Roundtable: Doing Queer History in the 21st Century

Report by Marcia Gallo, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

At the second CLGBTH-sponsored panel of the 2012 AHA meeting, which convened on Friday, January 6 at 9:30 a.m., approximately 35 people gathered to hear four scholars discuss their explorations in developing accessible queer history – in print, through a museum exhibit, online, and as performance. Organized by Marcia Gallo, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the roundtable’s participants included John D’Emilio, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Jennifer Brier, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and chair of Women’s Studies, also at UIC; Gallo; and E. Patrick Johnson, Professor in the Department of Performance Studies as well as Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. The audience provided insightful commentary and questions.

Legendary gay historian and activist John D’Emilio led off by discussing his experiences writing a local GLBT history column for the Chicago gay weekly Windy City Times. “What does it mean to write history in 1200-word self-contained segments?” he asked, noting that the ways in which historians are trained, and the rewards we receive from our professional colleagues, are not necessarily conducive to reaching audiences of community members. Community audiences may shift from week to week, may not have read other GLBT history, and may have been participants or observers in the events being written about, with very definite opinions about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of our (re)presentations of their lived experiences. He also announced that an exciting new project will bring him further from the printed page into cyberspace: D’Emilio recently assumed the co-director role, with founder Jonathan Ned Katz, of OutHistory.org, launched by Katz in October 2008. They intend a redesign of the site in the near future. http://outhistory.org

Jennifer Brier’s presentation focused on her involvement in working with the Chicago History Museum as guest curator for its LGBT history exhibit, Out in Chicago, featured on Thursday, the day before this session, as one of the AHA’s special tours for conference participants. Brier led the tour, which was the first queer tour conducted in conjunction with and as part of the program of an AHA meeting. For this session, she discussed some of the perils and possibilities of doing LGBTQ history in a “traditional” public history institution. Brier relayed not only the amazing process of putting such history into three-dimensional form and the possibilities for experiential learning this creates but also the substance of the compromises made in bringing the exhibit to fruition in a space that historically shied away from sexual content. Using PowerPoint images of the tour, Brier commented on the ways in which themes, rather than chronology, allowed them to tell stories about queer Chicago from the perspectives of people too often left out of such narratives, especially people of color and trans people. The exhibit Out in Chicago runs at the Chicago History Museum through March 26, 2012.
http://chicagohistory.org/planavisit/exhibitions/out-in-chicago

Tracing her interest in lesbian pulp novelist and poet Valerie Taylor to research conducted at the Gerber/Hart archives in Chicago for her first book, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, Marcia Gallo described Taylor as one of the few lesbians who helped launch the queer paperback publishing phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s and was a radical homophile activist. Taylor spent many years in Chicago and, later, Tucson organizing gay and women’s liberation as well as anti-war and pro-human rights protests. To introduce her in her own words, Gallo read Taylor’s 1979 poem, “The Sweet Little Old Gray-Haired Lady in Sneakers.” Referencing “old pups learning new tricks,” Gallo then illustrated her own challenges in learning how to transform a talk on Taylor given last summer to a small, non-academic audience at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan into an online exhibit at OutHistory.org. She showed images from the Valerie Taylor Photo Album from Cornell’s online Human Sexuality Collection. http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/eguides/manuscripts/7627+/

Chicago-based scholar and artist E. Patrick Johnson has performed nationally and internationally, and published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, and performance. The final presenter, he detailed his experiences creating his one-man show, “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Stories,” based on excerpts from his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – An Oral History, for which he gathered narratives of black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. He described his commitment to utilizing all of the tools at his disposal – verbal, visual, and political — in sharing the stories told him by his narrators, who hail from fifteen different states and range in age from 19 to 93. Johnson made his projects come alive as he showed clips of himself in conversation with one of his narrators, “Countess Vivian,” and then performed as “Freddie,” the self-described “mean little sissy.”

