In one of the most fabulous moments in the introduction to her Epistemol-ogy of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick considers the analysis and recovery work being done in gay and lesbian literary studies on the Harlem Renaissance, the New England Renaissance, and the Renaissance in Italy and England. As Sedgwick sees it, an antihomophobic inquiry into each of these renaissances promises to reconfigure completely the ways in which we conceive of the period in question. Although we “can’t possibly know in advance ... where and how the power in [these renaissances] of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest,” Sedgwick asserts that the questions currently being asked by scholars about these movements reveal that such desires and discourses were nonetheless undoubtedly central (58–59). She then concludes the section, characteristically, by “flaunting it”: “No doubt that’s how we will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one” (59).
If the centrality of lesbian and gay desires to a moment of distinctive cultural production is indeed one marker of a renaissance, then we should recognize the past fifteen years as just such a renaissance. Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, material representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, although openly gay and lesbian literature had begun to appear more regularly, such work was still quite rare. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, all that changed. Literally thousands of novelists, poets, and playwrights published or performed works about lesbian and gay people. Writers’ groups and workshops, such as the Violet Quill Club, Other Countries, and Flight of the Mind, helped create and nurture this literary movement; literary magazines and book reviews devoted entirely to gay and lesbian writing propelled the movement forward. Annual Lambda Literary Awards—or “Lammies”—even provided institutional recognition of outstanding achievement in lesbian and gay literature. Straight America began to take notice. As journalist David Gates observed, “At least since Edmund White’s best-selling ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ in 1982, major American houses have published more and more of such writing; even the staid Book-of-the-Month Club has announced a gay and lesbian reprint series” (Gates and Malone, 58). Gates’s incredulity about the supposedly staid Book-of-the-Month Club could have been as easily directed inward: his comments about the “explosion” of gay writing appeared in a magazine no less mainstream than Newsweek. Not surprising, by 1993, when this Newsweek article was published, gay and lesbian writers and publications had been taking note of the cultural phenomenon for quite some time.1
The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities puts a name to this unprecedented outpouring of lesbian and gay creative work.2 By naming and discussing this efflorescence of creative activity as a queer “event,” I work in this study both to secure a context for analysis of the period and to promote critical representation of the texts and authors involved. Many gay and lesbian writers have noted this cultural renaissance; my project is among the first to analyze the movement critically.
Through this analysis, I hope to complicate and illuminate the position of lesbian and gay writers in contemporary literary studies generally. When contemporary gay or lesbian writers are studied or taught individually, they are easily exoticized; in other words, they are inserted into a general academic market for difference that is able to consider and contain queer desire temporarily, before going on with business as usual. “Business as usual” in this case entails the reproduction of multicultural narratives of American literary history that celebrate and consume difference, including sexual difference, while simultaneously positing, without acknowledgment, an unmarked (and therefore heterosexual) consumer for whom this “difference” is an addendum to the straight narrative. If contemporary queer work is articulated to the idea of a collective movement or renaissance, however, it might be seen as disrupting or transforming the straight narrative and business as usual.
This disruption or transformation will definitely not be easy or automatic. Certainly, in literary studies there are many institutional pressures and expectations (such as the expectation that a given course will “survey” a culture or time period) that are not easily overcome. At the very least, I hope my analysis complicates the tendency to have days or weeks devoted to the study of “difference.” By reading contemporary gay and lesbian
writers as part of a larger contemporary renaissance, I mean to move them from the margins to the center of the stories we tell ourselves about contemporary literary history.
At the same time, there is more than a little irony involved in considering a “rebirth” of any sort during a period when thousands have died of complications related to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). For that reason, my study tries to resist—or queer—certain characteristic tendencies of renaissance thinking. This “renaissance” is “queer” not only because it is by and for lesbians and gay men but also because it is different from other renaissances. Indeed, this is not a renaissance at all, if renaissances are understood—as they traditionally are—as securing a “great nation’s” cultural position through “transcendence” of that nation’s historical location. Instead, this is a queer renaissance rooted in particular communities, histories, and struggles. Moreover, this is not simply a cultural renaissance but a rebirth of radical gay and lesbian political analysis, which recalls the formation of the Mattachine Society in the 1950s or the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s—two other twentieth-century moments when lesbian and gay people came together to reimagine and reshape culture and identity.
Such a reshaping of identity, like the unprecedented outpouring of gay and lesbian literature that many critics have noted, has not been overlooked by contemporary commentators, who have positioned “queerness” in particular as a supplement to understandings of sexuality that posit homosexuality and heterosexuality as fixed, immutable, and—supposedly—equal and opposite identities. Influenced by both poststructuralist theory and the flamboyant queer activism of the late 1980s, these critics have theorized queer identity as an alternative to such rigid understandings of sexuality.3 Sedgwick, for example, begins Tendencies, the book she wrote concurrently with Epistemology of the Closet, with an extended meditation on the identities being deployed around her:
At the 1992 gay pride parade in New York City, there was a handsome, intensely muscular man in full leather regalia, sporting on his distended chest a T-shirt that read, KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF OF MY UTERUS.
The two popular READ MY LIPS T-shirts marketed by ACT UP were also in evidence, and by the thousands. But for the first time it was largely gay men who were wearing the version of the shirt that features two turn-of-the-century-looking women in a passionate clinch. Most of the people wearing the version with the osculating male sailors, on the other hand, were lesbians. FAGGOT and BIG FAG were the T-shirt legends self-applied by many, many women; DYKE and the more topical LICK BUSH by many, many men. .. .
And everywhere at the march, on women and on men, there were T-shirts that said simply: QUEER.
It was a QUEER time. (Tendencies, xi)
Queer, indeed. Sedgwick’s overview of the 1992 parade makes it clear that these new identities were, above all, not fixed in discrete gendered locations; instead, identities were reborn in the interstices between various genders and sexualities. Moreover, this queer identification across difference often sharply (and with a camp flair) critiqued powerful American institutions—most obviously here through the “Keep Your Laws Off of My Uterus” and “Lick Bush” T-shirts but also through ACT UP’s graphics and T-shirts generally, since the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was, after all, formed to address directly and explicitly the government’s neglect of people living with AIDS. Indeed, the very slogan “Read My Lips” was intended both to ridicule George Bush’s vacuous uses of the phrase and to draw attention to the government’s overwhelming silence on issues of concern to lesbians and gay men, and to the many different people living with AIDS.
In this project, I argue that the renaissance of gay and lesbian creative work has not emerged alongside or above the renaissance of queer identities and political analyses; instead, the efflorescence of creative work is contingent on and, in turn, represents and fuels the proliferation of queer identities and political analyses. Both dimensions of the Queer Renaissance provide readers with fluid identities that are shaped and reshaped across differences and that interrogate and disrupt dominant hierarchical understandings of not only sex, gender, and sexuality but also race and class. In the chapters that follow, these identities take different names (Zami, trickster, new mestiza, AIDS activist) but share this queer commitment to fluidity and disruption. Indeed, to paraphrase Sedgwick, it is, no doubt, in such fluidity and disruption that we will learn to recognize a queer renaissance when we see one.
The remainder of this introduction locates the Queer Renaissance in and around contemporary debates about the uses and abuses of renaissance thinking. In the first section, through a brief survey of critical work on renaissances in literary studies, I consider how the critiques leveled by scholars in various literary fields might be used to read renaissance discourse in American culture more generally (including recent discussions of the supposed cultural renaissance brought on by the AIDS crisis). I then foreground a different kind of renaissance altogether: looking to lesbian and gay history, particularly the history of the 1950s and the 1970s, I argue that the contemporary emergence of radical gay and lesbian political analysis and activism is actually a reemergence, with antecedents in earlier lesbian and gay communities. The cultural production of the past decade and a half can and should be read through this political and historical rebirth, rather than through more traditional, transcendent notions of a renaissance.
