QOTD (2011-01-25); or, Nostalgia and the Homoerotic Literary Tradition 26 January 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Nerdiness, Personal Life, QOTD.4 comments
It’s disconcerting how much I identify with a teenage Terry Castle, as represented in her memoir, The Professor:
In high school I had been almost freakishly solitary and skittish, with no idea how to comport myself in ordinary-teenager fashion…. Bizarre as it sounds, by the time I left for college I had never once called anyone on the telephone or invited a classmate over after school. Nor had I myself been so called or invited…. On the contrary: I’d been reclusive, a regular Secret-Garden-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Girl-Hysteric-in-Training. At seventeen, I remained passionately (if uneasily) mother devoted; frighteningly watchful, in school and out; abnormally well read in Dumas novels, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, H.P. Lovecraft, and the lives of the poets…. I began devouring certain louche modern authors in secret: Gide, Wilde, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, even Yukio Mishima, then at the height of his celebrity in the West. Sexual deviance, or at least what I conceived it to be, began to exert a certain unhallowed, even gothic allure—a glamorous, decayed, half-Satanic romance…. Not least among the attractions that such literary homosexuality proffered: some drastic psychic deliverance from familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor…. As for “homosexual practices”—and I confess I wasn’t exactly sure, mechanically speaking, what they were—they sounded sterile and demonic but also madly titillating…. Anything could happen, it seemed, in the fascinating world of sexual inverts. Lesbianism didn’t figure much, if at all, in these early reveries: one of the oddest parts of the fantasy, I guess, was that I was male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents. I knew more about green carnations, the Brompton Oratory, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the curious charms of Italian gondoliers than I did about Willa Cather or Gertrude Stein—not to mention Garbo or Stanwyck or Dusty Springfield.
I was already feeling nostalgic about high school from earlier this afternoon, when something one of my high-school friends posted on Facebook reminded me of those lonely quiet days of negotiating friendship for the very first time, bumbling step-by-step out of the world of Musketeers into the bright cloudless San Diego shopping-mall sunlight, learning for the first time at the age of 16 or 17 how to socialize. At the very same time as I was learning how to socialize, I was learning how to study sexuality—putting off the terrifying process of having to confront myself and who I was and what I wanted by discoveries no less thrilling and rewarding. I can remember where I was, how I felt, when I read “Reading Gaol” and the Calamus poems and Howl. I remember lugging around school volumes of Krafft-Ebing and Kinsey borrowed from the UCSD library, because I thought it made me cool. I remember sitting up in a dark bedroom at 3 am on a hot summer night in the dead-quiet suburbs, talking to my high-school friend on AIM while we simultaneously watched Shortbus together. I remember being trapped by the walls, by the air, by the cars we all were stuck in all the time when we drove down Interstate 15 into or out of the city. I remember reading Viola in Twelfth Night for one English class. Teaching Whitman and Ginsberg in another. Adapting and staging and deliberately cross-casting The Importance of Being Earnest in another.
Like Symonds, like Terry Castle, like me, so many of us believe in another world, a place where glamor and panache and camp and beauty take the place of gender conformity and Hollister clothing and pink stucco houses. So many of us read our Plato, read our Wilde, lived our pretentious little teenage lives in a performative effort to clap! clap if we believed in fairies! So many of us grew up and didn’t quite ever find that the real world lived up to the hazy, lilac-scented Arcadian visions of the earliest chapters of Brideshead Revisited and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (As a teenager, I was never quite able to read all the way to the ends of those books, and watch the paradise slip away into madness.) But I’d like to think we all cultivate our own gardens, all find our paradises within, happier far. I’d like to think that Symonds’ creation of a homosexual culture and his affair with his gondolier at long-last helped to put some of his demons to rest; I’d like to think that Castle’s wonderfully dry self-deprecating humor bespeaks contentment with the material niceties of her life as a successful academic, far from the barren stucco San Diegan wilderness (mentally, if not physically. But I swear, Palo Alto’s nicer than University City anytime). And I dream that someday someone will pay me to introduce the homoerotic literary tradition to the young people who desperately need a little camp and glamor in their lives. But the thing is, even if plans B through Z fail and no one ever does, I’ll still be the 14-year-old kid who strutted over the hills of a southern-California suburb one September in floral-patterned knee-breeches, black lace-up boots, a frilly shirt and doublet and a broad-brimmed hat with an enormous purple peacock feather pinned to the brim. “Notes on Camp“? Baby, who needs ‘em? I’ve got the text memorized!
I’ll end this reverie on the perfect note that Madonna’s “Vogue” serendipitously came up on shuffle.
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are! 11 October 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT.1 comment so far
Today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day here in the U.S. As you can see from the Keith Haring poster, National Coming Out Day comes from a time in American queer history when “SILENCE = DEATH” was the watchword, and so it is tempting perhaps to think that it belongs to a time that is no longer, when urgency and militancy overtook the case for same-sex marriage and other, more concrete and legalized understandings of LGBT civil liberties. But in fact, that’s not so: the specter of a particularly large round of young queer people’s suicides means that there are radical political groups holding die-ins again.
But even as we find militant urgency surrounding us in a stark reminder that historical narratives cannot ever be written as entirely teleological marches toward progress, we can also think of National Coming Out Day as a reminder that you needn’t be a militant to save people’s lives; you needn’t pull a Harvey Milk and declare that you will risk assassination in the name of “destroy[ing] every closet door.” All you need do is be here, be yourself, and be alive. You can go about the rest of your life, and the rest of the things you do to make the world a better place, safe in the assurance that if you live an out and unashamed life, you are, in the paraphrased words of another eminent cultural icon of teh gayz, convincing by your presence.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt either if you’re willing to put a little part of your life and yourself into being a mentor to the queer kids and the not-yet-queer kids who happen to look to you for help. Tell them your stories and listen to theirs. I have found, through a life made not just easier and more bearable; but wonderfully entertaining, enriching, and loving, by good queer mentors, that it is easier to say “homophobia” or “transphobia,” to say “girlfriend” or “boyfriend” in the way you want to say them, to talk the language of cruising or of gay-marriage politicking, if you have heard someone else do it first. And it is easier to believe that you can be a queer, gender-nonconforming woman in academia if you have seen a woman stand in front of your classroom or sit with you on a committee who is also wearing a men’s dress shirt and slacks, you know?
