Every year, countless Americans from the forty-eight contiguous states flock to Hawaii, making tourism that state’s number one industry Travel agents, hotels, and airlines entice tourists by shaping the Aloha State into the land of beauty, romance, and imagination. A recent Vacations by Sheraton brochure, for instance, announces, “Hawaii is as much a place of mind as it is a place on the map. A peaceful paradise where golden sunshine warms the spirit along with the body Where worry drifts away on azure waves.” MTI Vacations adds, “Hawaii is a honeymoon paradise! You’ll be inspired by the breathtaking scenery and swept up in the romance of the islands.” The industry supports these claims with visual evidence, scattering pictures of men and women in luxurious settings through every brochure: men and women standing beside waterfalls or pools, walking along the beach, or watching the tropical sunset.
Gay men and lesbians, however, have disrupted the fantasy of Hawaii as a romantic (heterosexual) paradise. In 1990, three same-sex couples filed a lawsuit claiming the state violated their civil rights by refusing to grant them marriage licenses. The Hawaii Supreme Court agreed and ordered a lower court to review the couples’ complaints. Since states have a long history of recognizing marriages legally performed in other states, the events in Hawaii provoked a flurry of legislative activity elsewhere. By the mid-1990s, legislators across the country had introduced bills that would ensure that their states would not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in Hawaii. Congress even introduced the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and members of both major political parties lined up behind it to show their support for the idea that marriage should be defined only as the union between one man and one woman. DOMA was passed and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in September 1996.
In this context, the already suspect metaphor of the mainland collapses under the weight of the crisis. Hawaii indeed becomes “the mainland” here, given its ability to drive the legislative agenda of the U.S. Congress and of many other states in the Union. The legislators’ panic, and that of their constituents, endows Hawaii with a threatening subjectivity that belies characteristic understandings of it as an island paradise passively awaiting heterosexual travelers. No longer simply a beautiful and distant place to escape to, Hawaii—because it broaches the taboo subject of same-sex marriage—becomes a subject to escape from.
Nonetheless, to many gay men and lesbians (and indeed, to the litigating couples themselves), gay and lesbian marriage hardly constitutes a threat to civilization as we know it. On the contrary: proponents of lesbian and gay marriage openly admit that they don’t want to threaten heterosexual marriage; instead, they want to uphold marriage by extending it to lesbians and gay men. Other gay men and lesbians see the issue somewhat differently. While not denying that lesbians and gay men should have equal access to the political and economic benefits marriage bestows on couples in American culture, they argue that the gay and lesbian marriage movement seeks admittance to an institution that gay liberationists have sharply and consistently critiqued.
The debate over marriage rights in Hawaii might actually extend those critiques, since it again makes visible the crises that circulate around marriage and “the family” The legislative panic in particular exposes the ways in which the idea of the family is grounded in a fear of contiguous states: that is, a fear of queer states and eroticisms that are supposed to be safely distant, marginal, and exotic but are, in actuality, always internal to the family, the community, the nation. The debate about marriage rights in Hawaii reveals that those queer states (indeed, like Hawaii) are not “naturally” distant, marginal, and exotic; rather, they are distanced, marginalized, and exoticized through the heteronormative processes that construct “the family,” “the mainland,” and “civilization as we know it.” It is crucial that queer activists and theorists continue to draw attention to those heteronormative processes, especially since the lesbian and gay marriage movement in fact repeats them; many advocates for same-sex marriage distance queer identities and communities that don’t fit their “new and improved” model of family.
The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities examines how queer writers of the past fifteen years have shaped alternative relationships, communities, and identities. The 1980s and 1990s have seen an unprecedented wave of cultural activity by openly queer poets, playwrights, and novelists. The Queer Renaissance not only highlights that phenomenon but also considers how it works in tandem with a “renaissance” of radical queer political analysis that reinvents lesbian and gay identities and alliances in order to challenge dominant constructions of sex, sexuality, gender, class, and race.
The queer alliances and interconnections writers and activists have shaped cannot be contained by the model of a well-behaved same-sex dyad, and The Queer Renaissance thus brings together both women and men from a variety of overlapping communities and locations: women working together as friends and lovers, female and male activists protesting home-lessness and inadequate health care, lesbians of color hacienda alianzas (forging alliances), queers in the streets chanting, “We are fabulous—get used to it!” or “Safe sex—do it!” Although putting men and women together in one study will undoubtedly strike some readers as monstrously unnatural, such a queer gathering is actually more representative of the ways men and women have indeed worked together in many locations over the past fifteen years. The field of contemporary gay and lesbian literary studies, which generally focuses on writing by either men or women, in this sense lags behind gay and lesbian communities more generally.
The Queer Renaissance brings together Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman and considers how or whether these writers breed fluid and disruptive identities and communities. The conversation The Queer Renaissance stages among these writers intends to extend that disruption and fluidity. However, I unavoidably erect other barriers or establish new boundaries that can, and I hope will, be disrupted in turn. Most obviously, I focus here on “American” writers. Without question, the cultural phenomenon I examine crosses many different geographical and metaphorical borders, making my American focus in many ways arbitrary. My (partial) rationale for this focus is twofold. First, the field of literary studies continues to be segregated along national lines, and American literary studies provides one venue in which The Queer Renaissance might speak. At the same time, although this study thereby perpetuates the segregation of literary studies, it also (like lesbian and gay studies generally) questions from within many of the academic boundaries we establish. Second, disparate as the writers in this study might be, they are all subject, although in different ways, to various American institutions: religious life, the medical establishment, the U.S. Congress, the border patrol, the marketplace, and so forth. Therefore, many of the disruptions envisioned and detailed by writers in The Queer Renaissance are disruptions of specific American institutions or forces.
Still, the “unity” I achieve through this focus is temporary and at many points contested, and the margins of my study threaten to take it elsewhere. Latin America, China, Italy, Australia; Edmonton, Berlin, London, Tel Aviv—these are a few of the places that I tuck away in endnotes or that the writers I examine mention in passing. Other locations—Carria-cou, Mexico, West Africa—already resist marginalization in my study, since they have shaped the consciousness of the writers at its center. These locations begin to reconfigure The Queer Renaissance and to position the writers and texts here in alliance with other people, places, or contiguous states. Such an ongoing reconfiguration, however, is desirable and necessary: although most of the writers I analyze expose the ways normative identities are structured to distance, marginalize, and exoticize others, they do not do so from some imaginary “uncontaminated” location; although they refuse to be kept in their place, they simultaneously refuse to establish a pure “paradise” elsewhere. The writers at the center of The Queer Renaissance perversely insist that we can and should sustain the messy processes of interrogating the exclusions our identities and communities effect and of imagining our communities and identities otherwise.