We Must Cultivate Our Own Dancefloor; or, Thoughts While Listening to “Like a Prayer”

Look around: everywhere you turn it’s heartache
It’s everywhere that you go
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know
If all else fails and you long to be
Something better than you are today
I know a place where you can get away:
It’s called the dancefloor, and here’s what it’s for…!
—Madonna, “Vogue”

I am sitting in a darkened bedroom in a big, empty house on a rural island in the Strait of Georgia, listening to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” I am enraptured by this song whenever I listen to it, and I have listened to it many times this summer: on a train to Rhode Island, on a plane to Paris, speeding down the highway from the San Diego suburbs. Each time I have the same response, which is that a great gush of emotion wells up inside me, and I can do nothing but raise my head to the sky, shout the lyrics (silently, if need be, as now), and form a fist which pumps in time to the beat. It’s strange how much I love this song and how few pieces of music move me more—I’ve come a long way from the civil rights anthems of the elementary-school car ride, or the Scottish folk ballads of the middle-school bus, or the Pink Floyd that got me through high school. Weirdly (I think), I’ve wound up through all of this at Madonna, despite my actual political, feminist objections to the Madonna phenomenon itself. Weirdly, there are only a few Pete Seeger songs, a few finales from Russian ballets and symphonies, which can command this much attention and passion from my soul.

It must have something to do with the single memory I associate with this song, which (unlike most of the memories I associate with songs) is not related to the first time I heard it, or the person who introduced me to it. That’s a fairly uninteresting, and fairly embarrassing story: I’d never heard Madonna before this spring, when the Glee Madonna episode prompted me to download a “Best of” album from iTunes. I had the songs in that collection on in the background through a few months of walking across campus and doing laundry and surfing the web. I learned the lyrics, and I got them stuck in my head, and then I was playing the songs again and again as, finally, I packed my things up in boxes and got ready to leave Princeton for another summer.

One of the components of leaving Princeton for the summer was attending the three-day bacchanal my university throws for its alumni, an event of which I’m far more ashamed than I was of my sudden descent into pop culture and the slippery slope in that direction which Glee seems to have set in motion. I spent three days getting no sleep, hating the 70-year-old rich white men and 20-year-old rich white football players who made my beloved quad smell like stale beer and vomit, and letting my shame at actually enjoying myself at the alumni parties subside into the retributive self-righteousness I felt at abusing their free food. And after three days of all this, of the longest and most exhausting and most emotionally up-and-down party I’ve ever paid $45 to attend (or, indeed, attended for free), I went to the last dance, a Saturday night affair sponsored by the LGBT alumni organization, a high-school-prom of the very drunk queer kids set who spent a few hours grinding with their friends in a too-large multipurpose room with a DJ and a disco ball. It was cheesy and ridiculous and the most fun I’ve had in the past several months. Because it was a gay dance, the DJ played Lady Gaga and Ke$ha and even the Spice Girls, and of course various disco standards, and of course everyone knew all the songs. It was a collective experience of dancing to collectively popular music of the sort which I don’t get to experience very often, and for me it culminated with “Like a Prayer,” a song to which I remember shouting the words with one of my friends, all the energy I’d built up in months of secretly listening to Madonna in my room all coming out in the realization which it took that cheesy fag-and-dyke-prom of an alumni reunions event to bring home: I love the dancefloor. And I love it because it represents unbridled joy.

In the past twelve months, I’ve been absorbed neck-deep in the personal struggles of young adulthood: sorting out desires from obligations, trying to figure out my purpose in life, striving to identify what a good person is and what she does to be good and to be better. This time a year ago, I was about to return to my family after a summer of depression, disillusionment, and cynicism in the District of Columbia, and I spent my sophomore year of college salvaging my faith in humanity by coming to love art galleries, classical music, literary criticism, and other trappings of highbrow culture; by investing my emotions in friendships instead of in elections; by making a difference through the person-to-person contact of the dining hall or the LGBT Center; and by investing myself in my scholarship and in the notion that studying now so that I can be an academic in a decade or so is as worthy a use of my time as working for a political cause. In the intervening moments, between applying all my mental will towards figuring out what a good person is and then trying to become one, I have snatched slices of transcendent happiness: on my first and then successive road trips; having madcap ideas and making them happen; basking in the company of the brilliant people I idolize who let me tag along in their far-more-interesting lives; watching the sun set from that beautiful little room with its window seat over the archway in the college quad I call home. Occasionally, going to a party. Dancing. Laughing. Going back to my room too late, still grinning, still with pop songs and their unrelenting beats running through my head.

Last October, when I put aside my political and personal prevarications and went to the annual Terrace Drag Ball, I had fun. I danced with friends and strangers, all delighting in the party and in the dancing. I came home realizing that it was wrong to deny myself simple pleasures like this, because what is the LGBT political movement fighting for, exactly, if not the right to hold drag balls? The right to ownership of a dancefloor has presented itself to me, slowly, over the course of the past year, as a fundamental right surely on par with a few others which top the front pages of the news. As I’ve read more books by Edmund White, taken an American studies class which talked (among other things) about the birth of the downtown music scene, and more importantly stepped away from gay history once or twice and gone out for myself and danced till hours I never see otherwise, I’ve realized what a powerful sense of collective identity, and collective pride, and collective joy, dancing together provides. I’ve come to understand it as a tool to banish ugliness and despair, to create resolve and strength, to assert defiance and freedom from fear. Granted, I’ve only been to a few parties, and a few dances, in the past twelve months: work always takes priority, and more often than not I recreate the magic of the dancefloor for myself, with my eyes closed in a darkened bedroom and more than enough happiness and energy to swallow up a whole nightclub (granted, being a shy young thing of twenty, I’ve also never been to an actual nightclub). For “dancing” is as much a metaphor as it is a reality, and for me it functions easily as a symbol of the process of using joy to banish ugliness, using beauty (once sought) as a peaceful weapon, a route to strengthening moral resolve to fight the next battle of the human condition. In the past year, in the process of learning to have fun, learning to do good by being good, and learning to accept and to appreciate myself in the meantime, “dancing” as symbol has helped me to keep myself whole, to keep me going through my days, and to create, hovering in the back of my mind, a vision of what the Platonic ideal of happiness can be. Yes, that’s what it is, an ideal: an ideal I have experienced only elusively, but an ideal to keep in mind when working to build a world in which the right to the dancefloor is inalienable—consider it the universal Stonewall, the Stonewall of the mind. Everyone deserves a liberation led by a drag-queen kickline, a hedonistic music-and-club-and-drug-and-sex scene born in the bowels of Manhattan, and a resilient spirit which can rebirth that scene into one which can confront death and impoverishment and come out fighting. Everyone—even those of us for whom the gender politics of the female divas so beloved by the gay male stereotype create problems—deserves their Madonna, whatever their actual gender or sexual orientation or personal struggles or routes to community and acceptance.