Coming out is at times a complicated, a perplexing, and a daunting prospect. But when you do so, whether you have any sort of life as a public figure or not, you do so for the kids who need to see queer adults around them to know that it’s worth growing up to be one too. Something I’ve always admired about gay history is the familial closeness of queer communities, even when faced with incredible adversity. Think of what queer community could do for each other in the time when Keith Haring created that poster, think of today’s queer kids who still need a ton of support, and do the right thing and tell them you’re One of Those People too.
QOTD (2010-08-17), Continuity and Change Edition 17 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Nerdiness.add a comment
In A Problem in Modern Ethics, Symonds, in his detailed discussion of German sexologist Ulrichs’ arguments for homosexual tolerance, reminds us just how little has changed in 120-odd years:
As the result of these considerations, Ulrichs concludes that there is no real ground for the persecution of Urnings [his word for men-loving men] except as may be found in the repugnance by the vast numerical majority for an insignificant minority. The majority encourages matrimony, condones seduction, sanctions prostitution, legalises divorce in the interests of its own sexual proclivities. It makes temporary or permanent unions illegal for the minority whose inversion of instinct it abhors. And this persecution, in the popular mind at any rate, is justified, like many other inequitable acts of prejudice or ignorance, by theological assumptions and the so-called mandates of revelation.
This fin-de-siècle argument is, other than some stylistic markers, barely distinguishable from federal judge Vaughn Walker’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger—whose unveiling the other week reignited a conversation about equality, tolerance, and the nature and role of religion and morals in a society which includes men who love men and women who love women. Since there has been a thing called “homosexuality” (or “sexual inversion,” or “Greek love,” or “Urningliebe,” or other terms more recognizable to a Symonds or an Ulrichs), those who make a life out of thinking and writing about it have tried to puzzle through what its relationship is to the rest of our society. And it is remarkably striking that, just as surely as a discussion of men’s love for men will before long come back to Plato (even if by a circuitous, modern, post-classics route), it seems it will come back to marriage and divorce as well.
I remember how surprised I was, a year ago at the Smithsonian, to see a 1963 issue of One magazine with the cover text “Let’s Push Homophile Marriage,” a political rallying cry which, though advanced six years before the advent of gay liberation, though using the vocabulary of a pre-”gay” era, sounded disconcertingly familiar to 21st-century ears. I am even more surprised to see marriage rear its head in the equal-rights discussions of the 19th century: has the movement really, in 120 years, not come so far as all that? Is marriage equality as a 2010 cultural touchstone really so close to the cultural touchstones of 1890 as to make the lasting accomplishments of gay liberation seem like an illusion?
Obviously the past 120 years have brought decriminalization and the eradication of sodomy laws, a product of 1980s Britain and 2000s America largely unthinkable in Symonds’ and Ulrichs’ day, as standard as it already was in some European countries by the end of the 19th century. And yet despite shifts in public opinion and in the law, we seem to be having the same conversations, still unable to make up our collective cultural mind as to whether male homosexuality is a crime against nature or a psychological problem or just the way some people are; whether it’s fundamentally the same as or fundamentally different to heterosexuality; how the law should respect these categories and whether it should notice them at all; how we define male homosexuality as a cultural as well as a psychological category; and why, indeed, the hell it is that we get so exercised about male homosexuality while female homosexuality fades into the background! To the proverbial Martian anthropologist, our microbiological searches for the “gay gene” and endless academic psychological studies would likely seem as strange as Ulrichs’ obsessive taxonomizing of sexual behavior or Krafft-Ebing’s psychological-physiological quackery and a touch of the Freud about all their contemporaries’ early-childhood theories. We have come no closer than Symonds and his contemporaries to understanding why people are gay, and yet we seem just as wedded to an idea of the characteristic’s biological immutability as most homosexual-sympathetic sexologists of the late 19th century were. I suppose a good question to ask would be, why do we keep going around in circles? Why is it so difficult to construct a narrative of the history of homosexuality in which the arc of history bends as unremittingly towards progress as it’s supposed to?
And Christ, reader, have I really signed up to write a thesis about all this?
QOTD (2010-08-12), Thesis Research and Queer Theory Edition 14 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Nerdiness.add a comment
We normally think of J.A. Symonds as one of the pioneers of a modern theory of male homosexuality, and my thesis presently (that is, until I change my mind again next week) hopes to discuss how Symonds’ work and life prefigured the gay identities of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was in many ways an extraordinary pioneer, and I don’t believe the importance of his work to modern queer scholarship has been fully realized. Sometimes, however, he says things which mark him as far away indeed from the mainstream of modern queer thought. For example, from Chapter 4 of his short 1896 book A Problem in Modern Ethics:
… as is always the case in the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena, [German doctor and sexologist Casper's] classification [of "congenital" and "acquired" sexual inversion] falls far short of the necessities of the problem. While treating of acquired sexual inversion, he only thinks of debauchees. He does not seem to have considered a deeper question—deeper in its bearing upon the way in which society will have to deal with the whole problem—the question of how far these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagion to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour. Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions, he has left out of his account. It is also, but this is a minor matter, singular that he should have restricted his observations on the freemasonry among pæderasts to those in whom the instinct is acquired. That exists quite as much or even more among those in whom it is congenital.
