Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2001"

Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality

Abstract: In modernity, identities inevitably become global. Indeed, few things remain local in the aftermath of the rise of capitalism. Just as goods and people come to circulate in new ways, so too identities emerge and come into specific relations of circulation and expansion. In this globalized framework of encounter and exchange, sexual identities are similar to other kinds of identities in that they are imbued with power relations. These power relations are connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization, but they have also generated new asymmetries. Our task is to examine both the specificities and the continuities within the globalization of sexual identities at the present juncture. For the most part, throughout the twentieth century, what we might call politically “progressive” studies of sexuality emerged as a result of identity politics and social movements. Increasingly, with the rise of ethnic and postcolonial studies and the growing emphasis on diaspora in American studies, the scholarship on sexuality is globalized.1 Yet thinking simply about global identities does not begin to get at the complex terrain of sexual politics that is at once national, regional, local, even “cross-cultural” and hybrid. In many works on globalization, the “global” is seen either as a homogenizing influence or as a neocolonial movement of ideas and capital from West to non-West.2 Debates on the nature of global identities have suggested the inadequacy of understanding globalization simply through political economy or through theories of “Western” cultural imperialism and have pushed us to probe further the relationship between globalization and culture.3 Yet how do we understand these emerging identities, given the divergent theories regarding the relationship between globalization and cultural forma-

Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality

Abstract: I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we can be. I am not speaking of power only in a juridical or positive sense, but I am referring to the workings of a certain regulatory regime, one that informs the law, and one that also exceeds the law. When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. So I propose to broach the relationship between variable orders of intelligibility and the genesis and knowability of the human. And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly de* ne intelligibility.

"Spoiled Identity": Stephen Gordon's Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History

Abstract: Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men.”1 Nietzsche’s diatribe against the “born failure” in The Genealogy of Morals anticipates a common reaction to the heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. A few months after the novel’s obscenity trial, a verse lampoon titled The Sink of Solitude appeared, mocking the fate of “pathetic post-war lesbians.”2 The following year Janet Flanner, writing more coolly in the New Yorker, quipped that Hall’s “loneliness was greater than had been supposed.”3 From the moment of its publication, readers balked at the novel’s melodramatic account of what Hall called “the tragical problem of sexual inversion.”4 But the readers who have reacted most adversely to the novel’s dark portrait of inverted life are those whose experience Hall claimed to represent. The Well, still the most famous and most widely read lesbian novel, is also the novel most hated by lesbians themselves. Since gay liberation Hall’s novel has been singularly out of step with the discourse of gay pride. One reader, voicing a common reaction, said that she “consider[ed] this book very bad news for lesbians.”5 According to a model of readerly contagion not unlike the poisoning effect of ressentiment that Nietzsche traces in the Genealogy, Hall’s account of Stephen Gordon’s life is a depressing spectacle that must undermine life among lesbians. With its inverted heroine and its tragic view of same-sex relations, The Well has repeatedly come into conflict with contemporary understandings of the mean-

Ellen : Making Queer Television History

Abstract: When a television broadcast is hailed as a “first,” when it alters the flow of the network schedule, when it is described as television history, you know you are in the realm of the media event. This was certainly the case with Ellen’s coming-out episode on 30 April 1997. The historic status of this program was cemented by some linked observations that cropped up, in different forms, throughout the extensive coverage of the broadcast. The first was the perception of the show’s lesbian character and star as a first, as something that had never before occurred in television. But the second observation, which often followed on the heels of the first one, was the somewhat contradictory assertion that gay characters and stars had existed on the small screen for a long time. Writers in the gay press and in mainstream entertainment news would affirm the status of the show as a first, then generate long lists of the queer people of all sorts who had appeared on television in decades past. Such moments often turned into genealogical recitations of milestones in the liberalization of the sitcom’s representational politics. In April 1997 a writer in the Denver Post, for example, awarded Ellen a place on the liberal allstar team of sitcom firsts:

