1. For an excellent overview of “the gay and lesbian publishing boom,” see William J. Mann. Mann cites a Publishers Weekly estimate that about 3 percent of the fifty-eight thousand titles published in 1993, or just under two thousand titles, were lesbian and gay, though he also notes, “Exact figures are hard to come by, if only because of the fluid nature of what constitutes a ‘gay book’” (25).
Lambda Book Report’s 1991 article “Decade Dance” considered how “gay and lesbian literature took off in the 1980s” and included a profile of those whom LBR saw as the fifty “most influential people in the industry” during that decade (10). Such a profile, especially of those “in the industry,” would have been virtually unthinkable fifteen years earlier. Gay novelist Richard Hall’s article “Gay Fiction Comes Home,” which appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in 1988, was seen by some as an indication that mainstream journalism was finally acknowledging the incredible productivity of openly gay writers (Nelson, “Towards a Transgressive Aesthetic,” 16). The first Lambda Literary Awards (“Lammies”) were presented in 1989. See Labonte, 60–61, for a discussion of how, by 1994, these awards were taken very seriously by mainstream publishers.
My use of “rare” to describe openly lesbian and gay work in the 1970s is relative to the boom in the 1980s and 1990s; many openly gay and lesbian works were, of course, written or performed in the 1970s. Newly formed feminist presses such as Daughters, Inc., were particularly important for lesbian writers, many of whom got their start in such presses during the 1970s (Rita Mae Brown is the most famous example). Still, as Bonnie Zimmerman makes clear, the 1980s represent a significant advance: “Between 1973 and 1981, an average of only five lesbian novels was published each year; between 1984 and 1987, that number had jumped to twenty-three, and recent figures indicate that the pace is quickening” (207). For men, the shift is perhaps even more apparent: of the nearly five hundred primary works mentioned in the various entries in Emmanuel Nelson’s Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, well over half were published in the 1980s and 1990s. About one-fifth were published in the 1970s, with another one-fifth published in all the decades prior to the 1970s. Even this calculation, however, may be a bit deceiving, since many gay writers who published prior to 1980 published more openly gay work after 1980.
2. Sedgwick’s comments on renaissances make clear that scholars are beginning to see same-sex desires, affections, and activities as central to many literary periods; hence the “cultural phenomenon” I examine here is the explosion of openly lesbian and gay writing. I do not mean to champion fixed identities through this focus (quite the opposite, in fact), only to note that something unprecedented has indeed occurred. Although “lesbian” desires, for instance, are certainly discernible in a novel such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and in the Harlem Renaissance in general, there is still a significant difference between Larsen’s novel and openly lesbian work such as Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982).
3. See, for example, Crimp, “Right On, Girlfriend!”; Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer”; Edelman, 112–17; Halperin, 62–67. Out/Look, the now defunct national lesbian and gay quarterly, published a special issue on the “Birth of a Queer Nation” in 1991. I discuss more thoroughly how my own use of “queer” fits into this collective project later in this introduction.
4. In 1992, Dennis Cooper published Discontents: New Queer Writers, an anthology of angry, graphic, and often violent short stories, essays, comic strips, and interviews. Discontents brought together many different queer writers, some of whom I mention briefly at the end of this introduction. Sarah Schulman is the only writer considered in The Queer Renaissance whose work is consistently linked to this movement. For another discussion of the New Queer Writers, see Latzky.
5. On the relationship of urban renewal to dislocation and polarization of rich and poor, see Williams and Smith. Williams and Smith also mention, briefly, Detroit’s Renaissance Center (204). See also my discussion of Schulman’s novel People in Trouble in chapter 4.
6. It is perhaps not surprising that I first formulated these thoughts in a rundown Admiral Benbow Inn in downtown Memphis, a city similarly beset by “urban renewal.” I have no doubt that the majority of Memphis’s poor and African American residents are still waiting for the construction of the monstrous Great American Pyramid on the banks of the Mississippi River to improve their lives.
7. Although Crimp’s article is concerned primarily with the visual arts, Michael Denneny’s comment makes it clear that similar rhetoric has been used in discussions of the literature of AIDS. Denneny’s ideas on the subject haven’t gotten any better of late:
Great writers have always been reactionary.... It was true of 19th-century Russian literature and 18th-century English literature and almost assuredly will be true today. Political people are appalled by reality as it is and want to change it. Great artists are people who find intense beauty in the way life is and want to memorialize it. (Qtd. in DeLynn, 55)
For another literary example of appeals to the “transcendent,” consider David Leavitt’s comments about Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now.” Leavitt writes, “Sontag . . . had written a story that transcended horror and greed, and which was therefore redemptive, if not of AIDS itself, then at least of the processes by which people cope with it” (28). For an alternative perspective on Sontag, see D. A. Miller, who criticizes what he sees as patronizing “urbanity” in Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors: “Sontag is right when she says that AIDS and Its Metaphors is ‘not another book about AIDS’; rather it is a book (to be set next to Allan Bloom’s or E.D. Hirsch’s) that defends this culture, whose value . . . the epidemic provides a usefully extreme opportunity for once again recommending”
8. I consider the interrelation of art and activism more fully in chapter 4. On these issues, see Doug Sadownick, who asserts, “ACT UP’s grassroots war against AIDS is escalating, and the ammunition is art” (26). Sadownick demonstrates that Crimp’s ideas about activists and artists are shared by other members of ACT UP:
Video artist and ACT UP member Phil Zwickler finds it “revolting” and “telling” that art presenters would “still try and shove ‘art for art’s sake’ shit down our throats.” Performance artist Tim Miller finds the art world still cloven between those who vie for transcendence and those who want to fix the world. “The challenge of this time,” he says, “is for artists to also be citizens, social activists, journalists; the time when you just get to sit in your studio and make art product is over. This is no different from the Latin American model of the citizen artist, or a playwright soon to be president of Czechoslovakia or the student artists in Tienanmen Square.” (29)
Miller’s comments already begin to indicate that the concept of a global renaissance, like the concept of the artistic generally, might be resignified, as something other than an escape from secular history.
9. Quotations from Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities are cited parenthetically as SP. Quotations from Making Trouble are cited parenthetically as MT. Other analyses of the 1950s and 1970s that I have found useful in compiling and contextualizing this section include Adam; Duberman, Cures and Stonewall; Kennedy and Davis; Kissack; Nestle. George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 takes on what Chauncey labels “the myth of invisibility” (3): the belief that prior to World War II, gay men and lesbians were so isolated from one another that community formation was virtually impossible. Chauncey debunks this myth by providing extensive evidence for a vibrant and highly visible gay male culture in New York City in the first third of the twentieth century. Gay New York suggests that the historical moments I have chosen to survey are not necessarily the only moments when lesbians and gay men shaped identities across differences and critiqued heteronormativity and thus are not the only two historical moments to be recalled in the Queer Renaissance. Future work in gay and lesbian history will undoubtedly uncover even more locations when and where lesbians and gay men forged fluid and disruptive identities.
10. On this topic, see Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit, which details the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s, when a group of Chicanos were sent to prison without substantial evidence for the murder of a Sleepy Lagoon man. Valdez’s play was part of his Teatro Campesino (Farmer’s Theater) and part of the Chicano Renaissance.
