Chronique d’un scandale

• Main Author: David M. Halperin
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Genre, Sexualité et Société 2014-07-01
• Series: Genre, Sexualité et Société
• Subjects: homosexuality; culture; panic; initiation; education; norms
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/gss/3096

In this text, the first chapter of How To Be Gay (a French translation of the entire book by Marie Ymonet will be published by EPEL in late 2014), David Halperin revisits the stir that his college class, “How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation,” caused in the early 2000s in the United States and elsewhere. The outcry was the direct result of grandstanding by right-wing media and pressure groups promoting family values, but it also stemmed from the very content of the class: because Halperin presented male homosexuality as the outcome of an initiation, and the class itself as an example of such an initiation, he was accused of using taxpayers’ money for the purposes of converting his students to homosexuality. Still, what scandalized both right-wing and gay rights organizations was less the issue of sex than the very topic of the class, which set out to treat male homosexuality as a cultural practice with its own codes and modes of transmission.