Sexualities and Genders in Education

SEXUALITIES AND GENDERS IN EDUCATION

Towards Queer Thriving

Adam J. Greteman

QUEER Series Editors STUDIES & William F. Pinar EDUCATION Nelson M. Rodriguez, & Reta Ugena Whitlock Queer Studies and Education

Series editors William F. Pinar Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Nelson M. Rodriguez Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexual Studies The College of New Jersey Ewing, New Jersey, USA

Reta Ugena Whitlock Department of Educational Leadership Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, Georgia, USA LGBTQ social, cultural, and political issues have become a defining feature of twenty-first century life, transforming on a global scale any number of institutions, including the institution of education. Situated within the context of these major transformations, this series is home to the most compelling, innovative, and timely scholarship emerging at the intersection of queer studies and education. Across a broad range of educational topics and locations, books in this series incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex categories, as well as scholarship in queer theory arising out of the postmodern turn in sexuality studies. The series is wide- ranging in terms of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, and will include and illuminate much needed intersectional scholarship. Always bold in outlook, the series also welcomes projects that challenge any number of normalizing tendencies within academic scholarship from works that move beyond established frameworks of knowledge production within LGBTQ educational research to works that expand the range of what is institutionally defined within the field of education as relevant queer studies scholarship.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14522 Adam J. Greteman Sexualities and Genders in Education

Towards Queer Thriving Adam J. Greteman Department of Art Education School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA

Queer Studies and Education ISBN 978-3-319-71128-7 ISBN 978-3-319-71129-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961554

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To those fearless queers who paved the road with queer possibilities and to Phillip Weaver who travels those queer roads with me. Preface

A key lesson I learned while becoming a scholar and writer was that writing is writing what you do not know until it is written. To write is to work toward knowing. The idea for this book was to contemplate and come to know about what I have called queer thriving. I had no clue what exactly such a phrase might mean, but my instinct led me to think there was a need to contemplate what it could mean to thrive queerly, to queerly thrive, particularly given the shifts in the politics and discourses of sexuality. There appeared to be a net gain in the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people alongside growing representations of LGBT lives in the media. At the same time, however, violence against queer people persisted, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity was still legal in many places, and the global scene presented a host of challenges for global queer bodies and communities. Certain forms of queerness were being folded into the fold of normality while other forms of queerness remained threatened. Queerness, it appeared to me, had survived despite the odds against it—from AIDS to pathological discourses to familial homophobia, and hatred in the hallways—and developed an arsenal of tools (and toys) to advocate for itself. So it felt that perhaps there was a need to contemplate what comes upon surviving? Could queer thriving exist alongside surviving, not to cover over the assaults and violence against queers that dispute our survival but to build upon the histories, cultures, practices, and educations of queers to promote queerness, to cultivate a queer present and future? And so I began to write, unsure of what or if such a concept could make sense. And, as I suspect many books do, the concept began to make sense

vii viii PREFACE toward the end of its writing. Upon it being written, I came to see a bit more clearly the potential and need for queer thriving, along with its limitations. This was helped by the return of a memory that had kept haunting me, annoyingly, in the final weeks before the manuscript was due. I resisted the memory, batting it aside so I could “get on with my work,” until I finally realized the memory was getting at something central to what I was writing. So, I offer that memory—a memory that emerged toward the end of the writing process—here at the beginning. There are a lot of things wrong in the world, particularly when it comes to the experiences of queers—broadly defined, given queerness intersects with the other ways we identify and are identified in the world. We often sense something is wrong before we can name what it is that is wrong. We “feel” before we can name that which we feel. In feeling something wrong, which can also feel right, we work to feel our way into an understanding of what we are feeling by grappling with those feelings and the world giving rise to them. What is wrong and why do I have this niggling feeling? It was in college that I sensed something was wrong, and the wrong I sensed then has directed my thinking and writing in ways I had not expected. In its incessant return to the front of my mind in the summer of 2017, it asked me to look back to see how the “wrong” sensed then has directed me now. I resisted this memory because it was when I was younger, a college undergraduate. It didn’t seem important; it seemed juvenile, particularly since I am now a “professor.” Yet, my experiences then oriented me in ways it took years to understand. Given the rise of and attention to student protests on campuses across the United States that continue to push colleges and universities, for better or worse, in a different direction, and the innumerous opinion pieces published about the state of college students, I realized this memory of my own student activism helped direct me toward the work I do now. My own activism, looking back on it now, felt mundane and hence unimportant, but as Marilyn Frye (1983) argued, “the mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue” (p. 2). And this experience provided me a clue as to my aims in and for this book. I was a resident advisor while in college, largely to help pay for school. During my second year as a resident advisor, we were, as a group, tasked with creating a “tunnel of oppression.” This was the early 2000s, when college campuses were seeking to address diversity in ways that built on or extended the previous work on such issues. The Tunnel of Oppression was a program used to illustrate the multiple forms of oppressions that exist PREFACE ix and their intersections. It was a pedagogical exercise that asked students (or other visitors) to encounter representations of oppression. It was an exercise often geared toward privileged students. Yet, in being geared toward the privileged, the intersectional realities of oppression allowed privilege to become conditioned. As the tunnel illustrated the multiplicity of oppressions, so too did it challenge viewers to contemplate the multiple forms of privilege (Carbado, 2005; McIntosh, 1988). A tunnel of oppression is simultaneously a tunnel of privilege asking visitors to encounter their own and others’ complexities as social beings. However, the focus of the tunnel was oppression—privilege went unaddressed explicitly, in part, because our thinking about privilege was still quite underdeveloped. We were undergraduates, remember. Oppression, however, was the concept that we had to grapple with and engage somehow as we ourselves were learning how to put words to the various oppressions. “The root of the word ‘oppression’ is,” as Frye (1983) argued “the element ‘press’” (p. 2). And, she continued,

presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk … Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict, or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility. (p. 2)

Oppression presses people, molds them, limits them, restrains them in unfair and unjust ways. To fight oppression, however, also requires that we press against such realities in order to undo or break down barriers. The work we were tasked with in creating a tunnel of oppression was to document the ways in which people are oppressed because of their race, gender, sexuality, and ability. We were to show what oppression looked like so that visitors would have to face oppression. I remember innumerous conversations about what would be included in the tunnel of oppression and the various discussions that the department of student affairs hoped would be raised on campus—a Jesuit campus in Nebraska. Issues ranged from racism to sexism to ableism to homophobia. Plans were made, work divided up, and the task of turning a resident hall basement into a tunnel of oppression commenced. The memories are vivid, as I myself was challenged to confront my own privileges as a white male, a “cisgender” male at that. We didn’t have the concept of cisgender then, nor were transgender issues on our radar. This illustrates for me, on a personal level, how oppressions become visible or x PREFACE hidden, but also how being challenged to contemplate oppression provides one with the tools to do such work moving forward. We may, I sense, often forget the simple reality that learning about oppression and privilege takes time, that such work starts somewhere, and that students move through such lessons in diverse ways. The tunnel of oppression, as we had conceived it, could not only present oppression, but also had to illustrate resistance to such oppression. This was in recognition of the diverse audiences that could and would go through the tunnel. We felt we couldn’t only show oppressed populations their oppression, but had a responsibility to show how oppressed populations have histories of resistance. We wanted to show the complexity, as best we could, of oppression. And creating the tunnel in this way was our attempt to teach both the privileged about oppression and the oppressed about resistance. Oppression, we hoped to illustrate, impacted the material bodies of people, including our peers, just as people, including our peers, put their (our) bodies on the line. At the time, homosexuality was the scandalous concept. There were few out students, and those who were out had to put our bodies on the line. This was challenging, particularly within the larger Omaha archdio- cese that the university was situated in. We were, after all, at a Jesuit Catholic university and there were issues of doctrine in play. As one might expect, something went wrong; after all, homosexuality as a matter of concern for the tunnel created friction with the Catholic idea that homosexuals were “objectively disordered.” This friction would spark a fire. Nearing the opening of the tunnel of oppression, we were informed that we would have to remove an image that was included in the room to address homophobia. It was a rather innocuous image and an image that spoke to the ways in which queers fought against oppression. It was an image of two men kissing. This was curious, given that we didn’t experience any problems when it came to representing oppression. Images of violence—from hate crimes to lynchings—were condoned, as they spoke to and illustrated a history and present that we needed to address. Oppression was and is not a pretty picture. A tunnel addressing it had to address it head on. We couldn’t hide from the past. We had to show it—pedagogically and ethically, as well we could—so the issues that are often overlooked or denied could not be overlooked or denied any longer. Oppression was not simply something out there, but it was here, present in the student body, as it encountered the daily slights and historic realities of being different because of being a PREFACE xi student of color on a majority white campus, a gay student in a straight world, a woman in a sexist society. The oppression, as such, was fine to show. It was an image of resistance—that innocuous image of resistance—that put the university in a bind. It was an image of two men kissing. Innocent, it seemed. Far from pornographic. Simply, two men kissing. Two white men. The organizers were called into a meeting, a series of meetings really, and informed that we would need to take down the image of two men kissing. Such an image went against the Catholic viewpoint. It displayed actions deemed “objectively disordered.” It displayed actions, however, that many of us in the room engaged in cultivating within our own intimate lives. Doctrine was made manifest, pressing us to submit to a view, an idea, we did not hold. We were, after all, the Millennial generation of queers who had witnessed the collapsing of the closet. We resisted the university’s request. It was, we argued, ironic that, in a tunnel of oppression, we would be asked to take down an image that showed homosexuality in a positive light. It was here that I sensed something was wrong. We could show homophobia—the violence experienced by homosexuals. We could show homosexuals bloodied and bruised, handcuffed and shoved into police wagons. We could not show homosexuality—that which was the impetus for the violence. I was unnerved by this request. We were unnerved by this request. The university’s logic was understandable. It was a Jesuit university and the Catholic Church had a stance on homosexuality. Illustrating homosexuality, in a positive light no less, was simply unacceptable. To do so would potentially promote it. Homophobia was unacceptable and not something that the university would promote. Homophobia could not be promoted because it was a form of violence against people. Showing images of violence, so it seemed, would not promote violence. They were images meant to stop such violence, to reveal the material consequences of homophobia. They were pre- ventative images. However, showing an image of two men kissing would promote homosexuality and was thus unacceptable. Intimacy—homosexual intimacy— was inappropriate. We—those who worked on that room—were unwilling to see ourselves in such a light. To show homophobia as a form of oppression, but not how two men kissing amidst such homophobia is an act of resistance, seemed absurd. We were queer students who had, after all, grown up with positive representations of ourselves. We saw Ellen come out. We watched Will and Grace. We saw more and more attention being xii PREFACE given to lesbian and gay existence. We saw our queer futures in ways unimaginable to previous generations because of the work of those previous generations. We had come out not with fanfare or feeling shame, but to families that told us they had always known and that they loved us. To be sure, this is not true for all—even then, representations were limiting and limited. But, something is sometimes, often times, better than nothing in opening up the possible futures. The institution, however, was pressing against our collective sense of self. We were proud and could not accept a label of objectively disordered. We pressed back. We refused to take down the image. The image was taken down for us. And so, we refused to take part in the experience. We protested, standing outside the entrance of the tunnel on a busy thor- oughfare with signs and handouts articulating why we, all the organizers of the tunnel, were no longer taking part in the event. We pressed the university as they pressed us. The details escape me now, although the excitement of protesting the university quickly reemerges in remembering those early moments. The sense that something was wrong pushed us to become protestors, activists, who became a pain in the university’s side. In that mundane experience of protesting the university, I, with my peers, sensed something wrong. It was ok to show violence, to document oppression as it impacted the material bodies of the oppressed. It was okay to provide language for such oppression—to teach about racism or sexism or homophobia. Yet, what was unthinkable was showing two men kissing. The role of pleasure was unthinkable to show, just as the idea of showing a thriving queer culture would be unimaginable. For Foucault (1997), this made sense. Foucault noted numerous times, in different ways, “what makes homosexuality ‘disturbing’” is “the homosexual mode of life” (p. 136). It is not the sex acts that happen between men, but two men smiling at one another, holding hands, flaunting their pleasures with one another. Queer intimacy, to return to my memory, was not appropriate to show. Queers could only be seen as victims. Queers could be protected against violence. It was a responsibility, an ethical duty, for the university, by way of its Catholic mission, to protect all its students from violence. The school could provide pastoral guidance, to guide queer students through the school experience safely. Yet, it could not show queers what it meant to live, to thrive, to love and like, as queers. We were allowed to live. We had a right to live and be free of violence. And our straight counterparts had a responsibility to understand their privilege and our oppression. But, they could not see us as intimate beings or students becoming PREFACE xiii intimate through same-sex relationships. They could not promote a “homosexual mode of life,” much less the cultures that have existed historically and in the present around queer practices and ideas. I didn’t, at the time and for years after, ever fully understand what was wrong. However, that experience—of being allowed to focus on violence but not intimacy—shaped my curiosity about sexuality. It has been over a decade since that experience, and the book you are about to read attempts to move to the side of homophobia and its violence to take the side of what I call queer thriving. Queer thriving, as I hope to illustrate in this book, is not about being ushered into the cult of normativity or a blissfully domesticated queer subject. It is a concept that points to and advocates for recognizing queerness as possessing cultural wealth that generates new worlds for becoming queer. It is a concept that seeks to promote queerness and the ways queerness disrupts habits, not for mere disruption, but to open widely onto ways of becoming in the twenty-first century. The university’s move to censor an innocuous image of two-men kissing taught me then, as I hope to explore now, the power of queer thriving and the dangers such thriving raises for the world that still would prefer queers not exist or that they simply take a place at the table.

Chicago, IL Adam J. Greteman

References Carbado, D. (2005). Privilege. In E. P. Johnson & R. M. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1997). Friendship as a way of life. In. P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 135–140). New York, NY: The New Press. Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality. New York, NY: Crossing Press. McIntosh, P. (1989). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 90(2), 31–35. Acknowledgements

Books emerge in strange ways and innumerous people along the way help contribute to their creation. This includes those individuals behind the scene who assisted in the production of the book at Palgrave Macmillan— from the copyeditors, series editors, editorial assistants, and more. While often these individuals are nameless, it is their work that greatly helps produce the actual “product” held in your hand, including electronically. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to all of those who assisted in the production of this book from the first submission through revision and beyond. I sense that often such labor goes unacknowledged. In the process of developing, writing, and revising this book, a host of people have helped me in a variety of ways. To my fellow volunteers— Gary, Mike, Don, Vicky, Cathy, Tom, Harold, George, Brian, and Maggie—who for more years that I want to admit have allowed a “young queer” into their lives. Your friendships have taught me about the power of intergenerational relationships and my thinking is indebted to your kindness, your generosity, and our quarterly bar crawls that got me out of the classroom and into the barroom. To Patrick Gauld, AJ Pace, Laura Decker, Adie Slaton, Kelsey and Ryan Knorr, Desie Sanchez, Kelly Tadeo Orbik, and Brooke Stowers, whose friendships sustained me after long days of writing and have challenged me to contemplate this work in deeper ways than I could have imagined. To Kelly Christian, Ariel Gentelan, and Ryan Blocker, former students now friends, who in various ways helped me think about and through some of the content of this book. Generous scholars have pushed and prodded me to develop my thinking here and elsewhere. And they have done so in ways that have allowed

xv xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS me to remain curious and find pleasure in the work of writing. These individuals include Kevin Burke, Karyn Sandlos, Erica Meiners, Cris Mayo, Sam Stiegler, Ellen McCallum, Lynn Fendler, Avner Segal, Kris Renn, David Getsy, Therese Quinn, Beth Marshall, Oliva Gude, Lee Airton, Jen Gilbert, Shawn M. Smith and, I imagine, many more who I have forgotten to name. While the mistakes and slip-ups are all mine to own, any success that these ideas have are, in large part, because of your collegiality, friendship, time, and patience. To my mom, Roxanne, sister Ashley, and brothers Austin and Andy who have consistently been by my side and who always allowed me to be and become. To my dad Joe, step-mom Sherry, and step-sisters Kaitlin and Erin, along with my grandparents. To my aunt Jan and uncle Alan who many years ago toasted as I came out. And to the McNamara-Slaton’s, my family away from home. To Phillip Weaver, who has been by my side throughout the writing of this book. I cannot say the process has always been pretty, nor I kind, as my own anxieties emerged. However, your generosity of spirit and love carried me through and through and through. You have taught me how to thrive, queerly, for sure. Contents

1 Introduction: An Opening for Queer Thriving 1

2 On Reading Practices: Where Pragmatism and Queer Meet 37

3 The Idea of Queer Children 67

4 Generating Queer Generations 89

5 Queer Pedagogy and Documenting AIDS 115

6 Viral Matters: Barebacking and PrEP 145

7 Queer/Trans/Feminist Educations: On Becoming Queer 169

8 Conclusion: A Closing for Queer Thriving 187

Index 207

xvii CHAPTER 1

Introduction: An Opening for Queer Thriving

On Queer and Its Commentaries Queer is still a word that denotes any number of things—an identity, an aesthetic, a politics, an insult, a pedagogy. With so much going on in and around queer, engaging in a queer project presents certain challenges about who and what is being addressed. Has queer become the stuff of professionals, or does it still hold its radical potential? This is, I believe, more true than ever with the breadth of queer work and the evolving realities of queerness. Queer intersects with gender, race, class, ability, nationality, and more making strange how bodies come to matter and ideas about bodies slide about in the fields of discourse. These realities ask for a certain slowness to recognize the ways queer plays out in and for different people. In our hurried age, however, this grows more and more difficult as tweets, posts, and more fly in and out of our attention, drawing us into flame wars, trolling relationships, and varied forms of cyber-bullying. All of this may cause a certain existential angst around queer as it encounters forms of violence that befall queers at rates still unacceptably high and the historic playfulness attached to queers as they “read,” “slay,” “mock,” “satirize,” and more to expose the workings of norms and the performance of living. For Richard Ford (2007), queer is “a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other” (p. 479, italics in original). “One could say” Ford continued, “that

© The Author(s) 2018 1 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_1 2 A. J. GRETEMAN even if one is born straight or gay, one must decide to be queer” (p. 479). The idea—that “one decides to be queer”—is central to this book. To decide to be queer, to become queer, requires certain things—like access to ideas, practices, practitioners, and institutions tied to and rooted in queerness. There is, for me, an educational component to such a process as to decide to be queer should be an informed decision; informed not simply by “schools” or “parents,” but by the diverse things one encounters that inform one’s daily living. The twentieth century, on reflection, did not look kindly on queerness and its cast of characters. Throughout the twentieth century, there was a concerted effort to deny educating for the possibility of queerness, both in schools and other forms of education (e.g., the media, public health). I suspect, or perhaps—more accurately— speculate, the twenty-first century offers the space and time to push for educating in ways that allow one to decide to be queer: to take up queer projects and practices rooted in queer traditions and histories that have become more and more accessible in our digital age. There has been a marked growth in attention to queerness in its varied forms, as language has become more accessible and transmittable through digital means. There are attempts to move “beyond bullying” (Fields, Mamo, Gilbert, & Lesko, 2014) and disrupt the victim narratives (Marshall, 2010; Rofes, 2005) while refusing to accept the victory narrative (Signorile, 2015), so queers do not acquiesce to the continued work needing to be done. Safety, as such, given the arguments put forth by Michael Sadowski (2016), is not enough. “Yet, a particular subset of students in the United States—lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ*) students—are often served by their schools,” Sadowski argued, “as if their mere safety were a sufficient objective in and of itself” (p. 2). There have been important inroads in addressing the safety of LGBTQ students—from anti-bullying policies to gay-straight alliances— but it is necessary to move beyond seeing safety as enough to articulate education that allows queerness to thrive. And as I will address throughout this book, “education” is never merely limited to schools given the diversity of agents in the world that educate—from print and digital media, to films and television, to community centers and cultural institutions. Such work is immediately fraught. The very idea that education might work to promote queerness as a viable decision or way of life cuts immediately too close to ideas of recruitment long used against addressing queer issues or allowing queer teachers in schools. Additionally, the idea of promoting queerness, or helping kids become queer, smacks of essentialist INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 3 ideas that queerness is something that can be taught or has some essential core to its work. Throughout this book, I will strangely embrace these fraught ideas—asserting a belief that youth have a right to see queerness as a way of life and that these ideas are intimately rooted in the histories of queerness. These qualities are by no means natural—they are shifting and tied to their own contexts—but they do provide a sense of queerness as a cultural project and process. Queerness—despite its former ability to scandalize—is in some quarters no longer scandalous, revealing its contingent and contextual nature. Queerness has been commodified and commercialized in any number of ways. “Queer has been,” as Paul Preciado (2013) noted, “recodified by the dominant discourses” (p. 341) so much so that “We are currently facing,” Preciado continued, “the risk of turning the term into a description of a neoliberal, free market identity that generates new exclusions and hides the specific conditions of the oppression of transsexual, transgender people, crip, or racialized bodies” (p. 341). Queer, at the outset of this project, has, in some regards, lost its subversive appeal, its radical edges. However, I hold onto queer—perhaps stubbornly—with a belief that it has much to teach about becoming in the twenty-first century. While queer has been recodified by dominant discourses, to use Preciado’s term, I suspect that such codification has been overstated, particularly as such issues filter into and are taken up within various educational endeavors. Queer is, after all, contingent on its contexts, and research has aptly illustrated how, for instance, geography impacts accessibility to and tolerance of queer cultures and people (Grey, Gilley, & Johnson, 2016; Tongson, 2011). While taken up by dominant discourses, queers also continue to resist and create dissident practices and subjectivities within diverse contexts. As queer theory emerged, practices, approaches, methods, and more had to be developed using what was at hand in that time. In particular, however, as Berlant and Warner (1995) noted, “people want[ed] to know how it [was] going to solve problems.” What, as the title of their column noted, “does queer theory teach about x?” There was an expectation immediately that queer theory would be able to create a program or programs to address issues and explain queer life. This makes sense given such work emerged within the academy, which by the early 1990s had already started to see the demands of neoliberal policies and corporate sensibilities in the university (Brown, 2015; Giroux, 2014). In those early years though, as they noted, “queer theory [had] not yet undertaken the kind 4 A. J. GRETEMAN of general description of the world that would allow it to produce practical solutions. People want[ed] to know what costs, risks, and tactics are involved in getting from this order of things to a better one” (p. 348). For them, in those inaugural years, “the question of x [was] both a challenge and a hope” (p. 348). To ask the question—“What does queer theory teach us about x”—made visible that queer theory had no proper object, but also had demands placed upon it that it “do” something, particularly teach. Such teaching is, I sense, tied to the role of the erotic. The “x” that not only holds open the hopeful and challenging space in their question connects as well to the “x” that historically marks material that is sexually explicit. With this, what queer theory teaches about x asks us to understand not only that queer theory can be used to teach about a plethora of objects but that such teachings cannot be divorced from the role of “sex,” in its unwieldy forms. Queer theory as an academic discourse probably taught very little in the immediate moment as far as practical lessons went. Theory, after all, has a different purpose than teaching as theory is less tied to useful strategies about living in the world. Instead, theory brings together and ties up expansive ways of understanding that which captures the theorist’s attention. Theory is, as well, often dismissed as an academic pastime with little to do with the material realities of the twenty-first century. The twenty-first century itself appears to continue to anti-intellectual trends that began decades ago and are part of the general assault on education (Giroux, 2014). I am skeptical of the dismissal of theory, but also sensitive to the ways theory has been used to dispossess and malign non-academics. This was itself an issue Berlant and Warner (1995) noted in the early years of queer theory, arguing that “The metadiscourse of ‘queer theory’ intends an academic object, but queer commentary has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalism” (p. 343). Queer theory, in other words, was (and is) not broad enough to capture the work “queer” can describe. Queer commentary, as they proposed, would attend instead to the diverse and perverse work that falls under the banner of queer. There was then as there is now for me no need to reduce queer to a particular object or method. Queer commentary, in its broad appeals, instead, is “animated by a sense of belonging” and is aspirational; aspiring “to create publics, publics that can afford sex and intimacy in sustained, unchastening ways; publics that can comprehend their own differences of privilege and struggle; publics whose abstract spaces can also be lived in, remembered, hoped for” (p. 344). This project takes up queer commentary, inclusive of theory, to aspire for such queer publics and INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 5 cultures as they teach lessons about becoming and being queer. “Queer culture,” as Berlant and Warner noted, “comes into being unevenly, in obliquely cross-referencing publics, and no one scene of importance accounts for its politics” (p. 346). This is one of the challenging things about queerness and its cultures—it is never one thing and refuses to be pinned down too easily. It comments on things far and wide. And queerness changes with time while simultaneously refusing to be on time and, at times, being ahead of the times. To respond to and comment on the possibilities that lie within this question about what queer theory and its commentary teaches will take us into the work of education as it relates to and impacts queers, queerness, and the generation(s) of queers. This is important given it is education— understood specifically to imply schools and broadly to imply a variety of education agents—is a process where questions of teaching are centralized and where, historically, fears of queerness have manifested themselves quite vehemently and violently (Graves, 2009; Mayo, 2014; Sadowski, 2016). For decades, researchers in education have fought against these fears through various means. However, as Cris Mayo (2007) noted, “much work in LGBT issues in education is less interested in the theoretical nuances of queerness than in attempting to make those institutions more accountable to LGBT members” (p. 80). I trust Mayo’s assessment, but hope that the division between “theory” and “practice” can be challenged to address both the work of theory and the need for institutional accountability. This may sound queerly pragmatic and I see such work as indicative of the need for queer commentary. Such commentary—engaging the theoretical and practical—turns out to be concerned with the conceivable consequences of both forgoing theory for the immediately applicable and forgoing the immediately applicable for theory. Refusing the applicable or theoretical diminishes our abilities to intervene in the immediate lives of queers while also foreclosing the imaginative possibilities queer offers. Theory and practice, we would do well to remember, operate in different temporal registers, but such temporalities are connected by precarious threads, which I hope to comment on throughout this book.

Queer Thriving My interest in queer thriving is one that looks forward—for the imaginable future—to think about and through what happens alongside and after surviving. As I (2017) argued previously, “to thrive is a thing one does … And 6 A. J. GRETEMAN when one thrives one grows or develops well or vigorously” (p. 309). Yet, within particular developmental logics, what it means to grow or develop well is often sadly tinged with various forms of norms. Queers have, after all, historically been and presently are pathologized, medicalized, institutionalized, and shamed in various ways. This happens to individuals, but is complicated by the history of such individuals coming together to reverse such discourses, as Foucault (1978/1990) illustrated, to create communities and develop cultures. “Within this,” I argued, “queers resisted, developed new kinship networks, political organizations, and created various types of queer communities that thrived” (p. 309). It is thriving—in the midst of so many forms of exclusion, violence, and more—that I explore, develop, and emphasize. This is to look backwards to queer predecessors and cultures to generate queer possibilities of being and becoming in the world while also looking forward at what may come. “We don’t need to discover,” after all, “that we are homosexuals,” Foucault argued (1997, p. 163) “Rather, we have to create a gay life. To become” (p. 163). And to become requires teachers, lessons, and more that orient us queerly (Ahmed, 2006). Queer predecessors and cultures have already cultivated, despite animosities galore, queer practices and methods that could continue to promise the creation of queer worlds if such practices and methods are transmitted and taught to corrupt youth from the straight-and-narrow. Queers, of course, keep coming into presence in unforeseen ways. These forms change as conditions and possibilities shift. As queer options become viable, they become more easily taken up and on. Noting that, it is also important to realize, following Lorde (1984), “there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with renewed courage to try them out” (p. 38). In the work of becoming queer we, more often than not, are remixing and building on possibilities already in the ether of the world. As such, I do not contend I have new ideas that I have discovered. Rather, I turn toward and draw upon old ideas to combine or assemble together ways to try out and recognize queer thriving. I put together ideas developed across disciplines and times that, when combined, comment on what was, what is, and what could be. Such a shift toward queer thriving recognizes, as Jen Gilbert (2014) argued, that “No longer would it be enough to insist that LGBTQ people have a right to live free of harassment” (p. xxiv). “Instead, those of us thinking about education would be charged with imagining and creating INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 7 conditions,” she continued, “for LGBTQ students, teachers, and families to live full lives in schools—full of affirmation and acceptance but also contradiction, forgetting, and misrecognition” (p. xxiv). Queer thriving builds upon Gilbert’s recognition that queer work should do more than insist that queer people “live free of harassment.” They (we) should have access to living full lives within and by creating queer cultures that resist dominant cultures and ideas. I speculate that we are now in a time where such work is possible—both because of political and civil gains and in the face of how such gains normalize previous queer populations. Doing such work, to be clear, is not simple, as Mattilda Bernstein-Sycamore (2008) illustrated regarding the rise of respectability politics and assimilationist strategies: “[They’ve] succeeded in clamping down on the defiance, anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving is gay subcultures” (p. 4). The assault on thriving has been done “to promote a vapid consume-or-die, we’re just like you mentality” (p. 4). As such, this is, to be clear, not an argument that seeks to bring queers into the neoliberal fold—accepted and included in the commodified and privatized views of society. That has in many regards already happened as illustrated by the success of assimilationist strategies. Rather, I build on and return to illustrate that queers have already thrived not only in opposition to assimilation but also to the side of the more pressing work of survival. Michael Warner (1999) argued, as much, almost 20 years ago:

The queer ethos is currently thriving in urban spaces, in pockets of alternative culture in the suburbs, among younger queers in drag culture, among black and Latino cultures, in club scenes and the arts, on web sites and in queer zines, among all kinds of people in the least likely places. (p. 67)

Such a statement was written in the midst of the emerging gay-marriage debates and the decline of political attention to HIV/AIDS. Yet, it shows that there was already an archive of queer thriving and therefore a present- day need to understand if and how queer thriving persisted. This is, as I will discuss later, in part an issue of reading. How do we read queer thriving into our shared queer pasts as a strategy for cultivating queer strategies and practices for the present and future? Warner maintained that the queer ethos was thriving and it was doing so across spaces, media, and diverse populations. “People in the least likely places” were thriving as they continued to cultivate queer worlds and transmit such worlds in the diverse and perverse ways in which queers learn. However, “Between the 8 A. J. GRETEMAN thriving scenes of minor queer counterpublics and the more visible world of the official lesbian and gay movement,” he argued, “a gap has been widening the leaves people on each side staring in incomprehension and distaste” (p. 68). This gap has only widened in the years since Warner made note of it. Part of my hope for this book is to contemplate if such a divide can be bridged—a hope that connects to the need to address the broader divide within the US populace more generally. Radical queers are, by and large, no longer visible on the streets and are looked at with disdain by the respectable gay body politic when they do appear—as seen during innumerous Pride parades disrupted by Black Lives Matter. However, as Berlant and Warner (1998) argued,

Respectable gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they now despise. Extinguish it, and almost all out gay or queer culture will wither on the vine. (p. 563)

Such disruptions in recent years sought a return to the radical politics and subcultures that founded pride and drew lines between the work of queerness as intersectional politics and assimilative corporate politics that have come to define pride. These protests of pride might sound strange given the gains that have been made for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people—from more mainstream representation to political protections. This is particularly true in education, where LGBT issues and persons have become recognized as deserving of rights and protections. However, such gains are problematic. Therese Quinn and Erica Meiners (2013), for instance, located and analyzed “gay wins” in education, notably, the establishment of “gay-inclusive anti-bullying laws and policy” (p. 152). Their analysis exposed the contradictions within assimilation and equality-based tactics in the push for LGBT lives. Their pushback opened up space to demand a queer vision that utilizes “intra-movement organizing” instead of “single-issue strategies” (p. 152). To thrive, beyond surviving, cannot only involve attention to a single component of our complex realities nor attention to the self as a private individual— rather, it requires sustained attention to exposing the work of oppression while attending to creating collective alternatives rooted in shared identities and cultures. INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 9

Queer Theory and the Mainstream On January 17, 1998, Dinitia Smith, writing for the New York Times, argued that “queer theory is entering the literary mainstream.” In the pages of the Grey Lady, it was pronounced, that queer theory was no longer a marginal discourse within the academy but, at least in the realm of literary studies, becoming mainstream. At that point in 1998, queer theory was itself still relatively new on the academic scene. Queer theory was “popular” for its provocations and political orientations addressing the state of sexualities and genders. The methods of queer theory were generated, in part, through a perverse combination of activist work of the late 1980s that captivated the nation’s attention with theatrical political protests and rigorous academic readings emerging across various disciplines. Early queer theorists—from Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler to Michael Warner and David Halperin—were likely to be disparaged for rather obtuse writing, a far cry from the theatrics of ACT-UP and Queer Nation. However, their readings of canonical literary, philosophical, and historical texts were discursively theatrical in exposing homoerotic themes and unleashing a torrent of opportunities to read into and through the textual nature of sexuality. Entering the mainstream, however, while often viewed positively in some regards, was not something that queer theory and its practitioners sought out to do. Queer theory emerged out of various real needs. These included the need to address the rampant homophobia that, while exposed during the AIDS epidemic, had long been endemic to culture writ large; the need to protect the lives of queer people that were (and continue to be) cut short due to the nasty intersections of homophobia, racism, clas- sism, sexism, and more; the need to document and cultivate queer lives, practices, and ideas so that such queer things not only survived but thrived into new generations. Such work was and continues to be rather challenging. And the limits of queer theory were quickly noted and continually announced. By 1998, when queer theory was entering the mainstream, there were already growing concerns about queer theory in the academy. Teresa de Lauretis, often seen as coining the concept of “queer theory,” was, by 1994, lamenting how queer theory had “become a vacuous crea- ture of the publishing industry” (as cited by Warner, 2012, para. 5). As queer theory came into contact with the work of academics—notably graduate students—it proliferated in such a way as to cause a certain ambivalence and malaise to set in. By 2003, David Halperin was arguing 10 A. J. GRETEMAN that queer theory was being normalized. And in 2005, a special double issue of Social Text asked, “what’s queer about queer studies now?” By 2011, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker edited a collection that pondered “After Sex?” A year later, in January 2012, Duke University Press ended Series Q—one of the field-defining series for queer theory leading Michael Warner (2012) to ask, “is this the end of queer theory?” Given the number of challenges lodged against queer theory, it is no wonder there may be skepticism of its viability as a critical discourse. For much of the last two decades, we can see there has been a certain level of contestations in and around queer theory. There have been lines drawn, camps made, tendencies revealed making entering queer conversations quite challenging—an issue that will be addressed throughout this text in a variety of ways. In addition to the challenges of entering conversations already in process are the changes that have and continue to occur at local, state, and federal levels regarding gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lives. Queer theory, in broadly attending to the ways in which sexualities are subject to various disciplinary, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal norms, also concerns itself with the subjects that emerge within any given historical moment. We are subjects, we become subjects, and we are subjected to the discourses, practices, laws, policies, pedagogies, and cultural products that make up our daily lives. It is therefore important to note, in this introduction to a book rooted in “queer theories,” that to write about queer issues requires a recognition that what one writes will quickly be outdated. This is not, to be clear, a bad thing, as it speaks to the ways in which the world is changing and makes visible the contingency that is at the heart of queerness. Queerness is not an ahistorical concept that traverses spaces and times unscathed by the worlds it encounters. Rather, queerness is rooted in contesting the worlds that have sought to expunge it. This also challenges me, as a writer, to contextualize the moment in which this book is written. I cannot do this completely, particularly given the fragmented, never-ending production of ideas, products, and commentary within our digital world. Rather, I can do so provisionally to be transparent about the things (ideas, books, films, news sources) that I encounter, which inform my own sense of the world. There have been net gains in the representation of and rights for LGBT people. There is, as well, little doubt in my mind that there is a long way to go before lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people are ever fully embraced by the contemporary worlds we inhabit—be that in the INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 11

“West” or not. There is, as well, a need to question if such an embrace is desirable and the consequences that such an embrace has on various queer populations. While queer critics have historically and importantly critiqued, now won, rights to marriage rights, inclusion in the military, and protections from discrimination, the task remains to tarry between what such “gains” do for the material lives of people who engage them and the exclusions that such gains make visible, particularly in terms of alternatives to “mainstream” or “normal” ways of being in relation to the world. This is, I sense, a difficult task and one becoming more and more difficult in a polarized and highly partisan world.

