When I first encountered Eve Sedgwick’s “Queer and Now,” probably at some point in the late 1990s, I was entranced. Take the opening line: “I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents.” At a time—ongoing time, we are still in it—when homosexuals—we must use this technical term—were accused of recruiting innocent children, Sedgwick asked: What about the adolescents driven to suicide by the hostile, life-destroying demands of normativity? In today’s terms, we might ask: What about queer and trans* adolescents?
She offered a way of thinking about teaching as activism:
I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be challenged.
“To smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled” is a good description of my writing and pedagogy, to use the term queer promiscuously, to insist that such promiscuous use challenges “queer-eradicating impulses.” I still live in a geohistory where to the best of my knowledge, no institution of higher education teaches anything like queer and trans* studies—all queer and trans* content must be smuggled in.
And queer?
She offered a generous, capacious way to think of the term queer:
the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldagers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or. . . . people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.
This was queer not as border, but as invitation. Queer as excess of meaning. Queer as adventures. Queer as pedagogy, mentorship, pleasure, learning, openness.
And what about how the term queer was used to identify oneself?
Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else. This is true (as it might be true of “lesbian” or “gay”) because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category. But “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of evidence (however contested).1 “Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes—all it takes—to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.
Capacious. Generous. Daring.
Later, I witnessed the term queer become a branding category.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which first aired in 2003, was the exemplar.
I experienced academics use it to distance themselves from more conservative colleagues in ways that stripped it of all sex and desire, and had no affiliation with or attention to the violence faced by openly alphabet mafia2 students, faculty, and staff.
I saw it used as an aesthetic category of coolness, stripped of any potential for radical politics, as Cathy Cohen pointed out in 1997.
Queer as marketing category. Queer as inclusion. Queer as tolerance. Queer as “family friendly.” Queer as corporate friendly. Queer as neoliberal. Queer as pinkwashing.
Queer had become distorted in a way that, say, lesbian, had not.3 Queer was a fraught term, stripped of much of what I had found useful.
Where once I had taught Sedgwick’s capacious definition, I dropped it from my teaching and writing. I was very tired of aggressively straight men describing themselves as queer because they had pierced their tongues. And I was equally tired of the “I kissed a girl and I liked it” straight women who were ready to use it because they participated in drunken sorority shenanigans.
I have been thinking of how Sedwick uses queer again.
Let me detour through Rinaldo Walcott, who writes:
While Stonewall is credited as the origin story of the modern gay and lesbian movement — and it is clear that Stonewall represents a significant and fundamental shift in queer self-assertiveness in North America — I want to offer a slight but different shift in reading the history of the movement. In my slight revision, I want to suggest that the advent of HIV/AIDS is the moment that captures the real energies made possible by the outpouring of the carnal pleasures that Stonewall unleashed. Stonewall was queer sexual liberation, alongside heterosexual liberation, but HIV/AIDS was citizen-making; the distinction is important. HIV/AIDS worked to produce a very particular and specific queer subjecthood. It was a subject who was sick and diseased in a fashion different from how homosexuality as illness had been previously conceived (even though in some people’s view one illness led to the other) in the “eventful moment” of AIDS. Thus, it is in the realm of sickness and death that a very specific queer subjecthood comes into being. (“Queer Returns”)
Rinaldo returns me to Sedgwick, to thinking about the publication date of “Queer and Now” (1993). To think about what was daring about the article’s invitation. What was necessary.
(Despite a mentor’s broad hints, I am a very bad reader of Fred Jameson. I only remember “always historicize,” and perhaps that’s enough.)
By 1993, HIV/AIDS had transformed gay, lesbian, and trans* sociality. Poets and essayists wrote about caring for loved ones and attending weekly funerals. Gay men watched their numbers dwindle. Lesbians were pulled into necessary, tedious carework. Peer educators tried to access as many spaces as possible to discuss safer sex practices. Short-lived experiments in publication shut down as founders fell ill and died. Homosexuality was now an abomination and a death sentence.
Antiretroviral medications became available in 1995.4
PrEP became available in 2012.
What, then, did it mean to name oneself as queer in 1993? What affiliations were embraced? What risks? What practices of carework? What proximities made visible?
In the 1950s, gay was considered an umbrella word. “We were gay girls,” Audre Lorde says in a video clip. It’s not that the word lesbian didn’t exist, but gay named a politics of affiliation. And, I think, naming oneself gay as a lesbian carried the frisson of fucking with gender. In the 50s and 60s, coming out referred to one’s first sexual experience, which might lead to one joining a community of gays. One came out to one’s fellow gays, Samuel Delany writes.5 It’s only after Stonewall that coming out was redefined as disclosing one’s sexual desires and practices to predominantly straight people.
