From the issue dated September 12, 2003
|
|
|
A Queer Notion of HistoryResearch on gay and lesbian life makes its markBy SCOTT MCLEMEE It is not easy being gay in Oklahoma. When a leading national gay publication ranked the states according to their records on gay rights, Oklahoma came in 50th. Not one locality in the state has passed an ordinance against discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. But this inhospitable climate seems to have fostered true grit among local pioneers in gay history. Since the Tulsa Center for Gay and Lesbian History opened, in January, Laura Belmonte, the director, has raised $25,000 from private donors. "That's not counting the office space donated by the lesbian-and-gay community center," she adds, nor the labor contributed by archivists, librarians, and amateur historians in the area. The center has started collecting books on gay history, and plans are under way to open a small museum. For now, though, any discussion of scholarship on gay and lesbian people in Oklahoma has to be conducted in the future tense. "We know a great deal about gay life in places like New York, Atlanta, and Minneapolis," says Ms. Belmonte, who is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater. "But, really, you have a black hole with a place like Tulsa. Nothing much has been written. And it's not that there haven't been gays and lesbians here all along. Remember, Oklahoma was the frontier. It was where people went to do all the things you weren't supposed to do elsewhere." That sounds like a pretty good description of the field of gay history itself -- at least in its early days. But now things have gotten downright civilized. A quarter-century has passed since a few scholars organized the first ad hoc meeting of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History during the annual convention of the American Historical Association. Today the committee has more than 270 members, each of whom publishes a new book every year, or so it seems. Aside from studying history, scholars in the field have recently helped to make some. In June, several works by gay historians were cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, in which the justices ruled that laws forbidding homosexual activity are a violation of "personal dignity and autonomy." It was a decision that brought one era to an end and began another. "Even here in Tulsa," says Ms. Belmonte, "the winds are changing." A History of the History "Gay history has developed very slowly," says John D'Emilio, director of the program in gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His point is debatable. Thirty years ago, the field barely existed, apart from studies of homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, and the occasional biography speculating on the private life of some famous person. So, arguably, the historical study of gay and lesbian people has grown at a remarkable rate over a fairly brief period. But it doesn't seem brief to Mr. D'Emilio, perhaps because it overlaps with his entire adult life. When asked what it was like to do research on gay history in the field's early days, he begins to laugh. A minute or two later he composes himself enough to describe what it was like to work on his dissertation at Columbia University in 1974. Its focus was the Mattachine Society -- a "homophile" organization, as it termed itself, that emerged in the 1950s to campaign for tolerance, mainly through lectures and publications aimed at professionals in law and medicine. Mr. D'Emilio recalls mentioning his topic to a senior faculty member. The man leaned against a four-drawer filing cabinet for support and said, in hushed tones, "Do you know what this will mean for your career?" "And I just wasn't going to engage him on that," says Mr. D'Emilio. "I yammered something like, 'Oh, well, it'll be fine. Nobody's ever written on this. ...'" It was clearly an uncomfortable discussion for both parties. "My presumption, at least until the early 1980s, was that I would never have an academic career," he says. He did finally land a tenure-track job, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1983 -- the same year that the University of Chicago Press published a revised version of his dissertation as Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. He was an exception, though: Much of the early work on gay and lesbian history was written by independent scholars, because there simply wasn't support for it in academe. Scholars also faced the problem of finding historical sources. "We were trying to reconstruct something that, until the 1970s, was characterized by silence and invisibility," says Mr. D'Emilio. The agenda for his early research was strongly influenced by the fact that the Mattachine Society, as a public organization, had left a record he could actually locate and study. Other historians found traces of gay-rights activism in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and rediscovered the work of Edward Carpenter, a British writer of the Victorian era who proclaimed the dignity of "the third sex." But aside from those rare signs of early militance, the history of gay and lesbian identity seemed to be a blank slate, especially in the United States. Not Exactly Straightforward A second phase in the development of the field, Mr. D'Emilio says, was inspired by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's essay "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in 19th-Century America," published in the feminist journal Signs in 1975. The upper-class women whom she studied would not have considered themselves lesbian (if, indeed, they even knew the word). But their letters and diaries showed that Victorian society had tolerated, and even encouraged, intense emotional bonds and displays of physical affection among women that were often more passionate than their relationships with their husbands. It seemed to confirm the findings of Jonathan Ned Katz, an independent scholar who, upon examining the medical and psychiatric literature, drew a counterintuitive conclusion: Only in the 19th century did experts begin to speak of "the homosexual" as someone whose erotic desire reflected an unusual physiological or psychological condition. In earlier periods, certain sexual acts had been considered "crimes against nature," a category that also included nonprocreative forms of heterosexual intercourse. Those who performed such acts, however, were understood to be practicing a vice rather than manifesting an identity or a pathology. When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Lawrence, it cited Mr. Katz's work in arguing that early crimes-against-nature laws had not been directed specifically against gay and lesbian people -- for, the court noted, "according to some scholars, the concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century." That analysis