Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory 0199340196, 9780199340194

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LOST CAUSES

LOST CAUSES Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory

Valerie Rohy

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rohy, Valerie. Lost causes : narrative, etiology, and queer theory / Valerie Rohy. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–19–934019–4 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–19–934020–0 (paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–934021–7 (ebook) 1.  American literature—History and criticism. 2.  English literature—History and criticism. 3.  Homosexuality in literature. 4.  Queer theory. 5.  Narration (Rhetoric)—Social aspects. 6.  Homosexuality and literature. 7.  Gender identity in literature. I.  Title. PS169.H65R64 2015 809’.93352664—dc23 2014005144

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 

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1. Introduction: Cause and Effect 

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2. On Homosexual Reproduction 

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3. Strange Influence: The Picture of Dorian Gray 

56

4. Return from the Future: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography 

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5. Desire and the Scene of Reading: The Well of Loneliness 

104

6. The Future in Ruins: Borrowed Time 

138

7. Contingency for Beginners: The Night Watch 

163

8. Conclusion: Multiply and Divide 

185

Notes  Index 

193 231

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a privilege to thank the many people who directly or indirectly aided my work on this book. I am grateful to all those who made it possible for me to present parts of the project in earlier forms: they include Alfred Bendixen, Abby Goode, Dominique Grisard, Judith Haber, Richard Kaye, Susan Sniader Lanser, E. L. McCallum, Vincent Pecora, Brian Richardson, Ellen Rooney, Avery Slater, Mikko Tuhkanen, Robyn Warhol, Elizabeth Weed, and Ika Willis. Others near and far offered intellectual community and invaluable comments; they include Judith Brown, Lee Edelman, Annamaria Formichella Elsden, Jane Gallop, Joe Litvak, Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Jonathan Mulrooney, and Peggy Phelan. I am grateful to Alison Bechdel for her vital intelligence and terrific kindness, and to Matt Bell for his critical eye and eloquent correspondence. The exceptional University of Vermont students with whom I discussed these texts compelled me to think about them in new ways, and colleagues at UVM encouraged me as well. In particular, I have profited from conversations with Sarah Alexander, Dot Brauer, Paul Deslandes, Loka Losambe, Todd

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

McGowan, Hilary Neroni, Jackie Weinstock, and especially Liz Fenton, the first and most generous reader of these chapters. Though they are unlikely to read this book, others very much sustained its writing. Most of all I thank John Aberdeen, Elliott McEldowney and Liam Nolan, Kristen Johanson and Sean Field, Richard Wells and Kathleen Bailey, Mark Rubin, Michael Faletra and Annie Lighthart, and my family. It has been a great pleasure to work with Brendan O’Neill at Oxford University Press; this project has gained much from his guidance and from the comments of the press’s three anonymous readers. Balasubramanian Shanmugasundram skillfully supervised the book’s production. UVM’s College of Arts and Sciences supported this work with a Dean’s Lecture Award in 2012 and sabbatical time in 2009 and 2010. A version of Chapter 2 was previously published in differences 23.1 (2012), and an earlier form of “Return from the Future: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography” appeared in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011). I thank them for permission to reprint these materials here.

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C ha pt e r 1

Introduction Cause and Effect From fairest creatures we desire increase. Shakespeare, Sonnet 1

Can gay men and lesbians grow in numbers? Can they multiply? The question of whether homosexuality could be acquired earned Freud’s attention, and the view of dangerous knowledge as potentially transformative fueled the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness. In the United States following World War II, homosexual employees were thought to undermine federal bureaus, as a 1950 U.S. government report asserted, because they “frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices.”1 In 1961, a book titled The Sixth Man: A Startling Investigation of the Spread of Homosexuality in America claimed to be “inspired by the enigma of the rising homosexuality in our midst.”2 In later decades, of course, the rhetoric of homosexual increase through influence on others endured in other venues: in 1981 Jerry Falwell, the televangelist and star of the Old Time Gospel Hour, sent his supporters a letter warning that “homosexuals do not reproduce! They recruit! And, many of them are after my

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children and your children.”3 And in 2009, opponents of Annise Parker, a lesbian candidate for mayor of Houston, circulated a letter describing her “Homosexual Agenda,” which purportedly instructed homosexuals to “teach homosexuality to school children.”4 Asserting that mere tolerance of homosexuality invites a pedagogy, if not a practice, of “perverted sex acts,” the letter cultivated the belief that homosexuality can be acquired, like other bad habits, by exposure to baneful influences. Then and now, straight culture’s fear of queer increase depends on etiology, which is to say, a narrative of causation, a theory of what makes people gay or lesbian. Homophobic etiologies insist that homosexuality results from what I will call homosexual ­reproduction—not literal gay parenting, but the fantasy of proliferation through seduction, influence, recruitment, pedagogy, predation, and contagion. 5 To combat such accusations, lesbian and gay communities have increasingly denounced any account that does not regard homosexuality as immutable and essential; instead, they promote theories of biological determinism, tracing its causality to physiological factors such as genes and hormones. These theories, now so naturalized as to seem, to many, common sense, maintain that we are “born gay.”6 Frederick Whitam, a researcher who supports biological explanations, says that this thesis “relieves the families and homosexuals of guilt. It also means that society doesn’t have to worry about things like gay teachers.” 7 Biological-determinist theories are regarded as legally beneficial insofar as they support the designation of homosexuality as an immutable trait, and thus identify gay men and lesbians as a suspect class whose legal treatment requires heightened scrutiny.8 A recent editorial on the legal challenges to California’s Proposition 8 claimed that “biology cannot be avoided in determining whether fundamental rights are protected under the equal protection 2

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clause of our Constitution,” because theories of causation have profound legal consequences.9 And anti-gay voices generally concur that “born gay” arguments support tolerance of homosexuality; a book titled When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They’re Gay assails the “common assumption” that “homosexuality is inborn, therefore God made it; therefore it’s good.”10 In the 1990s, scientific attempts to determine the physiological causality of homosexuality coincided with heated debates. Scholars including Vernon Rosario, Edward Stein, and Anne Fausto-Sterling found in studies of biological causation faulty methodologies, unreplicated results, inadequate definitions of homosexuality, poor selection of sample populations, and inaccurate methods of measurement. Queer scholars took biological studies to task for assuming a categorical difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, denying bisexuality, excluding women, and omitting both historical and cultural differences. Finally, they voiced concerns about the political consequences of a biological etiology and etiology itself.11 As Robert McRuer observes, “Any myth of origin suggests a linear (or we might say ‘straight’) path of development and implies a pure and singular starting point”; as such, it underwrites “a naturalized, reproductive model of development.”12 Where homosexuality is concerned, a “pure and singular” answer to the thorny question of origins appeals to those who seek the clarity of identity and identity politics, but it may also serve to naturalize the heteronormative. Further, the medicalization of homosexuality does nothing to change the devaluation of queerness in a heteronormative culture; nor does it deter those who would interpret same-sex desire as a disorder, a pathological condition. Jennifer Terry notes how much this defensive posture concedes: “‘Biology makes us act this way. We can’t be cured. 3

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We can’t seduce your children.’ There is little in this approach that particularly affirms the value of resisting heteronormativity.”13 When we focus on what causes homosexuality, we neglect what causes homophobia. This study, however, takes a different approach. It does not address the scientific question of whether biological factors cause homosexuality, or the legal question of how best to secure equity. Indeed, it assumes that for many readers these matters have been long settled, and not in the direction of “born gay.” Instead, this book examines the stories told about gay and lesbian etiology and the language in which they are told. Because the scholarly critique of biological determinism in the 1990s came largely from bioscientists and social scientists, there remains a need for readings of homosexual etiologies as narrative forms, hermeneutic strategies, and constellations of recurring tropes available to the methods of literary studies. Taking as its archive largely canonical fiction and nonfiction by British and American authors from Wilde to the present, this book turns from the present to the past, from the popular to the literary, from the polemical to the speculative, to show how fictional and nonfictional accounts of homosexual etiology afford new ways to frame the relations between causality and queerness. What is needed is not a better, more accurate, or more sensitive etiology of homosexuality, but a fundamental change in this discourse—a change in and through etiology itself. Given the many difficulties that etiology presents, one might conclude that it should simply be discarded. Yet its effects are far-reaching; we must work through it, for its discourse has shaped understandings of gay and lesbian sexuality for over a century. Jonathan Culler cites Nietzsche’s reading of causality as an example of the deconstruction of a naturalized, “tak[en] for granted” formation. Nietzsche  shows, in Culler’s words, how the “concept of causal 4

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structure is not something given as such but rather the product of a precise tropological or rhetorical operation, a chronologische Umdrehung or chronological reversal” performed through metonymy or metalepsis.14 That is, only after what will become an effect has occurred does one seek, and thereby produce, its cause. In this sense, the deconstruction of causality does not constitute the elimination of causality; instead, “[t]o deconstruct causality one must operate with the notion of cause and apply it to causation itself.”15 The project of this book is to decenter homosexual etiology from gay and lesbian politics by reading causality against itself.16 After examining the language of etiology in arguments for gay and lesbian equity, this study asks what happens when we acknowledge and even embrace the abject tropes of homosexual reproduction. Informed by that phobic mythology, these chapters comprise a modern bestiary of homosexual causes—bad influence, trauma, “evil reading,” contagion, choice, recruitment—examining the penumbra of homophobic history surrounding each, while considering how each may prove itself perversely useful.17 As such, Lost Causes participates in the movement in queer theory against assimilationist politics and “homonormativity”—that is, as Lisa Duggan puts it, “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising . . . a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”18 Because theories of biological determinism and corollaries like “born gay” claim a categorical difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, they also, ironically, serve efforts of assimilation by allaying fears of queer increase. But a gay activist agenda determined to repudiate whatever makes heterosexuals uneasy is doomed forever to perpetuate those anxieties. Reading homosexual reproduction presents an opportunity to explore ideas that have been deemed politically 5

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unseemly, if not toxic, in gay and lesbian communities. These constitute what David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub call “topics that the imperative of gay pride had tended to place off-­limits to legitimate inquiry, or had simply repressed—shameful topics, that is, or topics gay pride itself might make us ashamed to i­nvestigate”— topics that, in the eyes of some observers, “seem to vindicate antigay prejudice.”19 That reclamation of formerly shaming terms informs my reading of bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, chosen identity in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness, contagion in Borrowed Time, and trauma in The Night Watch. A fundamental point of reference for any study of queer increase is John D’Emilio’s pathbreaking 1983 essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” which traces the twentieth-century social conditions that allowed some men and women to “become gay.” He writes: we are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago, more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be more gay men and lesbians in the future. 20

D’Emilio’s historical assertion, “there are more of us,” and prediction, “there may be even more of us,” imply a political message as well: There’s nothing wrong with more of us.21 My sentiments are the same, but my task is not historical. Thus the more immediate critical contexts of this project come from the work of scholars who, though they may not engage the etiology of homosexuality, address either the actually existing social reproduction of gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities and cultures, or the metaphorical and fantasmatic reproduction of homosexuality as such. The former includes Kathryn 6

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R. Kent’s work on early twentieth-century feminine culture in Making Girls into Women, which examines representations of the “ways lesbians are ‘made’”—which is to say, in Kent’s words, “queer reproduction.”22 Kent is cautious about what precisely can be replicated: most often it is named “lesbian identity” and its production is identified as fantasmatic. In How to Be Gay, David M. Halperin also differentiates between the reproduction of sexuality and that of culture, tracing the “social reproduction of gay male culture.”23 He flirts with scandal, asserting that “gayness can be shared with others and transmitted to them,” but he pointedly separates “gayness” from sexuality, insisting that he is “not talking here about what causes either homosexuality or heterosexuality.”24 Homosexual reproduction operates, for him, as the active perpetuation of a subculture through which queer identities and communities are sustained, yet same-sex desire remains biologically determined. A second thread of inquiry contemplates queer increase in more hypothetical terms that do not exclude desire. Guy Hocquenghem borrows a mot from Gustav Macé: homosexuals are “people who, though not procreating, have a marked tendency to multiply.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, he outlines a horizontal, not vertical, web of affiliation: “Homosexual production takes place according to a mode of non-limitative horizontal relations, heterosexual reproduction according to one of hierarchical succession.”25 In the same tradition, E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen have asked “how lineage can become nonlinear or nonfiliative—or might we even become uninvested in lineage as a temporal paradigm in favor of new ways to figure our relation to each other through time”?26 Tuhkanen imagines “a process of nonfiliation, a queer breeding” that eludes the mandate of reproductive futurism.27 To these we might add recent work by Peter Coviello, who finds in Whitman a queer paternity enabled by metaphorical 7

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surrogacy.28 Each of these critical works is richly provocative, but among them there is no sustained conversation about queer increase and homosexual reproduction: their forays tend to be isolated and discontinuous. Scholars view homosexual reproduction variously as a phobic myth, as (in some sense) an empirical reality, and as a salutary gay fantasy. For some it is a central concern, but for many it is a peripheral issue; some focus on etiology, while others address queer increase; some are anxious to isolate the social reproduction of gay cultures from the cultivation of gay desires, while others welcome the slippage of that distinction.29 This project aims to deepen and sustain that critical conversation by approaching the question of homosexual reproduction through theories of causality derived from psychoanalysis and literature, which index the complexity within notions of homosexual reproduction and extend beyond conventional cause and effect to discover retroactive, absent, contingent, and impossible causalities. That task draws on recent queer studies of temporality, including work by Caroline Dinshaw, Elizabeth Freeman, and Judith Halberstam, which complicate the seemingly obvious, but frequently unreliable, logic of before-and-after that subtends conventional causality. 30 Instances of extraordinary causality serve as a reminder of the queer difference within what can perhaps too easily seem the reproduction of homosexual sameness—that is, the replication of gay and lesbian cultures and identities. Where previous discussions largely address the proliferation of gay identities and cultures in a positive sense (that is, as coherent entities, even when socially judged less than desirable), I am equally concerned with queer negativity, difference, and nonmeaning. I therefore use the adjectives “homosexual,” “gay and lesbian” and “queer” more or less interchangeably, but I distinguish between “homosexuality” and “queerness.” (I choose “homosexual reproduction,” not “gay 8

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and lesbian reproduction,” precisely because the retrograde implications of “homosexual” befit the formerly shaming tropes of causation examined here.)31 While the reproduction of gay and lesbian cultures and identities constitutes a reproduction of sameness, the reproduction of queerness means the proliferation of difference: not only the difference that Derrida associates with writing and that indicated by the Real in Lacan’s model of the Symbolic order, but also the difference that Lee Edelman describes as queer negativity. Edelman writes, “queerness cannot be severed from its structuring negativity and that every effort to give it a literal referent, a determinate content, reflects our investment as social subjects in eliminating what’s queer.”32 If homosexuality can be assimilated to heteronormative culture, as with the inclusion of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in the military and, increasingly, the institution of marriage, queerness is by definition unassimilable, resistant not only to hegemony—identity, law, the Symbolic order, narrative closure—but also to the fixity of its own meaning. And in the effort to think about causation in queerer terms, psychoanalysis and literature, the realms of the analyst and the detective, offer hermeneutic methods attuned to negativity, indeterminacy, and impossibility.

A NA LYST A ND DETECTI V E There can be no misunderstanding that is not based on a fundamental relation to truth. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One

Despite the noxious purposes that figures of corrupting friends, recruiting teachers, and other predatory queers are made to serve, 9

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even the most derogatory notions of homosexual reproduction are not simply mistaken: they convey something that queer observers may not yet acknowledge about the workings of desire and culture. In examining such tropes, the wager of this book is that literature and psychoanalysis are not merely the sources of certain etiological narratives—notably, the detective plot and the case study—but also effective tools for thinking about etiology as a form and homosexual etiologies in particular. In literature, etiology constitutes a specific narrative form, while causality supplies an underlying principle of narrative as such. Aristotle defines narrative as a causally related series of occurrences, and E. M. Forster explains that a plot is “a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.”33 Clearly genres such as the detective plot foreground causation, but even narratives that appear unconcerned with it presuppose causal connections among events. There can be no functional narrative without the presumption of causality, which upholds effects of realism and coherence.34 As Roland Barthes writes, “Although in narrative they are never pure, temporality and causality seem to us to found a sort of naturality, intelligibility, readability.”35 When causal relations are not specified, we infer them; they still seem tacitly at work. As a narrative form, etiology informs any origin myth—any story, we might say, of “how the leopard got his spots.”36 But it finds its greatest purpose in matters of deviance and sin, illness and disorder, exemplified in the first question of Paradise Lost: “what cause / Mov’d our Grand Parents . . . to fall off / From their Creator, and transgress his Will”?37 Stephen Kern regards the n­ ineteenth-century murder novel, with its “clear and strongly deterministic causal factors,” as the epitome of conventional narrative causality.38 With this proclivity for the non-­normative, no etiology can wholly avoid the connotation of pathology, even when it shares the narrative geometry of general causality.39 10

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That is certainly true in psychoanalytic theory, where the case study attempts to identify the origins of an individual’s suffering. In an early essay, Freud designates factors that have “an unambiguous and specific relation to the aetiology of the individual major neuroses.”40 Psychoanalytic case studies share literary structures, and the chain of analogies linking doctor, analyst, reader, and detective is well known. Philip Rieff famously calls Freud a “master of detection” comparable to Sherlock Holmes.41 For Freud the goal of the analyst is that of the detective: to produce a narrative of the past that identifies the cause of a present disorder, whether psychic or social. Calling Freud “as much a novelist as he is an analyst,” Steven Marcus suggests that patients come to Freud with fragmentary narratives; indeed, “illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.”42 Judith Roof concurs: “Narrative defines the parameters of analysis, setting an imagined whole story against the patient’s partial one.”43 Other scientific etiologies—from Darwin to today’s biological determinism—also formally engage with literary traditions, offering narratives in which the past causes something in the present. But literature and psychoanalysis are also technologies for unmaking narratives. Both reserve a central place for indeterminacy and overdetermination and both have the potential to denaturalize “common sense” about such issues as sexuality, agency, signification, and identity. How then might literature and psychoanalysis intervene in queer etiologies? To outline how their premises might be developed, I want briefly to sketch some recurring threads of the following chapters’ arguments and answer some implicit questions about the presuppositions of this project with reference to literary texts and Freud’s case study, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.” 11

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1. The question of homosexual etiology is, in the strongest sense of the term, undecidable. In The Charioteer, Mary Renault compares young soldier Laurie’s homosexuality to his friend Andrew’s status as a British conscientious objector during World War II. Andrew is an anomaly in “one of those army families where every second or third generation throws off a sport, a musician perhaps, or a brilliant agricultural crank.”44 He is a “sport,” a mutation, because he resists war, but that difference signifies sexually as well: Havelock Ellis named homosexuality “a ‘sport,’ or variation, one of those organic aberrations which we see throughout living nature.”45 And in Andrew’s account, conscientious objectors, like gay men, are seen as an evolutionary dead end: “Subconsciously they feel we’re a biological loss and ought not to have women or propagate ourselves.”46 But if they are not encouraged to reproduce sexually, pacifists are believed to proliferate asexually through the transmission of dangerous ideas. Another soldier warns Laurie against intimacy with Andrew, asking, “That kid that does the ward at night, the young one, properly took to you, hasn’t he?” Laurie is noncommittal, but Reg continues: “What I’m getting at, Spud, you want to watch it. No offense.” When Laurie persists in his incomprehension, Reg must be more explicit: “I mean the law. . . . Because that’s an offense. Seducing His Majesty’s troops from their allegiance.”47 Ironically, Andrew is not attempting to seduce Laurie into treason, but Laurie is rather actively trying to seduce Andrew into homosexuality—or at any rate, into a relationship with him. Much like pacifism in The Charioteer, homosexuality has been explained both as an innate quality, a “sport” of nature, and as an acquired corruption, the result of seduction, even by such august observers as Freud. Kern notes that late Victorian accounts of homosexuality conjured multiple causes: “many experts believed that one could be born to homosexuality, be seduced into it, and 12

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catch it like some disease.”48 Freud, as we know, departs from Victorian sexology, but he too finds the etiology of homosexuality paradoxical. In “Psychogenesis,” whose title plainly announces its concern with origins, his question is much like today’s: Is homosexuality innate or acquired? His ambivalent answer shows how complicated that question must be. Freud cites numerous postnatal causes of the young woman’s homosexuality, including a revival of her Oedipal complex at puberty and her disappointment when her mother, not herself, bore her father’s child. While he feels that he has proven the acquired status of her condition, he admits some discomfort: a part even of this acquired disposition (if it was really acquired) has to be ascribed to inborn constitution. So we see in practice a continual mingling and blending of what in theory we should try to separate into a pair of opposites—namely, inherited and acquired characters.49

The structure of this “pair of opposites” repeats throughout the essay’s prolonged traversal of opposing claims. Having asserted that homosexuality is, in this case, both inherited and acquired, he turns again, concluding that it is “congenital” and not “lateacquired” homosexuality. 50 Beyond these answers, however, Freud is divided on the question itself: “whether this was a case of congenital or acquired homosexuality, will be answered by the whole history of the patient’s abnormality and its development. The study of this will show how far this question is a fruitless and inapposite one.”51 The task is “fruitless,” yet it must be engaged; the question can and cannot be answered; the project is and is not intrinsically valid. Each “pair of opposites” leads further from the polarized certainties of our time, with a “both/and” logic that contradicts 13

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the “either/or” on which both sexual difference and object choice are supposed to rely. What is most critical in “Psychogenesis” is not any single assertion but the sum of them all: Freud’s mixture of buoyant confidence and radical doubt amid the uncertainty of the essay’s warring conclusions. The methodological problems haunting extant biologicaldeterminist studies suggest that, like Freud, we should be at least agnostic on the question of causality, rather than embracing theories such as the “gay gene”—and that is to a large degree my attitude here. This book does not attempt to answer the question of causation; its project is not ontological, for its subject is the representation of queerness and queer increase. But I would go further than suspending judgment. Science will never find the biological cause of homosexuality, not because there is no biological cause but because there is no homosexuality: what that term names is too heterogeneous to totalize. To borrow from Judith Butler, “the ‘being’ of being homosexual” must remain in question, for “homosexuality” is a collocation of terms, each with its own relation to biology, contingency, culture, volition, and mutability. 52 It can describe unconscious same-sex desire, consciously acknowledged desire, sexual acts, affective bonding, a private identity, a public identity, (sometimes) gender nonconformity, (various) ethical commitments and political leanings, morphological selffashioning, and/or myriad forms of engagement with queer subcultures. Pace “born gay,” some of these dimensions are patently mutable. Changing sexuality is, after all, precisely the intention of National Coming Out Day, which attempts to influence people to “be” gay, where that being signifies a public, politicized identity. In 2013, the Human Rights Campaign produced a National Coming Out Day video whose message included the curious statement: “This is who I am / I need to finally be who I am.”53 “Who I am” is, 14

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presumably, a man who loves men or a woman who loves women, but one can occupy this identity without “being” it, for to “be” gay is, in this context, to be out and visible. 2. The alignment of innate/acquired with minoritizing/universalizing, ­nature/culture, and pro-gay/anti-gay is itself unstable. One need not accept all of Freud’s assertions on homosexual etiology to grasp how psychoanalysis unravels seemingly obvious ideas about the origins of desire. Psychoanalytic theory offers compelling reasons to see same-sex desire as innate that have nothing to do with biological determinism and do not exclude the possibility that homosexuality is also acquired. “Born gay” and “gay gene” rhetoric assumes that homosexuality may be deemed either innate, natural, and biological (ostensibly a pro-gay stance), or acquired, learned, and socially constructed (regarded as a homophobic view). Correspondingly, biological-determinist theories defend what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a minoritizing model of sexuality, in which “there is a distinct population of people who ‘really are’ gay,” rather than the universalizing model in which “sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities.”54 Although for Sedgwick neither position has an inherent political valence—they operate simultaneously to maintain heteronormative structures— both pro-gay and anti-gay arguments now presume that the minoritizing notion of natal homosexuality serves gay interests. In “Psychogenesis,” as we have seen, Freud entertains the possibility that homosexuality can be both innate and acquired, troubling the polarized terms of today’s etiologies. How can this be? In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he considers but rejects the theory of congenital inversion: homosexuals’ difference cannot be innate because “it is possible to show that very early in their lives a sexual impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect 15

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in the shape of a tendency to homosexuality.”55 One must always become homosexual—or heterosexual—out of a long and necessarily incomplete negotiation with sociality, leaving behind a polymorphous perversity. While the capacity for same-sex desire is innate, that desire does not constitute homosexuality, but rather one aspect of an undifferentiated libido; there can be no natal homosexuality because both homo- and heterosexuality depend on “a restriction in the choice of object.”56 Both homosexuality and heterosexuality require the recognition of sexual difference to set in motion the narrowing of infantile perversity into more or less acceptable channels. So although Freud’s notion that same-sex desire is natural and innate shares crucial premises with today’s “born gay,” it produces precisely the opposite conclusion, for it does not serve the effort to delineate a separate homosexual population. In his case against the biological imperative, Martin Duberman evokes Sedgwick’s minoritizing model: “Most heterosexuals are delighted with the suggestion that homosexuality is inborn. It then becomes a trait confined to a small number of people who are distinctly Other, wholly unrelated to oneself.”57 Freud, however, proffers a universalizing theory of innate same-sex desire: “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious.”58 His theory of what causes homosexuality is thus a backward version of “born this way” that fractures the alignment of innate/acquired with minoritizing/ universalizing. Although extending queer potential to “all human beings” evacuates the function of innate homosexuality as the basis for juridical protection from bias, Freud’s universalizing theory is also politically progressive, as Henry Abelove contends, since “the corollary of the humane ascription of minority status was this: that people outside the minority need no longer think 16

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of themselves as in some important way homosexual too.”59 The Freudian view allows same-sex desire to remain, in Sedgwick’s words, “an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities.”60 One might compare this universalizing theory of innate same-sex desire to that of Adrienne Rich in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which also rejects the oppositions that structure today’s etiological discourse. Instead of making innate homosexuality and voluntary homosexuality antithetical, Rich suggests that only by choosing lesbianism can women restore the organic female orientation from which they have been culturally alienated.61 3. Etiological projects are structured by multiple forms of retroaction. As Culler notes, the putative sequencing of cause-before-effect is subject to critical reversal: “If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin.”62 The same complication of temporality can be observed in the etiological narratives of literature and psychoanalysis as they examine past events to determine the cause of some present disorder. In psychoanalysis, that disorder is typically neurosis, while in literature it tends to be crime; both constitute a traumatic break in ordinary temporality. James M. Bromley explains that “[e]tiologies, by definition, cast a retrospective meaning on previous events; as such, they structurally resemble traditional narratives in terms of closure.”63 In each case, closure requires the orderly narration of causes and effects that have been obscured or disrupted. Writing on the detective novel, Slavoj Žižek calls the crime “an event that cannot be integrated into symbolic reality because it appears to interrupt the ‘normal’ causal chain,” turning events into a “lawless sequence” that the detective must correct by renarrating the series of events in proper order.64 Barthes makes 17

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a similar point, noting an effect of “postponed causality”: “detective work consists in filling in, backwards, the fascinating and unendurable interval separating the event from its cause; the detective, emanation of the entire society in its bureaucratic form, then becomes the modern figure of the ancient solver of riddles (Oedipus), who puts an end to the terrible why of things.”65 Both indicate that somehow the inaugural moment of the plot produces a disturbance in causality and temporality, but Žižek attributes that disturbance to the crime and Barthes locates it in the crime’s solution. Both are correct: the etiological project of the detective narrative can reestablish “the ‘normal’ causal chain” only through abnormal methods, through the retroactive construction of events. Distorted temporality is a symptom of the problem, but it is also the very mechanism of the solution. In psychoanalysis as well, the etiological project works through temporal disorder to amend temporal disorder. Freud believes that a case study such as “Psychogenesis” should delineate causal relations that function definitively backward or forward, yet the young woman’s story presents a “a disturbing state of affairs” regarding “aetiological factors that decide a given result”: he can only narrate it backward and cannot predict the eventual effects from what he has identified as the causal factors. Freud attributes this failure to the multiple factors at work in the case, but the real problem is the form of etiological narrative: “the chain of causation can always be recognized with certainty if we follow the line of analysis, whereas to predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible.”66 With its other notable paradoxes, the case yokes together certainty and impossibility to describe the function of retroactive causality in the psychoanalytic method: Freud proceeds backward into the past in order to track, among other things, the operations of Nachträglichkeit. As Malcolm Bowie puts it, “mental causality 18

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seemed to have one peculiarity that set it apart from the rest of nature: in the mind, the present could alter the past.”67 Perhaps this is why there is also something atemporal, unnatural, and uncertain about causal relations. Lacan argues that causality as such is disturbed causality: “Whenever we speak of cause, on the other hand, there is always something anti-conceptual, something indefinite. . . . In short, there is cause only in something that doesn’t work.”68 And Barthes, from a rather different perspective, concurs. The same texts that foreground the restoration of causal order are also “constituted by the disturbance of causality, as if the spectacle (‘notability,’ one should say) began where causality, without ceasing to be affirmed, already contained a germ of deterioration, as if causality could be consummated only when it began to rot, to disintegrate.”69 In such texts, literature joins psychoanalysis in addressing the contingency and artificiality of what pass for etiological conclusions, whether in the detective story or the case study: both exercises in logic are inextricable from logical fallacies such as post hoc propter hoc. Conventional etiologies produce merely the illusion of coherent meaning out of chaos. 4. Sexuality itself is subject to multiple forms of retroaction. Homosexual etiologies are no exception to the paradoxical structure of etiological narrative, but their particular causes and effects inevitably engage with the temporal ordering of heteronormative society.70 That is why retroactivity and unsequencing in narratives of queer causality function so intricately with and against the backwardness of etiological narrative as such. As Kathryn Bond Stockton shows, among the many forms of retroactive construction to which the queer child is subject, the later invention of an early homosexuality is crucial.71 But this retroactivity extends beyond the queer child to his straight brother: it is not that all children are born straight, but that their organic straightness has 19

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been invented after the fact by the same discourse in which “afterwardness,” the après coup, comes to signify perversion. That process goes unremarked because the surveillant property of homosexual etiology reinforces the deviant status of its object, as opposed to the unquestioned privilege of heterosexuality. As Paul Morrison observes, when “the pervert comes to occupy center stage,” white male heteronormativity remains “the cause that need never speak its name,” protected by its veil of normalcy.72 When in Dorian Gray Sibyl Vane falls in love with Dorian, her love causes effects—it makes her “altered” and unlovable—but there is no question of its cause.73 In their efforts to naturalize homosexuality, proponents of biological determinism have no interest in showing the unnaturalness of heterosexuality, the ways in which it must itself be taught, learned, communicated—in short, culturally reproduced. They merely ask that homosexuality be accorded the same “privilege of unknowing.”74 One of the most pernicious effects of “born gay,” then, is its implicit corollary, “born straight,” which obscures all the ways in which heteronormative culture works systematically to interpellate individuals to their proper roles through influences, incentives, and threats. Those who, like the opponents of Annise Parker, insist that queers “recruit children to their lifestyle,” do not merely assert the artificiality of homosexuality but also, implicitly, the naturalness of heterosexuality. In fact, it is heterosexuals who recruit. Every child is assumed to be straight at birth, yet every child is also taught to be straight by family, school, media, and peers. In The Well of Loneliness, Stephen enjoys her father’s fond tolerance, but her mother subjects her to the “soft dresses and sashes, and ribbons, and small coral beads, and openwork stockings” that she hates. A playmate, “already full of feminine poses,” says “‘Can’t you knit?’ . . . looking scornfully at Stephen, ‘I can—Mother called

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me a dear little housewife.’” Neighbors invite her to dinner parties that are “insistent upon sex distinction,” including, as they approach the dining room, a “solemn and very ridiculous procession, animals marching into Noah’s Ark two by two.” Finally, of course, her mother banishes her from home after her failure to recruit Stephen as a heterosexual.75 The violence with which the Right denounces “born gay” owes much to this dynamic: it is the effort to conceal the unnatural form of heterosexual reproduction that impels the association of homosexuality with unnatural (discursive or memetic) proliferation and heterosexuality with natural (sexual or genetic) increase. From the mythology of the institution to the habitus of the individual, the specter of queers’ unnatural reproduction secures heterosexuality’s claim to naturalness; the essential falsehood is not that homosexuality is artificially and retroactively reproduced, but that heterosexuality is not. In the chapters that follow, such questions of retroaction, sexuality, etiology, and narrative form take shape in the belated formation of lesbian identity through the act of reading, the ways in which queerness “returns from the future” to a text, the backward invention of gay ancestors, the peculiar temporality of the coming-out narrative, the impossible choice of sexual and racial identities, and the insistence of non-chronological narrative forms, as well as Lacan’s notion of a cause produced, impossibly, by its own effects.

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On Homosexual Reproduction Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy. Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”

In a 2003 interview appropriately conducted in the city of Darwin, Australian Prime Minister John Howard defended his view that gay marriage should be prohibited because same sex unions do not, like heterosexual marriage, enable “the survival of the species.”1 His language was not anomalous; today the case against marriage equality often includes a Darwinian vocabulary, if not a Darwinian spirit. In a 2004 lecture promoted by the Family Research Council, Allan Carlson cited science as the pretext for heteronormative bias: “new research guided by evolutionary theory does agree with Genesis that humankind, from our very origin as unique creatures on earth, has been defined by heterosexual monogamy,” in view of which, he concludes, “homosexuality emerges as an obvious biological and cultural dead-end.”2 On another Christian website, Kelly Hollowell urges readers to take a “Darwinist” view, consider the “theory of evolution,” acknowledge 22

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the importance of “propagation of a species,” and thereby recognize that “same-sex marriage would bring reproduction to a screeching halt, leading to the eventual extinction of the human race.”3 A “biblical” site reasserts this claim, conjuring the possibility that humanity will “go extinct” because “homosexuality is counter productive to the survival of the human race.”4 Given the religious Right’s vocal rejection of evolution in favor of creationism and its ongoing assault on the teaching of evolutionary science in public schools, its appeal to Darwinian concepts is curious; yet groups like the Family Research Council make no effort to reconcile their attacks on evolutionary theory with their “Darwinian” case against homosexuality. 5 What anxieties produce this odd confluence of science and faith? Why is evolutionary theory invoked against gay marriage? And why should the question of etiology—of what causes homosexuality—be the fulcrum of arguments for and against gay and lesbian civil rights? There is much at stake in the question of whether homosexuality is acquired or innate, not because the question can be settled but precisely because it cannot. Although the vocabulary of science figures prominently in the statements I have cited, their mode of persuasion is rhetorical, not empirical, and it is as rhetoric that I mean to examine them. In particular, I want to consider what homophobic vulgar Darwinism may tell us about the internal tensions of heteronormative discourse and the limitations of recent lesbian, gay, and bisexual responses. The “Darwinian” language of anti-gay factions is neither accidental nor wholly cynical, just as the use of evolution against homosexuality is not merely an expedient suspension of the case for “intelligent design”: instead, it symptomatizes a real, if unacknowledged, formation in heteronormative culture, structuring not only anti-gay rhetoric but also pervasive fantasies about sexuality, reproduction, and the human. 23

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In fact, tropes of homosexual sterility mask a fear of what I designate homosexual reproduction—that is, the ability to multiply nonbiologically in an unsentimental process of replication, repetition, and representation. This vision of how homosexuality persists has made etiological questions central to gay and lesbian politics.6 Anti-gay voices insist that homosexuality results from bad influences, recruitment, or seduction, and pro-gay activists make a case for biological determinism, insisting that they were “born gay.” Although conventional wisdom currently aligns the notion of queer increase with anti-gay politics, I will show how certain attempts to refute the phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction support straight hegemony and deform efforts to conceptualize same-sex desire. Where etiology is concerned, both gay and anti-gay positions share a heteronormative ideology anchored by tropes of fertility and sterility. In anti-gay claims, evolutionary theory appears in altered forms, collectively signified by “Darwin” but more indebted to Herbert Spencer, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and later neoDarwinists than to Charles Darwin himself. The issue, then, is not what Darwin’s work signifies for gay and lesbian politics, but rather how a broader discourse, a vulgar Darwinism, takes his name as shorthand for assumptions about reproduction, sexuality, and sterility that often defy the logic of his theories. What is most Darwinian about the anti-gay statements I have cited is their vocabulary: survival of species, evolution, extinction, procreation. But while On the Origin of Species does address survival and extinction, it is more concerned with change over the course of time. The root of such changes is arbitrary, consisting of random mutations, but the advantages or disadvantages conferred by particular variations determine whether they will persist through what Darwin terms “natural selection.” Given the 24

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degree of variation within species, he writes, “individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind.” 7 Conversely, he writes, “Rarity, as geology tells us, is the precursor to extinction. . . . But we may go further than this; for as new forms are continually and slowly being produced, unless we believe that the number of specific forms goes on perpetually and almost indefinitely increasing, numbers inevitably must become extinct.”8 The question of survival, however, is more complex than sheer multiplication. Reproduction is central to Darwin’s work, as the evolutionary changes he describes occur along the diachronic axis of successive generations, but it is by no means the sole or even the paramount determinant of evolutionary outcomes. Nonetheless, that is what anti-gay arguments glean from Origin, borrowing Darwin’s lexicon to pit survival, procreation, and increase against rarity, sterility, and extinction. Historically, the dialogue between homosexuality and evolutionary theory began with the invention of modern sexual identities. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species first appeared in 1859, only a decade before Karl Benkert’s coinage of the term homosexual, and it left its mark on nineteenth-century sexology: some researchers compared homosexuals to undeveloped “primitives,” while others imagined homosexuality as a peculiar adaptation to modernity. But as Jennifer Terry notes, some nineteenth-century scientists expressed concern for humanity because “the prevalence of homosexuality in the modern world suggested a potentially dangerous turn toward extinction.”9 In this context, it is not difficult to see how a vulgar Darwinism might appeal to the anti-gay voice of our own time, as in the proclamation by conservative radio host “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger that homosexuality is a biological “error” because “it doesn’t result in reproduction.”10 Countering that 25

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charge, queer observers have sought to integrate homosexuality with evolutionary theory, focusing on the essential role of natural variation. Without a range of morphological and behavioral attributes, species could not adapt successfully to their changing environments. An editorial in Toronto’s Globe and Mail responds to Schlessinger: “Biology is all about deviance. Species arise because variant traits are selected for by the environment. . . . Variancy is part of normalcy.”11 Indeed, in a study of same-sex sexual behavior in animals, Bruce Bagemihl suggests that seemingly “unproductive” and “aberrant” forms of sexuality are beneficial forms of biological diversity, such that “homosexuality is part of our evolutionary heritage.”12 Moreover, as Bagemihl shows, non-procreative sexual be­ havior, whether same-sex or other-sex, is common in nature. It would be untrue, then, to say that the most fertile individuals benefit their species most or that the least fertile jeopardize it. Elizabeth Grosz argues that “nonreproductive organisms, even in Darwin’s writings, can nevertheless be explained in terms of the evolutionary advantages they offer, not to the gene pool, but to the social group. . . . This must be, in part, an evolutionary explanation for the ongoing production and survival value of homosexuality and its near ubiquity in all known cultures.”13 Darwin writes, “Sterility has been said to be the bane of horticulture; but on this view we owe variability to the same cause which produces sterility; and variability is the source of all the choicest productions of the ­garden.”14 Although he does discuss organisms’ tendency to proliferate—“every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers”—he can be misread by even such careful scholars as Adam Phillips, who gleans “the fact that we want to survive and reproduce.”15 The problem is not merely that many of us emphatically do not 26

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want to reproduce (nor do we necessarily want to survive), but the way in which, in Phillips’s formulation and others, survival is equated with reproduction, much as reproduction is yoked to heterosexuality. Biologically, as Joan Roughgarden writes, “sex is not synonymous with reproduction but is one means of reproduction”; after all, many species reproduce asexually.16 Lynn Margulis and Dorien Sagan note that while humans generally assume that “the ‘purpose’ of sex is reproduction,” that is by no means universally true: “All organisms reproduce; sex, on the other hand, is optional.”17 Although evolutionary theory is concerned with the reproduction of organisms, then, reproduction does not require heterosexuality or any other sexuality, much less the normative gender roles, behaviors, and ideological formations attendant on heterosexuality as a social structure. Nonetheless, anti-gay voices invoke Darwin to underscore the supposition that heterosexuality is reproductive and homosexuality is not. Heterosexuality, in their words, enables the “survival” and “propagation” of the “species,” even as homosexuality means “extinction,” a “dead end.” For Schlessinger and others, heterosexual reproduction is no longer a means to a more vital end, but an end in itself. Conflating heterosexuality with reproduction and reproduction with futurity, they imbue conventional social arrangements with all the urgency of collective survival, making the defense of straight culture against the predations of homosexuality seem a matter of life and death. So pervasive is the notion of homosexual sterility that a popular amalgam of schadenfreude and urban legend, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action, pauses to debate whether homosexuals can be recognized for the suicidally stupid truncation of their genetic lines if, as queers, they are destined not to reproduce anyway. Named for Darwin but indebted to Spencer, the Darwin Awards books and website make comedy of 27

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an evolutionary axiom: if the fittest survive, here are the unfit who did not. Whether or not gay men and lesbians figure in such tales, The Darwin Awards wonders whether all homosexuals are not, in effect, already dead. Should we even register fatalities among “groups who have opted out of the opportunity to impact the gene pool by declining to reproduce?”18 Moving from individual to community, the question links suicide to genocide: “groups have perished as a result of such beliefs.” But although this rehearses the trope of homosexual sterility, it does not accuse homosexuals of foreclosing any future other than their own. Other commentators will not miss that opportunity. In response to charges of sterility, LGBT communities have for decades explained the reality of gay parenting, evidence of their material contribution to the sacred work of childrearing. Gay men and lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people can and do become parents in many different ways. And these communities have long known how to constitute for themselves non-genetic kinship structures—in Kath Weston’s words, the “families we choose.”19 But while it is useful to acknowledge alternative genealogies, that acknowledgment doesn’t go far enough. Gay men and lesbians can rightly cite their parental roles, but to grant the moral high ground to family and childbearing concedes too much. Instead of accepting that only procreation gives meaning to our existence, we might ask: How much of the supposed biological imperative of procreation is in fact a cultural mandate? What does marriage really have to do with fertility? And how do such terms enable heterosexuality to reproduce its own hegemony? To question the equation of heterosexuality with fecundity, we must separate the event of conception, the meeting of sperm and ovum that begins human gestation, from heterosexuality as a cultural system of relationships, institutions, values, and rituals. 28

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The  former is essential for human life to continue; the latter is not. This distinction resembles Roughgarden’s effort to distinguish breeding from mating in the animal kingdom—that is, to separate the specific acts necessary for procreation from social relationships that include bonding and various sexual behaviors.20 Despite his methodological differences, Freud makes a similar distinction, writing of “sexuality”: “I have been using the word in a far wider sense than that in which you have been accustomed to understand it. . . . But the question arises whether it is not rather you who have been using the word in far too narrow a sense by restricting it to the sphere of reproduction.”21 Much as “sexuality” elides the distinction between mating and breeding, “heterosexuality” conflates the rudiments of biological procreation with the host of other expected behaviors, ideological formations, and social taboos in which they are invariably cloaked. Assuming that the survival of Homo sapiens is in fact a goal to be desired, the conception, birth, and nurturance of children do not depend on straight institutions. Were heterosexuality to vanish, procreation would continue, whether through bisexuality, artificial insemination, or purely instrumental sexual acts between men and women whose erotic cathexes or lasting bonds lay elsewhere. The only thing that tolerance of homosexuality may end is the status of heterosexuality as a cultural edifice whose meaning depends on its endless reconstruction of a categorical difference from abjected sexual others. Though the prospect of reproduction without heterosexuality will seem monstrous to some, the point is not whether or not we should inhabit such a world. The point is that we could, and the fact that humanity can continue without heterosexuality nullifies the claim that any deviation from straight conventions is genocidal—the argument of John Howard and the Family Research Council. 29

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QUEER INCR EASE When opponents of marriage equality posit an absolute distinction between straight fecundity and queer sterility, however, there is another paranoid structure at work. Assuming that homosexuals do not reproduce, vulgar Darwinists might simply read the barrenness of same-sex love as the triumph of heterosexuality, a consoling vision of perversion’s genetic endgame. Or taking reproduction as a paramount goal, they might seek to remand homosexuals to their proper parental duties. But that is not the fantasy that emerges: instead it is heterosexual reproduction whose ruin they imagine. How could homosexuality, epitomized by same-sex marriage, possibly threaten straight fertility? It is as if all that lures people to the arduous business of childbearing is the social validation of wedlock, without which incentive—soon to be despoiled by gay and lesbian inclusion—heterosexual reproduction would cease. But the conservatives who not long ago bemoaned the phenomenon of “unwed mothers” thereby acknowledged that marriage, gratifying as it may be, is hardly a prerequisite for procreation. Why then would gay marriage lead to extinction? Because in heteronormative mythology sexuality is a zero-sum game—every gain for gays is a loss for straights, and homosexuality, unopposed, will gain in numbers. The endorsement of gay marriage, then, like all gestures of tolerance, would imperil the hetero simply by failing to suppress the homo. So ably do they proliferate, this story goes, that homosexuals, left unchecked, will crowd out heterosexuals, until finally the disappearance of straight families will bring an end to parenting. Hence the urgency of the anti-gay campaign: if homosexuals are not obliterated, the human race will be. The charge that gays are too sterile derives from an opposite horror: they are too fertile. From this springs the phobic rhetoric 30