OH BEHAVE!Austin Powers and the Drag Kings

Abstract: There has been much ink spilled in the popular media and in popular queer culture about the intimate relations between gay men and straight women. The “fag hag” role has become a staple feature of popular film, and at least part of the explanation for how gay male culture and gay male images have so thoroughly penetrated popular film and TV cultures lies in the recognized and indeed lived experience of bonds between “queens” and “girls.” There is no such parallel between lesbians and straight men. While the dynamic between lesbians and hetero-males could change significantly in the next few decades as more and more lesbians become parents and raise sons, for the moment there seem to be no sitcoms on the horizon ready to exploit the humorous possibilities of interactions between a masculine woman and her butch guy pal. This is not to say that no relations exist between the way lesbians produce and circulate cultures of masculinity and the way men do. However, these relations are for the most part submerged and mediated and difficult to read. This essay will trace the strange and barely discernible influence of lesbian drag-king cultures on hetero-male comic film. My contention will not be that straight men learn how to parody masculinity from butch women and then take that parody to the bank; rather, I will try to map circuits of subcultural influence across a wide range of textual play. I take for granted Dick Hebdige’s formulation of subcultures as marginalized cultures that are quickly absorbed by capitalism and then robbed of their oppositional power,1 but I will expand on Hebdige’s influential reading of subcultures by arguing that some subcultures do not simply fade away as soon as they have been plundered for material. Furthermore, I emphasize

Michel Foucault's Histories of Sexuality

Abstract: Didier Eribon is one of the preeminent intellectual historians in France. Best known around the world for his landmark biography Michel Foucault (1989; English, 1991), which has been translated into seventeen languages, he has also published books of conversations with Georges Dumezil, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ernst Gombrich. He followed up his biography of Foucault with a more specialized study, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (1994). In recent years Eribon has become one of France’s most vocal public intellectuals working on gay and lesbian issues, in particular civil rights for gays and lesbians. Some of his writings and interviews on these questions have been published as Papiers d’identite: Interventions sur la question gay (2000). He has been active, too, in encouraging the development of lesbian and gay studies in France. He organized an international conference on that subject at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in June 1997 and edited the collection of papers that resulted from it: Les etudes gay et lesbiennes (1998). Currently, in collaboration with the sociologist Francoise Gaspard, he conducts a seminar called “Sociologie des homosexualites” at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999 Eribon published Reflexions sur la question gay, which quickly became a French best-seller. Duke University Press will publish the complete English translation in the near future. It is a good example of a kind of writing— perhaps more common in France than in the United States—that is simultaneously accessible to a general reading public and accountable to standards of rigor typical of the most demanding academic discourses. Eribon is an exacting historian. In the third and final section of Reflexions—devoted to Michel Foucault, and

Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust

Abstract: In among the many ways I do identify as a woman, the identification as a gay person is a firmly male one, identification “as” a gay man; and in among its tortuous and alienating paths are knit the relations, for me, of telling and of knowing. (Perhaps I should say that it is not to me as a feminist that this intensively loaded male identification is most an embarrassment; no woman becomes less a woman through any amount of “male identification,” to the extent that femaleness is always (though always differently) to be looked for in the tortuousness, in the strangeness of the figure made between the flatly gendered definition from an outside view and the always more or less crooked stiles to be surveyed from an inner. A male-identified woman, even if there could thoroughly be such a thing, would still be a real kind of woman just as (though no doubt more inalterably than) an assimilated Jew is a real kind of Jew: more protected in some ways, more vulnerable in others, than those whose paths of identification have been different, but as fully of the essence of the thing.) —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written”

Don't Stop the Music: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Abstract: This roundtable discussion offers a glimpse of one of U.S. lesbian culture’s most important institutions, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2000. The festival emerged from 1970s lesbian feminism, which established women-only spaces and genres to nurture women’s creativity and community. Its longevity and continuity are testaments to the dedication of Lisa Vogel, one of the festival’s founders and its current producer, and of the thousands of women who have made the journey to “the land.” The festival carries enormous symbolic significance, even for those who have never been there; it often represents 1970s lesbian feminism, and all the opinions it generates, despite the fact that the festival itself has evolved and grown over the last quarter century. As roundtable participants, we present an inside view of Michigan because we are all festival workers, part of the workforce of five to six hundred women who set up the festival every year for the five to six thousand festivalgoers. As members of this intentional community for a period of ten days to a month, workers play, fight, perform for each other, work extremely hard, and debate the state of the lesbian nation. The discussion here is not intended to be representative of the festival; in fact, it questions whether such representation is possible. Instead it is merely one of thousands of conversations among friends that Michigan inspires. One reason for publicizing the festival through this roundtable is the controversy that arose at the 1999 festival over transgender inclusion and the festival’s “womyn-born womyn” admission policy. In 1999 a group of transgender people and their allies set up Son of Camp Trans (the return of 1994’s Camp Trans) outside the Michigan festival gates to draw attention to these issues. Members of Son

