"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

"Every Bloody Right To Be Here": Trans Resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1967 - 1989

<p>Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, trans people in Aotearoa New Zealand resisted cisgender hegemony in numerous ways. This thesis aims to explore three key methods of trans resistance practiced during the period between 1967 and 1989 – community building, trans pride, and normalising trans. This study reveals that trans community building was the essential first step for the budding trans movement, yet maintains that there was never one single trans 'community’ and that each trans community practiced different and sometimes contradictory politics. Just as it was necessary to feel pride in one’s trans self in order to have no shame in connecting to trans others, so too was it necessary to challenge cisgender hegemony and advocate for trans people. This study examines the various ways trans people embodied ‘pride’, refusing to bow to shame on stages as large as the nation’s highest courts to as common as the everyday encounter on the street. The role of trans people in sex worker, gay liberation and homosexual law reform movements is also considered, as is the way trans politics reflected changes on the broader political landscape. Finally, this thesis takes a critical view of attempts made to normalise transness. In the fight for trans rights, some communities practiced a politics of transnormativity and respectability; they attempted to make themselves more respectable by further marginalising those trans communities which were already marginal. This thesis aims to spotlight the disciplining power of race, class, sexuality and gender, determining which bodies mattered and which did not.</p>

"Every Bloody Right To Be Here": Trans Resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1967 - 1989

<p>Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, trans people in Aotearoa New Zealand resisted cisgender hegemony in numerous ways. This thesis aims to explore three key methods of trans resistance practiced during the period between 1967 and 1989 – community building, trans pride, and normalising trans. This study reveals that trans community building was the essential first step for the budding trans movement, yet maintains that there was never one single trans 'community’ and that each trans community practiced different and sometimes contradictory politics. Just as it was necessary to feel pride in one’s trans self in order to have no shame in connecting to trans others, so too was it necessary to challenge cisgender hegemony and advocate for trans people. This study examines the various ways trans people embodied ‘pride’, refusing to bow to shame on stages as large as the nation’s highest courts to as common as the everyday encounter on the street. The role of trans people in sex worker, gay liberation and homosexual law reform movements is also considered, as is the way trans politics reflected changes on the broader political landscape. Finally, this thesis takes a critical view of attempts made to normalise transness. In the fight for trans rights, some communities practiced a politics of transnormativity and respectability; they attempted to make themselves more respectable by further marginalising those trans communities which were already marginal. This thesis aims to spotlight the disciplining power of race, class, sexuality and gender, determining which bodies mattered and which did not.</p>

Antecedents of Marriage Equality in the 1970s

Chapter 3 tells the story of the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the small marches that grew up starting in 1970 to memorialize Stonewall. The marches became the Pride parades we know today, which have grown by a factor of more than 1,000 and spread across the world. Chapter 3 explains the antimarriage ideology of the Gay Liberation Front and tells the story of the American Psychiatric Association’s reclassification of homosexuality as a healthy manifestation of human sexuality in 1973. Early marriage plaintiffs Jack Baker and Michael McConnell faced a hostile legal climate and were unable to have their marriage recognized. The Christian Right rose in prominence in the 1970s on an anti-gay-rights message. There was a campaign of anti-gay-rights referenda that reached its pinnacle with the Briggs Initiative in California in 1978. The Briggs Initiative was defeated by Harvey Milk and other gay rights activists.

Lady-Husbands and Kamp Ladies: Pre-1970 Lesbian Life in Aotearoa/New Zealand

<p>This study explores pre-1970 lesbian life and lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand before the impact of women's and gay liberation and lesbian-feminism, using written sources and oral histories. The thesis argues that before 1970 most women could make lesbianism the organising principle of their lives only through the strategies of discretion and silence. Despite apparent censorship, many classical, religious, legal, medical and fictional discourses on lesbianism informed New Zealand opinion, as regulation of this material was one thing, but enforcement another, and most English language material was available here. These discourses functioned as cautionary tales, warning women of the consequences of disclosure, while at the same time alerting them to lesbian possibilities. Though lesbian sexual acts were not criminalised in New Zealand, lesbianism was contained, regulated and controlled through a variety of mechanisms including the fear of forced medical treatment, social exclusion and disgrace, as well as the loss of employment, housing and family relationships. Class and race affected these outcomes, and this study concludes that learning how to read a wide variety of lesbian lives is essential to furthering research into lesbian histories in New Zealand. The study examined pre-1970 published and unpublished writing suggesting lesbian experiences by selected New Zealand women, within a context informed by writing from contemporaries who have been identified as lesbian, and oral histories from pre-1970 self-identified lesbians.. Many of these women led secretive, often double lives, and of necessity deceived others through silence and omission, actual denial, or sham heterosexual marriages and engagements. The lies, secrecy and silence of self-censorship has often meant the deliberate destruction of written records such as letters or diaries, by women themselves, or later by family members and friends. The study concludes that the private lesbianism of most pre-1970 lesbian lives cannot be understood in isolation, and that scholars must move beyond the women's necessary masquerades to place their lives into a lesbian context in order to recognize and understand them. Each life informs an understanding of the others and by considering them together the study provides a picture of lesbianism in pre-1970 New Zealand, with the stories of the narrators illuminating the written experiences. Silences should not be mistaken for absences, or heterosexuality assumed for all pre-1970 New Zealand women. The stories of resistance and rebellion told by the self-identified lesbian narrators indicate that the women whose lesbian experiences are suggested by their writings similarly resisted societal expectations and prescriptions. Learning how to interpret and understand these materials is essential for moving beyond superficial and heterosexualised accounts of their lives. Towards the end of the period, influenced by other social changes, some lesbians in this study began to resist the need for caution and discretion, providing the basis for the liberation movements of the 1970s.</p>

