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Queer pasts now: Historical fiction in lesbian, bisexual, and gay film

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Queer pasts now: Historical fiction in lesbian, bisexual, and gay film

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Content Queer Pasts Now:
Historical Fictions in Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Film
Volume I
by
Michael du Plessis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
August 1993
Copyright 1993 Michael du Plessis
UMI Number: DP22563
All rights reserved
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quirements for the degree of
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DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Acknowledgements
I have been fortunate indeed in the kind of interest
that has been taken in Queer Pasts Now; the number of
people who contributed ideas, support, and enthusiasm
underscores for me the extent to which no text is ever
produced in isolation. I wish to thank the members of
my committee, Nancy Vickers and Tania Modleski (my two
dissertation directors), Peggy Kamuf and Joseph Boone
for their collective concern, patience and promotion of
my work. Nancy Vickers provided encouragement and
enthusiastic good cheer; Tania Modleski was committed to
my project from the start, gave invaluable advice in
directing my research, and continues to set an example
in rigorous and politically challenging work; Peggy
Kamuf offered friendship, criticism, and support in
equal measures; Joseph Boone was a meticulous, informed,
sympathetic and alert reader.
Two fellow former Queer Nationals have also
contributed to this project. Pam Selwyn was one of the
first people to suggest that I work seriously on my
obsession with queer costume drama, and in many ways
this project would never have completed without her
early enthusiasm. Judy Sisneros has provided me with
many references that would otherwise have been
impossible to obtain.
I have benefitted from many conversations with and
a great deal of advice from Lucille Kerr, whose clarity
has always been refreshing.
Richard Iosty influenced the early formulation of
this project and commented on the first stages of what
is now Chapter Two; Richard's death of AIDS-related
causes at the beginning of this year deprived me of a
scrupulous reader and a dear friend.
Finally, Kathleen Chapman and Ki Namaste both
contributed an immense amount to this work: Ki saw the
project through its final stages and provided
information and suggestions that shaped my manuscript as
it now stands; Kathleen has read almost every word in
every version of the manuscript with great care. Both
of them have given me an environment of intellectual and
emotional warmth in which to write. I am grateful for
their love.
Queer Pasts Now:
Historical Fictions in Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Film
Introduction: Queer:
Theories/Nations/Pasts/Spheres/Futures
Chapter One: On Reproduction
Chapter Two: Portraits of Mr. W. H.: Shakespeare, Wilde,
and Jarman
Part One: From Wilde to Shakespeare
Part Two: From Jarman to Shakespeare
Chapter Three: Acts of Sodomy: The Lineage of Gay Desire
in Edward II
Chapter Five: Taking Place: Isaac Julien's Looking for
Langston
Chapter Six: "The Angel of History/Where Does She
Reside?": Barbara Hammer's Nitrate Kisses. Jean
Carlomusto's L Is For The Wav You Look and Sheila
McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing Things
Chapter Seven: To the Ends of History: Ulrike Ottinger's
Freak Orlando and Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Works Cited
Introduction: Queer:
Nations/Theories/Pasts/Futures/Spheres
1
The poster steals two images from James Whale's
Frankenstein: in the first, the monster looms alone and
large, and in the second, below the first, he is
tormented by a torch-bearing Igor. Both images have
achieved a near-transparency as banal signifiers of
"movies" and "monstrosity" at one and the same time.
What may, however, prompt potential viewers of this
poster to a double-take is the text that runs between
the images. In large horror-movie lettering the legend
reads, "Hollywood has created a monster and it's you!"
The tormented monster is given discourse, for once.
"Enough already!," he cries through the convention of a
speech bubble, "Queers will no longer tolerate being
depicted in multi-million dollar films as only murderers
or murdered, rapists or raped, prostitutes or hustlers,
conspirators or objects of conspiracy, mentally ill or
emotionally ill, 'victims' of disease or disease
transmitters!" Then, in bold print, readers are
exhorted: "Shut down Hollywood homophobia, Come to the
Academy Awards 3/3 0/9 2."1
This poster was only one of many forms of discourse
put in circulation during Queer Nation's 1992 protests
of heterosexism in Hollywood, protests that ended in a
demonstration of several hundred people outside the
Dorothy Chandler pavilion where the annual Academy
Awards ceremony was being held. Forged Academy Awards
invitations were widely distributed, which mimicked the
typography and design of real invitations, and which
again called on their invitees to "shut down Hollywood
homophobia"; more mock-horror movie posters announced a
"Night of the Living Queers" at the Academy Awards, and
promised that "queer rage" would be part of the Awards
spectacle in 1992.
After all, 1991 and 1992 were quite spectacular
years for homophobia in Hollywood. Silence of the Lambs
(1991), which won the Oscar for the best film of 1992,
features a transgender serial killer who supposedly
kills women in order to be a woman2 and, during some
screenings, prompted audience members to shout "Kill the
fag!" during a shoot-out between an FBI agent and the
killer in question. Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), which is
based in part on material discredited because of the
very flagrancy of its homophobia, attributes John F.
Kennedy's assassination to a conspiracy led by a motley
group of gay men that includes a wealthy Southern dandy,
a defrocked Catholic priest, and a tough hustler, all of
whom, in one key scene, don Louis Quatorze drag and
sniff poppers as they plot the president's demise.
Basic Instinct (1992), which had just been released at
the time of the protests, presents a group of devious
and deviant women who are all bisexual or lesbian, and,
to boot, either killers or accessories to murder. The
Academy refused to consider lesbian director Jennie
Livingston's acclaimed documentary about queens of color
and vogue balls in Harlem, Paris Is Burning (1991), for
nomination in the category of best documentary— rumor
had it that Academy members had not even bothered to
view Paris Is Burning in its entirety before making
their decision. When the Hollywood films of 1991 and
1992 did not actively foment homophobia, they relegated
queerness and queers to closets. Fried Green Tomatoes
(1992) deals with a romantic friendship between two
women but makes sure that their friendship stays within
the limits of heterosexual family romance. Other films
like Frankie and Johnny (1991) or The Prince of Tides
(1991) or Father of the Bride (1991) feature gay male
characters as variously "amusing" or "freakish" or
momentarily "sympathetic" afterthoughts to the real
plots of heterosexuality. In films such as JFK. Silence
of the Lambs, and Basic Instinct, queers show up again
and again as agents and signifiers of death—
conspirators, assassins, serial killers, murderers— but
the deaths of queers outside its films left Hollywood
unmoved, as the AIDS crisis entered its twelfth year and
still no studio would finance a film about AIDS.3
4
Graphically and eloquently, the Frankenstein
poster, with its legend, "Hollywood has created a
monster and it's you!," stands as a metonymy for the
entire range of politics that made the protests happen.
How are subjects interpellated as "queer" in ways other
than the mute branding of abjection and stigma onto the
body that is taken to be "queer"? What practices of
representation make such actively "queer"
interpellations possible?4 These questions are crucial
to Queer Pasts Now, in so far as I propose to trace
simultaneously histories of representation and
representations of history, the institutions that
determine self-definition, and the difference that
sexual and gender identities can make for those
institutions, representations, and histories.5 Even
though, in the poster, the most immediate cognate for
"queer" seems to be "monster," the selection of
Frankenstein's monster as image is obviously more than
just convenient short-hand for the "monstrous."6
What construct could indeed be more calculatedly
and evidently crafted than Frankenstein's monster, that
pieced together and sewn up creature? In its choice of
image and of text, "Hollywood has created a monster, and
it's you!," the poster recognizes the dominant terms of
"queer" construction. Monsters, like queers, are made
to very specific ends. Specifically, the poster
suggests, such a creation can serve the ends of multi
national capitalism, the "multi-million dollar films"
which make the "culture industry" work to serve the
"straight mind."7 That "straight mind" needs and
profits from the perpetuation of the public image of the
queer monster and the monstrous queer.
The binaries listed by the poster expose the lethal
dialectics of the straight mind in which "queers" are
made to stand in for heterosexual "difference." Thus we
can be at one and the same time masculine and feminine,
aggressors and victims, super- and subhuman, abjectly
sick and contaminatingly seductive. "Queers" have to
represent heterosexual "difference," that is, both
depict and delegate that "difference." In doing so, we
come to be the fascinating site of an "otherness" that
has now been expelled from inside heterosexuality and
which we now spectacularly embody. Our supposed
"difference" guarantees the maintenance of
heterosexuality, which as Monique Wittig argues, can
only conceive of other sexualities in its own displaced
image, so that the straight mind can think of
"homosexuality [as] . . . nothing but heterosexuality"
("The Straight Mind" 1992 28). Utterly other, we are at
the same time granted no real difference at all, so that
the space for subjectivity opened by our "being
depicted," as the poster has it, is a closeting that
manages in advance to appropriate and expropriate any
outside to the straight mind.8 The only way out of
"being depicted," the poster tells us, is to "shut down"
that representation, much as Wittig calls for a
"[breaking] off of the heterosexual contract" (32).
We cannot do so, however, until we have taken on
that difference as the place where our identities are
made, "and it's you!" To respond to the poster, to be
hailed by it effectively, queer subjects must recognize
ourselves in the signifier "queer" and all of that for
which it stands. One of the first manifestos of Queer
Nation makes this strategy explicit in its heading:
"QUEERS READ THIS," the by now well-known "I Hate
Straights" broadsheet reads.9 To read it is, then, in
some sense already to have assumed one's queerness. The
broadsheet asks, "Why Queer?," and answers:
Queer! Ah, do we really have to use
that word? It's trouble. Every gay
person has his or her own take on it.
For some it means strange and eccentric
and kind of mysterious. That's okay; we
like that. But some gay girls and boys
don't. They think they're more normal
than strange.
The broadsheet, on the contrary, invites trouble
instead of refusing it:
Using "queer" is a way of reminding us
how we're seen by the rest of the world.
It's a way of telling ourselves that we
don't have to be witty and charming
people who keep our lives discreet and
marginalized in the straight world.
7
By taking on both word and identity, "we can steal [a
sly and ironic weapon] from the homophobe's hands and
use [it] against him." "Queer" marks the site where
different subjects recognize our own difference ("how
we're seen by the rest of the world") and utilize the
very marker of that difference to assume and to refuse
simultaneously such alterity.
Previously a token of silent shame, a brandmark of
dumb incarnated otherness, "queer" has indeed been taken
on, spoken from, set in motion, quarreled over, and even
institutionalized in quite unforeseen ways over the last
few years. (To some extent, I write after the fact, as
many Queer Nation chapters across the United States and
in Canada have disbanded recently.) How "queer" is
"queer"?10 While "gay and lesbian" may have some
metonymic links with "queer," these words are by no
means synonymous. What makes "queer" different from or
other than "gay and lesbian"? Does "queer" keep the
same meaning in the various sites— the streets, the
clubs, the lecture halls, the bedrooms, the bars, the
talk shows— in which it has been claimed, shouted,
whispered, stickered, deployed? And what, if anything
at all, do the activism of Queer Nation, the irruptions
of the queerzines,11 and the current boom of "queer
theory" in the United States academy share?
8
The manifold, often contradictory, deployments of
"queer1 1 share their contestations over a public sphere
of "queerness" and over the meanings of "queer" in the
realm of the public.12 Social theorists Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge define the "public sphere" as the
"organization of collective experience" (1988 66).
Specifically, Negt and Kluge write:
The public sphere denotes specific
institutions and practices (e.g., public
authority, the press, public opinion,
the public, publicity work, streets, and
public places); it is, however, also a
general horizon of social experience,
the summation of everything that is, in
reality or allegedly, relevant for all
the members of society (1988 66.)
Such institutions and practices, and the "general
horizon of social experience" that they make up, depend
as much on exclusion as comprehension. Negt and Kluge
take cognizance of what the public sphere expels in
order to present itself as representative or "relevant."
Thus, Miriam Hansen notes, Negt and Kluge draw attention
to the ways in which the "very principles of generality
and abstractness" that support pretenses to self-
representation in the bourgeois public sphere in effect
"[sanction] the exclusion of large areas of social
reality, in terms of participants (women, workers,
social dependents) and subject matter (the material
conditions of production and reproduction, including
sexuality and child-rearing)" (Hansen 1991 11). What
Hansen calls the "hierarchic segregation" (1991 14) of
public from private has immediate consequences for the
gendering of the one as "masculine" and the other as
"feminine."13 While Negt and Kluge take stock of the
effects of gender and desire, it is Hansen's sustained
feminist rearticulation of their terms that makes their
work available for a consideration of gender and
sexuality in the cinema in particular as one locus of
the public sphere (Hansen 1983, 1986, and 1991). In
4
particular, her re-articulation may help in thinking
about queers and Hollywood, as well as queers in the
public sphere and in history.
Queers, in their designation as such, are outside
the public sphere, located at a vanishing point where
the too private and the too public are made to converge.
The recent "debate" over "gays-in-the-military," as the
media have dubbed it, for example, stages a massive
public argument over the legitimacy of lesbian, bisexual
and gay identities, only to achieve the confinement of
queers to increasingly "private" spaces. "Don't ask,
don't tell," the military and, by extension, all the
apparatuses of the state say in so many words, after
having relentlessly both asked and coerced to tell.14
In contrast, all acts, activities, and activisms that
have taken place under the self-chosen sign of "queer"
have aimed at the public and the outside. "Being queer
V
10
is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom
to be public, to be just who we are," announces the
"QUEERS READ THIS" broadsheet. Post-Stonewall gay
liberation stressed coming out as a political act, but
"queer" has hyperbolized out as a way of being, an out
ness that impudently intrudes into the "press, public
opinion, . . . streets, and public places" of which Negt
and Kluge write. The by-now familiar "in-vour-face"
style of queer practices challenges "everything that is
. . . relevant for all the members of society" so that
that "general horizon of experience"— from shopping to
public displays of affection— can finally be exposed as
a line of heterosexist presumption.15
While Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman do not
explicitly use the notion of the "public sphere" in
their essay "Queer Nationality," their reading of Queer
Nation's political strategies is both accurate and
acute, and underscores precisely the public character of
queer identities: "QN," write Berlant and Freeman,
"understands the propriety of queerness to be a function
of the diverse spaces in which it aiims to become
explicit, it names multiple local and national publics
. . .: all politics in the Queer Nation are imagined on
the street" (1992 156). Queer Nation's practice of
stickering both the bodies of Queer Nationals and the
various locales occupied by Queer Nationals turns on a
11
tactic of public naming, which transforms what cannot be
uttered into what can be said, named, and proclaimed on
the streets, in broad daylight, in crowds.16
Manifestation and demonstration are key modalities in
queer discourses which want, in all possible senses, to
flaunt it.
Queer Nation's protests against Hollywood should be
understood, then, not simply as a plaint against
intolerable "images" of queers in dominant media, but
also as a bid for the public sphere and a larger
representation. The Academy Awards ceremony has multi
national ambitions and pretensions. It locates itself
in Los Angeles both as a supposed film metropolis and
through a nostalgic metonymic closeness to "Hollywood;"
moreover, it is a profoundly "American" event, a
celebration of the global hegemony of United States
popular culture (with, of course, respectful nods at
meritorious "foreign" films). As almost every
description of the Academy Awards ceremony reiterates,
it is broadcast to more than a billion viewers across
the world.17 Very much at issue, then, in Queer
Nation's protests of the Academy Awards is the putative
consensus over "popular culture," particularly "United
States popular culture," as a horizon of global
experience. The vast amount of international media
coverage which the protests received, with items on
12
nightly United States newscasts, CNN's "Hollywood
Minute," "Sonya Live," Channel 4's "Out On Tuesday"
series, and countless news reports from Hollywood trade
papers to The New York Times, evidences that such an
horizon could be shifted at the particular moment and
its meanings seized and re-aligned. Entertainment
Weekly commented after the protests: "The threat of
disruptions [at the Oscars] threw a spotlight on a
subject [Hollywood homophobia] that needed it, even
though the protests stayed outside" (113 [10 April
1992]: 14).
"Hollywood has created a monster and its you!"— the
cinema as institution is a site where identities are
fabricated and spectators are put in their place.18 But
that site can also be terrain to be liberated, a
darkened interior to be made into an outland or a free
zone. Hansen proposes a political understanding of the
very space of the seemingly mundane movie theater.
"[T]he cinema," she writes, "as an urban public space,
offers a social configuration different from that of
television, which assumes its function in a privatized
environment, i. e. people's living rooms" (1983 59).
She offers a reminder of the potential for resistance in
collective and public spectatorships: "Collective
reception, as classical cinema has taught us to forget,
still holds the potential of communicative interaction,
which is the prerequisite of political practice” (1983
59). While Hansen takes account of the stakes in the
collective reception of cinema, her implication that
'•people's living rooms" and television are simply
private seems too easy, when, for example, one looks at
the conflicts that inevitably follow any queer
representation on television as it appears to irrupt
into family rooms across the United States to trouble
heterosexuality at home.19 In the same year as Queer
Nation's protests, the broadcasting of Tongues Untied.
Marlon Riggs's film about the lives of black gay men,
occasioned considerable homophobic fury. Pat Buchanan
declared Riggs's film to be part of the "blasphemous and
vile" work funded by the National Endowment for the Arts
and Buchanan went so far as to steal footage of a Gay
Pride parade from Tongues Untied for his own televised
campaign advertisement in the 1992 presidential
election.20 The seemingly "privatized environment" of
television forms part of the public sphere in which
battles over meaning and representation can fiercely be
fought.
Hansen allows us to think the cinema as a social
medium when she calls for a theoretical engagement with
"the public dimension of the cinematic institution"
(1991 7); she finds such an engagement in Alexander
Kluge’s work, with the centrality it gives to what Kluge
14
calls the "'film in the spectator's head1" (qtd. in
Hansen 1991 13-4).21 While the "film in the spectator's
head" opens itself to fantasies and desires, it is at
the same time a social and public entity. Hansen
describes the usefulness of the notion:
While the trope of the film in the
spectator's head no doubt encompasses
psychoanalytic dimensions, it is doubly
contextualized both within a particular
public sphere— constituted by an ad hoc
social audience, a particular site,
phase, and mode of exhibition— and by
the public horizon, which is produced
and reproduced, appropriated and
contested, in the cinema as one among a
number of cultural institutions and
practices (1991 14).
When, during its protests, Queer Nation protesters
demanded, with posters and stickers, that "Hollywood
[should] show our true queer lives," they were not naive
believers in the veracity of experiences outside
representation; instead, their slogan challenges the
public institution of the cinema as measured (and found
wanting) precisely against the utopian possibilities of
the "films in queer spectators' heads." When protesters
gave away the ending of Basic Instinct's whodunit by
carrying posters and banners which proclaimed "Catherine
Did It" outside theaters where Basic Instinct was
playing, such a tactic made explicit the heterosexism of
a "public horizon" in which bisexuality and lesbianism
must function as titillating but deadly secrets, as well
as the homophobic hermeneutics which make queerness a
15
commodity in narrative cinema.22 The disruptions of
specific screenings of Basic Instinct played against the
"ad hoc" nature of public film reception, and revealed
what gets taken for granted in such a public sphere,
namely, the uniform heterosexuality of an audience. As
Hansen1s stress on the contingency of such a cinematic
public sphere suggests, that contingency means that
things can always be otherwise, and that the film in our
heads can give the lie to the film on the screen.
Memories, fantasies, experiences and desires make
up the "combat zone between public and private realms"
(Hansen 1983 54), the screening rooms of the films in
spectators' heads. It is no wonder, then, that history
should be implicated here. Protests mean that things
can made to be different in future, even as such
protests are spurred by recollections of oppressions of
the past. Cinema can be made over into a counter-public
sphere for a counter-history.23
The many mobilizations of the signifier "queer"
have inaugurated counter-public spheres and even
counter-counter public spheres in which the
significances let loose by that signifier can be spelled
out, protested, fought over, and always remade. The
"QUEERS READ THIS" broadsheet concedes that "some gay
girls and boys . . . think they're more normal than
straight," and that those "gay girls and boys" cannot
16
see themselves in the signifier "queer." "Queer"
defines itself as much against "gay" as against
"straight" or against "normal." Once again, the
political stakes of representation are at issue; here we
may recall that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out
the double meaning of "representation," that it
designates "proxy and portrait" at once, to which she
adds: "in the act of representing politically, you
actually represent yourself and your constituency in the
portrait sense as well" (1990 108).
On the subject of queer representation, in the
senses outlined by Spivak, Queer Nation/Los Angeles had
a simple practice (but one which was also eminently
theoretical) in which "Queer Nation" was never to be
thought of as a finite group of individuals but as a
borderless nation. There were no "members," only Queer
Nationals, and when Queer Nationals spoke, they spoke
not for the imaginary entity, "Queer Nation," but only
from their own positions as Queer Nationals. No
essential Queer Nation could be hypostasized. The
public sphere of the Queer National was thus always to
be decided, never yet determined.
While a legitimate criticism of Queer Nation has
been its potentially uncritical reliance on tropes of
United States nationalism, the practice of Queer Nation
was then always that no Queer National could speak for
Queer Nation, but only for herself or himself as a Queer
National.24 In other words, delegation was a sort of
synecdoche in which parts never added up to a whole,
just as at demonstrations and protests, no leaders were
ever appointed. To make explicit the theory of this
practice: there are only synecdoches (Queer Nationals)
that can operate together but never stand in
conclusively and definitively for some larger referent
(Queer Nation) since the latter was acknowledged to be a
mobilizing fiction rather than a homogenizing reality.
This was done in particular as a refusal of the most
restrictive notion of all: the concept of a unified "gay
community" against which Queer Nation, in Los Angeles at
least, always defined itself.25
Collective action can be taken on basis of
differences: while in time such differences (between
women and men, between people of color and whites,
between bisexuals and monosexuals, between transgenders
and their opposite26) could no longer hold a coalition
in Queer Nation, that does not invalidate the necessity
of thinking both coalition and difference through a
radical practice of synecdoche.27 It is a politically
useful lesson to learn that we can at best only
represent ourselves and, in the final analysis, the
images we present or the collectivities we may
18
represent, are modest parts of wholes that do not have
to add up to a coherent and unified front.
If anything, the peculiar and specific achievement
of the queerzines has been to break any unified fronts,
even those of Queer Nation, and to shatter any horizon
of consensus over what makes the counter-public sphere
of "queerness," while by the same token, forging other
kinds of solidarities and reconfiguring other group
interests. At least in their initial forms, the
queerzines were actively hostile to "lesbian" and "gay,"
especially insofar as those terms signalled a counter
public sphere already in place. The by now notorious
fourth issue of Bimbox. a queerzine from Toronto, which
has been banned from time to time in the United States,
states the differences between "lesbian," "gay," and
"queer" in no uncertain terms.
"Fact: All victims of gay-bashing deserve what they
get. All victims of queer-bashing are unfortunate cases
of mistaken identity," write the Bimbox collective,
before accusing what they call a "generation of
misogynist capitalist swine clones and half-baked
numbskull granola feminists over 30" of:
[direct responsibility] for segregated
bars, sexism, racism, classism,
separatism, mass complacency and a
complex network of selfish, over
educated, self-appointed rich people
overseeing a vast fake-democratic
lesbian and gay multi-national
bureaucracy that dictates how we think,
19
dress, act, and fuck (Bimbox circa March
1991 n. p.) .
The Bimbox collective offer their own generational
narrative here in which gay men and lesbians of a
particular age have established a "vast fake-democratic
lesbian and gay multi-national bureaucracy"— a quasi
official counter-public sphere that dictates the terms
of "lesbian" or "gay" identity. The Queer Nation
poster, "Hollywood has created a monster," points at the
film industry as a part of the public sphere that
maintains heterosexism, but according to Bimbox. the
very construction of a "lesbian" and "gay" counter
public sphere does nothing but safeguard a host of
oppressions, all allowed to flourish because of the
apathy this "lesbian" and "gay" counter-public sphere
and its self-appointed delegates instills.
Representation is both proxy and portrait, and the
queerzines make explicit the ongoing struggle over the
terms of such representation and the meanings of
constituencies, as they insolently ask, whose
representation is it anyway?28 They set themselves at
odds with the ambitions of many lesbian and gay
community leaders to preside over a homogeneous counter
public sphere of positive images that reassure straights
that queers are not unassimilable as too different, too
queer.29 The homogeneity of that counter-public sphere
tends to be assured even when— or precisely when, Bimbox
20
claims— it can be divided across lines between men and
women as "lesbian" or "gay."
To grasp the disruptive effects of "queer," its
diacritical deployment against "lesbian" and "gay"
should be remembered. In the same fourth issue of
Bimbox. queerzine producers Jena von Brucker and G. B.
Jones even complain about the appropriation of "queer"
by Queer Nation. Von Brucker declares, "We are angry
with those awful people at Queer Nation," to which Jones
adds, "They stole our word. While there is [sic] a few
o.k. individuals at Queer Nation, they are for the most
part clones in queer's clothing" (1991 n.p.). In
response to Queer Nation's yoking of "queer" to
"nation," the queerzine QT announces a Bitch Nation
which arises out of pure hostility to Queer Nation, and
warns, "... don't even bother trying to assimilate
any aspect of Bitch Nation in a futile attempt to make
your paltry careers or lame causes appear more glamorous
or exciting. We won't hesitate to prosecute— and the
Bitch Nation court is now in session!" fOT/Oueer
Terrorist Kollective 2 [1992]: 35).30 In a gesture of
apparently pure negativity, Bitch Nation sets itself— if
an entity called Bitch Nation can be said to have a
"self"— against even the counter-counter public sphere
of Queer Nation. But this gesture should not be
understood as a negative dialectic, all too familiar
21
from theories of the avant-garde, but as a very precise
and specific critique of the terms of co-optation of
"queerness" by a "gay" and "lesbian" counter-public
sphere.31 (Of course, Bitch Nation's terms mean that
any discourse whatsoever on those terms runs the risk of
being subject to "prosecution" by Bitch Nation, and that
includes this writing as well.)
"Queer" has indicated, inaugurated and responded to
a crisis of naming in various and diverse lesbian and
gay communities over the last few years, with other
identities based on genders and sexualities, such as
bisexuals and transgenders, insisting on their right to
name their identities and to assert their presence in
those communities. What may seem like a series of
disagreements over naming at crucial points of
collective action involves a complicated seraiotic
struggle over the social viability of self-definitions
in public and counter-public spheres: take, for example,
the battles over whether or not to include "and
bisexual" in Lesbian and Gay Pride marches, which are
certainly the most public annual manifestations of a
counter-public sphere.32 After a great deal of conflict
and national argument, the 1993 March On Washington
decided to add "bi" to its official title: "1993 March
on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and
Liberation."33 While the 1993 March On Washington has
included a focus on specific issues of bisexual and
transgender politics, as well as anti-racist, anti-
imperialist, and anti-sexist statements, still a
decision has been made to leave "transgender" from the
official title.34 However contested the process of
naming may be in the counter-public sphere of "lesbian,
"gay," "bisexual" and "transgender," at least the mere
contestation of these names creates a certain validity
for the identities they allow.
Since the very early 1980s, moreover, dominant
discourses have sought to link AIDS insistently and
phobically to "perversion," as Cindy Patton points out
(1990 117). With characteristic astuteness, she calls
that link the "queer paradigm" (1990 117). The
deployment of the term "queer" as a political act of
self-naming insists on solidarity within that "queer
paradigm" as the politics of the AIDS crisis forces
links between lesbians and gay men and other socially
stigmatized groups such as transgenders, bisexuals, pre
and post-op transsexuals, injection-drug users and sex
workers. (Of course, these groups are by no means made
up of singly exclusive identities.) While such
solidarities may always have existed in subterranean
forms, the bureaucracies that manage "lesbian" and "gay
representations tend to disavow such connections. On
the contrary, as lesbian historian and feminist, Joan
23
Nestle has struggled to keep alive the memories of queer
communalities and links.35 "Whores, like queers, are
society's dirty joke," she declares, as she asserts her
identity as both: "I am, depending on who is the
accuser, a pornographer, a queer, and a whore" (1987
158-9).
One response to the AIDS crisis has been the
enforcement of demonized categories of identity through
the construction of "risk groups": thus, dominant
discourses have pictured bisexuals as shadowy and
deceitful vectors of disease (Grover 1987 21). Newsweek
claims that "a four-letter word explains why bisexuals
are becoming the ultimate pariahs of the '80s," and the
next sentence of the article obligingly supplies that
mystery word, "AIDS," as if Newsweek readers would not
yet phobically have guessed it (13 July 1987, qtd. in
Danzig 1990 193).36 In the midst of the AIDS crisis,
the temptation to play what Nestle terms "the clean sex
deviant" (1987 123) has dictated many of the responses
of that "vast fake-democratic lesbian and gay multi
national bureaucracy" which Bimbox accuses of aiming to
speak on behalf of queers everywhere.
Against such "clean sex deviancy" the queerzines
parade stigma, four-letter words, and pariah status, and
they make multiple identities possible as sites of
enunciation that resist both heterosexism and the
24
fantasized uniformity of a "gay" and "lesbian"
community. They oppose any uniform "lesbian and gay
community" as a single counter-public sphere, shatter
consensus, cross national borders, and multiply queer
positions. Even grasping them under the single
signifier of "queer" as plural instantiations of that
signifier does their discursive project a disservice.
A comic-book zine simply called Facrz. the title of
which already mocks rather than repeats the privileging
of gay men as subjects of address in that "gay" counter
public sphere, makes this point. It also contemptuously
parodies the appropriation of "queer" as signifier in
the counter-public sphere of the "lesbian and gay
community," now newly renamed "queer." One section of
Fagz, "Flit$," presents what it calls "that ever-lovin'
GAY & LESBIAN 'COMMUNITY* [sic]." Here, "our self-
appointed leaders" are part of a talk show, the
"Genepool Davis Show," with "a special audience composed
entirely of Homosexuals! [sic]." Genepool Davis's show-
-whose name alludes to popular theories of genetic
causes of homosexuality and their currency in "gay and
lesbian communities" as the basis for "gay and lesbian"
self-understanding— deals with, as she says, "Gays and
Lesbians, um 'QUEERS 1" who admit that they "HATE K. D.
Lang." Various "gays" and "lesbians" then attack the K.
D. Lang-dislikers as closet cases who are unwilling to
25
come out and be part of the "community." One such
luminary is "Gay Johnny," an "openly gay Desert Storm
War Hero" who appears to chants of "GAY GAY USA" and "US
GAY," and who shouts, "Why don't you closet cases move
if you don't like K. D. Lang? With attitudes like
yours, I'll never kill . . . I mean SERVE again!"
Genepool Davis's show and the strip end with a fake
advertisement for GOUT magazine, which lists K. D. Lang,
Derek Jarman, Roseanne. Madonna, Almodovar, Erasure,
Phranc, and Sandra Bernhard on its cover (in short, the
entire corpus of commodified "queer" personae in the
public or counter-public sphere). GOUT informs its
prospective readers: "It's what's QUEER to think, what's
QUEER to watch, what's QUEER to wear and what's QUEER to
BUY!!" (GOUT alludes in its title to the glossy
mainstream lesbian and gay magazine Out which appeared
after the collapse of Outweek♦) Aptly providing the
metaphor of a talk show for the public sphere in which
"um, QUEER" is taken up and relentlessly commodified as
"lifestyle," "Flit$" makes very apparent the reliance of
lesbian and gay community formation in the United States
on notions of "American" democratic supremacy with flag,
dollar sign, and military as its chief pointers. The
centerfold of Faqz is a caricature of a monstrous
soldier with the caption "Gay Johnny's Got His Gun,"
which sharply criticizes the willingness of lesbians,
26
gays, and bisexuals to co-operate in the discourse of
"gays-in-the-military" as if settling for "inclusion" in
the military will somehow bestow respectability and
power in national and public arenas.37
"Queer" indeed is hardly a single and overarching
term: the zines take up any number of stigmatized terms
for self-identification.38 "Dyke," "nellie," "trannie,"
"fag," "swinger," "whore," "switch-hitter," "JD
(juvenile delinquent)," "queen," "pervert," "brat," and
"bitch" are scattered through their pages, from JDs.
Bimbox. OT. and Frighten the Horses, which speak to all
kinds of queers, to Loqomotive. Anything That Moves and
Bi-Girls1 World, for bisexuals, to Venus. Draqazine and
Dragnet for transgenders, to A Taste Of Latex for the
"sexually disenfranchised," that is, multiple interfaces
of genders and sexualities, from fetish and SM to
bisexuals, transgenders, gay men and lesbians. Thing
speaks to queers of color. Bad Attitude, its title
already quite telling, provides lesbian porn, as does
Ouim. from England, while Black Lace addresses lesbians
of color. Fertile La Tovah Jackson primarily provides a
mouthpiece for self-styled "blacktress," Vaginal Cream
Davis. Whorezine is produced by and for sex workers.
Zines such as Infected Faggot, for HIV-positive faggots,
and Diseased Pariah News, for anyone who is HIV-
positive, resist both the AIDS-phobic vision of people
27
with AIDS as silent and passive "sufferers" or "victims"
and "enlightened" versions of AIDS as a chronic
manageable condition. Hence, DPN has as its tagline,
"Kiss Me, I'm a Diseased Pariah!," accompanied by a
ratty Mickey Mouse.
While Berlant and Freeman give a seductive reading
of the queerzines in terms of "their
counterproductivitv" (176, Berlant and Freeman's
emphasis) and their "(widening of] the semantic field of
sexual description" (1992 176-7), they neglect to
account for the work of the zines in the context of the
AIDS crisis— that many provide vital safer sex
information for practicing perverts— and that almost all
the zines not only widen a semantic field, but actively
implant perversions.39 Bi-Girls' World, for example,
may be subtitled "Polymorphous!v Perverse". but these
t
are polymorphous perverts with access to Xerox machines
and designs on the socio-symbolic order.40 Here we may
recall Judith Butler's salutary criticism of attempts to
present any number of sexualities as before or outside
or on the borders of a heterosexual socio-symbolic
order; for example she comments on how "culture in no
way postdates the bisexuality [or any of the sexualities
it would render unintelligible] that it purports to
repress" (1992 54).
From Berlant and Freeman's account of the zines,
and their supposed "aggressive naming and negation of
their own audience" (177), the reader with no previous
knowledge of the zines may well be left to imagine that
zines do little more than recycle the well-rehearsed
avant-garde performance of insulting the audience (see
also Berlant and Freeman 178). Berlant and Freeman
implicitly present the zines as semioclastic to the
point of incoherence, barely legible within a socio
symbol ic order. Such a presentation not only
underwrites an insidious generational narrative of the
producers of the zines as vounq (read: "immature" and
"pre-symbolic"), but also domesticates and canonizes the
zines by reading them through a corpus of tactics that
have very much been part of modernist aesthetics.41
A queerzine can be made, as Dennis Cooper puts it,
by "any pissed-off queer with access to a xerox machine"
("Queercore," Village Voice 30 June 1992 31). As such,
even if only to challenge and fracture it, the zines
offer an access to the public sphere that has
historically been denied the sexually dissident and the
otherwise gendered. The question of the public sphere
and its horizons also brings with it issues of
technologies and means of production and reproduction.
Sadie Benning, who uses a Fischer-Price XPL video camera
to forge a space for herself as a teenage lesbian (now
nineteen years old), is exemplary in this regard. If
women have been excluded from the means of production,
if lesbians have been rendered invisible by both sexism
and homophobia, Benning's work with the apparently
simplest of video technologies resolves such exclusion
and invisibility by seizing on whatever technology is at
hand, just as the zines have grasped Xerox and desktop
copying. The title of one of Benning's videos, If Every
Girl Had A Diary (1991), evokes self-writing as a
subjunctive possibility that is realized by Benning's
own practice of diaristic video pieces.
The work of two lesbian photographers, Lynette
Molnar and Deborah Bright, make explicit further
strategies for representation in the public or counter
public spheres. Molnar's photographic collages,
Familiar Names and Not-So-Familiar Faces, in which the
image of a kissing and embracing lesbian couple is cut
and pasted into various advertisements and publicity
photographs intervenes in a public horizon of
experience, and shows up what cannot be shown. She
cites as the impetus behind the collages her outrage at
David Ruben's sex manual, Everything You Ever Wanted To
Know About Sex (unsurprisingly, for heterosexuals) in
which he writes that "[homosexuals] have a compulsion to
flaunt their sex in public" (qtd. in Molnar and
Thornburg, Stolen Glances 1991 120). Taking Ruben at
his word, Molnar1s collages envisage what such
"flaunting" would look like. Bright's Dream Girls
photomontage series takes us back to where we began:
classic Hollywood. Only this time, the gender of the
monster, and indeed its very monstrosity, have undergone
a metamorphosis, because Bright takes production stills
from 50s and 60s Hollywood films and pastes her own
lesbian image into the narrative tableaux. She writes,
"The impulse for a lesbian photomonteur (menteur) to
paste (not suture, please) her constructed butch-girl
self-image into conventional heterosexual narrative
stills from old Hollywood movies requires no elaborate
explanation" (Stolen Glances 1991 151).42 Still, the
photomenteur (or mervteuse43) uses the camera to lie, as
she seems to record what was never there. But it is
this lie that gives the lie to a heterosexuality as the
sole possibility of private made public in stills of
love and romance. As queers we may well have to "paste"
ourselves into histories, narratives, romances, and
spheres that seem to hold no place for us, that do not
"suture" us seamlessly into their mise-en-scenes.
With the slight mismatch that Bright proposes
between the theory of "sutures" or the sutures of
"theory" and the rougher and cruder pasting of queer
"self-images," another arena in which the signifier
"queer" has mapped out a discursive terrain comes into
31
view: what has been called "queer theory" in the last
three years, specifically and primarily in the United
States academy. "Queer theory" in and of itself forms
part of a public and counter-public sphere. Michael
Warner enthuses about the rise of "queer theory" in the
United States academy— it is "nothing if not hot," he
breathlessly tells readers of The Voice Literary
Supplement— and he adds that in the English Department
of Rutgers, "where graduate students take exams in a
theory or method of their choice, more students are
choosing queer theory this year [1992] than Marxism and
deconstruction combined" ("From Queer To Eternity," VLS
106 [June 1992]: 18). The unexamined maintenance of
disciplinarity-as-usual (exams, "theory," "method"), the
fiction of voluntarism (exams in the area of one's
"choice"), and the opposition of "queer theory" to
"Marxism" and "deconstruction" (presumably "hot" no
longer) in Warner's enthusiastic description add up,
despite Warner's enthusiasm, to a rather bleak picture
of an academy which can accommodate "queer theory"
within the confines of an already in place horizon of
expectations.
In the following discussion of some symptomatic
moments in texts that present themselves either
explicitly or implicitly as theorizing "queer
identities," I want to tease out why these very texts
32
seem to have difficulties in grasping the politics
signalled by "queerness." I must emphasize that what
perturbs me is the extent to which "queer theory" can
misrecognize its own social productivity even as it
tries to arbitrate the field of social meanings as
cultural criticism. "Queer theory" may come to take
meanings for granted that in other areas of queer public
or counter-public spheres are still open to negotiation.
The ways in which "queer theory" has dealt with
identities that cannot neatly be folded back into the
triumvirate of "lesbian," "gay," and the "closet" in
particular may be require a caution.
The self-identified "Queer Theory" issue of
differences is the occasion of one of the very first
formal academic inscriptions of "queer" (1991). Teresa
de Lauretis's introduction deserves close scrutiny,
because it provides a record of how "queer" has come to
be understood in the United States academy as that
academy tries to make sense of its outside/in.44 De
Lauretis begins by noting not so much the differences
between queers and gay men and lesbians, as between
lesbians and gay men. "The fact of the matter is, most
of us, lesbians and gay men, do not know much about one
another’s sexual history, experience, fantasies, desire,
or modes of theorizing" (viii), she writes. She
comments on the very real inequities of gender that have
33
separated lesbians from gay men (v-viii), and that have
to do with sexism and the relative— if still limited—
access of gay men to cultural production that has been
denied lesbians (vi-vii). Further, de Lauretis is
admirably alert to the divisions that separate white
lesbians and gay men from gay men and lesbians of color,
which she calls "the severe problem of institutional
access" brought about by racism (ix-xi).
Against such separations, for de Lauretis, the
signifier "queer" heralds a way of "[rethinking] the
sexual in new ways, else-where and other-wise" (xvi),
which is not some utopia still to be anticipated but is
already brought about in the work of the very essays in
the collection at hand, she suggests (xvi). She takes
care to stress that the signifier "queer" nevertheless
does not sweep away the oppressions of sexism and racism
under a blanketing collectivity of "queerness." Rather,
"queer" provides a point of departure to mobilize and
reconfigure differences of gender and race with
sexuality in unforeseen and potentially liberatory
ways.45
Far from gathering all differences together under
"queer," de Lauretis recognizes the separation of
"lesbian" from "gay" in order to question it. She
entitles a section of her introduction "The Gay/Lesbian
Bar: A Theoretical Joint?" (iv), as if to imply that the
overarching use of "queer" will work through and perhaps
even cross that "bar," in theory at least. Thus de
Lauretis asserts that "the term 'queer,• juxtaposed to
the lesbian and gay' of the subtitle, is intended to
mark a certain critical distance from the latter, by now
established and often convenient, formula" (iv). The
articulation of "queer" can hence begin to open that
"else-where" and "other-wise" as a "critical distance"
in the here and now, which seems reasonable enough, if a
little vague.
But for all de Lauretis's theoretical optimism and
political clear-sightedness, a footnote to her
introduction already gives a hint of a particularly
dismaying future for "queer theory." In this footnote,
she accounts specifically for her choice of "the term
'queer'" (xvii): she explains that "[it] was suggested
to me by a conference in which I had participated ..."
(xvii). If the note is intended to stabilize or at
least gloss the tricky term "queer," de Lauretis seems
unsure whether it has accomplished that task, so she
says a little more on the subject: "My 'queer,' however,
had no relation to the Queer Nation group, of whose
existence I was ignorant at the time" (xvii). On the
subject of de Lauretis's "queer" ("my queer,'" as she
says), an immediate response is to ask the question of
ownership, already posed earlier by queerzines and their
35
representations: whose "queer" is it anyway? The
ownership of a term, its control and definition, and its
dual tasks of delegation and depiction are all already
in place here at the outset of "queer theory," and not
necessarily in a way that heeds the conditions of that
ownership.
At stake is not simply de Lauretis's knowledge or
ignorance of Queer Nation. What does count is the
ringing disavowal with which she inaugurates "queer
theory" when she writes dismissively, "As the essays [in
differences' ! will show, there is in fact very little in
common between Queer Nation and this queer theory"
(xvii). This queer theory, that Queer Nation, my queer,
theirs: a process of adjudication has already begun to
determine the "very little in common between." as it
divides the labor up between bodies and ideas, direct
action and the work of the academy— "conferences" versus
"the streets," "theory" and "academics" versus
"collectivities" and "practice."
My quarrel with de Lauretis over this footnote has
not so much to do with siding with one set of these
terms over the other, although certainly, it is hard to
sympathize with the defensively self-sustaining circuit
of professionalism that leads de Lauretis from an
encounter with "queer" at one academic conference to the
organization of another. Unfortunately, the contexts in
36
which most "queers" come across the word first and are
forced to recognize themselves in it are considerably
more violent and painful than the round of academic
conference-going, so that the self-chosen flaunting of
the term of stigma possesses a force which de Lauretis
has already defused.46
Most particularly, I wish to inquire why the binary
"queer theory" versus "Queer Nation" is inscribed
precisely in and through theoretical work that should at
least notice, if not take stock of, such inscription.47
And while I may be making much of what is, after all,
nothing more than a footnote, this footnote seems to
prefigure all too clearly the history of "queer theory"
in the United States academy. In its first official
academic appearance in differences. "queer" not only co-
stars with "theory" but shares the billing with "Lesbian
and Gay Sexualities." What's in a name? If the point
here is to interrogate the division of "lesbian and
gay," then why reinstate them in a subtitle? "Queer" is
translated into "lesbian and gay" while "theory" is
juxtaposed with "sexualities." Does this last
juxtaposition signal equivalence or opposition? The
citation from de Lauretis with which I began, states
simply, as fait accompli, that "the fact of the matter
is, most of us, lesbians and gay men, do not know much
about one another's sexual history" (viii). Who is this
37
comfortably assumed "most of us," other than "lesbians
and gay men"?
De Lauretis's worries about the differences between
lesbians and gay men thus serve to fix or reify the very
categories of "lesbian" and "gay male" as the primary
referent for "queer." It is not that her concerns about
those differences are unfounded, or that very real
differences do not exist between lesbians and gay men,
or even that some other, undefined term is preferable to
"lesbian" and "gay." In understanding "queer" as
exclusively "lesbian and gay" even as she purports to be
taking a distance from the latter terms, she is already
relegating entire categories of disenfranchised
sexualities and subjectivities that are neither
heterosexual nor "lesbian" and "gay male" to the
margins, and perhaps even thinks them out of existence.
She does mention, en passant, what she calls "the
current trend (at least on my campus) toward Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning' solidarity" (vi): are we
to infer that this "current trend" is a "passing phase,"
and will not last, and that "lesbians" and "gay men"
will grow out of it?
All the more disturbing that de Lauretis should do
this at the exact historic moment when "queer"
solidarities— and not just between "lesbians" and "gay
men"— become politically and socially powerful.48
Moreover, she does this at a moment when "queer" as a
signifier mobilizes itself against "lesbian" and "gay"—
as Bimbox, for example, demonstrates, at a great deal
more than the judicious "critical distance" (iv) of
which de Lauretis writes. How does the "mistaken
identity" by which "queers" get taken for "lesbians" and
"gay," according to the Bimbox collective, relate to de
Lauretis's "queer theory"? Is "queer theory" a reversed
case of "mistaken identity" in which "lesbian and gay"
get taken for "queer"?
Like the Bimbox collective, the presumed
theoretically lacking "Queer Nation group" which de
Lauretis dismisses and with which "queer theory" from
its very inception would have no truck, addressed
"queers of all sexual persuasions," and recognized that
there has been a history of disavowal ("very little in
common") by lesbian and gay male communities of groups
and identities deemed inviable or unacceptable, such as
bisexuals and transgenders. In its own way, Queer
Nation also tried to account for such disavowals in
class terms: the disavowal of groups like bisexuals and
transgenders in particular has historically enabled a
certain limited success— a "passing"— by gay men and
lesbians into the terms of heterosexist acceptability
vehemently denounced by, for example, the Bimbox
collective.49
At the very moment that "queer theory" offers
itself as a resolution of some gaps and oppositions, it
institutes others in its pressing of "queer" into
"lesbian and gay sexualities." While the latter plural
may promise that there are many different and
potentially queer ways of being "gay" or (and?)
"lesbian," it works out in effect as simple addition:
one plus one equals two, or, "lesbian sexuality" plus
"gay sexuality" equals "sexualities" (or, monosexuality
and gender times two). Consider for a moment, de
Lauretis's comfortable assumption that "most of us" are
"lesbians and gay men": bisexuals and transgenders are
evidently not "us," and are thus expelled in advance
from the promised land of "queer theory." Again, whose
"queer theory" is it anyway?
That this can hardly be an innocent oversight, like
de Lauretis's professed ignorance of Queer Nation,
becomes clear when we consider the history of naming in
queer communities: the struggle over what names we are
called and give ourselves, and how those names create
social-symbolic spaces for desires and identities has
been a central part of the history of "homosexuality."50
Queers of all kinds have always been forcibly inducted
into semiosis. "Theory," Gayatri Spivak reminds us,
"always norms practice" (1990 44), so that "theory" and
"practice" are at all times inseparably caught up in
40
each other. The notion that there can be a space of
"theory" cleansed of the messiness of "practice" is just
as disingenuous, in other words, as the assumption that
"practice" knows no "theory."
To reverse the relation between "theory" and
"practice" or between "metalanguage" and "object-
language" for once: what can the queerzines tell us
about Eve Sedgwick's highly influential model of the
social understandings of non-heterosexual identities?
According to Sedgwick, crossings of the twin axes of
gender and sexuality with two further axes, the
"separatist" or "minoritizing" and the "integrative" or
"majoritizing" can account for various versions of why
people aren't heterosexual, from lesbian separatism
through theories of the third sex (Sedgwick 1989 58, see
also Sedgwick 1990 13). While Sedgwick's model has its
uses, it also performs a certain regulatory function of
its own as an updated Kinsey scale for humanities-based
academics. The model is silent on the subject of
bisexuals and transgenders, except as a vague "bisexual
potential" under integrative/majoritizing definitions of
sexuality (1989 58), while transgenders do not feature
at all, unless virtually under the
integrative/majoritizing axis of gender (1989 58): such
positioning (or more precisely, its lack) does an
injustice to the complexities of transgender sexualities
41
and bisexual genders. Many of the zines forge specific
discourses for transgenders and bisexuals, just as Queer
Nation was open to "queers of all sexual persuasions.1,51
In particular, the zines do their work as a productive
and political scrambling of a model like Sedgwick's (or
any model), and are neither minoritizing nor
majoritizing but actively proliferating.
A more recent example of how highly overdetermined
binaries may be re-inscribed through criticism that
professes to undo them may be found in Elizabeth Young's
essay, "The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of
Feminist Theory." Young is scrupulous and apparently
committed to both feminist and queer theories as she
investigates how The Silence of the Lambs seems to pit
women and queers against each other. But there is
trouble at the very start of Young's essay, when she
observes that the film has supposedly forced attempts to
"assess its adherence to political standards for the
depiction of women and gay men" (1991 6). Although she
grants that "this critical approach— along with the
political protests it gives rise to— is strategically
imperative, and will remain so for the foreseeable
future" (6), her notion of some particular "adherence to
political standards" is already suspect. It allows the
reader to assume that somehow only certain
representations "[adhere]" to "political standards," an
assumption that leaves the terrain of representation as
such seemingly open and uncontested. In truth, protests
of and against representations simply make visible the
limits of the consensus that covers over such adherence-
as-usual.
Having granted somewhat grudgingly that "political
protests" may have necessity, Young refers to, without
directly naming, Queer Nation's protests of Hollywood
heterosexism. Now the kinds of dichotomies at work in
de Lauretis's dismissal of Queer Nation reverberate in
Young's essay as well:
But such an assessment [of political
standards] can ultimately offer only an
inadequate "thumbs up, thumbs down"
rating. This approach not only reduces
cultural analysis to a system of score-
keeping, but cannot find common ground
with aesthetic evaluations, as
dramatized recently in the tableau
offered bv the Academy Awards, where the
main stage featured the film's artistic
triumph in every major award category,
while activists protested outside (6, my
emphasis).
If the always shaky category of the "artistic" (as in
"artistic triumph") is to be invoked, Academy Awards may
not be the surest indices of such "triumph." A more
pressing question, however, concerns whose gaze
detachedly surveys this "tableau," if not that of
armchair cultural analyst who, with one eye on the
screen of the word processor and the other on the
Oscarcast, has the luxury of savoring "aesthetic
43
evaluations" while cautiously sympathizing with the
anonymous "activists" and their "[protest]"? Young’s
middle ground, which is neither outside with Queer
Nation nor inside with the Academy, turns out to be safe
and familiar liberal territory.
The split between "queer theory" and "Queer
Nation," however those terms are to be understood
discursively, gets written into "queer theory" without
much reflection. In its inscription, "queer theory"
divides and elides in other ways as well. The
collocation of "queer" with "theory" already forms part
of an attempt to legitimate the unruly significance of
"queer": after all, "theory" commands a certain respect
in the humanities. But what, for instance, is the
import of de Lauretis's implicit definition, even at a
distance, of "queer" as "lesbian and gay" and how does
such a definition necessitate the separation of one kind
of "queer" ("theory") from another ("Nation")? Simply
tracing how certain "queer theorists" have responded— or
not— to bi- and trans-issues can tell us a great deal
about the limits of academic discourse and the
unacknowledged separations it brings into effect and
perpetuates. Who is acceptable? And who is just too
queer even for queer theory?
Consider the brief and inauspicious history of the
Annual Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies Conference,
since, as we have begun to see, the institution of the
"academy" can itself be involved in material politics at
the very moment when it sets itself beyond or above the
politics of everyday life. At Rutgers University in
1991 the organizers of the Third Annual decided to drop
"and bisexual," which had been part of the official
conference title the previous time.52 What does this
signify: theory or practice? Or just biphobia? One of
the reasons offered for the jettisoning of "and
bisexual" was that "bisexuals had not produced good
enough theory."53 "Theory" as pretext and alibi can
evidently justify oppressive and elitist practice.
Published as Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories. Gav
Theories. some of the proceedings of the previous yearfs
Annual Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies Conference,
inquires on its back cover: "what does it mean to say
someone is gay? A dyke? A queen? Queer?" "Queer" is
left dangling, however; Inside/Out dares not as yet
speak its "queer" name in either title or subtitle. In
her introduction to this collection Diana Fuss muses on
Inside/Out. and perhaps anticipates, in what she does,
the elision of "and bisexual" in the year to come:
Where, exactly, in this borderline
sexual economy, does the one identity
leave off and the other begin? And what
gets left out of the inside/outside,
heterosexual/homosexual opposition, an
opposition which could at least
plausibly be said to secure its own
inviolable dialectical structure only by
assimilating and internalizing other
sexualities (bisexuality, transvestism,
transsexualism . . . ) to its own rigid
polar logic? ("Inside/Out" 1991 2).
While Fuss may trot out the commonplaces of a certain
kind of "theory," her simple location of "bisexuality,
transvestism, transsexualism" in a parenthesis that
cordons them off from the inside/out of
heterosexual/homosexual neither displaces nor troubles
the "rigid polar logic" she identifies.
In its entirety the collection Inside/Out
underscores a sense that bisexual and transgender
identities are "out" rather than "in." In the entire
volume, Carole-Anne Tyler's violently transphobic (and
sometimes straightforwardly homophobic) "Boys Will Be
Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag" is the single sustained
discussion of transgender issues. Tyler ranges
indiscriminately across all kinds of transgender images
only to find that they all amount to the same "phallic
narcissism," a diagnosis (or accusation) which she
reiterates throughout her essay (1991 33, 47, 51). "The
irony in mimicry and camp," concludes Tyler, "therefore,
is all too often at the other's expense, a defense
against castration anxiety " (62).54
It is not possible to take exact issue with the
details of Tyler's argument here, all the more so since
Tyler has a certain knack for condensation and
homogenization. She can collapse socially and
46
historically quite distinct artifacts, such as the
psychoanalytic version of "transsexualism," a pop song
from the 1960s by a straight group like the Kinks, a
John Waters film, a novel by John Rechy, or a theory
proposed by Judith Butler, as if they, too, all amounted
to the same: the "truth" about drag. What does,
nonetheless, emerge unmistakably from the essay is
Tyler's utter lack of engagement with and indifference
to transgender persons as social subjects: they cannot
speak for themselves and only enter her essay through
their representations bv others. (Moreover, as her
subtitle indicates, Tyler has already assimilated
transgender identities to "gay drag.") That this should
be something of a political problem never seems to occur
to Tyler, and the reader may well be left to wonder what
phantasms of hostility, what specific mechanisms of
counter-transference, compel a theorist so desperately
to wish to unmask the supposedly phallic impostures of
queers, who are one and all in Tyler's view pathetic
dupes of their "phallic narcissism" which never, even
for a second, takes in the vigilant Tyler. "Disrupted
by camp, the camp moment does not last, misrecognition
follows upon recognition" (63), writes Tyler, as she
ends her essay by exposing the sorry "misrecognitions"
of drag and muscle queens alike.55
i
47
"Transvestism," of course, is a favorite object of
investigation in the academy, yet one of the most
curious and depressing aspects of such investigation is
the vanishing effect it achieves, in which the more
"transvestism" gets scrutinized, the less it exists as
practice and identity. There seems almost to be some
unexamined correlation between the hypervisibility of
"theories" of "transvestism" and the invisibility of
transgender persons within the academy. Marjorie
Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural
Anxiety. as the cross-over success of "queer theory,"
seems a great deal more sympathetic to transgender
people than Tyler's essay does. Yet Garber states the
difference between previous approaches to the analysis
of cross-dressing and her own as follows: "cross-
dressing, or transvestism, is looked through rather than
at in critical and cultural analyses" (1992 389): in
other words, Garber intends to look at and not, as
others do, through. While Garber's wish not to overlook
the specificity of transgender practices should be
applauded, her substitution of "looking through" with
"looking at" is not much of an improvement:56 it still
leaves— again without much of a second thought— the
transgender as obiect and not subject. Such
objectification seems central to Garber's work which
deals with what she calls "the transvestite effect" in
48
which "the transvestite is there and gone at once" (37).
What the place for transgender subjectivities would be,
Vested Interests cannot say once in the course of its
almost four hundred pages.57
"Theory" neither simply describes nor remains
"academic"; it is a practice. It can actively and
materially deny transgenders subjectivity, rendering
them "there and gone," as Garber puts it, sadly, less
descriptively than performatively. For Garber, the
transvestite "indicates a category crisis elsewhere"
(1992 17). What happens when that elsewhere is suddenly
here (on the doorsteps of the academy) can be gathered
from the following anecdote, one which perhaps all too
legibly exposes the vested interests of some academics
in transvestites as special effects, never to be dealt
with as social and political subjects. A call had been
issued for transgenders to participate in the planning
meetings for the 1993 Fourth Annual Lesbian and Gay
Conference to be held in San Francisco, so that the
conference would be more "community-based" and
"inclusive." When transgender lesbian activist and
cultural worker Kate Bornstein arrived, she simply asked
what the position of the conference organizers on
transgender persons would be: whether transgenders were
to be there as participants and panelists, or whether
they would be there as laborers, to send out fliers and
49
make practical arrangements. The organizers were unable
to give a clear answer (too busy looking at, perhaps?).
Such silences may well have to do with the divisions of
labor set up by "queer theory."58
For what little autobiography is worth: in 1992,
speaking at the Fourth Annual Sager Symposium in
Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies, I gave a paper on
the frequent heterosexist representations of bisexuals
and transgenders as little more than ruptures in the
domain of the socio-symbolic, and the semiotic
strategies that groups like Queer Nation use to
counteract such exclusion (for example, stickers that
read "... and bisexual/GET USED TO IT" and "BI
POWER/TRANS POWER"). Afterwards, I was told by another
conference participant that, while she had "enjoyed" my
paper, she still thought that "bisexuals were people who
could not make up their minds." During the final
plenary session, an "openly gay man" stood up to say
that "nellie faggots" (his precise words) like myself
and another participant (a self-identified bisexual,
like me) did not "represent" him.59 Whose
representation is it anyway?
How rapidly and stultifyingly the sphere of "queer
theory" can shrink is evidenced when it circles back to
de Lauretis in a recent attack launched by Cheryl Kader
and Thomas Piontek on the use of "queer" in the
50
differences introduction. Kader and Piontek assert that
"queer" has become "just as established' and
overworked" as "lesbian and gay" (1992 7) and list what
they purport to be a series of collocations in which de
Lauretis implies that "queer" can mobilize the other
term to which it is joined: "queer theory, queer
studies, queer sex, Queer Nation" (7). True enough,
"queer" can become just as institutionalized as "lesbian
and gay," particularly through analysis like Kader and
Piontek's, and especially when an implicit call for some
return to a less vexed "lesbian and gay" is being made.
Mysteriously, they appear to attribute such a mobilizing
vision of "queer" directly to de Lauretis; as far as
"Queer Nation" and de Lauretis go, it is clear that
Kader and Piontek do not read footnotes. They proceed
to say that the deployment of "queer" erases lesbian
specificity and offers no "magical resolution to the
issue of gender, and the issue of race" (8), a quotation
they derive from Simon Watney via his interview with
Stuart Marshall in the film. Over Our Dead Bodies.60
(Marshall's film itself offers a somewhat more
complicated analysis of gender and race, especially in
its representation of Queer Nation/San Francisco and New
York, but Kader and Piontek only take notes, it would
seem, when known theorists talk.)
51
To make their point that the struggle over "queer"
nomenclature frames a debate between white men, Piontek
and Kader cite an advertisement from The Advocate, in
which the same white male face appears, once as "gay"
(neat hairstyle), and once as "queer" (bandanna,
earring); the two faces confront each other across a
page, seemingly engaged in a shouting match. The
caption states: "There is a debate going on in our
community. Read about it in The Advocate." Now The
Advocate has frequently been attacked as a mainstream
and conservative gay publication, by, amongst others,
the Bimbox collective. In the already cited fourth
issue of Bimbox. a column appeared called the "inning
list, a.k.a. People We’d Like to Bash Over the head With
a Lead Pipe" (1991, n.p., "inning" as opposed to
"outing") which included the entire staff of The
Advocate by individual name. Such a gesture on the part
of Bimbox calls "gay community" consensus and its work
of representation— the eponymous "advocate" as
spokesman— into question. All the more inexplicable
then, that Kader and Piontek can fix The Advocate with a
single reference as "queer," and dismiss "queer" as such
accordingly. Granted, no one word will "[magically
resolve] the issue of gender, and the issue of race":
perhaps part of the challenge is to stop thinking of
"gender" and "race" as single "issues" to be addressed
52
or resolved and to concentrate instead on the tasks of
anti-sexism and anti-racism.
What is finally most disturbing in Kader and
Piontek's writing is its potential amnesia, its
consignment to oblivion of a complex history of
deployment of "queer": an academic disagreement with de
Lauretis, a quotation from Simon Watney, and an ad for
The Advocate are all that is left, as far as Kader and
Piontek are concerned, of years of extremely hard-fought
discursive battles in various communities in which the
signifier has been put in action. But even to confine
"queer" to those battles does its histories, which reach
back much further, an injustice. Writing as a lesbian
and a feminist, Joan Nestle describes "the first layer
of my history: the memory of being a queer, my
inheritance from the fifties" (1987 111). She states,
"when transvestites and transsexuals are beaten by the
police, . . . this history calls me to action. I cannot
turn away from it. My roots lie in the history of a
people who were called freaks" (112). Samuel Delany
writes of his experience as a black gay man (at that
time identifying as a bisexual) in the 1950s, and
suggests that at that time "queer" was the word he "used
and thought with," unlike "gay" (The Motion of Light in
Water 1987 288). Nestle and Delany's memories, the
pasts and struggles of countless freaks, deviants,
53
trannies, bulldykes, stone butches, nellies, poofs, and
passing women, are forgotten when "queer" turns its back
on queer histories.61
******
JDs. a queerzine from Canada, teases out a history in
which "punk" and "faggot" are found to share an
etymology. G. B. Jones and Bruce Labruce claim that
"punk" is "also an archaic word for dried wood used for
tinder" and that this is "the original meaning of faggot
as well" (1991 27).62 Jones and Labruce come up with a
miniature history in which sexual dissidence is part of
heresy, witchcraft, and all kinds of insurrection:
Homosexuals, witches, criminals, all
denounced as enemies of the state, were
once burned at the stake. The word for
the material used to set them on fire
became another name for the victims
themselves. It's no accident that
"punk" and "faggot" have a similar root.
Whaddayaknow. Punks are fags, too.
Better start worrying now (1991 27).
In Jones and Labruce's folk etymology, "punk" and
"faggot" are metonymies that bear in themselves complex
recollections of resistance, torture, and martyrdom.
Following JDs and its mock-etymological ruminations
on "punk" and "faggot" to "queer," one finds in as
authoritative a text as the OED that among its
definitions for "queer" ("strange, odd, eccentric,"
54
"bad, worthless" in "thieves' cant" and, of course,
"homosexual") the OED gives "of coins or banknotes:
counterfeit, forged" (2nd ed. 1989). It is tempting to
engage in some false speculation and to suggest that a
phrase such as "gueer as a three dollar bill" promises a
false and readily available symbolic currency, a forged
cultural and historic capital that nevertheless can
circulate everywhere in the public sphere.63
My work itself, of course, does not stand outside,
but is inscribed within the field now publicly
demarcated as "queer theory." The specific history of
Queer Pasts Now takes its own place within the larger
histories of both the rise and (temporary?) decline of
queer activisms and the success of queer theory. What
began, in my case, as another version of the by now
well-worn Foucauldian coming-out story of the emergence
of modern "homosexualities" at the turn of the century,
seemed to be overtaken by a rush of events, both through
an involvement, in whatever limited a way, in queer
politics in Los Angeles, and through the veritable
explosion of essays, journals, books, courses and
conferences on anything "queer." (I can recall, in
1991, having to justify my use of that signifier— on a
T-shirt— during a question and answer session at one
conference; by 1993, the term has achieved, for better
or worse, a degree of ordinariness and transparency.)
The present project of Queer Pasts Now is quite
modest: to give an account of how films made by
primarily gay and lesbian directors in the last few
years have opened up counter-histories and counter
public spheres for a variety of queer spectators. While
the signifier "queer" is central to my enterprise, it is
by no means the only one that can account for the
achievements of these films. The lesbian and gay— but
also transgender and bisexual— cinema of Ulrike
Ottinger, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Tom Kalin, Barbara
Hammer, Jean Carlomusto, and Sheila McLaughlin has
foregrounded history, less as the realm of an ultimate
appeal to truth than as a reserve of queer cultural
capital to be made available through technologies of
electronic reproduction.
In terms of the cinema as a public sphere where
"history" gets enunciated, Hansen makes use of the
distinction between histoire and discours.64 According
to this distinction, histoire is a form of utterance
which does not mark its own enunciation, and which
presents itself as unmarked while it is being
enunciated, so that the past it represents appears
unchangeable, done, once and for all, while discours
acknowledges the conditions of its utterance (Hansen
1983 64). Hansen argues that while the seeming "absence
of an enunciating subject is ideological," simply
56
noticing that absence is not enough, since that leaves
unanswered the question of how "historical individuals"
make and tell their histories (64).
Perhaps— and such is the hypothesis of Queer Pasts
Now— queers forge their histories, and find them
wherever they can make them up. Such a forging is not
facile but comes from a desperate and painful struggle
with realities of powerlessness and disenfranchisement,
whether that be Jarman's position as a gay man living
with AIDS, Ottinger and Hammer's lesbianisms, or
Julien's identity as a black gay man, confronting both
racism, homophobia, and the ruins of diasporal culture.
Queer Pasts Now responds to their various appeals to the
past and the different ways in which they make history
both current and a currency in their work.
The first chapter of Queer Pasts Now interrogates
the metaphor of reproduction: does the pervasiveness of
that metaphor in the technology of film and even in
theories of film tell the same old story of Oedipal
generation and family romance? The most powerful
narratives of temporal succession destine queers only to
the past and deny them continuity and succession, but an
examination of how the emergence of "homosexual"
subjectivities has always been accompanied by a quest
for ancestry and antecedents counters those narratives.
A film like Tom Kalin's Swoon which pictures gay men as
57
outlaws produced and reproduced through any number of
technologies tells a different story. While a
television series like Stephen Whittaker's Portrait of a
Marriage seems to depend entirely on a heterosexist
family romance in which lesbian desire can only appear
as a disturbance to be relegated to the past, it may be
made available for lesbian and bisexual women's
spectatorships and for lesbian politics in the present
under certain specific conditions.
The next chapter consists of two parts. The first
returns to a text by Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.
H.. Wilde's text, itself a fictional commentary on
Shakespeare's Sonnets, makes both the invert and
whatever ancestors that invert may claim, appear on the
stage of English letters for the first time, as Wilde's
fiction invents a "queer" lineage for itself that goes
all the way back to Shakespeare. The contemporary
politics of "queerness" are glaringly anachronistic in
relation to Wilde, but what is most, alluring about The
Portrait of Mr. W. H. is its mobilization of
anachronism, invention and fraud in the service of queer
identities. This seems to me to be particularly
suggestive when the significance of "queer" as the
"fake," the "counterfeit," and the "fraudulent" in
Wilde's time is taken into consideration. Wilde forges
a very powerful historical capital from Shakespeare that
is still available. Thus, Derek Jarman makes use of the
Sonnets in his film The Anaelic Conversation and
relocates the use value of those queer meanings in an
especially critical moment: the AIDS panic of 1985, the
year in which Jarman's Angelic Conversation was
televised in England. Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H.
circulated only in a limited way, but Jarman's version
of the Sonnets as a series of forceful gay male images
is broadcast, made public, and resists the homophobia
that would consign lust and desire between men to
oblivion, disease, and death. The two sections of this
chapter also stage an encounter between "literature" and
"film" as a doubling of text and image that come
together in the portrait. A freeze frame of male
beauty, the portrait can stand as a talisman against the
ruins of gay male cultures.
The next section of Queer Pasts Now consists of a
series of readings of individual films in their
intertextual relations with other discourses. The third
chapter deals with Jarman's Edward II. Here Jarman
takes up the English Renaissance again, but this time,
Jarman goes to Christopher Marlowe and places Marlowe's
play of Edward's love for Gaveston anachronistically in
contemporary queer politics in England, so that Edward's
army becomes the activists of OutRage. Jarman counters
the nationalist investment in a "great" Renaissance
culture, by yoking terms as seemingly disparate as
"queer," "punk," and "Elizabethan." Anachronism and
forgery are at the heart of both Marlowe, now redeemed
as a queer rebel, and Jarman's version of the play which
revises the sodomitical rape and murder of Edward.
Jarman invents a happy end for the tragic king which
promises new beginnings for queers in film. Similarly,
Jarman re-makes his own status as a gay man living with
AIDS, and refuses to be silenced.
The fourth chapter deals with Isaac Julien's
Looking for Langston. Julien's film takes up another
canonical figure, Langston Hughes, as the subject of a
meditation on black and gay identities. Historical
memory is intimately bound up with mourning in Julien's
film, which begins with the filmmaker himself in a
coffin, in the place of the Langston whose loss the film
mourns, along with the many black men who have died— in
racist violence, in homophobic attacks, in the AIDS
crisis. Questions of place and of taking place are
central to Looking for Langston. I argue, insofar as the
film invents its history out of the gaps and
dislocations of diasporal identities. Julien, the black
British filmmaker and Langston Hughes, the African-
American writer, are joined in the course of the film in
a complex interplay of time and place. But in the midst
of a historical memory that is also a mourning, the
60
promise of love between black men remains, as Julien's
film goes back to a text by Bruce Nugent, "Smoke, Lilies
and Jade," first published in 1926. This text provides
Julien's film with its historical capital, a promise to
be kept and renewed.
