Together with David Halperin, I’ve been working on a third book: In Praise of Unseriousness: A Queer Aesthetics of Pop Music. This book launches the first ever aesthetic critique of queer assimilationism. With detailed attention to specific instances in the queer reception of pop music, the project uncovers an endangered set of queer subcultural pragmatics that has yet to be named or described. Halperin and I specify the workings and the function of that queer pragmatics and demonstrate that its loss would entail an enormous cultural setback for queers.
Why has pop music played such a vital role in queer aesthetics? And what is to become of queer aesthetics once queers are assimilated into mainstream institutions? At one time, queers were deeply invested in unseriousness: they championed an aesthetic that they put into practice, in part, through their adoration of pop music. But as queers start to embrace the straight social institutions of marriage, family life, and military service, they are beginning to shift their aesthetic commitments from the light and the trivial to the sincere and the serious. The result has been disastrous: the replacement of the queer aesthetics of unseriousness with a new queer sentimentality.
Once upon a time, queer unseriousness mobilized a complex system of social, material, aesthetic, and political infrastructures. Its purpose was to enable queers to communicate serious sentiment to one another through their devotion to objects of popular culture, like pop songs. This whole system, as the book demonstrates, is predicated on the selection of a mass cultural object that is lacking in serious aesthetic value, which renders the object disposable and disclaimable. The system then turns on a strategy of deniability realized through a series of specific temporal, spatial, social, and rhetorical tactics for distancing the object from the people who love and admire it and for preventing it from indelibly tainting them with its unseriousness. The practice of affective and aesthetic communion, which such tactics make possible, produces contingent zones where collective queer identifications can momentarily be constituted and made meaningful. That is an important social function, essential to the creation of queer subcultural communities and to the expression and circulation of non-normative feelings, which serve to consolidate them. Pop music constitutes, in this sense, “the utopia of those with almost no place to go,” to borrow a phrase from D. A. Miller. It creates for queers the aesthetic object their social situation requires—if only they would avail themselves of it.
But queer unseriousness is now in trouble. It has fallen victim to a large-scale mainstreaming of queer culture, a process which has accelerated with the gradual opening of straight social institutions to homosexual participation. The new queer fascination with mainstream cultural institutions has generated a quantity of new aesthetic forms, and these in turn support an entire sentimentality industry. In order to understand this development, In Praise of Unseriousness revisits the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture, arguing that Adorno’s mistaken criticisms of popular music turn out to be truly trenchant when directed at the aesthetic forms generated by marriage, family life, and other normative social institutions—forms such as the deadly serious and sentimental life-writing that queers have lately been producing and consuming. Our resulting book is nothing short of a polemic against the recent queer cult of sentimentality, and a full-throated defense of pop music and its queer devotees.