Survivor's Anger: The Gentrification of the Mind

I've been meaning to write something about Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (California, 2012), but haven't been able to limit myself to one topic.  It's a very rich book, provocative and full of ideas, and it deserves a far wider readership than it's likely to get.  Along with the intertwined consequences of the AIDS epidemic and gentrification, she also writes about the loss of history and its effect of that loss on younger generations of people.

This last was something I'd already been thinking about, because I never thought that most schools would or could deal accurately with the history of the gay movement or of AIDS in the United States, or of activism in general.  Since these are still controversial subjects, they're not going to have a secure place in any curriculum at any level; if they were covered at all, it would probably be inadequately.  If you want to learn about such things, you have to educate yourself, and not many people do.

So, for example, Schulman tells about teaching at the University of Staten Island.

Most of the kids who attend the College of Staten Island are working class or poor, many are immigrants.  I had been at my job for eleven years, but it didn't take more than the first few months for me to learn that Staten Island is hell for queer kids.  Year after year my colleague, queer theorist Matt Brim, and I cry on the night bus coming home from New York about how profoundly traumatized our queer students are.  We do everything we can to intervene but for most of them, by the time they get to us, it's too late.

This, by the way, is why I was so surprised and annoyed by, for example, Bernadette Barton's Pray the Gay Away when she implied that gay kids are only traumatized in the "Bible Belt" nowadays.  Barton managed to reach adulthood without any awareness of how bad things still are in her home region of the Northeast.

This night a girl, Michelle, came out in class.  She had been taking my courses for two years and had never given any sign of being queer, but this one evening she read a story about falling in love with a girl in high school and starting a passionate sexual relationship.  When her parents found out, they gave her an ultimatum.  If she wanted to have a family, she would have to break up with her girlfriend.  Without much thought, she followed their instructions.  Three years later, waiting in the bathroom line of a Staten Island dive bar, she met another woman and fell in love.  In her story, Michelle described uncontrollable desire, accompanied by the knowledge of the tremendous familial punishment that lurked, waiting to pounce.  And it did ... At the end of the story, the protagonist finds a boyfriend, Danny.  She says that she is able to "be comfortable" with him. And the story closes with her parents gleefully welcoming Danny into their home to watch the football game, offering him a glass of beer.

Later in my office, Michelle tells me, I know my parents love and support me.  This is just too hard for them to understand."

I say nothing, but I know that her parents do not love and do not support her.  All they care about are themselves.  They do not see her as real.  And for now, she agrees with them [10-11].

This is heartbreaking enough, but it reminds me how often even some gay people, including academics, accuse other gay people, especially activists, of being hostile to "the family," when in reality it is much more the other way around.  (If some of us are hostile, it's not without reason.)  Schulman has noticed this too.  She first mentions a gay male artist who has performed the works of Joni Mitchell for many years; a reporter for the New Yorker asked him "why he 'did not want' to be part of a recent Joni Mitchell tribute album.  'I wasn't invited,' John replied" (85). 

About a week later I had a Facebook conversation with a reporter from New York Magazine.  She said she had "read somewhere" that I argued that gay people should have nothing to do with their homophobic families.  I informed her that my belief was, in fact, the opposite of that.  I told her that my book on familial homophobia argued that third parties should intervene and create consequences for homophobic families so that they could not get away with marginalizing and shunning their gay family members.  Again, she skewed reality to create a false but comfortable illusion in which it is the gay person who has the power and refuses to participate, when the truth is that we are the ones who are excluded [85-6].

There was a lot of other material I wanted to quote as I read The Gentrification of the Mind, but I came to realize I wanted to quote most of it.  So instead, I want to urge everyone who might be interested to read it.

Let the Sunshine In

Just when I start to think that I may after all be a bitter, carping, negative old queen who doesn't like anything (yeah, like that's a bad thing!), something comes along to restore my faith in humanity.  This weekend it's My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (North Carolina, 2011), by the late Allan Bérubé.  He's best known for Coming Out Under Fire, a history of gay men and lesbians who served in the US military during World War II, his first and (until now) only book.  (It was later made into a documentary that won numerous awards.)  Bérubé's friends and colleagues John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman contributed a biographical essay as introduction, which also sketches the history of GLBT American history.  The essays they chose include Bérubé's early work on passing women, preliminary reports on the research that became Coming Out Under Fire, and his accounts of the history of gay men's bathhouses, and conclude with selections with the project he was working on when he died (of complications from stomach ulcers), on the gay-friendly, antiracist Marine Cooks and Stewards Union.

