The Gentrification of the Mind
Page 14
1997 None None
1998 None None
1999 None None
3. The Whiting Foundation Writers Program (internal nomination)
1990 None None
1991 None None
1992 Robert Jones None
1993 None None
1994 Randall Keenan None
1995 Michael Cunningham, Mathew Stadler None
1996 None None
1997 Anderson Farrell None
1998 None None
1999 Not offered Not offered
4. The Lila Wallace / Readers' Digest Fund (internal nomination)
1990 None None
1991 None None
1992 None None
1993 None None
1994 None None
1995 None None
1996 None None
1997 None None
1998 None None
1999 Jim Grimsley None
5. The Lannan Foundation (internal nomination)
1990 None None
1991 None None
1992 None None
1993 None None
1994 None None
1995 None None
1996 None None
1997 None None
1998 None None
1999 None None
6. The American Academy of Arts and Science (internal nomination)
1990 None Jeanette Winterson
1991 Alan Holinghurst None
1992 None None
1993 James Purdy None
1994 Daryl Pinckney None
1995 Jim Grimsley None
1996 Larry Kramer, Randall Keenan None
1997 None None
1998 None None
1999 Jim Grimsley None
The study concluded:
In the current climate of conservatism and niche marketing, American literature with primary lesbian content is being increasingly marginalized. There are many factors contributing to this process including marketing aimed only at gay and lesbian readers, low advances, low sales expectations by publishers, quota systems in review venues, segregation in chain stores, exclusion from mainstream awards, and more.
When such a significant force systematically withholds support from lesbian literature, there are concrete results. Most importantly, lesbian writers are pressured to drop the lesbian content from their work in order to earn a living, win prestige and recognition, and thereby win good teaching jobs and have cultural influence. Not only will this silence writers without independent means, but it will dissuade younger writers from being out in their work.
By 2009, these predictions became reality. Today if you are a lesbian and want to get married in Iowa, you are in luck. But if you are a human being who would like to read novels with lesbian protagonists by openly lesbian authors, close your eyes and think of England. In the United Kingdom, right now, openly lesbian writers with lesbian content like Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters are treated like people and their books are treated like books. They are published by the most mainstream publishers, are represented by high-rolling agents, are reviewed in regular newspapers by real critics, contextualized with other British intellectuals, given mainstream awards, have their stories broadcast on television and as a result of all this respect and consideration, they are read by a broad constituency in England and the rest of the world.
For those of us writing here in the gentrified United States, England seems like the promised land. Here, lesbian literature has gone the way of cheap rents, good public schools, nonmonogamy, integrated neighborhoods, and free will. At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time that we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?
So, gay men's literature and lesbian literature have been impacted on and transformed by gentrification in profoundly different ways. Gay men have learned to eradicate their sexuality, their anger, and their experiences of heterosexual cruelty in order to be invited into the category of “literature.” And then they have forgotten that this is different than what they produced before what we should only sarcastically and ironically call “acceptance.” Lesbian literature has been gentrified out of existence, through a systematic series of punishments and critical exclusions that now make its production unimaginable for artists working seriously who want to be recognized.
Of course, I am ever the optimist and wonder if the collapse of behemoth publishing can help us poke back through the fog, back into the intellectual life of our own country. This year I am on the jury of two queer book prizes, and so have a chance to read every lesbian book published in North American in 2010. Some are pretty good. My favorites include Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn, published by Arsenal Pulp Press—a moody atmospheric novel about a young street prostitute in Canada who barely knows what she is doing/experiencing/feeling. The author conveys the story in a gorgeously stylized replication of the protagonist's consciousness—we see it all through her fog, and thereby understand with even more depth what her true story is. Or Eileen Myles's Inferno, published by O Books, in which this energetic, funny, formally engaged, almost mythic writer—who has inspired two generations of lesbian literature—somehow brings together her own story, Dante, and a social history of the New York School by the natural propulsion of her own charm on the page. Out of the sixtysomething books I looked at, only two had mainstream publishers. Most importantly, neither of those had openly lesbian editors. Therein lies the problem. The most truthful, moving, and advanced works we are producing are being ignored by the women who can be out in their jobs today, because of the work of fearless out lesbians of the past and present. The editors are gentrified, they don't understand their own responsibilities. It's all a blur, translating into a problematic lack of consciousness and a low level of ambition. Not that it is only the editors' responsibility, absolutely not. But when you look at the thousands of boring books by straight people that not only have nothing to offer, but financially tank—why should our most interesting writers be constantly sent to Siberia? Punished for telling the truth and writing well? And yet we persevere, that's what is so exciting. You can't kill lesbian literature—even if the authors are driven insane and into silence one by one, there is always someone else willing to carry on the fight. The impulse to express and understand will always compel some people with integrity. And integrity has its own strange trajectory—greater than any one person. Now that is a good lesson of history.
