You Keep Using This Word; or, How Can I Leave This Behind?

I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press.  The publisher's blurb proclaimed it 

a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.

Hm.  Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it.  I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.

The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.

I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements.  Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people."  Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.

What is "a people"?  The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental."  Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either.  Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier.  Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).

Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present.  It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.  

I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time.  It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.  It might be worth adding that a cursory online search found many references to "LGBTQ culture" and even to "queer culture." Queer culture is postulated as something that has persisted visibly over centuries, even millennia, despite attempts to stamp it out. That would seem to imply a stable and identifiable community with knowable identities, inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. As I've said before, queer and trans scholars have objected to imposing "gay" and "lesbian" on societies and eras that supposedly didn't have those concepts, but have then imposed "queer" and "trans" on them even though the same objection applies. At best Piontek was over-optimistic about the postmodern challenge to traditional historiography, as queer theory was simply assimilated to existing approaches and categories.

Dude, I'm a Gay and Lesbian Academic

It's been a busy couple of days, and I'm already feeling swamped by topics I should write about.  So I'll be sneaky and do what I hope will be a quick and easy one.

I found a copy of Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia (Temple UP, 1997) by Toni A. H. McNaron at the library book sale the other day, and it looked interesting, so I bought it.  McNaron, who began teaching in 1964 at the University of Minnesota, surveyed a generational sample of LBGTQ with questionnaires, and I'm always interested in seeing what people have to say about their experiences.

But once I sat down and started to read the book, I was frustrated by McNaron's writing.  Like so many academic writers (though not only academics, I concede) she thanks various friends and colleagues and editors for assiduously going over and improving her prose.  I can only wonder what it looked before they worked on it, and with that in mind I too must thank them for their efforts.

More important, though, I keep stumbling over strange errors that apparently no one caught despite the numerous hoops that academic writing must jump through.  For example:

In 1973, the American Psychological Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its catalogue of diseases, reducing its classification from psychosis to neurosis [17].

This is a mess.  First, it was the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that in 1973 removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  It's easy to confuse them with the American Psychological Association, since they have the same initials; many people do, I've done it myself, and so does Google, which brought up this New York Times article on the American Psychiatric Association when I searched for the American Psychological Association.  Even the organizations themselves get confused: this American Psychological Association page says that the APA has opposed stigmatization of homosexuals since 1974, while this one says 1975.

Second, while homosexuality was removed from the DSM-II, there was enough dissension among psychiatrists that a new category replaced it: sexual orientation disturbance, which meant that if you felt bad about being gay, a practitioner could take your money to make you feel better about it.  Given the poor results of most psychotherapy, I wonder how effective such treatment actually was.

Third, I can't find that homosexuality was ever classified as a psychosis by either APA, though some individual practitioners may have done so, if only as a term of abuse.  As far as I can tell, then, McNaron's claim that homosexuality went from psychosis to neurosis is false.  It also conflicts with her own statement that homosexuality was "removed" from the DSM; if it was simply reclassified as a neurosis, it was still a "disease" and so was not "removed."  Since both of us are old enough to remember that period, I wonder where she got this interesting misconception.

Next, McNaron writes:

Since much queer theory argues against identity politics as being too solipsistic and narrow to be helpful in understanding a post-modern world, it has become possible for a faculty member to conduct and publish research about gayness or lesbianism without necessarily being gay or lesbian.  To the extent that this new field of inquiry provides a protective umbrella for some faculty who might otherwise refrain from integrating their sexual orientation into their work, it can only benefit students and faculty alike.  To the extent that it runs counter to the ideas of an older generation or academic era, those who continue to advocate for greater visibility in asserting the existence of intimate and unavoidable connections between the personal and the intellectual, queer theory runs the risk of diluting gains made at great risk to individual faculty members [18].

My objections to McNaron's analysis here are perhaps less factual than interpretive, but there are still facts she leaves out.  (However: "solipsistic"?  It's a much-abused word, but ...)  First, before the rise of openly gay and lesbian scholarship in the 1970s, academics took for granted that only heterosexuals could be impartial and objective about homosexuality, so gay and lesbian academics who wrote about the topic didn't reveal their personal connection to their material because to do so would have discredited them in their profession.  An example that comes to my mind is Laud Humphreys, the sociologist whose controversial observations at sites of gay men's anonymous sexual encounters, published as Tearoom Trade (Duckworth Overlook, 1970), nowhere revealed that Humphreys (who was heterosexually married) was himself gay, though he did acknowledge it later.  Two decades before Humphreys, Alfred Kinsey presented his research team as married heterosexual males, though he and some of his team weren't exclusively heterosexual; but the reason was the same, to comply with professional and cultural norms of objectivity.  One of the motives of openly gay and lesbian scholars was to demolish the notion of objectivity; it's not just a "post-modern" concern.

When openly gay and lesbian scholars began to emerge and publish in greater numbers in the 1970s and afterward, they took different approaches to this problem, though this was, again, controversial, flouting professional norms of impersonality.  Some, influenced by Second Wave feminism, wrote more personally, but most continued to produce professional work that left the observer out of the discussion.  Often personal revelations were confined to prefaces and introductions.  I've seen some disagreement about the extent of this greater personalization, but this is how I perceived it as an interested observer during that period.

As for queer theory, the distinction between it and "gay and lesbian studies" was never well-defined or -maintained.  The textbook The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993), for example, contains many contributions which, properly speaking, are queer theory, including an important excerpt from Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's ovarian queer-theoretical The Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).  Sedgwick was also controversial because though she at times would accept the label "queer," she was heterosexually married, and both gay-and-lesbian-studies and queer-theory types disputed whether she really was queer and whether she should be doing queer theory if she wasn't.  Identity politics has been disavowed by queer theorists, but they have their own identities and their own politics about them.  The younger queer scholars I've read or met don't seem interested in excluding their queerness from their  work; they have other fish to fry.

So, whatever effects queer theory may have had on academics, McNahon's claims seem dubious to me.  One effect of greater gay visibility was, in my opinion, that it made it harder for scholars to do work on homosexuality while dodging questions about their own sexual orientation.  Older scholars, who'd grown up in a time when homosexuals were expected (under great coercion) to pretend, as much as possible, that they were not One of Those People, even when everyone around them knew otherwise, no doubt found it difficult to adjust.

What I've read of Poisoned Ivy so far confirms this.  One of McNaron's informants describes how a closeted colleague torpedoed his appointment to a choice position by tattling about his erotic past to the college president.  "He was obviously afraid I would expose him as a closeted gay," the informant writes (16).  Really?  There are other ways to read the incident.  One is that the informer exposed him partly to divert attention from himself: by fingering someone else, he could prove his own normality. Another is that while he was aware of his own vulnerability to exposure, he disapproved of anyone but himself being queer: he was different, a respectable academic, and this young upstart a disreputable perv.  It's impossible to say for sure in this case, at this distance in time, but I have known people with this attitude, and the trashier their own private lives were by their own standards, the more outraged they were by others.

I've peeked ahead in the book, and there is more to come.  Still, I hope to learn something by reading on, so I will.

Cather in the Dock, Critics in the Stocks

A selection of Willa Cather's letters has just been published, as I learned from Band of Thebes.  This is an event, because the lore for many years was that Cather had destroyed her correspondence and / or forbidden her estate to let it be published.  It turns out that while she did burn the letters she'd written to her great love Isabelle McClung after the latter's death, she let most of her private letters elude her grasp.  Still, it's a bit odd for the New York Times reviewer to dismiss as "a persistent urban legend" the notion of Cather as "the fanatically secretive author eager to erase any record of shameful desire."  Cather did, after all, instruct her estate not to let her letters be published, and the ban was enforced until her last executor died and "the copyright passed to a Cather Trust happy to violate her wishes" as BoT puts it.  Whatever knowledge about herself she wanted to suppress, she did try to suppress it.

For some reason Band of Thebes also quotes a new article by Joan Acocella, the New Yorker writer who in 1995 attacked academic literary critics for accusing (that's how she saw it) Cather of being a lesbian.  BoT reports that Acocella is "particularly glad to have the ban lifted now", but in the new article she basically repeats the same allegations she made before: suggesting that Cather was lesbian is still an accusation, though

Most of the Cather scholars I have talked to about this have told me that, long before O’Brien produced her putative proof in 1984, they had figured that Cather was homosexual. Furthermore, at that time, the gay rights movement had been going on for over a decade. To say that a person who lived in the early part of the century was an undeclared homosexual was not a big deal.