11. Compare, as well, Joan Nestle’s memories: “We needed the Lesbian air of the Sea Colony to breathe the life we could not anywhere else, those of us who wanted to see women dance, make love, wear shirts and pants. Here, and in other bars like this one, we found each other and the space to be a sexually powerful butch-femme community” (37).
12. I discuss this shift, along with the GLF/GAA strategy of “coming out,” in chapter 1.
13. For an excellent collection of essays on the sex wars of the early 1980s, see Duggan and Hunter. Analyses by writers of color and others sensitive to the divisions within both Anglo-American feminism and lesbian and gay politics include Beam; Bulkin, Smith, and Pratt; Hemphill, Brother to Brother; Hull, Scott, and Smith; Lorde, Sister Outsider and “What Is at Stake”; Martin; Moraga and Anzaldúa.
14. On the Lesbian Avengers, see Schulman, My American History, 277–324; Dewan. Schulman implies that the activist spirit in this group reinvigorated ACT UP (My American History, 311).
15. For overviews of the Harlem Renaissance that fill out some of the tensions I discuss in these paragraphs, see Lewis; Singh, 1–39. Gates’s “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black” traces the vicissitudes of the term New Negro from the nineteenth century through the Harlem Renaissance.
16. On the Native American Renaissance, see Lincoln; on the Hawaiian Renaissance, see Sumida.
17. At times Moraga’s critique of America and of nationalism leads her to posit another, Chicano nationalism. In chapter 3, I am more critical of Moraga and of this alternative.
18. Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Representative Robert Dornan (R-Calif.) are two of the most vocally homophobic members of Congress; Pete Williams was a spokesperson for the Pentagon in the Bush administration and was outed by Signorile and others in protest over the military’s policy of discharging lesbians and gay men. Vigorous opposition to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 arose mainly because of charges brought by a former employee, Anita Hill, although both his record on civil rights and his judicial qualifications in general also were and are highly questionable. Senate hearings on the Thomas-Hill controversy were held in the fall of 1991. Barbara Mikulski was, at the time, one of only two women in the Senate; she was the only one of the two to support Hill (and civil rights generally) by opposing Thomas’s nomination. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), and Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.) were the first openly gay members of Congress. Dr. Joycelyn Elders served as surgeon general in the Clinton administration until she was dismissed in 1994 because of her comments on masturbation.
Elders’s comments about the length of her telephone conversation with Bill Clinton were made on the Larry King Live television show. There are numerous other examples of Elders’s willingness to take on various queer identities, and there is no doubt that such a willingness hastened her dismissal. When asked by the newspaper USA Weekend why she agreed to grant a “controversial” interview to The Advocate, Elders asserted, “Why shouldn’t I talk to The Advocate? I would do it again.” And when critics of her opinions on the necessity of condom use began to call her the “condom queen,” she told the New York Times Magazine, “If I could be the condom queen and get every young person who is engaged in sex to use a condom in the United States, I would wear a crown on my head with a condom on it! I would!” These facts about Elders were drawn from the “Agenda” section in the following issues of The Advocate: March 8, 1994; July 12, 1994; March 7 and 12, 1995. Elders was criticized in particular by some religious leaders for talking to the gay and lesbian press; she insisted that she would do so again, and after her dismissal, she even contributed book reviews to The Advocate. See the article by Elders, “Three-Ring Circus.”
My comments in this section have obviously focused on the dearth of “queers in Washington.” Although I still disagree with Signorile’s use of the concept, I would agree with his assertion that there are, indeed, “queers in Hollywood.” Signorile and I, however, would not necessarily have the same people in mind, since I would include in that category, for instance, television comedian Roseanne.
19. Rich Tafel is head of the gay Republican group known as the Log Cabin Republicans. Bruce Bawer is the author of A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. I engage more directly with Bawer in my epilogue.
20. I also develop this argument in chapter 3. See Phelan, 151–54, for another discussion of these conflicts. It is interesting that Phelan is wary of how queer might “deny the colonization of lesbians and people of color that occurs within ‘gay’ politics” (154), even though all the queer theorists she cites in her discussion are women (Arlene Stein, Gayle Rubin, Robyn Ochs, and Lisa Duggan).
Although Wiegman criticizes “the deployment of queer so far,” she provides no example of such a deployment. Wiegman thinks that Teresa de Lauretis coined the term queer theory, which is perhaps part of the problem, since de Lauretis is so anxious in her introduction to the special issue of differences on queer theory to distance the concept from actual queer activists (de Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” xvii n. 2). Since I was participating in a graduate seminar called “Queer Theory” at the time de Lauretis’s volume appeared, I am skeptical about positioning her as the individual author of the concept. In other locations, Wiegman’s thoughts on queer theory are more complicated. In a recent review of books by Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, for instance, she concludes approvingly that “identity is always out of place” in the queer theory of these two writers (Wiegman, review, 895). Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, a collection of essays edited by Judith Roof and Wiegman, additionally contains several engagements with queer theory.
21. I am reminded here of the assertions of an audience member at the final plenary session of “InQueery/InTheory/InDeed,” the Sixth Annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference held at the University of Iowa in November 1994. Audience members’ comments generally revolved around predictable issues of exclusion and marginalization at the conference. One woman, however, chose to register her criticism in a unique—and to my mind, highly productive—way: after reciting a list of authors, publication dates, and titles (“Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 1981, This Bridge Called My Back . . . Audre Lorde, 1982, Zami: A New Spellingof My Name . . . Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mes-tiza”), the conference participant asserted, “That is queer theory.” In other words, far from being mere “additions,” these women writers of color are always already on the inside, authorizing queer theory—not in the (patronizing) sense of merely looking on and giving approval to someone else’s project but rather in the sense of writing (and living) the history of queer theory themselves.
1. John D’Emilio explains that homophile activists adopted the slogan “Gay is Good” in 1968 (Making Trouble, 239). Barry Adam notes that Franklin Kameny of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., had used the phrase as early as 1964: “In [the] face of the MSNY [Mattachine Society of New York] president’s traditional homophile contention that ‘we must lose the label of homosexual organizations,’ Kameny asserted simply that ‘gay is good!’” (71). Kameny was consciously referencing African American rhetoric, such as the slogan “Black is Beautiful.” For a discussion of the influence on the early gay movement of the rhetoric of African American and Latino groups such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, see D’Emilio, Making Trouble, 240–41. On Stonewall generally, see Duberman, Stonewall.
2. See the essays included in Jay and Young. On the GLF, see D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 233–35, and Making Trouble, 239–46; Adam, 73–89; Kissack. Adam specifically recounts the GLF and GAA (Gay Activists Alliance) zaps that helped pave the way for the APA shift (81–82). On the Radicalesbians, see Echols, 215–17, 232; Kissack, 121–23. The construction of the woman-identified woman enabled heterosexual feminists to identify more fully with their lesbian sisters, but it was, in many ways, a conservative move. Alice Echols argues that it was “designed to assuage heterosexual feminists’ fears about lesbianism” (215); consequently, it ended up desexualizing lesbianism. Still, despite its evasion of “the knotty problem of sexuality,” the construction at least temporarily “redefined lesbianism as the quintessential act of political solidarity with other women” (Echols, 217).
