In The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White’s nameless narrator envisions a day when gay people will claim the right to define themselves: “Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis” (226). This exhilarating thought comes to White’s protagonist as he finds himself in the middle of an uprising at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village on the night of June 27, 1969. Drawing on Civil Rights rhetoric, the protagonist and his friends reclaim and reposition their own experiences with chants such as “Gay is good” and “We’re the Pink Panthers” (226).1
Although White’s account is fictional, the riots outside the Stonewall Inn are generally considered the beginning of the contemporary gay liberation movement. They did indeed usher in a decade of redefinition by lesbian and gay communities. Within weeks, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had formed, employing the slogan “Out of the Closets and into the Streets!” Within a year, the Radicalesbians, influenced by both gay liberation and the women’s movement, had presented feminists with the “woman-identified woman,” a position that they hoped would facilitate the formation of challenging, politicized coalitions among women. By 1974, activists had successfully removed homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) list of mental disorders. In short, the new names and identities embraced by White’s protagonist and his friends were high on the agenda for early gay liberationists.2
These newly available gay and lesbian identities were claimed and proclaimed through the act of “coming out.” This act provided lesbians and gay men with positions that could serve as starting points for the radical political action the early gay liberationists believed was necessary to reconfigure the systems of capitalism and patriarchy responsible for gay and lesbian oppression. Indeed, the very slogan of the gay liberationists (and the title of a 1972 essay by Allen Young), “Out of the Closets, into the Streets,” suggests not simply that one claims a position (”out of the closet”) but that one moves from that position to effect radical social change. Young writes, “Of course, we want to ‘come out/. . . But the movement for a new definition of sexuality does not, and cannot, end there. . . . The revolutionary goals of gay liberation, including the elimination of capitalism, imperialism and racism, are premised on the termination of the system of male supremacy” (10). Similarly, “woman-identification,” according to the Radicalesbians, could be “develop [ed] with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow” (Radicalesbians, 176). Like the identity positions (pro)claimed by all the so-called new social movements, the identities into which gay and lesbian activists “came out” were collective identities meant to generate radical social change based on new and different ways of understanding the world.3
Coming out generally does not have the same radical edge for the new generation of queer activists, or for the writers of the Queer Renaissance, that it had for their gay liberationist forebears. On the contrary: coming out, along with its product—one’s “coming-out story”—has been thoroughly critiqued by many contemporary lesbian and gay writers. In particular, theorists have critiqued coming-out stories for their emphasis on the “discovery” of an individual and essential gay identity, unmarked by other categories of difference, such as race or class. This chapter briefly surveys these and other criticisms but simultaneously attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork for a reclamation of coming out’s radical potential. Specifically, through readings of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, I consider whether a feminist-informed and antiracist analysis might redefine the parameters of the coming-out story, shaping it into a myth of what I call “queer (op)positionality.”
Through the term (op)positionality, I intend to invoke the “opposition” to established and oppressive systems of power that was voiced by the GLF, the Radicalesbians, and members of all the new social movements, and that has been rearticulated in the contemporary Queer Renaissance. I also intend to invoke “positionality” theory (or “standpoint epistemology”) as it has evolved in recent feminist writing. Standpoint theorists, often explicitly citing both the strengths and the weaknesses of the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, argue for a nonessentialized “position” from which to forge coalition-based political action.4 Linda Alcoff, for example, argues, “If we combine the concept of identity politics with a conception of the subject as positionality, we can conceive of the subject as nonessentialized and emergent from a historical experience and yet retain our political ability to take gender as an important point of departure” (433). As Alcoff sees it, this new position is both fluid and relational: “being a ‘woman’ is to take up a position within a moving historical context and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how we alter this context,” so that “women can themselves articulate a set of interests and ground a feminist politics” (435).
Similarly, Donna Haraway’s feminist redefinition of “objectivity” argues for an openly acknowledged, although partial, position or perspective. Haraway writes, “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object” (190). This partial perspective is necessitated since, not unlike Edmund White’s narrator in The Beautiful Room Is Empty, with his concern about psychiatric diagnoses, Haraway confesses that she has occasional paranoid fantasies about so-called impartial, “objective” discourses that appropriate “embodied others” as “objects” of knowledge:
Academic and activist feminist enquiry has repeatedly tried to come to terms with the question of what we might mean by the curious and inescapable term “objectivity.” We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined “they” constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories; and the imagined “we” are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body. (183)
Because of these fears, Haraway’s redefinition of “objectivity,” like the rhetoric of gay liberation, gives preference to other ways of seeing, particularly those ways of seeing that emerge from what she calls the “standpoints of the subjugated.” She writes, “‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (191). Such standpoints are actually more “objective” because they do not claim to see, simultaneously, “everything from nowhere” (189) or “to be,” as Richard Dyer puts it in his analysis of the social construction of whiteness, “everything and nothing” (Dyer, 45). Such standpoints are more “transforming” because a coalition politics that emphasizes working together across difference is fundamental to what theorists of positionality envision. Indeed, this model would not have been shaped in the first place if feminists of color had not called for a more rigorous analysis of the differences within feminism and for an ongoing interrogation of the ways in which feminist concerns overlap with the concerns of other groups. Both Haraway and Alcoff, consequently, place race as well as gender at the center of their analyses: to Haraway, the category “women of color” “marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (Haraway, 156); to Alcoff, positionality theory “can be readily intuited by people of mixed races and cultures who have had to choose in some sense their identity” (Alcoff, 432).
Other theorists, recognizing the value of such coalition-based and self-reflexive positionality, have attempted to link gay male and feminist standpoint theory. Earl Jackson, Jr., for one, begins his study of Robert Glück by acknowledging, “One of the most important things gay men can learn from feminist and lesbian-feminist discursive practices is how to read and write from responsibly identified positions” (112). Nevertheless, there are drawbacks to any attempt to link, specifically, coming out to feminist theories of positionality; these drawbacks become evident from the critiques of coming out I alluded to earlier. The position “out of the closet,” much more than the “standpoint” of recent feminist theory, has become in the past two decades a mandated and delimited position, for both men and women. In the process of forging the imperative to come out, unfortunately, some lesbian and gay communities lost the sense that coming out was, as feminist theorists now argue about the feminist standpoint, only a beginning point from which to launch political action. The collective rallying cry “Out of the Closets, into the Streets” quickly became the demand that individuals simply “Come out of the closet.” Assimilation, rather than transformation, became the goal; increased visibility, it was thought, would lead to gay civil rights and acceptance into mainstream society. Martin Duberman explains that the Gay Activists Alliance emerged
as a breakaway alternative to the Gay Liberation Front, and would shortly supercede it.. . . Whereas GLF had argued that sexual liberation had to be fought for in conjunction with a variety of other social reforms and in alliance with other oppressed minorities, GAA believed in a single-minded concentration on gay civil rights and eschewed “romantic” excursions into revolutionary ideology (Cures, 213–14)5
Maintaining the GLF’s insistence that gay men and lesbians speak up but abandoning their politics of alliance, the GAA redirected the movement and circumscribed the meaning of coming out.
In addition to the dangers of quietism, coming out as a focus for gay and lesbian theory could also underwrite an apolitical essentialism. The narrowing of vision Duberman recounts could, and often does, narrow even further, so that coming out comes to signify solely the assertion of one’s (supposedly long-repressed) identity. This model of coming out, by itself, exhibits little concern for how lesbian or gay identities are socially constituted, for how they are intersected by other arenas of difference, or for what sort of collective political action might develop from an assertion of one’s gay or lesbian identity. Coming out here becomes a suspiciously white and middle-class move toward “self-respect,” not revolutionary social change, and many contemporary coming-out narratives might be seen as products of this shift toward individualism and essentialism. To be fair, however, John D’Emilio writes, in reference to the early gay liberationists:
For a gay man or lesbian of that time, I don’t think that it was possible to experience anything of comparable intensity. In a psychological sense it was an act of “revolutionary” import. No manner of political analysis could convince someone who had come out that he or she wasn’t turning the world inside out and upside down. (Making Trouble, 249)
Still, D’Emilio’s comment is less a trumpeting of the benefits of coming out than it is a note of caution. He is attempting to contextualize, but also look critically at, the psychological empowerment that coming out could bring: “Only later, as the movement matured, would it become clear that coming out was a first step only. An openly gay banker is still a banker” (Making Trouble, 249). By the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many lesbians and gay men no longer had the sense that coming out was a first step only. Coming out came to have one meaning, across all social locations: announcing one’s homosexuality. The act no longer necessarily carried the sense that lesbians and gays should collectively move to new locations; one could come out, and stay out, anywhere. Although “coming out conservative” would have been a logical impossibility to members of the GLF, by 1992, because of the ways in which the act had been redefined as the assertion of one’s essential, no longer repressed identity, it was the title of a popular book about Marvin Liebman, a formerly closeted anticommunist and conservative activist.