If that were true, then why is it an "accusation" to say so?   Notice the familiar closeting strategy: Oh, come on, why bring it up, everybody already knew she was a dyke!  But Acocella lies: saying that someone who lived a century ago was "an undeclared homosexual" is still a big deal, and still fought about in the media and even in scholarship.  BoT knows this, if Acocella doesn't: he often complains about "degaying."

Acocella attacked Cather biographer Sharon O'Brien for speculating about Cather's life by interpreting her works, but Acocella proceeds to do the same thing: "She may have died a virgin," Acocella writes hopefully, based on "not just on her life but also on her fiction, which very rarely represents a heterosexual relationship that has any romantic or sexual glow to it."  Joanna Russ read Cather's unhappy heterosexual couples as a reflection of Cather's own experience with women, but that infuriated Acocella.  (She half-forgave Russ, though, for calling Cather "innocent," which she took to mean "asexual.")  Only she was allowed to root around in Cather's knickers.

No, the problem was that once she was tagged as a closet lesbian, it was assumed that she lived her life in fear and unhappiness. At that time, proponents of the new modes of literary analysis already believed that the very center of art—its motor, almost—was conflict, but that the conflict was hidden. You had to ferret it out, and for years critics had been doing so, with artist after artist. But Cather was a special treat, because she was an intimidating, conservative woman. To have her in the dock was like getting to interrogate J. Edgar Hoover. The critics went to work, with joy.

Again Acocella posits that critics who said Cather was lesbian were hostile to her, but most of her targets are feminists and lesbians, who certainly didn't think being lesbian was a bad thing.  Acocella attacked the lesbian novelist Jane Rule simply for being, she thought, the first critic to say in print what everyone supposedly knew.  Nor was feminist academia as eager to "accuse" Cather of lesbianism as Acocella thinks.  In a preface to the book republication of her essay on Cather, Joanna Russ recalled that

The first (feminist) journal I sent this essay to gave it -- with my name on it -- to six readers. two of whom liked it and four of whom objected to it in the strongest terms, all denying that Cather was a lesbian, all insisting that I hadn't conclusive evidence of her gayness, and one calling my description of her an "accusation" ... The essay finally came out in 1986 in The Journal of Homosexuality.*

Acocella is still riding the homophobic hobbyhorse I discussed at length in a 2007 post; she hasn't learned a thing since her 2000 book on Cather criticism.  I say "homophobic" not as a clinical term, but to indicate that her denial evidently comes from a strong emotional reaction against the idea that Cather could have had sex with a woman; she can allow her to be queer, as long as she died a virgin.  The same goes for her kneejerk assumption that for anyone else to recognize Cather's lesbianism is an "accusation" and puts "her in the dock".  Her armchair psychoanalysis of others who write about Cather is ironic, given her hatred of psychoanalytic criticism.  Still, in 2013, homophobia can find a platform in elite print media.

The Times article quotes another revealing pronouncement of Acocella's:

In a 1995 article in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella blasted new-style Cather scholars for their obsession with psychosexual subtext, declaring it was time “for the professional critics to give up and leave her books to those who care about them — her readers.” 

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I find plenty of fault with academic critics, but I don't see how they keep "readers" from the books.  I doubt that one ordinary reader in a hundred reads academic literary criticism anyway.  Some of the ideas filter down through journalism and popular biographies, but the ordinary reader is more likely to dismiss any idea he or she dislikes with complacent (if not philistine) common sense.  For better or worse, academics and lay readers live in different worlds, with different interests and approaches.  Cather's books have always been there for anyone who wants to read them, and there's something paranoid and conspiracy-theory-ish in Acocella's implication that academics are hogging Cather's writings like dogs in the manger, growling at any prole who tries to glance at their pages.  And what is Acocella herself but a "professional critic"?

* "To Write 'Like a Woman: Transformations of Identity in the Work of Willa Cather," in Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (Indiana, 1995), p. 149.

I Like Your Queer Theory. I Do Not Like Your Queer Theorists.

I don't think I'll finish reading Stewart Van Cleve's Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).  It was such a nice idea, too: a survey of LBGTQ life in Minnesota, drawing on archival materials held at the University of Minnesota, where Van Cleve was formerly an assistant curator.  But it turned out to be badly written, and bogged down immediately in a misunderstood theoretical mire.

Queer Theory itself isn't really the problem; if Van Cleve hadn't misunderstood it, he'd probably have found some other framework to misunderstand.  But when theoretical cluelessness combines with scrambled facts, it's just more than I care to endure.  For example, on page 14:

The word gay, while essential in the twenty-first century, was not widely used in its current sense during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it will not be used here to describe these earlier times.

Really?  From what I've read, gay is widely regarded as inessential by twenty-first century academics, even when they're discussing late twentieth-century English-speaking American life.  They do their best to denigrate it and to seek alternatives, though their reasons are never very clear.

Similarly, words like lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or straight are generally inappropriate in any historical analysis before the Second World War, unless individuals used that language.

And yet those who agree with Van Cleve exhibit a curious reluctance to adopt the terminology used by individuals in a given period.  There could be valid reasons for this, for example that, before Stonewall, there was virtually no such thing as a public homosexual identity.  Homosexuals were seldom allowed to speak for themselves as homosexuals in media, even if many had wished to do so.  Another is related: public discourse about homosexuals used the language of the courts, the Church, the clinic.  Using this terminology takes the side of the forces that oppressed homosexuals.  The words they/we had for ourselves were usually in-group code, as gay was itself until the late 1960s, and weren't intended to be used and understood by the general public.  A lot of us delighted to think of ourselves as a more or less secret society, a guild or occult association with its own jargon, folkways, and rituals.  The idea that we might demand to be seen as an integral part of the larger society, on an equal footing with heterosexuals, was as outrageous to most of us as it was to straights.  That one was a bugger or a tribade was a thrilling but shameful secret, an identity to be used only among one's fellow shirtlifters and sapphists, not before normal people.  I have doubts as to the appropriateness of "identity" to refer to such labels in the first place. Though all this is known well enough by scholars of the period, it seems to me that they don't take it as seriously as they ought.  It's probably a measure of just how much has changed since 1969 that younger gays can't imagine living as their uncles and great-aunts did, doomed to a hopeless search for love in smoky bars, in a murky twilight world between the sexes, etc., etc.

Left without such words, it is at first difficult to describe sexual activity between members of the same gender.  Can it also identify alternatives to the male-female gender dichotomy?  Would those described by the word actually identify with it?  Or would the word act as an artificial border that contextualized a spectrum of identities as it left them undisturbed?

Here Van Cleve goes wrong at the end of the first sentence: it's not sexual activity between members of the same gender but between members of the same sex that is at issue.  The sex/gender distinction, intended to distinguish between "the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women" and "the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women," turned out to be rather more difficult to map than its proponents expected.  But now the confusion has come full circle, only with "gender" given priority.

Now, gay can and does "describe" -- better, refer to -- sexual activity between persons of the same sex, whether they are same-gender or not.  It can also refer to alternatives to the male-female gender dichotomy: it includes drag queens, sweater fags, leather boys, flaming sissies, and ordinary nebbishes.  Though it has tended to refer primarily to males, that wasn't always the case, and a good many lesbians call themselves gay.  Internationally it has been adopted and adapted to a wide range of other types, though usually to non-masculine males. It's often claimed that gay is too narrow a category, but the real objection seems to be that it's too embracing.

Would those described by the word actually identify with it?  Often not, but that's often a problem with stigmatized identity and behavior.  As with the secret-society aspect of gay life, stigma is also generally downplayed or ignored by today's scholars of homosexuality.

As the reader may have noticed, Van Cleve is building up suspense: Oh my, there seems to be no suitable word for the sensitive gay scholar to use to refer to same-sex-loving people of before 1990 or so!  Whatever shall we do, wherever shall we go?  It will come as no surprise that he has the solution up his sleeve:

The admittedly imperfect answer is a word with a past of its own.  A derogatory descriptor in the mid-twentieth century, the word queer has been embraced by scholars as appropriate for historical analysis.  Shorter, more elegant [!], and ultimately more descriptive than the acronym "Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning/Intersex" (LGBTQI), queer ultimately describes a host of identities that challenge the existence of sexual normalcy and the dominance of the gender dichotomy.  A still fluid term, queer functions as an adjective when it used to describe historic figures, places [!], and organizations.  The word provokes and simultaneously defines the social order by calling its assumptions into question.  Queer has come to describe many who are not easily categorized using contemporary terms [14].

