Introduction
QUEER INTENTIONS: A COURSE AND SCALAR PROJECT
Heather N. Lukes
Associate Professor
Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice
Occidental College
- Cruising the Archive, January 2016
You can’t clean it up ‘til you make a mess!
-Tracy + The Plastics, “Save Me Claude”
This course, “CTSJ 337: Queer LA: Cruising the Archive,” borrows its title from a 2012 ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive exhibition, “Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture, 1945-1980.” Actually, I don’t borrow the title. I steal it. Because ONE is one of Oxy's community partners, I expect they will forgive me. Yet as the quotable Wilson Mizner, playwright, manager of LA’s famous Brown Derby, and native Angelino ne’er-do-well once said, “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” While holding ourselves to a higher ethical standard of scholarship and many authors, CTSJ 337 intends to use this queer sense of reference, homage, and magpie research to study and create a mixed-media digital document that tells a unique story about LGBT* life in the greater LA area.
In a sense, LA has always been a site of layered plagiarisms with its film industry creating a cultural mise en abyme that has made it difficult to apprehend the city itself. Thom Andersen’s 2003 documentary video Los Angeles Plays Itself makes this point as it chastens “Hollywood” for its misrepresentation of the actual metropolis. Borrowing his title from a 1972 gay experimental pornographic film L.A. Plays Itself by Fred Halsted, Andersen nonetheless seems to miss his referent’s broader point that fantasy is central to LA’s ethos, and especially its queer communities. (Indeed, for better or worse, in a heteronormative world, porn still represents the largest archive of representations of gay men).[1] Even within the research paradigms of social science, LA is known as the United States’ urban anomaly with its sprawl, transnational diversity, and mixed economy. LA’s vaunted “72 suburbs in search of city” is itself an apocryphal quip typically, and falsely, attributed to Dorothy Parker.[2]
If Los Angeles as an American city has always seemed “queer,” in the antiquated sense of the term, so has its status as a belated and anomalous LGBT* city, ostensibly trailing behind landmark moments and movements in New York and San Francisco. Yet LA queered the narrative gay life well before these more legible modern US cities yielded what standard historiography has framed as the 1960s origin points of contemporary homosexual identity. The list of LGBT* “firsts” is lengthy, which is dispersed throughout this section.
LGBT "Firsts" in LA, Part 1
A flurry of academic and independent scholarship about queer LA inspired the first iteration of this course at Occidental College in 2009. It was a heady time, what with the recent publication of Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’ popular 2006 history Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians; the imminent integration of the ONE Archives into the USC library system; and local pop-up walking tours of queer LA’s historical geography (replete with Oxy students aghast that the Ronald Reagan State Building now sits where John Rechy used to cruise on Spring Street).[3] Why didn’t Los Angeles register as a wellspring of LGBT* activism, and what might reclaiming its legacy mean for contemporary social justice?
While acknowledging the crucial struggles and archives that must constitute any usable history of LA, we also resist a form of revisionist LGBT* historiography that jockeys for civic origin prestige. Following up from decades of scholarship questioning New York City’s Stonewall riot as a singularly historical font, Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage have argued that “the myth of Stonewall” only congealed because activists, as well as local and national politicians, construed the event “as commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorative vehicle.”[4]
Arguably, LA resists commemorability because it refuses to congeal as a city legible to urban studies or as a real site separable from its imaginaries. Historic plaques about LGBT* history don’t really stand out in a city geographically famous for the “Walk of Fame” and the looming “Hollywood Sign.” Mega-cultural fuzz tends to set this city off the radar. Scenes like the Northeast LA’s gayborhood Silver Lake, South LA’s drag balls, old Hollywood’s overlapping punk and hustler scenes, or the long-dead queer haven of downtown’s Pershing Square inspire new historians, and new cartographers of queer meaning.
The Digital Classroom
In homage to LA’s inherent oddities, this course forwards the idea of “cruising the archive” by placing in conversation the “digital” and the “queer,” each as implicit critiques of traditional methodological practices and brick-and-mortar containments of culture and history. Cruising implies both looking for sex in public spaces (as well as improvised community, world-making, and identity) and looking for information in non-systematic ways. This irregular form of “research” has consistently informed queer theory’s interdisciplinary and often anti-disciplinary ethos since its inception in the early 1990s.[5] In contrast to reigning metaphors like “browsing” or “surfing” that implicitly mark the whiteness and heteronormativity of standard digital engagement, we offer the edgier trope of “cruising” to open onto the creative potentials of the digital humanities forms of research and presentation.
LGBT "Firsts" in LA, Part 2
Caveat emptor, DH enthusiasts, Kim and Lukes together and separately scaffolded this 2016 course for over a year in advance of its actual offering. Following the ethos of “community-based learning,” we contacted a number of potential community organizations and local collectors to build relationships. We only sought out connections where our students would augment local social justice activity while also gaining critical knowledge.[6] In fits and starts, we had lost some potential community partners and gained others. By the time Kim had delivered his opening lecture on the current status of LGBT* archives and Michel Foucault’s immanent queering of archives as such, Lukes had located key collections at the ONE and conducted four oral histories for a potential chapter on the LA Silver Lake “gayborhood.” Meanwhile, Kim had confirmed a relationship with the community organization REACH LA to examine its huge unprocessed collections.
We told our students that they would be critically examining the potentials and limits of “the Digital Revolution” through such questions as: Who has more or less access to information in our current sea change from analog to digital forms?[7] How does the vaunted “digital divide” shape-shift as technology become more affordable, hashtags inspire social movements, and a threat to “net neutrality” now challenges even global elite communities?[8] Beyond access, whose information even gets archived in any form, be it in a temperature-controlled room or through a hashtag? How does the movement toward the digital cast a nostalgic light on analog formats and traditional humanities?[9] How does any shift in technology and media provoke, invite, repress, or ignore extant systems of information storage and access? Are these effects accidental, market-driven, community-oriented, conscious, or (dare I say) unconscious?
CTSJ 337 is framed as a team-driven and project-oriented course organized around building a hybrid archive/book in Scalar by the end of the semester. We designed CTSJ 337 as an interweaving seminar and lab structure (five units; three classroom hours led by me and one lab hour taught by Kim per week, over fifteen weeks). With the goal of organically balancing theory and practice, we did not write a conventional syllabus but rather built an “archive” of potential primary and secondary source materials, which far exceeds what students could read in a semester. With a few required texts in the beginning and a scaffolded schedule, we intend to allow flexibility for how the students themselves might select archival materials, assign readings, and teach sessions themselves as they hone their collective interests for the Scalar book overall and specific team interests for each chapter. It is unclear what final form this product will take, but we imagine linking text, audio, photography, video, mapping, and timeline formats to external sites of other community organizations and archives, perhaps constructing a kind of archive of and about queer LA archives.
I write this introductory essay to our book/archive in three parts in order to illuminate the beginning, middle, and end of our course-driven process. Our proposed audiences are the following (in no particular order), but we hope others will cruise our archive as well: users of Scalar interested in what the format affords; students and teachers interested in exploring the capacities of digital humanities and collaborative pedagogy; queers and feminists looking for information that they can cut, paste, and reassemble as they will; and less finally than expansively, all those interested equally in cleaning up social messes and messing up pre-ordained taxonomies. We believe that queer theory and the digital humanities share this interest and capacity.
To think the queer through the digital and the analog begs deep questions about relationality: between people, between people and things (analog or digital), and between things and things that real people may never mediate. Here at the beginning, I want to imagine this project as a riff on the classic 1970s feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves, which provided crucial answers to questions that many could once not even think to ask.[10] Here we lead with a question: Our Archives, Ourselves? I leave it to this semester’s talented and engaged collective of undergraduates to provide more nuanced questions about how to tell both the story of queer LA and their experience of trying to tell it.
- Notes in Media Res: Ropes, Rigging, and Queer Mapping, March 2016
Well, I am proud to say, that these fears of digital and democratic disaster have not come to fruition, due mostly to an amazing crew. Even as I instantly have a critique of my own colonial and adolescent boyish "sea adventure" discourse, I will nonetheless extend my metaphor in the name of our anti-hegemonic venture, at the very least to rally the deckhands. Our original intention was to construct four chapters: 1) Silver Lake as a gay neighborhood, 2) the Black/Latinx House and Ballroom scene, 3) the queer LA punk scene, and 4) queer art in LA. The ship has changed course but with better destinations in mind, even as these lead us through queerer and more harrowing waters.
To get out of port, we read together Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s popular history book, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians.[11] Whereas such early studies of queer LA started with a booster ethos, offering that “US gay history happened in LA first,” scholarship has evolved into more nuanced analyses, suggesting that queer LA challenges what we think of as standard LGBT* historiography, unto how queer social geography might revise urban studies. Where Moira Kenney and Karen Tongson complicate the idea of urban “gayborhoods” by revaluing LA’s inherently queer sprawl and the unique psychological locations of its immigrant communities, Daniel Hurewitz extends the reputation of Silver Lake (neé Edendale) as an urban queer enclave across time to connect it to a broader bohemian past.[12]
At this point we found ourselves at sea in multiple discourses that refused to align into a longitudinal/latitudinal matrix. We were equally dissatisfied with an identitarian approach that would chart single axis chapters along the LGBT acronym and a strictly historical or geographic approach to the city. In addition to already charted territory stretching from early homophile societies to the Gay Liberation Movement to the L Word, we were swirling in eddies of keywords: suburbs, lipstick lesbians, transgression, cognitive mapping, bohemia, gentrification, the police, community organizations, HIV/AIDS, and subculture. Returning to queer and archival theories provided a different navigation system starting with objects and taxonomies of organization rather than the narrative tactics of social history.
LGBT "Firsts" in LA, Part 3
To challenge the transhistorical nature of LGBT* studies that persists even after queer theory’s interventions, as well as what exactly we mean by “archive,” we read John D’Emilio’s “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and Marlene Manoff’s “Theories of the Archive.”[13] To further address the problem of the historical opacity of queer experience in traditional archives, we delved into José Esteban Muñoz’s 1996 “Ephemera as Evidence,” written five years after Joan Scott’s essay “The Evidence of Experience.”[14] Muñoz and Scott were not in direct conversation but shared the winds of three influences at their backs – earlier historical gay and lesbian studies’ “ancestor recovery”; newly minted “queer theory,” variously informed by Freud, Foucault, and all things “post-structural”; and the biopolitical devastations of HIV/AIDS. Whereas Scott claims that “[e]xperience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted,” Muñoz asks whose experience is even recognizable as or for interpretation? “Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere – while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility” (6). Whereas Muñoz and Scott could be construed as disagreeing with each other, they together complicate the burden of the empirical in archiving queer experience and the queering of any archive.
With this theoretical framing, we ventured into actual archives. Starting in Occidental’s special collections archives, we looked for signs of gay life on campus in Oxy newspapers, yearbooks, and loose photographs from 1968-1971. With the interpretative skills gleaned here, we took on the ONE’s Christopher Street West collection, documenting the world’s first gay pride parade in 1970. In the course of trying to determine why the parade was cancelled after two years (and later renewed), we came upon materials from the Satyrs Motorcycle Club (MC), technically the oldest extant gay group in the world. When students gained access to a local collector who agreed to share part of the Satyr’s archive before its eventual donation to the ONE, we dropped a proposed chapter on queer art in LA to make a chapter on gay MC and leather culture from the 1950s to the present.
Our next field trip took us the headquarters of REACH LA, which specializes in supporting youth of color at risk for HIV/AIDS. Our intention is to help REACH LA process some of their raw collections of ephemera and born-digital material from their hosted competitive drag "ball" events, a phenomenon popularized by the 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning and Madonna’s appropriation of the subculture’s dance styles in her song and video “Vogue.” Oral histories and visual materials from the ONE provide the archival basis of our Silver Lake section. The punk chapter is meant to draw on the increasing number of oral histories that have been published about the LA scene, as well as images found on the internet (at this point the UCLA punk archive is not yet accessible). This chapter intends to take on a methodological approach by setting analog technologies of fan culture, like wall postering and “zining,” in conversation with digital searches that the hypertextual capacities of Scalar afford. In fact, because the creative information displays of the digital humanities share much in common with zining, we invited UCLA archivist Kelley Besser to give a lecture on the history of queer zines and conduct a workshop. Our mutual zine for the chapters in the course are featured here.
Subculture
At this point in the semester, CTSJ 337's academic readings and archival research have narrowed our focus to a study of subculture, a now traditional subject of inquiry for Cultural Studies. Starting with Dick Hebdige’s classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style, then engaging texts by Judith “Jack” Halberstam, Tavia Nyong'o, and others, we took it upon ourselves to test the thesis of what counts as subculture.[15] So far, we have yielded one productive question: Can older hermeneutics of subculture still inhere in the age of the digital?
This testing of subcultural theses has reorganized our chapters, expanding some, honing others, and further queering all. Given the legacy of Hebdige's classical study of punk as subculture, the student-researchers of the queer punk LA chapter have been both blessed and burdened: on the one hand, they are blessed with an ostensible punk "control group" for our study; on the other hand they are burdened as our leaders for the rest of the class in theories of subculture. The implication of analogy between the subversive aspects of punk and queer, best analyzed by Nyong'o, dissolved quickly because the early LA punk scene did, in fact, involve a lot of extra-identitarian homosexual action. As is evident by our Scalar book’s focus on subculture, as opposed to identity, these theoretical concerns intoxicated all of us and made us think differently about our overall goal and the formal imperatives of the separate chapters.
In media res, I am so impressed by these students’ work toward researching, constituting, critiquing, and thinking through and with less recognized queer LA archives. As the chapters get more specific toward actually completing our archive/book, Kim has provided technical pedagogy, while also using the expansive organizational principles of Scalar to push students to think about how their archives and critical interventions might organically shape the structure of each chapter in correspondence with the “style” of each subculture.
No matter how fair the winds and currents, all hands on a vessel mid-ocean are inevitably both vexed and invigorated by their exposure to the elements and a desire to find a happy port. As a captain, I am continually anxious about becoming a sort of Ahab. Yet given that we did not leave port hoping to find a white whale or a New World of digital humanities that would subsume analog ways, our journey by the end will have at least been interesting.
- Deconstruction: Making Messes and Cleaning Up, February 2018
--Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings
Writing here, nearly two years later, I suppose I need to wrap up my extended maritime metaphor into a proper allegory. We shipwrecked but crawled onto the shores of a pretty interesting island. Or to return to my opening epigraph from the queer post-riot grrrl band Tracy + The Plastics, we made a hot mess.
Cvetkovich’s thoughts on the “praxis” of deconstruction speak to the exciting and often frustrating negotiation between abstract ideas and concrete decisions that characterized the course CTSJ 337. At some point, these students, who were already trained to deconstruct ideas, were chastened to realize that building an archive is harder than queering extant ones. In this sense, the course became an interesting meditation on the tensions always already at play in our department’s coupling of critical theory and social justice.
In many ways, our course fell into the whirlpools that Ryan Cordell warns about in his essay “How Not to Teach the Digital Humanities.”[16] We assigned too much. No one student took up the multitasking that our combination of DH, analog archival research, and critical theory demanded, even as each contributed and excelled in some areas. We presumed that these “digital native” students would care about the form of DH, when in fact they became intoxicated with the content, as well as analog archives and archival practices. Had we planned fewer chapters, teams larger than two students each would have generated more accountability and focused management for the instructors and the student coordinator.
We have decided to list all of the student contributors in alphabetical order, offering separate bylines to Adrienne Adams and Juan Daniel Calzadillas, whose labor for Finding a Tribe continues, and whose personal reflection essays are featured in our two most complete Scalar chapters, “#Ovahness” and “The Swish Alps.” While only two of the teams constructed projects that resembled the structure of a Scalar “chapter,” the class did gather a great deal of material from the ONE, REACH LA, and private collectors. These achievements in themselves made a cogent argument for telling the story of queer LA through its subcultures. In essence, the course provided an outline for an important ongoing pedagogical and public humanities project that might get at the queerness of LA itself and its LGBT* communities, otherwise than axial identity politics or linear histories.
Kim and Lukes have worked over the last two years to clean up CTSJ 337’s hot mess and create a sort of beta version of Finding a Tribe. We hope to build from this template in future courses at Occidental and to attract collaborators at other colleges interested in queer LA subcultures and undergraduate DH research. We believe that colleges and community organizations can collaborate through Scalar to create a hybrid public archive/book about queer LA that includes trans-media presentations, written narrative, and critical analysis that contextualize archival objects.
We also believe that undergraduate research – be it through the DH, dusty analog archives, interviews, or walking tours -- is crucial in a time when both minority community knowledge production and academia are under duress. While the course did not produce a finished project in Scalar, it did instill in students a deep, and often personal, interest in queer LA history as well as DH capacities and analog archives. A number of students continued working on the topic of queer LA after the semester through senior thesis projects and in internships and volunteer positions with community partners. Some started their own zines. Others gained proficiency with Scalar and applied it to other projects.
Even at its most frustrating moments, the class did have a lot of fun. It turns out that the grit and glamour of queer LA could happen in the classroom just as much as it could on the street, on silver screen, or in the backroom.
[1] See Rick Cante and Angelo Revisto, “The Cultural-Aesthetic Specificities of All-male Moving-image Pornography” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
[2] http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2013/08/misquoting_dorothy_parker.php
[3 Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
[4]http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25472425.pdf?casa_token=PDohJmWoUlUAAAAA:hcbxIOF-snB0MeegrHZO6gz264SSXUtBD0Md2TD-xCiWaaGDic5qoL8WmlOlBZeQ-6MxOF-6oSBfOQynLJSFiO2VZm_ZoZmWfha9PoO7Qmq0l9NFQ0M
[5] See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham and London, 2003); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); a staggered double issue on queer archiving in Radical History Review 120 (Fall 2014) and 122 (Spring 2015) eds. Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murhpy, and Zeb Tortorici. For an instance of how literally and unprofessionally cruising and queer scholarship can go, see the infamous Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (New York and London: Routledge, 1975), originally published in 1970 by Transaction Publishers with the subtitle “A Study of Homosexual Encounters in Public Places.”
[6] Celestina Castillo, Regina Freer, R., Felisa Guillen, and Donna Maeda, “Faculty Development and Ownership of Community Engaged Teaching” in Putting the Local in Global Education: Transformative Learning Through Domestic Off-Campus Programs, ed. Neal Sobania (Washington: Stylus, 2015) 288-97.
[7] See Bergis Jules, “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives,” https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280
[8] See Brian Dobler, “Informationism as Ideology: Technological Myths in the Network Neutrality Debate,” in Regulating the Web: Netword Neutrality and the Future of the Open Internet, ed. Zach Stiegler (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 123-42.
[9] See Jussi Parikka, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archeology and Digital Humanities,” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. D. M. Berry (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) 85-104.
[10] Boston Women’s Health Collective and Judy Norsigian, Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Touchstone, 2011).
[11] Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
[12] Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Moira Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Philadelpia: Temple University Press, 2001); Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
[13] John D’Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992); Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4:1 (2004) 9-25.
[14] José Esteban Muñoz, Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes on Queer Acts,” Women & Performance 8:2 (1996) 5-16; Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991) 773-97.
[15] Jack Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (York: Methuen Press, 1979), Tavia Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” Social Text 84/85: 19-34.
[16] Ryan Cordell, “How Not to Teach the Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016) 459-74.
This page has paths:
- Queer LA: Cruising the Archive Adrienne Adams