Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies

Thomas Piontek

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252072802, 9780252030314
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092169
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies is a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs, perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies. 
In this pioneering new study, Thomas Piontek provides a critical analysis of the development of gay and lesbian studies alongside the development of queer theory, the disputes between them, and criticism of their activities from both in and outside of the gay academic community. Examining disputes about transgendering, gay male promiscuity, popular culture, gay history, political activism, and non-normative sexual practices, Piontek argues that it is vital to queer gay and lesbian studies--opening this emerging discipline to queer critical interventions without, however, further institutionalizing queer theory.
 

1

Forget Stonewall: Making Gay History Perfectly Queer

We are the Stonewall girls

We wear our hair in curls

We wear no underwear

We show our pubic hair

We wear our dungarees

Above our nelly knees!

—a chorus line of mocking queens
confronting the police outside
the Stonewall Inn

WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE

HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT

ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE–MATTACHINE

—a sign on the boarded-up façade of
the Stonewall Inn

The 1970s and subsequent decades have spawned a proliferation of writing frequently described as “minority history,” a term that encompasses various subordinate groups’ struggles to recover histories previously overlooked or excluded. Minority history has met with considerable resistance from consensus historians, who claim that the political use of history jeopardizes the historian’s scholarly integrity.¹ John Boswell, a Yale professor who wrote perhaps the most popular work of gay history, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, addresses these anxieties about a politicization of the historical profession in a 1989 essay:

Since the exclusion of minorities from much historiography prior to the twentieth century was related to or caused by concerns other than purely scholarly interest, their inclusion now, even for purely political ends, not only ends a previous “political” distortion, but provides a more complete data base for judgments about the historical issues involved. Such truth as is yielded by historical analysis generally emerges from the broadest possible synthesis of the greatest number of viewpoints and vantages: the addition of minority history and viewpoints to twentieth-century historiography is a net gain for all concerned.²

Although clearly intended as an impassioned defense of “minority history,” Boswell’s argument raises a number of issues, including the conceptual differences between a modernist gay history and a postmodernist queer history.³ For one thing, Boswell considers the “problem” of minority history exclusively in terms of traditional definitions of history. Bracketing issues of power, he represents history as a pluralistic enterprise aiming for the greatest possible combination of viewpoints. But replacing an oppressive consensus with a liberating synthesis provides little in the way of a conceptual transformation.⁴ Does not a new synthesis risk producing yet another historical master narrative that reduces difference precisely by accommodating it? Thus, when Boswell claims that adding hitherto silenced stories has been a boon for history, he is ignoring conflicts over the way historical knowledge is produced and the struggle for hegemony that has characterized debates within the discipline.⁵ Boswell’s rhetoric thus suggests that, provided everybody is allowed on board, there’s no need to rock the boat.

From a queer perspective, however, the project of gay history involves more than simply adding information. As I pointed out in the introduction, the queer defines itself against multiple regimes of the normal, and I agree with Scott Bravmann that we should look at history as one such regime.⁶ Consequently, reclaiming the gay and lesbian past can never mean simply inserting previously excluded groups into the historical canon. Such a strategy permits at best purely cosmetic changes, not structural ones, for it portrays the problem solely as being bad history instead of questioning the way history has been traditionally constructed. At the same time, the multiplication of subjects and stories also raises epistemological questions. For example, Joan W. Scott argues that the “proliferation of Others’ histories [. . .] has exposed the politics by which one particular viewpoint established predominance.”⁷ Therefore, instead of merely developing another master narrative—one that can synthesize “minority” viewpoints without being fundamentally altered by them—we need to examine the modes of knowledge seeking that have made history an exclusionary practice in the first place.

Furthermore, the term minority seems problematic when applied to gay men and lesbians, for it raises exactly the kinds of questions that have polarized debates between gay and lesbian studies and queer theory: Can sexual orientation constitute a minority? If so, under what conditions? How does a minority thus constituted compare to ethnic and racial minorities? Is such a minoritizing view of lesbians and gay men politically advantageous, or does it restrict possibilities of political intervention? These questions are crucial to any consideration of gay history, and their discussion should not be foreclosed by a terminology that falsely suggests them to have already been answered. The constraints of modernist historical narratives are compounded when gay history relies on modernist notions of a “gay identity” uniting people across divides of race, sex, class, and time.

