"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 So, for example, he quotes on page 33 "an unpublished, undated poem inscribed to fellow reformer 'M.R.S.'", presumably Mary Rozet Smith, the woman Addams was coupled with for forty years.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.

"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.

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].

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 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 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.

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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 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.