In a slightly different vein, Haraway, too, stresses that essentialism in its many guises is a pitfall for feminist theories of positionality, especially those, like hers, that foreground the “standpoints of the subjugated”: “But here lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. ... A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detachment is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics” (191–92). Haraway’s disclaimers suggest that these essentializing tendencies might not engulf feminist theories of positionality, as long as “situating knowledge” entails continually and collectively repositioning identity: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another” (193).
An “innocent identity politics,” however, has already engulfed the coming-out narrative, according to many lesbian and gay critics. Diana Fuss sees even in the Radicalesbians a “tension between the notions of ‘developing’ an identity and ‘finding’ an identity” that “points to a more general confusion over the very definition of ‘identity’ and the precise signification of ‘lesbian’” (Essentially Speaking, 100). Biddy Martin discusses how, by the end of the 1970s, the imperative to come out is evolving into a predictable (and white) narrative, and how many coming-out stories “are tautological insofar as they describe a process of coming to know something that has always been true, a truth to which the author has returned” (89). Jeffrey Minson takes this accusation of tautology a step further, suggesting that “far from constituting a break from a repressive, closetted past, coming out might be situated as the latest in a long line of organised rituals of confession. . . . Sexual avowal therefore is a mode of social regimentation” (37). In Minson’s ominous scenario, coming out simply reproduces and undergirds the homophobic notion that homosexuality wholly explains a lesbian or gay person’s identity.
Finally, although Fuss’s, Martin’s, and Minson’s criticisms might also be leveled at some feminist theories of positionality, coming out may be problematic for a unique, more mundane reason: the imperative “Come out!” is by now, for many, a worn-out refrain. “National Coming Out Day” is at this point televised yearly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and encouragement, such as the exhortation in my own campus newspaper to “come out, wherever you are, and friends won’t turn away” (Behrens, 19), often sounds like pandering for heterosexual “compassion.” Since coming out, according to this mainstream model, is virtually synonymous with a call to “respect yourself,” many gay and lesbian people are understandably bored or irritated with this focus on coming out and its product, the coming-out narrative.6 For example, David Van Leer insists that for White, coming out is “the quintessential gay experience”; but in a review of The Faber Book of Gay Short Stories, which White edited, Van Leer suggests that, in its “preoccupation with the opinion of others,” coming out “sometimes looks like a bid for heterosexual sympathy, even for absolution” (50). Sarah Schulman states more forcefully, “The coming out story should be permanently laid to rest. ... It was a defining stage we had to go through, but it doesn’t help us develop a literature true to our experience” (qtd. in Fries, 8).
Although I have no doubt that “we” will never construct a literature “true to our experience,” since that “experience” is multiple and that “truth” is always socially constituted and continually shifting, I am nonetheless sympathetic with Schulman’s frustration over the primacy given the coming-out narrative, especially when this focus comes at the expense of attention to other queer stories. Richard Hall, in a review of White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, is more tentative than Schulman, suggesting, “Not that the coming-out novel in its pristine liberationist form is dead. Maybe it’s just weary. . .. Here is another coming-up-and-out story, taking the narrator into adolescence and young manhood...” (27). Although Hall feels White’s novel is told with “wit, humor and aphoristic elegance” (27), his reservations about the coming-out novel are standard fare these days in reviews of contemporary lesbian and gay literature.7
Thus, despite a possible affinity with recent feminist theory, as a myth of “queer positionality,” coming out can be read as a worn-out concept. In the remainder of this chapter I explore more thoroughly why this is the case, but I also use the insights offered by feminist positionality theory to present an analysis that considers ways to revise or reclaim the coming-out story. Myths of queer positionality/identity need not be hopelessly lost on teleological journeys toward essential wholeness; “noninnocent” myths of queer positionality can be shaped in a queer world that is about “lived social and bodily realities [and] in which people are not afraid ... of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” as in the cyborg world Haraway envisions and argues for (154). A Boy’s Own Story and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name were both published in 1982, when the cultural phenomenon I call “the Queer Renaissance” had only just begun. Through an examination of these two very different coming-out stories, I want to flaunt the ways coming out has been reinvented in the Queer Renaissance as a myth of queer (op)positionality.8
Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story is the first novel in a planned three-novel series. In each text, White traces the development of his nameless, faceless narrator. A Boy’s Own Story focuses on this development during the 1950s; The Beautiful Room Is Empty, on this development during the 1960s. The novel as yet unfinished (The Farewell Symphony) will carry the protagonist through the 1970s and 1980s.
The “invisibility” used as a mechanism in these texts works as a metaphor for the pain the protagonist goes through as a gay youth in heterosexist America. Ed Cohen writes that
the structuring stories we commonly use in order to make sense of our daily lives provide us with very few plots that do not emplot us in normative versions of gender and sexuality. . . . [These normative narratives] have special consequences for those of us whose movements appear to transgress the possibilities of such acceptable representations, effectively rendering us “unrepresentable.” (“Constructing Gender,” 545)
Thus, like many other gay men and lesbians, White’s protagonist feels that none of the people around him knows who he “really” is, and that he must consequently wear a (heterosexual) mask. The young narrator of A Boy’s Own Story muses, “What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion . . . ?” (41). The point is, however, that he cannot, given the normative versions of gender and sexuality available to him, and hence invisibility works to underscore that the narrator is forced to “live a lie” at the same time as it works to stress more generally the pain and isolation of being marginalized in and by American society. Like the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, White’s protagonist might say “I am invisible . . . because people refuse to see me” (Ellison, 3).
I mention Ellison at this point because White’s use of the trope of invisibility in A Boy’s Own Story and elsewhere is not unlike Ellison’s use of the same trope in his 1952 novel: both writers use invisibility to comment on the exclusionary logic at the heart of American culture. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, White’s narrators often see parallels between their experiences and the experiences of African Americans in the United States. In A Boy’s Own Story, for example, the narrator finds himself pressured by his friends to accompany them to a whorehouse staffed by two black women and one white woman. As the protagonist sits in the waiting room, one of the black prostitutes engages him in conversation. The narrator admits, “I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn’t have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status” (183). White’s narrator goes on to imagine a marriage between the two, “she a Negro whore and I her little protector.... If this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her” (183). Since both characters are invisible “outcasts,” White’s narrator imagines that they might more effectively face the world together.
The identifications here and elsewhere in White with African American (and with “fat” and “unpopular”) identity, however, are suspect for several reasons, and my main argument in this section is that the construction of sexuality in A Boy’s Own Story is in tension with the construction of race in ways that forestall the possibility that the story might serve as a myth of queer (op)positionality. Although the novel is in some ways “oppositional,” I argue that any “oppositionality” is ultimately undercut by the “apositionality,” or invisibility, of whiteness in the text. It is not White’s own story, necessarily, that produces this tension: by 1982, the standard coming-out story, with its single-minded focus on the discovery of one’s essential identity, required such apositionality. The remainder of this section shows how white apositionality fixes A Boy’s Own Story as a representative—or the representative—coming-out story and considers what ramifications the effacement of whiteness has for contemporary gay male writing generally. In the next section, however, I turn to an analysis of the ways in which Audre Lorde reconceives the coming-out story as a fluid and relational myth of queer (op)positionality
Initially, White’s novel may be read as “oppositional” for its disruption of linear models of sexual development in which heterosexuality is both the ultimate goal and the mark of maturity. This disruption of heterosexual telos is underscored by the very form of the text, which represents the protagonist’s story in a nonlinear fashion (he is fifteen in the first chapter, seven at the beginning of the third, fifteen again by the end of the sixth, and so on).9 Yet, despite this “opposition” to heterosexual telos, White’s novel nonetheless teleologically represents his protagonist’s coming to a racially unmarked gay consciousness. Although overt acts of coming out into this new gay consciousness are deemphasized in the text (the narrator confesses to a friend that he is gay only once, offhandedly [88]), it is still clear throughout A Boy’s Own Story that homosexuality is precisely and primarily what White’s nameless narrator must confront. Indeed, he uses a homosexual encounter with and betrayal of a “straight” teacher at the very end of the novel to confront this identity, which, he says, is “at once my essence and also an attribute I was totally unfamiliar with . . . this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being” (198). In the end, the betrayal of his teacher finally allows White’s narrator to work through the contradiction inherent in his “impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual” (218). Thus, although A Boy’s Own Story certainly disrupts the cultural mandate to develop heterosexu-ally it also institutes a coming-out narrative as necessary for understanding one’s (essential) gay identity. In fact, White later asserted that the novel “succeeded partly because it seemed to fill an empty niche in the contemporary publishing ecology, the slot of the coming-out novel” (Burning Library, 372).