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that—positing homosexuality as acquired, not innate—sees the gay population as capable of infinite growth, naturally inclined to expand its unnatural ranks through seduction, indoctrination, or recruitment. From such notions, Lee Edelman suggests, comes the “pervasive homophobic misreading of homosexuality as c­ ontagious—as something one can ‘catch’ through contact with, for instance, a teacher or parent who is lesbian or gay. Thus,” he continues, “even before the historical accident of the outbreak of ‘AIDS’ in the gay communities of the West, homosexuality was conceived as a contagion, and the homosexual as a parasite waiting to feed upon the straight body.”22 The ugly depiction of homosexuality in American popular culture bears out this premise: the last half-century has seen little change in the 1960s language about “infecting children,” “teaching” perversion, or “mak[ing] someone else that way.”23 A 1998 article on a website affiliated with the conservative group Focus on the Family offers a list of familiar “causes of homosexuality,” including “media and culture,” “molestation and pedophilia,” and “seduction by peers.”24 These figures of queer increase constitute a major homophobic tropology, reflecting straight culture’s enduring narratives of gay seduction, corruption, and contagion. In heterofamilial logic, then, homosexuality not only refuses natural reproduction but also constitutes a unnatural form of reproduction. As Guy Hocquenghem observes, when the homosexual refuses the mandatory Oedipal reproduction of the normative family, he is regarded as “the end of the species.” Homosexuality, he continues, has been regarded as “the ungenerating-­ungenerated terror of the family, because it produces itself without reproducing.”25 To borrow from Elizabeth Bishop’s portrait of a queer Robinson Crusoe, in a poem that was inspired by Darwin’s Galápagos Islands journals, they, too, will propagate their kind.26 31

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So when a Christian website warns that same-sex marriage will lead to the “eventual extinction of the human race,” the fear is not that homosexuals will not reproduce, but that they will. Such rhetoric calls homosexuality an evolutionary failure to negate its evolutionary success. In this anxious etiology, gay reproduction is not a vertical descent of man but a web of horizontal relations that reinvent human relationality and genealogy, forging what Hocquenghem calls “non-limitative horizontal relations” instead of the vertical “hierarchical succession” of Oedipal genealogy.27 Hocquenghem is influenced by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of the rhizome offers an evocative trope for horizontal reproduction. As they explain, “the rhizome is an antigenealogy.”28 Its task is to “oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction,” even imagining forms of evolution without sexual reproduction.29 The trope is resonant with possibilities; Mikko Tuhkanen, for example, explicitly links Hocquenghem and Deleuze and Guattari to “a queer breeding” that would resist reproductive futurism. 30 While genes pass vertically from parent to child, memes move horizontally through culture; homosexual generation could therefore proceed across a population. 31 Further, genetic inheritance makes metaphoric connections based on essence, but a perverse homosexual reproduction would produce metonymic bonds of arbitrary contiguity. The symbolic hierarchy that, as Paul de Man writes, depends on the “mystified assertion” of the “superiority of metaphor over metonymy,” privileging metaphor as the bearer of meaning, motivation, and presence extends to sexuality. 32 While the heteronormative family is metaphorical, structured by relationships through which the essence of identity is ostensibly inherited like property and genetic material, homosexual reproduction works metonymically, 32

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replacing the meaning-making order of metaphor with the contingency of metonymy. What Edelman calls “the ‘touch,’ the random contact, that characterizes metonymy” opposes the purposeful inheritance of straight familialism. 33 But there is one more trope that describes how homosexuality appears to the anti-gay constituency: as a dangerous idea that persists like a biological trait, a barren desire that outstrips heterosexual reproduction. In that rhetoric, same-sex desire is construed as the expression not of a gene but of a meme. Coined by Richard Dawkins as a semiotic extrapolation from Darwinian theory, the meme is a fragment of meaning that recurs and mutates like a gene: a catchphrase, perhaps, or a practice or belief. As a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” the successful meme shares the same qualities as the successful gene: “longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity.”34 It survives through asexual ­reproduction—either by following vertical genealogies (like a cultural tradition handed down to the young), or by traveling horizontally across a population (like a fashion trend or neologism). The concept of the meme has been both influential and controversial, so let me be clear: I would not suggest hat homosexuality is an expression of a meme, or even that theories of memetics are fully tenable. But the meme need not explain homosexuality in order to explain particular mechanisms of heteronormative ideology, and we need not endorse memetics categorically to see how some of its premises operate in the “Darwinian” case against gay marriage. Though the arguments against gay marriage do not explicitly name memetics, their concept of homosexuality coincides with Dawkins’s model. From its first formulation, the meme has been invoked to account for human behaviors that appear not to serve the supposed organic purpose of procreation. Dawkins notes that the interests of memes and genes sometimes conflict, as in “the 33

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habit of celibacy.”35 The figure of the celibate Catholic priest marks a switch point between accounts of sexuality and religion, both recurring concerns in meme theory. In fact, Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have, from different perspectives, described the spread of religious beliefs—including, presumably, those of today’s anti-gay factions—in the same memetic terms through which the religious Right implicitly frames homosexuality. 36 Dawkins continues, with a certain willful innocence, “The meme for celibacy is transmitted by priests to young boys. . . . The medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and the written word, personal example and so on.”37 In the case of the priest, “the meme for celibacy could have a greater survival value than the meme for marriage.” Piously or perversely, this case study shows how adult men influence impressionable boys to adopt unusual sexual identities and to replicate their own life paths. 38 The concept of the meme thus combines a number of familiar tropes from the myth of homosexual reproduction. If a meme is a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” that travels from person to person, in memetic terms, homosexual acts and identities would be expressions of the homosexual idea. Anti-gay notions of contagion, seduction, and bad influence describe forms of self-replication not by the gay individual, but by the queer meme, through which an ostensibly sterile homosexuality threatens to overwhelm straight familialism. That premise lies at the heart of the cultural phobia—call it an “anxiety of ­influence”—about the transmission of same-sex desire through social contact. 39 The homophobic rhetoric of human extinction depends on a belief in homosexual fertility, not in the realm of genetics but in that of memetics. Like the straight gene, the gay meme would replicate itself, mutate, and find expression—but the meme, in this fantasy, does it better. 34

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Even as it describes the essential structure of the anti-gay position, however, memetics proves a limited theory. It has been faulted for its divergence from Darwin’s thought, its elastic application to practically anything, and its lack of empirical grounding. Politically the meme is also something of a paradox—at heart a paranoid trope, but one that inherently naturalizes culture. Dawkins introduces the meme as ethically neutral, like the gene it mimics, and his examples are largely benign: “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”40 Yet he also compares memetic replication to both infection and procreation, implying that the two may be inseparable: the action of a “fertile meme” resembles “the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”41 Such imagery makes his conclusion, a vision of human rebellion against deterministic “replicators,” less sanguine than it may sound, for with the trope of infection comes anxiety.42 In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag observes, “Notions of conspiracy translate well into metaphors of implacable, insidious, infinitely patient viruses.”43 Gay and lesbian readers know only too well how the damage wrought by a particular virus, HIV, on their communities was compounded by antigay paranoia. Paranoia is the meme’s affective default setting, and it resounds in the arguments of John Howard, Kelly Hollowell, and others for whom the tolerance of gay and lesbian individuals augurs human extinction, a “great catastrophe,” the “end of the world.”44 Rather than explaining homosexuality, meme theory lends itself to the study of hegemony, even if, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s apt figure, too much paranoid reading may “unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills.”45 Memetics can most effectively describe how “units of cultural transmission” inhabit and determine what we misrecognize 35

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as individual, sovereign subjectivity. Slavoj Žižek takes this approach, comparing the meme’s mastery to that of Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic order: “What is so unsettling about this notion is that we, humans endowed with mind, will, and an experience of meaning, are nonetheless unwitting victims of a ‘thought contagion’ that operates blindly, spreading itself like a computer virus.”46 Yet despite its suspicions, memetics plays a strangely passive role. While it offers a glimpse of ideological control, it also obstructs critical intervention, for it focuses on discrete units of signification, precluding the study of their systematicity. With its allusion to biology, the meme tends to naturalize cultural formations, rendering them immutable and ethically irreproachable. These problems are necessarily political: as feminist theory has shown, naturalizing what is in fact cultural provides an alibi for the status quo, whereas gay and feminist dissent has most often relied on the denaturalization of conventional wisdom. So I do not call on the meme to describe the reality of homosexuality—not because homosexuality doesn’t reproduce itself laterally and asexually, but because memetics is maladapted to political intervention, especially on behalf of a population toward which there is already quite enough paranoia. Instead, the meme works best as a theory of non-genetic reproduction that describes what anti-gay factions believe about homosexuality. Memetics also provides a useful example of how heteronormative assumptions magnify the shortcomings of an ostensibly disinterested theory. Adopting standards of normative and nonnormative sexuality—“successful” fecundity and sterile celibacy— from genetics, meme theory has not fared well in its encounters with homosexuality. Although Dawkins and Dennett do not discuss homosexuality, separate studies by Susan Blackmore and Aaron Lynch come to offensive conclusions. Both assume that homosexuality is 36

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genetically determined but entirely sterile; attempting to explain why it still persists, both conclude that the violence of homophobic abjection has benefited homosexuals by forcing them into sham marriages whose offspring carry gay genes—a thesis one journalist dubs “the homophobe’s paradox.”47 As Blackmore puts it, “most homosexuals are at least partly bisexual and can, with strongly wielded taboos, be persuaded to marry and have children,” which is, after all, the best thing for them—or at least for their genes. While the meme of social tolerance may seem like a good idea now, its “long-term effect may be fewer genes for homosexuality.”48 Indeed, Lynch argues, the gay rights movement will decimate the ranks of gay men and lesbians until the society is “sparsely populated with innately homosexual inclinations” and “the movement dwindles,” producing the resurgence of “widespread taboo memes.”49 Lynch and Blackmore conclude that homosexuality thrives on persecution; if so, activism on behalf of gay rights must be suicidally misguided. What purports to be an objective memetic theory turns out to replicate heteronormative ideology: the liberal pieties of Lynch and Blackmore prevent them from considering the possibility of non-biological, memetic reproduction by homosexuals, but this in no way releases them from other homophobic assumptions. At the very least, when such strange bedfellows find themselves in conversation, religious conservatives’ encounter with Darwin recruits the vocabulary of evolution in the service of what Edelman has called “reproductive futurism.”50 That odd borrowing is no prevarication; it is rather the symptom of a more deeply woven thread. A vulgar Darwinism inhabits the case against gay marriage in two fundamental ways: in the evolutionary language of human extinction, and in the tacitly memetic accounts of homosexuality’s dissemination. In both instances the rhetoric of the religious Right depends on what it would exclude: there, in 37

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a deconstructive sense, “The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside.”51 Inverting this formula, we might ask how heteronormative assumptions have found their way inside gay and lesbian discourse as a structuring presence, part of a mutually constitutive opposition. If every statement contains the outline of its antithesis, anti-gay evolutionary language offers a useful provocation. Efforts to defend gay and lesbian communities against a heteronormative vulgar Darwinism, I will suggest, depend on another vulgar Darwinism, whose tropes of straight fecundity and queer sterility, embedded in discussions of the “gay gene” and being “born gay,” may be no better than the extinction fantasies with which we began.

A SCIENCE OF CAUSES If the notion of homosexual reproduction is discomfiting to the religious Right, it is no less unsettling to gay and lesbian observers. While the Family Research Council and its ilk regard homosexual reproduction as a pernicious fact, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals largely regard it as a pernicious falsehood. Faced with anti-gay paranoia, gay activists have labored to disprove ideas of contagious or communicated homosexuality, framing etiological counterarguments that have grown over time from rhetorical strategies to ontological claims. Homosexuality, they say, is not acquired, but innate and immutable, fixed at birth and impervious to influence. Since Simon LeVay’s study of gay men’s brain structure in 1991, various researchers have sought to show that sexual orientation is biologically determined. 52 Some name genetic factors, others point to hormones, and yet others content themselves with identifying “gay” physiological traits. Among the recent books addressed to 38

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popular audiences, Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland’s The Science of Desire (1994) pursues the “gay gene”; Jim McKnight’s Straight Science? Homosexuality, Evolution, and Adaptation (1997) places genetics in the context of evolutionary theory, and Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman’s Born Gay (2005) proposes a combination of genetics and prenatal hormones. 53 Despite their differences, all maintain that male homosexuality is produced, unalterably and before birth, by physiological processes. In this, gay communities share with anti-gay voices the premise that etiology—that is, the question of what causes ­homosexuality—is the appropriate, even inevitable, basis of their struggle for civil rights. So pervasive are these ideas that any nonbiological account of homosexuality is seen (by gay men and lesbians and their allies) as de facto hate speech, and any talk of innate homosexuality appears (to anti-gay groups) as obvious pro-gay bias. In 1992, advice columnist Abigail Van Buren was forced to apologize to her gay and lesbian readers after suggesting that both nurture and nature might affect sexual orientation; over a decade later, in 2005, she was criticized by one “Leonard in Lynchburg” for asserting that homosexuality has “everything to do with genetics.”54 “If you do not publicly admit your error,” Leonard wrote, “I will know you are a mouthpiece for the gay and lesbian crowd.”55 And in fact, that crowd now imagines genetics as its primary defense against lynching, figurative or otherwise. If queers are born, not made, they claim, the chief source of homophobia will fall, as the peril of an overfertile gay meme gives way to the reassuring finitude of the gay gene. And that, the story goes, not only protects gay and lesbian parents and teachers, but also promotes equality at every turn. Richard Pillard, co-author of a 1986 study, says that biological determinism sends a clear message: “This is not a fault, and it’s not your fault.”56 39

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History repeats, as the “gay gene” and similar theories seek to explain the deviance of the homosexual body—a body that has since the nineteenth century taken many forms, from androgyny to nervous dysfunction to genital abnormality. 57 This time, we are told, will be different; this time the medicalization of homosexuality will help, not harm. At such a time, it is worth recalling the critical readings of biomedical science produced by the nascent practice of gay and lesbian studies in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis—readings enabled by the feminist theory that had already recognized science as a social and discursive process. 58 In 1987, Paula Treichler wrote, “Our social constructions of AIDS . . . are based not upon objective, scientifically determined ‘reality,’ but upon what we are told about this reality; that is, upon prior social constructions, routinely produced within the discourses of biomedical science.”59 In 1990 David M. Halperin took that argument to etiology itself: “The more we become aware of the contingency of all forms of erotic life, the more we are disinclined to believe in such a thing as a ‘natural’ sexuality, something we are simply born into.” From the constructionist view, he added, it follows that “the search for a ‘scientific’ aetiology of sexual orientation is itself a homophobic project.”60 We might say the same of “born gay” theories today, but too often we do not. The more the idea of innate homosexuality approaches the status of liberal orthodoxy, the more it resembles the meme, that restless, endlessly replicative bundle of ideology. The ubiquity of the gay gene trope seems to magnify the consequences of its many faults, at least to those without the “infected brain,” as Žižek writes of memes, and the “contagious bacilli.”61 Many critics have exposed its theoretical and methodological failings without, it seems, slowing its rate of replication within or outside LGBT communities.62 Scholars have noted the ways in which 40

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various efforts to identify a biological etiology of homosexuality reinforce stereotypes, assume a categorical difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, implicitly or explicitly dismiss lesbians and bisexuals, conflate gender identity and expression with object choice, naturalize heterosexuality, and overlook the synchronic and diachronic variety of gay experience, omitting the places and times in which same-sex desire has taken markedly different forms. To these I would add the way in which that discourse has produced its own form of vulgar Darwinism, different from but implicated in that of anti-gay extinction claims. My task is neither to contest the findings of individual studies, important as that work may be, nor to advance a new etiological theory of homosexuality. Instead, responding to the use of Darwin by the Right, I want to consider how accounts of homosexuality by the Left themselves depend on “evolutionary” tropes of fecundity and sterility.63 In too many cases, gay and lesbian efforts to deny that homosexuality may be acquired depend on narratives of impotence, self-limitation, and collective suicide. Because genetic arguments lead the case for biological determinism, that discourse foregrounds the evolutionary role of homosexuality—a recurring question whose answers intersect unhappily with the extinction rhetoric deployed, as we have seen, against gay marriage. Many biological-determinist theories share not only the language of the religious Right but also its anxiety about queer increase, expressed in their efforts to prove homosexuality both memetically and genetically sterile. Wilson and Rahman, authors of Born Gay, do not engage Dawkins directly, but they toy with meme theory, touting the scientific method as “a kind of ‘survival of the fittest ideas,’” and their study typifies biologicaldeterminist attitudes toward the implications of a gay meme. Recall that in “evolutionary” anti-gay rhetoric, homosexuals’ 41

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failure to reproduce genetically is more than overcome by their propensity to reproduce memetically—that is, by spreading the contagious practice of same-sex desire. Wilson and Rahman oppose that view: there is no evidence for the notion that homosexuals can “seduce” others into becoming gay, or that gay parents influence the sexual orientation of their biological or adopted children. Hence scientific knowledge may help to combat certain prejudices associated with diverse sexual preferences. 64

In essence, they propose that the presence of a gay gene (broadly construed, as they include both genetic and hormonal factors) proves the impossibility of a gay meme (asexual reproduction of homosexuality through seduction or influence), defending gay people against “prejudices.” The implicit purpose of biomedical research is therefore to show that homosexuals cannot reproduce asexually; they are memetically impotent. When proof of the genetic reproduction of homosexuality displaces the specter of its memetic reproduction, proof of its collective memetic sterility will ensure the individual survival of “gay parents” and others—at least in the short term—by shielding them from violent antipathy. But there’s a catch: there are no “gay parents.” In the world of Wilson and Rahman, homosexuals are gay men, and gay men cannot or will not father children.65 Thus gays cannot be responsible for the transmission of gay genes; “how [homosexuality] has survived in the face of evolutionary forces” is in their view “one of the big mysteries.”66 Other writers repeat this question with a certain relish at the prospect of homosexuals’ evolutionary demise and a palpable frustration at its postponement. “Why haven’t the relevant genes vanished from the human gene pool?” asks one writer.67 42

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Hamer and Copeland pose the same question: “[H]ow could a gene that discourages reproduction survive more than a few generations?”68 Echoing Wilson and Rahman, McKnight calls male homosexuality a “major puzzle”—puzzling because “over successive generations gay men, who presumably produce less offspring than straight men, should gradually be flushed from the gene pool. Unfortunately for such an elegant theory, this is not the case.”69 Perhaps less vivid than his excremental trope for male homosexuality is McKnight’s conflation of gay men and gay genes; only the gene, not the man, can disappear from the “gene pool,” but the man presents a problem acute enough to engender this response. For some observers, as I have suggested, the mystery looks more like an opportunity: when not citing Darwin to prove gays genocidal, the religious Right calls on him to show that homosexuality cannot be innate. If it were a genetic trait, it would have disappeared when gays failed to procreate; therefore, they say, homosexuality must be chosen or learned. In a 2005 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, asked: How can you believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution and homosexuality at the same time? Now think about this. If Darwin was right, which is survival of the fittest [sic] then homosexuality would be a recessive gene because it doesn’t reproduce and you would think that over thousands of years that homosexuality would work itself out of the gene pool.70

Warren does not so much endorse Darwin as regard him as the lesser of two evils, while hinting that the “contradiction” between evolution and gay rights will destroy both secular, liberal principles. As one Christian website puts it, “If evolutionists accept 43

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homosexuals, the whole Darwinian argument falls apart.”71 The supposed contradiction depends on the fantasy of homosexual sterility, which in turn reflects the endemic conflation of what Roughgarden would call “breeding” with the institution of ­heterosexuality—not merely by Warren, but also by those who purport to champion gay causes. Both the question—how can the “deleterious” and “maladaptive” gene for homosexuality persist without reproduction?—and one common answer demonstrate the ways in which evolutionary rhetoric on the Left embraces heteronormative ideology.72 Why should the theory of the gay gene, meant to demonstrate the impossibility of memetic queer reproduction, also insist on the impossibility of genetic queer reproduction? Since Hamer’s 1993 study, proponents of biological determinism have offered lively accounts of “fertile females” and “sneaky males”—heterosexual figures who may indirectly benefit from the presence of a gene for male homosexuality.73 Hamer suggests that although the gay male carriers of the “gay gene” would not reproduce, heterosexual female carriers would do so abundantly enough to maintain its presence in a population. Andrea Camperio Ciani, whose recent research on male homosexuality supports this hypothesis, explains: You have all this antagonism against homosexuality because they say it’s against nature because it doesn’t lead to reproduction. We found out this is not true because homosexuality is just one of the consequences of strategies for making females more fecund.74

It is apparently easier to imagine sexually antagonistic selection producing a maternal gene for male homosexuality than to acknowledge that gay and bisexual men do in fact father children. 44

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(This imperative surely contributes to Wilson and Rahman’s rejection of the notion that men can be bisexual.75) Asserting that “homosexuality does not promote reproduction,” the London Times goes on to cite statistics about the number of gay fathers, begging the question: What promotes reproduction if reproducing does not?76 The answer, of course, is that gay procreation doesn’t count as reproduction: this is the fundamental premise of anti-gay ideologues, too often shared by proponents of the gay gene theory. Defending heterosexual privilege means regulating who can be recognized in that hallowed role. Consider the response of the editors of a 2008 issue of Radical History Review to Anita Bryant’s 1977 remarks on behalf of her anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign. Bryant said, “I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children, therefore, they must recruit our children,” a statement consonant with today’s pronouncements of homosexual sterility. The editors write, “Bryant could not have been more wrong about the ability of homosexuals to reproduce, as demonstrated not only by the current baby boom among gay men and lesbians.” 77 The statement may be true, but it fails to address the homophobic assumptions structuring both Bryant’s remark and those of some “gay gene” arguments. Our culture may fetishize the figure of the child, but it does not celebrate parenting indiscriminately. Having identified himself as straight, McKnight writes: “if evolution has a purpose it is reproductive fitness, the passing of our genes to our children” (my emphasis).78 Ideologically speaking, that is more true than he knows, for his view of evolution is organized around the biological and cultural reproduction of heterosexuality. Because the potential for procreation justifies the institution of heterosexuality, male homosexuality must be fantasmatically reoriented toward 45

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someone else’s fertility, where instead of redemption it finds its own erasure. While saving the laurels for straight parents, this insistence on gay men’s sterility also responds to the specter of homosexual reproduction. I have proposed that “gay gene” rhetoric appears gay-friendly because it allays fears of the gay meme: the supposed reproduction of homosexuality through contagious ideas. But as the theory of gay sterility implies, it is not enough that homosexuals cannot increase in that fashion; instead, the anxiety around homosexual reproduction can be allayed only by its absolute negation. If homosexuality stems from a “gay gene,” homosexuals must never pass on this gene. The “gay gene” may quietly contribute to the reproduction of the human race, but not by gays, who are implicitly excluded from the status of the human. Reviewing Ciani’s findings in Slate magazine, William Saletan attempts to show how proof that male homosexuality is genetically determined might change prevailing views—and incidentally, why the idea holds so much appeal. The existence of a gay gene, he writes, would mean that male homosexuality is “self-limiting,” obeying “natural limits,” such that there is “no scenario in which male homosexuality spreads throughout a population.”79 Saletan echoes the language of anti-gay groups about the unchecked “spread” of perversion ostensibly to oppose it, but in so doing bolsters its central presumption: that it would be a bad thing for male homosexuality to “spread.” Showing that the number of homosexuals is “naturally” restricted, biological determinism ensures that the line between straight and gay could not be brighter. Rather than explaining how homosexuality is propagated, the notion of a “gay gene” offers assurance that it could not be, at least not by homosexuals—an assurance welcomed by both anti-gay factions and people who think gay and lesbian lives depend on their 46

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own limitation. Arguments for an innate, biological homosexuality, then, do not content themselves with disproving the possibility of memetic homosexual reproduction; so great is the aversion to the prospect of queers, in Darwin’s words, “perpetually and almost indefinitely increasing,” that “gay gene” theories also stress their biological impotence. Applauding the “self-limiting” nature of homosexuality is no better than finding gay men and lesbians’ avoidance of extinction “unfortunate”; both indicate how profoundly the case for biological determinism has absorbed a heteronormative bias.

BOR N GAY How can homosexuality have a cause? Like light and water it just is. Sarah Schulman, “Biological Determinism, Uncontrollable Instincts”

The same fundamental assumptions inform the trope “born gay” as it enshrines fertility—apparently heterosexual—at the forefront of the language that gay men and lesbians use to describe themselves. When theories of biological determinism enter popular culture, “born gay” is their favorite axiom. Along with Wilson and Rahman’s 2004 book of that title, magazine and newspaper articles regularly evoke the phrase, beginning with Time magazine’s 1993 cover story, “Born Gay?” “Born gay or made gay: Which camp are you in?” asks the London Times, while the Seattle Times echoes “Born gay? How biology may drive orientation,” and Salon, not to be outdone, offers “Born That Gay.”80 This journalistic usage is consonant with scientific studies of homosexual etiology. Although “born gay” does not explicitly appeal to science or name a cause of homosexuality, it is inseparable from the etiology 47

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of biological determinism. When a gay man answers the question “What made you gay?” with the formula “I was born that way,” that answer could be understood as “nothing made me gay, there was no cause,” but in the context of today’s discourse around the homosexual body, it says: “The cause of my homosexuality is prenatal, so it is beyond both influence and choice.” In fact the etiological function can apply far beyond the realm of science: a striking example of “born gay” causality is the statement “God made me gay.”81 Today, biological determinism is less influential as a body of scientific work than as the scaffolding of an etiological narrative that can function independently of science—a more widespread belief system that for many gay men and lesbians explains why they are homosexual and thereby shapes how they are homosexual. In gay and lesbian communities “born gay” is so naturalized that many, if not most, lesbians and gay men in the United States experience their sexual identity as an inherent orientation. The Seattle Times quotes a spokesman for a gay nonprofit organization, who reports, “Most people I’ve come across say they’ve always been gay. . . . They would say it’s an innate part of who they are.”82 “Born gay” expresses these convictions in shorthand—but like any trope, it does not do so innocently. However contingent, it lends inchoate urges the clarity of narrative, disguising cultural determinism as biological determinism. And annealing laboratory studies with the authority of personal experience, it obscures the ways in which prevailing ideologies shape what we take to be personal experience. “Born gay” rhetoric insists on lived experience, even unremembered experience, to support its hypothesis: none of us can recall the moment of our birth or our earliest days of childhood, yet a woman interviewed by Newsweek says she knew she was gay “from day one.”83 As Martin Duberman observes, the recollection of an early same-sex desire is “probably nothing more 48

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than a measure of the fullness of our socialization” in which “an acquired identity comes to have all the force of a biological one because its acquisition is beyond the reach of our memory.”84 That illusion of an unsocialized subjectivity figures prominently in Wilson and Rahman’s introduction to Born Gay, which begins by championing scientific rationality over personal feeling, arguing that “modern developments” and “truth” should sweep aside erroneous beliefs, including those of gay men and lesbians, even if “some people may be unhappy” about the result. A page later, however, the authors reassure readers that what follows will validate their irrational sense of self: “this book will confirm what most of us have always intuitively felt: that our sexual preference is a fundamental and immutable component of our human nature.”85 Intuitions shape the course of science, and science in turn confirms intuitions. Theories that propose a prenatal sexual identity appeal not merely because they effectively defend against accusations of chosen or sinful homosexuality but also because of the psychic work they accomplish for gay men and lesbians. As Wilson and Rahman suggest, “born gay” installs homosexuality in a precultural, prelinguistic space, supplying a fantasmatic certainty. When Larry Kramer claims that “homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history,” his remarks seem to dismiss the entire question of homosexual etiology.86 But his unregenerate essentialism is precisely the attitude of biological determinism, with its own appeal to lived experience: “Why did we all not know and accept this instinctively,” Kramer asks, without an “obtuse vocabulary” and “gobbledygook theorizing”? Pitting “instinct” against “vocabulary,” he posits a space where animal impulses would not be tainted by language. “Born gay” puts homosexuality beyond the reach of language and culture, in a space of 49

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illusory clarity. It is as if locating gay and lesbian identities solely in the body promises to circumvent the alienating reality of the Symbolic order, the fact of our subjection in and to language, in favor of a model that flatters “unique” individuals so long as they trust what they know “intuitively” and “instinctively.” As such, “born gay” validates humanist presuppositions, rendering sexuality both a token of individualism and a prized possession. That function goes far to explain why biological-determinist theories have so much influence today, not merely as political strategies, but also as self-descriptions embraced by gay and lesbian people who may be indifferent to politics. In his popular book Is It a Choice? Eric Marcus tells readers that “your feelings of sexual attraction come to you very early in life (before or after birth) and are yours and yours alone and remain yours until the day you die—just like your fingerprints”; your sexuality is “innate, immutable, and uniquely your own.”87 Banishing cultural influence, Marcus renders sexual orientation the property of the individual; ironically, he declares the uniqueness of his readers’ sexualities in order to promote a biological determinism that renders everyone’s homosexuality exactly the same. As a trope, “born gay” also evokes the vexed relations between children and sexuality. Doubtless that accounts for the protests against a 2007 poster campaign in Italy that offered an image of an infant identified as “homosexual,” captioned “Sexual orientation is not a choice.”88 Discussions of innate homosexuality seem inevitably to evoke the figure of the child, sometimes as an iconic shorthand, sometimes as the subject of research. In 1992, Newsweek ran a cover story titled “Is This Child Gay? Born or Bred: The Origins of Homosexuality,” superimposing the question on an image of an infant’s face.89 Given the moral panic attending any collocation of child and sexuality, the notion of infantile homosexuality might 50

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seem to signal a new candor, but the resulting images of proto-gay children are far from encouraging. In a 2007 CNN special on gay and transgender issues, psychologist Gerulf Rieger told medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen how he knew that homosexuality is not chosen but innate: COHEN: Observers who looked at about 100 home videos of children, each for just a few seconds, were able, with surprising accuracy, to tell which ones would grow up to be gay. Rieger thinks the observers were picking up on nuances, the sort of mannerisms you see exaggerated or parodied in portrayals of gay people in movies and TV. RIEGER: So, a stereotypical mannerism of a gay man is that— the limp wrist or how you tilt your head and so on, or that you smile and so on. And it turns out that, to a certain degree, this is true. COHEN: His study suggests, your sexual orientation is with you from birth. And most of the current research agrees.90

Framed by film of anti-gay protesters, this segment sought to oppose prejudice, but it offered a grotesque caricature of the gay child. The idea that “mannerisms” are innate rests on evidence that Rieger acknowledges as “stereotypical,” as well as a crude conflation of gender identity and sexual object-choice, a disregard for cultural difference, and a concomitant failure to distinguish between attributes present “from birth” and behaviors acquired through experience—like a smile or tilt of the head borrowed from a public image-repertoire.91 The same discourse that promotes the ownership of sexual identity as a birthright can also deny the most basic self-knowledge: Rieger credits presumably straight observers, but 51

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not gay children, with the ability to perceive “nuances” of gay culture in their worlds. In arguments for biological determinism, the ideological antipathy between child and queer produces a temporal incoherence. Kathryn Bond Stockton has named the queer child a “publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral . . . by virtue of its future retroaction as a child.”92 The queer child appears only in retrospect, never in the present tense, as the past of the gay adult whom he or she becomes: “I was a gay child.”93 Gay men and lesbians who describe themselves as “born gay,” then, do so through a temporal distortion. “I always believed that homosexuality was something I was born with” says one man quoted by Time magazine in 1993.94 Playing tricks with time, “born gay” confers an organic, authentic gay identity and retroactively locates both that identity and the consciousness of it in the past: only after I decide that I was born gay can I know that I “always believed” it. Thus in CNN’s broadcast, the child will be gay and the child is already gay: he will “grow up to be” something that he has been “from birth”; he must then become what he already has been. Ultimately, “born gay” must sacrifice either youth or desire in order to resolve the ideological impossibility of the queer child; unwilling to sexualize the infant, that rhetoric will infantilize the queer. No longer capable of wrongful choice, people “born gay” become the passive product of someone else’s labor. Neither sexual object nor sexual subject, they cling to childish innocence as that innocence approaches an annihilating void—the status of pure difference, a difference without a referent. This evacuation of sexual meaning can be seen in a 2006 ad campaign on behalf of those who are “born different.”95 On television, only one of the campaign’s six advertisements mentions homosexuality; on the corresponding website, a tautological headline proclaims “we’re 52

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born the way we’re born.” The confidence with which this campaign declines to define “different” reflects both how thoroughly the notion of difference itself has been homosexualized in our cultural imaginary and, at the same time, how commonly sexual freedoms are predicated on the suppression of sexuality.96 The idiom “born gay” removes its subject from the laboratory and returns it to the family romance. The sexuality of homosexuality is subsumed by the sentimental story of (straight) reproduction, as if to appropriate the sacred aura of birth for the cause of tolerance. The man “born gay” may absolve his parents of “raising him gay” only to re-implicate them genetically, but he confirms their centrality, as progenitors, to whatever he has become. His identity does not signify laterally, in relation to his erotic cathexes, but lineally, in relation to those who gave him life.97 Acknowledging the reproductive status of his parents, the man “born gay” intimates that he will never take their place; the rhetoric of biological determinism highlights birth only to disavow the possibility that he will ever (literally or figuratively) breed people like himself. Accordingly, the trope returns us to the reproductive economy in which, as in heteronormative myth, homosexuality appears as a genealogical dead end. To be “born gay” in this discourse is to be born into a ghostly half-life, like the sterile homosexuals in The Darwin Awards whose suicides would signify nothing—a life in which, genetically speaking, one is already dead. So if the curiously Darwinian rhetoric of John Howard and others betrays a fear of homosexual fertility, the case for “gay genes” and being “born gay” reflects the same unease about homosexual reproduction, both genetic and memetic. Gay men can’t multiply, won’t multiply, and must never be allowed to multiply: like the Lacanian Real, their increase is an impossibility that must also be forbidden.98 Even when applied to the cause of equal rights, arguments 53

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for biological determinism are inherently anti-gay when they presuppose that homosexuals are and must be sterile: they must be genetically suicidal lest they seem memetically genocidal. Although concepts of homosexual sterility surely deny the reality of nonnormative family structures and devalue gay and lesbian parenting, that is not, to my mind, the central problem of extinction fantasies or the “born gay” idiom. Yes, some gay men and lesbians will become parents and pass on their genetic material, but none will be counted among contributors to the survival of humanity because that humanity is defined by an explicitly heteronormative reproductive futurism, which glorifies procreation and the child in the service of heterosexual privilege. Moreover, the assumption of gay sterility demonizes the possibility of homosexual reproduction, literal or figural: it describes a world that counts every queer one queer too many. Where homosexual reproduction is concerned, the paranoid fantasy of human extinction through gay marriage may grasp something that “born gay” does not: civil rights such as marriage do promote homosexuality, as they should, by widening the space of possibility in which it becomes visible as a livable life. The anxiety around homosexual reproduction—both in anti-gay rhetoric and in the axiom “born gay”—reflects a problem with homosexuality, not with reproduction. The replication, propagation, and communication of queerness seem monstrous only to those who abhor homosexuality as such. The fear that queers will multiply is not the root of homophobia; instead, homophobia generates fears of queer proliferation. That is why no assurance of homosexuals’ “self-limiting” tendencies will secure anything like tolerance, and etiology will never yield equality; indeed, a just society would be entirely indifferent to an increase in the numbers of homosexuals. So if one focus of gay activism is the campaign for legal parity, 54

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including the right to marry and full recognition of gay and lesbian parenting, there is work to be done beyond the families we choose. That work would begin to disjoin the biological mechanism of human procreation from the contingencies of heterosexual tradition; to eschew the vulgar Darwinism of both Right and Left; to consider how certain defensive etiologies have impoverished our concepts of desire and politics; and to theorize, in homosexual reproduction, queer affiliations unmoored from linear descent.

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Strange Inf luence The Picture of Dorian Gray It is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity. Review of Dorian Gray in the Scots Observer, July 5, 1890

Where homosexual reproduction is concerned, some readers have found The Picture of Dorian Gray an exemplary text. Noting that the novel’s first chapters describe “Dorian’s infection by Lord Henry,” Richard Ellman concludes that Lord Henry’s “attempt to inseminate his friend spiritually is at least ambiguous.”1 If so, there may be some truth in Camille Paglia’s capricious claim that when “Dorian becomes Lord Henry . . . an act of homosexual generation has occurred, a hermaphroditic cloning” in which Lord Henry “spawns the remade Dorian.”2 But Dorian does not become Lord Henry, even if, true to the mythology of queer increase, he becomes a person with new desires. Evocative as the tropes of insemination, infection, and cloning may be, the novel has another term for intimate relations among men: influence. The Picture of Dorian Gray is an early narrative of queer etiology in which something called influence causes something not called, but fully legible as, 56

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homosexuality. Published in Lippicott’s Magazine in 1890 and as a book in 1891, the novel foregrounds metonymic effects of proximity, persuasion, example, and imitation as the probable causes of Dorian’s corruption. As a narrative form, etiology imposes particular laws on the origin myth, the case study, and the detective plot, but like all narrative conventions, it is a rule made to be broken, a form made to be deformed. So while Dorian Gray invites its reader to consider queer etiology, its logic is anything but clear. Poised on the cusp of a nascent gay culture the novel depends on two divergent formations: one, a notion of homosexual persons consonant with the Foucaultian narrative of modern sexual identity, and two, a vocabulary of acquired perversion opposed to the sexological theory of “congenital inversion.”3 Both were available to Wilde. The concept of homosexuality predated Dorian Gray by two decades; coined in 1869 by Karl-Maria Benkert, it informed Victorian thinkers such as Karl Ulrichs.4 Noting the deployment of sexological theories of innate homosexuality in Teleny, written concurrently with Dorian Gray, Ed Cohen argues that Wilde would have been familiar with such models by 1890. 5 Surely Wilde’s scientific and literary knowledge enabled him to see homosexual love, even homosexual persons, as a distinct historical tradition. Even before the twentieth century, gay readers found descriptions of themselves in literary texts, and recognized among their contemporaries others who shared the same cathexes.6 And for British and American men seeking literary traces of same-sex desire, Shakespeare’s sonnets were second only to the Greeks. Like Dorian Gray, the sonnets retroactively became gay signifiers, gay memes; always a little queer, they came to signify a specific type of love. Wilde’s works and person would become the same sort of touchstone for twentieth-century gay men, but before they did, 57

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Wilde would identify himself as the sort of man who likes Shakespeare, and likes him in a certain way.7 In his 1889 “The Portrait of Mr W. H.,” whose title rhymes suggestively with that of Dorian Gray, Wilde offers the sonnets as evidence of love between men, much as, in his famous statement from his first trial, he would describe “the love that dare not speak its name” as “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.”8 In “Portrait” the sonnets are called “strangely passionate poems” addressed to a man for whom Shakespeare feels “passionate adoration” and “strange worship.”9 (Wilde credits Shakespeare with a potent form of homosexual reproduction, arguing that W. H. figures in the sonnets as a queer “begetter” who sires “no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame” because, the poet writes, “my verse ‘is thine, and born of thee.’”)10 In Dorian Gray, however, the discourse of influence renders queer increase not generational but companionable. As Lord Henry remarks, “to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions” (40). Influence implies intimacy: as Stephen Guy-Bray notes, the term, “in Latin, literally, ‘flowing in(to)’—could have literal and sexual connotations as well as metaphorical and mental ones.”11 And Lord Henry’s understanding of influence makes those connotations clear: “No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment . . . to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume” (60). The notion of being influenced into homosexuality, manifest in literature and in Wilde’s trials, suggests that the rudiments 58

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of today’s homosexual etiologies were in place in the 1880s and 1890s. Shortly before Dorian Gray, queer influence was prefigured in Henry James’s The Bostonians, whose Verena Tarrant responds to the persuasion of Olive Chancellor: “The girl was now completely under her influence . . . the touch of Olive’s tone worked a spell.”12 Remaking Verena as a feminist, Olive’s influence makes them both embodiments of a particular, recognizable pathology, whose morbidity, Basil reflects, defines “such a type as that.”13 The homosexual legibility of such relationships in the 1890s was evident at Wilde’s trials: prosecuting Counsel Charles Gill wrote that Lord Alfred Douglas should not be tried because Wilde’s “strong influence” had made Douglas one of his “victims,” and Director of Public Prosecution Hamilton Cuffe asserted that Wilde’s “great influence” over Douglas had “induced him to enter on these evil practices.”14 Queensberry’s attorney Edward Carson explained that his client “was trying to free his son from the influence of this man,” an influence that amounted to “the domination of Mr Wilde over this unfortunate Lord Alfred Douglas.”15 Where Dorian Gray addresses such matters, its own discourse of corrupting influence must, as in The Bostonians, signal the presence of homosexual etiology in its early forms. Yet the novel remains ambiguous about same-sex desire. What exactly is Dorian—and his reader—influenced to be or to do? What does influence, textual and otherwise, mean for Wilde? How does it work—and not work—as a motive force of etiological narrative? Readily available for paranoid reading, influence is, according to the OED, “the exertion of action of which the operation is unseen or insensible (or perceptible only in its effects), by one person or thing upon another.” But the juxtaposition of visible effects with invisible causes is precisely what Wilde’s notion of influence does 59

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not entail; on the contrary, Dorian Gray gives us visible causes and invisible effects. While its rhetoric of influence recalls anxieties about homosexual reproduction, the text’s reticence around the meaning of Dorian’s deviance makes it impossible to specify— though speculation is rife—the effect of which Lord Henry, Basil Hallward, or the yellow book is the cause. The peculiar status of queer desire in the novel has everything to do with the etiological questions set in motion by Wilde’s extended meditation on inf luence and the eventual collapse of its narrative logic. While homosexuality first appears in the text as the missing second term of a causal equation, the presumed but unproven effect of so much bad inf luence, it also functions as the absent cause of the novel, its invisible motive. In Dorian Gray, that is, homosexuality operates much like Lacan’s unconventional forms of causality, the absent and retroactive causes capable of impossible effects. For Lacan, the Real is both a byproduct of the Symbolic order and its retroactive cause, much as queerness is the constitutive outside and the internal resistance of the heteronormative Symbolic order, the externalized fantasy of what is in fact an internal failure.16 As a positive term, homosexuality could not normally be compared to the Real, whose essential impossibility aligns it with the negativity of queerness; yet in Dorian Gray it is the paradoxical absent presence of gay desire that allows it to constitute, like the Real, a retroactive or “lost” cause. As such, the text’s causality is profoundly recursive, lacking a point of origin and vacating the regular sequence of cause and effect. Indeed, the novel’s homosexuality “returns from the future” when Dorian Gray is read through the lens of Wilde’s fate and subsequent forms of gay identity; it determines the future that will only later make it decidedly queer.17 60

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“STR A NGE RUMOUR S” Find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say, the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2:2

While Dorian Gray alludes to homosexual reproduction, that is only one of the many contradictory causal narratives that Wilde sets in motion. From one perspective, it is unclear whether Dorian changes at all. True, at their first meeting Lord Henry sees him as ­immaculate—“All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world” (39). Accordingly, the novel’s first chapter sets the scene for a fall from Eden, its garden rich with “tremulous branches” of laburnum (23); but tautologically, to inhabit this scene one must already have fallen from grace. The garden always contains the cause of its own annihilation, much as Dorian already manifests the weakness that will motivate his terrible wish. At the same time, the text insists that Dorian responds to some obscure external force. Awash in superfluous causes, Dorian is doomed by his family legacy, trapped by a Faustian wish, tempted by Lord Henry’s bad influence, and lured by reckless reading. It is not enough that his spotless youth is despoiled once; it must be continually and repeatedly ruined throughout the narrative. Dorian, we are told, “loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins.”18 Acknowledging the possibility of “strange legacies of thought and passion,” Dorian wonders whether a “strange poisonous germ” in his family line has made him “so suddenly, and almost without cause” utter “the mad prayer that had so changed his life” (175). 61

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Yet having entertained that idea, Wilde is quick to turn away, evoking a queerer form of inheritance: “one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious” (176).19 In fact Dorian Gray explicitly shares in the queer scenes of reading offered by The Well of Loneliness and other texts. In Chapter 10 of the novel, after the drama of Sibyl Vane’s death and his banishment of the portrait to the schoolroom, Dorian idly picks up a “yellow book” that Lord Henry has given him, “a novel without a plot” whose fascination lies instead in its “curious jewelled style” and its character study of a man very like Dorian. The book seems capable of a mesmeric influence on its reader, for the “reverie” and “malady of dreaming” it inspires in Dorian last far beyond its final pages (156). What does it mean to say that “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book” (179) in a book about perilous exposures, a book that returns obsessively to questions of influence? What we might call an epidemiological theory of reading posits immoral suasion as endlessly contagious, replicating its effects on characters, the text itself, and finally Wilde’s own readers. When Lord Henry recalls “a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before” (43), he traces a textual genealogy that extends from his own reading to Dorian’s and in turn to our reading of Wilde. Wilde himself seems caught in the chain of abyssal reading: when six years later, in De Profundis, he calls Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance the “book which has had such a strange influence over my life,” we cannot say whether he recognized himself in the book or remade himself in its image.20 Similarly, the yellow book fails to explain Dorian’s fall. We are told that “[f]or years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free 62