Conjuring The Tempest : Derek Jarman and the Spectacle of Redemption

Abstract: In Dancing Ledge Derek Jarman explains his motivations for filming Shakespeare’s play, saying, “The concept of forgiveness in The Tempest attracted me; it’s a rare enough quality and almost absent in our world. To know who your enemies are, but to accept them for what they are, befriend them, and plan for a happier future is something we sorely need.”1 It should be quickly pointed out that Jarman was not generally known for making sunny and optimistic films. The film that preceded The Tempest (1979) was the punk apocalypse Jubilee (1977), and among his next films would be the even more apocalyptic The Last of England (1987), a flatout indictment of the contemporary English nation.2 Filming a version of The Tempest that emphasized forgiveness did not necessarily mean, then, that Jarman had capitulated to the Whig view of history, or of Shakespeare. Indeed, except for one spectacular scene near the conclusion, the film is quite dark, both literally and metaphorically. The film is shot in a gloomy country house, with the lighting kept low in order to “let the shadows invade.”3 Prospero is not an aging, benign patriarch but a virile, vaguely sadistic magician; Ariel is not his cheery, ethereal sidekick but a morose and timid slave. Which is to say Jarman’s interest in forgiveness means that the film articulates a possible version of the nation, a happier future, while remembering its unhappy present. It does this primarily by intervening in the production of its past.4 Jarman’s version of The Tempest is notable for a number of things: his unusual and controversial casting choices, especially with respect to race; his radical paring down and rearrangement of the text, following William S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique; and the penultimate scene of the film, which moves the masque out of act 4 and makes it the climax of the drama. These three elements of the film are, I argue, related to the film’s critique of contemporary English society. The masque form in particular is crucial to Jarman’s project. As David Bevington and

DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS Literary Genealogy and Lesbian Authenticity

Abstract: Although sexual activity between women has been documented since ancient Greece, it is no longer a secret that nineteenth-century European men of science —sexologists, psychiatrists, criminologists—are responsible for “discovering” the modern lesbian.1 Men of letters were no less assiduous than their clinical brothers in their devotion to portraying same-sex female eroticism. This was particularly true in nineteenth-century France, where nearly all fictions depicting female homoeroticism were male-authored. This body of literature includes such well-known figures as Honoré de Balzac’s exotic Paquita (The Girl with the Golden Eyes [1835]), Charles Baudelaire’s “condemned women” (The Flowers of Evil [1857]), and Emile Zola’s Sapphic courtesans (Nana [1880]). Other texts, many forgotten today, flooded the literary marketplace after the midcentury, some becoming runaway best-sellers (such as Adolphe Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme [1870] and Catulle Mendès’s Méphistophéla [1890]). If, to paraphrase Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin, sisters had been doing it for themselves all along, what happened when, finally, at the turn of the twentieth century, they began writing about it? A very visible group of international lesbians gathered around the American Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris, and the culture that resulted came to be known as Sappho 1900. One of the most prolific writers associated with Barney and her circle, the Englishwoman Renée Vivien, trod on Baudelaire’s terrain; like him, she wrote “lesbian poetry,” but for the first time from a position of subjectivity. For critics attributing to Baudelaire the invention of Sapphic modernism, Vivien’s work is merely derivative, insofar as it is indebted to the protodecadent lesbian poetry of The Flowers of Evil. Some go so far as to call Vivien’s poetry, with no irony, an inferior copy of Baudelaire’s. For those of us interested in questions of lesbian subjectivity, such suggestions raise several intriguing problems: How could Baudelaire author better or more authen-

