American Queer, Now and Then

David Shneer, Caryn Aviv

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317263814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

queer [adj]: 1 differing from what is usual or ordinary; odd; singular; strange 2 slightly ill; 3 mentally unbalanced 4 counterfeit; not genuine 5 homosexual: in general usage, still chiefly a slang term of contempt or derision, but lately used by some as a descriptive term without negative connotations --Webster's Dictionary queer [adj]: used to describe a 1 body of theory 2 field of critical inquiry 3 way of proudly identifying a group of people 4 way of seeing the world 5 sense of difference from the norm -- David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, Queer in America, Now and Then Contrasting queer life today and in years past, this landmark book brings together autobiographies, poetry, film studies, maps, documents, laws, and other texts to explore the meaning and practice of the word queer. By this Shneer and Aviv mean: queer as both a form of social violence and a call to political activism; queer as played by Robin Williams and Sharon Stone and as lived by Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena; queer in the courthouses of Washington D.C. and on the streets of hometown America. Contextualizing these contemporary stories with ones from the past, and understanding them through the analytic tools of feminist social criticism and history, the authors show what it means to be queer in America.

1

Bulldykes, Faggots, and Fairies, Oh My!

CALLING AND BEING CALLED QUEER IN AMERICA, NOW AND THEN

Queer \kwier\ adj [origin unknown] 1a: differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal b (1): eccentric, unconventional (2): mildly insane: touched c: obsessed, hipped d slang: sexually deviate: homosexual 2a. slang: worthless, counterfeit

—Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1971

Queer /kwie/ a. and n. A. adj. 1. Strange, odd, eccentric; of questionable character, suspicious. 2a. Bad; worthless. b. Of a coin or banknote: counterfeit, forged. 3. Out of sorts; giddy, faint, ill. 4. Esp. of a man: homosexual. slang. derog.

—New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993

Queer: adj. a. Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, in appearance or character. Also, of questionable character, suspicious, dubious. queer fellow, an eccentric person; also used, esp. in Ireland and in nautical contexts, with varying contextual connotations b. Of a person (usu. a man): homosexual. Also in phr. as queer as a coot (cf. COOT n.¹ 2b). Hence, of things: pertaining to homosexuals or homosexuality. orig. U.S. c. In U.S. colloq. phr. to be queer for (someone or something): to be fond of or ‘keen on’; to be in love with 2. Not in a normal condition; out of sorts; giddy, faint, or ill: esp. in phr. to feel (or look) queer. Also slang: Drunk. Noun: A (usu. male) homosexual. Also in Comb., as queer-bashing vbl. n., the attacking of homosexuals; hence queer-basher.

—Oxford English Dictionary, 1989

At the first public talk for our book Queer Jews, an elderly man stood up slowly from one of the back rows, his face purple and contorted in anger. With shaking hands and a trembling voice, he read from a piece of crumpled paper. “Here is what the dictionary says about that word you use all the time. Queer: perverted, odd, peculiar. Often used as an epithet in association with homosexuality.” He paused and glared at us. The room was silent and expectant. “How can you stand up there and call yourselves queer? Queer is what I was called by bullies on the playground. Queer is what I heard when people yelled at me from passing cars. Queer was something that was considered terrible. I want you to know that I’m not queer, and I am disgusted that you would even think to use this word as something to be proud of, let alone use it as the title of your book.” Little did this man know that “queer” was proudly used by many gay men as their name of choice only a few decades prior to his undoubtedly traumatic harassment on the playground.

What’s in a name, and why does it matter? What queer people have called themselves and been called by others has changed over the course of the past one hundred years. But one thing has remained consistent: the language we use to describe queer people, identities, and practices reflects who has the power to name and be named. The following readings explore how the act of naming ranges from subtle codes among insiders to institutional efforts to promote gender and sexual compliance, from flamboyant opportunities for creative expression to potent political statements of resistance.

Two things are quite clear from the growing historical record of queer history. First, in the past, queerness had more to do with gender roles than with who was sleeping with whom. People were identified as “that way” if they transgressed the boundaries of what it meant to be male or female, masculine or feminine. In addition, queer people named themselves based on disparate ideas about masculinity and femininity as much as by what queers were actually doing sexually. Second, elite groups and institutions have used law, medicine, psychiatry, and religion throughout much of U.S. history to shape public perceptions and fears.

In the late nineteenth century, physicians began to consider sexuality a serious topic worthy of scientific study and classification. Early sexologists such as Henry Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing attempted to explain same-sex desires through the lenses of medicine and biology. Krafft-Ebing, in fact, coined the term “homosexuality” in 1892 to explain a person who had a “great diminution or complete absence of sexual feeling for the opposite sex, with substitution of sexual feeling and instinct for the same sex.” These scientists shifted the conversation away from seeing same-sex acts through a Christian lens as “sodomy,” or sins against God, toward seeing them as medical and psychiatric issues beyond a person’s control. By doing this, Ellis and other primarily European sexologists advocated for tolerance of “homosexuals” because, in their psychiatric framework, same-sex love was no longer a sin, but instead, an illness.