Reading the Queer Renaissance alongside and against other American renaissances of the twentieth century, particularly the Harlem and Chicano Renaissances, the next section of the introduction considers whether these renaissances might also be understood as antecedents to the Queer Renaissance. The Chicano and Harlem Renaissances at times critique powerful American institutions and construct new, more fluid subjectivities, but despite these similarities, the identities shaped in both are generally less fluid than the identities shaped in the Queer Renaissance. Moreover, in the Harlem Renaissance in particular, the relationship between art and politics is much more tenuous than it is in the Queer Renaissance. Therefore, I argue that contemporary authors reconceive the identities shaped in earlier literary movements such as these.
Finally, I position my project, and the writers who are central to it, within current contested understandings of queerness. Although only a few of the writers in The Queer Renaissance have been associated with the movement overtly labeled New Queer Writing by Dennis Cooper and others, they share (and in many ways extend) the New Queer Writers’ emphasis on a critical perversion that continuously forges unexpected alliances and gives voice to identities our heteronormative culture would like to, but cannot, silence.4
Renaissances have long been staples of literary periodization, but in recent decades, scholars influenced by cultural studies and new historicism have tended to scrutinize the concept more closely. In his introduction to The American Renaissance Reconsidered, for example, Donald E. Pease writes:
The term American Renaissance designates a moment in the nation’s history when the “classics,” works “original” enough to lay claim to an “authentic” beginning for America’s literary history, appeared. Once designated as the locus classicus for America’s literary history, however, the American Renaissance does not remain located within the nation’s secular history so much as it marks the occasion of a rebirth from it. Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global renaissance time—the sacred time a nation claims to renew when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a world of great nations. Providing each nation with the terms for cultural greatness denied to secular history, the “renaissance” is an occasion occurring not so much within any specific historical time or place as a moment of cultural achievement that repeatedly provokes rebirth, (vii)
Despite the imperative to be “reborn” outside secular history, however, the contributors to the project Pease introduces, as he goes on to explain, met specifically to resist such demands, supposedly characteristic of “global renaissance” thinking generally. The ensuing volume consequently purports to reconsider the American Renaissance: “the demand for rebirth was met, but this time the American Renaissance was reborn not without but within America’s secular history” (vii). The essays that follow Pease’s introduction—“Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance,” “The Other American Renaissance,” and five others—thus consider how American works from this distinctive moment of cultural production neither transcended the contingencies of history and politics nor escaped nineteenth-century controversies about and around race, gender, and class. The volume’s contributors, in short, counter the dislocating tendencies of renaissance discourse with an insistence on location and specificity.
Such an insistence is crucial, given that the dislocating tendencies of renaissance discourse in American culture are in evidence far beyond the literary sphere. Growing up outside of Detroit in the 1970s, for instance, I watched how that urban area was transformed into the “Renaissance City” (an epithet I later learned it shared with Pittsburgh). The sign of this supposed transformation was and is the colossal Renaissance Center: a circular, seventy-four-story glass and steel tower flanked by four similar, though somewhat shorter, towers. At first, this literal “center” of Detroit’s renaissance might be understood as locating that movement, both geographically in the heart of the city and historically in a moment of urban renewal. Yet such an understanding of the Renaissance Center as the located sign and signature of the Renaissance City simultaneously covers over the inevitable dislocations of “urban renewal.”5 Center is, of course, a verb as well as a noun, and we might do well to examine the process of centering that occurred in the construction of, and that continues to occur around, this particular center. Atop the Renaissance Center, what can be seen is decidedly not the poverty, violence, and despair that continue to affect the majority of the city’s inhabitants. On the contrary, one is literally above all of that: the centering of vision that takes place at such a height assists in the construction of yet another Great American City filled with glass and steel skyscrapers. Indeed, especially at night with the glittering lights reaching as far as the eye can see, one could as easily be in, say, the Sun Belt as in the Rust Belt; that is, in the region that gained jobs even as the restructuring of labor and industry in the Midwest (a restructuring that the renaming of the Motor City as the Renaissance City covers over) cost jobs.
Hence, renaissance discourse in Detroit—centered in a monument that “transcends” the material conditions of the city—dis locates and de specifies. This particular (dis)location ostensibly provides visitors with a plethora of perspectives on the city, but the revolving lounge-and-observation deck at the top of the Renaissance Center, while shifting constantly, actually goes nowhere. Furthermore, the supposed “heart of the city” is ironically empty of any long-term life; the “tallest hotel in the world” obviously does not house those who actually live in Detroit. Instead, many Detroiters, whose labor has been made marginal or superfluous by corporate and industrial restructuring, have been displaced to ghettos on the city’s margins. These margins are precisely what become invisible by the centering of vision that renaissance discourse effects in Detroit.6
In literary studies, the dislocations of renaissance rhetoric are never, perhaps, quite as menacing as those enacted by the idea of a renaissance in Detroit’s fantasy of urban renewal. However, there are similarities, and as The American Renaissance Reconsidered confirms, many literary scholars have begun to look carefully at how the concept is deployed. Indeed, in the past few decades an influential critical movement has worked methodically to rename another entire era in literary and historical studies, precisely to shed the negative baggage carried by “the Renaissance.” As Leah S. Marcus explains, “Early modern carries a distinct agenda for historians, who have adopted the name quite consciously as a sign of disaffiliation from what they perceive as the elitism and cultural myopia of an older ‘Renaissance’ history” (41–42). Like the rhetoric of renewal in Detroit, much traditional
Renaissance scholarship, according to Marcus, centers our vision of that era at the cost of the supposed cultural margins:
The term Renaissance is optimistic, upbeat—rebirth and renewal are marvelous ideas. One of the reasons many historians have become suspicious of the term is that it buys its optimism at too great a price—the neglect of other cultural currents and forms of cultural production, of a vast sea of human activity and misery that Renaissance either failed to include or included only marginally. The term Renaissance implicitly calls for a perception of historical rupture (in order to be reborn, a culture must previously have died) and, along with that, a subtle hierarchical valuation of disparate cultures. (43)
The use of the term early modern, in contrast, explicitly resists such hierarchical valuation and refocuses our vision, bringing critics down from the revolving lounge that “Renaissance” scholarship is always in danger of becoming.
