What We Agree About When We Talk About Twilight: No Homo

I've used Natalie Wilson's Twilight blog as a bit of a punching bag in the past, utilizing it to articulate some of my issues with academia. And Wilson is not really to blame for those. Not that I regret being occasionally harsh—one invites that when they use parenthetical asides like “as I argue in my forthcoming book.” But the more I read “Seduced By Twilight,” the more I am, uh, persuaded by it.

Part of the reason is that I think the world of Twilight fandom—if you would go so far as to lump this blog in with “fandom,” which maybe I would not do—is really divided into two camps: those who like it, and those who like it with a lot of reservations. The latter camp has a kind of grudging admiration for Twilight as an international sensation, the former camp is the reason it is one. People travel from group A into group B, but not the other way around unless they suffer a head injury. I'd like to think this blog has won the latter group a few converts from the former group, even. But ANYWAY what I'm saying is: Natalie Wilson gets it. Natalie Wilson has a lot of reservations about Twilight, and they are the right ones. I understand that some of MY objections are weirdly specific ones, and that I have carried my own, mostly invented narratives throughout these texts. But I'm not imagining most of this. By reading Wilson's blog I can get out of my own head a little, and clarify some basic stuff; I can see where we connect on the Venn diagram of outrage. And on that Venn diagram, the middle section is really big. That feels pretty good. We're not crazy.

Let's start, today, with the gay stuff. That's what he said.



In several posts Wilson calls out Meyer for both the lack of gay characters in Twilight and her subsequent personal silence on the issue of gay rights. Now, having one and not the other can be problematic too, right? I was kind of bothered by JK Rowling's post-Potter revelation that Dumbledore was gay. In the books, he wasn't really. So coming out (sorry) with that information later seemed kind of disingenuous. Really, Harry Potter doesn't get any more progressive points on the gay rights front than does Twilight.

But Wilson points out that S. Meyer gives heavily to the LDS Church, and the LDS Church gave heavily to the Prop 8 campaign in California. That is not a long enough chain of giving to detach S. Meyer from where the buck stopped. Through more or less a single intermediary, S. Meyer has contributed to halt the progression of gay rights. The same cannot be said of JK Rowling (however it should be noted that for all of her well-known and lauded charitable giving, I cannot find any records of Rowling making a contribution to a gay rights group. And yet, Sarcastic Meow rather rightly points out that gay rights are not considered a civil rights issue in the UK, really. That is our problem, and JK Rowling shouldn't be held as accountable for our problems as S. Meyer is. Still, if anyone has any information regarding Rowling and donations toward gay rights groups, I'd like to know. Quite a bit of searching has so far turned up nothing).

Wilson quotes a section in Meyer's infamous FAQ in which she explains what would happen if a gay person became a vampire.

Later, in the same post, the authors pose the following question: “This is not meant to be offensive in ANY way, shape or form, but do gay vampires exist? What if someone changed a human, intending them to be their permanent companion or something and it turned out they were… er… well, gay?”

This question is of course problematic in its presumption that even mentioning the dreaded word “gay” might be offensive, let alone *gasp!!!!* the notion that one of the sparkly Meyer vamps might desire a gay companion – oh the horror!

Anyhow, Meyer answers as follows: “If someone was to bite a gay person, that person would still be who they were before, so they would still be gay.” Well, at least she didn’t say that as the turn to vampire makes one more perfect it would entail a turn towards heterosexuality!

Indeed. Wilson goes on to point out that if S. Meyer publicly clarified her position on gay rights and it was anything other than “they don't exist,” she could be excommunicated from her church. But Wilson suggests (and I agree) that fear of one's church is not a good enough reason to Do The Right Thing. (And since S. Meyer gives the church a lot of money, common sense suggests they wouldn't be particularly quick to show her the door.)

In the comments of that article (scroll to the bottom), someone named Alyce articulates a rather interesting reading of the text as the Cullen family as heteronormative “in a world with queer surroundings.”

The heterosexual pairings of the Cullen family greatly contrast those relationships seen in the rest of the vampire, or queer, world. The other vampires travel in groups of odd numbers, much like Victoria, Laurent, and James. Together these three roam about Washington, feasting together without regard to remaining under the radar. It is almost as if they are participating in some of feeding orgy [sic] that catches mass attention and worry in the community. Also, the Volturi in Italy have multiple wives, which is quite out of the ordinary for the ideal heterosexual family. And Maria and her two female counterparts who turned Jasper are another group who are outliers to the heterosexual ideology.

Edward and Bella being able to actually reproduce, as they unfortunately have, further underscores their hetero-ness (heterocity?). The Cullens have, Alyce says, the “heterosexual American dream,” which is obviously my new band name.