By “freemasonry,” Symonds means the tactics “pæderasts” use to recognize each other (dress, ways of looking at each other, linguistic cues, etc.), which so happen to be a major interest of mine, so that’s cool. But I’m actually far more intrigued here by Symonds’ endorsement of Casper’s inclination to break the population of men-loving men into those in whom the trait is inborn or developed in early childhood, and those in whom it is “acquired” and to a certain extent voluntary. To endorse such a taxonomy flies in the face of most of what we think of as standard in modern homosexuality, and it would be natural to dismiss it out-of-hand as late-Victorian wackiness. There are three reasons, however, why I think we actually ought to give Symonds’ raising of a “deeper question” more thought.
The first is a fairly straightforward historical-context point: it was commonly understood in 19th- and early-20th-century American and European culture that men not generally disposed to have sex with other men might do so in extraordinary circumstances when there were no women available—the best examples being sailors on long voyages, boys and young men at single-sex boarding schools and universities, and the still-common trope of the men’s prison. Hence the sense Casper and Symonds have that some men’s sex with men does not necessarily stem from any deep-seated physiological or psychological characteristic, even though–as Symonds says at the end of this chapter–”‘the majority of persons who are subject’ to sexual inversion come into the world, or issue from the cradle, with their inclination clearly marked.”
The second is a point of semantics and close-reading: at first glance the kookiest of Symonds’ suggestions in this paragraph is that “these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagion to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour.” It’s a strange sentence, one which seems to embody all the worst quackery of Victorian medical “knowledge” and to bear a disconcerting resemblance to modern warnings about the “homosexual agenda.” But putting Symonds’ suggestion in a slightly different context changes its meaning: how many stories do we continue to hear day by day about adults who come out reasonably late in life? For every modern teenage boy who grows up watching Logo, attending Pride parades, and looking for porn on the Internet, there is a middle-aged man who takes half a lifetime to realize or to determine that he is gay–and sometimes, I would imagine, this is because he has a sexual experience which spurs him to connect feelings he’s had all his life to the larger concept of “homosexuality.” It seems this could be a modern way of phrasing the problem which Symonds raises: how will society taxonomize the man who, though heretofore “normal” (in 19th-century parlance), has sex with a man and determines himself an invert? How would someone’s identity and sense of self be reshaped by having a homosexual sexual experience? It does not strike me as surprising that Symonds, who is fundamentally concerned with ideas of identity and the parts of history, culture, medicine, language, etc. which compose an identity for the sexual invert, would find this question important.
The third point is larger in scope, involving broader implications to Symonds’ observations which I don’t have the queer theory to attack properly, but which I think enormously important to understanding homosexuality both in its natal decade and today. By invoking “Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions,” I like to think of Symonds as raising the point I am fond of making that there is an extricable division between physiological/psychological, immutable homosexual sexual orientation and the much more mutable entity commonly known as “gay culture.” I am fond of pointing out that not all (male) homosexuals are participants in “gay (male) culture” (we can quibble about what that means, but regardless of what “gay culture” is, I think the point stands), while not all participants in “gay (male) culture” are (male) homosexuals themselves–I count myself in this group. And I am tempted to think of a man from Los Angeles I met in a gay bar in Paris who seemed to be enjoying the efforts of a couple guys to hit on him before confessing that he wasn’t gay himself. I think Symonds is right to point to “taste” and “fashion” as elements which make up an identity and a culture as much as something immutable does, and I think this is something which all of us who consider ourselves interested in the matter of queer identities could do a little more thinking about.
I think I’ll end on the note that I personally would like to do a lot more thinking about this word “taste,” because it could represent the simple uncontrollable desire of sexual orientation, but also quite obviously seems to connote a desire colored by preference. After all, homosexuality may not be a choice, but how many people are given to couching their sexual preferences for partners of a specific race, partners who prefer to engage in specific sexual acts, etc. in this same language of non-choice? Sometimes orientational models of these things surface–the orientational model of dominance and submission is beginning to catch on in many circles, while we nearly always speak both historically and contemporarily of pedophilic desire as something uncontrollable, only condemning in criminal terms the acting-out of that desire. But I think the language of “taste” colors many discussions of sexuality beyond LGBT activists’ “being gay is not a choice” mantra, and considering it a factor “in the dissemination of anomalous passions” could help us develop still further our understandings of how queer identities are shaped. I would think that “taste” would be incredibly important to men like Symonds who came to construct a theory of homosexual identity out of an intellectual trajectory heavily influenced by the British aesthetic movement, who joined Wilde and Pater in the study of Greats and the Renaissance, and who had much to say about art and its criticism. That Symonds’ origins in and study of this tradition related directly to his theory of homosexuality is something I hope to weigh in on in my thesis, and I hope that doing so can help us to consider what bearing “taste” has on homosexuality today, removed as it seems from ancient philosophy or Renaissance art.
We Must Cultivate Our Own Dancefloor; or, Thoughts While Listening to “Like a Prayer” 7 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism, LGBT, Personal Life.1 comment so far
Look around: everywhere you turn it’s heartache
It’s everywhere that you go
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know
If all else fails and you long to be
Something better than you are today
I know a place where you can get away:
It’s called the dancefloor, and here’s what it’s for…!
—Madonna, “Vogue”
I am sitting in a darkened bedroom in a big, empty house on a rural island in the Strait of Georgia, listening to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” I am enraptured by this song whenever I listen to it, and I have listened to it many times this summer: on a train to Rhode Island, on a plane to Paris, speeding down the highway from the San Diego suburbs. Each time I have the same response, which is that a great gush of emotion wells up inside me, and I can do nothing but raise my head to the sky, shout the lyrics (silently, if need be, as now), and form a fist which pumps in time to the beat. It’s strange how much I love this song and how few pieces of music move me more—I’ve come a long way from the civil rights anthems of the elementary-school car ride, or the Scottish folk ballads of the middle-school bus, or the Pink Floyd that got me through high school. Weirdly (I think), I’ve wound up through all of this at Madonna, despite my actual political, feminist objections to the Madonna phenomenon itself. Weirdly, there are only a few Pete Seeger songs, a few finales from Russian ballets and symphonies, which can command this much attention and passion from my soul.