Isn't that a fabulous coincidence?  But queer fails the test Van Cleve posed at the end of his previous paragraph: Would those described by the word actually identify with it? Probably most would not, especially those before the mid-twentieth century even in America and England and a fortiori those outside the English-speaking world.  It was also resisted fiercely by many gay Americans of my generation when it resurfaced in the early 1990s, not only because it was "a derogatory descriptor" but because of its transgressive connotations: they didn't want to challenge the status quo, they wanted to be part of it.

More seriously, queer does not "challenge the existence of sexual normalcy and the dominance of the gender dichotomy," it assumes the existence of normalcy and takes a stance outside of it; ditto for the dominance of the gender dichotomy.  Queer is one half of a binary, with normal (or some equivalent) at the other pole.  As I said earlier, most gay -- or, if you prefer, queer -- people we know about before Stonewall, though they often lived satisfying lives, seem to have seen themselves as stunted, deformed outsiders, and counted themselves lucky if the "normal" world left them more or less alone.  There were a few who considered themselves to be an elite, superior to the sheeplike masses, but this fantasy also assumed a divide between themselves and the normal.  Here gay has the advantage of having been chosen by ourselves, even if originally as a camp password: for a time it was more or less neutral, unlike most of the words straights had for us.

One virtue of queer, from Van Cleve's perspective, is that it doesn't really mean anything, so it can be used for all the purposes he asked for and more. But that also is queer's limitation: if it can mean anything, it also means nothing. (One benefit of typing these excerpts in by hand is that I notice features I missed on first reading, such as Van Cleve's excessive fondness for the word "describe," especially where it's not really the right word for the job.  One word doesn't "describe" anything; "refers to" would be more accurate.  I think he's giving the word more power and coverage than it really has.  And since "queer" can cover so many styles and cultures, it can hardly "describe" them.)  Van Cleve acknowledges where he's coming from when he writes that "queer has been embraced by scholars as appropriate for historical analysis."  Having consumed a good deal of the production of the queer academic endeavor, I suspect that its very meaninglessness is a major reason for its being embraced by them.  For the first wave of Queer scholars twenty years ago, it had the added frisson of safe transgression: Wow, I'm like using a derogatory word and reclaiming it!  Take that, heterosexist hegemons!  My fearless intervention will strike down your Western-style binaries like Luke Skywalker struck down Jabba the Hut!  Not that there's anything wrong with that -- anything that puts some spice into the hard life of a graduate student is fine with me, and I'm sure a lot of senior faculty look like Jabba.  But it doesn't excuse the conceptual confusion that the use of queer has sown.

Ironically, queer ends up violating the very stricture its advocates hope to evade by its use: it smothers all the variety of pre-Stonewall non-heterosexual life under a single monocultural name and category.  That isn't an objection in itself, since if you're going to subsume a wide range of behaviors and styles and terminology from an even wider range of cultures and periods under a single word, as well queer as another.  But gay could do the job as well, or as badly.  It isn't the word but how it's used that matters.

Van Cleve omits to mention that in scholarship queer works not only as an adjective and a noun, but as a verb, as in Queering the X, where X can be almost anything (752,000 hits!): the modern English-speaking scholar looks at all of human history with a queer eye.  The verb is also performative: by queering the X, the scholar marks his or her territory and advances toward tenure.  I'd thought that one aim of recent scholarship was to abandon the pretense of objectivity and embrace the scholar's subjectivity.  I've argued here before, for example, that it doesn't matter whether the author and director of Georgy Girl meant Georgy to be readable as a baby dyke, because she is readable as one and it enriches the film to do so.  A straight viewpoint wouldn't notice this possibility and would probably reject it indignantly.  A queer perspective also is supposed to reject the hetero/homo binary by recognizing that primarily heterosexual people often have homosexual desires or overt experience, and vice versa; but this insight is neglected in most queer scholarship I've seen.

It isn't the word that matters but how it's used, and in this book queer is used carelessly, thoughtlessly.  Come on, queer scholars: embrace the verb, embrace your subjectivity.  You could do so much worse.

"Show Me," Said the Spectator: Chronicles of the Backlash, Episode the Eleventh

I'm not sure whether I'll finish reading Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago, 2007). The writing is low-level academese, with an inordinate fondness for alliteration, but I could overlook that. What makes me wonder if it's worthwhile to read more is the (you should pardon the expression) thought.

Herring's subject is what he calls slumming, especially the sensationalistic media which promised to reveal the dark side of city life in America to respectable audiences, but also those non-poor people who for whatever reason lived among the poor themselves. His first case study is Jane Addams (1860-1935), the philanthropist and founder of Hull-House in Chicago. Addams never married, and her longest and most serious relationships were with other women. She lived at a time when nineteenth-century patterns of romantic friendship between women were being overtaken by pathologizing medical models, though it should be remembered that women who sought to live outside of male control had always been suspect.

Addams not only loved other women (and "love" was her word for it), she lived with another woman for decades, shared a bed with her, bought a house with her, compared their relationship to marriage. Whether she "had sex" with her beloved Mary is something we'll never know; whether she would have accepted the label "lesbian" seems unlikely from what I've read about her, and I consider it unimportant because labels come and go. In my own lifetime I've seen "gay" go from an in-group code word to a self-consciously chosen public name to a homophobic putdown, and it has been rejected by homosexual and bisexual people for a variety of reasons. In some circles, "lesbian" is rejected as a label by women who love and have sex with other women, in favor of other, equally specific alternatives. Jane Addams's contemporary Radclyffe Hall called herself a "congenital invert," not a lesbian. And so on. To hang too much on "gay" or "lesbian" as a label is a waste of time.

This shouldn't be too much of a problem, certainly not for a professional scholar. Unfortunately Herring can't seem to keep from doing what he accuses others of doing, namely imposing his categories and agenda on his material. So, for example, he quotes on page 33 "an unpublished, undated poem inscribed to fellow reformer 'M.R.S.'", presumably Mary Rozet Smith, the woman Addams was coupled with for forty years. In this poem, Herring says, "the slummer congratulates herself and her close friend on inhabiting a settlement house relation far beyond the bounds of recognizable attachments such as an opposite-sex coupling or even a Boston marriage:"

The “mine” and “thine” of wedded folk
Is often quite confusing
And sometimes when they use the “ours”
It sounds almost amusing.

But – You and I, may well defy
Both married folk and single
To do as well as we have done
The “mine” and “thine” to mingle
(Jane Addams Papers, reel 113.45.1572)

To nitpick first: it is Herring and not Addams who (repeatedly, throughout the chapter) calls her a "slummer." How odd that it's not acceptable to call her a lesbian (only her "critics" do so, according to Herring [31]), but okay to pin another pejorative term on her. The same goes for "settlement house relation," which appears to be Herring's own coinage, as though it were a "sexual taxonomy" of its own. As far as I can tell, it isn't; certainly Herring makes no effort to establish it as one.

Herring goes on:

In this pithy love poem, Addams praises herself and Smith for sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications. Against all odds, she suggests in this correspondence, the two have managed to carve out an affective space enabling “mine” and “thine” to conjoin into something foreign. Traditional relational spaces, Addams informs Smith, both perplex (“often quite confusing”) and please and are laughingly conventional. In contrast to such standard forms of intimacy, Addams and Smith inhabit a different form of coupling, something more akin to a relational terra incognita rather than a closeted liaison, since there is no suspicious sexual group identity to hide. Situated outside conventional Anglo-American marriage, and far removed from being “single,” the two gleefully – and defiantly – “mingle” in Hull-House without any relational fusion. Eschewing men, they are adamantly not married to each other for life. Instead they “have done” well when their relationship could have been construed as perverse and pathological given the Progressive Era’s increasing intolerance for passionate same-sex relations of any kind. In brief, their settlement intimacy is beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy like the mannish lesbian: it is instead a love that does not speak any name [33-4].

