Sophomore year of college, a freshly-declared double major in English and anthropology, I was in a used bookstore and spotted “Margaret Mead Made Me Gay.” I had to buy it, of course. But I didn’t read it— not for several more years, until the summer before I started my PhD program. It was one of three books I wanted to make sure I read before I moved to New York, alongside The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam) and Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed). So in that sense, I loved Esther Newton long before I knew who she was. Certainly, we never studied her in my anthropology department.
Last fall, Newton was a guest speaker at my school as part of the press tour for My Butch Career. I was thrilled. Elderly feminist academics fascinate and enthrall me. I look at them to imagine who I might have been if I was part of another generation, and to imagine who I might be in my future. I crave their approval and their mentorship. I want to adopt all of them as my proverbial scholarly grandmothers. I am terrified of them.
So that’s what was in my head going into the event.
And you know, she really was an important person in the field, and she really is a role model for young queer academics with a social science bent like me, but also— she’s human. I remember feeling uncomfortable when she talked about trans women, briefly. It was clear she knew she ought to be supportive, but was tentative, uncertain, unsure of what to make of the idea. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember feeling disappointed, yet still excited to have gotten to go to the talk.
I felt the same way reading My Butch Career. Partially because of what Newton says about trans issues (basically she says she thinks trans men transition because they are really butch lesbians who feel pushed into socially transitioning and changing their bodies by a patriarchal culture), and partially because of how she treats the issue of academic labor in the book. i have no doubt that it was very difficult to be one of the few women in a graduate program, dominated by strict gender expectations, with the assumption that she would marry a male anthropologist rather than become an anthropologist herself, all while carefully trying to stay closeted. Yet she still easily gets a tenure-track position immediately out of grad school, and even after she is effectively fired by being denied tenure, she gets a new tenure track job at SUNY Purchase seemingly very easily afterwards. She doesn’t even have to relocate. I and everyone else currently in graduate school will be lucky if we get a tenure track job, ever. Anywhere. Period. Newton writes with guarded awareness and sensitivity about many issues, even those she admits she does not fully understand, but seems unaware in this area, and only somewhat aware in terms of her other economic privileges (a generous upper middle class dad and a substantial inheritance from her grandfather), which I feel detracts from the power of the “I did some very cool and very important academic stuff while battling a lot of systemic obstacles” arc, even though the sexism and homophobia she faced are very, very real.
However, I was OVERJOYED to learn a new term: ki-ki dyke, which was a pejorative at the time but now I love. It was someone who was neither butch nor femme, but somewhere in between, but went to lesbian bars, but was rumored to be bi, and was probably middle class (which would be why she looked obviously out of place in a working class lesbian bar), but went anyway. (Apparently kikis were also suspected of being undercover cops.) Because there’s a subset of lesbians who think bi women cannot use butch/femme as terms, and I don’t really feel like either one is accurate for me anyway, I was very happy to learn a word from the same time period that butch/femme developed that I do feel like applies to me, even if it was negative at the time. (In some circles being bi is still negative in our time, so whatever.)
So, having finished the book, I feel similarly to how I feel after the talk. I learned a lot more about an important person who broke ground in my field, learned more about mid 20th century NYC and academia and feminism, and also have political disagreements.