LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
Unfortunately, I must begin this diary with an apology. You see, I had grand plans for a diary on a book that I love very much. But due to technological issues beyond my control, my plans went out the window, leaving very little time to write another diary. And this, kids, is why you don't wait until the last minute--although with dissertation writing this month, I had little other choice.
Which brings me to my diarist beg: I am deep in the throes of writing my dissertation, and I have less time than ever. Technological issues aside, I can write LGBT Literature diaries, but the end of the month is a crunch as I finish up chapter drafts, so of course I always appreciate the help. Over the course of this series, we have had an incredibly diverse array of writers cover a variety of different pieces of LGBT literature. I'd love for your voice to be heard here, as well. You don't have to be an academic, a writer, a prolific reader, or even LGBT. You just have to be a person with an interest in a piece of literature covering LGBT themes. As I said when I took over this series, we have a broad conception of LGBT literature here. If you have something in mind, please get in touch with me, even if you're a lurker who has never written a diary. I am more than happy to put you on the schedule and, if necessary, guide you through the steps of writing a diary. We look forward to hearing your voice here at LGBT Literature!
When I rebooted this series, I did promise a substantive diary every month, and an at least somewhat substantive diary you shall get. After I had my diary disaster, I looked around frantically for something I could cover fairly quickly--in other words, not a complex book that was going to take a while to unpack. As is often the case, the answer was literally under my nose and was actually sitting on my coffee table.
I'm big on coffee table books. When I have visitors, they often seem to enjoy thumbing through them, and I occasionally pick them up as well. I certainly don't mean to demean the book I'm writing about today by calling it a "coffee table book"--it is actually an important historical sourcebook that just so happens to sit on my coffee table.
Over a year ago, I wrote an LGBT Literature diary on another book from my coffee table, Jonathan Ned Katz's 1976 Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Katz's annotated collection of gay and lesbian historical documents stretching from the 1500s to the gay liberation movement is a bedrock of what has become the field of LGBT history. As I noted in the diary, Katz assembled the book at a time when "serious people" did not even have a conception of gay history. Indeed, it was a dangerous time for academics who even flirted with the idea of pursing it as a serious path of study. As Katz explains in his introduction:
Only recently have the first two Ph.D. theses on homosexuality been permitted in the history and political science departments of American universities. The writers were both warned that they were risking their academic careers by taking up this topic; both went ahead nevertheless. I know of two other recent instances in which a history department and an English department did not allow theses on homosexual subjects; another German department Ph.D. candidate was discouraged from writing on homosexual literature because the topic would impair future teaching prospects. Researching the present work without capitalization from academia took considerable ingenuity, and could not have been accomplished without the valuable voluntary assistance of a number of Gay people and a few heterosexuals, all named in the acknowledgments. This book is significantly not a product of academia; it does not play it safe; it is rough at the edges, radical at heart.
Gay American History was indeed radical and far from academic. Katz nevertheless laid important groundwork for the academic study of LGBT history. Over time, really beginning in the early 1980s (particularly after the publication of John Boswell's 1980
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century and John D'Emilio's 1983
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States), the "serious" field of LGBT history took shape. Today, fewer question the legitimacy of the topic, and
Gay American History looks less radical and more
foundational. Katz's work and other sourcebooks are now an important resource for scholars, in addition to being an excellent place to start for laypeople wishing to learn about LGBT history.
The book I'm writing about today is, like Gay American History, a historical sourcebook: We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (1997), edited by Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, both political theorists. And, like Katz's book, it deserves a place on your shelf (or coffee table) if you are interested in LGBT history.
As the title suggests, We Are Everywhere takes a broad look at gay and lesbian politics and assembles a wide variety of writings--organization pamphlets, essays, speeches, newspaper articles, polemics, and many more--that present a chronological view of the ways gay and lesbian people have conceptualized themselves socially and politically. The authors describe the book in the introduction:
We Are Everywhere provides a record of the issues and ideas surrounding the politics of homosexuality. It is not, strictly speaking, a history of lesbian and gay politics; it is, rather, a largely chronological presentation of the ways in which people whose primary sexual attraction to others of the same sex have understood their social and political position. Our goals are to provide readers with some tools to grasp our contemporary situation, to understand who we are by looking at how we came to be who we are; and to involve readers in the activity of theorizing in order to better inform their political action. We do this by presenting historically and theoretically important statements representing the diversity of lesbian and gay politics.
How is this book different from
Gay American History? Well, first, the obvious: Katz's book was published in 1976, and
We Are Everywhere came out in 1997. Clearly, a great deal happened between the gay liberation movement and the age of queer. Second, breadth: Katz covered gay
American history (as is obvious from the title), and while Blasius and Phelan do maintain a heavily American focus, they also give a good amount of attention to gay and lesbian politics in Europe. The American gay movement, after all, did not occur in a vacuum, and in some ways we can trace our history to the movement that arose in Europe (and especially Germany). Third, many documents not available in 1976 have been uncovered, some of which make their first translated appearance in
We Are Everywhere. While it is far from comprehensive (and the editors freely admit this--a comprehensive work would be much longer than the 800 pages that comprise this book),
We Are Everywhere richly expands upon the foundation Katz built in the 1970s.
