Saying Au Revoir to the City of Dreaming Spires

It is just gone 6pm on an uncharacteristically beautiful summer day, and I have been distracting myself from the discombobulation of leaving by leaning out my window and watching the people hustle and bustle up and down Broad Street. There are tourists in big hats and sunglasses, and there are students in subfusc or dressed for formal halls and Schools dinners, and there is everyone in between, town and gown alike. The sun casts shadows across the storefronts and Exeter College across the road, and I have spent much of today pacing this room, thinking about how much has changed since I first leaned out this window six months ago, jetlagged and disoriented, when the sun set at 4:30 and I was newly arrived, just another American abroad.

The past six months for me have been in all respects about the seductive power of this city. As the days have lengthened, I have felt its hold grow on me, even as my emotions towards it become ever more complicated. In the past six months I have wrestled with eye-to-eye confrontations with privilege and elitism, and as I have become inured to formal dinners so have I spent many hours trying to teach, pushing gently against the current of classism, sexism, and homophobia that has characterized too many of my interactions here. I have spent hours sitting in the Upper Reading Room, hours walking in the Parks or in Christ Church Meadow, hours in this room on Broad Street, hours in the Ashmolean, hours in the chapels of my own and other colleges, constantly feeling past and present collide in uncanny ways. I wrote a 45-page essay about one Oxford-educated Victorian historian who had some things to say about sexual identity, and I got to know people in this city whose secondary education and Oxford degree course mirrored his, who lived where he did and walked the routes he did and felt the things he did. And I spent hours writing essays about the latest developments in historiography; and I spent hours, particularly those of the early morning, drinking and dancing in the ways that I thought people only did in books, before I came to this city.

Oxford is a small world, a tiny enclosed space where you run into in the reading room people with whom you went to secondary school (or who know people with whom you went to secondary school) and people whom you met when you were out dancing the previous weekend. It is a tiny enclosed space in which, you have to think, those who have never left it cannot be blamed for not always remembering that there is a world outside it. For a bona fide city, some number of times the size of the Princeton campus, it can sometimes feel smaller, more insular, more suction-y. Princeton may be its own little world—the Orange Bubble—but for me Princeton has never seduced the way Oxford does. I miss my friends at Princeton, and I miss the Rocky dining hall. But I have never felt its buildings call to me. I have never felt lucky that it is a place whose streets it is my habit to walk. I have never felt it stir the promise of transhistorical connection deep within me that, before I came to Oxford, I had never felt from a place—only from books.

I finished my last Oxford academic obligation a week ago, and since then I have lounged desultorily through my daily routine, going to the library and eating in hall and spending time with my friends. I have floated disorientatedly through my life, not ready to realize that come this Sunday morning, I will have folded my life back up into two suitcases and I will be on a train away from here. I do not do change well, and I do not do leavings and losings well. I have never found it easy to leave Princeton. I am finding it harder to leave here, in a bizarre way that is new, and difficult for me to understand quite yet. When I moved across the Atlantic, I took one step closer to living a transient academic life, and the number of transatlantic connections I have made since then have reminded me that this is what academia is. Thanks to Facebook and the vagaries of academic nomadism, I know that when I say goodbye to my Oxford friends this weekend, I will do so completely confident that I will see them again. I am a historian of Anglo-American intellect and culture, and therefore there is no question that I will be back to England—and to Oxford—by necessity time and again for the next several decades. And yet. There is something about this city—just being in it, knowing it, working with and against its strange customs—that inverts your expectations of what is normal, making it so challenging to return to the real world. This is not like when you leave Princeton and mourn the loss of the embarrassment of riches that is its constant offerings of free food and t-shirts. This is something like how when you leave what Evelyn Waugh called the “city of aquatint,” the rest of the world seems drained of color by comparison.

And so rather than readjusting your sensibilities, being the better person and realizing Oxford’s flaws, knowing that this city’s life is no healthy thing to accustom oneself to, you find yourself drawn inexorably back. What I think I have learned more than anything in the last six months is why Oxford carries the power of image that drew me to it in the first place. It seduces you with the promise that you can still do good things even when you’ve placed style over substance. It is only in this city of strange ways of teaching, learning, and living that “burn[ing] always with this hard, gem-like flame” can be made truly to seem like the only way to achieve “success in life.” I have worked hard, here. But I have also every day averted my eyes from the homeless people whom this city does so little to help, have in the absence of classroom settings neglected to pay my dues at teaching others, have lived for the sake of pleasure as much as, if not more than, for the sake of bettering. All my life I have worked hard. But I have never until this term played hard as well. Oxford has wormed into my consciousness until it has given me permission to do so. And while this may be cathartic, it is not necessarily healthy.

