How Homosexuals Saved Civilization by Cathy Crimmins

Al Preston

Oct 14

7 min read

By Al Preston

Sometimes, as you look over a bookshelf at a store or the library, your eye catches on a title and you just know you have to read whatever that book is. For me, How Homosexuals Saved Civilization: The True and Heroic Story of How Gay Men Shaped the Modern World was one of those books.

I mean, what a title! What a story to tell and a promise to uphold. Sadly, I found the title a bit misleading. Even the tagline; The True and Heroic Story of How Gay Men Shaped the Modern World is doing a lot of heavy lifting, even if it is far more accurate to what I actually read.

This book is far more about how straight society cannot reliably tell when someone or something is queer then gives many examples to prove just that point. I would say a secondary argument is that gay men have contributed a lot to society. To the claims of the title itself, however, I would say that there are many other works that tackle that thesis far better.

Now, that’s not to say this book isn’t a fine read. Cathy Crimmins does have an engaging writing style. She also captures a very particular moment in American history. You could argue that 2004 and 2005 were transitional years between the expanding internet and gay visibility. She also captures a very specific viewpoint.

As a self-proclaimed ‘fag-hag’—which is apparently a straight woman who has nearly exclusively male gay friends (perhaps a more familiar term now would be ‘fruit fly’)—Crimmins writes about the queer demographic she knows the best, gay white cisgender men. Therefore, we have a very narrow view of gay men and gays in general, ‘saving civilizations’. That’s a lot to put on them!

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it’s a unique to me point of view. I have not ready many straight white cisgender women talking with such confidence about things well known to gay cisgendered men, although those are perhaps overlapping point of views. On the other hand, it’s a very narrow and stereotyped point of view of queerness and the LGBT+ community as a whole. I wouldn’t necessarily call it reductive, although it does play on the line.

Those who are this book’s very specific audience may adore this book, but it’s hard to say if anyone else would. Crimmins does acknowledge that she has some pretty obvious blind spots within the introduction, so I do have to give her that.

I will argue that some of the phrases and things she says are dated and may have been back then too. Sometimes, I just didn’t know what to make of what she said.

For example:

“Seeing a straight man in a pink or purple shirt is no longer a rarity, even outside of metrosexual circles. (A metrosexual, a term created by writer Mark Simpson, is a man who is straight but has gay habits and tastes.) Ah, the circle of fashion!” Pg 86

I can vaguely remember when ‘metrosexual’ was used widely, but I never hear it anymore. I do not know for certain that it is no longer used, but I definitely have not heard it in a very long time. I’ve always had a strange feeling about the term. I felt like it was an excuse for men back then. They weren’t gay for caring about their appearance, they just had a ‘sensibility’ that meant they…cared about their appearance.

It almost inherently implies that being perceived as gay in anyway is a bad thing. So much so that they had to make up a whole new term to hide behind. Crimmins uses ‘metrosexual’ to bolster her point that there is a cycle of the gay community doing something first, only for it to be taken over by straights (which happens with many minorities).

Another line that absolutely baffled me is this one:

“Dewy semi-nude posters looking like Queer Eye versions of Hitler youth still graced its walls.” Pg 91

For what it’s worth…the context is that Abercrombie & Fitch had a catalogue in 1997 that mostly featured male nude models which was hurriedly shut down afterwards when it became too popular in gay communities and got its own porn website.

…

That said, what in the world is this quote??? I think I understand what she’s talking about, but there was no need to describe it that way! I hate everything about it.

“In 2001, I stayed after a performance of [Edward] Albee’s off-Broadway production The Play About the Baby to hear him answer questions from the audience. One person asked whether all his characters were really gay, even if they were presented as heterosexuals. Albee became furious. He told the audience about how one theater company had acquired the rights to do his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With an all-male case. ‘If I had wanted to write about homosexuals, I would have!’ he bellowed.” Pg 202-203

This quote is part of a larger problem of this book. Many people never came out of the closet, even when it became safer and safer to do so. While we may have our suspicions and can tell that someone is most likely gay, it’s fully within their right to stay tucked in their closets. Public figures especially have a right to their privacy.

