Queerly Remembered

Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past

Thomas R. Dunn

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611176711
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Rhetorik

An interdisciplinary examination of the strategies GLBTQ communities have used to advocate for political, social, and cultural change

Queerly Remembered investigates the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) individuals and communities have increasingly turned to public tellings of their ostensibly shared pasts in order to advocate for political, social, and cultural change in the present. Much like nations, institutions, and other minority groups before them, GLBTQ people have found communicating their past(s)—particularly as expressed through the concept of memory—a rich resource for leveraging historical and contemporary opinions toward their cause. Drawing from the interdisciplinary fields of rhetorical studies, memory studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, Thomas R. Dunn considers both the ephemeral tactics and monumental strategies that GLBTQ communities have used to effect their queer persuasion.

More broadly this volume addresses the challenges and opportunities posed by embracing historical representations of GLBTQ individuals and communities as a political strategy. Particularly for a diverse community whose past is marked by the traumas of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the forgetting and destruction of GLBTQ history, and the sometimes-divisive representational politics of fluid, intersectional identities, portraying a shared past is an exercise fraught with conflict despite its potential rewards. Nonetheless, by investigating rich rhetorical case studies through time and across diverse artifacts—including monuments, memorials, statues, media publications, gravestones, and textbooks— Queerly Remembered reveals that our current queer "turn toward memory" is a complex, enduring, and avowedly rich rhetorical undertaking.

CHAPTER 1

“Making do” with Heterosexual History

IN 1914 DR. WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, A physician, sexologist, and chief of the Department of Genito-Urinary Diseases at Bronx Hospital who examined individuals suspected of being homosexual “inverts,” published an account of his views on homosexuality.¹ Castigating his sexological colleagues who argued that same-sex desire was a normal part of human existence, Robinson reasserted that homosexuality was “a sad, deplorable, pathological phenomenon. Every sexual deviation or disorder which has for its result an inability to perpetuate the race is ipso facto pathological, ipso facto an abnormality, and this is pre-eminently true of true homosexuality.” He concluded that, despite his opposition to overly harsh legal penalties for those engaging in same-sex acts and/or gender nonconformity, homosexual persons “did not have a great or even capable thinker among them,” were all “distinctly inferior to the normal man,” and that the “world could get along very well without these step-children of nature.”²

Ten years later Robinson had been persuaded otherwise. While still unprepared to regard homosexuality as favorably as possible, after a decade of research listening to “lovable, sympathetic types” of early gay men and lesbians “of high intelligence,” Robinson’s position on homosexuality evolved. In an article published in 1925 he stated: “My attitude towards homosexuals of both sexes has undergone some change, has become broader, more tolerant, perhaps even sympathetic.” While still convinced that there was something “‘not quite right’ with the male or female homo,” Robinson was nevertheless prompted to alter his professional recommendations. In regard to the study, care, and treatment of homosexual “inverts,” Robinson adopted the position of his new friend and homosexual advocate, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Like Hirschfeld, Robinson began to argue that “inverts” were not pathological or a menace to society but rather should be considered “merely a ‘variation,’ an intersex or a third sex.”³ For at least one contemporary researcher of the medicalization of homosexuality, Robinson’s conversion (if only a conversion from antagonism to neutrality) signaled a “notable instance” of queer persuasion in early-twentieth-century scientific and popular discourse.⁴

What contributed to the persuasion of this one famous skeptic and his prominent early sexological views of homosexuality? Robinson largely attributed his shift to conversations with numerous homosexual individuals over ten years of research and counseling. Robinson first had opportunities for such conversations early in his career as a physician; however, his “homophile” contacts expanded exponentially later in his career when he began to receive letters from homosexual readers in his role as editor of the Journal of Urology and Sexology, many of which Robinson chose to publish.⁵ In the early 1920s Robinson’s interactions with the homophile community deepened further when Hirschfeld invited him to Germany for an extended visit to the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science.⁶ While some of the individuals with whom Robinson interacted were important leaders of the homophile movement—Hirschfeld the most notable example—most of them were everyday people awash in mixed feelings of pride, guilt, shame, acceptance, and regret about their “condition.”