The elitism and cultural myopia to which scholars of the early modern period object appear in characterizations of other renaissances, not least in characterizations of the renaissance of contemporary lesbian and gay culture under consideration here. Especially when the topic in question is AIDS, elitist and idealist pronouncements abound. Consciously or unconsciously, commentators often position art as the force that can “purify” the supposed stigma of AIDS. For this reason, Douglas Crimp in particular, in his introduction to the influential collection AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, sharply chastises those who would deploy the rhetoric of renaissance when discussing the literature and art of AIDS. Writing to counter such “idealistic platitudes” as Elizabeth Taylor’s assertion that “art lives on forever” (AIDS, 5), Crimp asserts that these clichés communicate the message “that art, because it is timeless and universal, transcends individual lives, which are time-bound and contingent” (AIDS, 4). Crimp is critical of any artistic ideology that positions art as outside or above the contingencies of material human existence or—even more perniciously—as that which “redeems” human suffering:
Redemption—of course—necessitates a prior sin—the sin of homosexuality, of promiscuity, of drug use—and thus a program such as “AIDS in the Arts” [a PBS report against which Crimp is arguing] contributes to the media’s distribution of innocence and guilt according to who you are and how you acquired AIDS. Promiscuous gay men and IV drug users are unquestionably guilty in this construction, but so are all people from poor minority populations. (AIDS, 4n. 4)
In such an ideological context, in which the guilty offer up art as penance for their misdeeds, Michael Denneny’s belief that “we’re on the verge of getting a literature out of this that will be a renaissance” is insensitive and escapist (qtd. in Crimp, AIDS, 4), and Richard Goldstein’s that “AIDS is good for art” and “will produce great works that will outlast and transcend the epidemic” is politically reactionary (qtd. in Crimp, AIDS,5). These comments, and others like them, fetishize the artistic work and ignore how certain understandings of art require—and indeed, produce—the abject artist, the sinner whose transfiguration into the saint comes only through her art. Therefore, as Crimp convincingly establishes in his dismissal of such sentiments, “we don’t need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS. We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it” (AIDS, 7)7
As I have already insisted, however, the term renaissance might be made to signify differently—might, in short, be queered. Crimp himself implicitly opens the door to such a query of the concept, I think, when he faults media reports for failing to make “any mention of activist responses to AIDS by cultural producers” (AIDS,4). Crimp’s point is not that activists are the alternative to artists, as if the two groups were always and everywhere distinct, but rather that activists resignify the “artistic,” providing an alternative to the idea of art as somehow redemptive or transcendent.8 Crimp’s own subsequent analysis of Let the Record Show. . ., an installation produced by ACT UP in the Broadway window of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, presents readers with precisely such an activist/artistic project: Let the Record Show. . ., in contrast to exhibitions sequestered within museums, highlighted to those outside on the street the negligence and bigotry exhibited during the AIDS crisis by the Reagan administration, the medical establishment, and organized religion (AIDS,7–12). Extending Crimp’s linkage of art and politics, I suggest that activism similarly does not preclude us from reading the contemporary queer moment as a renaissance, as if queer politics and renaissances were always and everywhere distinct. On the contrary: we might say that the contemporary moment presents us with a “queer renaissance”—not in the sense of a cultural moment for gay men and lesbians that dislocates and despecifies, “transcending” history and politics, but in the sense of a cultural moment that engages history and politics and that recalls or cites other such moments. This is not simply a cultural renaissance, “timeless and universal,” but rather a specific time of enormous cultural productivity, integrally connected to another kind of renaissance: a renaissance of radical lesbian and gay political analysis. Shaped and reshaped precisely to resist the cultural myopia of those who celebrate art and discount ongoing structural inequities, and of all who maintain such inequities, this renaissance once again focuses our vision on the queer margins that are effaced (or “redeemed”) by more elitist or escapist notions of cultural production.
Two moments in twentieth-century lesbian and gay history that might be recalled in a consideration of the contemporary queer period, among the many moments that this period explicitly or implicitly cites, are the early 1950s, when the Mattachine Society was founded by Harry Hay and four other leftists, and the early 1970s, when, after the Stonewall Riots, groups of young people came together to form the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In his groundbreaking Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 and his subsequent Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, John D’Emilio presents the most comprehensive analysis of these time periods. Throughout his work, D’Emilio makes clear that there has been an ongoing tension in twentieth-century gay and lesbian history between radical liber-ationist and liberal reformist politics.9
In the 1950s, D’Emilio explains, “Hay and his partners . . . brought to their discussions an interest in uncovering a systemic analysis for social problems. As Marxists they believed that injustice and oppression came not from simple prejudice or misinformation but from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of society” (SP, 64). For this reason, the early Mattachine Society set out to formulate a theoretical explanation for the homosexual’s inferior status. The Mattachine Society began to argue that this status was not a function of individual deviance but instead resulted from the structure of American society, particularly from the structure of the dominant nuclear, heterosexual family, which “equates male, masculine, man ONLY with husband and Father . .. and which equates female, feminine, woman ONLY with wife and Mother” (qtd. in SP, 65). One of the main goals of the early Mattachine Society, then (which was linked to the Marxist goal of distinguishing between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself”), was to make homosexuals aware of their position as “a social minority imprisoned within a dominant culture” (qtd. in SP,65).
Although D’Emilio describes the Mattachine Society’s first action outside their discussion group as a “modest, undramatic one” (MT, 30), it is nonetheless significant if we are to read the contemporary Queer Renaissance, which repeatedly stresses coalition across differences, through this earlier period. Police in Los Angeles had a long history of harassing the Chicano community in that city.10 Not long after the Mattachine Society began to meet in the early 1950s, incidents of harassment of Chicanos received increasing attention in the newspapers. The city government finally held public hearings on the incidents, and the founders of the Mattachine Society attended these hearings to voice their support for disciplinary action against the Los Angeles police officers involved. “The rationale for their participation,” D’Emilio explains, “was their conviction that all socially oppressed minorities had something in common” (MT, 30). Hence the early Mattachine Society’s radical critique of American society extended beyond an isolated analysis of the homosexual’s position within that society to a promotion of intersubjective relations and alliances outside of their own group.
As the 1950s progressed and the Mattachine Society grew, however, those favoring such a systemic and far-reaching critique of American society came into conflict with those preferring a liberal reformist approach. By mid-1953, leadership had transferred to a group of men intent on redefining the mission of the Mattachine Society. These men sought to replace the structural analysis of Hay and the other founders, with its emphasis on homosexuals as a social minority within a dominant heterosexual order, with a position that argued that, except for their sexual object choice, homosexuals were “no different from anyone else.” Assimilation to American society was the goal, and this goal could be met if only “false ideas” about homosexuality were corrected. Therefore, the new leadership of the Mattachine Society advocated “aiding established and recognized scientists, clinics, research organizations and institutions . . . studying sex variation problems” (qtd. in SP, 81). D’Emilio concludes:
Accommodation to social norms replaced the affirmation of a distinctive gay identity, collective effort gave way to individual action, and confidence in the ability of gay men and lesbians to interpret their own experience yielded to the wisdom of experts. Under its new officers, the Mattachine Society shifted its focus from mobilizing a gay constituency to assisting the work of professionals. (SP, 81)
As in American culture generally in the 1950s, so too in the later Mattachine Society: the new atmosphere was no longer congenial to the Marxist insights Hay and his cohorts initially brought to the movement.
A similar “retreat to respectability” occurred not long after this within the autonomous lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis (SP, 75). Respectability, indeed, was the very basis for the formation of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). When the group first met in 1955, they explicitly emphasized that their organization was to be an alternative to the lesbian bars, which they considered “vulgar and limited” (Kennedy and Davis, 68). These lesbian bars, however, although not as numerous as gay male bars, were one of the few arenas where women had the opportunity and space to shape a collective lesbian identity. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain:
Tough bar lesbians . . . expanded the presence of lesbians in the world of the 1950s. As they affirmed their right to live as lesbians, they made it easier for other lesbians to find them, and more difficult for the heterosexual community to ignore them. ... In addition, by spending as much time as possible in the bars under difficult conditions, tough bar lesbians created a strong sense of community solidarity and belonging that included women of diverse ethnic and racial groups. (111)11
Kennedy and Davis’s language, especially its emphasis on “community solidarity,” diversity, and difference from the heterosexual community, links the incipient analysis occurring in the lesbian bars to the analysis developed by Hay and the early Mattachine Society. The DOB’s alternative to such group consciousness can also be linked to the “alternatives” emphasized by the leaders of the later Mattachine Society: the founders of the DOB “saw education—the dispelling of myths, misinformation, and prejudice—as the primary means of improving the status of lesbians and homosexuals” (SP, 102). As D’Emilio points out, the lesbian retreat to respectability, with its disavowal of bar culture, was particularly class-bound (SP, 106). However, the shifts in the Mattachine Society—a demonizing of Marxism, an appeal to middle-class professionals, and a refusal to acknowledge that a group’s status is a function of larger societal structures—were also clearly class-bound.
