NAKED BREATH
Before Queer Nation zaps my office’s fax machine or Babble spits out a nasty editorial on my betrayal of the gay community, I will of course acknowledge that artists working outside a white, Eurocentric, heterosexist tradition have historically been relegated to second-class status in our culture, when they’ve been acknowledged at all. The art world can only benefit from embracing diversity and questioning the standards it uses to evaluate art. Nonetheless we seem to be entering an era when being a particular type of person is a more important artistic prerequisite than having something of substance to say.
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Of course Miller could argue, as have many self-identified queer thinkers, that in a culture as antigay and antisex as ours sex between men is always an act of heroism and celebration. Certainly passionate arguments can be made in support of this notion, but they require a lot of work. Miller simply takes these arguments as givens and then presents a series of unremarkable stories as proof of their validity, ultimately offering little to support his conclusion that “these are stories worth hearing,” and hearing over and over again.