Those who met with Robinson throughout his career came with different motives and desires. Robinson believed that the vast majority of his homosexual visitors approached him because they were unhappy and sought a “cure.” In fact, early in his career Robinson declared that all the homosexual individuals he had ever met “considered their condition a great punishment, tho some of them were resigned to it.”⁷ By contrast, it has been suggested that, as Robinson’s prestige grew in scientific and popular circles, he became a targeted audience for homosexual activists.⁸ These later visitors almost all seemed compelled at some level to defend their homosexual feelings as reasonable. In doing so, they relied upon a particular kind of appeal to justify their being in the world. The appeal was so repetitive that Robinson made note of it in his publications: “the thing that struck me peculiarly in almost all homosexuals is their pathetic eagerness to claim … as homosexuals people whose homosexuality is extremely doubtful.… Thus they speak of Shakespeare, Byron, and Whitman as belonging to their class, as if their homosexuality … were a well-established historical fact.”⁹

While the text demonstrates that Robinson doubted the veracity of these statements and was far from convinced that these homosexual reclamation projects of accomplished historical individuals were either credible or merited attention, we can see simultaneously within this account a tactical form of argumentation in process. As a scene juxtaposing a scientist with his subject—an empowered, supposedly heterosexual man against his disempowered, homosexual patient—we might be tempted to view the exchanges between Robinson and the individuals interviewed as invasive confessionals in which homosexual persons were subjected to the disciplinary force of modern science and medicine.¹⁰ Doubtless much of this dynamic was in play and, in such settings, little agency might be expected of those who were considered by society at the time to be mentally ill patients, prisoners, or criminals. However, on the contrary, these conversations exemplified important moments in the formation of early gay and lesbian subjects—the budding utterances of a gay and lesbian rhetoric of resistance. In short, these conversations reveal a calculated, persuasive appeal by a nascent gay and lesbian community to defend itself from disciplinary apparatuses and heteronormative culture—“the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent … but also privileged.”¹¹ At the very heart of these persuasive appeals that sought to influence Robinson’s view of his patients as pathological was a deep and abiding rhetorical maneuver—the calculated deployment of homosexual historical representations aimed at a powerful heterosexual audience. As such, the anonymous patients’ interactions with Dr. Robinson illustrate in microcosm the central question of this book: How have gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ)¹² advocates of the past and present represented and contested history in endeavors to influence or persuade the judgments by dominant, apparently heterosexual citizens?

The Robinson anecdote is only one example of how GLBTQ people, institutions, and communities have and continue to use their collective pasts to shape sustainable selves and spaces within a deeply heteronormative world. This task is not simple. GLBTQ communities are and have always been richly diverse, not only with regard to gender, sex, and sexuality but also with deeply intersectional experiences of race, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, and age (among others) that have shifted in importance and articulation through time. Such diversity has frequently instigated contentious debates among GLBTQ persons about how and why communal pasts should be represented. These debates are valuable for understanding not only the fissures they produce but the participation, forethought, and critical self-reflection such debates demand. At the same time, deploying GLBTQ pasts in rhetorical ways—with the intent to shape the perceptions of audiences at the level of the public—has regularly been complicated by a pervasive drive to forget GLBTQ people within heterosexual cultures. While forgetting can provide important opportunities for communities to form, to be renewed, and to “begin again,”¹³ the erasure of entire sets of people from history also functions to sustain dominant culture, its privileges, and its attendant power structures. Heterosexual individuals, at the center of dominant culture, have regularly exerted and reexerted a constellation of forgetting practices (both consciously and unconsciously) against GLBTQ pasts—including heteronormativity, misrepresentation, the subjugation of knowledge, destruction of records, disqualification of evidence, and “mnemonicide,” among many others—to resecure that center.¹⁴ At times GLBTQ people themselves, for very different reasons, have contributed to this will to forget.¹⁵ Nonetheless, as Charles E. Morris III has suggested, GLBTQ communities in recent years have made a prominent queer “turn toward memory,” one that I argue has actually been a reliable, though less evident, resource for these communities’ survival for nearly 150 years.¹⁶ In doing so GLBTQ people have imbedded themselves within a popular and interdisciplinary project interested in public memory. While the particulars of this term are contested, in this book public memory refers to the use of the past in diverse but always shared ways by a particular community to respond to a present need.¹⁷ Through appeals to public memory, GLBTQ people and communities activate their pasts in powerful ways to shape the present and drive social change.

As an epigram, the early-twentieth-century gay men and lesbians who drew upon the past in their attempts to persuade Robinson ask us likewise today to reflect upon how contemporary GLBTQ persons in Western culture utilize their pasts to appeal to audiences or publics: In what ways do modern GLBTQ persons in the West remember the past?¹⁸ Do GLBTQ persons today remember the past in the same way, or what patterns typify diverse representations of GLBTQ history? Whom do we remember for doing certain deeds in the past? How do we determine what sorts of symbolic and material deeds are worthy of remembering or forgetting? How do we go about doing remembering as individuals and as groups? Whom do we remember as a community and, given the underlying roles of institutions and organizations such as publication outlets and archives, what symbolic and material costs does such memory require? As we will see, these questions are deeply historical, rhetorical, and queer. They also form the foundational themes of this project.