Contextualizing an Opening This book, as you will see, is partially speculative. I speculate—in that I “form a theory about a subject without firm evidence”—because there is no firm evidence for queer thriving. Or “Queer thought may not have the same sheen of scientific objectivity or sophistication as psychology or psychoanalysis,” as David Halperin (2007) argued, “In fact, it may seem utterly laughable as science” (p. 10). My commentary here is speculative, less interested in the sheen of objectivity or sophistication—long critiqued by feminist and queer scholars (Harding, 2008; Lather, 1991; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Instead, it uses other methods for developing understandings of subjects, promiscuously drawing upon diverse texts to create what I hope will be interesting in some way. In opening space to contemplate queer thriving, I have to speculate as to what queer thriving has been, could be, or could mean at a time when “queer” has been conceptually co-opted or recodified by dominant discourses, as earlier noted by Preciado. The predominance of neoliberalism as a governing rationale that has impacted education—in schools and beyond—is a rationale that I fear I breathed in daily growing up in the 1990s. This risk is one that haunts me. As a Millennial queer, I am worried that I came of age within and under neoliberal rationalities. While a reader of neoliberal critiques (and one often annoyed at the reproduction of neoliberal critique), I can’t but help worry that I won’t even recognize how my own views align with neoliberal rationalities. After all, as Wendy Brown (2015) argued, “even [neoliberalism’s] critics cannot see the ways in which we have lost a recognition of ourselves as held together by literatures, images, religions, histories, myths, ideas, forms of reason, grammars, figures, and languages” (p. 188). New generations of scholars, born under neoliberalism and educated under the 12 A. J. GRETEMAN market rationalities that dominate school policies (K-12 & higher education), have, it would seem, an added challenge of undoing the miseducation of neoliberalism and imagining the world otherwise and elsewhere. However, this generation of scholars, now entering the professoriate, precarious as it may be, are not alone. As the 2016 report by GLAAD— “Accelerating Acceptance 2017”—illustrated, the Millennial generation is, more than any other generation, likely to identify as LGBTQ, including identifying outside traditional boundaries. This may turn out to be a good thing, but may also illustrate that identifying as LGBTQ does not imply that one takes up a queer project. Queer, in being recodified by dominant discourses, has further privatized sexuality as an identity that fits in the governing rationalities. The “queer” identity taken up has fallen prey to the risks of neoliberalism, as what passes as radical merely reasserts such logics of inclusion (Bernstein-Sycamore, 2008). Yet, I am unwilling to give up on queer, hoping to wrest it from such institutionalization (while being situated in an institution of higher education). I sense time will tell if such work is possible and what such possibility offers up for those becoming queer in the twenty-first century. Amidst all of this, this queer milieu, I want to explore what queer offers in challenging contemporary rationalities and norms, including the newly gained acceptance and rates of identification. While “queer” may no longer be popular, surpassed by new iterations of critical scholarship, I hold onto it as a central concept born in the late twentieth century but holding out promises for the twenty-first century. Its promises (and pitfalls) can be seen within the marketplace of ideas and cultural production. On one level, access to queer representations allows new generations to come of age in ways once thought quite impossible. On another hand, once taken up within the grindstone of capital, such representations lose their radical edge, becoming part of society. There is, I imagine, importance to being part of society. There are benefits that accrue and make sense as one ages, but such benefits often come at the expense of other possibilities—a reason why the persistence of the anti-social tendency in queer theory is important. Becoming queer then arguably looks different as generations come and go. David Reddish (2017), writing for Queerty, argued that we may now (circa 2017) be living in the golden age of queer coming-of-age films.1 In his estimation, queer films in the 1990s were dominated by HIV and coming out. Such films, by and large, catered to straight audiences, allowing them to develop some positive sensibility (e.g., tolerance) INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 13 and understanding of the challenges “queers” (largely white, largely gay, largely male) faced. In my own memories, Philadelphia helped lay a foundation to my own understandings and interest in AIDS, particularly as a Millennial queer who came of age “post-AIDS” but still impacted by AIDS. By 2017, however, the diversity of films addressing queers, particularly coming-of-age stories, had diversified and catered toward queer audiences—from the Academy Award winning Moonlight illustrating a black gay experience across time to an adaptation of James St. James’s Young Adult novel Freak Show (2017) fabulously presenting the struggles and joys of a drag queen high school student to the South African film The Wound highlighting the cultural differences in “coming of age.” Time will tell if and how these emerging representations teach new lessons about the diverse ways queer operates while aspiring to show that queers have the potential to move beyond survival to thrive amidst the diversity of ways of becoming that are rooted in complex histories. The increase in options and representations for encountering and becoming queer have to do, no doubt, with decades of activism on various fronts (some “queer,” others more assimilation-based). They also have to do with the economic profit such representations offer and the reality that new technologies, notably streaming services, house and provide broader access to films once difficult to find. No longer do queer youth have to search for and read between the lines of films to find pleasure or visions of themselves. Instead, they are met with a far more challenging task of wad- ing through all sorts of possibilities that, to return to Preciado, risk turning queer in a product sold on the marketplace of neoliberal individuality. Such media (film, and I would include novels as well) no longer care as much about what straight people think, instead embracing queerness and the queer lineages that inform such work. Queer theory, as Eve Sedgwick noted in her 1998 interview that opened this chapter, “is about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them” (Smith,1998 , para. 1). Such work is, I hope you see, never ending given that new generations enter the scene building on, contesting, and inventing new ways of defining the world, including sexuality and identity. Such work, as such, has to continually assess and address the changing ways in which culture and sexuality become defined to generate not only new identities that people take up, but new ways of being “subject” in and to the world. This is always and already embedded in the milieu in which we find ourselves. “Only since the nineteenth century, queer theorists argue,” according to Smith’s 14 A. J. GRETEMAN

(1998) assessment of queer theory, “have sexual definitions become rigid. And along with this rigidity, they say, has come anxiety, panic, and inten- sifying homophobic attitudes” (para. 4). Twenty years ago, this was the case (I’ll take Smith’s assessment as true) as the United States under the Clinton administration had seen Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) both passed (in 1994 and 1996 respec- tively). The assaults against queer people (broadly defined) were ever- present, particularly at the institutional level. Yet, 20 years later, both DADT and DOMA have been repealed with DADT repealed in 2011 under the Obama administration and the legal- ization of same-sex marriage coming in June 2015 with the US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell vs. Hodges. It is these latter moments that were part of my own becoming as a queer adult. I was less encumbered by the explicit homophobia that defined the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, my own sense of self was generated within and through those rigid categories that were becoming “accepted” by more and more people. Queer theory, of course, both exposed and sought to disrupt these very identities as they themselves became mainstream. As an undergraduate and then graduate student, I became enthralled by queer theory as it opened up avenues beyond the rigidity and gave me insights into queer cultures and queer histories. Queer theory, as I encountered it, already had a history and, as such, it taught me rather practical lessons it had so earnestly sought at the outset. In looking back at this trajectory, I realize that queer theory and commentary in becoming normalized or institutionalized could also teach. It became educational. As such, I hold open—wide open—the possibility that queerness could offer much into becoming in the twenty-first century, with a rather general recognition that queers will come into presence through various means—some rougher than others; some more fulfilling than others; some more aligned with social norms; some more disruptive and transgressive. And these queers, on an individual level, will encounter various forms of violence and acceptance—psychically, politically, pedagogically. One task may be to minimize the structural factors that make becoming queer rough—poverty, homophobia, transphobia, lack of healthcare, and so on—while recognizing there is an inherent difficulty in figuring out who one wants to become while recognizing as well who one will continue to become in new ways as new generations open up new options. Becoming. It’s an interesting word and one that I will most likely over- use throughout this book. And there will probably be, to be upfront, a INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 15 number of puns using the word. But, becoming is that strange process of entering into the ever-expanding worlds that we inhabit. Philosophically, it is a word that brings us into the branch of ontology; asking questions about “being.” And as E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (2011) argued, “if queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that, for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits” (p. 10). Becoming, as a process, is one that never ends until one’s end and this is central to queer theory. “To think queer becoming,” they continued, “is to think, not only that one might never learn to straighten up and fly right, but the possibility of one’s becoming something other than queer” (pp. 10–11). Becoming, as an active verb, holds open a process that is never ending, but a process that is also rooted in its own time and place. Becoming is wrapped up in histories and presents while also engaged in the futures it may or may not touch. It is habitual as it disputes its habits. Our worlds are forever changing and we—whether we consciously realize it or not—change as well. We can, of course, resist such changes—for good reason—to maintain or hold onto things we find dear to our hearts. There is, after all, something compelling about traditions. Traditions as such should not only be positioned within the conservative wheelhouse of ideas. There are many queer traditions— particularly traditions that have emerged within and because of queer scholarship and activism. These are, to be sure, important to maintain and hold dear. Yet, we cannot hold too tightly to these traditions, as to do so would place limits on queer becoming. In Chap. 4 I will raise the role of and importance of generations in this process—both recognizing the work of previous generations while generating generations unrecognizable.

Understanding Education As I turn to think about the work of queerness in education, it is important to situate myself within how education is theorized. Education is, to be sure, a rather complicated terrain. Much has already been written about it—politically, sociologically, philosophically, and so on—because public education has been central to the democratic project, both its promises and its limitations (Labaree, 2010; Spring, 2016; Urban & Wagoner, 2009). Education, as I understand it, is a broad concept that operates in various spaces, is conditioned by time, and is intimately connected to political, economic, and aesthetic changes. As Gert Biesta (2010) argued “education, be it in the form of schooling, workplace learning, vocational 16 A. J. GRETEMAN training or learning through life, is by its very nature a process with direction and purpose” (p. 2). What directions and purposes education takes up and on, of course, is under construction and contestation, as the various stakeholders involved in education—from parents and students to teachers and administrators to policy makers and reformers—grapple and debate the directions and purposes that education, in the form of schools particularly, is to take. For my purposes, I draw on the work of Biesta (2010). Biesta has investigated what good education could mean in the twenty-first century; an interest that emerged largely because questions of “good education” had disappeared and been replaced by discussions about quality education. Such discussions ranged from educational effectiveness to standards, and accountability that divorced schools from broader purposes. These now- dominant discussions in education, as Biesta argued, “displace the normative question of good education with technical and managerial questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, not what these processes are supposed to be for” (p. 2). To contemplate good education is to push against the technical and managerial questions to do different work in thinking about and imagining what education could be as it works in and on the lives of students. There are, according to Biesta, three particular functions of schools—qualification, socialization, and subjectification. The first two functions—qualification and socialization—are arguably more prevalent in general understandings of school in the twenty-first century. Schools prepare students for employment (qualification) and prepare youth to be members of the existing social order (socialization). To be clear, both of these functions have their relevance in contemplating the work of schools within a democracy. Education, particularly within schools, has historically had competing purposes and this is good—something elaborated upon by David Labaree (2010)—as it has allowed public education, in particular, to survive the revolving doors of reform. However, for Biesta (2010), it is the function of subjectification that is central to good education. “Subjectification,” he argued, “should be an intrinsic element of all education worthy of the name” (p. 75). For him, arguing subjectification should be an intrinsic element is:

meant as a normative statement expressing the belief that education becomes uneducational if it only focuses on socialization—i.e. on the insertion of ‘newcomers’ into existing sociocultural and political orders—and has no interest in the ways in which newcomers can, in some way, gain indepen- dence from such orders as well. (p. 75) INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 17

Unlike socialization that brings newcomers into the already existent ways of being and doing things in the world, “subjectification has to do with the ways in which our beginnings are taken up by others in ways that do not preclude them bringing their beginnings into the world as well” (p. 108). To contemplate the work of subjectification as a function of education is less about what content should be taught, although content is still a necessary component, nor is it about preparing individuals for the marketplace of jobs, an important function as well, albeit one education fails at given the dramatic changes within the marketplace of jobs. Rather, subjectification emphasizes the work of becoming, or education’s ontological project. For Biesta, this project is one of thinking about and through the work of “coming into presence”; a process that has been of central concern when issues of sexuality enter the conversation, given the homophobic anxieties that children could be recruited into a homosexual lifestyle or that teaching about sex more broadly could lead to all kinds of problems (e.g., pregnancy, disease, moral degeneration). Rarely is it recognized that sexuality could involve the teaching of and experiences of pleasure, that teaching could assist us in living pleasurably. It is this subjectification function of education that is in the background of my work in this book—a function that emphasizes or privileges an ontological understanding of education. Such an understanding, to be sure, is one that is always forward looking at the possibilities and processes that open into and onto ways of becoming that are not yet known. It is, in some sense, speculative. We become what we become in relation to what was possible while pushing the boundaries of what is possible—for ourselves and for future generations. To be clear, though, the ontological function of education is weak. Neither Biesta’s (2010) nor my argument is seeking to a priori determine the types of subjects that come into presence. We cannot, in fact, predict such things. However, as he noted:

The ontological weakness of education is at the very same time its existential strength, because it is only when we give up the idea that human subjectivity can in some way be educationally produced that spaces might open up for uniqueness to come into the world. (p. 91)

Biesta, as illustrated above, argued for the need to attend to the potential in creating spaces that “might open up for uniqueness to come into the world” (p. 91). For him, drawing upon the likes of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alfonso Lingis, it is uniqueness that articulated 18 A. J. GRETEMAN the function of subjectification. Biesta looked forward to the great unknown to establish what it might mean to develop an understanding of good education. I find Biesta’s argument and analysis quite compelling. However, what I find challenging in his argument is a sense of materiality to the issues he raises in thinking about “good education.” I sense this is, in part, so his argument does not get trapped in “particularistic” discourses and demands. There is little doubt that education has been significantly and importantly challenged by any number of particularist discourses and demands, in various ways, for decades. The proliferation of feminist, critical race, indige- nous, disability, and of course, queer discourses have exposed, proposed, and intervened within the work of education on all levels. Such discourses and demands have pushed against democracy, as it was to deploy democracy in new and more democratic ways. I get the sense that Biesta is not opposed to such particularist discourses, but wants to turn toward the general work of democracy within and amidst competing demands. Biesta argued:

It is important to be aware of the distinction between democratic demands and particularistic demands (to which I also have referred as ‘consumerist’ demands). Whereas particularistic demands may indeed threaten the possibility of an education that is nonparticularistic, democratic demands, since they are the outcome of the translation of particularistic demands into collective concerns, are by definition nonparticularistic. (p. 107)

Providing analytic distinctions between the types of demands in education opens up space not to simplify things, but to articulate ways of understanding the complex and challenging work that falls under the banner of public and democratic education. Particularistic demands—demands made by and from particular groups—are not necessarily bad. They provide, in many ways, the very work of democracy, as democracy’s ever- evolving presence as a political idea is disputed for its exclusions. The particularistic demands, once taken up and struggled for, become collective concerns that are rooted in and are the root of democracy and education. Throughout the various chapters in this book, I will call upon education in various ways in thinking about the promises, challenges, and (im) possibilities of queerness coming into presence. My arguments, analyses, and interpretations should not be mistaken as simply seeking to produce INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 19 queer subjects as if we know what such subjects are already. Such an argument would inevitably uphold the function of socialization, despite possible controversy of an argument advocating the production of queer students. A queer project with a socialization function would merely reproduce queer subjects as they already exist. I am not completely opposed to such a focus—it might assist in anti-homophobia projects that seek to increase protections and recognitions of queer subjects. However, there would be, quite simply, nothing unique there except for, arguably, a more visible and recognizable queer social order. It is necessary, at the same time, to provide lessons in and on queer subjects to hold open the diverse ways in which subjects have come into presence queerly. Such necessary work has been a central struggle within queer scholarship in education and a struggle that continues, given the lack of attention to queer issues in the curriculum. Education, as a field, is instead one aligned more closely with state and expert authorities, as seen, for instance, with the National Research Council’s (2002) report Scientific Research in Education that set out “gold-standard” research methods and the significant amount of funding educational researchers receive from the government. Such realities make doing queer work within education a challenge since queer work, by and large, pushes against the state and/or utilizing state mechanisms for protection. The NRC’s report is at this stage dated, although its impact is still felt. Instead, the steady decline in funding for higher education and the decimation of the professoriate contributes more and more to the precarity of doing work that does not have a market rationale. At the same time, engaging in such work under the banner of queer—in all its contradictions (to be addressed throughout this book)— has, I have to believe, an impact on the material and discursive lives of LGBTQ students and teachers. There have been advances in addressing such concerns in education—primarily through state mechanisms such as anti-bullying programs and hate crimes legislation (see Mayo, 2014 for an overview of such work). This is not to believe such advances are the final step; they are not. Rather, it is to recognize the ongoing work and the multipronged realities of queer politics that operate parallel to one another. Yes, engaging in activism rooted in an identity politics that rests on assimilative tactics is problematic from a more radical queer politic. Both (and more) politics however do better together in pushing envelopes while creating protections that themselves create new envelopes to push. Such a view, here at the outset, may turn some readers off for its pragmatism. I hope you’ll forgive me and continue reading as I will comment 20 A. J. GRETEMAN on pragmatism and its role in my own queer commentary and politic in the next chapter. I am, after all, one reader and as such can only offer my readings of queer theory in it variations, histories, and presents. I admit that I am predisposed to align myself with radical queer ideas and practices, but also recognize the limitations of such ideas and practices among other diverse ideas and practices. Radical queer ideas and practices will not forever be radical. They will be taken up and normalized. However, they will also evolve and persist in revealing not only the survival of queerness but the very contingency of radical ideas in the ongoing work in the world.

The (Still) Trouble with Normal Warner (1999), at the turn of the twenty-first century, exposed the trouble with normal, excavating an ethics of queer life. His work countered the normalizing trends of the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian politics. Within my own experience as a student of queer theory, Warner’s argument provided the most compelling and queer-centric illustration of the work queers and queerness have to and could do, although such lessons, for me, came over a decade after their original pronouncement. However, Warner ended his book noting:

I want to inspire queers to be more articulate about the world they have already made, with all its variations from the norm, with its ethical understanding of the importance of those variations, with its ethical refusal of shame or implicitly shaming standards of dignity, with its refusal of the tact- ful silences that preserve hetero privilege, and with the full range of play and waste and public activity that goes into making a world. (pp. 192–193)

There is little doubt for me that Warner’s argument has inspired the current project, as I seek to map out, describe, and assemble variations of queerness that illustrate the ways queers have not only survived but thrived through “the full range of play and waste and public activity.” Being inspired by Warner, I illustrate, in the coming chapters, such worlds and the importance such worlds have in teaching about and through queerness, be that through reading practices or documenting AIDS. Central to the work of queer theory is the very work of teaching and learning. Queerness, as a cultural and political ethos, is not something one understands innately nor is one born into it. Unlike other forms of difference, queers are, by and large, born into non-queer families—a cause for INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 21 some of the angst and struggles queers have coming into presence. Queerness is not an inborn instinct. Rather, queerness, like sex, is “learned by participating in scenes of talk as well as of fucking” (p. 177). “One learns,” Warner noted, “both the elaborated codes of a subculture, with its rituals and typologies (top/bottom, butch/femme, and so on), but also simply the improvisational nature of unpredicted situations” (pp. 177–178). This learning is not prescriptive, nor something done solely within the confines of classrooms. It is, however, something one learns. One is taught through various types of interactions. Queer forms of learning are discovered and uncovered in the anxiety-ridden, joyous, and difficult everyday work of coming into presence within a world that, by and large, still refuses the full existence of queers. Still queers persist and our teaching and learning happens in fits and starts as one comes upon something curious, heart- palpitating, exhilarated by what one has found, but often nervous about what it will mean for one’s self or what will happen if one is “discovered.” It is a learning that occurs less within sanctioned spaces of learning, which prefer forms of miseducation, but within queer spaces such as bars, backrooms, chatrooms, and the streets. This learning—unsanctioned and unofficial most often—takes time as one grapples with the competing lessons one has received from one’s emerging sense of queer culture and the dominance of straight society’s lessons that pervade institutional life in schools, hospitals, popular culture, and more. Warner’s (1999) lessons “begin in acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself” (p. 35). This focus on the abject and least reputable, however, is not done through pity; rather, “abjection is understood to be a shared condition” which queers communicate “through such camaraderie, a moving and unexpected form of generosity” (p. 35). Refusing the shame historically steeped on queers and their cultural practices, he centralized such practices to highlight the ways queers learn and teach one another about ethics and sex, recognizing “you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you” (p. 35). Warner reads against the homophobia not by dismissing its fears, but embracing such fears as central lessons. While neither philosophers nor the mainstream gay and lesbian movement have significantly drawn inspiration from queers nor been interested in holding up what they see as the “anarchic gutter zone” of queerness (p. 34), queerness is and offers spectacular lessons. “In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated,” Warner argued, “the ground rule is that one doesn’t pretend to be above the indignity of sex” (p. 35). This is perversely, for Warner, an ethical 22 A. J. GRETEMAN vision of queerness, after all, “in queer circles, you are likely to be teased and abused until you grasp the idea” (p. 35): a queer form of bullying, perhaps, but a form that places everyone on the same plane—equally in the gutter. Such lessons are not easily transmitted, nor easily consumed. They take time as they ask what we might call “proto-queer-students” to grapple with and work through the varied lessons, possibilities, and practices that they are encountering. This entails learning to read against homophobia by not disavowing the practices feared by it. “As queers we do not always share the same tastes or practices,” Warner aptly noted, “though often enough we learn new pleasures from others” (p. 178). Continuing, he wrote:

What we do share is an ability to swap stories and learn from them, to enter new scenes not entirely of our own making, to know that in these contexts it is taken for granted that people are different, that one can surprise oneself, that one’s task in the face of unpredicted variations is to recognize the dignity in each person’s way of surviving and playing and creating, to recognize that dignity in this context need not be purchased at the high cost of conformity. (p. 178)

The diverse queer spaces where queers mix and mingle and the lessons within those spaces are central to the persistence and evolution of queerness. However, they also illustrate the precariousness and ephemerality of such lessons. “One reason why we have not learned more from this history,” Warner illustrated, “is that queers do not have the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built” (p. 51). There may very well be businesses catering to queer populations, but such businesses lack the centralizing pedagogical force that reproduce straight culture (e.g., schools, universities). Despite the lack of institutions and generational transmission, of course, queers persist in transmitting practices, ideas, and more. Additionally, per- sisting is the personal labor that goes into coming to understand the lessons held within those spaces—be they lessons of leather, show tunes, and beyond. The nervousness that goes into learning, particularly ideas and practices still considered taboo, is something we cannot get rid of, but that is central to the working through and entering of queer cultures. If central to queer is its disruption of norms and habits, then deciding to engage in such a process cannot be without the anxieties that emerge with such risk. INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 23

Some lessons, to be sure, have or will become normalized—part of new canons or curricula that have become acceptable. The task persists, however, as new queers will enter the picture and come into presence—figura- tively and literally. I write then about schools and education (the broad work of coming into presence), following Jen Gilbert (2014) with “a commitment to seeing schools as caught within the contested relations between sexuality and education” (p. xii). Schools derided, scapegoated, praised and demoral- ized in all sorts of ways are still, I believe, a central institution to democracy. Despite its histories of exclusions—exclusions that still exist—schools offer a space and time to create and imagine new worlds, although this is not always the case, given the realities of drop-out rates for queer and non- white youth. However, to imagine worlds requires significant work and more to undo, unseat, and realize the potential of schools or forgo schools in recognition that they cannot do everything, nor solve every problem. “Sexuality,” as Gilbert (2014) argued, “affects how classrooms function; but … we cannot know in advance how the meanings of sexuality will come to affect experiences of teaching and learning” (p. x). It’s tricky because sexuality is tricky. Sexuality—in its web of significations, histories, and material realities—provokes and evokes uncertainties, angst, joy, and more. Sexuality can proffer new modes of relating in and to the world while also, within schools particularly, be domesticated. Realizing this challenge herself, Gilbert noted:

Championing the rights of LGBTQ people in schools in ways that go beyond simply protecting LGBTQ students, teachers, and families from harassment requires theories of sexuality and education that engage the messy, ambivalent, and deeply contradictory spaces and relations of the school. (p. xiii)

There have been significant changes in how schools respond to the presence of LGBTQ students over the last several decades. As new legislation, policy, and research emerges articulating the rights of LGBTQ people and the responsibilities of schools to LGBTQ students, teachers, and staff, the work of sexuality alters, evolves, and pushes for new possibilities. I write this not to romanticize the transgressive possibilities of queerness—those days have past—but to hold onto the work that queerness has still to do in schools and beyond them in the work of society. Queerness must still transgress, but also play in ways that use such transgression to do things for the well-being of queer people—broadly defined. 24 A. J. GRETEMAN

Susanne Luhmann (1998) in an early contribution to queer pedagogy, wrote “writings concerned with the experience of being queer in the classroom do the important work of documenting the injurious effects that heterosexism and homophobic discourse and practices have on non- straight teachers and students alike” (p. 143). This work—often testimonial, as she noted—situated the work of addressing gay and lesbian issues as primarily one of pushing against negative representations and demanding accurate (or positive) representations of gay and lesbian issues. Close to 20 years later, such a statement and approach still rings true as research continues to illustrate the injurious effects of heterosexism and homophobia, along with assimilationist strategies to include “accurate” representations in the curriculum. In those early years of queer work, much attention was given to the injurious effects of ignoring, denying, or misrepresenting sexual minorities—namely, at the time, lesbian and gay students and teachers. And, as Luhmann (1998) pointed out, “citing the injurious effects of representa- tional absence, lesbian and gay content is figured as a remedy against homophobia and a prerequisite for the self-esteem and safe existence of queers in the classroom” (p. 143). Queers were injured by way of living within a heterosexist and homophobic society, and citing such injury became central to being able to develop compelling and politically persuasive arguments for addressing gay and lesbian realities. Queer subjects—be they youth or adults—became subjects through the injurious realities of the world. And this understanding of queer was central to understanding queers for much of the twentieth century and something that I want to slightly push against. I am less and less convinced that queers emerge only through injury, insult, and shame. Elsewhere, I have written with a colleague about our concerns with this trend of citing injury in addressing queer issues in education (Greteman & Thorpe, 2017; Thorpe & Greteman, 2015). Our concerns, to be clear, were not that such forms of injury and violence do not exist nor that they are unimportant to address. They most certainly do and are. Rather, our concerns—concerns that also inform and frame this project—were with how such a frame limits what we can see, think, and do in addressing queer issues, lives, practices, and cultures in the twenty-first century. Injury and violence are arguably more immediately more persuasive and in need of being addressed. There is a political, educational, and ethical expediency to making sure students and teachers are able to survive their daily lives free of assaults, bullying, and ignorance. Yet, there is also a necessity to INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 25 think to the side of survival to the ways in which queers have and could not merely survive but thrive—queerly for sure—within the worlds. Surviving is without a doubt important. Audre Lorde (1984) allowed us to think as much as she articulated ways that we might put into action a vision for a better, more just world. And such a vision requires the very basic demands of survival, for without it, there is no “I” or “We” to envision and struggle toward a more just world. However, she asserted, “every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions” (1984, p. 73). There are no easy solutions. The lines I write here in this book cannot propose easy solutions even as they imagine the possibility of thriving. Perhaps the only easy thing we could do is to ignore the challenges and continue through life believing that “ignorance is bliss” or that “I’ve made it, why look back?” As an educator, I sense the recognition that there are no easy solutions means there is some commitment to challenge the social worlds that enter our classrooms. How, critical educators ask ourselves, do we teach and learn in a world that is our world, the world of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and more, and the world of beauty, joy, and laughter? Our world is complex, as are our ways of living—both surviving and thriving—in that world. Lorde (1984) provided us a way to think and feel through this complexity. Thinking, we will do well to remember, is not the only task as feelings matter. “I cannot hide my anger,” Lorde noted, “to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivi- alizes all our efforts” (p. 130). The issues we as social beings bring, positioned in different ways with different histories, bodies, abilities, and more, mean that our work requires not only giving voice to our lives but also finding ways to listen to others—their struggles and joys. This is difficult. We often go on the defensive or are afraid of implicating our own selves in participating in “oppression”—often, we do this unknowingly or unintentionally. Lorde helps us again, implicating herself, reminding us

If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed. (p. 128)

Feeling, thinking, talking, listening all circle in our task of relating to others and relating in ways that “give life” or help us survive and thrive together. 26 A. J. GRETEMAN

To do such work together—to build alliances—is a challenge. “There is,” it is important to remember, “no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives” (Lorde, 1984, p. 138). I will try to present the queer issues I raise here as complex, intersectional issues, that’s what they are. Becoming, in whatever way in this world, is filled with complexities, often beyond our expectations. To address them in their entirety is impossible. However, to attempt to address them is a necessity; this, in the hopes that we might be part of bringing new worlds into presence, remembering Lorde’s lessons on change.

When I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives. (p. 127)

The assumptions that were once made about queerness have changed, but there continues to be a need to think about the tensions that exist when people meet. How, we will have to explore, do we uncover our assumptions? What labor goes into such work and how do we begin to invent these new ways of being, relating, talking, and listening? How do we encounter difference in new ways when we often have been taught to be afraid of difference, or are taught to ignore difference, or are taught that we are “post-difference?” We are not post-differences, but the differences that once defined us have changed. “Difference must be not merely tolerated,” Lorde (1984) argued, “but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening” (p. 111). We cannot do away with difference, for to do so would be to eliminate our humanity. But we also have to think about who speaks about and for difference? Who is asked to speak about difference? Who is asked to listen? When and why? For Lorde, such discussions often fall upon the “marginalized other.” Women have to talk about gender. People of color about race. Gay and lesbians about sexuality. Yet, such a move fails to recognize the intersections and complexities. Such an approach also drains those who speak about and for difference. “There is a constant drain of energy” Lorde contended, “which might be used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future” (p. 115). Constructing the future is a present reality. Yet, what does it mean for us to use our energy to redefine and INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 27 devise ways of altering the present and constructing the future? How do our positions—as racial, gendered, sexual, embodied, classed—privilege us (allowing us to take things for granted or make assumptions about the world) while also opening space for us to connect with difference in new ways (through art, schools, museums)? I am not sure, but I hope contemplating queer thriving will contribute to this broader project of envision- ing a different world as being a central project for education.