White’s discussion of niches and slots implies that A Boy’s Own Story was an easy fit; the publishing world was ready for a novel with a unitary focus on coming out. I would argue, however, that at the time the “contemporary publishing ecology” could provide a home for White’s novel only on two, unspoken conditions. First, gay identity had to be understood, as it is in A Boy’s Own Story, as an “essence . . . central to [one’s] being.” Such an understanding is what enabled the empty niche to be filled so exactly. Second, gay identity could not be explicitly intersected by other facets of identity, such as gender or race: in other words, this “gay” slot was white and male, although not openly white and male. Lisa Duggan’s comments suggest that these two points are, in fact, interrelated: “Any gay politics based on the primacy of sexual identity defined as unitary and ‘essential’ . . . ultimately represents the view from the subject position ‘20th-century Western white gay male’” (“Making It Perfectly Queer,” 18). Duggan outs the subject position as white and male, however; generally, such representations are advanced without being explicitly marked as such. And indeed, in A Boy’s Own Story, a unitary, essential gay subject position is achieved through the mechanism of invisibility.
The mechanism of invisibility in White’s novel is not intentionally deployed to cover the main character’s gender and race; White’s narrator is “invisible” throughout the novel precisely because homosexuality is an identity that he cannot openly embrace. Yet the construction of sexuality here inadvertently colludes with hegemonic constructions of whiteness, which maintains its power precisely to the extent that it is able to remain hidden from view. As Richard Dyer argues, “White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular” (44). What this effects in A Boy’s Own Story is contradictory: on the one hand, the story is one of marginalization and oppression; on the other hand, the story is representative. White himself recently gave voice to this contradiction, insisting, “When I was growing up, I felt I was a totally freaky person . . . and then later I came to realize that my life, which I had thought was the most exceptional imaginable, was actually the most representative. All I needed to do was to say what I went through in order to say what gay people went through in their evolution toward freedom” (in Avena, 224). In the end, even White’s title conveys this dual sense of the exceptional and the representative, suggesting that this “boy’s own story” is as much about any (gay) boy as about White’s specific protagonist. Indeed, I was struck, when I attempted to teach one of White’s texts, by a student’s response to my very first question, “Why do you think White chooses not to give his narrator a name or face?” A Filipino American student of mine responded, “So we can put ourselves into the story?”
My student was not “wrong” to identify with White’s protagonist; he is, in fact, like White’s narrator, a gay man living in a homophobic society. Yet the interrogative inflection my student gave to his response suggests that he suspected his resolution to my question might be a bit problematic. For White’s character is not simply a representative “Everyboy”: his mother and he play games with the classical radio station, guessing whether the composer is Haydn, Mozart, or early Beethoven (80); a (black female) maid, a (white male) therapist, and a private school are all part of his childhood; and he admits, however ironically, “Even as I made much of my present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future” (178). In short, aspects of the protagonist’s identity can be read as race- and class-coded, despite his “invisible” gay identity. Indeed, his gay identity is rendered representative precisely because the “naturalness” of his racial identity is maintained through White’s “god-trick” of “invisibility”10
The term god-trick is Haraway’s, and she uses it to refer to seemingly innocent perspectives that claim to see the world more comprehensively while actually “being nowhere” (191). This may seem to be an unfair charge to level at White’s story of gay development, but it is harder to dismiss in the context of Dyer’s analysis of whiteness. Dyer suggests that
white people . . . are difficult, if not impossible, to analyse qua white. The subject seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin. Any instance of white representation is always immediately something more specific—Brief Encounter is not about white people, it is about English middle-class people; The Godfather is not about white people, it is about Italian-American people; but The Color Purple is about black people, before it is about poor, southern US people. (46)
Similarly, A Boy’s Own Story is not about white people, it is about gay people; but Zami is the autobiography of a black lesbian, not of the gay community more generally. A Boy’s Own Story posits a seemingly innocent perspective that implicitly claims to see gay identity more comprehensively, but it is able to do so because white identity is nowhere to be seen.
The very landscape of A Boy’s Own Story underwrites white apositionality. The story takes place, alternately, in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. This is not Toni Morrison’s Ohio, however, in which racial divisions are graphically (and in Sula, geographically) represented. Like the protagonist, the various settings for the novel are unmarked: a “boy’s own story” presumably takes place in Anywhere, U.S.A. David Bergman argues that “the importance of Cincinnati .. . cannot be underestimated in White’s fiction,” but it is Bergman, not White, who actually names the “Queen City” that plays such a “prominent role in [White’s] autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story” (”Edmund White,” 387). Of course, the Midwest has long had a reputation for being the blank “nonregion” of the United States, the land—as in Don DeLillo’s White Noise—of supermarkets, station wagons, and “an expressway beyond the backyard” (DeLillo, 4). This unmarked regional identity, however, does not preclude White in his novel from marking other parts of the country regionally: the protagonist and his sister make fun of “hillbillies” from Kentucky (73), and the protagonist himself dreams of escaping to the “charm” and sophistication of New York City (52–57).
As in DeLillo, certainly, the blankness of White’s Midwest might be read as simply a metaphor for the region’s supposed cultural sterility. This interpretation would elide, however, the ways in which regional blankness underwrites racial invisibility in A Boy’s Own Story. Like Kentuckians and New Yorkers, African Americans in White’s Cincinnati are embodied as such, and throughout this text, it is the location of regional and racial identity in embodied “others” that enables the protagonist not to have a regional and racial identity of his own. This disembodiment, in turn, ensures that the protagonist’s coming-out story can be read as representative. The “other,” marked identities allow White’s narrator to negotiate a problematic sleight of hand: while he effaces differences of race and region, he simultaneously appropriates representative “outcast” status for himself.
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that white American writers have often used their African American characters to perform such sleights of hand. Morrison’s study emerges from her interest “in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them” (viii). Insisting that an understanding of American literature is incomplete without an understanding of the central role an African American presence has played in the American literary imagination, she concludes, “What became transparent were the self-evident ways that [white] Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (17). In A Boy’s Own Story, this metaphorical process begins in the second chapter. At first, the chapter might be read as starkly exposing the mechanisms of power that enable and ensure white privilege: the unmarked and privileged white identity is depicted here as depending for its very existence on the labor of a marked and African American identity. The protagonist admits:
As a little boy, I’d thought of our house ... as the place God had meant us to own, but now I knew in a vague way that its seclusion and ease had been artificial and that it had strenuously excluded the city at the same time we depended on the city for food, money, comfort, help, even pleasure. The black maids were the representatives of the city I’d grown up among. I’d never wanted anything from them—nothing except their love. To win it, or at least to ward off their silent, sighing resentment, I’d learned how to make my own bed and cook my own breakfast. But nothing I could do seemed to make up to them for the terrible loss they’d endured. (36)
Although he realizes his knowledge is “vague,” White’s protagonist is able to recognize here that race and geography shape subjectivity, including his own.
Events later in the chapter corroborate the possibility that, at least initially, the narrator is gaining insight into the unequal distribution of power and wealth. When their maid’s daughter survives a bloody fight and needs help, the protagonist’s father takes him along on a journey to her home in the “dangerous” section of town. This journey forces the protagonist to confront the poverty of the African American section of their town:
That had been another city—Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled onto the flowered congoleum floor. (50)
Nonetheless, the wedding photo “filched” by Blanche from her white employer is the first sign, I think, of what Morrison might label the “choked representation” in this scene. White specifically chokes, or checks, the “silent, sighing [and potentially threatening] resentment” of “the black maids” through the representation of Blanche’s shrine, which certainly suggests anything but resentment. Moreover, the identification of an/other city is already appropriated by the end of the chapter to facilitate the protagonist’s own developing sense of self. The very use of the name Blanche foreshadows the possibility that this scene could be as much about “White” as it is about the maid herself.11 And indeed, when he is considering running away to New York City, the protagonist appropriates—without reference to Blanche herself—the rhetoric he had earlier used to identify her: “I’d go hungry! The boardinghouse room with the toilet down the hall, blood on the linoleum, Christ in a chromo, crepe-paper flowers ...” (56). In this entire section, difference is not so much “exposed” and challenged as it is safely contained—in White’s Cincinnati, in this section of his novel, and, ultimately, in his own “outcast” protagonist.
This is White’s second chapter, and racial difference becomes a crucial factor only once more in the novel: when White’s protagonist and his friends, in the final chapter, visit the whorehouse. Despite the reemergence of race, though, the relations of power that determine and maintain white dominance remain safely behind in chapter 2. What was earlier an identification of racial difference and discrimination becomes, at the whorehouse, an identification with racial difference (White’s protagonist, as I mentioned earlier, equates the woman’s situation with his own). It is precisely the “invisibility” of the protagonist’s racial identity (as well as the “blankness” of the regional scene upon which all of this is played out) that allows for this slippage and appropriation to go unnoticed. Since the narrator’s regional and racialized body is invisible, he can safely appropriate “other” identities for his own limited—I would not necessarily call them “queer”—uses. Thus the blankness of the Midwestern landscape and the invisibility of whiteness in A Boy’s Own Story are more than simply metaphors for cultural sterility. Unmarked and dislocated racial and regional identities are exactly what enable this to be a “representative” story about gay people, rather than about white Midwesterners.