And so when I get on a train early Sunday morning, and I leave the only place I have ever lived where on Sunday morning I wake up to church bells, I wonder if I will cease to hear the siren song that seduces me into a world of surfaces I once only knew through the written word. But somehow—and particularly as my thinking and writing about Symonds evolves over the course of this next summer, year, and academic lifetime—I suspect that I will continue to detect its echo, even a continent away. And I know in my soul, just as I know that I have fallen in love with this otherworldly place, that I will be coming back. The only question that remains is when—and what sort of person I will have become when next I set foot to pavement in the shadow of the dreaming spires.

“Identity Politics for the Twenty-first Century”; or, More on Pride Month, The Mutable Feast

One of the very few things that this blog has in common with the New York Times Magazine (actually, I think it’s probably the only thing this blog has in common with the NYT Magazine) is that both have in recent years been very good about covering issues related to the state of LGBT/queer history, politics, and identity come June. This week’s Magazine included just such an array of articles, foremost among them the cover story, “Living the Good Lie,” which a friend passed on to me with the words, “Identity politics of the 21st century.”

Truer words were ne’er spoken. The URL of the story, implying the description “Therapists Who Help People Stay in the Closet,” is misleading. The article is in fact about therapists who are—like we have been discussing on this blog and on Facebook for the past several months—destabilizing the coming-out narrative—and the metaphor of the closet—as a psychological panacea. In particular, it follows one therapist, Denis Flanigan, who though is himself gay and has had a long career working with patients with sexual-identity issues, has come to the conclusion that encouraging patients to come out, to assume a normative gay identity, no matter what, isn’t necessarily the best solution for patients who, for example, need to choose between their sexual orientation and their conservative evangelical church. Instead, Flanigan believes in helping people to cope, to get along in their lives, to escape from denial but not necessarily to move to the West Village and make a life on the bar scene, or even to aspire to a white-picket-fence gay-married existence. He helps some of his patients to make peace with celibacy, or with lives married to opposite-sex partners. (Though it should be noted that the article doesn’t address something I think is very important, which is the position of the opposite-sex partners in all this. History tells us that Symonds and Wilde thought of themselves as family men who loved their wives and children even as they carried on dalliances with men, but that unbeknownst to Symonds his wife was miserable and the byproduct of Wilde’s trials is that his wife’s and children’s lives were ruined.) His method is rooted in acknowledging that while sexual orientation is the core of some people’s identities/self-conceptions, it is not at the core of everyone’s. For some people, a different identifying factor, like religion, may be far more central, everything else just superstructure; for some people, religion has the same immutable sense of Truth and born-this-way-ness that sexual orientation has for those who assume a more traditional LGBT identity.

The article does a great job of contextualizing Flanigan’s and other like-minded psychologists’ ideas within the framework of the modern LGBT rights movement and queer theory, sensitive to the fact that “identity” does not always mean “gay identity,” and that even what “gay identity” (or “queer identity,” though most of Flanigan’s patients seem to be same-sex-attracted men) means has changed significantly since the 1960s and before. This is, of course, no surprise to those who study the history of sexuality and who, like certain authors of this blog, spend a lot of time insisting quite vociferously on the point that sexual orientation did not form the fundamental aspect of a person’s self-consciousness a hundred years ago that it does today. But I think even those of us used to looking backward (and it must be said that there are certain parallels to be drawn between the ideas discussed in this article and those of some of the most progressive turn-of-the-century sexologists, like Havelock Ellis) are less inclined to look forward. As a politically-engaged queer-identified person, I often find myself asking where the LGBT rights movement will be in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years. But it is only recently that I have started to find myself asking where nonnormative sexual identities will be in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years. And when I do that, I think I do find myself noting that the metaphor of the closet is becoming less and less useful, especially for those young people my age and particularly half a generation younger than me who more and more grow up out to themselves, if not always out to others or eager to translate their own self-conscious sexual identity into something appropriate for public consumption. Many young people (and the NYT Magazine I think covered this last Pride Month!) are taking an approach of rejecting labels, especially if, like “LGBT,” they carry a political connotation; many more, even if they do identify as something easy like “gay,” don’t really get on board with the come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are, silence-equals-death approach that got their elders through some really hard times. And as this blog evidences, I have found myself doing the same: emphasizing intellectual and cultural much more than immutable biological or psychological factors as a way of understanding sexual identity, and insisting that gay-identity-politics messages—whether they are “Born This Way” or “Silence = Death”—can mean something even to people whose lives, for whatever reason, do not include a closet, or at least include a more complicated, less identifiable one.

Maybe this is just me getting older, becoming more of a historian, seeing more complications everywhere, and getting a little distance from that moment of identity-politics-infused discovery of the queer world that I think a lot of young queer people go through. I was looking through some of my ephemera from three years ago the other day, and came across some notes from a talk I gave at the first iteration of a conference called KinkForAll about why “coming out” gets figured as a political act and some ethical issues surrounding that. But never once in that presentation did I question the idea of “coming out” at all, or the notion that sexual identity would be so obviously important to someone’s being that it would trump all other concerns. Those notes were definitely a time capsule, because for a lot of reasons both personal and academic I would not now think of “coming out” or “sexual identity” as concepts reduced to their simplest form. I made a lot of assumptions about how people fit sexuality into their senses of selves as whole people that I would not make anymore—though this is not to say that the set of assumptions I have replaced them with are any better. At times, I now have a tendency to venture too far into deconstruction for anyone’s good. And the question is, of course, how to move forward from there, how to still be able to have useful conversations about sexual identity, how it works, and its role in public and private life.