Indeed GLBTQ histories, or more specifically GLBTQ public memories, are key rhetorical devices addressed to audiences or publics, devices that have grown more pervasive, more complex, and more controversial as they have been used to influence not only GLBTQ audiences but heterosexual audiences as well. In remembering these pasts GLBTQ communities have not only preserved often overlooked, ignored, disqualified, or willfully misrepresented ways of being in time, but they have also sought to shape the present and the future of queer life in highly rhetorically contested ways by seeking to influence diverse audiences with different stakes in remembrance.¹⁹ Three overarching claims drive the present study:

[1] That public memories offer a vital resource for GLBTQ persons, communities, and institutions for shaping public beliefs and judgments and winning political, cultural, and social change.

[2] That the trajectory of this memory work is not exclusively a contemporary phenomenon but rather a long-standing tactical and ephemeral practice that has recently begun to include more monumental enactments, styles, and forms.

[3] That monumental memory practices in particular, while posing significant challenges to GLBTQ advocates and audiences, will increasingly offer valuable effects in both heterosexual and homosexual public culture(s). As such, efforts to refine and make better monumental queer public memories will be an ongoing and important project.

History, Memory, Rhetoricity, Queerness
■

For longer than anyone alive can remember, history has been our preferred means for understanding our shared relationships with our pasts. An old but still very modern concept, history, in its most colloquial sense, is conceived as society’s record of days gone by. In Pierre Nora’s phrasing, it is “a reconstruction … of what is no longer,” a “representation” of what has come before that addresses our pasts in a very specific set of ways. In particular, history is a means for intellectualizing and rationalizing past times; it is ordered and structured, giving the hodgepodge happening of previous eras a continuity, linearity, and exactitude that can be taught and analyzed. Through this process of “intellectual and secular production,” we forge the narrative of the past, a record of previous moments with “universal authority” that “belongs to everyone.”²⁰ As a relationship to the past so invested with precision, objectivity, and general appeal that has served society’s interests for so long, history might then seem the best perspective for better investigating and understanding GLBTQ pasts in this project on several counts.

However, the concept of history is entirely inadequate for examining the particular applications of GLBTQ pasts. For one, history is increasingly incapable of connecting people to their pasts as it once did. While history had relevance within the transition from premodern to modern societies, the social, cultural, and technological forces battering our contemporary world have undercut history’s appeal. As Andreas Huyssen argues, globalization, weakened national borders, and the “very real compression of time and space” that typify our contemporary moment have unmoored history from its raison d’être. To put it another way, the hierarchical, national, rational, and totalizing merits of the history model, “no longer work.”²¹

Another inadequacy of history is that it is far removed from the “objective and scientific” telling of the past it proclaims.²² History’s façade as a fair and neutral assessment of the past has now long been exposed. Nietzsche’s critical history called into question the implied “truth” of events described in historical tomes. Marx gestured to the concealing nature of history in The German Ideology. Marxists such as Louis Althusser have argued that history’s neutrality is more akin to an ideologically infused narrative that ensures the perpetuation of the status quo.²³ Likewise, Michel Foucault has shown that the metanarratives of history are discursive constructions rather than rational Hegelian steps forward.²⁴ Such thinkers have been followed by a long line of feminists, materialists, radical socialists, and cultural studies scholars who recognized that when the disempowered and the marginalized put their faith in history, they often only affirm the powerful and become complicit in their own marginalization. GLBTQ people have likewise found significant reasons to doubt history’s claims to neutrality. As pioneering gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz remarked in 1983, GLBTQ people rarely appear in history in evident ways and, when they do, they are “mainly of concern to those who wish to be sure that they and their revered others do not fall into the class of the terrible tabooed.”²⁵ Despite progressive work to ameliorate these concerns by some historians in recent decades, the belief that history-writing’s function was much more than simply to record the past objectively permeated GLBTQ communities, prompting many groundbreaking gay men and lesbians to attempt to do their own historical work beginning in the 1970s.

Yet, while important and influential GLBTQ historians have now spent decades toiling to free GLBTQ lives from the shackles of history’s heteronormativity, even “gay and lesbian histories” have drawbacks. For one, the “gay and lesbian histories” produced to craft sustainable GLBTQ identities and communities during the 1970s and 1980s are often rife with partial and essentializing tendencies. As Scott Bravmann points out, early “gay and lesbian histories” that organize themselves around the unquestioned virtues of events like the Stonewall Riots “continue to imbue the present with meaning and give the past a surplus of signification that is itself in need of critical analysis.”²⁶ Similarly, some aspects of “gay and lesbian history” push singular, transhistorical, unitary metanarratives of the gay and lesbian past that cannot represent equitably the full diversity of GLBTQ experiences. In addition, a monolithic “gay and lesbian history” also suggests a standardized set of disciplinary procedures, measures of credibility, and locations of worth by which a “rigorous” past can be (re)constructed.²⁷ While many of these resources can be useful—including oral hist...