3. I have already mentioned the re-presentation of Civil Rights rhetoric in Edmund White’s fictional account of Stonewall. The name Gay Liberation Front itself was meant to give tribute to the liberation struggles in Vietnam and Algeria (Duberman, Stonewall, 217).
4. For a good overview of feminist standpoint epistemology, as well as an “archeology of standpoint theory” (76), see Sandra Harding. Harding explains that feminist standpoint theory emerges from an engagement with Marxism (53–54). On this point, see Haraway, 186–87. By translating standpoint theory to a queer context, I am trying to further coalition building among theorists; like Harding, I recognize that “even though standpoint arguments are most fully articulated as such in feminist writings, they appear in the scientific projects of all the new social movements” (54). Echols’s overview of radical feminism demonstrates that the boundaries between the different groups engaging in this self-reflexive constructionism were often blurred.
5. On this shift, see also D’Emilio, “Foreword,” xxiv–xxviii, and Making Trouble, 239–51.
6. I am grateful to Steve Amarnick for helping me sort out some of the issues I am working with here. I am not dismissing the psychological importance of coming out, nor am I denying that Oprah Winfrey’s sensitivity to coming out is empowering to thousands of gay and lesbian individuals. Rather, I am suggesting that the “coming out equals self-respect” model alone can be equally disempowering for the gay and lesbian movement, and for the many other lesbian and gay people who too infrequently see themselves represented in any other way.
7. For a counterexample, see John Preston. The very fact that Preston can say, “I always shake my head in disbelief when I read critics who think the coming out novel is just a stage we’re going through” (39), suggests that many critics have expressed their reservations about the genre. Indeed, Preston’s article is in the same issue of Lambda Book Report that includes Sarah Schulman’s derisive comments about the coming-out story (see Fries). In his introduction to the most recent edition of A Boy’s Own Story, White himself notes the reservations that have been expressed about the genre: “Now [1994] there’s an excess of coming-out novels, and critics talk of creating a ban against any further ones” (“On the Line,” xv).
8. Neither White nor Lorde has necessarily identified with the concept of “queer” as it is deployed in this chapter and throughout this study, although White has begun to use the term queer more frequently, generally as a synonym for gay men and lesbians. See White, “The Personal Is Political: Queer Fiction and Criticism,” in The Burning Library, 367–77. The work of Lorde (and other women of color) in the early 1980s, however, helped usher in the queer theory and activism of the later 1980s by facilitating the emergence of the disruptive identities that are at the center of the Queer Renaissance—identities that are not fixed in advance but are rather constantly reshaped in interaction with other identities. See chapter 3 for a fuller consideration of these issues in relation to Gloria Anzaldúa and the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back; see my introduction, for a consideration of these issues in relation to my own use of the term queer. Some of Lorde’s readers, of course, do identify with the term queer and deploy it in various ways, as my discussion of Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing later in this chapter highlights.
For another reading of Zami through and as feminist positionality theory, see Carlston, 226, 231–32, 236. On positionality theory in relation to Lorde’s 1986 collection of poetry Our Dead Behind Us, see Hull, 155, 159.
9. My thoughts on the ways in which A Boy’s Own Story disrupts heterosexist understandings of linear sexual development are indebted to Kenneth Kidd.
10. White himself has at other times disavowed the possibility that A Boy’sOwn Story might be somehow representative; he writes, “The novel is not a political tract, nor is it meant to be representative or typical” (“On the Line,” xii). My larger point here, however, is that the invisibility of whiteness allows for ABoy’s Own Story to be cast as representative regardless of White’s (clearly contradictory) intentions. The packaging of the novel underscores this: in spite of White’s disavowal, a blurb on the back cover from the New York Times’s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt announces, “It is any boy’s story. . . . For all I know, it may be any girl’s story as well.” The Plume paperback has gone through at least three cover designs since 1982, each utilizing a photograph of a different young (white) boy.
11. I am grateful to Michael Thurston for pointing out this connection to me.
12. Barbara Smith has made a similar point (Bulkin, Smith, and Pratt, 75–76).
13. This interpretation attempts to resist what Sagri Dhairyam points out about critical responses to Lorde’s poetry: “The relational, shifting points of the politics of identity enacted by and through Lorde’s poems are stilled by their recuperation into canons of feminine or lesbian identity” (243). Nonetheless, I have framed this interpretation in a chapter about “coming out,” and this, coupled with my own gay male location, might still the “shifting points of the politics of identity” yet again, recuperating Lorde, this time, into a rapidly expanding canon of “queer theory.” This tension within “queerness,” which I discuss at greater length in chapter 3, is unavoidable, but I hope that a negotiation of the tension will fuel, rather than forestall, the work of queer theory.
14. Lorde’s work has influenced the shaping and reshaping of so many readers, writers, and communities that it would be impossible to compile a comprehensive list of the locations where such reinvention has occurred. Celebrate the Life and Legacy of Audre Lorde, a booklet distributed for Lorde’s memorial service in New York City on January 18, 1993, particularly attests to the scope of her vision and influence. Celebrate the Life and Legacy includes tributes from, among many others, Palestinian feminists, groups fighting for Hawaiian independence, the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, and Men of All Colors Together. I am grateful to Steve Amarnick for sending me a copy of this document.
15. In 1992 a revised edition of Chosen Poems—Old and New was published as Undersong. In that collection, Lorde reiterated her commitment to revision: “The process of revision is, I believe, crucial to the integrity and lasting power of a poem. The problem in reworking any poem is always when to let go of it, refusing to give in to the desire to have that particular poem do it all, say it all, become the mythical, unattainable Universal Poem” (xiii).
16. For white gay male creative work that is more self-reflexive about whiteness or about positionality, respectively, see Allan Gurganus’s 1990 collection of stories White People and Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s 1993 film Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Gurganus’s stories explore both gay and nongay white life in North Carolina, and Joslin and Friedman’s film is a collective effort (often depending on who had the strength to work the camera) at documenting Joslin’s and his lover Mark Massi’s deaths from AIDS. The position from which the camera “sees” is repeatedly foregrounded and complicated. For a discussion of embodied and communal identity in the work of another white gay male author, Robert Gliick, see Jackson. See also Crimp, “Right On, Girlfriend!” and my discussion of Tony Kushner and “queer perestroika” in chapter 4, for considerations of the sort of collective identity I discuss throughout this chapter.
17. Jewelle Gomez notes, significantly, that “commercial companies . . . would publish Audre’s poems but could not bring themselves to publish the more explicit ideas of her essays” (7). On White’s sometimes rocky experiences with publishers, see Bonetti, 101–2.
