Earlier this summer, though not for the first time, I found out that, again, the Women’s and Gender Studies program at my university failed, rather clumsily, to add the courses that I regularly teach even as electives to the WGS minor and WGS certificates offered here. I’m about to start my seventh year in my current job, and this omission has been a little too glaring for a little too long—its origins are from before my arrival, and yet that gap just doesn’t seem to want to (be) close(d). Rather too coincidentally, I found out that changes to the WGS program “had been made” on the day the Supreme Court issued the Bostock ruling. Talk about feeling marginalized.
We live in a panopticon in which all the old devils are myopic. So it goes, and so a new semester is slated to begin.
This week, I sat down to prep the syllabus for a class that I’ve taught every year since I arrived here; and even before I arrived here. It led me down a familiar path, to ruminations about where I am and what, exactly, I am doing here, which, alas, I now record for virtual posterity on this blog.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I am an English professor. Inevitably, they ask what I teach. I tell them American literature. When that answer doesn’t suffice, and they ask what classes I teach, I tell them the surveys of American literature and some classes in gender studies. And I hope that’s enough. I try not to say more.
See where this is going? It is not an enigma wrapped in a mystery. I teach Gay and Lesbian Literature; I am a Gay Studies Coordinator. I am amply talented at avoiding saying both in conversation.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am as openly gay as I can be without announcing it on an intercom when I walk in a room. I have a pride tattoo conspicuously placed on my left forearm. I wrote a book titled Gay Faulkner, though even now, I often tell people I wrote a book on Faulkner and work my way through a variety of contortions to avoid saying the title (I used to explain, “Well, it’s about his life in New Orleans, soldiers, the Cold War—lots of things. It’s a long book.”) Whatever I might write about openly on a blog or on social media, in person I bend into all sorts of queer rhetorical shapes to avoid saying sometimes very simple, direct information about which I (swear I) make no bones.
Such is the world of LGBTQ+ identities and the long traumas of LGBTQ+ experiences. It’s not that I’m afraid to say I teach gay literature, per se, though lord knows the places I hang out can be a bit anathema to queer identities. Every queer person whom I know will tell you: we all feel unsafe sometimes, and we all know never to take a sense of safety for granted.
Sadly, I seem to pass for straight when I just sit quietly and pretend like I enjoy whatever football game is on at the bar. My reticence does not usually stem from fear so much as just avoidance. When you meet someone new, it always feels like you need to warn them that the conversation is going to delve in directions away from the straight and narrow before bringing up certain topics. You have to determine if they want to talk about it, if they are comfortable talking about it, if they will reassess your relative coolness and likeability as a result of it, and whether or not you want to play it cool when that shadow crosses their face or that ever-so-small pause holds back their response.
I will channel my inner DuBois for a moment: How does it feel to be a controversy? A bit like this, it turns out. Also—to channel my inner voice free from the influence of better genius: Y'all, the closet is a bitch.
Eve Sedgwick knew what she was up to when she wrote about the closet as the defining epistemology of sexual identity, especially gay identity, in the 20th century. Oddly, if the closet has changed, it is still a closet, and scholars might be able to write a 21st century Volume 2 on behalf of St. Eve, may she rest in peace, but only a dull opportunist seeking a lot of flair but having limited substance could reasonably claim that her theories are now quaint, outdated, or otherwise bunk. Volume 2 would probably be something along the lines of “Intersectionalities of the Closet” but the closet, old episteme of my youth, would still be there. To quote Beyoncé from Black Is King: “History is your future.” I’m taking that quotation out of context, but damned if it isn’t on point.
But who even reads Sedgwick these days? Folks read Judith Butler, maybe, because she has outlived the so-called “Theory Wars” of the late-90s, when everyone wanted to be a cool post-structuralist who could couch inane ideas diffusely related to a text in the semiotics of bad grammar and big words. Mind you, Butler increased her shelf-life by moving from gender to ethical questions about Palestinian/Israeli relations and non-gendered accounts of selfhood. Sedgwick moved into Affect Theory, which was probably the natural evolution of complexity for complexity’s sake in the aftermath of those distant theory wars. Maybe regular readers of QLF are plugged into that area of theoretical probabilities, but those discourses don’t translate to the undergrad classroom effectively, if at all, especially in an academic climate where even the best students struggle to read critically anything that isn’t labeled YA lit.