The sixth chapter deals with a discussion of the
strategic return to Sodom in Barbara Hammer's recent
film, Nitrate Kisses. Taking footage from Melville
Webber and James Sibley Watson's 193 0 film Lot in Sodom.
Hammer frames that film as part of a highly stylized
documentary on lesbian history. Fragmented images, a
disjointed soundtrack, and intertitles interrupt a
series of lovemakings between four couples: three
lesbian and one gay male. Nitrate Kisses contemplates
the losses of history, from the silencing of lesbian
biographies to the massive destructions of the
Holocaust. But as the title of her film indicates,
queer loves and desires can survive, paradoxically, even
through what would destroy them. While Sheila
McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing Things and Jean
Carlomusto's L Is For the Wav You Look appear to be more
immediately concerned with the conditions of lesbian
spectatorships, I argue that both Carlomusto and
McLaughlin acknowledge the centrality of history and the
social in the making of such spectatorships.
Queer Pasts Now ends with Ulrike Ottinger's quest
to push history as far as it can go, to its very ends
indeed. In her Freak Orlando she sets Virginia Woolf's
Orlando adrift, wandering without the hope of a return
to an ancestral home. Ottinger's Orlando becomes the
figure of all the freaks who have been dispossessed of
history and whose histories can only be recovered as
fragments and ruins, as metamorphoses that defy the
narratives of history itself. In Ottinger's Johanna
d'Arc of Mongolia the wanderer Johanna encounters the
nomadic people of the Mongols as a train journey across
Siberia and Mongolia is interrupted. Ottinger suggests
that another temporality can be found once the train of
history has stopped. While Ottinger is indeed the only
director in Queer Pasts Now with an epic vision, in both
films the pretensions of the epic to nationalist history
are debunked. Whether Ottinger manages to escape the
baggage of Western history in her fantasy of a benign
encounter between "East" and "West" that can initiate a
counter-history other than that of Western "Orientalism"
remains open to question.
62
Notes
1.The poster was designed by Los Angeles artist,
activist, and former Queer National, Kate Sorensen.
2.The fantasy that a transgender identity can only
exist as the murder of the "real" gender occurs over and
over again from Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill to Neil
Jordan's The Crying Game. The phobic character of the
fantasy— while quite obvious— is almost never addressed,
and instead is often presented as misogyny that is
attributed to male-to-female transgender identity as such.
3.See Queer Nation/ Los Angeles, "Stop Hollywood's
Homo-Hatred," Frontiers (27 March 1992): 27. See also
"Academy Advocates Restraint by Gay Orgs [sic]," Daily
Variety (13 March 1992): 1 and 45. David Ehrenstein,
"Homophobia in Hollywood: The Queer Empire Strikes
Back," The Advocate 600 (7 April 1992): 36-43, provides
one of the most comprehensive surveys in the mainstream
media of the Hollywood record for the particular year
and the events that led to the protests. For a lurid
account of Queer Nation's protest, see Kevin Phinney,
"Gay Activists' Call-To-Arms: Planned protest forces
police to beef up security," Hollywood Reporter (30
March 1992): 44.
4.1 am drawing on the lexicon associated with Louis
Althusser's well-known essay, "Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatuses," in which Althusser
formulates his reading of ideology as always dependent
on a hailing or interpellation of a subject. Whereas
for Althusser such a subject is inevitably The Subject
as such, my work suggests some reservation about whether
"queer subjects" are quite the same or whether indeed
all ideologies hail all subjects in the same manner.
See Althusser 1976 1-60.
5.1 have had the benefit of extensive contact with
as yet unpublished writings by Ki Namaste, Universite de
Montreal, Quebec. In addition, our countless
conversations about queerness, queerzines, and queer
theory have shaped and guided my work: Namaste's
influence is too pervasive to confine to particular
footnotes.
6.James Whale, the director of Frankenstein. was
one of the first directors in Hollywood to be out about
his relationship with another man— for which he paid a
high price: after 194 3, and until his death in 1961, he
was unable to find work in Hollywood. Vito Russo
63
comments perhaps a little portentously: "Whale's
Frankenstein monster was the creation that would
eventually destroy its creator, just as Whale's own
'aberration' would eventually destroy his career," The
Celluloid Closet 1987 50. The selection of Whale's
Frankenstein seems appropriate and historically
justified as an emblem of Hollywood's institutionalized
heterosexism.
7.1 am thinking here of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno's "culture industry" in Dialectic of
Enliqhtenment 1989 120-67, and Monique Wittig's analysis
of the "straight mind," The Straight Mind and Other
Essays 1992 21-32.
8.For attempts to account for this dialectic of
appropriation and expropriation, consider Cindy Patton
on the dynamics of appropriation by which straight
culture appears to feed off queer cultures: "Straights
appear to steal from the subcultures because hypostatic
culture has jettisoned its invented Other into a
cultural (but ahistorical) future in order to have ever-
new escape routes from the cultural stranglehold it
exercises— as boredom," "Embodying Subaltern Memory,"
1992 86.
See also Michael Warner, "... modern
heterosexuality needs a discourse about homosexuality as
a displacement of its own narcissistic sources," to
which Warner adds, "the psychoanalytic tradition enacts
and justifies that displacement," "Homo-Narcissism; or,
Heterosexuality," 1990 206.
9.Broadsheet "published anonymously by queers," New
York, 1989. It is briefly discussed by Lauren Berlant
and Elizabeth Freeman in "Queer Nationality" 1992 155-6.
10.An unfounded rumor has it that in the mid-1980s,
"queer" was employed by disaffected members of the Los
Angeles postpunk hardcore scene as a term of praise and
self-identification, and had very little relation to
sexual identity and orientation at all, personal
correspondence with Dennis Cooper, 1992.
11.Queerzines are those stapled and Xeroxed do-it-
yourself publications, independently made and
distributed, that take up the work of punk fanzines from
the mid-1970s and early 1980s.
12.See Jurgen Habermas, "Zur Genese der
burgerlichen offentlichkeit," in Strukturwandel der
Offentlichkeit 1986 28-41. Habermas's notion of the
public sphere presupposes norms that are diametrically
64
opposed to what I outline here as queer interruptions of
the public sphere or even the construction of queer
counter-public spheres; Habermas's later elaboration of
the "public sphere" yearns for an ideal of communicative
transparency that is highly questionable. For useful
summaries of Habermas that take account of gender and
sexuality, see Miriam Hansen, "Alexander Kluge, Cinema
and the Public Sphere; The Construction Site of Counter-
History," Discourse 6 (1983): 53-74 and more recently,
Babel and Babvlon: Soectatorship and American Silent
Film 1991 6-16. Joan B. Landes provides a critique of
the masculinist basis of the emergence of the public
sphere, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the
French Revolution (Ithaca; Cornell U P, 1988).
Still, the notion of the "public sphere" has a
certain explanatory force that accounts for the
upheavals wrought by "queerness." I am grateful to
Kathleen Chapman for discussions of Habermas and
particularly for bringing the work of Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge to my attention; I am also grateful to
Ki Namaste for first suggesting Habermas as an unlikely
yet appealing candidate for queer appropriations.
Michael Warner, in "Homo-Narcissism" alludes to Habermas
in the course of a discussion of the heterosexist
construction of "homosexuality," but Warner refers more
specifically to Habermas's work on modernity, 1990 2 04-5.
13.On the social effects of the private/public
distinction for feminist film theory, see also Judith
Mayne, "Female Narration, Women's Cinema: Helke Sander's
The All-Round Reduced Personalitv/Redupers." in Erens,
ed. Issues In Feminist Film Criticism 1990 380-394.
14.See Melissa Healy, "Nunn's Offer on Military
Gays: Don't Ask, Don't Tell," L A Times (30 March,
1993): A1 and 14. The theorization of an "epistemology
of the closet" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick goes some way
towards elucidating the private/public binary and its
imprint on queer identities. One of the drawbacks of
Sedgwick's theorization is that it relies heavily on
quasi-psychological categories such as "homosexual
panic," which, when used to explain social formations,
tend increasingly to make the social the personal, a
turn of the screw already anticipated somehow by the
very opposition of private and public. See Epistemology
of the Closet 1990 70-3, for a useful discussion of the
private/public divide in the structure of the closet;
see Closet 182-212 for a less useful analysis of the
closet under the rubric "male homosexual panic." It is
no wonder that Sedgwick's reading of the closet is
driven by a nostalgia for the closet, as she herself
concedes, 1990 63. Indeed, as the instance of "gays
65
in-the-military" evidences, the very notion of "male
homosexual panic" and the distinction between
"homosocial" and "homosexual" may well function as
pretexts and ruses in a larger heterosexist scheme in
which queers of all kinds are denied legitimacy in the
publie sphere.
15.1 am thinking here of the practices of shop-ins,
in which contingents of Queer Nationals would invade
shopping malls, usually with the chant, "We're here,
we're queer, we're NOT going shopping," and of kiss-ins,
in which Queer Nationals en masse would kiss in public.
16.Such stickers either specified queer identities
or solidarities: "DYKE," "FAG," "MARICON," "PUTO,"
"PUTA," "BI-DYKE," "BI-FAG," "LIPSTICK LESBIAN,"
"POSITIVELY QUEER," "DYKE POWER/FAG POWER" "BI
POWER/TRANS POWER." At other times, the stickers
invented and spelled out new identities, such as
"PIERCED PERVERT," "CLITLICKER," or "CONDOM CARRYING
QUEER." Stickers could also give miniature public
service announcements, mock "warnings" and "messages"
from Queer Nation, for example, "STOP THIS SEXIST SHIT,"
"RACISM IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH," "PROMOTE
LESBIANISM," "PROMOTE HOMOSEXUALITY," "PROMOTE
BISEXUALITY," and "PROMOTE QUEERNESS." "STRAIGHT POOP,"
used to identify heterosexism in public, was an
especially succinct sticker.
17.See Chris Woodyard, "Officials Confident of
Security for Oscars," L A Times 30 March 1992 Bl, which
notes, respectfully, the viewership of more than one
billion.
18.See Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier,"
trans. Ben Brewster, in Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology
1986 244-78, or Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects
of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams,
and "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in the Cinema," trans. Jean
Andrews and Bertrand Augst, both in Narrative.
Apparatus. Ideology 1986 286-98 and 299-318. Laura
Mulvey's vastly influential essay, "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," also in Narrative. Apparatus.
Ideology 1986 198-209, discusses, as we may recall, the
gendering of the look as masculine in narrative cinema
and in the institution of classic Hollywood cinema.
19.See Howard Rosenberg, "ABC Pulls Plug on a Rerun
of thirtvsomething," L A Times (19 July 1990): FI and
14. In particular, one might consider PBS's reluctance
to screen Robert Hilferty's Stop the Church (a
66
documentary about ACT UP/New York's disruption of the
mass at St. Patrick's cathedral) and its outright
refusal to broadcast Charles Atlas's Son of Sam and
Delilah in 1991.
20.See Frontiers (27 March 1992): 27.
21.See, for example, Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin
(Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1979) 294-5.
22."Queerness" as commodity is once again in
evidence in the manufacture of secrecy that has
accompanied Neil Jordan's The Crying Game as a
selling point.
23."Counter-history" or Geqenqeschichte is a term
that Hansen takes directly from Kluge,
Geleqenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Zur realistischen
Methode (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975) 204 and 222. See
Hansen 1983 64.
24.Frequent criticisms have been leveled at what
would seem to be Queer Nation's reliance on and
involvement in unexamined forms of specifically United
States nationalism. For example, Berlant and Freeman
write: "insofar as it assumes 'Queer' is the only
insurgent foreign' identity its citizens have, Queer
Nation remains bound to the genericizing logic of
American citizenship . . . ," 1992 171. While my
analysis is obviously inadequate as a response to
Berlant and Freeman's critique, I believe that some of
the actual practices of Queer Nation qualify what may
have been perceived as "American" chauvinism.
25.Thus, Jan Zita Grover notes in her "AIDS;
Keywords": "Whether used by spokespersons for said
community [gay/homosexual community], the people
characterized as the gay/homosexual community are too
diverse politically, economically, demographically, to
be described meaningfully by such a term. (one has only
to attempt its opposite, the heterosexual community— a
few right-wing politicians have— for the full absurdity
of the term to become clear . . . )" 1988 24. Grover's
work makes it clear that the antithesis of the "gay
community" is not some individual subjectivity that
transcends gender and sexuality, but rather, identities
mobilized in politically strategic ways.
26.Since "transgender"— an identification with a
gender other than the gender to which one has been
assigned on the basis of presumed anatomical sex— can
mean any number of things, there is no neat or single
67
antithesis to "transgender."
27.One might also take into account other
theoretical formulations of such practice, for example,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of the
molecular (parts) and the molar (totalities) in Anti-
Oedipus 1984 283-296: here, one might say that the
increasing decomposition of molar entities, such as "the
nation" into molecular parts, such as "queers," or even
the specific breakdown of Queer Nation chapters into
focus groups, demonstrates how theoretical notions may
be put to work. One might further consider Deleuze and
Guattari's version of "bands or packs" as "[webs] of
immanent relations," Nomadoloqv: The War Machine 1986
12, as a way of thinking about the "queer" appropriation
of the Nation/State as war machine (see 1986 13).
28.My question here echoes Lily Braindrop's title
of the special issue of A Taste of Latex 1.2 (1990) on
genderfuck: "Whose Gender Is It Anyway?": writes
Braindrop, "I say fuck gender: gender-fuck!" (5).
29.Here Marshall Kirk and Hunter Marsden, After the
Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of
Gavs in the '90s (New York: Doubleday, 1989) is
exemplary with its attempt to enter the heterosexist
public sphere only by offering "positive images" of
"gays," partly through a series of advertisements and
public service announcements, with non-monogamy,
transgenders, and obvious lesbians and gay men, butch
dykes and queens excluded from consideration. Kirk and
Marsden do not mention bisexuals at all.
3 0.Again, I am indebted to Ki Namaste for bringing
this material to my attention, and also for his
important elaboration of the differences between Queer
Nation and queerzines, in his doctoral dissertation,
Universite de Montreal, Quebec.
31.1 am alluding here to Theodor W. Adorno's
theories of modernist art as engaged in a negative
dialectic— an increasing withdrawal from and negation of
the dialectic of the commodity in advanced capitalist
cultures. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative
Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno. Walter Beniamin and the
Frankfurt School (Sussex: Harvester U P, 1977) 307-15.
32.In 1991 in Northampton, Massachusetts, for
example, a heated debate about the inclusion or
exclusion of bisexuals took place, with Queer Nation
supporting the inclusion and demonstrating with signs
and T-shirts that said, "there are many ways of being
68
queer," personal correspondence with Judy Sisneros.
33.See the Platform Statement, n. d., circa 1992.
34.In San Francisco, a newly formed group,
Transgender Nation, launched an action against the local
March On Washington Chapter or organizing committee
because of the decision to leave "transgender" out of
the official title, personal correspondence with Don
Mark. In the Los Angeles Chapter, in a very divisive
manner the issue of whether to call the March "Lesbian
and Gay," "Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual," or "Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual and Transgender" was put to the vote and a
decision was made to use the second sequence of terms,
personal correspondence with Judy Sisneros.
35.Nestle extends this project in her work on the
historical connections between lesbians and sex workers,
and expresses her concern that classism may be one of
the reasons why "cultural feminism" in particular has
refused to recognize such communalities, 1987 175.
3 6.See Alexis Danzig, "Bisexual Women and AIDS,"
Women. AIDS. & Activism 193-8, or Loraine Hutchins and
Lani Kaahumanu, Bi Anv Other Name: Bisexual People Speak
Out 1991.
Two by now quite canonical figures in "queer
theory," Eve Sedgwick and D. A. Miller use biphobic
articles that link AIDS to bisexuals from Cosmopolitan
and The New York Times at different points in their
respective work, and unfortunately, Sedgwick and Miller
tend in one way or another to dismiss bisexuality. The
articles in question warn the presumed-to-be-straight
female reader against the perils of becoming involved
with a bisexual man (note the immediate heterosexist
bias). Such involvement, a series of "experts" claims,
would inevitably bear HIV and AIDS with it.
Cosmopolitan and The Times can thus indulge in the well-
worn tactic of blaming "risk groups" (identities such as
bisexuals) rather than counseling against specific
activities (unprotected sex).
While Sedgwick mentions that the article is about
bisexual men, she immediately assimilates bisexuality to
the epistemology of the closet as its final
demonstration and last word (1990 249-51). She thus
sidesteps bisexual specificity: she does not question
the obsessive association of bisexuals (rather than
closeted gay men or lesbians) with the closet as a way
of making bisexuality the identity-in-the-closet.
Sedgwick recycles a biphobic association to which she
should be critically alert.
Miller draws on a very similar article, only he
69
dismisses bisexuality entirely from consideration, and
mentions it only in a footnote in supercilious quotation
marks (1991 140). For Miller, bisexuality is clearly
nothing other than a pretext for gay male sexuality: he
completes the reduction of bisexuality to a figure of
the closet that Sedgwick begins (1991 124). Sedgwick
and Miller demonstrate how monosexual writers, whether
straight or gay, can actively unthink bisexuality and
reinforce biphobia.
37.Like many zines Faaz has neither date and place
of publication nor page numbers. It is probably from
San Francisco and dates from early 1993.
38.Simon Watney asserts that "gay identity" as such
"offers a positive term for collective and individual
experience" that escapes the dyad of
homosexual/heterosexual in which either term is produced
only through an awareness of not being the other, 1992
3 32. Watney draws attention to how the borders between
"heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are policed so
that an uneasy consciousness is produced in subjects, on
whichever side of that great divide they position
themselves, of not-being-the-other. While Watney's
essay is first and foremost a powerful statement of the
necessity of AIDS politics, his use of "gay" is somewhat
confused. At times he seems to be talking of the
specific historic break effected by the mobilization of
"gay," as in post-Stonewall gay liberation, which seems
fair enough; at other times, Watney attributes a sort of
semiological essentialism to the very signifier "gay."
Thus, Watney writes, "the 'mollies' and 'margeries' and
'poofs' of earlier generations all seem to share a
common tendency to accept derogatory classifications and
to socialize in relation to them, even if, as seems
likely, these terms of abuse took on ironic or
counterdiscursive meanings for those whose identities
were formed and lived out under the stigmatizing
influence of such nomenclature," 1992 353-4. Along
comes that magic word "gay": "The emergence of gay
identity in the course of the twentieth century provides
an alternative structure of identity that proceeds from
a collective refusal of such strategies," 354. Earlier
in his essay, Watney presents "gay" as such as a
nomenclature that alone can perform the task of
"[recruiting] identities away from 'homosexuality,'
while simultaneously promoting a theory of sexual
diversity that can also challenge discrimination against
particular sexual identities and practices" 332. That
terms of abuse and stigma can be taken on by the
subjects named by them in more complicated and indeed
more liberating ways than simple "counterdiscursive"
70
ones does not seem to occur to Watney, oddly, since his
writing happens at the exact historic moment when "gay"
as signifier is under considerable political pressure
from "queer" and the numerous other signifiers I
discuss. In the context of such a massive counter
mobilization of signifiers of stigma, Watney seems to be
experiencing some nostalgia for a "gay identity" as
master term. His analysis, as well as his nomenclature,
does very little justice to "sexual identities and
practices," which dare not speak their name in Watney's
essay unless as "gay"— what about "lesbian"? (Watney
acknowledges the centrality of lesbians in AIDS
politics, but without taking the difference of "lesbian"
nomenclature into account.) Or "bisexual"? Or
"transgender"?
39.1 am echoing, with evident irony, Foucault's
well-known notion of the "perverse implantation," in The
History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction 1978
36-49.
40.In his essays on the zines, Matias Viegener
appears to misread their tactics: given the conflicts
over "gay," he inexplicably subsumes them under the
heading "gay fanzines," and connects them to the works
of Sade, as if to inscribe their project in a somewhat
over-familiar countercanon of Western literature.
Viegener also places them in an unspecified, barely
signifiable domain that appears almost to be outside of
culture as such; the zines in effect do very well within
a symbolic order that they trouble only, because they are
already inside it. See Viegener, "Revolting Style: Gay
Fanzines, Enlightened Audiences and Censorship,"
Framework 3.2/3 (1990): 30-5.
41.Viegener does the same, even more overtly
(1990). This reinscription of quite specific strategies
in a countercanon that may go from Sade to dada seems to
be part of how intellectuals receive cultural
productions since punk: Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces:
A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) is a
case in point.
42.Bright is obviously alluding to the widespread
currency of the notion of "suture" in film theory, and
her offering of "paste" as a counter-term (or
counterfeit term) suggests that things may work
differently for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men.
43.1 imagine that Bright is deliberately using the
masculine gender of monteur and menteur as opposed to
monteuse and menteuse here, given the butchness of the
71
persona she constructs.
44.1 am alluding to Inside/Out, which I will
discuss in more detail later.
45.Consider, in particular, Ekua Omosupe1s eloquent
reclamation of terms of "queer" stigma in her
"Black/Lesbian/Bulldagger" in the collection: "I am
Black/Dyke/Butch/Femme/mother/sister/cousin/girl
friend/confidant/lover/born from a/girl/who taught
me/how to be/woman/bitch/poet/sister/Dyke/ Bulldagger"
(1991 101).
46.As Sue-Ellen Case recognizes in her essay in De
Lauretis's collection: "queer" is initially "a painful
term hurled as an insult against developing adolescents
who were, somehow, found to be unable to ante up in the
heterosexist economy of sexual and emotional trade"
(1991 1) .
47.Fortunately, some of the essays in this
particular collection recognize the kinds of opposition
at work: take Samuel Delany's "Street Talk/Straight
Talk" (1991 21-2) for example. My use of "inscription"
owes much to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (and beyond
Spivak, Derrida): "it seems to me if one sees these
social texts, various social texts, U. S. academy—
international division of labor— as putting one in a
certain, large, writable context, as it were, one could
say that one is 'inscribed'" (1990 116). I wish to
direct attention to precisely those contexts of
inscription to which Spivak alludes.
48.Consider for example, Scott Tucker: "It's an
open secret, for example, that men and women active in
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and Queer
Nation are having sex together in unpredictable
patterns, with little sexual disorientation. Most are
contentedly lesbian and gay, some are bisexual, some are
straight. This is possible in a time and milieu when
they are able to achieve a strong community of
resistance; within it, they take much for granted and
don't feel their integrity is eroded when the centers of
sexual gravity shift for the duration of an affair or a
night" ("Gender, Fucking, and Utopia," Social Text 27
[1990]: 33). Tucker is right concerning the shifts
across and between genders and sexualities in queer
collectivities, but, as the rest of my analysis will
show, such shifts do not happen without "sexual
disorientation," especially if only those who rate a
perfect six on the Kinsey scale are awarded the lesbian
and gay award of "contentment," as Tucker does here.
72
Compare also Tucker's sense of queer collectivities with
de Laureti s's.
49.See "The Big Lie," Queer Nation pamphlet, n.d.
(circa 1990). At meetings of Queer Nation/LA,
particularly of the focus groups Gender Queries and
BiTen, these issues were discussed and debated, Fall
1991. See also the coalition proposed, more and more
frequently, between bisexuals and transgenders, for
example, Naomi Tucker, "The Natural Next Step: Including
Transgender in Our Movement," Anything That Moves 4
(1992): 37. Tucker writes, "It is logical and necessary
for the bisexual movement to include gender politics on
our agenda— not just because transsexuals, cross
dressers, or transgenderists are often assumed to be
bisexual, and not just because some of them are, but
because we as a bisexual movement are visionary in our
need and desire to break down dichotomies, creating a
powerful and diverse body of queers to smash the
heterosexual monolith" (37).
50.See Martha Gever, "The Names We Give Ourselves"
1990 191-4.
51."Queer Nation is a militant and uncompromising
group dedicated to subverting compulsory heterosexism in
all its political and cultural manifestations through
direct public actions which will celebrate and flaunt
sexual diversity, without pandering to heterosexual
angst; Queer Nation is open to queers of all sexual
persuasions," Queer Nation policy statement, Los
Angeles, n.d.
52.See "Conference Organizers Confused,'" Anything
That Moves (Winter 1991): 15. Robyn Ochs and Pam Ellis
note that while at Harvard "bisexual" was used in the
conference title. Conference organizers at Rutgers,
however, told Ochs and Ellis that the decision to drop
the word from the conference title was "unanimous," and
that the organizing committee felt that it was in fact
being "more inclusive" by leaving "bisexual" out. Ochs
and Ellis state: "Categorizing all sexual behavior which
cannot be categorized as heterosexual as 'lesbian and
gay' is an oppressive act in language," qtd. in Anything
That Moves 15.
53.Personal correspondence with Jordana M. Pilmanis.
54.Given the level of violence against queers, in
which genital mutilation is a hideously frequent part of
queer-bashing, Tyler's facile "castration anxiety" seems
irresponsible, given that she does, in contrast, invoke
73
"all too real lynchings" (62) to make a point about the
racism of drag queen identification with Fay Wray in
Kina Kona (by no means universal). To suggest, as Tyler
does, that "castration anxiety" motivates queers,
galvanizing us into ever more frenzied feats of "camp
and mimicry," is not unlike Freud's "discovery" that
homosexuals are "paranoid," because we suspect that the
dominant order is homophobic. "Does the homosexual only
feel threatened, or is he really threatened?" asks Guy
Hocquenghem in response to the Freudian definition of
"homosexuality" as "paranoia" and vice versa, Homosexual
Desire 1978 42, see also 41-7.
55.Tyler's conclusion is based on John Rechy's City
of Night, a novel from the 1960s. It seems odd that her
essay pays absolutely no attention whatsoever to
temporal differences between the texts she studies, as
if "camp and mimicry" were some timelessly frozen
essence (like "phallic narcissism"), and that she should
end her piece with a pre-Stonewall text. Tyler's
appeals to historically specific categories, such as
race, class and gender against what she calls "gay drag"
sit at odds with her lack of historical sense. For
Tyler, since Joan Riviere's famous "masquerade"
analysand fantasized being a Southern belle on a
plantation in a series of racist scenarios, and since
Fay Wray in Kina Kona was a drag icon at some point for
some drag queens, (in another one of Tyler's leaps of
logic and displays of phobia) drag as such is thus
racist, 1991 61-2.
Gloria Anzaldua gives a very different reading of
the novel with which Tyler ends: "In the 1960s, I read
my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John
Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father and a
Mexican mother. For days I walked around in stunned
amazement that a Chicano could write and get published,"
"How To Tame A Wild Tongue" 1990 208. Tyler's agenda is
especially evident in her decision to disregard
different queer readings which are not reducible to
"camp" or "mimicry." It also seems strange that Tyler
should be unaware of Anzaldua's reading of City of Night
as a Chicano novel, given Tyler's concern with "race" as
a category of analysis.
56.1 owe this specific formulation to Ki Namaste.
57.See Sandy Stone, "The Empire Strikes Back: A
Posttranssexual Manifesto" in Body Guards (1991 280-304)
for an articulation of "posttranssexual" subjectivity.
58.Personal correspondence with Don Mark, one of
the former organizers of the conference.
74
59.Since this introduction is, after all, partly
about the pleasurable re-appropriation of stigma, let me
say that I have no problem in self-identifying as
"nellie" and a "[bi-]faggot," but that the situation at
the conference in which the words were used was
evidently a hostile one which precluded, at least for
the time being, such acts of re-appropriation.
60.As my earlier discussion of Watney's use of
"gay" indicated, if anyone seems to have a faith in the
magic power of single words, it is Watney himself.
61.More recently, even, at the 1992 MLA panel on
"feminism" and "queer theory" panelists who moved from a
vague and ill-defined "feminism" to a no less inchoate
"queer theory" found themselves at a loss when pressed
to define their terms in extra-academic contexts: Biddy
Martin, the one panelist who did respond, pointed to the
specifically "academic" constraints of the MLA panel
structure which seemed to form the unacknowledged
conditions of possibility for the discourse in question.
62.Once again, I am indebted to Ki Namaste for
bringing this to my attention, and also for his analysis
of the discussion between Jones and Labruce.
63.The notion of "cultural capital" comes from
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard U P, 1984) 301-4. Pierre Nora uses
"historical capital" in a somewhat looser sense than
Bourdieu, in Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les
Lieux de Memoire." trans. Marc Roudebush,
Representations 26 (1989) 7. Patton uses the term
"historical capital" as well in her analysis of how
"diasporal groups" retain "a reserve of collective
memory" but lack historical capital, "Embodying
Subaltern Memory," 1992 89.
64.She takes the terms from Christian Metz,
"History/Discourse: Note on Two Voyeurisms," Edinburgh
176 Magazine 1 (1976): 21-5, Hansen 1983 64. The terms
were used first, I believe, by Emile Benveniste,
Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: U of
Miami P, 1971) 206-9.
Chapter One: On Reproduction
75
A Prefect of Police . . . defines
homosexuals as "people who, though not
procreating, have a marked tendency to
multiply" (Gustave Mace, La police
parisien: mes lundis en orison, qtd. in
Hocquenghem, 1978 95).
In spite of all the condemnation, the
number of perverts seems to be on the
increase . . . (Alfred Adler, Das
Problem der Homosexualitat. qtd. in
Hocquenghem, 1978 36) .
Queer Nation: We Recruit (Queer
Nation/Los Angeles sticker, circa 1991).
Reproduction/Recruitment
From its very start, film as such has been conceived as
a technology of reproduction: an early Lumiere program
announced an "apparatus [which] . . . permits the
recording, by a series of photographs, of all the
movements which have succeeded one another over a given
period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent
reproduction of these movements by the projection of
their images" (qtd. in Stephen Heath, "The Cinematic
Apparatus," The Cinematic Apparatus 1980 1). In "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Walter Benjamin makes reproducibility interior to the
very medium of film:
76
In the case of films, mechanical
reproduction is not, as with literature
and painting, an external condition for
mass distribution. Mechanical
reproduction is inherent in the very
technique of film production. This
technique not only permits in the most
direct way but virtually causes mass
distribution (Illuminations 1969 244).
The link between mechanical reproduction and film has
proved so suggestive that metaphors derived from
machinery and technology have come to occupy, it would
seem unavoidably, a central place in one particular
metalanguage of film.
Why does the language of reproduction seem so
inescapable? In this context, it appears explicitly
about mechanical or technological, and thus, artificial,
reproduction. Yet I suspect that its very inevitability
masks, obscures, or naturalizes— exactly as "nature"—
another sense of "reproduction," that is, "reproduction"
in its heterosexual, or heterosexist, import, what
Gayatri Spivak, for example, has called "the closed
circle of coupling in sexual reproduction," outside of
which lies "the entire 'public domain1" (1988 279).1 In
tracing the history of "reproduction" in film, I find
myself unavoidably aware of the extent to which the two
senses of "reproduction" (technological and sexual) fall
back on each other. At the outset, I propose a certain
judiciously queer skepticism of such a support of one
sense of "reproduction" by another.
A
In the seventies, theorists conceived of cinema as
a machine that produced ideological effects of
spectatorship and reproduced the spectator as
transcendental subject. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example,
described how an articulation of parts, such as the
actual film, projector and screen, with a spectator
makes cinema into a contraption of subjectivity which
"constitutes the subject' by the illusory delimitation
of a central location" (1970; rpt. 1986 295). Baudry
concluded that cinema "is an apparatus destined to
obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the
dominant ideology: creating a phantasmatization of the
subject, it collaborates with a marked efficiency in the
maintenance of idealism" (294). The effect or product
of the cinematic apparatus would be an I/eye, which, in
identifying itself with the all-seeing camera, takes
itself to be transcendental.2
For feminist film theory, such a spectator was the
male subject in his pretension to transcendence.
Although Laura Mulvey did not use the language of
apparatus theory in her classic essay, "Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema," she argued that narrative cinema
does serve to reproduce "sexual imbalance" in accordance
with which "pleasure in looking has been split between
active/male and passive/female" (1975; rpt. 1990 33).
From Mulvey onwards, feminist film theoreticians have
78
taken issue with the seemingly genderless subject
(theorized by Baudry, for example), a subject which
constitutes itself as an all-seeing voyeuristic camera
and which disavows the lack on which the image is based.
Jacqueline Rose expressed the need to foreground the
gendering of spectatorship and called for "putting the
concept of sexual difference back into the discussion of
the cinematic apparatus" (1980 184). Likewise, Teresa
de Lauretis asserted:
it is by posing cinema as a social
technology (as a process characterized
by the interplay of the social and the
technological in the production of signs
and meanings for and by a subject who is
their reference and constant point of
intersection) that one can pose, one
cannot in fact but pose, the radical
questions of feminism (1980 200).
However skeptically, then, feminist theorizations of
film have themselves often continued to draw on
metaphors of apparatus, machine and technology, as
evidenced by the above quotation.
Cinema was thus placed as an apparatus both in its
technical as well as social functioning and in the
metalanguages that described and criticized it. More
recently, film theory itself has been characterized as
machine. Mary Anne Doane, for example, has conceded
that "the apparent exhaustion of psychoanalytic film
theory, its impasse, is closely linked to its activation
of the metaphor of the apparatus or dispositif" (1991
79
80). It would seem that the motor of a particular kind
of theorization of film is about to run down.
Doane writes, moreover, that while psychoanalytic
film theory may "dissect and analyze the spectator's
psychical investment in the film" (1991 79), it has
begun to operate in a mechanically determined way: "the
cinema happens all at once (as, precisely, an apparatus)
and its image of woman is always subservient to
voyeuristic and fetishistic impulses" (1991 79). As an
instance of the mechanistic functioning of such a
theoretical "apparatus," Doane gives the by now familiar
formula, "woman = lack = the cinematic image" (1991 79).
Doane next considers how the synchrony (the all-at-
onceness) of a psychoanalytic version of the cinematic
apparatus has been countered by certain strategic
appeals to diachrony: to history, in other words. Yet
Doane ends by finding that there is still life in the
apparatus of psychoanalytic film theory. She therefore
affirms psychoanalysis over history, precisely as a
superior form of historical memory, as a way of
"producing remembering women. Women with memories and
hence histories" (1991 93). The issues of history and
memory will be crucial in this chapter, although from a
somewhat different place than the gender engendered by
the machines of cinema and psychoanalysis.
More emphatically even than Doane, in "Feminism,
Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines," Constance
Penley has stated that film theory itself may work as a
"bachelor machine": an apparatus that in the very act of
theorizing a transcendental (male) spectator both
produces and promotes the ends of such a spectator.3
Can a celibate machine be a queer machine? Penley does
not answer, and concludes by returning to a qualified
use of psychoanalysis in feminist film theory.
Another and different feminist writer, Jane Gaines,
begins to broach this subject. Gaines uses an analogy
derived from machinery to criticize quite strongly the
mechanisms of a certain kind of theorization concerning
film, and she presents "the bulk of the academic work
extending feminist film theory in the United States from
the mid-70s to the present [1984]" as working "like
clockwork" (my emphasis) to "the insider," while
"[being] often as impenetrable as the patriarchal
unconscious it hopes to unlock" to the "outsider"
("Women and Representation: Can We Enjoy Alternative
Pleasures?" 1984; rpt. in Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism 1990 81). She points to the ways in which
black women filmmakers and lesbian spectators and
writers alike either have used standard formats or have
devised spectatorial strategies for appropriating
pleasures from conventional Hollywood films from the
81
late 70s and early 80s such as Flashdance and Personal
Best.
De Lauretis, meanwhile, has taken the metaphor of
the apparatus further to begin to interrogate the
machinery of heterosexism. She suggests that "gender
. . . as both representation and as self-representation,
is the product of various social technologies, such as
cinema, and of institutionalized discourses,
epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as
practices of daily life" (1987 2). Here she is drawing
on Michel Foucault's notion of a technology of sex4 but
cautions that Foucault's "theory" may itself function as
an unacknowledged technology of gender (1987 3 and 19).
With de Lauretis's insight that technologies of gender
can be at work everywhere (in the cinema and in theory
alike) and that such technologies may serve an "ideology
of gender— that is to say, heterosexism" (1987 11),
different questions may be framed about the cinematic
apparatus— and indeed, about "sexual difference."5
To secure its reproduction of one set of social
relations among others, cinema has had to serve, in Vito
Russo's well-known formulation, as a celluloid closet, a
machine that reproduces rather than reflects the absence
of queers, those-who-do-not-reproduce (The Celluloid
Closet 1987 xii). In response, Russo issued a call to
jam the works of heterosexism: "We have collaborated for
82
a very long time in the maintenance of our own
invisibility. And now the party is over" (xii). More
than a decade after Russo first issued that call, the
party, regular as clockwork, seems unfortunately far
from over. But there have been some indications of its
impending end, most specifically in the recent— and
almost entirely independent— work of gay and lesbian
filmmakers such as Ulrike Ottinger, Derek Jarman, and
Isaac Julien. What is perhaps most surprising about
such work (beyond its very existence) is its engagement
with history: how it makes history queer, or, how it
produces and reproduces queer histories.
What concerns me here, then, is to reintroduce the
notion of the celluloid closet into the discussion of
the cinematic apparatus and to understand, precisely,
the involvement of cinema in that other kind of
reproduction: the reproduction of heterosexual
relations, themselves understood as the place of both
social and sexual reproduction. Usefully, Michael
Warner has coined the neologism "reprosexuality" for
what he describes as "the interweaving of
heterosexuality, biological reproduction, cultural
reproduction, and personal identity" (1991 9). It is
time to investigate how cinema, as well as its various
institutions, have been engines of reprosexuality, or,
more succinctly, breeding machines.6
83
But I wish to ask more than just how we are to come
out of the celluloid closet. De Lauretis has observed
that technologies, apparatuses and subjects meet "at the
historical (and therefore changing) intersection of
social formations and . . . [personal histories]" (1980
187). To extend de Lauretis's point: if the history of
Hollywood film has been repetitive— homophobia as usual
— I want to inquire whether film and video can make
other kinds of history available for gay men, lesbians,
bisexuals and transgenders.
In a discussion of historiography and its relation
to classic Hollywood cinema, "Securing the Historical:
Historiography and Classical Cinema," Philip Rosen
offers the hypothesis that "to different degrees, each
classical film offers in its ideological interpellation
a version of and an attitude towards history, whether or
not the film is explicitly historical" ("Securing the
Historical" in Cinema Histories. Cinema Practices 1984
26). History, it seems, is always there in the movies
and their machinery, but at issue is history how and for
whom? The subject of such interpellation7 is inevitably
and tacitly presumed to be straight-white-male, securing
the historical (to echo the title of Rosen's essay) for
heterosexuality.
In contrast, recent lesbian, bisexual and gay film
and video appears to propose that we can be
84
interpellated, or made over as different subjects, for
other histories, in a word, aueerlv.8 Accordingly, such
work makes it is possible for us to claim and to make or
even to forge histories, to assert our queer identities
and our differences through collective acts of
remembrance. As queers we can make cinema into a
"cultural memory" for ourselves.9 To put Rosen's
Althusserian "ideological interpellation" differently:
these films and videos issue a challenge to do more than
interpellate, that is, to solicit, to recruit. to deploy
film and video to promote queerness.10 As technological
reproduction no longer in the service of compulsory
heterosexuality, film can return the "lost histories of
perversion" as our histories, histories that we may
remember, celebrate, or mourn, but not be destined
unthinkingly to repeat.11
I do not intend, however, to describe or uncover
some universal "queer history" outside of highly
specific and contingent circuits of representation,
reception and use (hence the use of the somewhat less
heroic and monumental plural "pasts" in my title);
likewise, I do not purport to account for universally
true psychoanalytic mechanisms of "homosexual" or
"bisexual" spectatorial identifications in cinema: such
an undertaking would not only be unfeasible, but
essentializing in a way little short of imperialist.
85
Both de Lauretis and Judith Mayne, for example, have
recently expressed reservations about the usefulness of
"a theory of lesbian spectatorship" (following Mayne,
1991 136). Thus, for de Lauretis, it is appropriate "to
insist on addressing only very specific circumstances
that exist within certain historical contingencies"
(137);12 whenever I do describe how film texts encode or
create spectators (as I do below with Tom Kalin's Swoon
and Stephen Whittaker's Portrait of a Marriage} I do not
have some universal queer spectator in mind but only
particular lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders
at particular moments in specific North American,
British and Western European situations.
Such queer pasts, furthermore, do not have as their
stake a campaign for "positive images" of marginal
groups, understood (and often derided) as a limited
repertoire of normative "role models."13 While not
dismissing the need for "positive images," Jan Zita
Grover writes about "Positive Imaging and Scarcity in
Lesbian Photographs": "We need more, not fewer
representations to choose from: a greater variety of
women to enact them, a wider range of practices to be
enacted." She ends by celebrating the current
engagement of lesbians with "an entire panoply of self
defined sexual communities"— "queers . . .
86
transvestites, bisexuals, transsexuals" ("Framing the
Questions," Stolen Glances 1991 190).14
One recent instance of how such a lost history may
be reproduced with a difference is gay filmmaker Tom
Kalin's film Swoon (1992). Swoon recounts the story of
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Harvard students and
lovers. In the 1920s, Leopold and Loeb killed a young
male cousin seemingly for kicks; a sensational trial
aligned their crime with their class position, their
intellectualism, and, most profoundly, with their
Jewishness and homosexuality, thereby fixing certain
meanings of sexual and racial "otherness" in a way that
fused homophobia and anti-Semitism. The provocative tag
line, "Love Gone Mad/History Gone Bad," heralds Kalin's
film, and indeed, love and madness, history and badness
come together in Swoon as effects of technological,
mechanical or electronic reproduction.
The film keeps drawing our attention to the
presence of technologies (bodies of knowledge, science
applied). Early in the film, the camera lingers over a
series of daguerreotypes of nineteenth and early
twentieth-century "inverts"; Richard Burton, John
Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, as if the images of
those figures have themselves been both produced and
preserved through a technology like photography.
Equipped with a box camera, Richard Loeb pursues
87
ornithology; he takes and develops pictures and uses
optical instruments such as microscopes and a
stereoscope. Kalin's film even includes actual footage
of an ornithological documentary made by Loeb, less as a
device of historical verisimilitude, than as a doubling
and preserving of a technology. How does queer
"unnaturalness" fit into the join of machine and nature?
The lovers in Swoon are surrounded by gadgets—
often glaringly anachronistic ones— such as a cordless
telephone or a television with remote control. A
typewriter plays a significant role in both the crime
and its detection, and the spectacles worn by Loeb
becomes a central piece of evidence. Stenography and
tape recording are foregrounded during both
interrogation and trial. In prison, Loeb works as an X-
ray technician; after his eventual release he makes an
appearance on television. At the end of the film an
ostensibly "neutral'' male voice-over (itself another
convention of electronic media) informs us that, at his
death, Loeb bequeathed his eyes to science so that they
might be transplanted.
Both the murder and its detection proceed by
technology: fingerprints must be erased or discovered,
clues must be hidden or uncovered, confessions must be
withheld or extracted. In the explanation of the crime,
the budding disciplines of forensics and criminology
have recourse to psychoanalysis (a psychoanalyst
testifies at the trial) and craniology (the skulls of
Leopold and Loeb are duly measured). An entire dossier
of delinquents' photographs, with suitable physiognomic
notations, is projected like a sequence of slides at one
point, with the additional subcultural joke that many of
the faces belong to women and men who are activists in
ACT UP/New York; this sly anachronism points to
continuities in how deviance and resistance are
produced.
More than anything, the technology of film itself
is under scrutiny in Kalin's film, which incorporates
contemporary newsreel footage and photographs. The
grainy nuances of black and white stock that Swoon makes
so gorgeously visible holds out the filminess of film as
a reproductive medium itself. Together these
technologies conspire to detect, analyze, aid, produce
or control deviance and crime— in perhaps all too
Foucauldian a way, Swoon charts the "perpetual spirals
of power and pleasure" (Michel Foucault, History of
Sexuality; Volume 1; An Introduction 1976 45). In the
serpentine tautologies of these spirals, Leopold and
Loeb, as queers, commit a murder to enact their deviancy
in relation to the law; the law in its turn explains
their deviancy in committing the murder as the effect of
their queerness. The process of the trial can make
89
Leopold and Loeb into the foreign bodies (queers, Jews,
criminals) over and against which "America" produces its
identity. But instead of simply reproducing this
process, Kalin's film makes us see this process itself
in a doubled vision: Swoon does not simply replicate
that initial production of Leopold and Loeb as other,
but neither does it perform the equally facile act of
asserting Leopold and Loeb's "innocence."
Swoon, moreover, is not the first film to tell
Leopold and Loeb's story: classic Hollywood cinema has
relayed the case twice at least, both in Compulsion and
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. (Hitchcock's Rope. for
example— or more effectively, his Psvcho— worked to fix
the psycho-killer as the Hollywood type of the queer.)
Rope, according to D. A. Miller, sets in place the
homophobic pleasure of a deliciously frustrated "desire
for the spectacle of gay male sex," which we are never
going to see (given the homophobic representational
constraints on same-sex erotic contact in Hollywood
film, and not just of Hitchcock's time). All the same,
it is this "never" which, Miller suggests, a film like
Rope tantalizingly promises to suspend.
What Miller has to say about the occlusion of "gay
male sex" in Rope is pertinent to Swoon. if only to
measure Kalin's deviance from Hitchcock. Miller
describes the role of the hyper-vigilant apparatus in
90
Rope— the spectacular technique of extremely long takes,
baroque camera movement, and concealed cuts— as
productive of a double bind: "The camera-voyeur that
patiently waits for it* ['gay male sex'] to happen also
wears the hat of the camera-cop whose presence on the
scene will ensure that 'it' won't happen at all, and
whose unremitting surveillance will therefore go to show
that 'it' doesn't exist" (1991 133). In other words,
the incitement at work in Rope's imaginary of what-gay-
men-do operates at the same time as a blockage, as a way
of making what-gay-men-do vanish from possibility (men
couldn't possibly do such things I).15
One of the courtroom scenes of Swoon disassembles
camera-voyeur from camera-cop in a way that opens the
apparatus for other kinds of recordings. In this
particular scene, the judge orders that the court be
cleared of women so that the exact sexual character of
Leopold and Loeb's relationship may be determined; the
women leave, and the male jurors discourse and decide:
the voyeuristic-juridical gaze belongs to straight men
alone. Yet as the prosecutors read the diaries of
Leopold and Loeb, a series of shots (medium closeups)
suddenly locates the two men lounging and embracing on a
bed, a recollection of earlier erotic intimacy between
the two. Now, however, the bed is in the middle of the
courtroom itself; the accusing voices drone on and on as
91
they read the diaries, while the men move silently and
joyfully. The shots are inexplicable in diegetic terms,
since they are not framed in any way as either the
fantasy or the memory of any spectator present in the
diegesis; it is neither a matter of Leopold or Loeb's
remembering the earlier scene, nor of the court's
accurate reconstruction or projection of that scene.
In a sense, the scene can only be ours. now visible
proof that "it" (to recall Miller) does exist, and that
we, as spectators, can imagine and see "it." Perhaps
this scene constitutes proof of the cinematic apparatus
itself, which is so closely allied with the machinery of
sexual investigation and homophobic determination. Yet
proof means something very different in this instance—
something irrefutably pleasurable in the very midst of
the violence and murder, the mutilation, incarceration
and death of Leopold and Loeb's history.
Kalin's reconstruction works otherwise then, and
Swoon. despite its title, is not the dying fall of
"homosexual" loss and self-forgetfulness. Swoon revises
the Hollywood vision of the queer as anti-subject, as
black hole of identity. Indeed, this particular scene
in Swoon gives the lie to Leo Bersani's perhaps too
influential affirmative answer to his own question "Is
The Rectum A Grave?": no, the rectum is not a grave, and
for many gay men it is a site of pleasures both
anticipated and recollected.16 For this moment, Swoon
splits the voyeur-cop off from the spectating subjects
of the film: the camera remembers for us a moment of gay
male tenderness and lust, not as a panoptical instrument
superior to the court, but exactly as an apparatus that
makes us— now interpellated as queers— remember with
Leopold and Loeb, and remember them as part of us. Such
a recollection puts both camera and viewer in a
different place from the straight man, who may wait for
this scene but can never, effectively, see it (compare
Miller 131-9).
While Swoon effectively sets out many of the terms
for the readings that are to follow in my work, the
remaining sections of this chapter will clarify and
elaborate some of those terms and address in greater
detail why I maintain that certain forms of historical
fiction in queer film and video are forms of political
engagement and not nostalgia. First, I will analyze
ways of thinking about the uses of lesbian, gay, and
bisexual pasts in the present: I will thus trace some of
the unhappy relations that have been proposed between
"homosexuals" and the past, most notably by
psychoanalysis, but I will also draw on a number of
pronouncements on the political necessity and urgency of
different projects of queer historiography. Second, I
will then consider theorizations of historical fiction
in film through a reading of Portrait of a Marriage.
Stephen Whittaker's adaptation of Nigel Nicholson's
biography of his bisexual parents (Vita Sackville-West
and Harold Nicholson), and I will argue that the film is
not in and of itself a lesbian film, but that its
various readings and contextualizations open it to
lesbian-queer appropriations. Such appropriations open
onto issues of reception and consumption, issues which
belong to the "public sphere." In conclusion, I will
try to theorize, tentatively, the necessity of both
"public sphere" and "counter-public sphere" in thinking
about queer film. Insofar as these films ask about the
social and historical determinations of lesbian and
bisexual women's spectatorships, they pose questions in
a way that allows the celluloid closet to open onto a
public sphere. But for the moment, we must turn to the
very notion of queer pasts and what they might mean now.
94
Queer Pasts Now
I COULD HARDLY FIND YOU
IN MY HISTORY BOOKS
BUT NOW IN THIS SCENE
YOU ALL COME TOGETHER
(Tessa Boffin, "The Knight's Move" 1991
43) .
I
Time, like the Oedipus complex, seems to be something of
a family value. Or rather, structured by the have and
have-not of castration, the Oedipus complex is what
gives the family its temporality: sons do indeed take
the place of their fathers by becoming fathers in their
turn, fathering more sons to replace them when the time
comes; daughters, meanwhile, grow up to be mothers and
to gain at last the baby that is the next best thing to
a penis. These little baby-penises will grow up to be
boy children who will want to kill their daddies (just
like their daddies did when they were little boys) or
girl children who will want penises (just like the ones
their daddies had). And the boys will grow up to be
daddies and the girls will grow up to be mummies with
baby-penises all of their own. Thus, family values
become Family Romance, and the future is safe, or so, at
least, runs the story according to psychoanalysis.17
Oedipal temporality makes the world go round18: from
family to nation state (as the recent intense
concentration on family values in the 1992 United States
election campaigns would seem to have demonstrated).
How pervasive the link between family and history is,
can be seen even in a recent special issue of
Representations (26 1988) which is devoted to "Memory
and Counter-Memory." Its introduction ends with an
oddly unexamined bit of familialism: Natalie Zemon
Davies and Randolph Starn slip into a conflation of the
reproduction of memory with the reproduction of
generation, as they write, "an obligation to remember
truly, we might say, is as binding as the fact that
other generations live on in our very blood and descend
from our own" (1988 6, my emphasis).
What would be the place of queers in the Oedipal
scheme of things? Freud confidently asserted that "in
the case of many inverts, even absolute ones, it is
possible to show that very early in their lives a sexual
impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect
in the shape of a tendency to homosexuality" (Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1962 6, my emphasis);
more specifically, "external influences . . . have led
sooner or later to a fixation of their inversion" (6, my
emphasis). "Inversion," then, is a kind of after-burn,
the slow development of an already fixed image— an image
which turns out to be a family snapshot. For example,
according to Freud, the male homosexual's problem is not
96
so much that he becomes his mother as that he stays his
mother: "they [male homosexuals] have thus repeated
throughout their lives the mechanism by which their
inversion arose" (1962 11). In short, as far as
psychoanalysis is concerned, queers can only, indeed,
must be regressive.19
In 1972 gay theorist Guy Hocquenghem took issue
with the role psychoanalysis accorded queers in its
Oedipal temporality. "The homosexual is possible
socially," Hocquenghem wrote angrily, "only if he [sic]
has a neurotic 'fixation' to his [sic] mother or father;
he is the by-product of a line which is finished and
which turns his guilt at existing only in relation to
the past into the very meaning of his perversion"
(Homosexual Desire 1978 93). What makes the
"homosexual" tolerable in the social order that hates
her or him is that she or he should have the sense of an
ending— her or his own. This sense of an ending comes
to characterize "homosexuality" as it is produced.
The homosexual can only be a degenerate
for he does not generate— he is only the
artistic end to a species. The only
acceptable form of homosexual
temporality is that which is directed
towards the past, to the Greeks or
Sodom; as long as homosexuality serves
no purpose, it may at least be allowed
to contribute that little non
utilitarian "something" towards the
upkeep of the artistic spirit (1978 93-
4) .
From the point of view of psychoanalysis Hocquenghem
writes, "Homosexuality is seen as a regressive neurosis,
totally drawn towards the past; the homosexual is
incapable of facing his future as an adult and father,
which is laid down for every male individual" (94).
Hocquenghem argues that in psychoanalytic terms,
"temporality asserts itself as the absolute need for
parents and children to succeed each other" (94) ; on the
other hand, "homosexual desire is ignorant of the law of
succession— the law of stages— and is thus unable to
ascend to genitality" (94) : homosexuality can therefore
only be conceived as "a counter-current to the necessary
historical evolution, like an eddy on the surface of a
river . . . that responds to the inevitability of the
current" (94).
As Hocquenghem presents the homophobic
construction, the degenerate who does not generate is
outside the temporality of generation and generational
succession; the sole time available to the homosexual is
a past radically divorced from the present and a present
that is the empty repetition or rehearsal of that past;
the "homosexual" is somehow already history (in the
colloquial sense).20 Since "homosexuality" is thus
effectively always-already a la recherche du temps
perdu. Hocquenghem views any "homosexual" appeal to the
past with suspicion: Greek love for Andre Gide or for
98
Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. Proust's visions of a
lost Sodom under Parisian skies, Renee Vivien and
Natalie Barney's plans to start a properly lesbian
colony on the island of Lesbos, all attest both to
readiness to relinquish claims to an existence in the
present, and to an uneasy apprehension that there is no
future in Athens, Sodom, Gomorrah, and Lesbos.
Against such an intransitive past, Hocquenghem1s
strategy, in the context of the early seventies, gay
liberation, and the Front Homosexuel d'Action
Revolutionnaire. was to demand a radically transitive
present tense of enacted desire in the shape of "the
pick-up machine": "If the homosexual pick-up machine
. . . were to take off the Oedipal cloak of morality
under which it is forced to hide, we would see that its
mechanical scattering corresponds to the mode of
existence of desire itself" (1978 117-8). Indeed, the
kind of proliferation of desire which Hocquenghem
opposed to Oedipal generation was to be given shape of a
quasi-universal kind ("the mode of existence of desire
itself") in the pick-up machine. As an apparatus of a
different kind, the cruising gay male body was to
achieve that reproducibility without reproduction which
heterosexists and homophobes seem to find so unsettling
about "homosexuals." (Compare the prefect of police whom
Hocquenghem quotes who defines "homosexuals" as "people
99
who, though not procreating, have a marked tendency to
multiply," qtd. in Hocquenghem 95, and used as the
epigraph to this chapter.)
The pick-up machine is perhaps best embodied, even
though Hocquenghem does not say so directly, in the gay
macho clone of the 70s: one might here recall Wayne
Koestenbaum's more recent anti-homophobic polemic on the
part of clones. "Clone," Koestenbaum notes, "a
disparaging term for muscled gay men who dress and groom
themselves stereotypically, signifies a mechanically
reproduced masculinity inhabited as if it were real"
(Koestenbaum, "Wilde's Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay
Reading," Engendering Men 1990 182). Koestenbaum writes
that because "the word clone evokes laboratories, it
also subtly derides a gay male's non-procreative
sexuality; it defines homosexuality as a replication of
the same. Gay men may father children, but
homosexuality has often seemed equal to mechanical, not
sexual reproduction," and he cautions that "to consider
replication degrading is, literally, homophobic: afraid
of the same" (1990 182-3).
Even before the seventies ended, Hocquenghem felt
that the pick-up machine, the gay man born from gay
liberation, was a thing of the past. In an interview
given at the end of that decade, Hocquenghem returned
implicitly to the temporality accorded "homosexuals":
100
It seems as though consensual homosexual
acts between adults are something that
Middle America is beginning to accept.
But they won't accept the possibility
that this might continue into the next
generation. It's as though they have a
conscious or subconscious agreement with
themselves they can't put all the gays
alive to death now because so many of
them have come out .... But they can
try to prevent the same thing from
happening in the next generation. So
this is the significance of education
because this is the only way to suppress
homosexuality. And it is for the same
reason that I think gay child-custody
cases will, in the future, be one of the
toughest battles we'll have to fight
(interview with Mark Blasius, 1984 364).
Hocquenghem's words, spoken in the middle of the anti
gay campaigns of the late seventies, have an especially
ominous and prophetic ring in retrospect.
Here it is vitally important to grasp that the AIDS
crisis, which stands between us and Hocquenghem's words,
has not invalidated the political necessity of the pick
up machine; indeed, as Cindy Patton has written, "If
there is any truth in this epidemic, it must be that gay
men have shown far more ethical conduct in their sexual
relations with their brothers than the dominant
(heterosexual) culture has ever shown between men and
women" (Patton, "Visualizing Safe Sex: When Pedagogy and
Pornography Collide," Inside/Out 1991 385). The pick-up
machine can now be reconceptualized as a condom-vending
machine, in a way that would also transvalue the
homophobic trope, more prevalent than ever, that
101
associates safer sex with queer sex and thus understands
both as "unnatural," in implicit opposition to
"natural," that is, "heterosexual" and procreative
sex.21
Hocquenghem's fear that every possible effort would
be made to prevent the emergence of another generation
of queers has proved well-founded. Not only have
various forms of legislation stopped the "promotion of
homosexuality," but, through twelve years of homophobic
indifference, outright hostility, as well as overt glee
at what must have seemed to be the imminent
disappearance of the homosexual, the perpetuation and
escalation of the AIDS crisis has given force to the
possibility of letting the death of all queer people
happen: indeed, the neat conversion of AIDS deaths into
statistics and tables, that can be contemplated by a
"scientific" observer with detached equanimity, is one
of the many horrifying aspects of heterosexual response
to AIDS.22
Given his earlier suspicion of appeals to history,
it is remarkable that in this same interview Hocquenghem
should warn against consigning previous forms of queer
existence to oblivion: "I am struck by the ignorance
among gay people about the past— no more even than
ignorance: the 'will to forget1 the German gay
holocaust" (1984 358). He goes on: "... that we
forget in such a radical way is, I think, something of a
warning .... we don't remember! So we find
ourselves beginning at zero in each generation. Our
lesson from history, then, is that we can't be sure we
won't be suppressed" (358). None of the forms,
traditions or conventions of supra-personal mnemonics
(familial, regional, or national, to cite a few) would
appear to obtain for lesbian and gay people as lesbian
and gay people. The "will to forget" of which
Hocquenghem speaks is at once an outcome and a further
cause of such drastic historical rootlessness. For
Hocquenghem, the resistance on the part of lesbians and
gay men to remembering earlier lesbian and gay cultures
(in Weimar Germany, for example) indicates an uneasy
kind of awareness of how easily suppressible such
cultures and histories are.
II
Nevertheless, appeals to history have very much been
part of the legitimation and self-understanding of
identities formed on the basis of same-sex desires and
sexual activities in Western cultures. Such appeals
have been far from uniformly progressive, and indeed,
sometimes they have evidenced the regressive, even
reactionary nostalgia of which Hocquenghem accused Gide
and Proust (as we saw earlier, 1978 94). In any case,
103
there may well have been only "one hundred years of
homosexuality," in the currently fashionable
formulation, but there have been also at least, if not
more than, one hundred years of speculation about the
place of same-sex desires and activities in history.23
For example, as early as 1837 one of the first
polemicists on behalf of male same-sex love, Heinrich
Hossli, published a volume entitled Eros, die
Mannerliebe der Griechen (Eros, the Male Love of the
Greeks), which cited the ancient Greeks as predecessors
in male love.24 In England, Don Leon, a long privately
published narrative poem which pleads for reform of
sodomy laws, and which further purports to be a secret
verse autobiography of Lord Byron, was available in
1866. One of Byron's recent biographers, Louis
Crompton, has calculated that the poem may have appeared
as early as 1833.25 Not only does Don Leon forge an
accurately bisexual Byron— Crompton, amongst others, is
impressed by the wealth of biographical information
concerning the "real" Byron that the ostensibly
fraudulent text contains— but it also finds a number of
historical predecessors for Byron's own desires. The
speaker "Byron" thus justifies his infatuation with
another young man (John Edlestone, whom Byron met at
Harrow, Crompton [1985] 80) by means of a judicious
detour through the library in search of pretexts:
104
When young Alexis claimed a Virgil's
sigh,
He told the world his choice; and may
not 1? ... .
Then why was Socrates surnamed the sage,
Not only in his own, but every age,
If lips, whose accents strewed the path
of truth,
Could print their kisses on some favored
youth? (Don Leon 193 0; rpt. 1975, 11.
273-4 and 277-80).
Periphrastically invoked, Shakespeare, too, becomes a
predecessor;
Nay, e'en our bard, Dame Nature's
darling child,
Felt the strange impulse, and his hours
beguiled,
In penning sonnets to a stripling's
praise,
Such as would damn a poet now-a-days
(11. 315-8).
Not only does Don Leon aim to out Byron, it effectively
manages to out an entire literary and philosophical
tradition with him.
These early apologias on behalf of same-sex love
and sexual acts tended to be exclusively male, as one
may infer from the examples above, partly because of the
constraints that prevented women from writing at all,
let alone from writing about women's sexuality and
homoeroticism, and partly because men were often, as in
the cases of Hossli and the anonymous Don Leon writer,
responding to legislation that dealt exclusively with
male-male sexual acts. Here, one should consider Lilian
Faderman's well-known argument that, until the
nineteenth century, affection and desire between women
105
were widely understood as "female romantic friendship"
(Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men; Romantic
Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance
to the Present 1981, especially 103-42). Recently,
however, other historians such as Randolph Trumbach have
tried to demonstrate the existence of lesbian
subcultures, identified and self-identified as
"sapphists," as early as the eighteenth century
("London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders
in the Making of Modern Culture," Body Guards: The
Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein
and Kristina Straub, 1991 112-41).
In her encyclopedic survey of how "fictions of
Sappho" have historically informed the cultural-
political possibilities of female desire, whether
heterosexual or lesbian, Joan DeJean points out that in
French, "saphisme" was used first in 1838 to name sexual
desire and activity between women; DeJean notes that
"lesbienne" makes its first dictionary appearance in the
Complement of 1862 to the Academie Frangaise dictionary
(DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 1989 350) .
Actual usage, DeJean shows, must have preceded the
lexical enshrinement of the words by several years: as
an example, she cites Baudelaire's use of "lesbienne" in
his poetry already in 1845-8.26 While the derivation of
"lesbian" or "sapphic" is well-known, it is worth
106
observing that, as adjective or noun, in its allusion to
Sappho, poetess of Lesbos, the very word "lesbian" is in
and of itself a highly condensed historical fiction.
Renee Vivien's writing and life both must be the
most sustained instance of a subjectivity fully
attempting to live the supposedly historical and
mythical meanings of "sapphism" and "lesbianism" in the
present: one could say that for Vivien her lesbianism
was very self-consciously a costume drama, a glamorous
and exciting historical fiction. In her prose
narrative, A Woman Appeared To Me. there is an
androgynous, but ultimately female protagonist, called
San Giovanni (or "Saint John"— the name already evokes
another set of precedents: the Biblical John, as well as
Leonardo's painting of the epicene Saint John in the
Louvre— the text explains this nomenclature for us,
Vivien 1976 5). San Giovanni is a poetess herself of,
among others, a volume entitled, In Sapphic Rhythm (1976
5). San Giovanni fancifully explains her "lesbianism"
as a case of reincarnation:
If it is true . . . that the soul is
reborn in several human bodies, I was
certainly born once on Lesbos. I was
only a sullen and awkward child when an
older playmate took me to the temple
where Psappha [Vivien's preferred
spelling of the name] was invoking the
Goddess. I heard the Ode to Aphrodite.
That incomparable voice flowed out, more
harmonious than water. The verses
rolled on like waves, and died and were
reborn with a sound like the sea.
107
Truly, truly, I once heard the Ode to
Aphrodite! The shining memory has never
faded with the years, not even with the
passage of centuries (1976 7-8).
The reiteration of "reborn" in the passage is worth
noting. "Renee Vivien" was in fact the pseudonym of one
Pauline Tarn, and her chosen first name "Renee" evokes
possibilities of "rebirth" not only in the metaphoric
act of re-naming the self, but also, as the passage
above suggests, in a more literal way, as the reality—
however fantastic— of previous lesbian existence reborn
in the contemporary lesbian self.
Vivien went so far as to learn ancient Greek in
order to be able to translate Sappho's fragments herself
into French. Eventually she did a great deal more than
translate the fragments, for she also attempted to
restore the unity of Sappho's corpus by writing entire
new poems which used the existing fragments as their
basis. DeJean comments that as Vivien translates, her
"amplifications become ever more ample" (1989 25), and,
with some reservation, DeJean remarks on the "unsettling
quality of these translations'" (250).
As part of her fantasy of a Sappho or Psappha
renee, Vivien returned twice to a fragment of Sappho's
which reads: "Someone, I believe, will remember us in
the future" (Vivien, Sapho [sic] in Poorness, vol. 1, 167,
my translation). She not only translated and extended
the fragment in her Saoho [sic] as "Dans les lendemains"
("In the days to come," 167), but went back to it as
"Pour Une" ("For A Woman") in La Venus des Aveuqles (The
Venus of the Blind in Poemes. vol. 1, 219). In Vivien's
recontextualization, the fragment becomes a self-
fulfilling promise that speaker and addressee, lover and
beloved, will be remembered; the poems work as
performatives whose enunciations do what they say and
guarantee the truth of their promise: with each re
reading and re-writing of these words, the lesbian
moment is recollected and recreated. The future which
the poem projects from its place in time is the present
moment of "our" reading, and our present is itself
already projected as a future for other subsequent
readers. Vivien's position vis a vis Sappho's text is
repeated by the position of future readers vis a vis
Vivien's translation, and so on and on, in a play that
aims to quote a lesbian continuity into existence
(especially in "Pour Une," in which the titular
dedicatee and future reader is gendered specifically as
female). Vivien's writing, which clearly has designs
not only on the past but also on the future, does work
to invent and create a fantasy of shared— reincarnated
or reborn— lesbian identities across history in a way
that is very different from the regressive nostalgia
that Hocquenghem criticizes in Homosexual Desire.27
109
With the development of a homosexual rights
movement in Germany at the turn of the century, overtly
political claims for the previous existence of
homosexual identities became frequent. Freud himself,
in the Three Essays, conceded: "It must be allowed that
the spokesmen [sic] of 'Uranism* are justified in
asserting that some of the most prominent men in all
recorded history were inverts and perhaps even absolute
inverts" (1962 5). In Freud's summary, some of the
dangers and limitations of the strategy become apparent
already: any appeal to a history which calls on "the
most prominent men in . . . recorded history" runs the
risk of reproducing the biases and elitism of dominant
traditional historiographies (the deeds of great men,
the deeds of the great). A recent critic, Rainer Bohn,
has sharply criticized writing by gay men of the Weimar
era as "exotic, exclusivist, and elitist," ("Exotisch
Exklusiv Elitar, in Schwule und Faschismus 1983 87-121).
Bohn refers to texts that present fictionalized accounts
of the poet August von Platen (Hans von Hulsen, Den
alten Gottern zu. 1918) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann
(Victor Meyer-Eckhardt, Die Gemme. 1926): for Bohn, in
their concentration on idealized proto-gay individuals
from a misty past, these works escape the contradictions
of confronting homophobia in their present (104-5).
110
At the same time, an invocation of the past could
be used for overtly anti-homophobic ends. Here it is
heartening to know that very early in its history as a
medium of reproduction, film itself was used as the
vehicle of such an invocation. We should not lose sight
of the overall problem of how to reproduce queer pasts
in the present: the silent film Anders als die Anderen
(Different From the Others) is perhaps exemplary in this
regard.28 Made in 1918, it aimed not only to promote
social tolerance of male "inverts," but overtly allied
itself with early homosexual rights attempts to revoke
Statute 175, the legislation which criminalized sexual
acts between men. The director of Anders als die
Anderen, Richard Oswald, had Magnus Hirschfeld, the
sexologist and tireless homosexual rights campaigner, as
his collaborator on the film. (Hirschfeld was both gay
and Jewish and was later denounced by the Nazis as
"[der] Sexualjude Magnus Hirschfeld," qtd. in Schwule
und Faschismus 18). The film ends with a tableau:
[It] depicted famous homosexuals
throughout history— not only Socrates,
Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, but also
two of the sacred cows of German
history, Frederick the Great and Ludwig
of Bavaria!— bound in chains until a
huge hand strikes out Statute 175, thus
de-criminalizing homosexuality and
freeing them (program notes, Anders als
die Anderen 5 January 1991, Los Angles
Contemporary Museum of Art).
Ill
One contemporary spectator, Christopher Isherwood, later
recalled that this scene in particular impressed him
(Christopher and His Kind 1976 34). One of the bitter
ironies of history is that this very scene should have
been lost and is not a part of the surviving print of
the film.29
An odd coincidence underscores the ambivalent uses
of film to reproduce and record history. The Nazis
destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's extensive archival
documentation of early lesbian and gay history some
three months after Hitler had become Chancellor, and
Hirschfeld, who had already left Germany, first found
out that his Institute for Sexual Research had been laid
waste when he saw the scenes of destruction a few days
later as part of a newsreel at a movie theater.30 Film
and photographic images of the Nazi burning of
Hirschfeld's library have themselves become synecdoches
of the annihilation wrought by the Nazis; sadly, the
exact context of these images— their situation as part
of the Nazi attempt to destroy both homosexuals and the
homosexual rights movement— often goes unacknowledged.