18. I am grateful to Stacy Alaimo for calling my attention to this series. The Book-of-the-Month Club instituted a similar series with fewer authors but—initially—the same problems: included are Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), White (A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty [“available here in one exclusive volume”]), and Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle, published in 1973). After Lorde’s death in 1992, however, an “exclusive three-in-one volume” of Zami, Sister Outsider, and Undersong was the first new addition to the Book-of-the-Month Club series. This addition highlights the difficulty of making overly hasty generalizations about either White’s or Lorde’s canonicity. Also, I should note that, despite mainstream attempts to cast White as “America’s most influential gay writer,” such attempts have hardly garnered him nationwide fame. White has found such fame instead in European countries: in France, White is considered by many to be the most important American writer since Henry James, and in England, as he himself explains, A Boy’s Own Story “made me so well known that English fans are always astonished to learn that most Americans don’t know who I am” (“On the Line,” xix).
19. Since, at the time of this award, Lorde was in Berlin undergoing treatment for the cancer she had been battling for more than a decade (and which eventually took her life), Jewelle Gomez, another black lesbian writer, delivered Lorde’s speech. The “I” of Lorde’s speech is thus destabilized in a way similar to that of the “I” in “Need,” discussed above.
20. White’s “greatest hit” list is as follows: among non-American writers, “Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Jean Genet, Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Ronald Firbank,” and among Americans, “Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery” (“Twenty Years On,” 5). Overall, I might add, White’s 1989 acceptance speech is about two and a half times longer than Lorde’s 1990 speech.
21. Such bittersweet isolation is conveyed by the very title of White’s novel: “The Beautiful Room Is Empty . . . takes its title from one of Kafka’s letters alluding to the unfortunate inability of two people (or perhaps two psyches) to inhabit a single space” (Radel, 184). White’s beautiful and empty room contrasts significantly with Lorde’s “house of difference,” where cohabitation, though never easy, is both possible and necessary for survival.
1. Vito Russo lists lesbian and gay characters, the films in which they appear, and the causes of their deaths in his “Necrology” in The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (347–49). In the 1930s the Hays Office, headed by former postmaster general Will Hays, was responsible for the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code. The motion picture industry used this code to regulate itself (Russo, 31). Under the Hays code, virtually all portrayals of homosexuality were negative, and many ended in death, so that audiences would see that “vice” was appropriately “punished.” My thanks to Ramona Curry for discussing the Hays code with me.
2. “Widely available” is an understatement; migration-to-the-big-city novels could compete against coming-out stories for the title of “Most Common Lesbian/Gay Genre.” Pre-Stonewall works that turn upon migrations to the city include Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series (for example, Beebo Brinker [1962]; the back cover declares, “She landed in New York, fresh off the farm”) and John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). Post-Stonewall explorations of the trope include Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series (for example, Tales of the City [1978]; the front cover of the first paperback edition depicts a female figure with luggage, dwarfed and awed by the immensity of the Golden Gate Bridge), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), and Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). Ethan Mordden’s I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore (1985) explicitly thematizes the disjunction between the city and the “provinces.”
Of course, as Gates himself notes, the migration from South to North (and the corresponding shift from rural to urban) is also a trope in the African American literary tradition (Signifying Monkey, xxv). In a way, suggesting that Randall Kenan replicate this trope precludes him from signifying on it (see note 11, below).
In the Queer Renaissance, the dominance of the migration-to-the-big-city theme has been implicitly challenged by various Southern writers, including Kenan. For a few of the many texts in which Southern writers consider how queer subjectivity is shaped in the backwoods, marshes, and trailer parks of the South, see Allan Gurganus’s White People (1990), Blanche McCrary Boyd’s The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992). See also Kenan and Allison’s conversation about Southern queer literature, “Spies Like Us: Talking between the Lines.”
3. The second chapter of The Signifying Monkey, “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning” (44–88), provides a thorough explanation of the black concepts of “Signification” and “Signify in (g).” “The bracketed g,” Gates writes, “enables me to connote the fact that this word is, more often than not, spoken by black people without the final g as ‘signifyin’” (46).
4. This presumption, of course, may be a bit hasty. Gates himself, earlier in the interview I have been citing, notes that “a lot of gay black men in Harlem . . . are tired of being used for batting practice” (in Rowell, 454).
5. “Vogueing,” developed by black and Latino gay men in New York City, is a form of dance in which dancers imitate and implicitly critique “high-fashion” styles and poses, such as those depicted in Vogue magazine. “Snapping” is a gesture of pride and defiance used to “read,” punctuate, or invalidate another’s discourse (Becquer, 8–12).
6. Michel Foucault’s famous formulation is relevant here:
There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. (101–2)
7. Despite this disclaimer, I think an earlier article of mine on A Visitation of Spirits did disarm Becquer’s analysis (see McRuer, “A Visitation of Difference”); I hope that my indebtedness to Becquer’s argument is clearer here (see note 22, below).
8. The theme of “coming home” runs throughout Hemphill’s work. This quotation comes from his essay “Does Your Mama Know about Me?” Later in Ceremonies, in “Loyalty,” Hemphill makes a similar point: “We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home” (64). See also Joseph Beam, “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart”:
When I speak of home, I mean not only the familial constellation from which I grew, but the entire Black community: the Black press, the Black church, Black academicians, the Black literati, and the Black left. Where is my reflection? I am most often rendered invisible, perceived as a threat to the family, or am tolerated if I am silent and inconspicuous. I cannot go home as who I am and that hurts me deeply. (In the Life, 231)
Hemphill’s work, with its insistence that “I am coming home,” explicitly responds to Beam’s lament here.
9. For another brief overview of A Visitation of Spirits, see my bio-bibliographical article “Randall Kenan,” 234–35.
10. Reverend Barden reappears in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Kenan’s collection of short stories. In “Ragnarok! The Day the Gods Die,” Barden’s internal thoughts are juxtaposed with his pontifications from the pulpit. “Ragnarok!” is, on the surface, the record of Barden’s eulogy to the late Sister Louise Tate of the First Baptist Church. This eulogy is interrupted, however, by Barden’s parenthetical meditations on his decades-long affair with the woman. Barden’s hypocrisy in this story helps to de-authorize the bigotry he preaches in A Visitation of Spirits.
11. Interestingly, and pace Gates, both of Kenan’s significations here move an “urban” story to the rural location of Tims Creek. A Christmas Carol, of course, is set in nineteenth-century London. Go Tell It on the Mountain is set primarily in New York. Several of Baldwin’s characters come to New York from the South, suggesting that moving the story from New York to the South (which exactly reverses the situation) is part of Kenan’s signification on Baldwin.
12. Similar passages occur elsewhere in Go Tell It on the Mountain; for example, “[John] wanted to stop and turn to Elisha, and tell him . . . something for which he found no words” (219). Emmanuel Nelson discusses such passages in his examination of homoeroticism in Go Tell It on the Mountain (“James Baldwin,” 9–11).
13. I have provided only a skeletal outline of the ways in which A Visitation of Spirits signifies on Go Tell It on the Mountain, since to do more would be beyond the scope of this chapter. But it is not just in the story of Horace that Kenan signifies on Baldwin. Several sections of A Visitation of Spirits focus on older members of the community (Zeke and Ruth) who explore their pasts through internal monologue or through “dialogue” with God. As I mention briefly later, I read these sections as signifying on the second part of Baldwin’s novel, “The Prayers of the Saints” (63–189).