I mean, I read Sedgwick, but Imma take a step back here—away from the theoretical cliff— to explore some genealogy of gay and lesbian literature. In this case, my own.
In grad school, I formally studied 20th-century American literature. At the University of Mississippi, this period consisted of more than a healthy dose of southern authors and, by extension, critical conversations about black writers, often in relationship to the imaged south. I was also interested in LGBTQ+ literature, Queer Theory, and queer studies generally—lots of issues with naming things in this field, btw. My academic background, from the classes I took to the papers I wrote, easily read as the education of a burgeoning scholar of gay and lesbian studies, even if ostensibly the classes I took don’t look that way just by their titles on my transcript (my CV on the other hand, especially the portion on publications, is hellagay).
My dissertation director was quite aware of my interests and encouraged them—in fact, fostered them. She helped me carve out that queer space in otherwise non-queer coursework. However, she also often warned me that I could never go on the job market as a Queer Theorist nor as someone who studies LGBTQ+ anything as my primary focus. Those jobs didn’t exist anymore, she told me; or if they did, they were few and far between—holdovers from the ashes of the Theory Wars, mostly being blown away in the winds of focus on race and global capitalism as the modus operandi of our present-day literary conversations. So, we plotted a strategy—I’d be an Americanist with a sub-specialty in LGBTQ+ studies. It really is all in how you frame yourself in the cover letter for the specific job you apply for. Always best to emphasize what your audience wants to perceive as your strengths. It’s all a performance, after all.
Because, alas, as Judy B. would remind us—we can’t all go to Yale to be lesbians. Nor to regional public universities to be lightning rods of queer activism wrapped in the cloak of literary studies. Me, I ended up in Wisconsin, a somewhat less queer space than I had imagined it to be.
But how now, brown cow, didst thou arrive in this strange state? Shortly after my dissertation defense, I was hired at the University of Mississippi as an adjunct instructor to teach . . . the Early American literature survey! Admittedly, any decent Americanist should be able to teach both early and late American literature surveys, and I gladly jumped right into the role as lecturer overseeing TAs and delivering two well-rehearsed lectures per week on the foundations of and deep contradictions inherent in American literature prior to a Civil War. I also taught a course primarily for English Ed majors on the history of literary criticism. And thanks to some finagling by my dissertation director, in Spring 2014, I got a shot at LGBTQ+ coursework via a junior-level course on Gay and Lesbian Literature. So began my halcyon days!
Oxford is the kind of place that encourages the melding of creative and scholarly minds, both as a matter of associations and within one’s own intellectual life. I drafted my first novel in this period as a side project to essays on gay Mississippi writer Hubert Creekmore and interpreting Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as an AIDS narrative, all while writing weekly lectures to explain that all American literature prior to the Civil War is an attempt either to ignore the genocide of native peoples or ignore the realities of slave economies. And then I’d get to talk about the 20th century history of queer identities as they are reflected in literature—and how that literature in turn influences how we understand these identities anew.
At UM, my Gay and Lesbian Literature course consisted of a classroom full of genuinely brilliant students—not always the best writers, but all there for solid reasons. Either they were majoring in English and the course offered them an elective, but as majors, they loved to read, regardless of the topic; or they had an interest in Gender Studies, and the course was a variant of coursework aligned with the Isom Center and the Women’s Studies program, of which my dissertation director was interim (now full) director; or they were, well, you guessed it—curious readers looking for general elective credits towards degrees in Liberal Arts. But curious about what? Ah, yes, themselves and histories and identities that just weren’t covered so much in other courses. Many of my students were there because they identified as queer.
About that last reason—it is a true story that I had more than one student in that class who had not told their roommates/friends/frat or sororities siblings where they went those two days a week in the afternoon. They basically either lied and said they were in study hall or working, not unlike I used to tell my parents, when I was in high school, that I was out with “friends” when I was out on a date.
Like I said: y'all, the closet is a bitch.
