Watch Dynasty

I watched the first season of Dynasty last winter. A classmate in my critique group was writing an amazing paper on portrayals of non-normative characters in soap operas, including Dynasty. She loaned me her DVDs of the first season and I watched the whole thing. So I could give her better feedback. No other reason, of course. The common opinion about Dynasty seems to be that the first season, before Joan Collins joins the cast, is boring. Well, if the first season is boring, I can't wait to watch the rest, because I thought it was fantastic. If Joan Collins' Alexis is half as great as her daughter, Fallon, then I will be thrilled.

Last night, much to my excitement, I discovered that CBS.com has full episodes of the first two seasons that you can watch for free. Scroll over "Shows" and look under "TV Classics" on the far right. I watched the first episode of season two, and it was great. Fans of campy soap operas might want to note that they also have the first 4 seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 and the first season of Melrose Place.

If you want to read my classmate's paper, you can find it and my review of it on the Fashioning the Body website. It's "Framing the Body" by Ella Bowman. It also covers Melrose Place.

Gay comics!

I just discovered the blog Comics Should Be Good, which is doing a post each day in November for a series called Month of Good LGBT Comics. Definitely worth checking out.

ATC: Gayer Than Steps!

My sheer joy at discovering this German pop band from the early 2000s has prompted me to post on this blog for the first time in almost 5 months.

"My Heart Beats Like a Drum" by ATC



"Around the World" by ATC



A comment found on this youtube video: "This is obviously a big advert for Homosexuality"

Cultural Consumption Diary

Some thoughts on some of the cultural productions I have been consuming recently:

Bring It On: In It To Win It



I love all the terrible straight-to-DVD Bring It On sequels. This one came out in December but I just saw it a couple weeks ago. This one features two competing teams at cheer camp, the East Coast Jets and the West Coast Sharks. They have a cheer rumble. It must be pretty exciting to be on a teen cheerleading team for an entire coast. They end up having to join up to create one team, the East-West Shets. Seriously. The Shets.

In It To Win It wasn't as offensive as the third one, All Or Nothing. But it was still pretty offensive. There's a big scene where everyone "confesses" their secrets (very Foucault). The gay character, Ruben, turns out not to be gay. He was just pretending. Aeysha, the main character's black best friend, admits that she has been faking her "ghetto" accent all along. Turns out she wasn't involved in drive-by shootings as a child. She says, "I'm just a black girl who enunciates." The blonde head cheerleader of the other team says, "If you want respect that much, you should just be a bitch. That's what I do. Twice the respect, half the effort." What? Also, the goth girl, who previously revealed that she's on the squad because her parents make her? It turns out that she was lying, she loves cheerleading after all! What I learned from this scene: when someone is different from you, it turns out they're just pretending.

Pussycat Dolls - "When I Grow Up"



I've watched this music video kind of a lot of time. Reasons I'm fascinated:
1. Hair decisions. Jessica's new red hair makes her look like Carmit, the one who left the group. Did they need to have one redhead? Like, contractually? You can tell Jessica isn't Carmit though because of her lack of too much plastic surgery on her face. Melody's ponytail, I think, was a really bad decision. I do like Kimberly's new short haircut, though, because now I can tell her and Ashley apart.
2. So campy! Mostly how they lipsync along to the laughing. Especially at 1:32, sitting on the bench, when Ashley and Kimberly lean in to laugh.
3. Every Pussycat Doll song is about being watched by men. At least this song is about how they always wanted to be watched by men. And the "Be careful what you wish for cause you just might get it" is the first time they ever seemed ambivalent about it at all. The part most like earlier Pussycat Dolls is when Nicole sings, "I see you watching me, watching me, and I know you want it," which breaks the song! After that, she just sort of scream-sings for a couple seconds while someone (her, but she's not lipsyncing to it) says the chorus, then she punches the screen and it shatters! And then it goes into a dance breakdown which is only in the video. The song ends with, "Be careful what you wish for cause you just might get it, get it?" So that's the big point and they want to make sure we know it. Be careful when you wish to be famous and have people watching you all the time.
4. I think also that the video is kind of about the end of the world. I mean, gas prices keep going up, and there they are dancing on top of cars in gridlocked traffic. Then they climb up and dance on scaffolding (i.e. new construction) while singing "when I grow up ..." There's a prominent shot of an airplane flying over a car. What are they trying to say?