The other afternoon (back on the quiet, far-flung, isolated island) I was reading the newspaper stories and blog posts I’d downloaded from the neighbors’ internet connection (we don’t have one of our own), my headphones in and my body bouncing a bit to Donna Summers, another of my recent discoveries from the canon. As I flipped through stories about the dysfunction of our government; about the peril in which the environment finds itself; about soldiers and civilians killed in countries so far away I can’t imagine them; about economic crises or hate crimes the world over; I felt a sharp stab of guilt for dancing to disco while reading of such hurt and sorrow. But—as I steeled myself to move onto the stories about funding cuts to universities, a lack of investment in the humanities, and the end of tenure—I resolved that there is nothing shameful about seeking a slice of the dancefloor where you can find it, about trying to recreate for yourself where and how you can the rapture of “Like a Prayer.” I am tempted to think, as I rationalized myself into submission by thinking on that occasion, of the forces of disco and pop (allied with the forces of 19th-century portraiture and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and the Tchaikovsky symphonies and the Declaration of Independence and Oscar Wilde’s statements in the witness box and oh, at least five dozen other things) ranged in a great cosmic battle against the forces of hate and evil and ugliness; all doing their best, whether in earnest or in camp (though those aren’t too different!), to help us to cultivate our own dancefloor.

And, well: if this is what gets us through the days and nights and helps us to keep our shit together, I am all too happy to be “putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” on this one.

QOTD (2010-07-07); or, Another Problem in Greek Ethics

From the second chapter of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality:

In December 1837 at Yale, Dodd composed or transcribed a revealing, rhymed ditty, “The Disgrace of Hebe & Preferment of Ganymede,” about a dinner for the gods given by Jove, at which the beautiful serving girl, Hebe, tripped over “Mercury’s wand,” exhibiting, as she fell, that part “which by modesty’s laws is prohibited.” Men’s and women’s privates were on Dodd’s mind—eros was now closer to consciousness. Angry at Hebe’s “breach of decorum,” Jove sent her away, and called Ganymede “to serve in her place. / Which station forever he afterward had, / Though to cut Hebe out… was too bad.”

Considering Dodd’s cutting out Julia Beers [his girlfriend] for John Heath, Anthony Halsey, and Jabez Smith [fellow college students for whom he professed love or intense friendship], his poem shows him employing ancient Greek myth, and the iconic, man-loving Ganymede to help him comprehend his own shifting, ambivalent attractions. At Yale, Dodd read the Greek Anthology and other classic texts and began to use his knowledge of ancient affectionate and sexual life to come to terms with his own—a common strategy of this age’s upper-class college-educated white men.

This passage leads to the sort of thesis-related observations I usually try to keep off this blog, but given the relationship of the work Katz does to the questions of close-reading I contemplated yesterday, and the broader implications of his thesis about the historical contextualization of identity categories, it’s worth discussing here. Briefly, Katz has written this book to talk about men who loved and desired other men in America, but before such a thing as homosexuality existed. Through detailed case studies and work with both literary and more traditionally historical sources, he makes a case for a 19th century in which men’s sexual identities and relationships to sexual identity were very different from those of men in our own time. He fights against an essentialist reading of homosexuality across generations, and focuses instead on how 19th-century American men perceived their own relationships with each other, not what modern Americans might read into them. He finds (well, so far; I’m only on Chapter 4) that men often lacked the appropriate vocabulary to define their love for each other, but that they certainly did not see it as part of a distinct identity, evidence of pathology, or indeed reason not to love, desire sex with, and marry women—and that goes for both Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman!

And so I’ve been getting myself in this “men before homosexuality were nothing like men after homosexuality” mindset, which is productive in that it allows me both to find Katz’s book very persuasive and to further my own thinking about what changed, theoretically and culturally, when homosexuality did emerge as an identity. But I found that easy suspension-of-my-own-sense-of-identity-categories challenged by the passage I quote above, simply because it does not sound like the experience of a man from before-homosexuality. It sounds like the experiences of young men from across the history of homosexuality (though particularly in its early history) who came to understand their sexualities as sexualities through the frame of classical literature and art. I titled this post the way I did because one of those men was John Addington Symonds, whose 1901 tract A Problem in Greek Ethics is about Athenian pederasty, and implicitly makes the argument that because Athenian sexual mores were different from late-Victorian Britain’s, there was no reason why Britain and its legal system shouldn’t change to accept himself and his fellow “Uranians” into the fabric of society (this was an argument Symonds certainly expressed in so many words in private, if not so explicitly in print). The secondary “Problem in Greek Ethics,” however, would seem to lie in Symonds’ adoption of ancient Greek sexual practices which do not map precisely onto modern homosexuality and would not have been considered “homosexual” then to seek cultural and artistic validation for a modern form of sexual deviance. This sort of essentializing is, it seems to me, in some sense endemic to being homosexual in the modern western world—and it is this sort of essentializing which Katz’s book fights against in part precisely because it is so endemic. (You know how academics are.)