Methods In writing a book, one makes innumerable decisions—what to include, what to exclude, what to focus on, what to ask, when to finish, and so on. These decisions have reasons behind them, although at times, they are made haphazardly or expediently due to deadlines or exhaustion. They are grounded in my own experiences while I also attempt to extend my experiences beyond what might be expected. In the following chapters, I will assemble and explore a variety of objects that have and could continue to provide lessons into queer thriving. Each chapter offers, I like to think, object lessons. “Object lessons,” of course, have resonance within psychoanalysis and beyond. E. L. McCallum (1999) illustrated, in her book Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism, the need to take “fetishism seriously, not as a threat but as a promise” (p. xi). Fetishism, while often maligned, when stripped of its historical, cultural, and analytic baggage, “is clearly and simply a particular relation between subjects and objects” (p. xvi). Within fetishism, the object becomes central to the work of the subject. The object—the fetish—is no longer simply viewed as a passive thing to be used, but an active agent that teaches. The object provides lessons. Or as McCallum wrote, “we make our objects from what we make of our world, and in return they teach us: this is fetishism’s object lesson” (p. xxii). Educators, in my estimation, become within such a reevaluation of fetishism, fetishists; requiring us to take seriously the objects we bring into our teaching—in classes, in writing, in presentations—as those objects are simultaneously made from our world and teach us about that world. Objects breathe life into our pedagogies and promise possibilities. The objects I assembled here seek to make our world queer while recognizing that doing so will inevitably fail as objects are altered and changed. Similar to McCallum, although devoid of the psychoanalytic baggage, my work will seek to do things with objects, namely, assemble together objects that can provide lessons on queer thriving. I do things with various 28 A. J. GRETEMAN objects that have done things for me in my own teaching and writing, as I both teach individuals to become educators and engage the work of queer scholarship. For some time, a central concern within my scholarship has been bringing objects into educational scholarship that have, by and large, been absent, in order to see what such objects might have to teach about learning, sexualities, social relations, and more. Instead of reading, against the grain, the existence of queer pasts in previous texts, I read with the grain of long-ignored queer objects. These objects—S/M, barebacking, AIDS—have been absent, I suspect, because they are offensive objects within the educational imagination. The educational imagination remains sutured to respectability politics and particular modes of reproduction. Education continues to be rather conservative and reactionary which is not all bad. These objects—some I return to here—have been deemed inappropriate for education, but also exist in education through their negation, as they have little to do with the seemingly practical realities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students and teachers, defined narrowly. The practical realities of LGBT student and teachers, however, are less clear than such a statement makes them out to be. Distinguishing work that is and is not practical—offering “practical knowledge” to its readers—is always wrapped up within political sensibilities. “Evoking practical and useful knowledge as the educational panacea of change is filled with irony,” Thomas Popkewitz (2015) argued, continuing, “The irony is that the very principles that organize the hopes of practical knowledge are impractical” (p. 1). Why? As Popkewitz noted, “they are impractical in that the desire to find practical knowledge assumes a consensus and har- mony to organize change that conserves the contemporaneous frameworks that are the objects of change” (p. 1). Practical and useful knowledge are only practical and useful under certain conditions and so to claim one offers practical and useful knowledge, for instance, about LGBT issues, ironically becomes impractical as LGBT issues are contextually conditioned and changing. Such demands, more so, maintain and reproduce particular practices and ways of understanding. In Chap. 2, I will take seriously the work of reading and the heterogeneous practices necessary to queer work. Queer theory and commentary is, on a basic level, work rooted in reading. How we read matters and what we read matters, as we are directed by those readings to see the world in particular ways. There has been an explosion in reading practices over the past several decades as scholars and activists seek to read into and onto the word and world. My readings throughout this book, as such, are rooted in INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 29 pragmatism—a form of reading that looks forward to conceivable consequences—and Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading. Drawn together, these two approaches to reading seek to move to the side of paranoid readings that have dominated various critical discourses in order to assemble texts and ideas together that do related work. Queer theory, while originally lambasted for being difficult to read, has, as I will illustrate in this chapter, gone mainstream, for better and for worse. Queer readings of norms—heteronormativity, homonormativity—are now becoming utilized to do things in the world. They are, to put it simply, having an impact—consequential at that—in slowly changing how sexualities and genders are educated. Implicated in such work are children. Children are our future and we should teach them well. And as queer concepts go mainstream, the lessons children have access to fundamentally shift what futures are made available. Children are, at the same time, strange and conceptually complex. However, as Cris Mayo (2006) argued “for queers, too, children are often future participants in queer communities, but queers may have no say in how those future community members are raised” (p. 4). In Chap. 3 then, I turn to work in the last decade that has unpacked and complicated the child—both as a material being and as a figure used politically. While children are our future and we would do well to understand them more fully, children grow up. In growing, they become sexual. The blatantly sexual is no longer scandalous. Children are sexualized and granted access to sex educations in new ways—although in limited ways within the formal school curriculum still. How then has queer theory and its commentary wedged open space to contemplate children beyond the straight-and-narrow? Following this exploration, I turn toward the work of generations in Chap. 4. If children are our future, as individuals, they will be a part of a generation while also being in relationships with other generations. Intergenerational relationships are at the heart of school. Schools are places where generations meet in diverse and interesting ways. Yet, intergenerational relationships have been feared, particularly those between queers and children. How can queers push against such logics so that, remembering Mayo’s (2006) comment above, queers still lack say in how queer youth enter the broader sociopolitical world. I sense generational thought offers rich insights into the strange workings of change, but also illustrates the ways in which different generations have generated modes of surviving and thriving. 30 A. J. GRETEMAN

As such, in Chaps. 5 and 6, I turn to AIDS as a vital and viral matter to queer thriving. The emergence of AIDS, in my reading of queer history, parallels the development of queer theory. Queer theory itself, born at the crossroads of street and academic activism, had a stake in articulating queer survival. This history is slowly being lost in the ongoing process of normalization and gentrification. Yet, in the 2010s, there has been a growth in attention to the history of AIDS, particularly via documentaries that have emerged to document and revive the voices of our recent but dead past. Drawing on the pedagogical force of the documentary to transmit histories, this chapter takes seriously the centrality of AIDS to the history of queerness. There emerged a generational gap that queers would do well to recognize and fill so the lessons and lives lost can again speak to the living. Within this chapter, I articulate the shared responsibility for memory, memorializing, and resisting the gentrification of the mind as a central component of queer thriving and the generation of queerness. AIDS, in my object lessons, is a central issue to gay male subjectivity. This is, in part, because gay men coming of age in what Rofes (2007) called the “post-AIDS” moment are still part of an “at-risk group” (e.g., homosexual men, men who have sex with men) but are also removed from the realities of the AIDS epidemic. However, these realities have shifted dramatically— or so it is currently imagined at the time of this writing—when the Federal Drug Administration approved Truvada as a pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. In Chap. 6, I take up AIDS in the face of PrEP to contemplate the shifting terrain of AIDS and gay male subjectivity. You’ll excuse me for focusing on gay men—such a focus may seem anachronistic in the ever- proliferating and queering of identities we see in the 2010s—however, I focus on gay men (and the intersections with race and class) to contemplate specifically the emerging lessons of AIDS, sex, and the materiality of drugs. If I anachronistically focus on gay men in Chap. 6, Chap. 7 takes up a traditional university classroom and the work of feminist, queer, and trans theories. In the previous chapters, I took up objects such as documentary films or PrEP to assemble together lessons that emerge within the complex realm of queerness. In this final chapter, I move more directly into the world of the university to engage the tensions between feminist, trans, and queer theories. In this final chapter, I move closely to the traditional work of pedagogy—the seminar classroom. Yet, this classroom happens at an unexpected and unanticipated moment that illustrates the necessity of the complicated conversations that feminist, trans, and queer theories raise about the world. INTRODUCTION: AN OPENING FOR QUEER THRIVING 31

Coming Back to the Ground “Realistically, it takes deeply rooted, durable, and often somewhat opaque energies to write a book; it can take them, indeed,” Eve Sedgwick (1990) continued, “to read it” (p. 59). The present book cannot offer a totalizing view of queerness or queer theories or queer people or queer populations. It will be, upon publication, out of date, as the present “presented” here will have given way to futures unimagined. To write of and about queerness in education—via schools and elsewhere—is to write into both uncertainty and to outdatedness. The time of scholarship is, after all, much slower than the time of late capitalism with its 24/7 news and social media feeds. New scandals, assaults, murders, advancements, and backlash involving sexuality will continue to happen, but often quickly dissipate. Many of these will fall into oblivion unless captured by and in scholarship to understand and intervene within the worlds that such things happen. Scholarship’s work then, as I see it, is one of archiving the world, inter- preting the world, and helping in small ways to create new possible worlds through such commentary. A book cannot do that by itself, but it can, I believe, contribute. To draw this chapter to a close, I want to turn to a tiny contribution to the Chicago History Museum’s Out in Chicago exhibition. It was a small piece of paper, anonymously written by a student, often probably overlooked. It stated, “There isn’t a textbook that teaches a gay kid how to live. If there was, I think I’d be better at it. There aren’t any queer theory books that teach the real issues.” While this book, the one you are reading, will probably fail to meet the needs of the anonymous youth that will forever remain youthful, trapped in the archives of the exhibition, I sense it is important to begin to unpack the plethora of queer projects and why they read and do work in different ways. Queer theory has gone mainstream. It’s been institutionalized, and sparks less controversy than before. Such changes are important in that they illustrate the plethora of books that gay kids can access to learn “how to live.” The accessibility of these books is contestable, given the threats to brick-and-mortar bookstores where browsing can happen and the algorithms on-line that show us only things “like” those we have already searched for in some way. Still, the existence of growing resources points to changing opportunities and possibilities for queer youth to read. Gay kids, queer kids, probably won’t actually read this text; it is inevitably for adults (queer or not) to think about and through a range of issues 32 A. J. GRETEMAN as they relate to “queerness” and queers. I imagine this book is for gay kids, queer kids, who will come into presence with teachers, administrators, and others who have the opportunity to influence how those kids encounter possible futures. As Jen Gilbert (2006) has so aptly reminded us, we do not know who comes into our classrooms or our lives. Most often, they are strangers and strange to us, as most educators can attest. The task, in large part, is to find ways of welcoming these strangers and such strangeness hospitably. “Let us say yes,” Gilbert (2006) requested, “to those who turn up” (p. 25). They may very well not be nor become gay or queer. However, they should have a whole host of futures laid out before them. And to have such futures before them is to be knowledgeable of and comfortable with a whole host of futures that are connected to our pasts and presents. While there is always an individual and group reality to education, there is also a host of cultural issues at play. Queer cultures, in various ways, present ways of being in the world. Learning to read queer theory as a way to learn how to live queerly is not simply a matter of decoding such texts. That is such a straight version of reading. There are, instead, via queer cultures added requirements to reading, unteachable, but totally learnable with time and practice. Such reads are not mean, nor are they kind. Instead, they are queer in reminding listeners the importance of queer cultural traditions and the possibilities they offer in pushing against the mainstream and system of norms that continue to position subjects in queer ways. I turn then to reading, queer reading in particular.

Notes 1. I went through high school as the Internet entered the classroom. I was taught then to be skeptical of citing Internet sources. This lesson is still relevant in our “post-truth” era brought in with the Trump administration. However, I also find the diversity of sources that Internet allows has opened up untapped potential for capturing artifacts (large and small) for others to stumble upon. Such diversity contributes, I worry, to a fragmentation of voices, but also opens up the possibility to stumble upon other voices.

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Smith, D. (1998, January 17). “Queer theory” is entering the literary mainstream. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/17/ books/queer-theory-is-entering-the-literary-mainstream.html Spring, J. (2016). American education (17th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. St. James, J. (2017). Freak show. New York, NY: Penguin. St. Pierre, E., & Pillow, W. (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education. New York, NY: Routledge. Thorpe, J., & Greteman, A. J. (2015). Intimately bound to numbers: On the rhetorics GLBTQ climate research. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(1), 73–99. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.2.1.0073 Tongson, K. (2011). Relocations: Queer suburban imaginaries. New York, NY: NYU Press. Urban, W. J., & Wagoner, J. L. (2009). American education: A history. New York, NY: Routledge. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warner, M. (2012). Queer and then? The end of queer theory. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/article/ QueerThen-/130161 CHAPTER 2

On Reading Practices: Where Pragmatism and Queer Meet

Every season, or so it seems, on RuPaul’s Drag Race, there is a moment where the library is open. When the library is open, that’s when the queens read. And read they do! They read one another, often to filth, although sometimes they fail spectacularly to read at all. Illiteracy in the library is a bitch. Reading, as the queens illustrate, is an art. When the library is open, the ingenuity and cattiness of the queens is on full view—the art of the insult sifted through love leads to not only laughter, but the exposure of fault lines. To read—as a verb—is an action that, while straightened out often in the realm of schools, in the world of drag exposes the act of reading as fundamental to the cultivation of the self. Often exaggerated and definitely incisive, reading in this sense is a form of commentary done “just between us gurls,” as RuPaul likes to say. When one reads, one comments on the object being read, pointing out the obvious flaws, which in “good” company are more often said behind one’s back. RuPaul’s Drag Race, of course, is not the first place where reading is made visible; it is just the place reading is visible now. Reading, in this manner, is said to have originated in the ball scene of queens of color in New York City and elsewhere, as problematically shown in Jennifer Livingston’s (1990) Paris is Burning and more aptly described in Marlon Bailey’s (2013) Butch Queens Up in Pumps, which centers on the Detroit ball scene. Reading is less a technical practice, a science to be studied under the banner of literacy, and more an act of surviving and thriving in a world that prefers one read

© The Author(s) 2018 37 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_2 38 A. J. GRETEMAN straight. It is a practice connected to knowledge, but not only about knowledge. Knowledge is both central to educational projects and a hindrance to them as it can become divorced from knowledge’s performative effects. As Diana Fuss (1991) argued in the early years of queer theory:

Questions of epistemology (‘how do we know?’) enjoy a privileged status in theorizations of gay and lesbian identity. How does one know when one is on the inside and when one is not? How does one know if one is out of the closet? How, indeed does one know if one is gay? The very insistence of the epistemological frame of reference in theories of homosexuality may suggest that we cannot know—surely or definitively. Sexual identity may be less a function of knowledge than performance, or, in Foucauldian terms, less a matter of final discovery than perpetual reinvention. (pp. 6–7)

Knowledge then (and now) enjoys a privileged status in theorizing— knowledge provides an imagined sense of certainty, a connection to pasts and presents. However, such knowledge changes and impacts lives as it gets taken up and used by those who access it. The politics around sexuality—from the closet to covering—have changed across generations while continuing to impact the lives of queers. While the closet was central to knowing one’s self as gay or lesbian in the twentieth century, the closet has changed in its significance in coming to know a queer self. The “act” of coming out—once a fraught and dangerous proposition—has dramatically changed as such an act happens earlier and earlier and is met with much less resistance. However, at the same time, as Yoshino (2007) argued, we have seen a rise in covering, which “divides normal from queers” (p. 77). With covering, the political work of assimilation has become further centralized and has divided normals from queers such that they “seem to struggle against each other as hard as they struggle against homophobes” (p. 78). This is, to be sure, a dangerous generalization, but nonetheless a generalization that illustrates changes that have happened to how queers enter the world, the stances they are able to take, and the divisions that persist. As such, I begin this chapter on the act of reading—as developed within drag culture—to think about the ways queer theory has opened and invented ways of reading that inform my own readings throughout this book. Reading may be an act many of us learned in elementary school, but it is later in life that we learn the art of reading—for nuance, ideology, ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 39 pleasure, and much more. I suspect that it is queer theories’ relationships to various queer subcultures that queer theorists have themselves learned to read within and against the deafening straightness of the academy. I suspect as well that queer forms of reading, particularly those indebted to the witty reads of queens, have never fully been institutionalized, like queer theory proper, but always survive under threat, for such reads assist in that very work. To read the world, the straight world, requires queer readings indeed. Reading practices quickly change as the terrain around queers and queerness shift. Queerness is, after all, tied to the process of normalization. Being able to pick out weaknesses and flaws in idealized mirrors assists in exposing the failures of those ideals to remain, well, ideal. Norms are, as Judith Butler (1999) helped us realize, rooted in ideals that we can never fully achieve. The idea of what or how one should act is tied to ideals that precede one’s existence. One is guided by such ideas, but fails spectacularly to achieve the ideal. As some forms of queerness are normalized, queers must learn to read queerer or persist in queer readings in order to recognize where the exclusions exist. For instance, while same-sex marriage may now be the law of the land (for how long, may be a question to ask given the Trump administration’s potential to reshape the Supreme Court after his election in 2016) allowing some same-sex couples to access previously denied rights and privileges, same-sex marriage does not address other institutional, cultural, and disciplinary structures that disadvantage other forms of queerness and queers (Polikoff, 2009; Warner, 1999). Same-sex marriage may allow queers to imagine a married future previously denied to them, but it also limits queer forms of relationships still unrecognized by the state (which can be a good thing). With marriage a viable option, previous forms of queer kinship fade from view. Marriage demands queers say “I do” and reproduce all the clichés of married life. Of course, as Serpell (2017) argued, clichés have their use as they illustrate ideas that have become repetitive and common-sensical, for the time being. “A heap of clichés can remind us,” Serpell argued, “of the vacuous core and incessant materiality of all language” (p. 177). Queer theories themselves may by and large be clichéd in many ways, given their penchant for reiterating ideas about transgressive and subversion, but in reading such clichés we might very well realize the business of transgression and subversion anew. Queerness—as it relates to anti-normativity—remains transgressive and subversive, but what those things looks like cannot merely be reproductions 40 A. J. GRETEMAN of queer pasts. To decide to be queer, one needs those pasts, but also help in addressing the new realities that face emerging queer generations—for instance, economic inequality, climate disaster, neoliberalism, and so on. Deciding to be queer requires that one learn what queer is and then imagine other ways queer could be in context. Such a process is like other processes of becoming—one filled with feelings, institutional structures, family dynamics, material goods, cultural memories and more. Becoming a theorist, a queer theorist at that, demands developing various understandings and practices that have fallen under the umbrella of queer theory. Given the reality that queer theory now has a history, such work is already under way. For instance, as Adam Isaiah Green (2002) illustrated, queer theory by the early naughts had two methodological strands—radical deconstructionism and radical subversion. These both broadened the theoretical study of sexuality while also limiting the empirical investigation of sexuality. Green does not dismiss the role of theory; rather, he wanted to contemplate a “post-queer” study of sexuality that incorporated the theoretical grounded in the empirical. “Even when homosexual practices are perceived to disrupt heteronormativity in the abstract,” Green wrote,

we would be foolish to think that subjects practicing homosexual desires develop a sexual subjectivity consistent with a radically queer epistemology, or that subversion occurs just because it is theorized from the plush stand- point of the plush academic art-chair. (2002, p. 539)

Studying sexuality and doing so queerly cannot only be theoretical, even if that is where queer got its start. Rather, as such ideas infiltrate the world, sexuality and its study can grapple with the intersections of corporeal practices and theoretical interpretations that are used to read into and onto such bodily practices. Becoming a queer theorist, as such, involves not only being enmeshed in such work, but grappling with its ever-emerging histories. This includes understanding, although such a list is not exhaustive and merely illustra- tive, the historical (Halperin, 1990, 2002; Katz, 1992; Stryker, 2008), material (Alderson, 2016; Floyd, 2009), aesthetic (Getsy, 2015; Johnson, 2003; Munoz, 2009), political (Cohen, 1997; Edelman, 2004; Vaid, 2012), and educational (Gilbert, 2014; Pinar, 1998; Sadowski, 2016) issues surrounding and impacting queerness and queers. Becoming a queer theorist, as queer theory has a history, entails a certain citational practice whereby one cites theorists, those predecessors who laid the ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 41 groundwork. Such citational practices, however, are not neutral, as they reveal issues of access, privilege, and boundaries around who is and is not considered a “theorist.” Furthermore, they reveal diverse reading practices rooted in different disciplines, issues that dramatically complicate becoming a queer and/or a theorist. In such a process of developing understanding in such diverse areas, one’s views, practices, habits, and more shift in unexpected ways. The daily work of living in the world—experiencing the ordinary affects that define our humanness—impacts and is impacted by encountering the texts not only of theory proper but the wider world of texts. For Eve Sedgwick (2004) “affect itself, ordinary affect, while irreducibly corporeal, is also centrally shaped, through the feedback process, by its access to … theoretical meta levels” (p. 133). While theory historically divorced itself from the body, the corporeal experience of living informs theory and theory informs the ways in which we experience our lives. Theory, put simply is never objective, but always conditioned by the subjects who create it. Those subjects—creating and conditioned by theory—have bodies. Those bodies, our bodies, have been and will continue to be impacted by the meta-theories that inform our space and time of living. Theories, like living, are products of certain times and places. They traverse time and place, but in doing so transmit different ideas. Having been aspiring toward queer theory for more than a decade and in the position of writing the book before you, I contemplate the simple albeit complex work of reading. Reading impacts our corporeal realities. It makes us feel happy, sad, angry, confused, tired, and so much more. It has been impacted by digital technologies that have expanded what we can read, and the types of reading that we can do. Reading also impacts how we come to understand our corporeal realities. Things we read help inform how we understand (or don’t understand) our bodies. Feminist, race- conscious, and queer theories have, I think, made this quite clear, as they have, in intersectional ways, shown how racist, sexist, and homophobic texts have shaped worldviews and contributed to ideas of shame, inade- quacy, and more. Such theories have, as well, in creating new “liberatory” theories, illustrated that reading such texts help undo shame and other negative affects. It is probably true that many people in the world, to be sure, do not read theory, but theory in its work comes to impact us in strange ways often unbeknownst to us. Educators, doctors, clergy, parents, and others are, through their educations (formal and informal), impacted by theories 42 A. J. GRETEMAN implicitly or explicitly embraced. Theories—dominant theories that we encounter in various ways—condition the ways we think and read and do. Some, for example, take for granted rights granted through liberal theories of democracy, while others, in recognizing the limits of liberalism, draw upon other theories to challenge liberalism’s limitations. This is a general insight Foucault (1989) provided in illustrating the order of things as they come to impact our ways of understanding or knowing the world. Theories rooted in various disciplines, as Foucault (1989) noted, discipline our ways of thinking, acting, and being in the world. Discourses impact our bodies and our bodies impact discourses. After all, for Foucault, there are ways discipline is converted to undo these very disciplinary logics. We cannot get out of the disciplinary logic, but we can invent new ways by which our lives are disciplined. Discourses and material practices precede our existence. They shape our existence, but also do not determine our existence. Over time, we can recognize shifts in how different discourses have come to shape and impact our lives, but for much of the time, such theories are the air we breathe. Queer theory was an intervention in lives, pushing against theories of sexuality rooted in biology or religion or education. And part of its intervention was shifting reading practices. Deborah Britzman, within education (1995) asked, “Is there a queer pedagogy?” and demanded that we “stop reading straight.” In posing the question and providing an immediate demand, she sought to open space and time to engage sexuality in education and usher in attention to “queer theory.” Queer theory, as Britzman imagined it, insisted on studying three things: “the study of limits, the study of ignorance, and the study of reading practices.” For her,

Each method requires an impertinent performance: an interest in thinking against the thoughts of one’s conceptual foundations; an interest in studying the skeletons of learning and teaching that haunt one’s responses, anxieties, and categorical imperatives; and a persistent concern with whether pedagogical relations can allow more room to maneuver in thinking the unthought of education. (p. 155)

A queer pedagogy was, for her, “an attempt to articulate a thought of a method … to bring to pedagogical spaces consideration of … ‘unstable differential relations’” (p. 155). Queer was and is an educated mode, and it is educated in a strange manner to assist in not only engaging the unthought, but also deciding if one wants to become queer. The very work of queerness is rooted in the work of education. ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 43

Queerness, as an educated mode, takes its cue from the models that are disparaged to make such space inhabitable and extend the time of such lives. Queerness, in other words, embraces clichés and stereotypes used against queers and inhabits those ideas and practices to make them livable. This is not, however, to simply add these “queer models” to the already overpopulated curriculum of difference, because such a move for inclusion “produce[s] the very exclusions they are meant to cure” (Britzman, 1995, p. 158). Rather, these queer models expose the very limits of knowledge or how knowledge is itself a form of resistance. Queers have invariably been made to feel bad for their feelings, bodies, and forms of pleasure. Assimilationist strategies have sought to further distance queers from those things deemed bad (e.g., promiscuity, effeminacy, butchness) while queer theorists (inclusive of activists) have instead continued to act bad to expand possibilities. Such work is difficult given that there are consequences to acting bad—a central concern for queer theorists in education who have exposed the violence against queer bodies, be they students, teachers, or teacher-educators (Kissen & Bedford, 2002; Rodriguez & Pinar, 2007; Rofes, 2005; Unks, 1995). Education is central to the workings of queerness, both in the specificity of schools and the general work of agents beyond schools. For Britzman (1995):

Pedagogical thought must begin to acknowledge that receiving knowledge is a problem for the learner and the teacher, particularly when the knowledge one already possesses or is possessed by works as an entitlement to one’s ignorance or when the knowledge encountered cannot be incorporated because it disrupts how the self might imagine itself and others. (p. 159)

Queerness and queers are positioned to constantly acknowledge this limi- tation and how knowledge can be part of the problem. Knowledge is not always liberating, but dependent on the context and powers within any enduring context. And knowledge has the potential to undo the subject, which is, seemingly, contrary to the project of education that seeks to build subjects, particularly their self-esteem and self-understanding in the current educational moment. Student and teacher identities, within the pedagogical space, are a contested site where reading practices come into play. It is a matter of reading practices, of engaging different forms of reading, that teachers and students within the pedagogical space might do the difficult work of navigat- 44 A. J. GRETEMAN ing the terrain of identity, desire, and knowledge. As Britzman (1998) argued then “reading practices might be educated to attend to the proliferation of one’s identificatory possibilities and to make allowance for the unruly terms of undecidability and unknowability” (p. 85). It appears that, for Britzman, it is the undecidability, the uncertainty of queerness that opens up space and time for pedagogical investigations of sociality and the development of ethical modes of being. She (1995) refused “to secure Queer Theory to a fixed content, to a set of guidelines one might apply to automatize a queer logic, and to a stable and singular body of knowledge that supposes medicalized or minor identity” (p. 155). To stop reading straight, we might realize, could allow us to begin to recognize the need to constantly engage our practices of reading for what they bring forth and push back.

Pragmatic Readings I want to attend to the reading practices that inform my own work here to be transparent to my readers, but also provide lessons on the different ways in which “theory” informs reading as a practice. I first came to think about reading practices through pragmatism—not queer theory. For some this might seem rather unqueer. There has been little written looking at the ways in which pragmatism and queer theory could be productive together, although I’ve tried (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014). Nor have pragmatists in general taken up a queer project, despite pragmatism being a little queer. That’s neither here nor there. What is of interest to me in this chapter are reading practices. As Cleo Cherryholmes (1999) illustrated, reading is more than meets the eye. Pragmatism itself is, as well, more than meets the eye. Pragmatism presents a particular form of reading that attends to action. I dwell on pragmatism here to reveal my own pragmatic leanings. I like pragmatism. I also tend to read things I like as I sense, as argued elsewhere, there are pedagogies and politics tied to liking (Greteman & Burke, 2017). Cherryholmes (1999) began Reading Pragmatism, noting that the reason to engage pragmatism was “that pragmatism looks to the consequences that we endlessly bump up against” (p. 3). And we bump up against consequences all day, every day. Those consequences are the results of things we—ourselves and others—have done as well as things far outside of our control. “Pragmatists conceptualize the world where we, all of us,” Cherryholmes argued, “are constantly thrown forward as the present approaches but never quite reaches the ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 45 future” (p. 3). It is, in his estimation, “a discourse that attempts to bridge where we are with where we might end up” (p. 3). A key word, of course, being “might,” as pragmatism cannot predict what will come, but attends to contemplating conceivably what might come. We don’t know what will come, but we suspect we will come in some way to a future. Pragmatism is less a theory. Instead, it is a way of doing things in the world attending to the conceivable consequences of our actions. Queers come in the world, and in coming they encounter consequences, and not just theoretically. I sense pragmatism’s attention to consequences is important decades into the existence of various queer theories that have offered readings of various types of objects—films, performances, novels, policies, experiences, and more. Those readings—once scandalous in the academy—have now become part of the academy. They have in infiltrating the institutions they once critiqued or parodied or subverted become practices that can inform work that more, now than ever, has the backing of the institution. And, with such institutionalization we can more, now than ever, contemplate the conceivable consequences of queer theory and its attendant practices. We might now be able to think about if and how queer theories have had and could continue to have consequences for the worlds we inhabit— through discourse, material practices, and more. What are the conceivable consequences of various types of queer readings? What do such readings do for readers as those readers encounter the daily work of living? This is a question I will hopefully provide responses to throughout the remainder of this book as I contemplate how queer theory—as I have read and encountered it—has allowed me to contemplate queer thriving. Reading is—this might seem obvious—contingent and contextual. It is informed by our time, objects we have encountered, relationships we have had, and much more. Our readings are not, nor can they be, ahistorical. They will become dated, outdated even, becoming instead signs of a time gone by. Such times gone by might be read—in the present—as a sign of progress. See, things have gotten better as texts written years ago show things were pretty shitty. However, such times might also be read nostalgically as a time one wished one had lived in. “Wow, the 1970s sound fabulous! What happened to us?” I will, I suspect fall into reading things as signs of progress and nostalgically. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I think progress and nostalgia can serve us in various ways. Theoretical traditions serve us in various ways as well. Different theoretical traditions have offered different ways of reading texts. Cherryholmes (1999) illustrated this by providing readings that take an “authoritative” 46 A. J. GRETEMAN perspective or are informed by deconstruction, new historicism, and, of course pragmatism. This move was pedagogical, providing readers with a strategy to distinguish between related, but different, reading practices. Reading practices, Cherryholmes illustrated, have different consequences for how a text impacts readers and beyond. In addition, his readings illustrated distinctions between particular critical traditions (under the banner of poststructuralism and postmodernism) and pragmatism. Cherryholmes argued:

Poststructural and postmodern investigations tend to be investigatory, interpretive, critical, and analytic. They are not forward-looking. They are oriented to commentary and criticism instead of consequences and action. Poststructuralism and its postmodern relatives do not have a project that looks to action, nor do they seek one. (p. 4)

“Pragmatism,” as an alternative, “looks to results” (p. 4) but not just any results. The products of pragmatic readings “are never finished. They are interpreted, reinterpreted, and criticized indefinitely” (p. 4). Continuing, Cherryholmes wrote, “as a result, [pragmatic readings] are continually open to new experiences and problems and opportunities. Pragmatist pro- ductions deconstruct, they do indeed. And their deconstruction invites, indeed requires, revision and replacement” (p. 4). Pragmatism and its readings embrace the interpretive, analytic, critical options provided by poststructuralism. They are, I think, more alike than they are different. However, pragmatism moves beyond poststructuralism and postmodernism to contemplate action, to roll with the punches in order to make decisions about how to do things in the world. I have, I sense, quoted rather liberally from Cherryholmes above so let me provide my reading. Poststructural and postmodern theories—in which queer theory would be included—do interesting and important work. They deconstruct, interpret, provoke with their readings. They play with words and read against the grain. The work they do is critical since they seek, in part, to expose injustices. Additionally, their work is interpretive, as they do not propose Truth, but offer truths. They are also primarily backward looking. They look back at texts to expose or reveal in those texts their limitations or how the text deconstructs, or how texts illustrate the formation of things. What such ways of readings fail to do (and every reading does some things well and other things less well) is to look forward to the consequences of what they are doing. Deconstructionists or ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 47 new historicists have not immediately been interested or concerned with contemplating the possible consequences of their readings, although I suspect they are not unconcerned with consequences; being “critical” would imply a certain interest in consequences. Pragmatism on the other hand is forward looking. It attends to the conceivable consequences of its readings. Reading—with a pragmatic bent—is an exercise in reading into the conceivable future that could be the result of actions. It gathers together, assembles, conceivable consequences of doing this, that, or another thing in the world. And this requires interpretive and imaginative thinking. This generally seems rather wishy-washy. How do we determine conceivable consequences? What types of results are we looking for? And what limits help us “conceive” the conceivable? And how do we make choices about what results and consequences we want to help bring to fruition? These are, as Cherryholmes illustrated, important questions to ask and questions that are answered carefully. We seek results that are fulfilling, we decide inclusively, we expose our ideas to multiple interpretations and criticism so as to deal with the ever-changing realities we encounter. We do, in a sense, the work we often are already doing living in the world, except we do so attentively. Such answers are, to be clear, not “idealistic,” rather:

At the beginning and end of the day pragmatists are realists because they value what happens. They are interested in results, in consequences. They understand that pragmatist experiments are social constructions. These constructions come from experience and ideas and knowledge and power. Proposed material/ideal and realistic/idealistic distinctions deconstruct because the material conditions in which we find ourselves contribute to and shape what we can conceptualize and enact. Pragmatists try to bring about beautiful results in the midst of power and oppression and ignorance. (Cherryholmes, 1999, p. 5)

Pragmatism accepts the contingent realities that we face in our everyday lives where we have to make choices. And those choices are informed and limited in all kinds of ways. We cannot base our decisions on some foundation or truth. Pragmatism is “anti-foundational” since such foundations and “Truth” are already conditioned and constructed. Rather, pragmatism makes its decisions attending to consequences that are satisfying and fulfilling within the complex milieu where we come to understand those very concepts themselves. It exists in the present, is informed by the past, with an eye toward a beautiful future. 48 A. J. GRETEMAN

Reparative Readings Pragmatism—in looking forward—attends to contemplating pleasure and beauty as desired consequences of our actions. Pragmatism is, I suggest, an approach committed to bringing into existence positive affects and actions. This is something decidedly different from most critical traditions. Most critical traditions, as Eve Sedgwick (2004) aptly argued, embrace a hermeneutics of suspicion and this embrace, by the start of the twenty-first century, had become a problem. Sedgwick was concerned that there was a wide spread habit within critical work to engage a hermeneutics of suspicion. And while such hermeneutics—what she calls “paranoid” reading— is an important reading practice, there is a side effect when such reading practices become habitual. Critical theorists—variously situated in queer, feminist, race-conscious, and related theories—for Sedgwick, “may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller” (p. 124). Paranoid reading, while excellent at exposing things may, in becoming a “manda- tory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities,” limit encountering, intervening, and creating other possibilities. Or put differently, if we are mandated to do particular types of readings to be considered critical, we become limited in the work that we can do. We find ourselves always looking over our shoulder, paranoid about what enemies are chasing us without looking ahead to things that could trip us up (a paranoid option) or provide us support against our enemies. Reading practices, I hope you see, are never neutral, but always bring with them assumptions and viewpoints about what counts and what does not count. Reading practices inform what we look at, how we look, and where we look. They inform why we look at all. Reading practices frame the world before us and, just as a “frame” does, it sets us up to see (or be seen) in particular ways. Frames—like our reading practices—limn the scene for better and for worse. There are always frames, one task is to begin to see different frames and what they do for the objects they capture within the borders and what they, then, by definition, exclude. Sedgwick illustrated that queer reading practices, by and large, took up a paranoid position, which made sense. Within the history of sexuality, she argued, there was a clear relationship between homosexuality and paranoia. Homosexuality, as theorized by Freud, was connected to paranoia and anti-homophobic inquiries in a similar vein took up the paranoid posi- ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 49 tion, in an attempt to expose the violence of, for instance, heteronormativity (Warner, 1991) or homonormativity (Duggan, 2002) or homonationalism (Puar, 2007). The paranoid position was critical to resistance as it assisted in recognizing and exposing the enemies to queer lives and practices not only at the interpersonal level, but at the cultural, institutional, and disciplinary levels.1 However, as Sedgwick aptly noted, “just because you have enemies doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid” (p. 127). “Indeed,” Sedgwick continued, “for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppression does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences” (p. 127). Recognizing the realities of oppressions—in their diversity— does not require that one engage in a particular type of critical project. In fact, limiting oneself to a particular type of project would eliminate the possibility of surprise. Instead, it would leave readers over time with the sense that they are being beat over the head with a bat of the same information. “There’s oppression. Do you see the oppression? Do you see the oppression? It is there, there is the oppression. Do you see it?” This type of exposure is, as Sedgwick noted, a central tenet of paranoid reading practices. However, as she noted “[paranoid strategies] represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge” (p. 130). And to be clear, there are important things that paranoid strategies do. Pointing out and exposing oppression is important. However, there are also important things that such strategies fail to adequately address; this being a lesson the tunnel of oppression I addressed in the preface taught me early on. The tunnel of oppression was rooted in exposing, but the moment it sought to promote, to assemble objects that did different work, its work became contested. As an alternative to paranoid reading, but not as a replacement, Sedgwick developed what she called reparative reading, arguing that “to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new” (p. 146). To read from a reparative position is to allow for the possibility of surprise and leave open space that things could be different. This is “because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present” (p. 146). Additionally, she continued, “it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly relieving, ethically critical possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (p. 146). Reparative reading practices—embracing the contingent and positive—similarly to 50 A. J. GRETEMAN pragmatism, are concerned with how things could be different. There is with Sedgwick’s reparative readings, like Cherryholmes’s pragmatism, an opening for work looking forward done under the banner of queer theory. Queers do not have to maintain and be determined by their historical connection to paranoid positions, but can invent additional ways of positioning themselves in and against the world. Such a move makes sense as it recognizes the changing realities and needs of queers. Sedgwick herself, central to the invention of queer theory, historicized the relationship of reading practices in her own work. Paranoia had (and has) a role to play in opening space and time to contemplate queerness. However, the consequences of only doing and allowing paranoid reading practices to define critically leads not to satisfactory and fulfilling experiences reading the word and the world. Rather, reading subsumed and limited to the practices of paranoia close down the creative and inventive possibilities that are also central to the work of queerness. After all, “the desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, 2004, p. 149). Reparative readings, as opposed to paranoid readings, seek to add to the possibilities, to grow queerness in surprising ways. And such practices teach us. They teach us to look forward, not only over our shoul- ders, to advance our ways of life. Concluding her engagement with paranoid and reparative reading, Sedgwick (2004) noted, “What we can best learn from [reparative] practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves suc- ceed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (pp. 150–151). Reparative readings recognize that there are enemies in the world, but reads objects in that very world in ways that give life, that sustain the lives that are often ignored. Such reading practices are, I believe, central to contemplating queer thriving. Reading has, we should see, something to do with survival. Paranoid reading practices—with their focus on exposing oppressions—attend to things that thwart the survival of marginalized and oppressed populations. They expose structural and cultural violence—illustrating how the courts or prison are transphobic, racist, or homophobic and representations in popular culture are lacking. Such exposure, while important, has become commonplace. They are now habits often demanded or expected by scholars. Oppressed populations, of course, know they are oppressed—they don’t need academics to expose this to them anymore (if ever). Oppressed populations arguably never needed such exposure—they live it—rather, such exposure has been necessary to show other populations—perhaps ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 51 oppressed in different ways—the systemic oppressions that exist across the spectrum of difference. To expose such oppressions illustrates that there are significant challenges to surviving in the world. Survival is not guaranteed. While survival is not guaranteed, to only focus on survival or threats to its possibility, forgets the work that also must occur for those who are surviving so they can see themselves and successive generations in the future. Reparative readings, as Sedgwick noted above, teach us how to draw sustenance from objects in our cultures that might prefer we don’t exist. In the coming chapters, I will offer readings that draw sustenance from various texts that I suspect might help grow queer possibilities and add to the expanding archive of queerness. I do not, by and large, provide empirical data—interviews or observations of queerness or people. I am a philosopher, on my best days, so my data comes in the form of texts—academic books, articles, films, novels—that often draw upon and are rooted in the aesthetic realm. As such, these more aesthetically oriented texts allow for an investigation into what is often challenging to see within the limited parameters of empirical research, particularly given the reality that studying sexuality beyond the clinical setting is still a challenge. The aesthetic realm, instead, helps add to the world in other ways, as artists have been doing for centuries. While theorists are rarely seen as artists, we might remember Cherryholmes (1999) who asked that we “Think of pragmatists as artists, if you will. They are artists who seek to generate beauty and satisfaction in the context and circulation of power” (p. 5). Queers, as well, have a history in the arts, and queer theory is born of reading art to expose queer workings. I hope to—in developing the concept of queer thriving—to generate beauty and satisfaction in and for queers and their practices. This book may prove less a work of critique and more a work of art that seeks to provoke readers in ways closer to looking at a piece of art than reading a piece of research. Following Joyce Carol Oats (1983), we might remember her distinction between the conservative nature of critics and the possibilities of the artist.