Sarah Schulman's My American History

I got My American History in the mail yesterday, the only Sarah Schulman book I haven't read. After reading the introduction, I skipped right ahead to the section on the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action political group that Schulman helped found in the early 90s. They're really great. They always make me think of The Avengers, a comic book superhero team. Marvel is always putting adjectives in front of super hero teams in order to make spin-off books. Right now, there's The New Avengers and The Mighty Avengers. In the past, there's been the Young Avengers and the West Coast Avengers. So why couldn't there be the Lesbian Avengers? A team of superheros who use their amazing powers for direct action. For example, one could have the power to make photocopies without having to get a corporate job in order to access a xerox machine. I think that Multiple Man, from X-Factor, has powers that would be really great for direct action. He can create up to 40 copies of himself. If a Lesbian Avenger had those powers, it would be really helpful for preparing mailings, doing door-to-door outreach, and making sure there were plenty of people at a demonstration.

Kathryn Bond Stockton

I have been reading Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" by Kathryn Bond Stockton. I am roughly halfway through, and so far it is fantastic. Here are some of my favorite quotes and phrases:

"...those who elect to wear the sign that trails abuse may attempt to say, 'You gave me regulations, I made something else. ... Read it if you can (though I don't fully care if you do or you don't).'" (31)

She describes both skin and clothes as being "worn on the bone." (33)

"But I want to ask about an unexamined switchpoint between 'black' and 'queer': the switchpoint between these nonelective skins and what are for some queer women and men the highly preferred, habitually chosen, strongly valued, almost sewn-to-the-bone cloth skins that we call clothes." (39)

She calls Jean Genet novels "aesthetic texts of such dense weave, such lyric sheen" (42), whereas in The Well of Loneliness, "no sentence is transforming." (48)

"... it is queer to know a cloth wound when you see one." (46)

Referencing Barthes: "...unlike authors, theorists are not dead..." (72)

I also am quite fond of her term "switchpoint:" "The switchpoints in the texts I examine in this book may act to elucidate incommensurabilities, not cover over them. I emphasize the obvious switching of signifying tracks that occurs when a sign that is generally attached to blacks, let's say, flashes in the signifying field of 'queer'; when, for example, the sign of stigmatized skin flashes in the domain of queer clothing, or, to flip directions, the sign of anality flashes along the track of blacks' economic burdens. Each switchpoint is a kind of off-rhyme (to employ a different metaphor): a poitn at which we intellectually sense how one sign (the stigma attached to the surface of skin, especially its color) lends its force to another (the stigma attached ot the surface of cloth), which we know to be distinct. (An off-rhme, as a term from poetics, means a near or partial rhyme - for example, the rhyme between 'laws' and 'because' or 'down' and 'own.' The reader's ear hears something similar but distinct in these sounds that are not identical.)" (32-33)

Whenever she writes about switchpoints, I think of the Kid Sister song "Switchboard," which is the song with a mini-video stuck at the end of the "Pro Nails" video:



Or the whole song is here. But I kind of just like the part at the end of "Pro Nails."

50 Cent is Gay

I've been listening a lot to this G-Unit song ("Rider pt. 2") because it's just so gay:



This post at Idolator pretty much sums it up, with the exception that it doesn't mention the vocoder use. Hasn't 50 noticed that whenever T-Pain, Snoop Dogg, or Lil' Wayne use the vocoder, they're talking about how much sex they have with women? That's because the vocoder makes you sound gay unless you're really careful. Like, Lil' Wayne literally says "No homo" at the beginning of "Lollipop," just in case. Instead, 50 says, "I done told ya boy, I'm a soldier boy, I've got no choice but to be a rider. I approach ya boy, with the toaster boy, get to point blank range and fire." Because apparently he doesn't care if we know he's gay.

(p.s. Lil' Wayne, saying "No homo" isn't really enough because we've all seen this.)

