More Quotes from Stage Struck

(Buy this book.)

On "Tolerance:"

The breadth of ideas permitted into the popular discourse is extremely narrow--yet these restrictions are accompanied by a rhetoric of "diversity." This contradiction, a narrow range of ideas presented as a broad range of ideas, has come to be known as "tolerance" and is now an intrinsic component of how dominant-culture people feel about themselves, how they rationalize their privileges and justify their own false sense of objectivity. Today we face a "tolerance" defined by the diminishment of the minority and the heroization of the majority, a "tolerance" that simply acknowledges that the minority exists and that claims that acknowledgement as an act of generosity. The fact that this minor recognition is the result of the suffering and insistence of millions of gay and lesbian people over centuries is completely erased.

Et tu, MySpace "bisexual" men?

On marketing and subculture:

The rapidity with which newly articulated identities get channeled into marketing is an interesting one. It is a postmodern affirmative action employment plan--designed, not with the purpose of social equity in mind but to give marketing companies direct-pipeline access to information about emerging consumer niches. The campaigns are increasingly created by design teams that include at least one representative individual from the particular consumer category in question, who works inside the marketing industry. Their job is to take their knowledge of the source community, to engage its sensibility and wrap that around the desire for specific products, presented in such a way as to acknowledge the codes of the particular niche. The presence of these representative individuals in the industry allows for a contained upward mobility, even though the larger marketing structure is controlled by dominant-culture people. Most seductively, the presence of these individuals in the industry allows their previously overlooked or excluded community a veneer of normalcy by the fact if being represented in the marketplace, which is now a measure of American citizenship.

True in 1998, even more true in 2006.

And finally, on marketing "rebellion:"

Millions and millions of product dollars are earned by convincing white straight young males that they are actually outlaws and therefore not responsible for the system that benefits them. The advertising offers them a way out of that responsibility without losing any of their privileges, if they purchase and display particular products that have been coded as oppositional. Gay men, on the other hand, who are concretely rejected by the government and by their families...are not described [by niche marketing firms] in outsider terminology. Instead they are defined by normative purchases. By going against the grain of gay men's real experience [niche marketing firms] offer themselves and gay consumers an illusory normalcy that fits both of their needs.

Again, it was true in 1998 and even moreso now. Look at how often various gay men either claim allegiance to or independence from other gay men by virtue of what they do and do not own. You can see it online, and you can hear it in on the street.

In addition, the statement about advertising offering "a way of that responsibility without losing any of their privileges" can be expanded to explain the many ways that some former liberals (moderate and radical) proceed to become arch-conservative without undergoing a crisis of conscience. They don't think that they are being inconsistent, because they made the appropriate generational rebellious choices. They believe that they have maintained that magnanimous outlook, because they bought the right things (including ideology) at that time, when what they really have done is just proved that they have been self-obsessed at all stages of their lives.