Thus the radical beginnings of the lesbian and gay movement were overshadowed by a shift to liberal reformism. Although gay and lesbian organizations continued their activity throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they did so as part of a movement that “could accurately be described as a reform movement solidly implanted in the American liberal tradition” (MT, 239). It was not until the formation of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969 that the radical analysis of the early Mattachine Society was decisively “reborn.” The time was ripe for such a rebirth. Young lesbians and gay men were already involved in the antiwar movement, the Civil Rights movement, and radical feminism—movements that had spoken and were speaking to American young people generally (MT, 241). When the police raided the Stonewall Inn Bar on the night of June 27, 1969, the rage and energy generated by the ensuing riots could be easily articulated to communities of young people who were already radicalized by these other movements. In such a context, the GLF was born, and many of the ideas expressed by their early Mattachine forebears were reborn:
GLFers began to construct a rudimentary analysis of gay oppression. It was not a matter of simple prejudice, misinformation, or outmoded beliefs. Rather, the oppression of homosexuals was woven into the fabric of sexism. Institutionalized heterosexuality reinforced a patriarchal nuclear family that socialized men and women into narrow roles and placed homosexuality beyond the pale. These gender dichotomies also reinforced other divisions based on race and class, and thus allowed an imperial American capitalism to exploit the population and make war around the globe. (MT, 242)
As with the early Mattachine Society, the two main characteristics of the GLF’s political vision were a commitment to an ongoing interrogation of the very structures of heterosexual, patriarchal, and capitalist society and a simultaneous recognition that resistant identities needed to be reshaped across differences. For this reason, as Terence Kissack explains, the GLF “not only acted in defense of gay and lesbian rights, but also participated in antiwar demonstrations, Black Panther rallies, and actions undertaken by radical feminists” (108). Over the next few years, GLF “kindred groups” spread to cities and college campuses all over the country (MT, 243).
Not long after the formation of the GLF, however, a tension between the radical vision it espoused and more traditional liberal reformist impulses, similar to the tension that shifted the Mattachine Society’s goals, emerged. The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was formed virtually on the heels of the GLF and was, not surprising, much narrower in its focus: “Rather than try to destroy the old in order to build something new, they saw themselves as unjustly excluded from full participation in American society and wanted recognition and a place inside” (MT, 247). The GAA was able to achieve several victories—most notable, the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders (MT, 249)—but their shift to a single-issue politics eventually trumped the GLF’s broader vision.12 A commercial subculture of restaurants, bars, and bathhouses flourished by the end of the 1970s and can be seen as an indirect consequence of activists’ efforts, but this subculture was social and sexual rather than explicitly political (MT, 250–51). Understandably, just as women in many political movements were becoming dissatisfied with the overwhelming focus on male concerns and with ongoing sexist attitudes generally, many lesbians were dissatisfied with these new developments within the gay movement and with groups that focused on sexuality while virtually ignoring gender. This dissatisfaction led to the formation of autonomous lesbian-feminist groups. As the 1970s progressed, these autonomous groups themselves increasingly shifted from a structural critique of society to a more Utopian and separatist outlook (MT, 252).
D’Emilio’s summation of where all these shifts ended up is particularly astute. In stark contrast to the structural change envisioned by the GLF (and the early Mattachine Society), D’Emilio presents what may be the “quintessential products” of each wing of what he calls the “gendered seventies”: “the elaborate, glitzy, high-tech gay male discos found in many cities, and the self-sufficient, rural communes of lesbian separatists. Here were men, in a public space, spending money, focused on themselves, and searching for sex. And here were women, in a private retreat, financially marginal, focused on group process, and nurturing loving relationships” (MT, 258). So much for structural critique and for identities reshaped across differences. Although D’Emilio acknowledges that “some scrambling of gender characteristics did occur,” his critical insight is that traditional understandings of sex and gender were, ironically, very much intact in gay and lesbian communities as the 1970s concluded (MT, 258).
Despite what D’Emilio sees as a retrenchment at the end of the 1970s, he is not the only theorist to note that the AIDS crisis and other factors in the 1980s and 1990s have incited another period of political rebirth. Dennis Altman writes, “It has struck me that AIDS is leading gay men and our organizations towards some of the practices associated with the gay liberation movements of fifteen years ago” (41). Sarah Schulman broadens this observation, suggesting that feminist critiques of “practices associated with the gay liberation movements” have actually reconfigured “our” organizations, taking them further than they went in the early 1970s:
The coming together of feminist political perspectives and organizing experience with gay men’s high sense of entitlement and huge resources proved to be a historically transforming event. Necessity was the best motivator for efficiency, and for the most part ACT UP was able to function with a wide coalition and broad divergence of opinion. . . . ACT UP produced the largest grass-roots, democratic, and most effective organizing in the history of both the gay and feminist movements. (My American History, 11–12)
Schulman’s account of the early days of ACT UP implies that, if gay men’s inability to function with “a wide coalition and broad divergence of opinion” led to the fracturing of many gay and lesbian organizations in the early 1970s, a revitalization of lesbian and gay politics occurred in part because some gay men, however tentatively, began to learn the lessons of feminism and to work more effectively with lesbian and straight feminists.
Beyond this, D’Emilio factors in three additional catalysts that provoked a widespread rebirth of radical lesbian and gay political analysis: the rise of the New Right, the “sex wars” of the early 1980s, and independent organizing by lesbians and gay men of color (MT, 258–62). As early as 1977, the New Right was specifically targeting gay men and lesbians through Anita Bryant’s campaign to encourage voters to repeal gay rights legislation in Dade County, Florida. Bryant’s campaign and others brought home to activists both the dangers of complacency and the need for an ongoing analysis of the ways in which gay and lesbian oppression is built into the very structure of society. More positively, the “collapse of the lesbian-separatist Utopia” (MT, 259) and the ensuing sex wars of the early 1980s brought to the forefront the voices of s/m lesbians and other “sex radicals.” These diverse voices called for a more consistent attention to differences within feminist and lesbian communities. The sex wars were fought over issues such as pornography, sadomasochism, sex work, and alliances with men, and they made possible an understanding of sexuality as more fluid and discontinuous than 1970s utopianism had admitted. At the same time, through a series of moves that similarly brought to the forefront voices that had been previously ignored or suppressed, independent organizing by lesbians and gay men of color finally provoked (some) white gay men and lesbians to attend to racial privilege and to the tendency to disavow racial divisions within lesbian and gay communities.13
To all theorists of this period, however, AIDS is the central issue that elicited a sense of political urgency among gay men and lesbians generally.