This post on fourfour documents the homoeroticism of 50's movie, Get Rich or Die Tryin'. And these two posts on Rod 2.0 find some very gay stuff in 50's autobiography.

Can we revisit "Ayo Technology" now?



I always thought the beginning (when 50 says, "So special! Unforgettable! 50 Cent! Just-in! Timbaland! God damn!") sounded really gay. But now I realize the whole thing is a duet between 50 and Justin about their relationship. They're tired of mediating their love through technology (like Lord Ewald and Thomas Edison in Tomorrow's Eve). They call each other "she" and "girl" a lot because they're just that camp.

Eclectic?

The other day, my roommate had a friend over. A mix CD I made was playing. At one point, my roommate's friend said, "I like listening to other people's music taste sometimes." I asked why, and she said, "Because it makes me feel like my taste is music is less weird." I said that I didn't think my taste in music is weird (it's pretty mainstream), and she said, "Let's just say you're taste is eclectic."

I know that eclectic isn't an insult, but I was angry to hear it applied to my taste in music. I don't think it's eclectic at all. The songs she brought up to demonstrate that my taste is eclectic were "Murder on the Dancefloor" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and "Pro Nails" by Kid Sister.

"Murder on the Dancefloor"



"Pro Nails"



I've thought about it a lot since this happened, trying to figure out why it bothered me. I understand that sonically the songs are very different. However, disco-y dance pop and poppy hip-hop made by a female rapper are both two genres that historically have a certain appeal for gay men. Both the lyrics and the videos of the two songs can be read as being very campy. It would have never occurred to me that these songs wouldn't go together. From the perspective of the straight woman who thinks my music taste is "eclectic," they don't fit together at all. Her inability to see that these songs go together is because she could not imagine a cohesive queer perspective towards music. Thus, my mix CD was only coherent to her under the rubric of "eclectic."

To help process this, I made a mashup:

Queer Mashups

I made a couple more "mashups" today. I wanted to make queer mashups / use mashups to "queer" pop songs. Here's what I came up with:

Kelis' "Bossy" with Shareefa's "I Need a Boss"



Cher's "Take Me Home" with Lisa Lisa's "I Wonder if I Take You Home"



The Cher and Lisa Lisa songs, like pop songs in general, are in second person, they address someone, a "you." This "you" is a man, but when the two songs are put together, they are addressing each other. Cher becomes the person trying to convince Lisa Lisa to take her (originally him) home.

As hip-hop-tinged R&B / pop songs, "Bossy" and "I Need a Boss" are not sung to another character, they are sung to the audience. So, while Cher and Lisa Lisa seem to be having a straightforward conversation with each other, Shareefa and Kelis seem more to be flirting when the songs are put together. Shareefa says, "I need a boss" and Kelis replies, "I'm bossy."

My original thought was that, with the mashups, the mode of reception is listening - you listen to the songs together. However, they're pretty much unlistenable. Since most of the queer meaning of putting these songs together is in the titles, anyway, I think that the mode of reception is thinking the songs together.

Finally, these mashups are both women / women mashups because I mostly listen to female vocalists. I would love to make some male / male mashups. Any ideas?

Queer Booklist

One goal I have for this quarter is to create reading lists for myself, so when I graduate I will have a list of academic books I'm excited about. With that in mind, I compiled a list of queer books I want to read as a start. First, I found this list of "the now canonical texts of queer theory within the U.S. academy" in Douglas Crimp's Melancholia and Moralism:

- Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter.
- Edelman, Lee. Homographesis.
- Fuss, Diana. Inside / Outside.
- Halperin, David. 100 Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies.
- Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet.

I've read Gender Trouble and Saint Foucault, though I read SF before I read any Foucault or any queer theory, so I could stand to read it again.

I sat down with Google Books and a bunch of names I've come across in my reading to find the following list of other books I'm interested in:

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender.

Week, Jeffrey:
- Sexuality and Its Discontents
- Between the Acts
- Against Nature
- Invented Moralities
- Making Sexual History
- Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life

Bersani, Leo. Homos.

Patton, Cindy.
- Inventing AIDs
- Sex and Germs: Politics of AIDs
- Globalizing AIDs
- Fatal Advice

Edelman, Lee.
- Homographesis
- No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Rubin, Gayle. Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong.