Nearly all critics are conservative if only because they cannot presume to judge art by its own standards if those standards are new; even the most well intentioned critic carries with him, unacknowledged, his ideas of what a novel or a short story, or a play, or a poem should be, based upon works he has studied. His instinct is to preserve the past because it is his past; he has a great deal invested in it. The artist, by contrast, really must follow his instinct 52 A. J. GRETEMAN

into areas not yet mined by others—he cannot even console himself … that criticism will someday ‘catch up’ with his innovations. What appears as dis- order, instability, and frequent madness to the critic is in fact the creative activity itself: it seeks to blossom in inhospitable climates, break free of its confining species, celebrate the individual and the idiosyncratic, even at the cost of official—that is, ‘critical’—censure. (pp. 3–4)

Queer theory now has a past and it has its fair share of critics that seek to preserve that past. This is a noble goal, as the preservation of such past helps queer histories survive. Yet, we cannot only conserve the past without also inventing new ways of doing, being, and becoming queer. And it may be the arts—broadly defined—that help show us ways forward imagining queer futures and remembering queer pasts. The arts may help us pervert queer theory and continue the practices of being perverse readers taking on new reading positions. For Sedgwick (1993)

Becoming a perverse reader was never a matter of condescension to texts, rather of the surplus change of trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary. And this doesn’t seem an unusual way for ardent reading to function in relation to queer experience. (p. 4)

A perverse reader does not disavow texts or condescend to them, but rather takes them quite seriously. Yet, that seriousness is not about finding a particular truth or converting non-believers to one’s reading. Rather, it is to ardently, passionately, engage the texts to do justice to queer experiences; remembering that queer experience in some ways disrupts, cor- rupts, and “perverts” the text and lives in any given condition. To “read” perversely is not to abide by the strictures of proper reading, but, put against the confines of the proper. Marginalized, excluded, and oppressed populations survive and thrive by reading the texts of life against the grain—pushing against straight readings to offer their own cutting critiques that seek to do justice to the very stuff of life, exposing, assembling, undoing, and building potentials. This ardent and arguably cutting reading practice is lost in the search and struggle for inclusion, recognition, and respect. To be included and recognized, while politically salient and materially important, requires a certain level of acceptance and normalization. Again, this is an important project—inclusion and recognition are not improper objects of attention. They are quite proper and appropriate. However, as Butler (1994) taught ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 53 us, one of queer’s projects is to work against proper objects. Inclusion and recognition many be fine, but the queer project persists to challenge those changing realities. This is and probably will always be a losing but moving project on and for the margins. It will fail, but in failing do something else that reveals or uncovers the operations of new and emerging norms. To cut someone with a “read” challenges proper professional guidelines, but also works to illustrate, as Michael Warner (1999) aptly argued, “the rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge” (p. 35). To cultivate heterogeneous reading practices—perverse, reparative, pragmatic—is to remind queer theory and its practitioners of its political stance against its own normalization.

Queerly Pragmatic Readings “What does knowledge do,” Sedgwick (2004) asked, “the pursuit of it, the having and exposing it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows” (p. 124). Knowledge performs—it does things. Whether pragmatic or reparative, reading practices tend toward cultivating actions, ideas, and practices that do work different from that of paranoid, critical reading practices. Such readings do things with knowledge. A reader may, at this point, be asking, “So what?” How does this writing about reading inform the larger project at stake here? Let me try to explain. As part of my own process in reading queer theory—in its diverse forms—I have found myself wanting for more. And this wanting compelled me to develop the arguments in this book. I am, it seems, part of a third or fourth wave of students engaging queer theory. Queer theory, as I noted in the introduction and will explore in later chapters, now has a history. And that history—told in diverse ways—parallels my own history as someone born in the 1980s and coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My entrance into queer worlds came as queer theorists saw queer theory as passé or normalized (Halperin, 2003). And more generally, when society had become “past-gay.” “Post-gay life is characterized,” as Amin Ghaziani (2011), argued, “by the twin impulses of assimilation of gays into the mainstream … and biased toward a small segment of gays” (p. 100). These impulses gave way to an expansion of representations in the mainstream, but an expansion that was limited to particular representations that further segmented queer communities. Part of the task of becoming a queer scholar in the twenty-first century then seems to require one to contemplate the history of sexuality while 54 A. J. GRETEMAN also living in the midst of changes, particularly as a beneficiary of the “post-gay” rationality. The discourses of the twentieth century—that no doubt impacted my own understanding of sexuality—are not enough in the twenty-first century, as queer youth and young adults enter a world that is less explicitly violent toward some queer realities. This is not meant to discount the persistence of violence against queer people, something that we should still consider an epidemic (Meyer, 2015). Rather, this illustrates the strength and need of paranoia and its reading practices. On one hand, to not note that there are enemies when seeking to go elsewhere will lead to accusations of naiveté or privilege. While, on the other hand, there are still enemies out there that need to be exposed and engaged both in the USA and elsewhere. Things have gotten better, and while we can and should debate the merits of “better,” we cannot deny that there has been a net gain in representations and ways of being queer in the world. We can also recognize that new ways of becoming queer in the world differ from historical ways of being queer—leading to charges that queerness has been normalized, domesticated, or at worst “castrated.” I am not incredibly interested in pissing matches about who is or what practices are queerer. What I am interested in is the ways in which, given the plethora of work in queer thought, there can be inroads in contemplating the consequences of queer theory. How can reading queer theory and learning to read queerly provide us with satisfying and fulfilling consequences to becoming “queer.” Queer theory, while originally lambasted for being entirely academic and ensconced in the ivory tower, has in some ways gone mainstream, as noted in the introduction. Queer cinema is growing in stature, as our more diverse representations of queer people and practices—signs that support the notion we are “post-gay” but also that we are still in search of it. These are, I suspect, consequences of the work done, in part, by queer theorists who, along with a host of other scholars, activists, and allies, pushed for changes in the world.2 While queer theory in its early years was controversial—see notably the scandal around Eve Sedgwick’s (1993) essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”—their ideas and work have over the last decade come to be taken up in the mainstream press—illustrating at some level that such ideas are having an impact on the world. The consequences of academic labor are not often visible in the immediacy, but take years to foment into something beyond the ivory tower. But as such ideas get taken up, we see that queer theory and some of its practitioners have not only survived ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 55 but thrived in bringing “queer theory” to the publics. There are, to be sure, dangers in taking things to the public and becoming mainstream; one might be called a sellout or might be seen as normal given that one is now “liked” and “recognized.” And while that might be the case, I suspect such shifts illustrate the ways such ideas and theoretical insights have effectively impacted broader discourses around gender and sexuality— both at the discursive and material levels. Such shifts, as well, illustrate for the purpose of my argument the potential to develop and contemplate queer thriving. Queer ideas have survived, and more and more can help queerness thrive. I turn to a couple of instances where queer theory went mainstream, acting in the world and illustrating that while queer theory’s poststructural tendencies, following Cherryholmes argument, tend to look backwards, such backward looking over time can have consequences that are fulfilling and sustaining in ways then unimaginable. I turn to these two moments as well because as previously complicated ideas become commonplace, the interventions made and lambasted are, in many ways, redeemed, for their strength in impacting the lives of new generations of queers and queer scholarship. No longer do queers have to search in vain for materials addressing queerness; they can find it on-line in numerous commentaries and queer-related blogs. This is good, but also raises questions about how to continue queer work, how to read queerly in a world over run with information. Eve Sedgwick, who died in 2009, became the central figure in Jane Hu’s (2015) piece in The New Yorker: “Between Us: A Queer Theorist’s Devoted Husband and Enduring Legacy.” A piece that memorialized Sedgwick’s work and illustrated her hope that the work she did be useful. Writing and helping found “queer theory” was not a safe endeavor, particularly given the realities of the 1980s and the cultural “wars” at play. Sedgwick was, as Hu illustrated, an interesting figure—deemed the “soft- spoken queen of the constructionists” by Rolling Stone magazine, but also subject to intense criticism about her position as a straight woman writing about sexuality, particularly gay male sexuality. Her example, now however, illustrates the materiality of her very arguments. As she argued at the start of Epistemology of the Closet “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (Sedgwick,1990 , p. 1). Such an analysis is not one unique to any given subject position— 56 A. J. GRETEMAN such definitions write on the bodies of everyone. Critics illustrated this as they sought to straighten her out, putting her strangely back into a closet for pushing against both feminist and gay liberation scholars by way of her very embodied existence. Sedgwick’s work was focused on the twentieth century, where the modern homosexual identity came to fruition and could be read into to reveal the open secret and politics of homosexuality. The founding of “homosexual identity” came at first through expert discourses that defined a “new species” (as elucidated by Foucault’s (1978/1990) work in the first volume of The History of Sexuality). However, as homosexuals became visible to one another, they were able to reverse expert discourses to embrace themselves as a “new species” and assert themselves as a population deserving of rights and recognitions, rather than institutionalization and pathologization. “What was new from the turn of the [twentieth] century,” as Sedgwick noted, “was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality” (p. 2). And throughout the twentieth century, this assignation to a sexuality—binary, largely—defined a whole host of political, personal, ethical, pedagogical, and aesthetic realities. Living in, at least, the Western world during the twentieth century could not escape the requirements to be identified and/or identify one’s sexual identity. With Hu’s ode to Sedgwick and her relationship with Hal (her husband of 40 years), readers could see behind the words of the page to see how such words are always informed by the subjects that write them. Sedgwick’s queerness came not through a queer identity, but an identification with queerness and the “open mesh of possibilities” that was, for Sedgwick (1993), one of queer’s defining features (p. 8). “What sage could have predicted that heteronormativity would eventually make its way into the vocabulary of teen magazines and shareable web content?” asked Molly Fischer (2016) in her feature article “Think Gender is Performance? You have Judith Butler to Thank for That” in The Cut. Judith Butler, described as “the radical theorist who spawned a gender-queer nation—and became a pop celebrity in the process” was no stranger in the early days of queer theorizing to critique. She did, remember, win the worst writer contest for what many saw as obtuse and quite unintelligible prose. Yet, as Butler (1999) herself noted in the preface to the tenth Anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, “style is a complicated terrain” (p. xviii). She continued: ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 57

Certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. (p. xviii)

Style and difficult language were not mere failures to offer a lucid argument, but a necessary component to contesting the normative terrain around gender and sexuality given that “the demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly ‘clear’ view” (p. xix). Language—at its base—is quite central to our communications and ability to understand, live, and become in the world. And language or styles of writing that are deemed difficult or obtuse or complicated can now be shown with time, I argue, to contest norms and open up new possibilities. They also offer ways of reading texts given as decades after Butler’s famed Gender Trouble her ideas are featured in “teen magazines.” Butler’s original view—that difficult style is necessary to intervene in seemingly clear areas, has decades later proven quite true. Gender performativity is no longer as queer as it was then, but its consequences on the lives of individuals becoming queer is enduring and going mainstream. What these two instances where queer theorists meet the press illustrate is that despite the early critiques of queer theory—that it was obtuse, overly academic, impractical—it has impacted the world in how it thinks about and reads gender and sexuality. Popular culture, as illustrated in Fischer’s article and interview with Judith Butler, has embraced the mutability of gender. From Jaden Smith’s sartorial choices to the very public stories of Caitlyn Jenner, Janet Mock, and Laverne Cox, the ideas that gender is natural seem no longer tenable. Gender as performance is now, to some extent, a normal way to view gender and slowly opening up avenues for youth to become gendered in spectacular ways. However, let’s not romanticize such shifts as they often focus on glamorous instances. As Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (2013) argued:

However obsessed we may be with the most glamorous instances, most transsexual lives ‘are not fabulous’. In 2013 the level of unemployment among trans people in the US was reported to be 14 per cent, double the level in the general population; 44 per cent were underemployed, while 15 per cent have a household income of less than $10,000 compared to 4 per cent of the general population. (p. 8) 58 A. J. GRETEMAN

There is, we can see, still a lot of work to do and there are individuals who disagree with queer and trans becomings. Such disagreement illustrates the persistence of alternative theories and ways of reading gender that have material consequences for lives being lived. There are, to return to pragmatism, consequences to our readings, and it is important to recognize the conceivable consequences readings have for bodies that inhabit those concepts read here, there, and anywhere. While “mainstream” readers can now access queer thought as it has made its way into the world, we might ask about queer readings now, particularly as they help us think about sex and sexuality. Arguably, Sedgwick and Butler are no longer as queer as they once were, given the uptake of their ideas. Yet, their ideas provide a foundation for the work that comes after. There is a concern here regarding the ways in which queer readings become professional by becoming either mainstream or institutionalized. If queers historically read in strange ways to make the world inhabitable, how do such readings happen in the twenty-first century where youth are coming into and up in a “post-gay” world? Such a world, after all, has accepted and embraced particular segments of the queer world and in doing so has probably impacted the ways in which such youth are able to read that world queerly. They might, in fact, not be able to because the rationalities that they emerge from are already straightened out. This should be a cause for concern. One of the things pleasurable about queer theory and its work is its inventive playfulness that has serious consequences. Queer theorist’s plays on language and more illustrate the poetry of our lives. Yet, such playfulness seems under threat with certain shifts toward “political correctness.” I sense such shifts are overblown and more often than not fodder for political conservatives to lambast the pre- sumed coddling of college students (now called “snowflakes”). However, at the same time, I think there is importance in contemplating the working of language in politics. There is arguably no correct way to use language, despite attempts otherwise. However, there are norms within language and those are difficult to shift—as seen with the growing but long sought after shifts around gender pronouns. Making shifts in our language is important as it can have consequences for people living in the world. The challenge is in the execution of such lessons. The classroom— with a history steeped in normative uses of language—might help, but may also straighten out the joys of language. The propriety of institutions might still disregard the plays to which language is open. ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 59

This is where Lady Bunny’s classroom may come in, particularly her one-woman show “Trans-Jester” which she created

to ask what we’re still able to laugh at in this hyper-PC climate. We’ve become so politically correct that some college was recently claiming that “Hey, you guys!” was sexist because it excluded women. In a humorous way, this show seeks to poke fun at how PC we’ve become in the last decade or so. (Gurko, 2017)

Lady Bunny may not be a queer theorist, but her pedagogical approach to drag illustrates that queens read, and they read well, things happening on the ground. Lady Bunny, as David Clarke (2016), writing for Out magazine, reads “political correctness to filth” (para. 1). These readings are, to be sure, not done in a straightforward manner. They are serious, but also refuse to take themselves too seriously. For instance, in discussing her lessons, she noted,

I go through a list of newer words from ‘cisgender’ to ‘little people’, which I call “the lecture.” I do disseminate some actual information in this section, but it is punctuated by enough jokes to where it hopefully doesn’t come across as preachy.

Queers have probably been preached at enough, particularly for being sin- ners. So, it makes sense that being “preachy” about the workings of language will not inspire many to join one’s cause. Unless, of course, it is done in drag—a venue for queer preaching, given drag shows are colloqui- ally seen as a form of church. To preach—in a straightforward manner— bears little pedagogical import for queer readings. The sacred cows that emerge within any given moment—that seek to, on one hand, expand discourse and on the other hand enforce a certain “political correctness”— are, as Lady Bunny’s show implies, in need of the jester. The jester is a tricky position to take, but one who centralizes humor not by ignoring the issues of justice, but by laughing at oneself. After all, as John Waters so aptly argued, “If we can laugh at the worst things that happen to us because of our sexuality, we’ll be the strongest minority of all, proud to be illegal, proud not to be like everybody else. Instead of ‘act up,’ I’m for ‘act bad.’ Let’s embarrass our enemies with humor.” Humor is difficult pedagogically, particularly since having to explain a joke defeats the purpose. Sometimes jokes are hard to read. “In order to 60 A. J. GRETEMAN derive pleasure from humor,” Cris Mayo (2008) argued, “audiences need to move beyond their comfort zones and commonplace understandings. Though they may do so only to get the joke, the shift in understanding can remain beyond the time and place of particular jokes” (p. 245). Such moves—beyond comfort zones—are becoming more and more difficult, it would seem. Disrupting comfort can lead to more problems than one can handle, particularly in an age of heightened rhetoric around to trigger warnings and the ever-present specter of social media. I am, to be clear, not opposed to trigger warnings as I think they are, at their best, important tools to help students care for themselves. Yet, if attention to trigger warnings misses the mark—as it often does in opinion pieces and on Fox News—they quickly, despite their history within feminist work, become imagined cudgels against pushing the boundaries and comfort zones of students and teachers. The jester (or trickster or comedian) becomes, in an age of heightened sensitivities, both a problem and more necessary in the ways they read into the moment. Such reads are, I sense, at their best ways to cut through the discussions taking place. Such reads, as well, have consequences that are made more and more visible in our digital age—either the outrage at RuPaul’s use of she-mail or anything Joan Rivers said. The queer readings that help found queer theory—rooted in plays on language and expanding the use of language beyond the literal—cannot be lost in the institutionalization and professionalization of such thought. We cannot, to put it differently, take queer theory and its work (our work) too seriously to miss the pleasures of queer reading. Just as becoming queer implies a relationship to the embarrassing and shameful so often positioned on the other side of normal. Queer readings assist in transmitting queer ideas and practices that habituate themselves against the status quo. Queer readings assist in survival and thriving, not merely for individuals but for queer cultures. Roderick Ferguson (2012) noted the centrality of reading—within and because of institutionalization of critical discourses, writing:

If textual production is always a mode of institutional production, then how we read, write, and design minority difference and culture has everything to do with the kind of minority communities that we imagine and institutional- ize and might become the very question of our reinvigorated interdisciplin- ary life. (p. 230) ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 61

In a “post-gay” world where the forms of communities that exist and can be imagined might be restricted in some regards, there is importance in returning to textual production and the ways in which such texts are read both to expand the livability of lives and the pleasures of language.

Conclusion I dwell here, perhaps too long or perhaps not enough, depending on your perspective, on reading, because I sense reading is taken for granted in some quarters or not done in others (see The Trump Whitehouse). In education, to be sure, there is excessive focus on reading—namely under the realm of “literacy”—but most of that work is situated in early childhood and elementary education where the foundations of “reading” as a process are developed. However, through our educations we (in school and beyond) develop ways of reading as well, that are beyond the technical skills of reading letters and words and sentences. Instead, reading otherwise seeks to develop interpretations and understandings of texts on the varied levels they operate. Given this, I think it is important that I am transparent about my own reading practices that inform the arguments I present in the remainder of this book. Queer theory, after all, emerged out of reading into canonical texts be they literary (e.g., Proust, Melville) or philosophical (e.g., Freud, Lacan, Marx) for their queerness. Such readings were rooted in their own time, as queers had to read into and read between lines to find their existence. Over the decades, various reading practices, as addressed above, have been developed to do different types of work, particularly given the emergence of queer-focused literature that explicitly represents queerness in various forms. This work is possible because of paranoid readings that exposed and contributed to making this very work feasible. As I will address in Chap. 4, the readings I can generate now are indebted to generations that helped pave the way for queer work and queer existence to become what it is today and could continue to become tomorrow. Yet, we must remember that key lesson Dorothy provided us as she and her friends ran through the poppy fields toward Emerald City. If we want to reach our fantasy destination we cannot lie down because we are tired. Previous generations—of scholars, activists, everyday folks—have tirelessly kept watch and held open the fantasy of queerer futures. Such fantasies are just that, fantasy, and will very likely be ruined with reality. Reality is, it would seem, always more complicated than fantasy allows. This should not be taken pessimistically; reality is, as 62 A. J. GRETEMAN well, far more interesting than fantasy, as the Wizard showed us. We don’t need some other to define us, give us strength, or give us courage. But we do need friends along the journey. And, if we do fall asleep among the flowers, let’s hope we have a fairy godmother to provide us snow to wake us up and bring us up to snuff.3

Notes 1. Patricia Hill Collins (2010) in Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities offered a four-part frame- work for understanding power. I utilize her four domains (interpersonal, cultural, disciplinary, and institutional) here and throughout this project to recognize how power operates in diverse and diffuse ways. 2. I can’t help but think about the moment in the 9th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race when Sasha Velour, in preparing for The Snatch Game, mentioned she was thinking about being Judith Butler, providing a hilarious performance of Butler’s ideas. Inevitably, Velour went a different direction. Judith was probably not the most compelling individual to be dragged. Although, Martha Nussbaum tried unconvincingly in “The Professor of Parody” to drag Butler down. 3. While I cannot take it up here, we would do well to think about the historical relationship between queer subjectivity and drug use. In our current moment, drug use is most often equated with drug abuse (Race, 2009). Yet, within the history of queer life, the role of drugs, as Dorothy’s relationship with snow (slang in contemporary drug cultures with cocaine) points toward a less governable relationship with pills. I will take this up somewhat in Chap. 6 regarding the gay male body’s relationship to “a pill a day” in the form of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP).

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Greteman, A. J., & Wojcikiewicz, S. (2014). The problems with the future: Educational futurism and the figural child.Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(4), 559–573. Gurko, A. (2017, March 15). Our lady bunny interview will almost certainly offend you. Retrieved from http://fourtwonine.com/2017/03/15/lady-bunny- interview-will-almost-certainly-offend/ Halperin, D. (1990). One hundred years of homosexuality: And other essays on Greek love. New York, NY: Routledge. Halperin, D. (2002). How to do the history of homosexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halperin, D. (2003). The normalization of queer theory. Journal of Homosexuality, 45(2–4), 339–343. Hu, J. (2015, December 9). Between us: A queer theorist’s devoted husband and enduring legacy. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker. com/books/page-turner/between-us-a-queer-theorists-devoted-husband- and-enduring-legacy Johnson, E. P. (2003). Appropriating blackness: Performance and the politics of authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Katz, J. N. (1992). Gay American history: Lesbians and gay men in the U.S.A. New York, NY: Plume Press. Kissen, R. M., & Bedford, T. (Eds.). (2002). Getting ready for Benjamin: Preparing teachers for sexual diversity in the classroom. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Livingston, J., & Swimar, D. (Producers), & Livingston, J. (Director). (1990). Paris is burning. Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment. Mayo, C. (2008). Being in on the joke: Pedagogy, race, humor. Philosophy of Education, 244–252. Meyer, D. (2015). Violence against queer people: Race, class, gender, and the persistence of anti-LGBT discrimination. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Munoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York, NY: NYU Press. Oats, J. C. (1983). The profane art: Essays and reviews. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton. Pinar, W. (Ed.). (1998). Queer theory in education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum. Polikoff, N. D. (2009). Beyond (straight and gay) marriage: Valuing all families under the law. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Race, K. (2009). Pleasure consuming medicine: The queer politics of drugs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ON READING PRACTICES: WHERE PRAGMATISM AND QUEER MEET 65

Rodriguez, N., & Pinar, W. (2007). Queering straight teachers: Discourse and identity in education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Rofes, E. (2005). Status quo or status queer: A radical rethinking of sexuality and schooling. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sadowski, M. (2016). Safe is not enough: Better schools for LGBTQ students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sedgwick, E. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. (2004). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serpell, C. N. (2017). A heap of cliché. In E. S. Anker & R. Felski (Eds.), Critique and postcritique (pp. 153–182). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender history. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Stryker, S., & Aizura, A. (2013). Introduction. In S. Stryker & A. Aizura (Eds.), The transgender studies reader (2nd ed., pp. 1–12). New York, NY: Routledge. Unks, G. (Ed.). (1995). The gay teen: Educational practice and theory for lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. New York, NY: Routledge. Vaid, U. (2012). Irresistible revolution: Confronting race, class, and the assumptions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics. New York, NY: Magnus Books. Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, 29, 3–17. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yoshino, K. (2007). Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights. New York, NY: Random House. CHAPTER 3

The Idea of Queer Children

Every day, hosts of queer youth—of various shapes, shades, and sizes— wake up in a world that looks upon their queerness in complex and complicated ways. These queer youths may not be able to speak to these complexities in the ways that activists, academics, and advocates do, but within these queer youths’ equally complex and complicated contexts, they feel these things in their daily experiences as they move about— sashaying through, let’s say—these worlds. There is no doubt in my own mind that these daily encounters with the world inhabiting queerness in its variable ways are terrifying, exhilarating, and mundane. Terrifying in that the world is, by and large, still averse to queerness. Exhilarating in that the world is, by and large, still where youth get to come into presence, fabulously flaunting their emerging selves in an ever-changing world. And mundane in that daily life is mostly, just that, mundane, as people go about their lives. These queer youths may or may not be or become gay or lesbian; bisexual or transgender. They are, rather, following Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2009) logic, queer by way of being children who are not yet grown up. They have potential and promise, but also are under surveillance by parents, priests, pediatricians, and pedagogues. Projected onto youth are national fantasies; the hopes and fears of what they will become as they grow up; growing up to become the next generation of entrepre- neurs, politicians, and leaders who follow the previous paths set out before them. Projected on queers are homophobic anxieties that queers threaten

© The Author(s) 2018 67 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_3 68 A. J. GRETEMAN the future of children and this homophobic anxiety, as Cris Mayo (2006) notes, puts “LGBTQ communities … at pains to demonstrate that, for instance, gay men don’t, as a group, prey on young boys; that lesbian parents don’t produce effeminate boys; and that gayness is not socially or genetically contagious” (p. 5). Such demonstrations while, of course, quite true according to research, unfortunately also abide by certain heteronormative and homonormative assumptions about sexuality, childhood, and the future. In the current chapter, I want to push at these assumptions by engaging contemporary work on the child so as to capture, perhaps fleetingly, the changing ways childhood is and could be seen, reparatively I might say, through queerness. I begin with this general sense of queer youth and the complicated relationship they have to queer adults to draw attention to the everyday complexities that go into being and becoming queer in the twenty-first century. It is, to put it simply, not a straightforward process or experience. I forgo specificity to think broadly about the diverse ways in which queer youth, in varied contexts and realities, are generally going about their day and becoming in relationship to the broader worlds they inhabit. They are, by means of being youth, going about their days thinking less about many of the issues queer scholars engage—including myself in the coming pages—and more about the possibilities and limitations that lie before them. They, with their youthful zest, see a world filled with potential and possibility. It is not a perfect world, as queer youth inching toward an explicit queer relation to the world are far from ignorant of the issues queerness raises in and for their lives. However, it is a world that they are increasingly sure they have a right to inhabit, engage, and transform. They are, unlike other generations, asserting themselves earlier in life and, as such, could benefit from queer opportunities that connect them with queer generations (a topic for the next chapter). This is, for me, a hopeful image of queer youth and an image that I try to hold with me in my own daily engagements where conversations, by and large, focus on queer youth as victims. It is also the image that propels the purpose of this book—a book that as you will read builds upon decades of queer scholarship that has pushed and prodded the world to become kinder to queers (to put it quite simply). After decades of generating queer scholarship that honors (often perversely) queerness, emerging generations have expanded opportunities to come into presence. To be clear, while I hold this image of queer youth with me, this book is not about queer youth, but about the histories and futures of queer realities that THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 69 were once youthful and a push for recognizing unseen queer potentials in the youth of the future. This may, for some, sound a bit wishy-washy. The lack of specificity might read unsure or unaware of the specific challenges and realities queer youth and adults face in the present. And this may be the case—I am not an expert in specific realities beyond my own and those within my vicinity. My refusal to specify here is a recognition that queerness—at its heart—is ever shifting and difficult to pin down. Any specific mention of a queer youth, for instance, one who became prom king (or queen) or one who recently committed suicide, would already begin to foreclose other queer possibilities and the complexities therein. For me, the move to specify also feels like a move to use a queer youth to make an argument. I sense queer youth—particularly queer youth who are victimized, bullied, or commit suicide—are taken up in the grind of the media and academy to become a “cause,” often simplified or reduced to a particular talking point. There is, to be sure, a political salience to this and one I myself will take up on several occasions. However, I begin with and honor the general because for me it is helpful in allowing readers to read in their own specifics, in their own contexts, given the diversity of experiences and intersectional realities of our lives. Additionally, I am a “general- ist” in education, so I tend toward the general “big picture,” leaving specificity to those more suited to such work. For now, as readers, hopeful queers might see their optimism reflected back at them, but with a recognition that there is work to be done; while pessimistic queers might scoff at such optimism while secretly realizing the world can (and should) be different. Bored queers may simply remain bored, bored by the incessant academizing of queer experiences. But, back to the issues at hand—childhood, children, and queerness. When I was a child, Whitney Houston taught me that it was her belief “the children are our future.”1 It was an important lesson for me as a child, because I was allowed to imagine the future. I was the future and it was important to teach me well so that I, and other children, could lead the way in that, what seemed then, rather distant future. The future is, to be sure, a rather complicated concept. I am here in the future of my then- imagined childhood, although it is both more and less fabulous than I could have imagined. The future is always there, in the distance, and there are always more children for whom that future is. However, which children are allowed to be children and have a future is, as significant scholarship has shown, quite narrow (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014; Letts & Sears, 1999; Meiners, 2017; Pritchard, 2013; Weems, 1999). 70 A. J. GRETEMAN

Children, particularly queer children, and the future have been something educational scholars and queer theorists have contemplated for some time. In this chapter, I assemble some of the ways in which queer children and the future have been contemplated to build upon such work in further elucidating what I am calling “queer thrival.” If children are our future— and in some sense, they always are—the ways in which we imagine or are allowed to imagine both “children” and the “future” greatly impact the ways in which those very concepts come to function in our daily work, particularly in education. In assembling previous work addressing children, the future, and queerness, I attend closely to such work that exposed—through their paranoia—the violence, the limits, and challenges faced by queerness in education. Such paranoia has been central in recognizing the challenges queer youth face, yet changes have happened that would do well to be engaged to not only push for the safety of queer youth, but their ability to thrive. We need, to harken back to the last chapter, heterogeneous reading practices that recognize the contributions of paranoid readings while opening space for contingently, reparative readings and their possibilities.