In the poem, Addams doesn't congratulate herself for "sidestepping compulsory (homo)sexual identifications"; she doesn't even mention them. Herring appears to assume that when she writes of "single" people she's referring to queers, but I see no reason to make that assumption. Remove that assumption and his entire reading collapses. Addams situates herself and M.R.S. between, or perhaps outside, the (heterosexual) married and the (heterosexual) single. They are neither, but they are still a couple who successfully "mingle" "'mine' and 'thine'". I don't see "to conjoin into something foreign" as a justifiable reading of the poem; I think it's at least arguable that, far from being "beyond any discernible sexual taxonomy," the relationship can be classified quite easily.

If this poem were all we knew about Addams and Smith, Herring's (mis)reading might be understandable. But Addams's life is well-documented, from scrapbooks of clippings to personal correspondence. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (Columbia, 1991), a book Herring cites and quotes, Lillian Faderman wrote:

They thought of themselves as wedded. In a 1902 letter, written during a three-week separation, Jane remarked, "You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together." In 1904 they purchased a home together near Bar Harbor, Maine. "Our house -- it quite gives me a thrill to write the word," Jane told Mary. "It was our house wasn't it in a really truly ownership," and she talked about their "healing domesticity" [26].

According to Faderman, Addams and Smith "always slept in the same room and the same bed, and when they traveled Jane even wired ahead to be sure they would get a hotel room with a double bed" (25). None of this proves that they were Lesbians As We Know Them Today -- they didn't wear Doc Martens and never went to Michigan -- but that they were a loving and devoted couple, in a way that makes homophobes uneasy, is certain. (I should add that I'd like to see more evidence that Addams and Smith "thought of themselves as wedded"; maybe I'll pursue that. What Faderman provides, though, is enough to undermine Herring's epistemological certainties.)

Then Herring makes a significant mistake. He argues that "Faderman’s supposition that the signifier 'lesbian' may not have been in widespread circulation during Addams’s time could be reconsidered, given that Progressive Era U.S. discourses coded intense same-sex female relations across class lines as fundamentally degenerate" (35). Faderman's supposition rather was that Addams and Smith could rely on "the protective coloring of pearls and ladylike appearance and of romantic friendship, which was not yet dead in America since the works of the sexologists were not yet widely known" (Odd Girls, 28). Despite the sexologists, Eleanor Roosevelt's friendship with the butch Lorena Hickok could benefit from the same "protective coloring" even decades later. I know personally some "spinsters" who did the same into this century. And more important, Addams and Smith did not bond "across class lines", so Herring's objection collapses.

Weirdly, Herring writes that Addams's poem describes "an intimate same-sex relation that refuses the epistemological certainty of lesbian or heterosexual identity, primarily because Addams’s Hull-House relations fail to conform either to a burgeoning twentieth-century binary that now marks what Faderman marks as 'our day' or even a nineteenth-century romantic friendship that may have marked hers" (33). Leaving aside the question whether Addams rejected the category of romantic friendship -- for which Herring provides no evidence -- it's as though Addams could see into the future, and rejected concepts of same-sex love that would not exist, on Herring's assumptions, for almost a century! (In the same way, I refuse Herring's 25th century epistemology of same-sex mind-melds! It is narrow and constricting and craves epistemological certainty!)

Herring's historical sense is consistently a little off. He cites "another heated exchange that, unwittingly or not, verges on typing the Progressive female slummer as a modern-day lesbian, Helen Gould addresses the question, 'Are Bachelor Maids Useless to Humanity,' sensationally "CALLS MEN TIRESOME," and presents 'a list of ten world-famous' bachelor aunts that begins with Sappho, 'Grecian poetess,' and ends with 'Gould, philanthropist' and 'Jane Addams, sociologist'" (37-8). Herring then sneers:

Linking the Isle of Lesbos to Chicago’s Hull-House settlement and denouncing what Adrienne Rich would later call “compulsory heterosexuality” …, Gould would have made a fine revisionist historian … [38].

He has also called Faderman "revisionist," though on his own account Herring is a revisionist too, presenting a new picture of the history of "U. S. homosexual group identity." But it's odd to see him yank Helen Gould out of her historical context this way, as though she were a Second-Wave time traveler who'd gone back to 1916 to sow discord and confusion. Sappho, of course, was according to legend a woman who ran a school for younger women, an educator and therefore a benefactress to humanity in Gould's terms. Her image was controversial in the Victorian era and in Gould's day, as it is still. But Helen Gould wasn't casting Sappho, let alone herself, as a late 20th-century Lesbian. If Gould could denounce compulsory heterosexuality in 1916, it was not because of future-vision goggles or a time-traveling backwash from Adrienne Rich, but because she was a woman of her time, rebelling against the society she had to live in. It is Herring's picture of Addams and her circle that needs adjustment, I'd say, not Gould's.

I'll give Herring props for writing of "homosexual group identity," since he seems to recognize that gay "identity" is the declaration not of individualism but of membership in a collective. But maybe not; like so many of his peers he seems confused about what "identity" means. A bit later he recounts a story Addams told in her autobiography, about an "Anglo-American" committee woman who approached her after a Hull-House performance by Italian immigrants. "Do you know I am always ashamed of the way I have talked about 'dagos,' they are quite like other people, only one must take a little more pains with them," the woman told Addams. "I have been nagging my husband to move off M Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying while and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them" (41-2).

Here's how Herring reads this anecdote:

For the reformer, cosmopolitan interactions at Hull-House between Anglo [sic] middle classes and immigrant working classes ... are akin to entering a new “region” where particularized persons tend to become abstracted citizens where overcoming the habit of stifling “differences” becomes paramount.

To their surprise, Addams informs her readers, immigrants, philanthropists, reformers, and Hull-House visitors often find themselves cultivating these abstract spaces of anonymous social pleasure, a brotherhood where one “judge[s] their fellows by a more universal test” (207). The settlement house’s interclass transpositions, that is to say, fantastically begin to unsettle national as well as personal identifications, cherished prejudices, and particular taxonomies [42].

As far as I can tell, Herring has it exactly backwards here, though Addams may have been similarly mistaken. The "spaces" are not "abstract" but concrete and personal, and it appears that Addams and her fellow reformers wanted them to be so. The Anglo-Saxon (as she probably would have called herself -- certainly not "Anglo"!) woman had "abstracted" Italians as the Other, but through interacting with them personally she came to see them as "particularized" individuals, no longer "anonymous" but named, not "dagos" but Maria or Sophia or Loretta. Of course the individual is also an abstraction, as is "American" or "quite like us" or any other such specific label, but Herring seems not to see that. In general he prefers to see Addams and his other subjects as "slummers," a taxonomical abstraction that needs to be unsettled.

An old friend, and fellow writer, chided me gently not long ago when I'd been ranting about another book that affected me as Queering the Underworld does. Why, I fumed, does stuff like this get published? She said she preferred to see as many different viewpoints published as possible, so that they can be argued with. I agreed with her on that -- I wasn't advocating censorship -- but the fact remains that publishers have limited resources to invest; they don't publish everything that is submitted to them. And one argument that is made for traditional publication, as opposed to self-publication on the Internet, is that what gets into print through respectable publishers has to meet some standards of quality. What I was complaining about is how low those standards often seem to be. In acknowledgements writers offer fulsome thanks to their editors and to academic advisors, colleagues and friends who read and commented on drafts of the material, spotting errors and infelicities. The results are too often underwhelming. Doesn't anyone ever say, "You keep using that word 'identity' -- I do not think it means what you think it means"? Or "Foucault didn't mean that literally, and if he did, he was probably wrong." Or "Laura Mulvey was very tentative in her first paper on the Male Gaze; why do you refer to it as if it were unquestionably true?"

It's not that I object to Theory; as Kath Weston wrote in an excellent short paper, everybody theorizes about the world and how it works; the question is how to do it well. All too often it isn't being done well.

In the Future Everybody Will Be Queer -- Except Me

I've finally begun reading Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008), and am in the middle of a contribution by one of the editors, Wendy Gay Pearson. She begins by describing the 1998 call by fan groups for a boycott of an upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek: Insurrection.

After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group had has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last holdout in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the 'real' world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect ...

Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, 'it is just as important to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future'. The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek reject demands for visibly non-straight character: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem; in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it. Clearly, logic is not a prerequisite for would-be television gurus.

Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, right-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it is worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to 'queer' that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of 'cognitive estrangement' (to use [Darko] Suvin's term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little -- and one might suggest that it would only take a very little -- imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a 'problem' [14-15].

It should take a very little imagination to do so, since the producers would have before them the example of Star Trek's handling of race, with Lt. Uhura, a character of African descent whose skin color was not treated as a 'problem'; and if they wanted, they'd have the example of a great deal of print SF which already by 1998 had shown lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters whose sexuality was not a problem. That's why Star Trek always left me feeling dissatisfied from its first season: it was good for TV science fiction, but not very good compared to print science fiction. Where sex and gender are concerned, the lag between TV/film and print just widened as time went on.

But I disagree with Pearson's take on the producers' circular logic. They're quite right to insist that a non-homophobic future would not regard lesbian and gay Starfleet personnel as a problem; they could even have argued that in such a future, "gay" and "lesbian" would have no meaning. Queer theorists like to talk about "homosexuality as we think about it today" by contrast with the past, but they seldom consider how people might think about homosexuality in the future. In a nonhomophobic society, it seems to me, there would be many people who would become involved erotically / romantically with persons of their own sex, but they wouldn't think of themselves as lesbian, gay, or even bisexual, because there would be no need for such labels. Samuel R. Delany likes to cite a Thomas Disch story which contains the line (I'm quoting from memory here), "Father married again, a man this time and somewhat more happily." This sentence, all by itself, tells us that the narrator and his father live in a society where men can marry other men, where there's not an assumption that because one currently has a partner of one's own sex, all of one's partners have been or will be of one's own sex. That's not to say that in a non-homophobic society everyone would be "bisexual," as some have claimed. It would be homophobic to object if someone preferred partners of one sex or the other. The anthropologist Margaret Mead notoriously said that exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality, which is true only in the narrow sense that zero equals zero, because neither pattern is "sick."

I can't tell so far whether Pearson is unaware of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "universalizing" vs. "minoritizing" conceptions of homosexuality, or whether she merely misunderstands it. At one point she refers to her "own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of 'identity politics' influenced by an ethic of gayness" (17). She doesn't mention Sedgwick here, but if she has her in mind, she misunderstands what Sedgwick meant. A universalizing view doesn't assume that "all gays are alike" -- that would be the minoritizing view, which holds that homosexuals are a stable, discrete group, not all identical perhaps but still possessing the same gay or lesbian essence, which heterosexuals lack. A universalizing view holds that anyone might have homosexual feelings, desires, overt experiences. This is not necessarily either a hostile or an accepting view, just as the minoritizing style can be either hostile or accepting. Sedgwick was interested in exploring and unraveling the tensions and contradictions between the two styles, which aren't mutually exclusive. It's hard for me to figure out just what binarism Pearson is trying to define here.

But maybe Pearson meant something else. Whatever. What I was getting at is that the producers of Star Trek were using the idea of a non-homophobic society as a way of erasing same-sex eroticism. Their logic wasn't necessarily circular, just dishonest. The way to resolve the problem would be to have characters who interact romantically with partners of their own sex without labeling them gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This would probably be too much for television, let alone science-fiction television, but that's the way it has been handled in print science-fiction. I'd say that the producers Pearson quotes were using this valid logic to veil their own homophobia.

What got my attention in Pearson's discussion was that bit about "If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck ..." Pearson alludes to the problem of how you show a lesbian officer on the bridge -- what signifiers would tell us that a woman officer on the bridge is a lesbian? a labyris? Doc Martens? -- but doesn't seem to see the trouble with her image of a gay male couple holding hands on the holodeck. Two men holding hands would spell h-o-m-o to an American TV audience, of course, but not to people in every culture. The editors of Queer Universes pay lip service to postcolonial theory in their introduction, but Pearson gives me the impression that she doesn't know much about other cultures in the real world. She certainly hasn't taken them into account here.

In many cultures, from Africa to the Middle East to East Asia, men are physically affectionate with other men and women are physically affectionate with other women to a degree that often makes visiting Europeans uncomfortable. (This despite the fact that such effusive affection between men was not unknown in Europe or America in the recent past.) Men hold hands walking down the street or while having a conversation in a cafe, for example. There's a tendency among some Anglo observers to romanticize this behavior (Jeremy Seabrook on Indian men, for example), which I want to avoid here. Such societies are not less "homophobic" than "Western" societies -- indeed, they are often very homophobic. I have the impression that this same-sex affection flourishes in sex-segregated societies, and that as the culture changes and men and women are allowed to be affectionate in public, affection becomes eroticized and homophobia makes it harder (and eventually impossible) for it to be expressed between same-sex friends.

But there's also a tendency for homophobic spokesmen of those societies to insist that such affectionate displays are not "homosexual", in an attempt to deny that homosexuality exists in their cultures; I reject that tendency too, along with the contemporary "Western" academic tendency to de-eroticize this affection with terminology like the "homosocial." There's no clear line to be drawn between the affectionate and the erotic in general.

To postulate two male characters holding hands on the holodeck as "a gay couple" is a textbook example of that Eurocentric gay imperialism that post-colonial theorists often complain about, though they often try clumsily and ineffectually to "queer" those non-Western patterns -- that is, to claim them for queerness. (I hereby claim this island and its exotic folkways for Queer Nation!) It will take more than just "a very little imagination" to come up with depictions of lesbian and gay characters for Star Trek or other vehicles that don't fall into that trap, yet would work on American television with all its taboos. In a non-homophobic society, how would a lesbian officer or a gay male couple behave? What would two men holding hands on the holodeck signify? I see no reason to assume that such affection is only and always an expression of eroticism, though the erotic is as welcome to me as the non-erotic. What happens to pride and honor in a non-homophobic society? In a homophobic society, men must defend their honor against imputations of sexual receptivity, even (or especially) if they are sexually receptive to other men in private. Will men in the future be accepted not only if they have sex with other men, but if they hold hands with them? Ditto for women.

Questions like these are too much for the likes of Star Trek, of course, but queer theorists and science-fiction writers interested in sexuality, gender, and culture had better start exploring them; they seem to be very interesting, to me. The matter of affection and its relation to eroticism is something I hope to write about more before long.

When I Hear the Word "Pistol" I Reach For My Culture

Alan Sinfield is one of my favorite academic critics, and I'm currently reading his Cultural Politics - Queer Reading (Minnesota, 1994, though there's apparently a second edition out, which includes these words in its new foreword:

"The reader" is a coercive construct, designed to disqualify rival views. Its menu of exclusions is familiar. Othello should not be played by a black actor, A. C. Bradley remarks [in 1960], almost in passing. "Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our imagination" ... "We" in the audience may or may not be racist; in any event, Bradley assumes, we are all going to be white. ...

The assumed "we" is necessary for the conduct of literary criticism, because it embodies the supposition that the text simply yields its meaning to the (right) reader. Actually, I believe, it is the other way around: the literary is not a property of texts, but a way of reading. The text appears literary when it is read with literary criteria in view. Once it is admitted that different reading positions will produce different readings, easy claims for canonicity, the universal and essential qualities of literature, and the authority of the academy, become unsustainable, indeed embarrassing [xiv].

I had already come on my own to the conclusion that the literary is a way of reading, but it is pleasant to find that Sinfield agrees with me. I don't always agree with him, but he always has interesting things to say, including his reversal of the aphorism commonly attributed to Goering, which I borrowed for the title of this post. Or this, on the open secret in reviews of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which was originally staged in 1955:

Walter Kerr, in the New York Herald Tribune, acknowledged "the implication" of "an unnatural relationship" but complained that Cat exhibits "a tantalizing reluctance" to "blurt out its promised secret." In fact, the play is plain enough; Kerr needs there to be a secret. A standard tabloid story in the U.K. is the shock-discovery of the gayness of someone who has not in fact been hiding it. The need is to insist that it is the kind of thing anyone would conceal if they could [53-54].

Living in the Catacombs: John Howard's Men Like That, part two

I really did mean to post more on John Howard's Men Like That in reasonable time, but time got away from me. So here's more now.

-----------

3.

Somewhere along the line, "identity politics" has become a safe and handy term of abuse, like "political correctness" -- and about as free of content. Howard throws it around several times in Men Like That, without ever making it clear what he means by it.