D’Emilio, John.
- The World Turned
- Making Trouble

Delaney, Samuel. Time Square Red, Time Square Blue.

Duggan, Lisa.
- Our Monica, Ourselves.
- Sex Wars.
- The Invention of Heterosexuality.

Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line.

Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides.

Boag, Peter. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest.


I'm not sure yet how to collect the citations for books I want to read. I want to be able to tag them. I found librarything.com, where you can create a catalog of books and tag them. I haven't used it enough yet to see if I like it. Another idea I had was to create a blog in blogger and make a post for each book I'm interested in, which would allow me to tag them as well as add information about why I'm interested in it.

Let me know if you have any reading suggestions!

And the Band Played On

Recently, I have been reading a lot about the AIDS crisis, starting with Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism, which is fantastic. In one of Crimp’s essays, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” he critiques Randy Shilts’ book As the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, a journalistic book about the crisis. Crimp writes that Shilts irresponsibly places blame for the crisis on gay men and promiscuity, particularly in his creation of “Patient Zero.” I wanted to read And the Band Played On because I’ve been reading so much critical writing about politics and art in the AIDS crisis, but I don’t know much of the history. I was also interested in reading the book to see if I agreed with Crimps’ critique.

I’m almost 200 pages in now, and I think Crimp was definitely right. It’s clear from Shilts’ focus on promiscuity as what is at fault. For example, he repeatedly refers to bathhouses as “the commercialization of promiscuity,” to the point where it almost becomes a euphemism. On a few occasions, he describes gay men who were promiscuous before anyone had even heard of AIDS as “playing on the freeway.” For example: “Perhaps the new virus was like some lurking jungle predator, striking the stragglers first. That would explain the extreme life-styles of the early cases; they were out dancing in the freeway, ensuring they would be the first to get run over.” (153). On page 157, Shilts writes, “Jim Curran passed up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary. Curran had heard about the flamboyant attendant and frankly found every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos n’ Andy movies.” (157) Here, gay men acting “stereotypical” is equated with blackface. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be straight men acting a gay men and portraying these stereotypes, but that is not what is happening here. Curran is a straight doctor who is the head of AIDS research at the CDC. Shilts has created a story where a straight doctor is one of the heroes of the AIDS crisis, yet expresses such offensive sentiments. He wants to save gay men’s lives, but he doesn’t want to meet them if they act “stereotypical.”

What I actually like about And the Band Played On is how (unintentionally, I presume) campy the writing is. For example, Shilts writes, “The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that you worried it might break if you stared too hard.” (11). Or, a few pages later, “His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.” (14). Personally, I find this writing laughably bad. This amusement is helping me enjoy the book through the offensive sentiments.

On "Young Gay Rites"

A few weeks ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article about young gay men getting married called Young Gay Rites. Today, they published letters in response.

The first letter is my favorite:

As a gay man of a certain age (I was 18 when Stonewall happened), I realize that much of what I have valued overall in my life — virtually all of it “out” — has been access to a much wider landscape of sexual and relationship possibilities than most of my straight confreres felt they had. In fact, being gay in this culture has required me to forge my own identity — cultivate it consciously — rather than have it handed down through societal institutions like marriage. I think there have been benefits to that.

That everybody has a right to get married surely is obvious. But how lovely to feel you don’t have to.

When you’re gay, it can be difficult to explain to people why your views on gay marriage are negative or apathetic. I think this letter is very well articulated. I like that it expresses how a lack of marriage rights can be of benefit to queers without attacking the institution, which would cause a lot of people to close their minds to the sentiment.

The third letter I am not as fond of:

I dunno . . . after reading the article, sounds to me like gays get married for good or dumb reasons, impulsively or after careful or neurotic consideration, exactly like straight couples.

But as a 42-year-old gay engaged man, still giddy to be on the receiving end of a marriage proposal from my Julian, I do shudder to think what the gay-marriage opponents would think of our hypergay lifestyle, which I’m hoping California will condone soon by granting real marriage rights.