Well, I think part of it is saying that, while the queer cultural canon remains the queer cultural canon (and the same goes for my academic field, the gay male cultural canon), those who do not identify as queer (or gay men) still have a right to access and to gain inspiration, solace, and energy from the art that canon has produced and the lessons it can teach. I think part of it is saying that while you can be “born this way,” you can also be born many other ways as well, sometimes all of them at the same time, and sometimes all of them self-contradicting, taking immense amounts of will—and sometimes professional help—to muddle through.

I am not a gay man, but that culture’s canon is one of the things that gives both my personal and my scholarly lives meaning. Similarly self-contradictorily, I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Christian, and yet in the past six months of Oxford Sundays I have become a regular college-chapelgoer. Yesterday in chapel we had a leavers’ service, I suppose not dissimilar to the tradition of the graduation baccalaureate service at many American universities, though more patently Christian than those services are at Princeton. When the chaplain prayed for, among other collegiate things, the many who have sat in this chapel before us, I couldn’t help but think of Symonds’ letters to his sister from his first year at Oxford, telling her which colleges’ Evensong services he thought were the best. I couldn’t help but think of Symonds the undergraduate, Symonds the 21-year-old winner of poetry prizes and essay prizes, Symonds walking down Broad Street, Symonds in his subfusc, Symonds kneeling in a college chapel with his head full of Greek and of German philosophy, knowing that in some inchoate way Plato and Whitman fit together with the vision of the choristers but not quite certain of how to say it—and indeed knowing that, at least right then in 1861, the English words weren’t there.

Identity is a tricky thing, and a dynamic thing, and a thing as palimpsestic as Oxford itself. And, as Symonds knew by the time he was a little older than I am now, working through the muddles our identity problems place us in means resolving some improbable contradictions. Sometimes, like Symonds, we do it through dialectic; sometimes, as I have a tendency to do, we resort to deconstruction, and try not to get lost in it. Sometimes, we find ourselves sitting in therapists’ offices, struggling to describe why the world doesn’t have boxes big enough for us to fit ourselves in. And sometimes—particularly during Pride Month—we find ourselves taking refuge within the identity-political canon, asking in the plaintive words of psychoanalysis-weary gay history, that we “just learn not to hate ourselves quite so very much.”

QOTD (2011-06-15); or, Symonds and Sexual Liberation

Here’s something nice and liberationist for Pride Month: In this footnote from the first edition of Symonds’ and Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (cut from ensuing editions that revised out more obvious Symondsiana), Symonds argues for the legalization of same-sex sexual relations:

In this case the strength of sin is the law. No passion, however natural, which is scouted, despised, tabooed, banned, punished, relegated to holes and corners, execrated as abominable and unmentionable, can be expected to show its good side to the world. The sense of sin and crime and danger, the humiliation and repression and distress to which the unfortunate Pariah of abnormal sexuality are daily and hourly exposed—and nobody but such a Pariah may comprehend what these are—inevitably deterioriate the best and noblest element in their emotion. It has been, I may say, the greatest sorrow of my life to watch the gradual declining and decay of emotions which started so purely and ideally, as well as passionately, for persons of my own sex in boyhood; to watch within myself, I repeat, the slow corrosion and corruption of a sentiment which might have been raised, under happier conditions, to such spiritual heights of love and devotion as chivalry is fabled to have reached—and at the same time to have been continually tormented by desires which no efforts would annihilate, which never slumbered except through during weeks of life-threatening illness, and which, instead of improving in quality with age, have tended to become coarser and more contented with trivial satisfaction. Give abnormal love the same chance as normal love, subject it to the wholesome control of public opinion, allow it to enjoy self-respect, draw it from dark places into the light of day, strike off its chains and make it free—and I am confident that it will develop analogous virtues, to those with which we are familiar in the mutual love of male and female. The slave has of necessity a slavish soul. The only way to elevate is to emancipate him. There is nothing more degrading to humanity in sexual acts between a man and a man than in similar acts between a man and a woman. In a certain sense all sex has an element which stirs our repulsion in our finer nature….

Nor would it be easy to maintain that the English curate begetting his fourteenth baby on the body of a worn-out wife is a more elevating object of mental contemplation than Harmodius in the embraces of his friend Aristogeiton—that a young man sleeping with a prostitute picked up in the Haymarket is cleaner than his brother sleeping with a soldier picked up in the Park.

Obviously, this was a radical and dangerous sentiment to express in 1897, when English scholars of sexuality (and homosexuals themselves) were still shaken from the Wilde trials. It’s no wonder that Ellis, Horatio Brown, and Catherine Symonds all wanted to see sentiments like this erased from subsequent editions of Sexual Inversion.