It must have something to do with the single memory I associate with this song, which (unlike most of the memories I associate with songs) is not related to the first time I heard it, or the person who introduced me to it. That’s a fairly uninteresting, and fairly embarrassing story: I’d never heard Madonna before this spring, when the Glee Madonna episode prompted me to download a “Best of” album from iTunes. I had the songs in that collection on in the background through a few months of walking across campus and doing laundry and surfing the web. I learned the lyrics, and I got them stuck in my head, and then I was playing the songs again and again as, finally, I packed my things up in boxes and got ready to leave Princeton for another summer.
One of the components of leaving Princeton for the summer was attending the three-day bacchanal my university throws for its alumni, an event of which I’m far more ashamed than I was of my sudden descent into pop culture and the slippery slope in that direction which Glee seems to have set in motion. I spent three days getting no sleep, hating the 70-year-old rich white men and 20-year-old rich white football players who made my beloved quad smell like stale beer and vomit, and letting my shame at actually enjoying myself at the alumni parties subside into the retributive self-righteousness I felt at abusing their free food. And after three days of all this, of the longest and most exhausting and most emotionally up-and-down party I’ve ever paid $45 to attend (or, indeed, attended for free), I went to the last dance, a Saturday night affair sponsored by the LGBT alumni organization, a high-school-prom of the very drunk queer kids set who spent a few hours grinding with their friends in a too-large multipurpose room with a DJ and a disco ball. It was cheesy and ridiculous and the most fun I’ve had in the past several months. Because it was a gay dance, the DJ played Lady Gaga and Ke$ha and even the Spice Girls, and of course various disco standards, and of course everyone knew all the songs. It was a collective experience of dancing to collectively popular music of the sort which I don’t get to experience very often, and for me it culminated with “Like a Prayer,” a song to which I remember shouting the words with one of my friends, all the energy I’d built up in months of secretly listening to Madonna in my room all coming out in the realization which it took that cheesy fag-and-dyke-prom of an alumni reunions event to bring home: I love the dancefloor. And I love it because it represents unbridled joy.
In the past twelve months, I’ve been absorbed neck-deep in the personal struggles of young adulthood: sorting out desires from obligations, trying to figure out my purpose in life, striving to identify what a good person is and what she does to be good and to be better. This time a year ago, I was about to return to my family after a summer of depression, disillusionment, and cynicism in the District of Columbia, and I spent my sophomore year of college salvaging my faith in humanity by coming to love art galleries, classical music, literary criticism, and other trappings of highbrow culture; by investing my emotions in friendships instead of in elections; by making a difference through the person-to-person contact of the dining hall or the LGBT Center; and by investing myself in my scholarship and in the notion that studying now so that I can be an academic in a decade or so is as worthy a use of my time as working for a political cause. In the intervening moments, between applying all my mental will towards figuring out what a good person is and then trying to become one, I have snatched slices of transcendent happiness: on my first and then successive road trips; having madcap ideas and making them happen; basking in the company of the brilliant people I idolize who let me tag along in their far-more-interesting lives; watching the sun set from that beautiful little room with its window seat over the archway in the college quad I call home. Occasionally, going to a party. Dancing. Laughing. Going back to my room too late, still grinning, still with pop songs and their unrelenting beats running through my head.
Last October, when I put aside my political and personal prevarications and went to the annual Terrace Drag Ball, I had fun. I danced with friends and strangers, all delighting in the party and in the dancing. I came home realizing that it was wrong to deny myself simple pleasures like this, because what is the LGBT political movement fighting for, exactly, if not the right to hold drag balls? The right to ownership of a dancefloor has presented itself to me, slowly, over the course of the past year, as a fundamental right surely on par with a few others which top the front pages of the news. As I’ve read more books by Edmund White, taken an American studies class which talked (among other things) about the birth of the downtown music scene, and more importantly stepped away from gay history once or twice and gone out for myself and danced till hours I never see otherwise, I’ve realized what a powerful sense of collective identity, and collective pride, and collective joy, dancing together provides. I’ve come to understand it as a tool to banish ugliness and despair, to create resolve and strength, to assert defiance and freedom from fear. Granted, I’ve only been to a few parties, and a few dances, in the past twelve months: work always takes priority, and more often than not I recreate the magic of the dancefloor for myself, with my eyes closed in a darkened bedroom and more than enough happiness and energy to swallow up a whole nightclub (granted, being a shy young thing of twenty, I’ve also never been to an actual nightclub). For “dancing” is as much a metaphor as it is a reality, and for me it functions easily as a symbol of the process of using joy to banish ugliness, using beauty (once sought) as a peaceful weapon, a route to strengthening moral resolve to fight the next battle of the human condition. In the past year, in the process of learning to have fun, learning to do good by being good, and learning to accept and to appreciate myself in the meantime, “dancing” as symbol has helped me to keep myself whole, to keep me going through my days, and to create, hovering in the back of my mind, a vision of what the Platonic ideal of happiness can be. Yes, that’s what it is, an ideal: an ideal I have experienced only elusively, but an ideal to keep in mind when working to build a world in which the right to the dancefloor is inalienable—consider it the universal Stonewall, the Stonewall of the mind. Everyone deserves a liberation led by a drag-queen kickline, a hedonistic music-and-club-and-drug-and-sex scene born in the bowels of Manhattan, and a resilient spirit which can rebirth that scene into one which can confront death and impoverishment and come out fighting. Everyone—even those of us for whom the gender politics of the female divas so beloved by the gay male stereotype create problems—deserves their Madonna, whatever their actual gender or sexual orientation or personal struggles or routes to community and acceptance.
