Michael Jackson v. Larry Kramer, Round 1

As a speaker at the recent Michael Jackson conference at Yale, and alum of the school, and an historian, let me respond, if that is the right word, to the absurdities of Larry Kramer.

Kramer believes queer studies exists for the purposes of "the exploration of and reclaiming of gay people's history since the beginning of America." He is free to believe this, and he is free to grant money to a university to further this goal. But he is not himself a scholar and cannot dictate the agenda of intellectual debate. He seems to know this, so he relies on using his money and temper to bully University functionaries rather than taking the trouble to actually attend the conference and debate the issues with us. If he had, he would find that queer studies has long discarded his single-issue identity politics, and that there is simply no going back.

Moving LKI to the history department, should that somewhat stodgy department accept it, would bring Mr. Kramer a rude surprise. A mere glance at the work of eminent lesbian and gay historians Lisa Duggan, Jonathan Ned Katz, Henry Abelove, and George Chauncey will show you that the field has long abandoned the "great gays in history approach", and is now engaged in precisely the kind of contextual social and cultural history, engaged with questions of class, race, and yes, gender. I more than anyone long to discover that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Like my love of Alan Turing and other gay saints like Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Michel Foucault, not to mention Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Plato, and Shakespeare, I take as much pleasure as anyone in pondering the vicissitudes and triumphs of same-gender loving men across times and cultures. But scholarship is not therapy. While this kind of recovery work will undoubtedly continue on the margins of the profession, it is no more likely that it will become the center than that the next major work in African American history will be titled "Significant Black Firsts."

Kramer believes that gay history is not "not gender studies." Too bad. Lesbian and gay studies would not exist without feminism, and Yale and the world has moved on since the days the all-male days of Kramer's reverie. Queers of the female persuasion are not the only ones who would take umbrage at Kramer's parsing of gender and sexuality into 'proper objects': the central message of gender studies all along has been that men must be understood as a gender as well. Trans studies, and the emergence of genderqueer culture and politics, forever retires any possibility of going back to the days when all the gays were men.

And white. Nowhere does Kramer acknowledge that the conference was co-sponsored by African American Studies, perhaps because to do so would acknowledge the baselessness of his claim that "every other group of people at Yale" gets the right kind of study except queers. As a black queer, is it suprising that I reject Kramer's belief that these are separable topics? We do not need an additive model of scholarship: women plus queers plus blacks plus the disabled. We need an intersectional and transformational model that helps us understand the simultaneity of vectors of difference. Easier said that done, but don't look to Larry Kramer for help in doing it.