CONCLUSION
Degentrification
The Pleasure of Being Uncomfortable
Happiness for some involves persecution for others; it is not simply that this happiness produces a social wrong, but it might even be dependant upon it.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
As a nation we have long understood the conformity of the 1950s partially as a consequence of the trauma of World War II. Our young men signed up and were drafted out of their provincial towns and neighborhoods and witnessed/experienced/committed large-scale violence. They came home wanting stability of status, a known world. Back in the United States, veterans were offered the G.I. bill. Now they could go to college for free and get low-interest loans on suburban homes. While these significant advantages allowed many men to move from the working to the middle class and beyond, it also gave them a huge, sudden leap over women in educational level and financial power.
Women, who had experienced more economic autonomy and agency during the war, were now repositioned back into a submissive role. People of color and gay people who had fought in Europe and the Pacific returned to Jim Crow and compulsory heterosexuality. Internationally, McCarthyism (and the postwar imperialism it justified) strongly reinforced the United States in reactionary capitalism, where the market interdependence with familial privatization made citizenship more
complicit with excess and consumerism. The sexual and gender progress, the racial striving of the 1920s and 1930s, the benefits of social programs like WPA became the past, as America was repositioned into 1950s suburban culture—a racially segregated, class-stratified, highly gendered closed system. Over time this system proved unbearable; fifteen years later it exploded into revolutionary thinking, sexual liberation, and mass movements for social change.
It seems to me that gay people are currently undergoing a similar path. The trauma of AIDS—a trauma that has yet to be defined or understood, for which no one has been made accountable—has produced a gentrification of the mind for gay people. We have been streamlining into a highly gendered, privatized family/marriage structure en masse.
What have we internalized as a consequence of the AIDS crisis? As with most historical traumas of abuse, the perpetrators—the state, our families, the media, private industry—have generally pretended that the murder and cultural destruction of AIDS, created by their neglect, never actually took place. They pretend that there was nothing they could have done, and that no survivors or witnesses are walking around today with anything to resolve. They probably believe, as they are pretending, that the loss of those individuals has had no impact on our society, and that the abandonment and subsequent alienation of a people and culture does not matter. But of course, that could not be farther from the truth. My own study of the AIDS activist movement, the ACT UP Oral History Project, reveals the true message of AIDS,
that a despised group of people with no rights or representation, who were
abandoned by their government, families, and society, facing a terminal
illness, bonded together against great odds and forced this culture—
against its will—to change its behavior towards people with AIDS, thereby
saving each other's lives.
This is the most remarkable story I have ever experienced, and it should be and could be a model for human behavior in all realms. The true message of the AIDS crisis is that making people with power accountable works. This message, however, is obscured and unavailable (temporarily, we hope), not known by many people gay or straight. Instead, what most people internalize, falsely, as the dominant message of the AIDS crisis is that (1) our sexuality is dangerous and should be contained; and (2) no one cares what happens to us.
In this way, gay people are the new Jews. So traumatized by mass death and the indifference of others, we assimilate into the culture that allowed us to be destroyed. We access their values and use them to replace our own in a way that undermines our distinction and strength. In this process, we can take on oppressive roles—for example the increasing antiimmigrant sentiments of assimilated LGB people in Europe, or pro-military attitudes accompanying the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal.
For lesbians, the parallels to the fifties are even starker. The LGBT community is a community of men and woman/males and females, and people who don't identify with the binary gender system. We don't, for the most part, reproductively mate for reasons of romantic love and sexual desire—but nonetheless there is a dynamic interrelationship of sympathies, bonds and contradictions and conflicts. During the AIDS crisis, the sexist imbalance of the gay community was overwhelmed by the necessities of trauma. Men became endangered and vulnerable. They needed each other and women to intervene with the government, media, and pharmaceutical and insurance industries. They needed intervention in all arenas of social relationship. They needed women's political experience from the earlier feminist and lesbian movements, women's analysis of power, and women's emotional commitments to them. They needed women's alienation from the state. As men became weak, they allowed themselves to acknowledge the real ways that women are strong, particularly recognizing our hard-won experience at political organizing. There was more room for women to be seen at our level of merit, to occupy social space that we deserved to occupy, even if the reason was that men were disappearing. Like Rosie the Riveter, gay women gained more equality within the queer community, more social currency and autonomy because men were threatened, wounded, and killed.