The other afternoon (back on the quiet, far-flung, isolated island) I was reading the newspaper stories and blog posts I’d downloaded from the neighbors’ internet connection (we don’t have one of our own), my headphones in and my body bouncing a bit to Donna Summers, another of my recent discoveries from the canon. As I flipped through stories about the dysfunction of our government; about the peril in which the environment finds itself; about soldiers and civilians killed in countries so far away I can’t imagine them; about economic crises or hate crimes the world over; I felt a sharp stab of guilt for dancing to disco while reading of such hurt and sorrow. But—as I steeled myself to move onto the stories about funding cuts to universities, a lack of investment in the humanities, and the end of tenure—I resolved that there is nothing shameful about seeking a slice of the dancefloor where you can find it, about trying to recreate for yourself where and how you can the rapture of “Like a Prayer.” I am tempted to think, as I rationalized myself into submission by thinking on that occasion, of the forces of disco and pop (allied with the forces of 19th-century portraiture and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and the Tchaikovsky symphonies and the Declaration of Independence and Oscar Wilde’s statements in the witness box and oh, at least five dozen other things) ranged in a great cosmic battle against the forces of hate and evil and ugliness; all doing their best, whether in earnest or in camp (though those aren’t too different!), to help us to cultivate our own dancefloor.
And, well: if this is what gets us through the days and nights and helps us to keep our shit together, I am all too happy to be “putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” on this one.
QOTD (2010-07-07); or, Another Problem in Greek Ethics 7 July 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Nerdiness, QOTD.1 comment so far
From the second chapter of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality:
In December 1837 at Yale, Dodd composed or transcribed a revealing, rhymed ditty, “The Disgrace of Hebe & Preferment of Ganymede,” about a dinner for the gods given by Jove, at which the beautiful serving girl, Hebe, tripped over “Mercury’s wand,” exhibiting, as she fell, that part “which by modesty’s laws is prohibited.” Men’s and women’s privates were on Dodd’s mind—eros was now closer to consciousness. Angry at Hebe’s “breach of decorum,” Jove sent her away, and called Ganymede “to serve in her place. / Which station forever he afterward had, / Though to cut Hebe out… was too bad.”
Considering Dodd’s cutting out Julia Beers [his girlfriend] for John Heath, Anthony Halsey, and Jabez Smith [fellow college students for whom he professed love or intense friendship], his poem shows him employing ancient Greek myth, and the iconic, man-loving Ganymede to help him comprehend his own shifting, ambivalent attractions. At Yale, Dodd read the Greek Anthology and other classic texts and began to use his knowledge of ancient affectionate and sexual life to come to terms with his own—a common strategy of this age’s upper-class college-educated white men.
This passage leads to the sort of thesis-related observations I usually try to keep off this blog, but given the relationship of the work Katz does to the questions of close-reading I contemplated yesterday, and the broader implications of his thesis about the historical contextualization of identity categories, it’s worth discussing here. Briefly, Katz has written this book to talk about men who loved and desired other men in America, but before such a thing as homosexuality existed. Through detailed case studies and work with both literary and more traditionally historical sources, he makes a case for a 19th century in which men’s sexual identities and relationships to sexual identity were very different from those of men in our own time. He fights against an essentialist reading of homosexuality across generations, and focuses instead on how 19th-century American men perceived their own relationships with each other, not what modern Americans might read into them. He finds (well, so far; I’m only on Chapter 4) that men often lacked the appropriate vocabulary to define their love for each other, but that they certainly did not see it as part of a distinct identity, evidence of pathology, or indeed reason not to love, desire sex with, and marry women—and that goes for both Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman!
And so I’ve been getting myself in this “men before homosexuality were nothing like men after homosexuality” mindset, which is productive in that it allows me both to find Katz’s book very persuasive and to further my own thinking about what changed, theoretically and culturally, when homosexuality did emerge as an identity. But I found that easy suspension-of-my-own-sense-of-identity-categories challenged by the passage I quote above, simply because it does not sound like the experience of a man from before-homosexuality. It sounds like the experiences of young men from across the history of homosexuality (though particularly in its early history) who came to understand their sexualities as sexualities through the frame of classical literature and art. I titled this post the way I did because one of those men was John Addington Symonds, whose 1901 tract A Problem in Greek Ethics is about Athenian pederasty, and implicitly makes the argument that because Athenian sexual mores were different from late-Victorian Britain’s, there was no reason why Britain and its legal system shouldn’t change to accept himself and his fellow “Uranians” into the fabric of society (this was an argument Symonds certainly expressed in so many words in private, if not so explicitly in print). The secondary “Problem in Greek Ethics,” however, would seem to lie in Symonds’ adoption of ancient Greek sexual practices which do not map precisely onto modern homosexuality and would not have been considered “homosexual” then to seek cultural and artistic validation for a modern form of sexual deviance. This sort of essentializing is, it seems to me, in some sense endemic to being homosexual in the modern western world—and it is this sort of essentializing which Katz’s book fights against in part precisely because it is so endemic. (You know how academics are.)
And so to read about Albert Dodd’s bawdy Ganymede poem, and Katz’s observations about Dodd’s interest in Greek matters in 1837, far before the word “homosexual” enters the language or before the sundry proto-homosexual scandals of late-19th-century Britain get going, and to read them occurring out in the provinces, in New Haven, far away from the theoretical and academic and cultural work done to create homosexuality in London and Paris and Berlin, is to me to profoundly trouble the neat homosexuality-didn’t-exist-and-then-it-did narrative. It is to question what is homosexual and what isn’t, to challenge my coding of problems in Greek ethics as homosexual, and indeed to question Katz’s thesis (with which I otherwise agree strongly) about the mutability and historical contingency of identity categories. Is a search to understand one’s erotic impulses through ancient Greek literature something enduring across time, no matter what words exist in the language to describe it?
Blogger Historiann wrote yesterday about the importance of using “sideways” methodologies in building the narratives of people(s) and events (such as women, or people of color, or working-class people) whom written sources sometimes leave out. Sometimes these methodologies come with their own problems in ethics: Historiann gives the example of using the recorded lives of men in order to make inferences about the lives of women, but what does it do for women’s history if it’s still only told through the eyes of men? It seems as if the kind of work that Katz does moves similarly sideways, getting around the obvious lack of forthright records of 19th-century men’s sexualities by inferring and reading between the lines; I’m hoping to learn from his books how to employ similar strategies when writing my own thesis. But it seems to me as if there is always a tension between too much inference and too little (something else I learned from literary studies!), and that playing the inference game carries with it problems in ethics, Greek or otherwise. Am I undoing Katz’s work by assuming homosexuality on the basis of Hellenism? Or could he possibly be the one who is reticent to make a necessary logical leap. (What is truth, anyway?!)