Queerness and Challenges to Liberalism The challenge of children “growing up” is central to the work of schools where children are presumably taught well to lead the way when they become “grownups.” We know for sure, however, that many students are not taught well and are never able to lead the way due to any number of cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and disciplinary barriers (Collins, 2010). Students that are in such a marginalized position are, at the same time, more often than not, the students that push the limits, demanding recognition and access through various means—be that walk-outs, protests, or other forms of resistance. It is in fact, as we have seen since deseg- regation, children who lead the way into hostile environments so that the future has the possibility of being different. While there are demands to protect children and arguments made “for their own good,” I suspect history shows us that children, when faced with adversity, are able to survive and thrive, leading the way not there in some imagined future but in their present, as they demand they have a future. This is not meant to romanticize children or childhood, but to call attention to the material lives of children who we have historically seen push the limits of democratic liberalism. THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 71

Cris Mayo (2006) recognized the need to push the limits of liberalism in education because, “liberalism has been suspiciously unwilling to extend its analysis of freedom to sexual freedom, its embrace of autonomy to queer critique, its sense of progression toward new possibilities to queer futurities” (p. 471). Liberalism, to put it bluntly, has been uninterested in queerness. In liberal discourses, as Mayo noted,

There is a tension between discussing how people, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people, might be recognized by law and given (or denied) certain legal rights on the basis of their identity and how queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, might also live their potentials. (p. 469)

Liberalism requires recognizable identities by which to protect. Recent gains in LGBT rights illustrate this requirement as LGBT persons have gained rights and recognitions, be it to marriage, the military, or anti- discrimination. Yet, queer—as a political stance—is tasked with pushing against such recognitions and norms (Ford, 2007). LGBT people are a voting block more and more recognized through LGBT advocacy groups. Queer people, on the other hand, fall outside and beyond such recognitions to illustrate the persistence of exclusion and the possibility for alternatives. Or, as Puar (2007) illustrated, LGBT rights can be used as a cudgel against other queer forms of being. Mayo focused part of her argument on the issue of gay marriage as a struggle for access to a particular liberal institution. While gay marriage may be, from certain queer vantage points, quite conservative, on an educational level, it is an issue that opened some possibilities for queer students in seeing a queer future. “The drawback,” Mayo (2006) noted, “paralleling gay rights with marriage rights is that while kids may eventually decide to enter into unions, that is not the only form of gay (or, for that matter, heterosexual) life open to them” (p. 485). However, something is better than nothing, particularly because no “thing” can encapsu- late all queer possibilities. The issue is that some things become sanctioned by the state and, in becoming so, present a double-edged sword—both providing approval for types of relationships while also imposing a penalty on those who refuse such approval. To be sure, any given time will see some battles waged as they gain traction (and funding) while others unable to break through. The task, particularly for education, is to grapple with broadening possibilities, both those limited in scope and those more 72 A. J. GRETEMAN

radical. This, however, cannot be done without the insights and views of youth themselves. We need to provide youth more agency in decision making, not less, particularly if they are, themselves, “our future.” As Mayo noted, “access to queer possibilities and futures is not just a right crucial to queer adults, it is critical to queer youth, for their current flourishing as well as for their future participation in communities and as citizens” (p. 486). Queer youth and adults cannot only access narratives of their marginalization. Such narratives inform them, more often than not, that there is no future. Yes, it is true that for most of education’s recent past, queer children have been denied access to representations and access to queer futures, but with the explosion of youth expression on social media and elsewhere, such denials look more and more outdated. Queer youth have faced innumerous forms of physical violence and emotional turmoil, as illustrated by, for instance, GLSEN’s School Climate Research, for close to 20 years. However, there is need to address such research and push beyond it, not to deny such realities but work to change them (Thorpe & Greteman, 2015). “Arguably,” Mayo (2006) concluded:

queer communities are populated by paradigmatically modern citizens, and, as much as one may tire of citing dire statistics and want instead to point to innovations and resiliency among queer youth, it remains a fact that liberal theory and the liberal state need to provide more support for queer possibilities, through education and other institutions, and to recognize the particular challenge to traditional family forms, autonomy, and sexuality that queer youth bring. (p. 487)

The liberal state—whether one cites dire statistics or examples of resiliency—has work to do. The future for queerness has looked rather grim for some time, in part, because the liberal state has failed to attend to queer possibilities and institutional support. However, queerness has also survived into and against such threats and assaults. It has benefited from the liberal state’s slow movement while continuing its slow march demanding that queerness stays. Kevin McDonough (2007), took up Mayo’s challenges to liberalism and explored the possibility of liberalism in addressing the challenges that queer youth raise for schools. “Can the common school ideal, and the liberal political principles that underwrite it,” McDonough (2007) asked, “coherently accommodate reasonable and legitimate forms of moral and THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 73 cultural diversity, especially those forms that have historically been marginalized, discriminated against, or excluded” (p. 795)? The demands of queer people and queer communities have, for decades now, pushed up against the liberal political principles that ground American public education. And these demands have over those very decades seen some progress in achieving some forms of recognition and rights. McDonough is, however, skeptical of an uncritical embrace of queer recognition for fear that such an embrace will get “distorted into forms that are both anti-liberal and against the best interests of queer children” (p. 797). This is a key skepticism, as he argued, given that

if identities are poorly understood then the danger may arise that schools will socialise children into pre-existing moulds based on educators’ distorted and inauthentic conception of what a queer identity should be, rather than leaving children free to choose and endorse their own conceptions of queerness through an examination of how queer people actually might live worthwhile lives. (p. 797)

One of the matters at hand, for McDonough, is not limiting the queerness of children to those that are imagined to potentially grow up to be queer adults. “It is precisely because we cannot pick out beforehand which children will be [queer],” he maintained, “that all children require exposure to alternative models of identity, including queer models, upon which to base their individual sexual identities” (p. 798). No one, as we remember from the introduction, is born queer. Rather, one must decide to become queer and such a decision requires lessons in such matters. Queerness is then a matter that must be visible to all as a possible way of becoming in the world, recognizing that there are also other ways of becoming in the world, often that are yet known, to be created by new generations. The simple task, in all of this, may be that the rule of becoming is that we shouldn’t be mean to those who decide to live and join and create the diverse possible ways of being and becoming in the world. This was a lesson Kate Bornstein offered in her contribution to the “It Gets Better Campaign” started in 2010 after a spate of queer youth suicides. While there have been important critiques of this project (see Gilbert, 2014), Bornstein refused to tell youth “it gets better” because she is not sure it does. Rather, she offered youth advice to stay alive to find out if it would, the one rule being “don’t be mean.” Of course, such a simple task is not in fact that simple, as all kinds of institutional, structural, cultural, 74 A. J. GRETEMAN and interpersonal barriers emerge that impact the lives of those who become in ways rarely, if at all, recognized. Meanness seems to be more palatable and easier to engage in than kindness. After all, we do prefer Mean Girls, which ironically ends quite kindly. McDonough’s argument developed a prima facie reason that queer children’s autonomy “depend[s] on actual engagement with queer options” (p. 800). It is necessary, in other words, that queer children gain access to queer options in order to imagine possible futures. To not have such access denies children opportunities to encounter a wide range of possibilities by which to develop and see their own futures. Quoting McDonough:

If the communities of which children are a part (here I do not just mean those children who turn out to be queer, but all children) fail to include expansive visions of queer possibilities, then the ability of queer children (i.e. those who turn out to be unable to live their lives as heterosexuals) to develop into independent practical reasoners will be constrained to the extent that they will be unable to link up their reasoning to realistic and expansive ‘imagined futures’ involving valuable and worthwhile queer roles, communities, and identities. (p. 801)

His argument that expansive possibilities are necessary, particularly for liberal education, connects us back to the subjectification function of education. Schools inevitably play a significant role in the ways students can imagine their futures. And for much of the history of American public education, what futures are open to students has been limited. When it comes to providing students—queer and otherwise—actual engagement with queer roles, communities, and identities, however, a number of issues have emerged. For McDonough these included the reality that queer communities are often few and far between and located primarily in urban areas; that queer communities are often viewed disapprovingly by parents and society; and that queer children often come from families that are disapproving of queerness (p. 802). Such issues are, I sense, still present, but I want to suggest that there have been gains in accessibility to engaging queer roles, communities, and identities. It is, in fact, one of the purposes of this book to highlight such gains in order to further push for and cultivate ways in which schools could provide queer lessons for their students. It may be, in part, following Airton’s (2013) advice—more fully addressed shortly—to “leave ‘those kids’ alone” (p. 532). THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 75

Diverse queer lessons are, for me, less about reiterating the data that illustrates “hatred in the hallways” or reproducing the paranoid arguments that queer students and teachers have enemies. We’ve been hearing that for decades. Eric Rofes (1983), in “I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves”: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Suicide, offered an assessment of then emerging discourses on suicide and homosexuality. “Perhaps the most pernicious trick played on lesbians and gay men,” according to Rofes, “has been the creation of the dual myth of homosexual suicide” (p. 1). This dual myth “asserts that lesbians and gay men not only commit suicide at a rate higher than society-at-large, but that somehow a person’s homosexuality is itself the source of self-destruction” (p. 1). Rofes, to be clear, is not contesting the reality of “gay” suicide, but drawing the reader’s attention to the ways in which arguments centered on suicide and homosexuality are intimately tied to the discourses of the time, particularly those of the medical profession and media. The futures that were visible to queer people (then defined largely as gay and lesbian) were quite narrow. The gay liberation movement was little over a decade old and the known AIDS epidemic in its infancy. The social world, with its homophobia and violence against queer people—notably through expert discourses—was literally killing queers, but blaming such deaths on queer individuals. Rofes refused such a place for gay men and lesbians, offering insights on intervention, postvention, and prevention for the living taken from the dead. Such queer lessons were, returning to McDonough, provided in recognition that to envision “queer futures,” there are things that education can and should do, both in making sure queer youth survive the precariousness of childhood and can thrive. School is, after all, one institution among many that, to go back to Mayo’s earlier comment, needs to provide support to queer youth—be this at the K-12 level or higher education. Schools, as spaces where people meet diverse ideas and practices, continue—despite or in spite of neoliberal rationalities—to be spaces where futures can be envisioned. It is, to be sure, a challenge to broaden such futures given neoliberal rationalities, but try we must. McDonough (2007) himself offered five recommendations that schools could, perhaps should, take up to support queer youth. These included the need to address the persistence and pervasiveness of bullying, developing a curriculum that provides “detailed and rich examples of queer role models,” engages teacher education around queer life, promotes the development of anti-discrimination policies, and includes queer communities in such work (pp. 805–807). Such recommendations, practical to be 76 A. J. GRETEMAN sure, illustrate for McDonough the potential of common schools in accommodating “moral and cultural diversity” (p. 795). If we expect an institution to provide lessons that open up possibilities, we have the task of contemplating ways in which such lessons could be done. Queer commentary in education cannot only repeat hatred in the hallways or advocate for the protection of “out” queer youth. It must also envision practices that open up queer futures for “out” queer youth or youth who are queer by means of being children.

Queerness and Children How might such work be done? I suspect it is a multipronged approach. For me, it begins returning to the scene of childhood to think about the very ways in which children are conceived and how our conceptions of children impact what we allow (or know) children to do. The child has, for queer theorists, been a key target in thinking about and through queerness. To imagine queer futures then requires recognizing how queer futures themselves have been limned by the Child. Lee Edelman (2004) ushered in attending to the Child by illustrating how “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (p. 11). Edelman’s Child is not meant to be confused with actual children, particularly since actual children are often harmed in various ways by “that figural children [that] alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (p. 11). The Child, for Edelman, is a rather nefarious figure who has been used particularly against queerness. Or put differently, “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (p. 3). To not fight for the children, to many, might sound quite scandalous. Edelman’s polemic scandalized many since its publication. How could one not fight for children after all, given children lack the means to fight for things themselves? Edelman’s argument is, however, not about not fighting for the living, breathing children, but an intervention in how politics uses the Child (as a concept) to assault and limit the possibilities of both adults and children who live and breathe in the world. Missing for me, in much of the commentary on Edelman (for or against his argument), is the discussion about how Edelman’s work illustrated the need to push against the discourses, particularly political discourses, that had set up the Child as THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 77 a totalizing figure through which things are done. The Child, put suc- cinctly, really fucks up the child, as a living breathing being. I have always read Edelman, perhaps mistakenly, pragmatically. Reading Edelman in such a way may contradict his arguments—given that pragmatism is future oriented—and may misread Lacanian psychoanalysis. But, what is useful in Edelman is the distinction he makes between the ways concepts, in his case the Child, come to cover up and cover over the far more complicated work and realities of living in the world. We, to be sure, live in the world, but that world is made up of concepts that can become oppressive to the very existence of living in that world. Edelman’s (2004) argument was, as he argued, an ethical argument that refused to fight for the Child and, in doing so, allowed queerness to “attain its ethical values precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure” (p. 3). Edelman cheekily, in my view, argued that there was no future for queers. There was and is no future for queers because queerness names the excess that which “sever[s] us from ourselves” (p. 5). It is a queer argument indeed, in that it relies on the excesses so intimately tied to queer practices. We might claim to “be” queer, but in doing so we become recognized within the social order. We assist in any number of ways the social order’s work. This is, I think, all well and good at least until we refuse to recognize the queerness that persists in and beyond our own selves. Queer figures, in Edelman, as a constant reminder that no matter how good things get or how much progress is made, there remains work to be done; work that exists because the social that we have been recognized by is still not all it is cracked up to be. “Queerness proposes,” for Edelman, “in place of the good, something [he] want[ed] to call better” (p. 5). This better doesn’t promise anything. In fact, for Edelman, it promises “absolutely nothing” (p. 5). This sounds similar to Edwin Starr’s countercultural assessment of war. “War, huh, good god; What is it good for; Absolutely nothing.” War, like queerness, is good for absolutely nothing. To claim as much is countercultural. There is no goodness in war—only tears and lost lives—just as there is no goodness in queerness as it refuses to abide by the social order that already and always defines goodness. Queerness is at war with its own uptake, while the material world is inhabited by queers that seek to be in the world. Edelman’s sense of queerness, as such, “names only the insistent particularity of the subject” (p. 5). The particularity of the subject is a challenge since it holds open the contingency of being and becoming. I often 78 A. J. GRETEMAN think of this as the challenge it is to announce oneself as queer. If you announce it, it is probably not the case (using Edelman’s logic) as you become recognized within the social world. Yet, in our daily lives, we encounter queers that fail to abide by our own sense of sociality; causing discomfort, annoyance, or more. It’s a tricky thing, paradoxical perhaps, as queerness attends to the particularity while simultaneously making general claims about its status. I sense grappling with this paradox is vital, specifically, to the task of education. Education, after all, grapples with the particular subjects that come through its doors. Students, unformed and in formation, within the space and time of schools, struggle against the demands schools place on them. School has the task of forming students in particular ways, again, to fit in the current social order (e.g., social efficiency), or to get ahead in the world (e.g., social mobility), or become part of the democratic order (e.g., equality). What Edelman’s rather “anti-social” sense of queerness entails for education is a recognition that such purposes will always fail to sub- sume queerness. There will continue to be students that resist and push against the rules and norms of the school. Some of these students may very well be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. However, as LGBT youth advocacy has increased over the last several decades demanding protection and space, these students have gained certain rights and recognitions. While such students have become ushered into the fold—normalized in many regards—there continues to be students that refuse. Schools, as part of the larger social order, may very well have brought gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students into the fold, educating them in and through its various purposes, some of those purposes defined by such youth themselves. And those purposes will play out in relationship to how schools have and continue to “track” students in specific ways. This includes tracking students out of school, seen in the high numbers of dropouts from marginalized communities, including queer communities (see GLSEN’s reports on these matters). Edelman’s queerness—a queerness that does not fight for the Child— strangely demands space to fight for children in their particularity, however, not as part of a now recognized minority population. While this conceptual and politically motivated intervention in queer theory was built on the figure of the Child, so damaging to the actual lives of queers, Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009), in a different vein, addressed the ways in which the “queer child” came to be conceived in the twentieth century, particularly within literature, because, as she argued, “the silences surrounding the THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 79 queerness of children happen to be broken—loquaciously broken and broken only—by fictional forms” (p. 2). Jonathan Kemp (2015) argued as much, writing “the fact that it was novelists and poets who took up the gauntlet thrown down by the medical categorization of the homosexual suggests that reserve discourse is an act not only of immense bravery but also of great imagination” (p. 20). The queer child is strange indeed, as it is a child that raises rather dark questions, yet those questions have been, by and large, straightened up or simply avoided by historians, sociologists, educators, and more. The reverse discourse we can see more and more is not conducted from the top-down, but with the work of the imagination from the ground up. It is difficult, still, to engage queer youth in their queerness through empirical means without fear of any number of accusations or legal problems. While Stockton started her argument, “If you scratch a child you will find a queer, in the sense of someone ‘gay’ or just plain strange” (p. 1), experts prefer not to scratch children so as to keep them safe, pristine, and under the guise of legal protection. Of course, we cannot keep children safe—the nightly news illustrates the lack of safety and protections that actual children have. We also know that children live rather complicated and compelling lives, often outside the view of adults and experts. This, despite the onslaught of surveillance technologies to watch or check in on children. The twenty-first-century child, as such, is coming into a world drastically different from the twentieth-century child, queerly captured in the fictional tales Stockton engaged. The queer child—in the specific form of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth—is made visible within and through media. They access lessons about queerness in ways unknown to previous generations that had to furtively search between the lines for their existence. Such access, to be sure, is important. But such access may as well quickly become pedagogicized so as to teach appropriate lessons. Appropriate lessons are often preferred since they disrupt the status quo less; however, they also maintain certain hierarchies that fail to do justice to complexity (Jennings, 2015). The twentieth-century child may have turned into a child to be protected, while the twenty-first-century child might become a child to be left alone to their own devices. This may sound counterintuitive, a dereliction of duty, since schools and other educational agents are meant to do things with youth, not leave them alone. Such views are, of course, rooted in particular ideas about what children need or are capable of doing or not doing. Phillip Aries’s (1962) landmark history of childhood provides important illustrations of 80 A. J. GRETEMAN how childhood has not always been what it is now. Moreover, I suspect intergenerational discussions about lived childhoods would reveal these material changes—from shifts in discipline, to what one was allowed to watch, to experiences in school. Airton (2013) turned in this counter-intuitive direction and proposed that we “leave ‘those kids’ alone,” illustrating how fighting school homophobia is problematically tied to positioning queer youth as exceptional. Queer youth, conceived through homophobia, become individualized and in need of protection. However, as Airton argued, with that move queerness is eliminated. The flourishing— Airton’s word—of queer individuals comes at the expense of the flourishing of queerness, in that individuals are far more manageable and governable. Queer adults, in their argument, are part of the problem, as queer children become refracted through adult longings as adults look back on the strange state that is childhood. Adult longings, more often than not, seek to allow queer youth to have a childhood that adults were denied in previous generations. We want “them,” so the story might go to have what “we” didn’t have. Yet, such dreams often are more rooted in the “we” rather than the “them” who have no say in what they might want. “When we see ‘queer children,’ we may see ourselves in miniature and in meta- phor; this may altogether,” Airton (2013) argued, “elide or bracket children’s own processes of inter alia sexual becoming, whether of the children we do see (who are ‘like us’) or the children we don’t” (p. 537). There is, in grappling with children and their queerness, a reality to grapple with our own adult selves who seek to be the type of adults that we perhaps once longed for. Yet, given generational shifts, I suspect those types of longings are shifting. Millennial queers, for instance, came of age with far greater acceptance and the very protections that are now being critically investigated and challenged. Queer adults may very well prefer to leave children alone because they suspect queer children are not in need of as much protection as they once were. This is not to deny the needs that queer youth have at all. Rather, to recognize that such needs are changing. We cannot reproduce queer youth nor queer adults as always in need of being understood and reflected through the workings of homophobia. I suspect Airton would agree, given they write

It is possible to live, witness and indeed honor the affective intensity of queer adult longing for the origin stories denied us without necessarily con- flating this denial with a duty to others who are only barely or even not-yet ‘themselves.’ (2013, p. 539) THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 81

After all, in becoming “ourselves,” we are denied all kinds of stories. Such denials are, more often than not, realized after the fact as we reflect back on our own lives and moments we may have been “straightened out.” The motives we attribute to our becomings are, to draw on Stockton, birthed backwardly as we in our adult worlds can give voice and labels to experiences that we only “felt” then. There are opportunities within this—particularly when we leave queer kids alone—to recognize that the work of becoming “sexual” is not unique to those youths who become “gay or lesbian” but to all youth. All youth (and adults) should have access and the freedom to explore their sexuality and sexual possibilities in pleasurable and consensual ways. That we still lack the institutional and political wherewithal for that to be a reality is a sad state of affairs. Sex is, to be sure, as Zimmerman (2015) illustrated, a historically challenging topic that has yet to be handled adequately, however, back to the concerns at hand. Homophobia constructed as uniquely tied to queer youth, instead of all youth, is itself a sign of homophobia. We construct queer youth in and by homophobia—they are victims who come into presence under the workings of homophobia—making it rather difficult to break from such logic and imagine coming into presence in other ways. There are, to be clear, challenges raised by homophobia, including accessing diverse bodily pleasures; however, those challenges connect not only to queer youth but to all youth who are, by Stockton’s logic, always queer. There are, I suspect, challenges to addressing “intimacies” writ large within education, something I have elsewhere argued (Greteman, 2013). The particular focus that queer adults have had on queer youth “like us,” as the project of anti-homophobic work in the immediate future, makes sense, as we have an obligation to attend to the specific needs of LGBT youth. However, to position all LGBT youth as unique (or in need of such attention) similarly limits their very potential, a potential defined by their queerness (the excess, left over potential not yet covered up or disciplined by any number of relationships—personal or institutional). There are a multitude of ways LGBT youth have been constructed and, as Talburt (2004) aptly argued, if such constructions are not engaged critically, exclusions within schools and beyond can quickly emerge. I am, in many ways, persuaded and drawn into Airton’s argument. Positioning all children as queer, like Stockton, recognizes the radical potential that exists within childhood where, it would seem, anything is possible. I am, at the same time, concerned. There seems to be within such arguments a desire to divorce queerness from categories of identity 82 A. J. GRETEMAN

(gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender). This is the first move of queer theory, but the next move is to recognize the inability to complete such a divorce. Queer youth who come into presence as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender within heteronormative and homonormative logics may very well come to limit what they can become (respectable queers) but also show the need for opportunities to explore what those specific identities have to offer culturally. As David Halperin (2012) illustrated in his tome How to Be Gay, there are cultural resistant practices that gays learn from one another because no one else will teach them. In order to do so, it is ever more necessary, in the face of acceptance that bares a close resemblance to assimilation, for such lessons to be taught. To do so is less to focus on the idea of the individual liberal subject that deserves rights already defined, although we cannot avoid contemplating the particularity of individuals and their rights, and more toward the ways in which generations of queers have constructed ways of living, cultural products, forms of reading, and more that have lessons to provide. To be sure, not everyone will choose to embrace such lessons. This is a fact of education. We cannot control what lessons are learned and have to accept that unexpected lessons emerge, well, unexpectedly. The issue at hand is that such lessons should be accessible for people to encounter and possibly embrace, and these lessons are broader than sex. We know, of course, that there has been a lessening of walls between different sex acts. Jane Ward (2015) highlighted this illustrating that there is more evidence that “straight” men engage in various forms of sexual acts with other straight men—bro-jobs, anyone? This insight is not new. Eve Sedgwick, in Between Men, illustrated the ways in which the homosocial was created in and through a disavowal of homosexuality—seen largely through the literary canon. The difference that Ward raised was that there is more willingness for such practices to be made visible in the material world. In doing so, the disavowal of homosexuality becomes less about the sexual acts that once defined homosexuality (e.g., butt sex) and more about the cultural practices and histories that have been carefully cultivated by diverse sets of queers—be that the practices of camp or cruising. “To call oneself ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ is to take on the cultural baggage associated with these categories,” as Ward (2015) argued, “and whether or not this baggage is appealing is a separate matter altogether from the appeal of homosexual or heterosexual sex” (p. 34). There is, I realize, a growing acceptance of sexual practices no longer defined as “gay” or “straight.” Sex is, slowly becoming just that, sex. The anus is a universal THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 83 hole and less and less positioned negatively. Teen Vogue, in the summer of 2017, released a guide to anal sex, illustrating a possible watershed moment for the anus, despite the unsurprising backlash against such an issue by conservatives who would prefer to deny such a reality. And while that may be, those sexual practices once divided between “gay” and “straight” gave rise to distinct subcultures defined in part, but not wholly, by their sexual pleasures. There is, despite more permissiveness toward some forms of sex, still a general disregard for the diverse, specific cultural practices that define queer subcultures. It is difficult to completely distinguish between sexual acts and sexual cultures, as previous queer sexualities become normalized and with them cultural sensibilities. For Ward (2015), the distinction “is a cultural one, one in which straightness—and increasingly homonormative gayness—is marked by a fetish for the normal and the sanitized, while queerness directs its loving and lusting collective gaze at precisely the bodies and ways of life disavowed by straights as ugly and failed” (p. 204). To imagine queerness as an option for everyone to “choose,” as Ward argued, is

to highlight that most straight-identified people are ‘straight’ not because they don’t ever want to have a same-sex encounter, but because, in their view, queer modes of homosexual relating do not constitute an appealing way of life. Because their allegiance, ultimately is to normativity. (2015, p. 208)

The privacy of the bedroom and the acts that occur therein are increasingly less central to the challenges that queers face. Sodomy laws have, by and large, gone by the wayside. However, such shifts show, as well, the consequences of overcoming such challenges. “Despite the vast historical and social changes in the conditions of gay male life that have taken place over the past fifty years,” Halperin (2012) argued,

gay kids continue to grow up in a straight world, straight culture continues to matter deeply to them, and gay male culture still operates through—and indeed thrives on—a metaphorical or figural reading of straight culture: a reappropriation of it that is also a resistance to it. (p. 122)

And so, we are still left with the need and necessity of queer reading and queer attention to the ways in which queerness impacts children, along with how gay kids grow up and into the world (Greteman, 2017). 84 A. J. GRETEMAN

Acceptance is not to be scoffed at entirely. It is pleasant. But, it is also without careful attention the death of cultures rooted in queerness and its incessant refusal to become normal.

Conclusion It is probably the case that such concerns about the Child and fictional children are far from compelling to a “general” public. They are, in their own particularity, probably more compelling to particularly impacted audiences. Queerness, following Edelman (2004), promises absolutely nothing and life is often more interesting when we have some (even if they are feigned) promises. As such, there is a certain skepticism of children in queer theory that touches on the scary reality we all face living and becoming in the world. While we tell ourselves that “it gets better,” even as we critique that idea, daily living shows us there are no general promises. The skepticism toward “figures” or “concepts” that glue us together, just enough to have some order, is complicated. Critics or theorists live in the world, but also are tasked with drawing together the ways in which the world is filled with contradictions, paradoxes, and more in order to imagine otherwise and elsewhere. While such figures and concepts impact everyone (privileges often thwart us from seeing this), they more often are viewed as concerns for specific populations. Queer populations have been impacted and shaped by the Child and children. If children are our future, but children are limited by the Child, queerness as an intervening proposal disrupts the temporal logic tied to the future. Queerness proposes not only shifts in bodily configurations and possibilities, but also alternative temporalities. As McCallum and Tuhkanen (2011) argued “for those without children or ambitions to procreate, queers are cut loose not only from parenting responsibilities but from the quotidian temporal rhythms that the family-oriented community imposes (school, soccer, shopping)” (p. 8). For queer theorists and commentators within education, this “cutting loose” is challenging, as our ideas and bodies don’t fit into the time of schools. We can quickly be outed or criticized for not having “children,” and therefore no stakes in the game. However, history tells a very different story. Queer skin is always already in the game, for queerness is defined in and against the Child and its temporal trajectories. Queers—less the respectable gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals—are still feared in schools, for they may still derail the straight trajectory of—perhaps slightly bent now—children toward the future. The private (future) THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 85 lives of LGBT students are kept private—constructed as such for their place at the table—as they are allowed to be part of the social order. And such a move pushes the queerness that was refused transmission for its publicness further out the classroom door. There are still no queers allowed in school unless those queers become redeemed in some way. In “pushing the limits” in 2006, Mayo concluded, “The lack of attention to the needs of queer students is particularly galling because, perhaps more than any group, queer students rely on multiple sites of support outside of traditional families” (p. 486). While liberalism has sought to understand sexual minorities through an ethnic model, such a model fails to recognize the unique characteristics of being and becoming queer, including the reality that the “traditional” family has been largely unable to (and often uninterested to) educate and equip children for gaining membership into queer communities. The family, embedded in positioning their children as in line with the Child, is unable to adequately make room for queerness. Some try, of course, nobly and radically creating space for diverse gender expressions, but with the hope that such openness will promise something better. For to parent without such a promise leads one into the maze of institutions set to protect the child from such queer lessons. This sounds dire, and perhaps it is. Yet, queer youth have fought for, snuck out to, and gained access to various sites—physical and digital—in the time since Mayo’s remark about the galling lack of attention. Such work has not made it so the world is more queer-friendly, although it helps. There is always much work to do as questions of citizenship, rights, and sexuality continue to evolve (Loutzenheiser & MacIntosh, 2004). Part of that work is recognizing the importance of viable and visible queer communities and cultures that can push for the possibilities of becoming queer. After all, as Richard Ford (2005) argued, “Any social group whose members identify as a group potentially can develop a political group consciousness directed at achieving shared ends” (p. 18). In the next chapter, I will turn to think about the role of queer generations that have developed consciousness—in diverse ways—to the ways and workings of the world toward sexuality.

Notes 1. I would learn as an adult that the lesson from “The Greatest Love of All” was a lesson in particular meant for black youth, originally sung by George Benson. 86 A. J. GRETEMAN

References Airton, L. (2013). Leave ‘those kids’ alone: On the conflation of school homophobia and suffering queers. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(5), 532–562. Aries, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history. New York, NY: Random House. Collins, P. H. (2010). Another kind of public education: Race, schools, the media, and democratic possibilities. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ford, R. (2005). Racial culture: A critique. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ford, R. T. (2007). What’s queer about race? South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3), 477–484. Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in school: The limits of education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Greteman, A. J. (2013). Beyond intimaphobia: Object lessons from Foucault and Sade. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(7), 748–463. Greteman, A. J. (2017). Helping kids turn out queer: Queer theory in art education. Studies in Art Education, 58(3), 195–205. Greteman, A. J., & Wojcikiewicz, S. (2014). The problems with the future: Educational futurism and the figural child. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(4), 559–573. Halperin, D. (2012). How to be gay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jennings, T. (2015). Teaching transgressive representations of LGBTQ people in educator preparation: Is conformity required for inclusion? The Educational Forum, 79(4), 451–458. Kemp, J. (2015). Homotopia?: Gay identity, sameness, and the politics of desire. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. Letts, W. J., & Sears, J. T. (1999). Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Loutzenheiser, L. W., & MacIntosh, L. B. (2004). Citizenships, sexualities, and education. Theory into Practice, 43(2), 151–158. Mayo, C. (2006). Pushing the limits of liberalism: Queerness, children, and the future. Educational Theory, 56(4), 469–487. McCallum, E. L., & Tuhkanen, M. (2011). Queer times, queer becomings. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. McDonough, K. (2007). The ‘futures’ of queer children and the common school ideal. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41(4), 795–810. Meiners, E. (2017). For the children: Protecting innocence in a carceral state. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. THE IDEA OF QUEER CHILDREN 87

Pritchard, E. D. (2013). For colored kids who committed suicide, our outrage is not enough: Queer youth of color, bullying, and the discursive limits of safety. Harvard Educational Review, 83(2), 320–345. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rofes, E. (1983). I thought people like that killed themselves: Lesbians, gay men, and suicide. San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press. Stockton, K. (2009). The queer child: Or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Talburt, S. (2004). Constructions of LGBT youth: Opening up subject positions. Theory into Practice, 43(2), 116–121. Thorpe, J., & Greteman, A. J. (2015). Intimately bound to numbers: On the rhetorics GLBTQ climate research. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(1), 73–99. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.2.1.0073 Ward, J. (2015). Not gay: Sex between straight white men. New York, NY: NYU Press. Weems, L. (1999). Pestalozzi, perversity, and the pedagogy of love. In W. Letts & J. Sears (Eds.), Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling (pp. 27–38). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Zimmerman, J. (2015). Too hot to handle: A global history of sex education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. CHAPTER 4

Generating Queer Generations

For many summers now, I find myself and several friends, including my sweetie, taking a road trip to Des Moines, Iowa, for the Iowa State Fair. I am, myself, an Iowan by birth and was taught during my childhood that the Iowa State Fair is “America’s Favorite Fair.” It is a lesson I have not forgotten and I have found it my duty to convince non-Iowans of this by bringing them back to experience, as I like to say, “the only state fair in The New York Times 1000 Things to See Before You Die.” It is, for me, a small attempt to transmit a cultural asset from rural America and its lessons rooted in agriculture, Busch Light, and livestock.1 We stay with my best friend, from childhood, and her husband while visiting. And we often find ourselves heading out on the first night of our time in Iowa to catch up since our previous pilgrimage to the fair. A few years ago, we found ourselves heading to Des Moines’s oldest gay bar—The Blazing Saddle. While my best friend is the first person to whom I came out many years ago, I found myself teaching her about queer cultures at the Saddle, as it is known by locals. She knew me as a gay man, she knew my sweetie and my gay friends. Yet, we had never spent time in a queer cultural institution— in this case a gay bar—together. While I have called Chicago home for close to a decade now—living within a mile of Boystown, Chicago’s “gay borhood”—the Saddle presented me with a rather unexpected classroom that offered certain queer lessons. Boystown is itself, by and large, quite segmented—there are bars for those who like “this” (e.g., muscle queens)

© The Author(s) 2018 89 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_4 90 A. J. GRETEMAN and those who like “that” (e.g., sports), and there is Sidetrack for everyone in between, particularly those attuned to show tunes. Boystown has a history and is not immune to any number of issues connected to class, race, and politics (Orne, 2017). This makes sense—with lots of queers around, there are ways to distinguish oneself from others, just as there is the reality of doing so in a discriminatory fashion. However, in a small city like Des Moines, I realized that everyone who wants to be in a gay bar hangs out largely in the same gay bar. This was a revealing lesson, as I had become used to the plethora of options in Chicago; this, despite my own experiences coming of age in Omaha, Nebraska (the Maxx), and East Lansing, Michigan (Spiral), where that was the norm. Standing in their cliques before us at The Saddle, I was able to teach my best friend—perhaps superficially—about different subcultures that fall under the umbrella of “queer.” There were the daddies, hungrily looking at the twinks. There were the twinks, bashfully catching the eyes of the daddies, but drooling over the jocks. There were the dykes whose bikes were out front and the bears pounding heavy beers faster than I thought possible. And then there were the out-of-towners, us, being looked at, curiously, as fresh meat. There was no singular “gay” culture, rather, an assortment of subcultures that were, despite their differences, tied together by a shared history of stigma and insult. There are dangers in calling attention to such cliques as cultures, but doing so also recognizes the unique characteristics and practices used within the broad spectrum of queerness to find one’s “tribe” (Rofes, 1995). This memory returns to me often as I think about the ways in which queer cultures are transmitted through institutions such as gay bars. Gay bars are connected to the history of homosexuality and its emergence in urban areas post World War II (Chauncey, 1994; D’Emilio, 1983). They have been a central institution to the development of a unique population of people defined, in part, by their sexuality. Such bars are, to be sure, not everywhere, an unfortunate but true reality. And for some time, there have been any number of thought-pieces contemplating the very death of the gay bar. Those same urban areas that provided space and anonymity for the development of a unique culture (and its subcultures) have become more “tolerant” of homosexuality, allowing younger generations of GLBT individuals to feel comfortable in “mixed” environments. June Thomas (2011), writing for Slate, asked, in the midst of this cultural shift, if the gay bar could survive. While there are no national data set of gay bars, Thomas did some good old investigative work and found that while there is a GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 91 trend—gay bars are declining—that trend is not dire. Some cities—like Seattle—have, to be sure, seen a decline in gay bars, but also a rise in gay- friendly bars. Interviewing gay bar owners, Thomas asked if the gay bar would survive: “all but one said yes—and even the naysayer thought they’d persist in small markets, even if urban gays shifted their patronage to straight or mixed establishments” (para. 11). Let’s breathe a sigh of relief, the gay bar will live to see another decade, hopefully more, and in doing so continue to provide a space for queers to come together in all kinds of ways and transmit cultures and probably more. Or will it? As reported in The Economist (2016), the vanishing of gay bars was still a very real reality and fear (at least for those who like them, myself included). Gay bars, once so vital to the emergence and development of queer cultures and the site of one of the births of the gay movement, are vanishing. From One Last Shag in Brooklyn, Spin in Chicago, to dozens of others, including closures in San Francisco, London, and New York City, “the disappearance of these bars and clubs,” the authors wrote, “is upsetting to some past and present patrons.” The authors continued, curiously, I think, “But their decline also points to a larger, and overwhelmingly positive, trend” (para. 14). The positive trend is not the rising rents nor the success in hookup apps noted as contributing factors to the vanishing gay bars. Rather, the positive trend, the vanishing gay bar illustrated, is the growing acceptance of homosexuality. It is this growing acceptance that may be the silver lining of the loss of these cultural institutions. “One in five American adults,” the authors noted,

say their views on homosexuality have changed over the past five years (most have become more accepting). Similarly in Britain, views on homosexuality have become markedly more tolerant. This means that many gay men and women, particularly youngsters, do not feel the need to congregate in one spot. In big cities such as London or New York they can display affection in many bars and pubs, while they frequently live in areas of cities that are more diverse. (para. 14)

