| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

John D'Emilio, The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2002)

AS I BEGIN WRITING this review, an e-mail from John D'Emilio pops up on the Queer Studies List, a reaction to an account of an appallingly homophobic and misogynistic lecture given by a controversial researcher working on the etiology of homosexuality and its links to gender atypical behaviour, in other words to "sissyness" or "tomboyishness:" "A generation ago, queer activists made it very difficult for an earlier generation of ... ideologues posing as scientists to appear and speak in public — "zaps" were a part of queer movement life then."

These few lines — a call for action imbued with nostalgia — give a good sketch of the character of D'Emilio, a fuller portrait of whom you will find in The World Turned, a collection of his essays of the 1990's. Far from being a staid academic whose audience is limited to the initiated few, D'Emilio is one of a dying breed of scholar-activists whose work is stimulating and accessible. Not only is he the foremost historian of the homophile movement, the group of pioneering individuals and organizations of the 1950's and 1960's that paved the way for gay liberation, he is also an important actor and commentator of the struggles of the last 30 years.

Perhaps this central role will excuse the fact that the World in the title refers strictly to the US, even though an occasional glance at what was happening in gay communities elsewhere in the world might have made for interesting comparisons. For Canadian readers, the opening and closing essays on black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin will undoubtedly call to mind gay Québec liberationists Pierre Bourgault, late founder of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale, who heaped scorn on the gay movement as a secondary if not trivial struggle, or the late Pierre Vallières, of Nègres blancs d'Amérique fame, who late in life joined it. In an effort to bring gay history to bear on subjects not directly related to homosexual oppression or the homosexual subculture, D'Emilio argues that Rustin's homosexuality played a key role not only in fashioning his political career, badly damaged by scandals and FBI leaks to hostile politicians, but also in fashioning his political ideas on the civil rights movement. D'Emilio thus paints a carefully crafted picture of Rustin in which this often ignored aspect of his life is highlighted, but not to the point of obscuring his major accomplishments, an example that I hope will one day inspire a gay history of the Québec independence movement.

Perspective and subjectivity notwithstanding, D'Emilio is at his best when he writes history that is also his story, and the first part of the book, on gay history of the last 50 years, is most palpitating when the subject touches him directly, as in his essay, "Still Radical After All These Years." This is a preface he wrote for the 20th anniversary edition of Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, a book that was nothing less than a "cathartic experience" for the young D'Emilio in 1973. Still somewhat entranced by the echoes of these radical Voices, he now offers clearheaded assessments of the revolutionary ideas they proposed, tracing their historical roots and examining their branching into strategies that were sometimes fruitful, but mostly barren. If he is happy with the success of one pivotal idea, the politicizing of the private and the sexual, he is regretful that the analyses linking sexism to homophobia have been jettisoned; feminism and gay liberation having parted ways long ago. D'Emilio shows here one of his major concerns, which pops up again and again in the other essays of his book, namely that our views of oppression are being fragmented and that the struggle for gay rights will go nowhere if we fail to build alliances.

Another idea that D'Emilio encountered in Out of the Closets and which remains close to his heart also resounds all over this collection: the concept of sexuality as a malleable potential that promises escape from oppressive categorizations. He is dismayed by the failure of this vision and by the spread in the general public of the contrary notion of a fixed homosexual identity. He condescendingly calls this a "slippage," but elsewhere he consoles himself by noting the triumph in academic circles of a closely related idea, the social-constructivist view that sexual identity is historically transient. Not surprisingly, D'Emilio's previously published theory that the emergence of a homosexual identity in the 19th century is somehow linked to capitalism suffuses his writing. This is an extension of the concept of the homosexual as a creation of 19th-century medicine, proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It has become a creed of "queer studies" to which D'Emilio subscribes unquestioningly, even though Foucault himself had renounced it late in life when confronted with the work of Michel Rey on the networks of sodomites in 18th-century Paris.

Even if you do not always agree with D'Emilio's Interpretations, which is the title of this first section, there is enough information and coherence in these essays to elicit respect and sometimes even sympathy. For instance in "Placing Gay in the Sixties," a reassessment of the importance of homosexuality in that pivotal decade and its later repercussions, D'Emilio leaves room for a good debate by presenting nuanced arguments against which you can measure your objections.

His Interventions, as the second section is titled, are quite different in tone. The ideology that served as a discreet background to the first section is now brought to the foreground with sometimes disastrous results. In "Born Gay?" a critique of the belief in the biological basis of sexual orientation and of its political utility, D'Emilio comes across not only as dogmatic, but as an anti-scientific philistine. From the start of this essay, you know where he's heading when he writes "I'm not particularly interested in trying to counter the findings of scientists. In part, because I don't have the background to critique the scientific studies of the past years." (154) Indeed, he will keep his word and only allude to the studies of identical twins and to the "study of genetic markers of homosexuality" with no further elaboration. As you read along, it becomes clear that he believes these prove the biological determinism implied in the title, whereas, for instance, what the twin studies show is that only half of identical twins of gay men are also gay. Weighing in such information and discussing it would be too much for D'Emilio, who is not even interested in exploring the broadest principles of modern genetics (such as the interplay of genes and the environment) and much less its intricacies. To put it simply, he does not understand what the science is saying, but that does not stop him from misrepresenting it.

That a cultured man at the beginning of the 21st century should not make an effort to grasp some basic science when so much knowledge is easily accessible is disappointing. But worse yet is his attempt to prove, by conflating modern research with absurd theories of the past about congenital homosexuality and "contrary sexual instincts," that science is a "thin reed" swaying in the winds of fashion. To a scientist, his efforts only confirm that contemporary history sometimes has more in common with the flights of fancy of Herodotus than molecular genetics has in common with 19th-century medicine.

I, for one, would not go as far as calling for a zap against "ideologues posing as historians" without trying to understand the history they write. But zap or not, D'Emilio is holding on to the notion that there is some measure of choice in sexual orientation as steadfastly as Soviet biologists held on to the theory of Lamarckian evolution.

Fortunately, the closing section entitled Reflections, brings some modicum of relief to the exasperated reader. To the opening essay on Rustin is added a much more interesting pendant. "A Biographer and His Subject" is a fascinating house of mirrors in which D'Emilio tries to understand his own politics and those of Rustin by reflecting each upon the other, comparing the civil rights strategies of the 1950s and 1960s with those of the gay rights movement of the 1970s to the 1990s.

All in all I would sum up this collection with a variation on the old saying: the personal is better than the political.


Louis Godbout Archives Gaies du Québec

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