Ill
With the assertion of politicized gay and lesbian
identities after the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New
York, a limited institutionalization of lesbian and gay
112
studies and historiography followed in the 1970s,
largely in North America and England. Here the primary
historical activity was, as Gayle Rubin writes, a
"search [for] . . . ancestry" (1976 xx), which was very
often a quest for "role models." Robert K. Martin could
thus write, "They have taken away our lives, and we have
paid for the loss. We have had to see ourselves as
radically alone, without historic figures to whom we
could turn .... We have always been there but we
have been invisible" ("Reclaiming Our Lives," The View
from Christopher Street 1984 253).31 While there are
marked differences between Martin and Rubin's respective
approaches to lesbian and gay history, Rubin herself
characterized her reconstruction of Vivien and her
circle as an attempt at lesbian "hagiography" (qtd. in
Jay 1988 25).
Marked by its trope of "hidden-from-history," the
approach to lesbian and gay inquiry thus outlined
proposes to uncover what (more precisely, "who") has
always been there but has been made invisible. It
assumes that homophobia operates through concealment and
suppression, and that it must counteract homophobia by
showing what it is that homophobia has concealed and
suppressed. Once it has done so, its more or less
overtly hagiographical tendencies may lead it to cover
over contradictions— blemishes— in the role models it
113
sets up: Natalie Barney's elitism, for example, which
led to an unbridled enthusiasm for Mussolini and a
belief that the Second World War was caused by Churchill
and the Jews (Jay 1988 34). The "hidden-from-history"
approach is often marked by an empiricism that takes for
granted its ability to establish proof (or lack of
proof) of an historical figure's "homosexuality."
John Boswell, for example, simply states that
historical sexual orientation can be determined on a
basis of sexual preference. Explaining why he uses the
designation "gay" in what would appear to be a
transhistorical way, he replies, "What I mean by 'gay'
is a person who prefers his [sic] own gender for erotic
reasons" (Boswell, interview 1990 24); Boswell's
definition here glibly avoids complex historical and
political issues of sexual choice, constraint, and
cultural identities and proffers a reduced and
impoverished version of "gay identity." (In my
introduction I have tried to make clear why a definition
such as Boswell's is in some ways antithetical to a
queer understanding of sexual identity.) Not
surprisingly, the lesbian feminist definition of
"lesbian" offered by Lilian Faderman in Surpassing the
Love of Men is the antithesis of Boswell's (1981 411-5).
Bisexual and transgender activists have more recently
contested the assumption that "proof" of an erotic
114
preference for one's own gender over the opposite makes
for anything other than a history of monosexuality.
The empiricism of the "hidden-from-history"
approach limits it and tends to commit it to the
identification and establishment of a minority canon of
"known homosexuals." Crompton, unlike Boswell, is
prepared to acknowledge that sexual identities are not
simply a matter of who wanted to have sex with whom and
that they may be formed on the basis self-understanding
in relation to historically specific contexts of
homophobia.32 Yet as astute an historian as Crompton
is, he can still state that "in attempting to
reconstruct and understand the past, gay studies face
two specific critical problems— the identification of
documents and their interpretation" (1985 4-5). He
means the destruction and/or bowdlerization of texts
with "homosexual themes" (5) by "identification"; what
he means by "interpretation" is the acknowledgement that
"the central issue confronting gay studies may be called
the friendship problem'" (6). In short, all gay
studies have to do is find documents and then on their
basis decide if so-and-so actually did it with such-and-
such (of the same sex).
Foucault's work in the first volume of his The
History of Sexuality appears to have definitively
challenged such empiricism. Too well-known to rehearse
other than schematically here, Foucault proposes that,
far from being transhistorical, "homosexual identity" is
a comparatively recent phenomenon which emerged out of a
nineteenth-century concern with an historically and
culturally contingent notion of "sexuality" as the
"truth" of an equally historically and culturally
contingent notion of "subjectivity."33 A careful and
critical working out of Foucault’s very rapidly sketched
thesis has engaged some of the most politically
important work done in lesbian and gay historiography—
Lilian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men and her
more recent Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers and Jeffrey
Weeks's Coming Out; Homosexual Politics in Britain. From
the Nineteenth Century to the Present or Against Nature.
Foucault "himself" has achieved something of a canonical
position in the new field of queer theory as it has
marked itself off from earlier lesbian and gay
studies.34 For lesbian and gay historians less careful
than Faderman and Weeks, however, a Foucault-derived
rejection of an extended history for "homosexuality"
(coupled with general nervousness about "essentialism")
could lead to an extreme narrowing of focus, so that
henceforth the only theoretically authorized coming-out
story was to be the narrative of how the "homosexual"
emerged as a late-comer on the stage of Western history.
116
The work of Jennifer Terry may take its approach to
lesbian and gay historical work from Foucault, but it
avoids the potential historical and political short
sightedness of some other recent versions of
"homosexual" history. Terry offers some ways of
producing a politically viable historiography in and for
a present. She makes very clear what the limitations
and dangers of earlier forms of lesbian and gay
historiography are, in their "discovery of great gays in
history whose essence travels across historical and
discursive formations and whose coherent stories must be
told" ("Theorizing Deviant Historiography," 1991 58).
She further makes the point that such a discovery tends
to be implicitly apologetic: "'alternative' historical
narratives claiming to recuperate the truth of
homosexuality strive for a kind of respectability, a
restoration, a coherence ..." (58). Most importantly,
she points to the dangers that have accompanied the
"imposition of sexual identities from the Euro-American
present to the past and to different cultures around the
world" (59), for however well-intentioned, such
impositions may work in the service of an imperialism.35
This does not lead Terry, however, to determine
simply when and where in the new schema the "homosexual"
first showed up: she does not abandon historiographic
inquiry, but instead gives it an appropriately queer
117
turn. She calls for an "historiographic activism" (69),
which, informed by Foucault's genealogy and Gayatri
Spivak's deconstruction, would involve a "new archivist
. . . on the street, in the thick of things, occupying a
mobile subject position" (57). Instead of producing an
historiography in which the stability of a "homosexual"
identity could be measured, determined, and narrated
(somewhat in the manner of John Boswell), the archivist
on the move would be able to account for discursive
effects of deviance as productive of "deviant
subjectivity" which would be "inside and outside of the
ideology and history of heterosexuality" (71); deviant
historiography would also read differences "within and
between" homosexual subjects (69) such as gender, race,
ethnicity, class and age. Terry's specific project
involves the close readings of a voluminous series of
"case histories" of eighty men and women who were
identified as "homosexuals"— a number of whom were
working-class and/or people of color— in New York in the
1930s for instances of "reverse discourse"36 in which
subjects constructed as deviant can actively talk back
to power.3 7
IV
But the question lingers: to forget Foucault? To get
over Foucault?38 Terry begins to suggest ways in which
we can produce queer historiographies beyond Foucault.
Unfortunately, the history of sexuality which Foucault
proposed is sometimes taken up only as an invitation to
fill in what he left blank, as if more research into
discursive formations of sexuality would eventually turn
up the exact day and date on which the
transmogrification of "sodomite" into "homosexual" took
place. Such an approach, it seems to me, simply
replaces one historical teleology and closure with
another: in lieu of reading the great gays of history
for how "they" were "us," we simply now read how the
sodomite became "us." Contrastingly, the mobile, even
activist, archive in which both archivist and documents
are on the move envisaged by Terry can begin to make
explicit the relations— always somehow still to be
determined— between queer pasts and queers now. In this
section, I wish to consider some further specifically
queer theorizations of the ethics and practices of
historiography, from Jonathan Dollimore, Simon Watney,
Joan Nestle, and Tessa Boffin. Different as they are,
all of them can shape and guide an understanding of
queer pasts now.
Like Terry, Jonathan Dollimore draws on Foucault to
go beyond Foucault and to supersede the facile hundred-
years-of-homosexuality hypothesis. Dollimore
investigates the discursive formations that have
119
produced "perversion" across Western history from as far
back as Augustine. Explaining his negotiations between
"theory" and "history," Dollimore writes that he began
with theoretical explanations of how cultures are
organized around forms of discrimination— of sexuality,
gender, race, and class— and then traced those
theoretical explanations back in history (1991 24). As
he did so, he became aware of the "lost histories of
perversion" (22):
Through that history I have also been
led to a fuller recognition of the
suffering that attends not only the
discrimination and unsuccessful
resistance to it, but also successful
resistance to it. Trying to bear
witness to that suffering— a kind of
historical empathy infused with a sense
of loss and helplessness inseparable
from the simple fact of being alive in
the present— requires at least that we
refuse the temptation to write the past
according to our current theoretical
predilections (1991 24).
In other words, a rewriting of the past in accordance
with some neat theoretical model (the hundred-years-of-
homosexuality, for example) does not suffice to reflect
the agonies and braveries of marginalized groups in
their manifold histories.
The encounter with the past leads Dollimore to a
more humble archival activity: that of bearing witness
to loss, privation and pain of "specific historic and
political struggles," that is not unlike the bearing
witness of "cultural memory"— the term I borrowed at the
120
beginning of this chapter from Marita Sturken, who uses
it to describe the efficacy of a project like the AIDS
quilt. "More than ever before," states Dollimore, "we
need to recover those histories" (24).
That the recovery of such lost histories can
literally be a matter of life and death is made clear by
Simon Watney. Like Dollimore, Watney draws on Foucault;
like Sturken, he situates his work in AIDS activism. In
the ongoing AIDS crisis, Watney asserts that, "it is the
very possibility of gay identity that is now at
stake"(1992 363)— by "gay identity," Watney understands
the politics of sexual self-determination and self-
definition (332). The "public 'meaning' of AIDS,"
writes Watney, constitutes the arena in which "the
future of gay identity is being fought over" (363): it
is in this context that Watney very plangently cites one
of Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history that
reads: "Only that historian will have the gift of
fanning the spark of hope in the past who is convinced
that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he
wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious"
(Benjamin, qtd. in Watney 363).39 Now, more than ever,
politically accountable queer historiography must have
as its primary task the fanning of sparks of hope in the
past without which even the dead would be lost once
more.
121
If any queer writer here has managed to keep the
hope of the past alive in such a way as to redeem even
those who are gone, it is surely Joan Nestle, whose
archival work has maintained a continuity in lesbian
histories without which the memories of entire
subcultures would have been forgotten. Any discussion
of Nestle also has to take into consideration radical
inequities of power and dissymmetries between genders40
that often split male histories of perversion from
lesbian "herstories." The latter term, in fact, has
been used for the "Lesbian Herstory Archives," an
ongoing archival project in New York which Joan Nestle
founded with other lesbians. She explains her
commitment to the archival project as the outcome of her
different identities and histories, as a Jew, as a femme
dyke, as a feminist, as a working class woman, and as a
socialist (11).
Nestle, who is both an actual archivist and
activist, best exemplifies the project of a queer
historiography in the present which I would invoke here;
before Queer Nation or queer theory, Nestle had the
courage to claim an identity and a history as queer,
what she calls, "my memory of being a queer, my
inheritance from the fifties" (111). "My roots lie in
the history of a people who were called freaks," she
writes as she recalls her past as a young femme woman
122
with her butch lover in the 50s, walking the streets,
being arrested at lesbian bars, knowing passing women
(111-2; Nestle uses the word "queer" 112, 158, 171).
For Nestle, "it [is] the collective histories of
our bodies' desire that [help] forge the changes to
come" (1986 11). While "queer" initially may have
signified "forgery" ("queer as a three dollar bill"),
Nestle's use of "forge" here serves as a reminder that
construction is first and foremost struggle, real work
of bodies on streets and in beds, and that such
struggles are about the past as it may change the
future. At the same time, she warns;
History, that huge conglomeration of
people and events, is a tricky thing to
invoke. Often one person's history to
be glorified and celebrated is another
person's hell .... One cannot have
unquestioning faith in history. We
choose the history that we say is ours,
and by so doing, we write the character
of our people in time (11).
Nestle has returned again and again to history, in order
to re-examine and redefine its significances, in her
writing. She has made clear the stakes involved in the
apparently very simple act recognizing that queers do
have histories:
We need to know that we are not
accidental, that our culture has grown
and changed with the currents of time,
that we, like others, have a social
history comprised of individual lives,
community struggles, and customs of
language, dress, and behavior— in short,
123
that we have the history of a people to
tell (110).
But she also adds that "having a history may well be
harder than not having one" (110) for it carries with it
responsibilities to what and who has gone before, and to
how to tell that history.
Nestle has taken up those responsibilities: she has
challenged the unacknowledged class biases that would
count whores and passing women out of "acceptable"
lesbian historical inquiry ("Lesbians and Prostitutes:
An Historical Sisterhood," 157-77); she has maintained
the specificities of lesbian histories and identities,
not only from men but from heterosexual feminists as
well (124), but she has also over and over again
proposed and recollected coalitions and convergences,
whether between women, whether lesbian or straight and
deviant (120-2), between lesbians and men of color (178-
88), or between lesbians, gay men and queers of all
kinds (12 3-6). She remembers the range of cultural
practices that queers have built of dress codes or of
occupations of public space (161), but Nestle has also
always asserted the imperative of refusing the position
of "clean sex deviant" (123), the one whose culture and
history would be about something (anything) other than
"just" sex. In her prose that is by turns scrupulously
accurate, scholarly, autobiographical, poetic, and
erotic-pornographic (she notes the political need not to
124
disclaim "pornography" 187), she has made fantasies and
erotic writing central to her writing as an historian.
She insists:
Erotic writing is as much a documentary
as any biographical display. Fantasies,
the markings of the erotic imagination,
fill in the earth beneath the movement
of great social forces; they tell deep
tales of endurance and reclamation.
They are a people's most private
historic territory (10).
She explains:
This is why I always wince when a gay
activist says that we are more than our
sexuality, or when Lesbian culture
celebrants downplay lust and desire,
seduction and fulfillment. If we are
the people who call down history from
its heights in marble assembly halls, if
we document how a collective erotic
imagination questions and modifies
monolithic social structures like
gender, if we change the notion of woman
as self-chosen victim by our public
stances and private styles, then surely
no apologies are due. Being a sexual
people is our gift to the world (10).
As far as queer historiography is concerned, it may be
time to forget Foucault, but there is still much to be
learnt from Nestle.
Like Nestle, the photographer Tessa Boffin makes
fantasy and collective imaginings central to her
engagement with lesbian history. It is striking, in the
context of reproducing history, that Boffin should
choose photography as her medium. We may remember that
for Benjamin, the photograph plays a double role: a
harbinger of mechanical reproduction and destroyer of
125
the aura of art, but also, a guardian of "the cult of
remembrance of loved ones, [which] offers a last refuge
for the cult value of the human face" (1969 226). In
Boffin's fabulous tableaux, photography makes possible a
memory of what never existed: a mechanically
reproducible cult of lesbian history and fantasy. Women
are costumed and posed heroically, often as angels, for
example, in her photographs for the Ecstatic Antibodies
show, where lesbian angels engage in various acts of
safer sex.41 In a highly condensed way, the icons of
lesbians angels, the technology of safer sex, and the
medium of photography come together to provide a
counter-myth to lethal mythologies of AIDS, in which
women are either "vectors of disease" or "innocent
victims," in which "all queers deserve AIDS" or
"lesbians don't have to practise safer sex."42 Boffin's
angel of history, unlike Benjamin's, is a lesbian, an
angel who can indeed tarry and intervene (see Benjamin,
"Theses," 257).
In an essay, "The Knight's Move," which accompanies
a series of exquisitely posed photographic portraits and
tableaux of women dressed in a variety of costumes—
suits of armor, chain mail, rococo rake and belle,
another rebel angel— Boffin explains the need for a
carefully considered return to the "role models" drawn
from history (1991 49). As we saw, an earlier
126
generation of lesbian and gay historians considered such
role models, the great-gays-of-history, crucial to the
establishment of legitimate cultural identity. Boffin's
pictures seem very much like Rubin's hagiography of
lesbian saints. In one photograph from the series, the
rococo belle even bears a tablet on which the names of
lesbians such as Sappho, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe
Hall, and Alice Austen (a lesbian photographer from the
turn of the century) can be seen; in another, previous
photographic portraits of Alice Austen, Gertrude Stein
and other historic lesbians lie strewn like relics at
the entrance to a cemetery, around the base of a
memorial sculpture of an angel, which seems itself to be
the mournful custodian of a paradise lost, and the
antithesis of the flesh-and-blood angel Boffin's
photograph captures.
The return to role models that Boffin proposes,
however, is neither straightforward nor straight. She
names it "The Knight's Move . . . a lateral or sideways
leap" (49). The immediate reference, as Boffin notes,
is to the game of chess, in which the knight moves to
the side as part of an advance (50); another reference
is evidently the two women dressed knight and squire,
and who recall the iconography of Joan of Arc, as well
as the courtly rituals of Barney and Vivien. Moreover,
Boffin names as the knight's leap a specifically lesbian
127
engagement with narratives and emblems of the past; her
images and the text that accompanies them serve as
reminders of the specific traditions and practices of
lesbian cross-dressing as well as of how much chivalry,
heroism, and the national-cultural fantasies they
generate, have been heterosexual male preserves; "One
way we can move forward is by embracing our idealized
fantasy figures, by placing ourselves into the great
heterosexual narratives of courtly and romantic love"
(49).43 Her photographs become ways of mechanically
proliferating subject positions and sites for lesbian
desires and identities.
The photographs suggest, accordingly, both a match
and a mismatch between costumes and models, between
personae and identities, between histories and actors.
The rococo figures both carry masks which serve to
emblematize allegorically the very process of taking on
the props and trappings of a history from which
queers— lesbians, in particular— have been banished.
While the costumes are sumptuously detailed and the
models are posed in appropriately heroic portrait poses,
distinctly "contemporary" details such as shaved hair or
multiple ear piercings appear, so that such calculated
anachronisms make visible the labor, the strain even,
involved in the "knight's move."
128
A lack of fit between identity and costume that is
a great deal more serious can be located in Boffin's
selection of a woman of color, Rishma Janmohammed, to
play the squire who is paired with the knight. Her
presence in the sequence may show up the extent to which
traditions of heroic iconography— which have played a
role in stabilizing white "Western" culture as an
unacknowledged yet enforced norm— have operated not only
through exclusions of gender and sexuality, but of race
as well. However, as the only woman of color in the
sequence, Janmohammed may also show up the extent to
which certain legacies of historical narrative, whether
chauvinistic or countercultural, leave out people of
color.44
It may be that there is no historiography without
its own exclusions.45 Janmohammed's appearance seems to
be, paradoxically, the inclusion of what an appeal to
"history," understood as "Western history," excludes.
Boffin's use of Janmohammed as a model is highly
ambivalent and ultimately may raise more problems than
answers. For example, the sequence of photographs
leaves unanswered the question of whether Janmohmmed's
role in the scenario of knighthood makes such an
eminently "Western" tradition her own and on her own
terms, or whether she is simply being cloaked in its
codes and to some extent appropriated again. Her
129
explicit role as a somewhat subservient figure, "the
Knave," would indeed seem to suggest the latter. Does
her presence mark how appeals to "history" by queers— no
matter how strategic or subversive— tend to be appeals
to an implicitly "Western" history, with all its
hierarchies still intact? Can Janmohammed occupy the
place of a potentially radically different
rearticulation of history?46
Whatever response is offered, Boffin does
acknowledge that her strategy in "The Knight's Move" is
an uncertain one. Much as such costume dramas may be
used to conjure or wish away historical inequities of
representation, "we cannot just innocently rediscover a
lesbian Golden Age because our readings of history are
always a history of the present, shaped by our positions
in the present" (49) . Boffin, tacitly, draws on
Foucault to displace Foucault: "... we also have to
re-invent; we have to produce ourselves through
representations in the present, here and now. These
images may draw upon our past histories, or they may
transgressively take from others, but they will
certainly shape our futures and play with our desires"
(49-50).
It is then, for Boffin as well as Dollimore, Watney
and Nestle, a matter of queer pasts now, of the
productivity of that potentially oxymoronic or
130
anachronistic juxtaposition, interpenetration even, of
past and present: the insistence of these multiple
histories in the present and what they signify and for
whom at every moment of their reinvention. "I am here
with only a shallow pool of time around my toes,” says
Nestle, "But that here has been my history" (14). That
"here" is also, at the same time, as Boffin's work
attests, an everywhere.
Boffin's movement— the knight's move— makes the
past a point of departure for shared fantasies of the
future, a place from which to articulate the possibility
of different pasts and different futures. This is what
I see as crucial to a queer historiography that would
not deny the terms of its own construction— "old
tattered photographs and hazy daydreams," Boffin
concedes (50)— nor be intimidated into silence by its
need to invent.
More than anything, however, "queer pasts now"
should be read less as a declarative phrase than as a
demand, a slogan, and an insistent and impatient one at
that. Benjamin writes: "To articulate the past
. . . means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger" ("Theses," 255). This flash of
the past at a critical moment is the very opposite of
the slowly developing after-images to which the model of
131
Oedipal temporality would have consigned queers. In the
dangers that beset us, our pasts are yet to be made.
From Family Romance To Lesbian Public Sphere: Portrait
of a Marriage
Undoubtedly, not all depictions of "homosexuality"
against an historical backdrop make for queer history.
Representation and enunciation, questions of who speaks,
to whom, how, and where, determine the conditions under
which queer histories are produced and received. A
relatively minor case can prove highly instructive here:
Stephen Whittaker's adaptation of Portrait of a Marriage
(1990) as a television series based on the life of Vita
Sackville-West. A reading of Whittaker's Portrait of a
Marriage can demonstrate the failure of a "queer past
now," especially if the series is viewed against
theorizations of sexuality and history in film. But the
specific history of Portrait of a Marriage in the United
States, that is, outside of its primary context as a
made-for-BBC series, suggests otherwise. Its screenings
at lesbian and gay film festivals and its subsequent
censorship by the Public Broadcasting Service (WGBH
Boston) in the United States serves as a reminder that
queer pasts are where we find and make them, and that
132
even inauspicious versions of those pasts can have vivid
political effects in the present.
At first sight, it must be conceded that Portrait
of a Marriage seems to be nothing more than an instance
of "homosexuality" in period costume. Mark Finch and
Richard Kwietniowski have written that in a particular
kind of historical film, "homosexuality [is treated] as
a rather ungainly grand piano around which character
actors and vintage cars . . . gather" (1988 73);
Portrait of a Marriage seems to use lesbianism and
bisexuality primarily as a pretext for costume drama.
Moreover, in so far as it is an exemplary "period piece"
Portrait of a Marriage would appear to obey the same
Oedipal temporality which, we may recall, permits queers
only on condition of their nostalgic enclosure within a
familial frame.
Portrait of a Marriage exemplifies what might
cautiously be termed a recent and characteristically
"British" genre: the film or television series in which
"homosexuality" turns up in an historical (usually
idealized nineteenth- or early twentieth-century)
setting and occasions a tentative disturbance, before it
retreats safely into the closet of the past. Indeed,
the very pastness of such representation vouchsafes its
status as high culture, and in a metonymic interplay and
133
interchange, "homosexuality," "history," and "high
culture" are made to comprehend one another.
Films and television series such as Another Country
and Brideshead Revisited and, in particular the
director-producer team of James Ivory and Ismail
Merchant, have shaped this burgeoning canon which has
fixed "homosexuality" and "high culture" in nostalgic
closeness to both "Englishness" and "history." Writing
of these films in a discussion of Merchant-Ivory's
version of E. M. Forster's Maurice. Finch and
Kwietniowski argue that they provide "a sublimation
suitable for school trips" (73), and point out that
"homosexuality figures less as a desire than a class-
based symptom of wider issues': lost youth,
authoritarian upbringing, the perversities of privilege"
(73); differently put, the professed centrality of
"homosexuality" to this genre may be nothing more than a
red herring.
While Merchant and Ivory may have broached lesbian
desire in their adaptation of Henry James's The
Bostonians, the genre has been dominated by its concern
with male homosexuality, and finds its finest flower in
Maurice. As a "lesbian" or "bisexual women's" variant
of such a resolutely male genre, Portrait of a Marriage
seems to be a case of the "hommosexualization" of
lesbian desires and identities, that is, their
134
representation within and through codes derived from
male "homosexuality."47 Directed by a man, but dealing
with a bisexual woman writer, namely Sackville-West,
Portrait of a Marriage evidences the scarcity of lesbian
representation, and not only in the historical film.48
All the same, the "art film," of which the genre I have
been describing is part, allows for a limited
thematization of "lesbian desire": consider Mandy
Merck's comments concerning "the lesbians of art cinema"
on the subject of John Sayles's Lianna. which, like
Portrait of a Marriage, is an ostensibly "lesbian" film
made by a man (Merck, "Lianna or the Lesbians of Art
Cinema," 1987 166-79). Merck argues that "art cinema"
in its production and reception tends simultaneously to
market and to defuse or manage its images of sexuality
and sexual differences through its claims, precisely, to
be "art."
Moreover, "art cinema" works implicitly towards the
promotion of some national cultural identity with an eye
to the international marketplace. For example, Finch
and Kwietniowski observe that "British-costume-drama
. . . exports a nostalgic remoteness and fastidious
mise-en-scene which has proved particularly palatable to
moneyed sections of the North American market" (1988
72). British "art cinema" thus promotes a somewhat
faded and crestfallen hegemony of "British culture," as
135
it attempts to identify itself with a generalized
ruling-class "Englishness." Packaged as ’ ’Masterpiece
Theater" for consumption abroad— in the United States,
for example— "British culture" becomes an eminently
marketable and exportable commodity.49 In its very
exportability, what Finch and Kwietniowski call British-
costume-drama tries to secure a belated dominance for
"British culture," now forever a culture of museum-like
detail and stilted Oxbridge accents.
Additionally, British-costume-drama advances an
intimacy between "history" and "literature," and even a
tacit identification of the former with the latter.
Merchant-Ivory, for instance, generate film
"adaptations" of novels such as Maurice which, while not
historical fiction in the context of their writing,
become costume dramas for and on the screen. While
Portrait of a Marriage is not based on a fictional text,
it still has an eminently literary status, as dual
biography and autobiography of an Englishwoman of
letters: both its condition as quasi-literary and quasi-
historical allows it to be brought to the screen as
"homosexuality" in historical drag. Indeed, both spouses
of the eponymous "marriage," Sackville-West and Harold
Nicholson, were writers. And while both have achieved a
position on the sidelines of English literature, their
relatively minor rank only underscores the supposed
136
rediscovery that Sackville-West's and Nicholson's new
visibility, tele-visibility, is meant to confer.
In fact, the history and literature couple turns
out to be a menage a trois. in which the third partner
is homosexuality, or, more precisely, in the cases of
Sackville-West, Nicholson, and Sackville-West1s lover,
Violet Trefusis, bisexuality. It is the conjunction of
history and literature that seems aimed at legitimating
or even "redeeming" the intractable subject of
homosexuality as a subject suitable for art, or more
specifically "art" television. It has been pointed out
that in its early forms cinema attempted to counter
suspicions about its legitimacy by claiming status as an
art form through its adaptations of works of literature
and its presentation of edifying and elevated historical
narratives.50 When it comes to British-costume-drama,
film or television repeats this early double appeal to
historical edification and literary merit, but now less
because it is unsure of its status as film than because
it proffers history and literature as the excuse for
homo- or bisexualities.
Portrait of a Marriage, as an adaptation of Nigel
Nicholson's biography of his parents, both writers,
ensures or even cements a metonymic link with literature
and the "past." Finch and Kwietniowski's justifiably
skeptical account of Maurice as period film recalls
137
earlier analyses of historical film and popular memory
taken up in a series of articles in Cahiers du cinema in
the 1970s.51 One such dossier from 1974, which
criticized Liliana Cavani and Louis Malle, was
explicitly called "Anti-Retro" (Cahiers du cinema 251-2
[1974]). The participants spoke strongly against the
recent appearance of what they denounced as "la mode
retro," and which Pascal Bonitzer defined as "a snobbish
fetishism about old-time effects (costumes and decors)
and a scorn for history" (Cahiers du cinema 251-2
[1974]: 5, my translation).52 "La mode retro," the
writers argued, makes historical understanding
impossible and substitutes a bourgeois concern with
details that connote "pastness" for an effective
understanding of the past in the present.
This debate, in sum about what constitutes "proper"
or "adequate" historical representation in film,
prompted Stephen Heath to write a number of responses,
in which he pointed out that historical representation
is representation, first and foremost. Since, Heath
asserts, "history in cinema is nowhere other than in its
representations" (1981 237), there can be no easy way of
going back to "history" in cinema. "The present of a
film is always historical, just as history is always
present— a fact of representation and not a fact of the
past," he claims (238). Furthermore, since
i
138
representation of (whatever) is inevitably also
representation for (someone)— a subject, that is— the
real issue for Heath becomes the cinema as an
institution of subjectivity (238).53 And in an earlier
essay on the historical film, Heath argues that such
subjectivity is instituted through the family romance:
No historical film— in the everyday
sense of a film aiming to deal with some
past period or event— escapes fiction:
the fiction of the cinematic apparatus,
the imaginary signifier, but also quite
simply, the fiction of presenting the
past, which in turn is the obligation of
an ordering, a narration, a historical
discourse. In the classical cinema,
family romance is there as the point of
such a discourse— at once in the
specific sense that the historical film
engages in exactly the novel of noble
lives, heroes, famous figures, and, more
importantly, in the wider sense that the
constant force of the narrative of
history given is familiar and family
history: individuals, lives, passions,
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
sons, daughters, the whole panoply of
domestic conflict (1977).
In short, there can be no history without fiction and no
fiction without the family romance: the sweep of
historical fiction is but the latter writ large.
With the family romance— and Freud— we are back to
Portrait of a Marriage. There can hardly be a romance
more familial and more romanesaue than Nigel Nicholson's
memoir of his parents, Harold Nicholson and Vita
Sackville-West. Published in 1970, it consists of a
diary kept by Sackville-West and which records her
139
passionate love for and relationship with another woman,
Violet Keppel (later Trefusis), and which Nicholson
finds, in the best novelistic tradition of the found
manuscript, in "a locked Gladstone bag lying in the
corner of [a] little turret room" in Sissinghurst, the
ancestral family home (1973 vii). Nicholson is on hand
to annotate the maternal text and to write Sackville-
West 's story back into the story or portrait of
marriage, through extensive commentaries that follow
sections of Sackville-West's diaries (47-101 and 133-
233) .
While both parents were bisexual, part of
Nicholson's program is to present somehow his father as
more heterosexual than his mother:
Harold had a series of relationships
with men who were his intellectual
equals, but the physical element in them
was very secondary. He was never a
passionate lover. To him sex was as
incidental, and about as pleasurable, as
a quick visit to a picture gallery
between trains .... he had no
affairs comparable to Vita's ....
His life was too well regulated to be
affected by affairs of the heart, while
she always allowed herself to be swept
away (137-8).
While Harold has his odd visits to the picture
galleries, as it were, Vita, on the other hand, lets
herself "be swept away." Still, Nigel Nicholson can
affirm her ultimate commitment to the eponymous
"marriage": "Vita's elopement with Violet Trefusis was
140
the only crisis of her marriage" (187), and cites "the
existence of myself and my brothers" as incontrovertible
"proof" (13 6) that Vita and Harold were "sexually
compatible" (13 6).
Vita's subsequent involvement with and love for
Virginia Woolf are minimized and dismissed by Nigel
Nicholson, since, in his opinion, "Virginia was sexually
frigid" (203).54 From the very start of Portrait of a
Marriage, the marriage is the real story: "If their
marriage is seen as a harbour, their love affairs were
mere ports of call. It was to this harbour that each
returned; it was there that they were based" (ix).
Vita's relationship with Violet, the subject of the
found text, can be explained as a temporary aberration
that allows her eventual return to the marriage. Rachel
Bowlby, in her introduction to Orlando, makes the point
that when Portrait of a Marriage first appeared in 1973,
it was received as part of a liberal crisis in the
institution of marriage and as part of a public
discussion on "open marriage" (1992 xxvi). Bowlby also
asserts that the "fascination" with the sexualities of
the Bloomsbury group, of which the televised adaptation
of Portrait of a Marriage (1990) is part, has to do with
the commodification of "Bloomsbury" as an institution of
British upper-class and high-culture eccentricity
(xxvi). Part of such commodification is also a
141
closeting, although Bowlby does not say so, which allows
for queerness, whether lesbian, bisexual or gay male,
only on the grounds that it be far away, long ago, and
that what history it recounts be family history:
mothers, fathers, sons, only briefly and interruptedly,
same-sex lovers.
The television adaptation is framed as flashback
within flashback. It begins during World War II, some
twenty years after Vita's elopement with Violet, as an
older (and presumably "wiser") Vita refuses to see
Violet. A series of dissolves and internal diegetic
shots takes Vita and the viewers back to the
relationship between the women which begins as an
adolescent crush and develops into full-blown passion,
only to end disastrously when Vita discovers Violet's
bisexuality. Violet has indeed been having sex with her
own husband, Denys Trefusis, so that Violet's marriage
is not simply the marriage of convenience that she has
made it out to be for Vita.
A presentation of bisexuality as confusion
permeates the series, and while it may be explained in
terms of "historical" or "biographical" verisimilitude
(they were like that), the figuration of bisexuality as
crisis cannot but resonate with other contemporary
discourses around bisexuality in the 1980s and 90s
(bisexuals as vectors of HIV, for example). The series
A
142
is punctuated with various characters expressing their
bewilderment at the situation. As ultimate narrative
device and denouement, the exposure of the "lie" and
"betrayal" that bisexuality must be in the film's
imaginary is heterosexist and biphobic, to be sure. The
film ends with grotesque closeups of Vita and Harold,
now in the 1960s, "aged" by prosthetic makeup, so that
their age can connote the persistence, permanence and
legitimacy of a heterosexual tie over the interruption
that was the lesbianism/bisexuality of Vita and Violet.
By establishing the 1960s as the film's ultimate
temporal referent, it also stabilizes the narrative as
the narration of the marriage. The series makes no
mention of Woolf. As if to affirm Hocquenghem's
pronouncements on the temporality accorded
homosexuality, Portrait of a Marriage can give a
bisexual or lesbian relationship only the status of an
extended flashback in the present and "real"— so real
that it goes without telling— story of heterosexuality.
In her analysis of how lesbian feminist viewers
find "illicit pleasures" in mainstream films and
construct "particular feminist communities as
oppositional groups" (1990 181) through the public and
shared viewing of films, Elizabeth Ellsworth draws
attention to how films are framed by discourses such as
pressbook releases which allow and guide certain
■A
interpretations while disallowing others (188).
Ellsworth uses the term "salient" (184) to designate the
battle lines that are drawn and contested in dominant
and oppositional interpretations. In relation to
Portrait of a Marriage and the entire apparatus of
production, distribution, release, and reception,
Ellsworth can offer a way of accounting for the
pleasures and affirmations that lesbians and bisexual
women found as spectators when Portrait of a Marriage
was shown in the United States at the 1991 Ninth Annual
Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The festival
program encourages a lesbian reading of the series, the
four episodes of which were shown over two nights (13-14
July 1991). Portrait of a Marriage, the program assures
prospective viewers, has a "passionate lesbian love
affair at its core," and although the notes concede that
the series has no happy ending, it describes Vita and
Violet's relationship as "stormy vet loving" (program
notes, 11-20 July 1991, my emphasis), and sums up the
series as "a historical drama of an enduring love" (my
emphasis). Moreover, the notes take care to point out,
in conclusion, that "Vita Sackville-West was later
Virginia Woolf's object of desire and the subject of her
famous novel, Orlando." By stressing the continuity of
Vita and Violet's relationship, and by mentioning Woolf
and Orlando as markers of a particular set of lesbian
144
references, the notes expressly authorize the "salients"
of a lesbian reading.
Over the two nights that it was then shown,
Portrait of a Marriage brought the same group of female
spectators into the audience in a space that was
constituted as "lesbian." Through certain kinds of
repetition, not just the return to the theatre over two
nights, but also through the formal repetitions of
credits (for four episodes) the audience established a
particular relation with figures on the screen and with
each other as a specifically constituted community. The
audience "read" the series in terms of the "salients"
provided: thus, Violet's statements of independence from
men and desire for Vita were cheered, Harold Nicholson
booed, and the appearance of characters during the
repeated credits were greeted vociferously (more cheers
and boos). The ending, with its prosthetics to signify
the dignity of the marriage, met with derisive laughter.
Ellsworth's comments on how lesbian and feminist
reviewers support their readings of films produced
within a heterosexist economy are pertinent here:
"reviewers [celebrate] these moments [of ‘lesbian
verisimilitude1] with references to the viewing behavior
of other lesbians in theatres— clapping, laughter, and
feelings of validation in a context otherwise reserved
for the reproduction of heterosexist romance" (193-4).
145
The reproduction of heterosexist romance and marriage
can become something else: a different history and
another story.
On the ambiguous involvement of such communal
moments in limited contexts of distribution and
reception, Martha Gever writes eloquently:
No wonder gay and lesbian film festivals
which incorporate popular cultural
forms, retain the character of a ghetto,
where embattled people find pleasure
without having to constantly look over
our collective shoulder. Because self-
identified lesbians approach these
places with a presumption of community,
no matter how fictional, these become
cultural spaces that can change our
relationship to the screen. Our
identities are constituted as much in
the event as in the images we watch
(•'The Names We Give Ourselves" 1990 200-
01) .
Gever's description deserves to be quoted at length, not
only because it recapitulates so well the dynamics
between the "event" and the "images," but also because
it opens the possibility for the theorization of
collective, public spectatorships. Miriam Hansen has
done likewise, insisting on "the audience as collective,
the theatre as public space, part of a social horizon of
experience" (Babel and Babylon 1991 14).55
How such an alternative or counter public space may
change is evident in the subsequent screening of
Portrait of a Marriage on "Masterpiece Theatre" in the
United States (through PBS and WGBH Boston). Not only
146
does such a recontextualization put Portrait of a
Marriage back in the closets of History and Culture as
"Masterpiece," but the specific broadcast of the four
episodes cut scenes that establish childhood affection
between Vita and Violet. These scenes would, had they
been shown on television, presumably have affirmed not
only the lesbian/bisexual identities of both women, but
would also have given credence to the possibility that
queer desires are not the outcome of adult seductions.
To further heterosexualize the framing of Portrait of a
Marriage, the avuncular straightness of Alistair Cooke
was added. Cooke spoke of his shock upon first reading
Nigel Nicholson's book, which, Cooke claimed, seemed to
repeat the sin of Lot's children in exposing parental
nakedness (a scene more than simply primal given its
metonymic association with Sodom and Gomorrah). Cooke
opined that while Harold Nicholson was only "somewhat"
homosexual, Vita's relationship with Violet almost
"destroyed" the marriage (see GLAAD/LA Reports 4.8
[August 1992]: 1).
The opening of a sphere for lesbian and bisexual
women's collective spectatorships is insecure and
impermanent. Indeed, only through a reading of the
straight text of family romance and heterosexual
generation (from bisexual parents to straight son) is it
brought about in this instance. Yet the moment of
communal viewing, the multiplication of lesbian viewers
through the text of history recalls an earlier moment,
one anticipated long ago by Vita in a letter to Virginia
on the publication of Orlando in the United States:
1 1 • • - A woman writes that she has to stop and kiss the
page when she reads 0:— Your race I imagine. The
percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all
because of you” (The Letters of Vita Sackville-West To
Virginia Woolf 1985 318).56 Multiplying, increasing,
reproducing everywhere, the lesbian moment cannot simply
be contained in a past but still creates itself anew.
148
Notes
1.Following Spivak's suggestion that "sexual
reproduction" becomes a private realm falsely opposed to
a "public domain," I have preferred the use of the term
"heterosexism," which shows up the public domain as
arena which determines the supposedly private. While I
do, on occasion, use the term "homophobia," the term
"heterosexism" points to the social regulation of
identities, desires and relations in a way that
constructs and enforces heterosexuality as the norm, and
according to which a wide range of possibilities are
either interdicted (same-sex sexual activities) or
rendered unthinkable (bisexual and transgender
identities). Homophobia, on the other hand, allows the
"psychic" to be misunderstood as the origin of the
"social," so that the institutional effects of
heterosexism can be disregarded in favor of a
privatizing notion of "phobia." I have used
"homophobia" more in instances where what is evidently
at stake is some fantasmatic projection of desire and
disgust onto queer subjectivities or acts. Simon Watney
writes, "ironically, the discourse of homophobia1 turns
out to be as reductive as the explanations of
homosexuality which it seeks to counter" (Policing
Desire 1987 47); Jonathan Dollimore, on the other hand,
has argued for the usefulness of the term "homophobia"
(Sexual Dissidence 1991 233-48).
2.See Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of
the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," no trans., 1970,
and "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in the Cinema," no trans., 1975?
both rpt. in Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York: Columbia U P, 1986) 286-98 and 299-317.
See also, amongst others, Jean-Louis Comolli, "Machines
of the Visible," in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Stephen
Heath and Teresa de Lauretis (New York : St. Martin's P,
1980) 121-42.
In his vastly influential article of 1975,
translated into English and published in Screen in the
same year, Christian Metz wrote, in a way that
recapitulated Baudry, "And it is true that as he
identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no
other than identify with the camera, too, which has
looked before him at what he is looking at and whose
stationing (= framing) determines the vanishing point.
During the projection the camera is absent, but it has a
representative consisting of another apparatus called
precisely a projector.' An apparatus the spectator has
behind him, at the back of his head, that is, precisely
149
where fantasy locates the focus' of all vision,"
Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," no trans., in
Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology 253. A great deal of
film theory in the 70s was devoted, accordingly, to
tracing the imaginary production of subjectivity-
effects, especially via specular identification,
voyeurism and fetishism, as outlined by Metz, 260-76.
3.Constance Penley, "Feminism, Film Theory, and the
Bachelor Machines," in The Future of an Illusion: Film.
Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989) 57-80; I do not find the elaboration
of a psychoanalytic theory of fantasy, with which
Penley's essay ends, to be a particular escape from the
toils of either the bachelor machine or of Hollywood's
"dream-factories" (1989 80). For another feminist
engagement with apparatus theory, see Joan Copjec, "The
Anxiety of the Influencing Machine," October 23 (Winter
1982): 43-59. Usefully brief overviews can be found in
the discussion, with Diana Fuss, Judith Mayne, Mandy
Merck, and Teresa de Lauretis, following Judith Mayne,
"Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship,"
How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object
Choices (Seattle, Bay P, 1991) 134-41, and in Miriam
Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Early
American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard U P,
1991) 3-7.
4.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume
1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976) 127. It is worth noting that the
metaphor of the dispositif. or "apparatus," translated
as "deployment," pervades this first volume of
Foucault's History of Sexuality.
5.See, for example, Mandy Merck, "Difference and
Its Discontents," Screen 28 (1987): 2-8, and Jackie
Stacey, "Desperately Seeking Difference," Screen 28
(1987): 48-61.
6.In Anglophone queer contexts, "breeder" is an
antagonistic colloquialism for a heterosexual. The term
is applied to female and male heterosexuals alike and
does not, in its usage, evidence animosity towards
women's specific reproductive potential. The hostility
at play here is directed, very obviously, towards a
symbolics of sexual reproduction and procreation. That
it is never simply a matter of "having children" is
evidenced both by the common heterosexist understanding
of procreative heterosexual sex within marriage as a
norm of sorts and by various child custody laws that
deny gay male, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parents
150
custody of children. In a highly condensed form,
"breeder" transvalues the professed basis of
heterosexual superiority into stigma. See also Michael
Warner's discussion of the term, Warner, "Fear of a
Queer Planet," Social Text 9.4 (1991): 9.
7.Rosen makes it clear that "ideological
interpellation" derives from Louis Althusser's account:
"the category of the subject is the only constitutive of
all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function
(which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete
individuals as subjects" (Althusser, "Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards An
Investigation)," in Essays On Ideology 1971 45).
Althusser himself is adamant that "ideology has no
history" (35) and writes, "If eternal means, not
transcendent to all (temporal history), but omnipresent,
trans-historical and therefore immutable in form
throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud's
formulation word for word, and write ideology is
eternal, exactly like the unconscious" (35). It should
be clear that my line of questioning diverges from
Althusser's sweeping assumption of a transhistorical
subject of eternal ideology.
8.The notion of "seen queerly," or "queerly seen,"
has begun to be developed by Alexander Doty, "The Sissy
Boy, The Fat Ladies, and The Dykes: Queerness and/as
Gender in Pee-Wee's World," Camera Obscura 25-26 (1991):
131.
9.In a powerful reading of the meanings of the AIDS
quilt, Marita Sturken uses the term "cultural memory" to
describe the activity of "bearing witness" for
disenfranchised groups: she points out that notions of
"collective memory" tend to be inadequate since they do
not concentrate "on the politics of what gets to count
as collective memory." She then proposes "cultural
memory" as "a useful way to define cultural processes
that stand outside of official history and mainstream
culture, yet have served as catharsis for healing, the
sharing of personal memory, and community-building."
She concludes: "The way we remember events culturally
affects their historicization and hence helps to
determine responses in the future" ("Conversations With
the Dead: Bearing Witness in the AIDS Memorial Quilt,"
Socialist Review 22.2 [1992]: 65).
10.The homo-who-recruits is, of course, one of the
bogeys of heterosexism— an ideology which, with varying
degrees of violence, never stops interpellating and
recruiting. The fantasy of recruitment-into-
r
homosexuality stands behind various homophobic efforts
to stop the "promotion of homosexuality": Simon Watney
provides a pertinent analysis of Section 28, which
prohibits local authorities in England from
"intentionally [promoting] homosexuality or [publishing]
material with the intent of promoting homosexuality" and
from "[promoting] the teaching in any maintained school
of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended
family relationship" (qtd. in Watney, "School's Out,"
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. 1991 388,
387-401). Similarly, in the United States in 1987, the
Helms Amendment (to a bill that allocated funds for AIDS
research and education) reads "... none of the funds
made available under this Act to the Centers for Disease
Control shall be used to promote AIDS education,
information, or prevention activities and materials that
promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual
sexual activities" (qtd. in Douglas Crimp, "How to Have
Promiscuity in an Epidemic," AIDS: Cultural Analysis.
Cultural Activism. 1988 264, emphasis added). The
campaign against the "promotion of homosexuality"
ensures the invisibility of queers, in any other than a
powerless and stigmatized form. It is in this struggle
that Queer Nation's stickers command/demand: "PROMOTE
HOMOSEXUALITY," "PROMOTE LESBIANISM," "PROMOTE
BISEXUALITY," and "PROMOTE QUEERNESS."
11.The term "the lost histories of perversion"
derives from Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence:
Augustine to Wilde. Freud to Foucault (Clarendon:
Oxford U P, 1991).
One may also wish to compare Benjamin's assertion
that film in its mechanical reproducibility brings about
the end of history: "[Film's] social significance,
particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable
without its destructive cathartic aspect, that is, the
liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural
heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great
historical films." Benjamin quotes Abel Gance who
enthuses, "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will all
make films . . . all legends, all mythologies and all
myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions
. . . await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes
crowd each other at the gate." Benjamin comments drily:
"Presumably without intending it, he issued an
invitation to a far-reaching liquidation," "Mechanical
Reproduction," 221-2. Of course such a liquidation may
make other kinds of heritage available.
I am also indebted to Nancy Vickers's adjustment of
"mechanical reproduction" to "electronic reproduction"
in her work on music video.
12.It is unfortunate that de Lauretis should
formulate this important insight by drawing a very
poorly considered analogy between representations of
AIDS and representations of lesbians: "Stuart Marshall
remarked . . . that there should be no global and all-
encompassing representation of AIDS because no such
thing is possible, and I think in this instance, and at
this moment in history, exactly the same thing applies
to lesbian spectatorship" (1991 137). Equally
unfortunate perhaps is that de Lauretis's own
contribution the collection promotes a somewhat
universalized understanding of "lesbian spectatorship"
that draws on psychoanalytic notions of fantasy as if
all lesbians looked that way or as if this model were
universally true for all lesbians (de Lauretis, "Film
and the Visible," How Do I Look? 223-64). The
discussion that follows her presentation and that
concerns de Lauretis's minimization of the role of race
in She Must Be Seeing Things seems to indicate the
audience's discomfort with such a model. De Lauretis
says in her defense that she does not mean to overlook
"racial difference in the representation of lesbianism"
but that her work on fantasy "could be very useful to
others in thinking about how fantasy may work or may be
used in film to address racially as well as sexually
different spectators" (1991 270).
13.See Linda Artel and Susan Wegraf, "Positive
Images: Screening Women's Films," and Diane Waldman,
"There's More To a Positive Image Than Meets the Eye,"
both in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia
Erens (Bloomington: Indiana, 1990) 9-12 and 13-18. For
an influential but highly partial and potentially
lesbian-phobic overview of the notion of "positive
images" in feminist literary criticism— from Kate
Millett to Elaine Showalter— see Toril Moi,
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory
(London: Methuen, 1985), especially 42-9. For somewhat
different criticisms of the efficacy of "positive
images" in lesbian and gay politics, see Richard Dyer,
who writes, "It is often assumed that the aim of
character construction should be the creation of
realistic individuals,' but, as I will argue, this may
have as many drawbacks as its apparent opposite,
unreal' stereotypes, and some form of typing may
actually be preferable to it," Dyer, "Stereotyping,"
Gavs and Film, rev. ed. (New York: Zoetrope, 1984) 27.
14.GLAAD— the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation— is one organization that watches and reports
on the media for positive and negative images of gays
and lesbians. GLAAD has a tendency to combine
conciliatory politics, an aversion to direct action, and
a preference for images that are anodyne and
"assimilated"— gay men and lesbians who are "just-like-
you" (heterosexual, in other words) but who happen-to-
be-gay.
Although Grover concludes by calling for more
(representations and practices) she also provides a
convincing defence of "positive images": " . . .
countercultural or subcultural images propose a complex
forgetting1 of present realities— a resistance to, say,
the painful realities of war, powerlessness and poverty-
-and remembering' of possible alternatives: peace,
security and affluence. Thus it is naive— or very
cynical— to dismiss positive images as merely
sentimental or old-fashioned. To do so is to treat them
as if they proposed no arguments, embodied no
aspirations, reflected no ongoing struggles" ("Framing
the Question," 185-6).
15.In a parallel way, straight confusion over what-
lesbians-do is theorized by Judith Roof as follows:
"configurations of lesbian sexuality embody the
conflicting impetuses of representational insufficiency
and recuperation," A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian
Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia U P, 1991) 5;
for an opposed point of view, Susie Bright asserts:
"Lesbians are visibly sexual in a public manner that was
unseen even ten years ago. It's been years since I've
heard anyone wonder out loud what two women could
possibly do together in bed. Folks know better," Sexual
Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader (Pittsburgh: Cleis
P, 1992) 98.
16.Bersani writes: "It may, finally, be in the gay
man's rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps
otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous
judgment against him," "Is the Rectum A Grave?," AIDS:
Cultural Analysis. Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1988) 222. Bersani's essay is
perhaps best read as a document of its time and place
and as the statement of one gay man; several
contestations of the essay unfortunately seem so far to
have no problem in overlooking the first part— about the
AIDS crisis— as if only the second, apparently more
"theoretical" part really mattered. The structure of
Bersani's essay itself, in which the first part seems to
be glossed "theoretically" by the conclusion, may be to
blame here; in any case, Bersani's essay has achieved an
unfortunate representativity, as if reference to it
could stand in for more serious and considered
engagement with gay men, their sexualities, and the
154
politics of AIDS representation.
17.My summary (clearly a skeptical one) derives
from Freud's "Female Sexuality," trans. James Strachey,
in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 21 (London: The Hogarth P,
1964) 225-43; Freud, "Femininity," trans. James
Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 22 (London: The Hogarth P,
1964) 112-37; Freud, "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen uber
einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia
(Der Fall Schreber)," in Freud, Zwei Falldarstellungen
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982) 124-44.
18.See also Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard
Edition, vol. 13, 141-3.
19.Three Essavs on the Theory of Sexuality provides
an unpleasant wealth of homophobic material: Freud not
only asserts as a matter of fact that "hypnotic
suggestion" can "remove inversion" (1962 6), but offers
as causal factors for homosexuality the following
garbled catalogue: "exclusive relations with persons of
their own sex, comradeship in war, detention in prison,
the dangers of heterosexual intercourse, celibacy [and]
sexual weakness" (1962 6); towards the end of the book
Freud speculates about how "the frequency of inversion
among the present-day aristocracy is made somewhat more
intelligible by their employment of manservants, as well
as by the fact that their mothers give less personal
care to their children" (1962 96).
While the mass of homophobia in Freud1s work would
seem to go without saying, such going-without-saying has
allowed some recent critics to overlook and forget these
passages, and their history of use against queers. I
am, for example, not at all convinced by the efforts of
Kaja Silverman, whose schematization of Freud's models
of "homosexuality" manages precisely to edit out details
like the ones cited above. Reducing Freud's life-long
work on male homosexuality to three neatly diagrammatic
triangles (none of them pink), Silverman asserts, to
forestall criticism, "the systematicity of what follows
is the product of my own secondary revision of Freud's
text" (Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins 1992
361). Surely, as a psychoanalytic critic Silverman must
be aware that such "secondary revision," however
benignly intentioned, cannot be innocent: the effect of
her work is to make Freud workable again as a source of
"knowledge"— a Freud edited of homophobic trouble spots.
In this way Silverman aims to produce a version of Freud
sans homophobic peine, a Freud who, with more than a
little help from Silverman, can still (or is it once
155
again and better than ever?) "know" the "truth" about
homos.
20.Compare also Warner's already cited notion of
"reprosexuality" here. Warner comes to conclusions that
resemble Hocquenghem's in describing fantasies of
reprosexuality as constitutive of heterosexual self-
understanding: "Reprosexuality involves more than
reproducing, more even than compulsory heterosexuality;
it involves a relation to the self that finds its proper
temporality and fulfillment in generational
transmission," Warner, 1991 9.
21.In other writings on safer sex Patton has shown
how the opposition between "natural" or "procreative"
and "unnatural" or "perverse" still obtains in
homophobic and AIDS-phobic figurations of safer sex
practices: thus, Masters and Johnson's 1988 Crisis:
Heterosexual Sex in the Aae of AIDS "articulates the
bizarre idea of safe versus natural' sex," according to
Patton (Inventing AIDS 1990 48). Masters and Johnson,
writes Patton, "[reinscribe] normal and abnormal
sexuality along the lines of heterosexual sex without
condoms, versus all forms of safe sex" (1990 49); coded
as "safe people," those heterosexuals who test negative
for HIV-antibodies "can have sex naturally, while
everyone else— those who fail' or simply refuse to take
the test— is punished with unnatural, dehumanized (that
is, safe') sex" (1990 49).
22.More specifically, at stake here is white
heterosexual responses, as described by Simon Watney
when he writes of "the casual contemplation [in most
mainstream media that addresses a supposedly white and
heterosexual readership] of the virtual extinction of
all black Africans and gay men," Simon Watney,
"Missionary Positions: AIDS, Africa," and Race," Out
There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed.
Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and
Cornel West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1990) 95.
23.The word "homo-sexuality" was first introduced
into English only in 1892 by Charles Gilbert Chaddock in
his translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's
Psvchopathia Sexualis. as David Halperin points out,
Halperin, "Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics,
and Power in Classical Athens," in Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gav and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New
York: New American Library, 1989) 38-9; see also
Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other
Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990). For
156
Halperin, indeed, the introduction of the word marked
the possibility of the thing. Accordingly, the dates
1892 and 1992 neatly parenthesize a single century to
underscore just how historically contingent our
understanding of homosexuality is.
Halperin may not be wholly serious here; he may
well be polemically caricaturing his own position,
especially in response to an historian like John Boswell
who has no qualms about finding "gay people" in periods
very remote from our own (compare the subtitle of
Boswell's Christianity and Social Tolerance: Gay People
in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian
Era to the Fourteenth Century [Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1981], also 43-4). For Boswell, a "distorting and . . .
seductive danger for the historian is posed by the
tendency to exaggerate the differences between
homosexuality in previous societies and modern ones"
(Social Tolerance 28). An essay by John Boswell,
"Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,"
immediately precedes Halperin's "Sex Before Sexuality"
in Hidden From History (1989 17-36). The two writers
have become somewhat iconic of the "social
constructionist" (Halperin) versus "essentialist"
(Boswell) debate in gay studies; hence, presumably their
position at the start of Hidden from History. See also
Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian Sexualities,
Gay Sexualities," differences 3.2 (1991): iii-xviii.
24.See Ferdinand Karsch Haack, Per Putzmacher von
Glarus Heinrich Hossli (Heinrich Hossli. the Milliner of
Glarus), in Documents of the Homosexual Rights Movement
in Germany. 1836-1927. no ed. (1903; rpt. New York: Arno
P, 1972) 1-112, especially 5-6.
25.See Louis Crompton, Bvron and Greek Love:
Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1985) 344 and 359-60.
26.In Surpassing the Love of Men. Lilian Faderman
sees the substitution of "lesbian" or "sapphic" for
"female romantic friendship" as a male pathologization
of relations between women.
27.See also Elyse Blankley, "Return to Mytilene:
Renee Vivien and the City of Women," in Women Writers
and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed.
Susan Merrill Squier (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984)
45-67, Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank. Paris
1900-1940 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), and Karla Jay,
The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and
Renee Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana, 1988). Faderman
(1981 361-3) gives an opposing view of Vivien as someone
157
whose identity was entirely circumscribed by the male
meanings of "lesbian."
28.See Richard Dyer, "Less and More Than Women and
Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany," New
German Critique 51 (1990): 9-31, B. Ruby Rich, "Madchen
in Uniform: From Repressive Tolerance to ERotic
Liberation," in Mary Anne Doane et al., eds., Re-Vision:
Essavs in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: American
Film Institute, 1984) 100-30, and Russo, The Celluloid
Closet 19, 21-2.
29.See Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Gav
and Lesbian Film (London: Routledge, 1990) 10-27 for a
detailed discussion of the film and its contexts.
3 0.See, among others, Erwin J. Haeberle, "Swastika,
Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star," in Hidden From History
368.
31.See also Louis Crompton, "Gay Genocide: From
Leviticus to Hitler," in The Gav Academic, ed. Louie
Crew (Palm Springs: ETC, 1978) 67-91, for a statement of
the systematic suppression of gay history.
32.Unlike Boswell, Crompton does recognize bisexual
behavior and self-understanding, as in the instance of
Byron.
33.The much-quoted passage from Foucault about the
shift from an understanding of "sodomy" as an act to an
understanding of the "homosexual" as a person and
identity concludes, "The sodomite had been a temporary
aberration; the homosexual was now [in 1869] a species"
(Foucault, 1976 43). See George Chauncey, Jr., Martin
Bauml Duberman, and Martha Vicinus, introduction, to
Hidden From History (1989) 1-13, for a judicious
overview of both pre- and post-Foucauldian lesbian and
gay historiography.
34.See Warner, 1991 4-5.
35.See among others the works which Terry also
cites: Barry D. Adam, "Homosexuality Without a Gay
World: Passivos y Activos en Nicaragua," Out/Look 1.4
(1989): 115-50, and Ramon A. Gutierrez, "Must We
Deracinate Indians to Find Gay Roots?," Out/Look 1.4
(1989): 61-7.
36.Foucault 1976 101.
158
37.See also Jennifer-Terry, "Lesbians Under the
Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable
Differences," Journal of Sex Research 27 (1990): 317-40.
38.Obviously I am alluding here to Jean
Baudrillard, Forget Foucault. trans. Nicole Dufresne et
al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1987).
39.Watney cites a different edition from mine; in
my source, it is Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of
History," Illuminations 255.
40.See Terry 1991 68-9 for a similar statement,
although Terry does not refer to Nestle.
41.See Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta, eds. Ecstatic
Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (London: Rivers
Oram P, 1990). This show was cancelled because of
funding threats following the legislation of Section 28,
Boffin and Jean Fraser, Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take
Photographs (London: Pandora P, 1991) 21.
42.The debate about whether lesbians are "at risk"
of contracting HIV has taken place, with some intensity,
in various lesbian cultures and communities. Because
statistics on woman-to-woman transmission of HIV are
low, there has been an assumption that lesbian sex is in
and of itself safe sex: Boffin's phtographs offer an
iconic revision of that belief. See Women. AIDS, and
Activism.
43.By an amusing coincidence, Foucault has also
spoken of courtly love as a heterosexual tradition, if
in a very different way from Boffin: for Foucault,
heterosexuality is structured as "courtship" or
anticipation— the man must win the favor of the woman.
Since homosexuals, according to Foucault, make sexual
contact without courtship, homosexuality as such tends
to be structured as recollection, Foucault, "Sexual
Choice, Sexual Act," in Politics. Philosophy. Culture
296-7. Foucault's comments are limitingly male-
oriented, for example, would lesbians have a relation to
courtship similar to that of heterosexuals, or would
they share with gay men that supposedly quintessentially
"homosexual " tendency to erotic recollection? Who
would have thought that Foucault purported to be anti
essential ist?
44.Robert Young's thesis in White Mythologies:
Writing History and the West is that historiography as
such sets in place an Eurocentric frame of reference.
159
45.In a discussion of the advisability of producing
increasingly "inclusive" historical narratives, Gayatri
Spivak has said, "[it is not] that you should consider
all other subjects .... you might want to entertain
the notion that you cannot consider all other subjects
and that you should look at your subjective investment
in the narrative that is being produced" (1990 29).
46.The discussions in How Do I Look? take up
questions of race in relation to femme-butch roles and
identities: the point is made that the association of
women of color with butch roles— if that is their only
or primary role— may reinforce tacitly racist
assumptions about women of color. At the same time, the
obvious point is also made— that lesbian representation
in its very scarcity may be called on to carry an unfair
burden of representation.
47.Judith Roof writes: "a category by virtue of a
binary gender system, lesbian sexuality exists as a
coherent group only in contrast to heterosexuality and
male homosexuality," A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian
Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia, 1991) 250;
Roof uses Luce Irigaray's term "hommosexual" to describe
the process by which women can only be understood in
relation to men, 140. See Irigaray, This Sex Which Is
Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell U P, 1985) 158. I am aware of the not
inconsiderable potential for homophobia in Irigaray's
coinage of "hommosexual," which always seems to allow
the understanding that what is "really" wrong with
heterosexual men is their "homosexuality" (without that
other "m"). In this instance, however, it seems to me
to be a useful way of noting the frequency with which
lesbians are conceptualized according to a model of male
homosexuality.
48.See Teresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference and
Lesbian Representation," Theatre Journal 40.2 (1988):
155-77, as well as the discussions following de
Lauretis, in How Do I Look? 2 68-70.
49.See Paul Kerr, "Classic Serials— To Be
Continued," Screen 23.1 (1982): 6-19, especially 16-19.
See also, David Morley and Kevin Robbins, "Spaces of
Identity: Communications Technologies and the
Reconfiguration of Europe," Screen 30.4 (1989): 10-34.
50.See, in particular, Heide Schluppmann,
"Melodrama and Social Drama in the Early German Cinema,"
Camera Obscura 22 (1990): 73-90. Schluppmann tells of
how cinema responded to the attacks by cinema reformers
160
by drawing their subject matter from literature and
history, a strategy that was not always successful,
since very often the reformers would then rail against
the debasement of literature and history, 73-5.
51.A number of essays on various other aspects of
historical film appeared in the course of the 70s in
Cahiers du cinema: Louis Seguin, "La famille,
l'histoire, le roman," 260-1 (October-November 1975):
57-68, which offers Freud's notion of the family romance
as a model for historical fiction against which to read
the films of Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub;
Pascal Kane, "L'effet d'etrangete," 254-5 (December
1974-January 1975): 77-83, which calls for the social
crestus (part of the Verfremdunaseffekt) theorized by
Brecht as a prerequisite for "true" historical
understanding in film; Jean Louis Comolli, "Le passe
filme," 277 (June 1977): 5-14 which deals with the hors
champ in filming historical fiction; Comolli, "Un corps
en trop," 278 (July 1977): 5-16, which deals with the
reality effects of the actor's body as it impersonates
an historical personage; Comolli and Frangois Gere,
"Deux fictions de la haine," 286 (March 1978): 30-48,
and "Deux fictions de la haine [2]," 288 (May 1978): 4-
15, both of which deal with different figurations of
Nazi power.
As may be inferred from this overview, the writers
produced either "pure" semiological readings, like
Comolli's "Un corps en trop," or readings that were
heavily weighted in favor of a Brechtian
defamiliarization of historical fiction, as in the
essays by Seguin and Kane. Marked by a fondness for
Straub and Huillet, the latter is tied explicitly to a
modernist faith in the historically and politically
redemptive powers of supposedly anti-bourgeois (that is,
antirealist) forms.
52.A previous issue of Cahiers du cinema had
already touched on the question of "retro" in relation
to Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien: see Serge Daney, "Qui
dit quoi mais ou et quand?," 250 (May 1974): 38-42 and
Pascal Bonitzer, "Histoire du sparadrap," 250 (May
1974): 42-7. The relevant essays in the "anti-retro"
dossier (which deal with Liliana Cavani's The Night
Porter as well as Lacombe Lucien) are "Entretien avec
Michel Foucault," 251-2 (July-August 1974): 5-15;
Bernard Sichere, "La bete et le militant," 18-28, and
Pascal Bonitzer, "Le secret derriere la porte," 29-36.
53.1 return to these terms and to Heath in my
chapter which deals with Isaac Julien's Looking for
Langston below.
161
54.He does recount how his grandmother, Lady
Sackville, told him that "a few years later [after
Violet] a second woman [Woolf] entered my mother's life
and almost wrecked the marriage" (184). In particular,
Lady Sackville would fulminate against "That Mrs. Woolf,
who described in that book [Orlando! how your mother
changed her sexI" (184). Nicholson is more secure than
his grandmother in his belief that Woolf offered no
threat to the marriage, Orlando or no Orlando.
55.Hansen draws on the theoretical work of
Alexander Kluge, 1991 13-7. See also, Miriam Hansen,
"Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The
Construction Site of Counter History," Discourse 6
(1983): 53-74.
56.See also Elizabeth Meese, "When Virginia Looked
At Vita, What Did She See; Or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman
— What's the Differ(e/a)nee?," Feminist Studies 18.1
(1992): 99-118; Meese cites the same letter, 114.
Chapter Two: Pictures of Mr. W. H.: Shakespeare, Wilde, ^
and Derek Jarman
Part One: From Wilde to Shakespeare
"Had Shakespeare Asked Me": Panic in the Canon
Quizzed about Shakespeare, eminent British Shakespearean
actor Ian McKellen "shoots down speculation that his
fascination with Shakespeare is in any way related to
the questions of whether the playwright was gay,"
according to the lesbian and gay newspaper Vanguard
(August 7, 1992). McKellen nevertheless does have quite
a deal to say on the subject of Shakespeare's sexuality:
"I don't think that there's much
evidence that he was primarily gay. But
then 17th-century attitudes about
sexuality were much different from our
own; perhaps less compartmentalized."
He adds, "That strikes me as being much
healthier."
Certain reservations obtain, however. This is how the
interviewer summarizes McKellen's concessions to the
possibility of a gay Bard:
He admits that the Bard's sonnets, which
he calls some of Shakespeare's most
personal writings, reveal that he
understood what it was like to be
attracted to men. "But then, you can't
be certain he was writing as himself,"
he qualifies. "Does it matter?"
"What does matter is that he was
fascinated by the whole range of
sexuality." McKellen cites Twelfth
Night and As You Like It as indicators
163
that Shakespeare "knew what it was to be
straight. He was interested in every
single side of human nature" (Vanguard
16) .
McKellen quickly substitutes an assertion of
Shakespeare's putative "[fascination]" with "the whole
range of human sexuality" for the question of his own
"fascination" with Shakespeare, a fascination that may
or may not have to do with a sexual identity that
McKellen and Shakespeare may— or may not— share. All
things to everyone, McKellen's Shakespeare shows a
dispassionate interest in "the whole range of human
sexuality" that makes of him a kind of Elizabethan
Kinsey.
Such a timeless and universal "Shakespeare" rather
baldly incarnates the humanist "Shakespeare" that, at
least in the academy, has been under deconstruction for
almost a decade now; the project of undoing
"Shakespeare" once and for all is far from over, and the
imperializing ends of "Shakespeare" persist.1 Yet in
this instance I am more fascinated— in my turn— by the
role some notion of sexual identity plays in this
calling up of "Shakespeare." When the Sonnets are
mentioned, Shakespeare suddenly becomes that honorific
institution, "the Bard." The Sonnets may bespeak "an
attraction to men," and they do constitute
"Shakespeare's most personal writings," says McKellen,
with the implication that too great an interest in
164
Shakespeare's personal writings qua personal writings
could only be prurient. But then again, McKellen
cautions that the ever-protean Shakespeare may not have
been writing as "himself." Nothing if not eclectic,
McKellen's theories of authorship can be traditionally
expressive-of-experience one moment and a version of the
death-of-the-author the next. McKellen posits the
Elizabethan period as a golden age, "less
compartmentalized . . . much healthier," before the fall
into homo and hetero, in a way that might seem like a
commonsense version of present Foucauldian orthodoxy.
Yet we should not miss McKellen's apparent belief that
one— Shakespeare in particular— can still "know"
unequivocally "what it is to be straight," as though
heterosexuality were some timeless essence, while
"bisexuality" and "homosexuality" take their stage bows
as historically bound derivations. Before going on to
assure us that Shakespeare— of all plays, on the basis
of Twelfth Niaht and As You Like It!— without a doubt
knew "what it was to be straight," McKellen has to
dismiss all questions like these with an urbane shrug,
"Does it matter?"