And so to read about Albert Dodd’s bawdy Ganymede poem, and Katz’s observations about Dodd’s interest in Greek matters in 1837, far before the word “homosexual” enters the language or before the sundry proto-homosexual scandals of late-19th-century Britain get going, and to read them occurring out in the provinces, in New Haven, far away from the theoretical and academic and cultural work done to create homosexuality in London and Paris and Berlin, is to me to profoundly trouble the neat homosexuality-didn’t-exist-and-then-it-did narrative. It is to question what is homosexual and what isn’t, to challenge my coding of problems in Greek ethics as homosexual, and indeed to question Katz’s thesis (with which I otherwise agree strongly) about the mutability and historical contingency of identity categories. Is a search to understand one’s erotic impulses through ancient Greek literature something enduring across time, no matter what words exist in the language to describe it?

Blogger Historiann wrote yesterday about the importance of using “sideways” methodologies in building the narratives of people(s) and events (such as women, or people of color, or working-class people) whom written sources sometimes leave out. Sometimes these methodologies come with their own problems in ethics: Historiann gives the example of using the recorded lives of men in order to make inferences about the lives of women, but what does it do for women’s history if it’s still only told through the eyes of men? It seems as if the kind of work that Katz does moves similarly sideways, getting around the obvious lack of forthright records of 19th-century men’s sexualities by inferring and reading between the lines; I’m hoping to learn from his books how to employ similar strategies when writing my own thesis. But it seems to me as if there is always a tension between too much inference and too little (something else I learned from literary studies!), and that playing the inference game carries with it problems in ethics, Greek or otherwise. Am I undoing Katz’s work by assuming homosexuality on the basis of Hellenism? Or could he possibly be the one who is reticent to make a necessary logical leap. (What is truth, anyway?!)

This is a tricky business in which to get involved—and we should never lose sight of the concrete social and political ramifications our quirks of interpretation can have, when they make their ways beyond the ivory tower.

Chaucer, Milton, and the Greater Good; or, Happy Belated Fourth of July

Atlantic staff writer Heather Horn has jumped, and jumped hard, on the “I don’t understand the relevance outside the academy of the methodology of humanistic study” bandwagon. Her particular permutation of the bandwagon, while not precisely about the utility of STEM fields or the necessity of building career skills or the frustrating intangibility and apparent impermeability of humanistic study (as if STEM study is ever accessible to the untrained layperson!), is nevertheless pretty well intertwined with all these issues: she’s arguing for eliminating the teaching of close-reading in high-school English classes:

We should end it. Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don’t fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up (Ah yes–the tree mentioned once on page 89 and then never again stands for weakness and loss!) and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. (It’s because it’s an elm, and when you think elm, you think Dutch elm disease, and elms are dying out–sort of like their relationship, see?)

[…]

If a few students really want to do close reading, they can do it as an elective or jump in head first in college. Otherwise, let’s chuck the concept. We gain nothing by teaching kids to hate books–and hate them s-l-o-w-l-y.

I shudder to think what English teachers Horn must have had in high school and college to have gained the impression that close-reading entails “simply making things up,” but perhaps the curricula she learned under were not dissimilar from the AP English Language and Composition curriculum used by my English teacher in my junior year of high school. Taught to a test supposedly devised and graded by college professors, we were drilled in recognizing different forms of figurative language, and describing setting and tone. We were taught to write a formulaic five-paragraph essay in 45 minutes, in which we would argue that the author used the stylistic devices we had been taught to recognize in order to convey a specific theme (“the author’s message about life,” is the phrase that still rings in my ears), which we had also been taught to pull out and put on display. We were drilled in order to pass a test, mostly reading short expository prose passages instead of novels, plays, or poetry, and developed little understanding of how the work we were doing related to the study of literature outside the context of the exam for which we were preparing. Indeed, I always regarded that year of English as an aberration: in freshman, sophomore, and senior years, we read books and talked about them, and I never had the sense that what we did in those three years was in any way similar to the metaphor scavenger hunt we carried out junior year. And, like Horn, I graduated high school profoundly skeptical of English classes which did that kind of work.

But in the spring of my freshman year of college, I took my first college English class, and not only did my attitude towards the study of literature change, and my understanding of what I had and hadn’t been taught in high school change, my entire life changed. The class was a survey of 14th-18th-century English literature, which at Princeton all English majors are required to take—they’re fed canon in this course because it’s thought that they wouldn’t elect it otherwise, and because the Chaucer and Milton that the course assigns is good for teaching the fundamentals of close-reading. For this course also aims to prepare prospective majors to do well in their chosen field of study, and—as I think I must have been told in the first lecture of the semester—close-reading forms the backbone of the study of literature. As I soon discovered in my practice reading exercises for precept and in the papers I wrote about Alisoun in the Miller’s Tale and the narrative style in Book 6 of Paradise Lost, close attention to the detail of language completely changed how I engaged with texts. Once I had been persuaded (through admittedly, at first, a little willing suspension of disbelief) that Chaucer and Milton had carefully chosen every word, and that we should pay them the courtesy of reading their texts that way, I found not just important issues in the poems—tackling feminism and sex on one hand, and theology on the other—but true beauty. Neither my English classes which read for theme nor my English class which read for the metaphor scavenger hunt nor my own pleasure reading for plot had prepared me for the recognition of the transcendence of Milton’s blank verse, or the hilarity of Chaucer’s puns. Taking that class gave me—or perhaps restored to me—faith and joy in the beauty of language and the literature which puts language into a form that we can read and enjoy. I’ve read a lot of books in my life, and that transformation never happened through reading a light novel in an afternoon. It took being assigned weighty texts, and being asked to pay attention to their finest details, and to write on those details and consider what I thought about them. Contrary to Horn’s suggestion, I didn’t “[construct] increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support”: I believed in what I saw in the text, because I’d finally learned the importance of the details, and their connection to plot and themes. And now, Paradise Lost is one of the most wonderful pieces of literature I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. And despite being a history major, I have taken at least one English class every semester since, branching outside of the canon to women writers, African-American writers, literature for children, popular/pulp fiction, biography and autobiography, and (on my own time) queer literature. Since the first close-reading exercise I did on Chaucer, a silly scatological meander through the Miller’s Tale, I have maintained my faith that the careful study of literature will illuminate the high and the low, and that reading carefully and attentively—reading closely—will change the way you thought you understood everything.