Impenetrable, unkissable men involved in homosex -- men that [informant and self-identified "trade queen" Ron] Knight describes both as "supposedly straight guys" and as "men" -- should not be understood within the present-day psychoanalytic frame of denial or the identity politics category of closeted. They should not be read as essentialized gay men unable to accept it. As this and the prior two chapters show, in midcentury Mississippi male-male sexualities happened within complicated worlds of myriad desires. To experience or act on homoerotic desire did not necessarily define the person as gay....

As sociologist Steven Seidman puts it, "The very possibility of framing homosexuality as a site of identity presupposes sexual object-choice [the gender of one's sexual partner] as a master category of sexual and self-identity." For many in this time and place, this master category may not have been at work as an identity mechanism; although, certainly, sexual object-choice functioned more broadly in American culture in the framing of acceptable and unacceptable, normative and nonnormative sexual practices [122f].

This passage is a clotted mass of misinterpretations of data, and of misunderstandings of theory. Howard mentioned earlier the amazingly resilient "heterosexual will to not-know, the pretense of ignorance" (xvi); were only heterosexuals capable of denial in those days? I don't agree that it implies essentialism to suggest that someone is in denial over his participation in homosex. If anything, essentialism facilitates denial: "Yes, I'm screwing a man (or getting screwed by one), but it doesn't count because I'm not queer." This mindset has often been lethal for men who didn't believe they needed to use condoms while being penetrated, since only queers got AIDS. An anti-essentialist can point out (as Kinsey did), that someone is engaged in homosexual activity without necessarily implying anything about that person's inner nature.

As for "closeted," there may not have been a mid-century Mississippi equivalent to refer to men who declined to acknowledge (to themselves, or to others) what they were doing sexually. I see no reason not to use the accepted current label unless one is devoted to producing a purely emic account of midcentury Mississippi queerdom, which Howard is not.

Whether trade -- "Impenetrable, unkissable men involved in homosex" -- should be understood as closeted or in denial depends on the individual. For Howard's impenetrable and (initially) unkissable informant Mark Ingalls, who now sees himself as gay, both denial and the closet were definitely involved: Ingalls himself reports his mother's reproval on his second (!) heterosexual marriage: "Knowing what you know, why are you doing this?" (46) As Howard notes, "Avoidance of the topic did not indicate a lack of awareness on either side" (ibid.), and refusing to call something by its name doesn't remotely imply that you don't know that name. Trade don't refuse to think of themselves as queer because they are anti-essentialist: they are extremely essentialist, and in their social world they are essentialized Real Men. "Queer" represents what is outside manhood's carefully patrolled (because highly permeable) boundary.

And Queers were just as invested in that construction, as shown by Howard's informant Ron Knight, who says "A drop of sissy come would choke us. If we were going to go down on anybody, they would have to be men, trade" (122). (Another example, from Mexico City: "The vestidas disapprove of any signs of femininity in their partners. For example, bisexual men who are apparently manly but who secretly let themselves be penetrated as if they were homosexuales are often criticized by the vestidas, even when the vestidas are the ones who penetrate them" [Prieur 1998, 166]) Fellows like Ron Knight, incidentally, make it quite clear that "sexual object choice" – Men -- was a major and defining factor in their sexual identities.

A Real Man out looking for fun in postwar Mississippi would probably not consider a Queer equivalent to a woman as a sexual partner - but that might be part of the Queer's appeal. Women cost money, directly or indirectly; a Queer might pay the Real Man. This risked putting the Real Man in a feminized position, a fact which must never be mentioned, making it all the more important that his Real Manhood be maintained in bed. Or at least officially, out of bed.

The Real Man / Queer binarism is too restrictive to account for all sexual interaction between men, even in areas where that model is the norm. In parts of Latin America where the Real Man / Queer dichotomy still rules, there are Real Men who want to be penetrated some of the time, and who may seek out Queers to penetrate them. But this is a dread secret and may be denied in the act: "My experience of stubborn denial is indeed confirmed by Murray ... , who says he has 'been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they never get fucked.'" (Prieur 1998, 199). Howard, by contrast, seems unaware of such complexity -- he's at least as invested in the traditional dichotomy as any Real Man, or any Queer.

Finally, it simply is not true that "The very possibility of framing homosexuality as a site of identity presupposes sexual object-choice as a master category of sexual and self-identity." Despite its etymology "homosexual" originally referred to the invert, the Queer, the woman's soul trapped in a man's body – all quasi-heterosexual constructions of same-sex desire and behavior -- and only gradually and inconsistently was extended to all those who loved their own sex, regardless of "gender performance." The invert was an identity, and inversion as a "master category" encompassed both "gender performance" and "sexual object-choice" -- the latter being assumed on the basis of the former or vice versa, which is a reminder that sexual-object choice and gender performance were inseparable in the 19th century. (And still are in many cultures today, including much of the US.) This should not be news to anyone who really has been informed by queer theory, but it seems to be news to Howard.

Howard's insistence on the variety of motivations that brings men to sex with other males then (as now) is well-taken, but it hasn't been news since Kinsey (et al., 1948) at least. (It was an essentializing American society, which included an essentializing gay world, which assumed the 37% of males who'd had orgasms with other males must all be Queers.) More important, he seems to be unable to do anything but state and reiterate that insistence, renouncing essentialist binarism and its evil works. Yes yes yes, not all men who insert their penises into the orifices of other men's bodies, or who receive other men's penises into their orifices, are properly categorized as "gay" or "homosexual" -- so what? Howard has nothing new to tell us about how such men saw themselves, or even how they were seen by the men they penetrated. Nor does he cast any light on those "complicated worlds of myriad desires" in which his Queers and Real Men came together.

Even if we grant that there was "a heterosexual / homosexual dyad prevalent throughout American culture during the twentieth century", it's not obvious that the Real Man / Queer dyad which governed much sexual interaction between males in midcentury Mississippi "did not privilege sexual-object choice, or the biological sex of one's partner, a primary technique of categorization." While the Real Man may truly not have cared whether he penetrated a woman or a man (though I doubt it as a general rule), the Queer wanted to be penetrated by a Real Man, which sounds like a privileged sexual-object choice to me. (An essentializing Queer can explain away any heterosexual contacts he may have by recourse to the same strategies a Real Man uses: it doesn't count, because he really isn't That Way.)

Howard wrongly implies that "binarized conceptions of sexual identity" were something new to the US, or the Deep South; the Real Man / Queer binary disproves that. And the heterosexual / homosexual dyad hasn't become universally hegemonic in American society to this day; if nothing else, the "new" category employed in AIDS education, of Men Who Have Sex With Men, shows that. (See also Leap 1999.) As other writers have shown, George Chauncey among them, it was not just that "the" homosexual concept was transmitted to different regions at different rates; multiple concepts coexisted in any given place, and they diffused through different ethnic and class groups at different rates even in the same city. (It may also be that the Homosexual / Heterosexual dyad provides a touchstone of denial for many Men Who Have Sex with Men, creating more of the latter or letting them create themselves.)

The polemic heats up when Howard discusses gay activism in Mississippi. Though gay organizing in Mississippi began as early as 1959, the Mississippi Gay Alliance (MGA) offered the first sustained activist visibility the state had seen. But:

In the 1970s MGA membership never totaled more than a few dozen, with white membership always vastly outnumbering black. Influenced as it was by identity politics, most notably an increasingly national lesbian and gay movement, gay organizing clashed with local sensibilities, queer and nonqueer. For decades sexual deviants and gender nonconformists in Mississippi had functioned quietly but effectively within rural and small-town contexts, outmaneuvering hostile forces. [Except, of course, when those "hostile forces" -- which according to Howard were never inherently hostile -- arrested, harassed, beat, or killed them. And "effectively" at what?] Queer Mississippians even in remote parts of the state were nonetheless visible and available to one another. Gay politics required a different sort of visibility. Most disturbingly, it required clear-cut identity statements, individuals' open and public avowal of homosexuality, a speech act that some belligerent lawmakers and law enforcers interpreted as a felony in and of itself (attempted sodomy)....