Why, just the other night we went to Target with our straight friend Brian and then, to top off our gay evening, got some doughnuts. It’s just one fabulous day after another.

Or should I say fabulously normal.

This is a typical example of the “gays should be able to get married because they’re just like straight people.” If this particular gay life style is “normal,” then something else isn’t normal – probably some more "hypergay" lifestyle. The use of the word “fabulous” seems particularly offensive to me, attacking certain non-assimilationist ways of being gay (i.e. faggy).

The last letter is very interesting. It’s about the images that ran with the story, campy 50s-style portraits of the young gay couples in the article. For example:



The letter states:

I enjoyed Denizet-Lewis’s article. He created a lively and sympathetic read, chronicling the path to marriage and beyond, a path that is not so different for couples of any sexual orientation. But why the colorized, exaggerated photos, mimicking the most clichéd and self-conscious of coupled moments? Why pose Marc and Vassili in tuxedos when they specifically stated that they will sidestep all the trappings associated with “traditional” weddings? Besides the uncomfortable nod to the ’50s (an era that was not especially welcoming to gays and lesbians), it suggests that gay couples are somehow “play acting” at being married. As a civil celebrant, who has had the great joy to preside over many gay unions in New Jersey, I was offended by the way these couples were depicted, at least visually.

I think this letter misses the point, which is the campiness of the photos. It’s not an “uncomfortable nod” to the 50s, it’s a parodic nod. Pictures like these, send-ups of the 50s, are usually parodic these days even when they feature straight couples. The letter made me think of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Butler writes about gender parody as repeating gender norms with a difference – in this case, that the couples are both men. This is not “play acting,” it is a parody that reveals the “original” as being a copy all along (unfortunately, I don’t have Gender Trouble with me, and this is something of a paraphrase from memory). In this case, the photos point out the constructedness of straight marriage as an institution. In my view, the author of this later misread the photographs and was offended by what she read into them, something that she wouldn’t have seen if she had noted the photos’ camp effect.

"Finding the Switch"

I stumbled on an article about the biological basis of homosexuality in the most recent (May/June 2008) issue of Psychology Today. It’s called “Finding the Switch,” by Robert Kunzig. The beginning of the article can be found here. The full article can be found on Proquest. The article is terrible. It starts:

IF THERE is one thing that has always seemed obvious about homosexuality, it's that it just doesn't make sense. Evolution favors traits that aid reproduction, and being gay clearly doesn't do that. The existence of homosexuality amounts to a profound evolutionary mystery, since failing to pass on your genes means that your genetic fitness is a resounding zero. "Homosexuality is effectively like sterilization," says psychobiologist Qazi Rahman of Queen Mary College in London. "You'd think evolution would get rid of it." Yet as far as historians can tell, homosexuality has always been with us. So the question remains: If it's such a disadvantage in the evolutionary rat race, why was it not selected into oblivion millennia ago?

Immediately, this article sets up evolution as the guide to whether or not something “makes sense.” Of course, evolution here is code for reproduction, as the second sentence makes clear. If homosexuality doesn’t aid reproduction, and thus doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean that any behavior that doesn’t aid reproduction doesn’t make sense, such as heterosexual sex with a condom (i.e. safe sex)? Kunzig would probably make the distinction between behavior and a biological identity. But his own question would be answered by an understanding of homosexuality not based on biology but on social construction (in other words, Kunzig needs to read The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault).

Kunzig does mention Freud to argue that non-biological understandings of homosexuality are wrong:

Twentieth-century psychiatry had an answer for this Darwinian paradox: Homosexuality was not a biological trait at all but a psychological defect. It was a mistake, one that was always being created anew, in each generation, by bad parenting. Freud considered homosexuality a form of arrested development stamped on a child by a distant father or an overprotective mother. Homosexuality was even listed by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder, and the idea that gays could and should be "cured" was widely accepted. But modern scientific research has not been kind to that idea. It turns out that parents of gay men are no better or worse than those of heterosexuals. And homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom, as well-among sheep, for instance. It arises naturally and does not seem to be a matter of aloof rams or overbearing ewes.