Universalizing the Pride Message: A Modest Proposal

A century and a half ago or so, John Addington Symonds took his Victorian culture from a point at which same-sex desire was an inconceivable, inchoate longing that could only be expressed in Greek and Latin or with the French phrase l’amour de l’impossible, to a point at which there existed an entire historical, literary, and philosophical tradition that both validated same-sex love and relationships and provided an English-language discourse in which to study and express them. Symonds was an undergraduate in Oxford in the years 1858-1862. He studied Plato with Jowett, and astonished his tutors by not only getting one of the best Firsts of his year, but also winning the Newdigate Poetry Prize and the Chancellor’s Essay Prize. On a chance visit to a friend in Cambridge in 1861, he heard someone read aloud some excerpts from “Calamus.” When Symonds was 21, the seeds were sown for the framework he would build up over the course of the next thirty years through which to describe the way he felt when he went to Bristol Cathedral to listen to, and look at, the choristers.

In 2011, I am 21. In two weeks, I suppose you’ll be able to call me a quondam junior member of Trinity College, Oxford. I won’t have any exam results or university prizes to show for my time here. I do a modern subject. But I have read Plato (in translation), and Whitman. I have made friends here in this world across the Atlantic who did in the 21st century the same course that Symonds did in the 19th. This is the puzzling Oxford palimpsest. This is life in this strange city of dreaming spires, where on Saturdays you can go out to gay bars and dance, and on Sundays you can choose from two dozen different services of choral evensong and follow it up with formal hall. A century and a half or so ago, Oxford undergrads next-door in Balliol would have studied for their Greek prose composition papers and sat up till all hours debating about their Master’s article about Biblical interpretation in Essays and Reviews. Today, they can do these things too. But they can also celebrate Pride.

Oxford’s Pride festival was yesterday. I didn’t go. I worked and I socialized and I paced my room on Broad Street listening to Radio 3 while wondering, as I always do, how well Symonds would recognize this city now. I think I was just as happy for it. Why? Because the repurposing of cultural compasses works all ways, and because I am growing older, and because I believe the best way to rescue the message of Pride from commercialization and “homonationalism”—the best way to give “It Gets Better” and “Born This Way” the benefit of the doubt instead of simply getting angry—is to universalize, and essentially to reclaim, the message.

And so I didn’t go to Pride yesterday. But when a friend emailed me yesterday afternoon with an expression of sadness and uncertainty about hir future, I replied that with the careful practice of coping mechanisms and management of self-expectations and self-doubt, it can “get better.” And when another friend self-deprecatingly called hirself a “freak” for doing hard academic work on a Saturday night, I channeled my inner pop star, and said, “You were born this way, baby.” I said it with a raised eyebrow and a sarcastic tone of voice, the double camp that comes from grad students in jeans and woolly sweaters talking about their work through the language of a wildly successful surrealist diva. But, at the same time, I meant it with all my heart.

Because, you see, if there is anything that the long transhistorical (and ahistorical) narrative of cultural reclamation stretching from Plato to Gaga has taught me, it is that fabulousness comes in many forms, and that we all have a right to pursue it where we see it and use it as a way of enriching our own lives. The things in which we take Pride can be sexual liberation and the thudding bass of a disco beat, but they don’t have to be. I think that they can be anything and anyone we love, any work that we do. So many people deserve the chance to celebrate their survival, their learning of self-reliance, their community spirit, and the ways that they are able to make spaces for themselves in the world. There are many kinds of love that seem impossible, inexpressible.

When I use the Pride metaphor to make sense of my life, it stretches back 21 years through a string of confusions and evolutions of identity: from preschool when I wore frilly party dresses but took the boys’ side in the Boy-Girl War, to kindergarten when I stopped the battle, first grade when I first started to hear that I was going to Hell for being an atheist, fifth grade when I started to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, seventh grade when I wore my wool cape to school and ninth grade when I dressed up as Thomas Jefferson, tenth grade when I joined a rock band and the following summer when an orchestra mother walked up to me and said “Stay away from my daughter,” twelfth grade when I fought for the right to wear trousers instead of a dress under my graduation regalia, and the long hard process of adjusting to university and accepting myself and my right to be there. All the way through I had Lewis Carroll and L.M. Montgomery and Brian Jacques and Robert Louis Stevenson and a raft of fantasy and historical fiction books about the girl-warriors who disguised themselves as boys to join the Royal Navy or fight in the American Civil War; all the way through I had dead languages and living ones, Ovid and Shakespeare, the Children’s Bible and D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. When I use the Pride metaphor, I celebrate that I now live in a world filled with people who dressed weirdly and rebelled esoterically, and who sought in fiction and in history the kindred spirits who would keep them from going mad from loneliness. When I talk about how “it gets better,” or more accurately how we can better ourselves through a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, I think about how all of us (and I know there must be lots of us) who all too recently experienced the exciting moment when real friends started to replace a social life lived entirely in the imagination owe it to those who haven’t quite got there yet to be there for them; how we all owe each other help at assuaging the feared inevitability of dying alone. And when I talk about being “born this way,” I mean when I started to realize that having friends didn’t mean pretending not to care about school. It makes me remember my third semester of university, when I started to remember that I had never stopped being the constantly-pontificating three-year-old who loved Aladdin and the solar system and tap-dancing and whose party trick was reading the New York Times aloud to her easily-impressed grandmother.