For some of these students, they realized that telling their friends that they were taking a course on gay and lesbian literature would be to come out. And YES, that is crazy! But, still, that is true. The conversation was rehearsed to me by students in that gallows humor for which minority communities have such affection: “If I told my [friend, roommate, siblings] I was taking gay and lesbian literature, they’d be all like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know. Are you trying to tell me something? I love you no matter what. We’re still cool, right?’” We laughed over it, in pantomime away from said friends/roommates/siblings. I’d secretly wonder if it was kosher to ask said student out for a drink because damned if they didn’t deserve it.
Probably the most significant story of my gay teaching life emerged early in this class. At UM, there was a clear gay and lesbian community, but other identities, especially other gender identities, were not as discussed. I made the mistake of focusing on sexual orientation in the class, which worked out because sexual orientation and gender identity are not exactly separate things even if they are not fundamentally related in a fixed way, but I was still learning. My focus was too narrow, and I work to do better these days.
Apparently, I did something right in my first class meeting, though, because afterwards a student approached me, whom I had read as a butch lesbian, and asked if I would call him by he/him pronouns. Recognizing my erroneous assumption, I immediately said of course I would. But then the student said something that I will never leave behind in some arrogant sense that I’ve grown beyond it. The student told me, “This is the first time I’ve approached a professor to ask them to call me by my pronouns and not felt like I was going to vomit.”
They don’t train you for these moments in graduate school. I felt flattered that I’d done something to make the student feel that comfortable; I felt deeply moved by the compliment paid to me; I felt violently angry that a student had to feel that way at all in any situation; and I realized that I learned more in those 30 seconds of conversation than I had learned in whole semesters of the previous seven years of study to get me to the point I could even teach that class.
Yet, there I was. I was a “temporary employee” on my ID card, but it was a good year teaching. I was happy to be where I was. I was also on the job market, of course, and that is when is I applied for and got my current job. Funny how these experiences played out in that process. And by funny, I mean . . . well, “queer.”
The application for my current job listed the requirements as teaching freshman writing—a standard requirement for teaching universities—and the Early American literature survey! I shouldn’t have qualified even for an interview except I had found my way to teaching just exactly that survey at UM, though it wasn’t quite my area of expertise. Again, it’s all performance and I can perform. But I have my own ways of handling different performances. Recalling that many of my peers went down the rabbit hole of researching prospective employers when they landed an interview at a university—which subsequently didn’t hire them—I opted simply to google the university and town one night. Beyond that, I just let it ride. I did pack syllabi for my gay and lesbian literature course as well as for the literary criticism course to take with me to the on-campus interview, for one never knows just what will come in handy in those settings. I did not bother even researching to find out that the university I was applying to had a gay studies program, including three specific gay studies courses listed in the catalogue, all in the English department.
As it so happened, two coincidences joined forces when I was traveling north for my day on campus—well, three coincidences, but the third is worth its own blog post. My original plans for a trip of approximately 48-60 hours turned into an epic four-day ordeal due to multiple tornadoes and cancelled flights. The two pairs of pants, two shirts, and accompanying, well, two pairs of other clothing items that I brought with me when I left pushed my creative limits on the “what to wear for an interview” front. The other two coincidences matter more, though, for this posting.
First, the university had those three gay studies courses!
Second, as I waited in an airport for another tornado to pass, I got a call from a contact at the university to tell me, “So, the guy who teaches the gay studies curriculum just resigned,” followed by, “We’ve seen from your CV that you can teach those classes. Any chance you could talk about that while you are here? Did you bring a syllabus?”
Per Deadpool, it is obvious to me that my mutant power is just unreasonable luck. I gave my teaching demo on Early American Literature, a course I’ve since taught one time in six years here. Instead, for my first semester on campus, I taught Gay and Lesbian Literature—like, the course had the exact same title as at UM. Then that spring Gay and Lesbian Literature for Young Adults, a course mostly designed for English Ed majors but that also appeals to literature students. I’ve taught Gay and Lesbian Literature every year since 2014. I’ve taught the YA version of the class once as a regular class, twice as directed studies, unpaid overloads for students interested in the class for specific reasons relevant to their degree programs beyond general education requirements. And I’ve taught a course titled Introduction to Gay Studies more times than I can remember—usually every semester with rare breaks.