Analyzing the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Christian West, Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, for example, argues that a gay identity and gay people can be found throughout history. A queer approach to history writing, however, refuses the notion of a total history, casts doubts on attempts to write gay history in conventional historical styles, reconceives historical representation, and ultimately seeks to reframe the very meaning of history itself. Perhaps nothing illustrates the differences between the two approaches better than does a comparison between gay history’s interpretation of Stonewall as a “unifying and originary historical moment from which the present logically and coherently follows”⁸ and a queer reading of Stonewall as showing the impossibility of offering a singular interpretation of any particular event.

Before Stonewall

On the dust jacket of the historian Martin Duberman’s best-selling book Stonewall (1993), the Stonewall Riots, today generally taken to mark the birth of the “modern” gay and lesbian political movement,⁹ are described as follows: “The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. At a little after one A.M. on the morning of June 28, 1969, the police carried out a routine raid on the bar. But it turned out not to be routine at all. Instead of cowering—the usual reaction to a police raid—the patrons inside Stonewall and the crowd that gathered outside the bar fought back against the police. The five days of rioting that followed changed forever the face of lesbian and gay life.” For more than three decades the riots have been memorialized with commemorative celebrations in the month of June throughout this country and around the world. Indeed, Duberman claims, “‘Stonewall’ is the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history.”¹⁰ Yet Duberman, along with many others, is critical of this attribution of meaning to the historical event. He argues that “we have, since 1969, been trading the same few tales about the Riots from the same few accounts—trading them for so long that they have transmogrified into simplistic myth.”¹¹

In Beginnings Edward Said examines the obsession with his book’s eponymous topic, which he claims has occupied thought since the eighteenth century. Beginnings, according to Said, function as “intervening techniques that deliver reality to us in palpable form.” He adds that they allow us to “create sequences, periods, forms, and measurements that suit our perceptual needs. Once we have seen them, these orders are left alone: we assume that they go on ordering to time’s end, and there is nothing we can do about it. These mediating orders are in turn commanded and informed by one or another moderately intelligible force, whether we call it history, time, mind, or [. . .] language.”¹² Because historical events (and memories of them) imbue the present with meaning, one of the most instructive questions to explore is how the emphasis on Stonewall as a beginning has influenced the way we understand gay history before and after 1969.

One possible answer emerges from the way this question has been phrased: the focus on Stonewall as a beginning constitutes this event as a watershed and thus suggests a qualitative difference between the times on the two sides of the divide—before and after Stonewall. Thus, the mythology that has developed around Stonewall posits a radical difference between developments during the past thirty-five years and anything that happened before “those heady, sweltering nights in June 1969.”¹³ This perception, however, is merely the result of the plotting (or emplotment) of history around a specific, supposedly pivotal event, which inevitably risks creating a misleading before-and-after historiography through its overemphasis on discontinuity.¹⁴

The insistence on the Stonewall Riots as a point of rupture, a radical break with the past, fabricates a historical scheme in which Stonewall separates the past repression of gay culture from its present glorious realization: once upon a time, there was no gay organizing/movement/community; then came Stonewall, and now there is gay organizing/movement/community. The past becomes an amorphous mass without any distinguishing features, a block of time reaching, as it were, all the way from Stonehenge to Stonewall, during which there was only unrelieved oppression. In contrast, Stonewall itself is represented as an absolute beginning, the zero degree of gay and lesbian liberation. In fact, Stonewall has been called a watershed event so often that it would be impossible to list all the occurrences. One particularly extreme example of such a formulation comes from the lesbian separatist Jill Johnston. In her introduction to McDarrah and McDarrah’s Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today, Johnston writes: “I think of Stonewall myself as an event dividing time into B.C. (before consciousness) and A.D. (after death—of the life before consciousness).”¹⁵ Moving along similar lines, cultural critics such as Michael Denneny and David Bergman have described the post-Stonewall 1970s as a golden decade characterized by social transformation, increased freedom, and the burgeoning productivity of gay writers and artists.¹⁶

Reacting to this formulation, a number of gay and lesbian historians have questioned celebrating Stonewall as a beginning. Eric Marcus, for example, argues that “this misconception [of Stonewall as the origin of the gay and lesbian movement] has been reflexively asserted [. . .] so often and for so many years that it would seem to be an unassailable fact.”¹⁷ The director Greta Schiller makes a similar point in her award-winning documentary film Before Stonewall (1986), which combines oral history interviews with newsreels, clips from Hollywood movies, television news broadcasts, photographs, and personal memorabilia belonging to individual gay men and lesbians. As Schiller and her research director, Andrea Weiss, explain in their guide to the film, the juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate materials allowed them to challenge “the historical invisibility of gay people” even in contexts where, because of culturally conditioned ways of seeing, “we are so used to not seeing homosexuality.”¹⁸ The result is a chronicle of gay and lesbian communities from about the turn of the century to the late 1960s—a history from a time supposedly before there was any history.