Crimmins insists on someone’s queerness multiple times throughout this book, although they themselves insist on the opposite. While I have to admit my own faults here; I have somewhat made a career out of claiming the queerness of historical figures. That being said, I’m not saying it about people who are actively alive and I hope I’ve done a relatively good job of arguing that people of the past wouldn’t identify themselves with the way we identify today and give respect to that.

Crimmins often wasn’t so careful.

“Both straight and gay people will say, ‘That’s sooooo Martha!’ A friend of mine calls Martha Stewart ‘the gayest man I know.’” Pg 9-10

I mentioned before the stereotyping in this book, this quote kind of captures it pretty well. Crimmins tries to argue that gay men, in general, have a particular style. That style could be summoned up as Martha Stewarts style that she shared on her shows over the years.

While this may be a bad example of stereotyping because this is one of the truer examples Crimmins brings up, it’s once again indicative of a larger problem.

She’s trying to argue about the good style of gay men, she speaks in very broad terms. Not all gay men have good style. Many, in fact, have really bad style. Take me for example, I love bright and garish colors but not in a tasteful way. Oh, I am a transman which changes a few things, certainly, that doesn’t erase the fact that there are gay men who do not fall under this stereotype at all.

I’ve met plenty of gay men who would be considered ‘butch’ that still like very typically masculine things. There’s an entire social study that could be done about the way more masculine gay men react to more feminine gay men.

The biggest issue is the broad strokes that Crimmins paints with. She admits there are hardly any gay men of color and absolutely no lesbians in this book, but she doesn’t acknowledge that gay men also come in very different and varied lives.

“The gay/straight lists of things thread through out culture, forming the yin and yang of American society. Tennis is gay; golf is straight. Wrestling is gay; football is straight. Streak is straight; grilled chicken is gay. Poodles are gay; Labrador retrievers are straight. Scottish tartans are straight; Burberry tartan (in its most recent incarnation) is gay. Disco is gay; rock is straight. Opera is gay, gay, gay. Stock car races is intensely straight (even if I once found a whole website devoted to gay NASCAR fans, Gaytona.com, hosted by drag queen/racing fan Betty Jack DeVine). Hunting is straight, and so are fishing and bowling.” Pg 16

This passages speaks to perhaps a more personal issue I’ll harp on later as well. Crimmins never explains her reasoning for claiming something is straight or gay. She never defines what is ‘gay’ and what is ‘straight’. The reader is left to assume their own definition.

It’s my least favorite part of the book and I got very frustrated with it the further into the book I got.

“As both gay and straight reviewers have pointed out, Queer as Folk bears little resemblance to reality. Pittsburgh doesn’t really have the glamorous gay scene depicted on the show, and the club where the boys hang out, Babylon, seems to be part Land of Oz and part some demented teenager’s vision of an eighties disco joint.” Pg 111

I have not seen this show at the time of writing this review, nor have I lived in Pittsburgh during the heyday of the bars, but I do take some offence here!

All of my research and the remains of the archives show Pittsburgh had a perfectly glamorous nightlife! Granted, I did learn that the show was filmed and written by Canadians, so it definitely is not accurate—that’s not the point!

All of this is not to say there weren’t good or interesting parts of this book. Crimmins does capture elements of the conversation often had about what makes something ‘queer’. She also highlights queer folks I’ve yet to hear about (and who have left the closet).

This is a book of examples, in my eyes. I will use it to find research questions or as a source of examples. I’m not sure I would recommend this book. It’s a…fine read. I think it may depend on what someone wishes to do.

I still struggle with her refusal to define anything. This book is packed with examples of a queer culture and style of a particular subsect of the community. Without those definitions, without actually talking about why queer folks have trend setting styles, she can’t live up to her title at all.

Not to mention, just talking about the things queer folks have contributed to society does not explain how they saved society. Like her lack of definitive explanations for what is gay, she implies the idea that gay men in particular ‘save’ civilization.

Unfortunately, but also hilariously, the first quote page of this book supports her title more than she did:

“If you removed all of the homos and homo influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” -Fran Lebowitz