For an analysis of other black gay significations on the church, see Nero, 23843. As I suggested, Baldwin as well is quite critical of the church. For a more explicit and autobiographical critique, see Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time:
Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. ... I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself. ... I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. (55–58)
See Edelman, 68–71, for an analysis of the ways in which Baldwin resignifies the concept of salvation in his last novel, Just above My Head. I return to Baldwin in the next section of this chapter, where—through a consideration of Jimmy Greene—I am more explicit about how the church might be “saved.” The “other sort of church” A Visitation of Spirits envisions through Jimmy might be understood as a local manifestation of the “other myths of queer positionality” I advocate in chapter 1.
14. A few pages before this scene, Kenan playfully underscores that his story should be seen not in a direct line of descent from but rather as a signification on Dickens. Horace is ostensibly discussing, with one of his lovers, the historical inaccuracies of the theatrical production of the history of the Cross family, but his comment ironically speaks to (and invalidates) the parallels between A Visitation of Spirits and A Christmas Carol: “[This play] is more than a little inaccurate, to tell the truth. I didn’t have a great-great-great-grandfather named Ebenezer” (224).
15. Eve Sedgwick discusses the Department of Health and Human Services report in her article “Queer and Now”:
I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents. To us, the hard statistics come easy: that queer teenagers are two to three times likelier to attempt suicide, and to accomplish it, than others; that up to 30 percent of teen suicides are likely to be gay or lesbian; that a third of lesbian and gay teenagers say they have attempted suicide; that minority queer adolescents are at even more extreme risk. (Tendencies, 1)
16. If we take into account the annual number of deaths from lung cancer that can be linked to cigarette use, then the tobacco idyll itself, even without the suicide that immediately precedes it, is dependent on numerous sacrifices for the “good of the community.” My thanks to Elizabeth Davies for suggesting this to me.
17. The other epigraph to A Visitation of Spirits is from William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way” (epigraph page; Gibson, 243).
The Dickens epigraph is a commentary on how Kenan’s signification on A Christmas Carol should be read. One way (among many) to read the Gibson epigraph is as a commentary on A Visitation of Spirits’s other major signification, on Baldwin. Since Kenan’s novel “outs” Go Tell It on the Mountain, it rejects the tradition of coding homosexuality as the “unnameable” or “unspeakable” and instead “learns its names.”
18. Actually, although I focus on Foucault, I do not mean to suggest that the other writers Jimmy is reading are insignificant. Foucault most clearly introduces my argument about the ways in which sexual meanings have become unstable for Jimmy; later in this section, I discuss the transformations of Jimmy’s public life (asminister), and in that context it might be as appropriate to consider why Jimmy is reading Erasmus or Augustine (Confessions?). Still, I focus on Foucault at this point because Jimmy’s reasons for reading Foucault are a bit more ambiguous than his reasons for reading some of the others. After all, although John Hope Franklin (or C. L. Franklin), Benjamin Quarles, and Frantz Fanon are obviously important to Jimmy, he precedes their names with a touchstone that explains why: “black history.”
19. The translation is Ed Cohen’s.
20. Perhaps I should say that my Foucauldian fantasies are not intended to “name” in the standard English sense of that word. On the trope of naming in the black literary tradition, see Gates, Signifying Monkey, 55, 69, 82, 87.
21. On the tension between minoritizing and universalizing views of homo/heterosexual definition, see Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 82–86.
22. Mercer writes:
The challenge of sameness entails the recognition that we share the same planet, even if we live in different worlds. We inhabit a discursive universe with a finite number of symbolic resources which can nevertheless be appropriated and articulated into a potentially infinite number of representations. Identities and differences are constructed out of a common stock of signs, and it is through the combination and substitution of these shared elements that antagonism becomes representable as such. (“1968,” 427)
In general, this section on Jimmy and the “challenge of sameness” that Horace poses is the part of my argument that differs most sharply from my earlier article on A Visitation of Spirits. In “A Visitation of Difference: Randall Kenan and Black Queer Theory,” my critique of identity politics tended to elide the theoretical potential of subversive sameness.
23. With this view, Kenan positions himself as part of a strong tradition that rejects the oppressive elements of the African American church but embraces its more progressive, visionary elements. Baldwin is part of this tradition as well. Cornel West would perhaps identify Baldwin’s and Kenan’s views as related to what he calls “prophetic moral reasoning.” According to West, prophetic moral reasoning
encourages a coalition strategy that solicits genuine solidarity with those deeply committed to antiracist struggle. ... A prophetic framework replaces black cultural conservatism with black cultural democracy. Instead of authoritarian sensibilities that subordinate women or degrade gays and lesbians, black cultural democracy promotes the equality of black women and men and the humanity of black gays and lesbians. In short, black cultural democracy rejects the pervasive patriarchy and homophobia in black [and white] American life. (397–98)
24. In A Visitation of Spirits, although Rabbi helps Jimmy rewrite the “traditional” Christianity of Tims Creek, North Carolina, it is possible to read this ostensible rewriting as closer to the original spirit of Christianity. Many of Christ’s disciples, of course, called him “Rabbi.” I’m grateful to Amy Farmer for reminding me of this.
25. Indeed, Gates’s own tributes to Houston Baker often suggest as much; see, for example, his aside to Baker in “Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition,” 15.
26. In 1994, Chelsea House Publishers launched a series of biographies intended for young lesbians and gay men, Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians, under the general editorship of Martin Duberman. Kenan’s biography of James Baldwin was the first installment in this series. See Kenan, James Baldwin. See also V. Hunt’s recent interview with Kenan, in which Kenan cites Baldwin’s influence in his decision to become a writer and identifies Baldwin as “the one other person [he] can really be paired with” (Hunt 412, 415).
27. The complete title of the story is “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead; Being the Annotated Oral History of the Former Maroon Society called Snatchit and then Tearshirt and later the Town of Tims Creek, North Carolina [circa 1854–1985]” (271). “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” was originally conceived as part of A Visitation of Spirits (Hunt, 417).
28. I am suggesting that the emergence of Menes/Pharaoh marks a “resurrection,” of sorts, for Jimmy, but Jimmy’s death might be read ironically in another sense: Jimmy dies on March 12, 1998. March 12 is Kenan’s birthday.
1. The best study of male “homosociality” in literature is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. In BetweenMen, Sedgwick examines “erotic triangles” in which the bond between two (male) rivals for a (female) beloved’s affection is often as strong, or stronger, than the bond between either rival and the beloved (21). This erotic economy facilitates the exchange of women but simultaneously requires a structural homophobia that sharply proscribes the men’s relationships with each other, thereby ensuring their participation in the patriarchal system.