Gays and lesbians are gaining more acceptance. They are coming out earlier. They enter schools that increasingly have a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) (Mayo, 2017), or, as is becoming more common, Gender-Sexuality Alliances, that attend to the growing recognition of diversity within queerness. Gay and lesbian adults are living in neighborhoods with straight people and don’t feel as compelled to support gay institutions or live in 92 A. J. GRETEMAN gayborhoods. They are out on the job and likely to have mixed friend groups. These shifts are, in many regards, true. There have been generational shifts due to a rise in acceptance or tolerance (pick your elixir). These shifts are, in part, the foundation for this chapter, as I contemplate the generation of queerness across generations. While gays and lesbians with particular incomes and relationships have gained access to particular state-sanctioned institutions, this is not the case for queers who persist in and cultivate ways of being in ways that do not fall under “respectable” politics. I suspect that “respectable” is tied intimately with class as certain “queers” gain access to echelons of power and prestige. “Gayness” may very well have once helped define a culture, allowing for cross-class contact. This is beautifully (and tragically) captured by Samuel Delany (1999) in his history and memoir of Times Square before its gentrification. However, the rise in economic inequalities—due to neoliberal policies and rationalities roughly over the same period—have segmented “queers,” where wealthy (or at least middle class) “gays” find more in common with straight counterparts due to class than they do among their queer brethren with their formerly stigmatized sexuality. I raise the issue of the decline of gay bars here not to lament the changing relationships between “straight” and “gay” people—cultural change is inevitable and more “tolerant” attitudes are preferable to virulent homophobia. Rather, I do so to draw attention to the work of cultural transmission and the importance of institutions in such work. The journal- istic flair that raises the specter of a world without gay bars does so without addressing the losses such a trend raises, not for individual gay people who are able to live more fully in “mixed” society but for queer cultures that were born in and transmitted through such institutions. Gay bars, to be sure, along with other gay institutions (bathhouses, bookstores, community centers), were never historically liked by authorities; rather, they were sanctioned in various ways and sites of police violence. They were used during the AIDS epidemic to capture the homophobic imaginary, as seen with the closure of innumerous gay bathhouses. And as witnessed in the summer of 2016 at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando Florida, the bar/nightclub continues to be a site of violence against queer people and, in the case of Pulse, queer people of color—a topic I address in Chap. 7. The gay bar has quite literally been the pulse of gay cultures for decades, so claims of its demise deserve pointed critique and concern. While the government and its authorities have historically challenged the existence of such institutions, such institutions have persisted in the face of such threats, GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 93

continuing to be sites where queers came to meet one another; a safe space, as much as any space is safe. My concern here as I hope will be made clear (and perhaps compelling) is to contemplate the need to have institutions that promote such transmission and the challenges such institutions face as they are positioned as “old” or “seedy,” tied more to sex than sociality. While attitudes toward LGBT persons are improving, such improvement cannot lead to a mere assimilation of LGBT persons into straight institutions. It also requires a maintenance of and creation of queer institutions that will play a role in the development and transmission of queer cultures. “While liberal theorists debate whether or not some cultures should continue to exist after the conditions for their flourishing have been obliterated by modernization,” as Cris Mayo (2006) noted, “the queer community and queer kids exist because of modernization: it is possible to live outside of marriage, to support oneself, to form new kinds of communities” (p. 487). To do so—tarrying between the pitfalls of modernity and the reality modernity helped give rise to queers—recognizes the importance of the improvement of attitudes toward LGBT people as a positive trend, but also demands we recognize the need for queer-related institutions that persist in transmitting the histories, presents, and futures of queerness. I suspect that the contemporary politics around sexuality are shifting quite dramatically—as seen at the political level where access to marriage, the military, and anti-discrimination have been achieved. The rise of tolerant attitudes speaks to an interpersonal improvement between “gays” and “straights.” On an interpersonal level, this is fine. People should feel comfortable and be able to express themselves wherever they want, whether they are gay or straight. However, given the continued existence and recent rise in hate crimes against queer populations, particularly trans women of color, I suspect it is too early to celebrate the vanishing of gay bars because of their importance on the interpersonal and cultural level. We, in fact, I suspect, need more queer-centric cultural institutions, not less, because queer rights are yet to be fully achieved, nor will they ever be in the ever-shifting work of identity-creation. We need such institutions not because we are still viewed with disdain by straight society, but because we need to maintain the few institutions that we have to transmit and invent new ways of being and becoming queer in the twenty-first century. In an interview in the early 1980s, Foucault (1997) noted, and I suspect the challenge remains, that, 94 A. J. GRETEMAN

We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. (p. 158)

If the twentieth century gave birth to queer people and movements despite trying to expunge us at every turn, the twenty-first century could be the moment not when queers are ushered into the fold of society but instead continue to build institutions that give birth to new queers and forms of relations. “No! Let’s escape as much as possible,” following Foucault (1997), “from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities” (p. 160). Such a view seeks to generate, invent, and create ourselves as relational beings with rights to relations beyond those accepted and recognized by particular institutions. I do not dwell here on gay bars because I believe gay bars are the “end all be all” of gay or queer culture. Nor do I think they are entirely welcoming and affirming to all forms of queerness. Gay bars are not always safe places for everyone, nor are they always democratic institutions. They are, in that sense, no different from most institutions that exist in the world, except that theirs is a history tied to alternative relational forms. Any institution, even those geared toward marginalized and oppressed communities, has its faults. Yet, at the same time, such institutions also promise not only a good time, but lessons along the way about histories of relations made possible in and through institutional formations. It is with the cultural transmission at the heart of gay bars that I turn to, so to think about the work of queer cultural wealth, education, and generations. While significant attention in educational scholarship has focused on the need to protect individual gay students and develop anti-bullying programs that help teach about differences, including sexuality, such work often forgoes developing and addressing the cultural wealth of queerness. Queerness, instead, is largely positioned as a liability—for both advocates and critics of the incorporation of queer issues in education. For queer advocates, queerness is a liability that puts students’ and teachers’ safety at risk, therefore requiring attending to lessons in tolerance. For critics of queer inclusion, often homophobic, queerness is a liability that potentially undoes civilization and similarly puts students at risk at being “recruited” into a homosexual lifestyle or “perverted” from the straight path. GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 95

I do not, to be clear, believe queers no longer face discrimination nor violence. I am heartened by the attitudinal shifts—they are the attitudes I myself came of age in. However, there is enough social scientific research documenting the various forms of violence that queer youth and adults experience in the world. It is still a reality that homophobia is a liability that is transmitted through various educational agents, including schools. There is never a year, so it seems, where some legislator in some state or at the federal level introduces some type of legislation that seeks to undo protections for queer people, either in the name of religious freedom or privacy, as seen with various trans bathroom bills and gay consumer demands surrounding marriage (e.g., wedding cakes and flowers). Homophobia is still alive and well at the institutional and disciplinary levels despite gains at the interpersonal and cultural levels. “[Homophobia] is passed down, in ways overt and subtle, every day” as Michelangelo Signorile (2016) argued, “as we attempt to brush off slights or even more blatant forms of discrimination” (pp. 27–28). As such, homophobia is still transmitted from generation to generation. It is a liability that has slowly been chipped away at a positive development. However, as I argue here, there is a necessity to seriously address the cultural wealth that queerness offers to those who encounter such assets in the process of becoming— whether they come to identify as “LGBT” or otherwise in ever-evolving forms of identifying.

Identity Versus Culture One of the central challenges I have constantly struggled with as I developed the arguments in this book is the tension between “identity” and “culture.” Queer theories, as already noted, have not been fans of identity, nor its politics. However, as Judith Butler (1993) argued, we cannot avoid identity politics. Rather, the task is to recognize the ways in which identities are historically constructed while engaging the exclusionary work of those very identities on the possibilities of yet unknown identities. “The terms to which we do, nevertheless, lay claim, the terms through which we insist on politicizing identity and desire,” Butler argued, “often demand a turn against this constitutive historicity” (p. 19). The questions that early queer theorists raised around identity sought to hold open the democratic project at the heart of such critiques. After all, “it follows that the critique of the queer subject is crucial to the continuing democratization of queer politics” (Butler, 1993, p. 19). We both lay claim to identities, but also 96 A. J. GRETEMAN critique the ways in which such claims must not remain unquestioned. This, so to leave open space for those yet to be. Over the last few decades, we have seen such a trend as the identities that youth are claiming are new and expanding. The task, of course, while being for older generations to recognize such new identities and young generations to not discount the work older generations put in, is also to claim identities that may, in some ways, be recognized more clearly. While some identities—notably gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender—are more recognized (particularly since they are more often than not always included in the acronym that is, as well, expanding). It is not the case that such identities have been fully embraced.2 While there is a fair amount of in-fighting that still (and should) exists within queer (broadly conceived) politics, I avoid here such in-fighting for the most part in order to focus on a different, no better or worse, project. The tension within identity politics, as such, often sounds more complicated than it is. I suspect this is because of the language and the difficult work early queer theorists had in reading against the grain of not only an avowedly homophobic world, but also the grain of gay liberationist projects that had been built on the claims of a sexual identity. The liberal project of bringing lesbian gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects into the democratic fold was (and is) a noble project, however, such a project is always under question. A question constantly raised is how the production of those new liberal subjects (gays as citizens and/or consumers) maintain problematic institutions and practices that, in fact, continue particular forms of violence against other queer subjects. Or, put differently, identities that have been claimed and recognized from within liberal institutions have often failed to bring about institutional changes that actually build on the cultures of queers, long ignored, hidden, and pathologized. This leads me to the other side of the challenge—that of culture. There has been a strange aversion, I think, to advocating for queer cultures in education. This may, in part, be because of the diversity of queer cultures that exist and the ways such cultures dispute any number of other cultures’ worldviews and practices. Or it may be connected to the privileging of scientific and social scientific discourses—notably psychology—within education that focus on expert knowledges and psychological views of subjectivity that individualize the “queer” subject. It is the aversion to queer cultures broadly though I want to contest in this and the coming chapters to illustrate the importance, necessity, and promises of queer cultures in promoting queer thriving. Having introduced the broad landscape GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 97 and illustrated the work of reading, I want to, in the current chapter, set up thinking about “cultural education,” specifically, attending to queer cultural educations. To do so, I turn to Jane Roland Martin’s (2002) “cultural-wealth perspective” to refract through her work the potential in articulating queer cultural wealth. Queer cultural wealth may sound strange, particularly because queer cultures have for decades been marginalized, ignored, or feared by other cultures. Queers lack the cultural stabil- ity and recognition that other “cultures,” often based on race or nationality, have. Additionally, economic research has aptly shown that queer people lack actual wealth, despite the persistence of the stereotype of the DINK, or the “dual-income no kids” queer. While there are, of course, wealthy queers—often white gay males, illustrating the overlap of privileges—such realities cannot be continually held up to the detriment of the reality of queer cultures and economic realities. Queer cultural wealth, as I will explore more in depth here and in later chapters, is defined not by its actual economic wealth but by the assets that it transmits across and within generations so as to transmit and replicate queerness. Following Foucault (1997), I see such work not unique to gay people, but something that extends to all people. Gay culture (what I call now queer culture), as rooted in a history of invention, is broader than the objects a culture pro- duces (e.g., gay novels or films); it is “a culture that invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and are neither the same as, nor superim- posed on, existing cultural forms” (pp. 159–160). Important here is to recognize the role of and connection to queer cultures as not merely emerging through pathology, but giving way to, through breaking habits, new relations. One of queerness’s largest assets, I suspect, is the diverse cultural expressions that fall under its purview—be that kink, twink, butch, leather, trans, and so on—often, interestingly, on display in bars and during Pride parades across the globe. Queerness, like its precursor “gayness,” is founded on diversity and the refusal to foreclose identities beyond the currently recognized. While Pride celebrations have for some time been aptly critiqued for their newfound commercialization and commodification, I think the bodies on display amidst such commercial and commodified excess still illustrate the strength and diversity of queerness. I have never, as well, been completely convinced by arguments against Pride, as such arguments are largely based on an economic reading of floats and sponsors, forgetting the actual queer lives on and in the streets that come far 98 A. J. GRETEMAN and wide to, often for one day, flaunt their queerness in a space and time that, despite its flaws, provides some respite from the larger homophobic world. To be clear, there are problems with Pride celebrations and who (or what) is put on display. Pride could use improvements. Black Lives Matter protests at pride celebrations in Chicago, Toronto, and elsewhere since 2015 have importantly raised the political stakes at play when Pride loses its political edge and includes institutions, like the police, that have historically and presently, been no friends to queers, particularly poor queers and queers of color. What is important here is not, in my view, the Pride parade itself but that there still exists (and still needs to exist) a celebratory space where queerness is—despite corporate sponsors—allowed to be flaunted. Within urban enclaves, Pride may seem passé—my friends and I begrudg- ingly go every year—but, at the same time, I can’t but help think about all the burgeoning queers who come to the city to see and encounter the diverse ways in which queer people have come to exist. Pride is, I sense, still an important institution—albeit limited to a day—that transmits, in all kinds of ways, queer cultural assets within and across generations.

Cultural Wealth However, I think I have gotten ahead of myself writing about gay bars and parades. Let me backtrack to the cultural wealth perspective. Jane Roland Martin (2002) posited a “cultural-wealth perspective” that sought to address the importance and challenges that come with cultural education (and miseducation). As Martin illustrated:

The question on people’s minds was whether the traditional school curriculum was sufficient unto the day or whether the new conditions of society required that new subjects be added to the old—for instance, women’s history, African American literature, the treatment of American Indians, Asian and Hispanic Studies, the immigrant experience. (p. 3)

Throughout Martin’s engagement with this perspective, the issues connected to queer cultures go largely unaddressed. This is not a critique of her work—we can only take up and on so many issues in a given text. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to extend her work to think about if and how the cultural-wealth perspective offers ways of further developing, instituting, and teaching about and through queerness. Any number of GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 99 commentators have argued for a certain demise or death of gay culture— I’ll more thoroughly engage one of them below—but my suspicion is that such a demise is not preordained. While there has been a certain domesti- cation and privatization around queerness—as seen with the emphasis on same-sex marriage—there remains very real queer cultural communities, generating new models and modes of queerness similar to and different from their predecessors. Educational research and schools, more specifically, have by and large focused on sexuality as an individual issue—the focus being on protecting individual gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students—or an issue relegated to sex education. Schools and educational research have been less forthcoming about articulating and educating about the cultural wealth of queer communities. Martin (2002) recognized herself that schools are only one component of the ways publics are educated. Schools may very well be a central institution to the educational project, but there are a host of other agents that exist and transmit cultural assets and liabilities—including, for instance, queer presses that publish avowedly “queer” work rarely recognized, still in 2017, as viable literature. As Martin illustrated, “all institutions and informal groupings of society are guardians of a culture’s wealth, and hence its educational agents” (p. 3). However, as such institutions close or decline due to any number of factors, there is a need to contemplate cultural loss and the cost of no longer seeing or having such institutions in the work of education. As is always the case, there is a need to define culture—that pesky, over- used word. Queer culture is, as I hope is visible, rarely a singular thing. It never has been, despite attempts to homogenize it for political purposes. “Culture in the broadest sense of the term,” as Martin (2002) saw it,

includes not just artistic and scholarly projects, whether masterpieces or works of lesser merit. It encompasses the institutions and practices, rites and rituals, beliefs and skills, attitudes and values, worldviews and localized modes of thinking and acting of all members of society over the whole range of contexts. (p. 12)

While her definition is a little broad—which she did warn us about—such that there is a need to breakdown the broad sense to recognize specific cultures and/or subcultures, their institutions and practices, so on and so forth to assess their educational potential and importance. Remembering what Foucault noted above, culture is not only about cultural products, 100 A. J. GRETEMAN but about inventing ways of relating beyond those ways we enter. Amin Ghaziani (2017) reminds us, in relation to Foucault, “the meanings and material expressions of sexuality emerge in specific historical moments, they reflect cultural viewpoints, and they are socially shared with other people” (p. 11). We cannot speak at the end of the day about a singular queer culture or an ahistorical queer culture, but recognize the shifting meanings as they relate to the cultural milieu. For Ghaziani, “embracing a cultural approach showed us that the assumptions we make about sex can blind us from seeing the beautiful mutability of sexuality” (p. 179). The modern politics around queer sexualities have shown us this mutability and raised complex challenges tarrying between their histories and their futures. Within the twenty-first century, such a task has become even more complicated with the expansion of digital media where archives become more available and new possibilities are posted non-stop. Such complica- tions are also possibilities, as the technologies allow diverse populations to represent themselves. No longer are people limited to network or cable television. Streaming services (e.g., Netflix) along with social media plat- forms and YouTube offer a plethora of opportunities for people to present and represent their views. Yet, without educational opportunities that assist new generations in how to read such lessons—in heterogeneous ways—the diversity of content itself does not lead to “good” education. We may be able to access more and more information while never having the opportunity to digest and put such information in context. “In light of the expandable role of the electronic media in people’s lives and the vast array of anti-social and anti-intellectual cultural liabilities these educational agents pass down,” Martin argued, “it is indeed an enormous leap of faith to suppose that the population is better educated—as opposed to simply receiving more years of schooling—than it used to be” (p. 86). The explosion of media addressing not only forms of queerness, but also all kinds of diversity, is a heartening step in recognizing emerging voices and practices. Yet, if such voices only operate in siloes—segmented by like-mindedness— it may be difficult to imagine such media as contributing to the ongoing democratic project and creation of queer cultures. To be sure, I believe that the ever-expanding use of media by youth and the growing access (in some contexts, of course) to the Internet and related technologies is a net gain in providing the support that is needed. I am heartened by the queer youth voices that are uploading videos, creating blogs, and doing so much more as a way to be visible and assist one another across space and time. However, with such gains there is, as well, GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 101 a net loss in having some common curriculum that helps cultivate a citi- zenry. The individual possibilities of presenting and representing the self are enormous, but the cost may very well be a cultural loss of connection. I am, to be clear, not wanting to propose a common curriculum. I think history shows quite convincingly that such a common curriculum negates the diverse ways in which we come to know and be through school. I also think that there is, in a sense, already a common curriculum when it comes to queerness. What is common—in a broad sense—to the curriculum is an almost universal exclusion of “queer” issues, models, and topics. California is, at the time of this writing, the only state that requires teaching gay history within the high school curriculum, illustrating quite literally the common exclusion of such issues. Queerness—defined broadly—is viewed, drawing on Martin’s language, as a cultural liability to be avoided. There is a cultural miseducation that is rife through public schools and other educational agents. This cultural miseducation positions sexuality as a matter of individual identity, devoid of larger cultural histories, or as a matter of sexual behavior to be taught in sex education. Reducing queerness to individual identity or acts negates a century (or more, depending on your view of history) of queer culture and cultural resistance to the straightening bonds of society. Martin (2002) believed that to increase the nation’s education (not purely the nation’s years in schooling), cultural miseducation needed to be addressed while attending to the cultural assets to be transmitted. “Cultural miseducation,” according to Martin, “occurs when so many cultural liabilities or such devastating ones are passed down that a heavy burden is placed on the next generation; or, alternatively, when invaluable portions of the culture’s wealth are not passed down” (p. 5). For decades, queer scholars have fought to disrupt the lessons of homophobia and transphobia in order to make schools safe for individual students. They have as well sought to include LGBT topics in the curriculum—think here of the add and stir model of multicultural education. Such projects have been important in not only helping queer youth come out in unforeseen ways and at younger ages, but also in helping slowly shift the attitudes about homosexuality. The time has come, I sense, for making visible the cultural wealth of queer communities so that such assets are not lost in the process of normalization. This will ask that we attend to the generations of queers that help build the worlds in which we inhabit while helping leave space open for the generation of new generations of queers. “The materials are at hand,” in Martin’s (2002) view, “to solve what is surely one of the most important problems 102 A. J. GRETEMAN that our culture, indeed any culture, faces—the educational problem of generations” (p. 142). While there has been a problem historically between queer generations—notably, due to the loss of life during the AIDS epidemic—it is necessary for queer generations to come together in transmitting cultural wealth. Schools, to be sure, are a key site to the transmission of culture—both cultural assets and liabilities. However, education occurs in an expanded field, inclusive of other institutions—from hospitals that teach us about health to the courts that teach us about law—as well as various forms of media, be that television and film to the ever-expanding realm of digital media. “Cultural production” is vast and complex in the twenty-first century and in such a state demands constant attention—critical and imaginative—in understanding the forms of education between and within generations that is taking place. Cultural reproduction has historically been a component of education—both argued for and against—as it is done through the work of institutions and their norms (explicit, implicit, and hidden). Reproduction theories, to be sure, have had a significant impact in critically thinking about and through schools as they highlight the mechanisms by which “culture” is reproduced. From the work of Pierre Bourdieu to Michael Apple and Henry Giroux, there is little doubt that one function of education in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries has been some attention to reproducing particular divisions endemic in the larger society, along with the critical attack on such reproductions. Martin, however, shifted from theories of cultural reproduction to the work of cultural wealth with “a desire to solve the problem of generations and thereby reduce, if not actually eliminate, cultural miseducation” (p. 115). A utopic goal perhaps—particularly given Martin later notes that cultural miseducation is a “fact of life” (p. 142)—but a goal nonetheless that seeks to understand the work of educational agents, not exclusive to schools, as one that expands the understanding of education to be one of building upon cultural assets. Such assets are not meant to be siloed based on previous generations’ views, but open quite radically to the polity who, in any given time and place, is at work becoming itself—with similarities and differences to previous generations. Martin’s philosophical investigation of education is less interested in the now-dominant views on accountability that stifle that work of education and more inclined to imagine the ways in which culture—its assets and liabilities—might be the lens through which we contemplate the work of education. It is through education, after all, that we become ourselves—unique with shared characteristics with others. GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 103

Queer Generations For John Dewey (1973)

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything. (p. xix)

In living in the time we live, of course, we come into contact with people who lived in different times or will live to different times. These intergenerational and intragenerational relationships make visible the things that are shared and the differences that emerge as different social, political, economic, and educational realities take place. Ken Plummer (2015) offered up a number of ways to contemplate radical sexual generations “to help advance an understanding of how time … suggests interweaving webs of past, present and futures that play a major role in gay activism” (p. 341). Such work is not straightforward given the strange workings of time and how it comes to operate on us through different levels. To contemplate time generationally cannot avoid contemplating how other ways of contemplating time also connect to or contest the generational claims. “Ultimately,” for Plummer, “we have to ask how different pasts, presents, and futures dwell in the fragile ever-changing moment” (p. 341)? For youth in the process of becoming, older generations are often viewed skeptically. This is similar for older generations who appear to view youth skeptically as well. It is, I imagine, not until we gain more experience with members of different ages that we are able to begin to understand the historic contingency of our lives and the lives of others. Plummer (2015) noted such as well and offered a number of generational cohorts. I draw on these generational cohorts as I find them pedagogically compelling, and not necessarily as the only way to construct a generational understanding of queers. There are fraught issues with thinking generationally since generational thought paints very broad brushstrokes and is conditioned by context, but I also believe such broad brushstrokes illustrate, quite generally, the passing of time and how times have changed. For Plummer, the general generations included:

The Inchoate, Shamed generation, born between 1875 and 1930 and were ‘unformed’ and “invisible without any individual language to speak—let alone a collective one; they had to struggle to invent one.” (pp. 342–343) 104 A. J. GRETEMAN

The Homophile generation, born between 1920 and 1946, helped clarify and enhance the vision of a modern gay movement with “new language, arguments, and communities” that edged their ways “into a limited visibil- ity.” (pp. 343–344) The Gay liberation generation was shaped by the new left politics of the late 1960s and 1970s and helped form “a politics of identity, where identities are used as the basis for political activity.” It is here that we see the emergence of ideas like “gay pride” and “gay power” under the banner of a shared identity. (p. 344) The AIDS generation that “straddle[d] existing generations” while also being “a distinctive one in itself” that was organized around HIV. This generation was one that “dwell[ed] in a culture of death and dying, grief and mourning,” while this generation also “regenerated the by-then fading activisms of the 1970s.” (pp. 344–345) Rights & Queer Activist Generation raised the bar and the stakes between the more assimilationist politics that sought access to rights and the end to discrimination (Rights activism) and a radical politics that sought to “deconstruct any stable sense of gender or sexual category” and “articulated a radical questioning of norms and celebrated whatever was at odds with the normal and the dominant.” (pp. 345–346) The Millennium Generation, which has seen, due to the struggles and battles of previous generations, a significant increase in Western gay visibil- ity, a decrease in homophobia, and more ease in coming out. This generation, as well, came of age on the Internet, including the rise of “apps” and gay going global. (p. 346)

There are further distinctions that could be made within the broad generational brushstrokes that address more significant moments within such a broad period of time. For instance, Eric Rofes, broke down the AIDS generation into distinct moments within the epidemic, the final moment being what he called the “post-AIDS” moment which coincides, as well, with the emergence of the millennium generation. Within generations, there are distinctions to be made about how one encounters and experiences the world. Generations experience particular forms of political organizing (from homophile groups to gay liberation to AIDS activism), but as Chauncey (1994) reminded us “the history of gay resistance must be understood to extend beyond the formal political organizing to include the strategies of everyday resistance that men devised in order to claim space for themselves in the midst of a hostile society” (p. 8). He wrote of gays, but the idea extends to other marginalized populations and their forms of resistance. The point, I hope is clear, is to recognize the role of GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 105 generations in ways that do justice to the realities they faced and the practices they invented to face those realities. I am myself part of the millennium generation. Part of the struggle, I have found myself, is the very simple educational task of coming to understand such histories in the midst of my present while teaching “the future.” I find generations, like Plummer, compelling in large part because I have spent much of the last decade volunteering with senior LGBT citizens in Chicago’s queer community. And through such relationships have gained insights into these different generations, while also recognizing the similarities between them. If, as Foucault (1997) argued, “friendship is a way of life” for homosexuals, it has been friendships across generations that make manifest the work of becoming queer across and within generations. I am, as such, concerned with the possible de-politicization of contemporary queer generations. Such concern is not, to be clear, something to blame new generations for—new generations can only generate themselves amidst the resources, tools, and ideas they access. Rather, I sense the blame lies, in part, with the lack of institutional engagement with the assets of queer cultures—to return to Martin’s “cultural-wealth” perspective. Or to draw on Sarah Schulman’s (2012) questions about young queers, “Do they know their own history? Do they wonder why there are so few sixty-year old version of themselves passing by on the sidewalk?” (p. 63). Without relationships with queer histories and those whose bodies show the signs of that history, it seems to make sense that new queer generations would take up and take on social norms. This should be obvious. While gains have been made for the protection of queer youth—at least according to policy, as evidence from practice is still not great—there persists a refusal to imagine guidelines that help queerness come into presence. Sedgwick (1991) argued, amidst the AIDS epidemic, that the general cultural wish was “the wish that gay people not exist” (p. 23, italics in original). “There are many people in the worlds we inhabit,” she conceded, “who have a strong interest in the dignified treatment of gay people who may happen already to exist” (p. 23). This is well and good—seen over the last few decades since Sedgwick’s writing—as schools came to protect the lives of those students who “came out” in some way. However, “the number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay people is treated as a precious desideratum, a needed condition of life is small” (p. 23). “Advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students … is less ubiquitous that you might think” Sedgwick argued (p. 23). Continuing, “on the other hand, the 106 A. J. GRETEMAN scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large” (p. 23). Generations of queer people have emerged, conditioned by different times and practices, policies and economies. Yet, what remains largely unchanged is the lack of institutions that help generate queerness. There is wealth within queer cultures, but such wealth is not transmitted naturally. As Halperin (2012) argued, “gay culture doesn’t just happen. It has to be made to happen. It requires material support, organization, and a queer public sphere” (p. 26). The lack of such things remains a challenge. The above insights from Sedgwick and Halperin have, more than many things I have read consistently, guided my own thinking. I am “post-gay” and “post-AIDS,” a member of the Millennial generation that has been shaped by, drawing on Plummer, “postmodernism, neoliberalism, global- ization, and digitalization.” I have benefitted from the work of previous generations while simultaneously having to work quite hard to learn about and through those very generations. I can, in part, avoid the “political” and view myself as merely a “private” consumer/citizen with rights quite similar to my non-queer peers. This is well and good. What concerns me is the cultural loss that comes with such gains. How does queer persist as a project within society writ large? While some forms of queer people have become acceptable and gained a “place at the table,” we still lack institutional imperatives that draw upon and transmit queer cultural assets. Such assets, often positioned as outdated or of their time, particularly by new generations, fail to recognize the lessons such assets can offer in pushing for the continued relevance and possibilities of queerness: not queerness as a commodified identity, but queerness as a central component to the work of being a member of the polity. Queers have, unfortunately, historically been viewed as a threat to culture and to the polity. Think here of the persecution of gay men and women during McCarthyism, where gay governmental employees (or those thought to be) were expunged from the government. Or think of the continued realities that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are still not fully ensconced as citizens—provided the rights and opportunities guaranteed by the US Constitution. Queers, as well, have been seen as corrupting youth and of being a general threat to the cultural transmission of straight culture. We need to look no further than the campaigns of Anita Bryant and propositions in the 1970s to ban gay people from teaching. Queers and their cultures have spent much of the late twentieth century fighting to be seen as something other than pathological perverts out GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 107 to get your kids and destroy society. Strategies used to counter such mes- sages have been diverse—some leading to gains while at other times contributing to the persistence of particular ideologies of progress. With education, there has been concerted effort to document these historical realities in order to articulate the role of queers and their exclusions in the work of democracy (Blount, 2005; Graves, 2009; Lugg, 2016). Such work is central to developing a complex view of the role of sexuality and related cultures, however, it does not address the institutional needs for cultivating queerness. For some, the continued absence of institutions to generate or help your kids turn out gay might not seem like a problem. The lack of institutional transmission, for Andrew Sullivan (2005), should be viewed positively, as it highlights a decline in the separation of gays and straights. For him, children from various ethnic backgrounds, “come into society both uplifted and burdened by the weight of their communal past—a weight that is transferred within families or communities or cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide a context for self-understanding, even in rebellion” (para. 18). In distinction, Sullivan continued, “Gay children have no such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years, their self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their gay elders” (para. 18). It is this difference between gay generations that he claimed makes it difficult to distinguish between gay and straight children who— using Sullivan’s logic—encounter the same general institutions and curricula. Queers, in their very formation, are straightened out—made indistinguishable from their straight counterparts. I am not convinced, however, that younger “queer” generations, are better off without the burden of institutions that uplift and burden them with histories intimately connected to their becoming. Rather, it is the lack of such institutions that contribute to the burdens that queer youth face as they are unable to encounter queer practices, adults, and ideas except, quite often, through the digital realm. I suspect that much of what I have written above is not new. It borders on paranoia—suspicious about the enemies of queerness that seek to usher it in while stripping it of its differences. I worry that while there will continue to be trouble with normal (Warner, 1999), that society has sided with Andrew Sullivan’s (1995) claims that we are “virtually normal.” The governing rationalities of neoliberalism that have defined, in part, the Millennial generation have lulled us (myself included) into being happy consumers—proud to be able to buy gay-related and themed merchandise, 108 A. J. GRETEMAN see ourselves represented by the corporate media, and thus contributing to the national demand to shop more. Andrew Sullivan (2005) comes to play here again given his claims about the end of gay culture. These claims, as well, are rooted in a generational understanding. “So,” Sullivan wrote, “as one generation literally disappeared and one generation found itself shocked to still be alive, a far larger and more empowered one emerged on the scene” (para. 16). This was the Millennial generation, a generation that “knew very little about the gay culture of the ’70s, and its members were oblivious to the psychically formative experience of plague that had shaped their elders” (para. 16). The Millennial generation, so it would seem, according to Sullivan, may be the end of gay culture given the conditions for its existence. I am not immediately saddened by this claim, in part because the end of gay culture, as Sullivan argues, is more the end of a common gay identity. Instead, what the Millennial generation might more fruitfully illustrate is the very success—precarious perhaps—of generations of activism tied to sexuality. Yes, there has been an increase in acceptance and tolerance along with a decline in homophobia (a decline, not an elimination, of course). And in this, there has been a flowering of queer subcultures that are defined in diverse ways. To quote Sullivan 2005( ) at length:

Gay culture was once primarily about sex, because that was how heterosexuals defined gay lives. But gay life, like straight life, is now and always has been about happiness as well as pain; it is about triumph as well as tragedy; it is about love and family as well as sex. It took generations to find the self- worth to move toward achieving this reality in all its forms—and an epide- miological catastrophe to accelerate it. If the end of gay culture means that we have a new complexity to grapple with and a new, less cramped humanity to embrace, then regret seems almost a rebuke to those countless generations who could only dream of the liberty so many now enjoy. (para. 31)

Paranoid readings of Sullivan may very well disregard his claims—his conservative credentials and arguments have caused me, myself, to avoid reading him. However, I sense there are some queer lessons clothed in conservative garb here, for the end of gay culture is not the end of queer culture. Rather, it is perhaps with the loss of gay culture that queer culture starts. The start of queer culture does not dismiss the work of gay culture; rather, it extends the possibilities of becoming in the world to new and evolving ways people inhabit their bodies and pleasures. “Today,” as Ghaziani (2017) noted, “we live in a heteroflexible world, a place defined GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 109 by bromances and bro-jobs, heterodykes on a lesbian continuum, and dudes who have sex with dudes and sexually fluid women” (p. 179). The possibilities for pleasure with our bodies has evolved. This is to be celebrated while not losing sight of the cultural realities that helped get us there that we would do well to remember.