The book is divided into six chronological sections: gay and lesbian "pre-history" (1700s), the beginnings of a gay and lesbian movement (late 1800s to mid-1900s), the homophile movement (1950-1969), gay liberation and lesbian-feminism (1969 through the 1980s), the politics of AIDS (1980s-1990s), and "the present moment and the future of desire (1988-1994). Within each section, attention is paid to international (mostly European) context and diversity (to the editors' credit, this is not simply a white history). Included are documents from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the German homophile movement, the Soviet Union, in addition to more familiar American sources. What is missing? Well, as the editors admit, not much is included outside of the United States and Europe. Transgender people, as evidenced by the title, are also missing and would have made for an important addition to what, by the 1990s, should have been an LGBT history. While lesbians are included in later sections, earlier sources do not reflect gender diversity, but this says less about the editors and more about the male-centric sources in earlier centuries. It is easy to dwell on what is missing in this 800-page door-stopper, but taken for what it is and what it claims to be, We Are Everywhere has much to offer.
Like I did for Gay American History, I would like to highlight a few sources, just to give a taste of the diversity in the book.
Take, for example, an excerpt on "the crime against nature" from Montesquieu's 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws:
God forbid that I should have the least inclination to diminish the public horror against a crime which religion, morality, and civil government equally condemn. It ought to be proscribed, were it only for its communicating to one sex the weaknesses of the other, and for leading people by a scandalous prostitution of their youth to an ignominious old age. What I shall say concerning it will in no way diminish from its infamy, being levelled only against the tyranny that may abuse the very horror we out to have against the vice.
[...]
I may venture to affirm that the crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom, as among the Greeks, where the youth of that country performed all their exercises naked; as amongst us, where domestic education is disused; as amongst the Asiatics, where particular persons have a great number of women whom they despise, while others can have none at all. Let there be no customs preparatory to this crime; let it, like every other violation of morals, be severely proscribed by the civil magistrate; and nature will soon defend or resume her rights. Nature, that fond, that indulgent parent, has strewed her pleasures with a bounteous hand, and while she fills us with delights she prepares us, by means of our issue, in whom we see ourselves, as it were, reproduced--she prepares us, I say, for future satisfactions of a more exquisite kind than those very delights.
Moving ahead to the Soviet Union (I'm going to be jumping around a lot), here's an excerpt from the entry "homosexuality" in the state-produced Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1930):
HOMOSEXUALITY [Gomoseksualizm]--unnatural sexual attraction to persons of one's own sex (the opposite of the normal--heterosexuality). According to M[agnus] Hirschfeld, about 2 percent of people (more commonly men) suffer from H. H. occurs in all races and social classes and in various professions; homosexuals have included many outstanding people (Socrates, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and others).
[...]
The prognosis for H. is relatively poor. Only a very few cases have been cured, and then usually among those with bisexual tendencies.
[...]
From this it is clear that the Soviet evaluation of the peculiarities and distinctive features of homosexuals completely diverges from that prevalent in the West. In acknowledging the homosexual's mistaken development, society does not and cannot blame these peculiarities on those who have them...In stressing the causes of this anomaly, our society goes beyond prophylactic and curative measures to create the indispensable conditions under which the everyday interactions of homosexuals will be as normal as possible and their usual sense of estrangement will be resorbed in the new collective.
Jumping across the pond and and ahead several decades, here is an excerpt from the Radicalesbians' 1970 flyer "The Woman-Identified Woman":
What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society--perhaps then, but certainly later--cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with herself. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppressions laid on her by the most basic role of her society--the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyse what the rest of her society, more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her "straight" (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society's view of her--in which case she cannot accept herself--and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a torturous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women--because we are all women.
One more, from 1989, and it's a relevant piece considering our current LGBT struggle: gay rights lawyer's Thomas B. Stoddard's "Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry."
Today no American jurisdiction recognized the right of two women or two men to marry one another, although several nations in Northern Europe do. Even more telling, until earlier this year, there was little discussion within the gay rights movement about whether such a right should exist. As far as I can tell, no gay organization of any size, local or national, has yet declared the right to marry as one of its goals.
[...]
Nonetheless--and here I will not mince words--I would like to see the issue rise to the top of the agenda of every gay organization.
Why give it such prominence? Why devote resources to such a distant goal? Because marriage is, I believe, the political issues that most fully tests the dedication of people who are not gay to full equality for gay people, and also the issue most likely to lead ultimately to a world free from discrimination against lesbians and gay men.
Very relevant words, now that marriage equality
does top the priority list of our gay rights organizations--and now that, as we face a likely Supreme Court decision in June extending us the right to marry, we still have no federal civil rights protections in employment or public accommodations.
Okay, one more, which responds to the above piece: Paula L. Ettelbrick's 1989 "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?"
So why does this unlikely event [same-sex marriage] so deeply disturb me? For two major reasons. First, marriage will not liberate us as lesbians and gay men. In fact, it will constrain us, make us more invisible, force our assimilation into the mainstream, and undermine the goals of gay liberation. Second, attaining the right to marry will not transform our society from one that makes narrow, but dramatic, distinctions between those who are married and those who are not married to one that respects and encourages choice of relationships and family diversity. Marriage runs contrary to two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture; and the validation of many forms of relationships.
Obviously, there is a great deal of interesting stuff in
We Are Everywhere, and these few excerpts do not do the book justice. Taken as a whole, the documents Blasius and Phelan have assembled paint a rich, diverse picture of gay and lesbian politics in Europe and the United States. If you don't yet have it, I do recommend it as an addition to your shelf. You might even find yourself reading this tome cover to cover.
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