Although Sedgwick argues that, at the end of the nineteenth century, this homosocial system began to give way “to a discussion of male homosexuality and homophobia as we know them” (202), a “male bonding” or homosociality that nonetheless requires a structural homophobia obviously continued to exist in various forms into and throughout the twentieth century. Robin Wood, for example, argues that the 1970s “buddy film” requires “an explicitly homosexual character” who “has the function of a disclaimer—our boys are not like that” (228–29). Kerouac’s novels, which also make use of such queer disclaimers, are antecedents for such films. Of course, the homosocial system of the buddy film and of Kerouac’s texts becomes somewhat difficult to sustain when, as in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, the protagonist ends up sleeping with the queer disclaimer (72–74); drugs and alcohol, however, are always conveniently on hand to explain (away) the lapse. Although this structural homophobia makes Kerouac a fascinating object of analysis for contemporary queer inquiry, I think it also prohibits consideration of him as the “classical gay writer” Sarah Schulman considers him to be (My American History, 167); hence my description of him as an “unlikely candidate” for inclusion in my study.
2. The United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. Many regulations on goods and services crossing the border were lifted; the agreement was intended to provide all three countries with increased access to the others’ markets. Project Censored includes “NAFTA’s Broken Promises” among its top ten censored stories of 1995. Less than two years after passage of the agreement, many American corporations have cut jobs in the United States—more than 150,000 in 1994 alone—and moved their plants to Mexico, where they have exploited both workers and the environment in blatant violation of labor rights and environmental regulations in that country.
3. Teresa de Lauretis’s insight here comes from her analysis of Barbara Smith’s landmark “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” Turning to Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, de Lauretis adds, “The term ‘blacks’ does not include (comprehend) black women any more than the term ‘man’ (white men) includes or comprehends white women. The black feminist concept of a simultaneity of oppressions means that the layers are not parallel but imbricated into one another; the systems of oppression are interlocking and mutually determining” (de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects,” 134). In general, Andrew Ross’s analysis in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture cannot accommodate such observations: Ross has his “race” chapter (read: black men) and his “gender” chapter (read: white women), but never do the two meet.
4. In Kerouac’s work, the particular coming together of attraction to and revulsion for women of color is perhaps presented most starkly in The Subterraneans, in the relationship between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a young African American woman. Although his affair with Mardou is passionate, Leo repeatedly abandons her, often for explicitly racist reasons: “I wake from the scream of beermares and see beside me the Negro woman with parted lips sleeping and little bits of white pillow stuffing her black hair, feel almost revulsion, realize what a beast I am for feeling anything near it” (24). Despite the protagonist’s apparent awareness of it, the attraction-revulsion pattern repeats throughout The Subterraneans.
5. For an incisive overview of the corrido tradition, see R. Saldívar, 26–42. See also J. Saldívar, 49–84 (esp. 51–56).
6. Harper goes on to connect the elision of specificity that results from the mass-cultural marketability of marginality to the similar elision of specificity that can occur in academic analyses of social marginality (195). For another consideration of the marketability of a “fashionable” queerness, see Clark.
7. Of course, inevitable disappointment has been a component of many, many theoretical movements. Slavoj Zižek argues that identity becomes a rallying point in political movements when subjects phantasmatically invest identity with an expectation of wholeness. Such wholeness will always be exposed as fictive; hence inevitable disappointment occurs when the identificatory sign fails to live up to its original promise (cited in Butler, Bodies That Matter, 209). As an alternative to this politicization of identification, Judith Butler offers the politicization of disidentifica-tion: “What are the possibilities of politicizing d/sidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?... It may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference” (Bodies That Matter, 219). My reading of Anzaldúa and this chapter in general are very much indebted to Butler’s ideas; and as my conclusion should make clear, my reading of Butler is, in turn, indebted to Anzaldúa. As Butler herself notes, she is not the first to suggest such a politicization of disidentification:
To understand “women” as a permanent site of contest, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. . .. The numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category. (221)
See Riley, whom Butler herself cites, for another feminist argument suggesting a contestatory relation to the sign woman; see also Snitow, 9.
8. Norma Alarcon writes:
The most remarkable tendency in the work reviewed in this essay [Alarcón’s “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism”] is the implicit or explicit acknowledgment that, on the one hand, women of color are excluded from feminist theorizing on the subject of consciousness and, on the other, that though excluded from theory, their books are read in the classroom and/or duly (foot)noted. (39)
Although not specifically “feminist” or “queer,” Henry Giroux’s work provides some of the more glaring examples of this relegation to the margins: although he wrote a book called Border Crossings, he virtually ignored Chicana/o scholarship. Anzaldúa shows up on one page, in an epigraph for Giroux’s own thoughts on “The Politics of Voice and Difference” (168).
9. Through her representation of this process, Anzaldúa cites one of the legacies of the Chicano Renaissance. Luis Valdez’s Brechtian actos, or short one-act plays, were designed to incite audience members to action (such as joining the union or striking) through careful consideration of their social locations. Los Vendidos (The sell-outs), in particular, encouraged audiences to resist an assimilationist Mexican American identity and to assume instead a critical Chicano identity. See Valdez and El Teatro Campesino. Anzaldúa improves on her predecessors in that the identity she posits is more fluid and multiple than the male-centered identity of the Chicano Renaissance (Yarbro-Bejarano, 12). For more on the Chicano Renaissance, see my introduction.
10. My interpretation in this section, with its emphasis on specificity over and against appropriation, intersects with Shane Phelan’s; see Phelan, Phelan argues that Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness “has been an avenue for white women to develop a new understanding of alliance” that precludes simply adopting another’s perspective as one’s own (73).
11. In Lesbian Utopics, Jagose criticizes those who “figure ‘lesbian’ as utopic and outside dominant conceptual frameworks” (5). Jagose situates Anzaldúa’s borderlands as a site for such lesbian utopic thinking. At the other end of the spectrum, Cherríe Moraga argues, “Ironically, the most profound message of La Frontera I believe has very little to do with lesbians. . . . Lesbian desire is not a compelling force in the book” (“Algo secretamente amado,” 154–55). Too lesbian, not lesbian enough—Anzaldúa is caught between colliding critics as well as cultures (and I am not innocent of participation in the conflict; see note 15, below).
12. According to Raiskin, the very term mulatto reflects this conflation, since it is a racial categorization that draws its name from the sterile product (the mule) of an “unnatural” sexual coupling (157). For more on the historical linkage of the mulatto and the homosexual, see Somerville, 256–60.
13. Similar points, of course, could be made about the work of other women of color, such as Audre Lorde (see chapter 1). I have already discussed briefly Moraga and Anzaldúa; see, in addition, Sandoval; B. Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”; Hull, Scott, and Smith.
14. Chela Sandoval sees this sort of mobility as central to “U.S. Third World Feminism” generally (10–17, esp. 14–15). For another analysis explicitly juxtaposing this sort of mobility to what I label an “unlimited access” mobility, which maintains relations of domination-subordination by allowing white, male, and heterosexual identities to go unmarked, see Dhaliwal, 87, 93–96. The mobility Anzaldúa performs has affinities with the affirmation of “mixing and migration” that Tony Kushner stages in Angels in America. See my discussion of Angels in America and Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble in chapter 4.