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himself from it” (158). Upon that “or” turns the problem of causality. After all, the influence one seeks out and embraces is not an influence at all, but a reflection of one’s extant leanings. So while the book titled The Picture of Dorian Gray explicitly identifies that other book as a cause of Dorian’s moral decay, it also undermines that claim. As the portrait’s degeneration confirms, Dorian is already corrupt before he opens the yellow book, well toward the end of the novel. Perhaps, as Wilde suggests, it is not that the book makes Dorian like its protagonist, but that Dorian’s likeness to its protagonist makes him love the book, taking its hero as “a kind of prefiguring type of himself,” so much so that “the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it” (158). In fact the influence with which the novel is most concerned is not literary but personal. Basil Hallward credits Dorian with changing his aesthetic perception when “some subtle influence passed from him to me” (33) but warns Lord Henry: “Don’t try to influence him” (36). His interest piqued, Dorian asks Lord Henry, “Have you really a very bad influence?” and is told, “There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr Gray . . . all influence is immoral” (40). Moments later, Dorian “was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself ” (42)—a paradox that will later echo in Dorian’s assessment of the yellow book. Later in their acquaintance, Henry reflects that “[t]here was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence” (60), planning to extend his reach: “He would seek to dominate him—had already, indeed half done so” (61). Dorian freely confirms that power, telling Henry, “You have a curious influence over me” (77). While this rhetoric opens Dorian Gray to a familiar anxiety about homosexual reproduction—the supposed ability of queers 63

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to make more queers—the text cannot name the effect of which bad influence is the cause. Wilde takes Lord Henry’s seduction of Dorian to the utmost verge of plausible deniability: Dorian feels that Henry’s words “had touched some secret chord that had ­never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. . . . Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now” (42). The altered portrait attests to his “cruelty” (119), “sin,” “ruin,” (125), “evil” (159), and “foulness” (173), and he is the subject of “strange rumours” hinting of “dishonour” (159), which cause men to “whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer” (173). Basil and Dorian both acknowledge that they have secrets; Dorian knows “the terrible pleasure of a double life” (210). And the designation of Basil’s love for Dorian—the source of his own “double life”—as “such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself ” (149) shows an effort to imagine a male homosexual tradition. It is Basil, appropriately, who calls Dorian “fatal to young men,” and recalls the rumor that “you corrupt everyone with whom you become intimate” (183, 185). He recalls “that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide,” another man “who had to leave England, with a tarnished name,” and yet another who met a “dreadful end” (183), suggesting Dorian’s ability to communicate to others the influences that have worked on him. From the book’s first publication to the present day, readers have seen in it the possibility of a homosexuality that remains ineffable, at once present and absent, not only as a function of semantic delicacy but also through the very structure of the novel’s causality. As Paul Morrison writes, “Homosexuality is presumed to be at the root of all Dorian’s actions, but how do we know what we all think we know, even if that knowledge characteristically goes 64

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under the gentlemanly decorum of ‘it goes without saying?’”21 We know Dorian’s sexuality but we cannot say how we know it. 22 Joseph Bristow notes “the notorious invisibility—and yet unwavering implication” of homosexuality in Dorian Gray; and Ellis Hanson finds that Dorian’s misdeeds “are apparent without being certain.”23 Wilde’s contemporaries felt much the same, to judge by a series of hostile reviews, one of which prompted retailer W. H. Smith to withdraw its copies of the book.24 Samuel Jeyes’s 1890 review in the St James’s Gazette, as well as his later published dialogue with Wilde, identified the book and its topic as perverse; noting its “esoteric prurience,” Jeyes observes that Dorian Gray “constantly hints, not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes.”25 A review in the Daily Chronicle charged that the novel indulges in “every form of secret and unspeakable vice,” and should we wonder how many forms of vice were deemed unspeakable, Punch identifies Dorian as a “Ganymede-like” figure.26 On the text’s 1891 publication as a book, a review in the Athenaeum called it “unmanly, sickening, vicious (though not exactly what is called ‘improper’), and tedious.”27 Each reader attempts to register his recognition of sexual impropriety while unable to declare, and thus decisively to condemn, the nature of that transgression. In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously asserted that although he could not define “hard-core” pornography, “I know it when I see it,” and much the same logic is at work in readers’ responses to Dorian Gray, whether past or present, appalled or approving.28 In Wilde’s case, however, we know homosexuality when we do not see it; indeed, the very occlusion of Dorian’s actions in the novel opens them to modern sexual epistemologies. Hanson suggests that during the trials, “despite Wilde’s vagueness, his circumlocution, his intentional obscurity, the novel was thought 65

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to be  .  .  .  sufficient evidence of very specific sexual crimes.”29 Regarding this collocation of secrecy and specificity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that by the close of the nineteenth century, when “knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy.”30 Striving to articulate the structure of this open secret, other readers invoke absence and lack. In Jeffrey Nunokawa’s words, homosexuality constitutes “a current of desire whose subject is finally nowhere and thus everywhere at once.”31 Bristow concurs: due to “the notorious invisibility—and yet unwavering implication” of homosexuality in Dorian Gray, “the modern notion of ‘homosexuality’ is nowhere proved and yet everywhere suspected.”32 Similarly, Ellman writes, it is “not that all Wilde’s principals are homosexuals, but they are scarcely anything else.”33 Lingering in the mode of perpetual beginning and concluding only with arbitrary violence, Dorian Gray charges its reader with the impossible task of deducing effect from cause, contrary to the normal sequence. As we know, the narrative form of a conventional etiological study resembles that of a mystery novel with the doctor in the role of detective. Whether scientific, psychoanalytic, or literary, such investigations are fundamentally linear: given a phenomenon—say, the hysteria of Freud’s Dora or the plumage of Darwin’s male bird of paradise—they work backward to determine the cause. In such origin narratives, Freud will identify sexual dysfunction at the root of hysteria and Darwin will name sexual selection as the reason for the bird’s display. But as Freud writes in an 1896 essay: The area of occurrence of an aetiological factor may be freely allowed to be wider than that of its effect, but it must not be narrower. Not everyone who touches or comes near a smallpox 66

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patient develops smallpox; nevertheless infection from a smallpox patient is almost the only known aetiology of the disease. 34

Elsewhere Freud elaborates on the temporal direction of his inquiry: “So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous,” and yet “from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result.”35 Etiological narrative can find the earlier cause of a given effect, but it cannot know the eventual consequences of a specific event; it can explain the present by looking to the past, but it cannot predict what is to come.

JUST CAUSE Because the text cannot specify what effects follow from Dorian’s many influences, that elision becomes a site of readerly projection. In a published reply to the negative review in the Scots Observer, a document later cited at his trial, Wilde described his attempt “to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption.  .  .  . To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim.”36 So strongly does this strategy resemble Henry James’s account of the indeterminacy in his 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw that one may suspect an influence of another kind. In his preface to the New York edition of Turn, James writes: Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself—and that is already a charming job—and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy . . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. 37 67

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There is no evil in the text, James implies, except what the reader brings with him, the projected stuff of his and his culture’s particular terrors. As a result, Shoshana Felman writes, “we are forced to participate in the scandal . . . the scandal is not simply in the text, it resides in our relation to the text, in the text’s effect on us, its readers.”38 I will return to the reader’s part shortly, but first it is worth noting Wilde’s articulation of this idea, which echoes an axiom spoken by Lord Henry: “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame” (257). 39 In his reply to the Scots Observer, Wilde insists that “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.”40 He reiterated this point in the courtroom: asked whether Dorian Gray’s sins may include sodomy, Wilde responded: “That is according to the temper of each one who reads the book; he who has found the sin has brought it.” 41 Though James was not known for his support of Wilde, he grasped Wilde’s narrative strategy only too well. In an 1892 letter to a friend, James discusses Lady Windermere’s Fan in terms that might well describe Dorian Gray: “Everything Oscar does,” he writes, “is a deliberate trap for the literalist, and to see the literalist walk straight up to it, look straight at it, and step straight into it makes one freshly avert a discouraged gaze from this unspeakable animal.” 42 When in Turn of the Screw James echoes his remark on Wilde, insisting that “[t]he story won’t tell . . . not in any literal, vulgar way,” he has truly inherited the position of his rival.43 Dorian Gray withholds, in several senses, the satisfaction of narrative closure, as, unable to name the nature of Dorian’s change, the broken narrative offers cause after unending cause.44 Most of the 1891 text’s twenty chapters detail the formation or deformation of Dorian’s character, offering a protracted prologue for a plot that effectively begins with Dorian’s murder of Basil in 68

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Chapter 13. The lengthy exploration of the yellow book seems extraneous because Dorian has already become dissolute, whether through Lord Henry’s influence or through some morbidity of his own. Between two unrelated acts of arbitrary violence, Basil’s murder and Dorian’s suicide, the last portion of the narrative provides a generous wadding of irrelevant scenes. Surely the refusal of narrative progress has its own meaning, but no reader, I wager, savors Lady Narborough’s “tedious party” or tea-time with the Duchess of Monmouth (211). Nor is there much reason for James Vane’s sudden return, or much satisfaction in his accidental death, a third act of arbitrary violence. Appropriately, a narrative set in motion by Dorian’s wish to avoid his end finds itself equally averse to conclusion.45 Narrative conventions, of course, align closely with sexual conventions, in the marriage plot and beyond. As Judith Roof explains, “while healthy heterosexuality produces the proper reproductive narrative—like reproducing like and increasing (similar to well-invested capital)—perversions produce the wrong story: decrease, degenerescence, death.”46 No wonder, then, that readers have found in Dorian Gray a maddening perversion of novelistic form. John Paul Riquelme observes that “in this narrative garden of forking paths, there appears to be a virus that replicates itself in double, antithetical forms within a maze that leads us not to an exit but to an impasse.”47 Kevin Ohi notes that “the inexorable plot has a curious way of suspending itself; while not, perhaps, ‘a novel without a plot,’ it does move in circles, rushing toward where it has already preemptively been.”48 If not wholly plotless, Dorian Gray resembles the yellow book it describes in its subordination of narrative to decoration, monstrous metaphors, and “movements elaborately repeated” (156). Nunokawa is more blunt, declaring: “the book is boring . . . long stretches of the story are almost unbearably uninteresting.”49 And if it is dull or circular, 69

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Dorian Gray owes that narrative dysfunction to its reversal of etiological conventions. If homosexuality is an absent effect in Dorian Gray, it is also an absent cause. Presenting an absence that is homosexuality, rather than a mere absence of homosexuality, the novel evokes Lacan’s impossible causality: a cause that both does and does not e­ xist, with a capacity for retroactive effects. If in scientific etiology events are “understood as leading smoothly, in accordance with well-known ‘laws,’ to other events,” Bruce Fink writes, “Lacan understands cause in a more radical sense, as that which disrupts the smooth functioning of lawlike interactions.”50 Refusing teleology and closure, he divorces causality from scientific logic and evacuates its accustomed clinical function. Whereas a “Freudian slip” produces a gap between thought and speech, revealing the unconscious, for Lacan, as Slavoj Žižek writes, “the p­ sychoanalytic interpretation does not simply fill in this gap by way of providing the hidden complete network of causality that ‘explains’ the slip: the cause whose ‘insistence’ interrupts the normal.”51 The gap of the unknown, which Freudian etiology would attempt to fill with a cause, is for Lacan not the site of a missing cause, but cause itself. Unlike Freud, who sees symptoms as effects of unconscious repression, Lacan argues that “the cause of the unconscious . . . must be conceived as, fundamentally, a lost cause.”52 Something in the unconscious produces symptoms, but that cause remains opaque and inaccessible. What Lacan calls the Real is a stubborn node of unsymbolizable matter in the Symbolic order— in Žižek’s words, “a cause which in itself does not exist—which is present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way.”53 As such, “the Real is the absent cause of the Symbolic” because it determines by opposition what the Symbolic order will privilege as presence, meaning, and the Law.54 The Real perversely determines the Symbolic 70

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order within which it appears absent. Žižek explains: “Although it does not exist (in the sense of ‘really existing’, taking place in reality), [the Real] has a series of properties—it exercises a certain structural causality, it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects.”55 That is precisely the ontological status of homosexuality in Dorian Gray: it cannot be proven to exist and yet it produces effects. This narrative lacuna produces what Sedgwick calls “the homosexual-homophobic path of simultaneous epistemological heightening and ontological evacuation.”56 Morrison offers a similar reading of that paradox, calling the place of homosexuality in Dorian Gray “an impossible epistemological quandary” that is “meant to underwrite the ontological incoherence, the essential nonbeing, of its object.”57 When traditional etiology puts causes before effects, it fails to describe the backward narrative of Dorian Gray, to which homosexuality arrives belatedly as a retroactive cause. Renata Salecl argues that in Seminars XI and XX, Lacanian causality entails a temporal reversal: “the ‘primary’ element becomes delineated retroactively through the operation of the ‘secondary’ element, in which the primary is included, albeit as a foreign body.”58 As a retroactive cause, the Real is both the prerequisite for and the result of the Symbolic, and homosexuality is the retroactive cause of Dorian Gray. Here time runs backward, and not only because the portrait, as if to literalize Freud’s theory of deferred action, suspends the effects of time on its subject. Where sexuality is concerned, the novel’s causality becomes tautological: Wilde himself becomes an effect of the text. Having read the novel, Alfred Douglas was eager to meet its author in July 1891, and at their next visit Wilde gave Douglas a special copy. 59 As a token of erotic exchange, the book becomes a cause or impetus for Wilde’s eventual fate, which would in turn alter the text itself.60 When in the courtroom Carson asked whether the passage 71

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describing Dorian Gray as “fatal to young men” referred to sodomy, Wilde replied, “The passage you have read describes Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence. There is no statement about what the nature of his bad influence was, nor do I think there is such a thing as a bad influence in the world”—presumably as opposed to its role in fiction.61 That evasion notwithstanding, the trial was all about influence and its relation to sodomy, if in a circular fashion: Dorian Gray showed Wilde to be a sodomite, whereas Wilde’s crime remade Dorian in its own image. Bad influence, it seems, proliferates: a novel whose protagonist is famously malleable is itself blamed for corrupting Douglas and other readers, betraying its author’s influence within and beyond the text. Historical exigencies have made Dorian Gray both a product and a precursor of Wilde’s downfall. Sedgwick is right to note Wilde’s “hyper-indicativeness as a figure of his age,” but that representative function in no way obviates his role as a figure of ages to come.62 For modern readers, the cause of Dorian’s desire has come not from the text but from its future, reflecting Wilde’s 1895 trials and twentieth-century models of gay male identity. To say, as Wilde did, that “each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray” is to say that each man sees his own desire, and a century of readers have done just that. The text’s backward causality includes the ways in which later readers’ identificatory energies become the belated cause of Dorian’s homosexuality and the role of the Wilde trials in producing a public discourse of gay identity through which Dorian Gray would then be read.63 The most careful reader of Dorian Gray cannot help but bring to the novel her knowledge of what will follow, what has already followed. Christopher Craft suggests that the narcissistic doubling of Dorian and his portrait is reflected once again in readers’ relation to “the uncanny looking glass we call The Picture of Dorian Gray.”64 Audrey Jaffe argues that 72

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readings of Dorian Gray which link the text to modern gay identity make Dorian’s beauty “a kind of projection into the future.”65 But to see any part of the novel as a “projection into the future” requires a projection into the past: the novel has been subject, in Nunokawa’s words, to an “aprés coup canonization as an Old Testament version of the exodus from the closet, a shadowy precursor whose difference from the contemporary coming-out narrative is only a matter of time.”66 Alan Sinfield, too, associates Dorian Gray with anachronistic reading: “Wilde and his writings look queer because our stereotypical notion of male homosexuality derives from Wilde and our ideas about him,” even if the post-trial Wilde of our identificatory fantasies is not the Wilde of Dorian Gray. As a result, Wilde’s “typicality is after-the-effect.”67 In this circular causality, Wilde’s life and works cause—that is, enable a way to articulate—the modern forms of gay identity that cause his life and his works to “be” homosexual in the first place. Most scholars agree that Wilde’s peculiar status began with his trials, which brought homosexuality unprecedented public visibility: Bristow contends that the image of Wilde as a homosexual type emerged over the course of the trials.68 Sinfield has noted that before Wilde, effeminacy and aestheticism did not always imply same-sex activity; it was Wilde, in part, who infused them with meaning, setting the template for a twentieth-century homosexuality of which he would belatedly become the icon. By 1913 the eponymous hero of E. M. Forster’s Maurice could confess that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,” speaking his unspeakability in a language Wilde had authorized.69 Such temporally distorted reading effects do not merely reflect the inevitable retrospection of a later reader’s relation to a historically distant text, nor are they wholly driven by the desire of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers for figures of gay experience. Instead, 73

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the strange narrative causality of Dorian Gray conscripts the reader to the impossible task of a backward etiology and informs ­t wentieth-century projections of modern gay identity into a text that precedes them. Wilde’s homosexuality, that is, both causes the gay male identity of the future and is caused by it; Dorian Gray both presages that role and is transformed by it.

POSTSCR IPT: INDECIPHER A BLE If the post card is a kind of open letter (like all letters), one can always, in time of peace and under certain regimes, attempt to make it indecipherable without compromising its making its way. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

Wilde’s libel trial not only adduced Dorian Gray as evidence, but also introduced a second queer inscription, the brief text that precipitated Wilde’s suit against Alfred Douglas’s irascible father and began the series of events leading to his destruction. On February 18, 1895, the Marquis of Queensberry came to the Albemarle Club in London, of which Wilde was a member. When he was refused entry, he wrote a message to Wilde on one of his calling cards and gave it to the hall porter.70 The porter noted the time and date of its arrival on its back and put it in an envelope for Wilde, who received it on his visit to the club ten days later.71 The substance of that all but illegible text has been the subject of some debate. Queensberry may have written “For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite,” or perhaps “Poseur and Somdomite,” or as the porter believed, “ponce and Somdomite.” So contested is this question that not all scholars accept Queensberry’s statement, during the first trial, that his own note said “posing as sodomite.” 72 Instead, 74

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they write, the card is an “ambiguous” document in Queensberry’s “scribbled,” “scrawled,” “none-too-legible hand.” 73 A perfunctory survey of Wilde scholarship turns up ten variant readings, distinguished by their form of address (For? To?), diction (Ponce? Posing? Poseur?), punctuation, capitalization, even the location of the message. During the trial Willie Mathews, an attorney for the prosecution, mistakenly described the card as reading on one side “‘For Oscar Wilde, posing as sodomite,’ whilst upon the other side of the card is either printed or lithographed the name and title of the Marquess of Queensberry.” In fact, as the clerk of the court reminded him, the message to Wilde appears above Queensberry’s name on the front of the card. Several scholars repeat the error, as if to restage the sodomite’s supposed confusion of recto and verso.74 Even considering its fateful role, the hermeneutic effort expended on this text is extraordinary: everyone agrees that the note is unreadable, everyone tries to read it, and everyone already knows what it means. But despite so many readings of Queensberry’s unreadable message, in fact it has not been read closely enough. Consider the word “somdomite,” which some critics regard as an “aristocratic misspelling” and others call “a moment of notorious illiteracy.” 75 In court, Wilde’s arch understatement—“The Marquess’s spelling is somewhat unusual”—anticipated generations of queer scholars for whom superior literacy, not to say attitude, would be claimed as the privilege of the dispossessed. A century later, readers agree only that “somdomite” signifies “sodomite.” 76 One effect of the calling card, then, is a disjunction between signifier and signified. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, what this text means, but they cannot tell how it means. Ellman anticipates a century of subsequent readers when he describes the porter at the Albemarle Club, who “had not deciphered the words—no one was to do so accurately—but he understood 75

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that an insult was intended.” 77 How does one understand the indecipherable? What does illegibility itself mean? In an insightful reading, David Jays links the scribbled note to the historical ­questions haunting Dorian Gray: “Queensberry’s blunder usefully reminds us that Wilde cannot easily be considered a modern homosexual. He is less a sod than a ‘somd,’ his own category of unique slippage that straddles the borders between Victorian paterfamilias and contemporary queer.” Though Wilde’s difference from the modern gay man echoes the commonplace understanding of the alterity of the past, Jays avoids the repressive hypothesis; instead of a Victorian silence, Queensberry’s “somd” signals a surplus of meaning, a site of productive incoherence.78 For the card’s brief message, ambiguity and error are significant in their own right. The same vexed interpretation and radical undecidability describe the place of homosexuality in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Everyone says that it cannot be specified, and everyone attempts to read it nonetheless, confident that they know what the novel means although they cannot say how it means. As texts whose meaning is, in Derrida’s words for the post card, both “open” and “indecipherable” at once, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Queensberry’s calling card share the dubious honor of their evidentiary appearance in Wilde’s trial, where court proceedings extensively considered the relation between sodomy and interpretation. Defending Queensberry, Carson’s opening speech assumed both the transparent legibility of homosexuality and the legitimacy of fiction as evidence: Dorian Gray, he said, “was designed and intended by Mr Wilde, and was understood by the readers thereof, to describe the relations, intimacies, and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits, tastes and practices.”79 In contrast, Wilde’s attorney, Sir Edward Clarke, treated homosexuality as an 76

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open secret, never literally named so never wholly present: Dorian Gray, he said, “describes—I will not say describes—it hints at and suggests, for it does not describe, vices and weaknesses of which Dorian Gray is guilty.”80 The difference between describing and hinting is, of course, the difference between certainty and doubt, clarity and ambiguity, the literal and the figural. Clarke’s statement performs the very evasion it attributes to the novel, hinting at “sodomitical . . . habits” with “vices and weaknesses.” In Carson’s view, interpretation is easy—the author’s intent coincides exactly with the reader’s understanding—but for Clarke the text calls for interpretation only to evade the closure of meaning. Later in the proceedings, the issue returns: Carson: I will suggest to you Dorian Gray. Is that open to the interpretation of being a sodomitical book? Wilde: Only to brutes—only to the illiterate. Carson: An illiterate person reading Dorian Gray might consider it a sodomitical book?81

Aligning sodomy with misinterpretation, Wilde disavows responsibility for what others may find in Dorian Gray, echoing his reply to the Scots Observer: “each man sees his own sin.” But “an illiterate person reading” is at best paradoxical: the notion of illiterate reading as a figure for misinterpretation implies that some people read so badly that they are essentially not reading at all. This odd locution recalls the problem of Queensberry’s calling card: here the illiterate and the illegible join in an unlikely hermeneutic project. It is not that the calling card’s inscription is simply illegible; rather, like homosexuality in Dorian Gray, it is both legible and illegible at once, easy enough to grasp but fundamentally resistant 77

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to meaning. Both are ambiguous, but the nature of their ambiguity is different: Dorian Gray does everything but name homosexuality, while Queensberry’s message is all too easily reduced to “Wilde . . . sodomite.” The calling card, accordingly, functions as a supplement, providing the signifier of homosexuality that the novel lacks; it is a postscript to Dorian Gray, a final chapter, which, though inscribed by another hand, works to rewrite the meaning of the text. If the plot of the novel centers on the deferred action of Dorian’s aging, this narrative device is repeated by temporal disturbances around the novel. Queensberry’s calling card takes its place alongside the trials themselves and twentieth-century gay male identity as a site from which homosexuality “returns from the future” to Dorian Gray. The meaning of the 1890 novel comes to include—indeed cannot exclude—the narrative of Wilde’s 1895 trials, and with it Queensberry’s brief text. In the latter, the word “somdomite” purports to describe an existing person, but in fact it creates Wilde as that person, and it is Wilde’s failed refusal of that interpellation that ensures its historical durability. Perversely, the card is also what causes Dorian Gray to “be” homosexual, for its insulting charge is the lens through which Wilde’s previous writings will be read: some five years after the fact, it makes Dorian Gray and its eponymous protagonist the queer figures they will then have been all along. The chain of events set in motion by Queensberry’s message causes the trial, which causes the exposure of Wilde’s homosexuality, which belatedly causes the homosexuality of Dorian Gray, which is then returned as evidence against Wilde. How then might this “lost,” retroactive causality speak to more recent questions of queer etiology? While conventional etiology takes causality as its end, both homophobic and “born gay” theories make causality a means to an end, a way to promote an 78

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ideological cause. But the fixation on the lost biological cause of homosexuality—“gay genes,” “born gay”—is itself a lost cause, useless to advance queer equity. Dorian Gray suggests different ways we might imagine the relation between queerness and etiology, replacing the question of what causes homosexuality with that of what homosexuality causes. That question begins to turn away from the pathological connotations of etiology, shifting the focus from the anomalous individual to heteronormative society and addressing the systematicity of sexual discipline. What then does homosexuality cause? Wilde offers two answers. Dorian Gray suggests that homosexuality causes itself, as if to elaborate, without apology, the myth of queer parthenogenesis. Perversion causes more perversion, recursively and perpetually circling back on itself, spreading its bad influence among characters, readers, the courtroom, Wilde himself, and later gay culture. Beyond Wilde’s text as well, homosexuality perpetuates itself asexually, horizontally, promiscuously, in gay and lesbian cultures and identities. Yet Dorian Gray also insists that something more accurately called queerness proliferates in all its negativity, absence, and impossibility. In heteronormative culture homosexuality may have been “unspeakable,” as Forster put it, but it also functioned to stabilize a network of intelligible sexual identities, not least its own, whereas queerness is called to account for the inadequacy of the order within which it remains a “foreign body.” This “lost cause,” then, exerts its own— as Wilde might say—strange influence, pitting the closure of etiological narratives against the queerness of sexuality as such.

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Return from the Future James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

I will speak, therefore, of a letter. Jacques Derrida, “Différance”

In Borges’s parable of literary repetition compulsion, a quixotic author takes on the task of rewriting Don Quixote in the precise language of the original, producing a second novel that is both identical to and different from the first. The idea is less absurd than it might seem, at least where The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is concerned. James Weldon Johnson’s work of African American modernism exists in two versions attributed to different authors, texts that are at once the same and crucially different. The book was first published anonymously in 1912 by the firm

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of Sherman, French, and Company in Boston. Fifteen years later, after Sherman French went bankrupt and the original edition fell out of print, Knopf produced a new edition with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, crediting Johnson as author.1 With that attribution, the second edition revealed the text as a fiction: the memoir abruptly became a novel. Johnson’s subject is the voluntary mutability of identity, both sexual and racial—precisely the mutability that theories of homosexual reproduction anxiously presuppose. Inviting the credulous reader, the Autobiography begins in a confessional tone: “I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life.”2 But its great secret is that it has no secret to tell: the narrator’s story is not that of the author. The nameless narrator is a peripatetic African American man, capable of passing, who travels between black and white worlds—from a Florida cigar factory to the gambling clubs of New York and a career as a gifted pianist, from intimacy with a white male benefactor to a terrifying scene of lynching, before he finally adopts a white identity, becoming a conventionally successful businessman, husband, and father, and in so doing, choosing racial and sexual identities usually assumed to be immutable. Van Vechten notes that although “the work was hailed on every side, for the most part, as an individual’s true story,” in fact “in the matter of specific incident, [The Autobiography] has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson’s own life.”3 When Johnson did write his autobiography, Along This Way, in 1933, he reflected on the difficulty posed by the title and anonymous publication of his earlier Autobiography: When I chose the title, it was without the slightest doubt that its meaning would be perfectly clear to anyone; there were people, however, to whom it proved confusing. When the book 81

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was published (1912) most of the reviewers, though there were some doubters, accepted it as a human document. This was a tribute to the writing, for I had done the book with the intention of its being so taken.4

While Johnson insists that he intended to present the text as a realistic autobiography, its canonical reputation turns on the failure of that aim: only with the 1927 edition did the text appear as a modernist novel, unbound from the truth-claims that had characterized African American autobiography, notably slave narratives, in the previous century. The second edition’s ironies, then, include the way in which Johnson was credited with authorship only when another author put his imprint on the text, and the fact that the Autobiography only belatedly joined the avant-garde. This backward causality, defying the grammatical clarity of past, present, and future tenses, operates in and around Johnson’s novel at several critical junctures, touching on both race and sexuality. We must read the second edition from the vantage point of the original (whose status as origin is, of course, retroactively constructed) and regard the 1912 edition with the hindsight that 1927 affords. But this queer temporality is not just a paratextual oddity; it is intricately involved in questions of same-sex love, both in the Autobiography and beyond it. The 1927 Autobiography, I will argue, reflects with exquisite accuracy the central racial and sexual problematics of the text, and replicates the reversal of temporal sequences that structures Johnson’s meditation on passing. Toward that end, we should consider the 1927 edition’s curious orthographic shift; the racial resonance of repetition with a difference; the ideological dimension of the turn away from British orthography in the United States; the erotic dynamics of the Autobiography, through which same-sex desire passes as surely as blackness; 82

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and the relevance of the novel’s queer temporality for today’s questions of sexual identity. Even as its time line seems to move from blackness and homosexuality to whiteness and heteronormative fatherhood, Johnson’s text—not least in its coinage “ex-colored”— challenges the temporal logic underlying discourses of sexual identity. Indeed, acknowledging the possibility of retroactive causality may complicate the issue of homosexual etiology and dislodge the linear narrative of a pervasive origin myth. While the 1912 and 1927 editions of the Autobiography are both the same and different—one a realist memoir and the other a modernist novel—there is another difference between them: the u of the word “ex-coloured” in the 1927 title. When the Knopf edition alters Johnson’s spelling throughout the text from American to British usage, rendering “parlor” as “parlour” and “analyze” as “analyse,” the most visible revision occurs in the novel’s title. As Library of Congress records show, in 1927 the “ex-colored man” becomes, with little regard for his American origin, an “excoloured man.” The why is more obscure: as the American scholar of English Thomas R. Lounsbury noted in 1909, “It is not always easy to discover the motives which influence men in the choice of spellings.”5 Although Van Vechten favored British orthography in his own writing, Eugene Levy suggests that Knopf, not Van Vechten, was responsible for the changes to Johnson’s novel, “following a literary fad of the 1920s.”6 Conveniently, under U.S. law the resulting novel was entitled to separate copyright as a derivative version of the original text. Today both editions are in print, and the two are often treated interchangeably: otherwise careful scholars refer, willy-nilly, to the nonexistent 1912 edition of Ex-Coloured Man or the phantom 1927 novel Ex-Colored Man. Even Van Vechten can’t or won’t keep them straight in his introduction, which begins: “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is, I am convinced, 83

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a remarkable book. I have read it three times and at each rereading have found it more remarkable.”7 One wonders what he read. The novel that he cites did not appear until after he wrote its introduction; instead, the “remarkable book” he credits is projected backward in history as if to excise and replace its predecessor. What would it mean to read this letter, the u that you and I may easily overlook, as a signifier of the difference between two identical Autobiographies? If Van Vechten’s 1927 version is a different novel from the original, that change is signaled by a text one letter in length: the u of “ex-coloured,” the silent supplement in the novel’s revised title. This difference, I will suggest, makes a difference to the status of homosexuality in the text, not only in its link to Van Vechten, but also internally, in the text’s own sexual thematics.8 In fact the addition of an extra letter to the title—while recalling the Marquis of Queensberry’s misspelled “somdomite”—materializes a queer dynamic present in the text all along. The u functions as a visible figure for a formerly invisible distinction, the Autobiography’s difference from itself around the question of sexuality. The relation of the 1927 and 1912 editions of Johnson’s novel, that is, re-enacts the novel’s central figure of doubling, of original and copy, prominent in the narrator’s rapt gaze at his image in the mirror in one pivotal scene and in his love for his wealthy patron. How can two texts, as in Borges’s literary parable, be at once alike and quite unlike? We may as well ask how two people can be. The passing narrative, as we know, trades on the problem of telling a difference, on what could make two outwardly identical people, or the same person at two moments in time, as different as black and white. How could a “white” man and a “black” man, in the early decades of the twentieth century, be visually, intellectually, even economically indistinguishable, but socially and juridically 84

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worlds apart? Perhaps the logic of the passing narrative, showing two identical men, one called “colored” and the other “white,” is Lacanian avant la lettre. As in Lacan’s famous diagram of two identical doors labeled “ladies” and “gentlemen,” the power of signification makes the difference that will thereafter function as the letter of the law. Introducing that diagram in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan takes issue with Saussure’s privileging of the signified over the signifier, for language, he argues, has the power to create, not merely to describe, what we take to be reality. Lacan urges his reader not to “cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified” but instead to recognize the signifier’s primary and productive function.9 In the restroom door example, discursive practice makes a difference that, though nominal, is misrecognized as ontological, and through that misrecognition gains—as transgender people know too well when faced with “ladies” and “gentlemen”—an intractable force of social coercion. The “agency of the letter” that Lacan describes broadens to include that of the signifier, but he gives permission for a narrower reading: “how are we to take this ‘letter’ here? Quite simply, literally.”10 In such a literal reading, the stray letter in the title of the 1927 Autobiography could be said to re-enact the agency of the letter that undergirds the hegemonic production of racial difference. Contingent as it may be, the second edition’s revision of the first also mimics Johnson’s central concern with repetition in the text. Much as the relations between its “black” narrator and its “white” narrator, between colored and ex-colored, between Borges’s two Don Quixotes, present a paradox of same-yet-different, the 1912 and 1927 editions of Johnson’s novel mimic its narrator’s crisis of identity. Two texts, identical in all but orthography, author, and date, each describe two narrators, identical in all but their nominal race.11 85

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Lending its ear to musical repetition with a difference, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man offers a model for the revision it will itself eventually undergo when “ex-colored” becomes “excoloured.” If the passing narrative is always a story about a double life, Ex-Colored Man figures that doubleness in the narrator’s musical ability to cross between two traditions, in the cultural adaptability that anticipates his choice to pass as white and, in his words, in “the miracle of my transition from one world into another” (18). An accomplished pianist, he recounts how he “made ragtime transcriptions of familiar classic selections” (112) only to be outdone, later in his travels, by a musician in Germany who, he reports, “taking the theme of my ragtime, played it through first in straight chords; then varied and developed it through every known musical form” (139).12 As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has noted, repetition with a difference informs the African American tradition as the fundamental logic of jazz and the blues. In Gates’s account, Jelly Roll Morton’s adaptation of a ragtime piece by Scott Joplin “does not ‘surpass’ or ‘destroy’ Joplin’s; it complexly extends and tropes figures present in the original.” In rhetorical terms, this refiguration constitutes a form of agnominatio or paranomasia, tropes in which a name is repeated with a slight alteration.13 But with a nod to Derrida’s coinage of différance, Gates calls it Signifyin(g), a term that both describes and enacts the practice of repetition with a difference.14 Derrida renders the difference between différence and différance inaudible—like the proverbial children, seen and not heard. Instead, the distinction between homophones is “a purely graphic difference” expressed, as in the word “coloured,” in the form of an unvoiced letter, “a silent lapse.”15 For Gates, the notion of Signifyin(g) repeats différance with a difference, translating white signification into the idiom of African American aesthetic practice. Could we then say of Signifyin(g) and coloured: same 86

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difference? Not exactly. Like Jelly Roll Morton’s ragtime adaptation, Van Vechten’s 1927 version of Johnson’s 1912 novel might represent a creative revision of the original. But it is worth recalling that the “alternate universe” of Signifyin(g) is, in Gates’s view, both black and intentional, a conscious product of African American artistry, while the 1927 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man bends toward whiteness, driven by the mere, blind contingency of the Knopf stylebook. 16

ORTHOGR A PH Y A ND NATIONA LISM In fact, the second edition of Autobiography alludes not only to African American tradition but also to another discursive past. What makes the difference between two identical texts may be merely a matter of orthography—“merely” because, though Derrida begins his essay on différance by invoking “a kind of gross spelling mistake,” spelling is the humblest of literary concerns, a difference that seems to make no difference, less often the province of the theorist than the schoolmarm.17 The narrator of ExColored Man recalls that his mother, despite her demanding work, “found time to teach me my letters and figures and how to spell a number of easy words” (5). “How to spell,” however, has a political history in the United States. Converting Johnson’s text to British usage, the Knopf edition turned back the clock to a past from which Noah Webster, among others, had sought to free American English. In 1789, Webster proposed the radical spelling reforms, designed to promote a distinctly American cultural identity, that would later shape his best-selling 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster argued that orthography is “an object of vast political consequence”: 87

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As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain . . . should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.18

Other nineteenth-century spelling reformers took up the cause in equally patriotic terms. One T. C. Moffatt, for example, author of an 1876 pamphlet, contrasted American thrift with English profligacy. In an inventive argument for orthographic economy, Moffatt argued that the “waste” of letters such as the silent u of the British “coloured” was so impractical for a “man of business” that, as he noted approvingly, “the shrewd Yankee state of Connecticut has been debating whether it can afford to pay for printing silent letters in its public documents.”19 In 1927, publisher Alfred A. Knopf (inoculated, perhaps, against the problem of silent letters by the American mispronunciation of his own name) clearly disagreed, but he could not erase the constellation of associations surrounding the Anglicized “coloured.” In contrast to Yankee frugality and capitalism, the English usage favored by the Knopf edition recalls the aristocratic wastefulness attributed to the old country, as well as the Anglophilic imposture for which most Americans, by the twentieth century, had an active disdain. Anticipating the novel’s own future, Johnson’s narrator pauses to remark on British English, noting that “the English feel that the language is theirs” and wondering dryly, given their own linguistic offenses, “upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language” (136–137). And in the second edition of The American Language, published by Knopf in 1921, H. L. Mencken contrasts the “logical superiority” of American spelling with the madness of British custom. In the United States, he argues, British spelling reflects “the desire 88

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to pass as English”; it is a “mere affectation . . . chiefly visible among folk of fashionable pretensions,” like the vacationers at one New England seaside town: “At Bar Harbor, in Maine, some of the summer residents are at great pains to put harbour instead of harbor on their stationery, but the local post-master still continues to stamp all mail Bar Harbor, the legal name of the place.”20 By 1927, that is, the u of the revised Ex-Coloured Man would suggest a distinctly un-American kind of passing, whose pretensions would extend to the novel’s first-person narrator. The Knopf edition conjures an “ex-coloured man” who cannot exist in the world of the novel and can hardly exist anywhere else. As a black man in the United States, Johnson’s narrator would never be regarded as a “coloured” man, only as a “colored” one; yet in England, where the narrator could conceivably be “coloured,” his race goes unremarked. But despite the impossibility of his identity, his choice to introduce himself to the reader as “ex-coloured” must reflect on his character. When, in the first paragraph of the 1927 edition, the narrator pauses to “analyse the motives” that lead him to his confession, we see a man who, though born in the United States—and, as we know, welltrained in spelling by his mother—now writes with the affectation of British style. To the narrator’s many failings, the Knopf edition adds a snobbish Anglophilia. If British usage meant useless ornamentation, a “fashionable pretension” in defiance of male modernist aesthetics, American readers of that era would need little prompting to link that decorative impulse with a gay aesthetic. Siobhan Somerville has shown how the 1927 Ex-Coloured Man shifts the novel’s relation to homosexuality by associating Johnson’s text with Van Vechten’s persona. She notes that the 1927 edition of Autobiography creates “a different text” by staging a “re-production of ‘mainstream’ culture as decidedly queer.”21 Thus the u of the new title functions 89

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as Van Vechten’s signature on the book, the imprint of his desire. Borges writes of Pierre Menard, “it is permissible to see in this ‘final’ Quixote a kind of palimpsest, through which the traces— tenuous but not indecipherable—of our friend’s ‘previous’ writing should be translucently visible.”22 And arguably, in the second Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Van Vechten, playing the role of Menard, causes Johnson’s own sentences to reference Van Vechten’s own “‘previous’ writing,” his private scrapbooks of gay erotica.23 But the u is also the signature of Van Vechten’s fictional counterpart, the white millionaire with whom he shares a queer kinship. The Van Vechten whom Johnson knew was, to be sure, neither an “athletic looking man” who might “have been taken for a youth,” nor a world-weary gay suicide, but his own claim to sophistication is mirrored in Johnson’s fictional patron of the arts, the world-traveling connoisseur of culture, the American man alienated from American masculinity by epicene tastes (113). The novel’s gay resonance, in other words, exceeds the paratextual. It is only fitting that the 1927 edition should introduce a British orthography, for the narrator whose preferences this spelling must seem to reflect has already declared himself, in his childhood, “a perfect little aristocrat” (5), fascinated by his own beauty, whose bookish habits constitute “on the whole a rather unwholesome life for a boy” (44). If any American would affect a “coloured” spelling, it is the boy to whom Johnson introduces us in the first chapters, a fine embodiment of the effeminacy, highculture tastes, and artificiality that the orthographic flourish connotes. If in later chapters the child vanishes, as children must, his queerness does not. Traveling abroad, Johnson’s narrator comes to enjoy the “peculiar” friend to whom he is bound by both “pleasure” and “a very strong bond of affection” (145, 127, 140). While

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the narrator describes the millionaire as “possessing over me a supernatural power which he used to drive me on mercilessly to exhaustion” (118), he also finds there a “familiar and warm relationship” (118), second only to his bond with his mother. Although any “physical expression of tender regard” (141) is postponed until their parting, the unmistakable warmth on both sides counterweights the narrator’s eventual marriage, as the before of that after. And it is perhaps significant that Johnson imagines homosexuality as a problem with time, at least where the millionaire is concerned: I was his chief means of disposing of the thing which seemed to sum up all in life that he dreaded—Time. As I remember him now, I can see that time was what he was always endeavoring to escape, to bridge over, to blot out; and it is not strange that some years later he did escape it forever, by leaping into eternity. (140)

This seemingly gratuitous passage serves first to guarantee the nameless patron’s homosexuality, as he joins the list of suicides— no less exaggerated in literature than in film—chronicled by Vito Russo in the gay necrology of The Celluloid Closet.24 We have seen this character before: the neurotic gay man who allows aversive energies to structure his life even to the ending of it. The passage meant to explain the two men’s relationship as inconsequential (the narrator is not a lover, just a way of wasting time) at the same time cements the possibility that it is much more (the millionaire turns out to be that sort of man). But what haunts the narrator’s friend, besides his excess of idle time, is the structure of temporality itself: wanting less time in his life, he also wants his life to be less timed.