The rebirth of radical politics that AIDS sparked eventually led to the formation, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of other groups not specifically focused on AIDS, such as Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers. These later groups, in turn, tended to revitalize ACT UP and AIDS activism.14
The consequences of this political renaissance have been profound. D’Emilio insists that the AIDS epidemic “has once again given plausibility to understandings of gay and lesbian oppression as systemic; it has exposed the complex ways in which it is tied to a host of other injustices” (MT, 268). In short, responses to the AIDS epidemic have brought us back to analytical practices associated with the early Mattachine Society and the GLF. A consideration of the specifically queer identities that emerge from this return, moreover, brings us back to the impudent identities with which I began this introduction: identities refusing fixation in any one sexual or gendered location, reshaped across difference and in opposition to systemic injustice. In response to the challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, queers have collectively reinvented gay and lesbian identities; in unexpected ways and in ever-multiplying locations, they have flaunted new, transgressive identities. And as I have indicated, contemporary queer commentators have been quick to spotlight, and have in turn fueled, this identificatory irreverence. Cherry Smyth writes, “Queer promises a refusal to apologise or assimilate into invisibility. It provides a way of asserting desires that shatter gender identities and sexualities, in the manner some early Gay Power and lesbian feminist activists once envisaged” (60). Michael Warner likewise emphasizes:
Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is intricated with gender, with the family, with notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body. Being queer means fighting about these issues all the time, locally and piecemeal but always with consequences. It means being able, more or less articulately, to challenge the common understanding of what gender difference means, or what the state is for, or what “health” entails, or what would define fairness, or what a good relation to the planet’s environment would be. Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queer. (6)
Obviously, I cannot claim to address all the interrelations Warner cites here, though in the pages that follow I do engage many of them. My project is more modest. My study joins this queer parade of commentaries, and—through its reinflection of the insights of Smyth, Warner, Sedgwick, D’Emilio, and many others—aims to couple the renaissance of queer identities and political analyses with the other renaissance with which I began: the unprecedented efflorescence of queer cultural production. Of course, “couple” is not exactly the right word, if the concept assumes a prior separation of the parties involved. As I have already implied, neither renaissance was discrete in the first place.
The renaissance under consideration here is “queer” not simply because it is by and for lesbians and gay men but because it is different from many other renaissances. As I insisted at the beginning of the last section, the Queer Renaissance resists the discourse of transcendence and historical dislocation that generally accompanies cultural renaissances. In this section of my introduction, I consider more carefully how the Queer Renaissance differs from a few specific twentieth-century renaissances. At the same time, I complicate the sense I gave of the Queer Renaissance’s distinction from other renaissance moments. The Queer Renaissance is indeed fabulously distinct from renaissances that strive for transcendence of secular history, but absolute distinction from all other renaissance moments would be impossible, given the permeability of boundaries the Queer Renaissance celebrates. Moreover, many of the central figures of the Queer Renaissance would credit not only gay and lesbian history with shaping their political consciousness but also—or primarily—Chicana/o, African American, feminist, and working-class history, and hence these earlier literary and political movements are often explicitly or implicitly cited in the Queer Renaissance. The Chicano and Harlem Renaissances, in particular, share some characteristics with the contemporary Queer Renaissance. Nonetheless, vocal factions in both the Chicano and Harlem Renaissances attempted to contain fluidity, and thus writers in the Queer Renaissance who avail themselves of these movements reinvent the identities they proffer.
The Chicano Renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, like the Queer Renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s, initially produced a revitalized and politicized identity. “Chicano” identity was rooted in El Movimiento and opposed to a hyphenated “Mexican-American” identity, which was perceived as more complacent and assimilationist. Systemic critique and an identity reshaped across differences—the two central components I identify with the Queer Renaissance—were also very much components of the Chicano Renaissance, as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s epic poem I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin makes clear.
I want to consider a few aspects of I Am Joaquin carefully, since the poem so thoroughly intertwined, in its message and its reception, the political and literary aspects of the Chicano movement. Gonzales’s poem is printed in both English and Spanish. The first stanza opens by sharply criticizing la sociedad gringa that is destroying “Joaquin”:
I am Joaquin,
lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a
gringo society,
confused by the rules,
scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation,
and destroyed by modern society.
Yo soy Joaquin,
perdido en un mundo de confusion
enganchado en el remolino de una
sociedad gringa,
confundido por las reglas,
despreciado por las actitudes,
sofocado por manipulaciones,
y destrozado por la sociedad moderna. (6–7)
Even as the poem places Joaquin within a desperate situation, however, it begins to shape a Chicano identity that will remake this “world of confusion.” The English version of this first stanza appears beneath the picture of a young boy of eight or nine, who holds a sack and is seated atop boxes of El Rancho grapes. The credits identify this boy as a California grape worker (Gonzales, 118). The Spanish version of the first stanza appears on the opposing page, beneath the picture of a young girl of eight or nine, who leans against a wooden shack, also in California (118). The “I/Yo” that is Joaquín, then, is not individual but collective: both Spanish-and English-speaking, female and male, child and adult. More than fifty photographs throughout I’m Joaquin—of farmworkers, demonstrators, veterans, children, and so forth—make Chicano identity even more expansive, as does the poem’s distribution: thousands of copies were reproduced by Chicano newspapers; teatro groups performed the poem from California to Mexico (Teatro Campesino in particular, transforming it into a film); and—as Gonzales asserts—excerpts from the poem were “used by almost every Chicano organization in the country” (2).
The poem itself represented and refueled the Chicano movement. As Gonzales explains, “J Am Joaquin was the first work of poetry to be published by Chicanos for Chicanos and is the forerunner of the Chicano cultural renaissance. The poem was written first and foremost for the Chicano Movement” (3). Hence, far from transcending history or providing an alternative to El Movimiento, the Chicano Renaissance was understood as integrally connected to the political and the historical: “There is no inspiration without identifiable images, there is no conscience without the sharp knife of truthful exposure, and ultimately, there are no revolutions without poets” (1). Carlos Muñoz, Jr., explains that “I Am Joaquin did not offer its readers a well-defined radical ideology, but it did provide a critical framework for the developing student movement through its portrayal of the quest for identity and its critique of racism” (Muñoz, 60–61). In short, the poem nourished the nascent analysis taking shape within the movement. The sharpened political analysis within the movement, in turn, encouraged the formation of other literary works—such as the plays of Luis Valdez—that sustained a more well-defined critical ideology.
The poem provided the movement with a historical framework: “I Am Joaquin filled a vacuum, for most student activists had never read a book about Mexican American history—especially one that linked that history with Mexican history” (Muñoz, 61). To strengthen contemporary Chicano identity, Gonzales drew on a collective Chicano history. The name in the title, for instance, recalls the legend of Joaquin Murrieta, a miner who worked in California from 1849 to 1851. Gonzales explains that Anglo miners raped and killed Murrieta’s wife and then drove Murrieta himself away from the claim he had staked. He was later falsely accused of horse stealing and whipped in public for this fictitious crime. Vowing revenge, Murrieta formed a band of outlaws, who commenced a series of “daring robberies and narrow escapes”: “He became a legendary figure, el bandido terrible, the ‘Robin Hood of El Dorado/The California government offered a reward of $5,000 for him, dead or alive, and—because his last name was not well known—California became unsafe for anyone whose name happened to be Joaquin” (Gonzales, 115).
Through its citation of this legend, Gonzales’s poem both valorizes a history of Chicano resistance to Anglo oppression and enacts a reversal in the service of contemporary Chicano identity. In the nineteenth-century context recalled by the legend, the statement “I am Joaquin” would have been fraught with danger; if one’s name was Joaquin, silence would be the surest way to avoid certain death. Gonzales, in contrast, animates the Chicano movement by championing and disseminating the assertion “I am Joaquin.” The dangerous statement is transformed into a byword for all those who join the Chicano movement and thereby becomes a sign that “Joaquin” cannot and will not be eliminated. The statement “I am Joaquin,” then, is similar to ACT UP’s appropriation and resignification of the pink triangle in the 1980s and 1990s. In Nazi Germany, silence about one’s homosexuality was the only way to avoid being forced to wear the pink triangle and sent to extermination camps. ACT UP inverted the triangle (in Nazi Germany, it was worn with the point facing down) and appended to it the motto “Silence = Death.” Wearing the triangle thus signified both one’s membership in a vital, collective movement that refused to be silenced and one’s belief that the government’s silence on AIDS, in particular, had been murderous.