Conclusion There have been changes in societal permissiveness around sex and a growing acceptance of diverse sexualities. This is particularly visible when we look across the cultural landscape—film, television, streaming services, podcasts—and see or hear about a range of sexualities and discussions about sex. Younger generations are generating new content and new ways of becoming bodies that have pleasure. Such information is—while not always sanctioned by “schools”—out there and able to educate us about sex. Yet, there are still battles to be fought that address the persistent “war on sex” that generates new outlaw practices and sensibilities. The permissiveness and acceptance that we see is not fully inclusive, as inclusion is always in question. There are, and I hope there will continue to be, individuals who find themselves drawn to—despite the miseducation of homophobia and its trappings—queer ideas, practices, and histories. For Plummer (2015):

In thinking about the future of activisms, it helps to think of generations past, present and future—to think globally, act locally, and remain critical. We need to think of activist radical sexual generations moving historically and chronologically as well as synchronically and simultaneously.

The work here is critical—both in revealing the new enemies at the gates of queerness while recognizing unique potentials that emerge in our changing times. We cannot fully comprehend these changes without learning about and from other generations—both those before and after us. Despite the persistent fears of intergenerational relationships, it becomes more and more vital to create opportunities for generations to speak to one another. In the summer of 2017, such a conversation was staged between a 13-year- old gay boy, Louis, and a 78-year-old gay man, Percy as part of London Pride. Titled “Young, Gay, and Illegal: Then and Now,” the video begins by noting it has been 50 years since the UK decriminalized homosexuality. This means, 110 A. J. GRETEMAN as is discussed by Louis and Percy, that Percy came of age, came out, and met his partner (who is featured briefly) when being gay was still illegal. To become gay was to become criminal. The conversation is darling and daring in many regards for its simplicity. Two gay individuals sitting across from one another— a gulf of 65 years between them—that, in conversing, reveal similarities in the work of becoming gay, including the confusion of understanding one’s gaze oriented toward other boys, the search for language, and the act of coming out. But it also revealed the differences, particularly the work of coming and being out when homosexuality was illegal and when it was not. For Percy, it was the gay bar that centered largely in his story as the space where he met other people like him, while for Louis it is the family that looms large in that process. For Percy, “I think you are so lucky, the world is changing and you can just be yourself.” There is truth to this given that the world has changed and queer youth can be themselves in ways unimagined before. However, I suspect that in order to be one’s self one does, in fact, need models and lessons in what types of selves one can become. Following Foucault (1997),

It is therefore necessary to struggle to establish homosexual lifestyles, existential choices in which sexual relations with people of the same sex will be important. It’s not enough as part of a more general way of life, or in addition to it, to be permitted to make love with someone of the same sex … It’s not only a matter of integrating this strange little practice of making love with someone of the same sex into pre-existing cultures: it’s a matter of constructing cultural forms. (p. 157)

Such models and lessons do not come out of nowhere. They are products of their own time and place. When Foucault noted the above, such ways of life were only being constructed. Decades later, we have even more histories to attend to, although there are still significant challenges to such work. After all, cultural forms are generated in and through the transmission of cultural assets and liabilities across generations; such work has yet to be adequately taken up. Education—in schools and beyond schools—is central to the generation of new generations in that it opens up ways of making choices—sexual choices. Education has the potential to reproduce given rationalities (currently, broadly defined under the banner of neoliberalism) or take a critical look at itself to see how to generate alternatives. These alternatives are not, by and large, radically new but rooted in our own pasts—generated out of the labor of our predecessors (Meiners & Quinn, 2012). I suspect such work has a long road to go and hills to climb. The pessimist in me, at GENERATING QUEER GENERATIONS 111 times, becomes rather paralyzed at the challenges that democratic education faces, in part because I recognize that my own education was always already rooted in neoliberal rationalities. However, the pragmatist in me recognizes the need to persist and continue to look forward, pondering upon the conceivable consequences of doing this (or other) work. To give in and give up alters nothing, but to throw in for the side of democracy and queerness while not revolutionary may tip someone’s scale and assist in the generation of new generations of students that become—in ways unimaginable—queer in my view. To not take up the challenge—to seriously contemplate the need for institutions that sustain the cultural assets of diverse cultures—continues the forms of cultural miseducation that have plagued American education (public and private). “Cultural miseducation,” as Martin (2002) argued, “occurs when a heavy burden is placed on the next generation; or, alternatively, when invaluable portions of the culture’s wealth are not passed down” (p. 5). There is immeasurable wealth in the diverse queer cultures that have been generated over the last century and a half. This wealth has only recently begun to be fully documented, archived, and taught. In the next chapter, I turn to the necessary work documenting the AIDS generation as it became central to the emergence of “queer” and “queerness,” laying claim that “we’re here, we’re queer.” The jury is out if we are used to it or if we have been used by it: made into commodities. However, I believe it is the AIDS generation—a generation that was broadly traumatized and lost—that had previously imagined liberation. AIDS, in being front-page news exposing both governmental neglect and queer care networks, generated queer possibilities and gave us the start to queer institutional life.

Notes 1. “The Iowa Wholesale Beer Distributors Association” as reported by Mike Kilen (18 July 2016) in the Des Moines Register, “shipped nearly 16 million gallons of Busch Light to Iowa in 2015, which made it the top beer for the fourth straight year” (para. 2). 2. The LGBT acronym has a history of expansion. There is no way a text can keep up with the expansion. For the sake of my argument, I use LGBT as a way to think about how LGBT identities have become recognized and as such, despite the precarity of recognition, require the persistence of queer work. A more expansive acronym, such as LGBTQQIAA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Ally), exists but is not taken up here. 112 A. J. GRETEMAN

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Schulman, S. (2012). The gentrification of the mind: Witness to a lost generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sedgwick, E. (1991). How to bring your kids up gay. Social Text, 29, 18–27. Signorile, M. (2016). It’s not over: Getting beyond tolerance, defeating homophobia, and winning true equality. New York, NY: Mariner. Sullivan, A. (1995). Virtually normal: An argument about homosexuality. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Sullivan, A. (2005, October 23). The end of gay culture: Assimilation and its meaning. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/61118/the-end-gay-culture Thomas, J. (2011, July 1). The gay bar: Can it survive? Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_gay_bar/2011/06/the_gay_bar. html Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. CHAPTER 5

Queer Pedagogy and Documenting AIDS

Nancy. It is not only the name of a former first lady, married to the president who refused to talk about AIDS until well into the epidemic—seven years to be exact. It is also an insult, lobbed at men engaging in feminine activities. “You Nancy.” However, in 2017, WNYC studios launched Nancy, a podcast that addressed and explored an array of LGBTQ issues— from gay Republicans to the politics of haircuts, to the controversies about whether Professor Albus Dumbledore, of Harry Potter fame, is or is not gay (Collette, 2017). I began listening to Nancy when it was launched in April of 2017, curious about what the podcast would take up in thinking about the myriad of LGBTQ topics that pervade twenty-first-century life. And listen I did, embracing the podcast as a technology of cultural transmission that provided lessons for listeners to learn about facets of queer life. Nancy is an educational agent, streamed through earbuds as one navi- gates the world in one’s own time and place. One listens about queer life while wandering about the straight world. As I wandered and meandered through the city, I was struck by one particular episode, an episode that stopped me in my tracks and, embar- rassingly, caused tears to fall—in public no less. It was an episode that touched on the issues that this book in general explores—the transmission and generation of queer culture. Episode 6, “Here’s What It’s Like,” staged a conversation between two gay men of different generations— David who has been HIV positive for 30 years and Dominque who tested

© The Author(s) 2018 115 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_5 116 A. J. GRETEMAN positive in 2008 (Collette, 2017). David is “old” and Dominque is “young.” David is white. Dominque is a queer of color. David works for WNYC. Dominque is a member of the New York City ball scene, the mother of New York City’s chapter of the House of St. Laurent. Their differences are numerous, but they share an HIV-positive status. However, even that status is signified and experienced in different ways, as the ensu- ing conversation illustrated. “Here’s what it’s like” explored the similarities and differences to test positive and live with HIV across generations. The conversation came about because David, a staff member at WNYC Studios, was curious about the experiences of younger generations and their experiences with HIV/AIDS. David, as he described himself, was not an activist nor did he “act up”—a reference to the political activism of ACT-UP seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s in New York City and elsewhere. He was instead an ordinary gay man of the time, more interested in dancing and maintaining the life New York City had offered before the plague. He regaled Tobin Lowe, one of the podcast’s co-hosts, with memories of his early years in New York City where sex was everywhere one went. Yet, that sexual playground was dying by the mid-1980s. Walking down the street, one saw the waning bodies of previously vibrant gay men. The plague hit and hit hard and would define not only David’s life but the lives of many queer people who survived. This generation would be the AIDS generation—remembering a time before the plague and surviving into changing realities around AIDS. Decades later, David found himself pondering what had become of AIDS, both curious and concerned. As he stated at the outset of the podcast:

I’ve been HIV positive 30 years but I have no idea now what a young person testing positive or trying not to test positive goes through. All I know is the AIDS crisis. We are not in the middle of a crisis anymore … but I don’t know what they think. I was really curious, did we go through all this and nobody knows anything? And how do we pass that [knowledge of the crisis] on. Did we … Did we go through a plague for nothing? Did we learn anything?

It was with those questions, for David, that “made me think about it … Because I realized this is not an assumed thing. Knowledge of the AIDS crisis is not an assumed thing [straight peers and coworkers] know about.” David goes on to recognize that his reference points are way off regarding AIDS and related issues: “They are my reference points” after all. And, as QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 117 such, he wanted to talk about the experiences that he had and hear about the experiences of someone younger. This in order to learn from the younger generation about what he should know about AIDS “now” while also transmitting knowledge about the plague years “then.” His curiosity was less to lecture younger generations about those years. Generations, as discussed in the previous chapter, are broad and problematic. They also overlap and it is that overlap that is necessary to engage. And for David, he sought to engage such overlap through conversation. Conversation is a central pedagogical mechanism, particularly, I believe, within queer communities who converse in bars and bathhouses, bookstores and more, as they come into the presence of other queers. Podcasts are themselves recorded conversations staged between individuals with varied backgrounds around a particular topic—be that politics, art, or AIDS. As Jane Roland Martin (1985) noted in her landmark feminist text Reclaiming the Conversation:

A good conversation is neither a fight nor a contest. Circular in form, coop- erative in manner, and constructive in intent, it is an interchange of ideas by those who see themselves not as adversaries but as human beings come together to talk and listen and learn from one another. (p. 10)

Conversation is as well rooted in the potential to convert those involved. Conversation transmits ideas and, in such transmission, clears the space for learning to take place. What and how that learning takes place is not something one can determine ahead of time. Conversations can, particularly in educational settings, be viewed skeptically. Forced conversation seems to undo the potential for surprise as students seek to “please” teachers and teachers seek to steer conversations in desired directions. Alternatively, conversations can be viewed as less efficient than the privileged “lecture,” where information is transmitted from the expert to the novice, with mini- mal interruption. For David and Dominque, however, the educational setting of a podcast was informal. It’s a podcast, not a classroom, and they are each other’s guides. Neither participant had anything to lose, but a lot to gain in exchanging their ideas and experiences with being HIV positive. The conversation that ensued ranged from Dominque’s experience of testing positive in 2008 to David’s experiences losing his partner in 1988. There was a familiarity and a kindness in both men’s voices as they talked through their vulnerabilities—their successes and failures in living. Across 118 A. J. GRETEMAN

generations, the two gay men conversed about their lives, revealing that “what it’s like” is both dramatically similar and drastically different. For instance, a positive diagnosis, as Dominque revealed, still carries with it significant stigma, a surprise for David who erroneously thought the stigma attached to HIV had subsided in the decades since his own diagnosis. Similarly, the experience of loss, so often central to narratives of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, is similar for both men. The consequences of such a diagnosis are still dire, particularly for young queer men of color. HIV/AIDS may no longer be viewed as a crisis in the mainstream, but it is still, as Dominque made clear, an epidemic and one that takes the lives of innumerous queer youth of color. The certainty of death that defined the first decade of the epidemic may have been mitigated by the development of new pharmaceuticals—allowing AIDS to be viewed as a “manageable chronic illness” for those with access to such pharmaceuticals. However, as Linda Villarosa of The New York Times reported, there continues to be a hidden HIV epidemic in the United States for “America’s black gay and bisexual men.” This hidden epidemic, according to Villarosa is:

One of America’s most troubling public-health crises. Thanks to the success of lifesaving antiretroviral medication pioneered 20 years ago and years of research and education, most H.I.V.-positive people today can lead long, healthy lives. In cities like New York and San Francisco, once ground zero for the AIDS epidemic, the virus is no longer a death sentence, and rates of infection have plummeted. In fact, over the past several years, public-health officials have championed the idea that an AIDS-free generation could be within reach—even without a vaccine. But in certain pockets of the country, unknown to most Americans, H.I.V. is still ravaging communities at stag- gering rates.

There is, I want to emphasize at the outset of this chapter, no singular story of HIV/AIDS in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, as David Caron (2016) noted, “it has always been the case that the contours of the AIDS epidemic have duplicated those of social inequality and exclusion” (p. 23). Despite decades of activism, the rights and recognitions of marginalized and oppressed groups persist. So, even as pharmaceutical advancements extend the lives of some—a topic for the next chapter— there is a necessary task of holding in mind the intersections of social QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 119 inequalities and exclusions when contemplating the present, past, and future of HIV. The conversation between David and Dominque touched on these continued inequalities on the personal level as well as how “being gay” has been impacted by the presence of AIDS. In a revealing moment, Dominque expressed a concern he had when coming out as positive, a concern that becoming positive confirmed what his generation had been tragically taught about becoming gay. “So I know when I came out, it’s like…” Dominque noted, “You’re gay? You’re going to be gay? You’re going to get sick. Right? That’s what it was.” Coming out for Dominque, a Millennial queer, was wrapped up with the aftermath of the plague years, where coming out as gay became tied to HIV/AIDS. Coming out “post- AIDS” was less tied to the experiences of being pathologized for being homosexual or the discourses of gay liberation that defined previous generations; rather, coming out became wrapped up with HIV/AIDS discourses. This mirrored my own experiences of coming out. I was never told I would get AIDS explicitly—except when I encountered protestors at innumerous gay events—but concerned family members made clear that I needed to “be safe”—code that my embraced gay identity put me at risk in ways different from my straight siblings and peers. For David, this connection between coming out and death was a confusing moment and one he asked for clarity, given that “From my age and for being positive for so long, we didn’t know we were going to get AIDS.” Coming out for David was not tied to AIDS, rather, it was rooted in the rhetoric of liberation, refuting the pathologization that came before. Between David and Dominque, we see that coming out has been experienced in different ways as such an act relates to the context in which it happens. This should be, I sense, obvious. Nevertheless, the obvious can be important to point out since it allows one to dwell on the significance of the obvious. The relationship of queers to AIDS is an evolving relationship, and the response to coming out reveals in telling ways how that relationship has changed. “And nowadays, it’s not even that,” Dominque noted, about coming out being tied to getting AIDS. “You’re going to be gay? You don’t have to get sick if you take this blue pill. Take PrEP and you don’t ever have to worry about getting sick.” The history of AIDS and the evolving relationship to it shows that, across generations coming out, becoming queer is connected to the virus in dramatically different ways. What it’s like for one is not what it’s like for another, despite the common denominator being a virus. 120 A. J. GRETEMAN

I begin with this conversation to draw out several issues that frame this and the next chapter. In David’s curiosity, he revealed a concern about the transmission of the cultural knowledge of AIDS. “Did we go through all this and nobody knows anything?” he asked. “And how do we pass that [knowledge of the crisis] on. Did we … Did we go through a plague for nothing? Did we learn anything?” These are tricky questions and questions that inform this chapter as I read the emerging work that historicizes the AIDS epidemic in an attempt to remember and memorialize a lost generation. What are these texts teaching new generations of queers about the AIDS crisis and are such lessons also covering up the contemporary realities that Dominque’s contributions to the conversation revealed? In the next chapter, I will turn to the contemporary landscape of AIDS, grappling with both the discourses of barebacking that were fashionable during the first decade of the twenty-first century and the emerging discourses on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP). History is not repeating itself, particularly given the advancements in pharmaceutical treatments. However, there may be rhymes that we can hear in listening to history, to draw on Mark Twain’s idea. What are the rhymes that we hear as we investigate the emerging attention to AIDS as a moment in history that connects with and disconnects from other realities within the diverse queer experience? The twentieth century, after all, gave rise to varied movements for sexualities and genders—from the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society (the Homophile Movement) to the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activist Alliance (the Gay Liberation Movement) to Queer Nation and ACT-UP (the Queer Movement) (see Brown, 2015; Jackson, 2015; Weeks, 2015). From the invention of homosexuality at the close of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century, queer people came more and more into presence, such that by the late 1980s, “we” could claim that “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” And get used to it “we” have, as seen in the innumerous polls showing growing acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. “We” do not, to be sure, have full acceptance. Upon the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States in 2016, there are growing concerns that the gains made, particularly during the presidency of Barack Obama, are threatened. Trump’s administration has by the time of this writing rescinded federal guidance around transgender students, potentially banned transgender individuals from serving in the military, and made moves supporting religious freedom. “The truth is,” following Signorile (2016), “that we have not achieved victory; we are not even close” (p. 19). QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 121

“And,” he continued, “our history tells us that LGBT people have always needed to be confrontational in order to make great strides forward” (p. 19). It was with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s that contemporary scholars have turned to illustrate the history of such confronta- tions, and I turn to these contemporary histories to contemplate what such knowledge does for emerging lessons in queerness. Such documentaries bring to light the words of Vito Russo, who in his famed speech “Why We Fight” concluded:

Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes—when that day has come and gone, there’ll be people alive on this earth—gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.

The documentaries I take up later show these brave groups of people and those brave groups of people speak to and educate those people on earth for whom the terrible disease is not part of their lived memory.

Histories and Memories of AIDS “HIV and AIDS are treated like yesterday’s drama in film and on television” Signorile argued (2016, p. 99). This, despite the reality that HIV continues to impact, “transgender women and gay men, communities in which infection rates hold steady at roughly the same rate per year as they were in the ’90s” (p. 99). Similarly, for David Caron (2016), AIDS has entered the realm of history. From HBO’s remake of Larry Kramer’s famed The Normal Heart in 2011 and the revival on Broadway in 2016 of Lapine and Finn’s Falsettos, an early Tony award winning play addressing AIDS, a renewed attention to the crisis years has emerged. Additionally, in the 2010s, we have seen the publication of new biographies of important AIDS activists and artists—from Martin Duberman’s (2014) biography of Michael Callen and Essex Hemphill, Hold Tight Gently, and Cynthia Carr’s (2013) Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Additionally, there have been emerging memoirs from that same generation of individuals who survived—from Sean Strub’s memoir Body Counts 122 A. J. GRETEMAN

(2014) to Francisco Ibàñez-Carrasco’s (2014) Giving it Raw: Nearly 30 Years with AIDS. This is important as it provides materials to help in developing understandings of the ways HIV/AIDS impacted and continues to impact the social, political, art, and educational realities of the world. There is a surge in documenting HIV/AIDS and helping to make AIDS history—both something of the past and part of the ongoing present. “Anyone who teaches HIV and AIDS at least aspects of the epidemic other than strictly medical,” for Caron (2016), however, “has had to confront his or her students’ ignorance of what happened in earlier years other than the fact that a lot of people died and that many had to face some kind of bigotry” (p. 15). Of course, these new sources of information help confront students’ ignorance, revealing to many of them—particularly those born in the 1990s and coming of age in the 2010s—a time in American history, not yet taught in schools, where the government and society writ large allowed for massive death. This is, to be sure, not a history taught nor one even memorialized extensively within the United States. It was not until 2017 that New York City unveiled an AIDS memorial that sits adjacent to St. Vincent’s Hospital—NYCs first AIDS ward. And even that memorial has faced a variety of criticisms for covering over the difficult histories that AIDS brings to the table. The histories that are emerging that address and create archives of this time-period, however, illustrate not only the devastation of HIV/AIDS on various queer communities, but also the skills at surviving and thriving in the midst of such realities. They offer lessons of care, of rage, of collective action. Yet, as Caron (2016) also illustrated, “the historical patina these events have acquired may obscure the ongoing realities of the epidemic” (pp. 16–17). As HIV/AIDS becomes history, new educational possibilities emerge in both teaching about the American experience of AIDS—a reframing of AIDS—and the political potential of queer activism as seen historically. This is necessary. As Deborah Gould (2009) argued in her history of ACT-UP and AIDS activism:

What we lose if the history of AIDS activism in this country is forgotten is the memory of a government of a wealthy, ostensibly democratic country unmoved by the deaths of hundreds, thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of its own inhabitants, largely because the overwhelming majority of them were gay and bisexual men, and the others were seen as similarly QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 123

expendable: drug users as well as poor men and women, a disproportionate number of whom were black and Latino/a. (p. 45)

To lose such a history risks too much in covering over the queer strategies of resistance and the emotional life world of demanding recognition. I turn, as such, later in this chapter, to the lessons being taught through three documentary films—We Were Here (2011), United in Anger: A History of ACT-UP (2012), and How to Survive a Plague (2012). These films offer visual texts that return viewers to the scenes of the epidemic, now often forgotten in the forward movement of the ongoing present. They let those who survived speak about a time gone by while also raising the voices of the dead to speak to and for the living. However, before engaging these films, I must first turn to the issues that emerge when contemplating the work of memory and pedagogy with regards to AIDS. Roger Platizky (1998), in an early engagement with the ways novelists were addressing HIV/AIDS, noted:

While future works about AIDS will continue to witness, warn, and com- memorate those who have already been impacted by the disease, the shapes those works take, the voices invoked, and the details emphasized are likely to be richly variable. Among the many different groups now affected world- wide by this disease—people of different races, genders, ages, classes, religions, and ideologies—the narrative responses to AIDS in future years will be as mutable as the virus—and the treatments used to combat it—may become. (p. 343)

Two decades later, those then-imagined “future works” that Platisky wrote about can now be engaged to see if and how the mutability of AIDS has been shown to both continue systemic violence against marginalized populations while opening avenues for seeing AIDS as a catalyst for forms of care and kinship. However, with this we also see a certain shift to make AIDS history, straightening the horrors of the epidemic out and showing that the straight world eventually came around. Making AIDS history has consequences. Making AIDS history allows for a certain transmission of queer histories, allowing new generations to see what work queers did to survive. It also allows for those histories to become part of the past with no relevance to the continued challenges that AIDS presents diverse populations now. 124 A. J. GRETEMAN

For Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (2011), “what is certain … is that the sacrifice of spaces and rituals of memory to the lure of amnesia has weakened gay communities, both our connections to one another and our ability to imagine, collectively and creatively, alternative social presents and futures for ourselves” (p. 1). Looking through the recent queer past, they do not want to give up the possibilities found in memories and their role in the continuance of queers. They note, in fact, “Queer theory has frequently promised more—has promised, in fact, the capacity to make new worlds. That promise is deeply rooted in our cultural past, and if we want queer theory to make good on its promise, we best not forget it” (p. 161). Memory becomes central to their explorations— popular memory, counter-memory, official memory—to show the ways in which we might challenge “official memories” that “paradoxically … in the form of films, education, museum exhibitions, holidays, news report- ing, and political speeches—constitute a potent form of forgetting even as they purport to traffic in memory” (p. 2). To forget complicates the ability to forge new worlds. Queer memory then—erased by official memories that sought to “clean” up and “straighten out” the unruly queer bodies— must be reexcavated, remembered to imagine, and create new possibilities of relating to the self, the other, the past, the present, and the future. This demands attention to these histories and memories; a demand that is challenging given the lack of institutional support in teaching queer histories. In the lure of amnesia, Reed and Castiglia discussed, it is easier to forget than to allow memory to serve. In these days of neoliberalism and neoconservative gay politics seen in the form of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and GLAAD, sexuality has become de-sexed and straightened out. These general shifts have created what Lisa Duggan (2002) termed “the new homonormativity.” While coined in 2002, this “new homonormativity” is no longer new, but a part of the intellectual and political landscape. It defines, in many ways, the worldviews that emerging queers live and breathe. For Duggan (2002) this “new homonormativity … does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consump- tion” (p. 50). Sexuality, in this regard, can be seen as “not mattering”—a sentiment expressed often by youth and heralded as “progress.” Yet, as Castiglia and Reed (2011) argued, “sexuality should matter: it should be the thrilling, dangerous, unpredictable, imaginative force it once was and QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 125 to no doubt still is, although more often quietly and out of public sight. If sexuality does not matter anymore, it is not because we won but because of how much we have lost” (p. 9). When sexuality becomes normalized and depoliticized, what is lost as are the histories and memories of survival and thrival that gave rise to the diverse ways in which people could become queer. The call to remember the queer past is not a return to essentialized identities and the regime where sexuality speaks the truth of the subject. Rather, it is a call to embrace the reparative impulses of history and memory that, following Eve Sedgwick (2004), seeks to “assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (p. 149). The import of history and memory—particularly emerging from the queer past—is one that seeks to “repair the present rather than faithfully restore the past” (Castiglia & Reed, 2011, p. 13). The memories and histories engaged here reframe loss, whereby “loss is not synonymous with silence or absence or defeat; loss can be a starting point, an invoca- tion, an inspiration, a rallying cry” (p. 26). History and memory, the histories and memories of things like ACT-UP, AIDS memorials, and in queer cinema and art, serve as a means by which to utilize the past to imagine the present differently; to care for the self in new and inventive ways establishing new social and relational options in a world bereft of multitudinous ways of living. To be pained by the past while simultaneously intrigued by the skills previous generations brought to the table to survive. In line with Castiglia and Reed (2011), this chapter forgoes the impulse to sanitize the queer past to become normal. Rather than this “degenera- tional remembering”—a form of remembering that “cleaned” things up— queer memories “generate and justify a different sexual consciousness, which in turn shapes divergent theories of the relationships sexual objects … have to one another and to ideas about social protest and cultural organization” (p. 40). These memories—counter to official memories—are excessive, they exceed what is “proper.” The countermemories are tied up with loss, as already noted, and loss here becomes a call for “nonnormative sociality, to community formation, to ideality politics” (p. 203). Ideality politics, in opposition to identity politics, become less concerned with “identity” and more with the “ideals” that might be imagined when looking backwards to the past to re-create and re-generate pleasures in the present. There are queer ideals rooted in the experiences queers have in 126 A. J. GRETEMAN and with the worlds they inhabit. These worlds are violent, but also joyous. They are dull and exciting.

Moments of AIDS As discussed above, the 2010s have given rise to a certain historicizing of AIDS. New films and books have emerged, alongside revivals of plays from the epidemic that return viewers to the sites of previous struggle. Despite the ongoing epidemic, these works touch upon times gone by, that, as Caron (2016) expressed above, are no longer known by younger generations. These works are works of memory and memorial, but also threaten to cover up the complexities those years presented, as well as what the contemporary world presents. Such a threat, I sense, is tied to our own reading practices. Do these works merely pull at our heartstrings or do they push us to recognize the ties that bind queer generations to one another are still necessary today? The AIDS epidemic helped bring to life queer activism and theories that fought to keep alive queer cultures and populations that were, due to AIDS, facing a rather certain death. However, for Caron (2016), “the mainstreaming of rights-oriented politics has increasingly relegated HIV to the sidelines” (p. 23). On those sidelines, HIV—as a discourse, lived experience, viral material, politics, and health matter—looks out at the changing world it had once been the center of confused at its displacement from the center of queer politics and theories. The United States had, by the late 1990s, according to Eric Rofes (2007), entered a new moment: the Post-AIDS moment.1 The Post-AIDS moment was the final moment in Rofes’s periodization: a moment he saw as occurring between 1998 and 2003, that represented:

when mainstream gay communities backed away from an energetic and narrow focus on HIV and began to integrate AIDS as an ongoing and unremarkable feature of community life. HIV became understood as ‘chronic’ and ‘manageable’ among privileged gay men, as it continued to decimate communities of gay men with limited access to treatments (men of color, drug-addicted men, men living in poverty). During this time, the AIDS response infrastructure experienced shifts in funding and status, and many grassroots AIDS organizations restructured, merged, or closed their doors. The advent of the Bush administration brought censorship and narrowing of HIV prevention campaigns and sexual research projects. This was a period QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 127

for many gay men of moving beyond AIDS and charting new life courses. (p. 33)

For Rofes, the Post-AIDS moment was not a moment where we had gotten past AIDS and more a moment where AIDS became “unremarkable” in the mainstream gay community. The deaths tied to AIDS were no longer visible, pushed to the sidelines, made unremarkable. Decades into the epidemic with various successes in access to medication and lifesaving measures, AIDS was no longer as visible or vociferously debated. It was no longer front-page news or central to the work of LGBT-related organizations despite, as noted above, continuing to be a public health crisis for various queer populations—transwomen, the poor, gay men, and youth of color.

Queer Pedagogy: An Overview Queer pedagogy came about during the AIDS epidemic. Queer pedagogy—formulated in a variety of ways, as I will discuss shortly—was rooted in the uncertainties that AIDS raised regarding knowledge (Britzman, 1998). Jonathan Silin (1995), an early progenitor of queer thought in education, argued:

Although HIV/AIDS may challenge our prior ideas about pedagogical authority, it also offers us an opportunity to examine new models that more accurately reflect who we understand ourselves to be and what we would like our students to become. From HIV/AIDS we learn about the limits of science and the importance of human vision, the frailty of the body and the strength of the spirit, the need to nurture the imagination even as we direct our attention to rational cognitive structures. In the end, the HIV/AIDS curriculum can be more about life than about death, more about health than about illness, more about the body politic than the body physical. (p. 80)

In Silin’s estimation, while HIV/AIDS emerged onto the educational scene in a devastating fashion—exposing frailty and weakness—if taken up and on in serious and critical fashion, HIV/AIDS could prove to provide insights into the other side of things. HIV/AIDS would not only be conceived and understood within logics of victimization and immorality, but as a vital matter to understanding queer forms of becoming in relationship 128 A. J. GRETEMAN to matter, particularly viral matter. HIV/AIDS in its early years became a curricular issue and an issue informing pedagogy because such work was literally about life and death. Such work, now history, helps illustrate what has been done to contemplate what could be done. In this chapter, I will focus on what was done then, now the stuff of documentaries. In the next chapter, I will speculate on what could be done as AIDS encountered what I will call the Bareback Moment and the PrEP Moment. Queer pedagogy, on a basic level, sought to teach about and through queer subjects to do the work of education. Yet, in doing the work of education, such subjects became part of the institution. “Likewise, queer pedagogies that privilege nonnormative knowledge-making practices,” Brim (2013), argued, “accrue the shape and meaning, inescapably, as part of systems that facilitate the pedagogical reproduction of only certain forms of queerness within and beyond it” (p. 178). For queer pedagogy, there is a desire it would seem to corrupt the scene of education (see Greteman, 2016) while simultaneously recognizing that such corruption may very well lead to new, perhaps, differently perverse, subjects being taught. Such ideas though are due to the work of previous generations of scholars that laid the groundwork for queer work to become part of the academy. Queers have become part of the academy while simultaneously refusing to be “of” the academy (Harney & Moten, 2013). “We are,” according to Brim (2013), “in a queer pedagogical moment in the academy” (p. 173). However, the history of educational scholarship shows that such a moment in the twenty-first century is built on previous moments, largely under recognized in queer theory. Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell (1993) in one of the first attempts at developing a queer pedagogy, amid the then rather new realm of “queer theory” argued that “the distance from queer theory to queer pedagogy is great” (p. 298). Queer theory, rooted in its early years in literary theory, was by and large uninterested in the questions of pedagogy. This distance, for Bryson and de Castell, was illustrated by the reality that within Abelove, Barale, and Halperin’s (1993) landmark The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader “not a single entry … deals explicitly with the educational implications or appli- cations of these new discourses” (p. 298). Queer theory, it would seem, was then uninterested in its pedagogical potentials. Given Brim’s assessment in 2013 that queer theory has finally become interested in the work of queer pedagogy, the distance Bryson and de Castall noticed in the early years may be subsiding. Yet, in those early years, Bryson and de Castell, in QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 129 drawing attention to this distance, revealed that questions remained about “what could be made ‘queer’ about pedagogy?” (p. 298). They argued:

Queer pedagogy could refer here to education as carried out by lesbian and gay educators, to curriculum and environments designed for gay and lesbian students, to education for everyone about queers, or to something altogether different. Queer pedagogy could refer to the deliberate production of queer relations and to the production of subjectivities as deviant performance— that is to say, to a kind of postmodern carnivalesque pedagogy of the under- world, as agitation . (pp. 298–299, italics in original)

Queer pedagogy, we see in this early articulation, was largely undefined, as it sought to make sense of this new discourse as it came to enter the classroom. Queer pedagogy could involve any number of practices that sought to disrupt and do improper things within schools—through the presence of gay and lesbian teachers (still seen as improper in some contexts in 2017), to gay and lesbian content (still seen as improper in some contexts in 2017, notably in states that have nopromo homo laws). Queer pedagogy, then improper, by the 2010s had become institutionalized and a concern for scholars outside of the field of education. These scholars embedded in higher education were now interested in and concerned about what decades of queer theory were doing to and for students. Was queer pedagogical? And could it be within the conservative confines of education? Bryson and de Castell (1993), in their engagement with queer pedagogy, provided important historic insights into the struggles of articulating a queer pedagogy, but also the reality that educational scholars, while seemingly unnoticed, were taking the moment of queer theory’s unsteady birth to intervene queerly into schools and learning. We might be in a queer pedagogical moment “now” with Brim (2013), but we were in a queer pedagogical moment then, as well. Bryson and de Castell’s (1993) work contemplating queer pedagogy was tied closely to their own pedagogical practices—particularly within a lesbian studies course. I will follow Bryson and de Castell’s lead in Chap. 7 to address queer, feminist, and trans pedagogies. However, in contextualizing their work, they noted a certain resistance they felt in writing their article “knowing from past experience that to speak publicly about the possibilities and the dangers 130 A. J. GRETEMAN created by being ‘out’ as ‘queer’ educators is a speech act of either uncon- scionable arrogance or profound masochism!” (p. 286). There were (perhaps there still are) material consequences to “outness” as attached to identifying as queer in some way.2 This being something Judith Butler (1993) noted as well in the same year, arguing,

As much as identity terms must be used, as much as ‘outness’ is to be affirmed, these same notions must become subject to a critique of the exclusionary operations of their own production: for whom is outness an historically available and affordable option. (p. 227)

This tension between the affirmation of outness and the critiques of outness are, in many ways, a focal point for Bryson and de Castell in contemplating queer pedagogy. The fact remains that one’s outness impacts the classroom in all kinds of ways not often realized until after-the-fact of teaching. Queer pedagogy, rooted in the interaction between ideas and bodies learning those ideas, is always already implicated in the ways bodies come to matter to one another. Susanne Luhmann (1998), in a similar vein, asked “Queering/ Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy is a Pretty Queer Thing.” Work engaging gay and lesbian realities at that time, she noted, was providing “testimonial to the alienating and discriminatory experiences within the educational system” (p. 143). And this work saw the solution to be two- fold—protesting the distorted portrayals of gay and lesbian life while providing positive representations of gay and lesbian life. Such an approach, as Luhmann argued made two implicit assumptions about learning. First, that homophobia is a problem of ignorance (if they, read straight people, learn about gay and lesbian issues that are accurate, they will come around and see gay and lesbian people as normal too). Second, that even if homophobia cannot be eliminated entirely, having positive representations will provide role models and assist in developing the self-esteem of lesbian and gay students. Such views on learning, however, rested on traditional views of learning—the transmission model—and relied on seeing gay and lesbian identities as normal and unconnected to gay and lesbian social worlds. Queer theory and pedagogy, however, pushed against such views in favor of attending to the work of subject formation and the strange work of learning. Learning is not as straight forward as many would like to believe. As Luhmann (1998) wrote: QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 131

What is at stake in a queer pedagogy is not the application of queer theory (as a new knowledge) onto pedagogy, nor the application of pedagogy (as a new method) for the dissemination of queer theory and knowledge. Instead, at stake are the implications of queer theory and pedagogy for the messy processes of learning and teaching, reading and writing. Instead of posing (the right) knowledge as answer or solution, queer theory and the pedagogy … poses knowledge as an interminable question. (p. 151)

And interminable queer theory and queer pedagogy continue to be, as they encounter the shifting terrains of sexuality and gender, race and ability, class and geography within schools and beyond them. For Luhmann, the conditions in which learning takes place and the responses that emerge within the scene of learning provided the contextual and contingent time to think through, with students, the work of sexualities and genders in the work of coming to know or the resistance to know itself. We might see that while Brim’s “queer pedagogical moment” of the 2010s importantly illustrated the ways queer theory has become institutionalized in higher education, such a moment rests on previous moments that laid the foundation for contemplating the uncertain terrain of “queer pedagogy” in education in general. While early work within the field of education made possible the very thought of queer pedagogy, that work has as well been institutionalized. This is seen by the existence of any number of series on queer theory in education (of which this book is part) and the declining controversy of such work—in part, I sense, because of the declining impact of scholarship in general. Additionally, what this “moment” illustrates is that we can ask questions about what it means to teach “queer” topics with institutional approval.