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A N INDEFINA BLE SOM ETHING Is it any wonder, then, that the favorite tune on which the ragtime pianist works his Signifyin(g) changes is Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”? The Autobiography is, as a narrative, structured by variations both from and within heteronormative forms, repeating the wedding march with a difference. If sameness, mirroring, and repetition number among the novel’s central concerns, such tropes extend from the racial thematics and the publication history of Johnson’s text to its sexual plotting. The narrator recalls that his patron, having loaned him clothing from his New York apartment for their hasty departure, in Paris “bought me the same kind of clothes which he himself wore, and that was the best; and he treated me in every way as he dressed me, as an equal” (127). The Narcissus figure, already prominent in the narrator’s early scene of self-examination, recurs here in a love structured by both sameness and difference, by likeness and unlikeness. Such same-sex eroticism remains, like the u of Van Vechten’s title, visible but unvoiced in the novel. And it is in this sense that the second title accidentally and belatedly expresses the homosexual suggestions always present in the text. The effect is a temporal conundrum: in a paradox to which I will return, the novel’s second edition makes queer a first edition that was already so. The extraneous letter in Ex-Coloured Man is a supplement that signifies what is missing from the original: a material, excessive signifier of both presence and absence. This recalls Slavoj Žižek’s account of dream interpretation in Looking Awry: “In the final analysis, an element always ‘sticks out,’ marking the dream’s constitutive lack, i.e., representing within it its exterior. This element is caught in a paradoxical dialectic of simultaneous lack and surplus.” This seemingly extraneous signifier, 92

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Žižek writes, holds the place of “what this imaginary scene must ‘repress,’ exclude, force out, in order to constitute itself.” 25 The u of “ex-coloured,” I would argue, is such a figure, seemingly stupid and contingent, but in fact bound to the very structure of the novel—in particular, to what the novel’s own structure cannot acknowledge about itself. In Žižek’s terms, Van Vechten’s u represents what the novel has failed to account for; it constitutes, among other things, the visible trace of what Johnson’s narrator, scrutinizing himself for any sign that could betray him to the white woman he is courting, calls “an indefinable something which marked a difference” (196). 26 But that letter gestures toward other differences as well, among them homosexuality: it registers the presence of same-sex desire within the passing plot’s thematics of race and hints at a fractal multiplication of differences beyond black and white. If the narrator, passing into the status of the white patriarch at the novel’s end, can be called “ex-colored,” he might as well be called, in the noxious language of the religious Right, “ex-gay.” The combination of the two could economically be expressed as “excoloured,” if we allow that silent letter to hold the place of unvoiced queer possibilities. Where sexuality is concerned, the improper 1927 title of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man properly names the novel’s concerns, by suggesting a graphic return of the repressed within a conventional sequence of linear temporality.27 One might, of course, object that the 1927 edition is a distortion of Johnson’s original: How can the letter u, as a retroactive addition, represent the return of the repressed from the past? But as Žižek contends, the symptom always returns from the future. In the analytic scenario, matter repressed in the past returns through the subject’s later experiences, including the analytic conversation, where it retroactively assumes the meaning it must already 93

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have had. “Only through this additional detour,” Žižek writes, “does the past itself, the ‘objective’ state of things, become retroactively what it always was.”28 The seemingly obvious timeline connecting “colored” and “ex-colored,” Johnson’s Autobiography and Van Vechten’s, the before and after of the novel’s publication, thus spirals back. When the novel’s title takes a u-turn, its anachronistic orthography evokes another fragment of the past, the same-sex love that the narrator must leave behind. While holding the place of the past, the u of Ex-Coloured does not belong to it; coming later to indicate what has already been left behind, it occupies a peculiar temporal paradox. Both an anachronism and a belated addition, it is the residue of “a past that has never been present.”29 It will doubtless seem to some that queer readings of the Autobiography are themselves a belated distortion of Johnson’s original, another “past that has never been present,” another retroactive projection. But if so, homosexuality would merely follow the same retroactive causality of racial identity in Johnson’s novel. Like so many passing plots, the Autobiography appeals to racial origins only to question their originary status. Colored and ex-colored, then and now: the temporal sequence of the narrative pivots on that “ex.” Luring readers with the preposterous notion of race change—how can anyone be “ex-colored”?—the title establishes both the text’s logic of negation and its rigorous narrative sequence. Its naturalizing production of an originary blackness belies the fact that the narrator’s blackness is only belatedly posited as an origin; before he is an ex-colored man, he sees himself as a white man—or rather, a white boy, since it is a schoolroom interpellation that first alters his racial status. The teacher instructs “all of the white scholars to stand for a moment” and corrects the child: “You sit down now, and rise with the others.” More insulting than being excluded from whiteness is the embarrassment of his 94

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own inexplicable ignorance of what everyone else seems already to understand about him: “We knew he was colored,” say the black children, and his mother does not deny it (14). The process of the narrator’s assumption of blackness in the schoolroom scene retroactively invents an “original” identity, masking its production as its unveiling. Though the narrator will assiduously avoid naming his race in the story that follows, the novel’s title offers another belated inscription of an initial “coloredness.” Nowhere in the novel does the narrator designate himself as black or white; he describes himself in the negative, as not white or not black. His mother’s words echo in his own final decision: “I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but . . . let the world take me for what it would” (187). Of his great confession to his future wife, we learn only that “I told her, in what words I do not know, the truth” (200). Not until he names himself in the title of the novel does the narrator become “colored,” and then only by admitting he is “ex-colored.” “Colored” becomes an empty figure, an impossible identity, which comes into being at the same moment it is voided, X-ed out, and assigned to the past. 30 (In Ex-Colored Man, the X functions both to signify an unknown, as in mathematics, and to designate the production of racial identity through negation and under erasure. No Malcolm X, Johnson’s narrator turns away from blackness to claim the privileges of whiteness. They may, however, be mirror images: while the X of Malcolm X replaces a false patronymic with a signifier of the absence of his true African name, Johnson’s “ex-colored” could be rendered as “X-colored,” for the novel, too, refuses to affirm what the narrator regards as a false name, choosing instead a placeholder that makes visible a gap in the schema of racial identity.) Johnson’s narrator cannot inhabit the space of the “colored man”; for him that name is always already lost. Without defending the 95

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narrator or his choice, the Autobiography dissects temporal fantasies of authenticity, showing the futility—which does not preclude violence—of any insistence on “original” identity. And what of sexuality? If blackness is named retroactively and under erasure, homosexuality goes wholly unnamed. Yet Johnson’s narrative invites us to imagine racial and sexual identities as strictly parallel: passing as white is analogous to passing as heterosexual. This analogy has its own history, for modern homosexual identity, as theorized by sexologists such as Karl von Westphal in the late nineteenth century, adopted the temporal logic of scientific racism. 31 If the person of color was evolutionarily backward or “primitive,” they proposed, the homosexual was developmentally arrested, each atavistically trapped in the past and pathologically detached from time’s forward progress. 32 Without endorsing or extending that analogy, we might ask whether homosexuality is, like the narrator’s blackness, itself a retroactive construction in the Autobiography. Where sexuality is concerned, the more conventional teleology of the passing narrative seems to apply: true identities will yield to false, black to white, gay to straight. Homosexuality is assigned a primary status, as an original but unwelcome impulse that the narrator will finally deny. The “pretty boy” (15) and “little aristocrat” (5) will grow up, notwithstanding his detour through the millionaire’s midnight hours, to become a husband and father who tautologically invokes one form of passing to justify another: “My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am” (207). Yet this narrative progression from a primary homosexuality to a secondary heterosexuality is untenable in a culture that assumes all children to be straight, even while it torments them with the suggestion that they may not be. For the vast majority of gay and lesbian people, the timeline runs from supposed heterosexuality to 96

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homosexuality, not the reverse. In a society that, with very scant exceptions, treats heterosexuality as the original and default identity, the story of the closet would hardly qualify as a narrative at all; we are all born in the closet, and to remain there, however strenuous an effort that may require, cannot provide the motility required by narrative. (Driven by this temporal difficulty, today’s arguments that homosexuality is innate seek to prove that homosexuality is not belated when in fact the heterosexual presumption makes that experience unavoidable.) In some ways, the racial strand of Johnson’s plot better resembles that most cherished story of the gay community, the coming-out narrative. In each case, the protagonist abandons his socially established identity in favor of a more personally fulfilling role, and thereby signals a certain mistrust of origins: what everyone believed me to be when I was a child, he might say, is not who I really turned out to be. But this, too, fails, for unlike coming-out stories, passing narratives generally address the choice of a false identity or expose the falsity of racial identity as such. In the coming-out narrative, we are endlessly reminded, gay and lesbian identities are discovered, not chosen; the focus is essence, not contingency. 33 While it may be impossible, then, to read the narrator’s allusion to his “great secret” in the first paragraph of Johnson’s novel without hearing an echo of the closet, that resemblance must be continually called into question, strained as it is by the torque of divergent temporal models and narrative forms (1). Without falling victim to the seductions of an analogy—without, that is, assuming that what Johnson says of race can directly apply to sexuality—the Autobiography provides an occasion to revisit the biological determinism that is so central to antihomophobic rhetoric today. 34 For Johnson’s narrator the state of being a “colored man” is retroactively constructed; though by no 97

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means pathological, it returns, like the symptom in Žižek’s account, from the future. His original identity only later assumes the status it must then appear always to have enjoyed. This “retro” causality also structures the relations between the Autobiography’s two editions where sexuality is concerned. The 1927 edition of Johnson’s novel is both the same text as that published in 1912 and not the same text; the Autobiography was always queer, but it also became queer in 1927 in some sense. Through this temporal paradox, the homosexuality of the text comes back from the future in the belatedly antiquarian orthography, in the return of the repressed, in Van Vechten himself. What then would it mean to see homosexuality tout court as defined by a return from the future? If racial identities can be exposed as backwardly established, not simply originary, what of sexual identities? I have argued that the structuring role of etiology in today’s discussions of civil rights is fundamentally homophobic, whatever causality is claimed, and that a reclamation of “homosexual reproduction” is preferable to any effort to defuse anti-gay paranoia about recruitment, influence, seduction, and contagion as memetic vectors of queer increase. Against right-wing arguments such as those of the “ex-gay” movement, pro-gay activists insist that one cannot be made (or unmade) gay; rather, we are always already “born gay.” This argument, effective as it may be, allows only one kind of time: its stubborn essentialism suppresses all the ways in which queer lives may include temporal paradoxes, anachronism, and retroaction. The temporal dislocation of Johnson’s Autobiography suggests a retroactive causality that, inverting the logic of etiology, would explain how queer desires can in fact return from the future. As Tim Dean has observed, “any notion of sexual development must be a retrospective construction rather than a natural or historical fact.”35 That notion is elaborated in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s 98

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reading of the queer child as a historical conundrum, whose “asynchronous self-relation” is structured, among other things, by the predominant assumption, everywhere violated but inevitably sustained, that children cannot be sexual. 36 The gay child is then constructed from a later vantage point, as the necessary antecedent to the queer adult: only in coming out, one might say, do I now understand what I earlier must have been. As Stockton puts it, “I must become who I say I’ve been.”37 Or more baroquely, only now do I come to have been queer from the first. In fact, the coming-out story always proceeds retroactively, compelling the gay individual to claim a new identity that has been there all along. Acknowledging oneself as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, in the conventional formulation, one discovers what one has always been, but that discovery, like all discoveries, invents as much it unveils. The work of coming out is therefore temporally incoherent, for it requires one to become what one already is, retroactively constructing the “already” through which gay and lesbian identities gain historicity. That this retroactive causality fails to match the conscious experience of most gay and lesbian individuals simply bespeaks another retroactive dynamic, whereby the felt immediacy of personal experience models itself on the ostensibly secondary narrative trajectories promoted by the coming-out genre and by the rhetoric of innate, immutable homosexuality. That rhetoric has effectively countered homophobic efforts to deny any and all protections to gay and lesbian people, efforts predicated on finding homosexuality to be parasitic or inauthentic, not innate and original. But acknowledging a “retro” element in queer temporality and gay identity does not endorse anti-gay bias; instead, it opens the discussion of a different temporality, whose beginnings are found in the future. 99

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EXQUISITE A DA PTATIONS One aspect of that discussion might employ Derrida’s and Gates’s theories of repetition with a difference to deliteralize the notion of homosexual reproduction. Reproduction, after all, extends beyond procreation to replication, replacement, facsimile, substitution, all forms of repetition that describe Van Vechten’s Autobiography and Menard’s Quixote. If queerness means difference (negativity, undecidability), as opposed to the sameness (meaning, identity) suggested by homosexuality, this might best be called not homosexual reproduction but queer reproduction. That model cannot help but echo Darwin’s vision of needful genetic variation, rhetorical variation in literature, and what Johnson’s musical protagonist would recognize as variations on a theme—the “repetition and revision . . . fundamental to black artistic forms,” including the blues. 38 In evolutionary theory, as we have seen, genetic variations enable normal diversity within a population and the necessary range of evolutionary possibilities. On the Origin of Species is a celebration of differences: Darwin writes of “vast diversity,” “variations,” “peculiarities,” “deviations of structure,” and “exquisite adaptations.”39 Other figures for queer reproduction-asdifference are found elsewhere. In rhetoric, Erasmus famously demonstrates 150 possible variations of the sentence “Your letter pleased me mightily”—a sentence whose elements, though their meaning is irrelevant to the experiment, well befit their subject.40 What is queer reading but a relation between the letter/signifier and pleasure, endlessly refigured through an infinite series of differences? That is what Borges imagines in “Pierre Menard”: a text whose sublimity is an effect of its suspension between sameness and difference.

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As the OED reminds us, variation means difference, but it also means dissention, uncertainty, and inconstancy; so whether we call it variation, repetition with a difference, or Signifyin(g), the function of difference always potentially marks the “tomb of the proper,” as Derrida names the a of différance.41 How, then, do these variations on a theme mark the tomb of proper sexuality? How might they speak to Gayle Rubin’s call for a theory of “benign sexual variation”? As Rubin notes, “Variation is a fundamental property of all life, from the simplest biological organisms to the most complex human social formations. Yet sexuality is supposed to conform to a single standard.”42 This is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s point as well, and what I consider a fundamental ethical principle of queer theory: “people are different from each other.” Indeed, Sedgwick continues, “It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact”—that is, the immense complexity of human sexuality subsumed by the conventional metric of objectchoice.43 So if sexuality is to be theorized through science, let that theory reflect Darwin’s delight in variation, not the grim hypothesis of a putative gay gene. Elizabeth Grosz notes that for Darwin, evolution is “the generation of endless variation, endless openness to the accidental, the random, the unexpected”; it is the unpredictable mutation of the normal into something new and strange.44 At the very least, thinking sexuality through a theory of variation might foster recognition of the myriad differences operating in the ambit of “queer”; might counter determinism with contingency; and might insist upon not only one’s difference from others but also, as Johnson’s narrator knows too well, difference from oneself. When in Borges’s story Pierre Menard rewrites Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the two texts, he writes, “are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors

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will say, but ambiguity is richness).”45 The 1927 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a richer and more ambiguous text than the original, not despite but because of its pretentious spelling and odd geopolitical shift. The u of its title is a mistake, imposing on the narrator’s prose a British affectation nowhere explained by the text. The Anglicization of the novel, whether for vain or venal purposes, is all wrong. If, as the OED informs us, “coloured,” in Shakespeare’s day, meant “feigned, pretended, [or] simulated,” the 1927 edition may be “ex-coloured” in acknowledging Johnson’s authorship, revealing the text that had painted itself as a memoir in its true colors, as a fiction. Yet Knopf ’s title for Johnson’s novel is also coloured in its writing of coloured, dealing falsely with the original text. Where “coloured” means falsified, an “ex-coloured man” would have ceased to prevaricate; he would be genuine. But in fact the narrator is, in the eyes of a racist society, moving toward imposture as he assumes a white identity. The only alternative is to regard him as essentially a white man, in which case his assumption of whiteness at the novel’s end is not an act of covering up but one of coming out. Still, we might recall Lacan’s notion that “the Truth arises from misrecognition.”46 Although this remark refers to the specific mechanism of the transference in the analytic process, it is not only in analysis that truth arises from misrecognition—or, should we say, from misspelling. Certainly the truth of Johnson’s Autobiography lies in the relation between the two editions, the original and the bad copy. Describing the parallax view, in which two vantage points reveal the inherent plurality or self-difference of an object, Žižek suggests that the two editions of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night exemplify “the parallax function at its purest,” for “the gap between the two versions is irreducible, it is the ‘truth’ of both of them, the traumatic core around which they circulate; 102

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there is no way to resolve the tension, to find a ‘proper’ solution.”47 The 1927 travesty of an Ex-Colored Man, the publisher’s folly, is at least as rich as the original, for its retroactive invention of an impossible text retraces Johnson’s own skepticism about origins and teleology and its concern with pure style hints at the gay male desire that the text cannot more plainly name. Evoking a past that exists only in the future, the u of “ex-coloured” may be an error, but it cannot be corrected by a proper reading or a real origin. Instead, the 1927 title, whose extra, silent letter suggests the return of a repressed queer motif, whose retroactive imposition is also a kind of restoration, marks the temporality central to Johnson’s narrative, in which a “more ambiguous” truth arises from the mistake of anachronism. While the 1927 novel is, like Menard’s Quixote, a different novel from its identical predecessor, in another sense Johnson’s Ex-Colored Man turns out to have been an Ex-Coloured Man all along.

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Desire and the Scene of Reading The Well of Loneliness I remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater’s Renaissance—that book which has had such a strange influence over my life. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

In her graphic memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel recalls that when, at nineteen, she realized she was a lesbian, that revelation launched a research project: “One day it occurred to me that I could actually look up homosexuality in the card catalog.”1 Before love there was the library; before intimacy, before identity, before community there were books. Homosexuality, of course, has been defined for centuries by problems of representation, designated the “love not to be named among Christians” but spoken nonetheless throughout British and American literature.2 At the end of the nineteenth century, however, when sexology brought forth both the notion of homosexuality as a taxonomic category, fictional and nonfictional works concerning gay men and lesbians began to represent scenes, like those Bechdel describes, that write the act of queer reading.

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I want to suggest that a specific, overdetermined relation between gay and lesbian identity and the act of reading—an act sometimes documented for others to read—obtained throughout what we might call the long twentieth century, from the sexologists’ first major publications in the 1880s to the present Internet age. 3 For over a century, homosexuality has been defined as an identity, and among the myriad ways of assuming that identity, reading has held a prominent place. Queer scenes of reading necessarily reflect the exigencies of the marketplace, obscenity laws, and determinations of literary value that can be grandly canonical or provincially arbitrary; class, privilege, and education determine their scope, for along with literacy they require a certain degree of leisure. Although the chronology is necessarily inexact, a relatively short period saw the rise of a distinct tradition of queer books about books—which is to say, queer narratives in which the act of reading proves a critical step toward self-knowledge.4 Kathryn R. Kent has shown how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “specific reading experiences, widely available to white, middle-class women as books became increasingly a massmarket item, paved the way for new organizations of sexual, as well as gender, identities,” even as distinct connections emerged between lesbianism and identifications forged through reading. 5 So clear was this association that Djuna Barnes could parody it in The Ladies Almanack, a text that, as Kent notes, “sees reading itself as a form of erotic recruitment.”6 And Mikko Tuhkanen connects queer breeding to queer reading, “the danger of which is its contamination of the adolescent female mind,” in his account of The Children’s Hour.7 In what follows, I examine scenes of reading in British and American writing from the first half of the twentieth century: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre (1906), E. M. Forster’s Maurice 105

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(1913–1914), Frances Rummel’s pseudonymous Diana: A Stra­ nge Autobiography (1939), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Re­visited (1945), and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953). 8 Taken together, these texts delineate the defining features of queer ­re­ading—identity-formation, interpellation by prevailing language, the search for community, an education in cultural and sub-cultural signs, and the function of the material book as a medium of communication and exchange. I then focus on a pivotal scene of reading in Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness and the afterlife of that text. Sexological theory enables Hall’s argument that because homosexuals are naturally and immutably different—as we now say, “born this way”— they should not be accused of vice or subjected to cures. Yet the novel’s scene of reading implicitly opposes that claim, showing something like the queer influence of which the novel itself would be accused. There, through the peculiar temporality that Kathryn Bond Stockton associates with the queer child, Stephen Gordon attains queer subjectivity; by reading her father’s sexological texts, she comes to be what she will thereafter always have been.9 Considering how a person might become gay, where “becoming gay” registers a specific legibility to others and oneself, queer scenes of reading in The Well of Loneliness and other texts constitute sites of homosexual reproduction, their contagious ideas borne from wri­ter to reader. In The Well of Loneliness, the queer scene of reading troubles etiology by posing two theoretical questions, each structured by the trope of the mirror. First, how might texts that appear to reflect a queer subject tacitly invent that subjecti­v ity? And conversely, how does the reading of reading of reading, with its hall-of-mirrors structure, its mise en abyme, produce an endless displacement of the meaning on which both identity politics and normative sexual regulation depend? 106

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The contentious bond between reading and sexuality has a long history in Britain and the United States. The rise of the novel in the eighteenth century brought an outcry against the genre’s supposed corruption of young readers. In 1808 the Reverend Samuel Miller of Princeton Theological Seminary complained that in novels [e]very opportunity is taken to attack some principle of morality under the title of a “prejudice;” to ridicule the duties of domestic life, as flowing from “contracted” and “slavish” views; to deny the sober pursuits of upright industry as “dull” and “spiritless;” and, in a word, to frame an apology for suicide, adultery, prostitution, and the indulgence of every propensity for which a corrupt heart can plead an inclination.10

This criticism continued well into the nineteenth century. In 1840 one commentator in the New York Review accused popular fiction of “stimulating the passions with images of superhuman depravity, and poisoning the moral sense by familiarity with unthoughtof guilt.”11 While representations of normative heterosexuality would soon escape criticism (and “superhuman depravity” was regrettably scarce), the notion of reading as potential pollution persisted through the century. Nor was fiction the only culprit: British anti-masturbation crusader William Acton warned parents in 1867 about children’s reading: “It has often surprised me that ‘Lempriére’s Classical Dictionary,’ with its filthy stories of the loves of Heathen Mythology . . . should so generally placed in the hands of lads.”12 And in 1884, American reformer Anthony Comstock represented “Evil Reading” as a “death-trap” menacing “the moral purity of children” both at home and at school.13 These observers were wrong about the threat, but right to identify reading as a common source of sexual knowledge. Indeed, all 107

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sorts of literate young people have found in their reading, along with lasting identifications and clues to their own strivings, an introduction to intimacy, even when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that queer reading might best be imagined in the as-yet-unformed queer subject who “is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer.”14 No lurid paperbacks are required; Bechdel recalls the “alarming prominence” of “lesbian” at the top of its page in her dictionary, and Alberto Manguel reports that in his father’s library, at the age of twelve or thirteen, “I had begun to look up, in the elephantine Espasa-Calpe Spanish encyclopedia, the entries that somehow or other I imagined related to sex.”15 Clinical views of homosexuality, such as the work of sexologists, Freud, and other psychoanalysts, were unlikely to be censored but also unlikely, until Alfred Kinsey’s best-selling 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, to come into the hands of the average reader.16 (Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote sections of Psychopathia Sexualis in Latin to discourage just such readers as Hall’s Stephen Gordon.) As Manguel implies, reading holds a special meaning for those marked as different. “Within a segregated group,” he writes, sometimes “readers, like imaginative archaeologists, burrow their way through the official literature in order to rescue from between the lines the presence of their fellow outcasts, to find mirrors for themselves.”17 Several factors set the queer experience apart from that of other “outcasts,” as Manguel calls them. One is that the vast majority of lesbian, gay, and bisexual children grow up in straight homes that, whatever their degree of enlightened “tolerance,” can teach them little about queer culture and identity. Alone, the child  may 108

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appreciate a sense of her own difference or feel the stirrings of same-sex desire, but when useful images of gay men and lesbians are rare, when visibility is perilous and finding others like oneself uncertain, reading takes on a special urgency. Since the first experience of queer people as queer people is so often solitary, cautious, or secret, there is the book. Though intimately bound to history, scenes of queer reading are often anachronistic; though centered on literature, they tend to exemplify “strong” misreading.18 For one, the invention of homosexual identity did not obviate readings of older texts in which same-sex love found its way into language: Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman. It is not surprising that Whitman in particular would be read as a kindred spirit by later generations of gay men—among them Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and Allen Ginsberg. What is most remarkable about him, what never fails to deliver the thrill of the sentimental narration that Sedgwick calls “the impossible first person,” is that Whitman identifies as eagerly with his readers as any reader could with him.19 “Calamus 10,” for example, addresses the future: You bards of ages hence! when you refer to me, mind not so    much my poems, Nor speak of me that I prophesied of The States, and led them    the way of their glories; But come, I will take you down    underneaththisimpassiveexterior—Iwilltellyouwhatto    say of me: Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the    tenderest lover, The friend, the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend, his lover,    was fondest 20

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Anticipating a scene of queer reading, Whitman opens his text to anyone seeking the meaning of his desire or his difference from his neighbors; proleptically he reads us reading him. The fact that his great works largely predate the invention of modern homosexual identities suggests how insistently the vector of queer reading defies historiography, driven by a reader who finds her sexuality reflected, defined, or produced by a text that may only be queer in the context of that relation. How many generations of men and women have found poignant, cryptic figures in the same Bible used to condemn them? In Langston Hughes’s short story “Blessed Assurance,” the story of Ruth and Naomi speaks to a young gay man (“Entreat me not to leave thee”); and in Maurice, Clive knows that “[t]here was David and Jonathan; there was even the ‘disciple that Jesus loved.’”21 The scholarly “error” of retroactive projection merely extends the avid, untutored reading practice of many lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in search of textual self-recognition. Queer reading, however, is always ambivalent: what can appear as narcissistic mirroring or self-affirmation in fact contributes to the production of queer subjectivity, and the queer subjectivity that may seem self-invented is never free. Even as readers projectively imbue texts with the meaning of their own experiences, texts also imprint readers with the vocabulary of their ideological moment, whose most radical text bears traces of what it would oppose. While acts of reading function as mechanisms of identityformation, then, they are in many ways a tenuous foundation for identity politics. What may be presented as a simple assimilation of knowledge always signifies both more and less than it seems; as Freud says of sexuality, “it goes lower and also higher than its popular sense.”22 For one, any reading takes shape within a culturally specific vocabulary of deviance and desire, which—as later 110

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readers of Hall have been quick to note—renders “free” individuals acts of self-recognition inseparable from an apparatus of ideological management. At the same time, with their structure of infinite regress, such scenes of reading can suggest an endless displacement that refuses the fixity of meaning they presume to supply.

CLOSETED R EA DING The authoritative lexicons of the ancient languages were not much help . . . they defined the ancient terms for the less mentionable sexual acts in Latin, if the terms were Greek, and in Greek, if the terms were Latin. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

Even when sexuality competes with reading, as it sometimes does for college students, they remain pedagogical alternatives, two sides of the same coin. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles, facing exams at Oxford, sends Sebastian away while he pores over his books: “I remember no syllable of them now, but the older, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.”23 If he does not learn that lore from books, others will, seeking in their reading answers to the question: Why am I different? The smallest moments of queer reading contribute to that answer. In Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre, Oswald knows that the love he has felt is “possible” “between man and man” because he has “read it in the verses or the prose of the Greek and Latin and Oriental authors who have written out every shade of its beauty or unloveliness, its worth or debasements—from Theokritos to Martial, or Abu-Nuwas, to Platen, Michelangelo, 111

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Shakespeare.”24 Oswald’s own experience is insufficient to banish the notion that same-sex love is impossible; and, equally striking, what tips the balance for him is not a defense of homosexuality’s virtues, but rather the indication, across a range of canonical texts, that homosexuality is no worse than heterosexuality. As Gayle Rubin has argued, the social discipline of sexuality reserves for the normative the possibility of “moral complexity”; “heterosexual encounters may be sublime or disgusting, free or forced, healing or destructive,” but homosexual acts can only signify degradation.25 That Oswald welcomes evidence that homosexuality may or may not be debased bespeaks how little complexity has been granted to same-sex love in normative discourse.26 Queer books may defend homosexuality even when they do not praise it, and even when their diegetic reader fails to profit from their arguments. In Maurice, for example, Clive’s reading stirs him to a new understanding, but cannot overcome his loyalty to social institutions. Because he “had always been a scholar, awake to the printed word,” Forster writes, “Never could he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, toward good or bad.”27 As in Imre, merely to grant complexity to homosexuality is to elevate its status. Stunned by his “good fortune,” Clive considers taking Plato’s words as “a new guide for life,” but cannot reconcile Plato with Christianity. He has no difficulty with the Bible, but the church of his day remains obdurate. Clive “searched the Scriptures for support,” but “the Church’s interpretation was against him” and he chooses the side of the institutions: the church, the family, the law that says his love is “not to be mentioned among Christians.”28 How desperately fragile is the balance and how immense becomes the fact that David loved Jonathan in the face of normative ideology, whose paradoxical 112

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rhetoric evokes Freud’s story of the borrowed kettle: there is no such thing as same-sex love, we must never speak of same-sex love, we proclaim same-sex love an abomination. In the few decades that separate Forster from Frances Rummel, scientific knowledge replaces ecclesiastical authority. Thus in 1939, the heroine of Diana turns to sexology to understand her desire, for she “no longer thought of homosexuality as a moral issue, but merely as a condition within the range of sexual variations.” With that goal in mind, she launches a vast investigation: I read everything I could find in English, German and French which might increase my understanding of myself, and what I couldn’t find in libraries I sent for. Laboriously, often with a great French or German dictionary, I read Hirschfeld, Freud, Jung, Westermarck, Krafft-Ebing, Gide and Ellis, and I accepted, piecemeal, what was compatible with my own observations.29

While other scenes of reading elide the business of interpretation, Diana foregrounds it, sifting the scientific texts for “what was compatible with my own observations.” With such self-confidence, who needs the experts? And yet, much as the science lacks credibility without her experience, her experience wants meaning in the absence of science. From among conflicting theories, then, she rejects the notion of “congenital” inversion, warms to psychoanalysis, and embraces the notion of arrested development. Despite her refusal of some hypotheses, Diana finds her reading both a “comfort” and a “humanizing” experience: “Whether I could or could not agree with the psychologists on some of their observations, I did take the attitude that the homosexual was a fellow human being whose behavior was no better, no worse, than that of the 113

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heterosexual.”30 The sentiment, again signaling moral complexity, may or may not be universal among the psychologists, but that is of no consequence; it is not meant for the reader Diana, but for the reader of Diana. Because our own act of reading is always implicitly present in the text, any argument absorbed by a character has in mind another audience. Like Forster and Prime-Stevenson, Frederics uses the scene of reading to promote a polemical thesis—“no better, no worse”—bolstered by the assurance of her scholarly competence in three languages. Doubtless all three texts hope to nudge the straight reader toward tolerance, but Diana does so most pointedly. Would queers really need to be told that they are “fellow human beings”? If so, fellow to whom? Instead, that standard of humanity marks the place of the straight reader who is enjoined to recognize the lesbian’s legitimate subjectivity. In another strand of queer writing, a public scene of reading limns the many ways in which the act of reading may be an announcement of identity, a betrayal of a sexual secret or, at the very least, a hint of unusual sympathies. In Renault’s The Charioteer, set during World War II, convalescent solider Laurie has gone out into the woods to read the Phaedrus when his friend Andrew startles him, asking about the book. As if the revelation of his reading would divulge all of his desire, Laurie conceals the book’s title: In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were the diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart. 31

If modern technologies of sexuality have identified homosexuality with a form of corporeal inscription, “written immodestly 114

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on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away,” here the book becomes a prosthetic part of that semiotic system, legible not only in its explicit content but in the affective investments it has elicited from Laurie. 32 So thoroughly has he cathected the text as token of his desire that he can only see it as the site where he will be “revealed”; for one panicky moment, being a man who loves Plato seems as incriminating as being a man who loves men. And yet, like so many disciplinary mechanisms, this one ends in a double bind, for “Laurie suddenly wondered whether [Andrew] supposed it was something pornographic: after all in a free country there are very few reasons for hiding books.”33 In every “free” country there are quite a lot of reasons for hiding books, but Laurie is right to surmise that “pornographic” materials are the prime suspect, and that every effort of self-defense will have precisely the opposite effect. The Phaedrus is therefore “pornographic” merely in its exposure of what ought to be covered and vulgarization of what might be sublime—in its ability, in other words, to produce in Laurie a response of shame. Shame, knowledge, and arousal are so intertwined that arguably all visits to the HQ stacks, as they are named in the U.S. Library of Congress system, constitute pornographic forays. In the library, terror of one’s potential exposure underscores the untenable boundary between inflaming and informing texts. Nothing divides research from romance, as Forster acknowledges, or study from stimulation. The school-age Maurice, whose “chief indecencies were solitary,” finds that “the school library was immaculate, but while at his grandfather’s he came across an unexpurgated Martial, and stumbled about in it with burning ears.”34 Both the book and its subject may be arousing; the avid research in Diana hints at the readingcathexis, the desire for books, expressed in Bechdel’s Fun Home, where libraries are to be cruised and books to be “ravished.”35 115

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What is and is not pornography when any representation of homosexuality may be called obscene, and any text may be invested with erotic significance by a reader? The act of reading is equally suited to other kinds of seduction; when books are not hidden, they can as easily bring people together as drive them apart. In fact, one function of the queer scene of reading is to enable the reader’s entrance into a counter-public sphere, whether that means a sexual liaison, the ability to recognize others, or an introduction to gay and lesbian communities. 36 If one task attending the scene of reading is self-recognition, the cultivation of a queer interiority, a second is identification with an incipient gay community, as contemporary queer scholars note. The border of a gay world is always closer than it seems, for reading, like sexuality, marks the precarious boundary between private and public. Of his forays into classical literature, Halperin recalls, “I eventually discovered that it constituted a body of subterranean lore which circulated informally among classical scholars and was communicated from like-minded professor to student in the course of private conversations outside the classroom.”37 Kath Weston recalls: “In my own raid on a local college library, one of the few books on homosexuality I uncovered was Violette Leduc’s boarding-school romance, Thérèse et Isabelle. Though the book was untranslated and I knew no French, the cognates were enough to make the case that this was the book for me.”38 Sue-Ellen Case recalls that as a teenager, having discovered a book on Rimbaud, “I became queer through my readerly identification with a male homosexual author.”39 It is but a step from finding an author to finding a community with which to identify. Jeffrey Escoffier concurs: “For me, the process of discovering ‘the gay world’—it was another part of coming out—started with reading.”40 In Maurice, the class in which 116

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Mr. Cornwallis makes his oblique reference to Greek love leads to a discussion about Greek society. Maurice’s friend Durham asserts that “the Greeks, or most of them, were that way inclined.”41 That historical knowledge opens an avenue of connection to another gay community—not one he can inhabit, to be sure, but one from whose tradition he can imagine himself descended. The study of ancient Greece conveys a sense of same-sex love as a cultural institution, however historically distant—indispensable knowledge in the early twentieth century, when same-sex love was decidedly not a cultural institution. As Laurie ventures into the woods with the Phaedrus, he recalls the exquisite physical sensations associated with past scenes of reading: turning the pages, he thinks of the “other places where he had read them . . . the first time of all, in a sunny clearing with a stream running through it, a short way from his home. It had struck him with religious awe to find Phaedrus leading Socrates almost, it might have been, to the very spot.”42 The accident of finding himself replicating a scene of discourse— it cannot be a literal scene of reading—described in the text produces the same uncanny effect as Whitman’s proleptic address to his readers to come, because Laurie hungers for a connection to a past that is his only because he desires it—a past that is his because he can read it. Even after finding an imaginary history in the queer past, one must navigate the social spaces of the present—a task in which the talisman of the book can play a role. In Forster’s novel, Durham asks whether Maurice has read the Symposium: “Maurice had not, and did not add that he had explored Martial.” Durham lends him the book, which becomes the keyword of a later seduction. After the vacation, Durham makes an overture: “I knew you read the Symposium. . . . Then you understand—without me saying more . . . I love you.”43 Allowing Plato to speak for him, Durham relies less 117

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on the substance of the Symposium than on a fantasy of shared meaning grounded in the mutual act of reading. The closeted text unfolds in a public dimension; the solitary business of queer research touches circuits of seduction and exchange. As Escoffier observes, “the ‘private’ discourse of reading eventually opens up into social life.”44 Having delved deeply in sexology, Diana finds herself with a new knowledge of others, appropriately compared to a literary uncanniness: “like the reader who meets over and over again the new word he has just looked up in the dictionary, I now recognized homosexuals I would never have noticed before.”45 In The Charioteer, the book becomes a signifier of sexual history when Andrew, having asked to borrow the Phaedrus, notes the name of another man written in it before Laurie’s on the flyleaf where, by the text’s conclusion, his own name will be inscribed.46 The scene of reading helps one know oneself in part, it seems, through knowing others. Two problems emerge from such scenes, roughly aligned with constructionist and essentialist principles. Citing Foucault, Halperin asserts that “self-invention is not a luxury or a pastime for lesbians and gay men: it is a necessity,” and this self-invention is no less than the process of “becoming homosexual.”47 Yet for Foucault, self-invention cannot be the intentional act of a liberal humanist subject; however urgently we may pursue it, this becoming is also something that befalls us. What Halperin calls “self-invention” may disguise the systematic interpellation of deviance as narcissistic recognition and the pursuit of public business as private contemplation. Reading has long been considered a closeted pursuit, an activity that not only enjoys but also defines a specific zone of domestic privacy, even while the interiority it engenders enables subtle forms of surveillance. D. A. Miller writes, “Perhaps the most fundamental value that the Novel, as a cultural 118

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institution, may be said to uphold is privacy, the determination of an integral, autonomous, ‘secret’ self.” Yet the effect of interiority is thoroughly ideological, for “every reader must realize the definitive fantasy of the liberal subject, who imagines himself free from the surveillance that he nonetheless sees operating everywhere around him.”48 Does reading merely instill the fictional sameness of identity politics, or as some readers have Well have suggested, interpellation by hegemonic institutions?49 While Althusser would surely understand the work of Krafft-Ebing or Ellis as furthering the (“modern,” “humane”) medical establishment’s invention and population of a category of deviance, even works by authors such as Forster must to some degree impel their readers toward extant social roles. 50 That is, after all, what readers come for—to be named, recognized, endowed with meaning. In fact, the nominative function that seems most nakedly an exercise of institutional power is what Diana Frederics, the most critical of our readers, finds “comforting” and “humanizing” in sexology. That does not mean that ideological apparatuses wholly determine the meaning of an act of reading—that would not be reading. But it does mean that scenes that foreground the enjoyment of narcissistic discovery simultaneously perform a less individual, less spontaneous function. Conversely, to proponents of biological determinism, such scenes of reading may be deceptive because they feed the phobic conviction that people can learn to be gay. In this view, the notion that homosexuality is to any degree learned or acquired— like “socialization into the homosexual role” or any form of queer becoming—always serves the anti-gay sermons of the religious Right. Turning to The Well of Loneliness, I will chart a course between, or against, both objections: queer scenes of reading at once counter the biological determinist position and suggest a differently calibrated response to the anti-gay rhetoric in which gay 119

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men and lesbians, “naturally” barred from sexual reproduction, increase their numbers through contagion, seduction, and corruption. For that work, there is perhaps no better text than The Well of Loneliness, which both endorses sexological theories of congenital inversion and has for nearly a century tutored its readers on how to become a lesbian.

BIRTH/W R ITE What is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text? Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”

With its direct appeal to sexology, The Well of Loneliness speaks trenchantly to today’s rhetoric of biological determinism. The novel’s first edition included a preface from Havelock Ellis, so anxiously edited that the reader is left to ponder the book’s concern for “certain people” who represent, as he delicately suggested, “one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today,” and whose existence poses “difficult and still unsolved problems.”51 However, his sexological theory, published in the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, provides the novel’s most salient narrative of homosexual etiology. Drawing on Krafft-Ebing’s eventual conviction that homosexuality was rooted in an inherent “predisposition,” Ellis explained homosexuality as “congenital inversion”: if not “born gay,” Stephen Gordon is surely “born different,” a girl whose body never conforms to feminine expectations. 52 In her childhood, neighbors deem her “unusual” and even “unnatural” (77); but even when she tells her father, “I was never quite like all the other children” (116), he cannot bring 120

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himself to tell her what he has read. It is only after his death and after her mother’s repudiation of her, therefore, that Stephen enters his library and discovers what he knew all along. Unlike the occluded scenes of reading in Maurice and Imre, this passage offers a conventional realism; while much of The Well of Loneliness shows Hall’s propensity for overwrought metaphors, Stephen’s venture into the library entails a concrete description of physical space and elapsing time. Leaving her mother, Stephen goes to her father’s study “as though drawn there by some strong natal instinct” (230). I will return shortly to tropes of birth, but now Stephen must sit in her father’s armchair to ponder her fate: “Getting up, she wandered about the room, touching its kind and familiar objects; stroking the desk, examining a pen, grown rusty from long disuse as it lay there; then she opened a little drawer in the desk and took out the key of her father’s locked book-case,” intending to choose a few books to take with her into exile (231). Much as she has been invisibly guided to the study, then to the desk, she is now directed to the bookcase: “she had never examined this special book-case, and she could not have told why she suddenly did so. As she slipped the key into the lock and turned it, the action seemed curiously automatic.” With its uncanny sense of somnambulist inevitability, this is not a scene of automatic writing but one of automatic reading. As Mary Jacobus suggests, a paradigmatic scene of reading is one “in which imagining an open book in an empty room gives rise to a series of equivalences, such as ‘inside the book’ and ‘inside me.’”53 And indeed, the narrative moves from one enclosed space to another—house, study, desk, drawer—in a nested series evoking an unexplored interiority. Still aimless, Stephen notices that “on a shelf near the bottom was a row of books standing behind the others,” including one by Krafft-Ebing. Again, though Hall insists 121

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that the innocent Stephen has no purpose and cannot suspect what she will find, the material objects of the scene give a rather more pointed sense of approaching the forbidden; “bottom” and “behind” may not signify sexually as they might in a gay male context, but they do name what is conventionally shaming and unseen. Finally Stephen begins to read: she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes—She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly. For a long time she read; then went back to the book-case and got out another of those volumes, and another. . . . The sun was now setting behind the hills; the garden was growing dusky with shadows. In the study there was little light left to read by, so that she must take her book to the window and must bend her face closer over the page, but still she read on and on in the dusk.