Pride is a time of year when we celebrate the Stonewall drag queens who stood up and fought back. But it is also a time of year when we celebrate difference of all kinds, and particularly, perhaps, the kinds that don’t fit so easily into an identity-politics box. It’s a time when we remember those who died alone, making their spirits less lonely in our memories, and when we try to make sure we are creating a world in which mental survival is not always so very difficult. And yes, I believe that at this time of year, as at all others, it is not quite so important to hold a banner in a parade as it is to be there for a lonely kid who needs her world widened. But if you know a kid, and you think she will be startled into self-acceptance by a chance encounter with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, by all means get on your nearest source of public transportation and high-tail it down to your local Christopher Street Day Parade. Sometimes, what you really do need is a drag act and a disco beat.

Late last night, after my friends and I all went back to our respective homes under the constant drizzle of English June, my downstairs neighbors were having a party, and as I lay in my bed trying to fall asleep all I could hear was loud music, drunken shouting, and a lot of words I don’t like to hear: “bitch,” “twat,” “cunt.” When your personal space is being invaded at two in the morning by the culture of juvenile sexism whence you’ve spent all your life running, it’s awfully hard to marshal the courage to go outside and try to tell a lot of drunk kids that what they’re saying is wrong (though I did eventually ask them to please turn down the music, though fat lot of good it did). But what you can do is you can drown out their shouting with a podcast of RuPaul being fabulous on National Public Radio. It’s all about the coping strategies. It’s all about survival. It’s all about Pride.

QOTD (2011-06-06)

My sister reminded me that the Wilde tragedy narrative may be, to a certain extent, contrived; but it is also beautiful. Here is A.E. Housman, “Oh who is that young sinner”:

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

‘Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re hauling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he had to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

I don’t think we can underestimate the extent to which the Wilde trials brought a love that was only just becoming able to speak its name crashing into the public eye. This poem unsurprisingly and obviously wasn’t published during Housman’s lifetime, but it’s striking that after the trials he could write this poem, with its elegant nudging metaphor and its (as I read it) barely-suppressed rage. You wouldn’t call Housman a figure of liberation, at all—and yet here you have him articulating a change in the emotional tenor of homosexual identity politics—a change to anger and to outrage.

Happy Birthday, Walt!

I’m a day late, I’m afraid, but I do want to make sure to wish Walt Whitman a very happy belated 192nd birthday. I think the only other person whom I have ever wished a happy birthday on this blog is Pete Seeger, and the comparison is apt. Seeger and Whitman are/were both artists who tell the American story, who through love of country but simultaneous unstinting criticism do not hesitate to illustrate the points at which America has failed to live up to the ideals it promises; and yet who never waver in their conviction that their country can, by dint of purpose, better itself and do better by all who are born on its soil and all who wash up on its shores.

Though J.A. Symonds’ different cultural background led him to misread the erotic valance of Whitman’s hope for Union, it is clear that what attracted the Victorian gentleman-historian to the working-class New Yorker was his promise of utopic possibility. I’ll let Symonds take it away, from the very end of his Walt Whitman: A Study:

As I have elsewhere said in print, he taught me to comprehend the harmony between the democratic spirit, science, and that larger religion to which the modern world is being led by the conception of human brotherhood, and by the spirituality inherent in any really scientific view of the universe. He gave body, concrete vitality, to the religious creed which I had been already forming for myself upon the study of Goethe, Greek and Roman Stoics, Giordano Bruno, and the founders of the evolutionary doctrine. He inspired me with faith, and made me feel that optimism was not unreasonable. This gave me great cheer in those evil years of enforced idleness and intellectual torpor which my health imposed upon me. Moreover, he helped to free me from many conceits and pettinesses to which academical culture is liable. He opened my eyes to the beauty, goodness and greatness which may be found in all worthy human beings, the humblest and the highest. He made me respect personality more than attainments or position in the world. Through him, I stripped my soul of social prejudices. Through him, I have been able to fraternise in comradeship with men of all classes and several races, irrespective of their caste, creed, occupation, and special training. To him I owe some of the best friends I now can claim—sons of the soil, hard-workers, “natural and nonchalant,” “powerful uneducated” persons.

Only those who have been condemned by imperfect health to take a back-seat in life so far as physical enjoyments are concerned, and who have also chosen the career of literary study, can understand what is meant by the deliverance from foibles besetting invalids and pedants for which I have to thank Walt Whitman.