Hence queer (op)positionality in A Boy’s Own Story is choked by white apositionality. As I suggested, this is as much a function of how the coming-out story had evolved as it is of White’s particular novel. However, in some other contexts, the ways in which the identity “Edmund White” is constructed replicates this pattern. For example, after White edited an anthology of gay fiction (The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction) that included only one black writer (James Baldwin) and no women, the controversy was reported in a publication no less mainstream than USA Today. In the article, Kent Fordyce explicitly spells out the tension between sexuality and race: “I think Faber flubbed the title.... I think it should be ‘Edmund White’s Anthology of White Short Story Writers’” (qtd. in C. Wilson, 8D). The book isn’t about white people, White himself seems to be saying when he explains, “[I] read dozens of stories by dozens of gay black writers and I didn’t find anything too suitable. And I thought it was wrong to include them just because they were black” (qtd. in C. Wilson, 8D).
His dismissal of race notwithstanding, in the foreword to The Faber Book, White continues to appropriate racial identity for its comparative value: “Do gays really constitute something like an ethnic minority? Does an author’s sexuality represent a more crucial part of his identity than his social class, generation, race or regional origins?” (xvii). White’s persistent blindness to race (and to other arenas of difference) except when he is appropriating it to talk about his own oppression is surely what led Essex Hemphill to signify on White in his own introduction to Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men: “When black gay men approached the gay community to participate in the struggle for acceptance and to forge bonds of brotherhood ... we discovered that the beautiful rhetoric was empty” (xix).
In Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, Diana Fuss admits to implying throughout that “the adherence to essentialism is a measure of the degree to which a particular political group has been culturally oppressed” (98). And yet, in her chapter on lesbian and gay identity politics, Fuss spends only a page early on “exposing” the “essentialism” of the Combahee River Collective, Cherríe Moraga, and Barbara Smith (99). Although Audre Lorde is mentioned in passing in an earlier chapter (44), no other openly gay or lesbian writers of color are engaged in the chapter on identity politics, or in the entire book, for that matter. To me, this hardly provides enough material to justify a sweeping statement the logical conclusion of which would be that lesbians of color are the most essentialist of all. In fact, in contrast to Fuss, I would propose that those who are oppressed in only one facet of their identity often stand the most to gain from essentialism.12 As White writes in introducing his anthology of (white) gay short story writers, “Most gay men believe they did not choose to be homosexual, that this orientation was imposed on them, although whether by nature or nurture they have no way of knowing” (ix). White does not and need not necessarily speak for all white gay men here, but as in A Boy’s Own Story, coming out into an essential and essentially oppressed gay identity is exactly what allows White to mask white and male power and to assume a voice that purports to speak for “most gay men.”
The subordination of racial identity to an unmarked (white) gay identity has ramifications far beyond White’s texts. It is evident in some recent criticism of gay male fiction that likewise tends not to notice the apositionality of White and whiteness. David Bergman, in his study of gay self-representation in American literature, Gaiety Transfigured, examines Baldwin in one chapter on “The Agony of Gay Black Literature,” while White and other whites provide the material for the next chapter on “Alternative Service: Families in Recent American Gay Fiction.” Yet under what discursive regime can Baldwin be understood as not about “family”? Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of many twentieth-century American writers more interested in exploring the family than James Baldwin. Nonetheless, Bergman positions White under the sign family, while Baldwin is positioned and contained under the sign race.
Bergman explains, in the introduction to Gaiety Transfigured, that he added a chapter on “race and homosexuality” only after the “excellent suggestions” of Robert K. Martin (24), and he also concedes, “I felt some . . . reluctance when I began to explore black gay literature, namely, that as a white man I would fail to grasp the subtle—and not so subtle—differences between the black and gay experiences” (13). Although he admits that it was a challenge, he reports that he now feels “a greater sympathy with the gayness of black men than many heterosexual blacks have expressed” (13). In short, Bergman may not feel competent to write much about black gays, but he is certainly competent to make sweeping dismissals of “many” black heterosexuals. Bergman’s naive oversensitivity to the positionality of blacks and his reinscription of White/white apositionality result in a chapter on “family” in which he examines without critical comment such questionable scenes from contemporary gay fiction as Andrew Holleran’s description of two white men in Union Square observing a “cocoa-colored youth” whom they feel they have a right to “have” (Gaiety Transfigured, 188) and White’s narrator’s own fantasy of an expatriate white gay friend living as a “garden god” among a tribe in Mexico (Gaiety Transfigured, 199).
Baldwin’s ghettoization under the sign race here connects, moreover, to the ways in which “race” is contained in the larger narrative that some critics, including Bergman, are beginning to tell us about post-Stonewall gay male literature. Around 1978 (or so the story goes), gay literature began to come of age. Since 1978, Bergman explains, “when Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance gained critical and commercial success—gay books have become a regular and increasingly large portion of trade publishers’ lists” (Gaiety Transfigured, 9–10). This version of the story is underwritten by White: “It wasn’t until 1978 that three gay novels came out: Larry Kramer’s Faggots; Dancer from the Dance, by Andrew Holleran; and my Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Those three books gave the impression of a new wave, of a new movement coming along” (in Bonetti, 95). White modestly appends a disclaimer—”Mine was probably the least important of those three, as a publishing event” (in Bonetti, 95)—but just as for Bergman, 1978 is the banner year for White, the turning point for post-Stonewall gay male literature. As White asserts elsewhere, “Gay male fiction was suddenly on the map” (“On the Line,” xii).
Yet where was Baldwin during all of this critical and commercial success ? Although Baldwin was never wholly comfortable with the term gay, his most comprehensive study of black gay desire is nonetheless a product of exactly this period, Just Above My Head was published in 1979, but portions of the novel had begun to appear in that “banner year,” 1978. My objection here could certainly be qualified (Baldwin was nearing the end of his career, whereas the three white authors were at the beginning of theirs; and Just Above My Head first began to appear in Penthouse, hardly the premier gay venue), but this has not kept some critics from telling the White/Bergman “banner year” story otherwise. Joseph Beam, for example, in his introduction to In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, positions Baldwin’s novel as one of the few landmarks: “More and more each day, as I looked around the well-stocked shelves of Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia’s gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstore where I worked, I wondered where was the work of Black gay men. . . . How many times could I reread Baldwin’s Just Above My Head and Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future?” (14). The year 1978 may have been commercially successful for some gay writers, but the narrative that Bergman, White, and others tell depends on a unitary notion of what “gay” literature is. In contrast, for Beam gay literature was not necessarily “on the map,” since so much territory still remained uncharted. Baldwin and Maddy, however, not White, Holleran, and Kramer, provide Beam with a place to begin the journey.
Like Beam, Emmanuel Nelson, in his preface to Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, makes Baldwin (and John Rechy) central to his own coming-of-age as well as to the story we might tell ourselves about contemporary gay literature. In contrast to the deracinated narratives Bergman and White provide, Nelson’s narrative begins with the overbearing presence of “whiteness”:
Barely twenty years old, I had just arrived in the United States from India to work toward a doctorate in twentieth-century American literature. Before long I grew uncomfortable and impatient with a good deal of American literature that was the staple of my graduate courses: the works of white, straight authors. . . . The exclusive focus on white writers .. . was tiresome and frustrating, (xi)
Gay literature provided Nelson with alternatives. “Gay literature,” however, signifies much differently for Nelson than it does for Bergman and White:
It was then that I started to discover, on my own, those literary territories whose existence was either unacknowledged or derisively dismissed in the classrooms. ... I began to seek reflections of my own realities within the ethnic and gay spaces of American literature. In particular, I was drawn to the works of James Baldwin and John Rechy. I was drawn to Baldwin because of his elegant prose, his expansive humanity, his sharp challenges to the logic of racism, and his uncompromising deconstructions of conventional sexual assumptions. I was drawn to Rechy because of his authentic style and his rebellious stance; moreover, I imagined an affinity with his dark, Latino protagonists and their familiar and frantic journeys through the anarchic sexual underworlds. That Baldwin and Rechy were, like me, ethnic as well as sexual outsiders in American culture made their perspectives recognizable; their voices and visions became reassuring, even liberating. Their widely different styles of managing their competing ethnocultural and homosexual subjectivities offered me potential models to reconcile the conflicting claims of my own multiple identities. Above all, Baldwin and Rechy enabled me to rediscover American literature, (xi–xii)
Of course, there is more than a little irony in this alternative narrative, in which a scholar from India “rediscovers” America and its literature. In contrast to the “discoverer” of America who came to this continent and saw “Indians,” Nelson comes to America, looks around at its literature, and sees nothing but white folks. By putting a face to the unmarked (white) “American” identity of his graduate studies (”I grew uncomfortable and impatient with .. . the works of white, straight authors. . . . The exclusive focus on white writers . . . was tiresome and frustrating”), Nelson is able to resist and move beyond the hegemonic narrative being told not only about contemporary gay literature but about American literature more generally.