In the midst of considerable outrage from lesbians,
bisexuals and gays, including filmmaker Derek Jarman,
McKellen, who as a Shakespearean actor is "widely held
to be the heir to the theatrical throne of Laurence
165
Olivier" (Vanguard August 7, 1992 16), was made a knight
of the British Realm in 1990.2 The irony that did not
escape the gay press was that McKellen, who had come out
publicly as a gay man in 1988, seemed to have no trouble
accepting a knighthood from the same Thatcher government
that passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act in
the very year McKellen came out: Section 28 prohibits
any local authority from "(a) intentionally [promoting]
homosexuality or [publishing] material with the
intention of promoting homosexuality" and "(b)
[promoting] the teaching in any maintained school of the
acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family
relationship" (qtd. in Anna Marie Smith, "Which One's
the Pretender? Section 28 and Lesbian Representation,"
[1991] 128 and in Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk [1992]
113). The coincidence of McKellen's coming out with
Section 28 shows that sexual identity is not to be
dismissed with an airy "Does it matter?" Of particular
import in this context is how sexual identity is bound
up with cultural prestige and power and with cultural
contestation. In short, the question of sexuality in
Shakespeare's Sonnets persists.
Almost a hundred years before McKellen, someone
else "knew what it was to be straight." Frank Harris, a
notorious womanizer, "a bounder, liar, and a braggart"
(Martin Fido, Oscar Wilde 71), as well as sometime
editor, friend and posthumous biographer of Oscar
Wilde's, had occasion to remark on Shakespeare and
sexuality. In 1896, the year after Wilde's disastrous
trials, Harris felt the need to come out as straight,
but with one important qualification. He knew, he said,
nothing of "unnatural vice," but would have felt bound
"to submit . . . had Shakespeare asked me" (qtd. in Fido
71). The caricaturist Max Beerbohm drew Harris nude and
burly, twirling his moustaches, rotund buttocks exposed
to the viewer and looking, at least to a contemporary
eye, not unlike a macho 70s clone. In the right-hand
corner of the drawing Beerbohm added a Shakespeare in
full Elizabethan costume with limp wrists and a
decidedly queeny air, whose oblique look at the waiting
Harris seems to indicate a reluctance to initiate the
latter into the pleasures of sexual inversion
(reproduced in Fido 71). Beerbohm called this drawing
"Had Shakespeare Asked Me . . ."
Asking about Shakespeare, as McKellen's remarks
already show, metaleptically becomes being asked by
Shakespeare. Across the time that divides Harris,
McKellen and us from him, the questions that Shakespeare
asks, or may have asked, have something to do with
sexuality. No matter how well we know after Foucault
that such questions may be historically improper, they
linger— most often and most forcefully when they are not
167
directly faced. One such instance can be found in
Marjorie Garber's influential essay "Shakespeare As
Fetish." Garber uses a highly orthodox,
psychoanalytically derived account of fetishism to
account for the "[fetishizing of Shakespeare] in Western
popular— as well as Western high— culture" (Garber 242);
a central section of her essay deals with Laurence
Olivier, whose death, she assures us "quite simply, was
celebrated, or mourned, or commemorated, as if it were
the death of Shakespeare himself" (247). Moreover,
according to Garber, throughout his career, but
especially in the images that circulated at the time of
his commemoration, Olivier was associated with drag.
From his earliest acting credits in a same-sex public
school (Maria in Twelfth Night. Kate in The Taming of
the Shrew], Olivier was always somehow "a transvestite
Olivier" (247). And this despite or perhaps because of
what Garber presents as Olivier's status as "arguably
the most rampantly heterosexual Shakespearean actor of
his generation" (247). Garber can then reach the
following peroration in which Olivier and Shakespeare
come together as drag queens.
It is not, then, that Olivier is
revealed in these representations as
effeminate or gay (and indeed, no
similar cult has grown up around his
overtly gay contemporary John Gielgud)
but rather that he becomes the portrait
of triumphant transvestism— no closet
queen, but the Queen Elizabeth of his
168
age, and thus a figure for (who else)
Shakespeare himself (248).
Yet what looks like a drag queen, according to Garber,
is neither a queen nor a drag but something else: a
fetish.3 "If transvestism is anything," Garber writes
unblushingly, "it is, in orthodox clinical terms, a
fetishistic activity, one traditionally reserved, like
so much else, for males" (242) . Shakespeare and Olivier
may be drag queens but only in so far as they are
fetishists/fetishes.
What is entirely missing from Garber's account of
Shakespeare's continued prestige is the question of
sexual identities: drag is only really fetishism, which
turns out to be gendered as male, and gender is left
untroubled by sexuality. Olivier, specular double of
Shakespeare, may have displayed "sexual ambiguity," as
Garber has it, but he was— and so must Shakespeare have
been— "rampantly heterosexual" (247). On the subject of
Olivier, at least, Garber does not, so to speak, have
her facts straight: a recent biography details Olivier's
bisexuality (which included a twelve-year relationship
with Danny Kaye) at length.4 And if Olivier, the stand-
in for the Bard, is bisexual, then what about
Shakespeare?
Of current critics, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick seems
most prepared to tell us the truth— or at least the
gossip— about Shakespeare, but even in her work there
are more prevarications than answers. In Between Men
she concedes that the Sonnets "have been a kind of
floating decimal in male homosexual discourse" (1985
28), but she is adamant that both Shakespeare and the
Sonnets lack the "cultural context that defines the
homosexual as against the heterosexual" (1985 35), and
that any sexual identity other than a heterosexuality
with or without women (35) is not at play in these
poems. More recently, however, Sedgwick appears to have
revised her position on Shakespeare to such an extent
that she can only answer the guestion, "Has there ever
been a gay Shakespeare?," with another: "Does the Pope
wear a dress?" fEpistemoloav of the Closet 1990 52).
Despite her facetiousness, such questions are far from
obvious or settled, as Sedgwick, to her credit, admits.
Yet when she declares as an axiom, "The relation of gay
studies to debates on the literary canon is, and had
best be, tortuous" (Closet 48), her vision of some
eternal ebb and flow of sublimation and desublimation
playing across the Canon is more than a little remote
from a world in which a gay Shakespearean actor can be
knighted even as laws curtail the "promotion" of
"homosexuality."5 Asking about Shakespeare— and letting
Shakespeare ask us— is not simply about tracking the va-
et-vient of the timeless dyad of homophobia and
homoeroticism across Great Literature and Art, as
170
Sedgwick seems to suggest when she writes that "gay
desires, people, prohibitions, and energies" are
"central" to Renaissances, whether they be "the Harlem
Renaissance, . . . the New England Renaissance or the
English or Italian Renaissances" (58). What about
Shakespeare out rather than Shakespeare as closet drama?
Teaching queer Shakespeare would almost certainly
constitute "promoting homosexuality." A propos of
Section 28, Simon Watney analyses why schools in Britain
and the United States have become the frontline of
heterosexism— what the Section implicitly acknowledges,
he writes, "is the pedagogic value of gay culture in
developing and sustaining gay identities" ("School's
Out, " 1991 392). Not simply, as Sedgwick would have
it, a function of "Renaissances," the question of
Shakespeare and the Sonnets provides the occasion for
queer identifications and resistances every time it is
asked.
In varying degrees McKellen, Harris, Garber, and
even Sedgwick evidence some panic in and around the
canon. That "panic," I should add immediately, has less
to do with "homosexual panic"— the queer-basher’s
favored defense6— and more to do with the anxieties and
fantasies of seduction, recruitment, identification and
disclosure which prohibitions against the "promotion" of
anything other than heterosexuality betoken.
171
Against such panic and, indeed, against the canon,
I wish to offer how two gay men— in very different
periods and in very different ways— have posed the
question of the Sonnets and Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde's
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and filmmaker Derek Jarman's
The Ancrelic Conversation both take the Sonnets as
affirmations of same-sex love and desire. As we read
between The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and The Angelic
Conversation we must also negotiate movements across
borders not just of time and place but of genres as
well: from sonnets (or a sonnet sequence) to a novella
which is also literary biography, theory, historical
fiction (or fraud and plagiarism) and then to a film
which is at once narrative, ritual, portrait, and
textual interpretation. From high culture to kitsch,
from queer-punk to Masterpiece Theater, from libraries
to discos, we will follow the pictures of Mr. W. H.
True Histories of Mr. W. H.
In 1933 Alfred Douglas published a short work called The
True History of Shakespeare's Sonnets.7 Many years
before, Douglas had been Wilde's lover, and Douglas's
father, the Marquess of Queensberry, had initiated the
series of legal persecutions that, in 1895, put Wilde in
prison for "[acts] of gross indecency."8 Although the
172
publication of The True History may seem wholly
unconnected to Douglas's stormy relationship with Wilde,
unremarkable and even somewhat bathetic given Douglas's
early notoriety, the little book of 1933 goes back to
Wilde in a particularly 1iterarv way: Douglas takes up,
in The True History of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the
concerns of a text that Wilde had published in 1889, The
Portrait of Mr. W. H. . Douglas tries to resolve one of
the most tantalizing enigmas of English literature: the
identity of the mysterious "Mr. W. H." who appears as
the dedicatee of Shakespeare's Sonnets in their first
published version, the Quarto 1609:9
TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVER.LIVING.POET.
WISHETH
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
As Douglas traces it, the critical reception of the
Sonnets has a history of negotiating— but more often of
negating— this dedication or pre-text to the poems.
Since 1609 the Sonnets' pre-text has given editors,
critics, and readers occasion to take up or dismiss a
possibility which this dedication opens and which
pronouns and details of the sonnets support: one of
173
Shakespeare's finest and most passionate works may have
been dedicated to another man.
The history of the sonnets is a history of
shifting— and almost universally homophobic— attitudes
towards same-sex desire and its potential place in
cultural production.10 Even as recently as 1985, one
commentator on the Sonnets, Joseph Pequigney, had to
advance the following thesis with some defensiveness:
"Shakespeare produced not only extraordinary amatory
verse but the grand masterpiece of homoerotic poetry"
(Such Is Mv Love 1); Pequigney observes that "a love
between men," such as the Sonnets appear to record, "has
always posed a problem for editors, critics, and
scholars: the problem of protecting the work from the
embarrassment and scandal of homosexuality" (1).
Thirty-one years after the Quarto was published, the
first of a series of heterosexualizing interventions
into the Sonnets took place: a second version of the
Sonnets was printed and circulated by a John Benson, who
among other editorial decisions (such as leaving out
eight of the Sonnets and considerably rearranging the
sequence of the Quarto) added titles to individual
sonnets and sonnet clusters, many of which were
calculated to give poems addressed to another male an
object of the opposite sex instead. Thus, Sonnets 113-5
are named "Selfe flattery of her beauty," while Sonnet
174
122 is called, "Upon . . . a Table Booke from his
Mistress" (see Pequigney 2-3). Where internal evidence
pointed to a male beloved, the editor substituted terms
implicitly marked as "female" for intractably "male"
ones: "love" could replace "friend" in Sonnet 104 and
"boy" in 108; in other instances, the gender of pronouns
was switched (Pequigney 2). When the Quarto was
reprinted in its entirety in 1711, the publisher's title
announced "One Hundred and Fifty Four Sonnets," and
/
added with an emphasis evidently born of unease, "all of
them to his Mistress" (Pequigney 3).
Douglas, already in 1933, gives an overview of the
extent of measures by which the sonnets have been
heterosexualized (Douglas 13). While he insists that
the poems must be understood as highly charged texts
addressed by one man to another, Douglas himself
disavows the role that "homosexuality" might play in
Shakespeare's work: "The present writer, while accepting
it as perfectly obvious and indisputable that the great
majority of Shakespeare's incomparable Sonnets . . .
were written to, or about, a boy whom Shakespeare
adored, utterly rejects the notion that Shakespeare was
a homosexualist [sic]" (19). What follows is a very
complex series of disavowals. Douglas quotes himself,
on the subject of Shakespeare and Wilde, from his own
earlier autobiography: "... though I believe it is
175
the fashion nowadays to accuse Shakespeare of having had
the same vices as Wilde, this merely shows the ignorance
and baseness and stupidity of those who make accusations
on such grounds" (20). If Oscar is no Shakespeare,
Alfred is no Mr. W. H. By differentiating between Wilde
and Shakespeare, by making each name stand metonymically
for either "vices" or male-male affection (with the
latter tacitly presumed to be anodyne) Douglas
defensively repeats the very homophobia he sets out to
expose. Douglas's former sexual involvement with Wilde,
we may remember, would still have been common knowledge
in 1933. Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H. articulated
many of the issues to which Douglas was now going back,
especially the presence— or absence— of homosexual
desire in the sonnets. To return to Wilde's
interpretation of the sonnets, which Douglas calls "the
best that [has] ever been proposed" (33), constitutes an
act of posthumous loyalty to Wilde, so that Douglas's
disclaimers of homosexual desire— in Shakespeare, in the
Sonnets, and even, quite implausibly, in The Portrait of
Mr. W. H.— are belied by his fidelity to the love that
formerly bound him to Wilde himself.
Douglas does criticize Wilde on one point, however:
Wilde presented his theory about Mr. W. H. in the form
of fiction: "[Wilde] wrapped round the theory a very
foolish and unconvincing story" (34) . How do theory,
176
history, and sexual identities and desires intersect in
the space of a "story"? What does it mean to write
history as a fiction? After all, Douglas himself opens
his polemically entitled The True History of
Shakespeare's Sonnets by a substitution of "story" for
"history": "Let it not be counted to me for arrogance or
impertinence that I here claim to have set forth the
true story of Shakespeare's Sonnets for the first time.
Nor let anyone suppose that I am importing into that
story any fantastic or far-fetched theories of my own"
(v).11 What if all these histories were simply
"stories," either more or less convincing? What if
history were a matter of verisimilitude, where what was
taken for real counted as real?12 And how, most
importantly, could that allow us to write history
differently, to forge a queer history?
Truth in Forgery
"The only duty we owe to history is to
rewrite it" (Wilde, "The Critic as
Artist," Intentions. in Complete Works.
1966 1023).
Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W. H. unabashedly
forges a queer history. Pace Douglas, Wilde's text
advances a specifically "homosexual" reading of
Shakespeare's Sonnets— that they are the product and the
177
record of Shakespeare's infatuation with a beautiful and
gifted boy actor, one Willie Hughes. Its year of
publication, 1889, can approximately mark a threshold of
the century of "homosexuality" in the chronology that we
have inherited from the first volume of Michel
Foucault's History of Sexuality; this chronology is now
often reiterated by social, literary and cultural
historians working in lesbian and gay studies.13
Wilde has been given pride of place in some recent
versions of the emergence of homosexual subjectivity,
such as Sedgwick's Epistemoloav of the Closet. Richard
Dellamora's Masculine Desire, and Wayne Koestenbaum's
"Wilde's Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading."14
The significance accorded Wilde in a version of the
hundred-years-of-homosexuality hypothesis makes sense:
only six years after the publication of The Portrait of
Mr. W. H.. the trials of 1895 would inaugurate the age
of the "homosexual" that has had a word in English since
1892,15 but that would henceforward also have a face—
Wilde's, forever fixed as the countenance of the queer.
If the signifier "queer" in this context seems
anachronistic, I can only say that the forging of new
sexualities as sites of control, resistance and pleasure
must appear anachronistic. Besides, no less an
authority than Elaine Showalter assures us that by 1900
— the year, we may note, of Wilde's death— what she
178
calls "the homosexual significance" of the term "queer"
had already "entered English slang."16
From its position in 1889 The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
raises and anticipates many of our current questions
about the periodization of queer identity, questions
that a reading of Mr. W. H. and its context will show to
be politically urgent and risky. Wilde's text seemingly
asserts an unbroken link between the desires of men in
Victorian London and Shakespeare's desire for Willie
Hughes, which, according to the text, began in 1594 or
1595. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. annexes a history of at
least three hundred years to itself, and in some uncanny
way, the year 1595 exactly prefigures the year of
Wilde's trial, 1895.17 The Portrait of Mr. W. H..
moreover, is not a simple history of Shakespeare's
desires, but presents itself first and foremost as a
fictional text. Not so much a theory of the sonnets as
the story of a theory of the sonnets, not so much an
attempt at a homoerotic recuperation of Shakespeare as
the narration of such an attempt, The Portrait of Mr. W.
H. would seem to use fiction, and specifically
historical fiction, as a screen.
The novel begins with a conversation between two
men, one of whom is the anonymous narrator, while the
other is identified as Erskine.18 After a discussion of
forgeries, Erskine produces a late sixteenth-century
179
miniature of a beautiful young man; upon Erskine's
prompting, the narrator recognizes the subject of the
portrait as Mr. W. H., the "onlie begetter" of
Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Erskine goes on to relate how a schoolfriend of
his, the "fascinating" (1979 143) and "splendid" (1979
142) Cyril Graham, became convinced that the sonnets are
about Shakespeare's involvement and collaboration with
the boy actor, Willie Hughes. Always "absurdly devoted"
(1979 142) to Cyril, Erskine is instantly won over to
his friend's hypothesis. Other than an ingenious close
reading of the sonnets, however, Cyril Graham has no
proof of Mr. W. H.'s existence, not even a mention of
the name in some contemporary document. Erskine's
hesitations about the validity of Graham's reading are
dispelled when Graham produces the painting of the boy
actor which contains unambiguous clues to the sitter's
identity.
Here was an authentic portrait of Mr. W.
H., with his hand resting on the
dedicatory page of the Sonnets, and on
the frame itself could be faintly seen
the name of the young man written in
black uncial letters on a faded black
ground, "Master Will. Hews" (1979 150).
But much to his dismay, Erskine finds out that the
portrait is a clever forgery, intended solely to
safeguard his belief in the theory. He confronts Graham
with the deception: Graham commits suicide, still
180
insisting on the truth of his theory, despite his use of
fraud.
As the narrator listens to Erskine's story about
the origin of the portrait, he is converted in his turn
to Graham's version of the Sonnets. He takes up the
theory, enlarges it, and becomes obsessed by it. For
example, he imagines that the "rival dramatist” of
Sonnet 80 could only have been Christopher Marlowe who
"was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-
actor, and lured him away . . . that he might play the
Gaveston of his Edward II" (1979 160). That this might
well be typecasting is evident when the narrator
describes Willie as "[playing] the part of King Edward's
delicate minion" (1979 160). Speculating on Hughes's
death, the narrator imagines Hughes as one of the actors
who left England to perform in Germany, where he might
have been "slain at Nuremberg in a sudden uprising of
the people" (1979 163). Willie Hughes might now lie in
unconsecrated ground, having been buried clandestinely
in a little vineyard outside the city walls (1979 163-
4). These details imply that Willie Hughes dies because
of anti-theatrical prejudice, if not homophobia.
But after writing a long impassioned letter to
Erskine to restore the latter's faith in the theory, the
narrator himself loses his conviction and comes to doubt
the truth of any claim made about the existence of
181
Willie Hughes. He and Erskine have words on the matter:
Erskine now once again believes in Willie Hughes while
the narrator is skeptical about the very argument he
himself has elaborated. Two years go by and the
narrator receives a letter from Erskine which reiterates
his unshaken belief in the theory. He begs the narrator
to believe once more, and concludes with a threat of
suicide. Shocked, the narrator rushes to an address at
Cannes, only to find that Erskine is already dead, not
by his own hand but of consumption. Erskine bequeaths
the forged portrait to the narrator whose friends all
accept it as authentic.
Although one recent gay reader, William Cohen, in
his essay "Willie and Wilde: Reading The Portrait of Mr.
W. H." very meticulously outlines the metatextuality of
Wilde's piece, he does not altogether consider how such
a flamboyant metatextuality might do the work of the
closet.20 Although the theory advanced and espoused
variously by Cyril Graham, Erskine, and the narrator is
a significant historical intervention which claims
Shakespeare as sexual predecessor, both this theory and
this history are presented foremost as fiction. The
text indeed gives us not simply theory and history
framed by fiction, but theory and history as fiction:
like the portrait, the version of Shakespeare offered
here may be no more than a convincing fraud. By drawing
182
attention to its own status as a very specific kind of
"invention,” a forgery, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
provides itself with the alibi that it is not about
same-sex desire (Shakespeare's for Willie Hughes,
Erskine's for Cyril Graham, the narrator's for Erskine
or Graham), that it is, when all is said and done, not
about queerness, but about lies.21
Queer History On Stage
Forgery stands at the center of Wilde's text. Graham's
reading is a brilliant invention, and the portrait with
which he supports that theory is a beautiful fake. In
this context, theatricality and the theater become
synonyms for artifice, and by extension, for forgery.
The counterfeit portrait, tellingly, places Willie
Hughes next to a pedestal from which the masks of comedy
and tragedy are suspended (1979 140); later, when
Erskine discovers that the painting is a forgery, the
masks in a preparatory drawing for the portrait have
changed position as if to show up the liaison between
acting, masks and deceit (1979 151). Cyril Graham is
"wild to go on stage," and in amateur theatricals he is
"always cast for the girl's parts" (1979 143)— not
unlike Laurence Olivier, as we have seen! His greatest
success in the theatre is as Rosalind in As You Like It
183
(1979 143), thereby establishing a connection between
the supposed Willie Hughes and his biographer/inventor.
In addition, both Willie Hughes and Cyril Graham cross-
dress on stage and both play the role of Rosalind in
which sexual disguise is thematized.22 Or rather, more
than thematized, cross-dressing is put en abvme. since a
boy cross-dressed to play Rosalind would have to double
cross-dress when Rosalind plays Ganymede.23
Even texts that do not appear to be concerned with
the theater are overtaken by its influence, so that in
the narrator's elaboration of Graham's theory, the
Sonnets themselves constitute a commentary on
Shakespeare's plays, the supplement to a theatrical
project. This leads the narrator to a very creative
misreading of the numerous moments of deictic self
reference in the sonnets. For example, in lines such as
"When in eternal lines to time thou growest;/ So long as
men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this and
this gives life to thee" (Sonnet 18), "this" and
"eternal lines" are understood not to refer to the poem
itself but to the plays (158).24 Sonnet 55 points to
itself by synecdoche: "Not marble nor the gilded
monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful
rhyme." The narrator again insists that "this powerful
rhyme" refers to the theater (1979 158-9). Moreover,
the narrator's revision of Cyril Graham's theory brings
184
about a significant shift from the literal to the
figurative and theatrical. Where the speaker of the
Sonnets enjoins the young man to breed children that
will reproduce their sire's good looks, the narrator
reads the following:
The children . . . [the speaker of the
Sonnets] begs . . . [the young man] to
beget are no children of flesh and
blood, but more immortal children of
undying fame. The whole cycle of the
early sonnets is simply Shakespeare's
invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon
the stage and become a player (1979
157) .
It would seem then, that the concerns linking
forgery and the theater send queer identity and desire
into a hall of mirrors where everything is beguiling
illusion. An all-pervasive falsehood can contaminate
the integrity of Willie Hughes: "Why should false
painting imitate his cheek/ And steal dead seeming of
his living hue?/ Why should poor beauty indirectly seek/
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?" (Sonnet 67).
The narrator glosses this particular sonnet as a call
from Shakespeare to Willie to "abandon the stage with
its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face
and unreal costume, its immoral influences and
suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble
action and sincere utterance" (1979 155).
This last description of "false mimic life" as a
realm of "immoral influences and suggestions" allows us
185
to suspect that, far from leading us away from
queerness, theater and forgery instead take us back to
it. Indeed, the phrase "false mimic life" recalls the
homophobic presentation of all queers as creatures of
deception and error who emulate heterosexuality in their
own relations. That such a presentation of queers is
still current is evident in the language of Section 28
which quite specifically rails against the
"acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family
relationship" (my emphasis).25 As forgery and the
theater, simulation and verisimilitude, The Portrait of
Mr. W. H. takes over such homophobic tropes and sets
them to work towards affirmatively queer ends.
Very recently, in his magisterial Sexual
Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde. Freud to Foucault
Jonathan Dollimore gives Wilde's transvaluation of
artifice and fakery a central place as what he calls
Wilde's "anti-essentialist, transgressive aesthetic"
(1991 6). Such transvaluation, Dollimore points out,
may have anticipated the strategies of contemporary
"theory." Dollimore writes:
Wilde's transgressive aesthetic suggests
that certain aspects of what post/modern
theory finds so very contemporary about
itself— anti-essentialism especially,
and the critique of the depth model of
identity and culture— are not so new,
having been developed as subversive and
defensive strategies in subcultures
before more recent manifestations in the
intellectual main stream (1991 25).
186
Wilde's turns and paradoxes are still very much with us:
for example in Judith Butler's currently highly
influential call to "reconsider . . . the homophobic
charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations
of the heterosexual real" ("Imitation and Gender
Insubordination," 1991 21).
When Butler proposes that heterosexuals find gays,
lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders a highly
unsettling mirror image of themselves because queers of
all kinds defamiliarize the primacy that heterosexism
grants heterosexuality, she seems to be reiterating the
very terms that we have just spelled out in Mr. W. H.:
. . . if it were not for the notion of
the homosexual as copy, there would be
no construct of heterosexuality as
origin. Heterosexuality here
presupposes homosexuality. And if the
homosexual as copy precedes the
heterosexual as origin, then it seems
only fair to concede that the copy comes
before the origin, and that
homosexuality is thus the origin, and
heterosexuality the copy (22).
And, Butler implies, if heterosexuality is not first— in
significance and in sequence— heterosexism cannot insist
on its privileges. But queers need not be forever fixed
in a singly specular relation to heterosexuals: there
may even be a certain excess of imitation which undoes
what it imitates (22). It is no accident perhaps that
to make the crucial point of her argument, Butler should
invoke a notion that had its heyday in the second half
of the nineteenth century: "inversion"— both as
strategic maneuver and as sexual identity. "[Gay
identities] are, quite literally, inverted imitations,
ones which invert the order of imitated and imitation,
and which, in the process, expose the fundamental
dependency of the origin' on that which it claims to
produce as its secondary effect" (22).26 A forgery,
Butler would remind us, has the power to disturb forms
of authentication and to shadow the "original"; queers
intimate that heterosexuality may be the true fraud,
since heterosexuality must be culture decked out as
nature, and because it is compulsory is hence not
inevitable.27 For Butler then still, or now more than
ever, as it was for Wilde: queerness is the lie that
tells the truth. As a locus of simulation, the theater,
with its tradition of cross-dressing, takes center stage
in Wilde's history of queerness.
We have already seen how, for the narrator of The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.. the hetero-text can be displaced
into metaphor and mimesis, and pushed towards the queer:
the calls on the young man to procreate become
imperatives to go on stage and create new roles.
Moreover, Wilde produced a second, considerably extended
version of The Portrait, which was never published
during his lifetime, and in it, he gives us, via the
188
narrator, a brief history of boy actors on the
Elizabethan stage.
In a little book with fine vellum leaves
and damask silk cover— a fancy of mine
in those fanciful days— I accordingly
collected such information as I could
about them, and even now there is
something in the scanty record of their
lives, in the mere mention of their
names, that attracts me (1958 50),
writes the narrator, as he shows the possibility for an
erotically charged encounter with what is constructed as
queer history. The narrator goes on to enumerate the
names of these actors and snippets of information about
them with a relish in the detailing that bespeaks the
joys of historical fiction-making (1958 50-1). The
concentration on details of physical appearance— "pale
oval face with its heavy-lidded eyes . . . white hands
and amber-colored hair" (1958 50-1)— conveys the intense
charge that such fictions of the past can have,
especially when that past is decomposed into body parts.
Portraiture and portrait details have pronouncedly
homoerotic effects in Wilde's work, from the fake
portrait of W. H. to these verbal images to, of course,
Dorian Gray's picture. Attempts to theorize the role of
details in fiction have paid attention to how they both
forge a world out of particularities and how they come
to be gendered or sexualized.28
In this brief history of the stage Wilde
anticipates the current concern of many feminist and/or
189
lesbian and gay critics and cultural historians with the
meanings of gender and sexual disguise in the
Elizabethan playhouse.29 Indeed, The Portrait of Mr. W.
H. asserts not just that queerness and the stage are
metaphorically and metonymically bound to one another,
but also that the bond between the two has been central
to the shaping of culture:
Of all the motives of dramatic curiosity
used by our great playwrights, there is
none more subtle or fascinating than the
ambiguity of the sexes. This idea,
invented, as far as an artistic idea can
be said to have been invented, by Lyly,
perfected and made exquisite for us by
Shakespeare, seems to me to owe its
origin, as it certainly owes its
possibility of life-like presentation,
to the circumstance that the Elizabethan
stage, like the stage of the Greeks,
admitted the appearance of no female
performers (1958 52).
Wilde makes "life-like presentation" the key feature of
the Elizabethan stage, but not just "life-like
presentation" as the basis of a simple realism: rather,
this is a mimesis of gender, a verisimilitude of drag.
There is something queer about mimesis, according to The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.. and something mimetic about
queerness. The history of Western theater from the
Greeks onwards, the passage seems to suggest, is at the
same time a queer history, a particularly bold cultural
claim to make. The connections between cross-dressing,
imitation, and male same-sex desire are, to be sure,
historically contingent and not inevitable.30 Still, it
190
is part of the novella's historical enterprise to spell
out such connections and to insist on their cultural
centrality.
Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests. a recent
investigation into Elizabethan theater, and, indeed,
into theater as such, would seem to concur with Wilde's
version of the role of the boy actress on the stage of
Shakespeare. In the course of reading that ranges no
less ambitiously than Wilde's, Garber links the
"changeling boy" of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Pietro
Aretino's letter to a cross-dressing courtesan from
Pistoia, late Renaissance erotic engravings, Jessica
from The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare's Cleopatra,
and George and Martha and their imaginary son— or
changeling boy— from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (84-92). This is her conclusion:
An actor is a changeling; a boy, in
Shakespeare's culture as— somewhat
differently, but still pertinently— in
ours, is a medium, and a counter of
exchange .... the ultimate
"transvestite effect," the figure that
comes between demand and desire, the
signifier that plays its role only when
veiled. Both the boy actor and the
changeling boy are figures for something
that is not there. For if it were
there, it would not be what is desired
. . . . Like the transvestite marking
the space of representation itself, the
changeling boy is that which, by
definition, can never be present. For
the minute he comes to be embodied, it
is clear that he cannot be that which is
so desperately sought (92).
So, one is tempted to ask, does this mean that the
"life-like presentation" at the heart of Western
theatrical tradition, the lost boy actors and the
irrecoverable Mr. W. H. amount to a "transvestite
effect"? Are The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and its portrait
only desirable because they are fakes, mirages of
representation? Perhaps Garber would answer in the
affirmative and reiterate the lessons of Lacan that she
spells out so succinctly above.
Yet we need to be wary of conflating Wilde too
easily with the truths of our theories: if anything, The
Portrait of Mr. W. H. cautions us that all "[theories
are] based on [delusion]" (1979 166). Wilde's text
certainly celebrates "the charm and the fascination of
disguise— the desire for self-concealment, the sense of
the value of objectivity thus showing itself in the rude
beginnings of art" (1979 164). But while the
"transvestite effect" is a palpable part of The
Portrait's fascination, there are other questions that
Wilde and Mr. W. H. invite us to ask— what are the
reality effects of transvestism? To what subjectivities
does a transvestite effect give rise? In both versions
of The Portrait Wilde's narrator attempts to reconstruct
the lost subjectivity of Willie Hughes through an
intricate narrative strategy that utilizes a series of
modalizing locutions— such as "what more probable" (1979
192
162), "perhaps" (1979 163), "it was surely" (1979
163).31 The effect, at once transvestite and real,
fiction and history, forgery and truth, is that the
narration finds itself placed inside Wilde's
subjectivity even as it recognizes that such a placement
can at best be only a postulate— or an imposture.
Dark Ladies
There is no mention of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's
Sonnets in the first version of The Portrait of Mr. W.
H.. The second does, however, try to account for her.
Sedgwick comments that Wilde "feels free to extend his
authoritative insight into the speaker, toward the lady,
as well, as if they were knowable in the same way" (1985
36); in Sedgwick's tone there seems to be a hint that
such "extension" of authorial and authoritative insight
might simply be male intrusiveness. The "knowability"
or otherwise of the Dark Lady may turn out to be another
transvestite effect.
While William Cohen reads the Dark Lady as the
mother, "that classic figure of oedipal desire" (227)
whose presence brings heterosexuality into the text, I
would argue that, in fabricating his story of the
Sonnets, Wilde takes care to establish seemingly
opposite-sex relations, via the Dark Lady, very much as
193
a replay of queer desires. For Wilde the Dark Lady is a
"shadow" with a "false, fascinating nature" (1958 60).
The narrator in the second version of The Portrait of
Mr. W. H. hopes to glimpse some evidence of her
existence in the writings of the sixteenth-century
author Cranley: weaving quotations from Cranley's Amanda
into his own prose, the narrator makes the Dark Lady
one who loved to mimic the actor’s
disguises, appearing one day
"embroidered, laced, perfumed, in
glittering show . . . as brave as any
Countess," and the next day, "all in
mourning, black and sad," now in the
grey cloak of a country wench, and now
"in the neat habit of a citizen" (1958
67) .
Nothing less than a "female female impersonator" the
Dark Lady is a transvestite to the second power, a woman
who "mimics" the drag of the boy actors. Medieval and
Renaissance sumptuary laws, as Garber reminds us,
forbade not only dressing across genders but also across
the hierarchies of rank (21-32); the exception to these
rules was the stage where boys not only dressed as women
but where commoners wore the garb reserved for the
aristocracy. By wearing what the actors wear, the Dark
Lady crosses the lines between a number of categories at
once: between genders and between ranks ("Countess,"
"wench," "citizen"), between audience and performers,
between stage and world.
194
Just how risky a business it was to traverse such
lines even in Victorian London can be surmised from the
case of Fanny— or Frederick Park— and Stella— or Ernest
Boulton, two drag queens who were arrested at the Strand
Theater in 1870 after Stella had used "the retiring room
which is set apart for ladies" (The Times April and May
1870, qtd. in Bartlett 129). Stella was unemployed;
Fanny claimed to be a law student. Both had been seen
at numerous theaters around London where they had always
passed and had always caused quite a stir; both had had
previous experience of acting on stage. Leading, as
Bartlett puts it, "glamorous triple lives, as queens,
prostitutes and actresses" (135), at the time of their
arrest, they were being kept by a number of well-
connected young men: Stella was supported by Lord Arthur
Clinton, a Member of Parliament.
Fanny and Stella were tried, as the Attorney
General summarized the charges, for "[making] themselves
objects of desire to persons of their own class" (qtd.
in Bartlett 136). The word "class" here marks precisely
the kind of category crisis that Garber claims is
symptomatic of the transvestite (Garber 1992 16-7): in
this context "class" means something like "sex"— Fanny
and Stella tried to make themselves attractive to other
men. But "men" as a category of sex and gender is put
into question by Fanny and Stella's cross-dressing;
195
certainly the "class" or category of male-to-female
cross-dresser is not what the Attorney General had in
mind. Of course, "class" also and unavoidably brings
with it its usual significance, and here again Fanny and
Stella make trouble: although apprehended in the "room
set apart for ladies," Stella is no lady, not simply
because she is a man, but also because she is a kept
woman, an actress out of her place, and a member of the
petit-bourgeoisie who hobnobs with the gentry.
After much examination, including physical
inspections to ascertain whether their anuses were
dilated— supposedly "proof" of "sodomy"— Fanny and
Stella were acquitted. Why? The court assumed that the
very obviousness of the pair's display was a guarantee
of their innocence; surely no sodomite would be that
blatant, the argument ran. Arthur Clinton committed
suicide, and the case was one of the most sensational
before Wilde's trials, making the front page of The
Times (Bartlett 131-43).
We do not know if Wilde was aware of Fanny and
Stella, but the Dark Lady with her proteus-1ike
strange shapes"' (1958 67) certainly incarnates some of
the category crisis that the two high Victorian drag
queens occasioned. For Sedgwick, the Dark Lady of the
Sonnets is little more than "a pair of eyes and a
vagina" (1985 36), the merest marker in a homosocial
196
bond between two men; not at all the straight in the
text, Wilde's Dark Lady comes close to upstaging the boy
actors— she alone, of all the figures in the text is
explicitly designated as "perverse" (1958 64), a word
which carries an enormous resonance, especially in the
context of Wilde's work and life.32 Looking back from
his cell in Reading Gaol, Wilde summarized his entire
career as "paradox" and "perversity": "What the paradox
was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to
me in the sphere of passion" (De Profundis in The
Letters of Oscar Wilde 1962 466; see also Dollimore 14-
7) •
Dollimore defines "perversion" partly as "an
erring, straying, deviation, or being diverted" (104).
In Wilde's version of the Sonnets, what happens between
Shakespeare, the young man and the Dark Lady enacts a
comedy of seduction and simulation in a relay of
increasingly "perverse" feelings. Fearing that the woman
will seduce the young man away from him, Shakespeare
feigns love for her, so that the fraudulent heterosexual
relation between him and the woman will replace the
anticipated heterosexual desire between the woman and
the young man and thus safeguard the homoerotic tie
between the men. Shakespeare "forges false words of
love, lies to her, and tells her that he lies" (1958
197
63). But the feelings he mimics turn real.
Shakespeare, writes Wilde,
begins by pretending to love, wears a
lover's apparel and has a lover's words
upon his lips. What does it matter? It
is only acting, only a comedy in real
life. Suddenly he finds that what his
tongue had spoken his soul had listened
to . . . . He is enthralled by this
dark woman, is for a season separated
from his friend . . . (1958 63-4).
It would be too easy to dismiss Wilde's Dark Lady as a
misogynistic construction or an appropriative fantasy,
the heterosexual woman in a homosocial/sexual scene
between men.33 Evidently, an historical fiction like
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. runs counter to dominant
accounts of Shakespeare and his work which even now
would deny that Shakespeare could be anything other than
"our" Shakespeare, Shakespeare straight.34 It is less
evident that such a counter-fiction— counterfeited, if
necessary— would make its own exclusions. Wilde does
stabilize his version of canonic gay history as an
affair between men.
But through the figure of the Dark Lady what is
excluded from Wilde's fiction of history returns: the
"dark woman" (1958 60) takes the stage of what Wilde
calls "the essentially male culture of the English
Renaissance" (1958 56). She is not simply a marker, a
lining, a limit; she is a subjectivity, a subjectivity
produced in and through a transvestite effect.
The Dark Lady, c'est moi. Wilde seems to be saying:
a self-identification with what is other, the daring of
which we might well miss were we only to focus on its
presumptiveness. In Richard Ellmann's biography of
Wilde, one finds a mysterious photograph without any
explanation of context: it shows Wilde in full drag as
the Biblical daughter of Herodias, whose name has been
handed down by apocryphal tradition as Salome.35 In
this photograph that records a moment all but lost to
history Wilde plays his "dark woman."36 However, the
"dark lady" as enigma, whether Shakespeare's or Wilde's,
recalls Freud's notorious description of "the sexual
life of adult women [as] . . . a dark continent'" (the
phrase itself is in English in Freud's text).37 That
echo, however distant, of one phrase in the other shows
up the unavoidable overdetermination of Wilde's
masquerade by its entanglement in other histories—
imperialism, the changing and contested status of women,
anti-semitism. In the following section, we will see
how some of those entanglements shape Wilde's story.
Natural and Unnatural History
Much of the current use of Foucault's work in lesbian
and gay studies has functioned to curtail quite
drastically the scope of any history of identities based
199
on same-sex practices and desires: this has led the gay
historian John Boswell to complain that "if the
categories homosexual/heterosexual' and 'gay/straight'
are the inventions of particular societies rather than
real aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay
history" (qtd. in Halperin 1990 18). At the heart of
Boswell's complaint lies an opposition between
"inventions" and "real aspects of the human psyche" but
the entanglement of "reality" in "invention" and vice
versa strikes me as an urgent historical question.
However much Foucault's work is now taken for fact, he
was ready to concede that he had produced only highly
strategic fictions:
As to the problem of fiction, it seems
to me to be a very important one; I am
well aware that I have never written
anything but fictions. I do not mean to
say, however, that truth is therefore
absent. It seems to me that the
possibility exists for fiction to
function in truth, and for bringing it
about that a true discourse engenders or
"manufactures" something that does not
yet exist, that is, it "fictions" it.
One "fictions" history on the basis of a
political reality that makes it true,
one "fictions" a politics not yet in
existence on the basis of a historical
truth ("The History of Sexuality,"
Power/Knowledae 1980 193).
Wilde's version of same-sex desires, practices, and
identities "fictions" a history in much the same way
that Foucault proposes. Wilde forges a link between
fakery and queerness and celebrates the queer's fabulous
200
self-invention. Copies and fakes belong to the order of
the unnatural: accordingly, queer history would be an
unnatural history. Perhaps there is no "gay history,"
after all, but only a series of attempts to forge our
history. Are we not in the position of Cyril Graham,
"trying to prove [a] theory by means of a forgery" (1979
150), which is "a very good forgery, but a forgery none
the less" (1979 150)?
What concerns me here, however, is the efficacy of
such a forged queer history. There are very real
opportunities for acts of queer resistance and self
representation in fictions of historical identity. Take
the case of John Moray Stuart-Young, for example, a
minor "Uranian" poet. According to his most recent
biographer, Timothy D'Arch Smith, Stuart-Young's
"realization of his own Urning' temperament at about
the time of Wilde's arrest brought about an intensely
deep-seated identification with him" (Love In Earnest
210).38
[T]aking his self-identification past
the point of both conscious copying of
literary style and his own integrity, he
evolved a fictitious friendship with
Wilde which he retailed in an
Introduction to his long poem defending
Wilde's morals, Osrac. the Self-
Sufficient. embellishing the volume with
two facsimile letters from Wilde to
himself and a signed portrait, all three
of which are almost certainly forgeries
(202).
201
Fiction may function as truth; the simulacrum or copy
may come to do the work of the original that never
existed. Thus, the portrait emerges out of the desire
of Erskine and Graham that a queer ancestor should in
truth have existed. Similarly, commenting on The
Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed Cohen writes of Dorian that
he is "to some extent born of the conjunction between
Basil's visual embodiment of his erotic desire for
Dorian and Lord Henry's verbal sublimation of such
desire" ("Writing Gone Wilde," 1987 806). While
Dorian1s portrait still commands a certain
referentiality— without dispute it has a subject, a
sitter— the portrait of Mr. W. H. is altogether a
simulacrum— it is the imaginary portrait of an imaginary
subject. Yet it materializes the desire of the various
men in the text for Mr. W. H., as though their combined
gazes anamorphically pulled the face of Mr. W. H. into
focus out of the obscurity of the past.
The most important thing about this
theory [of Mr. W. H.] is that the man
whose story it claims to tell doesn't
actually exist. Even the portrait which
is supposed to authenticate his
existence is a fake. But he has a name
and a history, because we demand that he
exist. We need him (Bartlett 190).
Mr. W. H. and the queer past for which he stands may be
necessary inventions and unavoidable forgeries. While
queer identities may be provisional and queer history
202
constantly open to revision, we must still proceed as if
they— we— were the truth.
Wilde certainly did. After he had written The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.. he commissioned the gay artist
Charles Ricketts to paint a portrait of Mr. W. H., with
the motto, "ARS AMORIS, AMOR ARTIS" on its frame
(Ellmann 1987 298). Such an intertwining of desire and
art or artifice may found the forging of queer
identities in Wilde's text. After receiving the
portrait, he wrote to Ricketts: "it is no forgery at
all— it is an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic
value. It is absurd of you . . . to try and take me
in— as if I did not know the master's touch, or was no
judge of frames!" (qtd. in Ellmann 298). Rickett's
portrait of Mr W. H. is the forgery of a forgery, a
simulacrum of a simulacrum. Wilde wittily pretends (or
is he serious?) that Ricketts is fraudulently passing
off a real Clouet as a fake; the fake may overrun its
borders and present itself, once and for all, as the
original.
According to Frank Harris the publication of The
Portrait of Mr. W. H. "did Oscar incalculable injury,"
because "it gave his enemies, for the first time the
very weapon they wanted, and they used it unscrupulously
and untiringly, with the fierce delight of hatred"
(Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions 1918 117). In
203
other words, regardless of the elaborate interplay of
deceptions in the text, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. was
taken to disclose Wilde's queerness, six years before
the trials that would once and for all fix Wilde's
features in the gallery of known "homosexuals.'' What
did it mean for Wilde in 1889 to write a text that
asserted— even as a fiction or a forgery— that
Shakespeare "addressed [a young man] . . . in terms of
such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the
strange worship" (1979 146)?
Homophobia does not and will not tell the false
queer from the true. After he had seen Douglas dining
at the Cafe Royal with Wilde, who was indeed Douglas's
lover at the time, the Marquess of Queensberry had this
to say to his son: "I come to the most painful part of
this letter— your intimacy with this man Wilde ....
I am not going to try and analyze this intimacy, and I
make no charge, but to my mind to pose as a thing is as
bad as to be it" (qtd. in Ellmann 417, my emphasis).
The question of posing is, of course, crucial to the
queer identity fixed by Wilde. Queensberry goaded Wilde
into prosecuting him for libel by sending Wilde a card
at his club, addressed either "To Oscar Wilde posing
Somdomite [sic]" or "To Oscar Wilde posing as a
Somdomite [sic]" (Ellmann 438). Wilde's three trials,
as we know, eliminated the distance between posing as a
204
sodomite, being a posing sodomite, and being a sodomite
tout court. "The authenticity of inauthenticity was the
ground upon which Wilde met his society," writes
Jonathan Goldberg, with a suitably Wildean flourish.39
Whether Wilde was a poseur who passed himself off as
queer, or whether he was a poseur because he was queer,
such questions of identity did not detain the juries,
for whom Wilde was, ultimately, just another queer.
At the first trial, the question of The Portrait of
Mr. W. H. came up.40 "I believe you have written an
article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets were
suggestive of unnatural vice?," Edmund Carson, barrister
for Queensberry, asked Wilde (The Three Trials of Oscar
Wilde 130). Wilde replied, "On the contrary I have
written an article to show that they are not. I
objected to such a perversion being put upon
Shakespeare" (130). "Perversion" in this context means
"vice" and "interpretation" or "misconstruction"; note
that "perversion," the attribute of the Dark Lady, is
now being disavowed.
What exactly is Wilde saying here? He could be
claiming that the text, since it finally seems to show
up the instability of a queer theory of the Sonnets,
does indeed prove that Shakespeare was neither
"[perverse]" nor "unnatural," if those are understood as
cognates of "queer." He could be asserting very
205
passionately that the desire that informs both the
sonnets and his own work is not to be understood through
homophobic constructions of "perversion1 1 and "unnatural
vice," even though those very constructions do shape, as
we have seen, Wilde's representation of queerness.
Wilde could thus be insisting that neither he nor
Shakespeare is "[perverted]" and that, for all those who
experience it without homophobic refusal, same-sex
desire belongs to the "natural" and the "normative." Or
Wilde could simply have been lying.
Wilde's vehement rejection of the "unnatural" at
his trials is significant. When he was interrogated
about Douglas's poem, "Two Loves," Wilde was asked
whether it was not "clear that the love described
[related] to natural love and unnatural love" (The Three
Trials 236). Pressed to define "the Love that dare not
speak its name," in Douglas's poem, Wilde delivered his
well-known defence of same-sex male desire:41
"The Love that dare not speak its name"
in this century is such a great
affection of an elder man 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. It is that deep, spiritual
affection that is as pure as it is
perfect. It dictates and pervades great
works of art like those of Shakespeare
and Michelangelo, and those two letters
of mine, such as they are. It is in
this century misunderstood, so much
misunderstood, that it may be described
as the "Love that dare not speak its
206
name," and on account of it I am placed
where I am now. It is beautiful, it is
fine, it is the noblest form of
affection. There is nothing unnatural
about it (236).
Wilde's "nothing unnatural" can be understood as a
desperate attempt to ward off any imputation of
queerness, since the "unnatural" and the "perverted" or
"inverted" were synonymous at the turn of the century.
But "nothing unnatural" can also be taken as a refusal
of the homophobic forces "in this century" which have
made affection between men impossible. Here Wilde is
not that far away from the historicizing thesis of
Sedgwick's Between Men: homophobia appeared on the scene
some time in the eighteenth century to break up what had
previously been an undifferentiated continuum of male
bonds, adjudicating some as licit and others as illicit
and unnatural. To borrow some terms from Sedgwick's
recent work on the closet, Wilde would thus be asserting
a "gender separatist" model of male-male desire that
would be the presumed natural antithesis to the perverse
"gender-liminality" of the Dark Lady and the mimetic
model of queer desire.42
The invocation of Plato, Michelangelo and
Shakespeare provides Wilde with predecessors in "deep,
spiritual affection"; more significantly, it
incorporates Wilde in a cultural tradition of "great
works of art." To deny the erotic component of male-
male desire is not enough: that desire has to be put to
work in the service of culture.43 Indeed, the defense
Wilde provides at his trial recalls very strongly the
history of male erotic friendship that the second
version of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. gives. "And the
spirit of the Renaissance, which had already touched
Hellenism at so many points . . . sought to elevate
friendship to the high dignity of the antique ideal, to
make it a vital force in the new culture, and a mode of
self-conscious intellectual development" (1958 42).
From Plato to Marsilio Ficino, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, and Montaigne to Winckelmann, The Portrait
tries to uncover male-male desire as a force in the
construction of Western culture (1958 42-7). The
narrator conjectures in an appropriately organicist
metaphor that if Willie Hughes did indeed travel to
Germany he carried with him "the seed of a new culture,
and was in his way the precursor of the Aufklarunq or
Illumination of the eighteenth century . . . brought to
its full and perfect issue by Goethe" (1958 74). "A
romantic friendship with a young Roman of his day
initiated Winckelmann into the secret of Greek art,"
claims the narrator, and immediately after this he adds,
"it is not too much to say that to this young actor
[Hughes] . . . the Romantic Movement of English
Literature is largely indebted" (1958 47); in this
208
context, it is hard to miss the equivocations of
"romantic." Male-male desire moves almost
uninterruptedly throughout Western culture, from the
Greeks to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and
beyond.
Let us call this the "natural" history of the male
bonds that supposedly have cemented Western culture. It
is a kind of gay Darwinism which would set itself up in
sharp contrast to "unnatural" histories of queer desires
with which it professes to have nothing in common, as
Wilde himself insists when he claims that there is
"nothing unnatural" about it. The "perverse" woman and
those "perverted telegraph-boys" that W. E. Henley felt
made up Wilde's only true readership44 do not
participate in this cultural tradition; they may be
grist to the mill of dominant male bonding but nothing
more. When Wilde speaks, as he does in The Portrait of
Mr. W. H. or at the trial, as a representative of the
"high dignity" (1958 42) of male friendship, he is not a
voice for or from the closet, unavoidable as the closet
might have been given Wilde's situation. Instead, he is
speaking from a position that constructs its coherence
in terms of what it incorporates to marginalize— women,
transgenders, the working class— and what it does not
even deign to name— people of color, "dark women,"45 or
209
the Algerian men, for example, whom Wilde and Douglas
would seek out during their vacations in Africa (Ellmann
429).46
The very canon of "great works of art," produced by
prestigious white males which Wilde called upon from the
dock and within which he imagined his own writings
("such as they are") to be included, has worked to
exclude Wilde and to minimize the cultural importance of
his work. Wilde, for better or for worse, belongs to
unnatural history.
Part Two: From Jarman to Shakespeare
Perversions Upon Shakespeare
Wilde's faith in the prestige of the masterpiece
persisted even after his imprisonment and release. In
1897 Wilde met with Charles Ricketts, who had painted
the portrait of Mr. W. H. for him; Ricketts was by then
a Royal Academician and part owner of a press. "I must
return to literature," Wilde told Ricketts, "and you
must print The Portrait of Mr. W. H.. It is one of my
early masterpieces .... Your picture, I am told, has
vanished but you will design me another wonderful
masterpiece" (qtd. in Vyvyan Holland, introduction, 1958
xi). Wilde's confidence that lost masterpieces could be
210
replaced so readily proved unfounded: Ricketts never
painted another Mr. W. H., and the revised manuscript of
Wilde's text had disappeared from his house, stolen when
Wilde's effects were sold in 1895. Ricketts was
hesitant, moreover, to let Wilde return to literature
with a text as provocative as The Portrait of Mr. W. H..
"Yes, perhaps you are right. Mr. W. H. might be
imprudent," Wilde conceded, before adding a Wildean
twist, "The English public would have to read
Shakespeare's sonnets" (qtd. in Holland 1958 xi),47 The
imprudence of making the "English public" read
Shakespeare's Sonnets, Wilde implies, would be far
greater than his reappearance on the stage of English
letters with an unabashedly homoerotic text. For Wilde,
same-sex desire in the Sonnets is writ large, there for
all to read if only they chose to do so.
But it has taken some ninety years before another
gay man broadcast this open secret in the canon: in a
recent interview Derek Jarman makes it very clear that
he has no reservations about making the "public" read
the Sonnets. "There was until quite recently some sort
of controversy over whether Shakespeare wrote the
sonnets to a boy, but I think everyone will now admit
that they are," claims Jarman (Edge April 22, 1992 42).
Whether "everyone" will make such an admission is
perhaps not all that certain, but for Jarman the case
is closed: "All of Shakespeare's sonnets are directed at
a young man. Although people might tell you it was just
a convention that they were always doing, it's just not
true. They wouldn't be as good as they are if they
weren't" (Edge 42). That Jarman is utilizing a polemic
hyperbole, at once witty and urgent, becomes evident
when he asserts that the Sonnets "are actually the
greatest contribution, historically, in safe sex
eroticism" (42). The interviewer can only say, "It's
really great that you're popularizing Marlowe and
Shakespeare" (42).
On the issue of popularization, Jarman himself says
in another interview, "my importance— if I have any— is
that I have reclaimed a whole history for gay people"
("History and the Gay Viewfinder," Cineaste XVIII.4
[1991]: 26).48 He adds that a significant part of this
"whole history" is his film The Angelic Conversation, in
which "I was putting the sonnets into a different
context" (1991 26). In the Edge interview he describes
The Angelic Conversation as "a really lovely love story
between two young men with the sonnets as a soundtrack"
(1992 42). When it was shown on British television, The
Angelic Conversation had well over half a million
viewers for its version of the Sonnets as a love story
between two men (The Last of England 1987 134). The
extent to which the film made a gay Shakespeare both
212
available and accessible can be gauged by one critic's
acerbic accusation that in The Angelic Conversation
Jarman produced "the nearest thing to heterosexual
kitsch" (1987 134) for a "homosexual" audience.
How then, one could ask somewhat facetiously, does
The Angelic Conversation transform Shakespeare and the
Sonnets into kitsch for queers? Fourteen of the Sonnets
punctuate the film; as they follow one another in the
film, they are Sonnets 57, 90, 43, 53, 148, 126, 29, 94,
30, 55, 27, 61, 56, and 104.49 With the exception of
Sonnet 148 all the remaining Sonnets have been assumed
to be either addressed to or about the young man.50 A
critic like Pequigney makes the sequentiality of the
Sonnets central to his recuperation of their homoerotic
potential (1985 4-6), and Wilde's reading as well, as we
have seen, assumes that the Sonnets unfold as a
narrative in order to make homoerotic sense of the text.
Jarman, on the other hand, makes no attempt either to
include the entire Sonnet sequence or to maintain its
integrity as a sequence.
The Anaelic Conversation begins abruptly with
Sonnet 57, "Being your slave, what should I do but tend/
Upon the hours and times of your desire?" In extreme
closeup we see parts of the profile of a man. A clock
ticks ominously on the soundtrack, the only sound other
than a woman's voice speaking the Sonnet. The camera
213
zooms jerkily back from the man's profile to show him as
he sits at the casement of a Tudor manor, sunlight
streaming in through the window out of which he stares.
He turns his head from full profile to look directly
into the camera as a zoom closes in on his face, now
sguarely in front of the camera. A cut interrupts this
closeup, and another man appears, in medium shot. He is
only partly visible, because of the graininess of the
image and because he holds something above his head so
that his arms conceal his face. The framing of the
image cuts off whatever he is holding above his head.
His costume is visible however: unlike the previous man
who was dressed in simple black, this man wears period
costume— a full-sleeved shirt trimmed with ruffles and a
doublet of heavy brocade. We return to the closeup of
the previous man, before another cut takes us back to
the second man; now we can see what he holds above his
head: a mirror or flat polished surface from which a
shower of reflected sunlight cascades. There is a brief
cut to a long shot of a radar disk turning.
As spectators we are forced rather rapidly to try
to make sense of the disjunctions between images and
between images and soundtrack. Sonnet 57 dramatizes a
frustrating separation of speaker from addressee:
Nor dare I chide the world without end
hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock
for you,
214
Nor think the bitterness of absence
sour,
When you have bid your servant once
adieu (57.5-8).
The oppressive ticking of the clock seems to signify the
"world without end hour" of profitless waiting and
anticipation; the two men appear to be speaker and
addressee; the evident distance between them underscores
the Sonnet's concern with "jealous thought" (57.9).
Although uttered by a woman's voice, the words on the
soundtrack seem to articulate the thought of the first
man, whose posture— watching passively— and whose
presentation— in closeup, and at some point, looking
directly into camera— make it plausible that the Sonnet
expresses his interiority. Both the Elizabethan setting
for the first man and the costume of the second seem to
place the text in its "proper" period. Yet details like
the first man's contemporary appearance, the second
man's mysterious signalling, and the intrusive presence
of the radar remain enigmatic, irreducible to a simple
narrative scheme.
Most of The Anaelic Conversation retains similar
enigmas. It is "a dream world, a world of magic and
ritual" (Last of England 133), in which one non-sequitur
follows another. Even an attempt to summarize the film
may impose a coherence which The Angelic Conversation
avoids. We see the first man laboring through a
landscape of cliffs and quarries while clouds of dust
215
obscure him. The second man walks past a wire fence and
a burning van, and then down a path carrying two tapers.
The first man lingers on a rocky shoreline, gazing out
to sea; the second flashes light from a golden disk.
Both may be performing mysterious tasks, which could be
labors designed to prove them, like the tests in fairy
tales. Other male figures appear, some wearing
contemporary dress, some fantastic costumes. The men
wander through stark deserted landscapes: the first
lingers on a shoreline where he swims delightedly and
holds a shell.
Footage, shots, and images recur in the course of
the film: flowers, the radar, the shoreline, the second
man with his glittering disk, or his tapers. From time
to time we return to the same footage of the man at the
casement with which the film began. When the two men do
come together at last they enact what seems to be an
occult ritual; slowly they wash and anoint the body of a
heavily tattooed young man before crowning him and
placing ropes of pearls and a sword of sorts in his
hands. Later they wrestle in an extended sequence.
They kiss and we see them sleep together. In closeup
the second man kisses another: is he with a new lover?
Alone, the first man appears outside the Elizabethan
manor for the first time, fanning himself with a black
fan as he wanders through a formal garden. A last
216
series of images show the radar masked and framed by
blossoms, the second man plunging his face into flowers,
and the first man swimming.
The challenge this film offers to summary is
evident in Jarman's own more than terse summing-up; "a
series of slow-moving sequences through a landscape seen
from the windows of an Elizabethan house. Two young men
find and lose each other. The film ends in a garden"
(The Last of England 1987 133), but even Jarman's
summary makes The Angelic Conversation more coherent
than it is. Little in the film allows the spectator to
interpret it as a narrative of boy-meets-boy-boy-loses-
boy. The fourteen Sonnets that punctuate the film
exacerbate its mysteries rather than resolve them. All
fourteen are read by Judi Dench, and Jarman claims;
I wanted a woman's voice so there was no
confusion. If I had used a man's voice
it would have seemed that one of the
young men was talking about the other.
One of them would have had the dominant
voice, and I didn't want that to happen,
so the voice became that of an observer,
leaving the imagery autonomous (Last of
England 144-5).
The connection between commentary, which is
conventionally the role assigned to voice-over, and what
it comments on, here the body of images, is not at all
as given or direct as Jarman thinks it is; indeed, the
relation of word to image in this context can even be
reversed so that the images can equally be read as
217
commentary on the text of the Sonnets.51 Whatever the
relation, The Angelic Conversation eschews an
illustrative function and does not meekly provide
appropriate pictures for Shakespeare's words. Although
at various points an individual Sonnet may work to
clarify a set of images (while the two men lie next to
each other, for example. Sonnet 61 with its theme of
watchful jealousy is read), for the most part, the
Sonnets have an ambiguous and intermittent relation to
what is on the screen (the ritual washing and anointing
is not at all clarified by the Sonnet that accompanies
it, 94, "They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do
none").
Such an uncertain relation between Sonnets and film
is sustained throughout The Angelic Conversation. Never
in the film do word and image or even soundtrack and
film entirely fit. The reading of one of the poems does
not necessarily align with a particular and discrete set
of accompanying images; often, editing works against
such matching. What Jarman asserts as the "[autonomy]"
of the film's "imagery" works much more like
disjunction. The men are mute, and other than Dench's
reading of the Sonnets, the only other sound in the film
is a musical soundtrack which includes Benjamin
Britten's "Sea Interludes" from Peter Grimes but which
is composed for the most part by the industrial band
218
Coil. Coil's soundtrack which is harsh and lyrical,
menacing and delicate by turns, incorporates sampled
noises. For the most part, such noises are non-
diegetic: they have no direct bearing on the situation
onscreen. For example, as the two central men wrestle,
there is a grating track of sampled noises, among
others, the whinnying of a horse. At other times sounds
like the tolling of bells, or the roll of thunder crowd
the soundtrack.
The disarticulation of filmic elements and of the
Sonnet sequence makes it possible, paradoxically, to
spell out or re-articulate the homoerotic power of
Shakespeare's text. The breaking up of a canon always
makes for startling possibilities in Jarman's work: in
Jubilee (1978) Bod (Jenny Runacre), bisexual leader of a
gang of punks, steals the crown jewels of England; in
The Last of England (1987) the punk Spring masturbates
over a life-size copy of Caravaggio's painting Profane
Love before kicking and tearing it to pieces. The
Angelic Conversation performs a similar act of theft and
trespass in its dislocations and appropriations of
Shakespeare. Connections, historical and urgent, have
been found between "queer" and "punk" as both relate to
thievery and forgery.52 Even Wilde's Mr. W. H. was
stolen: Regenia Gagnier points out that Wilde lifted
"his" theory of the Sonnets for The Portrait of Mr. W.
219
H. from Thomas Tyrwhitt, an eighteenth-century
Shakespearean scholar (Idylls of the Marketplace 41).
In both versions of Wilde's text, key sections that
detail Mr. W. H.'s identity are composed of bits and
pieces of the Sonnets, broken up to be put back together
in homoerotic configurations (1979 158-62 and 1958 28-
41) .
The Anaelic Conversation makes such homoerotic
configurations visible in its focus on male bodies and
male gazes, and in its dramatization of physical
contact— touching, wrestling, kissing, embracing—
between men. Creating new contexts for the Sonnets, The
Anaelic Conversation leaves it to the spectator to do
the work of articulating the fragments of the film and
to invent convergences for the visual and acoustic
signifiers that it scatters. We may assume that the men
are drawn to one another and that the alternation from
one to the other charts some kind of parallel. Jarman
remarks that the scene of the men kissing unites the
film: "The love scene was difficult, as it tied the
whole ambient structure together. As long as they never
met along the footpath I could weave figures of eight
through the landscape" (Last of England 142). Even with
the assumption of a narrative teleology, though, the
spectator cannot be sure of the sequence or status of
events: does one man fantasize an encounter with the
220
other? Does he remember an encounter with the other?
Or perhaps anticipate such an encounter? We are forced
to make new sense out of the disjunctions of word and
image.
If the narrative sequence to which we are meant to
assign the film's parts is ambiguous, its exact temporal
and historical location is no less so. While the Tudor
house ("Montacute House in Somerset, a very fine
Elizabethan mansion," The Last of England 143) and the
first appearance of one of the men in doublet and
ruffled shirt seems to place the Sonnets in an
historically "appropriate" setting, much of the film
works against specific temporal localization.53 The
radar and burning van, the crisp black suits and
fashionably cropped hair of the central men, the
consciously punk look of the tattooed man all imply the
present. Such contemporaneity is undermined, however,
by the empty landscapes of the film and its ritual
elements which bespeak either a mythical past or a lost
future. All of which is not to say, however, that The
Angelic Conversation is set in that timeless and
ahistorical "present" of "relevance" in which canonized
Shakespeare is so often imagined as taking place. On
the contrary, the very time of the film is the time of
dislocation.
221
The way in which Jarman presents Sonnet 55 is an
instance of such dislocation. As the line "Not marble
nor the gilded monuments" is read, the first man wanders
through a series of dark rocky corridors— caves or
catacombs?— bearing a flickering torch. The Sonnet's
topos of the immortality of verse is both confirmed and
denied by the man's seemingly archaeological exploration
of a vanished world.
But you shall shine more bright in these
contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with
sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues
overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire
shall burn
The living record of your memory (55.3-
8) .
What time is the present of the image we see? Is it the
future envisaged by this Sonnet, when the memory of the
beloved is illuminated only for a few moments by
wavering torchlight after cataclysmic wars have laid all
of history, with its "gilded monuments" and "marble,"
waste? The last line of the Sonnet, "You live in this,
and dwell in lovers' eyes" (55.14), takes on
considerable poignancy when the image itself appears to
be under erasure, lit only spasmodically by a torch in
the middle of vast darkness. While in its context in
the Sonnet "this" refers to the poem itself, when it is
relocated in Jarman's film, "this," reinforced by
222
"lovers' eyes," can equally designate the film. Because
the film juxtaposes the Sonnets with unanticipated
images, contextual markers such as "this" can take on
different meanings, when we seek for some relation
between words and film.
In linguistic terms, contextual markers like "this"
are shifters or deictics. The semiologist Keir Elam has
defined deictics as
references by . . . speakers to
themselves as speakers, to their
interlocutors as listener-addressees and
to the spatial-temporal coordinates (the
here-and-now) of the utterance itself by
means of . . . elements [such] as
demonstrative pronouns and spatial and
temporal adverbs, . . . an I addressing
a you here and now" (The Semiotics of
Theater and Drama 1980 139).
We have already seen that the history of the Sonnets has
involved homophobic anxiety about the shiftiness of
their shifters: what if both "thou" or "you" and "I" in
this situation of passionate address were men? We have
also seen how early on attempts were made to shut down
the movement of these shifters in the direction of the
male homoerotic, sometimes by re-arranging the sequence
so that some Sonnets could be more securely placed in
relation to an assumed heterosexuality in the poems that
deal with the Dark Lady.54 In its very title The
Angelic Conversation would create a context of address,
a conversation precisely. But who converses with whom?
223
The film's disarticulation of the Sonnets sets their
shifters adrift: who occupies the place marked out by
"I" for example? And in relation to which possible
"you"? Take the opening of Sonnet 90, "Then hate me
when thou wilt,if ever, now," the second poem in the
film: read by Judi Dench as the second of the two men
walks along a path carrying his tapers and the hand-held
camera circles his face in closeup, who is speaking?
Roland Barthes once described shifters as "leaks of
interlocution . . . operators of uncertainty" (Roland
Barthes 1977 166) and dreamt of a future which would
provide
the freedom and, so to speak, the erotic
fluidity of a collectivity which would
speak only in pronouns and shifters,
each person never saying anything but I.
tomorrow. over there. without referring
to anything legal whatsoever, and in
which the vagueness of difference . . .
would be language's most precious value
(Barthes 166).
In other words, Barthes dreams of a future of angelic
conversations, airy voice-overs speaking in references
that refer to nothing concrete.55 But in Jarman's The
Angelic Conversation however freely the shifters float,
they move in the direction of the male homoerotic.
In film theory the term "suture" denotes the
spectator's activity of connecting filmic signifiers
such as soundtrack and image or shot and reverse shot;
the process of suture produces the spectator as the
subject of the film's enunciation, the subjectivity
which controls the film's enunciation as a coherent
whole.56 What I have been describing as the activity of
making sense (however arduous or multiple) of The
Angelic Conversation can be designated as suture: when
the camera cuts, as it frequently does, from one man's
face to the other's, from one man's gaze to the other's,
we suture their gazes as an interplay of male-male
desire. We suture the deictic drift by locating a
subject to enunciate those shifters and we suture the
discrepancies between the Sonnets on the soundtrack and
the images on the screen. (When the term "suture" was
first applied to film, it was used to question the
seamless unity of the gazes of camera, spectator and
onscreen character which produced classic narrative
cinema; in Jarman's case, suture produces a very
different effect and a very different subjectivity, that
of a gay man— hence the significance of the way suture
in this film shows its joins.) Interpellated by the
frequent looks of almost all the men in the film into
the camera, the camera with which our gaze is aligned,
we become the enunciators of the angelic conversation in
so far as we take up the position of gay men speaking
the Sonnets.
But what about women? Only there as voice-over, an
"acoustic mirror"5^ for male desires and identities,
Judi Dench's reading, nevertheless according to Jarman,
"established the feminine in the film, which otherwise
would have been lacking. [The voice] completed [the
film]" (Last of England 145). Much more so than in
Wilde's version of the Sonnets, where the Dark Lady has
an autonomous power and agency, in Jarman's film, the
woman as heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian is
disembodied, present as voice alone. There are other
tell-tale traces of the Dark Lady: in his black suit and
carrying a matching fan, the one actor "becomes the Dark
Lady," claims Jarman, although he "didn't make the
connection until after the film was completed" (Last of
England 143). Asked about the fan, Jarman replies, "I
am fascinated by fans, my mother always carried a fan"
(Last of England 143). As synecdoche— voice— or as
metonymy— the color black and the fan— the woman appears
on the borders, outside the action of the film, "an
observer," as Jarman puts it, who "[leaves] the imagery
autonomous" (Last of England 143). The Dark Lady of The
Angelic Conversation is observer but not spectator,
outsider and afterthought. Jarman's dissemination of
the Sonnets and their male homoerotic possibility
occludes a subject position for the woman other than
that of mother: or maternal voice-over. Are there
places and possibilities for the desires of women other
226
than as reflections of male desire? The Anaelic
Conversation leaves the questions of the Dark Lady
unasked and unanswered.