What finally engages Stephen’s attention is seeing her name written by her father in the margin, rendering the book a posthumous message to her. Despite Hall’s eagerness to secure the medical imprimatur of Havelock Ellis’s preface, this passage does not gloss the sexological texts for the reader. Instead it externalizes, so that only Stephen’s body offers clues to her experience; we know that she reads tirelessly, taking book after book, her whole posture attesting to her absorption, as her enlightenment as to her “nature” contends with the growing darkness of the room. The end of Stephen’s reading marks the end of Hall’s realism and the start of a passionate soliloquy indicating Stephen’s newfound knowledge about herself and sense of kinship to “thousands” of others. The encounter is structured by a negotiation between 122

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singularity and commonality: Stephen Gordon goes into the study as an “I” and exits as a “we”—which is to say, as a rather different “I” who acknowledges membership in a collective. “[T]here are so many us,” she thinks, “thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right to love”—a line whose compassion will be ironized by Stephen Gordon’s palpable disdain for other gay and lesbian people (232). 54 One reason for her ambivalence may lie in the other text found in her father’s study, as Stephen turns to the Bible and lapses into a kind of madness under the weight of her identification with Cain. Still, knowing now what her father knew about her, and capable of understanding her affinity with a class of people beyond herself, Stephen gains lesbian identity from a scene of queer reading. However, as Judith Halberstam rightly notes, Stephen Gordon’s difference is so patently visible, so much an open secret to both other characters and to the reader, that the “problem of self-knowledge” plays an uncommon part in the novel. 55 While other texts make reading a source of affirmation, The Well of Loneliness renders it initially a source of pain: Stephen recognizes herself among people who are “hideously maimed and ugly,” if not forsaken by God (232). Nonetheless, the novel retains the sexological explanation for Stephen’s difference, her hypothetical identification with homosexuals as a class, and the promise that her writing will eventually redress the trauma of this reading. Set near the midpoint of the narrative, Stephen’s scene of reading both explains her past and predicts her future. The sexologist Krafft-Ebing, whose 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis was among the most influential works on sexuality before Freud, concluded that homosexuality was neither a perversion nor a form of mental illness but an “anomaly” or natural variation that occurred when biological abnormalities during gestation produced a sexually “inverted” brain—masculine in women and feminine 123

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in men—manifested in anomalous gender expression and homosexual desire. 56 “Congenital sexual inversion in women” makes for a girl “found in the haunts of boys”: She is the rival in their play, preferring the rocking-horse, playing at soldiers, etc., to dolls and other girlish occupations. The toilet is neglected, and rough boyish manners are affected. Love for art finds a substitute in the pursuits of the sciences. At times smoking and drinking are cultivated even with passion. 57

Before second-wave feminism explained the difference between sex and gender, the theory of sexual inversion conflated them with each other and with object choice. Stephen’s body is masculinized from birth—she is “narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered” and marked by her “likeness” to her father—as is her sense of gendered self. 58 Her playthings are boyish, and her childhood identification with Lord Nelson leads her to practice masculinity with the housemaid’s naive encouragement: “Doesn’t Miss Stephen look exactly like a boy? I believe she must be a boy with them shoulders,” to which Stephen replies, “Yes, of course I’m a boy . . . I must be a boy, ’cause I feel exactly like one” (13). Each gesture feeds Stephen’s belief, and the reader’s, that she could not have grown up in any other way. 59 Later in the text, Hall translates Krafft-Ebing’s congenital origin of homosexuality into tropes of birth and heredity that include other kinds of identity and other fated occurrences. The inverts who haunt Valérie Seymour’s salon are “men and women who, set apart from their birth, had determined to hack out a niche in existence” (401). Stephen finds herself among them because, though she is among those “destined from birth to be writers” (242), she must also endure the “terrible birthright of the invert” (247). What 124

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links these natal tropes are the books from her father’s study. As Stephen embarks on her exile in Paris, Hall notes that “[s]he had taken nothing with her from Morton but the hidden books found in her father’s study; these she had taken, as though in a way they were hers by some intolerable birthright” (266). Emblem of her difference, the books identify “inversion” as inborn and immutable, for Stephen and for others. Hall tells us that “but for an unforeseen accident of birth, Wanda might even now have been a great painter” (468), while “under different conditions of environment and birth [Stephen] might well have become a reformer” (470). Yet the birthright of the invert precludes the right to give birth; in The Well of Loneliness tropes of procreation vie with figures of sterility. The sheer repetition of “birth” and “birthright” throughout the novel marks the world of this text as a reproductive economy to which homosexuals cannot contribute. The invert whose every attribute is a reminder of her birth cannot give birth, for—in a mythology Hall does not question—homosexuality means the refusal of procreation and the foreclosure of the futurity signified by the child. The external sign of her mental inversion, Stephen’s “sterile body” also signifies her turn away from motherhood, a perpetual reminder of her kinship with “those pitiful thousands” of the queer community (213). Hall is insistent on this point, and the repetition is inescapable: though Stephen’s kisses with Angela Crossby are “sterile” (164), her much deeper bond with Mary Llewellyn is no better, “bitterly sterile” when compared to Mary’s potential life with Martin Hallam (490). Even during their sunniest time together, Stephen’s bond with Mary approaches the rhetoric of fertility only to underscore its impossibility. “Something primitive and age-old as Nature herself, did their love appear to Mary and Stephen” Hall writes, “For now they were in the grip of Creation, of Creation’s terrific urge to create; the urge that will sometimes 125

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sweep forward blindly alike into fruitful and sterile channels.” So potent is this aura that even “they who might never create a new life” feel a part of it (359). Angela Ingram is right to suggest that a key component of the novel’s supposed obscenity in 1928 was its depiction of a woman who refuses her national duty to bear children and thus damages the patriarchal institution’s “ability to reproduce itself.”60 But as we have seen, despite their outrage about homosexuals’ supposed failure to conceive life, bigots also take comfort in it: at least perversion cannot replicate itself that way. From Hall’s moment to the present, inversion has seemed— homosexuality has seemed—capable of spreading unchecked, a phenomenon that has everything to do with reading and writing. At their expulsion from Morton, Puddle encourages Stephen to write “for the sake of all the others who are like you” (233). Years later, an acquaintance urges Stephen to her writerly “duty”: that is, to communicate the fate of her kind to those “happy people” eager “to persecute those who, through no known fault of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth” (450). Stephen protests “They can read . . . there are many books,” to which he replies: Do you think they are students? Ah, but no, they will not read medical books; what do such people care for the doctors? And what doctor can know the entire truth? . . . The doctors cannot make the ignorant think, cannot hope to bring home the sufferings of millions; only one of ourselves can some day do that. (450)

In passages like these, where The Well of Loneliness labors to justify its own project and narrate its conditions of existence, what is lost on Stephen resonates in defense of Hall. It is significant, then, that Stephen Gordon writes no Well of her own, no lesbian novel 126

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blending the familiar genres of science and fiction. The former includes the sexological studies that awaken Stephen to her identity; the latter comprises Stephen’s four published novels, all of them closeted. Her first novel, based on Morton, explores the love of “the normal” (242), but despite its success she feels that “there’s something wrong with it . . . something I’m always missing” (246). Hall hints that the missing element is lesbian sexuality, but whenever Stephen is urged to write for and about “certain people,” she always turns away. Although after the war we find her rewriting her third novel “for Mary” (393), Hall gives no hint of its topic, and its popular success seems to indicate another evasion. It is as if The Well of Loneliness is Stephen’s imaginary fifth novel, the novel she would write if she could find the missing element. But it is Stephen’s failure to write something like The Well of Loneliness that allows her to function in the narrative as a tragic spokesperson for other inverts (at least to the straight readers to whom the novel’s polemic is addressed), not a succès de scandale like Hall herself. If The Well of Loneliness is a book about books, it is also a book about the social regulation of reading and writing. Some observers, friendly and unfriendly, have regarded books as a non-biological means of reproduction. Michael Warner notes that for many of Washington Irving’s characters, “[s]terility leads each to literature, and to literary posterity”; as a result, “Literary reproduction is, for Irving, the ultimate form of surrogacy: a mode of cultural reproduction in which bachelors are, at last, fully at home.”61 It is not surprising, then, that the tropes of fertility and sterility in The Well of Loneliness extend to the act of writing. If lesbians like Stephen are literally sterile, Hall suggests, they are figurally capable of abundant reproduction: not the lineal transmission of genetic material to future generations, but the lateral sharing of queer identity and resources across social and discursive networks. Framing her 127

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birthright as birth writing, Stephen reflects on the success of her first novel: These people had drawn life and strength from their creator. Like infants they had sucked at her breasts of inspiration, and drawn from them blood, waxing wonderfully strong. . . . For surely thus only are fine books written, they must somehow partake of the miracle of blood. (242)

Like Anne Bradstreet, that famous proponent of maternal writing, Stephen might well describe her creation as parthenogenic—“If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none”—for despite its “normal” content, her project falls outside the economy of heterosexual reproduction (242).62 Later, despite her neglect of one manuscript, “it was one of those books that intend to get born, and that go on maturing in spite of their authors” (344–396). Writing begets a queer child. This figuration of authorship as motherhood structures the hallucinatory meditation with which Hall ends The Well of Loneliness. Having ceded Mary to Martin, Stephen feels the room fill with “unbidden guests,” shades of the gay men and lesbians she has known. “She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert” (505). They accuse her: “you and your kind have stolen our birthright” (505) and seem to enter her body: “They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden” (506). Called “children” in the next line, these beings merge in “one demand” for equity and recognition. Combining actual and fictional figures, past and future, they do not represent the characters Stephen has written but those she has neglected to write, those who might, Hall suggests, populate a novel very like The Well 128

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of Loneliness. Those “yet unborn” conjure up a future homosexuality, but to what end? Stephen finally feels herself empowered to advocate for these “thousands,” even as she is figuratively charged with their birth. This last grotesque image encapsulates the inherent contradictions of The Well of Loneliness—Stephen will not merely defend those queers who happen to be born, but will herself in some way give life to other lesbians and gay men, an act of generation that the theory of congenital inversion would deem impossible. The Well of Loneliness, then, presents a paradox: on the one hand, homosexuality is utterly determined at birth and cannot reproduce itself; on the other hand, Stephen’s potential writing about the reality of queer life has the potential to create a new generation of gay men and lesbians. Hall assigns this theory to Valérie Seymour, the unruffled foil for Stephen’s self-pity: “nature was trying to do her bit—inverts were being born in increasing numbers, and after a while their numbers would tell. . . . They must just bide their time—recognition was coming” (469). Assuming that inverts are born, not made, Valérie does not speculate on why their numbers should be increasing, but that possibility complicates Krafft-Ebing’s theory, in which nature is nothing if not constant. The matter of numbers produces a figural impasse that The Well of Loneliness never resolves—but it is also the impasse of heteronormative culture, which at once insists that queers cannot reproduce and that they must be prevented from doing so. Inherent in Hall’s trope of homosexual reproduction, in other words, is a model of queer kinship that is as distinct from her era’s notion of homosexual sterility as it is from today’s rhetoric of biological determinism. If, as Oscar Wilde writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “one had ancestors in literature,” it is because the act of reading establishes familial bonds among readers, authors, 129

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and characters—Prime-Stevenson and Shakespeare, Maurice and Martial, Diana and Havelock Ellis—in language that both reflects the preoccupation of heteronormative culture with breeding and offers an alternative genealogy. Writing queer scenes of reading produces more queer scenes of reading, and queer scenes of reading often make queer people what they are—which, if not entirely “making people queer,” still constitutes a reproduction of homosexuality. One has ancestors in literature because one seeks them out, and finding them, one will in turn be found.

THE HOMOSEXUA L AGENDA Arrayed against any positive notion of homosexual reproduction is a discourse of queer influence, seduction, and contagion, in which sexual identity is so pliable, and homosexuality so virulent, that the slightest encounter may prove corrupting—a paranoia vividly displayed in the obscenity case against The Well of Loneliness.63 Weeks after the novel was published in 1928 to generally good reviews, James Douglas wrote an inflammatory editorial in the Sunday Express, calling for the suppression of the book and asserting, in a famous line, “I would rather put a phial of prussic acid in the hands of a healthy boy or girl than the book in question. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.”64 The book represents an “intolerable outrage,” Douglas continues, “not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library,” because it poses a direct “moral danger” against which “we must protect our children.” Though it would be difficult to imagine a novel less appealing to children than The Well of Loneliness, Douglas plays the familiar card of infantile vulnerability. Mixing his metaphors, he joins poison with “vices,” “plague,” “contagion,” 130

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and “leprosy,” claiming that “this pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.”65 The British court concurred. After a short trial, despite testimony from such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, chief magistrate Charles Biron ruled against The Well of Loneliness, and Jonathan Cape, the publisher of the British edition, was charged with violating the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The court’s argument rested not on the book’s content, but on its probable effects on readers, following the legal definition of obscenity in The Queen v. Hicklin as any material likely to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.”66 The problem is not that the book represents lesbians, but that it fails to condemn them, spreading the dangerous idea—Wilde might call it an influence—of tolerance. In this finding, the court implicitly rejected Hall’s notion of congenital inversion, in whose logic no one could be influenced toward homosexuality by reading of any kind. On the contrary, adhering to the legal question of influence, the court’s judgment assumed that lesbianism was not congenital but was acquired through contact—the intimacy of seduction being, apparently, no more dangerous than the intimacy of reading. The court’s 1928 opinion still resounds in both pro- and antigay arguments. Notions of queer increase through influence or contagion vie with activists’ insistence that homosexuality, being wholly congenital, can never be communicated among people. As in the novel’s obscenity trial, what undergirds the anti-gay rhetoric is a notion of sexual orientation as infinitely fragile and endlessly mutable. In the American 1940s and 1950s, Jennifer Terry reports, “the idea that homosexuality resulted from youthful seduction” made the child a figure for the nation, both vulnerable to “terrifying and contagious carriers of immorality.”67 That 131

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message can be heard today in the rhetoric of the religious Right, which contends that because homosexuality is not innate, it can “spread” like a disease. As in Hall’s case, such language often joins queer reproduction with reading: in a fundraising letter sent to his constituents in April 2010, a Virginia district supervisor named Eugene Delgaudio claimed that the “Radical Homosexuals” had decided that “NOW is the time to push their perverse ‘life-style’ on every man, women and child in America.” Raising the specter of homosexual increase, Delgaudio singles out reading as its means of proliferation: his letter begins with a fictional description of a warehouse in which “row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls.”68 Making language the medium of homosexual reproduction, Delgaudio warns against the burgeoning word. But the rhetoric of biological essentialism is no better. Many in queer communities believe that conclusive proof of biological determinism enables significant political advances. In 2007 Wayne Besen, representing a gay organization called Truth Wins Out, told an interviewer: “Americans are not cruel. If they think that being gay is inborn and can’t be changed, they are going to be very sympathetic to full equality for gay people.”69 But defined by its defensive posture, as if forever on the verge of an apology, today’s version of congenital inversion implies that homosexuality is, at best, a misfortune that anyone would avoid if she could. That premise has made it difficult to imagine a world in which queer people can be valued, nourished, and sustained. In her 1991 essay, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Sedgwick notes with manifest irony that although some defend the right of gay people to exist, “the number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay people is treated as a precious desideratum, a needed condition of life, is small”; that is, against the vast array 132

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of institutions dedicated to “the wish that gay people not exist” there is no corresponding body devoted to “the development of gay people.” 70 In the two decades since that publication, institutions such as the queer youth advocacy organization Outright Vermont have taken on the nearly unthinkable work of bringing some kids up gay (or rather, bringing up some gay kids). Yet the existence of institutions like Outright Vermont is predicated on the success of the biological-determinist argument in checking fears that gay people corrupt children.71 But as it turns out, kids’ reading practices are one way in which they bring themselves up gay, in an open secret that only the queer paranoia about straight paranoia manages to suppress. Consider the afterlife of The Well of Loneliness, whose lasting influence over generations of queer readers demonstrates precisely the persuasive power of which the book was accused at its trial.72 As a result of the trial, the novel did not appear in Great Britain until 1959, but English-language editions published in the United States and France circulated among interested readers.73 The Well of Loneliness enabled a discourse in which, Jonathan Dollimore writes, “lesbians were able to identify themselves, often for the first time, albeit in the very language of their oppression.” 74 Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon acknowledge that The Well of Loneliness was at one time a “bible” for lesbians.75 Another reader said that the novel “fell upon me like a revelation. I identified with every line. I wept floods of tears over it and it confirmed my belief in my homosexuality.” 76 The same was true even for those who found the book less than attractive. In 1975 Jane Rule recalled that “in The Well of Loneliness, I suddenly discovered that I was a freak, a genetic monster, a member of a third sex, who would eventually call myself by a masculine name, . . . wear a necktie, and live in the exile of some European ghetto.” Despite her disidentification from what then 133

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seemed a retrograde portrait of lesbian masculinity, she recalls that the novel had a “radical” effect on her at the age of fifteen.77 Earlier I proposed that scenes of queer reading pose two problems, both structured by the trope of the mirror. Manguel’s belief that outcasts read to “find mirrors for themselves” describes the common-sense notion of identity-formation: there is a self who precedes the act of reading in which he recognizes himself. The effect of mirroring would then attest to the projective force of the reader’s own desire, as Forster suggests in Clive’s examination of David and Jonathan, and Renault confirms in Laurie’s reading: “the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them.”78 This lyrical description of his investment in the text also speaks to our encounter with the pages of The Charioteer, defending the text against the charge of influencing impressionable readers—after all, the tutelage described in queer books could easily be performed by queer books. Renault’s theory of narcissistic reading assures the reader of The Charioteer that he will find there only “all that he himself had brought” to it. In this view, it is the reader who determines the scene of reading, and that is what readers typically recall. Relating his own process of “searching through the available knowledge” for gay images in the 1950s and 1960s, Escoffier outlines an eclectic bibliography—Donald Webster Cory, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Martin Hoffman—to argue that “the process of my socialization into ‘the homosexual role’” must be considered through “my own rather idiosyncratic process of reading.” 79 But to whom does his act of reading really belong? In fact, queer reading is always ambivalent: as I have suggested, what can appear as narcissistic mirroring or self-affirmation may also signal an interpellation into the social taxonomy of deviance. Although such interpellations—that of the “congenital invert” 134

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in the case of Radclyffe Hall—may enable the formation of communities and the mobilization of identity politics, their ultimate effect must be the closure of meaning. The trope of mirroring is therefore misleading, for if the text merely reflected its reader, the act of reading would leave us unchanged. Instead, while readers imbue texts with the meaning of their own experience, texts also imprint readers with a socially inflected vocabulary. Discussing private book collections, Susan Stewart notes “the identification of the reader with the books he or she possesses,” which produces “the notion of self as the sum of its reading.”80 It is not that queer people find reflections of themselves in libraries; rather, they become reflections of their libraries. Reading not only changes the future but changes the past, for the reader acquires a proleptic history expressed in the future perfect; after their researches, Maurice will have been practicing Greek love and Diana will belatedly come to have been developmentally delayed. In this anachrony, texts remake readers in their own image; they transfigure readers to have always occupied the roles they thereby assume. The scene of reading is crucial to the formation of an identity that only later will precede it. As such, the readerly recognition of identity takes the form of a Moebius loop, a temporal impossibility: Diana’s research finally makes her what she now will have always already been.81 In her reading of The Well of Loneliness, Leigh Gilmore suggests that the scene of Stephen Gordon reading her father’s books represents Radclyffe Hall’s own reading of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion and her identification with his “inverted” subjects. Gilmore notes that once Hall “‘finds’ herself named in that text she begins to speak its language as her own representational style, even doctoring some childhood photographs to make her appear more ‘boyish’ and thus conform more rigorously to Ellis’s definition.”82 Although Hall already knows herself 135

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as a lesbian, as “finding” herself implies, the act of reading gives her a new language for her experience, which she then retroactively rewrites. Whether or not such revision is deliberate, it reflects the temporal dimension in which texts interpellate their readers to have always occupied the roles they assume. Although they can serve etiological narrative, with its causal geometry of before and after, its search for the singular origin, its presumed tempo of eventfulness, scenes of reading are also anachronous.83 One effect of this temporality is a failure to coincide with oneself: one can never be a gay child in the present tense, but only in retrospect.84 That argument, however, does not account for the peculiar structure in which literary scenes of reading constitute not only a narcissistic mirror but also a potentially disorienting hall of mirrors. Just as the reader’s engagement with a text like Bechdel’s memoir mimics the scene of young Alison at the card catalog, for readers of The Well of Loneliness reading Stephen reading KrafftEbing reading sexual inversion produces a chain in which, as Gertrude Stein might put it, your reading of my reading of Hall’s reading of Havelock Ellis must eventually take its place. Such lines of literary affiliation produce a structure of infinite regress that resists the mechanical replication of conventional and unconventional identities. Reading readers reading readers reading, these queer spaces enclose each other like Stephen Gordon’s interior geography: house, study, desk, drawer, key. And although its logic is repetition, this textual chain complicates the function of reading as an identity-machine. We might imagine the recursive scene of reading, therefore, as a mise en abyme, the repetition of a pattern inside itself in smaller and smaller iterations. Its literary significance dates to André Gide, who borrows from painting, where a “small, somber convex mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the depicted scene is set.”85 The classical mise en abyme promises 136

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closure, but after Gide it begins to suggest infinite reduplication. In the realm of literature, the mise en abyme designates a repetition whose endless play of differences supplants reflections of the same. This is Derrida’s sense of the term, associated with supplementarity, the recurrence of lack, and the impossibility of mastery.86 What he calls “a scene of writing within a scene of writing and so on without end” becomes a figure for the signifying chain in all its vertiginous movement.87 So the mirroring effect that seems to further narcissistic self-affirmation may also be the verge of the abyss, a tenuous foundation for both identity and politics. The structure of the mise en abyme is by no means uniquely queer, but it usefully figures how queer readers and writers like Stephen Gordon confront the doubleness of textual identifications. While readers strive to find mirrors for themselves in their books, literary scenes of reading are themselves a hall of mirrors. Thus the mise en abyme, which repeats without referentiality, makes an apt figure for the tension between reading as an identity-machine and reading as an eternal deferral of meaning. The former serves both hegemonic and resistant functions and the latter unravels both; it is not a matter of choosing between them, for both are at work in the scenes of “evil reading,” whose potential for homosexual reproduction we would do well to read closely.

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The Future in Ruins Borrowed Time But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch The far-off interest of tears? Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H.”

In twentieth-century literature and culture, one nexus of sexuality and causality must be the AIDS crisis, with its urgent proliferation of etiological questions: What is the origin of the epidemic? What caused its appearance in the gay male population? What is the source of an individual’s illness? Disrupted temporality corresponds to disrupted causality and narrative form, not least when, amid a medical emergency, questions of etiology are paramount. Paul Monette’s 1988 memoir Borrowed Time, chronicling the illness of his partner Roger Horwitz, shows an urgent concern with the causality of AIDS and of opportunistic infections. And that concern, temporally structured as it is by before and after, informs the text’s profound engagement with history and chronology. History comes to mean, among other things, patient history, what

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Monette calls a “tedious history”—a personal, medical past whose narration is never confined to the doctor’s office.1 Before Roger’s diagnosis, Monette recalls the stories of other gay men falling ill: Were they all drinking the wrong kind of vodka? Or was there something we weren’t being told about the organs? There was growing frustration—rage in New York—as to what we were and were not being told. Was anybody pooling this data? Sometimes you felt that your own journey and your own circle would give them the full etiology of it, if they would only factor in all these horrible coincidences. (41)

As Monette tells it, this etiology can only be wished for, tethered to possibility by “if . . . only.” The wish belongs to others as well, mapping the space between “they” and “we” and “you,” and persuading the reader as well to share the narrator’s desire for answers. Here the linear clarity of a causal narrative seems to promise respite from the temporal distortions, the “deconstruction of clear temporal categories,” accompanying the AIDS/HIV crisis. The exigencies of queer time need not be solely AIDS-related, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recognizes. Discussing “temporal disorientation” in Proust, she writes: “A more recent and terrible contingency, in the brutal foreshortening of so many queer lifespans, has deroutinized the temporality of many of us.” 2 But the peculiar disorientations of AIDS have been particularly significant for queer scholars concerned with time as such, in whose work the possibility of a dissident queer time vies, sometimes uneasily, with the sobering fact of diminished lives. One the one hand, there is a tendency to celebrate non-normative temporality as analogous with non-normative sexuality, with similar liberatory potential: Elizabeth Freeman argues that queer “erotic relations 139

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and the bodily acts that sustain them gum up the works of the normative structures we call family and nation, gender, race, class, and sexual identity, by changing tempos”; and José Esteban Muñoz claims that when queerness “does not adhere to straight time, interrupting its protocols, it can be an avant-garde practice that interrupts the here and now.”3 On the other hand, some instances of distorted temporality are clearly traumatic. Judith Halberstam asserts that “[q]ueer time emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic.”4 And perhaps most acutely, HIV/AIDS and their advancing treatments alter the narrative forms of individual lives; Lisa Diedrich notes “a particular temporality that the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS brings into being” because of its unknown period of latency, and Tim Dean writes that with retroviral therapy, “the prior temporality of the death sentence is merely suspended, not obliterated, by the expanded sense of time that medicine now makes available.”5 In each case HIV/AIDS imposes its own time. For Borrowed Time, as its title indicates, temporality is the most salient analytic lens for Monette and his partner’s struggle, not only in the altered rhythms of their lives, but also in their visions of queer pasts and futures. In particular, I am concerned with how the foreclosure of futurity by AIDS is counterbalanced by Monette’s imaginative production of, and identification with, the historical past. As the previous chapter explained, the readerly search for evidence of homosexuality has a long history, and the ancient Greeks frequently have been the figures through which at least some anglophone gay men have found, as Alberto Manguel writes, “mirrors for themselves.”6 In that “finding,” however, they also produce or reproduce the ancestors that they seek. Among the text’s many forms of homosexual reproduction, then, 140

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are imaginary affiliations proceeding backward, impelled by a hunger for history.  Instead of the birth of a new generation, Monette gives life to his ancestors, the heroes of ancient Greece and the monks of the Middle Ages. In this sense, we might say that not only does homosexuality reproduce asexually, but it reproduces into the past, not by creating children but by creating the figurative ancestors who will then have preceded it. Like the signs of same-sex desire in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray, queer history “returns from the future” in Borrowed Time: only when the Greeks, among others, are recognized as part of a queer lineage are they born as progenitors.7 If The Well of Loneliness is about reading as a form of homosexual reproduction, Borrowed Time is about writing as a form of homosexual reproduction. Yet there are two opposing forms in Monette’s nonfiction works; Borrowed Time differs significantly from the later memoir, Becoming a Man, and essay collection, Last Watch of the Night. Whereas Borrowed Time traces connections into the past, the later texts are oriented toward the future; while Borrowed Time insists on models of gay male kinship outside conventional tropes of reproduction and the Oedipal family, the later texts embrace them. Thus, although imaginative connections to historical figures, not least the Greeks, have been cogently discussed by such queer scholars as Scott Bravmann and Christopher Nealon, in Monette’s work past and future are distinctly opposed, like estranged siblings who must not be allowed to meet. His filial fantasies speak to what Lee Edelman has called the reproductive futurism of  heteronormative culture, embodied in the figure of the child; whereas the later texts clearly reflect that futurist ideology, Borrowed Time largely does not.8 There are no children in the text; in fact, Monette’s imagined kinship seems pointedly to avoid reproductive roles. His ancient Greeks and medieval monks 141

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are not fathers or grandfathers, but brothers. The notion of brotherhood hints at a queer affiliation more like replication than reproduction—clone-like, lateral, even memetic. This is kinship without linear genealogy, unlike the later texts whose “activist” politics are structured by the axis of time from past to future. To read Borrowed Time, therefore, I want to work backward myself, first considering Monette’s later nonfiction works, against whose backdrop the traumatic strangeness and ethical stakes of the earlier text can be glimpsed. Utlimately, I will suggest, the difference between Monette’s two modes of addressing HIV/AIDS corresponds to the difference between drives and desires. As Slavoj Žižek explains, desire pursues a specific object that is always a substitute for something else; it moves purposefully forward toward a meaningful goal, even if that goal is fantasmatic. A drive, however, is a “‘mechanical’ insistence” with no object other than its own eternal repetition; its movement is circular and senseless.9 Much is at stake in that difference for Monette, for his later texts operate in the illusory realm of desire, while Borrowed Time, governed by the drives, confronts the reality of loss.

FA MILY A ND FUTUR IT Y In the 1980s, just as ACT-UP proclaimed that “Silence = Death,” others insisted that “AIDS = homosexuality.”10 Claims that homosexuals “cause” AIDS began then and have persisted for decades.11 The biological etiology of AIDS was known as early as 1984, yet as Paula Treichler notes, heteronormative discourse had no difficulty asserting that “AIDS is ‘caused’ by homosexuals.”12 In 1991, an editorial in a New Hampshire newspaper maintained that “homosexual intercourse is the genesis of every single case of AIDS . . . 142

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[T]he sexual perversion that is anal intercourse by sodomites is the fundamental point of origin.”13 Genesis, origin: building on the familiar association of homosexuality with disease, the accusation borrows the language of etiology in order to assign blame to a suffering population. As late as 2010, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association writes that “we know what causes AIDS”— that is, “homosexual sex and injection drug use”—and “since we know the cause we know the cure.”14 Simon Watney observes that in the early rhetoric of causation around AIDS, “the male homosexual becomes an impossible object, a monster that can only be engendered by a process of corruption through seduction”; he continues, “It is this rigorously anti-Freudian scenario that actively encourages forward slippage from corruption theories of homosexuality to contagion theories of AIDS.”15 The concept of gay male sexuality as a communicable disease has a long history: a 1961 film, Boys Beware, described homosexuality as “contagious sickness.”16 In the first years of the AIDS crisis, phobic etiologies amplified that idea, attributing both homosexuality and HIV to consorting with the wrong sort of people. That history presumably inspired the curious passage from a Chicago Tribune review of Monette’s Last Watch of the Night, which called the text “contagious with hope.”17 While hope is indeed a notable theme of the text, it is the contagion that matters most immediately, reminding us that if diseases are said to be “communicable,” we may regard communication as a kind of contagion—and where queer issues are concerned, that is frequently the view of anti-gay observers.18 It is impossible to know whether the writer of the Tribune review sought to redeem the phobically charged notion of contagion through its proximity to hope (or conversely, to debase the sentimentalized rhetoric of hope through its association with disease). But it is worth 143

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asking what happens if we do not simply reject contagion as a hateful trope of homosexual reproduction, and instead consider how it might be, however fractionally or obliquely, useful to queer reading. The re-examination of the rhetoric of homosexual reproduction has been, after all, the first impulse guiding these chapters: How can we read differently the stories of gay men and lesbians retroactively acquiring a supposedly “innate” identity, corrupted by reading or subject to noxious influence? Etymologically “contagion” derives from the Latin con-tangere, “to touch together”: disease attributed to tactile contact. In this sense we might truly call Monette’s oeuvre contagious writing, determined to promote the spread of communicable ideas and, much as Tennyson imagines, to “reach a hand thro’ time” to touch the past or the future.19 In her reconsideration of queer historicism, Carolyn Dinshaw elaborates a methodology rooted in a “queer historical touch” and driven by “a desire for bodies to touch across time.”20 And if, as the last chapter suggested, Whitman eagerly solicits the desire of his future reader, we might consider him an early theorist of the “queer historical touch.” The well-known third poem of the Calamus group addresses itself to “Whoever you are holding me now in hand,” instructing its future reader: Carry me when you go forth over land or sea; For thus, merely touching you is enough—is best 21

Despite the poem’s teasing questions about its reader’s comprehension, Whitman’s second person address designates that reader as an erotic partner across unknown time and space. “Calamus 45” extends that address to the reader across a span of years into futurity: 144

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When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible; Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me, Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover; Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I am now with you.22

Intent on the reader and on immortality, the poem posits an undying intimacy between poet and reader, past and future. If, as Monette says, his queer history extends “from the ancient Greeks to Whitman” (11), Whitman is to his future reader what the Greeks are to Monette in Borrowed Time, and what Whitman himself is to Monette, a queer precursor. Although the intensity of Whitman’s futural desire exceeds politics as we know it, today the belief that gay and lesbian history enables a gay and lesbian future is commonplace. History is always both public and private: the past is not only a point of identification for the queer individual, but also the terrain of political contestation. An enduring vector of paranoia about homosexual reproduction follows this temporal axis, intimating that one way that homosexuals reproduce their future is by tracing narratives of their past. This notion informed the hostile response to the 2011 passage of a California bill that required public schools to include gay and lesbian history.23 While the law merely states that the contributions of disabled and LGBT people must be accurately portrayed in social science instruction, one of several websites opposing the policy refers to this curricular change as “sexual indoctrination” that requires students to “admire” homosexuals as “role models.”24 To populate the past with queer figures threatens to fill the future with them: Harvey Milk becomes, in this fantasy, the posthumous father of tomorrow’s gay kids. 145

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Monette’s later texts shift the emphasis from the gay past to the gay future. In Last Watch of the Night he quotes Sappho: “someone in /some future time / will think of us.”25 Sappho imagines an eventual reader, whose subject position Monette inhabits when he recalls her words; and when he reproduces her words, he implicitly posits a “someone” who will in time think of him, much as in the later texts he, like Whitman, names and directly addresses his eventual reader. By the time of his second memoir, Becoming a Man, ideas of memoir as history and historiography as a gift to the future have become widespread in gay and lesbian culture: every memoir now is a kind of manifesto, as we piece together the tale of the tribe. Our stories have died with us long enough. We mean to leave behind some map, some key, for the gay and lesbian people who follow. 26

In language by now familiar, Monette affirms writing as a political act, the relation between individual and collective, and the burden of responsibility to futurity. The essays collected in Last Watch of the Night bind together these tenets with tropes of queer genealogy: “I consider the work I’ve been doing in the last six years as a kind of letter to my gay and lesbian children in the future.” 27 Further, he continues, “what I would say to my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, especially to the gay and lesbian children of the next generation” is “come out when you can.” 28 Whereas in the past there was disconnection in the gay and lesbian community, with “not enough sages and grandparents,” the 1993 march in Washington, D.C., conveys “a family feeling”; despite the difficulties faced by gay and lesbian youth, they are Monette’s possibly contagious “hope for the future.” 29 146

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Coupling futurity with family, these texts rehearse the conventional rhetoric that Edelman identifies with reproductive futurism, in which “the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”30 As a result, Edelman argues, progressive politics takes the same blighted form as reactionary politics, compelled to defer today’s enjoyment in order to secure a fantasmatic better future. In Last Watch of the Night, Monette illustrates this mandate to serve the future over one’s own desire, and even accuses E. M. Forster of failing his “gay and lesbian heirs” by selfishly choosing not to publish his novel Maurice in 1914 (it appeared posthumously in 1971). 31 Although in the normative order that enshrines the Child and the futurity it signifies as objects of paramount value the queer is understood as unassimilable, toxic, and abject, queer-identified individuals are, Edelman writes, by no means exempt from the ideology of reproductive futurism: nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic. 32

Monette’s Becoming a Man and Last Watch of the Night bespeak that valuation of reproduction, literal or figural, as a guarantor of futurity. In this sense, they exemplify a profoundly conservative form of homosexual reproduction, devoted to what Lisa Duggan has called homonormativity—that is, the assimilation of homosexuals by heteronormative values. 33 While Borrowed Time shares many of the same concerns, to a significant extent it avoids the lure 147

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of futurity and family, and in so doing provides the foundation for a critique of homonormative reproductive futurism.

BORROW ING DAYS The Greeks entered into Death backward: what they had before them was their past. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

True to its title, Borrowed Time begins with the question of time: “I don’t know if I will live to finish this,” Monette writes. The virus is “ticking” in him, and “no one has solved the puzzle of its timing” (1). He anticipates by decades recent queer scholars’ arguments about the distortion of time by HIV/AIDS. Early on, Monette recalls packing up Christmas decorations and wondering who would fall ill in the coming year: “Time itself began to seem a minefield” (17). In that context, the meaning of the title seems clear: to borrow time is to live in contingency, where values are arbitrary and contracts never binding. One borrows time from a future whose resources are all too meager in order to extend the present as long as possible. When a promising drug fails, Monette writes, “Now we would learn to borrow time in earnest” (183), and Roger says, “We’re living on borrowed time, aren’t we?” (285). It’s worth noting that the trope of borrowed time has, in the narrative, a temporal complication of its own: Roger’s remark, the source of the phrase, occurs first in historical time but last in narrative time. We learn its source long after it has been used as a leitmotif, lending its final appearance an uncanny effect. Borrowed Time most often describes the future, when it describes it at all, as already lost or under erasure. At the midpoint 148

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of Roger’s illness, Monette reports that he has no recollection of the details of several months because he had stopped keeping his diary, much as he’s set aside “abstract” thoughts of “future or careers”: “when you live so utterly in the present, the yearning to record it goes away. To write in a diary you have to hope to read it later” (192). 34 That is why, he remarks, “we were not big fans of future talk” (286), and by August 1986, two months before Roger’s death, “I could neither hold to nor project a future anymore” (304). 35 Instead of investment in the future, the text foregrounds Monette’s investment in the past: the past, not the future, brims with wonders. It is significant, then, that having begun his narrative with the notion of borrowing time from the future, Monette later suggests that one can also “borrow time from the past” (23). The phrase occurs amid an account of an idyllic trip to Greece, which offers “dreamlike moments” of identification with history. Borrowing time from the past may seem a solecism, but in fact it has an etymological basis. Although the primary meaning of borrowed time, the OED reports, is “an unexpected extension of time, esp. of a person’s life,” the kindred phrase “borrowed days” designates “in Cheshire, the first eleven days of May, so called because in Old Style they belonged to April.” Just so, Monette borrows days from the past when he draws on an imagined history to endure the rigors of the present. The peculiar contours and affective intensities of queer investments in the past have been acknowledged by a number of scholars. Freeman maintains that “since sexual identity emerged as a concept, gays and lesbians have been figured as having no past: no childhood, no origin or precedent in nature, no family traditions or legends, and, crucially, no history as a distinct people.”36 The queer interest in history is always a compensatory effort, looking backward to sites of potential identification. As Laura Doan 149

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and Sarah Waters argue, “retrospection has played a vital role in the culture of homosexual self-definition.”37 That relation to history is by no means unproblematic: as John D’Emilio observes, gay men and lesbians often invent a “mythical history” that they “read backward in time.”38 Christopher Nealon notes Willa Cather’s participation in a larger gay and lesbian “attempt to understand, through an identification with an ancestor, how history works, what it looks like, what possibilities it has offered in the past, and what those possibilities suggest about our ineffable present tense.”39 For Monette, the uses of the past are necessarily shaped by the traditions available to him and the circumstances of his need. Chief among the historical identifications available to Western gay men is, of course, classical antiquity. David M. Halperin contends that “the Greeks are all about us insofar as they represent one of the codes in which we transact our own cultural business: we use our ‘truths’ about the Greeks to explain ourselves to ourselves and to construct our own experiences, including our sexual experiences.”40 What seems to be a revelation from the ancient past may turn out to be a backward projection of the present moment, or some affirmation missing from the present. As the previous chapter noted, in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre, Oswald knows that it is possible to find love “between man and man” because he had “read it in the verses or the prose of the Greek and Latin and Oriental authors”41 Monette reports a lifelong fascination with ancient Greece; recalling “History I at Andover,” he says it is “[i]mpossible to measure the symbolic weight of the place for a gay man. We grew up with glints and evasions in school about the homoerotic side, but if you’re alone and think you’re the only one in the world, the merest glimpse is enough” (20).42 Monette’s experience at Andover resembles the reading histories of gay and lesbian youth that Forster, Renault, Hall, and others describe, supplying both 150

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a viable identity and an implicit community.43 Monette and Roger find a distinct sense of belonging in their trip to Greece, as well as a gay cultural inheritance: “a gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments. . . . Fragments are all you get” (22). Greek notions of heroism and comradeship are equally resonant, both at home and abroad. Monette recounts seeing a “grave relief of the warrior binding his friend’s wound” (176) on a trip to the Getty Museum, and on another visit, “[i]n the Greek gallery we lingered over the fragment of a marble relief, a wounded warrior and his comrade” (122). The latter motif, though not the same work of art, would appear on the front of the first edition of Borrowed Time, which shows a Greek statue identified on the back cover as “Menelaus carrying Patroclus, the lover of Achilles, from the field of battle at Troy.”44 When AIDS disrupts ordinary temporality, ancient history provides Monette with a reconnection to time, a historical grounding. His friend Cesar says that “ancient places ‘confirm’ a person, uniting a man to the past and thus the future,” and Monette agrees: “Confirmed was just how I felt by the Greek idea” (22).45 For him “the ancient soil” (20) and “ancient places” (22) link one to the past, so that “the echo of the ancient image, warrior or monk, is in you” (23). But the future remains empty: instead, the repetition of the word ancient throughout Borrowed Time itself bespeaks a problem with temporality—at the very least, an effort to set an idealized past against a calamitous present moment, an effort to claim a secure history at a time when time itself seems treacherous. This is not conventional historiography, but the “strong misreading” that, as I suggested in the previous chapter, characterizes many queer readers’ appropriation of textual materials. Both antigay and pro-gay voices, within and beyond the academy, have criticized the queer appropriation of historical figures—with charges of “making them gay,” on the one hand, and ignoring diachronic 151

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differences, on the other.46 Monette makes no apology for his lack of scholarly rigor: he is not a historian, and his account of the past is necessarily anachronistic and fantasmatic. Surveying the uses that nineteenth- and twentieth-century gay men and lesbians made of ancient Greece, Scott Bravmann observes that its “genealogy is itself a retrospectively fabricated historical fiction.”47 I shall return to genealogy shortly, but first a word on Monette’s historicism. In an essay from Last Watch of the Night, he recalls some of the history of Sounion, but remarks: “all of this transpired in mythic time, pre-history, and who knew if I had the facts right anyway, mostly a rehash of Mary Renault.”48 Both an anachronism and a belated addition, a simulacrum of a historical fiction, his “mythic fragments” are tokens of what I previously called a “past that has never been present.”49 Even when Monette cites academic sources in Borrowed Time, they serve less to establish authenticity than to stir the imagination. Listening to friends discuss John Boswell’s work on Roman history, he says “I thought as I often did now—as usual, making history up as I went along— about the physicality of the pagan gods and the ancient men of our kind” (267). The “ancient men of our kind” evoke Elizabeth’s Bishop’s queer Crusoe, who wants to propagate his kind, and with it a queer kinship. Monette’s central project in the ancient world is to conjure a fantasmatic relationship with gay “ancestors” and “brothers.” Tracing similar imaginary genealogies, Nealon describes queer people “hearing the call of homosexuality in analogies to secret, impossible, affiliations.” The late-twentieth-century “ethnic model,” Nealon explains, imagines gay identity not only as unchanging throughout history, but also as a form of kinship structure, “found in the simple but enduring lesbian and gay practice of listing famous homosexuals from history—a gesture of genealogical 152

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claiming.”50 The ethnic model leaves its mark in Borrowed Time when contemporary gay men are called a “tribe,” implying not only familial bonds but also a certain shared knowledge: Roger’s brother Sheldon is “one of the few older men of the tribe I could talk to” (53) and Monette says he has “heard all the tales of the tribe” about cryptococcal meningitis (339). But while the “foundling” quest for a queer family lineage, for Nealon, constitutes an alternative genealogy, even Monette’s profound investments in the past in Borrowed Time resist genealogy by refusing the language of paternity and procreation. Instead, Monette joins the gay men of his own day to the “warrior brothers” of ancient Greece (20) and the “brother monks” of the Middle ages (276). At an ancient stadium he feels he belongs “at last to a brotherhood” (21), much as, on the same Greek voyage, “it seemed to me that Roger and I and our secret brothers were heir to all of it” (22). At the ruins of Thera, Paul and Roger find “inscriptions on the walls, erotic poems to the boys, though the guidebook wouldn’t recite a single line” (23). Musing on those artifacts, Monette writes, “we couldn’t decide which was our truer ancestry, the boys or the dirty old men.” Either way, he concludes, ancient Greece is “where a man finds his ancestors,” and it is in this passage, appropriately, that he mentions borrowing time from the past (23). That borrowing is the conception of a gay male kinship united not by patrimony but by brotherhood, not by descent but by a kind of backward homosexual reproduction: Monette’s ancestors are born in the book; his forebears are also his progeny. At “the merest glimpse” of ancient Greek culture, he writes “the ancient soil becomes peopled with warrior brothers” (20), as if in an eternal process of regeneration. The imaginative investment of the modern gay man in history retroactively gives life to these ancient men, unlike the forward-looking reproduction of gay and lesbian families 153

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in Monette’s later texts. In Becoming a Man, as it happens, an odd slippage echoes the atemporal kinship of Borrowed Time: describing the founders of Andover, Massachusetts, Monette names the “Puritans, all of whom seem to have ancestors down to the present age.”51 Shouldn’t the Puritans have descendants, not ancestors, in the present? Perhaps, but in Borrowed Time Monette’s identification with the Greeks trades in precisely this impossible inversion of history. What distinguishes Borrowed Time from Monette’s other writings is not only the backward reproduction of ancestors, but also its stubborn refusal of the genealogical tropes that appear in his later writing. A hint of that conventional vocabulary appears in Love Alone, a collection of poems published in the same year as Borrowed Time. One poem introduces the trope of paternity, and with it a fantasy of heredity, absent from Borrowed Time, that will grow more prominent with each of Monette’s subsequent publications. In “Brother of the Mount of Olives,” the speaker examines frescoes in a centuries-old monastery, asking of the monks: are we the heirs of them or they our secret fathers and how many of our kind lie beneath the cypress alley crowning the hill beyond 52

The monk is a brother in two figural senses and a father in one; this is a fantasy not merely of gay male community (“our kind”) but also of vertical reproductive relations between fathers and their sons and “heirs.” In contrast, Borrowed Time has no children, no sons, no fathers or grandfathers. The text’s most vivid evocation of queer fatherhood is, strictly speaking, outside the text: the cover image depicting Menelaus supporting the body of his son Patroclus— an intimate image that readers unfamiliar with the statue are 154

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unlikely to recognize as paternal. When recounting the horrors of AIDS, Monette attends to generations in the chronological but not the reproductive sense: a “whole generation of gay men” (282) await “a new generation of AIDS” and its treatments (142), wondering whether they would live long enough to benefit from the “next generation of drugs” (106), yet there is no sense in these passages that one generation begets another. As such, Borrowed Time complicates the effort now underway in queer theory to conceptualize queer reproduction outside reproductive futurism. In an eloquent recent essay, Peter Coviello suggests that the men who named their children after Walt Whitman made him “a kind of progenitor for their children” and enabled a form of “queer generation.”53 Similarly, Mikko Tuhkanen locates in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa “a form of connectedness in which hybridization proceeds not through lines of descent and filiation but queerly,” transecting “distinct lineages.”54 Both are resonant possibilities: Whitman’s futurism surely models an affective touch across time distinct from heterosexual familialism, as Anzaldúa imagines horizontal relationality. Yet in neither case does the sexuality of the author or the unorthodox manner of reproduction as such guarantee that old investments in futurity will be broken. In contrast, for the Monette of Borrowed Time homosexual reproduction is bound to the past, not the future. It is not that gay men cannot be imagined in the paternal role, but that Monette has no interest in replicating any family, Oedipal or otherwise. Unlike the queer writers’ backward genealogies described by Nealon, Monette attempts to imagine kinship without genealogy, refusing the geometry of hetero-reproductive ideology. Impossibly, his Greek warriors are both ancient and vitally present: if this is not a timeless vision, it is surely a collapse of historical time. 155

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HISTORY I While in Borrowed Time Monette professes no interest in the future, his commitment to writing—indeed, the very existence of the book itself—bespeaks some sense of futurity, however attenuated. What can be remembered of the ancient past limns the possibility that traces of his generation will also survive in history. The memoir inevitably contributes to the larger work of recording gay and lesbian history, but Borrowed Time arrives slowly at that project. On the one hand, Monette reports feeling “how keenly tenuous our history was” (227) and how possible the erasure and forgetting of their existence might be. He notes that his story joins other accounts of gay culture: Roger’s brother Sheldon “had seen the whole history of the movement” (53) and others convey “the growing oral history of AIDS” (65). He feels a need for more chronicles, for “no history had yet been written down,” quite apart from AIDS, of the gay community and its institutions in Los Angeles (319). As for AIDS, Monette feels “I needed to find a voice to witness the nightmare” (153). The task of Borrowed Time as memoir is that witnessing, as its epigraph from Pindar announces: “Unsung the noblest deed will die.” Watching friends struggle with AIDS before Roger’s diagnosis, Monette recalls a sight from his travels: broken slabs and columns lying in the fields, covered with Greek characters erasing in the weather. . . . Soon I was brooding that nobody left written artifacts anymore to slab the fields of the future. Out of some disjointed longing for ruins, I decided to make an artifact of my own. (146)

The first artifact he makes is not a book but a table covered with writing. That writing will evolve into Borrowed Time, whose purpose is 156

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to chronicle his experience, as when, in Greece, he thinks “I hope somebody’s recorded all this” (146). Borrowed Time will become his inscribed tablet, but like his thoughts it is “disjointed.” The fragmentary, unpolished style of the memoir reflects its “broken” inspiration: authentic archival evidence does not require unblemished prose. On the other hand, Monette cannot imagine the future reader of his text, even though Borrowed Time may come to fulfill for its reader a function analogous to that of the Greek inscriptions for Monette. For him, as we have seen, the “broken slabs and columns” of ancient Greece signify even if he cannot read them: they plainly attest to his own writerly goal, “to say we have been here,” and in doing so, potentially link gay men to one another. Monette’s artifact, Borrowed Time, may be incompletely legible to today’s gay men, but it may also be the Phaedrus or inscribed stone for another man, the talismanic queer text passed from reader to reader, or the counsel on “how to be a hero” (105). But if writing is Monette’s strongest link to the future, in Borrowed Time it is telling that, unlike Whitman or his later self, he cannot “reach a hand thro’ time.” He hopes to produce “written artifacts” for the “fields of the future,” but leaves those fields unpeopled. Whereas the later Becoming a Man opens by acknowledging a responsibility to guide “the gay and lesbian people who follow,” Borrowed Time outlines a more oblique relation to futurity when it addresses futurity at all: “The magic circle my generation is trying to stay within the borders of is only as real as the random past. Perhaps the young can live in the magic circle, but only if those of us who are ticking will tell our story” (6). The “magic circle” here is HIV-negativity, as opposed to the “ticking” of HIV in the men of Monette’s generation. The act of cautionary storytelling may have some benefits for the young, but this is cramped and cryptic 157