The catch to what I’m getting at might have just slid right past you in that last paragraph if you weren’t paying attention. That part about general education. My classes in my current job, when I teach them as regular seminars, are packed to the gills, every semester, usually with students emailing begging to be added over the cap. I’d like to tell myself this craving for my classes is a response to my awesomeness. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Their interest is because students need classes like mine to graduate—all students do. My gay studies courses fill general education requirements. My courses count as “Humanities” credit, of which all students need two; additionally, they count as “Gender Studies” credit, of which all students need one per a system-wide policy that guarantees I’ll never have empty seats, even for a gay-themed class.
And no one lies about their whereabouts to their friends, roommates, or Greek siblings. And most students in the classes do not identify as queer in any capacity. In fact, they often feign utter ignorance of even basic knowledge of sexual alterities and gender variance. And most of them are just stunned (at least for the duration of a class period) about the nuances and challenges of coming out. They’d, like, just never thought of it that much before. But they did know this kid in high school . . . or their cousin . . . or this kid in the dorms.
In Mississippi, that one semester I taught gay and lesbian literature, the students had specific cause to be in the class—they wanted to be there, for lack of a better way to put it. In the wilds of Wisconsin? For most students (notably, not all), my courses are a box to check on a checklist. Even the junior-level gay and lesbian literature course—better than half of the students are just gen ed students, seeking credits in one of the rare examples of a program devoted to Gay/Queer/LGBTQ+ studies remaining outside of the world of R1s.
I am the last, distant line of defense in the smoldering ruins of an ancient theory war battlefield, or so it feels like I am sometimes. But woe to they who focus on theory, history, and context in this faraway land among the new-age barbarians. In the best of situations, the complexity of teaching this material is challenging. In lesser situations, the problems compound.
The goal of this post is not to lament that my prodigious talents are being wasted in the wilderness, far from the celestial city atop some academic ivory tower I do not care to climb. A good teacher adapts to the setting, and for now, this world is my scholarly world, these classes my classes. Yes, it is true that I spend my days inch-worming marigolds with students who seem decidedly underexposed to most everything, not the least of which being history, queer or otherwise; but I have had some FUCKING AMAZING students here among the rabble of students just checking boxes towards graduation.
The goal of this post is to situate the challenge of teaching marginalized histories and about marginalized and closeted identities in an America that can’t even teach its own mainline history effectively or come to terms with its own identity politics beyond blind whiteness and unquestioning patriarchy.
How do you explain to students the impact of AIDS of gay communities when they 1) don’t know the blood ban from that era is still in effect and 2) at best have been told AIDS is a gay disease if they’ve ever encountered discussion of it at all? How do you explore the problems of discourse, even the simple concept of labeling identities, for students who can’t even define “gay” beyond, “like, when you like someone of the same sex” (this answer is problematic because what they actually mean is “same gender”, which is, itself, a social construct that students blank out on during discussion; and there is much to unpack with “like” versus “desire” versus “has sex with” versus “wants to have sex with,” which are among the many discussions one has with students who are just at the beginning of queer wokeness. There is little room for more advanced themes)?
It is not uncommon for students to admit they are afraid to answer questions during discussion—such as when I ask, “Define homosexual, anyone?”—because they think no answer that they give will be right. And I’m like, “Yeah, well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” before asking them, “would you prefer to define heterosexual instead?” Much silence ensues.
Notably, I rarely have students coming up to me to ask about pronouns after class—largely because most of the queer students already know me and spend time chilling in my office, where I have a chance to learn their identities outside of the classroom space. On campus, I work hard to be the biggest gay lightning rod set out to attract every strike of lightning. It’s a professional persona, and a necessary one lest students scan the horizons of the halls of learning and fail to see the LGBTQ+ folks among them, some even in positions of authority and rank.
But then, there’s always a catch, even now, even when I’m soldiered out in my last-line-of-defense drag for the cause of queer academic viability. See, not all my class are “Gay Studies,” and in 2020—and in 2018, 2016, and certainly in 2014 when I arrived to this wilderness outpost, most students here struggle mightily to accept the reality of queer people (“there’s this kid in the dorms”) and only take these classes for gen ed credits. It is not always at a bar where I am asked about what classes I teach.
