Me, talking about the Gays. |
Written by Greg Mills | |||
It’s a subject that I’ve been thinking about recently, thanks to to passage in the musician John Cale’s autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen?”, a book I re-read recently. Cale, of course, made up the nucleus of the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, and so was part of the Factory scene in the late Sixties. In writing about the Factory, he notes that the gay men that populated Warhol’s world took to using “her” or “she” to refer to each other. And I thought, how quaint! It also struck me that the sanctions against gays (just as it would for any group of people) forced gay men and women of that era into the very marginality that the forces of cultural conservatism accused them of embracing. The Shibboleths take on the fallacies of the prevailing convention wisdom.
|