Queer Public History

Essays on Scholarly Activism

Marc Stein

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520973039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Initially rejected by most colleges and universities, queer history was sustained for many years by community-based contributors and audiences. Academic activism eventually made a place for queer history within higher education, which in turn helped queer historians become more influential in politics, law, and society. Through a collection of essays written over three decades by award-winning historian Marc Stein, Queer Public History charts the evolution of queer historical interventions in the academic sphere and explores the development of publicly oriented queer historical scholarship. From the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the rise of queer activism in the 1990s to debates about queer immigration, same-sex marriage, and the politics of gay pride in the early twenty-first century, Stein introduces readers to key themes in queer public history. A manifesto for renewed partnerships between academic and community-based historians, strengthened linkages between queer public history and LGBT scholarly activism, and increased public support for historical research on gender and sexuality, this anthology reconsiders and reimagines the past, present, and future of queer public history.

PART ONE

Queer Memories of the 1980s

Historians often find it strange when they become the objects of historical inquiry. I remember sharing a draft of the final chapter of my 1994 PhD dissertation with my supervisor, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and reading her comments on my discussion of a feminist event that had taken place at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. “I was there,” she wrote in the margins. I regularly share this story when talking with students about the informal disciplinary rule that says that historians should avoid projects that concentrate on the last twenty years. Let scholars in other disciplines or interdisciplinary fields write about the very recent past, some historians say; we will get our turn when more time has gone by, when the dust has settled and we can offer longer-term perspectives.¹ Many historians address the present when writing about the past or offering historical perspectives on recent developments, but that is not the same thing as concentrating primarily on events so new that they feel more like the present than the past.

I recall thinking in 1994 that if my supervisor could add the authority of personal memory to all of the other power she had over my work, I was glad this was my last chapter. This was not because she misused her authority in any way, but how could I critically evaluate my sources when the source was my teacher, especially when I was a younger gay man, she was an older lesbian, and the chapter was about lesbian feminism in the 1970s? It was challenging enough to include her partner as one of my oral history narrators! I may have been a little defensive about this because around the same time a medieval European history specialist in my graduate program jokingly referred to all work on the twentieth century as “current events.” If in many other fields there is a special cachet associated with work on the present, in history there is distinct admiration for studies of the distant past, partly because research on earlier periods generally is more difficult.

Years later, I was simultaneously pleased and troubled when my students began to research things I remember from the 1980s and 1990s. This was especially true when they found traces of my personal past. One student found my 1989 review of Larry Kramer’s book Reports from the Holocaust in Gay Community News. Another found letters from the 1990s that I had written to Joan Nestle at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. It is not unusual for students to find published academic works by their professors, but it felt different when they began to find archival evidence of my life. Maybe it just made me feel old.

I am now close to the age that Smith-Rosenberg was when she wrote “I was there” on my chapter draft. More of my students are interested in historical developments I remember, some of which occurred before they were born. In the last decade, I have begun to write about the late 1970s and 1980s, but for a long time I avoided this. My first book, published in 2000, concluded in 1972, when I was nine years old. My second, published in 2010, concluded in 1973. At the rate I was going, I was barely going to reach 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial and my bar mitzvah, before retirement. But then I leaped into the great (un)known and agreed to write a third book that would focus on the years from 1950 to 1990 (Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement). Sure enough, I raced through the process of drafting the first few chapters, but stalled when I reached the years I remember well. I found it uncomfortable to complete those chapters, partly because my memories kept interfering with the strategies I had used for writing about earlier periods. This was a synthetic work that relied heavily on the scholarship of others, but historians had not yet written about MASS ACT OUT in Boston and ACT UP and Queer Action in Philadelphia. I found this profoundly disconcerting. Writing journalistically about those years, which I had done, was one thing; writing about them as an academic historian was more difficult.

“Queer Memories of the 1980s” reprints two essays originally published in the 2010s. Together they capture historical moments when “I was there” and historiographic moments when I was reconsidering a transformational decade. Today the 1980s is commonly remembered for the Reagan Revolution; the AIDS pandemic; and cultural wars about abortion, drugs, homosexuality, and pornography. Many gay men of my generation recall this as a strange and confusing time—we came out into a world shaped by the sexual revolution and gay liberation, but newly challenged by AIDS and the New Right. I experienced this period as a student at Wesleyan (1981–85), a traveler in Europe and the Middle East (1985–86), and an activist in Greater Boston (1986–89). In the 2010s, the publications reprinted here created opportunities for me to reflect on the 1980s as both participant and historian. Today, they allow me to revisit the era when I first became a queer public historian. In focusing on the 1980s, these essays also establish a foundation for the remainder of the book, which highlights my intensified engagement with queer public history in the 1990s and 2000s.

