Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality

by Patrick Moore

The radical sexuality of gay American men in the 1970s is often seen as a shameful period of excess that led to the AIDS crisis. Beyond Shame claims that when the gay community divorced itself from this allegedly tainted legacy, the tragic result was an intergenerational disconnect because the original participants were unable to pass on a sense of pride and identity to younger generations. Indeed, one reason for the current rise in HIV, Moore argues, is precisely due to this destructive occurrence, which increased the willingness of younger gay men to engage in unsafe sex.

Lifting the'veil of AIDS,' Moore recasts the gay male sexual culture of the 1970s as both groundbreaking and creative-provocatively comparing extreme sex to art. He presents a powerful yet nuanced snapshot of a maligned, forgotten era. Moore rescues gay America's past, present, and future from a disturbing spiral of destruction and AIDS-related shame, illustrating why it's critical for the gay community to reclaim the decade.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Sexuality, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Studies

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2004

About the author

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Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was born in the 70s and grew up during the AIDS epidemic of the 80s that put a halt to the creative sexual art of the 70s (and cast sex as an act that led to disease and misery), so in this book I found that rare thing of an author understanding that longing for the "freedom" of the 70s and describing just what queer culture was then. From the secluded communities created in sex clubs and bathhouses (and eventually diminished by voyeuristic heterosexuals) to the re-focused communities created by the HIV crisis (lesbians and gay men coming together to care for each other while the government ignored us) we are now at the so-called assimilation of our culture into the mainstream with the advent of gay marriage acceptance. Moore argues that there are positives and negatives to this "straight-washing." I continue to be ambivalent about the idea of marriage; it feels more like a construct for heterosexuals. This was a provocative book for me to read while I consider just what it means to be radically queer and what it means to retain that identity and continue to create the queer community that is my own.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is probably the most interesting thing I've read for my thesis.

[Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful meditation on the legacy of 1970s gay male sexual creativity and its complication by the AIDS crisis. Moore exhorts his readers to seek out cross-generational connections in an effort to reclaim radical utopias lost amidst plague.

[E. Rickert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love letter to a moment in gay history that will never again be, and a sad reflection on what New York City used to mean to people, when corporations and middle America had not yet claimed Times Square as their own.

I highlighted a lot of this book because it confirmed a feeling I've always had: that I arrived here too late. I will never understand any part of Manhattan being derelict and I will never know what it was like to be a member of ACT UP. I know people who live their lives as "sexual artists" (T-SHIRT IDEA Y'ALL) who want to upend the status quo, but they're anachronistic in NYC now. Hello, they're moving to Austin and Portland now.

But! That said! I'll also never know what it's like to watch all my friends die from AIDS and I'll never know what it means to live my life in secret, which makes me wanna scream YAAASSSS KWEEN YAAAASSSSSSS like I'm Leo on the Titanic.

NYC in many ways is antiseptic, but I get to live here on my own terms, so.

Every gay guy should read this book because Moore is right: reading is fundamental and we have to know our own history.

[Bill Arning · Rating 5 out of 5]

a marvelous book especially in considering gay men's sexual culture before AIDS as a collective art work and a thing of beauty to be celebrated. Some of the constructions of the shape of gay male culture in the east village erasing the west village cruisers feel overstated. Also his attempt to deal with the contradictions Felix Gonzalez Torres welcomed in the way his work interfaced with the art world reveals a writer well over his head, since there are multiple books by some great thinkers that still wrestle with his work and admit defeat, Moore's attempt to summarize those discussions fail. Also the book could not have anticipated the Truvada revolution would allow young gay men to create a sex culture as vibrant as what Samuel Delany feared forever lost in the remaking of Times Square in the form of a Disney movie set.

But these are quibbles in the end, its a very valuable book that should be read as we face the daunting hyper sanitized Stonewall 50 celebrations and remind us to ask what was lost along the way.