The City of Collective Memory

Abstract: How does the city figure in narratives of memory and history forthcoming from that loose group of individuals whose social existence is a product of the city itself? If lesbians, gays, and queers of all sorts owe their emergence to the modern metropolis, where they were hailed as a new “city type” in police and newspaper reports and, no less scandalously, in the first urban poetry (Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), then how do they figure the city in genealogies of their own telling? How do they see themselves arising and enduring within urban culture but without the traditional means of social reproduction afforded by family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion? If the city is the site of the “coming out” of vaguely constellated desires into a community of love that dare speak its name, is this erotic society not then radically susceptible to the shocks and catastrophes that structure urban modernity? Can social belonging be established by something as volatile as the modern metropolis? Memory is possible because it is collective. An individual knows herself or himself as a being of enduring, if evolving, character because she or he possesses memories that are collectively articulated, revised, and confirmed. Thus Maurice Halbwachs contended in La mémoire collective, published in Paris in the wake of World War II when memory, traumatic memory, and memory’s very survival became an urgent concern among sociologists. Though schooled in Bergson, Halbwachs departed from the idea that memory is a matter of durée, the persistent recognition of images, dually facilitated by neurophysiology and phenomenology of brain/mind. Halbwachs argued that memory is much more material than that, that it is a matter not just of consciously lived time but of socially lived space and the collective representation of that space. Older districts of foreign cities, cities we have never traveled, are able to recall us to ourselves—“indeed, the scene

Imperial New York: Destruction and Disneyfication under Emperor Giuliani

Abstract: During the early 1970s, as a Harvard undergraduate, I became a habitué of Boston’s leather bars, especially Herbie’s Ramrod Room, adjacent to the bus depot in Park Square, and the Shed, a few doors from the Huntington Avenue YMCA. Neither was situated in an upscale neighborhood like Beacon Hill or the Back Bay. Instead I was forced to walk through the Combat Zone, Boston’s counterpart to New York’s Times Square, past peep shows and adult theaters, and navigate the Fenway, at that time a primarily residential neighborhood occupied by seniors, students, queers, and aging hippie refugees from the 1960s. My suburban, middleclass upbringing had warned me about life in the naked city. The messages I had heard about poor people, prostitutes, drugs, and street violence told me to rush through these neighborhoods with great trepidation. While my Ivy League life directed me to sherry hours and literary talks, my sex life, apparently, was leading me right into the gutter. The men whom I met at these bars and with whom I tricked and formed friendships also brought me to places I had never been: local bowling leagues, Friday-night poker games, the dog races. I learned a geography of the city beyond

Lovely Lesbians; or, Pussy Galore

Abstract: From Sharon Stone’s ice pick–wielding high jinks in Basic Instinct to Ellen DeGeneres’s earnest self-revelation to Ally McBeal’s vapid experimentation, fictional lesbians have gotten a lot of press over the past few years. The preponderance of lesbian themes may well be the fruit of a discovery on the part of entertainment executives that lesbian plotlines represent the only erotic configuration more or less guaranteed to appeal to all sexual demographics. Lesbians themselves, no matter how indignant over exploitation and inauthenticity, will never be able to resist taking a look at exactly how they are misrepresented; straight women are notoriously curious about such matters; straight men will line up in any weather; and, finally, gay men can generally be counted on for at least a token modicum of solidarity and identification. In any case, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a heterosexual man in search of entertainment will want to watch women have sex. I began to ponder this phenomenon seriously some years ago while watching Roseanne. In one memorable episode Roseanne and her butch-but-straight sister, Jackie, get into an altercation about Jackie’s decision to join the police force. They end up, in that over-the-top Roseanne way that I still miss, wrestling violently on the couch. Roseanne’s husband, Dan, comes in, watches his wife and sister-in-law flail together for a moment, and finally asks: “Is this a sex thing? Because if it is, I’ll go get my camera.” The force of the joke depends on a peculiar assumption pushed to its limit: a heterosexual man finds the idea of women having sex together more compelling than any other conceivable contingency; this image somehow trumps all others. Faced with the spectacle of two women grappling, Dan is so distracted by the possibility that he is witnessing some arcane form of lesbian sex that he is prepared to ignore the scene’s more likely implications: that Roseanne and Jackie are engaged in hand-to-hand combat, which is in fact the