The first chapter, “Jonathan Ned Katz Murdered Me: History and Suicide,” was published in 2016 on the Organization of American Historians’ Process blog. The OAH, founded in 1907, has seven thousand members and is “the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history.” The blog was created in 2015 to explore “the process of doing history and the multifaceted ways of engaging with the U.S. past.”² With a variety of short essays on diverse topics, it engages larger and broader audiences than those who typically read the OAH’s Journal of American History, which publishes lengthy scholarly essays. I presented an early version of this essay in 2008 at the OAH’s annual conference; academic historian Jim Downs had organized a panel to mark the seventieth birthday of public historian Jonathan Ned Katz. For the panel, attended by between fifty and a hundred people, I decided to speak publicly about my 1982 suicide attempt. I had tried several times before to write about this episode, but the conference provided me with an opportunity to talk publicly about how much Katz’s work had helped me during a difficult time in my life. While I was anxious about sharing this story with an academic audience and concerned about distracting attention away from Katz, I wanted to honor his work, published by a historian without a PhD or academic appointment, by displaying the type of courage it must have taken for him to write Gay American History. Survivors of suicide attempts rarely write about their experiences; coming out about that can be more difficult than coming out as gay. I also wanted to speak out about an ongoing social problem: LGBT youth continue to attempt and commit suicide at staggering rates. My voice broke once during the presentation, but I was pleased by the audience responses and touched by Katz’s reactions.

As brave as I may have been in 2008, it took eight more years before I shared the essay, slightly revised, with a larger audience. When I did so, I did not choose a queer history venue, which might have been easier, but offered it to Process, which reaches mainstream historians. In doing so I worried about whether there would be professional costs, whether I would contribute to negative stereotypes about homosexuality, and whether my language would problematically disavow relationships between homosexuality and “madness.” In this context, I did not share the link with my department chair, my faculty colleagues, or my college’s communications staff, as I ordinarily might have done. Nonetheless I am proud of this essay, primarily for honoring Katz’s work, challenging the silences that surround suicide, and capturing a moment in the history of the 1980s, when the work of LGBT historians saved lives.

The second essay, “Memories of the 1987 March on Washington,” was published in 2013 on the queer history website OutHistory, which was founded by Katz and led at the time by Katz, John D’Emilio, and Claire Potter. I introduced Katz and D’Emilio previously. Potter, a professor of history in the Schools of Public Engagement and director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at the New School in New York, is best known for her work from 2007 to 2015 as the “tenured radical,” through which she “harnessed the power of blogging to address big changes in academic life, political writing and scholarship.”³ As for OutHistory, founded in 2008 by Katz, the website explains: “When the Internet became part of the everyday life of millions—even billions—of people in the 21st century, Katz understood that the work of archiving, establishing LGBTQ chronologies, and highlighting new discoveries begun in Gay American History should continue on a digital platform. Katz’s longtime history as an activist and community scholar also caused him to imagine the site as a place of active community participation in the process of discovering and writing LGBTQ histories. . . . Katz’s vision embraced the work of amateur and professional historians; researchers based in colleges and universities and those working on their own; historians focused on a particular topic and those with wide interests.”⁴

I wrote my account of participating in the 1987 March on Washington in response to D’Emilio’s public call for people who remembered the march to share their personal narratives for an OutHistory exhibit. In writing this essay in 2013, I was struck by the fact that I could not reconstruct the precise chronology of my involvement with GCN, the 1987 March, and MASS ACT OUT. Rereading it today, I am struck by the fact that I was wrong about one thing: I thought I had lost the yellow rubber gloves that I had worn during the week when hundreds of us committed civil disobedience at the US Supreme Court in 1987, but I recently found them. This makes me think about the fallibility of memory and the need to take that into consideration when interpreting oral histories and other types of autobiographical narratives. I say this not because of the need to correct mistakes, though sometimes that might be useful, and more to encourage questions about why people remember and misremember in the ways they do.

In reconsidering the essay now, I see that it was published in 2013, one year before I moved back to the United States after sixteen years of teaching in Canada. For more than a decade, I had shared with Canadian students the story of my 1987 arrest at the Supreme Court. Activists had selected the Court as a target because of its infamous 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld state sodomy laws. In 2004, when I first wrote for a public audience about my participation in the protest (see chapter 4), I avoided affirming explicitly that I had been arrested. At the time I was a legal resident but not a citizen of Canada and feared that my arrest record might endanger my status. By 2010, I was apparently less concerned about this, writing more explicitly about it in my book Sexual Injustice. Three years later, I shared additional details in the essay reprinted here. By this time I was willing to let caution go to the wind, trusting (naively perhaps) that Canada (unlike the United States) would not deport a gay man who had been arrested while protesting an antigay decision by the US Supreme Court. I probably would not have felt the same if I had not been the beneficiary of white middle-class privilege. In any case, this essay, like the previous one, highlights formative experiences in the 1980s that very much influenced my later work as a queer public historian.

