WHEN I first read Larry Kramer’s “Queer Theory’s Heist of Our History” in this journal’s September–October 2009 issue, I felt attacked, and on a surprisingly personal level. I was actually less angry at what Kramer was saying—he’s been saying it for years—than at where he was saying it: in a journal targeted to gay and lesbian intellectuals. I was angry that Kramer was blaming a body of work that I love for a combination of homophobia, obfuscation, and theft. I was furious to see Kramer attacking Michel Foucault and Judith Butler without even attempting to understand or make visible their complex and useful bodies of thought. But as my anger subsided, I considered Kramer’s frustrations, and began returning to his earlier works. I suspect that many people are sympathetic to Kramer’s claim that queer theory is “prissy incomprehensible imprecise gobbledygook” (Kramer, 2005).
Kramer’s main argument in the GLR article that “homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of history.” In his 1978 novel Faggots, Blaze Sorority (a penname) writes twice monthly features for “the faggot world’s very own and special paper,” the Avocado. In one of his columns, Sorority contemplates homosexuality’s past as a source of inspiration:
[L]et us try to summon up inspiration from our illustrious ancestors, those forefathers who had they opened their mouths, would have made our cause great a few years earlier, had they had the guts to cry out “here I come, ready or not” to all and sundry, the world at large and stood there long enough to have their toesies counted, would not have placed us in the mess we’re in today. I am of course talking about Leonardo and Michelangelo and Napoleon (who had a small one) and Socrates and Aristotle…
The list continues for 115 names. The passage ends, “Thanks a lot, gang. We didn’t know about you till you were dead.” It’s a farcical list in a farcical novel. Hadrian didn’t make a secret of his interest in Antinous. And considering that Belgian authorities subjected Verlaine to a humiliating exam of his anus, concluding that he “bears on his person traces of habitual pederasty, both active and passive” (Robb, 2001), one might say that Rimbaud and Verlaine did more than “open their mouths.” (The exam notes also comment on the small size of his penis.) It is also hard to believe that they wouldn’t have been better off being a little more discreet (though the police intervened only after Verlaine had shot Rimbaud). Kramer’s list does not include the three organizers of the first Mattachine Society press conference in 1959 who subsequently had their homes raided by police. One of them was sentenced to sixty days in jail and lost his job (Chauncey, 2005). It would seem that being visible in a climate of hate does not always have productive consequences, while being visible in a climate of acceptance can be as insignificant. But Kramer’s claim is consistent: a strong gay past makes for a strong gay present.
Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, a germinal text of queer theory, is quite close to Kramer. In this scene, the protagonist Jess makes a similar case for gay historiography, saying to her best friend Ruth:
“I’ve been going to the library, looking up our history. There’s a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven’t always been hated. Why didn’t we grow up knowing that?”
Ruth propped herself up on her elbow and watched my face as I spoke. “It’s changed the way I think. I grew up believing the way things are now is the way they’ve always been, so why even bother trying to change the world? But just finding out that it was ever different, even if it was a long time ago, made me feel things could change again. Whether or not I live to see it.”
On the face of it, these two claims are the same. Knowing your history makes you willing to fight for your present. But in Feinberg’s novel, one is hard-pressed to think of Ruth and Jess as simply being gay or homosexual. Ruth reads as a trans-woman or a drag queen, and the novel suggests that she is a two-spirit in a Native American tradition. Jess begins the novel as a butch lesbian, undergoes surgery to have her breasts removed, takes hormones, lives as a man, stops taking hormones, and by this late point in the story lives in an intermediate space. The novel’s happy ending comes when Jess is addressed as “sister” at a rally—she wants to live in a female space, but one of her own making. The characters of Stone Butch Blues are endlessly dissatisfied by the ways that the words “gay” or “lesbian” would simplify their identities (even if they might not put it that way). There is no simple taxonomy or paradigm that ever settles to name them, and what’s heroic about Jess is how ferociously she insists on her right to be outside of every category that comes her way.
And this is precisely why we need “queer,” and why we need “queer theory.” We can’t lose Jess or Ruth when we start combing the history books in search of people to claim as being “gay.” Amin Ghaziani did a rather nice job in the last issue of this magazine of laying out the basic tenets of queer theory. But I want to argue that queer theory has not robbed us of our history. Rather, queer theory has complicated the ways in which we think about sexual desire and created a space in which we can think about ourselves and our history in nuanced and difficult ways.