Moving Pictures of Mr. W. H.
The portrait, as we have seen in our discussion of
Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H.. becomes a cynosure in
the recognition of queer desires and identities: there
is the verbal portrait of the young man in the Sonnets
which solicits its double, the counterfeit portrait with
which Cyril Graham hopes to prove his theory; there is
the Dark Lady as a shadowy image of the boy actors;
there is Wilde's portrait, painted by Toulose-Lautrec
immediately after he had spoken with Wilde on the eve of
Wilde's last trial (Fido 126); there are the forged
photographs of Wilde that John Stuart-Young used to
establish a relation between himself and his literary
idol. Like its predecessors The Anaelic Conversation
begins and ends as a portrait.
Jarman tells how he met the two actors who play the
men in the film and how his decision to film them began
with his attraction to them:
I had seen Paul Reynolds [the second
man] out quite often in various clubs.
I thought he had an amazing face, moody,
with great sadness, he seemed set apart.
He was always immaculately dressed.
One evening I mugged up the courage to
227
speak to him, as I was slightly drunk.
I said I had always wanted to film him
. . . . We started the film. I had no
idea I was going to make it a love
story1 The initial attraction was mine
for him. This "love affair” was purely
cinematic. Out one evening we saw
Philip [Williamson, the second man], and
Paul said, "He looks great." I said,
"Why don’t we put him in the film, shall
I go over?" It was a sort of dare! I
said, "Let's make the film a love story,
because then it will be commercial"
(Last of England 142, my emphasis).
Beginning with Jarman's "purely cinematic attraction" to
one man, which leads to a desire to film him, and
passing through their joint attraction to the second
man, which leads to a decision to make the film a "love
story," the pretexts for The Anaelic Conversation all
have to do with looks. (And such looks make it hard to
tell the "purely cinematic" from its implied antithesis,
the wholly homoerotic.)
The look of the film fixes the men's looks: no
wonder that an interviewer should ask Jarman about his
interest in portraiture a propos of The Anaelic
Conversation. Largely filmed in closeup, the film
dwells on the details of faces and torsos: ears, noses,
nostrils, mouths, chins, eyes, necks, nipples and
chests. The first frame is an extreme closeup of Philip
Williamson's ear and earrings before the camera draws
back somewhat to examine his profile. It pulls back
even further and then closes in again as Williamson
slowly turns his head 90 degrees to face the camera
228
squarely. This is only one of what will be many similar
gestures vis a vis the camera. Throughout the film, two
kinds of circular motion define movement in its frames:
the circular motion of the hand-held camera moving
around the head of an actor and the turning of an
actor's face, torso or entire body towards or away from
the camera. Sometimes both motions are combined; at
other times the camera stares in static rapture at one
of the men, for example, in the swimming scenes when
Williamson turns over and over in the glittering water.
Consciously or not, Jarman repeats the formal placements
of portraiture in his positioning of actors face to
face, either in full or three quarter profile, with the
camera. Again, a single take can change from one to the
other, because of the movements of actors as they
complete 90, 180 or 3 60 degree turns in relation to the
camera. The reiterated turning of actors to look into
the camera becomes a kind of cinematic trope for the
look of the look.
A closeup of Paul Reynolds in profile facing his
right, matched with a closeup of Philip Williamson in
profile facing his left, accompanies Sonnet 53, for
example. Appropriately, this Sonnet records the
difficulties of recording the young man's beauty:
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
229
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new
(53.5-8).
Jarman's film recapitulates the Petrarchan convention of
the "blazon" in its lingering on parts of the men's
bodies:58 when homage is paid to the man who is washed
and anointed, the kissing of his hands, torso and feet
only performs what the camera has already done, which is
to single out body parts for description and
delectation.
But the look in The Angelic Conversation is not
simple. Many of the Sonnets cited within it express an
anxiety about perception and sight, an anxiety that the
look of the film, with its extremely grainy images only
exacerbates. Hence Sonnet 148: "Oh mel What eyes hath
love put in my head,/ Which have no correspondence with
true sight!" (148.1-2) and which ends, "0 cunning love,
with tears thou keep'st me blind,/ Lest eyes, well
seeing, thy foul faults should find" (148.13-4). In the
film, some shots of Philip Williamson seated on rocks on
a craggy shoreline and squinting up at the sky accompany
this Sonnet. The staging of the gaze is even more
elaborate with Sonnet 43, with its chiasmic paradox of
bright nights and dark days, of eyes sightless and shut
yet seeing:
When most I wink, then do my eyes best
see,
For all the day they view things
unrespected;
230
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on
thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark
directed . . . (43.1-4).
One of the images for this Sonnet is that of a very
young man, almost an adolescent, facing his right in
three quarter profile. He holds a large dark yet
burnished sheet, apparently of some metal. A closeup of
the sheet shows that it is inscribed with lines, but
since the lines are illegible because of reflections off
the surface of the sheet, we do not know whether those
are the lines of Sonnet 43. The young man turns to
stare directly into the camera and a shining gold disk
is apparently superimposed almost like a spotlight on
his head.
Part of the anxieties of perception to which the
Sonnets return is a fear that time, hostile to love,
youth and beauty, may already be at work to destroy the
young man's looks. Sonnet 12 6, for example, is read as
Philip Williamson is seen in long shot on the shores of
an estuary, holding a shell:
0 thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow'r
Dost hold time's fickle glass, his
sickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein
show'st
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self
grow'st— . . . (12 6.1-4).
A "glass" at once mirror and hour-glass, the boy
reflects his lovers' decline by his own lack of change,
but the poem cautions its addressee, the "lovely boy,"
231
that the apparent Dorian Gray-like prolonging of his
beauty may simply be a whim of a personified and doting
Nature who will eventually have to surrender him to
Time. The film ends with Sonnet 104, "To me, fair
friend, you never can be old," which insists on the
permanence of the young man's beauty only to concede
that such permanence may be invisible change:
Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace
perceived,
So your sweet hue, which methinks still
doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be
deceived: . . . (104.9-12).
The Sonnet can only allay its fears with an equally
insecure future anterior: "For fear of which, hear this,
thou age unbred,/ Ere you were born was beauty's summer
dead" (104.13-4). Is the almost monochrome image we see
on screen— Paul Reynolds holding clusters of heavy
summer blossoms to his face— then a distant projection
from some long lost past when beauty and its summer were
alive? Is our present that future which the speaker
invokes only to tell us we have been dispossessed of the
image we see? At once cancelled and preserved, the
image remains briefly as a freeze frame, after both
music and words have stopped.
A preoccupation with temporality permeates the film
on all its levels. Like 126 and 104, Sonnets 57, 30, 55
and 56 thematize time, the tempus edax of the
232
Renaissance topos. The ominous ticking of the clock
with which the film opens soon makes way for the
circular swings of a radar system, as if the radar were
some sinister equivalent to the ’ ’clock” which the
speaker of Sonnet 57 ’ ’[watches]” for its "world without
end hour" (57.6 and 5). The cycles of the seasons are
marked both by the Sonnets and by recurrent images of
flowers and blossoms, both metonyms of summer and
tropes, for the brevity of beauty, as in the final line
of Sonnet 104. Repetitions of footage in the film
underscore a cyclical structure, but one which does not
come full circle to restore what has been lost. Thus,
the penultimate poem included is Sonnet 56 which
promises a return of love: "Sweet love, renew thy force
. . ." (55.1); it is set against a reiteration of the
longshots that show Philip Williamson on the banks of
the estuary. But winter may be more than a hiatus in
the seasons of desire:
Come daily to the banks, that when they
see
Return of love, more blest may be the
view;
As call it winter, which being full of
care,
Makes summer's welcome, thrice more
wish'd, more rare (56.12-4).
However The Anaelic Conversation may attempt to run
counter to the temporality of film, time cannot be
escaped, as the Sonnets recognized before it.
233
Jarman's film is not just a picture of handsome
youth like the picture of Dorian Gray: it is a motion
picture which, in adding a kinetic element to its image,
opens that image to time and loss and ruin. Or perhaps
the picture of Dorian Gray, too, is precisely a moving
picture, while Dorian is the static image of that image.
Appropriately, Jarman has announced that his next film
will be an updated version of The Picture of Dorian Gray
with an actor from his last film, Edward II. as
Dorian:59 another surprising incarnation of Mr. W. H.
In The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Willie Hughes is said to
have played Marlowe's Gaveston in the play's premiere;
in the revised version of the novella the narrator
speculates that the presence of a copy of the first
edition of Marlowe's play in the Library of Cassel
constitutes evidence that Hughes must have gone to
Germany: "Who could have brought it to that town, but he
who had created the part of the king's minion, and for
whom it had been written? Those stained and yellow
pages were once touched by his white hands" (1958 74).
No less than the portrait of Mr. W. H., the beauty
that The Angelic Conversation would preserve may be an
artifice and a forgery. Jarman's wish to film the
handsome faces of Reynolds and Williamson does not end
in a simple documentation and preservation of their
features. The technique of the film— which gives it its
234
particular look— consists, Jarman explains, of shooting
footage with a hand-held Super 8mm camera. Setting the
camera to take speeded-up films, one in fact takes
single frames, which if projected at regular speed, seem
to go fast (Last of England 145). If shown on a
projector at a slow speed, though, the film can be
restored to something like a "normal" pace, but the film
looks like "a series of moving slides" (Last of England
145), so that one becomes aware of looking at single
frame after single frame. Jarman accordingly projected
speeded-up footage at slow speeds to achieve an
impression of frame-by-frame movement, almost like that
of early cinema. Next, Jarman re-filmed the film as it
was being projected at slow speed with a video camera,
while he "fiddled around" (146) with the white balance
button to achieve unusual colors. In short, The Angelic
Conversation is the film of a film, copy of a copy. Its
colors are drained monochromes suddenly suffused with
startling hues; its movement has the awkward jerkiness
of archaic cinema; its space has the depthlessness of
the incandescent screens of film or of television. The
crudity of its images becomes touching and poetic, like
very old silent films or like gay porn videos that have
been screened too often.
The Anaelic Conversation gives us an equivalent of
the picture of Dorian Gray— or the portrait of Mr. W.
235
H.— after an era of mechanical reproduction.60 But its
faces are not lost; instead they are kept, like the face
of Willie Hughes, as necessary fictions.
Telecommunications
"It worked well on television," says the interviewer to
Jarman a propos of The Anaelic Conversation. From its
re-filming on video to its being televised in 1985, the
film seems to have a particular affinity with television
and indeed telecommunications of all kinds. The first
shot is interrupted by an image of the second man
reflecting a cascade of sunlight from a glittering disk;
later he hides one of his eyes behind what is either a
bright coin or a dazzling monocle; throughout the film,
one man seems to signal to another by means of light:
tapers, candles, flares, torches, sunlight, an entire
heliography. The sheet of burnished metal, inscribed
with words over which is superimposed a gold circle,
seems to render the word helioaraphv literal, as a
writing with the sun. Cinema, too, writes with light.
Radiant, the images of the film can radiate the
heretofore secret codes— Petrarchan, canonic, closeted
— of the Sonnets across vast distances of space and
time. Jarman expresses a proclivity for languages
magical and private:
236
Part of my obsession with the magician
John Dee was his preoccupation with
secrets and ciphers.
Why this obsession with the language
of closed structures, the ritual of the
closet and the sanctuary? the prison
cells of Genet's Un Chant D*Amour, the
desert encampment of Sebastiane; Anger,
insulating himself with magick,
screening himself off; Cocteau's Orphee.
an attempt to steal through the screen
into the labyrinth and usurp the
privileges only the cabal of the dead
may confer; the wall of unreality that
girds the house in Salo and its victims,
who are told: What is about to take
place here will have never happened, you
are already dead to the world outside
(The Last of England 60).
The broadcasting of The Anaelic Conversation or the
radar that the film shows threateningly at work are all
telecommunications of one sort or another, just as the
signals of sunlight seemingly exchanged between the men
make for a contact and communication across a
distance,61 "the privileges only the cabal with the dead
may confer."
While all four elements— earth, air, fire, and
water— are conjoined in Jarman's film, air as the
communicating medium of soundwaves and lightwaves
predominates. A shell, linked with both water and
earth, becomes a candleholder in the scene of ritual
washing, but the shell, which is shown a number of
times, is also a potent trope for echo and memory, a
hollow that gives back acoustic reflections; it is an
apt emblem for the soundtrack. Ghostly sampled sound,
237
ethereal or discordant music, and an invisible voice
inhabit the soundtrack, which is perhaps the site of the
film's angelic conversation. Weaving sounds and sights,
glances and words, The Anaelic Conversation makes
contact possible.
"What is given us by . . . contact at a distance is
the image, and fascination is passion for the image,"
Maurice Blanchot writes in a very different context (The
Space of Literature 1982 32). Time lost or regained,
the film maintains its passion for the image, and, not
surprisingly, the Sonnet that gives a title to the
English translation of Proust is cited in The Anaelic
Conversation. "When to the sessions of sweet silent
thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past" (3 0.1-
2) .
One name for "contact at a distance" which relates
time to a passion for the image has been proposed in a
context of gay historiography. John M. Clum suggests
that "the impulse to depict and define the collective
past of gay men, to affirm a sense of identity and
solidarity and to educate the dominant culture about the
brutal effects of its heterosexism" be called "the
historical impulse" (Acting Gav: Male Homosexuality in
Modern Drama 1992 200); in the situation of The Anaelic
Conversation and its telecommunications, the notion of
an "impulse" that makes for the persistence and
238
reception of queer desires and identities across history
is to the point.
But the notion is not without its problems,
however. Clum cites, with some approval, a speech made
by a character in Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart
(1985) as a perfect articulation of this "historical
impulse." The character, Ned Weeks, demands the
"recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's
all there— all through history we've been there? but we
have to claim it and identify who was in it . . ." (The
Normal Heart 1985 114, qtd. in Clum 198 and 201). Via
his character Weeks Kramer then produces this
peroration:
I belong to a culture that includes
Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole
Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle,
Alexander the Great, Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe,
Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee
Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca.
Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin,
Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard
Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold (1985 114, qtd.
Clum 201; we might note that Shakespeare
is not included).
In all fairness, Clum recognizes some of the
difficulties of this list— what does it mean to perform
this kind of roll-call? What about the historical
differences that make it impossible for all the figures
on the list to have understood their sexualities or even
"sexuality" in a common way? But Clum appears to have
no problem with endorsing the key assumption of the
speech, which is that we can readily adjudicate what is
cultural and is sexual and that we can tell "what isn’t
just sexual" from what is.
I am aware that the reduction of queers of all
kinds— not gay men alone, but lesbians, bisexuals, and
transgender people— to what a heterosexist culture
presumes to know in advance as "just sexual" must be
fought and resisted. Yet we should at the same time
beware exhortations like Kramer’s to let go of sexual
practices in favor of some larger cultural identity.
Clum's readiness to go along with Kramer’s polemic
becomes clear in the way he sidesteps the exact context
in which the character compiles his list: he "[recites]
his list as a rebuttal to the charge that his pleas for
gay men in the AIDS epidemic to stop their promiscuous
behavior [are] destroying the foundation of the gay
community, which was sexual liberation" (Clum 201).
Note how the separation of "culture" and "sex" makes the
phrase "their promiscuous behavior" so easy to take for
granted. Kramer's play, staged in 1985, is in fact a
highly questionable polemic in favor of gay male
monogamy: here is another one of Ned Weeks’s impassioned
pleas: "the gay leaders who created this sexual
liberation philosophy in the first place have been the
death of us . . . . why didn't you guys fight for the
right to get married instead of the right to legitimize
240
promiscuity?" (The Normal Heart 1985 85). Note, by the
way, how "promiscuity" seems to have insinuated itself
from Kramer's text into Clum's. Douglas Crimp gives a
detailed and trenchant reading of the politics of The
Normal Heart in his essay "How to Have Promiscuity in an
Epidemic" (AIDS: Cultural Analysis. Cultural Activism
1988 247-53): Crimp points out how Kramer implicitly
disavows lesbians and transgenders (1988 247-8) and
excludes them from the canon of gay male history and
politics.62
The canon that "isn't just sexual" is very close to
a canon that isn't sexual at all: we are back, but
perhaps less honorably, to Wilde's "nothing unnatural"
as he stood in the dock, and to the natural history of
gay male identity that is always called on to protect
Culture. Against Ned Weeks's canon take Jarman's
fantasy of the pirate ship HMS Invincible as it sails to
"the very edge of the horizon":
They lay in the dawn, crushed in each
other's arms, satiated but still erect.
Who made love to whom that night? All
the ghosts came to that party: Alexander
the Great threw himself to the
battalions that died for him, Socrates
pronounced a blessing. Many were there
secretly, but I'll not give them away.
There was Richard Coeur de Lion with
Lord Kitchener, who pointed to us and
said "Your country needs YOU"; Gaveston
had his cock up Edwards' arse; they had
minstrels— Tchaikovsky was blowing
Britten— and painters to record them:
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio. The
guest-1ist was endless and they built
241
their own world far away from yours,
with doctors and dentists, bricklayers
and ploughmen. The authorities never
caught up with them because they were
wizards and witches and faeries. It was
a queer old world; you can stamp on a
fairy ring, but it will bring you
terrible luck, and neither you, or your
children, who know how sweet the faeries
are, will sleep soundly again (Last of
England 234; Jarman for whatever reason,
has chosen not to include Shakespeare
and his "fair friend").
Jarman's canon may still be a canon— with all the
attendant dilemmas that we have followed since Wilde:
all male and here all white. But at least its mocks the
high seriousness of Kramer's canon. And its guest-1ist
is endless. And it finds, as queer histories always do,
the sexual in the cultural and the cultural in the
sexual.63
(Even headier and more exhilarating— and a perfect
antithesis to Kramer, Weeks and Clum— is the anonymous
queer flyer Jarman includes as an appendix to his recent
A Saint's Testament, which proclaims, "LIBERATE YOUR
MINDS/ QUEER IS NOT ABOUT GAY OR LESBIAN— IT'S ABOUT
SEX," and which goes on willfully to confuse sex and
gender, "QUEER means to fuck with gender. Our sexuality
is unique. It's not about whether you fuck with boys or
girls .... Do you gobble it up or spit it out? Does
she come all over you? Do you push him up against the
wall & fuck him? Are you playing safe?" Its politics
plays on the faultlines of "queer" against "lesbian and
242
gay": "There are straight Queers, bi Queers, tranny
Queers, lez Queers, fag Queers, SM Queers, fisting
Queers in every single street in this apathetic country
of ours" [1992 129].)
Kramer's The Normal Heart was staged in 1985. That
was also the year in which Rock Hudson died of AIDS-
related complications after his announcement that he had
AIDS plunged the media into a frenzy of AIDS-phobia.64
It was the year that The Anaelic Conversation was
televised, with its closing lines, "... hear this,
thou age unbred:/ Ere you were born, was beauty's summer
dead." In such a context, the bravery of Jarman's
defiant assertion of the beauty of male bodies, of the
persistence of queer histories across whatever
interruptions, and of a sex in culture that isn't just
cultural, can most poignantly be apprehended.
243
Notes
l.See in particular John Drakakis, introduction,
Alternative Shakespeares. ed. Drakakis (London: Methuen,
1985) 1-25 for an overview of the humanist tradition of
reading and constructing "Shakespeare." Terence Hawkes
provides a witty, useful, and politically pointed
version of how "Shakespeare" became an "English man of
letters" in "Swisser-Swatter: Making a Man of English
Letters," in Alternative Shakespeares 26-46. There is
more than a little of heterosexism about a collection
(including Hawkes's essay) that offers itself as
"alternative," when there is no mention whatsoever of
same-sex desire. The one essay on "sexuality" takes us
on the well-worn paths of Oedipus: see Jacqueline Rose,
"Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and
Measure for Measure" 95-118. For a different overview
and interpretation of authorship controversies in and
around Shakespeare, see Marjorie Garber, "Shakespeare's
Ghost Writers," Cannibals. Witches, and Divorce:
Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Garber (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins U P, 1987) 122-64.
2.Barbara Isenberg, "Sir Ian's Crusade," Los
Angeles Times 13 September 1992: F/W 5 and 84-5.
3.Here Garber goes against her own injunction not
to look through the figure of the transvestite to
something else. See Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing
and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992) 7-17.
4.Garber repeats the mistake about Olivier in
Vested Interests 32-7. See Donald Spoto, Laurence
Olivier: A Biography (New York: Harper Collins P, 1992).
5.After asking "Has there ever been a gay
Shakespeare?" and answering in the affirmative, Sedgwick
segues more than a little unnervingly into a discussion
of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind—
Bloom, it turns out, used to be teacher of Sedgwick's.
She tries very hard to distance herself from Bloom's
nostalgia for the good old days when canons were canons
and closets were storehouses of libidinal energy, ready
to generate masterpiece after masterpiece, Death in
Venice, for example (Closet 52-9). Yet her final
admission that she herself feels most akin to "pre-
Stonewall gay self-definition of (say) the 1950s" (63)
puts her in uncomfortable proximity to Bloom.
244
6 .For a discussion of "homosexual panic" and a
defense of her analytic use of the notion, see Sedgwick,
Closet 18-22.
7.Alfred Douglas, The True History of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (rpt. 1933; London; Kennikat P, 1970).
8 ."Acts of gross indecency," of course was the
homophobic legal term for male same-sex activity. See
H. Montgomery Hyde, ed. The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
(New York: University Books, 1948) 336.
9.All quotations from Shakespeare's sonnets are
taken from Shakespeare1s Sonnets. ed., with analytic
commentary, Stephen Booth (New Haven; Yale U P, 1977).
The dedication of the sonnets with its punctuation is
reproduced in this edition, 1977 3.
10.Critics as different as Wyndham Lewis, The Lion
and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plavs of
Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1951) 149-58, G. Wilson
Knight, The Mutual Flame: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the
Phoenix and the Turtle (London: Methuen, 1955) 36-7,
Sedgwick, Between Men 29-48, and Rene Girard, A Theater
of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford U P,
1991) 46, remark on same-sex desires in Shakespeare's
Sonnets. Girard expresses the urbane disavowal with
which the subject usually gets treated: "It is
difficult, of course, not to read the Sonnets in an
existential light, and if we do, they suggest a
bisexuality that accords very well with what the theater
also seems to suggest. Speculations about Shakespeare's
\ private life are inevitable, of course, but cannot lead
to any certainty; even if they did, their interest would
still be limited," Envy 46. Pequigney provides the
fullest treatment to date of homoeroticism and
bisexuality in the Sonnets; unfortunately his readings
are somewhat hampered by their adherence to Freudian
"truths" about "homosexuality," Joseph Pequigney, Such
Is Mv Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1985). Gregory Bredbeck offers a reading
of the Sonnets with the provocative title, "The
Shakespearean Sodomite," but unfortunately, his analysis
is not especially helpful, Bredbeck, Sodomy and
Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell,
1991) 167-85.
11.Regenia Gagnier notes that Douglas did find
"proof" of sorts in 1942: he discovered a reference to
a William Hewes who had been apprenticed to Christopher
Marlowe's father, John, as a shoemaker, Idvlls of the
Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public
245
(Stanford: Stanford U P, 1986) 43.
1 2 .For an extended theoretical discussion of
verisimilitude, see Roland Barthes, "The Reality
Effect," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986) 141-8, Julia
Kristeva, "La productivity dite texte," in Semiotike:
Recherches pour une semanalvse (Paris: Seuil, 1969) 208-
45, and Tzvetan Todorov, "An Introduction to
Verisismilitude," The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1977) 80-8. The
work of Barthes, Kristeva and Todorov, while not
directly cited, nevertheless shapes my argument here.
For an influential statement on history and rhetoric,
see Hayden White, Metahistorv: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1973), especially his description of
Benedetto Croce as an ironist, 375-425.
13.See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality;
Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1979) 42-3. Perhaps
Foucault's most polemical exponent at present is David
Halperin: see Halperin, One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York:
Routledge, 1990). See also Jeffrey Weeks, Against
Nature : Essays on History. Sexuality and Identity
(London: Rivers Oram P, 1991).
14.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: California U P, 1990), Richard
Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of
Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina
P, 1990) 193-212, and Wayne Koestenbaum, "Wilde's Hard
Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading," in Engendering Men:
The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph
Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990)
176-89. Sedgwick, although she appears skeptical of the
kinds of teleological narratives that historians of
sexuality have spun since Foucault, still singles out
1891, the year The Picture of Dorian Gray was published
and Melville's Billv Budd was written, as the "gateway
. . . of our modern period" in "any gay male canon,"
Closet 48.
15.Halperin makes the point that the word
"homosexuality" was first introduced into English by
Charles Gilbert Chaddock only in 1892, in his English
translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psvchopathia Sexualis.
See Halperin, "Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty,
Politics, and Power in Classical Athens," in Hidden From
History: Reclaiming the Gav and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin
246
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey
(Harxnondsworth : Penguin, 1989) 38.
16.She notes the entry of something queer about
"queer" a propos of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekvll and Mr. Hvde. which was published in
1886. Even though Sexual Anarchy traces continuities
between our fin-de-siecle and that of the nineteenth
century, Showalter seems unaware of the deployment of
"queer" in the late eighties in zine culture, in
underground clubs or in political activism. See
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the
Fin-de-Siecle (New York: Viking, 1990) 111-2. Wayne
Koestenbaum also remarks on the occurrence of "queer" in
Dr. Jekvll and Mr. Hvde. see Koestenbaum, Double Talk:
The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York :
Routledge, 1989) 150-1.
17.In 1995, the centenary of Wilde's trial, the
British queer activist group OutRage intends to
commemorate Wilde's trial through a series of protests
aimed at Clause 28, in case more evidence were needed
for the politics of precedents.
18.1 have used The Portrait of Mr. W. H. as it
appears in Oscar Wilde, The Complete Shorter Fiction,
ed. Isobel Murray (London: Oxford U P, 1979) 139-69.
This is a reprint of the 1889 version. The enlarged and
revised version on which Wilde was working at the time
of his trials was never published during his life, and
the edition of it that I have used in Wilde, The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.. ed. Vyvyan Holland (London:
Methuen, 1958). The dates 1979 or 1958 followed by a
page reference will indicate which edition I am
discussing.
19.See Dellamora's discussion of Walter Pater's
"Denys l'Auxerrois" (1886) and "Apollo in Picardy"
(1893): both these stories have to do with what
Dellamora calls "the social expenditure of a beautiful
young man," Masculine Desire 168.
20.See William A. Cohen, "Willie and Wilde: Reading
The Portrait of Mr. W. H.." in Displacing Homophobia:
Gav Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture, ed.
Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon
(Durham: Duke U P, 1989): 207-33. See also Sedgwick's
work on the closet as it might shape gay male identities
and cultures, Closet.
247
21. The tension between the metatextual and the
homosexual is evident even in a gay-affirmative reading
of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. such as William Cohen's.
Thus Cohen can try and give "homosexuality" a specific
and constitutive role in the text: "Homosexuality
provides both the literary content and at the same time
the hermeneutic practice for deciphering that content .
. ("Willie and Wilde," 224); at the same time, there
is something in the text that tears away from such queer
specificity towards overly generalized pronouncements
about textuality and desire: The Portrait is ultimately
about "the very capacity of language to express or
contain the erotic" (221). Cohen's reading, admirably
exhaustive as it is, ends up by repeating some of the
tensions of the text, particularly the way in which it
might seem to keep pointing away from its own concern
with queerness.
22.Garber makes the point that Rosalind is "the
favorite among Shakespeare's cross-dressers, the
shorthand term for benign female-to-male cross-dressing
in literature and culture," Vested Interests 76.
23.Willie Hughes and Cyril Graham play a very
different part as Rosalind than Sibyl Vane does in The
Picture of Dorian Gray when she also performs that role.
See The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Norton, 1988)
62 .
24.Where discrepancies occur between the
punctuation used in the sonnets cited in The Portrait of
Mr. W. H. and that of the sonnets in Booth's edition, I
have followed Wilde's punctuation.
25. One might consider here Foucault's resistance
to a question about the connection between
"homosexuality" and untruth: "... it is true that,
during the 19th century it was, to a certain degree,
necessary to hide one's homosexuality. But to call
homosexuals liars is equivalent to calling the resistors
under a military occupation liars. It's like calling
Jews 'money lenders' when it was the only profession
they were allowed to practice," Foucault, "Sexual
Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality," in
Politics. Philosophy. Culture: Interviews and Other
Writings 1977-1984. ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York:
Routledge, 1988) 292. Foucault's response seems to move
from a disavowal of the link— it might have been true in
the nineteenth century, but it is no longer relevant— to
a qualified acceptance of a strategic necessity in
concealing one's sexual identity, which seems to me to
be the effect of the analogy Foucault draws between
248
queers and those who resist under a foreign military
regime. Judith Butler sees Foucault's work as somewhat
reticent, if not closeted: "Foucault . . . gave only one
interview on homosexuality and . . . always resisted the
confessional moment in his own work ..." Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of the Subject (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 101.
26.Likewise, William Cohen, in his reading of The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.. points to the significance of
"inversion" both in the text and at the historical
moment of its production, and re-negotiates "inversion"
as exactly the kind of strategic manoeuvre that Butler
envisages. "Yet if the procedure of this reading has
been throughout to display the mutual and simultaneous
effects of 'literature' on interpretation' and vice
versa, then Wilde's entire project— what can now be
understood as 'reading by inversion'— will in one sense
have already exposed its homoerotic predilection. For
it is well known that both the language and the trope of
inversion' were common figures for homosexuality in the
second half of the nineteenth century; and for a story
that is so centrally concerned with the interrelation of
literature and interpretation, such a trope overarches
the text even as it can never be articulated" (1989
227). Cohen's understanding of the operations of
"inversion" in Wilde are somewhat more narrowly
"literary" than the ones which, following Butler, I wish
to outline.
27.With considerably more political and polemical
emphasis, in his autobiographical meditation on
the meaning of Wilde to a gay Londoner of the mid 1980s,
Neil Bartlett comes to a conclusion not unlike Butler's:
"Something that is forged has no intrinsic value.
Rather it has the value with which the forger himself
manages to invest his creation. There is no intrinsic
value to homosexuality. There is no 'real' us, we can
only ever have an unnatural identity, which is why we
are all forgers. We create a life, not out of lies, but
out of more or less conscious choices: adaptations,
imitations and plain theft of styles, names, social and
sexual roles, bodies. The high camp of Sebastian
Melmoth's [Wilde's pseudonym after his release from
prison] life is a true model for us, not because we are
all devastated upper class queens, or want to be, but
because we too must compose ourselves" (Who Was That
Man? A Present For Mr. Oscar Wilde 1988 169-70).
28.See especially Barthes's essay, "The Reality
Effect," and Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics
and the Feminine (London: Methuen, 1987).
249
29.See Lisa Jardine, "'As boys and women are for
the most part cattle of this colour1: Female Roles and
Elizabethan Eroticism," Still Harping on Daughters:
Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, N.J.:
Barnes and Noble, 1983) 9-36, Phyllis Rackin,
"Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Elizabethan
Stage," PMLA 102 (1987): 29-41, Catherine Belsey,
"Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the
Comedies," Alternative Shakespeares 166-90, and Stephen
Orgel's "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the Elizabethan
Stage Take Boys For Women?," Displacing Homophobia 7-3 0,
or, for a useful summary of critical work on and
cultural contexts for gender and sexual "ambiguity,"
specifically as part of anti-homophobic projects, see
Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, "Introduction: The
Guarded Body," Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of
Gender Ambiguity 1-28. See also "The Changeling Boy,"
Vested Interests 84-92.
30.Alan Sinfield writes, "An essential link between
homosexuality and the theatre is sometimes proposed, but
the project eludes precise definitions .... I place
more weight on the mundane fact that theatre and illicit
sexual activity are likely to occupy the same inner-city
territory." See Alan Sinfield, "Private Lives/Public
Theatre: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual
Representation," Representations 36 (1991): 44.
31.See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An
Essav in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell U
P, 1980) 203-11 for a fuller explanation of these terms.
32.See Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence 104-65 for a
detailed exposition of what Dollimore calls
"perversion1s lost histories" (1 0 1).
33.1 am alluding, obviously, to Sedgwick. See
Sedgwick for a reading that runs counter to mine,
Between Men 28-48. When Butler writes— overly
optimistically, perhaps— that "heterosexuality is always
in the process of imitating and approximating its own
phantasmatic idealization of itself— and failing." (1991
2 1 ), she seems to be offering the kind of queer insight
that is close to Wilde's.
34.Of course there is the other tradition of
apparent dystopian and iconoclastic interest in a
"homosexual" Shakespeare which trades in homophobic
assumptions about the "shock value" of same-sex desire:
see for example, Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in
Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972) or Jan Kott,
Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski
250
(London: Methuen, 1965) .
35.Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage,
1988) facing 429. Showalter comments briefly on the
photograph in the course of her reading of Salome,
before discussing the implications of the Salome role
for women; she uses the Flaubert allusion to wonder when
Wilde decided ’ ’Salome, c'est moi?". See Showalter,
Sexual Anarchy 156-7.
36.See Garber for an extended discussion of Salome.
in which she claims this "drag Salome" as a "radical
reading that tells the truth" and which undoes the
binary opposition between Western male and Orientalized
female 3 39-45. Her endorsement of Ken Russell's
extraordinarily homophobic Salome's Last Dance seems to
me to limit the validity of her reading.
37.Mary Anne Doane has found the source of Freud's
phrase in "The Question of Lay Analysis," qtd. in Doane,
"Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual
Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," Femmes
Fatales: Feminism. Film Theory. Psychoanalysis (New
York: Routledge, 1991) 210. Doane1s reading of the
politics of sexual and racial masquerade, while it does
not consider sexuality, offers a correlative to a simple
endorsement of Wilde's appropriation.
38.Regenia Gagnier also makes Stuart-Young part of
her discussion of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. without
commenting on the connections between forgery and acts
of queer identification, Gagnier, Idylls of the
Marketplace 43.
39.See Jonathan Goldberg, "Sodomy and Society: The
Case of Christopher Marlowe," Southwest Review (Autumn
1984): 377.
40.This was not to be the only time that
Shakespeare's Sonnets would be admitted as evidence in a
trial to adjudicate "inverted" identities and texts:
"supporters of [Radclyffe] Hall had tried to use
Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence" in the obscenity
trial of The Well of Loneliness in 1929, Jane Marcus,
"Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well," in Karla Jay and
Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical
Revisions (New York: New York U P, 1990) 167. For
Marcus, when "[Woolf] told the sad tale of Shakespeare's
sister [in A Room of One's Ownl. her audience knew that
Radclyffe Hall was descended from Shakespeare's daughter
. . . . That Judith Shakespeare was a fiction did not
prevent the audience from seeing her death as a sign of
251
the suppression of lesbianism in the obscenity trial.
Judith Shakespeare is certainly the universal figure of
the oppressed woman artist, but she was also, in the
context of the times, 'Radclyffe Hall,'" 167. In
Marcus's view, then, the story of Shakespeare's sister
becomes another way of forging lesbian history.
41.Bartlett points out that even here Wilde is
quoting— two unrelated passages from Dorian Gray make up
the gist of Wilde's impassioned speech from the dock,
Bartlett 204.
42.See Eve Sedgwick, "Across Gender, Across
Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others," Displacing
Homophobia: Gav Male Perspectives in Literature and
Culture 53-61 and "Epistemology of the Closet," Closet 8 8 .
43.What Wilde is espousing here seems to be some
anticipation of "sublimation": see Dollimore, Sexual
Dissidence 105-6 and 174-82 for an analysis of how
Freud's notion of "sublimation" makes what is defined as
culturally marginal culturally central so that
"perversions" in a different form can serve the
interests of a culture.
44.Henley wrote this in a review of Dorian Gray,
qtd. in Dellamora, Masculine Desire 208.
45.Lesbians were neither unknown nor unthinkable,
as the pornographic novel Teleny. attributed to Wilde
and others, evidences: in it, a gay artist, Briancourt,
proposes to paint the Three Graces as a "mystic trinity
of tribadism," Telenv. or. The Reverse of the Medal
(London: GMP, 1986) 140. In 1864, Simeon Solomon, an
openly and scandalously gay painter who was an
acquaintance of Swinburne's, J. A. Symonds, and Walter
Pater, made one of the "few unequivocally homoerotic
depictions of Sappho . . . the only visual
representation . . . of the poet actively initiating an
embrace with another woman," Joan DeJean, Fictions of
Sappho. 1546-1937 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) 225.
Solomon, like Salome, was Jewish. My point is that a
history of male-male desire which puts itself in the
center of a tradition that is "Western" and
unambiguously "male," makes itself coherent at the cost
of rendering other identities and subject positions
seemingly unimaginable: lesbian or Jew, in this instance.
46.Dollimore frames Sexual Dissidence with Andre
Gide and Wilde in Algeria and their respective relations
with men of color, 3-18 and 335-4.
252
47.Ricketts's painting, sold for one pound, was
never found again; Wilde’s manuscript turned up in the
early 1920s the United States.
48.He actually attributes this assessment of his
value to Simon Watney.
49.Sonnet 20, "A woman's face, with nature’s own
hand painted,/ Hast thou, the master mistress of my
passion," which has an extensive history of queer
appropriations, is not included. See Pequigney for an
extensive discussion, "Passion and Its Master-Mistress
(Sonnet 20)," 1985 30-41. Sonnet 53, which is included
in The Angelic Conversation, recapitulates the trope of
the Master-Mistress with its conjunction of Adonis and
Helen (53.5-8).
50.This assumption has been shared both by critics
who limit the homoerotic significance in the Sonnets
(such as Ingram and Redpath in their notes,
Shakespeare's Sonnets [London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1964]) and by critics who assert that significance
(Pequigney 1985 4 and 155).
51.Here Jarman's film produces something like the
reversal of the Sonnets into a commentary on the plays
that takes place in Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H..
In Wilde's text as well, the relation of interpretation
to what it professes to interpret is uncertain, and the
borders of texts not at all secure.
52.Ki Namaste connects the etymologies of "queer"
and "punk" to uncover "historic links with degeneracy,
thievery and the specific practices of those living on
the street," "Queers in the Public Sphere: Thoughts on
Identity, Imperialism, and the Establishment of an
Ethics of Rupture," unpublished essay, University of
Montreal, Quebec, 1992. See also my discussion of
"queer," "punk," and "Elizabethan" in the next chapter.
53.It is worth mentioning that in the interview
about The Angelic Conversation in the book of The Last
of England, the interviewer seems to assume that the
film is indeed set in the Renaissance: "You've set [the
film] in a pre-romantic period, a tough period, when
intellectual debate was at a high point" (Last of
England 140). Jarman does not contradict him.
54.As J. Dover Wilson does, for example, in his
edition of the Sonnets, The Sonnets (Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1966); see also Pequigney*s comments on
253
Dover Wilson 1985 76-7.
55.Tellingly, Jarman cites Barthes, but Barthes's A
Lover's Discourse, as an influence on his film (Last of
England 140). The occasion for Barthes's shifter
fantasy is a postcard which bears a potentially
homoerotic message: "Monday. Returning tomorrow. Jean-
Louis" (Barthes 165).
56.See Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space," Screen
17.3 (1976): 97-100 for a detailed exposition of the
term "suture" which derives from Lacanian psychoanalysis.
57.Kaja Silverman derives the term "acoustic
mirror" from Guy Rosolato, "La voix: entre corps et
langage," Revue francaise de psychanalyse 37.1 (1974):
79. Rosolato writes that the voice can be "at the same
time emitted and heard, sent and received, and by the
subject himself [sic], as if, in comparison with the
look, an acoustic' mirror were always in effect. Thus
the images of entry and departure relative to the body
are narrowly articulated. They can come to be
confounded, inverted, to prevail one over the other,"
qtd. in Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice
in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U P,
1988) 80. In my context, Rosolato's use of "inversion"
to talk about the inside and the outside of the body
(whose body?) must be remarked on: the well-known
formula for the male "invert" of the nineteenth century
was anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa. Anima
also means "breath"— a woman's breath (or voice) in a
man's body.
For Silverman, the synchronic alignment of female
voice with female body in classic Hollywood cinema
serves the ends of a phallocentric imaginary: "By
confining the female voice to a recessed area of the
diegesis, obliging it to speak a particular psychic
'reality' on command, and imparting to it the texture of
the female body, Hollywood places woman definitively on
stage,' at a dramatic remove from the cinematic
apparatus," The Acoustic Mirror 63.
An extensive body of work on the voice in cinema
exists: for example, Pascal Bonitzer, "The Silences of
the Voice," and Mary Anne Doane, "The Voice in the
Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," both in
Philip Rosen, ed. Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology (New
York: Columbia U P, 1988) 319-34 and 335-48, Stephen
Heath, "Body, Voice," and "Language, Sight and Sound,"
in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1981)
176-93 and 194-220. See also the discussion of sound
and image tracks in Chapter Four.
254
58.Pequigney comments on the use of the blazon
against its heterosexual uses in Sonnets 99 and 106
(1985 71-2); see also Nancy J. Vickers, "This Heraldry
in Lucrece's Face," Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 171-84;
Vickers is specifically concerned with the effects of
the blazon in a heterosexual— specifically male
homosocial— context signifies: "a stylized
fragmentation and reification of the female body," 182.
59."Fighting the Wicked: Queer Filmmaker Derek
Jarman Bashes Ahead," Bay Area Reporter Arts and
Entertainment xxii. 12 (19 March 1992) 36.
60.Of all the Dorian Grays in the cinema, the most
fabulous is surely Ulrike Ottinger's transgender lesbian
Dorian Gray played as a female-to-male cross-dressing
role (a neat and appropriate lesbian twist on the motif
of male-to-female or even female-to-female crossings
encountered so far) by Vogue model of the 60s, Veruschka
von Lehndorff. Ottinger's Dorian Gray im Spiegel der
Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow
Press) (1984) makes Dorian lose his image to the
machinations of a culture industry run by Frau Doktor
Mabuse.
61.The significance of telecommunications—
literally contact at a distance— that Jacques Derrida
uses in "To Speculate— On Freud'" informs my use of the
term. See Derrida, "To Speculate," in The Postcard From
Socrates to Freud and Bevond. trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987) 320. Alan Bass also provides a
useful gloss on tele: "Tele is the French equivalent of
the American expression TV— the English 'telly' is
almost perfect here— as well as the prefix in
telecommunication,' communication at a distance, from
the Greek tele (distant, loin, fort)," translator's
note, The Postcard 320.
62.While Kramer has worked very single-mindedly and
tirelessly as a militant and uncompromising AIDS
activist, he has continued to focus on monogamy as some
alternative to a supposed "wrong" in gay male culture.
63.See also the discussion of Nestle in the
previous chapter.
64.Jan Zita Grover calls 1985 the year of
"heterosexual panic" in "the popular media" after
Hudson's death. Grover, "Visible Lesions: Images of the
PWA in America," in Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics
in the AIDS Crisis, ed. James Miller (Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 1992) 28. See also Simon Watney, Policing
255
Desire: Pornography. AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1987) 87-90 and Richard Meyer, "Rock
Hudson's Body," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories. Gav
Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991) 258-88.
Chapter Three: Acts of Sodomy: A Lineage of Gay Desire 255
in Edward II
Give me sodomy or give me death
(Diamanda Galas, "Confessional," The
Plaque Mass).
More of an Elizabethan lay than an
Elizabethan play (Derek Jarman, Queer
Edward II 16).
Punk/Queer/Elizabethan
Jubilee (1978), Derek Jarman's second feature length
film, begins in 1577, with a queen's dream: Elizabeth I
asks the court magician Dr. Dee to reveal the future to
her.1 What Dr. Dee's mirror shows Elizabeth is an
England of punks and anarchy, an England with a gay
police force, an England with Westminster Abbey
transformed into a disco.
At once dystopian and delirious, this England
recalls the England of 1977, the year of the second
Elizabeth's jubilee, but at the same time is not,
Jubilee insists, to be confused with the England in
which the film was made: Jubilee1s time is either that
of the past or a future which may or may not be our own.
Future and past intersect and cross over. Such a
temporal chiasmus is effected by the near coincidence of
257
royal names— Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II— and the
possibility, nationalistically evoked ever since
Elizabeth II's ascension to the throne, of a second
Elizabethan era.2
Ironically perhaps, punk’s most successful slogan
was "no future": insofar as there is time in Jubilee. it
is a future which is not one. More than a
transvaluation of values, "punk" is a liberating
devaluation, and in Jubilee history has been rendered
worthless and time itself is without meaning. Not the
occasion for collective recollection, nationalist
nostalgia, or chauvinist aspiration, the anniversary or
"jubilee" can neither remember nor anticipate anything.
Without time, history makes way for fiction, and fiction
opens endless possibility: "Nothing is true. Everything
is permitted," the film cites Hassan I'Sabbah.3 Punks
and drag queens triumphantly perform their acts amid the
ruins of English culture and history: punk, Jubilee
intimates, may well be the inheritor of national
traditions in England, so that Amyl Nitrate (Jordan)
acts out a punk version of "Rule Britannia" for the
Eurovision song contest.4
In Jubilee there is no future— which means that
there is no past and no present. One of the would-be
historians of punk, Greil Marcus, has claimed that punk
essentially takes place in such a time outside time:
258
"All that remains are wishes without language: all that
remains is unmade history, which is to say the
possibility of poetry. As the poetry is made, language
recovers and finds its target: the history that has been
made" (Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century. 1989 308). Or, as Marcus puts it
even more evocatively, all such moments of revolt
against history leave is "lipstick traces (on a
cigarette)" (345). But these lipstick traces inscribe
insurrections other even than the ones Marcus considers
— queer histories, histories too clandestine perhaps for
Marcus's self-styled "Secret History of the Twentieth
Century." Jarman's Jubilee, nevertheless, retains the
lipstick traces that queers of all kinds have left.5
Like punk, queer names the unnameable: worthless,
strange, valueless. As signifiers "punk" and "queer"
mark dis-identification. The space opened by the
current deployment of the term queer in lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender politics forms the arena within
which Jarman's most recent film, Edward II (1992),
relocates Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1594).
Jarman's script even writes the word "queer" into
Marlowe's play with a slight but telling substitution.
When the nobles discuss Edward's passion for the royal
favorite, Piers Gaveston, with Isabella, Edward's queen,
the older Mortimer says, "Is it not strange, that he is
259
thus bewitch'd?" (Edward II. I. ii. 55) . 6 Jarman's film
has Isabella say instead, "Is it not queer that he is
thus bewitched?" (Queer Edward II 38; my emphasis) . 7 A
minor flourish, this single word nevertheless claims the
love of Edward and Gaveston as "queer" and as everything
that "queer" has come to mean at the end of the
twentieth century.
The book of Jarman's film— subtitled "Edward II
improved by Derek Jarman"— renames Marlowe's play as
Queer Edward II. Emblazoned in gilt on its oxblood
cover, the title Queer Edward II makes "queer" a regal
honorific which, printed in large italic script,
dominates both "Edward II" and "Derek Jarman," the two
proper names that appear beneath its imperious imprint.
The back cover of the book bears a large Q that
encircles the Roman numerals II. Queer Edward II or Oil
becomes a royal monogram, one that recalls OEII. as a
number of queers have indeed noticed.8 If only by a
coincidence of initials, the monogram OEII connects the
second Edward with the second Elizabeth. In Jubilee.
"punk" provided the unlikely term for a convergence
between one Elizabeth and another;9 "queer" in Edward II
links the Englands of Edward and Marlowe with that of
Elizabeth II.
260
The presence of the second Elizabeth makes itself
felt in minor ways in Edward II— for example, in some
details of costume, such as an Hermes headscarf that
Tilda Swinton wears as Queen Isabella. A headscarf by
Hermes has become a kind of signature of Elizabeth II's
style, and hence provides Jarman with the occasion for
an anecdote about Elizabeth's being mistaken for
herself— a doubling of queenly identities:
Two ladies were in a tea shoppe in
Windsor, in walks a slightly windblown
lady with Hermes headscarf tied on the
chin, tweed suit, corgis at heel, she
orders a cake to take out. The ladies
look at her for a while, then have to
speak. "Excuse me, we have to tell you
that you look just like the Queen."
"Good," replies Her Majesty, and leaves
(QEII 38).
"[Looking] just like the Queen," the homonym,
"queen"/"queen" is also something of a staple, of
course, of gay male culture. "Queer" and "queen" are
cognates in this context, and even though neither the
film nor Jarman's screenplay ever explicitly makes such
a connection, the queer king who is a queen is entirely
possible within the signifying field of OEII. Moreover,
Marlowe is explicitly called a "queen" in the
screenplay: "Such an intellectual queen," observes
Jarman of Marlowe's fondness for classical allusions:
261
"Marlowe drops classical references like confetti
through the text to prove he's up-to-the-minute" (OEII
14) .
Of course, Marlowe's play and Jarman's film both
incorporate the "real" queen Isabella. How does this
inscribe the woman (understood as heterosexual) in a gay
male fantasy? The question of misogyny in Edward II—
which would seem to pit straight women, like Isabella,
against gay men, like Gaveston and Edward, in its
political scheme— has been addressed as follows by B.
Ruby Rich:
Since the heroes are guys and the main
villain is a woman, it already has some
critics condemning it as misogynist.
Tilda Swinton's brilliance as an actor
— and full cocreator [sic] of her role—
invests her character with more weight
and thus more evil than anyone else on
the screen. But the film is also a
critique of heterosexuality and of a
country ruled by royals and Tories.
Isabella is more clearly motivated by
Margaret Thatcher than by woman-hating
(Rich, "A Queer Sensation: New Gay
Film," 43).
The significance of Swinton's part as "cocreator" of her
role and of co-author of sections of Queer Edward II
does give the woman some agency which works against a
simple understanding of her as the object of a male
fantasy. It is worth noting that Tilda Swinton does
more than play Isabella in the film: she writes some
sections of commentary in the text of Queer Edward II.
262
where her sections are signed with the initials IR—
Isabella Regina. the woman-as-queen with a title
different from the male queer/queen.10 (I return to the
question of misogyny and the position of women as
straight or lesbian and bisexual at the end of this
chapter.)
The juncture of Edward II and Elizabeth II,
moreover, can be taken as a bid for historical
pertinence: Marlowe's play, Jarman wants us to
understand, makes sense in the fourth decade of
Elizabeth II*s reign when anti-gay laws like Clause 28
are enacted while, as we have seen in Chapter Two, a gay
actor like Ian McKellen is knighted.11 Hence B. Ruby
Rich's reading of the film: "Homophobia is stripped bare
as a timeless, tireless occupation, tracked across the
centuries from then to now, always with its historical
specificity" (Rich 43).
At the same time, Jarman's work on Edward II— as
film and as book— repeats and revises some of the
strategies of temporal dislocation at work in Jubilee.
"Punk" in Jubilee and "queer" in Edward II intersect
with reference to another term, "Elizabethan," the term
that joins them in Jarman's work. In Jubilee Elizabeth
I and Elizabeth II are aligned in order to contest the
cultural prestige that invocations of the "Elizabethan"
as paradigm intend. Jubilee's very gesture of making
263
links between 1577 and 1977 works to disrupt any feigned
historical continuity: the England of Gloriana has
nothing in common with the England of "no future." The
ascension of the second Elizabeth was hailed in certain
reactionary quarters as a return to England1s
"greatness," understood nostalgically in relation to
Elizabeth I. It is important to bear in mind that the
English Renaissance under Elizabeth I saw the
inauguration of nationalism and imperialism in England
as well as the consolidation of an "English" culture.
Jarman's Edward II draws the two Elizabeths and the
second Edward into a complex system of links and
ruptures that complicates a nationalist tradition that
pretends to be unbroken.
One must bear in mind, however, that Jarman made
Edward II on commission from the BBC. In an interview
with the gay magazine Edge Jarman comments on this
commission: "I am the British establishment
. . . . Edward is Kip Marlowe and Kip Marlowe is
central Elizabethan drama, right at the heart of British
life. There's nothing in any way controversial about
Kip Marlowe" (22 April 1992, 42). What the BBC's
commission assumes is that an interpretation— no matter
how idiosyncratic— of Renaissance drama— no matter how
aberrant— can be contained within some larger framework
of national high culture. Jarman's revision of
264
Marlowe's play will simply prove that Marlowe is
"relevant": the culture of the English Renaissance is
still with us.
The culture of the Renaissance has indeed always
been central to Jarman's work— as we have seen, his
film, The Angelic Conversation (1985), uses
Shakespeare's sonnets as the text for a film that is
overtly about same-sex desire, and both The Tempest and
Caravaggio, like Jubilee and Edward II. return to the
Renaissance. Yet the alignment of "queer" and "punk" by
means of "Elizabethan" or "Renaissance" works to devalue
the last two terms.12 Jarman may assert his place in
the establishment, but he also takes his distance from
the canon and the status quo: "I have a deep hatred of
the Elizabethan past used to castrate our vibrant
present," he writes in Queer Edward II when he
contemplates his relation to Shakespeare and Marlowe
(1992, 112).13 Of Marlowe's Edward II. Jarman writes in
the prefatory note to Queer Edward II. "How to make a
film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find
a dusty old play and violate it" (OEII dedicatory note).
But Jarman's Edward II is no simple valorization of the
present against the past: its time is most properly that
of anachronism, "something that is out of its proper
time" (Webster's Dictionary 1984).
265
As a strategy, anachronism lies at the heart of
Jarman's Edward II. Jarman observes of one scene in the
film that "the updating makes this eerie" (OEII 44).
Here Jarman seems to be stating simply that the film is
a production of Marlowe's play that has been
"[updated]"— that is, set in a contemporary milieu, as
though its time were the present. When Jarman comments
on the "[eerieness]" of this "updating," he recognizes
that the effects of his transposition of Edward II are a
great deal more unsettling, if not uncanny, than a mere
transposition.
Rather than a simple contemporary version of the
play, the film works to remove its spectators from any
one particular historical moment. Neither medieval,
contemporary, nor Elizabethan, Jarman's strategy in
Edward II has been described as "a syncretic style to
mix past and present" (Rich 43). A number of codes
compel spectators to see the presentness of the past and
the pastness of the present in Edward II. Costumes and
props are, for the most part, assertively contemporary:
the form of Gaveston's banishment is typewritten and
bears the House of Commons logo (OEII 56); Mortimer
wears a military uniform; his armies consist of soldiers
in camouflage and policemen in riot gear; Edward's
soldiers are members of OutRage in be-sloganed T-
shirts; the princeling drinks Coca-Cola from a can; a
266
royal Christinas banquet is dominated by a gilt Christmas
tree that seems to have come directly from Harrod's;
after the downfall of Isabella and Mortimer, the prince
dances, wearing a Walkman and listening to a version of
Tchaikovsky’s "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy." Yet each
of these transpositions reads as a temporal dislocation
instead of simply being received as a part of a seamless
continuity of a single time. If one accepts the moment
of Edward II as contemporary, there are still elements
that stand out as anachronisms: the corpse of Edward I
lies in state encased in a gigantic gold suit of amour;
his son takes to the throne as Edward II in a dazzling
gold robe; swords, crowns and thrones are meticulously
detailed to connote a certain precision of "period."
Even more subtly anachronistic are elements that do,
indeed, derive from the 1990s but that hint at— or can
be taken for— historical costume: Isabella's hairstyles
and dresses are at once haute couture and hieratically
medieval; Gaveston's gold earring and baggy white shirt
make him both a contemporary gay man and a Renaissance
blade. "It's strange," writes Jarman, "how the echo of
period in [Tilda Swinton's] costumes had everyone
remembering movie history" (OEII 148), but the "period"
in question is hard to locate: Jarman goes on to refer
not to costume drama but to classic Hollywood, Joan
Crawford and Katherine Hepburn (OEII 148).
267
Other filmic signifiers contribute to a sense that
the time of Edward II is neither here nor there.
Lighting disengages the actors from dark backgrounds, a
chiaroscuro that makes figures look as if they were
emerging momentarily from the murk of the past. Medium
shots and medium close-ups predominate, and the blocking
of the actors14 as well as the framing of shots tends to
place figures either facing camera directly or in three-
quarter or full profile. A reasonably static camera and
minimal editing makes such frames recall portraiture. A
dialogue between Isabella and Mortimer has both of them
in full profile in medium closeup with no camera
movement for the duration of the sequence: the effect is
of Renaissance miniatures (see OEII 108). Simon Turner
Frith's score, especially over the opening and closing
credits, connotes a certain "Elizabethan-ness" in its
use of string sounds.
Against the communal forgetting that official
versions of the past entail, Jarman proposes
strategically different acts of recollection. "Filmed
history," writes Jarman, "is always a misinterpretation.
The past is the past, as you try to make material out of
it, things slip away even further. 'Costume drama' is
such a delusion, based on a collective amnesia,
ignorance and furnishing fabrics. (Lurex for an Oscar)"
(OEII 86). He adds, "Does this answer the question:
268
'Why are you doing it in modern dress?' Our 'Edward' as
closely resembles the past as any 'costume drama1 (which
is no great claim)" (OEII 86). Jarman remarks
acerbically, "Vulgarity like this started with Olivier's
Henry V and deteriorated ever after" (86), and the
difference between Henry V and Edward II. between
Olivier and Jarman, is evident: one film enforces a
nationalist tradition that is the product of "collective
amnesia"— a forgetting of dissident forms of
sexuality15; the other allows that centralizing
tradition to be interrupted by many different kinds of
remembrance.
But it is the mise-en-scene of Jarman's film that
most specifically sets Edward II in an anachronistic
history. Labyrinthine and dusty, the stark corridors
and vertiginously high ceilings that— with the exception
of the dungeon sequences— house the entire action of the
film seem less like one specific historical setting than
the setting of History itself. Jarman tells us that the
film was shot at Bray studios, where, appropriately
enough, the Hammer Horror films of the sixties were made
(OEII 4). (Many of the Hammer films were period pieces
— usually set in some ill-defined early nineteenth
century.) Here, on the stage of the tackiest re
stagings of history as horror movie, Edward II takes
place, as if history were indeed the nightmare that
269
weighs on the brains of the living.16 In Jarman's film,
of course, the nightmare is homophobia, one from which
we still struggle to awaken but from which Edward II. in
Jarman's hands, goes some way towards rousing us.
When Jarman jokes about the royal gold robe that
Edward wears as something out of "all those camp
versions of Elizabethan plays" (OEII 18), he gives away
a certain queer relation to official history: if we
cannot see ourselves in their versions of the past, we
will imagine moments for ourselves in the fragments of
their versions— we will see their history as our camp
costume drama. The style of Jarman's film is less
"syncretic" (pace Rich) than anachronistic: making a
place in history for what, homophobia still tells us,
has no place in History. Anachronism is the figure
which puts the queer in history and what makes history
queer.
Christopher Marlowe, Sodomite and Forger
"Queer As Fuck" (OutRage slogan).
Marlowe himself may occupy the place of the anachronism.
While Alan Bray's influential study Homosexuality in
Renaissance England accords some importance to
invocations of "homosexuality," Bray can only come up
270
with one "homosexual" in Renaissance England— Marlowe.
Or, at least if Marlowe is not the only one, he is "the
most interesting and certainly the most famous" (1982
63). "Homosexuality," Bray asserts, as an identity
rather than as an act, only arrived in history with the
appearance of the molly, the man who cross-dressed for
the purpose of sexual encounters with other men, in the
eighteenth century (1982 88-9). In contrast, Marlowe's
enunciation of a subiectivitv on the basis of sexuality
seems entirely anachronistic, if we follow the
historical schema that has been very well rehearsed ever
since Foucault.17 As Gregory Bredbeck has succinctly
rephrased Bray, when we are dealing with the early
modern period, "the desire to speak of the sodomite is
possibly anachronistic" (Sodomy and Interpretation:
Marlowe to Milton 1991, 144).
Having asked, "Can we speak of the sodomite?,"
Bredbeck goes on to suggest that most often, after
Foucault, "the impulse is to decline to recognize the
sodomite behind (or perhaps in front of) the sodomy and
to label the discourse ‘subjectless’" (1991 143). Yet
Marlowe was, as Bray on the other hand concedes, a
subject very much behind, in front of, and in discourse.
(See Bray 1982, 64-7.) No matter how much one may try
to separate sexual act from actor, Marlowe seems, in the
pithy OutRage slogan, as "queer as fuck." (In Jarman's
271
film, when Mortimer's riot squad clashes with Edward's
army of OutRage militants, a T-shirt bearing that very
slogan can be glimpsed in the frontline rOEII 123];
Jarman himself has been photographed wearing a similar
T-shirt, "C'est pas du cinema," Gai Pied 498 [12
December 1991]: 57).
According to Bray, Marlowe was an anomaly who was
well-nigh unique in his ability to detach himself not
just from the "intense disapproval" of same-sex
practices in his culture, but also from the basis of
that disapproval in the hegemony of the Christian church
(1982 63). Marlowe's construction of a sexually deviant
identity for himself and his work took place, Bray
argues, in a larger matrix of dissidence (1982 64). If
the sodomite, the heretic, the werewolf, and the
sorcerer were all of a piece in the England of Marlowe's
day (1982 21), then Marlowe was prepared to claim those
identities and to be monster, blasphemer, traitor,
sodomite.
Jarman anachronistically celebrates Marlowe as an
Elizabethan punk and queer avant la lettre. "Marlowe
was the wildest boy on earth! He sold his soul to the
devil. He believed Christ and Saint John had an affair.
He said boys who did not love boys and tobacco were
272
crazy .... He made William Burroughs look staid"
fEdae 42). Wild boy Marlowe is a much wilder forerunner
of Burroughs's wild boys.
When Jarman refers to Marlowe's pronouncements on
boys, tobacco, Christ and John, he is drawing on
depositions that a certain Richard Baines made to the
Privy Council concerning Marlowe. Transcribed around
the time of Marlowe's death, Baines's note has become a
key text in the construction of Marlowe's dissidence:
the chief charge against Marlowe was that he seduced men
to atheism. Marlowe, according to Baines, said, "St
John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned
alwaies in his bosome, . . . he vsed him as the sinners
of Sodoma," and Marlowe also pithily observed, "all that
loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles" (qtd. in Thomas
Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe 143).18 Marlowe was, as Baines
charged, a forger as well as a blasphemer and a lover of
boys. He claimed:
he had as good Right to Coine as the
Queen of England, and that he was
acquainted with one Poole a prisoner in
Newgate who hath greate skill in mixture
of mettals and hauing learned some
thinges of him he ment through help of a
Cunninge stamp maker to Coin ffrench
Crownes pistoletes and English
shillinges (143).
Forgery was more than simply another criminal activity,
for in some ways it stood, during the English
Renaissance, in a fixed relation to sodomy.
273
Indeed, as a category, sodomy sometimes
comprehended forgery: James I cautioned his son against
"horrible crimes that yee [sic] are bound in conscience
never to forgive," and these "crimes" included sodomy,
forgery, and witchcraft (qtd. in Bredbeck, 1991, 5).
Usury, like sodomy, was seen as a practice "against
nature": "As Paederastie is unlawful, because it is
against kinde; so usurie and encrease by gold and silver
is unlawful, because against nature; nature hath made
them sterill and barren, and usurie makes them
procreative" (Francis Mere, Palladis Tamia. qtd. in
Bredbeck 1991, 5). Like forgery, sodomy was a
dissemination: "Ooortet rem penetrare et semen naturae
emittere et effundere" (Edward Coke, qtd. in Bredbeck
19). Moreover, as Thomas Blount’s Glossoaraphia of 1670
implies, "sodomy" also included same-sex activities
between women: "carnalis copula contra naturam. & haec
vel confusionem Specierum. a man or a woman with a brute
beast, vel sexum; a man with a man, or a woman with a
woman" (qtd. in Bredbeck 17). At the intersection of
counterfeiting and the "confusion of species and sexes"
Marlowe enunciates his subjectivity.
Or does he? Thomas Dabbs, in Reforming Marlowe,
has investigated Marlowe scholarship, which itself has
quite a history of forgery and false evidence.19 Alan
Bray concedes, for example, that the Baines deposition
274
should be regarded as a calculated attempt to
incriminate Marlowe, and as such, its status as proof is
more than a little questionable. Even though Bray
marshals evidence to demonstrate that there was truth in
what Baines said of Marlowe, he appeals to another
deposition, extracted under torture from one Thomas Kyd.
Kyd reiterates Marlowe's comments on the relation
between St. John and Christ, but embellishes it with a
classical allusion: "He [Marlowe] would report St John
to be Our Saviour Christ's Alexis" (qtd. in Bray 1982,
64). For Bray, the citing of classic precedent— Alexis
is the youth beloved of Corydon in Virgil1s second
Eclogue— proves that Marlowe1s words are recoverable
behind the violence, coercion and duplicity of Kyd's
deposition (64-5). Only Marlowe the poet, and only
Marlowe the self-identified sexual heretic, so Bray
argues, would have been capable of linking the Gospels
to Latin pastoral poetry. In literature there lies a
truth of sexuality, at least for Bray, who clinches his
argument by pointing out that Marlowe's lyric, "The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love," uses Virgil's second
Eclogue as its model (Bray 65).
Yet Marlowe the sodomite-forger provides a kind of
limit-case for reading— or is it inventing?— the history
of sexuality.20 Tellingly, it was in the mid to late
nineteenth century that "Marlowe" was established in the
275
form that we know "him" both as a supposed biographical
subject and as a corpus of writing. Dabbs makes the
point that the very first conscription of Marlowe into
the identity of the "sexual invert" was made by none
other than eminent Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis
(Dabbs 128). In 1897 Ellis produced Sexual Inversion,
which was partly a collaboration with John Addington
Symonds. In his introduction, Ellis claims: "in modern
Europe we find the strongest evidence of what may fairly
be called true sexual inversion when we investigate the
men of the Renaissance." Michelangelo, Bazzi, and
Marlowe are listed;21 Ellis cites Marlowe's putative
remark about boys and tobacco, and diagnoses Marlowe as
"clearly [having] a reckless delight in all things
unlawful, and it seems probable that he possessed the
psychosexual hermaphrodite's temperament" (qtd. in Dabbs
133-4). A real "psychosexual hermaphrodite," a true
"sexual invert," Marlowe was among the first.22
When we consider that both Symonds and Ellis were
literary critics, it is hard not to think about a
simultaneous consolidation of sexual identity and
author-function. Indeed, in his literary study,
Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884)
Symonds proposes the "catch-word" "L'Amour de
1'Impossible" for Marlowe's work (qtd. in Dabbs 125), a
catch-word that is all too evidently a code-word: as
276
Dabbs perhaps unkindly puts it, Symonds is "the
quintessential study in Victorian closet behavior"
(Dabbs 122).23 Symonds's work on Marlowe and the
Renaissance drew him come close to coming out: his
Renaissance in Italy (1885) brought him to the attention
of Havelock Ellis. If Symonds was primarily a literary
scholar, Ellis was already an aspiring sexologist, yet
it was Ellis who proposed the first popularly available
series of unbowdlerized Renaissance dramas. In 1887,
the first of the Mermaid series appeared: a volume of
Marlowe's work, with a prefatory note by Symonds and a
lengthy introduction by Ellis. The latter also
included, as an appendix, the Baines note, a piece of
literary scholarship so daring that the publisher of the
Mermaid Marlowe felt himself impelled to remove the note
from further editions (Dabbs 130-3),24
It is not difficult to recognize the constructed
character of wild boy Kit Marlowe as the invention if
not the forgery of nineteenth-century institutions such
as philology, literary studies, and sexology; it is not
surprising that Havelock Ellis, author of Sexual
Inversion, should have co-authored Christopher Marlowe,
the sexual-invert-as-author. Born out of the need to
legitimate and exemplify new sexualities, "Marlowe"
would be a construct, an invention, a fiction.25
Marlowe, the sodomite who wrote sodomite desire, emerges
277
as the composite of the false evidence and forgeries of
Baines and Kyd, or the literary frauds of the
nineteenth-century Marlowe scholar John Collier.26
Sodomy and forgery are— to recall James I— categories
that double one another.
And indeed, out of the overlaps of forgery and
sodomy, of sodomy-as-forgery and forgery-as-sodomy,
something queer emerges. Which is not to say that
queerness is inevitably deferred in the interplay
between invention and identity. "Marlowe" may simply be
"invented," but the effects of such an invention remain
nevertheless real. From where we read, along with
Jarman, perhaps, it is impossible not to see Marlowe as
queer as fuck; "fuck" can be the figure that can ground
or hyperbolize an identity. Some very compelling
evidence can be produced on the basis of sexual
fictions, which may well be necessary fictions, as
Jeffrey Weeks asserts.27
There can thus be no going back to a Marlowe not
read through— acres c o u p— our sexualities. When
Isabella says in Marlowe's play, "For never doted Jove
on Ganymede/ So much as he on cursed Gaveston" (El. iv.
180-1), alliteration ("Ganymede" and "Gaveston") as well
as syntactic parallelism ("Jove"/"he";
"Ganymede"/"Gaveston") reinforce one another to fuse the
distant king and his minion into their mythic
278
predecessors. Mortimer Senior delivers the following
speech:
And, seeing his mind dotes so on
Gaveston,
Let him without controulment have his
will.
The mightiest kings have had their
minions:
Great Alexander lov'd Hepaestion;
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;
And for Patroclus stern Achilles
droop'd.
And not kings only, but the wisest men:
The Roman Tully lov'd Octavius;
Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades (E I.
iv. 388-396)
We must, perforce, hail it with Jarman as "a great
outing speech" fOEII 84). Jarman puts it best when he
writes at the start of Queer Edward II that "Marlowe
outs the past— why don't we out the present?" IOEII.
dedicatory note). The political project of a reading of
Edward II is to seize the present— our present— as it
has made the past. But we should never underestimate
the risks of that reading.28
Edward's End, or History's Hindsight
"Edward in fact delighted
inordinately in the vice of sodomy'
(Ralph Higden).