[Gabriel H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. On the one hand, it does some important work and was able to get a lot of access to primary sources/interviews with really interesting gay people, whose voices are easily the highlight of the text. On the other hand, the book is more personal than it presents itself as being, and can sometimes be really lacking in nuance. It also spends more time on the "reclaiming" aspect of the title than on the actual history of radical gay sexuality, which it primarily considers as the pre-AIDS culture of the 70s. As a reading experience, it volleyed from delight to frustration constantly.

On a third hand, there are a few passages which, all by themselves have made this book a worthwhile read for me. For example, "[Jeanne] Barney, a straight woman, was an unlikely choice to be editor of America's first leather magazine. However, she had high ambitions for it: "With Drummer, I wanted a gay leather S/M Evergreen Review. The leather people I knew were older, better educated, more affluent, intelligent, affable, and I felt that they deserved the best possible product." Barney may not have fit the stereotypical role of a leader in the leather community but she was definitely in sync with its spirit and her interest in S/M was not voyeuristic: "I was with the guys and I was sort of a Mother Superior. I would be lying if said my interests weren't piqued. Just by chance I met a detective from the Hollywood Division. I used to get him in my living room and get him all lubed up with K-Y. And there is nothing in this whole world as satisfying as having your fist up the ass of the LAPD."" Like that makes it a four star book all by itself.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up Patrick Moore's Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004) and found myself with conflicted feelings after finishing the book in one evening. Moore "an activist and a writer", identifies himself as an artist is fascinated by what he terms radical gay male sexuality, and the development of radical gay male sexual cultures in the pre-AIDS era of the late 1970s. A topic that has always been close to my own heart, I found Moore's text raised issues about my own life and my own approach to queer sexuality. Moore and I have traveled similar roads and trajectories in our sexual development. We both arrived on the "scene" to see it slowly disappear and evaporate before our eyes in the face of AIDS, and we both found ourselves defined by the possibilities raised by radical gay sexuality. While Moore's topic is intriguing, in the end his approach is unfulfilling. I was hoping it would be an exploration of radical queer sexuality, and indeed Moore's interviews with "survivors" is intriguing and curious, but somehow he manages both to reduce the magic of radical queer sexuality to theatrics and performance (without ever gesturing towards the powerful and commanding academic literature of academics like, Judith Butler) while minimizing the voices of the people he quotes. He provides brief glimpses of fascinating individuals (and places) who straddled the world before and the world after, like Fred Halsted, Bruce Mailman, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Assoto Saint and Felix Gonzalez-Torres but fails to fill out their fascinating lives and work.

The book, the product of a dilletantish approach to its subject suffers from the author's own interjections. At points the book almost reaches beyond the anguished cries of the disgruntled, angry, young East-Village artist, (especially his brief chapter "The Sexual Flâneur", which could have made a better structure for the whole book) but then his writing collapses back in on itself never fulfilling the possibilities and exciting potential of the subject matter. Although Moore does deserve credit for not slipping into the usual pattern of AIDS/sexuality related moralism, it is sad that an author with such an exciting topic and some incredibly rich material in the personalities and interviews he collected fails to imbue the material with the life of those who lived it.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beyond Shame is a perspective on the gay male sexual culture of the 1970s and beyond that the mainstream hardly gets; instead of always forcing critiques of the time through the tragic filter of the AIDS crisis, Patrick Moore tries to get us to explore how this culture was, for its participants, an unprecedented liberation.

Moore's leitmotif is how radical gay sex is (was) like art. It's a bit of a leap at first, but it makes sense if you accept there is a certain theatricality to sex, particularly the sex of repressed persons, who are driven to extremes of location and practice by necessity. Detailed are the sex clubs, dance clubs, and art loci of NYC and San Francisco and how they played vital cultural roles for the queer community - until they were decimated by the truly unanticipated epidemic of AIDS.

But was gay sex so egalitarian in the 70s? Perhaps sex clubs promoted a democratic culture, but the book seems to lack a full perspective on queer communities of color and their struggles of the time. Judging from some of the racism and classism in the gay community today (not that I am saying it's any worse than straight society!) it's hard to believe that this picture is unaffected by a touch of nostalgia.