Kramer’s quest is for identification—to make apparent gay people from the past be seen as just like “us.” In contrast, queer theory puts the emphasis on recognition. Identification* is a problem because it threatens to destroy the object being studied. When Kramer looks at Washington, Lincoln, or Jamestown settlers and insists that we see them as being unambiguously gay, as “our brothers in love”—we lose their specificity, the historical nature of their being. If we look to gay history and only see ourselves, we aren’t practicing history at all.
In fact, Jewish history and black history (two analogs that Kramer invokes) both recognize discontinuities and differences in the people who make up their study. The rabbi at my synagogue once told the midrash of how Moses at Sinai was brought forward in time by God to witness Rabbi Akiba debating the Torah with his colleagues. Moses was shocked, and unable to recognize Rabbi Akiba as the future of his people. The story was told in the context of how gay, lesbian, and transgendered Jews need not feel less Jewish, even if the Jews of past generations might not recognize us. When Kramer objects, “And please don’t tell me that I’m guilty of applying today’s ‘sensibilities’ to something that happened over 300 years ago. You bet I am, and so what?” (2009), he reminds me of my students who write papers about Othello’s problems as an “African-American.” But my intention is not to mock. My students have good reason to see “African-American” in Othello. Arguably, Othello is the play that set the tropes for the next 400 years of thinking about racial difference. They are right that Othello has implications for their lived experience of race. But they are not right that Othello was an African-American. Here applying today’s sensibilities blinds us to the specificities of the past.
Rather than making history a process of identification, I think that queer theory would suggest that history be a process of recognition. History is a process of looking at what’s in the historical record and trying to make it visible on its own terms. Oftentimes, the historical record makes it hard to determine what’s going on. “Sodomy” can mean anal sex between men, oral sex between a man and a woman, as well as sex with sheep. Recognition—which is particularly the concern of Judith Butler—is the question of how we recognize the possibilities of identity. Butler is deeply concerned with categories of identity that are available. How is one recognized as a boy? How is one recognized as a homosexual? In the now famous case of Brandon Teena, we see the violence that can occur when one is recognized as boy before one is recognized as not-a-boy. What Chauncey does in his brilliant history of gay New York City is to show, not that there were always gay people just like us, but that sexual orientation and gender identity have been formulated in multiple combinations. Could a policeman tell a “queer” from a “fairy” or a “punk”? In one story, a young boxer joins a boxing club. After he lets an older boxer top him, the older boxer boasts about having had sex with him, and the young boxer is humiliated and has to leave the club. This is a version of “status-linked” homosexuality, where the insertive role in anal sex is masculine and normal, and the receptive role is feminizing and abnormal. This is not the version of homosexuality that Kramer is looking for, and yet we can’t ignore it.
The strongest objection to a universal notion of (homo)sexuality comes from David Halperin in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. To Kramer’s complaint, “I do not understand why historians and academics, including gay ones, especially gay ones, refuse to believe that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history,” Halperin insists on the non-universality of homosexuality:
Does the “paederast,” the classical Greek adult, married male who periodically enjoys sexually penetrating a male adolescent, share the same sexuality with the “berdache,” the Native American (Indian) adult male who from childhood has taken on many aspects of a woman and is regularly penetrated by the adult male to whom he has been married in a public and socially sanctioned ceremony? Does the latter share the same sexuality with the New Guinea tribesman and warrior who from the ages of eight to fifteen has been orally inseminated on a daily basis by older youths and who, after years of orally inseminating his juniors, will be married to an adult woman and have children of his own?
I’m actually quite excited about Kramer at last letting us all see the evidence that he has for all of the same-sex activity that American history has witnessed. I do identify with the same-sex lovers who have populated history. But I’m also aware that I should be careful about inserting myself too easily in their shoes. Kramer’s complaint is that historians set the bar too high for proof of same-sex activity. In some ways, I think that he has confused the work of creative artists—novelists, poets, playwrights and filmmakers—with the work of historians. I’d love to watch a steamy mini-series about the torrid love affair between Joshua Speed and Abraham Lincoln. But, on the other hand, I find that an ahistorical notion of sexual identity usually comes off as laughable. When Morgan Freeman delivers a remarkably enlightened formulation of the difference between gay men and men-who-rape-men in The Shawshank Redemption, it struck me as silly and anachronistic. My major problem with the film version of Brokeback Mountain (beyond the lack of foreplay) was that Jack and Ennis, once they had “come out” to each other, could only experience misery while apart. It was as though they were gay men from the late 90’s transplanted into the past, even as their actual time together seemed to be the kind of prolonged adolescence that Jim longs for with Bob in Gore Vidal’s 1948 novel The City and the Pillar. The mash-up felt wrong to me.
