Nothing That Meets the Eye: Notes on (Gay) Clones – “Enter the clone. The clone was, in Martin P. Levine’s appropriately science fiction-inflected phrasing, “the first post-Stonewall form of homosexual life.” With their masculine self-presentation (Levis, facial hair, gym-toned bodies, flannel shirts, leather accessories or gear) that projected sexual self-assuredness and availability, ‘clones came to symbolize the liberated gay man.’ At the same time, the clone look — with its perceived repudiation of anything swishy, faggy, or feminine — was criticized as an expression of gayness that was at best severely limiting, and at worst, self-hating and fascist. In fact, gay activist and scholar Arthur Evans meant the term to be derisive when he coined it in the ‘Red Queen’ broadsides he wheatpasted around the Castro in the late seventies. The word still comes off as pejorative, though its sting has dulled with time.”