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compared to the futurism of Monette’s later texts. When he does consider the years to come in Borrowed Time, his vision is more often apocalyptic. Late in the narrative he conjures a starkly depopulated future: “If we all died and all our books were burned, then a hundred years from now no one would ever know. So we figured we had to know and name it ourselves” (228). This future, home of a hypothetical “no one,” is an almost tautological time, which both impels and negates Monette’s effort to tell his story with the possibility that all books may be lost. Thus the prolepsis through which, in Becoming a Man, Monette can project himself into a later time, anticipating his work’s value for that new generation, is limited in Borrowed Time. As both early and later texts take up the task of bearing witness, whether from personal compulsion or a political imperative to serve future gay and lesbian generations, they present crucially different forms of homosexual reproduction, with crucially different consequences. While Borrowed Time finds an image of itself in “broken slab” and “ruins,” and the later Becoming a Man compares its work to that of a “manifesto,” a map, and a key, both texts produce history for the future. But Borrowed Time cannot predict what it will signify: “I was writing with a very blunt instrument, but groping at last toward leaving a record—‘to say we have been here’” (152). Blunt and groping seem apt words for so stark a message, whose very existence is its entire meaning: someone wrote this. And Monette cannot imagine the people for whom he leaves a record with anything like the vitality he brings to the Greeks: his disembodied reader is not a “brother,” nor even a member of the “tribe.” No family, no future—Borrowed Time has a significantly different relation to reproductive futurism than Monette’s later works. In Edelman’s account there are two irreconcilable positions: the subject, whether straight or gay, who accedes to the ideology 158

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of reproductive futurism, and the mythical monster, the sinthomosexual whose very existence seems to imperil futurity and meaning. He strives to articulate a third position, that of the queer subject who strategically embraces the negativity with which he is projectively burdened, but that subject remains lightly sketched. It is difficult to imagine what it would mean to live according to Edelman’s charge. That, I take it, is the basis of Leo Bersani’s comment, “Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument.”55 If the Monette of Borrowed Time has not yet adopted the rhetoric of reproductive futurism—or if the agony of Roger’s illness and death has violently expelled him from that fantasy—how might Edelman’s case and the psychoanalytic theory that grounds it speak to the text? While Becoming a Man and Last Watch are oriented outward, directly addressed to the gay and lesbian community and inspired by a political responsibility to it, Borrowed Time turns solipsistically inward, occasionally reporting on events and media coverage of AIDS in the wider world, but largely confined to the house on King’s Road. Among a handful of references to politics, most are quite distanced: “By now there was a fairly intense political consciousness evolving in New York” (226–227). But politically—or rather, in its refusal of politics-as-usual—the memoir takes a more complex position than Monette’s later texts. Ironically, his selfconsciously “activist” books are more conservative than Borrowed Time, which could justly be called self-centered; it has no time, so to speak, for the pieties of political activism. In Borrowed Time, the trauma of AIDS and its foreclosure of futurity force the narrative not only away from heteronormative genealogy and temporality, but also away from desire; unlike Last Watch and Becoming a Man, it is a text governed 159

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by pure drive. Whereas heteronormative culture is structured by desire, Edelman explains, the sinthomosexual is aligned with the death drive—for Lacan, a objectless, atemporal repetitioncompulsion. It may seem obscene to discuss the death drive in the face of Roger Horwitz’s actual death, but Lacan’s death drive is not a drive to die: it seeks perversely to continue, not advancing toward a future goal but merely persisting. Monette’s allabsorbing effort to sustain Roger’s life, and their life together, day by day evokes the objectless repetition of the drives; Monette’s wish that Roger go on living does not fit the geometry of desire, for it has no end and wants no end. The temporality of Roger’s illness is also circular: “He could feel he was getting stronger again” (215); “they admitted Roger, again just overnight” (206); “how charged with hope we were again” (226). Accordingly, the text is repetitive, like the diary it draws from, recording “useless,” contingent details—friends they met, what they ate—day after unremarkable day. The point is not eventfulness, the point is merely to continue; like Monette, the text knows where it must end (it has known from the first page), yet at the same time it wants more days. Lisa Diedrich has suggested that in Borrowed Time Monette occupies the time that Lacan calls “between two deaths,” between biological death and symbolic death or vice versa. After Roger’s passing and before the medical advances that made living with HIV possible, Monette is “ahead of time, or outside of time, awaiting death,” for like Antigone, his symbolic death at the time of Roger’s death precedes his biological end. 56 The space “between two deaths” is a space of drives, not desires. Žižek writes, “the apparitions that emerge in the domain ‘between two deaths’ address to us some unconditional demand, and it is for this reason that they incarnate pure drive without desire.”57 Finally, desire takes place 160

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in time, but drives are atemporal, signaling “the arrest of historical movement, the suspension of the temporal continuity.”58 It is this impossible temporality that impels Monette’s relation to futurity and genealogy. Grounding his reading in the questions of temporality that are so central to Borrowed Time, Todd McGowan joins Edelman in arguing that the drives resist the hegemony structured by desire. While it may seem that temporal desires offer freedom and the timeless repetition of the drives confines us, McGowan finds that the opposite is true, for the causality of time is a kind of determinism: “The drive’s repetition is at once the subject’s insistence on its own path and its refusal to submit to the reign of causality that governs time.”59 When desire promises that future satisfaction will compensate us for our present suffering, that promise is false and its effects are ruinous. Echoing Edelman’s warning about futurist politics, McGowan writes: “the focus on time produces an investment in a future pregnant with possibility, including the possibility of escaping loss.”60 Indeed, this is the foundation of Edelman’s polemic against politics as we know it: “politics conforms to the temporality of desire, to what we might call the inevitable historicity of desire—the successive displacements forward of nodes of attachment as figures of meaning.”61 For McGowan the illusory promise of desire is that in time we can overcome loss; but the atemporal drive signals that “no amount of time allows us to escape the hold that loss has over us.”62 It may seem strange that Borrowed Time is more radical than the “activist” texts that desire a better future, especially since the memory of profound loss is by no means dim in those later texts. But by operating in the mode of the drive, not desire, Borrowed Time faces trauma with no possibility for redemption; in Tennyson’s words, it refuses the empty promise that we can “find in loss a gain to match.” 161

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One might, of course, say that an ethical position must be chosen, not imposed by external circumstances—that due to its confrontation with irredeemable loss, Borrowed Time loses the capacity to desire and can only operate in the atemporal mode of the drive. Yet that would not alter its difference from the later texts and their mode of futurist politics. Borrowed Time arrives at its refusal of futurity and family, its drive-like insistence, as the result of a trauma capable of annihilating normal temporality, but only through this mechanism can it address that trauma directly. If Borrowed Time models a more defensible relation to t­ emporality, affiliation, and politics, it is because it accepts, however unwillingly, the reality of a loss that cannot be transfigured by service to future generations or political activism. As a text, it does not seek to mitigate horror by deferring its meaning to some greater cause, some better future; instead, its refusal of futurity is linked to its refusal of normative familialism. Structured by the atemporal order of the drive, it posits no sacred Child, no new gay generation, that will eventually give meaning to the calamity, and avoids, at least partially, the reproductive futurism that is all too seductive for both gay and straight subjects.

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Contingency for Beginners The Night Watch Entrusting oneself to a person is quite different from entrusting oneself to time. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation

While Sarah Waters is known for her historical novels, The Night Watch is the first that makes history and temporality a central concern, not merely in the characters’ diegetic reflections on their lives during and after World War II, but also in the backward movement of its narrative from 1947 to 1944 and 1941. With its reference to nocturnal ambulance work during the war, Waters’s title hints at the inversion of night and day, as well as inversions of other kinds, and a pun: the watch, of course, is also a timepiece.1 The narrative follows nearly a dozen Londoners whose lives intersect in complex and sometimes surprising ways. Waters focuses on five of them: Kay, a wealthy, mannish lesbian who by 1947 has lost both her relationship with Helen and her wartime work as an ambulance driver; Helen, a clerical worker who leaves Kay for Julia; Julia, a novelist whose commitment to Helen is faltering by 1947; Vivien, a coworker of Helen in 1947 who has a long affair with a married

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man; and Duncan, Viv’s gay brother, found living with his former jailor and working in a shabby factory.2 Everyone we meet in 1947 has secrets that only 1941 will explain, and all have been involved in non-normative relationships. With this cast of characters, The Night Watch both expands the meaning of “queer” and particularizes it. All sexuality in Night Watch is illicit in some sense, but the gradations of difference go beyond straight and gay. Duncan isn’t just a gay man but also a partner in an intergenerational relationship. Some lesbian characters are part of a like-minded community, while others exist within the ambit of their current relationship. Vivien and her lover Reggie enjoy the privileges of heterosexuality, but also face its perils when Viv becomes pregnant. Although The Night Watch is an etiological narrative, tracing effects to their earlier causes, its inclusion of a straight couple complicates the usual pathologizing scrutiny on causes of homosexuality. As Jennifer Terry writes, “We, as deviant subjects, have had to account for ourselves as anomalies. . . . How did I come to be this way/How and why am I different?”3 I have argued that rather than seeking to explain the causes of homosexuality, we should inquire into the causes of heterosexuality as an institution and an identity. Waters does not offer an etiology of heterosexuality as such, but she shows how straight and gay subjects are equally, if differently, subject to the effects of history and the strictures of sexual normativity. Where The Night Watch does engage the issue of what causes homosexuality, it is in Helen’s story: Having dated only men, why does she become a lesbian on meeting Kay? The obvious answer would identify the trauma of the war as the cause of her homosexuality, and I want to suggest that this is both correct and incorrect. The war is surely traumatic, and it is the primary causal engine of everything in The Night Watch, but 164

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in fact the text raises the question of homosexual etiology only to deconstruct it. The pieces of that causal narrative are present in the novel, but they fail to connect. Its etiological investigations (“What caused these characters to become who they are?”) ultimately follow neither the conventions of the psychoanalytic case study, which delves into the past to determine the origin of perversion, nor the crime story, with its retroactive revelation of causality. Instead, The Night Watch challenges precisely this kind of narrative it is not structured by ordinary causality but by contingent causality.4 Causality is conventionally understood to be teleological and predictable; the connection between cause and effect is meaningful and necessary. (Due to the war, luxury items such as liquor become scarce and expensive in London.) But it can also be aleatory, random, meaningless; accidents do have effects, in irrational and unpredictable ways. (Due to the war, Viv and Reggie meet on a train.) Among the many ways of understanding contingent causality are evolutionary theory, with its dependence on random mutations and refusal of teleology, and chaos theory, where the butterfly effect posits a causal discontinuity based on “the unpredictability of minute difference.”5 As Jonathan Goldberg observes, chaos theory is prefigured by Lucretius, whose notion of the clinamen, more recently developed by Michel Serres, names an arbitrary swerve, “an explanation of things in a motion that is utterly unpredictable and certainly unattributable to some originary purpose or cause.”6 Finally, psychoanalytic theory and narrative theory provide other ways to understand the relation between causality and contingency, as well as what is at stake for queer studies in that matter. Contingent events and the backward movement of time yield a narrative that both is and is not etiological. At the beginning of the narrative in 1947, the central characters are related to one another 165

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in multiple complex ways, whereas at its end in 1941, with the exception of Viv and Duncan, they have no knowledge of each other. The experience of reading The Night Watch is therefore one of watching the characters precipitate out of their entanglement into singularity, the opposite of what happens to them in ordinary time—for chronologically the characters move from singularity to relationality.7 This is not a narrative of how things fall apart, but of how things come together—only we approach that geometry in reverse. In The Night Watch, the war is the contingent cause whose raw, kinetic energy sets lives in motion toward collisions with other lives, but it does not determine their trajectories or outcomes. As such, it prompts us to consider how contingent causality is retroactively presented as necessary causality and how much accidents haunt every etiological narrative. In what follows, then, I want to think about the war’s causality in The Night Watch in several senses. First is the war as a historical cause of social changes such as those Kay briefly enjoys; second, the war as a traumatic cause linked to homosexuality; and finally, the war as a contingent cause, a senseless release of energy resulting in random events. This contingency at the heart of the text not only defies the motivated causality we might attribute to God, nature, or fate—in Lacan’s terms, the big Other—but also undermines belief in individual agency, both for the characters, who are aware of the accidents that shape their experiences, and for the reader, who can survey the full range of unmotivated occurrences. As such, The Night Watch not only invites us to imagine a different link between homosexuality and causality, but also offers, in contingency, a third term capable of breaking the agonistic opposition in contemporary queer politics between fate and choice, biological determinism and personal volition.

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A R MCH A IR DETECTI V E The Night Watch approaches time dialectically, both advancing an account of regular, measurable time joining past to present and trading on subjective experiences of altered and situational temporalities. It simultaneously suggests the existence of ordinary, recordable time and reveals characters radically alienated from that time. As a historical novel, it provides a detailed portrait of lesbian life in the 1940s, with the genre’s meticulous period detail and seemingly authoritative grasp of real events. Among the developments of that period was a relatively widespread notion of lesbianism as an identity and a vocabulary in which that identity could be named, whether as “our sort of love” (227), “queer” (132), “Lesbian” (133), people “like us” (52), and even “the whole grisly ‘L’ business.” (242).8 With that awareness comes vulnerability, however: in 1947, Mickey is harassed by a male customer at the petrol station where she works. Julia and Helen feel they cannot hire a housecleaner because it would be evident that they share a bed: “weren’t char-ladies, anyway, awfully knowing about that sort of thing”? (45). And in 1944, Helen worries about Kay calling her at work: “A friend of Mickey’s had lost her job, when a girl had listened in on a private call between her and her lover” (251). The historicism of the historical novel functions to regularize time, treating the past as an observable phenomenon about which accurate statements might be made. Further, The Night Watch insists on the regularity of time through its own conspicuous chronology. In the course of the narrative, Waters divulges the age of each major character at least once, and her diligent timekeeping allows no errors; time is uniform and everyone ages at the same rate. Reggie tells Viv he’s “nearly 30”

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in 1941, when she is worried about “getting old” at twenty and tells Reggie that her brother is seventeen; Helen celebrates her twentyninth birthday in 1944; Duncan feels empowered, at twenty-four, to rebel against Mr. Mundy in 1947; in 1947, Kay is starting to go gray, as she is almost thirty-seven. Indeed, it is possible to chart the ages of all the major characters in the three sections of the narrative (see Table).9 1941

1944

1947

Kay

30–31

33–34

36–37

Julia

28–29

31–32

34–35

Helen

25–26

28–29

31–32

Viv

20

23

26

Reggie

29–30

32–33

35–36

Duncan

17–18

20–21

23–24

Fraser

22

25

28

The Night Watch is structured by the tension between this regular, historical time and characters’ oblique or improper relations to it, their ability to experience radically different temporalities. Waters’s careful plotting and strategic disclosure of everyone’s age in the novel is both an authorial tour de force and a form of misdirection, a certain sleight of hand. In the world of the novel, temporality is alternately elastic and compressed, affected both by the exceptionality of wartime and by the contours of local spaces. Driving to the suburbs with Reggie in 1947, Vivien feels “it was like hurtling backwards through 168

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time” (55): in public time, they seem to journey back to before the industrial age and before the urban devastation of the war, and in private time, they try to revisit their earlier, happier trysts in the countryside. But more often people do not travel through time so much as submit to the time of their place in the world. At the house Mr. Mundy and Duncan share, Viv thinks: “how slowly time ran here. As slowly as at work. How unfair it was! For she knew that later—when she would want it—it would seem to rush” (26). She wants more time, slower time, for her infrequent rendezvous with Reggie, and like everyone in dull occupations, she wants time to slow in her moments away from her desk. Waters underscores the ways in which specific social institutions—the office, the factory, and the prison—each impose their own “universe of disciplined time.”10 At the dating service where they work, Viv wonders why their breaks seem so brief: “‘Why does time never go so quickly when we’ve got the clients in?’ ‘They must work on the clocks,’ said Helen. ‘Like magnets’” (14). Later in the narrative, but earlier in its chronology, Duncan feels that prison is “a great, slow machine, for the grinding up of time” (193) and his cellmate Fraser experiences his sentence as an uncanny suspension from the history that flows on outside: “It was just as though I’d been plucked right out of time, then dropped back in it” (86). Almost without exception, the characters are intensely aware of their places in and out of time, but awareness gives them no power to alter its pace. That is most tellingly illustrated in those who not only experience altered temporalities, but are also defined as stuck in or out of time, notably Kay and Duncan. Kay is introduced as “one of those women . . . who’d charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over” (6), and she fully understands her alienation from time: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, 169

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and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord’s door” (5). She watches the patients’ comings and goings idly, her own timelessness vaguely absorbing their disability and discomfort. Left behind by history and by Helen, she clings to the memory of her few good years. In 1947, the war is over for everyone except Kay: “I can’t get over it. . . . The rubble has all my life in it still” (95). The rubble that metonymically suggests the whole of wartime London also names the specific circumstances in which she first met Helen, “caught by her legs in the rubble” when Kay arrived with her ambulance (436). Unlike Kay, Duncan has no personal past to yearn for; instead, he’s drawn to history itself. He “had a vague, unhappy sense that time had passed—real time, proper time, not factory time—and he had missed out on it” (72). Paralyzed by his own history, he is irrationally drawn to history as such, in the form of small and valueless antiques: a lustre bowl, an ivory cupboard knob, a dented copper jug, part of a clay pipe, a “chipped enamel box,” a worn velvet cushion (7–8, 23–24, 81).11 This is what Mary Ann Doane calls “the pathos of archival desire”—that is, a cathexis on objects that offer an “image of time, and a time that is not necessary but contingent.”12 I will return to contingency shortly, but there is more to see in Duncan’s collection, as his peculiar relation to time does not go unnoticed. Fraser remarks to Viv: “It seems an odd sort of life, that’s all, for a boy like Duncan. He’s not even a boy any more, is he? . . . He might have got stuck. I think he has got stuck. . . . All that fascination of his with things from the past” (112). The source of Kay and Duncan’s untimeliness is the war as causal engine of the novel, though in distinctly different ways. Having enjoyed the war’s suspension of ordinary constraints on gender expression, sexuality, and labor, Kay has no place in the return to normalcy, while Duncan is shattered

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by the friend who commits suicide on receiving his draft notice and by his own attempt to follow suit. Traveling from present to past, the narrative of The Night Watch moves from disappointment to possibility, from concealment to disclosure: in 1947 everyone has a riddle that only 1941 will fully solve.13 Helen observes, “Everyone has their secrets, after all” (108), and earlier in the novel, Waters provides a hint on how to find them, instructions in how to read The Night Watch. Kay says of the movies: “Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way—people’s pasts, you know, being much more interesting than their futures” (93).14 The text charges its reader with the task of traveling backward, ends to beginnings, seeking in that seeming disorder some insight unavailable in ordinary chronology. In an article on the novel, Waters remarks that it had to have a “retrospective movement” because “[i]t was not my characters’ futures that would make them interesting to me; it was their pasts.”15 As a result, its first section is full of implicit and explicit questions. Why is Viv looking for Kay? What does Kay have to do with the ring? Why is Kay so miserable? How did Duncan end up with Mr. Mundy? Why did he go to jail? Why is Viv involved with the boorish Reggie? How did Helen connect with with Julia? Helen regards Viv’s brother Duncan as “the biggest mystery. He had some queerness or scandal attached to him—Helen had never been able to work out what” (17). But Helen herself, we are told, has “one or two things in her own life that she preferred to keep in darkness” (17). The reader must puzzle out the answers to these questions by progressing forward into the text and backward into the past, where more questions await: in 1944 Helen wonders “What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?” (311).

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The Night Watch is thus a novel with an etiological project that interpellates its reader to the role of analyst or detective. It’s not for nothing that Julia is an author of crime fiction: in 1947 she has successfully published “The Bright Eyes of Danger, featured on Armchair Detective” (29), as well as Death by Degrees and Twenty Mortal Murders (309), and is at work on a manuscript titled Sicken and So Die (128). Her lover Helen feels that she knows “all the ins and outs of the complicated plot” (128), but as we will see, she does not know all of the plot in which she is herself enmeshed, the plot that is The Night Watch. Like a detective novel, the text moves backward from a problem in the present to its origin in the past. As Roland Barthes writes, the crucial element of the sensational story, the fait-divers, is a “relation of causality: a crime and its motive, an accident and its circumstance.”16 In The Night Watch, a text so concerned with causal ligatures between past and present, the fundamental question is Kay’s: “What the hell happened to me?” (95).

TR AUM ATIC CAUSES The past is literally blasted into consciousness with the Blitz in London. H. D., Tribute to Freud

Three modes of causality are attached to the war in The Night Watch: historical, traumatic, and contingent. As a historical cause, the war is an exceptional time defined by the partial suspension of social norms. Julia asks “And when the war’s over? And everything goes back to normal?” (243). Wartime ironically dissolves, if temporarily, the very cultural mores and practices that the British would doubtless say they are fighting to defend. During the war 172

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Kay and Mickey enjoy a certain freedom of gender expression in masculine clothing, and new opportunity in their work as ambulance drivers. Afterward, Kay is harassed for her lack of femininity: “Don’t you know the war’s over?” asks a man in a shop (88). During the war Helen is removed from family scrutiny and expectations; Julia can work as a surveyor of bomb damage.17 When Helen mentions her anxiety about her social class, Julia responds, “nothing like that matters any more, does it? Not these days” (241). But the war’s greatest effects, in The Night Watch, have to do with sexuality. The business of war brings Viv and Reggie, then a soldier, together in 1941, and in 1944 they enjoy the camouflage it gives their trysts: “there were a thousand reasons, these days, why a girl should spend a night on her own in a London hotel” (158). The war also changes individuals’ sense of propriety. Helen explains, of her relationship with Kay: “It never felt strange, as perhaps it ought to have done. . . . But then, so many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then” (243). The impossible extends to Fraser’s relationship with Duncan while in prison, delicately traversing the boundary between the homosexual and the homosocial. After an air raid during which Fraser, terrified, creeps into his cellmate’s bed, he and Duncan “settled back into an embrace—as if it were nothing, as if it were easy; as if they weren’t two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits, as if it were the most natural thing in the world” (390). Yet the war is also a time of intense anxiety, grisly discoveries, and mortal loss, not least the tragedy precipitated by Duncan’s friend Alec. A second form of the war’s causality, then, can be understood through its function as trauma. Here I want to engage in a kind of thought experiment, tracing how one might read The Night Watch, with its gay and lesbian characters and etiological structure, as a story about how trauma causes sexual perversion. The particular 173

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one who would likely read in such a fashion is the anti-gay observer who believes in homosexual reproduction through contagion, bad influence, prurient knowledge, or seduction. I outline this reading in order to show how Waters provides the text with all the elements that could build such a causal narrative, but also with what undoes it: the contingency of causality. In fact there are two invitations to homosexual etiology that the text advances only to withdraw. In the 1947 segment, Duncan recalls the nightly ritual in which Mr. Mundy awaits him in bed, “ready to pat the side of the bed, invitingly.” Waters continues in free indirect discourse: “It wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. Duncan thought of other things. There was a picture, hanging over Mr Mundy’s bed: a scene of an angel, safely leading children across a narrow, precipitous bridge. He’d look at that until it was over” (143). Although this scene evokes the familiar tropes of seduction and corruption of young boys by older gay men, however distasteful Duncan’s relationship with Mr. Mundy may seem, in the 1941 chapters we learn that his love for Alec precedes his meeting Mr. Mundy in prison. His homosexuality is not caused by anything; it is itself, arguably, the cause of Duncan’s fate. The more complex etiological narrative concerns Helen, who enters into her first relationship with a woman after being trapped in a collapsed building; indeed, it is that event that connects her with Kay. All of Waters’s characters have been in some way damaged by their pasts, but by 1947 Helen is the most recognizably unwell, driven by her jealousy to cut herself, leaving a visible symptom of suffering. The phobic reading would equate self-harm with lesbian perversity and with Helen’s other salient symptom, her amnesia about the circumstances under which she met Kay. Today, the notion that trauma can cause perversion is wholly discredited in some circles and strangely persistent in others; focusing on sexual abuse as a form of trauma, Ann Cvetkovich cites 174

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several texts on the subject that avoid delving into the authors’ lesbianism because of the myth that “sexual abuse causes homosexuality.”18 Granted, Helen’s trauma is of a different nature, and it does not appear to be repeated in flashbacks, troubling memories, or strange actions. But the repetition of the trauma is externalized in narrative form: much as her meeting with Kay was in the ruins, her first romantic rendezvous with Julia is in a house wrecked by a bomb. Later, when Helen suspects Julia of infidelity with Ursula, they are in their ordinary flat, but the violence has come inside the house—has become a part of it—in the form of their neighbor’s incessant stream of verbal abuse of his wife.19 The notional story linking Helen’s lesbian desire to the trauma of the war would consider her amnesia a second telling symptom. During the 1944 chapters, as she begins her relationship with Julia and reflects on Julia’s past relationship with Kay, she repeatedly muses on the fact, as she believes it, that Kay had pursued Julia unsuccessfully, until finally Julia corrects her: it was Julia who had pursued Kay unsuccessfully. This curious bit of information seems stressed beyond any possible significance: wanting to desire as she believes Kay desired, Helen may be enacting an identification with Kay or merely seeking to understand her partner’s past. But neither of these changes our fundamental understanding of her. Instead, we learn in the last scene of the novel that, as Kay is ministering to Helen in the wreck of her house, Kay tells her that someone was courting her attention, a detail that, as Kay predicts, Helen will forget: “Someone’s in love with me. . . . But that’s another secret. I’m thinking of the morphia, you see. I’m counting on your not being able to remember any of this” (444). And that will largely prove true: Helen later says she “remember[s] hardly any” of that night (327). Traumatic failures of memory are generally understood to stem from the problem of understanding and representing the event. 175

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Cathy Caruth has theorized trauma as an overwhelming experience that cannot be grasped and must therefore be experienced repeatedly and belatedly. The paradox, she writes, is that “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it.”20 Similarly, Peggy Phelan writes of trauma: “The symbolic cannot carry it; trauma makes a tear in the symbolic network itself.”21 If Helen forgets the nature of Kay’s previous relationship, we may wonder what else she forgets after this scene of trauma: for one, she seems to forget that she was once in love with a boy. That amnesia echoes in Kay’s repeated thoughts on their meeting, whose three iterations share one word: unmarked. In the last lines of the novel, which are also its beginning, Kay thinks of Helen as “so fresh and so unmarked” (446). In the other instances, she is “so fair and unmarked” (227), and “beautiful and unmarked” (190). “Unmarked” seems to indicate that Helen is unharmed, but that is not the case; when she first meets Kay, she is in sufficient pain to require morphine. In view of that forgetting, “unmarked” more troublingly suggests blank, uninscribed, even erased.22 Of course, it is absurd to think that the trauma of the war causes Helen to become a lesbian. Or is it? In terms of generalizable, predictable causality, it is not true that trauma causes lesbianism (nor would I want to imply that lesbianism is a pathological symptom commensurate with self-mutilation and amnesia). But in The Night Watch, the war, manifest in the trauma of being trapped in a collapsed house, does literally cause Helen to be a lesbian. If Helen had not been trapped in the rubble of a bombed home, she would not have met Kay, would not have entered into a relationship with her, and her sexual future would be unknown: it is just as plausible that she would have remained straight as that she would become a lesbian. But this causality is contingent because it relies on random chance; it cannot be reproduced; it is a singular accident. 176

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Other people traumatized by the war did not become lesbians; the at least equally harrowing experience of a botched abortion does not make Viv a lesbian, and the other lesbian characters are not equipped with similar etiological narratives. Nonetheless, in the logic of the text it is literally true that Helen becomes a lesbian as a result of a traumatic event. The difference between an antigay form of this statement and a queer one turns on the nature of the causality presumed to be operating here. The anti-gay case rests on determinate, necessary causality—morphine causes amnesia, jealousy causes paranoia, trauma causes homosexuality— whereas the queer reading would predicate sexuality on causes that are ultimately random, irrational, and undecidable. In this contingent causality, one accident leads to another chance occurrence; it can all be pieced together in retrospect, but that retrospection merely imposes narrative on a meaningless contingency. The Night Watch, then, contains the elements of a phobic homosexual etiology, but they are offered precisely in order to be interrogated, much as the novel systematically pits rational causality against the forces of contingency.

TA K ING CH A NCES Contingency is the final way the war functions as a cause in The Night Watch. If the war is not the motivated origin of homosexuality or adultery, it clearly creates the conditions in which both thrive; if it does not determine the regrets and limitations of all the characters’ postwar existence, surely it has a hand in shaping them. In fact, the central conceit of The Night Watch is not its obvious backward chronology, but the extent to which its narrative depends on the chance occurrences that connect disparate characters 177

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to one another. As a contingent cause, the war is merely a mechanism that randomly releases energy, setting characters in motion without determining who will meet, and how, and with what result. Duncan accidentally crosses paths with his former cellmate, Fraser, in 1947, when the latter is dispatched to photograph the factory where Duncan works. Having never met him, Kay regards Duncan as the “fey-looking boy” who visits the Christian Science healer below her flat in 1947 (3). But he happens to be the brother of Viv, who by chance was rescued by Kay and Mickey after her abortion in 1944—an unplanned pregnancy being a prime example of a chance occurrence. Viv later turns up as a coworker of Helen’s, with no inkling that Helen, Kay’s ex-partner, connects her doubly to Kay. When she discovers she is pregnant, Viv feels she is, like her brother, a victim of accident: “We try to make something of ourselves and life won’t let us, we get tripped up” (256). Three years later, when the crises of that moment have receded in memory, Viv still marvels at the role of chance, whether good and bad: “It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had” (23). And Helen marvels at her own chance meetings and their consequences: “If I’d never met Kay, I should never have met you, Julia” (327); the random event of being rescued from a bombed building by Kay’s particular ambulance crew leads to her eventual acquaintance, and love affair, with Kay’s friend Julia.23 Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (“How did I randomly meet this person who is now essential to my happiness?”), as well as the retroactive revision of contingency into necessity (as the song says, “it had to be you”). This dynamic is nowhere more apparent than in Kay’s relationship with Helen. For her part, Helen explains being a lesbian as a benign accident: “It was just how things turned out,” she tells Julia (242), but Kay’s 178

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feelings for Helen are more complicated. As we have seen, the description of Helen on the last page of the novel—the passage that yields the term “unmarked”—recurs twice elsewhere in the text. While waiting for more help to arrive in 1941, Kay finds herself “gazing at her in a sort of wonder; unable to believe that something so fresh and so unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos” (446). In 1944, having feared for Helen’s safety when their neighborhood burned, “It seemed a sort of miracle to her that she should come back, from so much mayhem, to so much that was quick and warm and beautiful and unmarked” (190). And later that year, admiring Helen in her satin pajamas, Kay thinks: “it was wonderful to her that Helen, who was so lovely, so fair and unmarked, should be here at all” (277). Each passage turns on improbability: “wonder,” “wonderful,” “miracle.” The OED indicates that, in addition to its most common meaning—a wonder is something that causes astonishment—wonder archaically meant “[a] deed performed or an event brought about by miraculous or supernatural power; a miracle”; and “miracle” in turn stems from the “classical Latin mīrāculum object of wonder.” Helen’s very existence seems to defy natural causality; a miracle, after all, is an event that is attributed to the supernatural because it cannot be explained by any normal cause. Yet Kay is not always content to live in contingency. Coincidence must be turned into necessity because aleatory events always suggest the unnarratable, the impossible, the Real. There is something disconcerting about the chance occurrence, however wonderful, that compels us to assign it a cause, even if that cause is an ultimate, unknowable power such as God or fate. Writing of the film Babel, Todd McGowan contends that, due to its unsettling effects, “it is difficult to see the contingent as contingent and not interpret it according to some hidden necessity determined by the real 179

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Other behind the scenes.”24 And that is what happens in The Night Watch. In the second 1944 scene, Kay considers Helen’s presence a fulfillment of destiny: She might have been born, been a child, grown up—done all the particular, serious, and inconsequential things she’d done—just so she could arrive at this point, now; just so she could stand, barefoot, in a satin pyjama-suit, and Kay could watch her. (277)

Helen knows this only too well, as she tells Julia: “Kay’s a sentimentalist. She remembers it as though there were a touch of fate to it, a touch of kismet” (327). How is chance different from fate? Both are beyond human agency, but chance says anything could happen, while fate says one thing must happen, even if we don’t know what force may determine it. Like Kay, we turn chance into necessity to neutralize the unsettling meaninglessness, the vertigo of the random event. That interpretive effort is so commonplace that we may recognize it only in extreme instances—for example, in two moments of paranoia in The Night Watch. Paranoia affords a kind of solace by giving meaning, even sinister meaning, to occurrences that would otherwise seem inexplicable. Writing on chance in psychoanalytic theory, Derrida asks, “what is the difference between superstition or paranoia on the one hand, and science on the other, if they all mark a compulsive propensity to interpret random signs so as to restore to them a meaning, necessity, destination?”25 But one need not be a psychoanalyst to translate seemingly random signs to meaning. Jealous after she witnesses an apparently chance meeting between Julia and Ursula, Helen “remembered how keen Julia had been to get to the park—Come on! Come Quick!—her fingers 180

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slipping away from Helen’s in her impatience. Was it Ursula she’d wanted to see? Was it? Had they arranged the whole thing?” (53). And Duncan, noticing a man and woman from his neighborhood at a pub, is “horribly aware of being observed, being discussed, sized up, disliked.” In his fearful view, “the two of them stared at Duncan, with an extraordinary mixture of malevolence, avidity, and blankness” (83). Though manifesting differently as jealousy and scopophobia, in both cases paranoia is a refusal of contingency and a concomitant compulsion to interpret chance events as necessary and meaningful. Although causal sequences have been considered a fundamental building block of narrative, the logic that joins a series of events, it need not be literally present to function in this way.26 Presented with an seemingly random sequence of events, the reader infers causality, much as Kay later regards her meeting with Helen as predestined. Causality is all about before and after, but in such cases, the cause is an after masquerading as a before; its status as origin is retroactively installed. The reverse may be equally true. Barthes notes: “we might say that the causality of the fait-divers is constantly subject to the temptation of coincidence and, inversely, that coincidence here is constantly fascinated by the order of causality.”27 Something of contingent causality inheres in what seems to be motivated causality and something of necessity inhabits what appears mere contingency. In psychoanalytic theory the deferred action that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit proposes that an event becomes the cause of a later symptom only after that symptom has appeared to make the initial, random event retroactively a necessary cause.28 Slavoj Žižek approaches the psychic transformation of contingent causality into motivated causality similarly: “at some turning point of the subject’s (or collective) history, an act of interpretation which is in itself thoroughly contingent—non-deducible 181

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from the preceding series—renders the preceding chaos readable anew by introducing into it order and meaning.” Such a process, he continues, can be understood as “backwards-necessity” in which “necessity derives from the retroactive effect of contingency.”29 That principle applies to evolutionary theory as well as psychic processes, as he notes: “the fossils of Burgess Shale bear witness to how evolution may have taken a wholly different turn,” and thus to the possibility that “life is experienced as a series of multiple parallel destinies that interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters.”30 In the present tense, biological mutations are wholly accidental; the process of evolution looks teleological only in hindsight. What is and is not purposeful can be determined only retroactively, so that what appears as a meaningful, motivated cause always contains the trace of its other; it is haunted by its own contingency.

CHOICE A ND CH A NCE The other unsettling thing about contingency is the way in which it obviates individual agency. In the essay from which this chapter takes its title, Adam Phillips writes, “If chance is the medium that agency operates in, agency is a diminished thing, merely reactive.”31 We cannot believe we are capable of shaping our own destinies when we are subject to irrational contingencies. In The Night Watch, the characters both acknowledge the role that chance has played in their lives and contemplate the limits of their agency. In 1947 Helen speculates, “Maybe we’ve all forfeited our right to happiness, by doing bad things, or by letting bad things happen” (102). Apparently even a rueful cause, or a flimsy one, is better than no cause at all. But even as this passage posits a cause-and-effect 182

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relationship stemming from an individual choice (doing bad things causes unhappiness), its superstitious quality implies that this causality must be mediated by a big Other. At other times, characters’ sense of their own agency is stronger. In 1947 Reggie expresses the regret that most of the characters feel, telling Viv: “You know, if I could have done it differently—? All of it, I mean” (64). Merely to ask this unanswerable question reveals a wish to believe that one’s choices do determine one’s future. Recognizing contingency changes the question of homosexual etiology by introducing a third term capable of breaking the agonistic opposition between “choice” and determinism. 32 In recent decades, some anti-gay narratives have seized on the overdetermined concept of choice. The charge that queers recruit children implies an unconsenting subject, yet anti-gay rhetoric also insists that those who become gay have freely selected that path. A leader of an “ex-gay” organization, A. Dean Byrd, says, “When it comes to homosexuality, I’m pro-choice.”33 If the recognition of contingency undermines belief in individual agency, as in The Night Watch, it would obstruct the notion that one can control one’s sexuality through self-determination—a notion that in the hands of A. Dean Byrd is definitively anti-gay. But contingency also undermines the case for biological determinism. Understanding contingency means letting go of the illusion that one can control one’s fate, as well as the illusion that one’s fate is determined by the totalizing purpose of some larger entity. When today’s debate about the causes of homosexuality pits biological determinism against accusations that homosexuality is a choice, it replicates these terms: homosexuality is either caused by the big Other (biology, whether manifest in “gay genes” or hormonal differences) or it results from voluntary decisions. While we are all subject to contingency in the realm of sexuality, contingency 183

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neither redeems nor answers the question “what causes homosexuality?” Instead, it helps to show why that is the wrong question. Both determinist and volitional explanations of homosexuality seek to turn contingency into necessity—in the case of the individual who believes she was “born gay,” doing so retroactively. The anxiety surrounding contingency fuels strenuous efforts to narrativize what would otherwise have no fixed meaning. In this regard, gay and lesbian etiologists and their opponents are no different from Kay, Duncan, and Helen. To recognize contingency—that is, to accept that the world is full of accidents, coincidences, and unpredictable effects—does not preclude the study of the systematicity of ideology and social institutions. In The Night Watch, no one’s fate is entirely random: Reggie enjoys white male privilege, Viv is a victim of laws banning abortion, Mickey and Kay struggle with gender norms, and Duncan’s imprisonment is at least partly determined by homophobia. Instead, the random, accidental event brings with it a sense of undecidability that resonates with the fundamental ethos of queer theory, especially as distinct from gay and lesbian identity politics. Contingent events, which have no set meaning and may in fact be meaningless, resist the “dangerous consensus of knowingness” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “We Know What That Means,” setting smug knowledge against perpetual questioning. 34 We may well wonder, with Kay, “what the hell happened?” but the task before us is not to answer that question definitively; it is to open a space where contingency need not be remade as causality, and where the unease of not-knowing does not preclude efforts to think beyond conventional etiology.

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Conclusion Multiply and Divide

The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group formed in the 1990s, responded to phobic narratives of homosexual reproduction with a slogan, “We Recruit,” and a chant: “Ten percent is not enough: recruit, recruit, recruit!” Echoing Harvey Milk’s famous line about recruiting voters, “We Recruit” is a parody of anti-gay paranoia, even if observers on the Right, apparently deficient in irony, have quoted it widely as evidence of the speakers’ real intentions.1 Functioning not descriptively but performatively, “We Recruit” resembles another “untrue” statement, the second-wave feminist axiom, “we are all lesbians.”2 The latter is not a statement of fact, nor is it merely a proclamation of solidarity with a vulnerable group; it is a verbal inoculation against a particular malady—that is, the effort to shame heterosexual feminists by calling them lesbians. “We Recruit” functions as a similar remedy, for embracing the mythology of acquired homosexuality is the only way not to be terrorized by it—the only way to avoid the contortions of disavowal. A similar gesture informs Lee Edelman’s No Future. Discussing the figural burden forced on the queer in a culture of reproductive futurism—the burden of representing all that obviates the future—he takes a contrarian view: “Rather than rejecting,

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with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it.”3 And where homosexual reproduction is concerned, claiming an abject identity, even if that claiming is a rhetorical gesture, is an act of resistance to mortifying accusations. Instead of pitting biological determinism against anti-gay notions of homosexual reproduction, that is, we would do better to accept the unnatural proliferation with which queer people are charged. We should own the mythology of homosexual reproduction, because imagining a world in which more homosexuals are welcome is essential to producing a world in which any homosexuals are welcome. Equity does not require more queer people, but it requires a culture in which the idea of more queer people is not regarded as disastrous. Referring to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1991 essay “How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Michael Warner argues that tolerance is not sufficient: “heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world,” although at the time of his writing, in 1993, “the idea that the emergence of more queers might be a desirable outcome remains unthinkable.”4 Today that idea is thinkable, and to pursue it means abandoning a minoritizing narrative in which same-sex desire is so feeble and “self-limiting” that there is “no scenario in which [it] spreads throughout a population.”5 One version of the Lesbian Avengers’ counterintuitive claim may emerge from the vexed question of choice. As the previous chapter suggested, many observers, both pro-gay and anti-gay, believe that the claim that gay and lesbian identities can be chosen devalues these identities.6 The assertion that homosexuality is the product of individual volition, they say, implies that it can be undone in the same way: queers could, and should, choose to be otherwise. That is why Eric Marcus answers the question posed by his 186

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book’s title, Is It A Choice? by asserting that we “don’t get a choice about our feelings of sexual attraction.” 7 The concept of choice has become so inextricable from homophobia that many gay and lesbian people treat choice as essentially noxious. In 2000, at the final debate of the U.S. presidential campaign, then-President George Bush and Senator John Kerry paused to consider an issue distant from the usual matters of public policy. Moderator Bob Scheiffer asked, “Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?” What may have seemed a philosophical question had obvious political implications: while Kerry’s assertion that “it’s not a choice” signaled his support for gay rights, Bush’s “I don’t know” needed only to refuse that narrative to align him with the competing story in which homosexuality represents a sinful “lifestyle.”8 The same suppositions were evident in the chorus of denunciation that greeted presidential candidate Bill Richardson in August 2007, when he said that he believed homosexuality was “a choice,” although his next remarks affirmed his support for gay rights.9 So abhorrent is the notion of choosing to be gay or lesbian that when actor Cynthia Nixon came out in 2012, her remarks were met with outrage in LGBT communities. As Nixon tells it: I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.” And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice.10

It makes no difference that she identified as gay, embraced queer culture, and did not pretend to speak for anyone other than 187

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herself: choice is always anathema.11 Why would anyone choose to be gay? A website created by an apparently well-meaning straight couple to support their gay son answered that question with a chart listing eleven “positives” and “negatives” of homosexuality. The “negatives” range from violent death to eternal damnation; the “positives,” repeated eleven times, are “none.”12 The message is clear: no rational person would choose to be gay because being gay is an unmitigated calamity. But to assert that no one would ever choose a gay or lesbian life is to assert that homosexuality is intrinsically a hardship to be borne by hapless victims; that is the unmistakable message when those who note the “negatives” of homosexuality do not recognize their exteriority, their historicity, their contingency. In their haste to combat antigay polemics, proponents of “born gay” have created a discourse whose cringing attitude (“We can’t help it! No one would choose such an fate!”) categorically rejects the possibility that same-sex desire could be wanted.13 What would it mean, then, to say that “we choose”? As we have seen, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is structured by the narrator’s “impossible” ability to define his own racial and sexual identities. Johnson’s novel makes the seemingly absurd proposition that a man may choose his race and sexuality. At the end of the text the nameless narrator takes a wife as deliberately as he becomes a white man, putting behind him other affiliations and modes of desire, even if he half-regrets that turn: “I cannot repress the thought, that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part.”14 While such conscious self-making is by no means commonplace in gay and lesbian communities, there is a long pro-choice tradition in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer thought. In 1980, Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” revealed heterosexual “preference” as radically less organic and volitional than it appeared, 188

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and lesbianism as more so. Some lesbian feminists have been asserting their choice of sexual identities and partners for decades; whereas today the idea that homosexuality might be chosen is met with outrage, Rich’s references to “women who have chosen women” and “the act of choosing a woman lover” were then among her least contentious claims.15 For his part, John D’Emilio suspects that the rush to embrace biological determinism is motivated by the fear that “if we did have a choice, we might choose otherwise.” But, he concludes, “I would also like to know that we might embrace our sexual identity even if we discovered we had a choice.”16 More recently, Donna Minkowitz acknowledges that there are “grains of truth” in right-wing charges about acquired homosexuality: “Maybe you didn’t choose to be gay—that’s fine. But I did.”17 Of course, we cannot really choose to be gay—not because sexuality is biologically determined and not because being gay is a catastrophe. Instead, as we have seen in The Night Watch, contingency plays a signal role; and as psychoanalytic theory and myriad strands of post-structuralist thought remind us, we are not free subjects, but subject to the anarchic unconscious and the ideological constraints of our time and place. There is no agency where the disposition of the libido is concerned. We cannot choose our desires; indeed, we cannot even truly know them. Yet we must both acknowledge the impossibility of this choice and demand our notional right to choose queerness, for a culture in which homosexuality cannot be chosen is surely a culture of coercion. In the biological-determinist argument, freedom depends on straight culture’s belief that there is no voluntary homosexuality. When Marcus assures his reader that her sexuality is “innate, immutable, and uniquely your own,” he affirms the sovereign liberal subject by negating that subject’s agency to shape her or his own desire.18 Here, paradoxically, freedom is found in compulsion; the tolerance 189

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of homosexuals, we are told, depends on their inability to choose homosexuality. We are free to live as gay only as long as we do not want to live as gay. In a world governed by that Kafkaesque proposition, insisting on the right to choose the impossible starts to look eminently reasonable. It is worth imagining a world in we recruit, we choose, we increase: all three may be untenable, but the gesture of affirming the impossible may yet be vitally important. The impossibility of that claiming opens onto the dimension of difference and negativity inherent in all narratives of identity and community, their difference-from-themselves. That negativity crucially complicates any engagement with the tropes of homosexual reproduction; it is all that prevents “we recruit” or “we choose” from becoming merely another etiological narrative, for as Annamarie Jagose writes, “queer is less an identity than a critique of identity.”19 Queerness resembles evolutionary mutation and variation as an insistence of pure difference; in literature, as we have seen, it takes the form of an absent cause in Dorian Gray, an abyssal deferral of meaning in The Well of Loneliness, contingency in The Night Watch, anti-futurism in Borrowed Time, and the instability of identity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Queerness tempers the rigidity of identity and identity politics with endless variation, eternal difference. The stakes are clear: for Edelman, theories of difference always confront the “danger of regressing from difference to presence, from relations without any positive terms to relations among differences or identities that tempt us to know them ‘in themselves.’”20 This is the problem with understanding homosexual reproduction merely as gay culture begetting gay culture, for that generates what Sedgwick calls “separatist assimilation”—the separatist difference from the norm becomes meaningless when the scission of that difference is reduced to the sameness of an identity category. Biological etiologies 190

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promote a fantasy of assimilation and liberal inclusion by representing homosexuals as fundamentally distinct from heterosexuals, as Sedgwick observes. The identity-based social movements on which gay and lesbian activism models itself, she writes, “claim the right of seamless social assimilation for a group of people on the basis of a separatist understanding of them as embodying a stable ontological difference.”21 At once separatist and assimilationist, “born gay” produces a curious narrative of categorical difference from heterosexuality and subsumption by it. By contrast, the difference instantiated by queerness cannot serve the separatist mode of “ethnic model” gay politics. What then would it mean to imagine the reproduction of queerness, difference, contingency, negativity? What I have been calling “homosexual reproduction” encompasses both the social reproduction of really existing, material gay and lesbian cultures and identities and, antithetically, the reproduction of “lost,” retroactive, and contingent causes. The former is a homosexual reproduction of sameness; the latter is a queer reproduction of difference. Homosexuality and queerness necessarily have different relations to causality: gay and lesbian identities and cultures reproduce or “cause” themselves, but queerness is reproduced or “caused” by its abjection from heteronormative culture.22 Gay and lesbian identities and institutions perpetuate themselves over time—for example, in the social reproduction of gay male culture that David M. Halperin describes in How To Be Gay—while queerness troubles the security of identities and institutions. Homosexuality multiplies, so to speak, but queerness divides. If literary texts often chronicle and sustain the dissemination of gay and lesbian identities and cultures, they also engage with the queer impulse whose reproduction means more difference, not more of the same. Both operate in and around The Picture of Dorian Gray through different 191

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retroactive mechanisms: Wilde’s homosexuality “returns from the future” when twentieth-century gay male culture invents itself through identification with him, but something more like queerness takes the place of the Lacanian Real as an absent cause that nonetheless produces effects. Just what queer reproduction will engender must remain forever in doubt; it is a solicitation of the inherent perversity in everyone and everything.23 We can’t know in advance, as Sedgwick would say, what the parameters of this queerness will be—only that it will exceed our understanding of intimacy, enjoyment, identification, politics, and community. The reproduction of queerness will be negative, not positive; its multiplication as such will constitute division. Describing difference as a negative space that does not need to be occupied or made intelligible, Jacques Khalip pointedly compares it to queerness: “difference, like ‘negativity’ in No Future, does not require fulfillment; it resists the motions of consensus, sociality, and agreement that would want us to think of theory as having always to pay tribute at the altars of sociality.”24 This is what is lost if “born gay” goes unquestioned or is replaced by some other politically expedient meme, some other convenient story about the etiology of homosexuality. And it is why the social reproduction of gay male, bisexual, and lesbian cultures must be accompanied by the propagation of queerness as an ongoing negotiation with difference.