What he has done for me, I feel he will do for others—for each and all of those who take counsel with him, and seek from him a solution of difficulties differing in kind according to the temper of the individual—if only they approach him in the right spirit of confidence and open-mindedness.

And for edificatory purposes, here’s a fantastic reading of an excerpt of “Song of Myself” from a PBS documentary on Whitman’s life (h/t MP):

Doing the History of Sexuality: A Post for Pride Month

When I first became fascinated by Symonds, it was in the context of narratives and teleologies, of arcs of progress, of rights-driven activism at whose center was marriage equality. When I was first moved by Michael Robertson’s account of Symonds’ futile correspondence with Walt Whitman in his book about Whitman’s fans, I was the sort of person who organized protests against Proposition 8 and the National Organization for Marriage, who was there with my reporter’s notebook when Barney Frank introduced the 2009 version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act into the House, who was in the Rayburn Room with my voice recorder to ask Jared Polis what it was like to be the first openly gay member of Congress to have been elected when he was already out, who never missed a Pride parade or a National Coming Out Day. When I first became fascinated by Symonds, it was in the context of a worldview grounded in a rights-based teleology, an understanding of queer history as a concentric layering of closets grounded in the Harvey Milk craze of a few years ago, a particularly identity-political form of convincing by one’s presence. When I decided to be a history major, it was with the assumption that I would do history as if it were politics, telling stories about modern LGBT identity that related closely to the world I was beginning to inhabit as a professional gay.

But as I began to be embedded more deeply in my discipline, things began to change. Learning a bit more about what history is as a discipline caused me to begin to believe that while history may inform and help us to understand the present, it is not the present, nor is it necessarily always a guide to the future. The more I learned about Symonds and his historical context, the more I became aware that the complete foreignness of the way he and others in his time constructed sexual identity was at the root of what I needed to say about him. I was getting suspicious: of historians who say that they are writing “gay” or “LGBT” history when they are talking about the nineteenth century or earlier, before such categories existed; of historians who claim they can “out” figures such as Lincoln, Whitman, or Wilde; of really any form of interpretation that linked the sexual identities of the past too closely to those of the present. I started to conceive of Symonds not so much as a figure of liberation, but rather as a figure who illustrates the distance of nineteenth-century sexual identity from its twenty-first-century counterpart. And I attracted a fair amount of confusion, and at times ire, on the Internet when I stubbornly insisted that Walt Whitman was not a gay poet, that Tchaikovsky was not a gay composer, that thinking of an “uncensored” edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (based on Wilde’s first draft, without editorial changes) as something that can bring the famous homoerotic novel out of the closet is desperately misguided. And as I did this, I started to get tired of modern LGBT politics, and to unpin my interest in the history of gay culture from marches for marriage equality and Pride parades. I was looking back at some of my old journal entries last night, reliving months of blushing as I read Edmund White on the bus, learning Allen Ginsberg off by heart, and watching my aspirations of professional homosexuality shift from dreaming of having Kerry Eleveld‘s job to understanding myself as someone who steps back and reads, writes, watches, concludes and synthesizes. I proposed and discarded idea after idea for my independent work—and as I look over my journals from that time, a couple years ago, I can see myself becoming less and less certain not only of the veracity of the identity categories I had taken for granted when I was angry about Prop. 8, but also about their importance. In the fall, at Princeton, I became the girl with the dining-hall catchphrase “Remember to always be suspicious of binaries,” and over the course of that semester a couple friends and I painstakingly worked out a theoretical paradigm that allowed us to separate identity politics—and culture—from LGBTQ essentialism, distinguishing sexual orientation and gender identity from culture in a way that allowed us to make sense of politically and culturally conservative gay people, or the straight people in our community who are always welcome at the queer parties. We started to recognize the limits of a construction of identity in which orientation mapped one-to-one onto culture, and in which both putting one’s sexual orientation in a box and seeing it as one of the most integral characteristics of one identity remained central. We started to see that if homosexuality is not a choice, gay culture certainly is. And I started to question my identity as a professional gay in a serious way.

Yesterday, I turned in a junior paper that is as much about what I learned in the archives in the past several months, or in my classes before that, as it is about what I have learned about myself in the past three years of university. My JP makes an argument about Symonds’ intellectual sphere, about his own reading strategies and how his education and cultural milieu prepared him to synthesize material from all kinds of disciplines and outlooks into a cultural discourse within which it was possible to identify as “a homosexual man.” It’s a romp through the Oxford classical curriculum, the Aesthetic movement, Darwinism, scientific sexology and early pre-Freudian psychoanalysis, and the allure of democracy and other questions about the relationship to the individual to society. While I am aware that I am telling a story, like any historian is, I also try to take seriously (as Symonds himself did!) the traditional Rankean exhortation to “discover a sense of the past as it actually was.” I try to consider what it was like to think about homosexuality before you could think about homosexuality, when there literally were not English words to express issues of sexual identity and when, as teleological as nineteenth-century worldviews could be, no one would dream of a grand-scale teleology of “gay liberation” or a small-scale teleology of “coming out” (or, indeed, “it gets better”). And in so doing, I consider the mutability of ways to categorize identity, the importance of culture, the ways in which we can delude ourselves into thinking that a cultural framework signifies something essential when in reality it’s just another narrative we’ve constructed (as Symonds did when he misread Whitman). When I write in my JP that “the time is long past to consider [Symonds] an intellectual just as much as a homosexual,” it is because I have learned in the past three years that there is more than one route to identity politics, and also more than one route to self-bettering; and that to write about homosexuality is not always to adhere to the established expectations of the genre, or to consider one’s sexual orientation the most essential thing about oneself. Sometimes the orientation is the base, and the culture the superstructure. But sometimes—as when Symonds got from ancient Greece and the Renaissance and Whitman to a language of sexual object choice—sometimes it’s the other way round.