I first fucked with a young man in the
basement of 64, Priory Road. I was 23,
it was 1963" (OEII 32).
279
In the homophobic culture that surrounds us, the asshole
is still the metonym for male-male sexual desire and
practice. One of the many slogans that traverse Queer
Edward II proclaims: "anus— the last place the
government should be poking its nose" (OEII 80-2).
"Anus" plays the part here of a synecdoche for an entire
range of sodomitical activities: the contextualization
of the slogan in the book makes it clear that gay men as
well as lesbians and transgender people are to be
understood as the whole for which "anus" is a part.
"Anus" may have a particular signifying relation to
"sodomy," but the scope of initial definitions of
"sodomy" comprehended almost all non-procreative sexual
acts.29 Jarman's slogan seems deliberately to widen the
definitional sweep of sodomy so that a coalition of
dissident sexualities can be formed.30 The slogan
counters the homophobic reduction of sodomy to
exclusively male-male acts and the concomitant narrowing
of those acts to anal intercourse between men. The
enlarged scope of Jarman's definition allows whatever
implicitly libertarian claims this slogan makes for
"anus": private parts and sexual acts should exist in
private, away from the "nose" of the government.
While the definitional changes of "sodomy" are all
too often presented as shifts in a history of sexuality
with which we are done, a brief examination of sodomy
280
laws in the United States shows that "sodomy" is still
in its widest possible definition a public matter.
"[I]n almost half of the jurisdictions within the United
States," Janet Hailey points out in an important
analysis of sodomy legislation, "anal intercourse,
fellatio and cunnilingus all constitute the felony of
sodomy" ("Misreading Sodomy," Body Guards 1991 351). No
fewer than eighteen jurisdictions criminalize consensual
sodomy— that is, "any act in which the sex organ of one
person [touches] the mouth or anus of another" (351)—
regardless of the gender of sexual partners (373).
What gives the sodomy laws currently in force in the
United States their homophobic edge is their application
exclusively in cases involving same-sex partners.
Hailey discusses two recent juridical instances, Bowers
versus Hardwick, and Padula versus Webster, in which the
implications of sodomy laws were contested, spelled out,
and ultimately reinforced: she concludes that according
to the judges in both cases, "the class of homosexuals'
is inevitably sodomitical and thus intrinsically
felonious; discrimination against it therefore merits no
special juridicial solicitude" (354). She concludes:
"Statutes that expose homosexual sodomy, no matter how
clandestine, to public scrutiny and punishment, also
define the class of homosexuals and justify its
exclusion from public benefits and responsibilities"
281
(354), and she draws attention to how definitions of
sodomy, no matter how ostensibly "inclusive," contain
and constrict the category of "homosexuals."31
Jarman's slogan, "anus— the last place the
government should be poking its nose," opposes what is
deemed public ("the government") to what is declared
private ("anus"). Yet the opposition discloses a not so
secret complicity between the terms. As Hailey
suggests, no matter how "clandestine," "homosexual
sodomy" is always already on the verge of "public
scrutiny"; the interface of "private" and "public" forms
another site for the policing of sexual identities.
When the gay theorist Guy Hocquenghem writes that "the
anus is so well hidden that it forms the subsoil of the
individual, his [sic] 'fundamental' core" (Homosexual
Desire 86), Hocquenghem is asserting at the same time
that "control of the anus is the precondition for taking
responsibility of property" (85). The "secret" that
lies beyond all social identity, most private of all
private parts, the anus is nevertheless open to all
kinds of anxious inspection. Another slogan in Queer
Edward II simply declares, "Intercourse has never
occurred in private" (OEII 90). Never more public than
when they are decreed to be private, sexual acts and the
282
identities they found are relegated to a vexed in-
between, which is where the contradiction between the
slogans leaves us.32
The story or history of Edward I centers on the
scandal of the royal asshole as simultaneous site and
sight of desire and homophobic violence. Edward's
asshole is made public— he is the king who (as we all
know) was killed by the insertion of a red-hot spike
into his anus.33 Official histories adduce secrecy and
efficiency as reasons for the manner of Edward's end.
Hoiinshed writes in his Chronicles that after a number
of attempts had been made on Edward's life,
when they [Edward's gaolers] sawe that
such practices would not serue their
turne, they came suddenlie one night
into the chamber where he laie in bed
fast asleepe, and with heauie
featherbeds or a table (as some write)
being cast vpon him, they kept him down
and withall put into his fundament an
horne, and through the same they thrust
vp into his bodie an hot spit, or (as
others haue) through the pipe of a
trumpet a plumbers instrument of iron
made verie hot, the which passing vp
into his intrailes, and being rolled to
and fro, burnt the same, but so as no
appearance of any wound or hurt
outwardlie might once be perceiued
(1807, rpt. 1965 587; emphasis added).
In Marlowe's play, Lightborn, the assassin,
presents himself as a deviously ingenious poisoner,
something of a Machiavellian stereotype: "I learn'd in
Naples how to poison flowers;/ To strangle with a lawn
283
thrust through the throat . . ." (E V. iv. 30-1). "But
yet," Lightborn adds, when it comes to Edward, "I have a
braver way than these" (E V. iv. 37). When Mortimer
immediately asks, "What's that?," Lightborn answers,
"Nay, you shall pardon me; none shall know my tricks" (E
V. iv 38-9), to which Mortimer replies, "I care not how
it is, so it be not spied" (E V. iv 40). In other
words, the murderers in Marlowe's play, like Holinshed's
Chronicles. justify the murderous anal penetration of
Edward as secret: not "outwardlie . . . perceiued" or
"spied."
Yet the way in which Edward is put to death is
perceived and spied, cynosurally. Holinshed's account
of Edward's murder immediately follows the "explanation"
for the method devised by the killers with a description
of Edward's scream:
His crie did mooue manie within the
castell and towne of Berkley to
compassion, planelie hearing him vtter a
wailefull noise, as the tormentors were
about to murther him, so that diuerse
being awakened therewith (as they
themselues confessed) praied heartilie
to God to receiue his soule, when they
vnderstood by his crie what the matter
ment (587).
A number of commentators observe that if Edward's "crie"
could be widely heard that makes nonsense of the secrecy
that was the prime motivation for the manner of Edward's
murder.34 What appears to be in play is a fantasy in
284
which it is necessary that Edward die in this particular
way. Bredbeck asserts that in Marlowe's play, there is
a "removal of any practical reason for this choice of
death" (Sodomy and Interpretation 76, n.58). The
precise way in which Edward supposedly died rapidly
became part of the "Edward II" intertext. John Taylor's
seventeenth-century verse chronicle, A Memoriall of All
the English Monarchs. Being in Number 151 from Brute to
King Charles, makes Edward's end make sense within a
scheme of gender and sexual power:
The hard mis-haps that did this King
attend,
The wretched life and lamentable end,
Which he endur'd, the like hath ne'r bin
seene,
Depos'd, and poyson'd by his cruell
Queene.
Which when the poyson had no force to
kill,
Another way she wrought her wicked will.
Into his fundament a red hot Spit
Was thrust, which made his Royal1 heart
to split (1630; rpt. 1965, 427).
In this instance "will" with all its attendant meanings
of lust is a function of unruly female desire. Bringing
about "her wicked will" with a "red hot Spit" as her
phallus, the queen goes "another way," turns the tables
on the king, and penetrates him in a reversal of gender
and sex which both literally and figuratively, according
to the poem, breaks the king's heart.35
More and more this public "fundament," the object
of attack, begins to define Edward as a sodomite, as a
285
male "homosexual." Hocquenghem states, "Homosexuality
primarily means anal homosexuality, sodomy" (Homosexual
Desire 84). The anus— anything to do with it— becomes a
metonym for anal sex; anal sex in its turn is a metonym
for male homosexual desire. Edward's end makes him,
through this kind of metonymic to-and-fro, a sodomite:
Bredbeck puts it best when he writes, "the murder of
Edward by raping him with a red-hot poker— quite
literally branding him with sodomy— can be seen as an
attempt to 'write' onto him the homoeroticism constantly
ascribed to him" I Sodomy and Interpretation 76). The
extreme and murderous violence of such an act of
inscription serves to remind us of the chiasmic
interrelation between "homosexuality" and homophobia.36
In Edward's end, there is an all too close fit between
"punishment" and "crime." The discourse on Edward II
allays and expels homophobic anxieties about the public
identity of the male asshole— Bredbeck finds a "large
group of writings throughout the Renaissance about the
infamous heir to Longshank's [Edward I's] throne"
(48).37
A common critical reaction to Edward II has been
pretended disgust at Marlowe's presentation of the
murder of the king on stage. A Marlowe critic could, as
recently as 1981, write that the opening of Marlowe's
Dido Queen of Carthage— Jove and Ganymede in amorous
286
play— is "one of the most nauseous scenes in Marlovian
drama. Perhaps only the buggering of Edvard with a red-
hot poker matches it" (Malcolm Kelsall, Christopher
Marlowe 34, emphasis added). Simon Shepherd provides
quite a catalogue of homophobia in Marlowe criticism,
many instances of which turn obsessively to the onstage
death of Edward now read, as Shepherd puts it, "as a
personal kink of Marlowe's deriving from his
homosexuality" (Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan
Theater 1986 198) and, as Shepherd notices, very often
couched in a language of "dirt and deep drives" (xii).
Kelsall, for example, expresses some surprise that
Edward and Gaveston should command any sympathy from the
audience whatsoever, let alone more sympathy than
Mortimer and Isabella do, "though that sympathy is
always checked by a natural repulsion, if not at
homosexuality itself, then at the corruption it
engenders" (1981 51): Kelsall's "natural repulsion" and
"[nausea]" at the thought of same-sex desire give his
pointed glossing of Lightborn as a devil and Edward's
dungeon as hell an especially creepy twist (1981 53).38
No wonder that with such a baggage of homophobic
imaginings Jarman finds filming the death of the king
difficult. Marlowe's play makes the monarch's body the
locus of homosexual desire and homophobic violence.
What then is the place of sodomy in history? What
287
places sodomy simultaneously outside history— as if it
were "timelessly" interdicted— and inside it? What does
it mean for Edward’s asshole to enter history?
Here one might summarize Bredbeck's reading of
Edward II. which is both adroit and politically to the
point. Instead of asking what the place of sodomy in
history is, Bredbeck proposes that Marlowe's play turns
the question around, and inquires about the place of
history in sodomy. For Bredbeck, Edward II negotiates
specifically Elizabethan concerns about the embodiment
of power. The presence of a woman, Elizabeth I, on the
throne of England, necessitated a kind of semiological
split of the body of the monarch. There was the body
politic, which was the transcendental signifier of
absolute power, and there was also the body temporal,
which was the leftover or residue of corporeal
specificity, the purely idiosyncratic and contingent
embodiment of monarchy in a particular body. Thus,
Elizabeth I could famously address her troops at Tilbury
in 1588: "I know I have the body but of a weak and
feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a
king, and of a king of England too, ..." (qtd. in
Bredbeck 52).39 The opposition— indeed the
contradictions— between "body" and "heart and stomach"
or between "weak and feeble woman" and "king of England"
make a gender binary that is reinforced and sublated in
288
the service of monarchical nationalism: while Elizabeth
may only have the temporal body of a weak woman, as a
body politic, "she" is and remains a King— not Queen— of
England.
If the split in Elizabeth's case is one of gender,
that division between body temporal and body politic can
also be sexualized, potentially as an opposition between
sodomitical and conjugal bodies, which, Bredbeck argues,
is the split that Marlowe's Edward II negotiates. The
play writes sodomy onto Edward's body and lays bare the
process of such writing: Bredbeck advises us to "think
of Marlowe's play as a lesson in writing, as an extended
exposition (and hence a demystification and
undercutting) of how to inscribe sexual difference on
the tabula rasa of amorphous power" (60). Marlowe's
play would expose, according to Bredbeck, how it is that
"sodomy" can be deployed strategically— whether to
delegitimize the body politic of the king (as Mortimer
the Younger does) or to declare the irrelevance of body
temporal to body politic (as Mortimer Senior does in his
speech, "The mightiest kings have had their minions
. / .
Edward's body thus becomes the site both of history
and what is declared to be outside it. In particular,
as Bredbeck suggests, violently writing "sodomy" onto
Edward safeguards the body politic and assures the
289
continuity of the royal lineage. The lineage of the
body politic passes the authority of patrilinear
heterosexuality from father to son.40 Thus, Taylor's
Memoriall of Monarchs presents the succession of Edward
III to the throne as follows: "In Peace, and warre, this
King was right, & good,/ He did reuenge his murdered
Fathers blood? . . ." (1630? rpt. 1967 428). From
Edward Longshanks ("a hardy, wise, Victorious King,"
according to Taylor, 427, or "straight Edward I,"
according to Jarman, OEII 2) to Edward III, the second
Edward seems to be simply an interference in the
transmission of power from one royal Edward to another.
Brecht's Edward II ends with the Archbishop of
Winchester's words about Edward's solitary death:
...this second Edward who
Not knowing, as it seemed,
Which of his foes remembered him
Not knowing
What lineage was above him in the
light...
Forgetting
Even himself
Died
In misery (Brecht, Edward II 94).
To which the young king replies with a prayer for his
lineage:
That our lineage may not suffer for
these sins,
0 God, grant us remission at this time
And grant us, God, that also
Our lineage may not perish in the womb
(Brecht 94).
In Brecht's play, the "womb" is the conduit that
290
transmits dynastic prestige from one straight male to
the other; queer Edward ends by disappearing in a
"[miserable]” oblivion that excludes the sodomite king
from any place in memory, dynastic or historical.41
For Jarman there is no similar "forgetting.”
Sodomy in history and history in sodomy are everywhere
in his Edward II. "My real ambition,” he writes early
on in Queer Edward II. "is to film an act of sodomy
(even though it would be much more fun to be in it)
. . . But I found out early on that I'm a bad actor.
Shame" (OEII 10). Jarman's wording here— "act of
sodomy"— plays both on sexual practice and on artifice
and theatricality. Filming an "act of sodomy" would be
a transgressive sexual activity and a sexually
transgressive performance at one and the same time.
Moreover, Jarman playfully and somewhat wistfully draws
attention to the different positions he occupies or
could occupy: filmmaker, actor, performer of a sexual
act, bearer of a sexual identity, all these roles
together. In a sense, the entire film of Edward II
supplements Jarman's never-filmed "act of sodomy":
without ever actually being shown, sodomy shows through
everywhere in the film.
In the scene that immediately follows the opening
credits, the three "Poor Men" of Marlowe's play (El. i)
become "two hustlers" (OEII 6) who languidly make— or
291
fake— love behind Gaveston. The same two figures, face
to face, naked, kissing, one squatting on the other's
lap, appear on the cover of the Village Voice as a
synecdoche for what the Voice hails as "the new wave in
gay cinema" (24 March 1992). Not just in Jarman's film
or images and discourses around it, but everywhere in
the 1980s and 90s the "act of sodomy" seems central in
its absence.42 Gregg Bordowitz, activist and theorist,
began a lecture entitled "The Uses of Pleasure Against
the State" by calling up the picture of a penis about to
penetrate a man's anus— the kind of sexually explicit
homoerotic image that many forces in our culture would
keep invisible— and which Bordowitz chose not to show
his audience. Consider for example the Helms Amendment,
Amendment no. 956, which
[prohibits] the use of any funds
provided under this Act [a Labor, Health
and Human Services, and Education bill]
to the Centers for Disease Control from
being used to provide AIDS education,
information, or prevention materials and
activities that promote, encourage, or
condone homosexual sexual activities or
the intravenous use of illegal drugs
(qtd. in Douglas Crimp, "How to Have
Promiscuity in an Epidemic," AIDS:
Cultural Analysis. Cultural Activism.
1988 259).
The image that motivated the Helms Amendment was a safer
sex comic that showed two men having anal sex with a
condom (Crimp, 260-3). "Acts of sodomy" occupy the
absent center of the image-repertoire of a homophobic
292
culture; hence D. A. Miller's comments on classic
Hollywood cinema, as epitomized by Hitchcock's Rope; "we
are continually being put in the position of being iust
about to see what we are waiting for; and the desire for
the spectacle of gay male sex is intensified accordingly
into that pleasurably (because all but unpleasantly)
prolonged state of expectation called suspense" ("Anal
Rope," 131). I would like to argue that Jarman's film,
working queer-affirmatively as it does on the outskirts
of Hollywood convention, reverses such phobic
expectations. As Miller acknowledges, the "we" who
watch Rope are forcibly recruited— by "our" very
suspense— for a compulsory heterosexuality that is
fascinated by the others it ceaselessly constructs.
Jarman's film, unlike Marlowe's play, tells its
narrative analeptically: from its end, or back to front.
Edward is already in the dungeon at the start of the
film, and the events are partly cast as his
reminiscences. The dungeon in which Edward was kept at
Berkeley Castle, before his supposed murder, was a
"chamber ouer a foule filthie dungeon, full of dead
carrion, . . . with . . . abominable stinch ..."
(Holinshed, Chronicle 586). In Marlowe's play, the
King's keepers observe,
293
. . . I wonder the king dies not,
Being in a vault up to the knees in
water,
To which the channels of the castle run,
And:
...yesternight
I opened but the door to throw him meat,
And I was almost stifled with the savour
(E V. v.1-3 and 7-9).
The dungeon can be construed as a metaphor for the anus,
just as Lightborn"s poker— its very name a catachresis
for violent penetration— seems to be a murderous
phallus. In Jarman's film, the furnace in Edward's
dungeon stands as a trope for bowels and entrails, for
the notions of inferiority, both architectural and
anatomic, occasioned by the dungeon. Lightborn is
repeatedly seen at the furnace, as if Jarman wished to
underscore the pun implicit in the executioner's name.
Jarman maintains the visual significance of the poker as
a proleptic reminder of Edward's end by showing
Lightborn working with it a number of times, and also by
showing Edward with it in one scene. By telling the
story of Edward from its/his end, Jarman's Edward II
constantly returns to the dungeon, to the mise-en-scene
of sodomitical rape, the scene of its crime. Such
analepsis or hindsight in the film appears to inscribe
Edward even more emphatically in his end than Marlowe's
play does.
294
The film begins with a long shot of Edward in the
dungeon and Lightborn talcing a crumpled piece of paper
the hand of the sleeping king. From this piece of paper
Lightborn reads what is in effect the opening line of
the play, "My father is deceased; come, Gaveston" (OEII
4; I.i.l). In the play, this is a line spoken by
Gaveston as he reads from a letter that the new king has
sent him to summon him back to his royal lover's side (E
II I. i. 1); in the film, this line is read by
Lightborn, and then repeated by Edward as he awakes.
Credits follow this opening scene in the dungeon before
Gaveston speaks the remainder of the speech in what is,
effectively, the film's past tense, a flashback.
Jarman's notes inform us that the crumpled piece of
paper, from which Lightborn reads, recognizably a
postcard, is in fact a postcard of the Eros monument in
Picadilly Circus (OEII 4). The very notion of a
monument to Eros is way of monumentalizing desire, of
memorializing what is, by definition, transitory and
unstable. At the same time, the Eros monument has long
had a more than metonymic relation to the male sex
workers of London, to the rentboys and hustlers who make
up the "Dilly boys."43 The postcard which bears an
image of the monument of desire— unseen as such in the
film but nevertheless written into the book of the film
— is very much like that other back-to-front postcard-
295
book which also monumentalizes desire: Jacques Derrida's
The Post Card. Going from back to front, it is as if in
Jarman's film Lightborn's reading of the postcard
summons Gaveston and the events that follow. Only now,
those events metaleptically follow what follows them:
the imprisonment of the king.
Derrida's postcard, we may remember, bears the
imprint of another act of sodomy, one which determines
its reverse logic: the postcard in question reproduces a
medieval illumination of Plato standing behind Socrates,
seeming to dictate while Socrates writes. Moreover, to
Derrida's eyes, anomalies in the details of drapery
reveal that not only does Plato have a hard-on, but that
he is penetrating Socrates's behind. All of this makes
for a double reversal: of the order of writing (Socrates
the peripatetic philosopher is now the scribe of Plato
the poet's dictations) and of the order of pedagogic
pederasty (Plato the pupil now fucks his master
Socrates). "The one in the other, the one in front of
the other, the one after the other, the one behind the
other?" muses Derrida (19).
Commenting on this postcarded "scene of sodomy" in
Derrida's writing in the context of "gay theory," Lee
Edelman finds it an exemplification of "metaleptic
structure" ("Seeing Things: Representation,
Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,"
296
Inside/Out 96) which Edelman also calls the
"(be)hindsight" (96), that characterizes the responses
of heterosexual men to the "vision of the sodomitical
encounter" (113). According to Edelman, himself writing
as a gay man, Derrida's wilfully perverted embrace of
"sodomitical (il)logic" (113) unloosens the secure
epistemological positioning of the spectator presumed to
be straight.
Yet it is not at all clear that Edward II has as
its aim the unsettling of a straight spectator.
Theoretical models— whether Derrida's, Edelman's or
Miller's— that presuppose a straight spectator plunged
into crisis or catastrophe by the mere sight of two men
fucking may not be altogether appropriate for Jarman's
film. No matter how serpentinely its narrative doubles
backwards and forwards on itself, the "behindsight" (to
borrow Edelman's term) at work in Jarman's version of
Edward's story may serve different ends. In an
important essay, "All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the
Work of Mourning," Jeff Nunokawa has written of the
"lethal characterization" which always, always already,
reads the gay man's end in his beginning, and which
"[concentrates] fatality in the figure of a male
homosexual identity, as the figure of a male homosexual
identity" (316). Queers are fatal, because it is fatal
to be queer, repeats a particular homophobic
297
configuration over and over again.44 Is Jarman's Edward
II for all its achronicity and anachronism, simply
another text in which gay men are always and already
fucked?
Indeed, Edward II does give us the murder of Edward
as a lurid realization of some fantasy of sodomy. Lit
by an infernal crimson glow, a three quarter shot shows
Edward from the front. He is foreshortened as black-
clad figures hold him down, writhing, across a table.
Liturgical music on the soundtrack makes the scene
ritualistic— the performance of expiation or sacrifice
— and ironic— the murder of another gay man in the
service of a self-celebrating homophobic ideology. Then
we see Lightborn facing the camera directly in medium
closeup. His face registers satisfaction and he holds
the glowing poker. There is a return to the first shot,
only now with a 180 degree turn of the camera: the three
quarter shot shows Edward in profile as he struggles.
His body is masked by the figures who are holding him
down so that the presumed insertion of the poker can be
inferred but not seen. A medium closeup reaction shot
of Edward screaming works as an index to signify that
the murder has begun. We see Edward's body going limp
and his head slumping forward in a return to the profile
three quarter shot. Codes such as lighting, music and
the formality and repetitiveness of camera angles serve
298
to emphasize the ritual aspect of the sequence, which is
staged as if indeed it were the mise-en-scene of sodomy.
At the same time, of course, the actual act is not
shown, but only signified— to some extent, it remains
unrepresentable or hidden even as it is being shown. No
shot, for example, reverses the medium closeup of
Edward's face reacting to the penetration by the poker.
The absence of the much-anticipated scene of sodomy is
curiously duplicated by another absence in the film:
from the notes on filming in Queer Edward II. we learn
that Jarman, because of his health, was not present
during the filming of Edward's murder. Ken Butler, who
is credited as the "ghost director," writes: "Woke up
and thought— Oh, the poker scene today, what will Derek
do? .... Derek did not show— was not well. I didn't
know what to do, thought I had better take five deep
breaths and pretend I knew what to do" fOEII 160).
Butler ends by remarking with regret on the lost
opportunity for homoerotic nudity in the scene, "We
didn't film Steven's bum— what a pity" fOEII 160; Steven
Waddington is the actor who plays Edward).
But it is now that Jarman's film comes up with its
most astonishing reversal. Edward's head slumps forward
in medium closeup. A match cut follows which shows him
reviving: Edward rises from the nightmare of homophobic
violence. Lightborn is there; he flings the poker into
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the pool at the center of the dungeon. Finally, in a
twoshot, Lightborn and Edward kiss in profile, a screen
kiss that asserts the viability of homosexual romance as
potently as any of the kisses that have shaped the
heterosexist history of Hollywood. Coming as it does
after massacres and mutilations, perhaps this kiss
recalls the dance of the two soldiers at the end of
Pasolini's Said with its promise of a new beginning.
In forging this other end for Edward II, Jarman
draws on certain historical documents and traditions,
such as the "confession” of Edward II, a long letter
addressed to Edward III from one Manuel de Fieschi, a
papal official who claimed to have administered Edward's
last rites. According to this letter, which came to
light in the nineteenth century, Edward was not
assassinated but escaped on the very night he was to be
murdered. He killed a porter in the course of his
escape, and the porter's body was presented to Isabella
as the dead king. The porter was buried in the royal
funeral in Edward's stead, while the latter lived on for
a number of years, travelling as a hermit all over
Europe, and even visiting the Pope in secret.45 Jarman
is aware of the Fieschi letter, which he refers to as a
"conspiracy theory," and which, he indicates in a note,
forms the basis for "the end of the film" (OEII 158).
300
Before the discussion of the murder, Jarman
describes Edward's burial and monument, and proposes,
albeit casually, the tomb as destination for a queer
pilgrimage. But he adds a surprising twist that
motivates the version of Edward's end in the film.
Edward lies buried in Gloucester
Cathedral, in a magnificent alabaster
tomb. His body was embalmed; his heart
was encased in a silver casket and sent
to Isabella. The burial was
magnificent, the body borne through the
streets draped in the Royal Leopards of
England .... If you go to Gloucester
put a flower on Edward's tomb. However
when you do so, remember that he might
have got away. A diviner who works for
the Police looking for bodies sent me a
letter saying that the tomb was empty.
So this is why we have a "happier"
ending (OEII 118).
Butler, the assistant director, notes of the filming:
"Then this scene [the kiss between Lightborn and Edward
after throwing the poker away], the surprise, the 'happy
ending.' Derek says that Marlowe is lucky to have us:
we rescued the play!" (OEII 162). As the diviner tells
Jarman, there is no body. To rescue Marlowe's text is
to rewrite history in the image of queer desire; to
rescue Marlowe's play is to let Edward get away with
Lightborn who is now reborn as angel instead of demonic
torturer. The body temporal of the king outruns
official chronicles, and outlives the tragic ending that
the history has decreed for it. Edward enjoys a happy
end at the end of history. The body is then both inside
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and outside history— "But what are Kings when regiment
is gone,/ But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?" asks
Edward in Marlowe's play (E V. i. 26-7), a question
which Jarman repeats at the end his film. To the tragic
question, "But what are kings when regiment is gone?,"
Jarman's film proposes a joyful answer: if they are
queer kings, they are desiring subjects whose queerness
remains when their "regiment" is gone.
Such a counter-history of queer desiring subjects
refuses to fit queer desire into some fore-ordained end.
One of the slogans that Jarman cites in the text of
Queer Edward II is a playful but effective instance of
paranomasia: "SOVDOVMY¥FRIENDS" (OEII 118; the graphic
inscription of hearts as punctuation markers rewrites
the demonized signifier "sodomy" within the context of
highly domesticated seventies and eighties Anglo-
American popular cultures). "Sodomy," the punitively
formed and policed moral and judicial category, becomes
transliterated as "so do my," a marker for a
collectivity of desiring subjects who assert their
identities and histories. Transvaluations like this, at
once startling and everyday, make up queer history.
302
A Lineage of Gay Desire
In Jarman's film, the speech, "The mightiest kings have
had their minions," is spoken by the Earl of Kent in a
sauna, redolent of homoerotic heat, with Isabella, in a
severe white dress and a profusion of pearls, as his
interlocutor. Gay desire is here envisaged as a
differential of power that the alliteration of
"mightiest" and "minions" only serves to underscore.
The sonorous roll call, Alexander and Hephaestion,
Hercules and Hylas, Achilles and Patroclus, Tully and
Octavius, Socrates and Alcibiades, constitutes a lineage
of gay desire, perhaps not unlike the toiling chain of
Great Lesbians and Gay Men that appeared in the now lost
full-length version of the homosexual reformist silent
German film, Anders als die Anderen (1919).46 (Indeed,
parallels can be drawn between Clause 28 of the 1980s
and the homophobic legislation of Paragraph 175.) What,
however, is the lineage of gay desire?
To ask this is not so much to ask where gay desire
comes from or what causes it— for such questions carry
an overwhelming legacy of homophobia. Rather, to
inquire after the lineage of gay desire is to
interrogate the ways in which Edward II figures the
appearance of gay desire and to begin to think about how
such figures might be part of larger social discourses
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and image-repertoires through which we inevitably
understand our "homosexualities."
In Jarman's film, gay desire irrupts into a
heterosexual world which it can only interrupt. As such
"queerness" signifies this force that works towards or
as rupture.47 Such rupture begins a time of breaking
that is already a time of breaking off: "Ev'ry time we
say goodbye/ I die a little," sings Annie Lennox to
Edward and Gaveston, and indeed, their love is scanned
from beginning to end by the interventions and
interdictions of homophobia. After Gaveston's
banishment from the court, a single long shot shows him
on a cliff, howling soundlessly in the rain— as if his
separation from Edward leaves him outside the social
order altogether. Gay desire, at least in the version
of it that Jarman proposes here, operates on a fort-da
principle, banished to be called back, recalled to be
sent away.
One of OutRage's slogans is "Gay Desire Is Not A
Crime." In Jarman's film, members of OutRage, "the Gay
Activist Group" fOEII 1), play Edward's army. When
they clash with Mortimer's soldiers, in a set piece that
resembles a "real-world" queer demonstration, this very
slogan can be read on one of the OutRage posters.
Analyzing the exact political-semiological work of the
slogan "Gay Desire Is Not A Crime," it is evident that
304
one immediate function is to negate polemically whatever
powers deem any same-sex desire criminal: the juridical
forces of Clause 28, anti-sodomy laws, or the veto of
anti-discrimination laws (such as AB 101 in the state of
California). Yet Edward II, or specifically Queer
Edward II. defines gay desire as its difference, as its
queerness, against heterosexuality. Gay desire, to
rephrase the OutRageism, has to be a crime in order to
be, and also for it, strategically, to be denied as a
crime. Consider the film's narrative present tense as
the time of Edward's imprisonment in the dungeon— the
locus of Edward's "punishment." Because of this
structural shift in the film, far greater emphasis is
placed on Lightborn, who is there from the start in
Jarman's film, while he only makes a somewhat
perfunctory appearance at the end of Marlowe's Edward
II. The effect is partly to render gay desire and
homophobia, transgression and containment, a timeless
couple, not unlike Edward and Lightborn. Jarman
provides a way out of the dialectic pairing of this
particular master-slave dyad: for once, each man does
not kill the thing he loves. But utopian as the kiss
between Edward and Lightborn may be, it does not answer
the question of what connects us, and our desires, to
Gaveston and Edward, Achilles and Patroclus, or Marlowe
— unless what we do have in common is "the timeless,
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tireless occupation of homophobia," as B. Ruby Rich
calls it in her review of the film ("A Queer Sensation,"
43). Yet the assumption that homophobia is timeless may
be dangerous, for if homophobia has neither beginning
nor end, it cannot be ended.
How do gay desire and homophobic retribution, the
private and the public, the family and history
intersect? Jarman's film leaves these intersections
unclear. One reason for this may be the vast shifts of
social structure that separate Marlowe's period from
ours. Marlowe's Edward II is centrally about feudal
intrigue and the limits of absolute power. Jarman can
make Marlowe's thematics of feudalism work in a way that
gives gay desire an immediate and overwhelming political
resonance. Edward's assertion, "I will have Gaveston"
(OEII 34, E I. i. 96), makes a politics of desire. In
the film, Edward's desire is all public— in one scene
courtiers and a baying pack of hunting hounds surround
the very bed on which Edward and Gaveston sprawl. When,
in one scene, Gaveston lounges naked on the royal throne
with his pale flesh and red-gold hair against its gilt
heraldry and scarlet velvet, this conjunction of the
royal minion's body and the seat of state serves as a
very concrete emblem of the conflation of personal
desire and public power.
306
Yet Jarman's film allows the public-private
intersection to be read the other way round: the echoing
castle which houses all the events of the film becomes,
in a bathetic reduction, a family home, the setting for
Edward's personal difficulties. (After all, an
Englishman's home is his castle!) When Edward and
Gaveston play their games in the throne room, they wake
Mortimer who rushes into the throne room in a tiger-
print dressing gown, like a disgruntled neighbor who is
about to call the police because of a noisy party. In
Marlowe's play, Kent joins Mortimer's troops; in
Jarman's film, he drops in on Mortimer and Isabella for
a formal— but nevertheless family— dinner. Such
signifiers as an ornate gold Christmas tree mark family
rituals in the film. (Does the film also mimic,
comically, the bourgeoisification of the British royal
family, now actors in a media soap opera?)
Jarman's Edward II hijacks the feudal intrigue of
Marlowe's play to serve as an allegory of the political
dimensions of dissident desire. Yet the film risks
having the allegory cut the other way: all too often the
film leaves open the possibility that public events can
be reduced to private causes. Such is, of course, a
fully mystified and individualist version of historical
process and is a risk that always accompanies any focus
on a "great individual." Jarman's version of Edward II
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very nearly makes the Family transhistorical, so that
the rhizomic corridors of the castle become a labyrinth
in which Jarman's Wild Boys can never outrun the Holy
Family.48
The role of the princeling in Jarman's film tends
to invite a psychoanalyzing, Oedipalizing version of the
lineage of gay desire. "Did you wear your mother's
clothes?" Jarman asks the reader of Queer Edward II
across the page from a photograph of the princeling in
Isabella's picture hat fOEII 32). Now running not from
king to minion, from man to man, gay desire instead runs
from mother to son— Edward wears his mother's clothes,
which, as the film hints, makes the princeling a second
queer Edward. He is his father's son because he is his
mother's boy. Before the scene in which Isabella and
Mortimer are caged with the new Edward dancing in his
mother's shoes, make-up and earrings, the assistant
director wonders: "Should Jody [the actor who plays the
princeling] wear his mother's clothes? Half the crew
admit to at least clod-hopping around in their mother's
shoes as children wearing jewellery [sic]" fOEII 164).
The prince's change is progressive: the second time he
appears in the film, he tries on his mother's broad-
brimmed straw hat; at the royal Christmas celebrations,
just before the murder of Kent, he puts on his mother's
earrings; when he comes into his kingship, after the
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downfall of Mortimer and Isabella, he is in full make-up
and his mother's silver pumps. However jokingly these
signifiers are scattered, they do end up by finding the
origins of gay desire and queer identity where a
normative psychoanalysis has always professed to
discover them: in the family.49
Such an inadvertently Oedipal scenario makes
Isabella central. (As psychoanalysis would have us
believe, Oedipal scenarios are inevitably inadvertent.)
The woman-as-mother becomes the embodiment of
heterosexuality in a manner that forecloses questions of
lesbianism and bisexuality. Even in scenes where
Isabella does not play a part, the association of women
with heterosexuality is evident: Mortimer is seen in bed
with two women, called simply "2 wild girls" in the
screenplay (OEII 28); the two women kiss one another,
and Jarman writes in his notes, "The same-sex kiss got a
sigh of approval, straight men get off on lesbian sex"
(QEII 28). Given the lack of lesbian visibility in
Edward II— even in the scenes with OutRage, men far
outnumber women— Jarman's somewhat peremptory remark
that "straight men get off on lesbian sex" leaves
lesbians or bisexual women out of the history he is
making up. Jarman intimates no doubt inadvertently that
lesbianism is only a male fantasy. Between the queen
(Isabella) and the dykes (two wild girls) specific
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figures of queer desire for women disappear. The
lesbian kiss, which takes place in bed with Mortimer,
the king's arch-enemy, signifies a kind of outer limit
in the film, the other side of the king's desire for
Gaveston, an other side that the film and its book seem
all too ready to call "heterosexuality."
A number of the slogans in the text of Queer Edward
II invoke lesbians in ways that range from provocative
to arch and patronizing: "I wish my aunt were a lesbian"
(OEII 40), "I wish my father were a lesbian" (OEII 46),
"God is a black Jewish lesbian" (OEII 120), "Lesbians
are beautiful" (OEII 124), "Thank God for lesbians"
(OEII 128). Empty as such slogans seem when compared to
the film's actual representational balance, they appear
even more hollow when read off against other slogans in
the text. "Hetero?" runs an especially bothersome one,
"Mixed marriages never work" (OEII 20). The simple
reversal of a racist cliche into a gender-separatist
statement about relations between men and women leaves
the uncomfortable impression that Queer Edward II does
really see gender as race, a perception that is,
needless to say, fully racist and sexist. A slogan like
"gender is apartheid" (OEII 36) not very convincingly
belies the "mixed marriages" maxim and keeps the race-
gender equation intact.
310
In their entirety and at their best the slogans
make up a stereographic space (a la Barthes) for
activist ecriture; the slogans with their bold or
italicized typefaces cut through Queer Edward II to shut
up, for once, the hum of heterosexism-as-usual.
Nevertheless, contradictions such as the invocation of
lesbians when they are effectively absent, or the
association of women with heterosexuality alone (and
hence, the "enemy" in the terms set up by book and film)
leaves the purportedly plural realm of queer politics,
at least as outlined by Queer Edward II. with some
immediate limits.
Annie Lennox's appearance as a materialization of
Gaveston and Edward's love is another instance of the
film's difficulty with associating women with a
queerness of their own. B. Ruby Rich recognizes Lennox
as an antithesis to Isabella: Lennox is, writes Rich,
"clearly meant to be on the side of girls and angels"
(43). What Rich's praise effectively means, however, is
that Lennox is the token woman on Edward's side. Once
again, it is the straight woman, the woman-as-mother and
hence assumed to be straight,50 who puts in an
appearance, although in this instance in a black trouser
suit and a bleached blonde Roman-style crop. (By
contrast, Isabella is never seen in anything other than
a formal dress or skirt.) Lennox's celebrated gender-
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bending— which would make her a queer— has been
underwritten in almost all the public discourse around
her by the persistent identification of her as
heterosexual- Whatever her experiments with cross-
dressing may be, they have always been legitimized by
her identity as straight (noted, metonymically, by a
reference to Lennox's baby, even in OEII 88). Despite
their different dress and gender styles, Lennox, like
the character of Isabella, is a mother. Her androgyny
is all performance, an act, gender only and never
sexuality (unlike say, Boy George, a figure to whom she
is often compared).51 Ethereal, derealized, serenading
the two men with a melancholic croon, Lennox seems less
on the side of "girls and angels" than a Tinkerbell for
lost boys Edward and Gaveston.
Given this focus on mothers good or bad, the
princeling's position in the film is hardly surprising.
Not just Edward's successor, he is also the encoded
spectator: reaction shots show him observing the action
in a number of scenes, for example, the quarrel between
Edward and Isabella after the second banishment of
Gaveston. Very early on in the film, the prince watches
Edward's masques from the shadows (see OEII 16).
Moreover, a number of photographic stills in the text of
Queer Edward II (OEII 3, 43, 51, 73 and 95) show crew
members with cameras, or cameras intruding into the
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scenes being filmed, but two in particular show the
actors who play Edward II and the princeling
respectively (101 and 66) as they peer through the
viewfinder of the camera: like father, like son, agents
of the gaze in collusion with the cinematic apparatus.52
In the film, armed with a torch that literally
highlights what he looks at, the prince becomes a
metaphor for the gaze. When Edward's courtiers play a
game of nude rugby, the prince's torch sweeps the
darkness. The beam of his light first appears out of
darkness, before it erotically picks buttocks and thighs
and testicles out of the darkened long shot. The final
sequence of the film is heralded by Tchaikovsky's "Dance
of the Sugarplum Fairy." Edward appears in a longshot,
framed in the foreground by flames. He is crowned, and
wears a gold robe, like Edward II, and he sits on the
royal throne. The next section shows Edward III
dancing, before a reverse zoom draws back from the
prince to reveal Isabella and Mortimer inside a cage, on
top of which Edward has been dancing. If Edward the
princeling is indeed a figure of and for the spectator,
the film appears to narrate his sovereign emergence— or
even his coming out: born of Oedipus and sexual
difference comes a gay spectator. Or so one reading of
the film, which Jarman's Edward II does not disallow,
could go. For example, Kaja Silverman draws a
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distinction between "look" and "gaze," according to
which the "gaze," like the phallus, is never owned by
the subject; instead, the subject is always subject to
that gaze. The princeling's place might then describe
that impossible place of the gaze, and would mark both
the inevitability of castration and the fetishistic
desire to evade it.53
But the film does not end there. Immediately after
the shot of Isabella and Mortimer's imprisonment, a high
angle camera cranes in long shot over the assembled
OutRage members. Many of them stare into the camera?
they are grouped in an heroic tableau that is at once
theatrical and documentary— these are the remnants of
Edward's army; these are the actors who played Edward's
army, standing, out of character, on the set of a film
called Edward II. Now Edward's voice is heard in voice
over: "But what are kings when regiment is gone,/ But
perfect shadows in a sunshine day?" While he speaks the
screen fades to black, as if nothing but shadows are
left. In the OutRage group as group, there is an
alternative to the lone figure, like the princeling, who
comes out of the family, the spectator as the
individual.54 Instead, in the OutRage group, we see
ourselves momentarily as collective actors and
spectators in a public sphere— momentarily, in the few
seconds before the screen fades to black.55 Then the
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black screen can no longer recall, make, unmake, or
remake history. The closing credits roll over the same
background of rough granite surface used in the opening
credits. (A monument? A cave? A tomb?)
What remains of queer Edward but perfect shadows?
"In our film all the OutRage boys and girls are
inheritors of Edward's story," Jarman writes (OEII 146).
What remains is the glimpse of a queer collectivity, for
which Jarman has forged a fabulous history, a literally
incredible genealogy.
Making Up Lost Time
And now all the boys are covering up
their cocks again, not at all like the
good old days . . . (OEII 16).
Jarman emphatically denounces narrative with its linear
temporality. "I'm so often asked, 'Why don't you make
films that are more accessible?' ie: narrative . . . the
cost of narrative is essentially prohibitive—
essentially narrative is an exercise in censorship
because of that" (OEII 110). Yet the film Edward II is
narrative. Even its behindsight, its anachronisms, its
temporal deformations, can be recovered in narrative
terms. On the other hand, the book, Queer Edward II.
breaks much more radically with chronological or
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teleological narration: Queer Edward II works in a
textual. rather than a temporal. way.
Here four texts collide and interrupt one another
between these oxblood covers. First, there is Marlowe's
play in the version used as a shooting script, behind
which, of course, lies Marlowe's play in its canonized
form, and the exegetical and philological history of
that form. On the right hand side of the Marlowe text
runs the logbook or diary of the film shoot that is
itself a mosaic of snippets about the Middle Ages,
Edward, Jarman's life, the making of the film. For this
second text, Tilda Swinton and Ken Butler serve as co
authors with Jarman. A third text is made up of the
slogans, some of which are derived from OutRage, some of
which are part of queer culture, and some of which have
been coined for the occasion.56 They spill from one
page to the next, curling around the columns of the
screenplay and the diary like activist versions of
medieval marginalia. Finally, on each right-hand page
there is a black and white photograph, stills not of the
film but of the film's making. Queer Edward II works to
focus attention on the construction of the film— as a
collective process that engages and involves the reader-
onlooker. Barthes, in his "Theory of the Text,"
proposes, "The text is a productivity. This does not
mean that is the product of a labor . . . , but the very
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theater of a production where the producer and the
reader of the text meet: the text 'works, ' at each
moment and from whatever side one takes it" (1981 36);
Queer Edward II is precisely the theater of such an
ongoing "work" that is production-as-process, history
being made as a collective social process that is not
necessarily teleological.
It is here, in this text, that the body of the
filmmaker Derek Jarman writes itself. From its very
start, the margins of Queer Edward II are occupied by
the markings of a body and a subjectivity living with
AIDS:
Edward I died on 7 July 1307. His
account books list many exotic medicines
prescribed for his ill health: a cordial
made from amber, jacynth, musk, pearls
and gold.
My chemical life splutters on. Each
morning I swallow, with increasing
difficulty: a cordial of Ritafer,
Fansidar, AZT, Pirodoxin, one Calcium
Folinate (to counteract the Ritafer) and
two Carbamazapepine to stop any fits my
damaged brain might bring! fOEII 2).
The resistance to narrative in a text that enunciates a
subjectivity living with AIDS makes sense: almost
inevitably, the deadly temporality of the "AIDS victim"
who exists under the "death sentence" of HIV
narrativizes the person living with AIDS as fated to
die, as already dead. Jarman's body, then, is not
without its context and AIDS is not simply marginal to
317
the text of Queer Edward II. Jarman makes clear what
that context might be in his comments on changes made to
a scene in which the screenplay originally simply read
"Edward and Gaveston fuck" (OEII 2 6). He remarks sadly
on yet another absent scene of sodomy:
Fucking was a problem, I signed minute
notes for the BBC, and the boys found it
impossible; they said it was out of
place. In the end they had a cuddle. I
wanted an act of buggery like I had
performed countless times in private and
in public, and once for the screen in
"Ostia" for Julian Cole, but the times
were not right (OEII 26).
What makes the times "not right" is the increase in
homophobia around AIDS, a homophobia that has created
and perpetuated the AIDS crisis. Gay and bisexual men
have been targeted as vectors of disease; the very
notion of anal sex between men has been made
"impossible"— one may consider among many other pieces
of AIDS misrepresentation, the frequent trope of the
"rugged vagina," the supposedly "natural" sexual
receptacle of the penis, opposed to the "fragile anus,"
the "unnatural" site of unreproductive and ultimately
destructive intercourse.57 (The notion that "anal sex
causes AIDS" finds its way even into certain kinds of
supposedly safer sex information which insist that even
during the practice of safer sex, condoms break more
frequently during anal sex than they do during vaginal
intercourse.58) Indeed, a great deal of necessary
318
political struggle— for AIDS activists as well as queer
activists— continues to be devoted to contesting the
heterosexist link between sodomy and death.59
Whatever the failures of its gender project and
projection, Annie Lennox's song to Edward and Gaveston,
"Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye," marks the AIDS crisis,
however indirectly, in Edward II. Jarman had earlier
made a video of Lennox's version of this Cole Porter
song as part of the Red. Hot, and Blue project, in which
various singers and bands were asked to prepare cover
versions of Cole Porter songs; videos were commissioned
of each of the songs, and proceeds from sales of the
album and the videos raised money for various AIDS
organizations, including ACT UP. Specifically in the
context of the AIDS crisis, "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"
speaks eloquently of love and loss, even as it
formalizes grief not as activism but as lyric.
Reiterated in Edward II. "Every Time We Say Goodbye"
memorializes not only Edward and Gaveston, but claims a
continuity between the two medieval lovers and the
hundreds of thousands who have died because of
government inaction and public indifference to the AIDS
crisis and because of the fomenting of this crisis by
homophobia.
Lennox's version of "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye,"
then, notes the AIDS in the film with a poetic
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obliquity. By contrast AIDS is written large in Queer
Edward II: in Jarman's frequent absences from the film
set, for example: "Laid low with my stomach and quite
exhausted, Ken directed" (OEII 46), or in details like,
"My temperature is 102 [degrees]" (OEII 96). "Le virus
est devenu le pivot de tout mon travail. Malgre cela,
je n'ai aucune envie de realiser un film sur le sida.
C'est trop complexe. J'ai vu tous les films qui
abordent ce sujet. Decevant. Ils ont ete tournes pour
les vivants et les bien-portants. Certainement pas pour
les malades," Jarman has said in an interview with Gai
pied (12 December 1991, 58). Jarman refuses to be the
mute body, the patient's body made to disclose its
symptoms by medicine or confess its desires by science.
Instead, Jarman writes as the body-as-subject: he
resists, he speaks, he writes, he gives a voice, a face,
and a name to AIDS— and he insists on his right to
articulate himself in this text.
Hence it is appropriate that the final still of
Queer Edward II should show Jarman, very much alive,
with a camera and a laughing film crew. He is wearing
the royal crown, a crown that we never see Edward II
wear in the course of the film, and that only appears
when the princeling ascends to the throne. The sole
gloss on this photograph is a simple remark by Jarman
which appears next to it: "We are having a good time
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here (8 June 1991)" fOEII 168). While the time of the
film and its queer history may be anachronism, our time
is a good time, a time still in the making. And in the
making up.
Notes
l.It is an intriguing coincidence that one of the
key texts in the recent historical reconsideration of
Renaissance culture— Louis Adrian Montrose's "A
Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of
Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form"— should begin
with a dream about a queen: on 23 January 1597, "a
professional astrologer and physician, amateur
alchemist, and avid playgoer" (Montrose, 1986 65), one
Simon Forman, recorded a dream that he had about
Elizabeth I. The coincidence stops short in that both
Forman's dream and Montrose's essay are assertively
heterosexual. as the privileged term of Montrose's
analysis, "gender." indicate. Montrose encloses A
Midsummer Night's Dream in an entirely familial matrix,
that no matter how contested, still excludes the same-
sex desire that Shakespeare's play recognizes: what
takes place in the conflict between Oberon and Titania
over the changeling boy is only a struggle between a
"female-centered world" and the world of the father
(Montrose 73-7). Against Montrose, I would cite
Marjorie Garber's remarks on A Midsummer Night's Dream
in Vested Interests (1992, 84-90). One could also
consider Lindsay Kemp— a sometime collaborator of
Jarman— and his decidedly queer Midsummer Night's Dream
that features a drag queen, the Incredible Orlando, as
Titania. My point here is that dreams about the
Renaissance, whether "new historicist" or "new wave,"
negotiate the politics of sexuality with varying degrees
of openness. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "A Midsummer
Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan
Culture: Gender, Power, Form," in Margaret W. Ferguson,
Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting
the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in
Early Modern Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 65-
87, and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-
Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge,
1992) 84-90.
2.See for example Alan Sinfield, ed., Society and
Literature 1945-70 (London: Methuen, 1983).
3.Hassan I'Sabbah turns up again and again in the
writings of William Burroughs, and the motto, "Nothing
is true. Everything is permitted," is cited in several
places in Burroughs's writings. See for example William
Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1981) 64. See Eric Mottram,
William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Marion
322
Boyars, 1977) 61, for a discussion of Hassan I'Sabbah,
leader of the hashashin sect (the Assassins); Mottram
further suggests that Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov may be
the source of the quotation. In Lipstick Traces: A
Secret History of the Twentieth Century Greil Marcus
attributes these words to Nietzsche, but without
documenting his source, Lipstick Traces (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard U P, 1989) 303.
4.It is worth noting that Jon Savage, in a recent
history of the Sex Pistols and punk, praises Jarman's
Jubilee as a film that captured the "landscape" of the
early years of punk. See Jon Savage, England's
Dreaming: Anarchy. Sex Pistols. Punk Rock and Beyond
(New York: St. Martin's P, 1992) 374-6. Savage's title
derives from the Sex Pistols' "No Future."
5.Jubilee includes among its line of queers not
only gay policemen, but the Incredible Orlando (as noted
above, later to play Titania in Lindsay Kemp's A
Midsummer Night's Dream), as well as one of the very few
overtly queer stars from the early days of punk, the
transgender Wayne County. Many commentators have
remarked on the "homophobia" of early punk, Marcus
himself, amongst others (1989, 80). Jubilee is one of
the first instance of claiming punk as queer. This
gesture is of a piece with Jarman's refusal of "liberal"
or "enlightened" gay politics. Mark Finch has
contrasted what he describes as "liberal gay discourse"
which insists on the "ordinary and individual
homosexual" (1986, 31)— "gay people are individuals who
happen to be gay" (34)— with "camp discourse," which, as
Finch defines it by way of quoting Richard Dyer, is "a
characteristically gay way of handling the values,
images and products of the dominant culture through
irony, exaggeration, trivialization, theatricalization
, . ." (Dyer qtd. in Finch, 1986, 36). Finch's analysis
is useful, but his identification of only two
enunciative possibilities for "gay discourse"—
liberal/camp— seems short-sighted. See Mark Finch, "Sex
and Address in Dvnastv." Screen 27.6 (1986): 24-43.
Specifically, queer/punk discourse and signifying
practices might be considered as a refusal of both
discourses. Neither liberal nor camp, queer/punk
discourse would draw on aspects of camp discourse in its
distance from "liberal gay discourse"; while camp
discourse owes its allegiance to "pre-gay movement
culture," as Finch argues, queer/punk comes after
"liberal gay discourse" and reacts against it but not as
a return to some time before Stonewall. Jarman's
allegiance to punk, however complicated, places him
323
closer to the homocore or queercore cultures of the
early nineties. See Matias Viegener, "Gay Fanzines:
'There's Trouble in That Body': Cool Politics, Revolting
Style," Afterimage 18.8 (1991): 12-4, and Ki Namaste,
"Beyond the Binary Matrix: Punk Reconfigurations of
Bisexuality,1" Popular Constructions of Lesbian, Gay,
and Bisexual Identities, Fourth Sager Symposium,
Swarthmore College, 27 March 1992.
How far away Jarman is perceived as being from
liberal gay discourse may be gauged by the attack
launched on him in the mainstream gay magazine,
Christopher Street: "There are those of us who look
forward to a time when our being gay is nothing more or
less than one in a series of facts about who we are. We
don't think of our sexual orientation as something that
consigns us to a team that's locked in a death struggle
with another team" (5). Jarman, the article cautions
its readers, unreasonably believes the opposite: that
sexual orientation in the homophobic context of the
eighties and nineties is something more than "one in a
series of facts about who we are." Of course, such
attacks typify the distance between "gay" and "queer"
positions and identifications. See Bob Satuloff, "I
Just Called To Say I Hate You," Christopher Street 14.5
(1992): 4-5. Satuloff makes his point by associating
Jarman's politics with his (Jarman's) HIV status, an
especially insulting and dangerous link. He moreover
substantially misreads the film and seems amazingly
ignorant about Christopher Marlowe.
6.1 cite Christopher Marlowe's Edward II as E
followed by act, scene and line references. All
references are from Christopher Marlowe, Edward II. ed.
H.B. Charlton and R.D Walker (New York: Gordian P,
1966). The book of Derek Jarman's film Edward II. which
includes the version of the Marlowe text (quite
considerably cut and altered) used for the film,
Jarman's notes, with additional material by Tilda
Swinton, as well as by Ken Butler, a stand-in for Jarman
as director, stills from the set, and a welter of
slogans is Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London:
British Film Institute, 1991). To distinguish it from
Marlowe's play, I cite it as OEII followed by a page
number.
7.In Holinshed's Chronicles. we read the following:
"A wonderful1 matter that the king should be so
inchanted with the said earle [of Cornwall, that is,
Gaveston], and so addict himselfe, or rather fix his
hart vpon a man of such a corrupt humor . . . ,"
Raphael Hoiinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England.
324
Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 2 (1807; rpt. New York: AMS
P, 1965, 6 vols.) 549.
8.B. Ruby Rich notes that "the film is already
tagged the QE2,'" "A Queer Sensation: New Gay Film,"
Village Voice xxxvii.12 (24 March 1992): 43.
9.As if to underline convergences in opposition, in
Jubilee, the same actor (Jenny Runacre) plays Elizabeth
I and Bod, a gang leader in the future England.
10.Jarman notes his concern about a possibly
misogynist reception of the role of Isabella a number of
times in the text of Queer Edward II (for example QEII
20 and 46).
11.Jarman's Queer Edward II comments on both
McKellen's knighthood and Clause 28, two significant
moments in recent British queer politics (QEII
dedication page and 106). Indeed, Jarman dedicates his
book to "the repeal of all anti-gay laws, particularly
Section 2 8." I have already commented on this in
Chapter Two.
12.Jonathan Dollimore has the following to say
about the "Renaissance" and its relation to "us": "In
English studies there has always been an association of
the Renaissance and the modern. Some critics have read
the Renaissance as the origin of the present, in
particular the origin of modern man, 'he' who threw off
the shackles of the dark ages, triumphantly affirming
and discovering himself, and so beginning that long
march forward to humanism, enlightenment, and progress.
For such critics, incipient in the Renaissance is much
that we value about Western civilization as it is
subsequently developed, and the present is linked to the
past via the powerful and reassuring idea of a
teleological unfolding of the one into the other." His
own project, Dollimore states, is "[to trace] dissension
and disparity in both periods, and in a way
. . . [intends] to give new perspectives on each," a
project that is not unlike Jarman's, or even my own.
See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to
Wilde. Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991) 23.
13.Jarman implies that the past can have a
castrating relation to the present: very precisely, here
one might take up the question of "Shakespeare as
fetish" that Marjorie Garber has posed. See Marjorie
Garber, "Shakespeare as Fetish," SQ 41.2 (1991): 242-50.
As a fetish, Shakespeare would both affirm and deny
325
castration, would both evoke a "glorious1 past forever
lost and connect "us" with it- But what would Marlowe
be? Something altogether different, something for which
psychoanalysis has no name, something queer- I am
reluctant to submit Jarman's appeal to something not
castrated to the inevitable laws of psychoanalysis. Who
knows what lies "hiding behind history's jockstrap"
(QEII 110)?
14.This point was brought to my attention by
Kathleen Chapman.
15.Such forgettings could take the form of the
production of a timeless, nationalist "Shakespeare" that
would entail disregarding, say, the sonnets and their
specific historic relation to gay male cultures, or the
"sublimation" of Olivier's bisexuality into an icon of
heroic heterosexual warrior manhood.
16.In Marx's famous formulation, "The tradition of
all the generations of the past weighs like a nightmare
on the brains of the living," Karl Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, no trans. (Peking: Foreign
Language P, 1978) 9-10.
17.For commentary on and analysis of Bray's account
of the emergence of male homosexual identity around the
figure of the mollv in the eighteenth century, see
amongst others, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia U P, 1985) 83-8 and 92-4, and Ed Cohen,
"Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency,"
in Displacing Homophobia: Gav Male Perspectives in
Literature and Culture. ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M.
Clum, and Michael Moon (Durham: Duke U P, 1989) 169-206.
For the most part, since Bray, most writings that take
up his schema have been interested in making it more
Foucauldian: bringing it into line with a schema derived
from The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. Gregory
Bredbeck provides a welcome alternative in his skeptical
reworking of Bray's arguments: see Sodomy and
Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell U P,
1991) 143-6.
18.The "Baines Note" is given in full as an
appendix in Thomas Dabbs, Appendix B, Reforming Marlowe:
The Nineteenth-Centurv Canonization of a Renaissance
Dramatist (Lewisburg: Bucknell U P, 1991) 142-4.
326
19.Dabbs writes of John Payne Collier (1789-1883),
one of the foremost Victorian authorities on Marlowe,
and one of the scholars most influential in establishing
a position for Marlowe as the dissident in the canon:
"Collier was a relentless forger, whose compulsion to
falsify documents mystifies scholars even to this day"
(Dabbs 1991, 57). What makes Collier's will to forge
Marlowe even more astonishing was that Collier was, in
fact, a fine scholar, who did uncover a great deal of
genuine material about Marlowe.
20.Bray takes his argument from A. L. Rowse's
Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in
Society. Literature and the Arts (New York: Macmillan,
1977), especially 25-32. Rowse often figures as the
essentialist historian of "homosexuality" who most
uncomplicatedly imagines an unbroken line from one
"homosexual in history" to the next. See Bredbeck,
preface x, for commentary on Rowse.
21.Jeffrey Weeks writes: "Ellis was anxious, above
all, to suggest the respectability of most homosexuals .
. . . Some thirty odd pages of Sexual Inversion are
devoted to homosexuals of note, including Erasmus,
Michelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Francis Bacon,
Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Sappho. Even here he showed
a form of 'political tact': he carefully omitted names
(like Shakespeare's) that might prove too controversial
and thus obscure his case," Coming Out: Homosexual
Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the
Present (London: Quartet, 1977, emphasis added) 64. One
can only wonder at the trade-off that allows Ellis to
have Marlowe but not Shakespeare.
Elsewhere, Weeks has underscored the very strong
appeals to "history" made by early sexologists and
polemicists for "inversion": "All the major works of
writers such as Havelock Ellis have clear-cut historical
sections; some, like Iwan Bloch's, were substantive
historical works," "Discourse, Desire and Sexual
Deviance: Some Problems in the History of
Homosexuality," Against Nature: Essavs on History.
Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram P, 1991) 11.
22.Weeks notes that even though "homosexual"
identity may only have emerged in the course of the
nineteenth century, "there is evidence for sub-cultural
formation around certain monarchs and in the theater for
centuries," "Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance," 18.
Could the court of Edward II have been one of the sites
for such early sub-cultural formation?
327
23.More generously, Weeks suggests that Symonds's A
Problem in Greek Ethics of 1883 "can probably claim to
be the first serious work on homosexuality published in
Britain," Coming Out 51. Wayne Koestenbaum discusses
the sexual and textual tensions at work in Symonds's
collaboration with Ellis in some detail. See
Koestenbaum, "Unlocking Symonds: Sexual Inversion."
Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration
(New York: Routledge, 1989) 43-67.
24.Weeks points out that Symonds was shocked by
Ellis's decision to include these documents on Marlowe;
Symonds felt that "the cause' was not helped by such
wilful openness," Coming Out 58.
25.Simon Shepherd, in his study of Marlowe,
comments on how biographical work is "bedeviled" by the
"mythical figure" of "Kit Marlowe." Shepherd adds,
"Perhaps I should invent a further Marlowe' here— the
homosexual writer. This homosexuality has nothing to do
with Elizabethan ideas of sexuality or with theories of
a gendered subject, but is seen instead as a sort of
pathological condition .... Marlowe the homosexual
is always eventually to be understood as a flawed writer
because of this obsession which he could not control,"
Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theater
(Manchester: Harvester UP, 1986) xii. I agree with
Shepherd on the widespread homophobia in English Studies
that assumes that Marlowe— or Marlowe's work— as marked
by same-sex desire must necessarily be "flawed"; at the
same time I am not convinced by Shepherd's easy
assurance that Marlowe can be disentangled from his
"myths" by a recourse to "ideas of sexuality" or
"theories of a gendered subject" as if those— evidently
historically circumscribed notions themselves— somehow
did away with "homosexuality." Shepherd goes on to make
the important point, however, that "Marlowe the
homosexual partly explains the status of another
'Marlowe,' the Marlowe of A level and degree courses,
the Marlowe of Eng. Lit.. This is the Marlowe-who-
isn1t-Shakespeare, the leading playwright in what is
always called 'pre-Shakespearean' drama but who, in
comparison with Shakespeare, is found to be immature,"
xiii.
26.Collier was apparently exposed as an expert, if
somewhat arbitrary forger in the 1850s, as a result of
which Collier was "completely . . . disgraced,
[although] he never confessed to this or to many other
forgeries that he committed during his career" (Dabbs 60).
328
27."Identity may well be a historical fiction, a
controlling myth, a limiting burden. But it is at the
same time a necessary means of weaving our way through a
hazard-strewn world and a complex web of social
relations," "Questions of Identity," Against Nature 85.
28.Hence Jarman's use of the term "outing* to
describe a relation to the past and the present in
Marlowe's play and his film. One of the most contested
terms of the late eighties in queer political practice,
Jarman uses "outing" to signal the dangerous links of
present to past and present to itself. He also
qualifies the links between outing, the past and the
present: "The present unfortunately has to be misted
over. The problem about outing people is that most of
them are so unpleasant, one really doesn't want them
around; outing should be done from a sense of duty, just
like Christian charity" fOEII 70).
29."The uncertain status of sodomy points to the
fact that before the nineteenth century, the codes
governing sexual practices— canonical, pastoral, civil
— all centered on non-reproductive relations. Sodomy
was part of a continuum of non-procreative practices,
often regarded as more serious than rape precisely
because it was barren," Weeks, "Discourse, Desire, and
Sexual Deviance," Against Nature 38.
30."Dissident sexualities" derives from Jonathan
Dollimore's work. See Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence.
31.Anna Marie Smith, in a detailed and invaluable
analysis of the discourses around Clause 28, makes the
point that homophobic attacks expressly directed at gay
and bisexual men often invoke lesbians as a category of
"good homosexuals" against which to define gay male
"excesses." She quotes the Earl of Halsbury's saying,
in the House of Lords, that lesbians are "not a
problem": "They do not molest little girls. They do not
indulge in disgusting and unnatural acts like buggery.
They are not wildly promiscuous and do not spread
venereal disease," Official Report. House of Lords, 18
December 1986, col. 310, qtd. in Smith, "Which One's The
Pretender?: Section 28 and Lesbian Representation,"
Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (Somerset:
Pandora, 1991) 132. Smith makes the point that the
manner in which lesbian sexualities are inevitably
defined against notions of gay male sexualities has
consequences that cannot be ignored for lesbian self-
representation, 134-7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing
on female anal eroticism— problematically understood as
329
heterosexual, with the woman as receptive— raises some
other questions about sodomy definitions, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, "A Poem Is Being Written," Representations 17
(1987): 110-43.
32.See, for example, Eve Sedgwick's useful
discussion of the interlinkings of public and private in
so far as those interlinkings make up the domain of the
closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 70-5.
33.One twentieth-century biographer of the king
traces versions of the way Edward was put to death in
the following way: "The story that Edward was slain
horribly with a hoote broche putte thro the secret
place posterialle' which showed no traces on the corpse
is in John Trevisa's translation of Higden's Latin
Polvchronicon. . . . — it was repeated by Knighton, by
the Brut chronicle, and the Westminster monk responsible
for the chronicle of John of Reading," Harold F.
Hutchison, Edward II (New York: Stein and Day, 1971) 142.
34.Harold F. Hutchison, Edward II 142. Hutchison
writes, "Amid so much lurid fiction, the only fact which
seems well established is that Edward of Caernarvon was
murdered, if not to the instructions of, at least with
the connivance of Mortimer, and probably also of
Isabella" (142). Natalie Fryde writes that "if we
separate contemporary evidence about his fate from the
legend which has accrued around it, we are certainly
left with more mystery than certainty," Fryde, The
Tyranny and Fall of Edward II. 1321-1326 (Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1979) 201. Fryde goes on to doubt
whether indeed Edward was murdered.
35.Bredbeck cites another poem by Taylor on the
subject of Edward II and his death, a sonnet this time,
with the last three lines:
Yet taken by my Wife at my returne,
A Red-hot spit my Bowels through did gore,
Such misery, no Slave endured more (qtd. in
Bredbeck 48).
Bredbeck comments that "The wife's action of 'taking'
the husband, which directly contradicts typical tenets
of domestic decorum, is never commented on. Even the
barbarous murder offers few overt morals, as if to imply
that the lessons are self-evident: a contra naturam love
deserves an equally contra naturam death" (Bredbeck 49).
330
36.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia, 1985) 92. See also Dollimore, Sexual
Dissidence 233-75 for a detailed discussion of the
psychodynamics of homophobia.
37.Historians of sodomy such as Jeffrey Weeks and
Ed Cohen place a fair amount of emphasis on the
transformation of sodomy into a felony by the parliament
of Henry VIII in 1553. See Cohen, "Legislating the
Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency," Displacing
Homophobia: Gav Male Perspectives in Literature and
Culture. ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and
Michael Moon (Durham: Duke U P, 1989) 173. Sodomy,
Weeks notes, was made a capital offence by this
transformation, "Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance,"
17. It would be tempting to speculate on the
connection, as Bredbeck does not, between the making of
sodomy into a felony and capital offence during the
reign of Henry VIII and the outpouring of writings on
Edward II and his death from the early Elizabethan
period onwards.
38.An entire history of homophobia can be compiled
from responses to Marlowe. Writing of Bertolt Brecht's
reasons for translating and adapting Marlowe's play,
Eric Bentley has this to say: "What first comes to mind
is the subject— a Brechtian one— of a homosexual
relationship seen as a fatal infatuation, seen moreover,
as masochistic in relation to the male principal and as
sadistic in relation to women," Bentley, "Bertolt
Brecht's One Tragedy?," Edward II; A Chronicle Plav. by
Brecht, trans. Bentley (New York: Grove P, 1966) viii.
Bentley is a little better than someone like Kelsall in
his comments on the manner of Edward's death: first
Bentley remarks primly that the description of Edward's
end given in Holinshed "is hardly suitable to the
theater," before suggesting that the name of Lightborn,
which derives from the names of devils in "medieval
dramatic tradition" stands in for the entire tradition
of how Edward was killed: "By this is meant not only
that what they' did to Edward was diabolical' in a
general sense but that it was precisely diabolical in so
hideously suiting the punishment to the crime? Edward
is guilty of sodomy— perhaps not in Holinshed's eyes,
but certainly in Marlowe's. The devil now buggers him
with a red-hot skewer, and he does this in such a way
that there will be no surviving evidence" (1966 98-9).
Bentley adds, "It seems like a myth of society's vicious
attitude to homosexual acts: cruelly punishing them,
slyly duplicating them, and then affecting innocence and
331
detachment" (99). At least there is some recognition on
Bentley’s part that violence against queers is not self-
inflicted or a retribution. In Brecht's version— which
includes some broad homophobic jokes (1966 8-9)— Edward
is choked by Lightborn (88-9).
39.The question of the queen, again! Marjorie
Garber elaborates on Elizabeth's appearance to add that
she was dressed — or better, cross-dressed — as an
"androgynous martial maiden," Garber, Vested Interests
28. See also Montrose, "A Midsummer Wight * s Dream and
the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture."
40.See Shepherd's slightly different reading of the
end of Edward II. Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of
Elizabethan Theater 168-9.
41.Edward II was Edward Plantagenet, like his
father and son. In Jean Genet's The Miracle of the
Rose. when the narrator is brought to Fontevrault
Prison, the following exchange takes place:
"As soon as each of us gave his name, occupation,
and distinguishing marks and signed with a print of his
forefinger, he was take by a guard to the wardrobe. It
was my turn:
'Name?'
'Genet.'
'Plantagenet?'
'I said Genet.1
What if I feel like saying Plantagenet? Do you
mind?'....