For reasons I have gone into before, I am not an English major, but perhaps this has attuned me more closely to the need to involve methodologies taught in literature departments in the work of other disciplines. The history papers where I have deployed my close-reading skills in the service of addressing the subjectivity of primary sources have, I believe, been the ones where I’ve gotten the closest to saying something interesting; treating the themes and theories of the past like those advanced by fiction has spurred on my greatest intellectual passions. I don’t think I had necessarily forgotten the good that learning and knowledge and careful analysis can do, but being taught actual close-reading, and not just the metaphor hunt, reawakened my sense that reading and interpreting texts and text-like media (which is what we all do, in the humanities) is not a game of pleasure-reading, nor one of baseless speculation, nor one of stringing together citations, but rather a route towards understanding the world we live in. This realization, whenever I think about it, produces an attitude of utter pleasure of which I could never have conceived in high school. Just think what could have happened if my close-reading education had been well-executed then!

Today, in the course of having a political discussion/debate/thing, I found myself reduced to tears by the liberal guilt and 20-year-old’s existential confusion which I so often find is never far away from my mind. I asked myself—as I so often do—whether I am doing the morally right thing by choosing an academic life, whether such a life helps other people in addition to myself, and whether I do in fact have a greater obligation towards selflessness and utilitarianism by virtue of being an Ivy League legacy and the child of academic parents. Every time I find myself frustrated by this problem, I desperately seek for the validation that will tell me I am not selfish to want things which will make me happy, and that furthermore I can do good from behind a lectern, on one side of a seminar table, across an office desk, at committee in a conference room, or seated next to a student in the dining hall. But when I read about human rights abuses such as those being carried out against LGBT people in Iraq (aside: read that story and then call your Congressional delegation, or, if you’re British, your MP about it. I’m serious), I wonder whether I can continue to talk about unhistoric acts when the world is in such desperate need of some historic ones.

But—as it has proved to be in opening up the world of art—close-reading can serve to illuminate these more pragmatic matters too. Last week, the Supreme Court determined—though by a narrow majority—that the precise semantic significance of the 45 words in the First Amendment to the highest law of the land does not permit religious organizations at public universities to exclude those (like LGBT people) protected by the university’s non-discrimination policy. The Court has read those 45 words time and again, and whether they have been understood to strike down school prayer, or to uphold the right of the Ku Klux Klan to walk down the street, the nine (or more, or less) justices have historically achieved their decisions through the very close reading of those 45 words. Likewise, they have read the Fourteenth Amendment to uphold or to overturn public segregation; to uphold or to overturn sodomy laws; to uphold or to overturn miscegenation laws. Reading and misreading and re-reading, those nine (or more, or less) men and women deploy the skills of my freshman-year Chaucer-and-Milton class to change the way life is lived in America, to hold back or to push forward the progress of the arc of justice. If we are to take seriously (as we must) the mission and the necessity of the mission of the Supreme Court, we must embrace the value of a practice of reading which examines the significance, the meaning and the placement, the connotations and at times the critical history, of every word in the United States’ founding document. This has been part of the mission of our country since 1787, and continues to be the integral piece of making it a more equitable and fairer place for anyone to pursue her or his happiness—as integral, indeed, as close-reading is to the study of literature.

Perhaps Heather Horn never had the luck to enroll in an English class which taught her what I have learned in mine since that one disastrous experience junior year of high school. Perhaps she only experienced dull and poorly-taught classes which put her off the study of literature altogether, as happened to so many of my peers without humanities-professor parents and the odd teacher who really knew what she was doing. For that, I am absolutely sorry, because learning how to read literature (and, with it, art) has been my greatest source of joy and hope. I only ask Horn not to condemn the careful examination of literature out of hand—because without people in the public sphere willing to invest in the necessity of the humanities and the close study of texts which they entail, our society doesn’t just forfeit the personal pleasures of a few nerds like me. Our project of “form[ing] a more perfect Union” (note that “more,” edging the project ever onward—not just “perfect” but “more perfect”!), our very nation, is at stake.

What Do the Scissor Sisters, Grindr, and My Local Barnes and Noble Have in Common? or; Presumption and Gay History; or, A Rant Which Is a Little More Sarcastic Than Usual

Starting to overcome the jetlag and culture shock that greeted me upon my arrival back home in southern California, I ventured out of the house for the first time today. My mother drove me to the mall near our house and dropped me in front of Barnes&Noble, and before too long I was standing in front of the two shelves in a back corner labeled “gay and lesbian studies,” wondering what, in my first mainstream chain media emporium in a while (it’s been all independents, academics, and useds lately), those two shelves would hold. It turned out to be largely lesbian erotica (for reasons unbeknownst to me, only one volume for gay men amidst a sea of lesbian titles), but mixed in among every volume of “Best Lesbian Erotica” published in the past 15 years were—to my shock and awe—books and books about Stonewall. There was Martin Duberman’s classic text, and a new one by a local historian who lives on Christopher Street, and one specifically aimed at young adults, and a couple others too which I’ve now forgotten. And though the books I need which was half-hoping I might find on those shelves, like David Halperin and Jonathan Ned Katz, were absent, I did see a few classic texts of the work I do in Literary Gay Men Studies standing out amongst the erotica: Randy Shilts. Edmund White. It was strange, in a conservative suburban world which I imagine is everything that my academic world is not, to think that the Mira Mesa Barnes&Noble’s usual customers might care about gay history too, enough to buy one of five different books about Stonewall. I suppose it should have come as no surprise, really—I knew kids in high school energized into activism by the legend of Harvey Milk—but the incongruity was still jarring. I was so startled that I almost bought And the Band Played On—I mean, who knows whether anyone else would?