But lest I be accused of not being fair to a culture and a community I too claim as my own, or of ignoring what good the coming-out narrative and the essentializing of sexual identity can do for those who are struggling with it, I feel obliged to point out one more thing. As a scholar, a polemicist, and a very astutely introspective person, Symonds was always keen to have everything both ways, to make the impossible possible. Deconstruction hadn’t been invented yet, and rather than having neither one thing or the other, he was keen to have both. It was his relentless faith in dialectic that enabled him to construct an epistemological framework in which “ethical same-sex sexual behavior” was a conceivable idea, and so having it both ways is a strategy that I think is worth trying. If Symonds can be taken as a guide, it is to a strategy that can admit the refashioning of existing cultural elements into new identities—and that’s why I can have the greatest respect for Kerry Eleveld, and for Rachel Maddow, yet no longer want either of their jobs. Instead I am quite content to think that it is my funny old place in the world to read Edmund White on the bus, to memorize Housman like Robbie Ross did for Wilde when he was in Reading Gaol, to listen to the new Lady Gaga album all the way through the day it comes out, to have opinions on Facebook about “It Gets Better,” to go to Paris and make my pilgrimage to Wilde’s grave, to never miss a Pride parade. Symonds repurposed a Platonic understanding of virtue into something which made it possible to assert that, contra his teacher Benjamin Jowett’s belief to the contrary, the love of the Symposium was not “mainly a figure of speech.” I feel that I can repurpose his repurposing not into a coming-out narrative, but into a promise that we can understand our lives and our selves if we read closely enough, that even if we feel right now as if there are no words to describe our innermost longings, if we keep reading widely we will be able to pull some together. I don’t want to erase identity politics—but I want to suggest that, as I myself have discovered, their boundaries may be wider than we might at first imagine.

And so Symonds was an intellectual just as much as a homosexual, and so I do not need to be a professional gay to spend my days in the Bodleian, elbow-deep in the male side of the homoerotic literary tradition. And so it will be June, and like all the Junes since the June before I started university, I will celebrate Pride. But while I have the greatest respect for and sense of comradeship with those who celebrate with the minds on the present or the future, I will celebrate as a historian, with mine on the past: reminding merry-makers that Pride commemorates Stonewall; respecting our elders who were there when AIDS first hit thirty years ago, and remembering those who died in that first horrible wave and since; and asking myself what Symonds would have thought about flatbed trucks covered with the logos of corporations and filled with gyrating young men in very small underwear. Because I am an intellectual far more than I am a homosexual; because when orientation and culture are separate entities, assimilationism and political obligation alike become moot points; and because while the personal may frequently be political, it is often not quite in the ways that you’d expect.

In Which We Bask in a Feeling of Accomplishment

After doing one last read-aloud to check for infelicitous phrasing, I just declared my junior paper (or, to translate that into non-Princeton terms, a partial first draft of my thesis that’s evaluated as part of my degree), which has assumed the title “J.A. Symonds and the Making of Male Homosexual Identity,” finished. Here is what it treats on:

And now it’s time to get to work on the thesis in earnest!

QOTD (2011-05-22); or, In Which Faith, Bettering, and Symonds Are Revisited

I think I remain faithful to Symonds because of how wonderfully comforting he can be when I am in the grasp of a crisis of existential loneliness. This is from his Memoirs:

So then, having rejected dogmatic Christinaity in all its forms, Broad Church Anglicanism, the gospel of Comte, Hegel’s superb identification of human thought with essential Being, and many minor nostrums offered in our time to sickening faith… I came to fraternize with Goethe, Cleanthes, Whitman, Bruno, Darwin, finding that in their society I could spin my own cocoon with more of congruence to my particular temperament than I discerned in other believers, misbelievers, non-believers, passionate believers, of the ancient and the modern schools. This is the way with all of us who, like the caddis worm, build houses around them. Men of a different stamp follow the ways of the hermit crab, and creep into solid shells which shelter them against the sea and assaults of neighbours. It comes to the same thing in the end; only the caddis worm is the pupa of that winged ephemeron the Mayfly, born to be eaten up by trout; while the shell into which the hermit crab has crept may last long after its tenant’s lonely death, until at last it perishes beneath the stress of elemental forces, pounding waves and churning sands.

