It’s the just the demeanor, and many gay people have gone along with that for many years. They have felt the need to tailor their conduct and appearance and enforce among their fellow gays a sort of blending-in—not being who they really are, but sort of butching it up mentality. Because being effeminate, or not “man enough”, has been long recognized as being a real cause of animosity and agression. Just amazing things have happened. I remember once hearing about this guy who was not an especially butch gentlemen—he was straight and he was married and he was at a restaurant or a club or something and his wife needed to go to the restroom and he held her handbag for her and ended up dead as a result. He was identified as a faggot by somebody and that was the end of it. It had nothing to do with sexual activity, maybe imagining it, but what triggered it was “oh, who is this queer here holding a handbag?”

I think it’s those two very powerful things; ideas and gender and what men and women are supposed to be like are extremely basic powerful organizing principals in all cultures. All cultures differ a little, but they all have that. Some cultures assign genders to objects in language. It’s so fundamental to people’s understanding of the world and their interactions with others—just think of how difficult it would be to go through the day without differentiating he and she. When you have individuals who don’t fit and they’re unwilling to pretend to fit—people who challenge it or whose basic natures or constitutions don’t allow them to fit in—they may be flamboyant. And even if they were lobotomized, they would probably just be flamboyant and lobotomized! It’s not a choice. You don’t cure it. It’s part of the variation of humans, but we as a species have this need to categorize and organize. That has very powerful benefits; in many ways it’s allowed us to do many things and organize the world and our understanding of it, but it has real downsides when it comes to trying to take this massive messy scrawling spectrum of people and fit them into boxes.

Arno: I think it becomes engrained in the culture and we’re a very media-oriented culture; our media tells us women are supposed to look like this and men are supposed to look like that and we’re supposed to do this and do that. And if certain people don’t fit into these ideals that are constantly barraged upon us, it really aggravates subdivisons.

Will: I consider us to be very fortunate that we’re in a time period now in this culture where its much less rigid that way then it used to be. The various types of self-presentation that you encounter in the course of a typical day today you would never see 40 or 50 years ago in this country.

Arno: I think the media has helped bring that out as well. Personally, I can’t stand American Idol, but my mom watches it, as do millions of other people, and I understand that one of the finalists recently was an openly gay man. It’s interesting in many aspects, one being that it was an indication of acceptance. It struck me that there were huge numbers of people that would not normally accept a gay person who in this instance were like, “…oh I really like this guy. Its okay that he’s gay.” In a sense its marginalizing, but in another sense I like to see that as a positive thing.

Will: I agree. I see it as a messy fragmented general trend in a particular direction. My partner and I have been involved in a group called PFLAG; Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It’s a national organization thats been around for 20 years, and it’s basically a support group for parents and friends of gays and lesbians to help when they get blown away when their child comes out to them. They give support. They help them figure out how to deal with it in the community and in their own minds.

Arno: I would imagine that would be a really nurturing, constructive kind of action for these people having trouble getting their heads around it. Ideally what I would like to see happen is to increase the scale of that. What ways can we make that happen on a larger scale?

Will: It’s been interesting looking back on the time that my partner and I have been involved in that organization from when we first met 15 years ago. The most typical scenario was the mother of a gay man comes to her first meeting, very devastated and tearful and shaky about the whole thing looking for help. At this point her gay son is an adult moved away in another city, and now the most common thing is parents who come with their teenage child who’s maybe in high school or even occasionally middle school, who has come out. And it’s a totally different thing then that adult who moved away to come out to their parents at home—to know assisting parents who aren’t even necessarily greatly bothered by it. They might be thrown by it, wondering, “…how do I parent a gay child?” but, it’s not a big deal for them like it used to be, with all the hand-wringing. I don’t mean to be dismissive of it, its great that these parents were there. Many parents wouldn’t even take the trouble.

Arno: It was certainly a step forward to come to those meetings when your kid is 30. When you say that I think about how much positive impact it has on a person’s life to have this support and acceptance of who you are by your parents—especially while going through puberty, the most traumatic part of anyones life. Its a nightmarish time and to go through that having to stay in the closet and not having your parents to talk to and not having that kind of foundation must really be a burden going through life from then on out.

Will: It is. Certainly in some cases for the children, but also for the parents because then down the road—especially if it’s a senario where they don’t find out the child is gay till he’s an adult who has moved out—they have this sense of having failed the child and they look back at all the little indicators they might’ve picked up on if they were more astute informed parents and they looked at all the ways they tried to make their child more conventional and be more like other boys and girls. They often feel like, “God I really dropped the ball.” So you know the fact that there’s been a general change in culture—there’s more information available, there’s more stuff in the media to kind of help people connect the dots and figure things out sooner—I really think it’s a tremendous thing. And I do want to mention too that the people in the Milwaukee PFLAG chapter were the largest financial supporters of the Shall Not Be Recognized exhibit. Jeff and I went to them early on and showed them some of the sample portraits and explained why we wanted to do this and they immediately got it.

One of the things I really liked about this is that if you create an exhibit that people have to make a special trip to a gallery or museum to visit you’re just preaching to the choir—you’re not going to reach any of the great uninformed head-in-the-sand types who we really want to reach. And that’s why Jeff and I really tried to create an exhibit and market it a way where we could get it into venues where people would just encounter it going about their life. We haven’t had huge success because it’s hard to get places like the public library system to agree to have an exhibit like this. We have had some success getting it on campuses, like we had it at MSOE for an evening, and Carol University in Waukesha. It’s been at UW Madison in the memorial commons area where people are going and getting their lunch and they’re just going to see this exhibit and think, “oh what’s that?” and wander over and read some of the text and look at the pictures—and maybe they won’t read more then one or two but at least they have actively seen something. Whereas in a more typical gallery sort of format all you’re going to get are 1/10 of 1% of people who wanted to make a trip to the gallery.

watch for the conclusion of my conversation with Will in Issue 7 of Life After Hate

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