In Chauncey’s 2005 book Why Marriage? he writes, “the history of antigay discrimination is typically misremembered,” and he goes on to remind us that mid-20th-century gay oppression was far more severe than is usually understood today, and that this period of extreme repression was relatively anomalous during American history. Forgetting that the repression was extreme “makes it easier” for our enemies “to argue that gay people do not need or deserve the most basic civil rights protections.” But believing that “social hostility toward homosexuals is age-old and unchanging” gives the upper hand to our enemies as well, since it lets them naturalize measures that were “an unprecedented and relatively short lived development of the twentieth century.” Our history is critical to our rights and to our lives, but always in its specificities.
HAVING RESISTED Kramer’s idea of history as a sequence of identifications, I want to argue that his thinking is not as incompatible with queer theory as he thinks. Kramer inveighs against queer theory as the “devil” being “taught in place of gay history” (2009), robbing gay men of their history.
In The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick looks at the way that other minority groups have been asked about their role in (literary) history. “Is there, as Saul Bellow put it, a Tolstoy of the Zulus? Has there been, asks the defenders of monocultural curriculum, not intending to stay for an answer, has there ever yet been a Socrates of the Orient, an African-American Proust, a female Shakespeare?” Sedgwick exposes these questions as willful forms of ignorance. She turns the question around in ways of which I think Kramer would approve:
[W]hat distinctive soundings are to be reached by posing the question our way—and staying for an answer? Let’s see how it sounds. Has there ever been a gay Socrates? Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare? Has there ever been a gay Proust? Does the Pope wear a dress? If the questions startle, it is not least as tautologies. A short answer, though a very incomplete one, might be that not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust, but that their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, Proust; and, beyond that, legion—dozens or hundreds of the most centrally canonic figures in what the monoculturalists are pleased to consider “our” culture, as indeed, always in different forms and senses, in every other.
Kramer’s project, as much as it overlaps with Sedgwick’s, might look to queer theory for assistance, rather than viewing it as the enemy. Sedgwick also insists that erasing homosexuality from the history books is a problem, and lists eight methods by which homophobic historians can insist on keeping us out of the history books. Number five should feel particularly familiar to Kramer: “The word ‘homosexuality’ didn’t exist back then, unlike now—so people probably didn’t do anything.”
I suspect that when Kramer refers to Foucault, he’s referring specifically to this often quoted passage from the The History of Sexuality:
We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870. … Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.
This argument is taken to mean essentially that before homosexuality was an identity, it was a behavior. So, just as we regard Bernie Madoff as someone who stole, not someone whose identity predisposed him to steal, pre-homosexuals were just people who had sex with members of their own gender (sometimes). To follow up on the Bernie Madoff example, we certainly have the word “thief” to suggest an identity for him, but we don’t think of him being a thief in the same way that we think of him being a heterosexual. We would say that Madoff married a woman because he’s straight, but not that he stole because he’s a thief. Similarly, people were prosecuted for sodomy in ways that suggest it was like Madoff’s stealing: not an identity, just something they did.
And again, since Kramer wants to resist this Foucauldian idea, he could again find alliance with Sedgwick. Axiom 5 of the Introduction to Epistemology of the Closet reads: “The historical search for a Great Paradigm shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.” Sedgwick points out that notions of what it means to experience or act upon same-sex desire is less a historical arc that brings us to our current ideas of “gay” than it is an accumulation of notions and paradigms. And here she will part ways with Kramer. Sedgwick argues that homosexuality, as it is understood in America and Britain, is unstable and incoherent. She points out that at times homosexuality is defined as “minoritizing”—meaning there’s a distinct group of people that are really and truly gay. At other times, it is seen as “majoritizing”—meaning that everyone is a little bit gay or everyone has the potential to experience same-sex desire. But these two mutually exclusive understandings work together in the service of homophobia. She shows how the very successful “homosexual panic” defense draws on both sides of these incompatible ideas. Sedgwick is less concerned with picking the right version than with showing how these versions operate, particularly how they enforce homophobia by creating logical loops that punish gay people and even justify their murder.