As protease inhibitors normalized AIDS, this relationship shifted back. Men began to regain their collective health and with that their patriarchal imperatives. Male power returned with t-cells and lesbians occupied a much more ambiguous and unstable social role. I often think about this when I am operating inside the white patriarchy called the American theater. White gay men have an open and explicit level of power in the theater that they don't experience in many other realms. They are vicious in their disrespect of non-gay-icon-type women's perspectives and their favoritism towards other men. There is a level of sexist corruption so blatant, it merits them losing all their federal, state, and city funding for violation of nondiscrimination policies. As I experience regular diminishing, cruel, or stupid behavior from some sexist gay man in the theater, I often think about how the fact that he is alive— whether HIV-positive or -negative—is in part a consequence of my own actions and the actions of many women he knows and will never know. But now that that history is invisible, these men—once vulnerable—now again feel superior. Now that we need them to let us into the power system of representation that they control, there is no reciprocity. This is depressing and also defeating. I can understand why gay women of my generation retreat from the community relationship, like their 1950s foremothers, into the highly gendered but recognizably legitimate social role of lesbian mother.
Everyone wants to be a good parent, and LGBT parents have to make deliberate, elongated efforts to get their children. The obstacles to insemination and adoption require a strong need to parent. Unfortunately, in our real world, large numbers of children grow up to be victims, perpetrators, or bystanders. Very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place. Personally, I don't feel that creating new victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is the great social ooh-and-aah that it is made out to be. I do understand that people want to have children for reasons personal to their own needs, not necessarily for the child or for the world, and perhaps that's reason enough, but I don't know why.
Observing my very decent friends raise their children is—of course—a fascinating experience. Many of these children have the same anger, sadness, cruelty, passivity, neediness and narcissism, and the same unfulfilled potential as most adults I know. I see the future.
Being a great parent is so tough—it requires that the parent feel loved and accepted enough themselves that they don't need to control or construct another person, while still being able to be disciplined and provide structure, love, security, and guidance. Having children to end loneliness, to win parental approval, to feel normal, to heal past traumas may all be fine for the parent, but does it work for the child and the community? Sometimes. Most of my kind, loving, well-intentioned friends are human and therefore problematic parents, like all parents. They project onto their kids, which is normal. They threaten, make false “deals,” give false information, are arbitrary with boundaries, indulge excessively in objects. Some of them are in relationships that are not dynamic, truly loving, or sexual. More families-by-habit and fear of being alone, more displaced unhappiness and emotional control or neglect of their kids. More brilliant women unable to make larger contributions because they are parenting a sad, spoiled, frightened, complicit, or bullying child. Since these parents are too busy and overwhelmed in the domestic sphere to champion collective child care, for example, the rest of us lose as well. We lose access to our friends, their gifts/skills/ideas, we lose their presence. We have to cover for them or submit to them when they have child care needs. Even at work, we—the unparenting—are supposed to privilege our colleagues' needs for child care, compensate for the lack of governmental responsibility. After so many years of radical thinking, creating new paradigms and working collectively to end the AIDS crisis, fight for economic autonomy and social justice, create new representations—after all that awareness and action, I often see my most brilliant female friends re
duced to endless conversations about private school. If they wanted me to join them in creating movements for radical child care reforms of course I would. But I don't see much leadership coming directly from that overwhelmed corner. Yet. I still have hope.
I'm an optimist and believe that this period of conformity is in part a reflection of the conservative tenor of our nation as a whole, and in part an unacknowledged consequence of AIDS trauma. And that it can't last forever. So, pressure to marry and have children, institutionalized monogamy, social recognition through marriage and motherhood, financially strapped female parents, relationships by habit, sexual repression, the propensity of single parent lesbian households due to lack of accountability, identity by consumerism, privatized living, lack of community, over-burdened projecting broke parents, obstacles to being productive…sound familiar? Can the Gay Fifties last forever? Thankfully not. Just as with straight people, these 1950s values of control and homogeneity will probably prove to be unbearable at some point and we will have a swing back in the other direction towards LGBT communal living, sexual revolutions, and collectivity. I hope I live long enough to see my prediction come to pass.
In the 1930s, European psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich started a movement in Germany that he called “Sex-Pol,” thereby coining the phrase later popularized by Kate Millet, “sexual politics.” Sex-Pol attempted to combine Communist and psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality. Reich would go to working-class people and say, “You know why your sex lives are so lousy? It's because you don't have decent housing conditions. You have to sleep in the same bed as your children and can't express yourselves freely. Fight for housing reforms so that you can have a better sex life.”
Now, of course, because this was brilliant and true, he ended up getting thrown out of both the German Communist Party and the Psychoanalytic League. The Communists didn't like sex and the shrinks didn't like Communists, and were busy trying to appease the Nazis. However, his ideas spoke to large numbers and at one point forty to fifty thousand people were involved in Sex-Pol. I think it is inevitable that LGBT people will come around to this kind of integration again, a melding of the human need for free sexual expression with a sense of social justice—the combination that was at the heart of gay liberation, lesbian nation, and AIDS activism. So, if this is our “1954” and nothing great is going to happen until “1966,” we're back in the prerevolutionary days—when so much newly preliminary and yet foundational work can be done.