In another post, Wilson articulates the issue a little better and more briefly, and even implicates all of us along with S. Meyer. “Amongst other types of diversity depicted in the series – race, class, age, (dis)ability – there is not one single non-hetero character nor even a nod to the fact that not everyone on the planet is hetero,” she writes.

In addition to the series’ seething heteronormativity, the practice of buying the books and related products results in profits for those institutions that want to bolster heterosexism. Profits from the series are funneled to the Mormon church through the practice of tithing – such funds are used in various ways, but one of them is to prevent same sex marriage laws from passing...

Remember those commercials after 9/11 that told you if you bought drugs you supplied terrorism? WHOOPS. For the record, I borrowed my sister's copy of Twilight, and my wife bought all of the other ones. So my conscience is clear. But the rest of you are going to hell. I'm going too, but for other reasons.

Wilson cites an incident in Wales in which—LOLOLOLOL—a poster featuring the wolfpack was removed from a theater for being too “homoerotic.” She points out the particular irony of that fact, given that the Quileutes are openly homophobic in several scenes (the only instances of actual homophobia in the text so far). [Which is, I just realized, a nod to the fact that non-hetero characters exist! So that's a contradiction Wilson will make want to reckon with in the future.]

For example, in Breaking Dawn when Quil says to Jacob “I don’t notice girls anymore,” Jacob jokes ““Put that together with the tiara and makeup, and maybe Claire will have a different kind of competition to worry about.” Here, Jacob insinuates that Quil’s tiara-wearing antics might lead to some non-hetero ‘competition.’ Quil laughs in response, making kissing noises at Jacob and asking, “You available this Friday, Jacob?” Ah yes, homosexuality is SO FUNNY – especially in a book that presents heterosexuality as the ONLY option with a message that screams “Be hetero! Get married and have babies!”

In Breaking Dawn Leah also teases Jacob about his heartfelt goodbye to Quil, snickering “Thought you were going to make out with him.” Yeah, cuz it’s so homo-esque for a male to care about his guy friends. Leah might as well have said, “Hey, wolf boy, grow some hetero balls and put your focus where it should be – on the ladies!”

MAN, I am having some heteronormative urges toward Natlie Wilson right now. PREACH IT. And irony of ironies, Wilson claims that the Quileutes in reality have a pretty good record of accepting diverse kinds of love and belief, so it's a particularly choice choice for S. Meyer to push the Christian-like homophobia off of the Cullens and onto the brown people. Nicely done. And then Wilson keeps going. When Allen Ginsberg first read Howl, the story goes that Jack Kerouac sat on the edge of the stage shouting “GO, GO, GO, GO,” as he read. I get how he feels right now. Check this shit out:

I am wondering if the above poster would have been removed if it featured shirtless white men instead — if it depicted the Carlisle, Edward, Jasper, Emmett pack? (Who are of course not referred to as a pack – think about the racial implications of that!) I would venture a guess that the poster would be less likely to be accused of homoeroticism if those pictured were white – partly because hegemonic, normative masculinity is linked to whiteness, and partly because (due to a global system of racism) it’s easier (and more common) to discriminate against non-white men.

GOD DAMN. Of course, she ends by quoting Eve Sedgwick, who theorized that homoerotic themes are deeply buried in almost all works of literature. That's the kind of thing I was talking about the last time I wrote about Natalie Wilson and academic writing in general; I'm sure there ARE homoerotic themes buried in everything—along with themes of every other stripe. Bend and twist a work of literature enough and you can wring pretty much anything out of it (I had a professor at BU who had a knack for finding phallic imagery in everything, and when I took the final exam I was genuinely surprised there wasn't a question like “List the most prominent symbolic penises in four or more works of literature we examined this semester.” Surely a few of these references he saw were intentional, but at some point midway through the semester we reached critical mass, penis-wise. Sometimes a cigar is not a cigar, but sometimes a dude named Peter is just a dude named Peter. Remember that episode of 30 Rock where it turns out Kenneth sees the world as basically a musical number from Sesame Street and Tracy sees every other human with his own face? Sometimes I think my professor looked at our class and just saw row after row of giant penises watching him, taking diligent notes). And those lines of academic thinking (the grand theory of gay everything) are the ones that directly undercut the stuff Wilson does so well in these two posts: concrete examples with their implications laid bare and clear. Academic writing can do more than serve itself, but it too often does not do so.

All of that said, it's not as though I haven't claimed there were deeply hidden gay themes in Twilight before.

Thoughts?

Related: Forks I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down