But these things are metaphors; and there is a want of taste and sense in straining metaphors too far. Speaking simply I chose for my motto ‘to live resolvedly in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful’. I sought out friends from divers centuries—Marcus Aurelius, Cleanthes, Bruno, Goethe, Whitman, Darwin—who seemed to have arrived, through their life throes and ardent speculations, at something like the same intuition into the sempiternally inscrutable as I had. They helped me by their richer or riper experience, by flights beyond my reach, by knowledge denied to my poor studies, by audacities which thrilled the man in me….

Because these men were so, I elected them as the friends with whom my spirit chose to fraternize. From being in their company I derived solace, and their wisdom, like in kind, was larger than my own. It is good for the soul to dwell with such superiors; just as it is also good, in daily life, to live with so-called inferiors, to learn from them and love them.

I do not seek to preach this faith which animates me…. Certainly no one but myself knows how tentative and far from stable it is, how like a gaseous fluid, in the mind of him that lives by it. After admitting so much, I may anticipate ridicule by comparing my faith to something which lifts a balloon in air, to the fermentation of a fungus, to the sulphuretted hydrogen in a rotten egg. Still, being what it is, this faith has enabled me to do my duty in so far as I have done it by my family and friends; it has brought forth my literary work, and has sustained me active under the pressure of many grievous and depressing maladies…. The perorations of all that I have written are inspired by this faith, as the substance of my labour was for me made vital by it.

I have written here before that my mind has not developed into young adulthood with the synapses that program “faith” intact. But when I am sitting here in my room on Broad Street and I can hear the college clock strike midnight, and then one, and I am cripplingly alone, I can pull Symonds’ Memoirs off the bookshelf. I am sure he would never have countenanced that he could be a “friend from divers centuries” too. He is not my God, Symonds. He is not my lover. I have held his letters and notebooks in my hands; I do not need faith to believe in his existence. But when I do believe in him, I believe in myself. And I get out of bed in the morning, and I go to the library, and I come home in the evening, and on a good day maybe I’ll have taught someone something, however small.

We all make our own ways of getting through the world. Cultural narratives notwithstanding, we all make our own betters and betterings. If we have done our duties, we will have discovered mechanisms not only of coping, but also of human flourishing; we will have divined how we may purpose an ideal of Virtue and of Good to the work that we do and the ways we help others.

It is sometimes nigh-impossible to keep doing this, and to see why we must. If we did not reach adulthood with faith synapses, we may wonder on what grounds the need to become better rests. The best answer I can give, when even my non-faith synapses are much-frayed on this not-untroubled night, is that although there is no afterlife, there is a longer durée of human flourishing than we with our short lives may always recognize. You never know when, some generations hence, a young historian will discover not only her craft, but also her moral purpose, in your life. If this should happen in the case of the legacy you leave, neither her faith nor yours will have proven anything better, but you will have taught her how to better herself. And surely that is worth as much as any eternity.

QOTD (2011-05-19); or, In Which Symonds Does a MySpace Survey

If you were born sometime around 1990, give or take a few years, you probably remember back when everyone was on MySpace and filled in those endless stupid surveys that asked you your favorite everything and the last time you did various things and whether you had ever kissed in the rain. Courtesy of Phyllis Grosskurth and the Symonds papers at Bristol, this was the Victorian equivalent, as Symonds completed it. He was 27:

Your favourite virtue
Loyalty
Your favourite qualities in a man
Strength & Tenderness
Your favourite qualities in a woman
Tenderness & strength
Your favourite occupation
Writing
Your chief characteristic
Doublemindedness
Your idea of misery
Waking in the morning after some sorrow
Your favourite colour & flower
Green[,] Brown[,] Gentian
If not yourself, who would you be?
Nobody
Where would you like to live?
At home
Your favourite prose authors
Balzac[,] Fielding
Your favourite poets
Dante[,] Goethe
Your favourite painters and composers
Michael Angelo[,] Beethoven
Your favourite heroes in real life
Pericles[,] Spinoza
Your favourite heroines in real life
My baby
Your favourite heroes in fiction
Hamlet[,] Oedipus
Your favourite heroines in fiction
Antigone[,] Cordelia
Your favourite food and drink
Cream
Your favourite names
N or M [Grosskurth: “The ‘N or M’ of the catechism provided him with a sombre jest for these were Norman Moor’s initials as well…” Norman Moor was the young man with whom Symonds was in love at the time.]
Your pet aversion
Ennui
What characters in history do you most dislike?
Caligula
What is your present state of mind?
Thinking of my own mind
For what fault have you most toleration?
Moral weakness
Your favourite motto
In mundo immundo sim mundus [In an impure world may I be pure]

I assume this was before Symonds famously adopted as his motto the line from Goethe, “Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen/Resolut zu leben.”