The renaissance of African American cultural production in the 1920s, especially if that movement is understood as the “New Negro Renaissance,” similarly displayed a dynamic new identity. Although the New Negro Renaissance was certainly much more committed to abstract ideas of beauty than either the Queer or the Chicano Renaissance, all three nonetheless attempt to construct an identity that will speak to the presumed inadequacies of older identities: we are not simply lesbian and gay, but queer; not Mexican American, but Chicano; not Old Negroes, but New Negroes. An “Old Negro” identity might be considered politically apathetic and acquiescent in its subordination to whites, but “New Negro” identity offered an active, proud, resistant alternative. Hence the New Negro Renaissance, like the Chicano Renaissance forty years later, offered some African Americans of the 1920s a heightened and collective “race consciousness” that specifically countered from within the negative representations from without that dominated discussions of Negro life. Many in the New Negro Renaissance also saw art as the force that could bring about change. James Weldon Johnson, for instance, insisted that “artistic efforts” would enable the New Negro to overcome racism “faster than he has ever done through any other method” (qtd. in Lewis, 193).
However, there are important differences between the Queer Renaissance and both the New Negro and the Chicano Renaissance. In the New Negro Renaissance, for example, even though writers such as Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois saw politics and art as compatible and even positioned art as the highest form of social protest, the identity some of these writers favored was much less fluid than the identities favored by writers in the Queer Renaissance. DuBois and others championed the artist’s ability to produce “positive images” of black people. Representations of the erotic, therefore, were often proscribed. Carla Kaplan notes that “black publication guidelines warned that nothing liable to add fuel to racist stereotypes of wanton licentiousness and primitivism would be printed” (122). Kaplan concludes that such proscriptions “were much more rigorously applied to the work of black women” (122). Male gatekeepers in the Harlem Renaissance thus scapegoated black women writers as more likely to reflect “wanton licentiousness” but simultaneously required them to embody the “highest moral values.” Black women such as Bessie Smith did shape more fluid (and sexual) identities, but artists like Smith “were not often invited to New Negro salons” (Gates, “Trope of a New Negro,” 148).
Furthermore, for some the question of how or whether the “political” and “aesthetic” functions of art were related remained open. The debate was ongoing and often vigorous. Alain Locke and others resisted DuBois’s insistence that literature portray black people in a positive light and advocated, in contrast, unfettered individual self-expression. Locke and his cohorts understood DuBois’s desire for “positive images” as propagandistic. The debate about art paralleled a more general controversy over New Negro identity. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues, “At least since its usages after 1895, the name [New Negro] has implied a tension between strictly political concerns and strictly artistic concerns” (“Trope of a New Negro,” 135). Locke’s usage of the term to describe a literary movement, according to Gates, celebrated a mythological racial self and diluted the connotations of political activism that New Negro identity carried. Other writers took this separation of the artistic from the political to the extreme: in 1924, Charles Johnson characterized Jean Toomer as “triumphantly the negro artist, detached from propaganda, sensitive only to beauty” (qtd. in Lewis, 90). Thus, in spite of its articulation of a collective new identity for some, and in spite of some writers’ linkage of the political and the aesthetic, the New Negro Renaissance as often positioned the two realms at odds, and this sharply contrasts to the Queer Renaissance, where they have consistently been mutually constitutive.15
Finally, if the New Negro Renaissance is understood, more traditionally, as the Harlem Renaissance, then its limited geographic location and availability contrast with the ubiquity of the Queer Renaissance. The “here” of the queer pronouncement “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” is as valid, and perhaps more threatening, in Peoria as in New York or San Francisco. I do not mean by this assertion to contradict my argument in favor of location and specificity but rather to affirm that queers in specific locations everywhere have reinvented gay and lesbian identity. We are everywhere, but the terms of our existence shift according to distinct histories and locations. Thus my first chapter is critical of how Edmund White’s Ohio in A Boy’s Own Story becomes a blank “Everyplace,” whereas my second and third chapters examine specific and very different queerings of rural North Carolina and the U.S.-Mexican border region, respectively.
As with the Harlem Renaissance, there are differences between the Chicano and the Queer Renaissance—in this case, precisely to the extent that the former is, relentlessly, the Chicano Renaissance. As Lorna Dee Cervantes writes, “You cramp my style, baby / when you roll on top of me / shouting, ‘Viva La Raza’ / at the top of your prick” (qtd. in Gutierrez, 48). In other words, the Chicano Renaissance, despite its expansiveness and despite the gender inclusivity suggested by the first few pages of / Am Joaquin, often depended for its meaning on the containment of Chicanas. “Queer,” too, can and does generate its own exclusions (some of which are considered more fully in my third chapter), but I think that, at its best, the concept is unruly and undermines attempts at fixation or containment. “To queer,” in my mind, is precisely “to bring out the difference that is compelled to pass under the sign of the same.” As Sedgwick notes, “The most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example” (Tendencies, 8–9). Isaac Julien, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Richard Fung are exemplars of this type of queer theory, according to Sedgwick: “[These] intellectuals and artists of color . . . are using the leverage of ‘queer’ to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the gravity (I mean gravitas, the meaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term ‘queer’ itself deepens and shifts” (Tendencies, 9). Such constant shifting is a central focus of all four of the chapters that follow. Only through this constant shifting can the Queer Renaissance guard against the exclusionary practices that already endanger it and that have plagued—and ultimately grounded—earlier movements.
Hence, when practitioners of the contemporary Queer Renaissance avail themselves of movements such as the New Negro or the Chicano Renaissance, they resist the tendency to contain fluidity. At the same time, they reinvoke those earlier moments’ sharp critique of American culture. Cherríe Moraga, for instance, writes, “For me, ‘El Movimiento’ has never been a thing of the past, it has retreated into subterranean uncontaminated soils awaiting resurrection in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation” (Last Generation, 148). For Moraga, then, the contemporary moment signals a revitalization or rebirth of Chicano/a political/artistic practices through the lens of queer and feminist thought. This revitalization sustains and extends the Chicano Renaissance’s and El Movimiento’s indictment of America: “An art that subscribes to integration into mainstream Amerika is not Chicano art” (Moraga, Last Generation, 61).
Since Moraga writes openly as Chicana, feminist, and queer, understanding those identities as inextricably imbricated, and since queer art similarly indicts “mainstream Amerika,” Moraga’s assertion could as easily describe the Queer Renaissance of which she is a part as it does the Chicano art that is her immediate topic. In fact, the title of the collection of prose and poetry from which these quotations are taken seems to license such an ongoing linkage of “queer” and “Chicano.” Calling her collection The Last Generation, Moraga insists that the reproduction stops here: both literally, since she is a lesbian who chooses not to have children, and figuratively, in that she is a Chicana resisting the reproduction of assimila-tionist “Hispanic” narratives. In short, Moraga reinvents Chicano/a identity in and through queerness and vice versa. She describes her writing as “a queer mixture of glyphs” that “shape[s] the world I know at the turn of this century.... Like the ancient codices, The Last Generation begins at the end and moves forward” (4). Judging by the writing that follows this description of her project, the “end” Moraga invokes here is the end of assimilation to Anglo-American, heterosexual, and patriarchal norms. Like all the “queer glyphs” that constitute the Queer Renaissance, Moraga’s prose and poetry are dedicated to a dismantling of such norms, wherever they are encountered: “I hold a vision requiring a radical transformation of consciousness in this country, that as the people-of-color population increases ... we will emerge as a mass movement of people to redefine what an ‘American’ is” (61); “We can work to teach one another that our freedom as a people is mutually dependent and cannot be parceled out—class before race before sex before sexuality” (174).