So, why does this book make me feel good, despite its often downbeat content?  One factor is Bérubé's constant focus on resistance, ordinary people's dogged insistence on living their lives and seeking happiness even under persecution -- even fighting back, as he shows many times.  I still must remind myself sometimes that life before Stonewall wasn't always the depressing twilight world between the sexes of smoky, crummy bars, guilt, and shame that straight society wanted us to believe it was, and some gay people choose to believe.  (This notion survives as the plaintive cry, "Why would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated and persecuted?" used by many of us and our allies in defensive mode.)  A lot of our forefathers and foremothers apparently lived reasonably happy and fulfilled lives -- at least as fulfilled as many heterosexuals do.

Another factor is his emphasis on class, and particularly on what it means to be a working-class intellectual.  Many people, whether middle-class or working-class, take for granted that if you are interested in books and ideas, you must be interested in upwards mobility, in leaving the trailer park for Manhattan or at least the Ivory Tower.  Bérubé himself was working-class, the first in his family to go to college, though he didn't finish his degree.  (We have a number of other traits in common, from Catholic families to having been conscientious objectors during the Vietnam era.  This makes the differences between us very instructive to me.)  In his historical work he paid most attention to people who weren't rich, famous, or white.  This was more radical when he started his historical work than it is now, but even now his manner, the way he treats his subjects, feels unusual to me.  I haven't yet read the essays in My Desire for History where he deals directly with class, but it's everywhere in his work.

I also appreciate his approach to spirituality, notably in "AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disasters," a 1988 essay that deserves more attention.  It emerged from his own struggle to come to terms with the death of his partner Brian Keith, and addresses some trends in gay spirituality that have bothered me too.

There are two different ways to respond to the "why" questions we ask about AIDS.  Their differences are not between religious and secular, the political right and left, antigay and gay, but in the ways each assigns meaning to misfortune.  One response offers questions: the other accepts uncertainties and dwells between the questions and the answers.  When people respond with answers, they are likely to explain why AIDS at particular times to particular people and what AIDS teaches us.  They can cause harm when their definitive answers keep people from finding their own meanings, blame people for their illness, or fill the silences in which people can face their fears and grieve.  When people respond to the tragedy of AIDS without answers, they are likely to challenge moral explanations and open up the possibility of wondering, listening, and being silent together. But without answers, people can feel isolated, helpless, and without direction.

Each of these kinds of responses has ethical implications.  The stories we tell  each other about why particular people do or do not get AIDS have tremendous power.  They touch real lives with real consequences and have the potential for framing some of the most profound experiences in a person's life.  Even our most casual comments or reassurances -- "You should have loved yourself better" or "There must be a reason why your son is suffering" -- can be fragments of a moral framework which, if we could see it whole, we might not condone.  It is important for us, as individuals and as communities, to examine our assumptions and begin openly discussing with each other the ethics of how we ask and answer questions that assign meaning to other people's misfortunes  [151-2].

If I had seen this essay while Bérubé was still alive, I'd have sent him a copy of my more polemical review of gay New Age spirituality, which also criticized the destructive certainty of many spiritual teachers.

As I read the biographical introduction, I began wondering if I should have moved to a city like San Francisco or New York, as Bérubé did.  But I realized quickly that the difference was that he worked much harder than I ever have at building his own community of like-minded thinkers and scholars.  I've had some such community here in Bloomington, but not to the same extent: not because it couldn't have been available here, but because you have to make it yourself.  It's not something that already exists anywhere.  And I'm not saying this to complain, only as another example of the kind of things I'm learning from this book.

Another theme is one I want to tie to other things I've written, namely my criticism of post-colonial and other scholars who see the American construction of gay community as whimsically hostile to family.  Bérubé showed that urban lesbian and gay communities grew after World War II because of veterans who'd been expelled from the military for homosexuality.  They couldn't go back to their smaller communities and families because of the stigma -- jobs were hard enough to find in the postwar readjustment even for the honorably-discharged -- and often enough their families rejected them too.  So they stayed in the cities where they'd first found community, and often their first chance to explore life outside of the limits of heterosexuality.  Some of them were involved in the first gay-rights organizations (with staying power, anyway), which emerged in those cities.

My Desire for History is a good introduction to GLBT American history; it would work well as a basic text in a class on the subject.  But it's also a fascinating read for anyone with any interest in knowing where gay community in America came from.