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Chapter 1 1. Quoted in David M. Halperin, “Deviant Teaching,” Michigan Feminist Studies 16 (2002): 5–6. 2. Jess Stearn, The Sixth Man: A Startling Investigation of the Spread of Homosexuality in America (New York: Doubleday, 1961): 13. 3. Hans Johnson and William Eskridge, “The Legacy of Falwell’s Bully Pulpit,” Washington Post (May 19, 2007): A17. 4. Rick Scarborough, “Vision America Action,” e-mailed letter dated December 7, 2009, reproduced at “Scarborough Jumps into Houston Mayoral Race with Anti–Gay Email,” People for the American Way: Right Wing Watch, December 20, 2009. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-jumps-houstonmayoral-race-anti-gay-email (accessed February 14, 2010). 5. On the “possibility of mimetic duplication” and “poetics of reproduction” presented by male-male love in the sonnet from which I take my epigraph, see Valerie Traub’s astute essay, “Sex Without Issue: Sodomy, Interpretation and Signification in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999): 441. 6. See, for example, Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman, Born Gay: The Science of Sex Orientation (London: Peter Owen, 2004). Chapter 2 discusses this text further. 7. David Gelman, “Born or Bred?” Newsweek (February 24, 1992): 46–53. 8. Where the courts are concerned, legal scholars note that immutability is not the only (nor necessarily the best) way to identify a suspect class, and biological determinism is not the only (nor necessarily the best) way to establish

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immutability: other deeply rooted identities such as religious belief are protected because they are deemed so essential to personhood that it would be unreasonable to ask anyone to change them. On law and immutability, see Janet E. Halley, “Sexual Orientation and the Politics of Biology: A Critique of the Argument from Immutability,” Stanford Law Review 46.3 (1994): 503–568. On biology and immutability, see William Byne, “The Biological Evidence Challenged,” Scientific American (May 1994): 50. Byne writes: “a requirement that an unconventional trait be inborn or immutable is an inhumane criterion for a society to use in deciding which of its nonconformists it will grant tolerance” because in biology, “learned behavior can nonetheless be immutable.” 9. Dean Hamer and Michael Rosbash, “Genetics and Proposition 8: Human Sexual Orientation Has Deep Biological Roots,” Los Angeles Times ­(February 23, 2010): A13. 10. Joe Dallas, When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They’re Gay (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004): 55. 11. That questions of homosexual etiology participate in the disciplinary hyperscrutiny of queer individuals is well known in gay culture: a questionnaire circulated since 1982 reveals the bias of common questions asked of homosexuals by addressing them to heterosexuals, starting with “What do you think caused your heterosexuality?” (The questionnaire, widely copied with and without attribution, is either identified as the work of Mary Ann Tucker and Sharon Young for the gay Catholic organization DIGNITY, San Diego [December 1982], or M. Rochlin of the University of Ontario [spring 1982]. I am grateful to Dot Brauer for providing me with a copy.) 12. Robert McRuer, review of William B. Turner’s A Genealogy of Queer Theory in National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14.2 (2002): 227. 13. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 392. Randall Halle expresses a similar concern: “Knowledge of a cause for homosexuality would surely become knowledge of a cure for homosexuality, unless it existed in an environment in which diversity and difference already structured the rationale of the socius. The problem is normativity, not etiology.” Queer Social Philosophy (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2004): 215. 14. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982): 86. I thank Matt Bell for reminding me of Culler’s argument. 15. Culler, 87. 16. Although some bisexual and transgender people share the belief that sexual orientation is biologically determined, I generally avoid the acronymic “LGBT” because bisexuals and transgender people are neither the focus of phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction, nor included in the counter-­ discourse of “born gay.” Where transgender identities are concerned, 194

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notions of sexuality as innate may or may not reflect notions of gender identity as innate and as such deserve a consideration that is beyond the scope of this project. 17. Because pedagogy has been frequently discussed by others, this project focuses on other tropes of homosexual reproduction; on pedagogy and sexuality see, for example, David M. Halperin, “Deviant Teaching,” and the essays by George E. Haggerty, Joseph Litvak, Sue-Ellen Case, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: MLA, 1995). Halperin also considers the notion that teachers can corrupt students into homosexuality in How to Be Gay (New York: Belknap, 2012). 18. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003): 50. Chapter 8 discusses assimilation in more detail. 19. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, “Beyond Gay Pride,” in Gay Shame, ed. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 4, 11. See also the essays in Queer Futures: Radical History Review, ed. Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 2 0. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 472. D’Emilio considers the political utility of biological determinism and rejects it: he acknowledges that the notion of becoming gay might resemble anti-gay rhetoric, but continues, “our response must be to challenge the underlying belief that homosexual relations are bad, a poor second choice” (474). If urbanization is one historical cause of queer increase, increasing social tolerance may be another. Donna Minkowitz writes in 1992: “I am increasingly impatient with the old chestnut that our movement for public acceptance has not increased and will not increase the number of gay men and lesbians in existence.” Indeed, she goes on to defend “the morality of teaching kids that gay is OK even if it means that some will join our ranks.” Donna Minkowitz, “Recruit, recruit, recruit!” The Advocate 619 (December 29, 1992): 17. 21. Today’s efforts to locate the biological cause of homosexuality repress the history of quite different arguments: pro-gay accounts of homosexuality as acquired, volitional, or contingent. Whereas the European homophile movement of the early twentieth century found in theories of congenital inversion a basis for tolerance, the later gay liberation movement sought to “free the homosexual in everyone”; in 1972, Dennis Altman alluded to Freud’s understanding of sexuality when he urged others to realize their “bisexual potential.” Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 40–41. 195

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22. Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 136, 15. 23. Halperin, How to Be Gay, 351. While adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s term “social reproduction,” Halperin does not rely significantly on Bourdieu. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 58. 2 4. Halperin, How to Be Gay, 18, 323. How to Be Gay and Making Girls engage with heavily freighted tropes of homosexual reproduction—recruitment, initiation, instruction, conversion—recognizing such notions as at once figments of the homophobic imagination and real mechanisms for the social reproduction of gay and lesbian identities and cultures. 25. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 109. 2 6. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, “Introduction: Becoming Unbecoming” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 9. 27. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Mestiza Metaphysics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 281. See also his “Breeding (and) Reading: Lesbian Knowledge, Eugenic Discipline, and “The Children’s Hour,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.4 (2002): 1001–1040. 2 8. Peter Coviello, “Whitman’s Children,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 73–86. Like Tuhkanen’s, Coviello’s vision is compelling but more utopian than my view. 29. Somewhat further afield, but figuring usefully in my readings, is work on fantasmatic queer genealogies: Scott Bravmann and Christopher Nealon consider imaginative efforts to trace gay genealogies and kinships through history. See Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Political Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Also relevant are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussions of “queer tutelage” and “How to Bring Up Your Kids Gay,” and Michael Warner’s remarks on how “extrafamilial intimate culture” challenges old reproductive ideologies. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 52–72 and 154–166; Michael Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” ELH, 67.3 (2000): 794. I thank Abby Goode for bringing Warner’s essay to my attention. 30. See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer 196

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Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120.5 (2005): 1608–1617; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequences (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 31. See Jeremy W. Peters, “The Decline and Fall of the ‘H’ Word,” The New York Times (March 23, 2014): ST10. 32. Madhavi Menon, “An Interview with Lee Edelman,” Shakespeare Quarterly Forum, August 2, 2011. http://titania.folger.edu/blogs/sq/forum/?p=287/ (accessed July 29, 2013). 33. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978): 45; E. M. Forster, from Aspects of the Novel (1963) rpt. in The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2000): 45. On causality in narrative theory, see also Brian Richardson, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 3 4. For a structuralist account, see Emma Kafalenos, Narrative Causalities (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 35. Roland Barthes, “Textual Analysis: Poe’s Valdemar,” in Modern Criticism and Theory, 3rd ed., ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (New York: Longman, 2008): 170. 36. Rudyard Kipling, “How the Leopard Got His Spots” (1901), Just So Stories (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1936): 43. 37. John S. Tanner, “‘Say First What Cause’: Ricoeur and the Etiology of Evil in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 103.1 (1988): 45. 38. Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004): 4. I am grateful to Robyn Warhol and Brian McHale for their suggestions regarding causality and narratology. 39. Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 33–34. 4 0. Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974) 3:114. 41. Philip Rieff, “Introduction,” in Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997): viii, xii. 42. Steven Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990): 79, 71. 197

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43. Roof, 10. 4 4. Mary Renault, The Charioteer (Orlando, FL: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1987): 82. 45. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. 2: Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1933): 317. 4 6. Renault, 81. 47. Renault, 87–88. 4 8. Kern, 187. 49. Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), Standard Edition 18:169. 50. Freud, “Psychogenesis,” Standard Edition 18:169. 51. Freud, “Psychogenesis,” Standard Edition 18:154. 52. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991): 13. 53. “25 Years of National Coming Out Day: Coming Out Still Matters,” Human Rights Campaign, October 11, 2013. http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/ national-coming-out-day (accessed October 14, 2013). 5 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 85. Ann Pellegrini suggests that Sedgwick’s universalizing/minoritizing model complicates in advance what would become the “born gay” argument: see “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 55.33 (May 8, 2009): B99. 55. Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), Standard Edition, 7:140. 56. Freud, “Psychogenesis,” Standard Edition 18:151. 57. Martin Duberman, Waiting to Land (New York: New Press, 2009): 282. 58. Freud, “Three Essays,” Standard Edition 7:145. 59. Henry Abelove, “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and The Americans,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 391. 6 0. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 1. 61. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 637 and 659. 62. Culler, 88. 63. James M. Bromley, “Let It Sufise: Sexual Acts and Narrative Structure in Hero and Leander,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography, ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton (Williston, VT: Ashgate, 2009): 75. 6 4. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992): 58. 65. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972): 189. 6 6. Freud, “Psychogenesis,” Standard Edition 18:168.

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67. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991): 14. 68. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981): 22. 69. Barthes, Critical Essays, 188. Kern argues that modernism brings a new model of causality with “increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty” (13) as compared to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ determinism, positivism, and materialism. Barthes, however, suggests that conventional etiology has always contained within it the disorder it seems set on correcting; indeed, narrative causality relies on that illogic, that uncertainty. 70. Research on biological determinants of homosexuality has generated its own retroactive effects. Instead of moving from effect to cause, like the “ancient solver of riddles,” scientists and commentators define their subject to match their anticipated conclusions. Researchers trained in biology believe that homosexuality must be biological, so they define homosexuality as something that can be explained biologically; they naturalize sexual identity in order to find a natural explanation. The authors of one popular book, Born Gay, for example, describe “sexual preference” as a “behavior” and assert that all behavior is “biologically ‘caused.’” By defining sexuality as somatic and precultural they attenuate the etiological question: a successful detective story would not define the crime to fit the usual suspects. See Wilson and Rahman, 147. 71. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press): 7. 72. Paul Morrison, The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (New York: New York University Press, 2001): 12. 73. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 1985): 112. 74. The phrase is Sedgwick’s; see Tendencies, 23. 75. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Covici Friede, 1929): 14, 47, 83. Part of Stephen’s recruitment as a heterosexual is, of course, her equally unsuccessful interpellation as a woman. Chapter 2 1. “Howard Opposes Gay Marriages,” AustralianPolitics.com. August 5, 2003. http://australianpolitics.com/news/2003/08/03-08-05b.shtml (accessed October 15, 2011). 2. Allan C. Carlson, “Two Becoming One Flesh: On Marriage as the Union of the Sexual and the Economic,” Family Research Council (March 10, 2004). Carlson’s lecture could be found on the Family Research Council website from 2004 to 2006 but has since been removed. It is now archived at the

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Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society website, http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc_acc_frc_oneflesh_040310.htm (accessed September 19, 2013). 3. Kelly Hollowell, “Homosexuality: Evolution of the Human Race?” World Net Daily.com, February 28, 2004. http://www.wnd.com/2004/02/23492/ (accessed October 5, 2006). 4. Joel L. Watts, “15 Reasons Why Homosexuality Is Wrong and Hurts Society.” Unsettled Christianity.com, July 28, 2008. http://unsettledchristianity. com/2008/07/15-reasons-why-homosexuality-is-wrong-and-hurts-society/ (accessed October 15, 2011). In 2013, the author accompanies the article with a disclaimer saying “this is no longer my view.” 5. See, for example, Peter Slevin, “Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens,” The Washington Post (March 14, 2005): A01. 6. This figurative sense of homosexual reproduction is arguably more anxiogenic than same-sex parenting, which, as recent studies have shown, does not increase children’s likelihood of being gay themselves. See Jane Gross, “New Challenge of Youth: Growing Up in Gay Homes,” New York Times (February 11, 1991): A1. 7. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, 29 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1988) 15:59. 8. Darwin, 15: 80. 9. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 37. 10. “CJCH–AM re the Laura Schlessinger Show,” Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, Atlantic Regional Panel, February 14, 2001. http://www.cbsc.ca/ english/decisions/2001/010314.php (accessed December 21, 2006). 11. “Abnormal Dr. Laura,” unsigned editorial, Toronto Globe and Mail (May 16, 2000): A16. 12. Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 64. 13. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 83. 14. Darwin, 15: 7. Evelyn Fox Keller explains that “[f]or sexually reproducing organisms, fitness in general is not an individual property but a composite of the entire interbreeding population”; “Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory: Reading Cultural Norms into National Law,” in Feminism and Science, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 169. 15. Darwin, 15: 49. Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (New York: Basic Books, 2000): 21. 16. Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 288. 200

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Discussions of same-sex sexual behavior in both humans and animals frequently fail to grasp this. Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, for example, states that homosexuality “appears to violate that central tenet [of evolutionary biology], that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction.” Quoted in Jon Mooallem, “Can Animals Be Gay?” New York Times.com, March 29, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html?ref= magazine (accessed June 28, 2010). 17. Lynn Margulis and Dorien Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Combination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986): 4. I am grateful to the reader for differences who brought the work of Margulis and Sagan to my attention. 18. Wendy Northcutt, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action, 2nd ed. (New York: Plume, 2002): 103–105. The ostensible premise of The Darwin Awards, “survival of the fittest,” was coined by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology (1864), five years before Darwin included it in the fifth edition of The Origin of Species. 19. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 2 0. Roughgarden, 127. 21. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974) 11:46. 22. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994): 87. 23. Sara Harris, The Puritan Jungle (1969), rpt. in Gay American History, ed. Jonathan Ned Katz (New York: Crowell, 1976): 124. 2 4. Don Schmierer, “An Ounce of Prevention” (1998) appeared on troubledwith. com: A Web Site of Focus on the Family, when I accessed it at the URL below on August 19, 2010. http://www.troubledwith.com/ParentingTeens/ A000000319.cfm?topic=parenting%20teens%3a%20homosexuality. It has now been removed; it appears to have been an excerpt from the book An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing the Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1998). 25. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 107. 2 6. Although Crusoe himself sees reproduction as essentially identitarian, couched in the language of “kinds,” “Crusoe” evokes another sort of increase. Etymologically, propagation refers to asexual reproduction, such as the process of creating multiple plants by rooting cuttings from one; and the poem propagates queerness through the non-biological reproduction that we might well call representation. On the Bishop/Darwin connection, see Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): 54. 201

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27. Hocquenghem, 109. 2 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (New York: Continuum, 1987): 12, 266. While the trope of the rhizome and related concepts are evocative, my reading departs from Deleuze and Guattari by aligning itself with psychoanalytic theory and with Derrida’s critique of metaphysics. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, 267. 30. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Mestiza Metaphysics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 281. 31. The notion of a horizontal queer genealogy complicates linear heterofamilialism much as the theory of horizontal gene transfer—the exchange of genetic material from one organism to an unrelated other, as in bacteria— complicates the vertical models of classical evolutionary theory. I thank the reader for differences who suggested this connection. 32. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979): 17. 33. Edelman, Homographesis, 17. 3 4. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 192 and 194. 35. Dawkins, 198. 36. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006). Grosz objects to Dennett’s conception of the meme insofar as it divorces the meme’s evolution from the physical world in which Darwinian evolution takes place (55). 37. Dennett, 198–199. 38. Northcutt, 104. 39. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press,1973). 4 0. Dawkins, 192. 41. Dawkins, 192. 42. Edelman notes that HIV, like any virus, functions metonymically, through “contiguous transmission” (Homographesis, 90). 43. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988): 68. On a Christian radio broadcast in 2013, pastor Dave Buehner compared homosexuality to a virus, saying “they are trying to make it look happy, make it look fun, call it gay, but what they are also doing is they are spreading it.” Brian Tashman, “Swanson and Buehner Call Homosexuality a ‘Flesh Eating Virus,’ ‘Sores’ with ‘Happy Faces [Carved] into Them,’” RightWingWatch.org, May 8, 2013. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ swanson-and-buehner-call-homosexuality-flesh-eating-virus-sores-happyfaces-carved-them (accessed September 14, 2013). 4 4. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911), Standard Edition 12:68. Freud notes the fear of 202

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catastrophe in paranoiacs, but assigns rather a different explanation; in the Schreber case, paranoia does not reflect a fear of another’s homosexuality, but rather a defense against one’s own. 45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 21. 4 6. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004): 122. 47. Michael Abrams, “The Real Story on Gay Genes,” Discover 28 (June 2, 2007): 58–83. 4 8. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 135. 49. Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (New York: Harper Collins, 1996): 83. The idea that homosexuals benefit from their own oppression has unsettlingly wide currency in the conversation about biological determinism; see also Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994): 183. 50. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 29–30. 51. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): 35. 52. Simon LeVay, “A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men,” Science 253.2053 (1991): 1034–1037. 53. Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Jim McKnight, Straight Science? Homosexuality, Evolution, and Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 1997), and Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman, Born Gay: The Science of Sex Orientation (London: Peter Owen, 2004). 5 4. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, “Creating Natural Distinctions,” in A Queer World, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997): 314. 55. Abigail Van Buren, “Officers in Plainclothes Want to Blend into the Background,” uexpress.com, May 11, 2005. http://www.uexpress.com/ dearabby/?uc_full_date=20050511 (accessed October 16, 2009). 56. Quoted in Vera Whisman, Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996): 2. 57. Terry, Obsession, 46–47. 58. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Feminism and Science,” in Feminism and Science, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (New York: Oxford, 1996): 31. 59. Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988): 35. 6 0. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990): 44 and 49. 203

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61. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 232. 62. Roughgarden offers a cogent critique of Hamer’s findings (248–254). 63. On the place of metaphors in scientific discourse, see Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in Feminism and Science, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 121–136. 6 4. Wilson and Rahman, 10. 65. Wilson and Rahman use “homosexuals” to designate only gay men, adding “something similar probably applies to lesbian women.” 6 6. Wilson and Rahman, 57. Other texts that ask how homosexuality could genetically persist include Hamer and Copeland (181–182), McKnight (1), and William A. Henry III, Ellen Germain, and Alice Park, “Born Gay?” TIME 142.4 (July 26, 1993): 37. 67. Anjana Ahuja, “Born Gay or Made Gay? Which Camp Are You In?” Times Online (July 12, 2005): 2:4. 68. Hamer and Copeland, 180. Hamer and others hedge their bets by saying that gay men father too few children to keep their genes active in a population; but too few turns out merely to mean fewer than heterosexual men. 69. McKnight, 1. 70. “Interview with Rick Warren,” Larry King Live, CNN.com, December 2, 2005. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0512/02/lkl.01.html (accessed October 4, 2006). 71. Nathan Tabor, “Charles Darwin Disagrees with Homosexuality,” Renew America.com, September 8. 2005. http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/ tabor/050908 (accessed October 4, 2006). See also Joe Carter, “Was Darwin Wrong about Homosexuality?” Evangelical Outpost.com, January 21, 2004. http://evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/2004/01/was-darwin-wrongabout-homosexuality.html (accessed October 4, 2006). 72. McKnight, 3. 73. Hamer and Copeland, 180–185. Wilson and Rahman discuss how a “gay gene” might benefit straight individuals’ reproduction (53–54, 57–60), as does McKnight (65). 74. William Saletan, “Sexual Antagonism: A Sexual Theory of Homosexuality,” Slate.com, June 25, 2008. http://www.slate.com/id/2194232/ (accessed October 19, 2009). 75. Wilson and Rahman, 22. 76. Ahuja, 2:4. 77. Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin, “Introduction,” Radical History Review 100(2008): 2–3. Patrick McCreery offers some resistance to the heteronormative family model, but not to the cult of reproductive futurism, in his contribution to the same issue, “Save Our Children/Let Us Marry: Gay Activists Appropriate the Rhetoric of Child Protectionism,” Radical History Review 100 (2008): 186–207. 204

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78. McKnight, 1. 79. Saletan, “Sexual Antagonism.” 8 0. Henry, Germain, and Park, 36–39; Ahuja, 2:4; Sandi Doughton, “Born Gay? How Biology May Drive Orientation,” The Seattle Times (June 19, 2005): A1, A18; and Robert Burton, “Born That Gay,” Salon.com, September 12, 2008. http://www.salon.com/2008/09/12/gay_neurology/ (accessed July 16, 2012). 81. Melissa Wilcox, “When Sheila’s a Lesbian: Religious Individualism among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Christians,” Sociology of Religion 63.4 (2002): 504–505. 82. Ahuja, 4:2. 83. David Gelman, “Born or Bred?” Newsweek (24 February 1992): 48. 8 4. Martin Duberman, Waiting to Land (New York: New Press, 2009): 34–35. 85. Wilson and Rahman, 9–11. 86. Larry Kramer, “Queer Theory’s Heist of Our History,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 16.5 (September/October 2009). http://www.glreview. org/article/queer-theorys-heist-of-our-history/ (accessed July 7, 2010). 87. Eric Marcus, Is It A Choice? 3rd ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2005): 10. 88. “‘Gay’ Baby Triggers Row,” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 24, 2007. http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Gay-baby-triggers-row/2007/10/ 24/1192941155033.html (accessed December 9, 2007). 89. Cover image, Newsweek (24 February 1992). 9 0. “Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture? Trapped in the Wrong Body?” Paula Zahn Now, CNN.com, June 27, 2007. http://transcripts.cnn.com/­ TRANSCRIPTS/0706/27/pzn.01.html (accessed June 28, 2007). 91. While decades of feminist work have elaborated the social construction of gender, Wilson and Rahman return to the old notion of sexual inversion, in which an innate non-normative object choice is coterminous with an innate nonnormative gender identity. They cite studies that purport to show that gay alleles produce “feminine personality traits” in men. Thus the male-homosexual allele might produce “greater sensitivity, empathy, and kindness” in a straight man, while “having too many feminizing alleles would tip a male over the threshold into homosexuality” (60). They claim, in short, that gay men are hard-wired for “feminine” traits that are not considered to be biological even in women. 92. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1009): 11. 93. Stockton, 7. 94. Henry, Germain, and Park, 38. 95. The “Born Different” web, print, and television campaign ran in Colorado in 2006. http://zmudas.com/sites/borndifferent/ (accessed September 19, 2013). Sexuality comes into focus at the end of the message, when we learn that just as “15% of the population is born left-handed,” “3% of the population is born gay.” 205

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96. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 11. 9 7. As such, “born gay” recalls the supposed arrested development of homosexals—in Stockton’s words, their “presumed status as dangerous children, who remain children in part by failing to have their own” (22). 98. I discuss this formulation in Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Chapter 3 1. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1987): 316, 319. 2. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990): 518. 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990): 43. 4. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 44. 5. Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 102.5 (1987): 805. 6. See David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990): 3–4. 7. Joseph Bristow persuasively suggests that in “Portrait” Wilde offers a handbook on how to interpret desire between men; see “‘A Complex Multiform Creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (New York: Cambridge University Press; 1997): 204. 8. Ellman, 463. Wilde was involved in three trials in 1895, first his failed libel suit against Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury, who had called him a sodomite, and then two criminal trials in which, based on the evidence uncovered by the first trial, Wilde was accused of “gross indecency.” The second trial ended without a verdict; the third found Wilde guilty and sentenced him to serve two years in prison. 9. Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Boston: Aldine, 1910): 179, 184. 10. Wilde, “Portrait,” 173, 204. 11. Stephen Guy-Bray, Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) xi. Responding to Harold Bloom’s Oedipal model of poetic influence, he suggests an erotic, not agonistic, relation between male writers. On Wilde’s “conception of seduction as ‘influence,’” see also Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997): 268. 206

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12. Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Bantam, 1984): 120. 13. James, 13. I discuss The Bostonians and lesbian typology further in Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000): 31–32, 49–52, 69–71. 14. Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Manuscript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas, Marquess of Queensbury, 1895 (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003): 294, 296. He continued: “Wilde has exercised almost absolute sway and control over this young man. . . . Douglas has never had the force of will or character to emancipate himself from his degrading submission to Wilde” (296). 15. Holland, 262. 16. Arguably the question of what causes homosexuality could be reframed as what homosexuality causes without a Lacanian intervention. But without psychoanalytic theory, answers to the latter question are limited by the linear temporality and positive terms that define conventional causality. While it is obvious that homosexuality causes (or is said to cause) social disorder, Lacan enables a grasp of the reciprocally constitutive function of perversion and heteronormativity. 17. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989): 57. 18. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 1985): 175. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 19. Stephen Kern initially criticizes Wilde’s “heavy-handed ancestral explanations for his murderer,” but goes on to acknowledge a more complex causality at work in the novel; A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004): 39, 317–318. Kern’s conclusions follow from his choice to read the novel as a murder plot; a rather different causal system would emerge from a reading of Dorian Gray as a narrative of secret identity or closeted sexuality. 2 0. Qtd. in Daniel Novak, “Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Oscar Wilde, Photography, and Identity,” in Joseph Bristow, ed., Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; 2008): 72. 21. Paul Morrison, The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (New York: New York University Press, 2001): 18. 22. Joseph Bristow discusses this hereditary element in “Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency,” in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Routledge, 1992): 57. 23. Bristow, “‘A Complex Multiform Creature,” 204, 210; Hanson, 298. 2 4. Bristow, “Gross Indecency,” 52. 25. Qtd. in Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1997): 68. Jeyes refers to the Lippincott’s Magazine version of the novel. Nicholas Frankel observes that readers of the Scots Observer could have easily recognized the phrases “perverted telegraph boys” and “outlawed noblemen” 207

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as references to the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889–1890, which uncovered a circle of London rent boys and their aristocratic patrons. See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011): 9. 2 6. Qtd. in Beckson, 73, 75. 27. Qtd. in Beckson, 82. 2 8. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). 29. Hanson, 290. 30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 73. Sedgwick calls Dorian Gray “the perfect rhetorical distillation of the open secret, the glass closet, shaped by the conjunction of an extravagance of deniability and an extravagance of flamboyant display” (165). 31. Jeffrey Nunokawa, “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” American Imago 49.3 (1992): 320. Similarly, Hanson notes that Dorian’s misdeeds “are apparent without being certain” (298). 32. Bristow, “A Complex Multiform Creature,” 204, 210. 33. Ellman, 319. 3 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974) 3:209. 35. Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), Standard Edition 18:167. 36. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda C. Dowling (New York: Penguin, 2001): 116. 37. Henry James, “Preface to the New York Edition,” rpt. in Henry James, The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999): 128. 38. Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977): 97. 39. As John Paul Riquelme notes, the same sentiment appears in the novel’s axiomatic preface: “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”; “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (2000): 616. 4 0. Wilde, The Soul of Man, 116. 41. Holland, 78. Wilde admitted that for the book publication he altered a passage that “would convey the impression that the sin of Dorian Gray was sodomy” (78–79). 42. Denis Donoghue, England, Their England: Commentaries on English Language and Literature (New York: Knopf, 1988): 235. 43. James, The Turn of the Screw, 3.

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4 4. As Morrison suggests, “Dorian is motivated by a desire for a perpetual present, a discrete set of perfect moments, yet the perpetual present is an intolerable motive for narrative” (18). 45. Christopher Craft suggests that the novel’s project “never closes out or finishes up, but simply ends with Dorian’s life, as does the story itself ”; “Come See about Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Representations 91.1 (2005): 123. 4 6. Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 35. 47. Riquelme, 616. 4 8. Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 81. 49. Jeffrey Nunokawa, “The Importance of Being Bored: The Dividends of Ennui in The Picture of Dorian Gray” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 151. For his part, Ellman calls portions of the novel “wooden, padded, self–­ indulgent” (314). 50. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995): 31. 51. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2005): 112. 52. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981): 128. 53. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 163. 5 4. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994): 30. Žižek’s language differs from Lacan’s: while Žižek repeatedly refers to the “absent cause” of the unconscious, adopting a phrase from Spinoza and Althusser, for Lacan causality occupies an impossible position between existence and nonexistence (Four Fundamental Concepts, 128). Nonetheless, Lacan’s terms for unconscious causality consistently evoke negativity and lack: a “hole,” “split,” and “gap” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 22). 55. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 163. 56. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 174. 57. Morrison, 44. 58. Renata Salecl, “Love Anxieties,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002): 133. 59. Holland, xvi. 6 0. Earlier, the history of the novel’s publication produced its own temporal disturbance, as Wilde, responding to critics of the Lippincott’s Magazine version, added the preface to the novel for its publication as a book in1891; the Dorian

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Gray that we read today begins after its own conclusion. See Frankel, 237; he further notes that the Lippincott’s version was the one cited at the trials (38–39). 61. Holland, 102. See also Bristow, “Gross Indecency,” 52. Dorian Gray was only discussed at length in the first of Wilde’s three trials, but the first trial effectively sealed Wilde’s fate in that Queensberry’s defense against the libel charge entailed proving that Wilde was guilty of unlawful sexual acts. 62. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 151. 63. This formula is Slavoj Žižek’s; see Sublime Object, 57. 6 4. Craft, 132. In this sense The Picture of Dorian Gray functions for modern readers much as the picture of Dorian Gray does in Wilde’s novel, as a site of (perhaps mistaken) identification. Ed Cohen calls Dorian the man “the surface on which the characters project their self-representations” (“Writing Gone Wilde,” 806) and Dorian the image as the surface on which Dorian the man projects his self-representation (808). 65. Audrey Jaffe, “Embodying Culture: Dorian’s Wish” in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 301. Though Jaffe’s reading is largely persuasive, she tends to naturalize identity, identity politics, and the “desire for identity itself ” (300), which queer subjects have not always embraced. 6 6. Jeffrey Nunokawa, “The Disappearance of the Homosexual in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 185. 67. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 103, 3. 68. Bristow, “A Complex Multiform Creature,” 200. 69. Sinfield, Wilde, 3. On the Wilde trial as a turning point in the Foucauldian narrative of acts and identities, see Novak, 65. 70. For accounts of this incident, see Ellman, 438; Bristow, “A Complex Multiform Creature,” 200; Donoghue, 229, 241–242 . 71. Holland, 4. The law added its own inscription to Queensberry’s calling card: a large A in the lower left corner designates its place in the court’s inventory of evidence. That A not only recalls the signifier of illicit desire in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter but also rhymes with the M of “somdomite” by adding to the card a second extraneous letter; finally, by evoking the A of Derrida’s différance, it returns us to the question of spelling evoked by the improper M. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 3. 72. Holland, 4. This is the statement recorded in the transcript of the trial, although Ellman says Queensberry read the written message as “posing as a Somdomite” (438). 210

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73. Donoghue, 241; Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984):62; Ed Cohen, Posing the Question: “Wilde, Wit, and the Ways of Man,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996): 35. 74. Holland, 43. See also Ed Cohen, “Posing the Question: Wilde, Wit, and the Ways of Man,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996): 35; and Anne Varty, introduction to The Plays of Oscar Wilde (Ware: Wordsworth, 2000): xxv. 75. Ellman, 438, and Bristow, “A Complex Multiform Creature,” 200. 76. Moisés Kaufman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1998): 23. 77. Ellman, 438. 78. In this Jays differs from Sinfield, who sees newspapers’ elision of both “sodomite” and “somdomite” during the trial as indicating the unspeakability of homosexuality in Wilde’s day (Wilde, 3). David Jays, “Wilde Disappointment,” New Statesman.com, September 25, 2000. http://www.newstatesman.com/node/138631 (accessed September 19, 2013). See also Ed Cohen, “Posing the Question,” 35; and Anne Varty, introduction to The Plays of Oscar Wilde (Ware: Wordsworth, 2000): xxv. 79. Holland, 39. 8 0. Holland, 42. 81. Holland, 81. Chapter 4 1. On the marketing of the second edition, see Claire Hoertz Badaracco, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson: The 1927 Knopf Edition,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 96.2 (2002): 279–287. 2. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French, 1912): 1. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 3. Carl Van Vechten, “Introduction,” rpt. in Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997): 25. Van Vechten writes: “The publishers [in 1912] attempted to persuade the author to sign a statement to the effect that the book was an actual human document. This he naturally refused to do. Nevertheless, the work was hailed on every side, for the most part, as an individual’s true story” (25). 4. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking, 1933): 238. 5. Thomas R. Lounsbury, English Spelling and Spelling Reform (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909, rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970): 198–199. 211

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6. Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973): 305. See also Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver, Introduction to Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997): 14. 7. Van Vechten, 25. 8. Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 125–129. 9. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977): 150, 147. A rather different Lacanian reading of Ex-Colored Man, focused on the mirror stage, can be found in John Sheehy, “The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity,” African American Review 33.3 (1999): 401–415. 10. Lacan, 147. 11. Readers have noted that Johnson’s success in passing as his first-person narrator in the 1912 edition is mirrored by the narrative and its publication history. See, for example, Donald C. Goellnicht, “Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” African American Review 30.1 (1996): 17–33. 12. Bruce Barnhart convincingly links repetition and the structure of ragtime to the novel’s internal temporalities in “Chronopolitics and Race: Rag-time and Symphonic Time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” African American Review 40.3 (2006): 551–570. 13. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): (46). 14. Gates, 63. 15. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 3. 16. Derrida, 51. For Gates, Signifyin(g) indicates that “a simultaneous, but negated, parallel (ontological, discursive) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (49). 17. Derrida, 3. 18. Noah Webster, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation,” Dissertations on the English Language: With Notes, Historical and Critical, to Which Is Added, by Way of Appendix, an Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Dr. Franklin’s Arguments on That Subject (Boston: I. Thomas, 1789): 20. 19. T. C. Moffatt, A Plea for the Restoration in the English Language of the European System of Orthography (Wheaton, IL: J. D. Nutting, 1876): 13. Moffatt’s opening salvo is equally suggestive: “is it not a strange sight to see a people, so progressive and innovative as ours, a nation of iconoclasts, humbly paying tithes to the Goddess of Traditional Spelling?” (3). 212

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2 0. H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1921): 235, 238–239. Knopf ’s publication of this book, which both defends and employs American spelling, suggests that its attachment to British usage was inconsistent in the 1920s. If so, Levy, Price, and Oliver are mistaken about Knopf ’s house style and the motivation for the 1927 changes more probably falls on copyright questions. 21. Somerville, 127 and 129. On homosexuality and the Autobiography, see also Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 108–113; and Anne Hermann, Queering the Moderns (New York: Palgrave, 2000): 115–137. 22. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962): 44. 23. Jonathan Weinberg, “‘Boy Crazy’: Carl Van Vechten’s Queer Collection,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994): 25–49. 2 4. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1987): 347–349. 25. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992): 52. 2 6. The word “indefinable” appears only twice in the novel, once in relation to racial difference and the other referring to what makes the millionaire, in the narrator’s eyes, different from other men: “all of his movements bore the indefinable but unmistakable stamp of culture” (54). 27. See Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequences (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 2 8. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989): 57. 29. Derrida notes that he borrows the phrase from Levinas (21). The same temporal loop around a problem of origins informs orthographic history: while Americans are accustomed to seeing the -our spelling as archaic and the -or spelling as modern, in fact the opposite may be true. Lounsbury argues that -or spellings are not an American invention, but rather the original form of many English words—in which case the nationalistic demand for American orthography would represent not progress but reversion. Mencken, too, notes that in England, the original -or spelling of such words as “honor” was replaced by a more or less consistent use of -our only with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. See Lounsbury, 229, and Mencken, 228. 30. Also relevant here is Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s reading of the letter X as a signifier of the blues as a distinct African American art form, evoking as it does both the railroad crossing or switchpoint and the undefined possibility that opens to improvisation. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): 5–7. 31. I discuss the temporal analogy between sexuality and race further in Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009): 2–20. Not only does this analogy relegate the civil rights movement to the past, but it also elides fundamental differences 213

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between homosexuality and blackness regarding visibility, privilege, community, and passing. Most gay and lesbian people have the experience of passing at some point in their lives and most people of color do not; most queers do not grow up in queer households, while many, if not most, people of color share an identification with their families of origin. 32. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 36–37. 33. There are clear historical reasons for these disparate paths: because racist discourse has stressed the notion of essential differences among populations, the anti-racist response, in Johnson’s time and afterward, has relied on the contingency of racial categories. Conversely, given the heteronormative argument that homosexuality is constructed or chosen, many gay men and lesbians have insisted that it is essential and innate. Yet these politically convenient models cannot account for the constellations of alternate ways in which both race and sexuality are interpellated, experienced, and represented. 3 4. The phrase “seduction of an analogy” comes from Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974) 23:268; it is further discussed by Jane Gallop in Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 21–39. 35. Tim Dean, “Bareback Time,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 89. 36. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1009): 6. The introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), also situates the queer child in the grammatical place of the future anterior: “the child’s primary caretakers and storytellers insist on making child queerness into a story that will not be, but will only have been” (xix). 37. Stockton, 184. 38. Gates, xxiv. 39. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, 29 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1988) 15:6–9, 15, 24, 45. Darwin reserves the term “monstrosities” for traits that are “injurious to or not useful to the species” (33). 4 0. Elaine R. Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993): 27. Musical variation is by no means peculiar to the blues; on its role in rhetoric and classical music, see Sisman’s useful introduction (1–19). 41. Derrida, 4.

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42. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 15. 43. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 22. 4 4. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 7. 45. Borges, 42. 4 6. Slavoj Žižek, Sublime Object, 57. 47. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 19. Chapter 5 1. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006): 75. 2. I take my title from Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); she takes hers in turn from Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74–117. 3. This chronology need not be too precise; as Bechdel suggests, twenty-firstcentury texts continue to document scenes of reading, and readers sought out writing on same-sex love long before the advent of sexology. 4. The queer tradition is a subset of the vast number of texts about the act of reading, including, for example, Keats’s “On Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” 5. Although many texts offer affirmation, affirmation is not a precondition of queer reading; even hostile or disinterested texts provide powerful opportunities for identification. Though we are accustomed to recognize identifications structured by resemblance (“I see myself in him”), more ambivalent identifications and even violent disidentification can also serve, in the words of Diana Fuss, as “the detour through the other that defines a self.” Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995): 143. José Esteban Muñoz develops a theory of ambivalent cathexis in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 6. Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 85, 126. Kent usefully theorizes the female “scene of reading” (76) as a scene of both subject-formation and the “decentering” of the subject (77). Her approach tends to be historical, whereas I am primarily concerned with the representation of reading in the context of other tropes of homosexual reproduction.