Other American renaissances of this century (I think here especially of the Native American Renaissance and the Hawaiian Renaissance), despite important differences, share with the Queer Renaissance the commitment to a systemic critique of American culture.16 I would never argue, then, as David Bergman does in the introduction to his Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature, that “to be American is to be queer” (10). Bergman jotted this observation down on a scrap of paper during a visit to Harper’s Ferry with his lover, and he insists that “in so doing I united the currents of the national spirit with my literary ancestry and my erotic desires” (10). Of course, Bergman’s national epiphany here has to be read in the context of Harper’s Ferry: that is, in the context of John Brown’s famous attempt to change the America of his day. In this sense, “America” for Bergman, as for many people at various locations on the political spectrum, stands for “liberation” and “freedom.” The abstractness of Bergman’s formulation and his celebratory lyricism, however, prevent him from moving beyond this oversimplified nationalism. Bergman’s lyricism also prevents him from questioning the potential ramifications of his thesis about “the national spirit.” If “to be American is to be queer,” in what sense is it or is it not the case that “to be queer is to be American”? Could “American” simply replace “Queer” on the T-shirts that so delighted Sedgwick at the gay pride parade, since the two terms are interchangeable? Of course not: “American” carries too many other contradictory and reactionary meanings that are not easily dismissed (or, to use Bergman’s language, “transfigured”). Rather than teasing out these contradictions and insisting—as Moraga does—that we continuously “redefine what an ‘American’ is,” however, Bergman uses this scrap of paper to pull together a sort of high-modernist unity from the disparate fragments of his life. Moraga, in contrast, advocates not unification but dissolution: ‘I the Soviet Union could dissolve, why can’t the United States?” (The Last Generation, 168).17
If Bergman had more fully explored these contradictions, then perhaps he would have asserted that to be queer is to contest America. In this formulation, “Queer America” is less a description than an ongoing imperative. It is this imperative, I think, that the Queer Renaissance performs and extends, and it at times shares this imperative with, and inherits it from, the New Negro and Chicano Renaissances.
“Queerness” is not merely contestatory, however; over the past several years, activists, journalists, scholars, and many others have sharply contested the meanings of queerness itself. In many locations, and in gay and lesbian journalism in particular, queer is still used as a simple synonym for embodied lesbians and gay men. And indeed, such an association should remain primary; as Sedgwick notes, “Given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself” {Tendencies, 8). Still, queer as I am using it in this project (and certainly, as Sedgwick deploys it in hers) should be seen as more expansive and not simplistically coextensive with fixed homosexual bodies.
My use of the term should be seen, for instance, as a deliberate contrast to Michelangelo Signorile’s use of it in his national bestseller Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power. Although Signorile explores a plethora of locations in his book, in each “queers” look exactly the same. Like many ethnographers before him, everywhere Signorile goes, he sees people just like himself. In sections such as “Queer in New York,” “Queer in Washington,” “Queer in Hollywood,” and “Queer in America,” Signorile positions those who engage in heterosexual activity as always automatically on the outside of “queer” (“Because they’ve never experienced the closet, because they have no idea what it’s like to be queer, sympathetic straights often see coming out or being outed as the most excruciating, most horrible thing imaginable” [xx]), while those who engage in homosexual activity are automatically on the inside—as if, were Jesse Helms and Robert Dornan to be caught in a tabloid love nest, it would indicate that all along they have been unacknowledged members of the queer club.
To me, Signorile’s use of expressions such as “all the president’s queers” (165), “Pete Williams[’s] . . . queerness” (104), or “closeted queer” (71) verge on the oxymoronic. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, given the current structure of the American political system “inside the Beltway” and in contrast to what Signorile implies throughout Queer in America, there are no “queers in power,” only queer moments: Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski’s characterization of the Senate Judiciary Committee as an “inquisition” and Republican senators as “grand inquisitors,” an accusation she made before delivering the resounding “No!” vote that registered her opposition to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court; Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’s assertion that we should understand masturbation as part of human sexuality and even that we—gasp!—should communicate that to our children. The cross-identifications and commitments that led to these moments and many others like them indicate, certainly, that queer processes are alive and well on the inside, disrupting the system; but embodied “queers in power,” whatever such creatures might look like, are not—Representatives Barney Frank, Gerry Studds, and, especially, Steve Gunderson notwithstanding. Indeed, I would argue that Elders, complete with sparkling heterosexual and Christian credentials, is the closest we have come to a highly visible queer in power, and that her rapid dismissal (Elders: “[The conversation] was more than one minute and less than two”) attests to the difficulty of articulating queerness to the current political system, given that queerness is so intent on changing that system.18
My use of queer in this project has more in common with David Wojnarowicz’s uses of the term than with Signorile’s. For Wojnarowicz, queerness is fluid and disruptive. Wojnarowicz’s use of queer shifts constantly throughout his Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, so that at various points in the text it describes fags, dykes, junkies, hustlers, the homeless, people living with AIDS, people of color, women, and the occasional straight man—all of those who stand in opposition to what Wojnarowicz calls throughout “this pre-invented existence” (174), “the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION ... this illusion called AMERICA” (153), or more globally, this “shit planet” (168). To Wojnarowicz, “Being Queer in America” (the title of one of his essays) means constantly living “close to the knives.” Living close to the knives, in turn, means dealing with danger and rage as basic components of everyday life: Will you suddenly face the knives, literally or metaphorically pinned to the wall by queer bashers, or will you instead suddenly grab the knives yourself, to use against the bashers? In short, one lives close to the knives because this is a dangerous and infuriating world in which queer lives of all sorts are expendable:
I thought of the neo-nazis posing as politicians and religious leaders and I thought of my genuine fantasies of murder and wondered why I never crossed the line. It’s not that I’m a good person or even that I am afraid of containment in jail; it may be more that I can’t escape the ropes of my own body, my own flesh, and bottom line in the pyramids of power and confinement one demon gets replaced by another in a moment’s notice and no one gesture can erase it all that easily. (Wojnarowicz, 33)
On a journey through the American West, Wojnarowicz is not surprised to read in the newspaper of one city—a city he describes as “a government war town filled with a half million workers employed in the various research centers attempting to perfect a president’s dream of laser warfare from the floating veil of outerspace” (30)—about a Native American teenage boy who is terrorizing civilians by driving his car onto the sidewalk. Instead, given “this pre-invented existence” and “the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION,” Wojnarowicz is surprised by others’ surprise: “I thought of the face of our current president floating disembodied and ten stories tall over the midnight buildings. I wondered why any of these things, like the kid in his camaro, are a surprise. Why weren’t more of us doing this?” (32).