Moving back to Foucault, it’s curious to hear Kramer disavow him, since David Halperin, in his excellent Saint Foucault, points out that Foucault’s History of Sexuality was a major source of inspiration for some of the activists in ACT-UP, the organization that Kramer founded. As Halperin puts it, “on Foucault’s view, power is not a substance but a relation. Power is therefore not possessed but exercised.” In fact, Kramer’s The Tragedy of Today’s Gays is deeply invested in this idea. Kramer is not asking “Today’s Gays” to use the power they have but to realize that power is always there. It’s not that gays have a power they aren’t using, but that the potential power they have is not becoming kinetic.
Foucault is a curious thinker in that no one else ever seems to have gotten his facts so wrong while having ideas so useful. And while Foucault can be a frustrating read—I’ve more than once tried to follow a complicated argument for pages before being told that this is the counter position he’ll be arguing against—his ideas are remarkably pervasive. Chauncey finds that his history of New York “confirms several of Michel Foucault’s most speculative and brilliant insights.” Foucault was deeply concerned with how to study the past. He considered himself a genealogist, working in a Nietzschean mold to discover discontinuity and disjuncture, rather than the trajectories (that famous arc bending toward justice) that historians tend to specialize in. The concept of Foucault’s that I’ve found most useful is the idea that every moment of repression contains the possibility of liberation and vice versa. Perhaps the emergence of the “Prop 8 Generation” of activists (or “Stonewall 2.0”) is an example. The (temporary) end of same-sex marriage in California has sparked activism among a previously complacent group of young gays. In standing up for Foucault, I have to admit that I’m less fond of Foucault’s writings than I am of how they’ve been deployed by queer theorists (particularly Halperin, Sedgwick, and Butler).
IN A SPEECH that Kramer gave at Yale, he said: “I would like to proclaim with great pride: I am not queer! And neither are you! When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world.”
I am sympathetic to Kramer’s concern that the word “queer” is a problem. I’ve more than once encountered people who regard the word as anathema to gay progress, rights, and acceptance. Forgetting myself once in Kentucky, I remarked to a table full of schoolteachers that the English program in which I study is remarkably queer. They seemed appalled. But the words that Kramer prefers—“gay” and “homosexual”—have their own problems and histories. In fact, as Chauncey writes, the word “queer” began its life in gay argot as a way to distinguish masculine “queers” from feminine “fairies.” “Gay” has its own history of meaning “hedonistic” and “frivolous,” as well as referring to female prostitutes. And “homosexual” is the word that won out over numerous other contenders for the medical term. “Gay” has come to seem relatively innocuous, but we should remember that gay versus queer is something of an internal conflict.
Actually, the word gay was originally a code word that allowed gay men and lesbians to communicate without straights knowing what they were saying. During the early 1970’s burst of post-Stonewall activism, “gay” replaced “homophile” as a way to indicate a commitment to homosexual rights under the larger rubric of all oppressed peoples. The Gay Liberation Front, naming itself for the National Liberation Front of the Vietcong, had affiliations with the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers. One of their chants was “Two, Four, Six, Eight / Smash the church, smash the state!” The word “gay” was meant to show a broad defiance of bourgeois norms, and it was meant to stand in opposition to the “homophile” desire to make homosexuals acceptable. When one remembers that the GLF took their inspiration from the Vietcong, the word “queer” hardly seems so radical.
Queer theory is usually distinguished from other bodies of thinking about sexual minorities by its attachment to a set of postmodern thinkers, mostly French, who don’t regard the self as “natural” but rather as a set of negotiations with those around us and with the categories that our culture makes possible for us to know. These thinkers—Louis Althusser, Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Foucault, and Roland Barthes make the short list—tend to regard selfhood as being in flux, and language as creating meaning rather than innocently capturing it. The famous example from Althusser is of “hailing”—that how you are addressed tells you who you are. When I was nine years old, for example, and I went upstairs to ask my mother was sodomy was—I had been watching a news report on the Hardwick v. Bowers decision—I realized that I had a problem, particularly since I had just had my first same-sex experience at a sleepover. I suddenly understood myself as a proto-criminal, a Cub Scout with a secret. This is not reducible to a simple nurture vs. nature, with postmodernist queer theory insisting on nurture, and rejecting nature out of hand. Rather, queer theory posits that complicated processes of identity, recognition, and possibility shape our lives and identities.