I do appreciate the personal and anecdotal angle in Beyond Shame as a break from more academic queer theory, but its focus on the art world was often too narrow for me - although I did learn about some fascinating artists lost to AIDS. But Moore lost me quite a bit when he said that drag shows are the minstrel shows of our time; although it's not my argument to make, I really can't disagree more.

[6655321 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think, to start, i want to be clear: i hate writing about New York City. Somehow (frequently in radical queer theory) the preservation of certain cultural spaces with a sexual component (the Mineshaft for example) is more important than, say, the long and unending strings of police brutality against the community. Admittedly, Moore is part of the Art World (tm) and so this is about art (which i am radically unqualified to talk about) but i think this often serves to take his good points (sexual shame and assimilation destroy a vibrant culture and fragment it into enclaves of socially palatable folx) but (since the publication of Beyond Shame) this has been done better (for example unlimited intimacy by Tim Dean) and while it also has the blindspot of overwhelmingly focusing exclusively on the issues of Gay Men who are Sexual Radicals (which are a real group obviously) Dean at least is able to be critical in a way Moore isn't (it probably doesn't help that Moore seems to have some deeply rooted problems with effeminacy and calls drag queens minstrel shows of the gay life or seems disinterested in trans folx or seems to have no political framework for what he is talking about but rather wants to talk about experimentation as an act in itself). Basically, idk if you read Unlimited Intimacy and The Trouble With Normal and were like GOD I NEED ANOTHER ANTI-ASSIMILATIONIST BOOK FOR GAY MEN like, here you go, this is it (or if you want either of those books but largely apolitical and about Art i guess this is yr book).

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book. The first part of Beyond Shame looks at gay culture in the 1970s and how radical and revolutionary it was until AIDS came along. The second part looks at ACT-UP and how AIDS negatively affected the gay community and turned the once radical sex culture into a closeted shameful affair--especially in NYC where the city administrations used AIDS as a public health issue in order to scare people as well as completely shutting down all the of sex club et al. Finally, the author looks at how people today and young gay men need to find mentors/regain history to help steer them in directions to reconnect and remember the 1970s legacy as well as continue the fight against AIDS. Finally, the author cites race and class dynamics that don't enter into the policy arena when it comes to treating and preventing AIDS in the contemporary era. The first part has some really sexy/hot descriptions of famous sex clubs in NYC like the Mineshaft or the Anvil. The second part really sketches out the interpersonal and cross-cultural/sexual connections made during ACT-UP and highlights the brutality of the infection as it killed off a whole generation of gay men--as well as others. (The author focuses on gay male culture.) The last part is a kind of remembrance and call to action. Heartbreaking and hot at the same time, this book is not to be missed.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle of the gay non-fiction work is "Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality." Basically from the author's POV, the promiscuous sexual rebellion of the 1970s has been blasted as having caused AIDS not only by the religious right but also within a divided gay community itself. The idea is that gay men should bear the scar of shame for unleashing this "deadly plague," which took the lives of many of many brothers, lovers, and close friends. AIDS is supposedly the punishment for the unbridled sexual play and expression. Instead Patrick Moore states that the radical sex practiced in the 1970s should not be a stigma of shame but a work of art or performance of "creative exploration and expression." This revelation in itself is revolutionary and might be quickly dismissed by others less understanding. Moore points out that gay male sexuality is the ultimate expression of the lifestyle. As an artist, Moore founded the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. So as a memorial to those creative artists, designers, writers, filmmakers, composers, etc., he lists the many names of those lost to AIDS who left behind their work "that influenced American life through their lives as well as their art" and that they may not be forgotten. This book is truly an excellent read which I highly recommend.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh man, so many conflicted feelings about this book. I definitely liked it but I felt the arguments he made were not as strong as they could have been. I did enjoy however reading his viewpoints about queer history.

[Harry E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gay History and an innovative perspective on how sexual liberation is vital to gay culture. Moreover, how the sexual freedom of the 1970s was something of an art-form and means of cross-class interactions. This was lost, in large part, due to the AIDs epidemic. Essential reading.

[Jennpants · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I don't want an angry political funeral. I just want you to burn me in the street and eat my flesh" -- Jon Greenberg.