The guard gave me a dirty look. Perhaps he
despised me for not knowing that the Plantagenets were
buried in Fontevrault, that their coat of arms— leopards
and the Maltese cross— is still on the stained-glass
windows of the chapel," Jean Genet, The Miracle of the
Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1971) 9-10. It is highly appropriate that Jean Genet,
criminal and queer, should have a false lineage and
patronym bestowed on him that links him to Queer Edward.
42.See for example, Michael Callen on the subject
of "newscasters wrapping their untrained lips around the
words anal intercourse." "PWA Portfolio," AIDS: Cultural
Analysis. Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1988) 150.
43.Weeks says that "Picadilly Circus was notorious"
as a cruising site. Weeks, "Invert, Perverts, and Mary-
Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of
Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early
332
Twentieth Centuries," Against Nature 64. Picadilly
Circus was also the site of one of OutRage's first
public actions, a same-sex kiss-in, see Stuart
Marshall's Over Our Dead Bodies.
44.Nunokawa uses The Picture of Dorian Gray as one
way in which such a configuration can be made into a
narrative. Official AIDS discourse with its talk of
"high-risk groups" sees gay and bisexual men as
necessarily already fated "victims" simply because they
are gay or bisexual. One could also cite Paul
Verhoeven's recent Basic Instinct as a case in point:
truly a fatal attraction, any desire for a lesbian or a
bisexual woman in the film leads to death, as if death
were the basic instinct of bisexual identities.
45.Natalie Fryde provides a complete translation of
the letter and also discusses its historical reception
(which has been for the most part, one of disbelief).
Fryde, however, is strongly inclined to accept the
authenticity of the letter. Once again, it seems to be
a matter of forged papers and reality effects. See
Fryde, The Tvrannv and Fall of Edward II 2 03-6.
46.For a detailed discussion of the film and its
history, see Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on
Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990) 10-22; I
also discuss it in Chapter One..
47.My analysis here is indebted to Ki Namaste's
work on queer identities, and especially, punk-queer
identities, as working through rupture.
48.The connection between Jarman and Burroughs has
been noticed by Lawrence Driscoll, "Burroughs/ Jarman:
Anamorphosis, Homosexuality, and the Metanarratives of
Restraint: An Immanent Analysis," Spectator (10.2 1990):
78-95.
49.Hocquenghem says: ""the [psycho]analysis of
homosexuality is at the same time the construction of
the whole family romance, where it [homosexuality] will
have to go on living whether it likes it or not,"
Homosexual Desire 67.
50.Here I am mindful of Judith Roof's qualification
of the "heterosexuality" of maternity: Roof makes the
point in her discussion of Julia Kristeva that the
latter assumes "that mothering— conceiving a child— is
the act of a heterosexual woman (instead of the
heterosexual act of a woman) . . . Roof, A Lure of
333
Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York:
Columbia, 1991) 104.
51.See Garber, as an instance of academic
discussion of Lennox, Vested Interests 73, 136, 181,
356, 372. My reading of the Lennox persona is somewhat
different from Garber’s.
52.See the discussion on relations between
reproduction and the cinematic apparatus in Chapter One.
53.See Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins
(New York: Routledge, 1992) 152-3. Because some film
theory tends to rely heavily on psychoanalytic accounts
of subjectivity it may reproduce the heterosexist models
of difference that psychoanalysis endorses, and a great
deal of recent film theory has either tried to counter
psychoanalytic models or has bent them to other, queer
uses. Sue-Ellen Case makes a case against Silverman and
Mary Anne Doane because of their reliance on
psychoanalysis, "Tracking the Vampire," differences 3.2
(1991): 9-13. See also Jane Gaines, "Women and
Representation: Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasures?," in
Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana,
1990) 84-7, Judith Mayne, "Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner
and Female Authorship," Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and
the Visible," both in How Do I Look? Queer Film and
Video, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay P, 1991)
103-43 and 223-84.
54.See for example, Miriam Hansen's criticisms of
Christian Metz for thinking of the spectator as a monad
of sorts, unshaped by social conditions, in "Alexander
Kluge and the Public Sphere: The Construction Site of a
Counter-History," Discourse 6 (1983): 61. See also my
discussion, following Hansen, of the necessity for
thinking of the cinema as part of a queer public sphere
open to collective intervention and change in the
introduction.
55.In Edward II filmic signifiers— especially
lighting and mise-en-scene— make figures appear as if
they emerge from the dark screen, which could fade to
black at any moment. It is as if the figures are at
once accessible and on the point of being lost. Often
Jarman's films draw attention to the filmic process
itself— we look at light and darkness and the flat
surface on which light and darkness produce moving
images. (A film like The Garden, for example,
foregrounds the circular repetition of reels of film.)
In Edward II. when Edward signs the banishment forms for
334
Gaveston, he and the bishop are seated at a slight angle
to a high white wall behind them, on which the bishop's
shadow looms large. When Isabella weeps at her
rejection by Edward, she is facing the camera directly
in a very formally composed medium longshot; at some
distance behind her, the earls and nobles appear as
shadows on the wall. Often figures are backlit in such
a way as to make them seem like dark templates cut out
of light— for example, the scene in which Edward is
captured by Mortimer's forces. Light, too, is used to
divide settings into acting areas in a way that is
closer to theater and that reinforces Jarman's use of
static camera and relatively little editing— when
Lightborn sleeps in the dungeon, he is placed and lit in
the foreground, while a different light picks out a
middleground in which Edward appears and soliloquizes.
56.Queer Edward II credits Greg Taylor with the
authorship of its slogans. However, many of the slogans
have been used time and time again in queer politics:
they properly have a collective authorship and should be
heard as a kind of homo glossolalia.
57.Paula A. Treichler, "AIDS, Homophobia, and
Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification," in
AIDS: Cultural Analysis. Cultural Activism 37-9. Barry
D. Adam, "The State, Public Policy and AIDS
Discourse,"in Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in
the AIDS Crisis, ed. James Miller (Toronto: U of Toronto
P, 1992) 312 makes points similar to Treichler's.
58.As part of the "PWA Portfolio" there is a
discussion of the widespread assumption that "all one
has to do to wipe out AIDS is to eliminate anal
intercourse." See "PWA Portfolio," in AIDS: Cultural
Analysis. Cultural Activism 151.
59.Regardless of what Leo Bersani might say, the
trope of the "rectum-as-grave" should perhaps not be
"celebrated for its very potential for death" (Bersani,
"Is the Rectum A Grave?" AIDS: Cultural Analysis.
Cultural Activism 222) ; I was present at a concert in
1991 where ACT UP/LA operated a booth to sell T-shirts:
a number of audience members, including myself, were
wearing ACT UP's signature T-shirt with the pink
triangle and the slogan "SILENCE = DEATH." At one
point, a heckler began to shout that the T-shirts were
lying, since, as he put it, "SODOMY = DEATH."
Chapter Four: Taking Place: Isaac Julien's Looking for
Langston
"Where?"
In film, events take place. What happens in front of
the camera takes up a site, gets projected on screen and
in frame, and makes a story. But such "taking place" is
not the truism that it seems at first sight, as both
filmmaker Michael Snow and film theorist Stephen Heath
argue. Heath, in particular, writes: "events take
place, a place for some one, and the need is to pose the
question of that one’ and its narrative terms of film
space" ("Narrative Space" 1981 69J.1 In other words,
the story made by the film frames, their sequences and
suturings, and their off-screen elisions, can only be a
story for someone: what takes place in cinema requires a
spectator in place.2
Representation calls for a subject, and produces
that subject as the site of its significance: this is
precisely Heath's point when, in another essay, he
describes cinema as:
the matching of images as continuity,
narrativization of that continuous
matching as the steady assignment of a
developing view, a stable memory,
something for some one, some one for
that something, these meanings, this
vision ("Contexts" 1981 241).
336
It is important to note that this last description
derives specifically from Heath's dismissal of a debate
about "popular memory" in cinema. For Heath, quite
simply, the issue is settled in advance, since "history
in cinema is nowhere other than in its representation"
("Contexts" 237).3
In cinema then, according to Heath, "history" takes
place as representation and representation takes place
for a spectator. But here we have reason to pause:
cognizant as he is of the social forces which make that
"some one" for the "something" of representation, Heath
nevertheless appears to imply that representation as
such will go on reproducing the same subject, the
subject as such (238-42). The question of "that one'
and its narrative terms of film space" is still urgent,
but perhaps remains to be answered in terms that differ
from Heath's, especially once the differences of
history, which are not altogether reducible to
representation, are confronted. Do all representations
indeed take place in the same way for all spectators,
despite differences of nationality, race, gender, class,
and sexuality? Or do such differences open questions of
representations and subjectivities, in unforeseen ways,
for other histories?4 In this chapter, I shall ask what
happens when a black British filmmaker of the 1980s and
90s takes up a key African-American writer and the
337
period of the Harlem Renaissance. What takes place in a
film and for its spectators when sexualities and desires
are relocated in the diasporas, geographic as well as
temporal, of black identities?
For the moment, however, these questions may be
approached somewhat obliquely with reference not to the
cinema itself but to the cinema in a literary text:
Langston Hughes's 1951 collection of poems, Montage of a
Dream Deferred. The very title of Hughes's collection
draws on the cinematic, and indicates that "montage"
operates here as a strategy that evokes the "dream"
which remains, like the adjective "deferred" itself, put
off, displaced, belated.5 Lexically and semantically,
the "dream deferred" is a salient motif in the
collection. In its titular association with "montage,"
"dream" may serve to recall the numerous descriptions of
cinema as a scene of dreams (and of the unconscious, in
its turn, as an interior cinema).6 But very
specifically the "dream" at stake here is the frustrated
and denied aspirations of African Americans as they
struggle with class and racial injustice and economic
oppression. Commenting on Montage of a Dream Deferred.
James De Jongh writes, "Harlem— the great black
metropolis— within New York City— the great white
metropolis— symbolizes the deferred dream of black
Americans within the American dream" (1990 109).
338
With a deceptive mundanity, one particular poem is
entitled "Movies," and it sets up a confrontation
between the dreams of Hollywood's dream factory and that
other "dream deferred":
The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem,
Alhambra:
Harlem laughing in all the wrong places
at the crocodile tears
of crocodile art
that you know in your heart
is crocodile:
(Hollywood
laughs at me.
black —
so I laugh
back) (Montage of Dream Deferred 1951
15) .
The names of movie palaces in Harlem connote official
American national history ("Roosevelt"), the precious
("Gem"), and the seemingly foreign ("Alhambra"). Yet
the name which metonymically evokes a historically
precise site and community— "Harlem"— is at odds,
despite its alliterative link, with that other place for
which the movie palaces stand as synecdoches—
"Hollywood." Dominant cinema in the United States, from
its inception as a form with epic nationalist ambitions,
has had a history of complicity with racism; consider
Birth of a Nation.7 For "Harlem," then, to laugh "in
all the wrong places" is to see through the movies, and
to offer a reading that is not taken in,8 one that gives
the lie to "crocodile tears" and "crocodile art."
\ !
339
The second stanza recapitulates the opposition of
the first, with "Harlem1 ' now given a first person, an
"I" who responds to "Hollywood."9 Both the phonic
repetition of rhyme ("black" and "back") and the lexical
repetition of "laugh" ("Hollywood laughs," "I laugh")
mark dissension, rather than accord, namely the odds at
which the speaker finds himself as a black spectator
with what takes place on the screen. "Laughing back" is
not the encoded response of the spectator-subject who is
the effect of representation; instead, "laughing back"
is closer to the act of defiance that bell hooks
associates with "talking back": "it is that act of
speech, of talking back' that is no mere gesture of
empty words, that is the expression of moving from
object to subject, that is the liberated voice"
("Talking Back" 1990 340). Often in Hughes's writings,
laughter marks both a recognition of and a response to
unbearable social conditions: "When you see me
laughin'/I'm laughin' to keep from cryin'" ("Harlem
Literati," The Big Sea. The Langston Hughes Reader 1958
377), or the title of his 1952 collection of short
stories, Laughing to Keep from Crvinq.
A short lyric restatement of the "dream deferred"
motif comes immediately after the poem "Movies" in
Montage of a Dream Deferred, in which the repeated
340
italicization of "my" constructs a subject position
defined through and in the deferral of "song" and
"dream":
Why should it be my loneliness,
Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong? ("Tell Me" 1951 15).
Another revision of the "movies" follows, which this
time is overtly presented as a negation— "Not A Movie."
"Not A Movie" tells of a black man who survived a
brutal attempted lynching in the South, "because he
tried to vote" and who "got the midnight train/ . . .
now he's livin'/on a 133rd" (1951 16), that is, he has
moved to Harlem, 133rd Street.10 In this poem, Harlem
figures as the "city of refuge" that it represented,
however ambivalently, for many African Americans.
(Rudolph Fisher's short story, "The City of Refuge,"
published in Atlantic Monthly deals with the
expectations of people who left the South for Harlem;
while the story points out the "ironies of experience"
that awaited black refugees in Harlem, it also
established the topos for Harlem, Kellner 1984 123, see
De Jongh 1990 17 and 106.) The movement from South to
North that "Not A Movie" sketches is moreover a
traditional motif "with its roots in . . . the slave
narratives of abolitionist literature" (De Jongh 1990
17). In addition, the anonymous protagonist's journey
341
from rural South to industrialized and urban North
further recalls the "Great Migration" of many African
Americans early in the twentieth century (see De Jongh
1990 7-8, as well as Eric Garber, "A Spectacle In
Color," 1989 319).
Both poems, then, create a place for identities
which resist the coercions of racist violence and white
hegemony. Harlem takes its historic place as image and
topos against the displacements and relocations of the
diaspora: "From one international generation of black
writers to the next, the motif [of Harlem] has remained
the avatar of an ethos of spiritual, cultural, and
political renewal of peoples of African descent in the
various zones of the diaspora," writes De Jongh (1990
209). In the 1920s and 1930s Harlem became the
"symbolic center of African America," and was known
variously as the "Negro Capital," "Mecca," or the
"Promised Land" (Bremer, "Home in Harlem, New York,"
1990 49). We might also recall the many voyages of
Langston Hughes, marked in the titles of his two
autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I
Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956). Born in
Joplin, Missouri, Hughes moved with his family to Kansas
when he was a child; later he stayed with his father who
settled in Mexico. Hughes himself travelled to Africa,
working on a freighter, and wrote later of his first
342
response to Africa as "My Africa! Motherland of the
Negro Peoples!" (qtd. in Dictionary of Literary
Biography 51 119). He journeyed to Paris and Venice,
toured the South, and worked as a correspondent for the
Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish civil war.
(See Dictionary of Literary Biography 51 115-32.)
Hughes was also a strong opponent of apartheid in South
Africa (Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes
2.1941-1967 1988 105). In one of his early and most
anthologized poems, "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers," Hughes
inscribes a memory as diaspora in black identities:
11ve known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than
the flow of human blood in human
veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers
(The Langston Hughes Reader 88).
Together "Movies" and "Not A Movie" inscribe their own
specific ways of "taking place," whether it be a
movement across borders as in "Not A Movie" ("he crossed
that Dixie line," 1951 96), or the rejection of the
image and position assigned African Americans by
Hollywood ("laughing in all the wrong places" 1951 15).
And all these other ways of taking place bear African
Americans's long histories of migration and suffering.
Yet there is still another kind of place in Montage
of a Dream Deferred, one that is only presented once in
343
a short vignette which signals both time and place in
its title, "Cafe: 3 A.M.":
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates
some folks sav.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where? (1951 32).
"Cafe: 3 A.M." recognizes the considerable lesbian,
bisexual and gay presence in Harlem. "Throughout the
Harlem Renaissance period," writes Eric Garber, "...
black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other on
street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent
parties, and worshipping in church on Sundays, creating
a language, a social structure, and a complex network of
institutions" (1989 318). But while the enunciators of
"Movies" and "Not A Movie" can be identified as,
respectively, an individual voice that forms part of an
audience or community, or a kind of collective third-
person voice that narrates common and shared experience,
the voice or persona in "Cafe: 3 A.M." cannot so easily
be placed.
Looking at both the "fairies" and the "[wearily]
sadistic" vice squad that looks at them, the gaze that
sees both looks is itself somehow placeless. It is not
altogether clear whether the poem is a mono- or
dialogue, since the insertion of italics could either
herald another speaker or signal some interior dialogue
within a single speaker. Additionally, it is not
entirely sure whether the deictic "over there" does, in
fact, locate speaker or speakers in the same physical
space, that is, the cafe, as the "fairies," lesbians,
and police. The poem offers a limited and tentative
explanation to counter homophobic accusations of
"degeneracy"— which is consonant with what Eric Garber
calls the "relatively tolerant attitude shown toward
homosexuality" in Harlem (320)— but its use of third
person sharply marks enunciator from enunciated
("them"). The poem halts its explanatory defenses as
one kind of separation seems to collapse: when its gaze
can no longer discern the difference that seemed to give
it its power in the first place. While the distinction
between "vice squad" and "fairies" appeared clear cut,
what separates "police lady" from "lesbian"?11 Perhaps
the point is toward a limited and circumscribed
tolerance, that there is really not that much of a
difference between the oppressors and the oppressed in
this instance, after all. But the same meaning also
shuts vice squad and fairies, lesbians and police women
into a sphere of "deviance" that cordons them off, all
the more effectively, from the speaking voice and the
345
seeing eye.12 Still, the question, "Where?," as the
last line and word of the poem, resonates beyond the
answer that the title of the poem has already given:
"Cafe: 3 A.M." Where, indeed? Can the place of voice
and eye, that "I" that never quite states itself as a
first person in this poem, itself be in question here?
From an altogether different direction, black gay
British filmmaker Isaac Julien's film Looking for
Langston (1989) takes up that question of "where?"13 A
shift from the look in a literary text to texts in film
occurs, but much more besides. As the title of the film
hints, the direction of the look is now reversed, and
Langston Hughes himself becomes the object of a search
and a gaze. "We look for Langston, I submit," Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. has written about the film, "but we
discover Isaac" ("The Black Man's Burden," Black Popular
Culture 1992 77). Yet to look for Langston does not
necessarily mean to find Langston, to find Langston's
place, or to find Langston in his place. "Looking for
Langston" can also indicate a delegation of the look,
that is, to look in place of Langston, on his behalf, in
his memory.
346
"In Memory"
One of its subtitles best describes Looking for
Lanaston; "A Meditation on Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
and the Harlem Renaissance." In an interview Isaac
Julien comments on the distance between any spectator
now and the world of that Harlem Renaissance: "one can
only view that world [of the Harlem Renaissance] or
review it from an imaginary position" (Brother to
Brother 1991 178). With such a distance, and with
viewing and reviewing made subject to imaginary play,
Julien adds that in the film, "it was very important to
construct images of dreams" (Brother to Brother 1991
178).14 Meditation, imagination, revision and desire
shape what stories Looking for Langston has to tell.
Julien comments, "the idea was to have desire exist in
the construction of the images and for the storytelling
to actually construct a narrative that would enable
audiences to meditate and think, rather than be told"
(1991 177).15
As a "meditation," the film, he emphasizes, is "not
. . . a documentary" (1991 177, Julien's emphasis).
Hence it does not attempt to prove the historical truth
of Hughes's sexual identity as bisexual or gay. The
look in and of the film does not police— unlike the
"vice squad" of "Cafe: 3 A.M."— what may or may not have
347
been the content of Hughes's desire. Looking for
Langston does not guarantee finding Langston, or the
truth of Langston's sexuality.16 What would it have
meant for Langston to have been a black gay or bisexual
man? The film does not answer that question but instead
invents a fiction, an imaginary revision, allowed by the
distance between spectators now and their desires for
the images of the film. Julien notes that insofar as
the oneiric and fragmentary narrative of Looking for
Langston has a protagonist, it is a figure named Alex.
Beyond the documentary footage of Langston Hughes
reading his own texts near the beginning and end of the
film, Langston is absent.
In his reading of the film, Manthia Diawara argues
that spectators of Julien's film might be tempted into a
"pseudo-identification" with the absent Hughes as
himself a stand-in for the other Diawara calls "the
Absent One" (1991 104).17 Such a temptation, Diawara
proposes, is the very strategy of the film:
The younger generation's attempt to
identify with [Hughes and the other
figures of the Harlem Renaissance] in
the film, to fill in the void left in
their absence, to stand in their place,
is a way of shifting the issues away
from those debated during the Harlem
Renaissance, to using the figures to
confront new themes of the discourse of
Blackness, i. e. homosexuality (1991
105) .
348
For Diawara, the film transforms historical distance
into a generational narrative that joins rather than
separates, and lets ’ ’ the young generation [stand] in
Hughes's place and [seek] his protection, [empower]
themselves with his energy" (1991 108).18
Nevertheless, despite Julien's disclaimers and the
film's insistence on its imaginary character, some very
powerful effects of reality are produced by this fiction
of Langston's place. Julien has not, for example,
forestalled a reluctance on the part of Hughes's estate
in the United States to let texts from Montage of a
Dream Deferred be used in the film, and Looking for
Langston has on occasion been prevented from being
screened at lesbian and gay film festivals with the
texts included (Doug Sadownick, "Protest From Poet's
Estate Keeps Film Out of Gay Festival," L A Times [12
July 1989]: 4.2).19 At the moment, it appears that the
version of the film available in the United States does
not contain any additional texts by Hughes beyond those
read near its beginning and end (Hemphill, "Undressing
Icons" Brother to Brother 1991 181).
Looking for Langston is a dense montage of images
that combines archival footage, some of it from early
African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, with
narrative recreation in a series of dream-like sequences
that are coded by setting, costume, and the use of black
349
and white film stock throughout as evocative of the
1920s and 19 30s. Certain calculated anachronisms, such
as elements of dress, citations of Robert Mapplethorpe's
photographs of black men, and contemporary jazz and
house music break the illusion that everything on screen
belongs to a past.
The film unfolds between a number of different
areas. A group of formal mourners are gathered around a
coffin, with a corpse, played by Isaac Julien himself,
lying in state. Down an elaborate baroque staircase
from the mourners, men in tuxedos dance, and cruise one
another at a bar and on a dance floor, dominated by a
huge mirrored ball, that arch-signifier of 1970s disco.
There is also a cemetery in which angels with wings of
wire and gauze hold large portrait photographs of
Langston Hughes and James Baldwin as talismans. When
one of the men in the bar (identified in the credits of
the film as Alex) exchanges looks with another man, who
is allegorically named Beauty, the latter's white lover,
and one of the few white people there, aggressively
asserts his proprietorship of Beauty. Lying on his bed,
Alex appears to fantasize that Beauty is at home with
his white lover. A sequence follows that is framed as a
dream within the dream of the film itself.20 Alex
wanders through a meadow with ponds and flags that seem
to guide his way as he searches for Beauty. Briefly he
350
finds Beauty, who is surrounded by white lilies. Now
Beauty speaks the only diegetic dialogue in the film,
two words, "I'll wait," before Alex turns and loses him.
Shots of Alex and Beauty, together in Alex's bed as they
kiss, end the sequence.
Later, men in contemporary dress cruise in the same
cemetery in which the angels appeared, while a man from
the bar, in period tuxedo watches and walks down moonlit
streets. Beauty's white lover wanders through a space
hung with white muslin drapes on which are projected
images from Robert Mapplethorpe's Black Males and The
Black Book, both collections of highly fetishized
photographs of black men.21 This scene forms part of
the film's indictment of white gay racism and
objectification of black men as sexual stereotypes, and
ends as the white man dismissively hands a black man
some money. (Julien writes, in Diarv of a Young Soul
Rebel. that in both Looking for Langston and Young Soul
Rebels [1991] he "[tries] to re-politicize the gaze of
black and white subjects," 1991 67.) Afterwards, one of
the black men from the bar watches a porn video; this
scene is intercut with shots of two men making love
shown only from the waist down. Alex leaves the bar
with a man; Beauty stays for a while before going home
with his white lover. The angels gaze down over the
balustrade at the dance floor as the dancing in the bar
351
becomes more energetic. The music changes to
contemporary house music, and champagne glasses are
smashed, while outside white policemen and thugs gather.
They beat at the door before they burst in, to find
there only smoke and a gramophone.
Dance floor or disco, funeral parlor, cemetery,
bedroom, and street are conjoined, often in disorienting
ways as the film's mise en scene and its narrative
space. Together these sites function as lieux de
memoire or "places of memory," to borrow a term from
Pierre Nora (1989, recently used by Cindy Patton,
"Embodying Subaltern Memory" 1993). The question of
"place" is then at the very heart of the film: the
places of spectators and desires, the places of diaspora
(Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Britain, the
United States), the places in the diegesis (funeral
parlor, dance floor, nightclub, streets, cemetery,
cinema or video arcade, meadows of dream, bedroom,
"Harlem" or "Britain," the past), the place of utopian
possibilities, the places of historical hardships and
loss. The final credits say that the film was "shot on
location" in Britain, and not in the Harlem of the
present, a seemingly minor detail which nevertheless
underscores the necessarily fictive character of
memories and place. Insofar as Looking for Langston
"[invents] time" as Cindy Patton claims (94), it also
352
makes a place for memories of oppression and resistance
formed from the particulars, reiterations and minor
rituals of certain everyday black gay existences that
cut across histories and geographies to form
connections.
In addition to its overtly "narrative" elements,
the film includes montages of photographs of key male
figures of the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, of
course, but also Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Bruce
Nugent and Claude McKay. Archival footage shows black
artists interacting with the white patrons on whose
fickle patronage their work frequently depended, as well
as Richmond Barthe at work sculpting and Bruce Nugent
painting, so that the diverse cultural activities of the
time are recalled. The visual works, particularly the
sculptures of male torsos and faces, echo or anticipate
the film's own project of visualizing beautiful black
male bodies.22 in two sequences the camera pans over
objects that metonymically evoke the Harlem Renaissance:
photographs, a typewriter, and books such as Countee
Cullen's On These I Stand, and Fire!I. the anthology of
writing and art which Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale
Hurston, Langston Hughes and Bruce Nugent edited. A
hand enters the frame to type. A similar shot shows a
hand hesitating over a newspaper with a photograph of
Hughes and the caption "Black and Gay?" Here the absent
353
figure, only there in the synecdoche of hands which
appear in the open frame, evokes the absence, the loss
of the figures from the period who are themselves only
there as metonymies: their photographs, their relics,
their texts. The open frame invites a look for, or a
delegation of the look, on the part of spectators.
As we have seen, for Julien "it was very important
to construct images of dreams" in the film (Brother to
Brother 1991 178) and that "the idea was to have desire
exist in the construction of [those] images ..."
(177). Yet the film does not exist only in its images,
for the interplay between soundtrack and image track
creates the sites in which spectators can look for
Langston. On sound in cinema, Mary Anne Doane writes,
"whatever the arrangement of interpenetration of the
various spaces [of image and of sound in cinema], they
constitute a place where signification intrudes," and
she adds, "The various techniques and strategies for the
deployment of the voice contribute heavily to the
definition of the form that 'place' takes" ("The Voice
in the Cinema," Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology 1986
347). In other words, sound makes a place just as much
as image does in the cinema, and it is in their
arrangements that meaning can be constructed.
The image track of Looking for Langston opens with
a longshot of a train, and cuts to a sequence of shots
354
of mourners in a church, with all the footage
recognizable as archival, a quality signalled by the
scratchiness of the film stock or a certain jerkiness of
editing. The soundtrack, in contrast, begins with
ominous sirens. The sound of sirens occurs throughout
the film, and seems to stand metonymically for a threat
that is finally realized by the racist and homophobic
mob, composed of both police (the putative forces of
"law") and bashers (that "law" by other means). At this
point, the sirens have been incorporated into the
electronic sounds and the rhythmic wails of the house
music that is playing.
The film's soundtrack further consists of a number
of literary and musical texts. Some period music from
the Harlem Renaissance is included, thus, we see and
hear a snippet of Bessie Smith singing "St. Louis
Blues." Later George Hanna sings "Freakish Blues," as
the camera delineates the space of the bar and dance
floor. Both music and images of men dancing together
code the area as a club primarily for black gay men,
since Hanna's "Freakish Man Blues" is one of the several
blues songs from the period that recognize and speak to
lesbian, bisexual and gay male experience, such as
Bessie Smith's "Foolish Man Blues," Lucille Bogan's
"B.D. Woman Blues," Pinewood Tom's "Sissy Man Blues,"
and of course, Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me Blues."23
-- 355
Blues from the period provides a counter-discourse that
insists on the historical presence and cultural
recognition of black lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, and
transgenders, and offers a repository of popular black
queer memory. Linked with jazz and house music, the
blues marks a continuity in the popular uses and
reception of music in clubs where it forms a basis for
collective identities, black and gay.24 The musical
soundtrack further includes two songs, "Beautiful
Blackman" and "Blues for Langston" by contemporary black
gay singer Blackberri, and a complex aural montage is
mixed with the house music that accompanies the attack
at the end of the film.
While the blues deals with suffering and
resistance, the first words spoken on the soundtrack
likewise announce mourning and remembrance. They come
from Toni Morrison as she reads a eulogy for James
Baldwin which quotes a section from Baldwin's The Price
of the Ticket. Here Baldwin writes at once of the
difficulty and the necessity of standing against one's
society: "A person does not lightly elect to oppose his
society. One would much rather be at home among one's
compatriots than be mocked and detested by them" (also
qtd. 1991 175). Insofar as the film has a voice-over
narration, it is intermittent and drawn from a text, "An
Introduction to Negro Faggotry in the Harlem
_ 356
Renaissance," by a black gay writer in the United
States, Hilton Als. Als's text is more poetic and
evocative than informative in the manner of documentary,
and is difficult to situate in relation to its material.
Als leaves unclear the historical distance separating
his text's enunciation from what it enunciates, so that,
at certain times, it appears as if that text speaks from
the Harlem Renaissance as a contemporary reality, while
at others, the text acknowledges a remoteness in time.
"An Introduction to Negro Faggotry in the Harlem
Renaissance" weaves quotations from the period without
signalling them as quotations into its own discourse,
which contributes to slight confusion about its historic
location.
Als himself does not read his writing on the
soundtrack, which is read instead by Stuart Hall, so
that Hall's British accent marks a difference of
locality. Julien explains:
I was also trying to engage Diaspora-
type relationships in the work. I
wanted to make the connections between
black gay identities in the present and
black gay identities in the past, and
also to make the film exist in a space
somewhere between the two— in mid-
Atlantic, as it were. Hence, the
British voice-over, the British
narration (1991 177).
What separates Julien from both the Langston of his film
and the Langston Hughes of history is one kind of
diasporal relation, that between black people in Britain
and black people in the United States, both groups with
distinct histories of colonialism and slavery. Yet that
separation can also connect, which is the task of
Julien's Looking for Langston. In connecting Britain
and the United States through the diasporas of people of
color, the "British voice-over, the British narration,"
as Julien calls it, does not so much center the film and
provide it with a dominant voice or a last word, as it
becomes one voice among many, so that the soundtrack is
no less of a montage than the image track. The work of
two black gay United States artists, the poetry of Essex
Hemphill (perhaps one of the most important poets in the
States today) and singer Blackberri's songs make other
narrations that carry as much weight as the writings of
Als as read by Hall.
Desire, Julien suggests, resides both in the
connections and disjunctions between the images of his
film. The soundtrack, likewise, opens distances and
proximities.25 Work in feminist film theorizing of the
soundtrack has analyzed the closure of soundtrack onto
image track, with the illusory unity provided by
synchronized sound in classic cinema, especially insofar
as that closure and that unity offer up "woman" and
"her" voice to the male eye and ear (see Silverman, The
Acoustic Mirror 1988 1-71). Yet the closure of voice
and body, image and sound can also have different
effects outside of the paradigm of male look/female
image. When Looking for Lanaston was shown at one film
festival in New York, the audience was told that because
of the dispute with the Hughes estate in the United
States, the film’s sound would be turned down in the two
archival sequences that show Hughes reading his poetry.
In other words, Hughes's image would appear but not his
voice. so that his voice could, presumably, be saved
from an incriminating association with queerness in the
context of the film. Already, this turning down of
Hughes's voice stood in for a previous elision, namely,
the removal of more of Hughes's poetry from an earlier
version at the insistence of the estate.26 A contingent
moment in the history of the film's reception, this
incident nonetheless indicates just what the political
stakes of a relation between body and voice, image and
sound, can be in the kind of cinema in which Julien
works.
The voice of a contemporary black gay man from the
United States can be heard in the poems by Essex
Hemphill that he reads himself on the soundtrack.
Hemphill's voice at once stands in for Hughes's, and
also doubles Hall's voice as another kind of commentary.
Angrily, tenderly, and very movingly, these poems speak
of Hemphill's identity as a black gay man in the United
States who faces both homophobia and widespread racism
----- -— ' 359---
among white gays. If archival footage or photographs,
variously held by angels or projected on draperies,
figure the film's visual citations and archaeologies,
the image of gramophone on the bar, shown a number of
times, figures the soundtrack of Looking for Langston.
Together, sound and image track produce verbal and
visual rhymes and puns. There are angels in the
cemetery, of flesh as well as funerary marble, and
angels also appear in Hemphill's poetry on the
soundtrack— "I was fucking fallen angels . . . /I can be
an angel,/falling," he reads in one of his poems ("The
Edge" Ceremonies 1992 162-3). The trope of the "fallen"
or "falling angel" is in its turn itself troped upon by
dizzying camera sweeps up and down during this sequence,
that run from the angels upstairs looking down over the
bannister at the dance floor below.
Now all these echoes and rhymes, visual, verbal,
and semantic, have as their effect a dense investment of
memory in the signifiers of the film: Looking for
Langston constructs a particular field of recollection
that holds its fragments, its isolated images together
and gives them a resonance in their incremental
reiterations. At the same time, breaks are
emphasized.27 For example, in the image sequence that
accompanies Hemphill's poem "Now We Think As We Fuck,"
two pairs of male legs are visible from the thighs down,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- • 3 6 0
with some crosscuts to a man who earlier watched a porn
video watching them now. So heavily are the cuts
underscored by lighting which prolongs each cut to a
point where, less than simple editing, a cut becomes a
momentary blackout. That field of recollection and its
breaks alike are indeed (to return to the problems
outlined by Heath at the beginning of this chapter)
"something for someone" (Heath 1981 241). Looking for
Langston incorporates its fragments as figures,
leftovers, relics, from the losses of diaspora
histories.
I would argue that Julien's film makes spectators
become the collective repository of its memory. Cindy
Patton claims that technologically reproduced forms such
as music videos have become "an important site for the
struggle of control over popular memory" (1993 91).
Like the other forms of technologically reproduced
memories which she theorizes, Looking for Langston
appears to engage in "the bricolagelike combination of
kinetic moments of resistance, performances of
difference, perspectival visions from the margin, and
the mute recognitions of power effected against the self
that continues to form the comic-book story of subaltern
place," as Patton calls it (1993 91).28 Given the
popular dimension of such memories, the issue of the
film's status inside or outside an avant-garde seems to
------------------------------------------ 3'61
me to be moot: I agree entirely with Jose Arroyo who
proposes that the key feature of Looking for Langston is
its accessibility in the way it makes its history
available. Arroyo writes refreshingly, "Old classic
realist versus avant-garde debates ignore that there is
a whole generation who has grown up watching music
videos who have access to, and derive pleasure from,
many forms" ("Look Back and Talk Black: The Films of
Isaac Julien," Jump Cut 36 [1991]: .106-7).29
On occasion, Hemphill's poetry itself summons the
cinema in one of its forms most widely available to gay
and bisexual men, as that poetry gives the pornographic
apparatus a new meaning:
the cheap movie reel
rattles in its compartment
while the silent color movie
for a quarter
grinds around and around . . .
I moan as his mouth
swallows me.
This is the first sound
in this silent movie.
Then he moans
giving the movie
its dialogue ("Le Salon" Ceremonies 1992
151) .
While Hemphill reads these words in the film, a video
monitor plays in darkness on screen, only intermittently
visible, and the additional framing, too high or too
low, makes its nearly impossible to discern the video
images. Intercut, the camera shows a black man's face
in extreme closeup, either in profile, directly facing
----------------------------------------------------- 3*62
the camera, or with his head to the camera. From the
front, he looks directly into camera, giving this movie
— Looking for Langston— its dialogue of looks: this is
one of the many looks into camera that directly address
the spectator. The refusal of conventional eyeline
matches (which would connect the gaze of the man with
the images at which he looks) reproduces the ambivalence
that Julien and Mercer describe in their relation as
black gay men to pornography made by a primarily white
male industry in which black men are either absent or
objects of white fantasy: "We want to look but don't
always find the images we want to see1 1 ("True
Confessions" 1991 170, their emphasis).
Hemphill's poem, "If His Name Were Mandingo,"
sardonically comments on the ways in which black gay men
are visible frequently to white gays only through a
screen of racist stereotypes, stereotypes which the
speaker of the poem calls up only to cancel (as its use
of subjunctive already indicates).30 The "Mandingo" of
Hemphill's title alludes to Mandingo, both a novel and a
film from the 1970s, set in the antebellum South, in
which the black man functions as racial and sexual
stereotype.
He doesn't dance well, but you don't
notice.
He's only visible
in the dark
to you ("If His Name Were Mandingo,"
___________Ceremonies 1992 142) . ___________________________
— _ _ _ _ _ _ — 3 6 3 ----------
Punning on such white projections, the white man on
screen moves through projections of images from
Mapplethorpe's Black Book and Black Males, and as he
moves, the images are also projected onto his body. The
scene ends as a black man— for once a person and not a
photographic projection— enters and leaves the frame,
while his shadow remains briefly visible, repeating as
image the words of the poem.
The sequences I have just described would appear to
be entirely susceptible to the kind of reading that Kaja
Silverman offers when she draws on a version of Lacan to
distinguish "look" from "gaze," with the former a poor
stand-in for the unattainable latter (Male Subjectivity
at the Margins 1992 125-56). In a highly influential
analysis, Silverman claims that "look" stands to "gaze"
as "penis" stands to "phallus," that is, no one has
either "phallus" or "gaze," but both "gaze" and
"phallus" determine the subject in its lacks (1992 130).
No one subject has that "gaze," but all subjects are
subject— object— to it (130-1).31 The struggles of the
black male spectator in this particular scene to view
the porn video would recapitulate that unrealizable
desire for the gaze to which he would, in effect,
unavoidably be subject in the terms of Silverman's
analysis. Moreover, when Silverman argues that the gaze
and the screen determine subjectivity in cinema, and
---------— — — — 3 '6 ' 4
that subjects only become visible through the screen of
representation (which incorporate the stereotypes) that
makes up the Symbolic (1992 148-50), she may seem to
describe the scene in which the white man can only see
black men through veils of photographic projections
which simultaneously determine him, as they are
projected onto his body as well.
For Silverman, the putative political program of
both this theory and the films by Fassbinder from which
she derives it, contains the following lesson: "all
subjects, male or female, rely for their identity upon
the repertoire of culturally available images and upon a
gaze which, radically exceeding the libidinally
vulnerable look, is not theirs to deploy" (153). Yet
Silverman's statements, I submit, precisely do not fit
the sequences I have described. Overly generalized to a
point of commonplace, Silverman programmatic statement
is based on a forgetting of the historical conditions
under which social groups have access to "culturally
available images" and that not everything in that
"repertoire" is the equivalent of anything else. Her
endorsement of Fassbinder's "refusal to provide
affirmative representations of women, blacks, gays [by
which she means, lesbians and transgenders as well], or
the left" (1992 126) elides the precise circumstances of
the groups she so easily enumerates.32 Looking for
---------------------------------------— ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ■ 3*65
Langston offers a counter-model for commemorating
losses, the "historical hurt" and "historical traumas"
of which Silverman writes (53-4). "History," Hilton
Als's text reiterates in the film as voice-over by Hall,
"is the smiler with the knife under the cloak."3- * is
this then history-as-castration? Against the historical
realities of racist violence, that include lynchings and
castrations, Julien's film sets both memories and
promises for different futures to be found in the past.
Looking for Langston begins with its director,
Isaac Julien, in a coffin, in the place perhaps of
Langston Hughes, whose death is announced a little later
on the soundtrack in found radio footage. For Diawara,
Julien's taking "the place of the deceased poet in the
casket [denotes envy]" (1991 108). Yet more than simply
envy, this taking of the place of the dead figures a
profound mourning.34 Mourning and melancholia, we may
remember from Freud, are both processes in which the
subject who mourns incorporates and ingests voraciously
what has been lost.35 A great deal of feminist theory
of the last few years has taken Freud's model of
mourning and melancholia as the basis for an
understanding of the position of women within a social
order dominated by men.36 In a very complex recent
essay Homi Bhabha takes Freud's brief suggestion that
behind melancholia may well be a plaint against a
dominant figure ("Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern
Guilt," 1992 65), and suggests that after the violences
of colonialism, "a melancholia in revolt" may be "a
symbolic space of cultural survival" (65).37 He writes
of such revolutionary melancholia in prosopopeia:
It says: All these bits and pieces in
which my history is fragmented, my
culture piecemeal, my identifications
fantasmatic and displaced; these
splittings of wounds of my body are also
a form of revolt. And they speak a
terrible truth. In their ellipses and
silences they dismantle your authority:
the vanity of your mimetic narratives
and your monumental history; the
metaphoric emblems which you inscribe in
The Great Book of Life. My revolt is to
face the Life of literature and history
with the scraps and fragments that
constitute its double, which is living
as surviving, meaning as melancholia
(66) .
For Freud, melancholia is mourning that has no end, that
has forgotten what it has lost and can only go on losing
itself (1963 166 or 170). Bhabha's version of resistant
melancholia may seem to describe the strategies of
Looking for Langston, yet the film reminds us that there
is dancing at the wake and cruising in the cemetery, and
that the mournful stone angels, markers of memory as
death, have joyful angels, fleshly and fallen, as their
counterparts.
There is great cause for melancholia and much to
mourn in Looking for Langston. An intertitle at the
beginning of the film recalls Bruce Nugent, one of the
-------------------------------------------- — 3*67
longest surviving participants in the Harlem
Renaissance, a very open bisexual, and the intertitle
recalls his dates of birth and death: 1906-1987. That
same year, 1987 was also the year James Baldwin died.
In a piece written to commemorate Baldwin's death,
Joseph Beam recalled the significance that Baldwin's
writing had for him as a black gay man, activist and
writer:
James Baldwin lived as long as he was
supposed to live: sixty-three years is
the average life expectancy for black
men? white men live seven years longer.
He said much more than he was supposed
to say: twenty-three works published
since 1953. Not a bad legacy for
someone whom the Republic wished deaf
and dumb by age fourteen. Not a bad
legacy at all, brother (Brother to
Brother 1991 186).
The concluding intertitle of Looking for Langston is a
last "in memory," this time, for Beam himself: "In
Memory of Joseph Beam (1954-1988)." Beam, whose
anthology In the Life, was truly groundbreaking in
creating a discourse for black gay men, died in the year
Julien's film was made, of AIDS-related complications.
Looking for Langston memorializes countless black
men who have died, whether because of racist violence or
the political indifference and greed that has allowed
the AIDS crisis to happen. Thus, Hemphill writes in a
poem (not included in Julien's film):
------------______ 368
I die twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five . . .
("Cordon Negro," 1992 124).
But Looking for Langston looks to an end for mourning.
The opening and closing of the film is marked by the
appearance of Langston Hughes, in archival footage,
reading his poetry into the camera. The first time he
reads:
Sun' s a 1settin'
This is what I'm gonna sing
I dunno where to turn
I dunno where to go
Nobody cares about you when you sink so
low.
At his last appearance, he reads:
Sun's a'risin'
This is gonna be my song
Sun's a'risin'
This is gonna be my song
I could be blue
But I've been blue all night long.
Hughes takes off his glasses and walks out of the frame.
Even if the film itself is framed then, by the night of
mourning, it gives way to the temporality of another day
and a different beginning. Or, as Hemphill puts it in
his essay on the film, "Every closet is coming down—
none are sacred— even if our liberation is considered
profane, those closets are ancestral burial sites that
we must rightfully claim and exhume" (1991 183).
Looking for Langston transforms closet and burial site
into places where ancestors can be re-encountered and
claimed. __________________ _____
---------------------— — ------------------------— 369
"I'll Wait"
On the soundtrack of the film, Blackberri sings "The
Blues for Langston":
Langston, I'm singing these blues for
you
You loved this music
God knows we love this music too
Whatever happened to the dream deferred
Whatever happened to the dream deferred
We still find power in your words.
I wander as you wandered
And I see how far you've come.
Though history's forgotten angel
Your name will not be one
The life that you've hidden
One you thought was forbidden
We're seeking what truth has been lost
to know you.
Citing Hughes's line, "whatever happened to the dream
deferred," as well as alluding to Hughes's
autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander. Blackberri invokes
Hughes as precursor and ancestor in whose footsteps he
follows. But with a twist of signification, in its
context in the film, the "dream deferred" now includes
the identities and desires of black gay men as well.
That dream comes almost to the point of no longer
being deferred in the dream sequence in the film: Alex,
who bears something of a likeness to Hughes, and who
stands in for Hughes, as central protagonist, seeks
Beauty in a dreamscape. The sequence utilizes a text by
Bruce Nugent, "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade," as its voice
over narration. Nugent's text, in its turn, has a dream
---------------------------------------- “ — 370
at its center, a dream in which its protagonist, Alex,
finds "one can love two at the same," and that he can
love and desire both Melva, a woman, and Beauty, a man
(FireM. 39). Garber claims that "Smoke, Lilies, and
Jade" "became the first published essay on homosexuality
by an African-American" (1989 330); published in
November 1926, Nugent's text, a novel that was never
completed, is possibly one of the most open declarations
of homo-and bisexual love in English in the first
quarter of the twentieth century.38 At the time of its
publication, the eminent Harlem literary figure Alain
Locke commented rather sourly that "Whitman would have
been a better point of support than a left-wing pivoting
on Wilde and Beardsley" (Garber 330): an intriguing
invocation of a "proper" national literary tradition for
homoeroticism rather than the outlandish Beardsley or
Wilde.39
By including Nugent's text, Looking for Langston
keeps Beauty's promise, "I'll wait," and keeps it open.
In the dream scene, both Beauty and Alex look directly
into the camera in frontal closeup. Throughout the
film, similar looks occur: at the bar, Alex looks into
the camera; Alex and Beauty exchange looks that are,
effectively, looks into camera; the man who watches the
video is shot in extreme closeup so that he, too, looks
into camera; even the archival footage of Hughes is set
-----_____ 371
up in such a way that he looks directly into the camera.
It is significant, then, that when Beauty makes his
promise, the camera moves from an extreme closeup of his
eyes as he gazes into the camera downwards to his mouth
as he speaks the words. Writing of the look into camera
in a number of Julien's films, Arroyo describes "the
device of looking back' at the audience as a cinematic
form of 'talking back'" (1991 104), and he claims that
by "looking back" at their spectators, "the figures in
the frame .... are aggressive objects who gain
subjectivity through the matching of their gaze to that
of the audience" (104). Arroyo connects the
significance of this "looking back" with the
archaeological or historical potential of "looking back"
in Looking for Langston (104).40 Such a look back is
at the same time a metaleptic look forward into the past
as possibility.
A propos of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Bhabha
describes a "projective past" as a temporality that
"introduces into the narratives of identity and
community a necessary split between the time of
utterance and the space of memory" ("Freedom's Basis in
the Indeterminate," October 61 1992: 57). Looking for
Langston recovers Beauty's promise from the fragments of
a 192 6 text, and makes it into just such a "projective
---------— — 372
past." Its promise, its performative— "I'll wait"—
that, despite racism and homophobia, black men can love
black men, offers the promise of a past that can only be
renewed.
373-
Notes
l.See Heath "Narrative Space," Questions of Cinema
1981 19-75, for a highly influential theorization of
space in film. Heath quotes Snow, the avant-garde
filmmaker, 19 and 24.
2.Heath's essay "On Suture" has been as highly
influential as "Narrative Space." Towards the end of
"On Suture" Heath calls for a reckoning with the subject
of ideology in precisely historical terms: "A theory of
ideology must then begin not from the subject but as an
account of suturing effects, the effecting of the join
of the subject in structures of meaning; which account
would thus involve an attention to the whole history of
the subject, the interminable movement of that history,
and not its simple equation with ideology," "On Suture,"
Questions of Cinema 1981 106-7.
I agree with Heath on the necessity for an account
of subjectivities in their multiple relations to effects
of meaning in historically concrete situations: I am
less sure, however, that the terms in which Heath poses
the issue here— "the whole history of the subject, the
interminable movement of that history"— lend themselves
very readily to such an analysis. As this chapter will
show, there are very real differences between my sense
of film spectatorships as always plural and always in
material situations and Heath's rather detached vision
of the "interminable movement of history" as effects of
suturing "the subject" (a subject? any subject? every
subject?).
Kaja Silverman presents an articulation of "suture"
within the terms of the feminist film theory of the late
1970s. After a consideration of how women often provide
the grounds for the consolidation of male mastery and
identity in films such as Lola Montes and Gilda, she
writes: "Suture can be understood as the process whereby
the inadequacy of the subject's position is exposed in
order to facilitate (i. e., create the desire for) new
insertions into a cultural discourse which promises to
make good that lack. Since the promised compensation
involves an ever greater subordination to already
existing scenarios, the viewing subject's position is a
supremely passive one, a fact which is carefully
concealed through cinematic sleight-of-hand" (The
Subject of Semiotics 1983; rpt. in Narrative. Apparatus.
Ideology 1986 234). While Silverman explicitly takes
gender into account, her version of suture, like
Heath's, implies a kind of determinism of the apparatus,
as if things cannot but be this way as long as
representation itself is in place. See also my analysis
374
of the reproduction of film and film theories in Chapter
One.
3.The issue here is Heath’s dismissal of Michel
Foucault's call for a "popular memory" in film, and the
debates that took place in Cahiers du cinema over
Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter. It seems strange
— symptomatic perhaps— that Heath's discussion of the
debate over popular memory should eliminate the exact
historical terms of the debate, namely the rise of la
mode retro as a kind of false communal memory, and the
appearance of la mode retro at a specific historic
juncture as the "official" history of French resistance
in World War II gets revised. See, in particular,
"Entretien avec Michel Foucault," Cahiers du cinema 251-
2 (July-August 1974): 5-15. I discuss the debate over
la mode retro in Chapter One, when dealing with British
television costume drama.
More recently, Cindy Patton has taken issue with
Foucault's nostalgia for a popular memory untainted, as
it were, by the apparatuses of cinema and "mass
communication's effect of networking memories that
conform to the failing dominant narratives," Embodying
Subaltern Memory 1993 91.
4.Of course, these questions have posed themselves
quite forcefully in all the films I discuss in Queer
Pasts Now.
5."Montage" as a key tactic of modernism may also
be considered here. For a full discussion of the Harlem
Renaissance and modernism, see Houston Baker, Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1987). See also Judith Williamson, "Two Kinds of
Otherness: Black Film and the Avant-Garde," "The Last
Special' Issue On Race?" Screen 29.4 (1988): 106-12.
Williams is hostile towards the use of what she
perceives to be avant-garde, modernist strategies in the
work of filmmakers such as Isaac Julien. Manthia
Diawara takes up the questions of modernism, the avant-
garde, and race as the "other" of the avant-garde in
Julien's Looking for Lanaston. "The Absent One: The
Avant-Garde and the Black Imaginary in Looking for
Langston." Wide Angle 13.3 (October 1991): 103.
6.Jean-Louis Baudry seizes on Freud's analogy
between the unconscious and an optical instrument such
as a "microscope" or a "camera" at the end of The
Interpretation of Dreams. "Ideological Effects of the
Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Jean Andrews
and Bertrand Augst, Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology 286.
See also Christian Metz ,_.l'The_Imaginary_Signifier.,1!_____
-------------— 375
Narrative. Apparatus, Ideology on "the other scene,"
249.
7.Manthia Diawara writes of "how aspects of a
dominant film can be read differently once the
alternative readings of Afro-American spectators are
taken into account," and he goes on to say that "the
black spectator's reluctance to identify with the
dominant reading of this archetypal Hollywood film also
underpins the protest elicited by a film as recent as
Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple [1986]," "Black
Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and
Resistance," Screen 29.4 (1988): 67. Jane Gaines has
criticized the idealist underpinnings of psychoanalytic
film theory in the United States and the concomitant
inability of that theory to deal with the specificity of
race as a social determined and determining factor in
spectatorships, "White Privilege and Looking Relations:
Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory," Issues in
Feminist Film Theory 1990 197-214. Mary Ann Doane seems
intent on addressing Gaines, without necessarily saying
so directly, when she provides a detailed analysis of
blackness and whiteness as signs in D. W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation (1915), in "Dark Continents:
Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," Femmes Fatales:
Feminism. Film Theory. Psychoanalysis 1991 227-32.
8.Marcos Becguer writes of the practice of the
gesture of snapping among black gay men as "a critical
response to dominant culture," in "Snap!thology and
Other Discursive Practices in Tongues Untied." Wide
Angle 13.2 (April 1991): 9; here, of course, I am being
somewhat anachronistic, as well as anticipating Julien's
relation to dominant cinema.
9.James A. Snead claims that "the characteristic
call and response' element in black culture . . .
[elicits] the general participation of the group at
random . . . ," and hence makes for a communal
collective culture that is the opposite of a Western
notion of high culture, "Repetition as a Figure of Black
Culture," Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures 1990 221. It is possible to see the pattern of
response in the poem as a parody of that call-and-
response structure, which both undermines an
identification with the film and establishes a
connection between spectators. Snead's generalizations
are, however, somewhat problematic, and I would hesitate
to extend his point too far, since that runs the risk of
hypostazing an essential set of structures to what he
calls "black culture." Snead's essay,__which_seems_to___
376
trace the history of how the West has come to understand
itself against a structure of temporality marked by
repetition and "cuts," allows both a more complicated
reading and a simplified and unproductive
essentialization.
10.See Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes; An
Introduction to the Poetry 1973 69, for further
discussion.
11.Part of the poem's ambiguity has to do with its
switch from an opposition between feminine men (the
"fairies") and masculine men (the "detectives"), who can
then be read as the antithesis of "fairies," in their
firm gendering as straight men. The shift to an
opposition, that turns out to be asymmetrical with
regards to the previous one, between "police lady" and
"lesbian," turns out to trouble the hetero/homosexual
opposition itself. The text plays between gender and
sexuality, and leaves the gender and sexuality of the
speaker or speakers uncertain— with the presumption that
such unmarked gender and sexuality signify male
heterosexuality, although this, in "Cafe: 3 A.M.," is by
no means certain.
12.D. A. Miller extends Foucault's examination of
how the policing of society constructs a seemingly self
enclosed sphere of deviance that shuts both "criminals"
and "agents of the law" off from what is then defined by
default as "normalcy." Miller's analysis is useful in
this instance. See Miller, The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1988). Clearly,
Sedgwick's "epistemology of the closet" is also at work
here.
13.The designation of Julien, and indeed, other
cultural producers such as Hilton Als, Essex Hemphill,
and Joseph Beam as "black gay men" should be noted and
explained here. Joseph Beam's ground-breaking
anthology, In the Life: A Black Gav Anthology (Boston:
Alyson, 1986) established the use of "Black gay" as a
term of self-description, with "Black" taking priority
in sequence over "gay": thus, disco diva Sylvester
presents himself as "being first black and then gay" in
the foreword to Beam's anthology. This practice of
naming acknowledges an allegiance to black communities
first and foremost, with race as a prior category of
identification. "Gay blacks," in contrast, are defined
as "people who identify first as being gay and who
usually live outside the closet in predominantly white
gay communities," according to Max C. Smith, "By the
Year 2000." In the Life 226. "Black1 '_is_by_no_means____
377
given as a transparent or neutral term, either, and
involves the further question of whether or not it
should be written with a capital letter (as Beam does,
for example). For more on the contest over "Blackness”
and "blackness," see Gina Dent, editor's note, Black
Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay P, 1992). I have followed
the practice of writing "black" and "gay" with lower
case letters.
Essex Hemphill's anthology, Brother to Brother: New
Writings bv Black Gay Men (Boston: Alyson, 1991)
continues the usage of "black gay." Given the
importance of naming in social and sexual identities
discussed at some length in my introduction, I have used
"black gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender" in this chapter
rather than "queer." Recently, however, Julien has
himself taken up the signifier "queerness": speaking of
Looking for Langston, he says, "I wanted to redress the
debate around race and representation and the queerness
in blackness from a diasporic perspective," "Black Is,
Black Ain't: Notes on De-Essentializing Black
Identities," Black Popular Culture 258. A little later,
Julien also talks directly of "Langston Hughes's
queerness," 259. In the same anthology, Marlon Riggs
talks of himself in angrily empowering terms as "this
queer, this queen, this radical black sissy-fag,"
"Unleash the Queen," Black Popular Culture 99.
14.Given Julien's awareness of film theory in its
Screen form, his use of "imaginary" here has more than
the ordinary sense of "made up" or "fictional"? it also
alludes to Jacques Lacan's notion of the "imaginary."
Compare, for example, Metz's assertion that "what is
characteristic of the cinema is not the imaginary that
it may happen to represent but the imaginary that it is
from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a
signifier . . . ," "The Imaginary Signifier," 249. My
argument is that a film like Looking for Langston
specifies that imaginary as representation for a
particular, historically situated subject, just as it
specifies Heath's version of representation.
15.Julien's stress on the imaginary dimensions of
this "looking for Langston" recalls the search for
Shakespeare or Mr. W. H. in Wilde and Jarman, or the
quest for a queer Marlowe, discussed in previous
chapters.
16.Arnold Rampersad writes, "To some people, that
[Hughes] was aging, unmarried, and often in the company
of various handsome, sensitive, artistic young men,
meant that he was a homosexual," The Life of Langston
Hughes. 2: 1941-1967 I Dream a World 19.88-3.35______ _____
378
Rampersad lists a number of such assumptions about
Hughes, including one comment, "Ain't nothing over there
but a fat old homosexual!," 3 35. Another unnamed source
is quoted as saying, "Around the streets of Harlem in
the sixties . . . everyone knew that Langston Hughes was
gay. We just took it as granted, as a fact. He was
gay, and there was no two ways about it," 3 35.
Rampersad goes on to comment on the "almost fanatical
discretion" that Hughes showed throughout his life, and
he relates that to Hughes's desire to preserve his
"position as the most admired and beloved poet of his
race," 336. Intriguingly, Rampersad links Hughes's
reputation as a "homosexual" to his reputation as a
communist, 337: for Rampersad, both reputations were
"based almost exclusively on rumor and suspicion," 336.
The connection between sexual and political dissidence,
as dual products of rumor, seems telling. Rampersad,
however, is adamant that whatever the truth of the
matter may have been, Hughes "did not want to be
considered gay," 337.
17."The Absent One" is a term Diawara takes from
the film theory of Jean-Pierre Oudart, in which the
spectator's identification with the images on the
screen, and concomitant suturing into a position of
meaning, is based on an assumption of the "Absent One"
whose imagined position "seems to determine the images
on the screen and to be determined by them," Diawara
1991 104.
18.Here Looking for Langston plays off the
generational narratives, or rather, generation as
narrative, that I discuss via Guy Hocquenghem and Freud
in Chapter One.
19.See also Catherine Saalfield, "Overstepping the
Bounds of Propriety: Film Offends Langston Hughes
Estate," The Independent 13.1 (1990): 5-8.
20.Diawara comments that this scene is "metafilmic
because it thematizes the cinematic reconstruction of a
dream," 1991 103. He also relates the scene to similar
ones in surrealist films such as Un chien andalou and
Sang d'un poete in which a character is "led, without
resistance, to a destination and confronted with the
object of his most profound desire" 103. For Diawara,
the dream "[defamiliarizes] . . . the classical theme of
the boy meeting the most beautiful girl in the
wilderness" 103. Diawara misses the literary pretext of
this scene, however, and which I discuss in detail
later.
-------- ------------------------ ' 379
21.See Robert Mapplethorpe, The Black Book (New
York: St. Martin's P, 1988) and Black Males (Amsterdam:
Gallerie Jurka, 1982). A great deal has been written on
the issues of race involved in Mapplethorpe's
photographs of black men. In their essay, "True
Confessions: A Discourse on Images of Black Male
Sexuality," Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer discuss how
Mapplethorpe "appropriates the conventions of porn's
racialized codes of representation"? however, this
appropriation only secures rather than displaces racism,
for "by abstracting its stereotypes into art,' he makes
racism's phantasms of desire respectable," Brother to
Brother 1991 169. The scenes in Looking for Langston
continue this critique of Mapplethorpe.
Essex Hemphill describes attacks on his public
criticisms of the racism of Mapplethorpe's images of
black men in "Miss Emily's Grandson Won't Hush His
Mouth," Ceremonies 1992 47-9. His poem, "Object
Lessons," extends his analysis of objectification in the
images of black men from the position of the subject of
such images, Ceremonies 69-70. Thomas Yingling
discusses Mapplethorpe's work after Mapplethorpe's death
of AIDS-related causes, the censorship of that work by
Jesse Helms's attacks, among others, and the National
Endowment for the Arts debacle: see Yingling, "How the
Eye Is Caste: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Limits of
Controversy," Discourse 12.2 (1990): 3-28. In "Skin
Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic
Imaginary," Kobena Mercer revises his earlier criticisms
of Mapplethorpe in a way that tries to make his position
irrecuperable for a homophobic reading of Mapplethorpe,
and which takes the significance of Mapplethorpe's
death into account, How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video
1991 169-210. See also Mercer, "Imagining the Black
Man's Sex," Photographv/Politics. ed. Pat Holland, Jo
Spence, and Simon Watney (London: Commedia/Methuen,
1987): 61-9.
22.Julien comments, in an interview with Bell
Hooks, that in Looking for Langston "I really wanted the
black male body to be the site of pleasure," "States of
Desire," Diary of a Young Soul Rebel 128.
23.Eric Garber provides a list of blues songs that
speak to or about lesbian, bisexual, gay male or
transgender experience; he notes that Hanna's "Freakish
Blues" is "explicit about potential sexual fluidity,"
1989 320, and he observes that the "blues reflected a
culture that accepted sexuality, including homosexual
behavior and identities, as a natural part of life,"
32 0. Chris Albertson writes about "Lesbianism in the
Life of Bessie Smith," in Gav American History; Lesbians
----------- — — ------ 380
and Gav men in the U.S.A.. ed. Jonathan Katz (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976) 76-82. See also the entry,
"1928, June: Ma Rainey: Prove It On Me Blues,'" in
Jonathan Katz, Gav/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper and
Row, 1983) 442-4. Lilian Faderman discusses both the
ways in which white lesbians and bisexual women,
including Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Crawford, used
Harlem as a space in which to "slum" and explore their
own sexualities, but Faderman also provides a detailed
overview of black lesbian and bisexual figures such as
Bessie Smith, A'Lelia Walker and Ma Rainey, "White
Slumming' in Harlem" and "Black Lesbians in Harlem" in
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life
in Twentieth-Centurv America (New York: Columbia, 1991)
69-79.
24.Diawara also comments on the use of blues to
"[narrativize] suffering, deferral of freedom for Black
Gays, abandonment and deception," 107.
25.On the subject of the soundtrack, Pascal
Bonitzer argues that there are "at least two types of
voice-off" in the cinema which in their turn "refer to
at least two types of space-off": in one the voice is
"homogeneous" (Bonitzer's term) with the "scenographic
lure offered by the filmic image"; in the other, the
voice is "inscribed in a space which is not in proper
interaction with (not homogeneous) with that of the
image," "The Silences of the Voice (A prooos of Mai 68
by Gudie Lawaetz)," trans. Philip Rosen and Marcia
Butzel, Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology 32 3. The first
is what is usually termed voice-over narration that
proceeds in some way from the diegesis, as found in
narrative film, the second is voice-over commentary of
the kind most commonly reserved for documentaries.
Bonitzer ends by affirming a kind of Barthesian grain of
the voice (or of the voiceover, rather): "What one hears
. . . is something like the body of the voice— and its
body is its death to meaning," 328.
Mary Anne Doane expresses some very useful cautions
about Bonitzer's simple celebration of body-as-voice in
the cinema, in particular when that body-voice is
gendered as female: "... it would seem unwise to base
any politics of the voice solely on an erotics. The
value of thinking the deployment of the voice in cinema
by means of its relation to the body (that of the
character, that of the spectator) lies in an
understanding of the cinema, from the perspective of a
topology, as a series of spaces including that of the
spectator— spaces which are often hierarchized or
masked, one by the other, in the service of a
representational illusion." "The Voice in the Cinema__
------------- 381
Narrative. Apparatus. Ideology 3 46-7. Kaja Silverman's
work in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema provides a very detailed
account of "the sonic vraisemblable" as it is "sexually
differentiated," although Silverman's focus is on the
gendering of that voice as female, 45. At stake in
Looking for Langston is less an historically
recoverable sonic vraisemblable than the historic and
cultural capital to be made of voices from the past. I
have discussed soundtrack/image track relations to some
extent in Chapter One, Part Two.
2 6.See Bad Object-Choices, introduction, How Do I
Look? Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay P, 1991) 17-9,
for a discussion. Julien himself comments on this in
"Black Is, Black Ain't," Black Popular Culture 1992 258-
9.
27.Snead makes the assertion that black culture is
based on both repetition and cut: "In black culture,
repetition means that the thing circulates .... [it]
is 'there for you to pick up when you come back to get
it.' If there is a goal . . . in such a culture, it is
always deferred; it continually 'cuts' back to the start
. . . ," "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture" 1990
22 0. Again, Snead is making points about the large
teleology of what has constructed itself as white
Western culture, and how that construction has
marginalized other forms and patterns of meaning, but in
a scheme that is as generalized as Snead's, essentialism
and a worrying lack of specificity are real risks.
28.It is interesting that Patton should formulate
this discussion as part of Madonna's Vogue and the
appropriation of vogueing, which she distinguishes from
Looking for Langston. While the Vogue video and
Julien's film are both politically and culturally
distinct artifacts, Patton's description applies to
Julien's film as well.
29.Arroyo is taking issue with Judith Williamson's
position that Julien's films are inaccessible to a wider
audience, "Two Kinds of Otherness: Black Film and the
Avant-Garde," Screen 4.29 (1988): 106-13. Diawara
implicitly also reads Looking for Langston as part of an
avant-garde.
30.Homi Bhabha deals with the racial stereotype as
an integral part of colonial discourse in "The Other
Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse
of Colonialism," Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell,-Ferguson Martha_____
382
Gever, Trinh Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT, 1990) 71-88.
31.1 discuss this distinction at the end of my
analysis of Edward II as well.
32.Consider her peculiar analysis of "the
vulnerability of the Gastarbeiter" (1992 154) in Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul insofar as Fassbinder "refuses to
treat the Arab guest worker differently from his white
male protagonists ..." (154). She adds in celebratoty
tones, "Fassbinder is unwilling even for a moment to
countenance the notion that a black or third world man
operates out of an existential plenitude or a self-
sufficiency denied to the first world white man or that
such a figure is any less riven by anxiety or desire"
(154) and that Fassbinder refuses to "forego his assault
on the phallus" in the figure of Ali (154). Silverman's
phrasing is, to say the least, unfortunate. Her voiding
of social categories and historical specificities into
the "phallus" does Fassbinder a disservice, and
resonates far beyond Silverman's analysis.
33.This is a citation from Chaucer's "Knight's
Tale," I 1999, Canterbury Tales, ed. John H. Fisher (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977) 41.
34.Both Diawara and Henry Louis Gates recognize the
importance of mourning to Looking for Langston. Diawara
1991 108 and Gates 1992 7.
35.See Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia,"
General Psychological Theory, trans. Joan Riviere (New
York: Collier-Macmillan, 1963) 164-79, especially
171-3.
36.This has usually involved an attempt to critique
rather than reinforce psychoanalysis. See Luce
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman 66-73, Naomi
Schor, "Eugenie Grandet: Mirrors and Melancholia,"
Breaking the Chain: Women. Theory, and French Realist
Fiction. 90-107, Silverman's own The Acoustic Mirror
141-66, and Juliana Schiesari, "The Gendering of Freud's
'Mourning and Melancholia,'" ms., as well as Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
the Subject 57-78.
37.Bhabha argues that the incorporation of loss by
the melancholiac offers the subaltern or colonized
subject of way ingesting the Master, but in pieces, so
that the Master's power is broken up— "an act of
'disincorporating' the authority of the Master." (-65)_,___
383
writes Bhabha. He derives his argument not only from
Freud but from Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison's Beloved
(1987), and he describes it as a lesson of "violent
ingestion or incorporation1" (66). In the discussion
that follows, Bhabha has to defend himself against
accusations of "an aestheticization of the fragment"
(68). His argument is not without certain problems
evidently, but it does speak to the strategies of
Julien's film.
38.For more on Nugent, see DLB 51 (213-221),
Charles Michael Smith, "Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the
Harlem Renaissance," In the Life 209-20, and the entry
under his name in The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical
Dictionary for the Era, ed. Bruce Kellner (Westport:
Greenwood, 1984) 269. Nugent features, famously, as the
character Paul Arbian in Wallace Thurman's novel Infants
of the Soring. There, Arbian tells a dream that is very
similar to the one narrated in "Smoke, Lilies and Jade,"
and ends with a declaration of his sexual desire for
both men and women, Infants of the Soring (Boston:
Northeastern U P, 1992) 45-7. Thurman's novel itself
ends with Arbian's suicide, which signals the end of
black creativity in Harlem. The suicide itself is as
much an extreme, dandaical gesture of self-promotion for
Arbian's unpublished novel as a decision to end his own
life. He slits his wrists in a bathtub, leaving the
manuscript of his novel scattered around him, but
neglects to turn off the taps of the tub so that the
water makes his writings illegible, 282-4. Thurman, who
was bisexual himself, uses the Arbian figure to narrate,
precisely, a promise that cannot be kept.
39.1s this the long shadow of Wilde?
40.Kobena Mercer writes, "through his dialogic
textual strategy, Julien overturns this double-bind [of
black men as objects rather than subjects of
representation] as the black subject 'looks back’ to ask
the audience who or what they are looking for," "Skin
Head Sex Thing," How Do I Look? 200, see also 198-201.