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7. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Breeding (and) Reading: Lesbian Knowledge, Eugenic Discipline, and The Children’s Hour,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.4 (2002): 1003. 8. The author’s identity was revealed in 2010 by a PBS program that identified Rummel as a French teacher at Stephens College in Missouri. The program can be viewed at PBS.org, July 26, 2010. http://video.pbs.org/ video/1918179946/ (accessed September 19, 2013). 9. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009): 11. 10. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 111. 11. Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984): 179–180. 12. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, Adult Life, and Advanced Life, 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill, 1867): 59. Needless to say, the particular scenes of reading anchored by the classical tradition belonged to the privileged, usually white, men to whom that education was available. But in the absence of Oxbridge tutorials, scenes of reading emerged in other forms. In Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle, we find the working-class young lesbian Molly with a book: “I was sitting in the bright yellow kitchen reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, laughing my head off.” For her, the book signifies both intellectual and sexual difference; her stepmother scolds, “I tell you for your own good you got to stop this reading so much. Besides that it ain’t good for your brains as well as your eyes to be reading all the time.” Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (New York: Bantam, 1988): 96. 13. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883): ix–x. 14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 2–3. 15. Bechdel, 74; Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996): 12. Though I focus here on fiction, it is worth noting the range of publications, from newsletters to anti-gay exposés to travel guides, included in queer scenes of reading in mid-century America. Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, reported that he first “found refuge in books,” including Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex (1908), which brought an “earthshaking revelation” about himself. See Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 16. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988): 285. 17. Manguel, 233. 18. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 216

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19. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 143. 2 0. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, 1855–1892: A New Edition, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 233. 21. Langston Hughes, Something in Common and Other Stories (New York: Hill, 1963): 227–232; E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993): 70. 22. Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis” (1910), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974) 11:222. 23. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1972): 45. 2 4. Edward Prime-Stevenson, Imre, ed. James J. Gifford (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2003): 84. On other gay and lesbian narratives of historical antecedents, see Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001): 5–6. 25. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. H ­ enry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: ­Routledge, 1993): 14. 26. Granted, some texts make a more strenuous claim. In the privately circulated pornographic novel Teleny (1893), Des Grieux reports: “I read all I could find about the love of one man for another, that loathsome crime against nature, taught to us not only by the very gods themselves, but by all of the greatest men of olden times.” Oscar Wilde (attrib.), Teleny (New York: Mondial, 2006): 34. 27. Forster, 70. Nicholas Frankel suggests that first discussion of homosexuality published in English was Karl Muller’s History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (1824, trans. 1830); see Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 2011): 10. 2 8. Forster, 70. 29. Frances Rummel, Diana: A Strange Autobiography (New York: New York University Press, 1995): 70. 30. Rummel, 71. 31. Mary Renault, The Charioteer (Orlando, FL: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1987): 101. 32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990): 43. 33. Renault, 102. 3 4. Forster, 23. 35. Bechdel, 75. 36. On the counterpublic sphere, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25–26 (1990): 56–80; and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). 217

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37. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990): 3. 38. Kath Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration” GLQ 2.3 (1995): 259. Weston notes that similar reading experiences are a common element of coming-out stories. 39. Sue-Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 381. 4 0. Jeffrey Escoffier, “Homosexuality and the Sociological Imagination: The 1950s and 1960s,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997): 248. 41. Forster, 58. 42. Renault, 99. 43. Forster, 58. 4 4. Escoffier, 258. 45. Rummel, 71–72. 4 6. Renault, 104. 47. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford, 1995): 81. 4 8. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 162. 49. This complaint was typical of second-wave lesbian feminists who objected to Hall’s masculine identification and acceptance of “sexual inversion.” For a response to such readings, see Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: NAL Books, 1989): 281–293. 50. On interpellation, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Lietch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001): 1503. 51. Havelock Ellis, “Commentary,” in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001): 35. 52. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion: Volume 2: Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1933): 70. 53. Jacobus, 18. 5 4. Heather Love offers a strong reading of Stephen’s “unwanted being” in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007): 123. 55. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998): 98–100 passim. Halberstam reads The Well of Loneliness as an example of female masculinity, a form of subjectivity that may overlap but 218

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is not commensurate with lesbian sexuality. Jay Prosser goes further, arguing that Stephen is not a lesbian at all, but a transgender man; see Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 155–168. 56. Only in terms of anatomical sex can this (the love of a female-bodied person for another female-bodied person) be called “homosexual”; in the realm of gender the same two people’s relation (the love of a masculine person for a feminine person) would be “heterosexual.” As transgender theory reminds us, both normative and non-normative discourses of sexuality often rely on under-examined concepts of gender and object choice. 57. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 12th ed., trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Bell Publishing, 1965): 264. 58. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Covici Friede, 1929): 5, 8. Further references to The Well of Loneliness will be cited parenthetically. 59. However, Stephen’s father, in his desire for a son, treats her as a boy from birth. 6 0. Angela Ingram, “Un/Reproductions: Estates of Banishment in English Fiction after the Great War,” in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989): 611. 61. Michael Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” ELH 67.3 (2000): 774, 792. 62. Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book,” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse (Charlestown, MA: Abram E. Cutter, 1867): 389. 63. The Well of Loneliness was also tried for obscenity in the United States in 1929, but was not found guilty and appeared print that same year. The lawyer for the U.S. publishers, Morris Ernst, prepared for the case by doing some reading of his own at the New York Public Library, which owned Arthur Symond’s Lesbia and Other Poems, Mary Mill Patrick’s Sappho and the Island of Lesbos, a book titled The Invert and His Social Adjustment, works by Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and research on the prevalence of lesbians in America. Leslie A. Taylor, “‘I Made Up My Mind to Get It’: The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness, New York City, 1928–1929,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10.2 (2001): 261–263. 6 4. Leigh Gilmore, “Obscenity, Modernity, Identity: Legalizing The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.4 (1994): 612. 65. James Douglas, “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,” in Palatable Poison, 36–38. 6 6. Charles Biron, “Judgment” (1928), in Palatable Poison, 41. 67. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 328. 68. Eugene Delgaudio fundraising letter, quoted in Steve Clemons, “Eugene Delgaudio’s Really Weird Rant: Beware the RADICAL Homosexuals,” The Washington Note.com, April 19, 2010. http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/ archives/2010/04/eugene_delgaudi/ (accessed June 25, 2010). 219

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69. Gary Greenberg, “Gay By Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity,” Mother Jones.com, August 2007. http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/gaychoice-science-sexual-identity (accessed July 9, 2010). 70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993):161. Sedgwick finds the biological determinist argument, with its dependence on “conceptualizing an unalterably homosexual body,” profoundly troubling; while the constructivist alternative is not without perils, she writes, “increasingly it is the conjecture that a particular trait is genetically or biologically based, not that it is ‘only cultural’ that seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy” (163–164). 71. Outright describes itself as a “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQQ ) ‘queer’ youth center and statewide advocacy organization.” “Mission,” Outright Vermont (n.d.). http://outrightvt.org/ wordpress/about-us/mission/ (accessed September 19, 2013). 72. True to the theory of congenital inversion, The Well of Loneliness seeks to show Stephen Gordon as impervious to the sorts of influence that the obscenity charge levies: Hall invites us to see Stephen’s scene of reading as a moment of self-recognition or self-making, and while “Mary’s finer perceptions began to coarsen” (97) through immersion in the Paris demimonde, that experience makes neither woman more or less a lesbian. 73. Gilmore, 603. 74. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): 48. 75. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, “Introduction,” in Palatable Poison, 16. 76. Qtd. in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society (New York: Longman, 1981): 117. 77. Jane Rule, “Radclyffe Hall,” in Palatable Poison, 78. 78. Renault, 101. 79. Escoffier, 248–249. 8 0. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 34. 81. See also Kathryn Bond Stockton,“Eve’s Queer Child,” in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 185. 82. Gilmore, 613. 83. Manguel argues that the same anachrony describes any history of reading, 22–23. 8 4. Stockton writes, “Since they are ‘gay children’ only after childhood, they never ‘are’ what they latently ‘were,’”15. 85. Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme,” October 5 (1978): 76–77. 86. In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida says that “like all who know how to write, [Freud] let the scene duplicate, repeat, and betray itself within the scene” (116). The geometry is that of the mise en abyme, although Derrida suggests it serves Freud’s mastery rather than uncertainty. 220

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87. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983): 223. See also Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (New York: Routledge, 1998): 75. Chapter 6 1. Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988): 74. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 26. 3. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 173; and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009): 155. Similarly, Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark find that “the potency of ‘queer’ as a political term is indebted to certain temporal disorientations”; “Queer Moments: The Performative Temporalities of Eve Sedgwick,” in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Barber and Clark (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 5. 4. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005): 2. More discussion of the politics of non-normative temporality can be found, for example, in Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 21–39, and Tim Dean, “Bareback Time,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 75–100. Halberstam is cautious about AIDS, but also quick to celebrate the subversive potential of “queer time.” 5. Lisa Diedrich, “Between Two Deaths: AIDS, Trauma, and Temporality in the Work of Paul Monette,” in Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma, ed. Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela Henderson, and Carla Paterson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007): 54, and Dean, 76. 6. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996): 233. 7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989): 57. 8. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 2. In Last Watch of the Night Monette criticizes sentimental views of infants, but also solicits our sympathy for “damaged children” who suffer abuse (Boston: Mariner Books, 1995): 247. 9. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992): 21. 221

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10. James W. Jones, “Refusing the Name: The Absence of AIDS in Recent American Gay Male Fiction,” in Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis, ed. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 226. 11. Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985): 58. 12. Paula Treichler, “AIDS: An Epidemic of Signification,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Boston: MIT Press, 1988): 52, 66. 13. Qtd. in Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994): 99. 14. “Bryan Fischer: No More Taxpayer Funding for AIDS Research,” Rightly Concerned, December 2, 2010. http://www.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost. aspx?id=2147500830 (accessed June 1, 2013). 15. Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Boston: MIT Press, 1988): 77. 16. Sid Davis, Boys Beware, Sidney Davis Productions, 1961. I thank John DeLamar for bringing the film to my attention and for productive conversations about AIDS and the 1980s. 17. The phrase is quoted on the dust jacket of the first edition of Last Watch of the Night. 18. On contagion and/as representation, see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 67–186. Edelman discusses this essay in relation to AIDS in Homographesis, 83–84. 19. Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (Boston: Knight and Millet, 1901): 4. 2 0. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999): 3. 21. Walt Whitman, Selected Poems 1855–1892: A New Edition, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 226. 22. Whitman, 252. 23. Legislative Counsel of California, “Bill Analysis: SB 48,” Official California Legislative Information, July 2011. http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/ sb_0001-0050/sb_48_cfa_20110408_105410_sen_floor.html (accessed February 20, 2013). 2 4. “The Problem Facing California Public School Parents,” RescueYourChild. com, (n.d.). http://rescueyourchild.com/The_Problem.html (accessed April 27, 2012). 25. Monette, Last Watch, 164. 2 6. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 2. Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Political Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001): 2. 27. Monette, Last Watch, 122. 222

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Monette, Last Watch, 128. Monette, Last Watch, 31, 164, 256. Edelman, No Future, 2. Monette, Last Watch, 43. Edelman, No Future, 17. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003): 50. 3 4. Much more could be said about the place of Monette’s diary in a text that is so keenly concerned with reading and writing and so cogently connected to other queer readings of queer reading, such as those discussed in Chapter 5. Although he says he lost interest in reading during Roger’s illness, Monette recalls a wealth of literature, from the Greeks to Rilke, the New York Times, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, Woolf, Plato, Socrates, Frost, and Milton. Yet the text he reads the most, both as a narrator and diegetically, is his own diary, which becomes the source and the double of the published memoir. 35. Tellingly, the exceptions are moments of qualified hope for Roger, not comments on the collective future of the gay community, Monette’s concern in the later texts. A medical advance makes them feel “as if the future had opened again” (215) and in another instance “we played it as if the future would be free of further complication” (232). In both cases, “as if ” makes what is already a compromised future doubly contingent. 36. Elizabeth Freeman, Introduction to special issue on “Queer Temporality,” GLQ 13.2–3 (2007): 162. 37. Laura Doan and Sarah Waters, “Making Up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History,” in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. David Alderson and Linda Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 12. Similarly, Freeman finds the “image of queer ‘ancestors’” in lesbian films; see Time Binds, 14. 38. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 468. 39. Nealon, 96. 4 0. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990): 70. 41. Edward Prime-Stevenson, Imre, ed. James J. Gifford (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2003): 84. 42. Andover functions as a reminder, should one be necessary, that knowledge of classical Greece has historically belonged to privileged white men. As Amy Richlin notes, however, the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s began to disseminate these tropes more widely; see “Eros Underground,” Journal of Homosexuality, 49.3–4 (2005): 421–461. 2 8. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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43. Scott Bravmann traces gay and lesbian uses of ancient Greece in Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 47–67. Bernard F. Dick gives a detailed, if unsympathetic, account of British and American gay men’s interest in and identification with the ancient Greeks in “The Origins of Homosexual Fiction,” Colorado Quarterly 22(1974): 509–515. 4 4. The curators of the Monette archive at UCLA offer a useful discussion of the cover image at “Warriors Together: Monette’s Work: 1988,” One Person’s Truth: The Life and Work of Paul Monette (1945–1995), UCLA library (n.d.). http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/special/monette/pmheal.htm (accessed May 15, 2013). 45. Another function of ancient Greece in the text is its implicit mediation of Monette’s tone. Halperin has discussed the performance of mourning by the “Fire Island Italian Widows” as a simultaneous expression of camp sensibility and true bereavement: “the emotions they felt and displayed were necessarily consigned by conventional cultural codes to the realm of the incongruous, the excessive, the melodramatic, the hysterical, the ­i nauthentic—at any rate, the less than fully dignified. Their grief, however genuine, was disqualified from being taken seriously” by the straight world; How to Be Gay (New York: Belknap Press, 2012): 180. Monette’s representation of mourning is the opposite, literal and devoid of irony—an attitude no doubt reflecting his refusal of analytic distance and effort to convey, instead, the pure present tense of raw emotion. But that choice has the further result of removing Monette from the arch, theatrical affect of the gay male stereotype personified by the Italian widows of Fire Island. In Borrowed Time, the ancient Greeks represent a horizon beyond camp; with them, Monette privileges one style of gay masculinity, typified by the ancient warrior, over another, the narcissistic queen. That opposition and its self-lacerating effects have been discussed by Lee Edelman in his essay on Monette, “The Mirror and the Tank” (Homographesis 93–120). On Monette’s affect and gay stereotypes, see also Halperin (79). 4 6. I discuss the debate in queer theory around projections of present ideas into the past in “Ahistorical,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1 (2005): 61–83. 47. Bravmann, 67. Bravmann is right to call this gesture “genealogical,” and that well describes Monette’s later two texts, with their elaboration of familial metaphors organized lineally in time. Yet Borrowed Time attempts to imagine a non-genealogical sort of kinship, childless and atemporal. 4 8. Monette, Last Watch, 178. 49. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 21. 50. Nealon, 182, 5.

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51. Monette, Becoming a Man, 5. 52. Paul Monette, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988): 62, 65. 53. Peter Coviello, “Whitman’s Children,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 75, 74. Coviello persuasively links Whitman’s sexuality to his futural investment, the force that drives such poems as “Whoever you are holding me now in hand,” though his conclusion is perhaps too sanguine with regard to reproductive futurism: “Whitman shows us how an investment in futurity, even one routed through the idea of children, may not be as homophobic, or as normative, as we now believe it to be.” It is possible that Whitman’s familial/ futural endeavors escape the heteronormative cult of the Child, but Whitman’s queerness cannot be the cause. For Edelman it is immaterial whether the investment in reproductive futurism is performed by straight parents or a gay man who is not a literal father; it is an ideological formation to which all are interpellated. 5 4. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Mestiza Metaphysics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011): 280. Tuhkanen’s proposal of “queer breeding” apart from reproductive futurism shows the same promise and the same pitfalls as Coviello’s notion of “queer generation.” 55. Leo Bersani, back cover blurb for the paperback edition of No Future, 2004. Granted, there is no sinthomosexual in Borrowed Time, no threat to children, no monstrous figure of intractable, dehumanizing drive. Monette cannot embody the sheer, annihilating negativity of the sinthomosexual, for no one can. Edelman’s argument is concerned with what queerness is made to represent in the heteronormative Symbolic order. 56. Diedrich, 53. 57. Žižek, Looking Awry, 21. 58. Žižek, Sublime Object, 140. 59. Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 13. 6 0. McGowan, 15. 61. Edelman, No Future, 9. 62. McGowan, 14. Chapter 7 1. I thank Alison Bechdel for this observation and for our conversations about the novel. 2. Arguably the text foregrounds a different five characters, since its 1941 portion focuses on three events; how Viv got involved with Reggie, why Duncan

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went to prison, and how Kay met Helen. But what is important is the fractal proliferation of relationships and narratives from these three original events to include peripheral figures like Binkie, Mr. Leonard, and Ursula. 3. Jennifer Terry, “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity,” in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997): 273. 4. Although I take my title from Adam Phillips’s essay “Contingency for Beginners” in On Flirtation, I do not share Phillips’s severe view that Freudian interpretation is the enemy of contingency. He writes, “In Freud’s work a whole range of accidents began to be redescribed as unconscious intentions; in psychoanalytic theory bodies were bled of their contingency”; On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994): 9. There is a grain of truth here, but Phillips fails to consider the role of overdetermination and indeterminacy in Freud’s hermeneutic methods. 5. Elizabeth Cowie, “Thinking Differently,” differences 21.1 (2010): 181. On the butterfly effect, see also Peter Dizikes, “The Meaning of the Butterfly,” Boston Globe (June 8, 2008). 6. Jonathan Goldberg, “After Thoughts,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 505. On the clinamen, see also Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007): 349– 351. Goldberg expands his reading of Lucretius and the “chance meetings and conjunctions” of the clinamen in The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 7. I owe this observation to an especially insightful student, Mateus Manço Teixeira. 8. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (New York: Riverhead, 2006): 227, 132, 133, 52, 242. Further citations of this text will be given in parentheses. 9. A range of ages (e.g., 30–31) appears when we are told the character celebrates or approaches a birthday during a particular year; the others, of course, also have birthdays each year, but these are not discussed in the text. 10. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 84. On institutional time, see also Anthony Giddens, Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 132–161. 11. Katharina Boehm reads Duncan’s fixation on old objects as a model for an alternative historiography, one predicated on decontexualized, fragmentary and metonymic connections; “Historiography and the Material Imagination in the Novels of Sarah Waters,” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (2011): 237–257. 12. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 23.

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13. The Night Watch manages to supply more or less satisfying answers to the questions it raises despite the fact that it omits two lengthy stretches of time, between 1941 and 1944, and 1944 and 1947. In Robyn Warhol’s taxonomy of narrative absences, these lacunae would constitute the subnarratable, that which “needn’t be told,” though the unusual chronology of Waters’s novel may present a new species of narration. See Robyn Warhol, “Neonarrative: or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 222. The temporal gaps also suggest the incompletion of any text, any history, and they lend an uncanniness to the handful of textual references to events that occur in the unnarrated intervals. Some time between 1944 and 1947, for example, Kay moved into the apartment in Mr. Leonard’s building (5); Viv met Julia outside the office and didn’t like her (29); and Mr. Mundy learned that Duncan’s sister had a baby (24). Much like the supplement in Derrida’s account, such references are both superfluous and indicators of lack; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrvorty Spikak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): 141–164. 14. It is perhaps significant that Kay goes to the movies to deal with her temporal problem since, as Doane argues, cinema has a unique relation to the modern negotiation of time (22). 15. Sarah Waters, “Romance among the Ruins,” Guardian (January 28, 2006): 4. 16. Roland Barthes, “The Structure of the Fait-Divers,” in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972): 188. 17. Waters observes, “the war gave many lesbians a licence to do things they had always enjoyed doing but which, until then, they’d had to do more or less illicitly—such as cutting their hair, wearing ties and trousers, driving cars” (“Romance,” 4). 18. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 90. She develops this observation in unsettling directions: “As someone who would go so far as to claim lesbianism as one of the welcome effects of sexual abuse, I am happy to contemplate the therapeutic process by which sexual abuse turns girls queer” (90), yet she says this possibility should be consideredwithout “determination or causality.” 19. On repetition and desire in The Night Watch, see Lynne Pearce, “Romance, Trauma, and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love,” in Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013): 71–89. 2 0. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 91–92 . 21. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997): 5. The notion of trauma is itself associated with the Lacanian

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Real and thus with radical contingency. Lacan writes, “Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it—in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin?” Though it is contingent and “accidental,” it is also a cause, a “determining . . . origin” of the Symbolic order to which it is “unassimilable.” See Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981): 55. 22. “Unmarked” also suggests that Helen is the blank screen onto which Kay projects her fantasy; in her romantic idealism, she loves a Helen who does not exist. Helen knows that “Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of [her]; that Kay’s passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched” (243). 23. After this accurate remark, Helen continues mistakenly: “But Kay would never have loved me at all, if you had let her love you—” (327), furthering the text’s odd insistence on the seemingly trivial matter of why Kay’s relationship with Julia failed. 2 4. Todd McGowan, “The Contingency of Connection: The Path to Politicization in Babel,” Discourse 30.3 (2008): 404. 25. Derrida, “My Chances,” 364–365. 2 6. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978): 45–46. 27. Barthes, 194. On coincidence in narrative theory, see also Brian Richardson, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997): 157–81, and Hilary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 2 8. Peter Nicholls, “The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison,” in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. Sue Vice (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996): 57. 29. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002): 129–130. 30. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001): 205–206. 31. Adam Phillips, Side Effects (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007): 270. 32. I also discuss contingency and biological determinism in “Fortune’s Turn,” in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 55–61. 33. Gary Greenberg, “Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity,” Mother Jones.com, August 7, 2007. http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/gaychoice-science-sexual-identity (accessed July 15, 2010). 3 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 45. 228

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Chapter 8 1. Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994): 279. On Milk’s line “My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you,” see Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982): 359. 2. See Judith Roof, The Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): 133. She refers to Hélène Cixous’s use of the phrase as distinct from Adrienne Rich’s. 3. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 4. Crucially, this act is negative, not positive, performed “[n]ot in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social order . . . but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation” (4). 4. Michael Warner, Introduction, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): xvi. 5. William Saletan, “Sexual Antagonism: A Sexual Theory of Homosexuality,” Slate.com, June 25, 2008. http://www.slate.com/id/2194232/ (accessed October 19, 2009). I discuss the notion that tolerance depends on homosexuals’ “self-limiting” propensities in Chapter 2. 6. Vera Whisman, Queer By Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996): 3. Whisman notes that the conservative group Focus on the Family asserts that homosexuals as a group are defined by “their chosen behavior.” 7. Eric Marcus, Is It a Choice? 3rd ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2005): 9. 8. “Transcript: Bush, Kerry Debate Domestic Policies,” CNN.com, October 14, 2004. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/13/debate.­transcript/ (accessed July 4, 2010). 9. Patrick Healy, “Democrats Voice Support of Gay Rights in TV Forum,” New York Times (August 10, 2007) Late Edition; Final. A14. 10. Quoted in Alex Witchel, “Life after ‘Sex,’” New York Times Magazine, January 19, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/cynthianixon-wit.html?_r=1&ref=alexwitchel&pagewanted=all (accessed August 12, 2013). 11. The case against choice also relies on questionable matters of memory. Neuroscientist Marc Breedlove writes, “If you’re going to say people choose a sexual orientation when they reach puberty, you’re going to have to find some people who remember making that choice, and there aren’t any.” Qtd. in Sandi Doughton, “Born Gay? How Biology May Drive Orientation,” The Seattle Times (June 19, 2005): A1, A18. Reversing the burden of proof, we might say: if you’re going to say people have a sexual orientation from birth, you’re going to have to find some people who remember being gay (or straight) infants, 229

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and there aren’t any. From a psychoanalytic perspective, both statements are specious because they deny the vicissitudes of memory, the role of the unconscious, and all that makes us strangers to ourselves. In fact, Freud responds in advance to Breedlove’s idea of experiential evidence: “it may be imagined how little value is to be attached, for instance, to an assertion that a case of homosexuality is congenital, when the ground given for this belief is that ever since his eighth or sixth year the person in question has felt inclinations only towards his own sex”; Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974): 17:193. As Martin Duberman remarks, “If we could trace the process of acculturation, we would not have been very securely socialized in the first place—since acculturation consists precisely in learning to accept as natural, normal, and inevitable what is in fact a set of parochial and transient social conventions” (Waiting to Land [New York: New Press, 2009]: 35). 12. Patti and Jeff Ellis, “Why Would My Child Choose to Be Gay?” FamilyAcceptance.com (n.d.). http://www.familyacceptance.org/questions/question9. html (accessed October 16, 2009). 13. In fact, anti-choice rhetoric often misrepresents nuanced constructionist arguments that show how cultural formations limit individual agency. 14. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Sherman French, 1912): 207. 15. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 637, 659. 16. John D’Emilio, The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 164. Also responding to theories of biological determinism in the 1990s is Vera Whisman’s Queer By Choice (New York: Routledge, 1995). 17. Donna Minkowitz, “Recruit, recruit, recruit!” The Advocate 619 (December 29, 1992): 17. 18. Marcus, 10. 19. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 131. 2 0. Lee Edelman, Differences 21.1 (2010): 153. 21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 183. 22. Madhavi Menon also sees causality as crucial to the difference between queerness and identity politics, though her formulation is somewhat different: “If queerness does not have a cause, it cannot form the basis for an identitarian theory”; “Of Cause,” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 94.3 (2013): 282.  23. I thank Matt Bell for this framing of queer solicitation. 2 4. Jacques Khalip, Differences 21.1 (2010): 163. 230

IN DE X

Abelove, Henry, 16 ACT-UP, 142 Acton, William, 107 Althusser, Louis, 119, 209n54 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 155 Aristotle, 10 assimilation, 5, 9, 20, 147, 190–91 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 80–102 passim, 106, 141, 188, 190

Bishop, Elizabeth, 31, 152, 201n26 Blackmore, Susan, 36–37 Boehm, Katharina, 226n11 Borges, Jorge Luis, 80, 84, 85, 90, 100, 101 “born gay”: 2, 20–21, 47–54, 198n54, 205n95 politics of, 3, 5, 15, 24, 40, 78–79, 188, 191 temporality and, 98, 184, 206n97 Borrowed Time, 138–62 passim, 190, 223n34, 223n35, 224n45, 224n47 Bostonians, The, 56 Boswell, John, 152 Bowie, Malcolm, 18 Boys Beware, 143 Bradstreet, Anne, 128 Bravmann, Scott, 141, 152, 224n47 Breedlove, Marc, 229–30n11 Brideshead Revisited, 106, 111 Bristow, Joseph, 65, 66, 73, 206n7 Bromley, James M., 17 Bruhm, Steven, 214n36 Bryant, Anita, 45 Bush, George W., 187 Butler, Judith, 14 Byrd, A. Dean, 183

Bagemihl, Bruce, 26 Baker, Houston A. Jr., 213n30 Barber, Stephen M., 221n3 Barnes, Djuna, 105 Barthes, Roland, 10, 17–18, 19, 172, 181, 199n69 Bechdel, Alison, 104, 108, 115, 136, 215n3 Becoming a Man, 141, 146, 147, 154, 157, 158, 159 Benkert, Karl, 25, 57 Bersani, Leo, 159 Besen, Wayne, 132 biological determinism: 11, 20, 40–54 passim, 119–20, 186 politics of, 2–5, 24, 39, 132, 193–94n8, 220n70 vs. notion of chosen sexuality, 166, 183–84, 189 Biron, Charles, 131 bisexuality, 3, 29, 37, 45, 194–95n16, 195n21

Cape, Jonathan, 131 Carlson, Allan, 22 Carpenter, Edward, 109, 216n15

231

INDEX Carson, Edward, 59, 71, 76–77 Caruth, Cathy, 176 Case, Sue-Ellen, 116 case study, 10, 11, 18, 19, 34, 57, 165 Cather, Willa, 150 causality: 2, 47–48, 138–39, 142–43, 164, 173–76, 195n21, 199n70, 199n69, 207n19, 230n22. See also etiology contingent, 165–66, 174, 176–82, 184, 191 extraordinary, 8, 17–19, 70–74, 82–83, 94, 98–99, 164–65, 191–92 narrative form and, 10–11, 59–68, 164–66, 172, 181 of heterosexuality, 20, 164, 194n11 politics of, 3–4, 31, 39, 98, 183–84 psychoanalytic theories of, 11, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 70–71, 181–82, 207n16, 209n54, 227–28n21 temporality and, 4–5, 17, 71–74, 78, 83, 94, 98–99, 161 Charioteer, The, 12, 106, 114, 118, 134 children: 58, 96, 107–09, 126–31, 149, 154, 155, 206n97, 221n8 futurity and, 54, 125, 141, 146–47, 162, 225n53 of gay men and lesbians, 28–30, 37, 42, 44–45, 200n6, 204n68 queer, 19, 50–52, 90, 99, 106, 120, 123–34, 136, 214n36 recruitment of, 1–2, 4, 20, 31, 45, 131, 133, 183 choice, homosexuality as, 21, 48–51, 86, 97, 183, 186–90 passim, 214n3, 229n6, 230n13 Ciani, Andrea Camperio, 44, 46 Clark, David L., 221n3 Clarke, Sir Edward, 76, 77 Cohen, Ed, 57, 210n64 Cohen, Elizabeth, 51 coming out, 14, 21, 73, 97, 99, 102, 116, 146 Comstock, Anthony, 107 contagion: 31–32, 38, 130–31 meme as, 34, 36, 40, 42, 46 reading as, 62, 106, 143–44

contingency: 33, 85, 87, 93, 148, 160, 226n4, 227–28n21 causality and, 165–66, 170–84 passim, 191 vs. determinism, 40, 101, 182–84 Copeland, Peter, 39, 43 Coviello, Peter, 7, 155, 225n53–54 Craft, Christopher, 72, 209n45 Cuffe, Hamilton, 59 Culler, Jonathan, 4–5, 17 Cvetkovich, Ann, 174–75, 227n18 D’Emilio, John, 6, 150, 189, 195n20 Darwin, Charles, 22–55 passim, 66, 100, 101, 214n39 Darwin Awards, The, 27–28, 53 Dawkins, Richard, 33–36, 41 de Man, Paul, 32 Dean, Tim, 98, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 32 Delgaudio, Eugene, 132 Dennett, Daniel, 34, 36, 202n36 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 76, 86–87, 100–01, 137, 180, 220n86, 227n13 detective fiction, 9–11, 17–19, 57, 66, 172 Diana: A Strange Autobiography, 113–14, 115, 118, 119, 135 Diedrich, Lisa, 140, 160 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 8, 144 Doan, Laura, 149 Doane, Mary Ann, 170, 227n14 Dollimore, Jonathan, 133 Douglas, James, 130 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 59, 71–72, 74, 207n14 Duberman, Martin, 16, 48–49, 230n11 Duggan, Lisa, 5, 147 Edelman, Lee: 9, 31, 33, 190, 224n45, 225n53, 225n55, 229n3 on reproductive futurism, 37, 141, 147, 158–61, 185–86 Ellis, Havelock, 12, 120, 122, 135 Ellman, Richard, 56, 66, 75, 209n49, 210n72 Erasmus, 100

232

INDEX Escoffier, Jeffrey, 116, 118, 134 etiology: 79, 138–39, 142–43, 165–66, 183–84. See also causality narrative form of, 10–11, 17–19, 57, 66–67, 70–71, 74, 165, 172, 199n69 of heterosexuality, 19–21, 164, 194n11 of homosexuality, 2–6 passim, 12–19 passim, 23, 32, 38–40, 47–49, 57–60, 98, 120, 174, 177, 190, 192 politics of, 3, 24, 39–40, 54–55 evolution, 12, 23–27, 32–45 passim, 96, 100, 101, 165, 182, 190

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 86–87, 100, 212n16 gay male sexuality: 38, 43, 174, 204n65, 205n91 culture of, 7, 57, 78, 153–54, 157, 191–92 HIV/AIDS and, 139, 142–43, 155 in history, 72, 109, 140, 150, 153, 157 infertility and, 12, 42–44, 53–54, 204n68 genealogy, 28, 32–33, 62, 130, 142, 146, 152–55, 161, 202n31, 224n47 gender, 14, 41, 51, 124, 170, 173, 184, 205n91, 219n56 genetics, 14, 15, 21, 26–54 passim, 100–01, 127, 133, 183 Gide, André, 113, 136–37 Gill, Charles, 59 Gilmore, Leigh, 135 Ginsberg, Allen, 109 Goldberg, Jonathan, 165 Grosz, Elizabeth, 26, 101, 202n36 Guattari, Félix, 7, 32 Guy-Bray, Stephen, 58

Falwell, Jerry, 1 Family Research Council, 22, 23, 29, 38 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 3 Felman, Shoshana, 68 feminism, 36, 40, 59, 124, 185, 189, 205n91, 218n49 femininity, 20–21, 120, 123, 173, 205n91, 219n56 fertility, 24–35 passim, 39, 44, 46, 47, 53, 125, 127 Fink, Bruce, 70 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 102 Focus on the Family, 31 Forster, E. M., 10, 73, 79, 105–06, 112–19 passim, 134, 147, 150 Foucault, Michel, 57, 118 Frankel, Nicholas, 207–08n25, 210n60, 217n27 Freeman, Elizabeth, 8, 139, 149, 223n37 Freud, Sigmund: 29, 71, 110, 181, 202–02n44, 226n4 “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 229–30n11 etiology and, 11, 14–15, 18, 66–67, 70 “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” 11, 12–15, 18 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 15 views of homosexuality, 1, 12–16, 108, 113, 143, 229–30n11

Halberstam, Judith (Jack), 8, 123, 140, 218–19n55 Hall, Radclyffe, 1, 106, 111, 121–37 passim, 119n75, 150, 218n49, 220n72 Halle, Randall, 194n13 Halperin, David M., 6, 7, 40, 116, 118, 150, 191, 196n24, 224n45 Hamer, Dean, 39, 43, 44 Hanson, Ellis, 65, 208n31 Hay, Harry, 216n15 heterosexuality: 3, 5, 17, 22, 41, 96, 112–14, 188–89, 191, 194 biological reproduction and, 7, 27–33, 44–45, 54, 128 gender and, 199n75, 219n56 narrative form and, 69, 96–97 social reproduction of, 7, 16, 20–21, 45, 164 heteronormativity: 20, 23, 37, 92, 142, 147, 160, 191, 207n16 biological determinism and, 3–5, 47 family and, 32, 159, 204n77

233

INDEX heteronormativity: (continued) fertility/sterility and, 24, 36, 53–54, 129–30 Symbolic order and, 60, 225n55 HIV/AIDS, 31, 35, 40, 138–59 passim Hocquenghem, Guy, 7, 31, 32 Hollowell, Kelly, 22, 35 homonormativity, 5, 147–48 homosexual reproduction: 140–41, 147, 153, 155, 200n6 as anxiogenic, 2, 24, 63–64, 130, 145, 174, 185 compared to meme, 33–34, 46–47, 53 of identity and culture, 7, 190–91, 196n24 queer theories of, 6–8, 32, 155 reclamation of, 98, 144, 186, 190 responses to, 2, 38, 46–47, 53–55, 185 via writing, 58, 105–06, 127–32, 141, 158 homosexuality: as acquired, 1–2, 31, 38, 43, 57, 119, 130–32, 185, 189, 195n21 as innate, 2, 38–41, 47–52, 57, 97–99, 120, 123–24, 129, 131–32, 183–84, 188–89, 214n33, 229–30n11 biological reproduction and, 12, 23–31, 42–45, 54, 125 biological studies of, 2–3, 14, 38–44, 47–48, 199n70, 205n91 causality and, 60, 64, 70–74, 78–79, 94, 166, 177, 184, 191, 207n16 compared to meme, 21, 33–54 passim, 98, 142 etiology of, 4–5, 23–24, 31, 38–41, 47–48, 58–59, 164–66, 173–75, 184, 194n13 evolutionary theory and, 23–27, 32, 41–44, 201–02n16 vs. queerness, 8–9, 79, 100, 184, 190–92 Howard, John, 22, 29, 35, 53 Hughes, Langston, 110 Human Rights Campaign, 14 Hurley, Natasha, 214n36

identity: 14–15, 57, 81, 83, 96, 99, 105, 130, 140, 189, 199n70 gay and lesbian, 7, 41, 48–53, 72–74, 96–99, 127, 149, 151–52, 167, 186, 190–91 racial, 81, 94–98, 102 reading and, 105–10, 114, 119, 123, 134–37 identity politics, 3, 106, 110, 119, 135, 184, 210n65, 230n22 Imre, 105, 111, 112, 121, 150 influence, 1, 2, 14, 20, 34, 42, 48, 56–72 passim, 79, 106, 131, 133, 206n11 Ingram, Angela, 126 Jacobus, Mary, 121 Jaffe, Audrey, 72–73, 210n65 Jagose, Annamarie, 190 James, Henry, 59, 67–68 Jays, David, 76 Jeyes, Samuel, 65 Johnson, James Weldon, 6, 80–103 passim, 188, 212n11 Johnson, Samuel, 213n29 Jung, Carl, 113 Keats, John, 215n4 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 200n14 Kent, Kathryn R., 6–7, 105, 215n6 Kern, Stephen, 10, 12, 199n69, 207n19 Kerry, John, 187 Khalip, Jacques, 192 Kinsey, Alfred, 108 Knopf, Alfred A., 88 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 108, 113, 119–24, 129, 136 Kramer, Larry, 49 Lacan, Jacques: 102, 160 “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, The,” 85 big Other, 166, 183 causality, 19, 21, 60, 70–71, 80, 207n16, 209n54 Real, 9, 53, 60, 70, 192, 227–28n21 Symbolic order, 9, 36, 60

identification: 108, 116, 123–24, 135, 140, 145, 149–50, 154, 175, 210n64, 215n5

234

INDEX Lamarck, Jean-Baptise, 24 Last Watch of the Night, 141, 143, 146, 147, 152, 159, 221n8, 222n17 LeVay, Simon, 38 lesbianism: 17, 164, 167, 174–78, 188–89, 218n49, 218–19n55, 223n37, 227n17, 227n18 excluded from research, 41, 204n65 identity and, 6–7, 104, 105, 123, 133–36 reading and, 108, 120, 131, 216n12 writing and, 126–27 Lesbian Avengers, 185–86 Levy, Eugene, 83, 213n20 Lounsbury, Thomas R., 83, 213n29 Love, Heather, 218n54 Lynch, Aaron, 36–37 Lyon, Phyllis, 133

Minkowitz, Donna, 189, 195n20 mirror, 84, 92, 95, 106, 108, 110, 134–37, 140 mise en abyme, 106, 136–37, 220n86 modernism, 80, 82, 83, 89, 199n69 Moffatt, T. C., 88, 212n19 Monette, Paul: 138–61, 221n8, 222n17, 223n34, 223n35, 224n45, 224n47, 225n55 Morrison, Paul, 20, 64, 71, 209n44 Muñoz, José Esteban, 140, 215n5 Nachträglichkeit, 18–19, 71, 78, 181 narrative: 68–69, 78–79, 92, 94, 97, 138, 163, 175, 209n44, 227n13 causality in, 9–11, 73–74, 181, 199n69, 207n19 coming out, 73, 96–97, 99 etiological, 4, 17–19, 48, 56–59, 66–67, 70, 79, 120, 139, 164–66, 174, 177, 190 passing, 84–86, 96 Nealon, Christopher, 141, 150, 152–53, 155 negativity, 8–9, 60, 79, 100, 159, 186, 190–92, 225n55, 229n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4–5 Night Watch, The, 6, 163–84, 189, 190, 227n13 Nixon, Cynthia, 187 Nunokawa, Jeffrey, 66, 69, 73

Manguel, Alberto, 108, 134, 140 Marcus, Eric, 50, 186, 189 Marcus, Steven, 11 Margulis, Lynn, 27 marriage: 34, 69, 91 same-sex, 9, 22–23, 30, 32, 33, 37, 41, 54, 55, 187 Martin, Del, 133 masculinity: 90, 219n56, 224n45 female, 123, 124, 133–34, 173, 218n49, 218–19n55 Mathews, Willie, 75 Maurice, 73, 105, 110, 112, 115–18, 121, 130, 135, 147 McCallum, E. L., 7 McGowan, Todd, 161, 179–80 McKnight, Jim, 39, 43, 45 McRuer, Robert, 3 meme, 21, 33–37, 40, 42, 44, 46–47, 53–54, 57, 98, 142, 192, 202n36 Mencken, H. L., 88–89, 213n29 Menon, Madhavi, 230n22 metaphor, 6, 32–33, 35, 58, 204n63 metonymy, 5, 32–33, 57, 170, 226n11 Milk, Harvey, 145, 185 Miller, D. A., 118 Miller, Reverend Samuel, 107

obscenity, 1, 105, 116, 126, 130–31, 219n63, 220n72 Ohi, Kevin, 69 Paglia, Camille, 56 Paradise Lost, 10 paranoia, 35–38, 54, 59, 98, 130, 133, 145, 177, 180–81, 185, 202–03n44 Parker, Annice, 2, 20 passing, 81–97 passim, 212n11, 213–14n31 Pater, Walter, 62 Phelan, Peggy, 176 Phillips, Adam, 26–27, 182, 226n4

235

INDEX Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 20, 56–79, 129, 141, 190, 191–92, 207n19, 208n30, 208n31, 208n39, 208n41, 209n44, 209n45, 209–10n60, 210n64 Pillard, Richard, 39 Plato, 58, 112, 115, 117 Prime-Stevenson, Edward, 111, 114, 150 prolepsis, 110, 117, 158 Prosser, Jay, 218–19n55

Richardson, Bill, 187 Richlin, Amy, 223n42 Rieff, Philip, 11 Rieger, Gerulf, 51 Riquelme, John Paul, 69, 208n39 Roof, Judith, 11, 69 Rosario, Vernon, 3 Roughgarden, Joan, 27, 29, 44 Rubin, Gayle, 101, 112 Rule, Jane, 133–34 Rummel, Frances, 106, 113, 216n8 Russo, Vito, 91

Queensberry, Marquis of, 59, 74–78, 84, 210n61, 210n71, 210n72 Queerness, 8–9, 79, 100, 184, 190–92

Sagan, Dorien, 27 Salecl, Renata, 71 Saletan, William, 46, 186 Sappho, 109, 146 Scheiffer, Bob, 187 Schlessinger, Laura, 25–26 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: 35, 71–72, 101, 108–09, 139, 190–91 “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 133, 186 on knowing/unknowing, 66, 71, 184, 192 on minoritizing vs. universalizing, 15–17, 186, 198n54 seduction, 12, 31, 42, 64, 116–18, 131, 143, 174 Serres, Michel, 165 Shakespeare, William, 57–58, 64, 109, 112, 130, 193n5 Sinfield, Alan, 73, 211n78 signification, 36, 57, 75, 85–87, 92, 137, 212n16 Somerville, Siobhan, 89 Sontag, Susan, 35 Spencer, Herbert, 24, 27, 201n18 Stein, Edward, 3 Stein, Gertrude, 136 sterility, 24–46 passim, 53–54, 125–29 Stewart, Potter, 65 Stewart, Susan, 135 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 19, 52, 98–99, 106, 206n97 Symbolic order, 9, 17, 36, 50, 60, 70–71, 225n55, 227–28n21

race, 80–87, 89, 93–97, 100, 140, 188, 213n30, 213–14n31, 214n33 Rahman, Qazi, 39–49 passim, 204n65, 204n73, 205n91 reading: 62–63, 73, 104–41 passim, 144, 150, 215n4, 215n6, 216n12, 216n15, 223n34 misreading and, 76–77, 109, 151 Real, 9, 53, 60, 70–71, 179, 192, 227–28n21 realism, 10, 82, 83, 121–22 recruitment, 1, 20–21, 45, 105, 183, 185, 190, 199n75 Renault, Mary, 12, 106, 113, 134, 150, 152 reproduction: See also homosexual reproduction heterosexual, 7, 21, 27–33, 45, 54, 128 queer, 7, 32, 100, 155, 191–92 social, 6–9, 191–92, 196n24 reproductive futurism, 7, 32, 37, 54, 141, 147–48, 155, 158–59, 162, 185, 204n77, 225n53, 225n54 retroactivity: 17–21, 94–97 causal, 60, 70–71, 165–66, 178, 181–82 of gay and lesbian identities, 52, 97–99, 136, 153 of textual meaning, 57, 82–83, 93–94, 98 Rich, Adrienne, 17, 188–89

236

INDEX Teleny, 217n6 temporality: 7, 142, 146, 155, 158–61, 168, 172–73, 207n16, 224n47, 227n14 narrative, 10, 17, 83, 121, 163, 167–70, 227n13 of HIV/AIDS, 138–40, 148–51, 160 queer, 8, 83, 91, 96, 98, 106, 136, 139–40, 144 retroactive, 21, 52, 71, 82, 93–94, 99, 103, 106, 136, 166 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 144, 161 Terry, Jennifer, 3, 25, 131, 164 trauma, 17, 102, 123, 140, 159, 161–66, 172–77, 227–28n21 transgenderism, 28, 51, 194–95n16, 218–19n55, 219n56 Traub, Valerie, 6, 193n5 Treichler, Paula, 40, 142 Tuhkanen, Mikko, 7, 32, 105, 155, 225n54 Turn of the Screw, The: 67–68

Warhol, Robyn, 227n13 Warner, Michael, 127, 186, 196n29 Warren, Rick, 43 Waters, Sarah, 150, 171, 227n17 Watney, Simon, 143 Waugh, Evelyn, 106, 111 Webster, Noah, 87–88 Well of Loneliness, The, 1, 20, 62, 106, 119–36, 141, 218–19n55, 219n63, 220n72 Weston, Kath, 28, 116 Whitam, Frederick, 2 Whisman, Vera, 229n6 Whitman, Walt, 7, 109–10, 144–45, 146, 155, 157, 225n53 Wilde, Oscar: 62–68 passim, 76–78 as gay icon, 57–58, 72–74, 76, 78–79 trials of, 58–60, 65, 71–78 Wilson, Glenn, 39, 41–43, 45, 47, 49, 204n65, 204n73, 205n91 Woolf, Virginia, 131, 216n12

Van Buren, Abigail, 39 Van Vechten, Carl, 81, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 92–94, 98, 100, 211n3 variation, 12, 24–26, 92, 100–01, 113, 123, 190, 214n40 von Westphal, Karl, 96

Žižek, Slavoj: 17–18, 92–93, 102 on causality, 70–71, 181, 209n54 on desire and drive, 142, 160 on meme, 36, 40 on symptom, 93–94, 98

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