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and just when you thought i'd given you enough to read, i'm also posting the introduction to my more official academic rendering of gay bombs:


Gay Bombs: Exploding Topologies of Queerness

On January 15, 2005, BBC News published an article entitled “US military pondered love not war.” In this news brief, US Air Force research for the now supposedly defunct development of a “gay bomb” was announced to the public. Proposed in 1994 at the Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, the gay bomb is defined as an aphrodisiac chemical that “would make enemy soldiers ‘sexually irresistible’ to each other.” Indeed, the gay bomb, which was designed to be a six-year development project costing $7.5 million, “would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.” That the gay bomb would explode into immorality, detonating a public shaming upon its victims, pre-supposes rampant homophobia, for the act of homosexual sex in and of itself does not promise defeat or surrender. Yet, given the US military’s conflation of gay (here, defined as homosexual sex) with weapon, it seems that the military pondered war not love. Indeed, the image chosen to accompany this text of a military aircraft dropping dozens of missiles assures us that this bomb is a loveless act of sovereign dominance and destruction.
Perhaps more importantly than its sketchy exegesis of the gay bomb, the BBC News article encapsulates all the contradictions that have come to be embodied within medial representations of this military proposal. As BBC shifts between the use of “gay bomb” and “love bomb” freely, suggesting that these two descriptors are equally suitable for what the military has proposed, the conflation of the performance of a sexual act with “love” confuses and displaces how “gay” operates to signify “bomb.” The production of love as a result of the gay bomb’s detonation reads as a failure: the military wants homosexual sex to shame and disgrace—love remains absent from this plan. Still more perplexing is BBC’s use of citations, identifying “gay bomb,” “love bomb,” and “sexually irresistible” in the text to be directly extracted from military documents. Yet, as I will discuss later, this is not the case for any of these quotations. These citations that the BBC implement as definitions present a conflicting gap between the military’s allusive textual explication of this weapon as a “strong aphrodisiac” and BBC’s rhetorical move to visualize this text within the materiality of a bomb, seen here in the image of bombs released from a military aircraft. In turn, the BBC article coupled with the military proposal network the homosexual within grids of relationality that connect gay, love, weapon, bomb, and explosion. In fact, this new topology of relations that the homosexual is interpolated into maps a genealogy of what has come to be known as the gay bomb in visual culture, dialectically located, I will argue, within a love bomb, or queer bomb, and a war bomb, or a military-media bomb. Unlike BBC’s implication, love and war here are found to explode in two very different ways.
This paper reads the 1994 US Air Force document “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” in which the military proposes the development of a chemical weapon to enact homosexual behavior on combatants of war, through four visualizations of the gay bomb. These visualizations fall into two separate timeframes, divided by the release of the military document. While today medial representations of the gay bomb proliferate in popular culture on YouTube music videos, television shows, and movie spoofs, this contemporary union of homosexuality and bomb return us to another type of gay bomb that has existed in queer culture, a bomb that does not use homosexuality as a weapon of shame but rather explodes queer existence and affect into the world. This queer bomb of the past unites homosexuals with the threat—or at the moment of—explosion. Historically, the homosexual has built a gay bomb but is now blown up by another.
After an analysis of the military document, I will discuss two current representations of the gay bomb: 1) the 2001 online proliferation of an image of the USS Enterprise GBU-31 that was de-faced with the tag “High Jack This Fags” (and later dropped on Afghanistan), and 2) the gay bomb’s 2008 appearance on the television show 30 Rock. Next, I will turn to two older examples of the queer bomb (or love bomb): 1) the “No Future!” bombing in the 1977 film Jubilee of a heterosexual couple’s house by a queer punk, 2) the playful bomb-as-beach-ball in The Smith’s 1986 music video Ask. I will ask how current formations of the gay bomb affect our readings and interpretations of these older visualizations that notably did not embody the words “gay bomb” in their visuality and were not necessarily subordinated to military power. Specifically, how did the military document, which never mentions a “gay bomb,” produce an explosion of gay bombs in contemporary media, and in turn, how does this shape our reflections upon queer bombs?
The dialectic of the gay bomb poses a complex positionality of homosexual existence and agency, for before and after the US military proposal, the gay bomb aims toward different targets, and the directionalities of those aims are controlled by different forces. As I inquire into the ways the homosexual targets and is targeted, I will use a topological framework to analyze these networked grids of warfare that the homosexual has become inextricably encrypted within. A network topology is the mapping of elements in a network, including the physical connections between points and the logistical flows of data between these nodes. As military applications most commonly use a full mesh topology that provides direct links to all nodes in the network, I will employ such a topology to structure my analysis of the gay bomb. The gay bomb—a military application, a full mesh topology, a decentralized network—fuses, in a radical horizontality, to warfare, weaponry, and mass destruction as well as queer affect, community, and love. To parse the homosexual’s node(s) in this topology, a discursive interrogation must be executed, asking how the gay bomb restructures the logic of the homosexual, that is, what data does the gay bomb explode into the ontological formation of the homosexual, as well as how the gay bomb re-wires the quality of the homosexual’s interactions within this topology.
Samuel Weber notes that each target is positioned to exploit an opportunity. With the rise of what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism, the gay bomb takes as its opportunity the enfolding of homonormativity into mainstream culture to include the homosexual into the construction of its own exclusion and effacement. While representations of the gay bomb in popular culture are at times applauded and enjoyed by homosexuals, the gay bomb always takes the opportunity to mark the homosexual not as target but as target-already-hit. If, in the past, queer communities “learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” they did so through embracing their positionality as target and took this as an opportunity to target back (become the bomb) and establish community and its production of love on the basis of imminent explosion.
If the bomb is always a target that aims to manipulate—as its opportunity—network topologies that are links between bodies, weapons, life, death, power, and subordination, I would like to conclude this paper with a consideration of the productive possibilities that the gay bomb might still have for queer as well as GLBTI communities in general. If the queer bomb of the past internalizes an explosion predicated on the historically specific risks of HIV/AIDS, gay bashing, closetedness, and general societal exclusion, all of these threats still remain painfully present and unrelentingly intensified. Has the externalization of this bomb—a production outside of queerness and into the mainstream, within and beyond homosexuality—eclipsed the performative power the bomb once held? Or can the gay bomb explode once again, with the weight of its history, as a political tactic to unite those it embodies as well as those it aims to destroy, in love?