Further, the category gay didn't well encompass the range and inventiveness of sexual and gender nonnormativity in Mississippi. And it made few allowances for those whose sexual and gender nonnormativity served as a relatively insignificant component of identity. For African Americans, for example, to participate in gay organizing meant to participate in yet another white-controlled, white-dominated institution. Though homosexuality and gender insubordination clearly weren't just a white thing, gay political organizing for the most part was [239].

All the evidence Howard musters indicates that non-involvement in MGA had much more to do with wholly rational fear and hopelessness than with a distaste for "identity politics." (As shown, for instance, by the terrified small-town resident who wrote anonymously to the Jackson Daily News advice columnist, asking him to publish MGA's contact information instead of mailing it to him directly: "'I can't reveal my name ... because of the small town in which I live'" [238]. Not because homosexuality was "a relatively insignificant component of identity" -- just the opposite.)

And how is gay African-Americans' reluctance to get involved in one more white-dominated institution -- as though it were utterly unthinkable that they start their own! -- an "example" of people whose queerness was "a relatively insignificant component of identity"? It was significant enough to produce conflict in people who felt they had to choose between one component of their identity and another. Also, since "gay", like "queer," has always been multivalent, including significant amounts of gender insubordination (and certainly did in the early 70s), in Mississippi as elsewhere, how can Howard say that it doesn't "well encompass the range and inventiveness of sexual and gender nonnormativity in Mississippi" etc.? Once again, his evidence just doesn't support his conclusions.

Nor does the "different sort of visibility" and "individuals' open and public avowal of homosexuality" required by gay activism have anything to do with "clear-cut identity statements." Rather, as Howard is aware, the difference is between being visible to other gay people and being visible to straights. Such visibility meant a whole new way for queers to think about themselves, but that was as true, as challenging, and as disturbing to college-educated white professionals in New York City as it was to preachers' sons with an eighth-grade education in Mississippi. Chanting "identity politics" like a mantra obscures the real issue, which is that being visible to straights as a Queer formerly happened only involuntarily, through arrest or murder. What the gay movement advocated was not "identity" -- that was already present -- but a rejection of shame in being gay. It also wrested the power to label from straight society, and put it into queers' own hands, an act of insubordination that bothered many straights for a long time after.

Finally, Howard cites the nascent Metropolitan Community Church as a corrective to MGA's thoughtcrime: "They [the MCC] found fertile soil in Mississippi" (245). "Such ecclesiastical gatherings, in stark relief to in-your-face activism, could generate the support of some liberal politicians" (240). But the binary opposition he hopes to construct collapses almost immediately, since "The leadership of the two organizations [MGA and MCC] was intimately intertwined..." (248), and the MCC became involved in "in-your-face activism" by opposing Anita Bryant's late-70s antigay crusade and the Mississippi Moral Majority. In other words, it may not have been that the MCC itself was so attractive, as Howard implied earlier in the chapter, but the visible threat of organized bigots that got Mississippi homos off their butts. But with that came once again the serpent in the Garden, the spectre of "identity."

"While the enumeration and articulation of gay institutions appeared an invitation to many, it seemed a barrier to others, a signal that an identity-based community, by its very nature, excluded some as it smoothed differences among the elect ... Where gay identity politics flagged, a gay social gospel flourished" (251f). This is a false antithesis, and anyway, it ain't true, as the next quotation shows. The "gay social gospel", Howard laments, included "gay identity politics":

Some visitors to MCC felt particularly unwelcome. As Kathy Switzer recalls, the congregation was entirely white. Though African-Americans visited, "they would always go back to their home churches because they felt more comfortable there." One black worshiper explicitly stated the dilemma to the group: "It's hard enough to be black. You want me to be gay too?" "Yes," came the response. "You play with the boys, honey. Don't you think it's time to identify yourself?"

Indeed, identity was the issue... [253]

Indeed, was it? It wasn't that the MCC whites wanted that "black worshiper" to "be gay" -- he was already, and he knew it. What was going on there was not a conflict between those who espoused "identity politics" and those who didn't: it was about conflicting allegiances to different identities. Howard approvingly tells the story of an African-American community leader whose political career managed to survive repeated homosexual scandals. This was a triumph of African-American identity politics -- the demand that racial solidarity should trump every other consideration, a demand that finally ran aground on the controversy over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. Howard seems not to be aware that racial solidarity is the paradigm case of "identity politics" in the US, or that such "identity politics" were what kept so many gay African-Americans closeted.

We're now seeing the rise of specifically African-American lgbt organizations, which is probably the only solution to the problem, and long overdue, since there are plenty of gay and lesbian and bisexual African-American exemplars. This will only confuse those who, like Howard, insist that you can only have one "identity" at a time. Like being bisexual, being gay and African-American is a multiple identity: the solution is to choose both, or more than both -- lesbian, feminist and black; gay, black and Muslim; and so on.

WORKS CITED:
Kinsey, Alfred; Pomeroy, Wardell; Martin, Clyde. Sexual behavior in the human male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.
Leap, William L. "Sex in 'private' places: gender, erotics, and detachment in two urban locales." In Leap, William L. (editor), Public sex / gay space (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 115-140.
Prieur, Annick. Mema's House, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. [Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture] Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Living in the Catacombs: John Howard's Men Like That, part one

(Yeah yeah yeah, I know I know: Dogpatch was in Kentucky, not Mississippi. So sue me.)

I've had this long piece sitting around for some years now; I figure it might as well go here.

John Howard. Men like that: a Southern queer history. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999.

1.

Depending on whom you believe, either an Evil Essentialist Empire has seized hegemonic power over American queerdom, and is poised to extend its nefarious rule over the entire world; or Satanic Social Constructionists, having gained a stranglehold on public discussion with secret subliminal backwards messages, are sapping the precious bodily fluids of decent Homo-Americans.

Essentialists get more corporate media access, since those media tend to favor and promote biological determinism; but in order to denounce social constructionism, they must mention it now and then, so word gets out, and some of the impressionable young will be tempted by this unnatural sin. Social constructionists are well-represented and influential in academia and in the publications of university presses, but are lucky to get a soundbyte in edgewise now and then outside the classroom. These opposing viewpoints make for gripping Family entertainment (tune in next week to see Andrew Sullivan and Michael Warner bludgeon each other on Celebrity Death Match), but they are really just more-or-less amusing caricatures.

Social construction is counter-intuitive, so it's not surprising that even its proponents often have trouble understanding it, let alone applying it consistently. Some confuse it with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates written on by Society. When gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay was promoting his hypothalamus theory of the cause of homosexuality, he told an interviewer that friends had told him there was no need to look for a biological cause, since 'we know it's socially constructed.' I’ve always wondered whether it was LeVay who misunderstood the meaning of 'socially constructed,' or his friends, or both.

There's no question that skin color and such traits have biological roots, for example, but "race" and its meanings are socially constructed around these physical features. It's often been pointed out that few people identify themselves as essentialists -- at least, people in the formal study of sexuality. But even those lay writers like Andrew Sullivan who denounce social constructionism most fiercely, seldom seem to refer to themselves as essentialists. (Is essentialism genetic, or is it a lifestyle choice?)

Essentialism correspondingly is often equated with biological determinism, though there's not a necessary connection: social constructs are built from material, biological traits like physical sex or skin color. Essentializing is social construction in action: when a person who writes is called a writer, when a person who lies is called a liar, when a person who commits sodomy is called a sodomite and thereby essentialized, social construction is taking place. The belief that a thief, or a writer, or a Sodomite, is "born that way" will then be rationalized with whatever naive theory is available: it's in the blood, the genes, the soul, one's nature, etc.

Some use social construction, as some essentialists use essentialism, as a weapon to settle political or personal scores. Every few pages they haul out a catchphrase like a burlesque clown's bladder and give their opponents a good basting for comic relief. Or they use it as a sort of good luck charm, which they touch periodically to reassure themselves that they are on the right side, whether or not it relates to their subject. It might be more accurate (or at least clearer) to refer to many self-identified social constructionists as "anti-essentialists", since they are sure that essentialism is of Satan but aren't sure what social construction means. Something like this seems to be going on in John Howard's much-praised book Men Like That: a Southern Queer History.