Of course, there was more to psychiatric explanations of homosexuality than bad parenting, and more to constructionist views of homosexuality than psychiatry, so dismissing bad parenting by invoking sheep is not enough to prove that homosexuality is biological. I find it very interesting that Freud’s idea of homosexuality as gender inversion is not mentioned, since some of the “scientific” language used in the article is remarkably similar.

No one has yet identified a particular gay gene, but Brian Mustanski, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is examining a gene that helps time the release of testosterone from the testes of a male fetus. Testosterone masculinizes the fetal genitalia-and presumably also the brain. Without it, the fetus stays female. It may be that the brains of gay men don't feel the full effects of testosterone at the right time during fetal development, and so are insufficiently masculinized.

Gender inversion is the idea that sex and gender naturally lead to heterosexual desire, so homosexual desire must be an inversion of biological sex and gender. How have we moved past Freudian ideas of inversion if we use science to say that gay men’s brains are “insufficiently masculinized?”

But if that gene does prove to be a gay gene, it's unlikely to be the only one. ... Gay genes could be genes for hormones, enzymes that modify hormones, or receptors on the surface of brain cells that bind to those hormones. A mutation in any one of those genes might make a person gay. … More likely it will take mutations in more than one gene. And that, as Rahman and Wilson and other researchers have suggested, is one solution to the Darwinian paradox: Gay genes might survive because so long as a man doesn't have enough of them to make him gay, they increase the reproductive success of the woman he mates with. Biologists call it "sexually antagonistic selection," meaning a trait survives in one sex only because it is useful to the other. Nipples-useless to men, vital to women-are one example, and homosexuality maybe another. By interfering with the masculinization of the brain, gay genes might promote feminine behavior traits, making men who carry them kinder, gentler, more nurturing-"less aggressive and psychopathic than the typical male," as Rahman and Wilson put it. Such men may be more likely to help raise children rather than kill them-or each other-and as a result, women maybe more likely to choose them as mates.

Gay men = feminine, more like women than men. These genes are later referred to in the article as “feminizing genes.”

Perhaps, he suggests, the mothers of some homosexuals have a "man-loving" gene. In women, it would be adaptive, causing them to have more sex and more children. But in men, the "manloving" gene would be expressed differently, causing homosexuality. To the gay sons, that would be an evolutionary disadvantage-but one outweighed by the advantage to the mothers, who would have more than enough other children to compensate. And so gayness in men would persist in these families-as a side effect of a trait that is beneficial to the women.

Oh, now it makes sense. Homosexuality is a side effect of a natural process that aids heterosexual reproduction. Here, as elsewhere in the article, heterosexuality is central, and needs no explanation. Homosexuality is what needs explanation. Only through a benefit to heterosexual reproduction can something “make sense.”

The biggest gap in the science of homosexuality concerns lesbians: Much less research has been done on them than on men. That's because women's sexuality seems to be more complicated and fluid-women are much more likely to report fantasizing about both sexes, or to change how they report their sexual orientation over time-which makes it harder to study. "Maybe we're measuring sexual orientation totally wrong in women," says Mustanski. Rahman and Wilson suggest that lesbianism might result from "masculinizing" genes that, when not present to excess, make a woman a more aggressively protective and thus successful mother-just as feminizing genes might make a man a more caring father.

This is the only reference to lesbianism in the entire article. As usual, lesbians are invisible. The difference between men’s sexuality and women’s sexuality is attributed to some natural difference between the two, not because of a difference in how men and women can express non-normative sexuality in our culture. If lesbians are considered at all, it is assumed that results of studies done on gay men can just be reversed.

Homosexuality seems to arise as a result of various perturbations in the flow from genes to hormones to brains to behavior-as the common end point of multiple biological paths, all of which seem to survive as side effects of various traits that help heterosexuals pass along their genes.

The two key terms here are “perturbations” and “side effects.” Homosexuality is a “perturbation,” a mistake. The article is structured to make homosexuality a problem that must be explained away, and it eventually it is explained because of how it “helps” heterosexual reproduction. I suspect that evolution is not a useful field of study for queers because of the centrality of (heterosexual) reproduction, but I would be interested in seeing a queer make use of evolutionary theory.