I first started using the term “design fag” after two gay men—one of them a planner of theme nights at night clubs and the other a designer of floral arrangements for rich people’s houses—condescended to me for a few hours one evening, in the dead of winter, in a small bar on Amsterdam Ave. I don’t use the term a lot but it’s become shorthand for me for a certain kind of gay man whose attitude seems to deny, implicitly, that what I care about and what I am are of much interest or value.
The design fag values surfaces and transient beauty above depth and permanence. He gets excited about a beautifully designed magazine but has little interest in the articles contained therein. He dresses exceptionally well. He likes partying hard and late at trendy night clubs. He’s not particularly interested in the straight world. He’s not the least bit attracted to my moderate, slightly disheveled good looks or to my piercing intellect and wry sense of humor, nor to the unique blend of the two.
You get the picture. He’s a stereotype. There probably are a few guys out there who are as shallow as I imagined my inaugural design fags to be. But really the design fag is a product of my imagination, of my fragile ego—he’s a generalization, a radical simplification that allowed me, when I first used the term, to process my insecurity and anxiety at being found uninteresting by some people who I (secretly) envied and found fascinating. When I use it now, it’s still that bad thing—a way for me to ignore that I’m not living a very exciting, in-the-moment kind of life—and it’s also just a term I like because it’s evocative and naughty and I like evocative, naughty phrases.
It’s also, of course, a slur. It’s a straight man calling a gay man a fag, which isn’t such a pretty picture. It’s also a straight man denigrating a gay man using the most sexist, homophobic, and retrograde of binaries—that depth and permanence are serious, good, meaningful and manly, while surfaces and transience are silly, trivial, flighty, shallow and effeminate. That gay men now seem to feel comfortable using the term “design fag,” and even making “design fag”-themed T-shirts, mitigates the nastiness a bit, perhaps, but not all that much.
What complicates the picture much more, I think, is that I happen to be pretty good on gay issues. I’ve written a fair amount on behalf of gay rights and about gay culture. I’ve given money to MassEquality, the big pro-marrriage group in Massachusetts. I intend to raise my kids, when I have them, to believe that gay is as good as straight, and if one of them turns out to be gay then I’ll love him or her no less than I love my straight kids, and I’ll treat whoever they bring into the family as well or as badly as I treat the husband or wife of a straight kid.
I write this blog, in part, to help loosen up the concept of masculinity to where it can not only embrace gay men but can allow the embrace of gay men to expand the possibilities for straight men.
Publicly, in other words, I’m a good guy. Privately, not always. My instinct is that it’s the public that matters far more than the private, but maybe I’m letting myself off the hook. I agree, I think, with the op-ed that Orlando Patterson, the (black) Harvard sociologist, published in the Times a week or two ago, in which he writes about the American preference for authenticity over sincerity. Sincerity, writes Patterson, “requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.”
Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group’s true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.
?The cult of authenticity partly accounts for our poor choice of leaders. We prefer leaders who feel our pain, or born-again frat boys who claim that they can stare into the empty eyes of an ex-K.G.B. agent and see inside his soul. On the other hand we hear, ad nauseam, that Hillary Clinton, arguably one of the nation’s most capable senators, is ”fake” and therefore not electable as president.
But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds?. The Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborators claim to have evidence, based on more than three million self-administered Web-based tests, that nearly all of us are authentically bigoted to the core with hidden ”implicit prejudices” — about race, gender, age, homosexuality and appearance — that we deny, sometimes with consciously tolerant views. The police shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, they argue, are simply dramatic examples of how ”implicit prejudice” influences the behavior of us all.
However well meaning these researchers, their gotcha psychology is morally invasive and, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has cogently argued, of questionable validity and use. ?
I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?
? Sincerity rests in reconciling our performance of tolerance with the people we become. And what it means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.
Is it sincere to talk about design fags privately, occasionally, but to present myself to the world as an opponent of homophobia? I guess not. But it doesn’t seem as if my private lapse is nearly as much of an offense against the code of sincerity, which has mostly do with our public selves, as it is an offense against authenticity.
Then again in writing this post I suppose I’m announcing myself as a person who will treat everyone with respect but will, on occasion, resort to some mild bigotry in my own head when I’m feeling spiteful. So maybe that makes me both sincere and authentic, albeit sincerely, authentically bigoted.