“One of the signs of the times is that we really don’t know what ‘white’ is,” Kobena Mercer writes (”Skin Head Sex Thing,” 204). Whiteness, after all, maintains its hegemony by passing itself off as no-thing. As A Boy’s Own Story and some recent gay male criticism indicate, whiteness is apositionality; it denies “the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective [and makes] it impossible to see well” (Haraway, 191). “Every gay man has polished his story through repetition,” White writes in the foreword to The Faber Book, “and much gay fiction is a version of this first tale” (ix). Perhaps. Yet White’s celebration of the coming-out story as the original gay tale obscures the ways in which the coming-out story positions some gay people as more “polished” or representative than others. In A Boy’s Own Story and The Faber Book, White disavows the appropriations and erasures that enable him to transform his story into “a boy’s own.” Denying its own racial situatedness, White’s coming-out novel fails as a “noninnocent” myth of queer (op)positionality. Like the texts Biddy Martin examines, White’s understanding of the “story” “reproduces the demand that women [and men] of color . . . abandon their histories, the histories of their communities, their complex locations and selves, in the name of a [gay] unity that barely masks its white, middle class cultural reference/referent” (Martin, 93). The Queer Renaissance requires another myth of queer positionality, one that renames “gay unity” by continually reimagining and relocating the complexity of queer histories, communities, and selves.
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is set in roughly the same time as Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. At about the same time that White’s protagonist is learning the difference between Mozart and Haydn, Audre, the persona at the center of what Lorde calls her “biomy-thography,” goes to Washington, D.C., to celebrate her graduation from the eighth grade. Stopping at a Breyer’s ice-cream and soda fountain, Audre and her family are told they can get their dessert to “take out,” but they cannot eat the ice cream on the premises. The bitter episode ends with Audre thinking, “The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left my childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments . . . made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all” (71). In stark contrast to A Boy’s Own Story, the mechanisms of white power are all too visible in Zami.
Clearly, despite nominal similarities (the 1950s setting, the 1982 publication date, the autobiographical elements, homosexuality), A Boy’s Own Story and Zami are extremely different texts. Their publication history reflects their difference as well: whereas White’s novel was published in hardcover by E. P. Dutton and in paperback by Plume, both divisions of New American Library, Zami was rejected by a dozen or more mainstream publishing houses, including, as Barbara Smith reports, a house known for publishing gay titles (“Truth That Never Hurts,” 123). Smith explains,
’The white male editor at that supposedly sympathetic house returned the manuscript saying, ‘If only you were just one/Black or lesbian” (123). So much for the “empty niche in the contemporary publishing ecology” in 1982, the “slot” waiting to be filled by the coming-out novel! To my knowledge, Lorde was never interviewed by USA Today.
Zami was eventually published by Persephone Press and the Crossing Press Feminist Series, and Donna Haraway, Katie King, and others have already noted Zami’s importance for feminist theory. Haraway includes Zami in her discussion of “feminist cyborg stories,” which “have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (175). King is more specific, suggesting:
It is in this currently contested time/place [the lesbian bar of the 1950s] where “the passing dreams of choice” are mobilized that Lorde looks for the secrets of the making of her personal identity; the passing dreams of choice, where sexual identity is neither an existential decision nor biochemically/psychoanalytically programmed, but instead produced in the fields of difference individually and collectively (332).
In this section, taking Haraway’s and King’s observations as a starting point, I suggest further that, in these “fields of difference” where sexual identity is “produced .. . individually and collectively,” Zami also allows for a “recoding” of the coming-out story, a recoding along the lines of what I call “queer (op)positionality” In Zami, coming out can be seen as an/other myth of queer positionality—not because Lorde makes, as White does in A Boy’s Own Story, an attempt to construct her protagonist into an alienated, marked “other” but rather because Zami is concerned, as King notes, with collective identity. A humanist, unified self is not Lorde’s objective, but rather a definition of “self” as defined in and through others, particularly those “who work together as friends and lovers” (Lorde, Zami, 255).
Already this goes against White’s objectives in A Boy’s Own Story, which ends, after all, with a betrayal that enables the protagonist to self-define as against a lover. Moreover, Lorde’s biomythography improves on Linda Alcoff’s theory of positionality, which fears that “poststructuralism’s negation of the authority of the subject coincides nicely with classical liberal views that human particularities are irrelevant” (Alcoff, 420). Indeed, the fiction of identity Lorde constructs in Zami goes beyond the poststructuralism Alcoff fears, since a negation of the authority of the subject underscores here the relevance of human particularities. Taking its protagonist through approximately two decades of development, Zami is framed by a prologue and an epilogue that are meditations on the particular women Audre has loved. In the prologue, Lorde poses the question “To whom do I owe the woman I have become?” (4) and proceeds to answer it by naming and describing those who have shaped her identity. Lorde concludes the prologue by apostrophizing:
To the battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it. To the others who helped, pushing me into the merciless sun—I, coming out blackened and whole.
To the journeywoman pieces of myself.
Becoming.
Afrekete. (5)
Of course, the penultimate stanza of the prologue might read like another teleological myth of essential wholeness, but Lorde immediately undercuts this with fragmentation and open-endedness (”pieces of myself,” “becoming”). Moreover, even the “wholeness” into which Lorde “comes out” here is unlike the myth of identity represented in White. Particular “others” have helped forge this identity, and the metonymic reference to baking underscores Lorde’s emphasis on the construction, not the preexistence, of identity.
Zami constructed a collective “new spelling of my name” that was subsequently taken up and reshaped by other readers and writers in the Queer Renaissance. Lorde promoted a similar identity in her Chosen Poems—Old and New, which were also published in 1982. The rest of this section first overviews exactly how identity is reinvented in these two texts. Then, after examining the ways in which both Lorde and White have responded to being cast, in various contexts, as “representative,” I conclude by reconnecting Zami to Stonewall and the myths of queer (op)positionality with which I began.
In the body of the text of Zami, Audre has a number of “friends and lovers,” black and white, beginning with Genevieve, a friend who commits suicide while the two are still in high school. Both in her biomythography and elsewhere, Lorde stresses how important this event was for her. “Yes, I see Gennie often,” she acknowledged in an interview twenty-five years after the suicide. “I’ll never forget what it is to see young waste and how painful it is. And I never got over wanting to help so that it would not happen again” (in Corn well, 43). In Zami, the placement of the suicide in the text makes it appear that the event inaugurates Audre into an identity separate from others; after the chapter detailing Gennie’s suicide concludes, the next chapter opens, “Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parents’ home” (103).
The separation from home and parents, however, does not mark the end of Audre’s development; on the contrary, this emergence into a separate identity initiates a cycle of desire that takes Audre through a series of lovers over the course of the text. Although after Gennie’s suicide, the protagonist “decided that I would never love anybody else again for the rest of my life” (141), she admits the loss of the wholeness she felt with Gennie was actually the commencement, not the end, of desire: “It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched” (141). That this loss was a commencement is underscored by the fact that, in the text, Lorde positions the admission that after Gennie she “would never love anybody else again” after she details Audre’s first sexual affair with another woman, Ginger. Ginger helps Audre recognize that her earlier resolve to separate from others was both misguided and untrue to what she had learned from and with Gennie. After this affair, Genevieve is not often invoked in Zami; in fact, Audre is caught off guard at one point when she mentions the girl to a lover: “I surprised myself; usually I never talked about Gennie” (185). In general, the formation of Audre’s identity and her explorations of desire proceed without explicit reference to Genevieve.