This is a tricky business in which to get involved—and we should never lose sight of the concrete social and political ramifications our quirks of interpretation can have, when they make their ways beyond the ivory tower.
What Do the Scissor Sisters, Grindr, and My Local Barnes and Noble Have in Common? or; Presumption and Gay History; or, A Rant Which Is a Little More Sarcastic Than Usual 3 July 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism, LGBT.4 comments
Starting to overcome the jetlag and culture shock that greeted me upon my arrival back home in southern California, I ventured out of the house for the first time today. My mother drove me to the mall near our house and dropped me in front of Barnes&Noble, and before too long I was standing in front of the two shelves in a back corner labeled “gay and lesbian studies,” wondering what, in my first mainstream chain media emporium in a while (it’s been all independents, academics, and useds lately), those two shelves would hold. It turned out to be largely lesbian erotica (for reasons unbeknownst to me, only one volume for gay men amidst a sea of lesbian titles), but mixed in among every volume of “Best Lesbian Erotica” published in the past 15 years were—to my shock and awe—books and books about Stonewall. There was Martin Duberman’s classic text, and a new one by a local historian who lives on Christopher Street, and one specifically aimed at young adults, and a couple others too which I’ve now forgotten. And though the books I need which was half-hoping I might find on those shelves, like David Halperin and Jonathan Ned Katz, were absent, I did see a few classic texts of the work I do in Literary Gay Men Studies standing out amongst the erotica: Randy Shilts. Edmund White. It was strange, in a conservative suburban world which I imagine is everything that my academic world is not, to think that the Mira Mesa Barnes&Noble’s usual customers might care about gay history too, enough to buy one of five different books about Stonewall. I suppose it should have come as no surprise, really—I knew kids in high school energized into activism by the legend of Harvey Milk—but the incongruity was still jarring. I was so startled that I almost bought And the Band Played On—I mean, who knows whether anyone else would?
I think perhaps that I was attuned today to the extra-ivory tower understanding of gay history (and I use “gay” intentionally; I’m sorry to say I’m not going to be talking about LBT folks too much here) because I had a couple reasons in popular culture to believe that there isn’t much of that going around these days. Sure, everyone’s excited about Pride and stuff, but the Harvey Milk craze has more or less died out, the Frank Kameny craze was more or less confined to Washington, and none of the elders of the gay community are getting any younger when it comes to getting their stories out into the wider community. The increasing normalcy of same-sex marriage has supplanted the urgency of gay liberation; on a far more nerve-wracking note, HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men are sharply on the rise because men my age, born around 1990, don’t remember how awful the 1980s were. I worry that gay men and the LGBT community at large do not only take their history for granted, but are at serious risk of losing memory of it altogether—particularly as my generation, with its oh-so-very-different outlook on being gay in America, reaches maturity.
One event which has got me worried about this is the release of the new album from the very gay dance/pop/disco/thing band Scissor Sisters, Night Work. I saw the promotional posters all over Paris, and couldn’t wait to download the album; it turns out I love it, and have been listening to it a lot the past few days. And perhaps I am attuned to love it because it is an album steeped in gay history, from its Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo to its ’80s-style promotional video to band frontman Jake Shears’ bold declaration that the album’s concept is to carve out an alternative history for the past 25 years: “like AIDS never happened.”
And yet as much as I myself am at times consumed by a profound sense of loss from reading about a time and a virus I didn’t live through; and as much as I devour the history of the era just before, Shears’ explanation of his album makes me uncomfortable enough to sour me on the music. It is irresponsible history—verging on the point of moral wrong—to pretend that AIDS never happened. It (and I do not think strong language is out of place here) desecrates the memories of those who have died from it. I do not know that we owe it to our community to become steeped in the sadness and depression of the so-called “plague” to the exclusion of happier moments in gay history, but I think Shears—and all of us who listen to and love his band’s album—owe it to thousands of people, right down to the man whose ass graces Night Work‘s cover, to remember a history that does not sweep AIDS under the rug simply because it is as depressing as all hell. Rather, we can aim for a more cautious, forward-looking revival of musical genres and cultural aesthetics, which I think is something Night Work does. 2010 so far has been a year fatigued by marriage-equality battles and soured on gay civil rights heroes; it is a year that is perhaps more willing to embrace disco as it once was. Which is fine; I only ask that we turn ourselves to fashioning a disco of 2010 instead of trying to pretend as if it’s still 1978.
I’m not the only one taking this attitude: it’s saturating Guardian writer Polly Vernon’s article about Grindr, the gay-men-meetup-and-hookup iPhone app. If the Scissor Sisters are stuck in some sort of irresponsible time warp before 1983, Vernon is all forward-thinking. Positing that we live in a “post-gay world,” and drawing attention to the apolitical nature of Grindr, Vernon is very much a part of this 2010 gay world I mentioned which is both non-radical and fatigued by politics. Not to mention the fact that Vernon is talking about that most 21st-century of cultural markers, an iPhone app—and one which, she is convinced, is on its way to revolutionizing gay culture and, in this aforementioned “post-gay world,” straight culture too.