Pulpitic Publicity: James Baldwin and the Queer Uses of Religious Words

Abstract: “Light and life to all He brings, / Risen with healing in His Wings!” Unexpectedly, in the work of James Baldwin, religious language is the rhetoric through which queer characters create what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner would call “counterintimacies.”1 In their suggestive essay, “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner locate queer counterintimacies and queer “counterpublics” in unofficial and slightly romanticized locations, the worlds of “entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (558). Yet queer counterpublics are found not only in the “dirty-talk” (558) of the world-making and hazy spaces that Berlant and Warner pose against an official heterosexual normal. Perhaps queerness might also be found in the “sanitized” public discourses to which all of us are subject: in the excessive morality and normative words of a religious lexicon, for example, that by many definitions quickly offers the possibility of a life that cannot be explicitly articulated at the present tense of its experience. Sometimes, that is, the form of the “normal” and the assumption of identities that are quickly recognizable and socially understood, that seem normal, express a desire not merely for heterosexual enfranchisement but for legibility, community, and another route into social resistance that need not be so “counter” public in order to be innovative and queer.2 Indeed Berlant elsewhere acknowledges that “the wish for normalcy everywhere heard these days, voiced by minoritized subjects, often expresses a wish not to have to push so hard in order to have a ‘life.’”3 Certainly the decision to pursue routes through rather than against more socially recognizable structures and institutions of intimacy does not always imply that one has uncritically submitted to, or is even protected by, the state or even the church.4 The example of Baldwin is instructive because his iconic legacy confounds the ways both queer theory and critical race theory have articulated what counts

Fever in the Archive

Abstract: These eight stills come from videotapes that are part of the Royal S. Marks AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library. The collection, sponsored by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, will eventually encompass over three thousand videotapes that document the grassroots response in the United States to the AIDS crisis. The collection will include both finished tapes and source material from more than thirty donors and at least eight cities across the United States. It contains hundreds of hours of original camera tapes from DIVATV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) documenting ACT UP/New York demonstrations, the original source tapes for Silverlake Life, and tapes from such significant collectives as Testing the Limits, WAVE (Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise), Gran Fury, and House of Color. One of the project’s most valuable aspects is its commitment to remastering one thousand hours of videotape, yielding archival masters and VHS reference copies that will be available for viewing at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room of the central branch of the New York Public Library. In addition, the Guggenheim Museum hosted a series of eight shows of works from the collection in December 2000, called Fever in the Archive. Many of these tapes, although made solely as timely responses to the crisis, retain a remarkable vitality. They are important for their largely unrecognized innovativeness in documentary form. Not only do they record the events of the crisis as they happened, but they were made by people participating in these events, not by outside observers analyzing or judging the past. The tapes convey, in an unmediated way, what it was like to take part in these events. The AIDS activist movement was built on an analysis of mass media as an essential part of American culture. It assumed that “the whole world was watching” on TV. The demonstrations were designed to take advantage of that immediacy, which in most cases meant playing to the mainstream media. Because the

The Special Issue That Shagged Me

Abstract: Years ago, while teaching “if” clauses in French language classes, I used to give a short essay assignment that seldom failed to yield interesting results: the paper was to be titled “Si j’étais un homme” [If I were a man] or “Si j’étais une femme” [If I were a woman]. Although I never specified who was to address which topic, the students, predictably, chose to imagine being the sex they were not. Girls often approached the assignment as a forum in which to voice complaints about gender inequities (e.g., “If I were a man, I would fart and burp in public and treat everyone badly”), or, conversely, Emma Bovary–style, they imagined being the sort of men they wanted to be courted by but had apparently never encountered. (Among other things, the assignment provided an incentive to use the dictionary.) The boys, too, were sometimes prodded into romantic reverie by their grammatical task, but one recurrent response leads me to cite this pedagogical exercise in the present context. Every once in a while—it must have happened three or four times during my career as a language instructor—I would receive a variation on the following fantasy: “If I were a woman, I would never leave my room. I would spend all my time in front of the mirror, caressing my breasts.” The first time I read this response, from an ostentatiously heterosexual student who proudly displayed the insignia of his fraternity on all his clothing, I laughed. What made me laugh was partly the incongruous image his paper suggested: I could not help visualizing the boy’s head, baseball cap and all, atop a voluptuous female body, as he fervently stroked his breasts before a mirror. I was amused by what I took to be an evident misapprehension on the student’s part. I wanted to tell him that he had not really completed the assignment, that he had failed to imagine being a real woman but had instead conjured up a fantasy of “being a woman” in which he remained a man but had unlimited masturbatory