I also teach first-year writing. When my freshmen in that class ask me what other courses I teach (so they can have me as a professor again), I respond with, “Well, some upper-level literature courses, they’d count for your Humanities credits; I also teach some gender studies courses. You can look those up.” Because most of them don’t know (apparently, I can read as straight even when I’m not faking interest in football); or if they do know, they think they are in on some secret, like they are special because they get the joke.
Because y'all, I told you, the closet is a bitch.
I do sometimes attempt to have my students read Judith Butler’s essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” So they can read Butler’s commentary that we come out of the closet, but into what? (this) And that we (have to) come out again and again (like I'm trying to explain here), if we are not outed against our will by others (“there’s this kid in the dorms”). And then she goes to Yale to be a lesbian. At that point, my students tend to blank out.
The few who stay with the vein of the conversation get a small laugh when I explain that whatever I’m wearing that day in class is my professor drag, just a teaching persona. And it’s all drag really, all of it! And that’s when I roll up my left sleeve to show off my pride tattoo, which I said was conspicuous, but which I never said I couldn’t, when I felt the need to, hide.
The past is prelude (history is your future!), but this is the place I return to, this rhetorical rabbit hole that I find myself in at the start of every fall semester as I prepare to teach Gay and Lesbian Literature, a junior-level survey I’ve taught in Mississippi and now teach regularly in Wisconsin. My class has been fully enrolled since before semester ended in Spring. At UM, I taught eight novels, including both The Well of Loneliness and Tales of the City, neither difficult reads, but neither short, especially for students who read, it seems, almost nothing outside of class. And maybe nothing in class either.
Here, I’ve tried eight novels, and struggled, even when one novel was a graphic novel. I’ve long since reduced the reading to six novels. I like novels. I like the fullness of their narrative texture, the chance to explore text and context in detailed ways. No Hemingway and baby shoes—but communities and identities told in textualities. This is what “gay and lesbian” literature is to me, and some students here keep up.
As I’ve prepared my reading list this semester, I’ve got five novels, plus a very limited selection of short stories and poems. Now, a thought experiment: take any substantial category of human identity, marginalized or not, and reduce it to five texts. Then tell yourself that those five texts will tell the full story to students for whom this reading list is the entirety of their exposure to these ideas, this their whole experience. One is a YA novel, Simon v. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which is where we will begin the semester because it is generally devoid of cultural context—minus a few throwaway lines about “the south” since it is, technically, set in suburban Atlanta. One character does have an accent. It makes him stand out.
The entire novel is a study of (upper) middle-class sheltered high school students confronting the fact that one of their cohort is gay, and no one will really care about it, but he just “doesn’t want to change anything” and he’ll just wait til college to come out if he can—that is, until he’s blackmailed by a classmate who wants a date with a girl. The novel contains no serious attempt to position this coming out against the AIDS crisis in the south, especially in Georgia, which is, also, to the CDC; no serious discussion of gay marriage, though Simon is a high schooler, so we can forgive him that, even if his story, published in 2014, happens to coincide with the critical year between Windsor and Obergefell, both of which were predicated on Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, a case out of Atlanta, Georgia that had national effects on anti-sodomy laws. At the end of the novel, Bram turns out to be both part Jewish and part black, and this is the extent of racial discussion in the novel, though his coming out experience mostly mirrors Simon’s because, though of different ethnic backgrounds, both are from financially solvent homes. Both plan to go college; both represent characters who, if real, could.
It is a garden variety coming out story about a garden variety gay teen, but the students really get into the discussion and think of their own high school experiences, or the experiences of their friends, or people they knew in high school. Never that kid from the dorms. He/she/they is other to their experiences; and those are the walls that give the closet its shape.
The other novels—I rotate what I teach, hoping something will stick—devolve into consternations. When the story is not so accessible as a YA novel about coming out, sans the complexity of Butler’s essay on that topic, class tuns into me wondering what I’m supposed to be teaching—basic textuality? Or context and history?
It feels like a yearly viewing of some far away object but through a glass darkly. Every year it is a return to one question: what to do to help them see?
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