But if Vernon does not deliberately erase key swathes of gay history, she certainly seems pretty ignorant of some of them. She thinks Grindr will change the ways that gay men meet each other, hook up, form social connections with each other, date, and understand each other as a mapped-out community. She threatens the downfall of monogamy, raising concerns about monogamous couples where one partner might cheat using Grindr… but Polly, honey, where the hell do you think American male homosexual culture has been for the last, I don’t know, 90 years? Not all gay men are alike, to be sure, or find sex partners in the same ways, but cruising is a long and storied tradition stretching back far before the invention of the iPhone or the GPS or the social networking site. Since homosexuality has existed in America, gay men have had varyingly covert ways of recognizing each other and soliciting each other. Furthermore, as Jake Shears could probably tell Vernon if he hasn’t blocked it out, non-monogamy was the norm in the urban gay culture which Grindr targets until AIDS hit. As Edmund White explains it in The Farewell Symphony (I’m paraphrasing, as the book is in a box in Princeton), the gay community in New York so much understood its identity to be based in non-monogamous values that it had serious difficulty adjusting to a world threatened by infection in which it was recommended that you know the names of your sex partners. And even in our current century, in this AIDS-ridden world, the character Jamie in Shortbus says, “Face it: monogamy’s for straight people.” For all Vernon’s insistence on “post-gay,” there is still a not-insignificant band of the rainbow flag which defines itself in opposition to the “straight” world.
Of course, straight people have never been wholly monogamous, either (ever seen a cheating Senator ‘fess up on TV? or, for a less morally-charged example, ever heard of swingers?), and so I’m not sure what Vernon thinks is so new about Grindr’s potential in the straight market. History and my academic knowledge of these things leads me to believe that a disproportionate number of users would still be gay men, but I see no reason to believe that Grindr will dramatically change how straight men and women conduct their business. Those who hook up will continue to hook up; those who might once have attracted each other’s attention by glances across a bar or perhaps by their own version of the handkerchief code (yes, I’ve seen heterosexual-geared color keys) will just be adding another tool to their repertoire. Despite the wide expert knowledge Vernon claims due to her many pseudonymous gay friends, I don’t see any reason to be as excited as she is about Grindr. Yes, I’m sure it’s a shiny toy. Yes, I think it would be hilarious to watch my friends try it out in a bar. And yes, I’m sure it’s helped a lot of men have a good time. But it seems to me as precisely much of an upgrade to old-fashioned cruising as email was to the penny post: faster and flashier, but not fundamentally altering how we use the English language. Or pick up boys. Or something.
I wish Vernon would not be so quick to assume that, just because she has some gay friends, she knows what it is like to be a gay man and to belong to the gay male community. And I wish Shears would not be so quick to assume that, just because he is gay, he can rewrite the history of his elders. But perhaps I should not either be so presumptuous as to tell a musician and a journalist what I think of what they do on the basis of having read a few books and (yes, I admit it) knowing a few gay men. For just as Vernon will never really understand what it is like to be on the gay cruising scene, and just as Shears will never really know what it was like to live in the Village in the ’80s, I will never have the full understanding of this community that my gay male friends can—and it would be wrong of me to pretend that I can too.
However, I believe that, given the particular mission I’ve carved out for myself, it would also be wrong of me to stop trying. By reading more history, and being judicious about how best to apply it, I can hopefully bring my own outsider’s perspective to the recording of this community’s life before we all forget too much of it. Perhaps, after all, I should have plucked And the Band Played On out of the sea of lesbian erotica and done my best to pay my respects, even all the way out here in the California suburbs.
New York City Dyke March: A Curious Anachronism 1 July 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Politics/Current Affairs.4 comments
My good friend Elizabeth Cooper has a great post up at Princeton’s feminist blog, Equal Writes, about last weekend’s Dyke March in New York City. Elizabeth compares the Dyke March (which styled itself as a protest, not as a parade, unlike the general Pride parade) to last October’s National Equality March in Washington (full disclosure: I helped Elizabeth organize a delegation of 80 Princeton students to attend the NEM). She found herself much less invested in the Dyke March than she had been in the NEM:
The Dyke March, on the other hand, did not feel transformative, at least for me. Although I wanted it to be a protest, it didn’t feel like such for a few reasons. Most importantly, I hadn’t been invested in the organization of the march, and therefore hadn’t really thought about what the march meant to me – it was happening, and I felt like since I was in the city partially for Pride and consider myself an activist in some respects, I should go. Amongst the people I marched with, I felt we shared this sense of not exactly knowing why we were marching. A couple of people thought we were going to be watching a parade, rather than participating in a protest. Once they realized the nature of the march, namely that it was a protest rather than a parade, they asked what we were protesting. I ventured a vague answer about protesting homophobia, but even the question made me insecure about not being more informed about what the march was about, as a whole, and for me personally.
As I was thinking about what I was marching for the day before, I had identified what meant and means the most to me personally right now – acceptance of LGBT children by their parents and family. I thought writing a slogan encapsulating that on a shirt would be cool both during the march and as a keepsake. I am happy and proud that I took the time to invest in my idea. However, at the march, it didn’t prove as valuable for making me feel engaged. People didn’t seem to read it like they would read and interact with a sign.
Elizabeth ends on the important note that visibility of any kind is important, and I absolutely agree with her that “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” is still, in 2010, a valuable slogan. I think it’s absolutely worth underscoring that visibility is in itself a form of queer protest, and that actively and aggressively pushing queerness into the lives of straight people is more or less as radical as it comes. However, the moderate version of this idea (“Everyone knows someone who’s gay!” and coming out to your friends) and the more radical version (using the appearance of queerness to unsettle and challenge people, e.g. a public kiss-in or indeed a Dyke March) can work together very productively. It is not irrelevant that one of the slogans at Stonewall was “gay is good!”—that attitude of simple affirmation persists in the activities which commemorate Stonewall’s anniversary.
That said, I see in Elizabeth’s ambivalence about the Dyke March-as-protest a certain divorce of last weekend’s event from the history of gay activism. It seems as if something like a Dyke March sits rather uneasily in the context of the more mainstream civil rights movement that is LGBT activism today. Elizabeth asked what the march was protesting, and I think that was a good question. An easy example of the problems inherent in answering that question would be that, to judge from its name, a “Dyke March” would be protesting the patriarchal institution of marriage in favor of the beauty of wymynhood, or something from the ’80s like that; while moderate LGBT activism today supports marriage wholeheartedly as an institution same-sex couples should be able to buy into. I do think, though, that Elizabeth made a good choice with the issue she decided to promote on her t-shirt: it straddles this moderate-radical divide in a way that makes sense for 2010.