I believe that queer theory offers us excellent tools for understanding those processes. That is the central point of David Halperin in Saint Foucault: we can better make sense of ourselves and our situation by using these theoretical tools. Halperin praises Foucault’s theory and Chauncey’s history. It’s a false choice between them. But I do not believe that queer theory is easily isolable from Gay Studies or Gender Studies or Trans Studies or any other body of thought about sexual minorities. Queer identity does not preclude gay identity, lesbian identity, etc. Rather, “queer” as I comprehend it is a big tent approach to sexual minorities. I am very much a gay man, right down to my love of Bette Davis. But I hope that my identification as queer indicates my commitment to other members of the alphabet soup coalition that just keeps adding letters. I think we’re up to six: LGBTIQ (the final “Q” is for “questioning”). I hope that the word Queer suggests that those letters who haven’t yet found their voice (or letter) are not only welcome, but integral to our fight.
Earlier in this essay, I invoked two novels with characters who wish that heterosexuality hadn’t written everything else out of the history books. It’s my contention, and I will say queer theory’s contention, that of the many things that need to get back into the history books, gayness is only one of them. As gay men, we’ve risen pretty far in the years since Stonewall. But others have not made as much progress. Once, as a visiting poet at a relatively isolated university, one of the students I was meeting with came out to me as transgendered. We discussed what she should expect going forward as a trans writer. In due course she observed: “You’ve already had your Stonewall, but we haven’t really had ours.” “Honey,” I replied, “Stonewall was every bit your Stonewall, and don’t you forget it.” The problem with insisting on gay/straight/bi litmus tests that can be applied throughout history is not just that other periods have had other understandings of gender and sexuality. The problem is that it lets some of us be visible while it erases others (in this case the drag queens and transwomen at Stonewall). A quick viewing of La Cage Aux Folles should make it as clear as a thorough reading of Chauncey’s Gay New York that gay men’s history is intimately tied up with many other formations of sexuality and gender. And for the past twenty years, that umbrella term for “everything else” has been the word “queer.”
Returning one last time to Faggots (a gay novel) and Stone Butch Blues (a queer novel), what seems to me at the heart of both is a portrayal of how oppressed groups end up lashing out at themselves when they can’t lash out at their oppressors. In Kramer’s book, the men can never love or be loved; they pursue sex and drugs and pleasure, but their commitments to each other are ruled by cruelty, whim, and infidelity. In Stone Butch Blues, the women lash out at each other in bar fights. The butch becomes “stone” when she has to deaden herself to the constant humiliation and violence to which her body is subject. Jess proudly tells her former lover that she never hit a butch. No matter how much the temptation to a bar fight, Jess takes pride in having never passed the hurt of a homophobic world onto the women who shared her life.
I think Jess calls us to an ideal—never to lash out at those close to us, because we’ve been hurt by the world that hates us. I don’t believe that proving Lincoln’s homosexuality would have the impact that Larry Kramer believes it would. I don’t see why proving that George Washington was gay would make a person any more accepting of homosexuality than of slave holding. I began to write this essay in a pique of anger. Kramer was attacking the ideas that I cherish, and in the pages of a journal I love. But I always knew that I was writing this essay about a wider community. Kramer is not alone in being frustrated by ideas that are often expressed in difficult or obscure prose and that demand a mastery of words like “diachronic,” “hegemonic,” and the curious construction “always-already.” My gratitude to these thinkers is that they struggled for words when their ideas had no language to fit them. I hope that I haven’t lashed out at Kramer. I hope I’ve made an argument that queer theory is in fact complementary to gay history. And I hope I’ve made a coherent argument that queer theory—far from being the enemy of gay people (including lesbians)—is in fact a useful body of thinking that can provide us with thoroughgoing analyses of situations while offering directions for activism—without having to abandon anyone who needs or wants to join our struggle.
References
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1994.
Chauncey, George. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality. Basic Books, 2004.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Firebrand Books, 1993. Alyson Books, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Vintage Books, 1990.
Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. Routledge, 1990.
Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kramer, Larry. “Review: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform.” Huffington Post (on-line). June16, 2009.
Kramer, Larry. Faggots. New American Library, 1978.
Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005.
Robb, Graham. Rimbaud. W. W. Norton, 2000.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.
Jason Schneiderman, the author of Sublimation Point