Near the end of the text, however, Audre meets Afrekete (”Kitty”) at a party for black women. When the two women arrive at Afrekete’s apartment, Audre notes they are “in Gennie’s old neighborhood” (247). Indeed, the two are in Gennie’s old neighborhood in more than one sense: Afrekete is Audre’s final lover in Zami, and she provides a fitting conclusion/nonconclusion to the problematics of identity and desire that commenced with the loss of Gennie. On one level, the nickname Kitty recalls Audre herself, since—as AnnLouise Keating points out—Ginger had repeatedly labeled Audre the “slick kitty from the city” (Keating, 29). This is only the first link in a chain of associations, however; the identity of this final lover is highly unstable and merges freely with others. Not only does the epilogue explain what the prologue did not—that Afrekete is the name of a goddess and of a “mischievous linguist, trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become” (255)—but even as Audre and Kitty make love, the scene shifts seamlessly from the present to memories of Genevieve, so that the identity of the first lover reemerges in the identity of the last. Afrekete thus completes a circle for Audre/Lorde, bringing her to the point where she can write that her “life had become increasingly a bridge and field of women” (255). In other words, whether she understands her life linearly or circularly, as a bridge over which she crosses or as a field that surrounds her on all sides, connections between women are what give that life its shape. Furthermore, in the epilogue, although “human particularities” (women’s roles and names, both “real” and mythical) are present, “Audre,” in her specificity as a named, individual subject, is not. In fact, the “new spelling of my name” envisioned in the title is finally explained in the epilogue, and it turns out not to be about individuality at all: “Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (255).
Alcoff wants to reclaim an “identity,” fictional though it may be, from which women can construct a feminist politics (435). The queer position Zami establishes, however, disclaims Lorde’s individual identity. Earlier in the text, Audre realizes that, for her, the passage “beyond childhood” entails recognizing herself as “a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths” (175). Others have thus authored “Zami,” this new identity, with her. Sagri Dhairyam argues, “Zami. . . calls itself ‘biomythography/a description which explicitly . . . recognizes the tactical uses of fictional identity, but refuses to grant the author primacy over the textuality of her life” (231). In the end, this refusal to grant primacy to any concept of the supposedly individual author ensures that, in Zami, fictional identity and nonidentity alike construct “the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference” (Zami, 226).
At the same time, this is not some White/white “god-trick” that disavows its own situatedness. It may be impossible to read “Audre” as a self-identical, unified individual, but the identities “black,” “lesbian,” and “woman” are all present in the identity “Zami.”13 In a sense, Lorde’s persona comes out into a fiction of nonidentity not unlike what Trinh T. Minh-ha envisions:
A critical difference from myself means that I am not i, am within and without i. I/i can be I or i, you and me both involved. . . . “I” is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. “I” is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can hardly be conveyed through such typographic conventions as I, i, or I/i. Thus, I/i am compelled by the will to say/unsay, to resort to the entire gamut of personal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I. (90, 94)
This, it seems to me, is queer (op)positionality at its best: an effacement of, and in-your-face-ment to, the liberal humanist God/man/subject, with its notions of separation, individualism, and fixity.
As much as Zami works as a realization of Trinh’s unstable i/I/Not-I, it also, pace Alcoff, maintains in its very self-definition a commitment to feminist political action; these are, after all, women actively working and loving together. Zami constructs a nonessentialized identity position from which to forge a coalition-based, and oppositional, politics. In fact, King and Haraway both position Zami as an example of Chela Sandoval’s “oppositional consciousness” (K. King, 338; Haraway, 174). Sandoval herself explains that the notion of oppositional consciousness provides feminists with a new, more fluid definition of “unity”: “These constantly speaking differences stand at the crux of another, mutant unity . . . mobilized in a location heretofore unrecognized. . . . This connection is a mobile unity, constantly weaving and reweaving an interaction of differences into coalition” (18). The act of reading Zami stands as a figure for the “weaving and reweaving ... of differences into coalition”: since the “new spelling of my name” in Lorde’s biomythography is not defined until the epilogue, one must read the entire text, with all of its “constantly speaking differences” and “location[s] heretofore unrecognized,” before one can begin to understand that new spelling.
Zami does not end with the epilogue, however. Indeed, there is a sense in which Lorde’s biomythography cannot end, even with her death. By remembering the identities envisioned in Zami, readers have attested to its ongoing vitality and success at achieving an/other, mutant, mobile unity. The editors of Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, for instance—Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce Delaney—frame their collection with selections from Audre Lorde. The first selection, “Tar Beach,” is the excerpt from Zami wherein Audre is transformed through her encounter with Afrekete. The final selection, “Today Is Not the Day,” is a poem in which Lorde calls on Afrekete and resolves to continue working and loving in the face of mounting challenges (particularly cancer). Afrekete and Zami, then, both set the stage for the explorations of identity furthered by this anthology and sustain the writer(s) through the process.
In her introduction to Afrekete, McKinley explains, “This is a story at once familiar and new. You may find yourself in it” (xii). McKinley goes on to detail her own experience of first reading Zami and explains how and why Lorde’s text provides the writers included with a useful myth of positionality:
Afrekete, in Zami, is Audre’s last embrace. Afrekete is a child of the South, a migrant to Harlem. She is someone you may know. She is both wonderfully common and of the substance from which myths are spun: ‘round the way girl, early banjee, roots daughter, blues singer. . . . AFREKETE is many women. With contradictory selves. And while AFREKETE troubles identity politics—her vision stretches much wider, (xiii-xv)
Afrekete, then, is both ancient and new; she is mythological, historical, and visionary. With this contradictory and impetuous figure as their muse, the contributors to Afrekete, according to McKinley, are committed to shaping new visions, selves, and communities:
The contributors and these editors identify as lesbian, gay, zamis, dykes, queers, Black, African, African-American, biracial—and often may use these terms and others interchangeably. And while sexuality, or race for that matter, is and is not always at the center of their work, both deeply inform the writer’s vision. The work featured is written in a range of styles, a breadth of aesthetics reflecting the birthing and meshing of seemingly disparate artistic sensibilities and traditions: Black and queer, as well as others. (xvi)
Many other readers have similarly reinvented themselves and their communities because of the queer identities posited in and by Lorde and Zami.14
Lorde’s Chosen Poems—Old and New were published in the same year as her biomythography, and the narrative she constructs about her life in this collection of poetry is similar to the narrative she constructs in Zami, in the sense that both texts posit a shifting positionality and a self ultimately defined in and through others. The volume opens with four poems depicting the poet’s attempt to come to terms with Genevieve’s death. In “Memorial II,” the poet approaches her mirror and sees not her own face but Gennie’s. Despite this merging of the two girls’ identities, however, “Memorial II” also represents the poet’s attempt to recognize that she does indeed have an identity that is separate from Genevieve’s. By the last stanza, the speaker acknowledges that any vision of Genevieve in the poet’s mirror can only be a fantasy In this early poem, the poet must recognize herself, as she gazes into her mirror, as a subject separate from Gennie; for if Genevieve were to see her again, she would not recognize the young woman the poet has become: “Are you seeking the shape of a girl / I have grown less and less / to resemble” (5). Although the separation from Gennie is painful and difficult—at the end the poet laments that “your eyes / are blinding me / Genevieve” (5)—it is, at this point, nonetheless inevitable.
“Memorial II,” then, with its emphasis on the formation of an individual identity, might allow for a reading of identity that is opposed to the collective identity represented in the epilogue to Zami. Yet, as in Zami, this assumption of a separate identity in Chosen Poems is only the beginning of the story. The poet’s new, autonomous identity never quite seems to fit. In “Change of Season,” for example, she complains, “Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?” (40). Beyond this, the figure of Gennie and that original loss continue to haunt “Change of Season” and many other poems: “I was so terribly sure I would come to april / with my first love who died on a Sunday morning / poisoned and wondering / was summer ever coming” (41). “Memorial III: From a Phone Booth on Broadway” shows how easily the poet’s supposedly stable world is thrown into disarray by the memory of that loss:
you will blossom back into sound
you will answer
must answer
answer me answer me
answer goddammit
answer
please . . . (89)
In short, the death of Gennie in Chosen Poems provokes the poet’s assumption of a separate identity, but with all the insecurities and instabilities specific to a poststructuralist account of the subject incompletely sutured into an identity. In Chosen Poems and Zami alike, however, inauguration into identity for the poet is much more than this: inauguration into identity is simultaneously inauguration into a social system dependent on racism, sexism, and homophobia, and hence into a system intent on defining and controlling all that is black, female, and queer. “Good Mirrors Are
Not Cheap” captures the lack of control the poet feels because the cultural context in which she finds herself allows only for deceitful, masked representations of her identity:
down the street
a glassmaker is grinning
turning out new mirrors that lie
selling us
new clowns
at cut rate. (44)
Lorde is thus caught, in Chosen Poems, in the paradox of recognizing the instability of any subject position and yet desperately needing to articulate an identity that has been systematically distorted. Gennie’s suicide itself, in both Chosen Poems and Zami, illustrates this central paradox. In Zami, before detailing in prose the events surrounding Gennie’s death, Lorde includes a poem that foregrounds the ways in which the event is simultaneously an effacement and an assumption of identity:
But we wept at the sight of two men standing alone
flat on the sky, alone,
shoveling earth as a blanket
to keep the young blood down.
