Queer criticism

10 Lesbian, gay, and queer criticism

In the critical‑theory survey course I teach, I sometimes open the unit on lesbian, gay, and queer criticism by reading the class a list of frequently anthologized Brit‑ ish and American writers: for example, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Eliza‑ beth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Edward Albee, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, W. H. Auden, William Shakespeare, Carson McCullers, Somerset Maugham, T. S. Eliot, James Merrill, H.D., Sarah Orne Jewett, Hart Crane, William S. Burroughs, and Amy Lowell. Then I ask my students if they are aware that these writers are gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Sometimes that question is met by an initial reticence to respond, a difficulty not encountered in our opening discussions of other theories. Of course, I know that, unfortunately, the stigma attached to being thought gay or lesbian is still quite strong in America today, and some students may be unwilling to express anything on the subject until they see how the rest of the group responds. As one student told me, after signing out a number of books on lesbian and gay theory from the university library for a paper she was writing for my class, she wondered if the student who waited on her at the circulation desk thought she were nonstraight, and to her embarrassment she found herself wanting to shout, “Hey, wait a minute; I’m not a lesbian!” Another reason for my students’ difficulty, however, is their lack of knowledge. The work of gay and lesbian writers forms a major part of the literary canon and is therefore included in most literature courses, but many undergraduate students assume that these writers are heterosexual. And their assumptions are not always corrected. Of course, our anthologies of English and American litera‑ ture usually include biographical introductions to the writers whose works they contain, and professors frequently offer additional information about authors’ personal lives. We may be told, for example, that Charlotte Perkins Gilman

suffered a deep depression after the birth of her only child; that, as a young man, Langston Hughes’s difficult relationship with his father almost drove him to suicide; or that Robert Frost’s dying wife refused to admit him to her room. But often we are given little biographical information about a writer’s lesbian or gay sexual orientation, let alone information concerning how that orientation affected her or his life and literary production. If personal information about writers’ heterosexual lives is relevant to our appre‑ ciation of their work, why is personal information about writers’ nonstraight lives often excluded from the realm of pertinent historical data? If the experi‑ ence of gender and/or racial discrimination is an important factor in writers’ lives, then why isn’t it important to know about the oppression suffered by gay, lesbian, and other nonstraight writers? Clearly, in many of our college class‑ rooms today, homosexuality is still considered an uncomfortable topic of discus‑ sion. Some literature professors simply avoid addressing lesbian and gay issues in undergraduate courses not specifically devoted to lesbian and gay writers. And at many colleges, although courses on gay and lesbian writers can be offered as “special topics” courses, they do not always occur as regular course offerings in undergraduate English departments, despite the progress made by gay studies programs since the 1970s and the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer theory as an important force in academia in the early 1990s. In other words, my students’ uncertainty concerning the sexual orientation of the writers they read reflects the silence of some of their professors on that sub‑ ject, including the silence of some professors who compile anthologies. Further‑ more, I would argue that the silence of some English faculty on the subject of gay and lesbian writers reflects, in turn, the long‑standing silence of many literary critics who have minimized or ignored the sexual identities of lesbian and gay writers and distorted or overlooked the representations of gay and lesbian char‑ acters in literary works.

The marginalization of lesbians and gay men

Consider, for example, the critical response, analyzed by Lillian Faderman, to Henry James’s The Bostonians (1885). As Faderman explains, James’s novel, by his own testimony, describes a “Boston marriage,” a term used in late nineteenth‑ century New England to refer to a monogamous relationship of long standing between two single women, who were usually financially independent and often shared interests in culture, feminist issues, the betterment of society, and profes‑ sional careers. Such relationships were not that uncommon, and although it’s impossible to know how many of them included sex, it is clear that the women