15. I am implicated in Anzaldúa’s comments here, since I am a white and male writer whose identity as such often can and does go unmarked and unremarked. In this chapter, and in this project generally, I am attempting to take comments such as Anzaldúa’s seriously; to counter the tendency to include lesbians of color as footnotes that validate a writer’s ability to be “inclusive” while nonetheless maintaining a white center and colored margin (see, for example, my comments on Giroux in note 8, above), I am attempting to position the work of lesbian and gay writers of color as at the very center of the Queer Renaissance. However, despite my arguments against “hipness” in this chapter, my declared intentions and my commitment to the politics of alliance do not fully displace me from the potentially patronizing position of (white) hostess at a hip and inclusive queer party. I leave this as a necessary tension in my work; attempting to smooth away this tension would, I think, be an example of the very “escapes from identity” against which I have argued in this chapter.
16. Nor is Anzaldúa’s lament that white gay men and lesbians “police the queer person of color with theory” a simple denunciation of “theory.” Elsewhere, Anzaldúa writes, “Because . . . what passes for theory these days is forbidden territory for us, it is vital that we occupy theorizing space, that we not allow whitemen and women solely to occupy it. By bringing in our own approaches and methodologies, we transform that theorizing space” [Making Face, xxv). This quote suggests not only that theory is used to police the queer person of color but also that the queer person of color with theory is policed. Anzaldúa resists, with theory, that policing.
17. For examples crediting This Bridge Called My Back with revolutionizing feminism, see de Lauretis, Technologies, 10; Sandoval, 5; Quintana, 112–15, 139–40. Lisa Duggan also writes, “The elaboration of ... a [‘queer’] locale within feminist theory could work a radical magic similar to that of the category ‘women of color.’ As many feminists have argued, the category ‘women of color’ as proposed in such ground-breaking anthologies as This Bridge Called My Back, is a significant conceptual and political innovation” (“Making It Perfectly Queer,” 25). I agree with Duggan here, while giving an added twist to her argument: “women of color” is not simply like “queer”; it was theorized as “queer” well before queer theory became hip (particularly, as I have suggested, in Anzaldúa’s “La Prieta”). But this extension of Duggan’s argument is actually indebted to Duggan herself, who in 1991 taught the first “Queer Theory” course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and whose syllabus placed This Bridge Called My Back in just such an “originary” position within queer theory.
Making Face, Making Soul extends the disruptive and queer tradition of This Bridge Called My Back from the first page of Anzaldúa’s introduction, where she explores “gestos subversivos, political subversive gestures, the piercing look that questions or challenges, the look that says, ‘Don’t walk all over me,’ the one that says, ‘Get out of my face’” (xv). Connection and coalition are central issues in Making Face, Making Soul, but as with This Bridge Called My Back, and as this quote illustrates, these connections are never simply celebratory.
1. Quotations from Angels in America: Millennium Approaches are cited parenthetically as MA. Quotations from Angels in America: Perestroika are cited parenthetically as P.
2. Biblical scholars generally agree that the earliest strand in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers was written by a single author, J, who lived around the tenth century B.C.E. Harold Bloom argues that J was a woman and that later authors seriously revised her work, tempering her irony and taming her impish Yahweh. More normative versions of Judaism and Christianity, which Bloom thinks would be unrecognizable to J, stemmed from these revisions. Kushner acknowledges his debt to Bloom’s reading of J’s Jacob story in his “Playwright’s Notes” for Perestroika (P, 7).
3. The first national tour of Angels in America, directed by Michael Mayer, originated in Chicago at the Royal George Theatre, with a cast made up of both Chicago and New York actors. In the spirit of my second chapter’s commitment to redefining centers and margins, I focus mostly on this national production—rather than the “original” Broadway production—when I comment on the performance of Angels in America. Mayer describes the production as “different conceptually from the New York version,” which was “too complicated technically to be toura-ble.” My theses about the performance of identity in Angels in America actually work best in conjunction with the national production, which Mayer describes, alternatively, as “actor-driven” (qtd. in Rossen, 32).
4. Undoubtedly, the contradictory nature of this scene was appreciated more fully in the Tel Aviv production. My thanks to Dan Sharon of the Asher Library at Chicago’s Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, for providing me with translations of these Hebrew passages.
5. Kushner has Walter Benjamin’s contradictory “angel of history” in mind here. Benjamin analyzes a Paul Klee painting, “Angelus Novus,” that “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating” (257). Benjamin reads this angel, whose wings are open, as being blown backward into the future, toward which he refuses to look. The wind is so strong that the angel can no longer close his wings (257–58). Both Kushner’s and Klee/Benjamin’s angels, then, simultaneously represent stasis and extreme movement.
6. I am thinking in this section not only of Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of her own deconstructive project (Epistemology, 9–10) but also—through my insistence that Prior moves to a new location—of her recognition that “a deconstructive understanding of these binarisms,” although necessary, is not “sufficient to disable them” (10). With this in mind, it is important to point out that while each of my chapters might be said to perform a deconstructive analysis, each additionally attempts to supplement such an analysis with an examination of new queer identities that work to refuse the terms of the binary relations from which they emerge and which they cite. As the preceding chapter suggests, however, following Gloria Anzaldúa and Judith Butler, this is an ongoing project, in that each new performance of “queerness” can and will generate other exclusions that must be critically negotiated.
7. A local production of Angels in America at the Station Theater in Urbana, Illinois, augmented the queerness of the angel by casting Shelley Holt in the role. In a small community such as Urbana-Champaign, many audience members would undoubtedly remember (and bring to their watching of Angels in America) Holt’s performance of Benita in Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Benita is the queer psychic who seems to know everything about everyone in Edmonton, where Fraser’s play is set.
8. Rob Baker credits Robert Chesley’s 1984 Night Sweat as the first AIDS play to present onstage gay sex scenes and positions Angels in America as the next major play to do so (184). In general, most of the major plays about AIDS have presented a more subdued sexuality or have—as with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart—actually preached against gay male “promiscuity.” Kramer’s semi-autobiographical character Ned Weeks opines, “Why is it we can only talk about our sexuality, and so relentlessly? You know, Mickey, all we’ve created is generations of guys who can’t deal with each other as anything but erections” (Kramer, 58). For pointed critiques of The Normal Heart, see Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity,” 246–53; Roman, 209–11.
9. The audience for Kushner’s attack on “the myth of the Individual” reaches beyond the readership of Perestroika: Kushner originally published this piece in the New York Times, and he republished it in his recent collection of essays. See Kushner, Thinking, 33–40.
10. Although I have not focused much on the Roy Cohn plot in Angels inAmerica, it is nonetheless an important element of the play. As Kushner explains, “Part of the impulse to write Angels in America came from the way this man who I hated got an obituary in the Nation by Robert Sherrill that was completely homophobic. The question of forgiveness may be the hardest political question people face. . . . But forgiveness, if it means anything, has to be incredibly hard to come by” (qtd. in Tucker, 33). My point here is that Kushner thematizes “forgiveness” and affirmation of the character’s humanity in the play but does not uncritically absorb these themes into the vision of political solidarity in the end.