is not beyond dispute. Critics of the decision cite a Connecticut statute from 1642 that reads: "If any man lie with mankind as with a woman, both of them hath committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death." And in his dissent from the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia noted the existence of "records of 20 sodomy prosecutions and 4 executions during the colonial period" -- citing as his source the work of John Katz. For Linda K. Kerber, a professor of history and a lecturer in law at the University of Iowa, who contributed to a supporting brief submitted for Lawrence, such objections reveal an ignorance of the documentary evidence and of the way historians go about reconstructing the past. "When conservatives make those arguments," she says, "I want to tell them, 'We don't make it up. Check the footnotes, go read the sources. If you don't agree with the way I've interpreted things, my cards are on the table.'" Sex and the City While some historians were discovering worlds of ambiguous sexual identity in earlier periods, others became interested in the ways that distinct sexual subcultures emerged in urban areas. "The next stage," says Mr. D'Emilio, "was to reconstruct community histories for the geographic locales that, in the present, offer the greatest evidence of a lesbian and gay world." There followed studies of the development of gay neighborhoods and institutions in such cities as Buffalo, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. What really put this research on the map -- at least for people outside of gay-and-lesbian studies -- was the publication in 1994 of George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Chicago), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. Drawing on oral-history interviews, newspaper accounts, and court records, Mr. Chauncey, a professor of American history at the University of Chicago, revealed the existence of a large and extraordinarily visible gay community in New York in the early years of the 20th century. Well-advertised drag balls, featuring cross-dressers of both sexes, drew huge crowds; and any urban sophisticate, however straight, would have visited a "pansy nightclub." By mid-century, though, there was a backlash. Laws were passed to regulate "degenerate disorderly conduct" -- and gay life was driven further into the margins, leaving it invisible to historians until the 1970s. In recovering that past, scholars have been making up for lost time. Recent titles have chronicled gay life in the Pacific Northwest, the role of gay writers in the Harlem Renaissance, and the "pink scare" of the McCarthy era, which cost many gay and lesbian government workers their jobs. Scholars are looking overseas as well, as studies of gay history in Brazil, France, and Russia attest. "We usually have four panels at the annual convention of the American Historical Association," says Leisa D. Meyer, chair of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History and director of the women's-studies program at the College of William and Mary. "Occasionally you get people coming into a session to let you know that they don't think what you are doing is appropriate. But the professional organization itself has been fairly supportive." Redefining 'Breadth' Scholars in gay history no longer have trouble getting a hearing for their research, but finding employment can be more difficult. "Almost without exception," says Mr. D'Emilio, "those of us who do gay-and-lesbian history don't get jobs in history departments. If we're lucky, we find appointments in American studies, or in gender studies, as in my own case." The problem, he says, is that gay-and-lesbian history "is seen as this bounded, marginal field that doesn't qualify you to be a 'real' historian." "Departments are looking for scholars who can teach broadly," says Ms. Meyer. "But I think 'breadth' is being defined very narrowly. If you are researching a topic in lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered history, you can't do it without knowing history more broadly. It's just common sense. Doing gay history means you are studying the way a part of society affects the whole, and vice versa." While that argument may not persuade committees overseeing the hiring of professors, it has had some effect on how historians approach their work. "More historians who don't work on gay history per se are beginning to take issues of homosexuality seriously when they discover them in their research," says Mr. Chauncey. "I've had graduate students come to ask how to deal with an issue involving homosexuality when it emerges in an archive in connection with a dissertation project completely unrelated to these issues. A decade ago they would have simply closed that folder and moved on to the next. Now, they realize that it might actually be interesting -- that exploring it might open up questions relevant to whatever subject they are studying." Memory and Loss It may be a sign of the times that Mr. D'Emilio says his new book, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, published last month by the Free Press, is not primarily a work of gay history. His account of the civil-rights leader's career places due emphasis on the difficulties that Rustin faced as a gay man -- including his arrest in 1953 for "public lewdness" in Pasadena, Calif., which thereafter left him vulnerable to gay-baiting. But the author's main concern "is to place Rustin at the center of the struggle for peace and racial justice in postwar America," he says. "Gay oppression created a series of obstacles that he had to work around." By blending an account of Rustin's sexuality into an account of his role in the civil-rights movement, Mr. D'Emilio has, in effect, written the first work of post-Lawrence v. Texas gay historiography. It is scholarship that takes the existence of gay and lesbian people for granted; it assumes their impact on the larger society, and vice versa, as a given. All of which might seem like a happy development. Yet there is a touch of something mournful. Mr. D'Emilio describes a time 20 years ago, when Allan Bérubé, author of Coming Out Under Fire, traveled the country giving slide shows about the history of gay men and lesbians during World War II. "It was not uncommon for two or three hundred people to show up," he recalls. "I'm not sure that would happen anymore. The status of being gay or lesbian has changed in the last 20 years, so that there's not the same kind of hunger for history as part of your identity as there once was." The work of memory has become professionalized, he says, yielding scholarship that is "read by our colleagues, or by our students, rather than by the gay community." Perhaps he should visit Tulsa. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 3, Page A14
|
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education