For we saw ourselves in the dark warm mother-blanket
saw ourselves deep in the earth’s breast-swelling—
no longer young—
and knew ourselves for the first time
dead and alone. (97)
We “knew ourselves for the first time / dead and alone”: obliteration of identity and assumption of identity come together in the same moment. All of this, at the same time, occurs in an oppressive system intent on “keep[ing] the young blood down.”
In “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices,” the final entry in Chosen Poems and one newly written for Lorde’s collection, the poet further probes this paradox, reproducing on a more urgent level the exploration of identity/nonidentity found in the epilogue to Zami. Coming together with others is never easy (in fact, another selection in Chosen Poems poses the insistent question “Who Said It Was Simple” [49]), but from the title of “Need” on, Lorde implies that a collective voice is necessary for survival. “Need” opens by giving voice to that which has been silenced and by making visible that which would otherwise be effaced:
This woman is Black
so her blood is shed into silence
this woman is Black
so her death falls to the earth
like the dripping of birds
to be washed away with silence and rain. (111)
The poem has three speakers, “I,” “P.C.,” and “B.J.G.,” the latter two representing the voices of Patricia Cowan and Bobbie Jean Graham, two women murdered in Detroit and Boston in 1978 and 1979, respectively. As in Zami, naming is a central preoccupation in “Need.” After P.C. and B.J.G. describe their violent deaths, the “I” of the poem rages, “I do not even know all their names. / My sisters deaths are not noteworthy / nor threatening enough to decorate the evening news .. . blood blood of my sisters fallen in this bloody war / with no names no medals no exchange of prisoners” (112). The three voices weave in and out in this prolonged meditation on violence and oppression, until the final stanza of the poem, when the “I” transforms into an “All”: “‘We cannot live without our lives’ / ‘We cannot live without our lives’” (115). A note explains that the italicized quotation is from a poem by Barbara Deming. The words are therefore Lorde’s and not Lorde’s, and the individual identities of Lorde/I/Patricia Cowan/Bobbie Jean Graham/Barbara Deming, along with all the women named and not named in Chosen Poems, coalesce, as they do in the epilogue to Zami, into a collective and threatening identity that depends for its existence on the foregrounded yet constantly shifting positionality of the identity “black”/“lesbian”/“woman.” The poem, once again, belies any notion of an essentialized self existing apart from others, and indeed, in the face of such violence and destruction, such separation seems not only unproductive but absurd.
“Need” itself is a particularly useful example of the ways in which Lorde comes out into a myth of collective identity. Lorde’s Chosen Poems—Old and New was originally published by W. W. Norton and Company. “Need,” however, was reissued as a pamphlet in 1990 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press as part of their Freedom Organizing Series. In the preface to this new, revised version of Need, Lorde traces the poem’s genealogy. As 1978 was for white gay men, 1979 is a “banner year” for black and Latina lesbians. The latter banner year, however, looks significantly different from the former:
“Need” was first written in 1979 after 12 Black women were killed in the Boston area within four months. In a grassroots movement spearheaded by Black and Latina Lesbians, Women of Color in the area rallied. . . . My lasting image of that spring, beyond the sick sadness and anger and worry, was of women whom I knew, loved, and trembled for: Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and women whose names were unknown to me, leading a march through the streets of Boston behind a broad banner stitched with a line from Barbara Deming: “WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT OUR LIVES. (3)
Lorde again attributes the words to Barbara Deming, but the identity/nonidentity articulated in Need and in Lorde’s genealogy of “Need” belies any unified authorial consciousness. Instead, the identity is an example of Haraway’s “contradictory” standpoint, which gains its strength precisely because authorial consciousness is “permanently partial.” Deming does not, therefore, become so much the “source” here as another element in the collective and shifting identity into which the women behind the banner come out. This collective identity is a powerful and threatening one, made more so by its lack of fixity. Indeed, the (re)issuance of Need reaffirms and deploys that lack of fixity: each pamphlet includes a button with the line “We Cannot Live without Our Lives” printed on top of the pan-African colors and beside the symbol for female. Neither Lorde nor Kitchen Table makes any attempt here to suture, within the reissued text, the identity being articulated; on the contrary, the button and a “Resources for Organizing” section that follows the poem encourage women (and apparently, men) reading the text to join and hence continually reshape this collective identity. Lorde herself, in fact, traces the 1990 revisions of the poem to the ways in which others had used and reshaped it since its publication: “Alterations in the text since the poem was originally published are a result of hearing the poem read aloud several times by groups of women” (Need, 3).15
The Kitchen Table version of Need seems at least to allow for male inclusion: the “Resources for Organizing” section that follows the poem includes the addresses for organizations such as NCBLG: The National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, the National Black Men’s Health Network, Men Stopping Rape, and the Oakland Men’s Project (Need, 16–17). Identity, as Lorde constructs it in Zami, Need, and elsewhere, however, while not exclusionary, does not always simplistically include men or white people; connection is not necessarily easy or automatic. Hence “Zami” is an“other myth of queer positionality,” not the necessary corrective to versions of coming out such as White’s. As Elizabeth Alexander notes, “‘A’ new spelling (as opposed to ‘the’) means there is probably more to come” (704). In the Queer Renaissance, there have indeed been many more “new spellings,” as subsequent chapters of this book will demonstrate.
However, Lorde often does connect with men—particularly men of color/gay men—throughout her work. In fact, one of Lorde’s earliest uses of the phrase that would become the subtitle to Zami occurs in a poem from the late 1970s to “Brother Alvin,” a boy from Lorde’s second-grade class who suddenly died of tuberculosis:
I search through the index
of each new book
on magic
hoping to find some new spelling
of your name.(The Black Unicorn, 54)
A more recent and particularly poignant example of connection with a man comes in her poem to the late Joe Beam. In “Dear Joe,” Lorde uses as an epigraph words from “Sister, Morning Is a Time for Miracles” (Chosen Poems, 109–10). The words that had signified Lorde’s attempt to connect with another woman, her sister, are here re-signified in her memorial to Beam: “if you have ever tried to reach me / and I could not hear you / these words are in place of the dead air / still between us” (“Dear Joe,” 47). “Zami,” then, may signify “women working together as friends and lovers,” but the new ways of spelling identity that Lorde envisions do not preclude working with and loving others.16
As Need,”Brother Alvin,” and “Dear Joe” illustrate, and as with White in and out of A Boy’s Own Story, the construction of identity in Zami connects to the construction of “Audre Lorde” in other contexts. I should note before continuing, however, that my earlier account of White as the one of these two authors more likely to be published by houses such as New American Library, while Lorde is consigned to lesser-known houses such as Persephone or Crossing Press, was somewhat unfair. White’s publication history, like Lorde’s, has at times been rocky, and Lorde has indeed been published by both small feminist presses and mainstream houses such as Norton.17 Both authors are therefore made available for representation in a variety of contexts. I do not want to institute an argument in this chapter that implies too much about either White’s or Lorde’s canonical or precanonical status: for example, that White is “more canonical” than Lorde because he is oppressed in only one facet of his identity and is hence closer to what Lorde called the “mythical norm” of American society (Sister Outsider, 116). The “canonicity” of either author is actually quite difficult to assess, and not only because both are contemporary authors. It would appear that both White and Lorde are fairly canonical, but in two different contexts. Although Time magazine declared White “America’s most influential gay writer” (L. Schulman, 58), it is Lorde who is more likely to be taught in college classrooms or to be the subject of scholarly articles. The MLA (Modern Language Association) Bibliography, for instance, lists forty entries for Lorde between 1981 and 1994 and twelve for White. Ten of White’s entries, however, are articles he himself has written, compared to only four such articles for Lorde. Of Lorde’s forty entries, moreover, seven are dissertations, underscoring her importance to the generation of scholars who will be shaping the academy over the next few decades.
Lorde’s burgeoning academic reputation is highly contestable, of course; other contemporary writers, such as Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, have garnered much more attention during the same time period (Morrison, 329 MLA Bibliography entries; Pynchon, 514 entries). Nonetheless, Lorde is better known than White in academe (in part because of women’s studies departments and academic feminism), while White, in contrast, is becoming ensconced as the gay author mainstream readers need to know. The Quality Paperback Book Club (QPB), for example, “proud to announce the launch of Triangle Classics, a series of landmark books illuminating the gay and lesbian experience,” initially included one writer from the 1980s in their new series: Edmund White. The flyer for the series declares that QPB’s edition “brings together Edmund White’s landmark novels of coming-of-age and coming out,” that is, A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty. The series included one black author, James Baldwin; but significantly, the Baldwin novel included, Giovanni’s Room, is about white Europeans.18
If, as Richard Ohmann suggests, contemporary canon formation is the result of “both large sales .. . and the right kind of critical attention” (384), then it would seem that White is cornering the market on one necessary qualification and Lorde on the other. Michael Bérubé complicates Oh-mann’s thesis, suggesting that “we are no longer confronting Ohmann’s mid-1970s landscape” and that academic critics “now represent contemporary writers to different audiences from those of the nonspecialist press” (31). To Bérubé, then, the Toni Morrison of academic criticism is not the same as the Toni Morrison of nonacademic journals and reviews; indeed, there is a competition between members of these two groups for what “Toni Morrison” will signify. In contemporary lesbian and gay writing, this competition, I would argue, is conducted not so much over individual authors as over the very sign gay/lesbian literature, and moreover, this competition tends to be split along gender lines. Hence, and very generally, the contemporary “gay(/lesbian) literature” represented in nonacademic journals and reviews is not the same contemporary “lesbian(/gay) literature” of academic criticism.