I think perhaps that I was attuned today to the extra-ivory tower understanding of gay history (and I use “gay” intentionally; I’m sorry to say I’m not going to be talking about LBT folks too much here) because I had a couple reasons in popular culture to believe that there isn’t much of that going around these days. Sure, everyone’s excited about Pride and stuff, but the Harvey Milk craze has more or less died out, the Frank Kameny craze was more or less confined to Washington, and none of the elders of the gay community are getting any younger when it comes to getting their stories out into the wider community. The increasing normalcy of same-sex marriage has supplanted the urgency of gay liberation; on a far more nerve-wracking note, HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men are sharply on the rise because men my age, born around 1990, don’t remember how awful the 1980s were. I worry that gay men and the LGBT community at large do not only take their history for granted, but are at serious risk of losing memory of it altogether—particularly as my generation, with its oh-so-very-different outlook on being gay in America, reaches maturity.

One event which has got me worried about this is the release of the new album from the very gay dance/pop/disco/thing band Scissor Sisters, Night Work. I saw the promotional posters all over Paris, and couldn’t wait to download the album; it turns out I love it, and have been listening to it a lot the past few days. And perhaps I am attuned to love it because it is an album steeped in gay history, from its Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo to its ’80s-style promotional video to band frontman Jake Shears’ bold declaration that the album’s concept is to carve out an alternative history for the past 25 years: “like AIDS never happened.”

And yet as much as I myself am at times consumed by a profound sense of loss from reading about a time and a virus I didn’t live through; and as much as I devour the history of the era just before, Shears’ explanation of his album makes me uncomfortable enough to sour me on the music. It is irresponsible history—verging on the point of moral wrong—to pretend that AIDS never happened. It (and I do not think strong language is out of place here) desecrates the memories of those who have died from it. I do not know that we owe it to our community to become steeped in the sadness and depression of the so-called “plague” to the exclusion of happier moments in gay history, but I think Shears—and all of us who listen to and love his band’s album—owe it to thousands of people, right down to the man whose ass graces Night Work‘s cover, to remember a history that does not sweep AIDS under the rug simply because it is as depressing as all hell. Rather, we can aim for a more cautious, forward-looking revival of musical genres and cultural aesthetics, which I think is something Night Work does. 2010 so far has been a year fatigued by marriage-equality battles and soured on gay civil rights heroes; it is a year that is perhaps more willing to embrace disco as it once was. Which is fine; I only ask that we turn ourselves to fashioning a disco of 2010 instead of trying to pretend as if it’s still 1978.

I’m not the only one taking this attitude: it’s saturating Guardian writer Polly Vernon’s article about Grindr, the gay-men-meetup-and-hookup iPhone app. If the Scissor Sisters are stuck in some sort of irresponsible time warp before 1983, Vernon is all forward-thinking. Positing that we live in a “post-gay world,” and drawing attention to the apolitical nature of Grindr, Vernon is very much a part of this 2010 gay world I mentioned which is both non-radical and fatigued by politics. Not to mention the fact that Vernon is talking about that most 21st-century of cultural markers, an iPhone app—and one which, she is convinced, is on its way to revolutionizing gay culture and, in this aforementioned “post-gay world,” straight culture too.

But if Vernon does not deliberately erase key swathes of gay history, she certainly seems pretty ignorant of some of them. She thinks Grindr will change the ways that gay men meet each other, hook up, form social connections with each other, date, and understand each other as a mapped-out community. She threatens the downfall of monogamy, raising concerns about monogamous couples where one partner might cheat using Grindr… but Polly, honey, where the hell do you think American male homosexual culture has been for the last, I don’t know, 90 years? Not all gay men are alike, to be sure, or find sex partners in the same ways, but cruising is a long and storied tradition stretching back far before the invention of the iPhone or the GPS or the social networking site. Since homosexuality has existed in America, gay men have had varyingly covert ways of recognizing each other and soliciting each other. Furthermore, as Jake Shears could probably tell Vernon if he hasn’t blocked it out, non-monogamy was the norm in the urban gay culture which Grindr targets until AIDS hit. As Edmund White explains it in The Farewell Symphony (I’m paraphrasing, as the book is in a box in Princeton), the gay community in New York so much understood its identity to be based in non-monogamous values that it had serious difficulty adjusting to a world threatened by infection in which it was recommended that you know the names of your sex partners. And even in our current century, in this AIDS-ridden world, the character Jamie in Shortbus says, “Face it: monogamy’s for straight people.” For all Vernon’s insistence on “post-gay,” there is still a not-insignificant band of the rainbow flag which defines itself in opposition to the “straight” world.

Of course, straight people have never been wholly monogamous, either (ever seen a cheating Senator ‘fess up on TV? or, for a less morally-charged example, ever heard of swingers?), and so I’m not sure what Vernon thinks is so new about Grindr’s potential in the straight market. History and my academic knowledge of these things leads me to believe that a disproportionate number of users would still be gay men, but I see no reason to believe that Grindr will dramatically change how straight men and women conduct their business. Those who hook up will continue to hook up; those who might once have attracted each other’s attention by glances across a bar or perhaps by their own version of the handkerchief code (yes, I’ve seen heterosexual-geared color keys) will just be adding another tool to their repertoire. Despite the wide expert knowledge Vernon claims due to her many pseudonymous gay friends, I don’t see any reason to be as excited as she is about Grindr. Yes, I’m sure it’s a shiny toy. Yes, I think it would be hilarious to watch my friends try it out in a bar. And yes, I’m sure it’s helped a lot of men have a good time. But it seems to me as precisely much of an upgrade to old-fashioned cruising as email was to the penny post: faster and flashier, but not fundamentally altering how we use the English language. Or pick up boys. Or something.

I wish Vernon would not be so quick to assume that, just because she has some gay friends, she knows what it is like to be a gay man and to belong to the gay male community. And I wish Shears would not be so quick to assume that, just because he is gay, he can rewrite the history of his elders. But perhaps I should not either be so presumptuous as to tell a musician and a journalist what I think of what they do on the basis of having read a few books and (yes, I admit it) knowing a few gay men. For just as Vernon will never really understand what it is like to be on the gay cruising scene, and just as Shears will never really know what it was like to live in the Village in the ’80s, I will never have the full understanding of this community that my gay male friends can—and it would be wrong of me to pretend that I can too.