Social Construction of Gay Male Identity in Brazil

Abstract: The 1990s saw a profusion of anthropological publishing in English on gender in Latin America, with a special focus on the construction of male gender and on practices of homosexuality and bisexuality among men in that region.1 To this growing literature Richard Parker contributes his excellent Beneath the Equator, about the historical development of male homosexual identity and practice in Brazil. Images of Brazil, fueled by advertising from international tourism agencies, include the pleasures of Rio de Janeiro’s sweeping beaches and sparkling nightlife, representations of hot times to be had in a lush tropical setting. As Parker has shown in works published from 1985 to the present, sex—hot, exotic, available—has been part of Brazil’s allure since the earliest colonial times.2 In Beneath the Equator he offers a broad political-economic history of the emergence of a variety of ways of celebrating male homosexuality in modern Brazil. Parker is perhaps the foremost authority on Brazilian sexuality writing in English. His previous work has been criticized for proposing to explain Brazilian sexuality in general while actually telling more about how Brazilian men think of sex than Brazilian women, a criticism with which I agree.3 Beneath the Equator

Made from the Stuff of Saints: Chateaubriand's Rene and Custine's Search for a Homosexual Identity

Abstract: Reviewing Anka Muhlstein’s Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine, Robert Darnton, the eminent American historian of the French Revolution, has recently commented that the existence in Paris in the 1830s of “a homosexual ménage established at the pinnacle of high society was an extraordinary phenomenon.”1 Given its contexts and development, it was indeed. Darnton’s estimate of the marquis’s achievement exudes wonderment at every turn: for not only was Custine’s salon a milestone in the history of homosexuality, but it was also “an extraordinary phenomenon” in view of Parisian high society in the early nineteenth century. That two men living domestically as if married—Custine and his lover, the Englishman Edward Saint-Barbe (or Edouard de Sainte-Barbe, as he became known)—should have filled their hotel de ville with the illuminati of the day was genuinely remarkable. As Darnton notes, “They gave dinner parties, concerts, poetry readings, and receptions, where aristocrats rubbed shoulders with the most famous figures of the Romantic era: Chopin, Berlioz, Balzac, Musset, Lamartine, Hugo, Stendhal, Heine, Sand, Gautier” (16). Darnton remains amazed at the achievement, enacted long before Oscar Wilde convened his secret nocturnal

Communism, Perversion, and Other Crimes against the State: The FBI Files of Klaus and Erika Mann

Abstract: Only a man at the end of his rope would write to the U.S Government to defend himself without knowing what the charges were. In 1943 Klaus Mann wrote a seven-page, single spaced memorandum in which he gave Attorney General Francis Biddle ample information about both his political and sexual past—just in case it was the information the government already had. Eloquent and impassioned as his letter is, it would seem an exercise in futility, though he could not have done otherwise. Mann was desperate to be sent overseas as a member of the United States Armed Forces, and had devoted the previous 10 years to railing against the Nazi regime when few were prepared to listen; now he longed to be part of the Allied fight against tyranny and fascism in his former homeland.