Consider, for instance, the very different observations of Ed Cohen, a professor of English at Rutgers University, and Victoria Brownworth, a lesbian journalist and fiction writer. Cohen justifies his focus on gay men in his essay on “Constructing Gender,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, in this way:
If I focus now on the former [gay male writing] rather than the latter [writings by women of color/lesbians, which he acknowledges have also been important to his intellectual development] it is because I know that in a volume like this one it is likely that the works of women of many races and ethnicities will have been addressed heretofore, while the works of men who are exploring the possibilities for sexual and emotional intimacies with other men will most probably remain eccentric. (557)
In contrast, Brownworth insists:
Unlike gay men . . . lesbians have not been part of the big queer book boom of the last few years. We haven’t received the same advances as our gay male counterparts. So while there may be more lesbian writers than ever before, few of us are making a living by writing alone—most of us supplement our income with teaching or lecturing. For lesbians there’s no money in being a writer. (49)
Lesbian writers and readers have witnessed a few major “publishing events” over the past few years (most notably Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, which was a finalist for the National Book Award), but some have claimed that these events were made possible because the lesbian content was not always explicit in such books.
This is not to argue, by any means, that academic criticism is somehow inherently more progressive because lesbians are on top; on the contrary, in both arenas, the uses to which the winner of the gendered competition might be put are more important than who, specifically, wins. Publishers take advantage of White’s purchase outside the academy, for example, to market his texts. The cover of White’s 1978 novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples includes Newsweek’s assessment of the author, which is identical to that of Time magazine: “White is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist.” Inside the academy, in contrast, Lorde is able to cash in on a desire for “difference” that can be, nonetheless, safely contained. Anna Wilson, discussing Lorde’s increasing canonization in the academy, argues:
For feminist academia Lorde is particularly effective as a token: since she is Black, lesbian and a mother, her work compactly represents that generally repressed matter towards which white feminists wish to make a gesture of inclusion—but since Lorde conveniently represents so much at once, she can be included without her presence threatening the overall balance of the white majority vision. (77)
Certainly, the majority vision in literary studies, if not in feminist academia, is also heterosexual, or at least heterosexualized. Thus, in literary studies, Lorde can “conveniently represent,” along with other “differences,” a homosexuality that nonetheless does not threaten to disrupt the straight narrative.
Of course, according to Ohmann’s thesis, openly lesbian and gay literature will never be canonized, since the two necessary ingredients of canon formation are not really coalescing for any individual author. I have already mentioned Bérubé’s complication of Ohmann, but I include here a third, mediating context that emerged during, and even before, the Queer Renaissance and that particularly complicates the canonicity question for queers: the gay and lesbian marketplace. Lorde and White may not be “canonical” in quite the same way as other contemporary writers are, but because of the existence of a community-based marketplace, as White himself points out, “even quite celebrated heterosexual authors—watching their books go out of print or out of stock—might well envy the longevity of books written by lesbians and gay men” (“Twenty Years On,” 4). Lesbian and gay bookstores, literary reviews, award ceremonies, and the like ensure that canonization is an extremely complex affair for openly gay and lesbian writers. In this third context, the community context, White and Lorde are both among the most canonical of contemporary writers.
Thus both Edmund White and Audre Lorde are positioned by others, in various ways, as “representative,” and as representative of overlapping and competing constituencies with varying degrees of access to the “center.” Each author, however, responds differently to the ways in which he or she has been represented by others, and in general, White’s and Lorde’s responses parallel the ways in which each constructs identity within the texts I have been examining. In 1990, when Lorde was presented with the second annual Bill Whitehead Memorial Award, in recognition of outstanding contributions to lesbian and gay literature, she informed the audience, “One award will not counterbalance a continuing invisibility of Lesbian and Gay writers of color” (“What Is at Stake,” 66). Using her individual location to emphasize how her identity had been shaped in and through others, Lorde went on to explain that the best way to honor her was to honor those she had loved and worked with: “If this group wishes to truly honor my work, built upon the creative use of differences for all our survivals, then I charge you, as a group, to include and further expose the work of new Lesbian and Gay writers of color within the coming year, and to report on what has been done at next year’s award ceremony” (“What Is at Stake,” 66).19 In contrast, Edmund White, the recipient of the first annual Bill Whitehead Memorial Award in 1989, concluded his speech with the reflection, “Oddly enough, what literature has always taught us is that only in tracing our individuality can we become universal” (“Twenty Years On,” 5). “We,” “our,” and “us,” of course, signify quite differently in White’s speech from how “our” signifies in Lorde’s “creative use of differences for all our survivals.” Despite his stress on “the recording of our differences” in gay and lesbian literature, when White himself acknowledges that “it has struck me as no coincidence that many of the most original writers of this century have been gay” (5), the list he produces in support of this claim includes no people of color.20
Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. White’s protagonist’s thoughts during the Stonewall Riots, with which I began this chapter, apparently contradict the points I have been making about White/white apositionality and appear to participate in a more productive myth of identity, akin to those articulated in Zami and “Need.” This moment of potentiality in The Beautiful Room Is Empty, however, is trumped by the novel’s notorious ending:
I stayed over at Lou’s [one of the nameless narrator’s friends]. We hugged each other in bed like brothers, but we were too excited to sleep. We rushed down to buy the morning papers to see how the Stonewall Uprising had been described. “It’s really our Bastille Day,” Lou said. But we couldn’t find a single mention in the press of the turning point of our lives.” (227–28)
At the end of The Beautiful Room Is Empty, bittersweet isolation and invisibility triumph over the possibility of community.21
Yet the story of Stonewall has been told otherwise. Martin Duberman’s historical overview, Stonewall, interweaves the stories of six people who were active in lesbian and gay communities during the time of the Stonewall Riots. Craig Rodwell was one of the men actually present when the riots broke out, and Duberman details his reaction: “Craig dashed to a nearby phone booth. Ever conscious of the need for publicity—for visibility—and realizing that a critical moment had arrived, he called all three daily papers, the Times, the Post, and the News, and alerted them that ‘a major story was breaking/Then he ran to his apartment a few blocks away to get his camera” (Stonewall, 198; emphasis mine). Rodwell’s photographs never came out, but Duberman’s “day after” is nonetheless not characterized by the existential alienation White’s protagonist and his friend feel:
Word of the confrontation spread through the gay grapevine all day Saturday. Moreover, all three of the dailies wrote about the riot (the News put the story on page one), and local television and radio reported it as well. The extensive coverage brought out the crowds, just as Craig had predicted (and had worked to achieve). All day Saturday, curious knots of people gathered outside the bar to gape at the damage and warily celebrate the fact that, for once, cops, not gays, had been routed. (Stonewall, 202)
At Stonewall and in Stonewall, gay men and lesbians “come out” into a myth of collective identity, and the ramifications of that collective act are still being felt today.
During high school, the protagonist of A Boy’s Own Story and Tommy, his current obsession, go slumming: “He and I had trekked more than once downtown ... to listen, frightened and transported, to a big black Lesbian with a crew cut moan her way through the blues” (120–21). Of course, this exoticization of the “big black Lesbian” is only a minor incident for the narrator, unconnected to the larger project of coming out into his own, individual, gay consciousness. And yet the black lesbian singing the blues in A Boy’s Own Story is not as out of place as she might at first appear. Teleological and essential (white) “boys’ own stories” at this point offer feminism and queer politics little in the way of queer (op)positionality. Like the protagonist of Lorde’s Zami, whose “heart ached and ached for something [she] could not name” (85), the blues singer in White’s novel needs an/other myth of queer positionality. Coming out into an essential wholeness may be the myth that lesbians and gay men are told they must embrace, but as Audre’s teacher declares early on, when the young protagonist of Zami refuses to take dictation in the same manner as the rest of the class, Audre is “a young lady who does not want to do as she is told” (26). Lorde responds instead with a nonessentialized, non-self-identical “new spelling of my name” in Zami, and only through this new construction is she able to envision a queer and powerful community of women, whose new identities are permanently partial and whose coalitions are conscious.