As an aside, I saw a video by a cishet Kenyan woman urging presumably gay Kenyan men to “just come out.” It felt incredibly coercive. And brought me back to Foucauldian critiques of identity as a regime, as a demand, as a violation. We still live in a world where our desires and practices can be—and often are—weaponised against us. The use of the term closeted has come to mean frightened and inauthentic, a personal failing. Because heteronormativity is unwilling to accept that it is fundamentally hostile to and violent against those who refuse to follow its precepts. Those of us who know that violence are obliged to choose our safety. Whenever possible.
The promise of neoliberal queerness—I’m not sure what else to call it—is that queers are useful to heteronormativity (the overall message of Queer Eye); excellent for capitalism (as the pioneers of urban gentrification on one scale and the best marketers for beauty products on another scale); host the best parties (what, after all, is Pride if not the best party for straight people?); and, most importantly, are no longer marked by or tied to HIV/ AIDS (read this as “family friendly”).
It’s been a while since I watched Drag Race, but from what I recall HIV/AIDS was rarely mentioned. Not in any way that stuck. Pose taught us to locate HIV/AIDS in the past. Noah’s Arc dealt a little with safer sex practices and advocacy—Black and Latinx men saving Black and Latinx men.
In mainstream sexual minority media, “I’m on PrEP” is about as close as we get to discussions of HIV/AIDS. I mean the media created to entertain, not educate. Documentaries are a different thing.
The affiliations and proximities Sedgwick embraced in her 1993 description of queer no longer—or rarely—attach to queer now, and certainly not to neoliberal queerness.
To state something banal: queer circulates and is used differently by mainstream media, popular culture, rights activists, and academia. We use it differently as we move through these spaces, attempting to filament. I am certainly not interested in any one use—despite my academic lineage, I find many academic uses of the term irrelevant within my current geohistory.
I agree with Sedgwick: “Anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else.” As weird and awkward as it might be, we might ask each other how we are using queer when we do use it.
In recent writing, I explain,
Queer always names a relation and, often, multiple relations: surveillance and discipline and punishment in one instance, primarily from the state and its institutions; pleasure that helps us work across difference, what Audre Lorde terms the erotic; hauntings from ghostly presences of those we have lost and keep losing, to HIV/AIDS, to quotidian violence, to erasures by and silences from those we love. The queer I have found most useful has never been about identity or identification; it has always been about the multiple relations one is embedded in and navigates across different scales. (“Dear Hugo”)
To that description, I would add that queer might also be an invitation to be in proximity to and intimacy with those produced as disposable by the state and capital. It might be an invitation to track our genealogical lines to the historical and ongoing devastation of HIV/AIDS. It might be an invitation to imagine freedom, a freedom prefigured by our erotic desires and practices. Queer might be an invitation to ask how we can be queer for and with each other.6
At this point, we are at some remove from what were then important distinctions between gay and lesbian studies, on the one hand, dominated by the social sciences and history, with broadly shared vernaculars about the varieties of gay and lesbian identities and practices, and what was emerging in the early 90s as queer studies, often found in humanities departments (here, one thinks of Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner; the very first issue of GLQ establishes a terrain of where this work emerged from). While opacity was not a keyword in early queer studies, the work itself was interested in the affordances of opacity and skeptical of the empirical drive of earlier scholarship. The re-turn to the empirical, especially in queer anthropology from the late 90s and in the early 2000s needs more attention than I can give it here. I must also add here that Africa has never not been anthropological, so that colours my thinking.
Alphabet Mafia is one of my favourite Kenyanisms to describe the interminable LGTBQIA+.
I think there’s something to the category and label lesbian that has made it less amenable to neoliberal appropriation. Unlike gay and queer. Misogyny is part of it, of course. I might be wrong.
AZT was available in 1987. But it was expensive and incredibly toxic. In 1995, the first protease inhibitor was approved by the FDA, and it changed many things. For a timeline, see https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline.
From the indispensable essay “Coming/Out,” in Shorter Views: “I learned that ‘coming out’ meant having your first homosexual experience. And what you came out into, of course, was homosexual society. Until you had a major homosexual experience, you could be—as many younger, older, straight, gay, male, or female folk have always been—a kind of mascot to homosexual society. But it took some form of major sexual act itself to achieve ‘coming out.’” What I find most exciting and useful about this definition is coming out was “finding your people.” I worry that the focus on coming out to straight people, especially family and friends, leads to a lot of isolation and alienation. But that’s a different discussion.
All of this might simply be my way of tracking how I have lived with the term queer. Perhaps we need more such accounts in addition to the many contested academic geneologies we offer.
This was fantastic.
"Alphabet Mafia"!! <smirk, snicker, laugh out loud>
This is everything — thank you.