Magnus Hirschfeld, a German sexologist and gay rights advocate in the early 1900s coined terms like “transvestite” and “third-sex” as a way of categorizing and at the same time validating queer sexualities, genders, and even queer biologies. The continuing medicalization of sexuality also had negative consequences as queer people could be deemed “sick” and in need of “curing,” a trend that became dominant in the mid-twentieth-century United States. At the same time, others used sociological language to describe and categorize sexuality. Some researchers showed that “deviant” sexual practices were a threat to public law and order and signs of immorality, and perversions that could potentially disrupt society and families.

Those who fell into these new biological, social, and psychological categories played with, contested, resisted, and quite often ignored them, as George Chauncey shows in his classic analysis of early twentieth-century gay New York. By examining what queers said about themselves rather than simply looking at what others said about them, scholars are now discovering that American queers have not always been a silent minority. In major U.S. urban areas in the early twentieth century, the first traces of organized gay and lesbian subcultures began to emerge, and with them, an astonishing array of names for the people who congregated in these places. Among these were queers, fairies, trade (a term that said as much about a man’s class status as about his gender presentation or sexual orientation), “normal” men, bulldaggers, mannish lesbians, and flaming faggots. Queers described themselves differently depending on their race, class, sex, gender, sexual preferences, and even sexual roles. Butch, femme, pansy, fairy, top, bottom, trade, wolf—the list of labels within queer communities was and is far more extensive than the labels social authorities have invented. In claiming their own names, queers exercised self-determination in situations where they had less power.

If the early twentieth century was a heyday for queers to name themselves within the linguistic confines of vocabularies available to them, by World War II the state had become more actively involved in identifying and defining queers. Just as queers were coming together in ways unimaginable fifty years earlier, the military was asking questions as never before about people’s identities. As Allan Berube shows in his classic work, Coming Out under Fire, both queer men and women were forming communities on navy ships, on military bases, and on leave in major ports while the U.S. government was simultaneously “outing queers” and discharging them. It was also one of the first times queerness was defined primarily by sexual desire and sexual act rather than by gender presentation. A formerly “straight” guy or “trade” might now be characterized as homosexual and discharged because of it.

By the 1950s, “queer” had moved from being an insider term of identity to an epithet of derision, a word with which no one wanted to be associated. “Homosexual”—that medicalized word from psychiatric literature—became the term to define people who expressed same-sex desire. It took radical queer activism to take power over naming away from institutions. The word “homosexual” began once again to be seen for what it was—a medicalized term that transformed personal, intimate identities into fixed categories—and the words “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender” began to take hold. Other groups reclaimed older terms and self-identified as “radical fairies” or “butch dykes,” terms that had once been identity labels but which had become negative terms of social opprobrium. In this vein, a group of homosexuals in 1990 reclaimed a potent epithet by calling their activist group Queer Nation. In doing so, they returned the word to its former meaning as an insider badge of pride.

As the following excerpts demonstrate, the act of naming has been a series of struggles from inside out, and outside in, throughout the history of American queers over the past two centuries. On the one hand, queer people have tried to define for themselves who they are, what they do, and what their identities mean to them and the larger world. On the other hand, others have tried to define queers using medicine, religion, and the law. Sometimes that dialogue has been marked by constraint and repression. At other times, the conversation has reflected outright resistance to stigmatization and oppression. As Audre Lorde’s essay demonstrates, to name oneself is an act of love and power. Naming, in the face of hostility and outright hatred, is no easy task and requires enormous courage. The following pieces ought to stimulate thought and discussion about who gets to name, how and why we call ourselves what we do, and how these ways of naming change over time. Thinking about the relationships between power and naming heightens our sensitivity to how language shapes our realities, our imagination, and our possibilities for living full and meaningful lives.

AUDRE LORDE

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1978)

The work of Audre Lorde (1934–1992), one of the most important voices of second-wave feminism, is synonymous with the power of activism through poetry and literature. Born in New York to Caribbean immigrant parents, Audre Lorde began writing at an early age and published widely read prose and poetry. An outspoken advocate for feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, and civil rights, she was a featured speaker at the historic first march on Washington, D.C., for lesbian and gay liberation in 1979, and was poet laureate of New York State from 1991 to 1993. This speech was originally given at the Modern Language Association conference in 1977.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge—within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not—I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-American festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia—self-determination—the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima—collective work and responsibility—the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear—of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long fo...