However, I believe that, given the particular mission I’ve carved out for myself, it would also be wrong of me to stop trying. By reading more history, and being judicious about how best to apply it, I can hopefully bring my own outsider’s perspective to the recording of this community’s life before we all forget too much of it. Perhaps, after all, I should have plucked And the Band Played On out of the sea of lesbian erotica and done my best to pay my respects, even all the way out here in the California suburbs.

New York City Dyke March: A Curious Anachronism

My good friend Elizabeth Cooper has a great post up at Princeton’s feminist blog, Equal Writes, about last weekend’s Dyke March in New York City. Elizabeth compares the Dyke March (which styled itself as a protest, not as a parade, unlike the general Pride parade) to last October’s National Equality March in Washington (full disclosure: I helped Elizabeth organize a delegation of 80 Princeton students to attend the NEM). She found herself much less invested in the Dyke March than she had been in the NEM:

The Dyke March, on the other hand, did not feel transformative, at least for me. Although I wanted it to be a protest, it didn’t feel like such for a few reasons. Most importantly, I hadn’t been invested in the organization of the march, and therefore hadn’t really thought about what the march meant to me – it was happening, and I felt like since I was in the city partially for Pride and consider myself an activist in some respects, I should go. Amongst the people I marched with, I felt we shared this sense of not exactly knowing why we were marching. A couple of people thought we were going to be watching a parade, rather than participating in a protest. Once they realized the nature of the march, namely that it was a protest rather than a parade, they asked what we were protesting. I ventured a vague answer about protesting homophobia, but even the question made me insecure about not being more informed about what the march was about, as a whole, and for me personally.

As I was thinking about what I was marching for the day before, I had identified what meant and means the most to me personally right now – acceptance of LGBT children by their parents and family. I thought writing a slogan encapsulating that on a shirt would be cool both during the march and as a keepsake. I am happy and proud that I took the time to invest in my idea. However, at the march, it didn’t prove as valuable for making me feel engaged. People didn’t seem to read it like they would read and interact with a sign.

Elizabeth ends on the important note that visibility of any kind is important, and I absolutely agree with her that “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” is still, in 2010, a valuable slogan. I think it’s absolutely worth underscoring that visibility is in itself a form of queer protest, and that actively and aggressively pushing queerness into the lives of straight people is more or less as radical as it comes. However, the moderate version of this idea (“Everyone knows someone who’s gay!” and coming out to your friends) and the more radical version (using the appearance of queerness to unsettle and challenge people, e.g. a public kiss-in or indeed a Dyke March) can work together very productively. It is not irrelevant that one of the slogans at Stonewall was “gay is good!”—that attitude of simple affirmation persists in the activities which commemorate Stonewall’s anniversary.

That said, I see in Elizabeth’s ambivalence about the Dyke March-as-protest a certain divorce of last weekend’s event from the history of gay activism. It seems as if something like a Dyke March sits rather uneasily in the context of the more mainstream civil rights movement that is LGBT activism today. Elizabeth asked what the march was protesting, and I think that was a good question. An easy example of the problems inherent in answering that question would be that, to judge from its name, a “Dyke March” would be protesting the patriarchal institution of marriage in favor of the beauty of wymynhood, or something from the ’80s like that; while moderate LGBT activism today supports marriage wholeheartedly as an institution same-sex couples should be able to buy into. I do think, though, that Elizabeth made a good choice with the issue she decided to promote on her t-shirt: it straddles this moderate-radical divide in a way that makes sense for 2010.

But a Dyke March still seems, sadly, like an anachronism to me, in contrast to the much more sign-of-the-times National Equality March, which listed clear objectives linked to headlining civil rights issues like marriage equality and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It makes sense that NEM would have been more energizing to Elizabeth for that reason, and not just for her personal investment as an organizer: its messaging contained much more to relate to for queerfolk of our generation, while a Dyke March seems as if it would speak largely to second-wave feminists and historians.

(cross-posted at Campus Progress)

QOTD (2010-06-12)

Richard Ellmann, on the last page of his biography of Oscar Wilde:

His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.

I have been a month in slowly making my way through this book, and all through it I have been torn between love for the words and the glamor of one of the western canon’s greatest figures, and irritation at the partiality and romanticism with which Ellmann treats his subject. Ellmann has crafted Wilde’s life into such a narrative, and you can see quite transparently how much the biographer has invested in the climax (the “two loves” speech in the witness box at the second trial) and how tragic the next 200 pages of decline and fall must therefore be. I read all 200 today, nevertheless, unable to tear myself away, the dramatist’s life itself a drama.

It is ahistorical, I think, to write anyone into history as a martyr, and yet that doesn’t eliminate the haunting despair that visits me whenever I read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” I am angry at Douglas for what he made Wilde endure, and I am angry at Wilde for enduring it, and I am angry at them both for what they put Constance through. Having read the story to its close, I am as invested in it as—perhaps, for deliberate comparison—those Americans waiting for the steamer with the mail from England were in the ending of The Old Curiosity Shop. (It changed a lot of things I thought I knew to learn from Ellmann that Wilde made his famous remark about laughing at the death of Little Nell when he was on bail awaiting his own inevitable prison sentence.) Yes: try as I might to rationally divorce my admiration of the man’s writing from his existence as a deeply flawed human being, I cannot help thinking, all the same, that he was most notoriously—most tragically—wronged (and I think the Malvolio quote not inapt here!).