involved shared a strong emotional tie and focused their time, attention, and energy on each other and on their women friends. In James’s novel, such a relationship exists between Olive and Verena, who are active in the women’s movement of their day. Their relationship is broken up by Basil, whose overpowering determination finally convinces Verena, almost by the sheer force of his will, to abandon Olive and marry him. Although, as Faderman points out, James does not portray Olive heroically, and indeed sati‑ rizes her and her women companions, it is obvious the author has no sympathy for Basil either, whom he depicts as a selfish, brutish, competitive manipulator who is infuriated by the women’s movement and sure to give Verena an unhappy life. In contrast, Verena’s life with Olive is happy and productive. Yet, Faderman observes, critics have argued that Basil rescues Verena from what they see as her unnatural relationship with Olive and restores her to what they assume is the true love a woman can find only in the arms of a “real” man. How can these critics ignore the very positive aspects of Verena’s relationship with Olive and completely distort James’s portrayal of Basil? Clearly, their inter‑ pretation rests on, and imposes on the novel, a view of heterosexual love as the only kind of normal, healthy love there is. Any other kind of love is presumed abnormal, unhealthy, and to be avoided. As a result, these critics are unable to recognize Basil’s obvious and serious character flaws. Because he is heterosexual and takes Verena away from Olive, he is often viewed in a very positive, even heroic, light. This kind of interpretation is an example of a homophobic reading, that is, a reading informed by the fear and loathing of homosexuality. Thus, it is part of a larger cultural context in which homophobia has long played a major role. Although gay people are no longer placed in mental institutions for “treat‑ ment”—which sometimes included aversion therapy, electric shock treatment, and even lobotomies—it wasn’t until 1974 that such practices officially ended, when the category of homosexuality was removed from the American Psychi‑ atric Association’s list of psychological disorders. Moreover, it wasn’t until 1990 that the 1952 immigration policy restricting homosexual immigration into the United States was lifted. And homophobia is evident in many forms of discrimi‑ nation against gay men and lesbians still practiced today, despite the enormous social and political gains achieved by gay and lesbian activist groups since the Gay Liberation Movement began in 1969, after the gay and lesbian patrons of Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn bar finally responded to police brutality by fighting back, two thousand strong, during two nights of rioting. This momen‑ tous event, referred to as Stonewall, has great symbolic significance because it marks the turning point when gay men and women renounced their victim status and stood up collectively for their rights as American citizens.

Today, gay men and lesbians in America still face discrimination in the mili‑ tary; in obtaining jobs and housing; in using public facilities, such as hotels and taverns; in areas of family law such as the right to marry, retain custody of their children, adopt children, or provide foster care; as victims of police harassment and violent hate crimes; and in AIDS‑related discrimination.1 Gay men and lesbians who are members of racial minorities in America face a complex system of discrimination. In addition to the oppression they suffer in white heterosexist culture, nonstraight African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos/as, and Latinos/as are sometimes heavily stigmatized in their own communities. Part and parcel of the discrimination practiced against lesbians and gay men are the negative myths that used to be generally accepted as truth and that still exert some influence today. These include the myth that gay people are sick, evil, or both and that it is therefore in their “nature” to be insatiable sexual predators, to molest children, and to corrupt youths by “recruiting” them to become homosexual. Another myth portrays gay men and lesbians as a very small population of deviants, when, in fact, it is estimated that gay people com‑ prise at least 10 percent of the U.S. population. Other common misconceptions include the belief that children raised by gay men or lesbians will grow up to be gay, that unchecked homosexuality will result in the extinction of the human race, and that gay people are responsible for declines in U.S. foreign power. This might be a good place to pause and define some terms, many of which are related to discrimination against lesbians and gay men. These are terms that you may encounter when you read lesbian and gay criticism. While the word homophobia is generally used to refer to an individual’s pathological dread of same‑sex love, I used the term above to refer to institutionalized discrimination (discrimination that is built into a culture’s laws and customs) against gay people because I think we would be hard pressed to argue that such discrimination is based on anything other than a collective, if sometimes unconscious, homopho‑ bia promoted by traditional American culture, or what feminism calls patriar‑ chy. Internalized homophobia refers to the self‑hatred some gay people experience because, in their growth through adolescence to adulthood, they’ve internalized the homophobia pressed on them by heterosexual America. The word more commonly used to refer to institutionalized discrimination against homosexuality, and the privileging of heterosexuality that accompanies it, is heterosexism. For example, a heterosexist culture enforces compulsory heterosexuality, a term used by Adrienne Rich, among others, to describe the enormous pressure to be heterosexual placed on young people by their families, schools, the church, the medical professions, and all forms of the media. Heterocentrism, a more subtle form of prejudice against gay men and lesbians, is the assump‑ tion, often unconscious, that heterosexuality is the universal norm by which