CHAPTER 1

Jonathan Ned Katz Murdered Me

History and Suicide

In 1982, after my first year of college, I was murdered. The weapon was seven inches long and two inches thick. It was mostly beige, but also featured the reddish color of blood. It may look old today, but when I first encountered its massive volume, it was in perfect condition. It was almost too large, long, and powerful to handle, but eventually I absorbed all of it. And then, after an unexpected twist, it was among the weapons that killed me. Or perhaps I should say it killed a certain version of me, a version that could not quite figure out how to be happy, how to be gay, or how to live in this world.

The weapon that helped kill me was Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking 1976 book Gay American History. I do not offer here a comprehensive review, a critical analysis, or a celebratory account. Instead I provide a set of personal reflections on what this book meant to me when I encountered it more than thirty years ago, when I was eighteen years old. I first read Gay American History during my first year in college, 1981–82. This was the year I attempted suicide, or, as I sometimes prefer to say, the year I committed suicide. When I was younger I used to talk with friends and acquaintances more regularly about what happened to me during the summer of 1982, when I was living at home with my family in the New York suburbs after an emotionally devastating year. Over time, the stories multiplied. In one, I committed suicide because of homophobic self-hatred. In another, the causes were antigay prejudice, discrimination, and oppression. There were stories of family violence turned inward, a traumatic breakup with a girlfriend, unrequited feelings for a male friend, and chemical imbalances. There was even a story of corporate workplace alienation, which focused on the soul-destroying effects of working for my father’s company that summer. On my suicide’s tenth anniversary, which occurred just after I passed my Ph.D. comprehensive examinations, I rented a cabin in Maine, where I invited my closest friends to join me as I marked a decade of life that I almost did not have.

Since that time I have been less inclined to share the stories of my suicide and in the last decade or two I have been repeatedly surprised to realize that some of my closest friends do not know that I almost did not live to my nineteenth birthday. Certainly most of my professional friends and colleagues have not heard these stories. So why did I offer to speak about this episode on a 2008 conference panel celebrating Jonathan Ned Katz and why am I now sharing this revised version more widely? One reason is captured in my title: this book helped kill my suicidal self. The historian in me is impressed by any work of scholarship that can have such a powerful effect on a reader. But I also want to honor this remarkable book by echoing, in a small and personal way, the courage that it must have taken for Katz to produce this extraordinary work. This is difficult for me to do, but I am inspired to speak about the unspoken by Katz’s book.

My copy of Gay American History is now so old and tattered that each time I turn one of its 1,063 pages I find myself holding a page no longer attached to the rest. It is one of just a few of my books that are now held together with a rubber band. I no longer recall the circumstances that led me to buy Gay American History during my first year of college. I think it’s the first gay-themed book I ever owned. If I had to guess I would say that I purchased it at Atticus Books in Middletown, Connecticut, but it might have been at a feminist bookstore in Hartford or New Haven; or one of the bookstores that I used to frequent in Harvard Square; or Glad Day Books in Boston. Either way, I am sure that when I took the book off the shelf, carried it to the checkout line, interacted with the sales clerk, and paid the bill, my heart was racing and I was overwhelmed by a combination of terror and excitement. I know this because the same thing happened to me for years whenever I purchased a gay or lesbian book. Sometimes it still does.

In the early 1980s, when I purchased Gay American History, Ronald Reagan was the U.S. president, I became eligible to vote, and I was legally required to register for the military draft. I was straight and had a girlfriend, though that year I also fell for a fellow male student, who also happened to be named Jonathan. I may have bought the book because I was working on a paper on “the origins of homosexuality” for an introductory psychology class. I remember that paper well because at the last minute, when I realized that someone would actually be reading what I had written (and that other students might see the title page), I changed the title to “the origins of heterosexuality” without changing the paper’s contents. Who knows what the teaching assistant thought as he or she read a paper with a mismatched title, though I sometimes joke that years before Katz helped establish another field of historical inquiry with the publication of his 1995 book The Invention of Heterosexuality, I precociously gestured in the same direction. Today it does not surprise me that I wrote my first gay studies paper in a psychology course; in the early 1980s psychology was still the dominant discipline in studies of homosexuality. John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), which also changed my life, was not yet published. Gay American History was unique.

That year, as I descended into the depths of a depression that culminated in my suicide, Katz’s book became my lifeline. Each night, as I lay in bed in my dormitory room, I would read one of the hundreds of primary documents collected in Gay American History and my head, heart, and body would respond to the results of Jonathan’s archival research and introductory commentary. I have a vague memory of deciding to ignore Katz’s thematic organization and instead read the documents in chronological order, which may be why even today I remember not only the first document, which tells the story of the murder of a sixteenth-century French interpreter, but also the first item in the book’s Native American section, a sixteenth-century account of “devilish” practices in Florida. In the last few years, as I have returned to Gay American History...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One. Queer Memories of the 1980s
• Part Two. Discipline, Punish, and Protest
• Part Three. Histories of Queer Activism
• Part Four. Queer Historical Interventions
• Part Five. Queer Immigration
• Part Six. Sex, Law, and The Supreme Court
• Part Seven. Exhibiting Queer History
• Part Eight. Stonewall, Popularity, and Publicity
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index