Wojnarowicz carries his outrage to his art and, in photographs and paintings such as Fuck You Faggot Fucker (1984), translates that outrage into a queer challenge to those in “the pyramids of power.” Fuck You Faggot Fucker displays a collage of images, including a crude drawing of anal sex flanked by the words “Fuck You Faggot Fucker.” The drawing appears to be graffiti, perhaps pulled from the walls of a public restroom. Wojnarowicz places a much larger drawing of two men kissing, waist-deep in water, in the center of the collage and overlays the men’s bodies with a color map of North America. The graffiti beneath these men suggests that they are embattled, surrounded by—indeed, almost drowning in—hostility, yet their kiss remains the most prominent feature of the collage. Moreover, Wojnarowicz defiantly maps queer acts and eroticisms onto countless locations everywhere, since all of North America is incorporated into the kiss between these two men. A far cry from Signorile’s desire to “out” Malcolm Forbes or Jodie Foster, Wojnarowicz’s desire is to represent queer identity otherwise: not as an identity one might discover tucked away in the “closets of power” but rather as a fluid and disruptive identity openly constructed and reconstructed in innumerable pockets of power by the many who share Wojnarowicz’s opposition to a society “pre-invented” to sanction “the legalized murder of those who are diverse in their natures” (154)-
In the pages that follow, I consider the various ways other poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists have represented such queer identities. I have specifically started here with Signorile and Wojnarowicz, two white and male writers, in order to tease out differences within that group over and around queerness. Another difference worth pointing out is that some white men (in opposition to both Signorile and Wojnarowicz) have often been among the concept’s greatest detractors: Bruce Bawer and Rich Tafel, for instance, are among the many white gay men who think the movement would gain more respect if we queers would only behave.19
I highlight this disjunction because there are some who would turn the most recent history of the term into the story of a split between white gay men (a group that is assumed to be monolithic) and everyone else. Consider, for instance, Ruth Novazcek’s concerns: “I worry about the word queer. I still have this image of the gay clone in a black leather jacket and shaved ‘blonde’ head and I worry that it will perpetuate that aesthetic” (qtd. in Smyth, 34). Or take Robyn Wiegman’s too-easy dismissal of queer theory: “The turn toward the word queer is intended to displace [the] displacement of difference, to mark a mutual eccentricity ... as central. While I certainly agree with the political imperative of such a project, it seems to me that the deployment of queer so far . . . actually neutralizes difference” (“Introduction,” iyn. 1). Yet rejection of queer might also neutralize difference; in fact, Bawer’s repeated rejections of the concept suggest as much. Bawer is the editor of Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy, a collection that he hopes will convey the message that it’s time “for the gay rights movement to grow up” (xiv). For Bawer and his cohorts, however, growing up “beyond queer” apparently means moving away from difference and diversity: the contributors to Beyond Queer are overwhelmingly white and male; it is, indeed, difficult for me to think of a recent gay and/or lesbian collection that is less inclusive than Bawer’s.
Pace Wiegman, I certainly agree that queer has the potential to neutralize difference. My point here is simply that resistance to or dismissal of the concept also has the potential to neutralize difference, and one goal of our inquiries might be to negotiate these tensions.20 Rather than simply assuming that queer perpetuates a white male aesthetic, we might consider more critically how and why the concept has failed to speak to some white men and how it has already been deployed by many different gay and lesbian writers of color. Many white men do not want to be queer, and many women and men of color were queer before queer was hip.21
It is this belief that makes The Queer Renaissance a project that is more about writers such as Audre Lorde, Randall Kenan, and Gloria Anzaldúa than about the group that has recently been labeled explicitly the “New Queer Writers,” The New Queer Writers (Wojnarowicz, Dennis Cooper, Eric Latzky, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and several others) are a loosely associated group of writers who nonetheless share a commitment to interrogating sexual and social identities that are made marginal by contemporary society, even (and in some cases, especially) by contemporary lesbian and gay culture. I think this group of writers is very much part of the Queer Renaissance (much more so than, say, a mainstream gay writer such as David Leavitt), which is why I have focused on Wojnarowicz here. In this project, however, I am interested in bringing together “related but disparate views [that] inform and corrupt each other,” if I may appropriate one recent description of the New Queer Writing (qtd. in Latzky, 14). I want, in short, to corrupt queer writing by examining an even wider variety of “margins”: not simply the high-literary “bad boys” who look back to Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs as their forebears (important as that group may be) but also those writers who look back to the various liberation movements I have surveyed in this introduction and who draw their commitment to the representation of boundary-crossing and systemic critique from them. To my mind, Wojnarowicz, Cooper, Latzky, and the rest have produced some of the most provocative and exciting contemporary queer writing to date, and I do not mean to suggest that they do not recall or cite in their writing the movements I have considered. New Queer Writers, however, come in a wide variety of forms, and the bad boys and girls I have nodded to here are only a small part of a “vast, diverse, and growing anti-assimilationist queer movement” (Cooper, xi). Hence, in the chapters that follow, I consider novelists, poets, and playwrights whose work might not, at first, be thought to represent the New Queer Writing. The theories they advance and the unruly identities they depict, however, ensure that their work is very much in concert with the work of this school.
Chapter 1 thus reads Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name alongside Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and considers how, at the outset of the Queer Renaissance, Zami redefines the parameters of the coming-out story. Although the Gay Liberation Front intended “coming out” to provide a starting point for radical political action, by the late 1970s the coming-out story had evolved into a predictable narrative, detailing a protagonist’s teleological journey toward an essential wholeness. Examining coming out alongside feminist theories of positionality, I suggest that Zami resists this individual and essentialist understanding of gay identity and constructs instead an/other myth of queer positionality—not because Lorde attempts, as White does in A Boy’s Own Story, to construct her protagonist as an alienated, marked “other” but because Zami argues for collective identity, for a “self” defined in and through others.
Chapter 2 carries queer theory to another region, where “community” is not always the sustaining force it is in Zami. I analyze Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits—which focuses on a black gay youth growing up in the rural African American town of Tims Creek, North Carolina—in order to consider what happens when queer desire turns up in apparently unlikely and inhospitable places. This chapter engages African American theories of signification and suggests that A Visitation of Spirits effects a queer trickster identity, able to reverse hierarchies of power and transform even the supposed “margins” of the queer world.
Chapter 3 focuses on Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands I La Frontera and the current academic penchant for transgressing disciplined/disciplinary boundaries. I argue that there’s more than one way to cross a border: border crossings may challenge the mechanisms of power that produce borders, divided identities, and histories of exploitation, but they may also uncritically posit cosmopolitan consumers/theorists, able to move anywhere and everywhere with ease. Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza” crosses the U.S.-Mexican and other borders not to escape identity and history but rather to challenge the unchecked mobility of oppressive systems of power. The new mestiza turns the searchlight away from those border residents deemed “illegal” and onto those who delimit and police the border in order to secure unlimited mobility for themselves.
Chapter 4 examines lesbian and gay work generated by the AIDS crisis. I begin by considering how Tony Kushner, in his critically acclaimed play Angels in America, queers the concept of perestroika in order to promote the performance of a disruptive, coalition-based identity. I then provide a genealogy of Kushner’s aesthetic: using Sarah Schulman’s fictionalization of ACT UP in her novel People in Trouble, I put Kushner’s play into conversation with the queer AIDS activist identities that were being performed in the streets during the writing and production of Angels in America. This final chapter considers more directly how the critical aesthetic that is at play in the works that constitute the Queer Renaissance shapes, and has been shaped by, liminal sexual and activist “identities in a crisis.”
Finally, in the epilogue, I conclude that the Queer Renaissance is ongoing, despite—and in the face of—the recent rise of gay neoconservatism and of studies that seek to ground homosexuality in biology. Queer inquiry commences by challenging the boundaries established by others and thus thrives despite attempts by some to fix us with a well-behaved neoconser-vatism or an underdeveloped hypothalamus. Activists and writers in the Queer Renaissance continue to refuse such constricting identities. The queer trickster, the AIDS activist, the new mestiza, Zami—these are the identities I analyze here. Born of a wide variety of twentieth-century liberation movements, such identities have been reborn in the contemporary Queer Renaissance.