The historian John D’Emilio takes on this misconception about Stonewall as well. He argues that “mass movements for social change do not spring full-blown into existence, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Movements have roots; they have origins. Surely [. . .] something of significance must have occurred before that night of outrage in Greenwich Village to explain why a spontaneous riot could have birthed a mass grass-roots movement.”¹⁹ Furthermore, the celebration of Stonewall as the birth of the gay and lesbian movement seems puzzling, for birth primarily signifies progression from one generation to the next, so that the metaphor ultimately implies exactly the kind of continuity that the insistence on a radically new beginning belies.²⁰

D’Emilio’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of A Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 demonstrates that the political efforts of gay men and lesbians in the 1970s were preceded by a generation of men and women in the 1950s and 1960s who composed the “homophile” movement, comprising such organizations as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. D’Emilio concludes that many of the shifts that occurred in the 1970s “were due to the weakening of traditional centers of powers caused by the protest movements of the 1960s, but the relative ease with which gay liberationists accumulated victories can only be explained by the persistent, plodding work of the activists who preceded them. The homophile movement deserves kinder treatment than it has received. The popular wisdom of gay liberation needs to be reevaluated.”²¹ The misreading of Stonewall yields two important questions that lie beyond D’Emilio’s suggested remedy of a “kinder” historical treatment of the homophile movement: First, why did gay activists in the 1970s claim Stonewall as the beginning of their movement even as they were working alongside people from various homophile organizations? Second, why has the creation myth surrounding Stonewall been so durable?²²

Why Stonewall?

Duberman, Marcus, D’Emilio, and Schiller have successfully challenged the notion that Stonewall initiated the modern gay and lesbian movement by providing ample evidence of gay and lesbian organizing and community building in previous decades. Surprisingly, however, only Marcus attempts to divest Stonewall of its singular status. He argues that by investing so much in Stonewall, we not only diminish all that came before but also tie everything that has happened since to this mythic event. Stonewall, according to Marcus, should be considered one significant moment in the history of the gay and lesbian movement rather than its single point of origin. Significantly, this shift is also implied by the historical period Marcus examines in his book, the forty-five years from 1945 to 1990. He denies Stonewall any of the special attention usually lavished on events believed to mark either the beginning or the end of an era.

In contrast to Marcus’s approach—and despite their stated desire to challenge the origin myth surrounding Stonewall—Duberman’s and D’Emilio’s books, as well as Schiller’s documentary, leave intact and even help to perpetuate the event’s status as a watershed. Both D’Emilio and Duberman end their respective studies with the formation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which they represent as a direct result of the events at the Stonewall Inn. Schiller’s film is framed by the very myth it seeks to debunk, beginning and ending as it does with footage of the Stonewall Riots. Thus the structure of these three texts, wittingly or not, maintains Stonewall as the critical break with the past, suggesting that Stonewall did in fact inaugurate a history different in kind from the one that they set out to tell. Despite their creators’ intentions—to challenge the creation myth surrounding Stonewall—these texts end up suggesting that the course of gay and lesbian history did change overnight in June 1969, that gay liberation was born at the Stonewall Inn. In a paradoxical way, D’Emilio, Duberman, and Schiller thus confirm the singular status of Stonewall as the beginning of one era precisely by representing it as the end of another.

A chapter entitled “A New Beg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Forget Stonewall: Making Gay History Perfectly Queer
• 2. Queering the Rhetoric of the Gay Male Sex Wars
• 3. How Gay Theory and the Gay Movement Betrayed the Sissy Boy
• 4. Queer Alternatives to Men and Women
• 5. Redrawing the Map of the Gender-and-Sex Landscape: Gender, Identity, and the Performativity of Queer Sex
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index