It is of course Pride Month, LGBT History Month, or whatever you call that month when we celebrate the anniversary of a riot at a bar on Christopher Street in 1969. The past couple weeks (you might say, since this month’s inception) I’ve been reading Wilde almost exclusively, with only a brief two-day digression into Virginia Woolf. I wonder as always what good and what ill we do by loving these fallen heroes so much that they become martyrs to our cause, a cause that stands so very much outside their own historical moment. I only hope that we wrong Wilde no more notoriously than he has already been, because I can certainly attest that it is very difficult to stop.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Self-Promotion, and a Confession

This morning I blogged at Campus Progress about the new movement in D.C. on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, why you should care, and why, if you find yourself on the far-left, queer-radical side of things, you should really be ignoring the issue of DADT because you object to the military-industrial complex instead of complaining that this new compromise doesn’t go far enough:

The New York Times reported yesterday afternoon that the new deal on a repeal timeline would give the Pentagon until December to “[complete] a review of its readiness to deal with the changes,” which the White House would also have to sign off on; before even this can happen, the House and the Senate must find the votes to add a DADT repeal measure as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill. There’s reason to be cautiously optimistic about those votes, but they’re not in the bag yet, and it seems as if some of the moderate Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee will need to be convinced—though, Steve Benen predicts, Congress might vote on the amendment as early as Thursday. If it makes its way into the defense reauthorization act, the Pentagon and the White House will then be able to conduct their respective reviews; if these conclude satisfactorily, DADT will be history.

If you’re curious about how this complicated new process might or might not work, the rest of my post I think lays it out pretty clearly—or as clearly as it is possible to lay out the web of D.C. LGBT politics. Even when I was in D.C. last summer, going to some of the hearings and press conferences, it was hard to keep track, and now I feel more distanced than ever from how things get done in Washington.

I was reminded of how much my life has changed in this past academic year today, because after sending in that DADT post, I went to grab some lunch. Walking past my mailbox on the way to the student-center cafeteria, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker, which was waiting for me, and I sat down to my seriously lackluster roast beef and iced coffee (hey, I’m not really complaining—it was dirt cheap) while reading a totally fascinating review of a new biography of Somerset Maugham. I knew nothing about Maugham before reading this article—except that he was the author of Of Human Bondage, which is a fact I memorized back when I memorized authors and titles for my quizbowl team, and which came in useful in one memorable home match when I was a sophomore, one of the first times I played on the varsity team. I had no idea, however, that Maugham was gay (or its early-20th-century equivalent); I suppose I should probably have surmised as much, but it took reading this article for me to add him to my mental roster of queer writers whose biographies I read and by whose cultural contexts I am fascinated. It was a funny realization because it took me oh-so-very out of the context of glaringly polarized D.C. LGBT politics into a more amorphous world of biographical and historicist literary criticism, and a world of long-dead men and women whose sexualities are not, unlike Dan Choi’s, the stuff of headlines. Maugham reminded me that I work in a different context now, one where nothing is black-and-white (or blue-and-red) polarized, and one where nuance is everything, where even the people we’re so certain are one thing or another aren’t, really.

My RSS reader has been changing, over the past year; I’ve pared down my number of political blogs and upped my intake of the likes of the New Yorker, the NYRB, the TLS, and the higher ed press. I’m reading book reviews instead of Politico, and I’m grateful for it. We all do what we have to do in order to stay sane, and to seek beauty; I am thankful that I know now that I am suited less to explaining Washington than I am to explaining the long-dead writers whose identities are so far removed from our own present cultural context. I look forward to seeing what this summer will bring, and whether I can find in every part of it as much joy as I found last summer in the elusive moments when I could escape from politics to the National Gallery or to the Dupont bookstores.

QOTD (2010-05-15), “Whitman Is Not a Gay Poet” Edition

From Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples:

Whitman was not suggesting that all men were repressing a supposedly shameful tendency; rather, he was celebrating the seeds of a politically powerful democratic affection that existed within every person and that only needed encouragement to blossom. Whitman’s poems of adhesiveness were intended not to set a few men apart but to bring all Americans together.

It is this inclusiveness that has made arguments about Whitman’s sexuality so intense. When Oscar Wilde said, years after his visit to the United States, that the kiss of Walt Whitman was still on his lips, he was claiming an artistic consecration, a mark of special favor. Symonds and Carpenter used Whitman to defend the rights of a persecuted minority, to suggest that same-sex passion was natural and innate in a certain portion of the population. But Walt Whitman refused to consider himself as special or different. He was not a minority but a kosmos. In depicting himself he was depicting you, any reader, every reader—the erms of adhesive love are in all people. It is a message that remains more radical and unsettling than any that Symonds, Carpenter, or Wilde—for all their transgressive courage—ever offered.

Ahistorical determination to claim Whitman for the cause of homosexuality usually tends to ignore the fairly obvious contextual point that no one aside from a few German sexologists and their British acolytes was really developing a framework in which to understand men’s sexual attraction to men (in contrast to a more romantic “manly love of comrades”). It goes without saying that American contemporaries of Whitman’s would not have read the “Calamus” poems as homosexual or even precisely homoerotic, simply because of the cultural context in which they all existed; this is in part why Whitman so enthusiastically rebuffed Symonds’ and Carpenter’s attempts to read “Calamus” love as “Uranian.” Homoerotic relationships and men who engaged in them as a distinct social category did not exist for Whitman or in his America. As Robertson points out earlier in this chapter, an allusion to (female) prostitution elsewhere in Whitman’s oeuvre generated the cultural concern—and censorship&mdash that the “Calamus” poems never did.

But I think it is worth noting that in this passage, Robertson seems to be suggesting that even if a cultural construction of homosexuality had existed in Whitman’s America, he wouldn’t have considered himself part of it. Sexual orientation is ever a question of self-identification, and Whitman would neither have understood himself to be writing on gay themes nor would have understood himself to be gay. Indeed, identity politics and the ensuing cultural divisiveness were exactly what concerned Whitman: remember that so much of his poetry comes directly out of the Civil War; remember the degree of patriotic concern with which he mourned the death of Lincoln and worried about what it would mean to the Union. I don’t understand the amative-adhesive dialectic nearly as well as I should, and it is possible that it has more in common with Carpenter’s gender-transgressive utopian vision than we might expect. But recent attempts to call upon Whitman in the name of an identity politics do a disservice to the poet’s own, I believe more complex, cosmology.

