The Passive Partner
Straight depictions of motorcycle culture pervade the United States, taking shape in the form of films, televisions programs, books and magazines. Some of the more notable examples include Sons of Anarchy, Easy Rider and Roughriders, but there are countless others. Even movies which have almost nothing to do with motorcycles or MCs place their masculine leads in the saddle, spicing up their masculinity with the roar of engines and the squeal of tires on the pavement.
It's interesting to note that the Satyrs and other Gay MCs have chosen to use an abbreviation; MC and MCC are both used to mean "motorcycle club" but have a special social meaning attached to them. “MC is generally reserved for those clubs that are mutually recognized by other MC or outlaw motorcycle clubs" (Drew 56). Examples of well-known MCs with branches in Los Angeles include Hells Angels, the Mongols, Devil's Disciples and more. The abbreviations were created from the point of view of the “outlaw” or “one percenter” motorcycling subculture, a perspective popularized by televisions shows like Sons of Anarchy (link needed).” The history of “one-percenters” in relation to the American Motorcycle Association reveals quite a bit about why American gay MCs like the Satyrs chose to take on the “outlaw” name and image.
The American Motorcycle Association (AMA) began as a whites-only organization [TRANSITION? SHOULD THIS GO BEFORE PARAGRAPH 2?]. From its inception in 1924 until 1956, the AMA prohibited African American, Latinx, or Asian motorcyclists from joining the club and from participating in its organized events (Youngblood). There continues to be a stigma around the AMA today, and numerous “clashes” have occurred as AMA-affiliated organizations come into contact with so-called “one-percenters.” The term one-percenter was coined after the 1947 riot in Hollister, California. The AMA is said to have responded that “99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens, and the last one percent were outlaws" (Youngblood). The AMA now says they have no record of such a statement to the press and call this story apocryphal; fact or rumor, we think the cat’s out of the bag on this one. Heterosexuality can be asserted by counter-identification with homosexual men, or as Leo Bersani writes, misogyny and the dehumanization of a female subject. “The heterosexual male’s rageful resentment... must, in what are hardly negligible after-effects, find expression not only in the antagonism towards other men that, according to Freud, makes heterosexual social feeling less developed than homosexual social feeling, but also in a misogynous aggressiveness toward all those women, who, to some degree, cannot help but be seen as mere substitutes for for an abandoned, irreplaceable, supreme object of love (Bersani 16).” This may occur by “boundary testing” practices involving adherence to strict heterosocial norms of behavior, usually an attempt at counteridentification from the queer subject.
By performing “not femininity” in these ways, the man leaves socially constructed, heteronormative mechanisms of social power intact and operational. Unlike a model of sexuality which expresses a gender, gender itself is comprised of what remained inarticulate in the failures of heterosexuality. Masculinity and femininity are not merely dispositions, as Freud suggests, but rather accomplishments which emerge “in tandem with the achievement of heterosexuality (Butler 135).” In this way, “melancholic identification” may actually be a prerequisite for decathexis from the object of libidinal investment. This logic creates a matrix in which gender is achieved and stabilized through heterosexual action; threats to heterosexuality become threats to gender itself and socially prohibited by some kind of collective superego.
Disidentification, as theorized by Jose Munoz in his book Disidentifications, is “meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform (Munoz 4).” It’s clear that disidentification, in its original conception, is an act which both partially appropriates from, yet disidentifies with, the external object. For queers of color, disidentification permits navigation through complex social roles and relationships created in a hostile social environment. Munoz calls this “Identity-in-difference (Munoz 6).” While I do not believe that the aforementioned queer experience is shared by heterosexual men, I do think the term “disidentification” is useful in describing the impossible task undertaken by heterosexuality. Unable to see non cis-males as valuable or as equals prompts an intense struggle; but rather than navigating the phobic sphere for survival, like in the queer of color’s case, heterosexual navigation occurs for the sake of re-identification with normative codes of social behavior. The hetersosexual subject appropriates the aspects of queerness he finds desirable or useful to him, but denies any identification with the object of this thievery in a gesture not too unlike Marga’s love/hate for the image of the “diesel dykes” on TV. For example, how many “faggot hating” biker gangs still wore head-to-toe leather and chains after Glenn Hughes started doing so? Not so many, but I’m sure they still rode motorcycles and spent the vast majority of their time with other men just as Hughes himself did.
Having witnessed the prohibition of non-white riders from joining the AMA firsthand, queer motorcycle organizations chose not to register, taking up the MC abbreviation in an act of resistance and rebellion. Some clubs have since registered with the AMA for legal protection, but many continue to persevere without the protection of America’s largest riding association, proudly wearing 1% buttons and MC patches on their jackets.