I picked up Men Like That because I liked Howard's stated aim: to explore queer life in postwar America outside of the large cities that have drawn most scholarly attention so far. (Though not all of it by any means. Howard himself edited a collection of writings (1997) about glb southern life, which ranged outside the major urban centers; it included a version of Martin Duberman's "Writhing Bedfellows" (1981), including the text of erotic letters by one antebellum Southern male to another. James T. Sears has published at least four books (1991, 1997, 2001, 2009) on glb life in the South. Buring (1997) covers Memphis, Tennessee. Kennedy and Davis's groundbreaking 1995 study of lesbian life in Buffalo, New York ranged beyond Metropolis. Fellows (1996) collects oral histories of gay men who grew up on farms in the Midwest. Appearing at about the same time as Men Like That, Rupp (1999) includes not only the usual suspects in a "short history of same-sex love in America." Bailey (1999) includes information about gay life in Nebraska since WWII. And now there's Wilson 2000.

Of course there's also a growing body of non-scholarly writing, including fiction, on the topic. Neil Miller (1989), like Edmund White (1980) before him and Darrell Yates Rist (1992) after, traveled between the coasts, even to small towns; Pratt (1995) writes as a white southern lesbian. Preston (1995) writes of relocating to Portland, Maine after living for years in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other large cities; Riordon (1996) interviewed gay men and lesbians in rural and smalltown Canada. Osborne and Spurlin (1996) collect writings by lesbian and gay midwesterners. And so on; this list doesn't pretend to any completeness, it's just a reminder that Howard isn't blazing totally new trails.

Howard draws on his predecessors, and adds some new information as well, from interviews, newspaper archives, and popular culture. But he isn't as different, or as consistent in his approach, as he wants to believe. If his focus is supposed to be on rural life, then he spends rather too much time serving up dish on scandals in Jackson and other Mississippi cities, even if they are smaller than New York. If I take his subtitle -- a Southern queer history -- at face value, then perhaps Howard should have spent less time than he does devaluing the work of scholars who have focused on urban areas elsewhere in the US. The reason for their focus on cities is the same as Howard's: the light, so to speak, is better there. Sexual nonconformists are concentrated more visibly, in greater numbers if not necessarily larger proportions than in the countryside, and there's, duh, more accessible documentation. Even in elite universities, scholarship on sexual nonconformity can still pose risks to a scholar's career; so it's hardly surprising that we don't have enough full studies of postwar queer life in mid-sized cities, done by historians at regional campuses or community colleges. It's still worthwhile to move beyond the coastal and metropolitan provincialism that has largely neglected the American heartland, and Howard doesn't need to defend it by dismissing those who have worked elsewhere.

I appreciate Howard's labors, but there are many problems, some serious, with Men Like That. Some arise from dubious interpretation of his data; others involve misuse of his social-constructionist theoretical frame, and to those I will return.

2. "I guess people felt like they had to be pretty careful."

Howard paints an attractive bucolic picture of queer life in Mississippi after the Second World War: farm boys and ministers' sons peaceably fucking and sucking in haylofts and choir lofts (52f) and in the woods surrounding highway rest stops, participating with their straight families and neighbors in womanless mock weddings and beauty pageants for church fundraisers, "well enmeshed" (xi) in their society -- until "unkempt", "brusque and shrill" (239) activists imported "identity politics" from outside, shattering the harmony and contentment Mississippi queers had enjoyed until then. The similarity to Jim Crow apologetics (whites and Their Colored lived in segregated harmony until dirty beatniks and other outside agitators from Jew York came down and stirred things up) is not coincidental, though it seems to be unconscious.

It would be pleasant if this portrait of queer life in Mississippi were accurate, but it isn't. Howard has to qualify his own generalizations rather seriously, until nothing remains but a warm Southern smile, floating disconcertingly in the air. Though at one point he denies that Mississippi police harassed queers before the Sixties (in order to argue that such harassment was a reaction to the Civil Rights movement), he refers to busts at highway rest stops and tearooms and bars during the Forties and Fifties. Maybe these weren't anti-queer campaigns with full media coverage, where politicians, including police chiefs, made political hay from their protection of decent people from the homosexual menace; but such anti-vice campaigns leave a convenient paper trail in the press and courts for the intrepid queer historian to follow; clearing out a highway rest stop now and then doesn't.

More important, while many people did manage to have reasonably fulfilling queer lives in the pre-Stonewall dispensation, even outside large cities, it is also true that such people lived in danger most of the time. As Howard acknowledges, "If forced to the surface, however, if held up to the light, transgressions were indeed punished" (171). "Police ... seemed a threat only when bars became 'too notorious,' as Chuck Plant put it" (94). "The wide-open [?] attitudes of World War II persisted in Jackson, and white gay bars operated downtown into the 1950s. ... sufficiently perceptible to attract men like that, sufficiently ambiguous to allay police officers who patrolled the area. ..." (95). It was, of course, up to straights to decide when a meeting place had become "sufficiently perceptible" or "too notorious." This was the era of the open secret, where 'everyone knew' but pretended they didn't, and toleration was conditional on keeping quiet and acknowledging queer inferiority. Howard says nothing to refute this; he merely denies it, like a Jim Crow politician assuring outsiders that southern whites loved their nigras, I mean Negroes.

The work of gay and lesbian historians since Stonewall should forestall any assumption that pre-Stonewall gay life was unrelieved persecution and misery, or that no gay people in those days (or outside that dispensation now) felt good about themselves. But it also does not justify Howard's opening claim that Mississippi society and its institutions were "Never inherently hostile to homosexual activity" (xi), which he typically contradicts a few sentences later by admitting "complications": "In Protestant evangelical Mississippi, most everyone took for granted that it was sinful, and it was legally proscribed by the 1839 sodomy statute" and again a few pages later: "Though sometimes subject to intimidation and violence ... queer Mississippians proved adept at maneuvering through hostile terrain" (xiv). Chuck Plant, one of Howard's informants, sheds light on maneuvering through the Fifties: "But you needed to be careful. You could meet behind closed doors with the drapes drawn with your friends, but you didn't want it known" (82). I suppose the key word in Howard's earlier sentence is "inherently," whatever it's supposed to mean. Was Jim Crow society "inherently" hostile to people of African descent -- or did it only become hostile when Colored got too big?

Howard declares at the outset, "The extent to which queer genders and sexualities in Mississippi appear akin to those in other places is a question I leave to future writers of larger syntheses and surveys. ... I argue primarily for a specific queer Mississippi, which is not to say a wholly unique queer Mississippi" (xix). As we'll see, this is a slight exaggeration. Howard is quite sure that the good folks of Mississippi are different from the degenerate heathen in other regions, and he rarely misses an opportunity to say so.

WORKS CITED
Bailey, Beth L., 1999. Sex in the heartland. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Buring, Daneel, 1997. Lesbian and gay Memphis: building communities behind the Magnolia Curtain. (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture) New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Duberman, Martin Bauml, 1981. "'Writhing Bedfellows' in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence." Journal of Homosexuality (Fall/Winter 1980/1981).
Fellows, Will, 1996. Farm boys: lives of gay men from the rural Midwest. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Paperback reprint with new afterword, 1998.
Howard, John, 1997 (editor) Carryin' on in the gay and lesbian south. New York: New York University Press.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky; Davis, Madeline D., 1993. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge.
Miller, Neil I., 1989. In search of gay America: women and men in a time of change. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Osborne, Karen Lee; Spurlin, William J. (editors), 1996. Reclaiming the heartland: lesbian and gay voices from the Midwest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pratt, Minnie Bruce., 1995. S/HE. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books.
Preston, John, 1995. Winter's light: reflections of a Yankee queer. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Riordon, Michael, 1996. Out our way: gay and lesbian life in the country. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Rist, Darrell Yates, 1992. Heartlands: a gay man's odyssey across America. New York: Dutton.
Rupp, Leila J., 1999. A desired past: a short history of same-sex love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sears, James T., 1991. Growing up gay in the South: race, gender, and journeys of the spirit. New York: Haworth Press.
--- , 1997. Lonely hunters: an oral history of lesbian and gay southern life 1948-1968. Boulder: Westview Press.
--- , 2001. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and rhinestones: queering space in the Stonewall South. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP.
---, 2009. Edwin and John: a personal history of the American South. London: Routledge.
White, Edmund, 1980. States of desire: travels in gay America. New York: Dutton.
Wilson, Angelia R., 2000. Below the belt: sexuality, religion and the American South. London and New York: Cassell.

(part two to follow soon)