Queers in Revolutionary Cuba

Abstract: A British trade unionist and queer activist who hails from Turkey greeted me at the Havana airport on the vespers of the millennium with the warning “In order to understand Cuba, you need a lot of patience.” This, for me, was not a problem. It had taken me twenty-five years to visit this tropical island at long last. I had attempted to travel with a squadron of enthusiastic radicals on the fifth Venceremos Brigade in 1975 to show solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, but I was bounced for allegedly being “insensitive to Third World issues.” Twenty-some years later my cousin, at the time a member of the National Committee of the Brigade in the United States, which made the decision to ax me, confessed that it was actually pure and simple homophobia. At Cuba’s 1971 First Congress on Culture and Education, homosexuality had been declared “antisocial behavior.” Wayward leftists and gay and lesbian activists who might have questioned or protested this reactionary position of the Cuban government were carefully weeded out of the next few contingents of brigadistas who circuitously voyaged to the land of Fidel in defiance of the United States–imposed blockade of the island. There they cut sugarcane, harvested fruit, and built houses to show support for a new regime that

A Hard Left Fist

Abstract: Ialways thought I’d begin to tell my story with my mother, the Eldorado of my desire, but while I’ve been struggling to begin, the fathers and their masculine principle have pushed their way forward. Is it because my masculinity defines me more than my desire does? Or because masculinity is more associated with the disciplines of history and anthropology that have shaped my outlook? I had three fathers. The first was my mother’s first husband, a Hungarian Jewish refugee photographer named Laszlo Gluck, much older than she, who had died of a heart attack. On my original birth certificate he was named as my father, and I had his last name until I was eight years old. Recently, when I asked my mother why I had been named Esther-Mary, she said that these had been names of Gluck’s relatives; she had wanted to think of me as his child. My second father was Saul Newton, a Communist Party organizer, also Jewish, who had married my mother after World War II and then adopted me. These were the two fathers I was told about, growing up. At nineteen I learned that there had been a third man, whose affair with my mother had caused my birth. My biological “father”—would this person now be called a “sperm provider”?—was also Jewish and left-wing, the only kind of man who turned my WASP mother on. I have become some version of those men, the ones who turned my mother on, even though, because of my chromosomes—XX as far as I know—and a reproductive biology, which is, or rather was, capable of giving birth, my sex is female. During my lonely childhood I was stuck in the girl gender, which is linked, worldwide, to hard work, low pay, and disrespect, though this is not the only reason why, for me, neither being female nor being a woman has ever been easy or unequivocal. Later, when I found gay life, I was given a second gender: butch. This masculine gay gender makes my body recognizable, and it alone makes sexual love possible. Butch is my handle and my collective name—a tribe, the late

"You Will Fit the Tighter into My Embrace!": Henry James's Letters to Jocelyn Persse

Abstract: Harvard’s Houghton Library contains eighty-three letters from Henry James to his Irish friend Dudley Jocelyn Persse (1873–1943); to date only eleven have been published.1 James indeed was a prolific letter writer. At latest count there are over 10,500 extant letters, the majority of which have never been published, that he wrote over a fifty-year period.2 In and of themselves these letters constitute a remarkable history of Anglo-American culture during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In addition, James’s remarkable outpouring of letters from 1906 and later places these final epistles among his last, greatest literary texts. This dossier includes thirteen letters from James to Persse, letters indicative of the breadth and depth of their friendship.3 For reasons that we do not fully understand, James never formed a permanent relationship with a lover. There was no significant other for him. But with several of his younger companions (Hendrik Andersen, Morton Fullerton, Jonathan Sturges, Howard Sturgis, and Hugh Walpole, among others) he achieved temporary liaisons that afforded him close, loving friendships. And he wrote many letters to these beloved companions, epistles that were evident love letters on the one hand and on the other courageous speech acts. After the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895, certainly, the very act of composing love letters to same-sex individuals placed James in possible jeopardy. Nonetheless he wrote hundreds of these affectionate epistles, to Jocelyn Persse some of the most potentially incriminating. James met Persse, who was thirty years old at the time, at the wedding of Frances Sitwell and Sir Sidney Colvin in 1903. James later spoke of their meeting

Take Me to Your Reader

Abstract: An anthology is first, a symbol of a community. . . . [It] also is an economical way of presenting many voices at once.” Assotto Saint’s comment on black gay literary anthologies in Queer Representations (374) applies to all four weighty titles reviewed here. Together, they constitute an impressive statement of the vibrancy and visibility, the diversity and depth, of a field of study institutionalized for barely a decade. They also signal a new direction. All of them register frustration with the dominance of literary and cultural studies over lesbian and gay studies and offer in response something of an empirical turn. Routledge’s Social Perspec-