Duckie's Gay Shame: Critiquing Pride and Selling Shame in Club Performance¹

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Notes

I'm grateful for comments I received on an earlier version of this article presented at the Department of English Literature Seminar Series at the University of Edinburgh (November 2010) and for invaluable feedback from Jen Harvie, Dominic Johnson, Julia Cort and the two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Theatre Review. I'm also grateful to Simon Casson, Amy Lamé and Robin Whitmore for being so generous with their time and to Bryon Fear and Christa Holka for permission to reproduce their images.

Gay Shame,  <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=66&submenu=shame>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

Videos of the Macho and Girly events can be viewed at <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=66&submenu=shame> and <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=96&submenu=shame&special=_girlyrespectively> [accessed 12 November 2011] (see Images 1 and 2). Short films of the Macho and Girly events can be viewed at  <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=66&submenu=shame> and <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=96&submenu=shame&special=_girlyrespectively>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

‘Duckie: The Vision Thing’,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=41&submenu=vision>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

Gay Shame and Lesbian Weakness (1998) took place at the New Connaught Rooms in London's West End.

Arts Council England (ACE) has funded Duckie since 2002/03 as a Regularly Funded Organisation, and through Grants for the Arts and, from 2012/13 as a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO). Between 2003/03 and 2007/08, Duckie received approximately £62,820 per year, with an additional Grant for the Arts of £79,903 offered in 2005/06. From 2008/09 to 2011/12, Duckie received approximately £146,940 per year (ACE, Freedom of Information request (FOI), July 2011). From 2012/13 until 2014/15 Duckie will be funded as one of ACE's new NPOs, with a cash percentage change of –2.3 per cent and a real percentage change of –11 per cent over this period (‘National Portfolio Funding’,  <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/national-portfolio-funding/>  [accessed 12 November 2011]).

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 103.

Rachel Zerihan, ‘Gay Shame’, Dance Theatre Journal, 23 (2009), 16–22; Zerihan, ‘Gay Shame Goes Girly’, Dance Theatre Journal, 24 (2010), 11–15.

Gay Shame, ed. by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

See for example Judith Halberstam, ‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity’, Social Text, 23.3–4 (2005), 219–33; Hiram Perez, ‘You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too’, Social Text, 23.3–4 (2005), 171–91; and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, ‘Gay Shame: From Queer Autonomous Space to Direct Action Extravaganza’, in That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008), pp. 268–95 (pp. 284–86). Halperin and Traub also address the tensions that the conference generated around race and activism in their introduction ‘Beyond Gay Pride’, in Gay Shame, pp. 29–33.

See for example Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); and Silvia Rief, Club Cultures: Boundaries, Identities and Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Simon Casson, interview with the author, 28 October 2010. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Casson are from this interview.

José Esteban Muñoz, ‘“The White to Be Angry”: Vaginal Davis's Terrorist Drag’, Social Text, 52/53 (1997), 80–103 (p. 96). Emphasis in original.

Amy Lamé, interview with the author, 13 January 2011. All quotations from Lamé are from this interview.

Gay Shame, 2004,  <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=34&submenu=shame>  [accessed 12 November 2011]. Robin Whitmore, interview with the author, 12 November 2010. All quotations from Whitmore are from this interview.

Gay Shame,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=105&submenu=shame> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Flyer, Gay Shame: Duckie Gets Macho (2008),  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=96&submenu=shame&special=_girly>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

John D'Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 100–13 (pp. 104–5). Emphasis in original.

Lisa Peñaloza, ‘We're Here, We're Queer, and We're Going Shopping! A Critical Perspective on the Accommodation of Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Marketplace’, Journal of Homosexuality, 31 (1996), 9–41; Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Katherine Sender, Business Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Peñaloza, ‘We're Here’, p. 34.

D'Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, p. 109.

Gay Shame,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=96&submenu=shame&special=_girly>. See Kaffequeeria,  <http://www.kaffequeeria.org.uk/home.htm>; Get Bent,  <http://www.get-bent-manchester.com/>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

Sycamore, ‘Gay Shame’, p. 269.

Gay Shame SF,  <http://www.gayshamesf.org> [accessed 12 November 2011].

While Lamé recalls that members of the US Gay Shame collective attended Duckie's early Gay Shame events, Bernstein Sycamore's account of the emergence of Gay Shame in New York and San Francisco doesn't acknowledge a connection. Bernstein Sycamore does, however, claim that “‘Objective” history is a cruel lie, and I'm not interested in perpetuating such viciousness’ (‘Gay Shame’, p. 268).

Outrage!, ‘An Open Letter to the Pride Trust, August 1997’,  <http://rosecottage.me.uk/OutRage-archives/pride97.htm>. See also Outrage!, Open Letter from OutRage! to the Pride Trust, 18 July 1996,  <http://rosecottage.me.uk/OutRage-archives/qintelpt.htm> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xxiii.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel’, GLQ, 1 (1993), 1–16 (p. 12).

Michael Franz Basch quoted in Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity’, p. 5.

Silvan Tomkins, ‘Shame – Humiliation and Contempt – Disgust’, in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 133–78 (p. 137).

Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity’, p. 5.

Michael Warner, ‘Pleasures and Dangers of Shame’, in Gay Shame, ed. by Halperin and Traub, pp. 283–96 (p. 289).

Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity’, p. 13.

Claire Colebrook, Irony (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 16. Emphasis in original.

Gay Shame, 2005,  <http://duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=59&submenu=shame> [accessed 12 November 2011].

See Ann P. Haas et al., ‘Suicide and Suicide Risk in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations: Review and Recommendations’, Journal of Homosexuality, 58.1 (2011), 10–51.

See for example Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity’, p. 5.

Colebrook, Irony, p. 18.

Halberstam makes a similar point about the diversity of pride events (‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity', p. 223).

Flyer, Gay Shame Goes Girly (2009).

Maddy Costa, ‘In Search of their Feminine Side’, Guardian, 3 July 2009, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/03/gay-shame-femininity-duckie-brixton> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Zerihan, ‘Gay Shame Goes Girly’, p. 15.

Casson quoted in Steve Gray and Peter Lloyd, ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, Pink Paper, 9 June 2009,  <http://news.pinkpaper.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=1021> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 2.

Judith Butler, ‘“I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism”: “Civil Courage Prize” Refusal Speech, Christopher Street Day’, 19 June 2010, <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/i-must-distance-myself/>. For a discussion of Transgeniale CSD see Ute Kalender, ‘Queer in Germany: Materialist Concerns in Theory and Activism’, in Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies, ed. by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 71–84 (pp. 79–81).

Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. xii.

Gross Indecency,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=104>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

Gross Indecency,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=104>  [accessed 12 November 2011].

For a short film of the raid see ‘Duckie Gets Raided by The Police’,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=104> [accessed 12 November 2011].

R. W. Burnie, Section 11, The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885: With Introduction, Commentary and Forms of Indictments (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1885), p. 67.

Equality Act 2010,  <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/pdfs/ukpga_20100015_en.pdf> [accessed 12 November 2011]. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, ‘Prohibition on Promoting Homosexuality by Teaching or by Publishing Material’,  <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/section/28#section-28-enacted> [accessed 12 November 2011]. Section 28 was repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of the UK.

This Is Not Gay Shame,  <http://www.duckie.co.uk/generic.php?id=123&submenu=latest> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Ibid.

ACE awarded Duckie £152,171 in 2010/11 and £141,671 in 2011/12 (ACE, FOI request, July 2011); Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, p. xxv.