Chapter-Five: "The Ange1 of“History/Where DoesShe 384
Reside?”: Sheila McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing Things.
Jean Carlomusto's L Is For the Way You Look, and Barbara
Hammer's Nitrate Kisses
In Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig's Brouillon pour une
dictionnaire des amantes (Notes for a dictionary of
women lovers), the entry for "Lesbos" reads as follows:
LESBOS
Lesbos is a particular place in
everyone's opinion. Some women say
that only Lesbians frequent Lesbos.
Others are of the opinion that all
women lovers go there some day or
another. The bearers of fables say
that in addition, they too go to
Lesbos (Wittig and Zeig 1976 154, my
translation).
Lesbos, then, is given as a definite site, even though
that may only be a matter of women's "opinion." The
more immediate issue is which women do— or can— inhabit
Lesbos: whether that be only Lesbians as true citizens
of Lesbos, or all women lovers, or the tellers of tales
(who may be fabricating all of this, their own visits to
Lesbos, as well as the place itself.)
The alphabetically earlier entry for "Gomorrah"
reads:
GOMORRAH
Before having been destroyed by fire,
by sulphur, before having been changed
into statues of salt, the lesbians of
Gomorrah always preserved harmony in
their city. That city, one of the
largest ever to have been built,
___ 385
appears sometimes, it is said, when
the sun is especially bright, with its
golden roofs and the white marbles of
its terraces, at the bottom of the sea
(108).
Gomorrah, unlike Lesbos, no longer exists. One of the
largest city the world has ever known now appears as a
placeless rumor ("it is said," in the French, "on dit")
and a mirage. But even after its destruction, the city
persists, still inverted, now upside-down in the water
of the sea, instead of fire from the heavens, to be
glimpsed or imagined in all its legendary splendor only
when certain circumstances permit.
In their specificity as women lovers— "les amantes"
— the addressees of Wittig and Zeig's "notes," the two
fables about sister cities pose still more questions
about returns, about backward looks, to the past and to
fictions of origins, at the end of Queer Pasts Now.
What can lesbian or bisexual women gain from looking
back at their histories/herstories, fabricated or
otherwise? Looking back at Gomorrah was fatal, was to
risk turning into a pillar of salt, but still Gomorrah
allures, like a fata morgana, from the depths of the
ocean, where now perhaps it can be viewed with impunity,
if only on occasion. While Lesbos may be no less of a
fiction than Gomorrah, it does exist somewhere, and that
existence brings with it more practical problems: who
---------- _ _ _ _ _ 386
can go there? Who has citizenship or a right to visit
or even make it up?
Indeed, Lesbos and Gomorrah— fictive entities that
nevertheless locate women's passions, desires and
identities in reality— may represent the wish for
lesbian specificities, against the ambiguous positions
that lesbians and bisexual women occupy within other
designations such as "queer." (Wittig and Zeig
disregard that other city of the plain, Sodom, and thus
revise the tradition of linking Gomorrah with a
counterpart that has come to be gendered as a
male/female pairing.1) There have been considerable
inequities between the cultural productions of men, and
their stakes in queer histories to be disclosed or
invented, and those of women. That inequity,
unfortunately, Queer Pasts Now both reflects and
reluctantly repeats.2
The new "queer cinema" in the United States and in
Britain has been a site where men have worked primarily;
women continue to experience sexist exclusions and
difficulties of access to film production (which makes
the cinema of Ulrike Ottinger such an extraordinary
accomplishment).3 Even when a critic like B. Ruby Rich
hails the "queer sensation" of "new gay cinema" (as she
calls it), she draws attention to the relative scarcity
of corresponding lesbian (self-)representation.4 In
---------------------- 387
another register of "queer" deployment, the disbanding
of major Queer Nation chapters in the United States,
with the seeming end of that one particular political
mobilization of "queer," has had to do, amongst many
other reasons, with the difficulties of sustaining
coalitions between men and women.5 The collapse of
Queer Nation has brought about new activism specifically
for lesbian and bisexual women, such as the Lesbian
Avengers in New York and Puss'n'Boots in Los Angeles.6
How to see Gomorrah? Who lives in Lesbos? Wittig
and Zeig's questions resonate for Queer Pasts Now. The
two cities may be read as allegories of the ambiguous
conditions of lesbian visibility as those have been
understood by women involved in political struggles over
lesbian identity to determine those struggles, whether
for good or ill.7 As allegories of place and
visibility, Lesbos and Gomorrah can also be read in the
context of various accounts by feminist and lesbian film
theorists of the elusive specificity of lesbian
spectatorship in cinema. Thus, for Teresa de Lauretis,
"visibility," with all its obscurities, circumscribes
the situation of lesbian spectatorship in the cinema, as
even the title of her recent essay, "Film and the
Visible," announces. "Subjective vision and social
visibility, being and passing, representation and
spectatorship— the conditions of the visible, what can
388
be seen, and eroticized, and on what scene," all these,
de Lauretis tells us, are at stake in lesbian
representations in film ("Film and the Visible," How Do
I Look? 1991 223).
For de Lauretis, lesbian representation as such is
always just on the point of coming out into sight or
disappearing. A femme lesbian "would be either passing
lesbian or passing straight, her (homo)sexuality being
in the last instance what can not be seen," as she puts
it in an earlier essay that tries to negotiate the
appearance of lesbianism either on male terms or not at
all ("Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation"
1988 177). "Passing" one way or the other, a lesbian's
sexuality emphatically "can not be seen," unless she
appears "as or with a lesbian in male body drag,"
according to de Lauretis (1988 177).
Demands for the visibility of lesbian and bisexual
women's identities and desires may be represented by
Lesbos and Gomorrah, which, while they have much in
common, also represent two different places or two
different answers to such demands. Like de Lauretis,
but perhaps even more strongly, Judith Roof sees lesbian
representation as a disappearing act, there and not
there, a Gomorrah to be seen only when it is about to
vanish. "Lesbian sexuality, like images of beauty and
desire . . . sustains desire by giving us only the
389
shadow, the hint of a kiss almost expressed and
expressed in its almost-expressedness," writes Roof
("View to a Thrill," A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian
Sexuality and Representation 1991 88). She values a
film like I've Heard the Mermaids Singing precisely
because it provides an "other measure of desire [which]
is a desire for desire, not just a teasing titillation,
but a desire enacted by the perpetual interplay of
desire and lack" (89). Gomorrah also shadows Sue-Ellen
Case's argument for the lesbian, both in film and in
culture, as vampire without reflection: "You can still
only see her . . . when you don't" ("Tracking the
Vampire," 1991 17). The lesbian shows up as another
shady creature in Patricia White's analysis when she
tracks the "ghostly presence of lesbianism in classical
Hollywood cinema on the one hand, and in feminist film
theory on the other" ("Female Spectator, Lesbian
Specter: The Haunting." Inside/Out 1991 142).
While attitudes and positions can by no means be
neatly and categorically opposed, there are also
theorists of lesbian spectatorship who take it as a
reality rather than a mirage— like Lesbos in Wittig and
Zeig's dictionary, and not Gomorrah. Chris Straayer in
"Personal Best: Lesbian/Feminist Audience" (Jump Cut 27
[1984]: 4-8), Elizabeth Ellsworth in "Illicit Pleasures:
Feminist Spectators and Personal Best." (in Erens,
----------------- 290
Issues in Feminist Film Criticism 1990 183-96), Jackie
Stacey, "Desperately Seeking Difference" (Screen 28.1
[1987]: 48-61), Patricia White in "Madame X of the China
Seas" (Screen 28.4 [1987]: 80-95), Judith Mayne in
"Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship"
(How Do I Look? 1991 103-144), all take for granted that
lesbian spectatorships do exist and the theoretical
issue is how to describe such spectatorships in concrete
terms. This is not, however, to imply that these
writers have simple or similar answers to the question
of who sees and visits Lesbos and how.8 For Valerie
Traub, however ambiguous it may be, and while still in
quotation marks, nevertheless, "'lesbian' desire is
available, reproducible, and, despite efforts to deny
it, everywhere" ("The Ambiguities of Lesbian' Viewing
Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of Black Widow." Body
Guards 1991 325). The ambivalences of lesbian
spectatorships and indeed identities lead to double and
contradictory strategies and answers.9 Gomorrah and
Lesbos may blur into one another, their borders
indistinguishable.
In one of the most thorough-going analyses of
lesbian representation and lesbian spectatorship to
date, De Lauretis attempts to answer the question of
visibility and seeing, "How do I look?," which itself
has a potential for a double understanding ("how do I
_____
appear?" and/or "how do I see?"). De Lauretis responds
to the potential duplicity of "How do I look?" with a
kind of double entendre; "... it takes two women, not
one, to make a lesbian" ("Film and the Visible," How Do
I Look? 1991 232; she repeats it at the end of her
essay, 264). She arrives at this conclusion via a
consideration of how the "field of fantasy" may
constitute a lesbian spectator insofar as she shares
that fantasy with another woman.10 Again, there are
two; two women, two ways of responding to "How do I
look?," just as there are two cities for lesbian
mythology.
The film under consideration in de Lauretis's
analysis is Sheila McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing
Things (1987), a film which has been especially enabling
for de Lauretis's project of the last few years to
specify lesbian spectatorship within a larger context of
feminist theoretical film inquiry. Its title alone
poses the terms of spectatorship and fantasy, illusion
and looking, that have shaped the terms of inquiry into
lesbian representation in cinema. Indeed, "Film and the
Visible" is only the most recent of de Lauretis's
returns to She Must Be Seeing Things.11 Since this film
stages a meta-filmic encounter with lesbian history as
part of its mise-en-scene by setting the production of a
film about a passing woman in seventeenth-century Spain
----------------------------------------------------------------- 292
in the context of a contemporary lesbian relationship,
it may provide, especially via de Lauretis's readings of
it, a particularly dense text for a consideration of
lesbian and bisexual women in relation to a fiction of
history.
In one of her first engagements with She Must Be
Seeing Things. "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian
Representation," de Lauretis follows yet another doubled
trajectory as she traces the intrications of what she
calls "hommosexuality"12 with "homosexuality," and the
potential space for lesbians opened in the paradoxes and
duplicities of and between those terms— whether lesbians
are to have a sexuality defined in male terms (and thus
no sexuality outside of "sexual indifference") or a
gender-specific sexuality (which may, in turn, take them
back into the "sexual indifference" of heterosexuality).
How can the lesbian become visible as neither a man
nor a straight woman? Initially, de Lauretis brackets
lesbians with gay men against heterosexuality, but the
distinctions soon become contested. She writes:
In taking up [Irigaray's] distinction
between homo—sexuality (or homo
sexuality) and "hommosexuality" (or
"hom(m)osexuality"), I want to remark
the conceptual distance between the
former term, by which I mean lesbian (or
gay) sexuality, and the diacritically
marked hommo-sexuality, which is the
term of sexual indifference, the term
(in fact) of heterosexuality; I want to
remark both the incommensurable distance
_________betw,een__them _and _the ^conceptua 1__________________
_ 393
ambiguity that is conveyed by the two
almost identical acoustic images.
Another paradox— or is it perhaps the
same? (1988 156).
Tellingly, de Lauretis*s route begins with Sodom— the
invocation of the cities of the plain in the Georgia
sodomy trial of Bowers versus Hardwick, with its violent
reinscription of heterosexism (158). The sodomy trial
is little more than a pretext for a discussion of Greek
pederasty and the role of Diotima in Plato's Symposium
as the woman poised between hommosexuality and male
homosexuality.13 De Lauretis takes up David Halperin's
guestion, "Why Is Diotima a Woman?,"14 to which the
answer is, she is a woman insofar as a "woman" has to
guarantee the site of female sexuality as a projection
of male sexual indifference, whether male heterosexual
or homosexual (157-9). (But other questions may shadow
even that answer: what if Diotima were a lesbian? Where
is Gomorrah? What if there were lesbians in Sodom?)
De Lauretis*s essay finally provides a pessimistic
version of lesbian representation from Gertrude Stein
via Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Djuna
Barnes's Niahtwood to McLaughlin's film, in which she
finds not so much lesbian representation, but rather
"the question of lesbian desire" (de Lauretis 1980 173).
That question she poses even more succinctly as, "So
what can be seen?" (173), and which echoes still in the
title of the more recent essay, JIEilm._and_the_Visib 1 e.J!_
------------ - _ , 394
What can be seen is the primal scene, according to de
Lauretis in the latter.
She Must Be Seeing Things concerns the relationship
between a white woman filmmaker, Jo (Lois Weaver) and a
lawyer, Agatha, a woman of color (Sheila Dabney). Jo is
making an historical film Catalina, based loosely on
Thomas de Quincey's The Spanish Military Nun:15 Agatha,
of Brazilian descent, is working against the abuse of
native peoples in Guatemala. Both women "see things"—
as a filmmaker Jo visualizes and sees, while Agatha has
jealous visions of Jo with men, since Jo is implicitly
presented as a bisexual woman, or at least a woman who
has had relationships with men in the past, and hence
potentially is not a "true" lesbian. We are shown some
parts of Jo's film as it is being shot and edited, and
we are also party to Agatha's imaginings. Catalina is
set in seventeenth-century Spain, and the incidents we
see Jo film follow Catalina from a childhood in a
convent, watched by repressive nuns who send away her
best friend when the two children sleep together because
they are afraid of a storm, to her escape from the
convent, to her life as a passing woman, who kills a man
during a duel.
In de Lauretis's reading, the film-within-a-film
structure of She Must Be Seeing Things embeds the primal
scene, when Catalina spies on a man and a woman making
------------- ----- - - 395
love, as an available matrix for lesbian desire (23 6-7).
This scene constitutes "a visualization of the subject
and the figure, mise en abime. of the very process of
spectatorship ..." (237). De Lauretis tries to make
that scene a template for lesbian desire against
versions of lesbianism as diffuse and pre-Oedipal
mother-child dyad (this is in other kinds of
theorizations, as de Lauretis acknowledges 2 37). While
de Lauretis would then be able to locate lesbianism at
least inside the Symbolic and render it intelligible
correspondingly, it is still not entirely clear what the
political gains of such a situation of lesbian desire
would be. De Lauretis reiterates McLaughlin's own
statements about the imbrication of lesbian desires
within a "heterosexuality as the dominant code of the
society we live in" (McLaughlin, qtd. in de Lauretis
241), which de Lauretis then connects (somewhat
puzzlingly for anyone who has read the entirety of
Wittig's essay) with Monique Wittig's declaration that
the "straight mind" thinks homosexuality as "nothing but
heterosexuality" (qtd. 241-2). Here, de Lauretis
misreads Wittig, who argues precisely that the "straight
mind," "la pensee straight," (a gibe at Claude Levi-
Strauss's "la pensee sauvage") is located within the
theoretical disciplines of anthropology and
psychoanalysis. and thus reliant upon their binary
_ _ 396
oppositions of gender, cannot conceive of anything
outside its own always-already gendered and hence
heterosexualized domain.
Wittig’s essay polemically speaks to those who
would find "la pensee straight" a useful theoretical
tool (as it were):
All their testimonies emphasize the
political significance of the
impossibility that lesbians, feminists,
and gay men face in the attempt to
communicate in heterosexual society,
other than with a psychoanalyst. When
the general state of things is
understood (one is not sick or to be
cured, one has an enemy) the result is
that the oppressed person breaks the
psychoanalytical contract (Wittig, "The
Straight Mind," 1992 24).
"Film and the Visible" does sign, with some enthusiasm,
on the dotted line of that psychoanalytical contract.
That signature has certain effects for De
Lauretis’s reading of the film— in the discussion that
follows her essay the significance of race in the
relation between the women is debated with some
intensity (264-72). De Lauretis replies by saying:
this discussion . . . has had the
unfortunate effect of avoiding those
issues that I did raise in my paper,
that is, the difficulties of
representing lesbian sexuality as
distinct from both heterosexual female
sexuality and gay male sexuality—
difficulties and problems that clearly
exist for white lesbians as well as
lesbians of color (272).
---------_ _ _ 3 2 7
She adds that it would seem as if "the specificity of
lesbian sexuality must remain unspoken or unspeakable
even in the context of a gay and lesbian conference.
This is very disturbing" (272) . Of course, the
identities, desires, and experiences of lesbians are
specific and distinct from those of heterosexual women
and gay men. The assumption, however, that "the
specificity of lesbian desire" (in the singular) is
accessible via a psychoanalytic discourse constitutes
part of the problem of de Lauretis's reading of She Must
Be Seeing Things.
Wittig, in contradistinction to de Lauretis, writes
of how "linguistics engenders semiology and structural
linguistics, structural linguistics engenders
structuralism, which engenders the Structural
Unconscious," at which point Wittig declares that "the
ensemble of these discourses produces a confusing state
for the oppressed, which makes them lose sight of the
material cause of their oppression and plunges them into
a kind of ahistoric vacuum" (1992 22). It is exactly
that abyssal regression into the primal scene ("en
abime," de Lauretis repeats, 242) that allows a drop
into the "ahistoric vacuum" which Wittig describes. Why
should de Lauretis elide the historicity of Jo's film,
Catalina. and then view its character as an historical
film implicitly as a ruse, in which "history" covers
----------_ _ _ _ _ , _ 398
over ontogeny, and in which the trappings of costume
drama do nothing more than cloak "primal scenes"?16
What, for example, given the film's inscription of
Agatha as the daughter of a Brazilian lawyer, and who is
currently engaged in work with the peoples of Guatemala,
does the setting of Catalina in seventeenth-century
Spain, that is, at the point of colonialist expansion,
signify? When the nun "explains" the subordinate status
of women and children as groups that "must be led," how
does that relate to the ideologies of colonialism, that
persist in the definition of parts of the world as
"third world" or "developing countries"? Is it
significant that this explanation should occur at the
very point where the film-within-the-film suggests that
Catalina's putatively "innocent" childhood play has been
misconstrued as "sin" (implicitly as proto-lesbian play)
by the nun? What about the historicity of figures of
nuns as signifiers in a Western discourse on
"lesbianism" that goes all the way back at least to
Denis Diderot's La reliaieuse (1760)?1^
If the potential (but never fully explored) femme-
butch roles between Agatha and Jo relate to "lesbian
specificity," then what does the coding of Agatha as
butch and Jo as femme signify within the film's use of
"race"? Moreover, what does "lesbian specificity" mean
in a context in which Agatha is coded not only as
399
somewhat butch, but also "authentically" lesbian, while
Jo, on the contrary, is coded as not only as femme but
as bisexual as well? When Agatha watches Jo's rushes of
the scene in Catalina in which Catalina spies on a man
and woman making love— that familiar "primal scene"— why
is that scene intercut with various extradiegetic shots
from Agatha's fantasies of Jo making love to men? The
answer proposed in de Lauretis's essay, that this shows
the involvement of "lesbianism" in "heterosexuality"
seems to miss and misunderstand the specificity of
bisexuality, which de Lauretis dismisses summarily even
as a possibility twice in the course of "Film and the
Visible" (at one point even as "the heterosexual notion
of bisexuality," 252, also 237-8). Is the suspicion of
"bisexuality" enough to drive the narrative of Agatha's
jealousy? At one point, when Agatha complains to a
friend of hers about her suspicions concerning Jo, the
friend points out that Agatha should never have become
involved with a woman with Jo's "sexual history" (the
precise words). What does it mean for a very well-
rehearsed discourse of colonialism that women of color
are associated with authenticity— as real lesbians? Is
the proof of Jo's "innocence" (she no longer has affairs
with men) the guarantor of the lesbian happy ending?
My point in asking all these questions is that de
Lauretis's subsumption of "lesbian specificity" into a
_____ 400
psychoanalytic discourse necessitates an overlooking of
a historicity which the film does inscribe, however
problematically, within itself.18 Accordingly, de
Lauretis*s formula that it takes two women to make a
lesbian rings hollow, for that very formula brackets the
entire realm of the social and the historical in which
it takes far more than two women to make a lesbian.
Indeed, as the inclusion of Catalina implies, an entire
history forms the ground for the emergence of any one
lesbian couple.
To reiterate the guestion of doubling that has come
up again and again, since the pairing of Lesbos and
Gomorrah: how do two women make a lesbian? In Jean
Carlomusto's short film, L Is For the Wav You Look
(1991) , a double and doubled "I" ("elle"?) signals
another consideration of lesbian spectatorships.
Carlomusto's film consists of a number of interviews
with lesbians who speak about the public images of women
with whom they identified and whom they desired. In its
own way, L Is For the Wav You Look opens the theoretical
debates on lesbian spectatorship onto a public sphere.19
Each interviewee provides an archaeology-in-miniature of
her identity as a lesbian by talking about her
identifications with and desires for women as
constituted by an act of looking at a particular woman.
The interval that occurs between the image of one woman,
--------- 401
and another woman's lesbian look at her gives way to a
space of history and the social. Carlomusto includes
not only the usual documentary talking-head footage of
her subjects, but intercuts that footage with the images
the women are talking about, so that L Is For the Wav
You Look performatively recreates for its spectators the
encounter with lesbian looking. Inscribed in its title,
the spectator is addressed as lesbian: L (lesbian?) is
for the way you look.
Thus, one interviewee speaks of the influence that
Martina Navratilova as an open lesbian, whose image is
everywhere available in the media, has had on her.
Another woman speaks about her first encounter with the
photograph of Patti Smith, proto-punk singer, poet and
visionary, that Robert Mapplethorpe took for the cover
of Smith's album, Horses. Amazed by Smith's bold direct
stare into the camera and butch dress, the woman tells
how she spent an entire week-end as a teenager trying to
work out if Smith was a girl or a boy. A third woman
talks of how important the figure of Eartha Kitt as
Catwoman in the Batman television series of the 60s was
for her as an African-American child at a time when
television in the United States was dominated by whites.
In Eartha Kitt's Catwoman, she saw a desirably
transgressive image of what a woman of color could be.
In all these instances, lesbian identities and looks are
------- — 402
mediated by complex networks of social relations and
technologies of reproduction— sportscasting on
television, serials, pop music, art photography,
intersections of race and gender, of sexualities
(Mapplethorpe's male homoerotic vision of Smith as a
tough boy), of publicity.
L Is For the Way You Look begins with a parodic
documentary history of its eponymous L as it supplies a
brief etymology of the word "lesbian," complete with a
map of the island of Lesbos, picturesque but clearly
fake Greek ruins, and a gum-chewing Sappho draped in a
sheet, seated in a deck chair, who reads a brief
fragment of Sappho's poetry. Invoking a myth of origins
which it takes none too seriously, the film nevertheless
pays homage to the necessity of making up places and
sites from which identities emerge. It finds the
origins of lesbian desires in looking, but a looking
that negotiates the complexities of social circumstance.
When de Lauretis ends her discussion of "Film and the
Visible" she observes that "other visible
representations of lesbian subjectivity and desire are
already there for all to see, if only we know how to
look" (1991 264). Lis For the Wav You Look suggests
that the "you" it addresses already knows very well how
to look.
---------------- _ _ _ _ _ 403
Barbara Hammer's Nitrate Kisses (1992) looks back,
not at Lesbos or Gomorrah, but at Sodom, that other city
of desire, which has shadowed some of the present
discussion. Indeed, the daring of Hammer's film is to
stake out Sodom itself as a place of lesbian identities
and histories. As a veteran lesbian filmmaker of short
experimental pieces, Nitrate Kisses represents Hammer's
first feature-length film.20 While de Lauretis suggests
that lesbian representation is caught between the
hommosexual and the homosexual, Hammer plays with that
distinction by pushing it to its limits. At the center
of Nitrate Kisses is re-edited footage from an anomalous
avant-garde film made in 1930 by Melville Webber and
James Sibley Watson, Lot in Sodom.
While it is unclear whether either Webber or Sibley
was gay, their film presents the inhabitants of Sodom
(almost all male, with the exception of Lot's family
members) as "luridly painted queens and handsome young
men" (Dyer, Now You See It 1990 109), and lends itself
to male homoerotic and camp readings. As such, it would
seem to operate within a particular context of gay male
culture. The film is overdetermined by its very
material, since the story of Sodom survives not only
metonymically in the term "sodomy," but in its frequent
and unfortunately still current invocation as a basis
for homophobia that can range from the sporadic to the
__
highly institutionalized. Thus, Justice Byron White
cites the story of Sodom as justification in his
majority opinion in the Bowers versus Hardwick case.21
Hammer's film looks back not only at Sodom, but also,
obliquely, at the history of cinema in that other film,
Lot in Sodom. It transgresses the interdiction against
such a backward look that is part of the story of both
Sodom and Gomorrah; it turns Sodom around so that it is
transformed into the site for both lesbian specificities
and conjunctions and coalitions between lesbians and gay
men, in a shared history of oppression, marked by the
myth of Sodom.
Nitrate Kisses is shot in black and white film
stock; it is highly fragmented both in image and
soundtrack. A number of voices speak; they comment,
testify, tell stories. None of the voices is identified
except in the final credits, but the speakers include
Joan Nestle and Alan Berube, as well as a number of
lesbians who recount details of their own experiences.
No particular hierarchy is established, so that
historians or academics are not distinguished from
voices that speak of personal experience. Thus, the
film can underline the intrications of history with the
personal and the apparently private.
Structurally, Nitrate Kisses is divided into four
sections, in each of which a couple is shown making
405
love. In the first, women's voices speak of the
difficulties of women's biographies, which are
compounded when those biographical subjects are lesbian.
Older women reminisce about the traditions of passing
women and their relation to pre-Stonewall bar culture
and working-class or rural life. The section begins
with a brief glimpse of a photograph of Willa Gather,
who is identified for viewers by comments on the
soundtrack that remark on Cather's fondness for male
dress as well as the circumspection she showed in her
"private" life. Rapid editing connects shots of ruined
farm buildings, women walking in groups, and closeups of
images masked or obscured by lace. Two older lesbians
are shown making love in this section, with the editing
at once disorienting and tender. Viewers are never
moved from establishing shots "into" the love-making, as
in conventional Hollywood editing or in pornography, and
there is a focus both on the entirety of bodies and on
faces, with a particular emphasis on touch. Body parts
such as feet, backs, and calves that are not usually
part of a pornographic image repertory are given as much
attention as breasts and vaginas.
The next section uses the footage from Lot in Sodom
and concentrates on a gay male couple, a white man and
an African-American man. The narrative of Lot in Sodom,
which follows the Biblical story and ends with the
406
destruction of the city, is re-arranged and disrupted,
so that the conflagration of the city as "divine"
punishment is suspended and arrested. Here the voice
overs comment on the political and cultural meanings of
the Sodom story. In the following section, two younger
women make love— they wear leather gear and chains.
Although their trappings potentially connote S&M, the
women are filmed in the same way as the previous
couples, with a marked stress on tenderness and
touching. Hammer is also careful to include the
materials of safer sex such as latex gloves and dental
squares in each section. This particular part of
Nitrate Kisses evokes the women who died in Nazi death
camps and some of the voices of survivors, women who
were arrested as vagrants or for their socialist
politics, testify on the soundtrack. There are also
shots of long rows of rectangles which may either be an
effect of light shining through an architectural
structure, such as bars or grilles, or plaques that
commemorate the dead. Two women, coded as
"contemporary" and "queer" by their piercings and
tattoos, appear in a last section.
In its conjunction of Sodom, the Nazi death camps,
the destruction and loss of specific lesbian cultures
and identities, and the AIDS crisis (which while never
directly named, cannot but inform a queer spectatorship
_ _ 407
of a narrative of "divine" punishment as a commonplace
of AIDS-phobic rhetoric), Nitrate Kisses calls up the
ruins of lesbian histories. Scattered throughout the
film are images of empty and crumbling buildings, and
torn photographs; the editing itself duplicates the
fragmentation of the pasts the film calls up. Even the
somewhat overexposed film stock hints at the fragility
of celluloid as a repository for memories, individual or
collective. Indeed, its title suggests something of the
fiery end of Sodom and Gomorrah.
At the same time, the coupling of "nitrate" with
"kisses" reassures that every act of tenderness or lust
that runs against heterosexism is potentially
combustible, an act of defiance. Hammer uses intertitles
that situate the images and voice-overs of the film
within an overtly didactic context: "EVERY SEXUAL ACT IS
HISTORICALLY SITUATED," one such title tells spectators.
Nitrate Kisses places its couples and couplings within
such historical and political situations, to remind its
viewers that what may appear like the privacy of sexual
acts takes place in a world where no such privacy exists
for queers of any kind. Ambivalently, the film also
affirms intimacy and closeness, mystery, even, as forms
of resistance.
Many of the intertitles draw on Foucault and
Benjamin— one intertitle cites Benjamin's thesis on
_ _ 408
history, about "[seizing] hold of a memory as it flashes
up at a moment of danger" (Benjamin, "Theses on the
Philosophy of History" 1969 255). Another rewrites
Benjamin on the angel of history. "THE ANGEL OF
HISTORY/WHERE DOES SHE RESIDE?," the intertitle asks.22
Neither in Sodom, nor in Gomorrah, nor in Lesbos,
Nitrate Kisses tells us that the angel of queer history
is everywhere.
409
Notes
1. l.Here one might consider Marcel Proust's famous
Sodome et Gomorrhe or The Cities of the Plain in its
English translation, for one of the most influential
links between the two cities as metonymies for lesbians
and gay men. Colette responds acerbically to Proust's
equivalence between the two cities, and suggests instead
a very real discrepancy of gender: "Intact, enormous,
eternal, Sodom contemplates its puny counterpart from on
high," Le pur et 1'impur (Paris: Hachette, 1971) 143, my
translation.
2.The rare work by transgender people such as Kate
Bornstein's short video Hidden A Gender remains largely
unavailable outside circuits of lesbian, bisexual and
gay film festival screening. The lack of parity between
gay male and lesbian cultural production, especially
with regards to historical fictions in film, reproduces
the larger inequities of gender in heterosexual culture.
There is very little film work done within transgender
and bisexual contexts, given the widespread absence of
self-identified bisexual or transgender communities with
cultural and political resources beyond those of
queerzine networks. Hostility in lesbian and/or gay
male communities against transgenders and bisexuals has
also not been very conducive to the production of
transgender and/or bisexual work.
3.Work like Sadie Benning's short videos document
lesbian everyday with little time, apparently, to waste
over "history;" Cheryl Dunye's She Don't Fade. both an
account and invention of black lesbian adventures in a
day-to-day New York, similarly concentrates on the
present.
4.B. Ruby Rich, "A Queer Sensation: New Gay Film,"
Village Voice xxxvii.12 (24 March 1992): 44.
5.1 discuss some of the other political inequities
and conflicts at stake in the collapse of Queer Nation
in my introduction. While celebrating Queer Nation's
promise in 1991, Lilian Faderman cautioned that "the
divisiveness that plagued militant groups in the
preceding decades may be repeated in the 1990," and she
added, "It is too soon to predict whether Queer Nation
will be able to transcend those earlier problems, or
even whether it will really appeal to large numbers of
lesbians., _who_may_still_be_wary_of_being_sucked_into____
_____ 410
concerns that are peculiar to gay men," Odd Girls and
Twilight Lovers 1991 301. Unfortunately, time has
proved Faderman1s concerns to be well-founded.
6.See amongst others, Natasha Gray, "Bored With the
Boys: Cracks in the Queer Coalition," NYO (26 April
1992): 27-30.
7.See Gray, "Bored With the Boys": "Queer
nationalism was supposed to ease the problem of lesbian
invisibility .... To a remarkable extent this
strategy worked. But there are problems with the
quality of visibility that we have gained and even more
serious problems with the idea of visibility as a goal
that lesbians need to strive for," 29.
8.Patricia White, for example, can move from seeing
lesbian spectatorship as ghostly to an insistence on its
presence. Obviously, I am simplifying complex arguments
in every essay enumerated.
9.One might also consider which of the theorists in
question value popular or mainstream representations of
lesbians in films such as Personal Best. Desert Hearts
and Black Widow (Straayer, Ellsworth, Gaines and Traub,
for example), and which insist on different conditions
of representation, that is, something closer to the
avant-garde (de Lauretis).
10.De Lauretis derives the term "field of fantasy"
from Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis's
discussion of "primal fantasy" in "Fantasy and the
Origins of Sexuality," Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor
Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen,
1988), qtd. in de Lauretis 231-6.
11.See for example, "Guerilla in the Midst: Women's
Cinema in the 80s," Screen 31.1 (1990): 6-25
12.Here she follows Luce Irigaray's coinage in
Irigaray, "Cosi fan tutti." This Sex Which Is Not One,
trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1985) 86.
De Lauretis also uses the term "sexual indifference"
derived from Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman,
trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1985) 28.
13.1 have discussed some of the implications of the
trial in Chapter Three. See also Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries: Renaissance Texts. Modern Sexualities
(Stanford: Stanford U P, 1992) 1-26.
---------- _ 411
14.See David Halperin, One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality and Other Essavs on Greek Love (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
15.See "Film and the Visible" 226 and n.6, 226.
16.Peter Matthews, "Garbo and Phallic Motherhood: A
'Homosexual' Visual Economy," Screen 29.3 (1988): 14-39,
reads Garbo's roles in "expensive costume melodramas,"
19, such as Queen Christina (1933) as dress rehearsals
for ontogenetic memories, supposedly of the pre-Oedipal
"phallic mother," 24, which then accounts for Garbo's
appeal to both women and gay men, 39. Matthews come
down on different sides of the Oedipal divide from de
Lauretis (pre- versus post-), and his essay elides
lesbian specificity of any kind quite flagrantly in its
deployment of the single categories of "women" and "gay
men." (What about Garbo's lesbianism, or the scandals
attendant on Queen Christina, or the circulation of that
figure in a number of discourses about lesbian,
transgender and gay identities in the early part of the
twentieth century?) Still, de Lauretis and Matthews
share a privileging of "psychoanalysis" over "history"
(however fictional or dressed up) with a concomitant
bracketing of the social effects of historical fantasies
as simple exempla of "primal fantasies." Thus Matthews
writes: "[Garbo's] 'anachronistic' beauty, embalmed
irrevocably in the past in her opulent costume
melodramas, endures both as eternal form and as museum
piece. It alludes to that obliterated mnemic image of
the mother's face, now decorporealized as a sacred relic
and withheld from the trajectory of the narrative, while
the body incarnated in the various tragic roles
repetitiously acts out its banishment in the post-
Oedipal world. The memory is contained— concealed and
preserved— for spectatorial consumption as the body of
the phallic mother is diegetically conducted into
compulsory oblivion," 27.
17.See Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men
1981 43-5. See also Jean Fraser, "Celestial Bodies,"
Stolen Glances 1991 76-85, and Joan Nestle, A Restricted
Country 1987.
18.In the discussion which follows "Film and the
Visible," Richard Fung suggests that the film "simply
[inserts]" people of color "to legitimate the liberal
credentials of the film and the white characters in it,"
1991 270.
19.See the discussion at the end of Chapter One.
412
20.For a discussion of Hammer's work in the context
of lesbian cultural feminist work, see Richard Dyer, Now
You See It 1990 194-206; see also P. Gregory Springer,
"Barbara Hammer: The Leading Lesbian behind the Lens,"
The Advocate (7 February 1980): 29, 35, and Jacqueline
Zita, "Counter Currencies of A Lesbian Iconography:
Films of Barbara Hammer," Jump Cut 24/5 (1981): 26-30.
Her films include Multiple Orgasm. Women I Love, and
Double Strength. See also program notes, The Vito Russo
Lesbian and Gay Winter Film Festival, 19-21 March 1993,
Los Angeles, where the film had its Los Angeles
premiere.
21.See Justice Byron White, "Survey on the
Constitutional Right to Privacy in the Context of
Homosexual Activity," University of Miami Law Review 4 0
(1986): 521-657. See also Jonathan Goldberg's
discussion of the case in Sodometries 1993 6-16.
22.1 have also discussed Benjamin and the angel of
history in the context of Tessa Boffin's work in Chapter
One.
— Chapter-S i x T o -the~Ends of History: Ulrike 413
Ottinger's Freak Orlando and Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Film offers the possibility to tell the
story of the world again, as in Baroque
theater. It gives the possibility to
describe human connections and
misunderstandings again (Ulrike
Ottinger, interview 1992).
C'est toujours la premiere fois . . .
(Lady Windermere, Johanna d'Arc of
Mongolia 1988).
My films are utopias in the sense that
utopias have no fixed position, either
in time or in place. This is how I
think of utopias (Ulrike Ottinger,
interview 1992).
Taken together, the three epigraphs to this chapter hold
out the conventional offer of epigraphs, namely, to
"place" what follows, just as the conclusion undertakes
to "place" what has gone before. However, the work of
German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger in effect does neither;
instead, it sets adrift and beckons towards the very
ends of history.1 Ottinger’s films, which do
effectively concern themselves with dissidence and the
past, with secret moments of social transformation,
recapitulate much of what has already been encountered
in Queer Pasts Now, yet her Freak Orlando (1981) and
Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1988-9) raise questions about
_ _ 414
the ends of history and suggest perhaps that Ottinger1s
films go so far as to turn history against itself,
queering even those historical projects, that are
forged, invented, and made up.2
In the first epigraph, Ottinger expresses the
promise she finds in the cinema, which is that film can
tell the "story of the world," as Weltqeschichte.
Welttheater or histoire du monde. all over again, from
the very start, perhaps as if it were the first time.3
Indeed, Ottinger subtitles her own film Freak Orlando as
"Welttheater" and "histoire du monde," in a manner at
once hubristic and parodic: "Eine Irrttimer, Inkompetenz,
Machthunger, Angst, Wahnsinn, Grausamkeit und Alltag
umfassende 'Histoire du monde1 am Beispiel der Freaks
von den Anfangen bis Heute als Kleines Welttheater in
funf Episoden erzahlt" ("An 'Histoire du monde1 [World
History] Comprehending Errors, Incompetence, Hunger for
Power, Fear, Madness, Cruelty and the Everyday,
Exemplified By Freaks From the Beginnings To Today, As a
Little 'Welttheater1[World Theater] Told In Five
Episodes" 1981).4 Yet the power of film to retell does
not happen quite from the start, it seems, for it has
been done before, Ottinger adds, in the theater of the
Baroque. What happens anew has happened before, "From
Beginnings To Today."
415
In contrast, the second quotation declares in its
French that, "It is always the first time . . : that
whatever takes place always takes place for the first
time. These words are the very first words of
Ottinger's Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, and are spoken in
French by a woman's voice-over.5 French is the first,
too, of the many languages of the film, which include
German, Russian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Yiddish, just
as the title of Ottinger's film translates into three
languages all at the same time— the French "Jeanne
d'Arc" becomes Germanicized into "Johanna," while
"d'Arc" is retained in French, and a second genitive of
place is added to "d'Arc," one that sends the familiar
"d'Arc" of Western history and a French nationalist
tradition seemingly to the ends of the earth, "of
Mongolia."6
While that female voice speaks its words, the
camera appears to show a point-of-view shot (hers?) of a
landscape of almost pure snow, blank to the point of
absence, nearly as white as the screen itself, as seen
from the window of a fast-moving train. In such a void
at the start of the film— the screen has just faded from
black to snow's dazzling whiteness— the voice-over rings
performatively, since it calls forth every beginning of
every film, every fade from black to image as a magical
first time that opens unexpected vistas, as if we were
416
truly about to be told the history of the world anew:
for a time that is always a first time and hence always
a repetition, too. Every time is a first repetition,
for if everything happened only once, for the first
time, there would be no time as such, so that even a
first time must be a repetition of sorts.7
In the third epigraph, taken from the interview
quoted before, Ottinger describes her films as utopias,
somewhat paradoxically, for as we have seen in the
subtitle of Freak Orlando, she concedes that they may be
full of "Errors, Incompetence, Hunger for Power, Fear,
Madness and the Everyday." In every way, however,
"utopia" is ambivalent, since the term "utopia" itself
effectively restates both "time" and "place" only to
leave them open to doubt. Ottinger reminds us that
"utopia," as its etymology would indicate (ou or "not"
and tooos or "place"), is nowhere, not-place, neither in
place nor in time.8
The epigraphs, then, do not quite do their expected
work. Insofar as they provide a context for Ottinger's
films, it is only in as much as those films are without
place and without time, always a repeated first
instance. That does not mean, however, that Freak
Orlando or Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia take place entirely
outside history, in some realm of the universal or the
purely mythical, but at the very ends of history, and
_ _ _ 417
always a rehearsal of those ends. On Freak Orlando1s
relation to time, Frieda Grafe has written, that, "in
contrast to films with a linear narrative, [it is]
ahistorical, no matter how often [it] may invoke
history" (Grafe, "Freak Orlando." Suddeutsche Zeitunq
7/8 November 1981, in Ulrike Ottinger: A Retrospective,
n. p.).9 Roswitha Mueller goes even further, and puts
Ottinger's work entirely in the domain of the mythic
when she claims that Ottinger's films have the
temporality and narrative structures that characterize
fairy-tales (Mueller, "Telling Wander Tales," in Ulrike
Ottinaer: A Retrospective n. p.). Between nowhere and
here, the present recollection of that other first time
that is both then and now, the work of Ottinger
confronts Queer Pasts Now with its limits. She herself
cites Paul Valery as an epigraph at the beginning of her
manuscript screenplay of Freak Orlando: "Le monde ne
vaut que par les extremes et ne dure que par les moyens"
CFO 3, "The world has value only in extremes and
survives only in means," my translation).
Ottinger takes what has been constructed as the
mean and measure (rational white male heterosexuality)
of "Western history" in two opposing extreme directions,
both of which, however, force that "history" to
encounter what it has excluded in order to constitute
itself. On the one hand, there is what has been
- _ 418
excluded as "non-history," that which can have no
history in and of itself, the "freaks" of Freak Orlando.
for example. Michel Foucault, in his early text,
Madness and Civilization, attempts to trace not an
"horizontal history" of reason's triumph over its
supposed opposites, but a "vertical history" that
follows what history in the West has had to expel at
least since the eighteenth century, according to
Foucault:10
Where can an interrogation lead us which
does not follow reason in its horizontal
course, but seeks to retrace in time
that constant verticality which
confronts European culture with what it
is not, establishes its range by its own
derangement? What realm do we enter
which is neither the history of
knowledge, nor history itself; which is
controlled by neither the teleology of
truth nor the rational sequence of
cause, since causes have value and
meaning only beyond the division
[between reason and unreason]? A realm,
no doubt, where what is in question is
the limits rather than the identity of a
culture (preface, Madness and
Civilization 1967 xi).
Freak Orlando would recover "that constant verticality"
of which Foucault writes via its "freaks."
On the other hand, Ottinger's work, specifically in
Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia, deals with what "Western
history" has excluded as "non-Western history," in other
words, that which, since it does not belong to the
"West" can know no "history" as such. If Foucault
traces the moment of scission between madnessand_reason
-------- _____ 419
to Descartes (Histoire de la folie 56-9),11 the division
between the "West" with its "history" and the "non-West"
with its putative timelessness goes back, at least in
part, to Hegel. As far as Hegel is concerned, in Die
Vernunft in der Geschichte (Reason in History), "In
Tthe] main portion of Africa there can really be no
history. There is a succession of accidents and
surprises" (qtd. and trans. in James A. Snead,
"Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," 1990 215).
Similarly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes of the
exclusion of "Asia" from the grand narratives of
production— "the history of humankind at work, the story
of capitalist expansion, the slow freeing of labor power
as a commodity, that narrative of the modes of
production, the transition from feudalism to
mercantilism via capitalism"— that make up the West's
most cherished forms of historical self-understanding.
For Spivak, those narratives must simultaneously rely on
and actively render incomprehensible other forms of
production and temporality. "Yet the precarious
normativity of this ['Western'] narrative is sustained
by the putatively changeless stopgap of the 'Asiatic•
mode of production" ("Can the Subaltern Speak?," Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture 1988 298) . 12
Like Snead and Spivak, Robert Young also attributes
the scission between "Western history" and its newly
420
constituted "others" to Hegel, but concedes that in
effect Hegel "wasn't inventing things," rather, that the
"entire Hegelian machinery simply lays down the
operation of a system already in place, already
operating in everyday life" (White Mythologies: Writing
History and the West 1990 3). For Young, "History with
a capital H . . . cannot tolerate otherness nor leave it
outside its economy of inclusion," to which he adds:
The appropriation of the other as a form
of knowledge within a totalizing system
can thus be set alongside the history
(if not the project) of European
imperialism and the constitution of the
other as "other" alongside racism and
sexism (1990 4).
The nomadic peoples of Mongolia in Johanna d'Arc of
Mongolia appear to be such "others," set outside the
history and project of European imperialism as the
limits of its self-understanding.13
Absent from Young's list of "imperialism,"
"racism," and "sexism," however, is another term,
"heterosexism," as if heterosexism had no history of
consigning what eludes its grasp to the status of mute
"otherness" in order all the more effectively to be
brought back into its comprehension precisely as that
"other." Ottinger's Freak Orlando and Johanna d'Arc of
Mongolia acknowledge most explicitly of almost all the
films discussed in Queer Pasts Now the ends of "Western
history" in what appears from inside its enclosure as
421
neither "Western" nor "history." But Ottinger's films
also do this by taking queer identities to their limits.
While Patricia White has hailed Ottinger as a
practitioner of "queer cinema" (and this as early as
1987, some time before the present currency of the
term14), and while the queerness of Ottinger is
inscribed both in her films themselves and in their
contexts of reception (most commonly at lesbian and gay
film festivals,15 or through her well-known appellation
as the "queen of the Berlin underground," see Grisham
29), very few commentators on her films are altogether
agreed about where that queerness resides.
White herself appeals to "some subcultural
sensibility' or gay aesthetics'" (1987 81), before
dismissing the notion to concentrate instead on
Ottinger's construction of specifically lesbian address
to its spectator in her film Madame X— Eine Absolute
Herrscherin (1977, Madame X— An Absolute Ruler, see
White 1987 81-2) . Judith Mayne concedes that to argue
for a reading of Ottinger's Bildnis einer Trinkerin— -
Aller Jamais Retour (1979, Ticket of No Return) as a
"lesbian film " (Mayne 1990 136) may require some
special pleading, but does so anyway through a version
of a "connection between that so-called pre-oedipal
realm and lesbian desire" (150).
_____ 422
Richard Dyer sees Madame X as a "homosocial world"
(Dyer 1990 282), a description he quotes from White
(1987 84), but, like White, Dyer notices, but does not
entirely explain why this should be a homosociality of
women or a lesbianism that inscribes male-to-female
transgender identity in the figure of Belcampo.16 Of
all the women on board the otherwise all-women and all
lesbian pirate ship, the Orlando, from which Madame X
issues her seductive call for women to come and join her
for "love and adventure," only the psychoanalyst, the
wonderfully named Karla Freud-Goldmund, challenges
Belcampo in an attempt to prove his/her "true" gender
identity, to which the latter responds by jamming the
mechanism used by Freud-Goldmund and the crew reacts by
turning on her.17 Sabine Hake gives pride of place to
"female homosexuality" in Madame X as "object choice,"
as an "element of the narrative," as well as by "a
specific homosexual appreciation of the aesthetic,"
which then leads Hake to recapitulate Susan Sontag on
camp (1988-9 97-8); the film also stages certain
psychoanalytic "truths" about "homosexuality," according
to Hake (98). Hake subordinates "female homosexuality"
to "camp" only to make that in its turn subservient to a
"postmodern sensibility" (Hake's phrase 97). Teresa de
Lauretis has taken Hake briefly to task for the
depoliticizing character of her reading of Ottinger;
----------- ------ , 423
unfortunately, de Lauretis bases her appeal to the need
to make a distinction between gay male and lesbian camp
on Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum A Grave?," an authority
on camp even less felicitous and informative than Sontag
("Film and the Visible" 246-7).
White, Hake, Dyer and de Lauretis all recognize
Ottinger's queerness, although they cannot quite make up
their minds what it is that makes her films so queer— a
"gay sensibility," a "lesbian aesthetic," pre-Oedipal
lesbian fusion, camp, postmodernism, homosociality,
"lesbian punk anti-realism."18 Other critics have
turned a blind eye to such queerness, and have
concentrated variously on the possibilities of
"feminine" or "feminist" fetishism in Ottinger's work
(Miriam Hansen, "Visual Pleasure, Fetishism and the
Problem of Feminine/Feminist Discourse: Ulrike
Ottinger's Ticket of No Return." New German Critique 31
[1984]: 95-108), or on its possibilities for
"narcissism," with the latter instance apparently
oblivious to the long history of linking "narcissism" to
"homosexuality," both male and female, in psychoanalytic
tradition (Roswitha Mueller, "The Mirror and the Vamp,"
New German Critique 34 [1985]: 176-93). At other times,
a notation of Ottinger's "campy flamboyant sets and
costumes" is enough simultaneously to call up and shut
up queerness (Ruth Perlmutter, "Two New Films by Helke
424
Sandler and Ulrike Ottinger," Film Criticism 9.2 [1984-
5]: 67-73). Everywhere and nowhere, queerness— which in
Ottinger's world is lesbian, gay male, transgender, and
bisexual at various moments and can even accommodate
heterosexuality— is all over the place, in mise-en-
scene. setting, narrative, director, context, or ill-
defined "sensibility."
Jonathan Dollimore cautions that the notion of a
full-fledged "sensibility" is a dangerously
essentializing version of "homosexuality" (Sexual
Dissidence 1990 308). In Ottinger's work, the frequent
appeals that critics— whether straight or lesbian or gay
male, feminist or not— make to a "sensibility" or some
version of it ("camp," for example) indicates a
response, either panicky or celebratory, of a queerness
that cannot be placed. The questions of time and place
return at this point, for if any one figure condenses
the relations between history, fiction and queerness
that have been outlined in Queer Pasts Now, it is the
wanderer who appears in so many of Ottinger's films.
Her films occupy public space, whether historic or
cultural, with as much assertiveness as any attempt to
intervene in the public sphere that forms part of the
political deployment of "queer" as a signifier. "Events
[in Ottinger's films]," writes Frieda Grafe, "cluster
and accumulate into a monumental story" (1991 n. p.).
_____-----------------------------------------------------425
Yet that space is most often taken up as errancy, as
vagrancy and wandering: consider Bildnis einer
Trinkerin— Aller Jamais Retour in which a woman drinker
drifts through Berlin. The film which begins with her
asking for a "one way ticket," literally, "to go, never
to return."19 Throughout Ottinger's films, journeys
take place that never return to their point of
departure. The significance of "perversion," Dollimore
reminds us, lies in "aberrant movement" (1991 117). In
the aberrant movements of Ottinger's cinema, its
perversions make Western history lose its bearings.
A central figure and a central text for Ottinger
has been Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928, rpt. 1992).
Woolf's novel, as we may recall, begins with a young
man, Orlando, a would-be poet and playwright, who is at
the same time the aristocratic heir of a vast country
estate and an enormous manor house. From the
Renaissance onwards, Orlando follows the fortunes of its
eponymous hero, who mysteriously does not age a great
deal even while living for a number of centuries. In
the late seventeenth century, as an ambassador for the
court of Charles II to Constantinople, he undergoes a
mysterious and immediate change of sex during a coma,
which occurs in the midst of an insurrection by the
Turks against the Sultan. Joining with gypsies for a
while, the new Orlando voyages in central Europe, before
42 6
deciding to go back to England as a woman, where she
explores the Enlightenment with such luminaries as
Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison. She survives the
reign of Victoria, and returns once more to her country
estate where she awaits the man she has married, who may
even be as much a woman as Orlando is a man (1992 240).
My summary here places a little more stress than most
summaries of Orlando on the dynamic of voyaging and
return, as well as national identity ("British" as
opposed to "Turkish," for example) because the
connection between Orlando and place— significantly the
country seat— is quite pronounced. Moreover, that
country seat with its synecdochic oak tree (18, 100,
145, or 312) stands in its turn as a synecdoche for an
"England" in the national and cultural traditions of
which Orlando, for all her/his metamorphoses of gender,
is securely at home. Orlando may well be subtitled A
Country Estate of One's Own. for in Woolf’s novel that
appears to be the precondition of Orlando's freedom from
the constraints put upon women in their search for
freedom from the constraints society imposes on their
gender to prevent them from writing. The novel has
often been celebrated, and perhaps deservedly so, for
its claiming of a literary and cultural tradition for
women as well as its invention of a proto-queer history
and identity that offers a respite from the tragedies
_ _ _ 427
envisaged by the particular heterosexism of sexological
theories of the day.20 Nevertheless, Woolf's Orlando
remains dependent on a much larger narrative of
nationhood, national culture, and class privilege to
tell its story and to secure its shiftings of gender and
sexuality. The framework of the novel relies on,
rather than displaces, political and historical
determinations in a way that may not necessarily be
liberating.2 1
Orlando. as almost everyone knows, is the "longest
and most charming love letter in literature," as Nigel
Nicholson rather blandly put it (Portrait of a Marriage
1980 202).22 At the same time, Orlando also underscored
the connection between Vita Sackville-West, to whom it
was dedicated (as novel and as "love letter") and Knole,
her country estate, over which there had been a very
considerable legal dispute a number of years before.
(Orlando alludes to the case, for example 1992 183). As
if to drive the point home, distributed throughout the
text, a number of paintings and photographs are
reproduced, many of which are from the family portrait
gallery at Knole (1992 xlviii); the others are
photographs of Vita in costume. Part of the effect of
the photographs is to underscore family resemblances
between Vita and her ancestors, and the very last
photograph, which shows Vita/Orlando "at the present
428
time," with Vita/Orlando nonchalantly pictured in the
landscape that is hers.
Ottinger uses Orlando in a very different manner.
In Madame X Ottinger herself plays a character named
Orlando, once the lover of the fierce pirate Madame X.
Orlando/Ottinger was killed by a jellyfish, which also
poisoned the hand of Madame X, as she tried to save her
lover. In memory, Madame X names her ship Orlando. and
the ship has a magic figurehead, which is not only the
exact double of Madame X (played by Tabea Blumenschein,
Ottinger's frequent collaborator and sometime lover) but
which also speaks, unlike Madame X herself. If there is
a practice of metonymically either naming a ship for its
figurehead or carving a figurehead for the name of its
ship, then Orlando is the name of ship, figurehead and
lost lover alike, just as the resemblance between Madame
X and the figurehead allows for the name "Orlando" to
stand behind the enigma of Madame X's X. In one scene,
a flashback, Ottinger appears as Orlando, reading a
book, the title of which is quite legibly Orlando.
Ottinger has intercepted and re-routed the letter
between Woolf and Sackville-West— always an open letter
anyway— to send it to new and unexpected destinations.23
In Ottinger's Freak Orlando, as the very
transformation of the title signals, Woolf's Orlando is
subject to radical metamorphosis. The film takes place
------------ _ _ _ _ — — 429
in five parts, each of which figures some historical
period and its relation to freaks. The first is some
unspecified mythological epoch— Orlando Zyklopa's
gigantic and brightly shining cyclops eye dominates the
screen at the beginning of the section before the camera
withdraws to reveal that Orlando has three eyes
(Ottinger's joke on an excess rather than a lack of
female vision at the cinema? FO 15). With seven dwarves
Orlando places a mythological seal on shoes in a vast
department store dominated by Herbert Zeus, the store
manager. Orlando has her eyes (all three of them) on
Helena Mueller, the store's public address person.
Menaced by shoppers, Orlando is chased from the store
and launches a counter-attack: not only does she grow a
beard, thereby becoming the stock "bearded lady" of
freak shows, she and the seven dwarves build a wooden
horse with which they attack Zeus's stronghold and
liberate Helena. When a stylite saint offers his place
to Orlando and she refuses it, his followers, a troop of
self-flagellating leatherboys, fall on Orlando and kill
her. (All references, FO 17-42.)
The next section is set in the Middle Ages. One of
the dwarves, a woman, Galli e Primo, has become an
artist, making images of freaks with which she can
barter. Orlando has meanwhile been reborn as a double
headed being Orlando Orlanda, whose beautiful
430
harmonizing charms her enemies, of whom she has many,
for the superstitious dread and fear her difference.
Orlando tries to rescue a pair of acrobats from the same
troop of flagellants. She encounters a hermaphrodite
and another bearded woman, Saint Wilgeforte. Now
Orlando Orlanda undergoes a mysterious transformation
that corresponds to the change in Woolf's novel, as she
becomes trapped both in an elaborate costume of
restraints and in her mirror image. Her entrapment in
both image and costume recalls the "great confinement"
of which Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization (FO
41-73). Orlando and Galli end up at the same department
store from which time travels can now be undertaken and
they manage to arrive in eighteenth-century Spain, at
the height of the Inquisition's power. Orlando is now
called Orlando Capricho, a reference to Goya's
Caprichos, the nightmarish influence of which pervades
the section. Martyred figures are everywhere, and an
entire swimming-pool is filled with dissidents,
including Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Rosa
Luxemburg. Given the chance to escape to the "New
World," away from the many-tentacled power of the
Inquisition, Galli and Orlando do so (FO 74-91).
Orlando is able to extricate herself from a mirror
image— a trope which recalls perhaps, Foucault's
suggestion of the communication between reason and
_____ 431
unreason, and the making of unreason into the mute twin
of reason. With the voyage to the "New World," the
histories of colonialism are also evoked.
The penultimate section takes place in the
nineteenth century and plays itself out between an
asylum and a travelling freak show. Orlando, now an
elephant man, with flaps of skin, falls in love with one
half of a pair of Siamese twins. When the other twin
continues— inevitably— to intrude in their relationship,
Orlando kills her and thus also his beloved. The freaks
condemn him to death in the Snake Woman's cage (FO 9 I'
ll!) . In the final section, Orlando, a woman now,
travels the world with a troop of bunny girls and
adjudicates a contest to find the ugliest person in the
world. Herbert Zeus, who has himself gone through a
number of incarnations, strolls by and as the most
"normal" person is immediately judged the winner of the
contest.
Freak Orlando begins with a black screen which
turns out to be a pilgrim's cloak, Orlando's, as he
strides towards the gates of "FREAK CITY"; the film ends
with Orlando still as a pilgrim, striding away from
"FREAK CITY." For Ottinger's Orlando, unlike Woolf's,
there is no simple return home, no country estate, no
family resemblances other than those shared by the
marginalized and the persecuted. One of Ottinger's
_ _ 432
collages, which juxtaposes a formal Baroque portrait of
an aristocratic woman by Vandyke with a series of
musclemen photographs torn from a fitness magazine,
suggest both the sexual and gender duplicity of Orlando
(FO 28), and make fun of the "family portraits" that
constitute such ready cultural capital in Woolf's
fantasy world. For Freak Orlando history is not a
portrait gallery but the scrapbook, the things of
tatters, shreds, clippings, and half-forgotten pictures
that Ottinger lovingly reconstitutes.
In Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia Ottinger stages an
encounter between the West, represented by a trainload
of passengers on the Trans-Siberian railroad. These
include Lady Windermere (one of Ottinger's frequent
allusions to Wilde's work), a young Italian woman
backpacker Giovanna (the Italian version of "Jeanne" and
"Johanna"), Mickey Katz, a tenor in the Yiddish-American
musical (a dandy, epicure, and one of the many queer
figures in the film), two pre-Revolutionary Russian
officers, one of whom begins an affair with Katz, a
late-nineteenth-century German tourist with her
Baedeker, a troupe of cabaret performers called the
Kalinka Sisters who offer a punkified version of
traditional Slavic music. The first section on the
train is based almost entirely on glance-object shots,
-------------------- 433
and the exterior of the train is only visible as part of
a reverse shot: it has no autonomy.
Once the women change trains, however, onto the
Trans-Mongolian Express, they find themselves stopped by
Mongolian women warriors, led by a princess, Ulun Iga.
The film switches to panoramic and epic. in all possible
senses, longshots. A relationship has developed between
Lady Windermere and Giovanna, based on Lady Windermere's
ability to translate and her vast cultural knowledge.
Giovanna and Ulun Iga now become drawn to one another.
The film details the world of the nomadic mongols
without ever moving into it: it is as if the camera
maintains a distance between the world onscreen and that
of the spectators. Nevertheless, the women learn to
communicate. Once they return to their train, they
leave the world of the Mongols behind— Giovanna elects
to stay, but inside Lady Windermere's luxurious
compartment suite, Princess Ulun Iga, or at least her
double reappears, this time fully "Westernized." She
and Lady Windermere share a vision of a perfect
reciprocity between East and West. Lady Windermere
says: "In Paris, at the Cabinet des Estampes of the
Bibliotheque Nationale, I saw a remarkable engraving
showing how Louis XV amused himself by having his entire
court appear in Chinese costume," to which the Princess
answers, "On the other hand, a painted mirror in our
---------------- ------ - 434
summer palace shows ladies-in-waiting drinking tea in
Rococo costume." Both have a vision of a benevolent
exchange, a perfectly reciprocal mirroring between East
and West.
That such a vision may be guestionable, given the
painful histories of Western orientalisms, is true. At
the same time, Ottinger's films— like those of Jarman,
Julien, Carlomusto, McLaughlin, Hammer— or like the
fictions of Wilde and Woolf that guide her films to
uncharted terrains— hold open the promise of now,
everywhere, and nowhere, that this will be the first
time, and that history can be remade.
435
Notes
1.While I identify Ottinger as a German filmmaker,
her work has not been received within the same framework
of nationally understood and internationally marketed
filmmaking— German Autorenkino— as Fassbinder's, or
Wenders's for example, both in Germany and abroad. Here
one could once again consider the connections between
national cultures and their exportation that I discuss
briefly a propos of Merchant-Ivory films in a British
context in Chapter One. More recently, Ottinger's own
move towards an extremely complicated form of
"ethnographic" filmmaking as in China: The Arts.
Evervdav Life (1985) and Taiga (1993) underscores once
again her refusal of place in a tradition, however
troubled, of national filmmaking. See Janet Bergstrom,
"The Theater of Everyday Life: Ulrike Ottinger's China:
The Arts. Evervdav Life." Camera Obscura 18 (1988): 43-
52, and "An Encounter Between Two Cultures: A Discussion
With Ulrike Ottinger, Introduced By Annette Kuhn,"
Screen 28.4 (1987): 74-9 for more discussion of
Ottinger's work on China. See also Ulrike Ottinger,
Taiaa: Eine Reise ins nordliche Land der Monoolen
(Berlin: Nishen, 1993).
2."Queer," we may remember, as a verb signifies "to
thwart" or "to ruin," as "to queer a deal."
3."The Welttheater" or "theatrum mundi" is central
to Ottinger's work. Therese Grisham seems to recognize
this when she calls her essay on Ottinger's Johanna
d'Arc of Mongolia "Twentieth Century Theatrum Mundi:
Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia." Wide Angle
14.2 (1992) 22-7. Grisham comments that Ottinger's
films are "highly artificial works, full of pageantry,
spectacle, and lavish costumes— a mixture of Baroque
theater set in terms of women's utopias (thereby
altering the masculine coding of the Baroque theater's
status as 'the grand theater of the world,' its
'universality,'" Grisham, interview, 1992 26. The
centrality of the "Welttheater" in Ottinger's work shows
up her preoccupation with history, especially with
history as costume drama in excess.
The "Welttheater," "theatrum mundi," "mimus vitae,"
or "scenus vitae" is a widespread tooos from Greek and
Roman time to the Baroque, and it presents the world as
a theater in which human beings act their roles for God;
it appears as a metaphor in Plato, Seneca, Augustine,
John of Salisbury, Shakespeare (As You Like It), and
Cervantes. It had its heyday in Baroque theater as in
which figures_enact their ro 1 es_under_the_dir.ection_of__
436
the World until Death interrupts the play and God judges
it. See "Welttheater," Mevers Enzyklopadistisches
Lexikon. 26 vols., vol. 25 (Mannheim: Lexikonverlag,
1979).
4.The screenplay and the program pamphlet for Freak
Orlando have been my primary sources of documentation
for the film. Like all of Ottinger's published
screenplays, both texts are beautifully produced, and
reproduce the manuscript of her typewritten shooting
script with handwritten comments as well as elaborate
collages of found images and visual references, Ulrike
Ottinger, Freak Orlando: Kleines Welttheater in fiinf
Eoisoden Erzahlt von Ulrike Ottinger (Berlin: Medusa,
1981)— the screenplay--and Freak Orlando: Eine Irrtumer,
Inkompetenz. Machthunaer. Wahnsinn. Grausamkeit und
Alltaq umfassende "Histoire du monde" am Beispiel der
Freaks von den Anfanqen bis Heute als Kleines
Welttheater in fiinf Episoden erzahlt von Ulrike Ottinger
(Berlin: DAAD Gallerie, 1981)— the program pamphlet.
The latter contains somewhat different material in a
considerably abbreviated form from the full-length
screenplay. Where I make reference to the screenplay in
my text, I will designate it as FO with a page number,
while I will signal the pamphlet as FO Ausstellunq with
a page reference. All translations, unless indicated
otherwise, are mine.
5.1 am grateful to Robyn of Women In Film/New York
for giving the time to watch their copy of this film.
6.For another discussion of the trilingual
character of the title of Ottinger's film, see Grisham,
Filmography 1992 32. ("The title of the film is in at
least three languages, which hints at what is to come: a
film affirming transfer rather than purity' as the
basis of culture," writes Grisham.)
7.1 am drawing, of course, on Jacques Derrida: "A
sign which would take place but ‘once' would not be a
sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign,"
"Meaning and Representation," Speech and Phenomena and
Other Essavs. trans. David B. Allison (Evanston:
Northwestern U P, 1973); see also Derrida's work
concerning the iterability of the sign as event in
"Signature Event Context," trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and
Samuel Weber Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern U P,
1988) 9.
8.Louis Marin makes the point, too, about the
etymology of "utopia" as a non-place, see Marin,
" Disneyland :_A_Deqenerate__Utopia._!L_Glvph_2— (.19.7-7-)-:_50—__
437
66 .
9.Roswitha Mueller, ed., Ulrike Ottinger: A
Retrospective. trans. Pam Selwyn (Berlin: Martin
Durchschlag, 1991).
10.Hanne Bergius notes a connection between
Foucault's History of Madness and Ottinger *s Freak
Orlando when Bergius cites Foucault as an epigraph to
her catalogue essay on Freak Orlando: "In any case, the
Reason-Madness nexus constitutes for Western culture one
of the dimensions of its originality ..." (Madness and
Civilization xi, qtd. in Bergius "Freak Orlando— Orlando
Freak," FO Austelluna 24). Bergius makes the connection
even stronger by alluding to Foucault's well-known
description of his project in Madness and Civilization
— "I have not tried to write the history of that
language [of Reason] but the archaeology of that
silence" (Madness and Civilization xi)— in the subtitle
of her essay in which she describes Freak Orlando as "A
Film Of the Archaeology of Silence, of Dream, of
Madness, of the Repressed," Bergius 24, my translation.
11.I am using the French original of Madness and
Civilization. Histoire de la folie a l'age classiaue.
here, since the English "translation" is in fact an
unacknowledged and quite drastic abridgement of
Foucault's text. For Foucault on Descartes, see
Histoire de la folie a l'age classiaue (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972) 56-9.
12.See also Spivak, "Subaltern Studies:
Deconstructing Historiography," In Other Worlds: Essays
in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988) 202-11.
See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the
Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian' Pasts?"
Representations 37 (1992):l-26.
13.See Grisham on the significance of nomadism in
Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia 23; Ottinger comments on its
centrality to her work in the interview, 1992 31.
14.See Patricia White, "Madame X of the China Seas:
A Study of Ulrike Ottinger's Film," Screen 28.4 (1987):
80-95.
15.The 1990-1 retrospective of her work was
organized and sponsored in part by lesbian and gay film
festivals and media coalitions.
_ 438
16.Dyer goes so far as to claim that the figure of
Belcampo reinforces the "sense of a homosocial world"
(283), and reads Belcampo unproblematically as a "man in
a skirt" (284). White is somewhat more careful.
17.White does discuss the scene at some length, 91-
4, to point out "the film's address to the marginal
subject" (91, no longer or all the more so lesbian?).
Sabine Hake analyzes the scene somewhat less
persuasively than White in "'Gold, Love, Adventure': The
Postmodern Piracy of Madame X." Discourse 11.1 (1988-9):
88-110.
18.The latter— which seems wholly plausible— is
from Angela McRobbie, introduction, Erica Carter,
interview with Ulrike Ottinger, Screen 41 (1982): 34.
19.See Hansen 1984 95, who finds an allusion to
Marlene Dietrich's arrival as Amy Jolly in Morocco in
the title of Ottinger's film. Jolly also voyages to
Morocco on a one way ticket, and ends by wandering into
the desert after her legionnaire lover. Ottinger's film
resists such an heterosexual pretext for one way
journeys. See also Mayne 1990 146-7.
20.See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Discourses of
Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936,"
in Hidden From History 276-7. "Tying gender to dress
rather than dress to gender, Woolf inverts Krafft-
Ebing's dark vision of the 'Mannish Lesbian.' Her
joyous androgyny ridicules his decadent
hermaphroditism," 276.
21.In Between the Acts, a much later novel, Woolf
writes about an historical pageant of British history,
staged, again perhaps somewhat ambivalently by Miss La
Trobe, who almost towards the very end of both novel and
pageant, is presented as a lesbian, see Woolf, Between
the Acts (Oxford: World's Classics, 1992) 190.
22.See my discussion of Portrait of a Marriage in
Chapter One. See also Sherron E. Knopp, "If I Saw You
Would You Kiss Me?': Sapphism and the Subversiveness of
Virginia Woolf's Orlando." PMLA 103.1 (1988): 24-33.
23.See White and Hake for further discussions of
the role of Woolf and the figurehead in the film.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Du Plessis, Michael (author)

Core Title Queer pasts now: Historical fiction in lesbian, bisexual, and gay film

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,comparative literature,GLBT Studies,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-740510

Unique identifier UC11344994

Identifier DP22563.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-740510 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP22563.pdf

Dmrecord 740510

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Du Plessis, Michael

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA