GAY SHAME DAVID M. HALPERIN & VALERIE TRAUB I he University of Chicago Press C H I C A G 0 A N D L 0 N D 0 N david m. h alperin is theW. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford University Press, 1995) and, most re­ cently, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (University of Michi­ gan Press, 2007). valerie traub is professor ofEnglish andwomen's studies at the Uni­ versity of Michigan, where she chairs the Women's Studies Department. She is the author of Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakesptanan Drama (Routledge, 1992) and The Renaissance of Ltsbianism in Early Modem England (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago Al rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 ii 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31437-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31438-9 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-31437-5 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-31438-3 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gay shame / [edited by] David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31437-2 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-31437-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31438-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-31438-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Gay and lesbian studies. 2. Gays— Attitudes. 3. Homose^lity— Political aspects. 4. Queer theory. I. Halperin, David M. 1952- II. Traub, Valerie, 1958- h Q75.15.G53 2008 306.76'6—dc22 2007049301 ©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1992. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix GAY SHAME Beyond Gay Pride 3 David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub Why Gay Shame Now? 41 David M. Halperin PERFORMING SHAME Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel 4 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Mario Montez, For Shame 6 3 Douglas Crimp White-on-White: The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol Being 76 Taro Nettleton B o ricu a Gazing: An Interview with Frances Negr6n-Muntaner 88 Rita Gonzalez SPECTACLES OF SHAME Shame on Me 103 Elisabeth Ladenson On the Uses of Shame and Gifts of a Bloodmobile: Musings from a Musical Queer Apprenticeship 111 Nadine Hubbs vl C 0 NTENTS Shame on Me, or The Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich 117 David Caron Teaching Shame 132 Ellis Hanson Shameful Fantasies: Cross-Gender Queer Sex in Lesbian Erotic Fiction 165 Amalia Ziv Excluding Shame 176 UoBersani DISABLED SHAME Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability 181 Robert McRuer Sllpplng 188 Abby Wilkerson Where Is the Truth In Painting Today? 192 Dylan Scholinski Tough 196 TeTer Galloway Sex, Shame, and Disability Identity: With Reference to Mark O'Brien 201 Tobin Siebers HISTORIES OF SHAME The Shame of Queer History/Queer Histories of Shame 219 Helmut Puff The Shame of Gay Pride in Early AIDS Activism 221 Deborah B. Gould Emotional Rescue 2 5 6 Heather K. Love The Trouble with Shame 277 George Chauncey Pleasures and Dangers of Shame 2 8 3 Michael Warner Shamefully Gay: Documents from the Labadie Collection 297 Julie Herada and Tim Retzloff C 0 NTENTS vll COMMUNITIES OF SHAME How Might We Create a Collectivity That We Would Want to Belong To? 301 Barry D. Adam Scandalous Acts: The Polltics of Shame among Brazilian T ravesti Prostitutes 312 Don Kulick and Charles Klein "Plunge Into Your Shame" 3 3 9 Neil Bartlett Gay Shame and the Politics of Identity 3 5 7 JtnniftrMoon A Little Humility 3 6 9 Gayle Rubin Enactivism: The Movie 374 Dennis Allen,Jaime Hovey, andjudith Roof On the DVD 3 8 3 List of Contributors 391 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Gay Shame emerged out of a conference at the University of Michigan. Many people at the university contributed time, money, and encouragement to support both the original conference and the volume which is based on it. So we have a lot ofpeople to thank. The conference and this book benefited alike from the generous sup­ port of the Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michi­ gan. The conference was also supported by the Associate Dean for Interdis­ ciplinary Initiatives at the Rackham Graduate School, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Program in Women’s Studies. Two additional sponsors deserve our warm gratitude. Under the directorship of Daniel Herwitz, the Institute for the Humanities embraced the happy accident ofour being fellows in 2002-2003 to provide the conference with exceptional administrative assistance; Eliza Woodford, in particular, responded to our constant requests with energy, gracious­ ness, and fortitude. In addition to financiaUy unde^mting the conference, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender has provided an institu­ tional home for the Lesbian-Gay-^eer Research Initiative, the unit at the University that sponsored the conference, as weU as a grant for the prepara­ tion of the manuscript of this volume. We particularly thank Colin Johnson and Abby Stewart for helping to bring LGQRI into being, and Carol Boyd and Peggy Bums for their ongoing support of this program area. Suraj Patel, our conference coordinator, was indefatigable in his enthu­ siasm, dedication, insight, and sensitivity to participants' needs; we thank him for taking this project on so entirely and so competently while com­ pleting his senior year at the University of Michigan. For visual cnhance- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ment of our project, we would like to thank Brian Hussey and Jayne Hamil­ ton, as well as Patrick Moore, Brennan Gerard, and Catherine Opie. We are particularly grateful to Tim Retzloff and Julie Herrada, who created a li­ brary installation from the Labadie Collection; Holly Hughes, for associ­ ating her performance piece, “After a Fashion,” with the conference; and Gayle Rubin, for DJing the final dance at the conference. Staff at the Women's Studies Program provided much valued assis­ tance in helping with manuscript preparation; we would particularly like to thank SheUey Shock and Sandra VaUie. We would also like to thank Chad Thomas, Lamont Egle, Laura Ambrose, Marjorie Rubright, and Dashini Jeyathurai for help with many aspects of the manuscript. It has been a pleasure to work with the University of Chicago Press. We extend our special appreciation to Doug Mitchell, our editor, who believed in this project and supported it from the beginning; also, to Mary Gehl, for smoothing our way to publication. Most of all, we would like to thank our contributors, who often took time out from their own work to address a difficult, volatile, and elusive topic, and who rose marvelously to the occasion. D. M. H. V.T. Ann Arbor, Michigan December 3, 2005 GAY SHAME [DAVID M. HALPERIN AND VALERIE TRAUB] Beyond Gay Pride Ever since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the era of gay liberation they in­ augurated, "gay pride” has been the rallying cry of a broad social movement for sexual freedom. It has also been the driving political force behind the emergence of the interdisciplinary fields of lesbian and gay studies and, more recently, queer theory. Liberation, legitimacy, dignity, acceptance, and assimilation, as weU as the right to be different: the goals ofgay pride require nothing less than the complete destigmatization ofhomosexuality, which means the elimination of both the personal and the social shame at­ tached to same-sex eroticism. Since 1969 the lesbian and gay movement has made remarkable global progress toward its goals, leading to such once undreamt-of achievements as the visible integration of queer folk into mainstream popular culture and the formal, public recognition of same- sex partnerships. At the same time, gay pride has generated considerable dissatisfactions of its own among some of the very people it has aimed, or claimed, to benefit. Despite everything it has accomplished, and perhaps because of everything it has accomplished, the gay pride movement has given rise to a surprising array of discontents. It was in this context that we decided, someyears ago, to interrogate the continued usefulness of gay pride. We wanted to find out what it would be like to do queer politics and queer studies otherwise. In this case, “other­ wise” seemed necessarily to imply some degree of renewed engagement with a category that represents, by definition, the very opposite o f“pride," at once its emotional antithesis and its political antagonist: namely, the category ofshame.* Gay pride has never been able to separate itself entirely from shame, or to transcend shame. Gay pride does not even make sense without some reference to the shame of being gay, and its very successes 4 HALPERIN AND TRAUB (to say nothing ofits failures) testify to the intensity of its ongoing struggle with shame. We started, accordingly, to identify topics that the imperative of gay pride had tended to place off-limits to legitimate inquiry, or had simply re­ pressed— shameful topics, that is, or topics gay pride itself might make us ashamed to investigate. And we tried to imagine a queer community founded not only in collective affirmations of pride but also in residual ex­ periences of shame.