Perhaps the best line of the session came when Johnson related the reaction to his performance from a Southern Baptist minister: “The preacher said, ‘God was there for the first wet vagina. God was there for the first erection. And he said, ‘It is good.’” The same can be said about “Doing Queer History in the 21st Century,” which was a bright, lively, and informative two-hour conversation among queer history-makers working in increasingly varied venues.

“The Queer Politics of Managing Youth and Sex in the 1920s United States”

by Nick Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

This panel explored the ways that reformers, mental health professionals, and reform schools regulated young people in the decade of the 1920s, especially in regards to their sexuality. While the primary focus was on adults’ understandings of childhood, adolescence, and sexuality, there were also crucial moments of youthful agency revealed by the panelists, and of course that was one of the elements that most disturbed the adults who attempted to regulate them.

Don Romesburg, an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University gave a paper entitled “Wayward Sexualities, Delinquent Mentalities, and Early 20th-Century Youth Experts.” In it he focused on the way that experts treated delinquent boys and girls who exhibited queer tendencies, including same-sex sexual behavior, differently from other kinds of delinquent youth. The former group was more likely to be segregated within institutions and be subject to surgical intervention and diagnoses of psychopathy. Treatments for those understood as seducers (as opposed to seduced) were particularly dire. Romesburg provocatively suggests that we need to look to the early twentieth century for the origins of the sexual psychopath; that figure, emerging later in the 1920s, was built on the backs of psychological and penal discourses about incarcerated queer youth in the 1910s and early ‘20s.

I, Nick Syrett, an assistant professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado, gave a paper called “Child Marriage and Contests Over Non-Normative Sexuality in the 1920s.” Using the celebrated case of “Peaches and Daddy” – the 1926 marriage of a 15 year-old working class girl to a 51 year-old NYC real estate magnate – and the work of New York-based child marriage reformers, I argued that concerns over child marriage reflected worries about changes in female adolescent sexuality more broadly. I also demonstrated the differences between reformers’ treatment of girl wives in comparison to their reactions to sexually active single girls: they cast them as victims, refusing to recognize their agency, precisely the problem in the case of the single girls. Both sets of reformers, however, were dealing with the same issue: increasing sexual self-assertion by younger women.

Allison Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University, gave a paper entitled “Therapeutic Discipline and Queer Youth in a School for Delinquent Girls, c. 1926.” In a fascinating case study of renowned prison reformer Miriam Van Waters and one of her charges at the El Retiro School for Girls, a queer girl named “Johnnie,” Miller demonstrated the ways that what she calls “therapeutic discipline” was marshaled by prison officials like Van Waters to regulate and to reform the girls who were incarcerated at “schools” like El Retiro. Using Van Waters’ own phrase to describe her interactions with girls at El Retiro and elsewhere, “virile warmth,” Miller elaborates the ways that a form of transference and queer fellow feeling became one of the tools used by Van Waters and other juvenile justice workers in order to do their reform work. In some cases it succeeded so well that Van Waters and others maintained correspondence with former inmates for many years after their incarceration.

Amanda Littauer, an assistant professor of History and Women’s Studies at Northern Illinois University, commented on the papers, prodding each of us to think about some of our claims, and situating them in relation to certain other works in the historiography. A lively conversation then ensued, focusing on changing notions of childhood and adolescence; the figure of the sexual child; the role of parents in regulating sexuality in children; the growth of state intervention in the lives of youth; the specters of intergenerational sex; and the understandings that guided reformers in their work with sexual children. How much did these reformers acknowledge the sexuality of their charges? And how often did they refuse to acknowledge it? These shared themes made for a really valuable discussion, even as the papers themselves took different material as their subjects.

“The Politics of Respectability Reconsidered: Using the Framework of Respectability to Examine Southern Lesbian History.”