But a Dyke March still seems, sadly, like an anachronism to me, in contrast to the much more sign-of-the-times National Equality March, which listed clear objectives linked to headlining civil rights issues like marriage equality and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It makes sense that NEM would have been more energizing to Elizabeth for that reason, and not just for her personal investment as an organizer: its messaging contained much more to relate to for queerfolk of our generation, while a Dyke March seems as if it would speak largely to second-wave feminists and historians.
(cross-posted at Campus Progress)
QOTD (2010-06-12) 11 June 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, QOTD.2 comments
Richard Ellmann, on the last page of his biography of Oscar Wilde:
His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.
I have been a month in slowly making my way through this book, and all through it I have been torn between love for the words and the glamor of one of the western canon’s greatest figures, and irritation at the partiality and romanticism with which Ellmann treats his subject. Ellmann has crafted Wilde’s life into such a narrative, and you can see quite transparently how much the biographer has invested in the climax (the “two loves” speech in the witness box at the second trial) and how tragic the next 200 pages of decline and fall must therefore be. I read all 200 today, nevertheless, unable to tear myself away, the dramatist’s life itself a drama.
It is ahistorical, I think, to write anyone into history as a martyr, and yet that doesn’t eliminate the haunting despair that visits me whenever I read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” I am angry at Douglas for what he made Wilde endure, and I am angry at Wilde for enduring it, and I am angry at them both for what they put Constance through. Having read the story to its close, I am as invested in it as—perhaps, for deliberate comparison—those Americans waiting for the steamer with the mail from England were in the ending of The Old Curiosity Shop. (It changed a lot of things I thought I knew to learn from Ellmann that Wilde made his famous remark about laughing at the death of Little Nell when he was on bail awaiting his own inevitable prison sentence.) Yes: try as I might to rationally divorce my admiration of the man’s writing from his existence as a deeply flawed human being, I cannot help thinking, all the same, that he was most notoriously—most tragically—wronged (and I think the Malvolio quote not inapt here!).
It is of course Pride Month, LGBT History Month, or whatever you call that month when we celebrate the anniversary of a riot at a bar on Christopher Street in 1969. The past couple weeks (you might say, since this month’s inception) I’ve been reading Wilde almost exclusively, with only a brief two-day digression into Virginia Woolf. I wonder as always what good and what ill we do by loving these fallen heroes so much that they become martyrs to our cause, a cause that stands so very much outside their own historical moment. I only hope that we wrong Wilde no more notoriously than he has already been, because I can certainly attest that it is very difficult to stop.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Self-Promotion, and a Confession 25 May 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Personal Life, Politics/Current Affairs.add a comment
This morning I blogged at Campus Progress about the new movement in D.C. on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, why you should care, and why, if you find yourself on the far-left, queer-radical side of things, you should really be ignoring the issue of DADT because you object to the military-industrial complex instead of complaining that this new compromise doesn’t go far enough:
The New York Times reported yesterday afternoon that the new deal on a repeal timeline would give the Pentagon until December to “[complete] a review of its readiness to deal with the changes,” which the White House would also have to sign off on; before even this can happen, the House and the Senate must find the votes to add a DADT repeal measure as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill. There’s reason to be cautiously optimistic about those votes, but they’re not in the bag yet, and it seems as if some of the moderate Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee will need to be convinced—though, Steve Benen predicts, Congress might vote on the amendment as early as Thursday. If it makes its way into the defense reauthorization act, the Pentagon and the White House will then be able to conduct their respective reviews; if these conclude satisfactorily, DADT will be history.
If you’re curious about how this complicated new process might or might not work, the rest of my post I think lays it out pretty clearly—or as clearly as it is possible to lay out the web of D.C. LGBT politics. Even when I was in D.C. last summer, going to some of the hearings and press conferences, it was hard to keep track, and now I feel more distanced than ever from how things get done in Washington.
I was reminded of how much my life has changed in this past academic year today, because after sending in that DADT post, I went to grab some lunch. Walking past my mailbox on the way to the student-center cafeteria, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker, which was waiting for me, and I sat down to my seriously lackluster roast beef and iced coffee (hey, I’m not really complaining—it was dirt cheap) while reading a totally fascinating review of a new biography of Somerset Maugham. I knew nothing about Maugham before reading this article—except that he was the author of Of Human Bondage, which is a fact I memorized back when I memorized authors and titles for my quizbowl team, and which came in useful in one memorable home match when I was a sophomore, one of the first times I played on the varsity team. I had no idea, however, that Maugham was gay (or its early-20th-century equivalent); I suppose I should probably have surmised as much, but it took reading this article for me to add him to my mental roster of queer writers whose biographies I read and by whose cultural contexts I am fascinated. It was a funny realization because it took me oh-so-very out of the context of glaringly polarized D.C. LGBT politics into a more amorphous world of biographical and historicist literary criticism, and a world of long-dead men and women whose sexualities are not, unlike Dan Choi’s, the stuff of headlines. Maugham reminded me that I work in a different context now, one where nothing is black-and-white (or blue-and-red) polarized, and one where nuance is everything, where even the people we’re so certain are one thing or another aren’t, really.
My RSS reader has been changing, over the past year; I’ve pared down my number of political blogs and upped my intake of the likes of the New Yorker, the NYRB, the TLS, and the higher ed press. I’m reading book reviews instead of Politico, and I’m grateful for it. We all do what we have to do in order to stay sane, and to seek beauty; I am thankful that I know now that I am suited less to explaining Washington than I am to explaining the long-dead writers whose identities are so far removed from our own present cultural context. I look forward to seeing what this summer will bring, and whether I can find in every part of it as much joy as I found last summer in the elusive moments when I could escape from politics to the National Gallery or to the Dupont bookstores.