Scott Tucker has some potentially valid reservations about Kushner’s inclusion of Cohn in the play. Tucker insists that, “as an emblematic figure of reaction in the 1980s,” Cohn
cannot really bear the burden Kushner places upon him. . . . William F. Buckley, for example, is an equally grotesque and dramatic figure who once proposed tattooing all HIV-positive people for easy identification—and his political power far exceeded Roy Cohn’s during that decade. Introducing a living public menace in the play would have made “the question of forgiveness” Kushner raises a great deal more challenging and pointed. . . . [Cohn’s] presence in the play is not the problem, but it underscores the complete absence of the main players in power during those years. (33–34)
“Complete absence,” however, is a misnomer. Reagan, in particular, is a constant and looming presence in these characters’ lives—a menacing presence that would have been diluted, I think, had Kushner actually embodied Reagan as a character. Kushner is very much aware of “the main players in power” during these years, and it is these players against which some (and only some) of his characters are united in the end.
11. Kushner explains in his “Playwright’s Notes” that the cases cited in this scene are actual cases with some names and circumstances changed (P, 8). Louis confronts Joe with only a few specific cases, but it is clear that Joe has written many more. The first involved plaintiffs on Staten Island who were suing a New Jersey toothpaste company because the smoke from the company’s factory had led to the hospitalization of at least three children. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs had no case because the Air and Water Protection Act, which they were citing, did not apply to people, only to air and water. The second involved a gay soldier who filed an appeal when the army kicked him out and cheated him of his pension. Although the soldier got his pension again, the judge’s decision stated that it was only because the army in this case had foreknowledge of the soldier’s homosexuality, and that homosexuals are still not guaranteed to equal protection under the law (P, 109–10).
12. Moreover, conservative critics did feel excluded: “The crowd-pleasing swipes at conservatives, Republicans, and Mormons, an occasional irritant in Part I, have multiplied this time to fill the dramatic vacuum” (Olson, 72); “The playwright is not given to moderation in expression. He says Ronald Reagan will go down in history as a ‘tremendously evil’ man, who ran a ‘closet-fascist government’” (Grenier, 54).
13. Kushner, in turn, reiterates his commitment to solidarity over and over again in his interviews and writings. See, particularly, his response to neoconservative writers Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer:
What of the things gay children have to fear, in common with all children?
What of the planetary despoilment that kills us? Or the financial necessity that drives some of us into unsafe, insecure, stupid, demeaning and ill-paying jobs? Or the unemployment that impoverishes some of us? Or the racism some of us face? Or the rape some of us fear? What about AIDS? Is it enough to say, Not our problem? Of course gay and lesbian politics is a progressive politics: It depends on progress for the accomplishment of any of its goals. Is there any progressive politics that recognizes no connectedness, no border-crossings, no solidarity or possibility for mutual aid? (“A Socialism of the Skin,” 13)
14. Kushner himself has implied that “ongoing dialogue” for him includes dialogue with lesbian and gay novelists such as Schulman:
[Interviewer]: Larry Kramer wrote in The Advocate last year that the gay novel is a dead form; the only interesting work happening in gay literature is in the theater. What is your reaction to that?
Tony Kushner: Oh, Larry! I don’t know what he’s talking about, because he’s gone off to write a novel as far as I know.
I just read Michael Cunningham’s new novel [Flesh and Blood], which is just astonishing. And Chris Bram has a new novel [Father of Frankenstein], which is amazing. I think Sarah Schulman writes amazing novels. Certainly there’s Dorothy Allison—I think Bastard out of Carolina is one of the best things I’ve ever read. So I don’t agree at all. (Lowenthal, 11)
Kushner provides an extended blurb on the back cover of Schulman’s most recent novel, Rat Bohemia, and quotes approvingly from Rat Bohemia in the preface to his collection of essays (Thinking, ix).
15. On Donald Trump and the Trump Tower, see Crimp and Rolston, 122.
16. During the summer of 1988, medical waste (catheter bags, sutures, hypodermic needles, and vials of blood—some of which tested positive for HIV) washed ashore on beaches from Long Island to Staten Island.
17. On the Tompkins Square Park Riots, see N. Smith, 59.
18. For a more extended consideration of the issues in this paragraph, see my discussion in chapter 2 of Randall Kenan’s character Jimmy Greene from A Visitation of Spirits.
19. The dance floor is an appropriate location for this announcement, since it has been, historically, an important site for the (re) fashioning of queer identities. See, for example, my overview in chapter 2 of Marcos Becquer’s reading of Tongues Untied and Paris Is Burning, as well as Becquer and Jose Gatti’s more extensive analysis of vogueing.
20. Edward King, in Safety in Numbers: Safer Sex and Gay Men, criticizes ACT UP and coalition work, suggesting that they have contributed to the contemporary “degaying” of AIDS (191–92). King’s analysis focuses primarily on Britain, where the degaying of AIDS has proven disastrous for gay men: the British government has shifted funding away from organizations that address the specific needs of gay men, even though the vast majority of people living with AIDS in Britain are gay men.
King’s study in general is important and convincing, but in his zeal to critique the degaying of AIDS, I think he conflates universalizing (“AIDS is everyone’s problem”) and coalition. Perhaps this conflation is necessary, given the particular problems in Britain that King addresses. Throughout my analysis, however, I hope it has been clear that “coalition” entails coming together to face, not efface, the specific needs of various groups. In the United States, moreover, many people living with AIDS are already located in multiple communities: gay and bisexual men of color, particularly, have been disproportionately impacted by the epidemic. Audre Lorde’s comments from chapter 1 are again apropos here: “It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference” (Zami, 226).
21. See especially Bordowitz, “Picture a Coalition,” which provides an overview of the Testing the Limits Collective, a group of video activists who documented many of ACT UP’s early actions. See also Bordowitz, “The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous”; Saalfield; Saalfield and Navarro, 367–65.
22. Schulman’s own position on this issue is unclear, but she maintains that People in Trouble’s “principal idea . . . was how personal homophobia becomes societal neglect” (in Loewenstein, 220; see also Schulman, My American History, xviii). Since it is unclear whether she is referring here to Molly’s or Kate’s “personal homophobia,” Schulman’s statement is fairly ambiguous. Either way, however, it is problematic and biphobic: Does Molly’s personal homophobia lead her to neglect her activism and “the community” by “wasting time” with a “straight” woman? Or does Kate’s personal homophobia prevent her from making a “real” commitment to the gay and lesbian world?
Whenever I have taught this novel, Kate’s character initially has elicited the standard biphobic litany from students: she “can’t make up her mind,” is “indecisive and mean,” treats both Molly and Peter “unfairly,” and so forth. Invariably, however, discussion gravitates toward Kate, who—given the profound shifts she experiences throughout the novel—is a more seductive character than either Molly or Peter. Schulman’s attempts to contain Kate (by providing readers with a theme through which to read her: “personal homophobia becomes societal neglect”) are never, I think, entirely successful.
23. I am thinking here of Gary Indiana’s disturbing contribution to the anthology Discontents: New Queer Writers: “He goes to a party where a five year old child gets passed around for everyone to fuck, and then it’s chopped up with steak knives and consumed” (167). Schulman is also a contributor to this anthology, so if her citation of Indiana in People in Trouble is parodic, she herself is nonetheless allied with him in at least one queer venue.