This chapter tells story after archival story of queer people from the mid 20th century heading to the library or to the encyclopedia or secretively to the gay magazine to try to find answers. Jonathan Ned Katz describes some of the texts he found as the books/people who “warped me.” Below I’ve listed a quote from him that Mark quoted— “Am I alone, and where are all the rest?” The archive available during this time provided relieving answers (you’re not alone) but also warping answers (you’re not alone, but there’s something wrong with you).
Another person Mark quotes, upon seeing an older man in the library reading the same books he’s been reading, asks the man, “Are you a homosexual?” He tried to find the rest, and make a real connection to a real other person. Maybe they could have sifted through the information and found truer truths together. But instead, the man reprimanded him for asking a “brazen” question.
This chapter painted for me a picture — and a painful one— of the information situation facing young queers in the mid to late 20th century. It was informative to me in this way. But I feel more pushed to add to the story, and use my own experiences to reflect on what is still the same and what is different and why. In a quote I pulled out in the quotes section below, Mark says a younger person will need to do the project on Queer identity crises in cyberspace. So while this blog post isn’t that project, I do feel called upon to write my own little piece
I grew up in one of the most liberal (and suburban) areas of a conservative state, North Carolina. My parents are from rural Western New York. My church was not the kind of church that preached about the evils of homosexuality— it just didn’t mention it at all (until our state tried to pass a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman). My parents later told me that they never talked about gayness with me because they didn’t know any gay people and figured it just wasn’t relevant to bring up. Quite a lot of queer literacy efforts had been made in the 35 years between Mark’s adolescence and mine, but I wasn’t aware of any of it. I didn’t know being gay was a thing that you could be, so I didn’t know to look for it within myself. When I caught myself looking at girls in the way I imagined boys look at girls, I figured it was because pervasive sexism makes the male gaze the norm and I had just internalized that into myself even though it wasn’t real. (I doubt I’d heard the phrase “the male gaze” at 9 years old, but I certainly understood it.)
I first remember hearing the word “gay” in 7th grade, during an after school play rehearsal. JK Rowling had just revealed that she’d always thought of Dumbledore as gay. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew people thought it was a bad thing, so I was fiercely denying it. Dumbledore couldn’t be something bad. An 8th grade girl asked me, “Do you even know what that means?” I admitted I didn’t. She said, “It’s when boys like boys.” Oh. Well, that didn’t seem bad to me. Somehow, I still never put it together that if boys could like boys, then girls could like girls. I didn’t know that was possible until the following summer, when Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl.”
Both this announcement by JKR and the song by Perry have been the subject of much criticism from the LGBTQ+ community in the years since then. But both are close to my heart. Some people have said that JKR should have let Dumbledore’s sexuality go un-commented-upon rather than try to earn social justice points after the fact without ever writing it into the book. And lots of people have said the song is biphobic, by playing into the stereotype of women being interested in women falsely, just for male attention at parties. But I’m glad. Because the same girl I’d had male gaze thoughts about in 4th grade, I watched dancing to that song in 8th grade, and I wondered again, before setting those thoughts aside again. Both of these texts, I place in a similar category to the books Mark and the people he quotes found in the library. Confusing, and problematic, but absolutely important.
After that, it was a lot of books. Mostly nonfiction about neopaganism where the subjects also happened to be queer, and LGBTQ+ YA books (many of the same ones drawn on Kobabe’s shelves in Gender Queer). Tumblr was important. The Harry Potter fandom was important— the song “In Which Draco and Harry Secretly Want to Make Out” in particular, which in retrospect is still lowkey homophobic. I don’t remember so much going on forums to read about gay stuff specifically, although I certainly sought out a lot of my general sex ed that way. More and more of my friends came out during high school (and even more in college and after), but I don’t remember talking with them about queerness that much. Mostly I remember watching them, and listening, and we all wrote an awful lot on Tumblr and read each other’s blogs. The queer girls I was closest to were mostly either just as inexperienced with dating as I was, or much Braver and More Experienced than me (not just sexually and romantically), and therefore far too intimidating.
“Pansexual” was becoming increasingly common right when I was entering The Discourse, as were other identity words like demisexual. Singular they and neopronouns were not actually new, but they were newly known more widely. I’m sure there were queer kids who found their community not on Tumblr, but I’m really not sure where else people went.
I got initiated into a lot of the debates around lesbian/bisexual identity and history and terms in this way, via Tumblr, rather than through academic texts, like people pre-internet did. And a lot of that was warped from the original arguments and ideas , or at least presented sans context, and I’ve often felt warped and confused just like my queer literary ancestors. (Am I actually straight and faking it for attention? Am I actually a lesbian and just in denial? Will most lesbians hate me and resent my presence in queer women spaces? What are you if you’re not butch and not femme? Which one am I? Am I something else? If I’m not a lesbian, is it rude/inappropriate for me to use those words at all? What about dyke? Can I be a dyke? How is femme different from feminine? How is a femme lesbian’s gender different from a straight feminine woman’s gender?) Those feelings are part of what led me to focusing on bisexuality as a research interest, and are part of why I’m still totally uncertain about the nuances of what “femme” means.
Answering some of these questions and trying to figure out where I stand in all the Arguments has been one of the motivating impulses for studying LGBTQ+ history. I’m a researcher, and I need to not diminish that, but I’m also just another Queer literate like the ones Mark describes in this chapter, reading book after book trying to figure out my place in the world.
Quotes I’ve Marked
(p.31) “for GLBTQ students, who navigate through patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia, literacy often takes on special roles for their survival”
(p.31) “‘restorative literacy’ acts can reverse the damaging effects of heteronormative discourses and homophobic textual violence”
(p.34) “Most gays have at some point gone to books in an effort to understand about being gay or to get some help in living as gay. In my time, what we found was strange to us (they’re writing about me but I’m not like that!) and cruelly clinical (there’s nothing about love) and always bad (being this way seems grim and hopeless)” — this quote is actually a block quote from Gays in Library Land
(p.36) “Even if Powell finds anonymous comfort in the Queer cybersphere, this techno-literate Queerness comes with its own hazards of homophobic trolling and cyberbullying so I don’t want to deny that contemporary Queer young people don’t still have Queer identity crises with which they grapple. (One of them will have to do that research and write it.)” Challenge accepted.
(p.40) — a Mr. Y writes to ONE magazine asking if anyone knows why “All Queen’s Day” is a thing and why wearing green on that day is a sign you’re queer— wants to know where this notion came from!
(p.47) “In my investigation, the archive acts as the sponsor that has permitted me to find Queer literate ancestors whose literacy labors improved cultural conditions so that I and all Queer people could lead more fulfilling lives. I argue that this Queer literate work must continue when heteronormative rhetorics continuously and unendingly seep into our lives.”
(p.50) “The first question is, ‘Am I alone?’ and the second, ‘Where are all the rest?’” — quoting from Jonathan Ned Katz
Sources I’ve Marked
“Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner” by Ellen Louise Hart
Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, by Eric Darnell Pritchard
“‘Like signposts on the road’: The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors” also by Eric Darnell Pritchard
“Gays in Library Land,” Barbara Gittings