At the entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station in Washington, DC, there is a Whitman quote inscribed into the stone: it reads, “Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,/Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;/The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,/I sit by the restless all dark night – some are so young;/Some suffer so much – I recall the experience sweet and sad…” So, I assume, was Whitman’s experience as a Civil War nurse adopted for the cause of an AIDS memorial, and so, once again, was Whitman’s cultural status as the bard of homoeroticism brought to bear on this particular memory of a virus which claimed a generation of gay men. I like, however, to think that Whitman—despite his own rejection of the Uranian association, and despite the ahistoricity of labelling him with an identity which did not exist in his cultural context—would not have hesitated to minister to dying AIDS patients in the virus’s first couple decades, nor as it continues to ravage indiscriminately today. At risk of lapsing into my own particular brand of ahistoricity, I can only believe that Whitman would treat the young gay man of the 1980s, wasting away in a hospital bed before his time, with the same reverence which he did the young soldier of the 1860s dying a not-entirely-different, equally-undeserved death. Adhesive and amative love, after all, are not needlessly squeamish about whom they touch.

QOTD (2010-05-03), Pete Seeger’s Birthday Edition

Bruce Springsteen at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Concert, at Madison Square Garden one year ago:

As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s Inaugural Celebration, he told me the entire story of “We Shall Overcome”. How it moved from a labor movement song and with Pete’s inspiration had been adapted by the civil rights movement. That day as we sang “This Land Is Your Land” I looked at Pete, the first black president of the United States was seated to his right, and I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. My own growing up in the sixties in towns scarred by race rioting made that moment nearly unbelievable and Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was ao happy that day, it was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man!…It was so nice. At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing, like fifteen degrees and Pete was there; he had his flannel shirt on. I said, man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt! He says, yeah, I got my longjohns on under this thing.

And I asked him how he wanted to approach “This Land Is Your Land”. It would be near the end of the show and all he said was, “Well, I know I want to sing all the verses, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, about private property and the relief office.” I thought, of course, that’s what Pete’s done his whole life. He sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people. At some point Pete Seeger decided he’d be a walking, singing reminder of all of America’s history. He’d be a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people, and despite Pete’s somewhat benign, grandfatherly appearance, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant, and nasty optimism. Inside him he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us.

Pete Seeger turns 91 years old today, and he’s still alive and well and singing up in Beacon, NY. I am shy of superlatives, but he is at least one of the greatest living Americans today. He is also one of the most patriotic, with a love for an idea(l) of America that surely transcends any “Country First” shouting or Tea Party mania. Pete Seeger taught me that it is possible to be a left-wing American and not be permanently ashamed to call this country home—because he has taught me that there are things like the First Amendment that we can still have faith in as sacred text, even when much else is disillusioning and dispiriting and depressing and disastrous. Pete Seeger got me through a summer in Washington; he gets me through every day in Princeton.

Now I must return to writing about Gothic literature in French and about the historiography of the Salem witch trials in English, because I don’t have as much time as I once did to write on this blog about my heroes. But if you know a Pete Seeger song, sing it today; if you think you don’t, you probably do. (You might find some in a little book called Rise Up Singing.) I’ll leave you with one of my recently-rediscovered favorite Seeger songs, “Tomorrow Is a Highway“:

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the many who’ll travel there.
Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the workers who’ll build it there;
And we will build it there!

Come, let us build a way for all mankind,
A way to leave this evil year behind,
To travel onward to a better year
Where love is, and there will be no fear,
Where love is and no fear!

Now is the shadowed year when evil men,
When men of evil thunder war again.
Shall tyrants once again be free to tread,
Above our most brave and honored dead?
Our brave and honored dead!

O, comrades, come and travel on with me,
We’ll go to our new year of liberty.
Come, walk upright, along the people’s way,
From darkness, unto the people’s day;
From dark, to sunlit day!

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair
And hate and greed shall never travel there
But only they who’ve learned the peaceful way
Of brotherhood, to greet the coming day;
We hail the coming day!

The Queer Activist: A Brief Observation

Over at Princeton’s new queer-community blog, my colleague Ryan has written a great, thoughtful post about making a career in queer activism work:

I feel extremely conflicted towards the LGBT movement establishment and question whether I want to make a career out of LGBT advocacy.

Before coming to Princeton, I was Director of Louisiana’s statewide LGBT advocacy organization, the Forum For Equality. It was an amazing and challenging experience — as one might expect, there are a unique set of priorities and obstacles for the movement in the American South. I am incredibly proud of my work at the Forum, and it seems natural for me to return to this type of work upon graduation.

But when I think of returning to work for LGBT issues, I wonder what is motivating me. Is it a sense of guilt or obligation? Should smart young gay people who are interested in politics feel as if they “must” work for LGBT rights? The LGBT community is a small minority, and those with elite educations are an even smaller minority. Who am I to turn my back on the movement that has allowed me to be who I am?

Ryan continues, asking (very saliently, I think) whether the developing world would be a better use of his talents, and implicitly noting how exhausting political advocacy work can be. But he didn’t note something else I think is important, which is that there is more than one way to be an activist. Deciding against a career in LGBT advocacy and policy, or advocacy and policy at all, does not mean turning your back on queer issues and being an advocate for queer visibility, acceptance, and civil rights. I consider myself a queer activist through my work at learning to be a historian and an educator, because someday I intend to make a career out of telling the stories of queer lives long ended, out of developing critical frameworks through which to examine the sexualities and identities and cultural movements of the past, and out of passing all this information on to a new generation of young folks whose lives were changed by learning about Harvey Milk or Stonewall and who are ready to learn so much more. Long after marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are decided in America, all around the world we will have a need for people to tell stories like the ones I am learning to tell—and, if necessary, perhaps to tell their own stories of their own lives too. Staying well-informed enough and staying accessible enough that when someone has a question about queer issues you can take a half-hour to answer it is a form of activism. Being out is a form of activism. And if all these things weren’t true, I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the life I want to lead with the principles I believe in.

And teaching—about queer stuff or not—is the greatest way that there is to make the world you believe in and dream of for the next generation.

Addendum: I see that a lot of people are coming to this blog from a College Confidential thread about the atmosphere for LGBT students at Princeton. If you’re a prospective Princeton student seeking information about LGBT life on campus, please feel free to contact me, and I will absolutely answer any questions you have.