Lady-Husbands and Kamp Ladies: Pre-1970 Lesbian Life in Aotearoa/New Zealand

<p>This study explores pre-1970 lesbian life and lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand before the impact of women's and gay liberation and lesbian-feminism, using written sources and oral histories. The thesis argues that before 1970 most women could make lesbianism the organising principle of their lives only through the strategies of discretion and silence. Despite apparent censorship, many classical, religious, legal, medical and fictional discourses on lesbianism informed New Zealand opinion, as regulation of this material was one thing, but enforcement another, and most English language material was available here. These discourses functioned as cautionary tales, warning women of the consequences of disclosure, while at the same time alerting them to lesbian possibilities. Though lesbian sexual acts were not criminalised in New Zealand, lesbianism was contained, regulated and controlled through a variety of mechanisms including the fear of forced medical treatment, social exclusion and disgrace, as well as the loss of employment, housing and family relationships. Class and race affected these outcomes, and this study concludes that learning how to read a wide variety of lesbian lives is essential to furthering research into lesbian histories in New Zealand. The study examined pre-1970 published and unpublished writing suggesting lesbian experiences by selected New Zealand women, within a context informed by writing from contemporaries who have been identified as lesbian, and oral histories from pre-1970 self-identified lesbians.. Many of these women led secretive, often double lives, and of necessity deceived others through silence and omission, actual denial, or sham heterosexual marriages and engagements. The lies, secrecy and silence of self-censorship has often meant the deliberate destruction of written records such as letters or diaries, by women themselves, or later by family members and friends. The study concludes that the private lesbianism of most pre-1970 lesbian lives cannot be understood in isolation, and that scholars must move beyond the women's necessary masquerades to place their lives into a lesbian context in order to recognize and understand them. Each life informs an understanding of the others and by considering them together the study provides a picture of lesbianism in pre-1970 New Zealand, with the stories of the narrators illuminating the written experiences. Silences should not be mistaken for absences, or heterosexuality assumed for all pre-1970 New Zealand women. The stories of resistance and rebellion told by the self-identified lesbian narrators indicate that the women whose lesbian experiences are suggested by their writings similarly resisted societal expectations and prescriptions. Learning how to interpret and understand these materials is essential for moving beyond superficial and heterosexualised accounts of their lives. Towards the end of the period, influenced by other social changes, some lesbians in this study began to resist the need for caution and discretion, providing the basis for the liberation movements of the 1970s.</p>

The World in Question

This essay focuses on two radical gay/homosexual organizations of the early 1970s: Third World Gay Revolution (TWGR)—a small group of radical Black and Latinx activists that spun off from the Gay Liberation Front in 1970—and the Argentine organization Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH), which was active between 1971 and 1976. By analyzing periodicals, bulletins, and other ephemera produced by them, Garrido demonstrates how both groups not only articulated demands related to queer sexualities in relation to those of other oppressed communities but also inscribed their gay struggles in a movement for the liberation of all peoples on a planetary scale within the framework provided by third world anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles being waged in African, Asian, and Latin American countries at the time. TWGR and the FLH engaged in “dissident forms of cosmopolitanism” (Chela Sandoval) that drew, in part, from the imaginary of a world in dispute—a world in which colonial and (neo)colonial/imperialist powers were being challenged and third worldism as a global emancipatory project led by “the darker nations” (Vijay Prashad) was gaining ground. At the dawn of neoliberal globalization, both organizations advanced a radical political agenda based on values of social justice with a spirit of transnational solidarity that, Garrido argues, may inspire the multidimensional nature of a queer cosmopolitics to come.

Gendered Sexuality

Sexuality encompasses diverse sexual practices including sexual behaviors, their sequencing, meanings, effects, pleasures, and risks, sexual identities, preferences or orientations, and the social construction of sexual acts and communities over history. Sexuality is undeniably shaped by gender as an individual, interpersonal, and institutional force. It is also shaped by intersecting axes of difference including class, race, ethnicity, age, and body morphology or disability status. These are in turn also affected by sexuality. The study of gendered sexuality has been an interdisciplinary undertaking. The sociological field incorporates insights from anthropology, feminist philosophy, gender and women’s studies, history, LGBTQIA+ studies, cultural studies, media studies, psychology, and queer studies. Early sociology failed to recognize sexuality as a domain of social study, so the subject only gained relevance in sociology in the second half of the 20th century. Touchstone texts from the subfield’s formation often draw on non-sociological works as well as biological, medical, and psychoanalytic approaches. Newer advances in the study of sexuality were initially spurred by feminisms and activist-scholars from the lesbian, bisexual, and gay liberation movement. As such, alongside theoretical development and empirical study, some work in the discipline retains a normative approach, seeking to clarify and advance varying definitions of sexual liberation. Contemporary sociological research on sexuality focuses on resultant inequalities: whether between genders (mostly still conceived of as either men and women) between sexual orientations (mostly still understood as either straight or gay) or between different races or ethnicities. As such, sociological study on sexualities focuses on the collective consequences of sexuality as a varied and changing institutional and normative force.