By Ben Wise, University of Florida

I was fortunate to be chair of this panel, which included papers by La Shonda Mims, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, Megan Taylor Shockley, a professor at Clemson University, and Janet Allured, a Professor at McNeese State University. Carolyn Herbst Lewis of Louisiana State University delivered the comments.

Megan Taylor Shockley’s paper entitled, “Respectability and Lesbian Motherhood: Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman,” discussed the child custody cases of Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman though the lens of respectability. In the early 1990s, Sharon Bottoms’ mother sued for custody of her grandson because of her daughters’ harmful “lifestyle” as a lesbian, and the Virginia courts, citing the state’s sodomy laws but turning a blind eye to many other custody case precedents, gave her custody in 1996 (despite the fact that she, too, was living in an unmarried sexual relationship, albeit with a man). Shockley detailed the ways Bottoms was portrayed in the media and in the trial, and argued that—in addition to the obvious homophobia at work—the discourse relied also upon portraying Bottoms as too mobile, too dependent on state welfare, and too unpredictable: in short, she was not a respectable woman in terms of class and social comportment. In contrast, Linda Kaufman was an ordained Episcopal priest who sued the Virginia Department of Social Services in 1999 because they halted her attempt to adopt a child, again citing the state’s sodomy laws. But Kaufman, who was portrayed as an “excellent mother,” a stable worker, and a rooted middle class woman, won her custody case. Shockley worked through the nuances of these two cases and raised questions about the role of the state, the law, and the family in constituting not only our cultural values about sex and gender, but also the well being of children.

Janet Allured’s paper, “Fashion and the Performance of Lesbian Feminist Identity,” opened with a compelling vignette: a group of women were boarding a bus to travel to Baton Rouge to fight for the passage of the ERA, and some women were not allowed to board the bus because they were wearing pants (not skirts, not dresses). Allured invited us to consider fashion through the lens of respectability, because that was a major split among activist women in the 1970s: on the one hand, women wanted a platform from which to speak, and appearing “respectable” allowed them to do that (quite literally—women wearing pants were not allowed on the floor of the state legislature). On the other hand, some women (lesbians in particular) viewed this as a capitulation to the demands of middle class, patriarchal values. Allured drew upon theories of fashion and gender performance to raise questions about the nature of activism and women’s political lives. Fashion, she argued, should be interrogated more fully, alongside other aspects of women’s public lives, in order to give us a more complete view of politics, activism, and American gender norms.

La Shonda Mims’s essay, “Activist or Apathetic? Lesbians and Bar Space in the Post WWII South,” examined bars in Charlotte and Atlanta in order to raise questions about homosocial spaces, political discourse, and the nature of activism. In her research in oral histories and queer newspapers in particular, Mims has found evidence of thriving queer bar scenes in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Her aim has been to figure out what these spaces meant to those who frequented them, and how these meanings did or did not translate into a political vocabulary. Mims argued that in most cases, her evidence suggests that women who went to lesbian or gay bars (most queer bars at the time served a male clientele, since they tended to have more money) seemed to have wanted mainly to drink beer and meet other women. They wanted a place to socialize after a softball game, not a place to organize political networks. Though lesbian bars suggest disrespectability and a segregated social space that is potentially political or pre-political, the women in Mims’ story did not necessarily conceive of their queer identity as a political identity. Mims’ essay provoked a very fruitful discussion of queer activism, the nature of “space” in politics, and the cultural work of homosocial spaces.

On the whole, these papers addressed questions about the viability of respectability as a political strategy among women. Carolyn Herbst Lewis, in her comments, discussed the ways lesbian identity was always mediated by race, class, and gender presentation, and that “respectability” has been only one of many strategies employed by women activists. Whom we call activists, in turn, should be broadened to include not only those demanding entrance into political buildings, but also those whose priorities may be less explicitly political but no less important. The important part of these stories, she noted, was that these were all stories about lesbians fighting against heterosexist laws, policies, spaces, and customs. In some cases they won; in others, there is work yet to be done.