The Gentrification of the Mind What are the consequences of AIDS and how, in thinking about those consequences, do we grapple with the complex histories and politics around sexuality, race, and more? There are many consequences we can now see amid the continued presence of AIDS. There are the consequences of AIDS then at the beginning and height of the epidemic—such as death, direct-action activism, and queer care networks. And there are the consequences of AIDS now during the continuing epidemic—such as prolonged illness, erasure of memory, and, as Schulman (2012) illustrated, a “gentrification” of the mind. Gentrification is not a new concept and for 132 A. J. GRETEMAN many it is a concept linked to physical spaces, namely neighborhoods, and the process of cleaning up and clearing out diverse populations for a more homogenous, economically mobile population. Gentrification is connected, quite intimately, to economics and what land is or could be of most value and used for profit. However, as Schulman argued, gentrification of spaces relates as well to the gentrification of the mind. Gentrification, in her intellectual memoir, represented a moment where economics and sexuality met with deadly and profitable consequences. Gentrification is, we might realize, a spatial, cognitive, and temporal term. AIDS, for Schulman (2012), was and is an “American experience,” despite it often being positioned otherwise as a “gay” experience or “IV drug-user experience” to be engaged in a “specialized” course (e.g., Queer Studies) instead of a “general” course (e.g., US History). The reality that AIDS is not positioned as an “American experience” has consequences and, as she asserted, the AIDS crisis has become sanitized under the banner of “tolerance” and “progress.” For her—as someone who lived in, through, and amidst the AIDS crisis in New York City—such a sanitizing of AIDS is a further moment of devastation. To address and counter this emerging narrative (one that perhaps many of us heard, if we grew up or came of age in the mid-to-late 1990s), she drew together the concept of “gentrification” with that of AIDS to show how the loss of life due to AIDS in New York City had a direct correlation to the gentrification of particular New York City neighborhoods. Neighborhoods were gentrified and with that so too came, for her, the gentrification of the mind. Neighborhoods lost something in being gentrified—diversity, cultural mixing—and one of these losses was the loss of imagination that came with heterogeneity of neighborhoods dramatically impacted by AIDS. Neighborhoods are complicated and they often develop various forms of relations and memories. While some argue that gentrification is just a “natural process” or shift blame to others, Schulman wanted to sidestep the blame game since, “no one is inherently problematic as a city-dweller because of his/her race or class”; rather, “it is the ideology with which one lives that creates the consequences of one’s actions on others” (p. 29). With the moment of gentrification that Schulman addressed, neighborhoods that had been complex and complicated by race, class, sexuality, and more become homogenized by new corporate (and sanitized) ideologies and businesses (think “cupcake shops” and fusion restaurants). These new ideologies threatened and decimated the previous neighborhoods— QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 133 kicking out families, cultural practices, and bohemian ideologies. It became more difficult to decide to be queer as the space around oneself was straightened out. The problem with this, for Schulman, was that it impacted our ability to think because we are less and less able to meet people who are different from us. “[Gentrified thinking is],” as she noted, “a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like” (p. 51). And people are complicated, challenging, diverse, beautiful and much more. There are no simple ways to meet others because “complexity is where truth lies” (p. 36). If one lives in a neighborhood that abides by “gentrified thinking” (buys into particular ideologies) then one has less access to difference and diversity. And again, this is not just about “visual” difference (the “rain- bow” view of diversity), but about differences of ideologies, histories, and more—that create challenges and promises through complex conversations, relationships, and connections. One of the challenges of the AIDS crisis before gentrification took hold was that AIDS devastated particular communities. And, as Schulman (2012) beautifully argued, “it’s hard to have collective memory when so many who were ‘there’ are not ‘here’ to say what happened” (p. 135). We might in our own individual lives ponder if we have ever heard much about or from the “crisis years?” If we have not, why is that? Is it because a generation of people (queer, in a variety of ways) were lost to government, scientific, and medical inaction; or put differently, to blatant homophobia that contributed to, in some estimations, a genocide of queer people and their practices, habits, and ideologies? To not have heard or talked with those who have “lived” or “survived” is not our own fault. It is a much broader issue, including one connected to neighborhoods and educations. But it is an issue that educators have a responsibility to think about and through. An intersectional analysis may need to include not only the standard list of identities based on race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class but also viral status and ideological habits. How, in the twenty-first century, did the “crisis” and its consequences— both in terms of mass death and gentrification—impact our ability to engage, encounter, and be educated on contemporary art, politics, history, and sexuality? How has homophobia—that “social pathology that causes violence and destroys families”—in often unseen ways, limited our ability to access and imagine the world? How does this, along with its intersection with racism, ableism, and more, impact the work artists, teachers, and other creators can do or are not able to do in the current 134 A. J. GRETEMAN climate where a war on sex persists, an issue addressed in the next chapter? For the remainder of this chapter, I want to assemble together work that has documented and helped developed an emerging history of AIDS in order to further contemplate the consequences of AIDS and its role in queer thriving. I tend to documentary films—three in particular—not to critique them or engage in film analysis. My interest is far simpler. I am interested in responding to, following Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1997) question, “Who does this film think you are?” (p. 22). The “you” I suggest here at the outset are emerging generations of viewers—queer or not. Such documentaries, following Brim (2013), contribute to the “queer pedagogical moment,” and raise important questions about how queer pedagogies and related theories could broaden understandings of history and queerness. How do such documentaries—rooted in the memories of AIDS activisms—shed light on a past that some fear is being quickly forgotten? Who do these films think students are as they watch them decades after the plague years?

We Were Here I was not there during the plague years. I sense more and more as I develop the arguments for this book that I am interested in the challenges of cultural transmission between queer generations, as such transmission seems vital in maintaining queer cultures and practices. AIDS, as illustrated through the assembly of texts and documentary films here, was a culturally significant experience for previous queer generations. Those generations have a reference point that I can only refer to through history because even the contemporary landscape of HIV has shifted—as I will explore in the next chapter. I am, in many ways, haunted by the absences that I feel inhabiting this world where hundreds of thousands of queers—variably defined—are not here contributing to the world in unimaginable ways. There is an absence of conversations that will never happen. In the documentary We Were Here, I heard and encountered the voices of individuals who were in fact “there” in the epidemic and are still here, being documented and telling the story of those who were there, but are no longer here. Those who died in ways that queers vehemently fought to change so that they could die with dignity. Their deaths and their memories give me chills and bring tears to my eyes as I see their archived faces. Is this what archival fever feels like? I cannot quite fathom it. It makes no sense while it also makes complete sense. Years of reading radical AIDS QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 135 activists and academics rage through their actions and writing have given me information about a moment that has passed, but such information is difficult to feel fully. These were, as Gould (2009) illustrated, moving politics that drew upon emotions and demanded an emotional reserve to continue such work. AIDS was and is an epidemic of signification, as Paula Treichler 1987( ) documented, and there is a way to have promiscuity in an epidemic, so said Douglas Crimp (1987). Yes, the rectum is a grave, as Leo Bersani (1987) argued, but inhabiting that homophobic logic opened up queer options. So much was written then fighting against the devastation and trauma. However, are such lessons taught beyond the confines of a queer-themed course? Are such lessons taught even there? Do such lessons matter now that we are “Post-AIDS?” Or has the story of AIDS, in becoming documented, become less and less interesting to the public. To remember David from the opening of this chapter, did people survive a plague for nothing? In becoming history, does AIDS no longer affect our becoming? Gone and forgotten? I hope not, but fear so. I write here perhaps to help tip the scale in ways that might help make AIDS a more important part of American history, not unique to queer communities, but in fact central to the experience of America in the late twentieth and well into the twenty-first century. We Were Here—a call, a reminder from the past when that we, then and there, exclaimed that We ARE here…boldly proclaiming We’re here, and We’re Queer. Get Used to it. Yet, the documentary changes the tense, puts that “we” in the past to remind us that “we” were here. We cannot include us all. Those born after the plague are not included; excluded from the rampant homophobia and genocidal neglect of the government, the medical community, and the scientific community. We, those born after the plague years, are distanced from the plague’s devastation—a good thing to be sure—but also not entirely true since we encounter an absence, a missing generation, and the continued realities that HIV/AIDS exacts on queer communities. “We”—they, those who lived in and through the plague years—once walked, cruised, fucked, laughed, and fought for queer ways of living that were denied. But denials have never stopped us. We—those still here and those now emerging—are still here and we are inventing relational modes of becoming queer together. Doing such work of becoming is challenging, in different ways now. We Were Here makes that clear as it turns back the clock to the days when San Francisco was a queer playground. San Francisco had that reputation, before it was gentrified. It was a queer mecca, as queers moved in droves to establish a visible and viable queer community. And San Francisco, as illustrated in the documentary, was an epicenter during the AIDS epidemic. 136 A. J. GRETEMAN

San Francisco and New York City were the epicenters—they are captured in history as being central to the queer work resisting neglect. We Were Here asserted that there is a necessity in remembering those who were there, as survivors named names and spoke about the realities they faced. They lived and fought and loved not so others would have the same battle, but so that others could live and fight and love in previously unimagined ways. Theirs was an altruistic fight, as many knew they would very likely die from the disease before significant progress. But it was such fighting that allowed “us” to be here and, hopefully, for more to be there in the future. Because “we were here,” it seems that “we can be there” in the then future only imagined then.

How to Survive a Plague The challenges to generate new queer generations is not preordained. Surviving has never been a guarantee and the AIDS epidemic taught queer populations that it would be our “we” that would have to figure outhow to survive a plague. Such lessons are important to queer culture as they teach us that queerness survived because queers fought to make survival possible. “We must never lose sight of the fact that the gay movement,” as Douglas Crimp (1987) argued, “is responsible for virtually every positive achievement in the struggles against AIDS during the epidemic’s early years” (p. 250). In How to Survive a Plague, such lessons were made visible and put into historical context. Before the rise of the gay lobby and gay-related non-profits, there were emerging queer cultures—gleefully coming of age in a moment of gay liberation. Yet, in those scenes of liberation—bars, bathhouses, streets, and parks—there came a plague that would not only challenge liberation but also solidify its resolve. AIDS would give rise to new institutions that cared for and addressed queer needs—from various non-profits to inclusion in governmental and pharmaceutical conversations. Queers would in some ways become profession- alized through the AIDS epidemic, as they sat on boards and became included in high-level political conversations. Surviving a plague is not something the Millennial generation has, by and large, had to contemplate, given the ways in which queer populations and attention to queer issues has been fragmented. Our political cause—in general—had been determined by the rise of the gay lobby and non-profit sectors born out of but revised “post-AIDS” to focus on gay marriage, gay adoption, and access to the military. The cause of gay marriage, of course, plagued gay politics for much of the late 1990s and 2000s until it was QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 137 legalized by the US Supreme Court in 2015. And in plaguing, gay rights contributed to the continued poverty of institutional relations. Queers may have survived a plague, but they seemingly survived into a lack of institutional and relational options. This poverty is not new. Foucault (1997a) noted in an interview in 1982,

We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a right relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. (p. 158)

How to Survive a Plague, along with the other two films in this chapter, documented alternative forms of relations that were being lived. And they illustrated how such relations were devastated by the lack of institutional support or recognition. While the coalitional politics of the time were visible in the documentary—notably through more than 700 hours of archival footage—the documentary focused more on particular figures, notably white gay men. Of course, white gay men were greatly impacted by the AIDS epidemic, yet, the work of AIDS activism, particularly ACT-UP was coalitional. Such activism did not follow the leader, but worked its way out in webs that drew upon different approaches and affinities.

United in Anger During the political funeral of Mark Lowe Fisher, documented in United in Anger: A History of ACT-UP, AIDS activist Bob Rafsky defiantly noted, “When the living can no longer speak, the dead may speak for them.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic, as activists worked to develop strategies for making the AIDS crisis visible to save queer lives, the political funeral became an act that, as Rafsky noted, allowed the dead to speak for the living. The living—those who had buried friends, lovers, and more—were at a loss for words or realized that words were not enough. As such, the bodies of the dead became the spokespeople for the AIDS crisis as their coffins were covered in demands. The dead indeed spoke for and to the living. The dead spoke from beyond their graves to continue their work advocating for an end to the AIDS crisis. We have yet to end the AIDS crisis, despite making progress in many regards. And as such, we have new responsibilities to listen to the dead who speak to us not only about the AIDS crisis, but as reminders of the world that was. Matt Brim (2013) discussed his use of United in Anger, arguing, 138 A. J. GRETEMAN

The film contains difficult truths about how the AIDS crisis emerged at the nexus of an unwieldy combination of social dangers: homophobia, racism, sexism, an antihealthcare culture, corporate greed, institutional elitism within the medical and scientific communities, a newly identified virus, and a government that, rather than intervening in order to save the lives of its citizens, chose to remain committed to deadly inaction. (p. 176)

These difficult truths, however, are difficult to come by given the lack of attention to AIDS in the twenty-first century. As Schulman 2012( ) argued, for younger generations (myself included), there is a sense that the youth have not had access to ways of developing a critical consciousness. “The young,” as she wrote, “had the choice to live quietly because of the bold fury of the old” (p. 6). The old, who were young then, were united in their anger. Like We Were Here, United in Anger focused on New York City, and the rise and fall of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power or ACT-UP. And in such a focus documented the complexities and erotics of coalitional politics. The documentary focused less on any particular individuals, instead performing, in a sense, the politics born out of the epidemic. There were no stand out leaders, but actions developed by people working, struggling, together to survive. It was a youthful and youth-led movement. They, those activists and academics, were in their twenties and thirties as they fought for their lives and the lives of their fellow queers. It is this reality that is strikingly difficult to watch as one realizes—I realize—that many died at or younger than the age at which I am writing this book. Why, as I watch their archived images, am I so interested in their activism and work? Am I nostalgic for a radical time gone by? Do I feel guilty for the life I can now lead, in part, because of the activisms they invented? Am I uncomfortable because I can now do queer work fully ensconced in the academy with all its benefits and trappings? “Being uncomfortable,” for Schulman (2012), “is required in order to be accountable” (p. 167). However, to what or whom is one accountable as one watches queers united in anger? Or engages in learning about and through queer histories? How does one account for the absence of such ideas in the world today? Or how does one account for the lack of conversation across generations because a whole generation was lost or traumatized by the epidemic? “The trauma of AIDS—a trauma that has yet to be defined or understood, for which no one has been made accountable” according to Schulman (2012) “has produced a gentrification of the mind for gay people” (p. 155). “We have been streamlining,” she continued, “into a highly QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 139 gendered, privatized, family/marriage structure en masse” (p. 155). AIDS, in being made history, in being documented, teaches new generations about a time more and more sanitized or forgotten. I am unsure if there are answers to such questions or what accountability will look like for the traumas of AIDS. However, what these documentaries do is raise such questions about how “we”—a queer we—engage queerness. Of course, some might cringe at the use of “we,” as if there is a common “we” that are queer. Following Foucault (1997b), however,

the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a ‘we’ in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not rather, necessary, to make the future formation of a ‘we’ possible by elaborating the question. (p. 114)

The “we” in my estimation is not something that can be determined once and for all, but the questions that are raised when the “we” enters the conversation are necessary in developing the self in relation to others. If “we” are streamlining into the private and commodified spaces en masse, what are we losing? How can a queer project be reclaimed both historically and so that futures will not be foreclosed by such histories, but radically opened?

Educating the Young The young—particularly young queers—have access in different ways than previous generations to queer networks. The rise of the Internet and digital apps have expanded how queers meet, albeit such forms of meeting have been challenged, notably, by Dean (2009). Cruising, as Dean pointed out, may have been a way of life—one made visible in the documentaries—but such a way of life has been altered into becoming a networked reality of apps and websites that mediate meetings. These changes do not, to be sure, negate the challenges young queers still face. The rate of suicide and continued violence against queers continues to be unacceptably high. It makes sense to me, however, that the young do not know about the AIDS crisis because it is a topic rarely engaged anymore, beyond medical advancements. There are quite simply significant differences in reference points. As David made clear in his desire to talk to a younger HIV-positive individual, discussed in the introduction, we come to queerness with vastly different reference points. I understand the lack of understanding of the AIDS epidemic because I myself knew little about it. 140 A. J. GRETEMAN

A driving issue in this book is my own curiosity about the changing reference points and how those reference points touch on different ideas of queer survival and thrival. AIDS was not part of any curriculum in any of my education until graduate school. I am a “millennial” queer who came of age “post-AIDS” and “post-gay,” such that I was under the impression that my sexuality was not a big deal. “Sexuality” I heard people say, “doesn’t define me.” I was, however, uneasy with such statements as in the early-to-mid-2000s homophobia was still rampant. Bullying was still present, hate crimes were still in the news, and there was still a lack of academic coursework engaging LGBTQ issues. However, I was as well beginning to encounter queer cultures, notably through the gay bar and gay literature, seeing the promises of sexuality despite homophobia. I learned through these mechanisms that sexuality was a big deal and sensing it was not spoke more about one’s privileges in other categories. One could, I found, disregard being categorized in particular ways, however, “to proceed as if the categories do not matter because they should not matter would be,” as Sara Ahmed (2012) argued, “to fail to show how the categories continue to ground social existence” (p. 182). Categories perhaps should not matter, but the material world around shows us that they in fact do, for better and for worse. As more and more documentation occurs around queer realities, the role of categories will continue to be fleshed out to reveal both the texture of history and the collective possibilities that emerge as we find people like us.

Conclusion “Educators must take an active role in bringing the full spectrum of human difference to the classroom,” Silin (1995) argued, “acknowledging the ways that these have become sources of conflict and domination as well as the ways that they enrich and form the basis of participatory democracy” (p. 80). It is, I sense, much easier to write about the need to do such work than it is to bring such work to fruition, particularly within certain educational contexts. Education is, after all, in the realm of schools, still quite conservative and reactionary. Yet, it has reacted to LGBTQ causes by including them a bit more now than before. However, as Todd Jennings (2015) illustrated, the ways in which LGBTQ issues have been included has been quite narrow and limited. Their inclusion has been highly edited. “The purpose of these edited representations,” he argued, “is to promote acceptance by highlighting those within the LGBTQ population who QUEER PEDAGOGY AND DOCUMENTING AIDS 141 more closely conform to dominant notions of normalcy and respectability” (p. 452). This forward march toward respectable representations has given way to straightening out the “bold fury of the old” and the diverse ways in which people inhabit the world. They have, to draw on Yoshino (2007), allowed queerness to be covered over. This is, to be sure, not unique to education, but a reality that queers and queerness face in the twenty-first century. Douglas Crimp (2011) reflecting on his decades of work contemplating AIDS pointed toward this shift:

I think maybe most important in all of this was that something of an enormous shift happened in the wave of AIDS toward a conservative gay culture where issues like fighting for equal rights to marriage and to fight in the military took precedence over what I think of as a truly queer culture, which is a culture that want to change how we think about forms of human relations in a much more general sense. (p. 3)

Attention to LGBTQ issues in education has, by and large, focused on respectable issues—marriage, safety, victimhood—that are seen as not posing a threat to the larger purposes and project of education. For Jennings (2015), “this is a denial of diversity” (p. 456). Queerness—in its diverse transgressive possibilities—does threaten what is respectable and acceptable. This has been the purpose of queerness for decades as it, following Crimp above, seeks to be a culture that changes “how we think about forms of human relations” (p. 3). “These transgressives threaten, or more importantly promise, to open up new possibilities for all youth” for Jennings (2015, p. 456). And it is to the transgressiveness of twenty-first- century sexual subcultures and new forms of prophylaxis that I turn to in the next chapter.

Notes 1. The interview was conducted and published in 2004; the text I refer to was part of Rofes’s posthumously published collection Thriving: Gay Men’s Health in the 21st Century. 2. As reported by Samantha Schmidt (2017), in the summer of 2017, Ruthie Robertson, an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University, was fired after refusing to remove a Facebook post expressing support for LGBT issues. In the post, Robertson wrote, “This is my official announcement and declaration that I believe heterosexuality and homosexuality are both natural and neither is sinful.” 142 A. J. GRETEMAN

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Viral Matters: Barebacking and PrEP

In the summer of 2017, the University of New South Wales’ The Kirby Institute reported the results of their Opposites Attract study at the IAS Conference on HIV Science in Paris—“the world’s largest study on HIV transmission” (The Kirby Institute, para. 1). The results showed that HIV-positive men with undetectable viral loads cannot transmit HIV to their sexual partners. Professor Andrew Grulich, as reported by The Kirby Institute, noted, “Undetectable virus level effectively prevents HIV transmission among gay couples” a notable finding looking at serodiscordant couples and the decades of research looking at safe(r) sex practices based on serostatus (para. 4). “Our research adds to the evidence of a small number of other international studies of heterosexual and homosexual couples,” Grulich commented, “and means that we can say, with confi- dence, that effectively treated HIV blocks transmission in couples of different HIV status” (The Kirby Institute, 2017, para. 4). Decades into the known AIDS epidemic, progress, it would seem, is being made in reducing the transmission of the virus globally. The temporality of AIDS has dramatically shifted since the height of the epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly for those with access to the necessary treatments. Tim Dean (2011) unpacked the temporalities of AIDS arguing that “The dis- integration of our singular certainty about HIV/AIDS blasts the future wide open” (p. 93). There is, in the twenty-first century, after decades of struggles for and advancements in the treatment of AIDS, no longer a

© The Author(s) 2018 145 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_6 146 A. J. GRETEMAN singular certainty of death. There is, in fact, a future for queers. However, the future is not singular, but embraces heterogeneous temporalities. “If an HIV-positive diagnosis used to be understood as an inevitable death sentence,” Dean (2011) illustrated, “now it is a sentence whose terminus remains unknown and whose imaginary meaning therefore remains radically ambiguous” (p. 75). This ambiguity, however, may contribute to the changing health landscape that benefits from the relationship between ambiguity and risk. There is, to be sure, lots of work still to be done, particularly in poor and developing countries, as structural, cultural, political, and personal conditions persist in limiting access to treatments and life spans. However, as Dr. Nittaya Phanuphak, Chief of the Prevention Department at the Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Centre, noted about the results:

Demonstrating that condomless sex with undetectable viral load is a form of safe sex does not only prove the scientific concept of treatment as prevention but heavily destigmatizes gay men living with HIV, as well as their seronega- tive partners. (The Kirby Institute, 2017, para. 10)

Condomless sex mediated by HIV treatments—in the form of drugs—is now safe(r) sex, at least as far as HIV transmission goes. This, decades after condoms had become the central technology for preventing the transmission of HIV (and other sexually transmitted infections) as well as decades after the rise of barebacking where condomless sex was purposefully engaged in as a form of opposition to safe(r) sex initiatives. The Opposites Attract study contributed to the growing international body of scholarship investigating HIV transmission, prevention, and treatment strategies. “Our data add to previous studies,” Dr. Professor Grulich noted, “which show that there has never been a recorded case of HIV transmission from an HIV-positive person to their HIV-negative sexual partner when the HIV-positive partner had undetectable viral load” (para. 6). Drugs, we can see, have gotten into bodies. HIV treatment can now effectively reduce the viral load of HIV-positive individuals. This is, as Dr. Phanuphak noted above, a clear sign that “treatment as prevention” works. It is from this concept of “treatment as prevention” that this chapter takes its starting point, as it connects to changing understandings of health, sex, and risk. I am interested in “treatment as prevention” less as a scientific strategy for eliminating transmission between serodiscordant couples and more as a philosophical puzzle exposing our changing subjectivities as they relate to drugs and sexuality. If, as Joseph Dumit (2012) argued, we have entered VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 147 a new era in health defined by taking drugs for life, it seems necessary to contemplate how drugs, like Truvada, used as a Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) impact changing queer sexual cultures and practices. In the fight for AIDS treatments—as made clear by ACT-UP and other AIDS activisms documented in the films discussed in the previous chapter—there were demands for “drugs into bodies,” and those drugs eventually became drugs one takes for life—both to live and for the duration of one’s life. However, getting drugs into bodies is only a small component of a much larger, complicated picture. Such a strategy achieved great successes, as evidenced by the results of the Opposites Attract study itself and the decades of life put back on people living with HIV. Drugs have made their way into bodies and, in doing so, helped alter the lives of people living with HIV. HIV went from a death sentence to one of chronic illness, at least for those with access to the standard of care. In the process, it shifted in how HIV was taught and represented in evolving public health campaigns. Life spans were no longer cut short and the political crises revealed by AIDS subsided from view. While those political crises have subsided—we are “post-AIDS,” remember—the crises that AIDS presented are very much alive and well. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Trends in U.S. HIV Diagnoses, 2005–2014,” which looked at a decade worth of perspective on HIV diagnoses and emerging trends, the annual number of HIV diagnoses within that decade declined by 19% (CDC Fact Sheet, 2016, para. 4). While this is a sign of progress, according to the CDC, “progress has been uneven and certain groups, particularly gay and bisexual men and African Americans, continue to be the most affected” (para. 2). While gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men account for 2% of the U.S. population in the CDC’s estimation, they account for 67% of people diagnosed with HIV in 2014. Over all, MSM diagnoses increased by 6% during the decade in question but this further varies by race. Latino MSM diagnoses increased by 24%, black MSM diagnoses increased by 22% while white MSM declined by 18% (para. 8). Additionally, issues of region and age add further nuance and complexity such that between 2005 and 2014, “the steepest increases occurred among young black and Latino MSM aged 13–24, who both saw increases of about 87% over the decade” and also “diagnoses among young white MSM aged 13–24 increased 56%” (para. 8). These increases have leveled off since 2010, but the reality remains that HIV is still disproportionately impacting gay and bisexual men, particularly men and youth of color. I focus, as such, on gay men in this chapter, to add some specificity to thinking about HIV, but also to recognize the continued ways in which HIV impacts gay male populations. HIV may no longer be publicly viewed 148 A. J. GRETEMAN as a “gay disease” as it had at its outset, but it remains the case that HIV is still disproportionately impacting gay men.

Health and Lifestyle The presence of such trends and the persistence of HIV in the lives of gay men requires continued investigation not only into treatment and/as prevention but also into how HIV is understood to impact bodies—of individuals, communities, and knowledge. There is little doubt that the progress made is important; however, progress is, it would seem, quite often a double-edged sword. We live, after all, drawing on Paul Preciado (2013), in the pharmacopornographic era. A rather frightening portmanteau, perhaps, but one that describes “the process of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity” (pp. 33–34). The era in which we live and are formed as sexual subjects, following Preciado, is one defined by our relationships to chemicals (pharmaceuticals) and technology (pornography). Gone are the days where the psychological sciences defined sexual subjectivity through concepts of repression, the unconscious, desire, and here are the days where sexual subjectivity becomes seen through the biochemical substances ingested— from the Pill to Viagra, to, as this chapter takes up, Truvada or PrEP. The twentieth century, after all, centered on the psychological subject through ideas of “depth.” Tell me your desires, so it went, and an analyst will tell you who you are. Dig deep into the recesses of your memories and there you will find your self. However, as Preciado 2013( ) illustrated, those concepts have been made manifest through the work of technoscience. “Technoscience has established its material authority,” Preciado noted, “by transforming the concepts of the psyche, libido, consciousness, femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, intersexu- ality and transsexuality into tangible realities” (p. 34). These tangible realities come in the form of biochemical substances and molecules—pills and hormones—that transform the intangibles of the twentieth century into the twenty-first-century bottle or syringe. To quote Preciado:

The success of contemporary technoscientific industry consists in transforming our depression into Prozac, our masculinity into testosterone, our erection into Viagra, our fertility/sterility into the Pill, our AIDS into tritherapy, without knowing which comes first: our depression or Prozac, Viagara or an erection, testosterone or masculinity, the Pill or maternity, tritherapy or AIDS. (pp. 34–35) VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 149

The twenty-first century is no longer interested or invested in hidden truths. We have, perhaps, fully embraced the postmodern and poststructural moves that decentered the subject, although such decentering has come at the hands of multinational corporations developing biochemical substances that address those previously “hidden” truths. Our subjectivity is no longer hidden in the depths of our psyche. Our psychic life, instead, is made visible through the pills and hormones we ingest. It is no longer necessary to tell me your desires, merely open your medicine cabinet. And for a growing number of gay men, a bottle filled with Truvada is now visible in the medicine cabinet, raising a host of problems and possibilities in thinking about sexual subjectivity and health. There is, to be clear, no natural human subjectivity, nor a standard sense of health. A range of scholars have shown the ways in which subjectivities are tied to their time and place—be it gender (Fausto-Sterling, 1985; van den Wijngaard, 1997), sexuality (Dollimore, 1991; Foucault, 1978/1990; Hocquenghem, 1993), or race (Ferguson, 2004; Ford, 2005). Given this, Preciado (2013) argued, in contemplating sexual and gendered subjectivity specifically, “it is about the necessity to specify the cultural, political, and technological processes through which the body as artifact acquires natural status” (p. 34). Natural status has never actually been natural in the pre-lapsarian sense. Rather, we become natural (or not) through the cultural, political, and technological processes that condition the natural in the twenty-first century. With such a view, one that recognizes things are not as they have to be, new possibilities can emerge with the invention and development of alternative cultural, technological, and political processes. Pharmaceuticals are central to this, particularly since they are the technology that we consume to be healthy or put ourselves less at risk. “[Pharmaceuticals] are part of our identities as well as our lives” noted Joseph Dumit (2012), and “this is neither shocking nor exciting, it has become ordinary” (p. 181). That we engage in pharmaceutical living is ordinary at this point in the United States, as we are surrounded by pharmaceutical ads that inform us about new drugs that can assist us if we are exhibiting innumerous symptoms. This is not all bad, although it does illustrate how pharmaceutical companies have gained significant influence on how we think about health. Such influence, for Dumit, has led to what he called “modes of biomedical living” (p. 182). These modes show how “patients” (and we are all patients, it would seem) navigate living in this new era of health—from being “expert patients” to “fearful subjects of duties” to recognizing “better living through chemistry” (p. 182). These modes are inhabited in different ways, in different moments. The attempts 150 A. J. GRETEMAN to be expert patients that are knowledgeable of symptoms, emerging clinical trials, and so forth, are increasingly easier to do in the age of “Dr. Google,” and position patients as seeking to adopt a healthy lifestyle. “Whereas the expert patient adopts a healthy lifestyle,” Dumit argued, “the fearful subject sees his or her lifestyle as being at odds with health yet dependent upon it, leading to a terrible double bind solved not by choice but by fear” (p. 189). Whether fearful or diligent an expert, we all find ourselves sensing there is “better living through chemistry,” which marketers have assiduously helped us realize as they integrate pharmaceuticals with lifestyles. “Marketers recognize that pharmaceuticals integrated into lifestyles in this way require constant reinforcement that cannot always be negative images of death” (p. 189). Lifestyles give way to healthstyles, as they are remixed both in the public imaginary through ads and more and internally as chemicals are ingested to alter one’s body. Dumit (2012) himself does not take up pharmaceuticals connected to HIV/AIDS; however, there is little doubt that there have been shifts in how pharmaceuticals are marketed to gay men and the lifestyle connected to them. Pharmaceuticals were—as illustrated in the documentaries about the crisis years and activist responses to the AIDS crisis—central to not only establishing health but also maintaining life. HIV is no longer a death sentence and with PrEP, as illustrated by AIDS Foundation of Chicago’s “PrEP for Love Campaign,” something that allows one to, “spread tingle” and “catch desire.” Taking a pill a day protects one against HIV, and such a campaign—made of black and white images of couples who are of various shapes, sizes, races, and sexualities—flips the script on the discourses of transmission. “Love is contractible. Love is transmittable. Touch is contagious. Catch feelings, not HIV,” goes the campaign slogan.1 Gone are the images of people dying of HIV, faces gaunt. Gone as well are the activist images of Gran Fury implicating politicians and scientists in the death and destruction caused by HIV during the 1980s and 1990s. In place, and in line with the changing ideas around health, are happy couples who ingest a pill to transmit feelings. This makes sense because “in this new health,” according to Dumit (2012), “we are dedicated to measuring our health by understanding our risks and taking practical steps to reduce them” (p. 197). A pill a day seems practical enough, and the campaigns make visible the diverse forms of relationships that are at risk—notably, people of color. Of interest in this chapter then is this evolving understanding of health as it relates to sexual subjectivity and risk. As I will discuss below, we may have seen the “Bareback moment” that was itself a response to health campaigns, only to see the practices utilized in barebacking to become VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 151 legitimate through the invention and approval of a pill. Education is central here, as it has been various education campaigns—marketing, public health, and sex education—that have been responsible to messaging and teaching “at-risk” people and communities. How do these two things— barebacking and PrEP—illustrate a shifting understanding of sexual subjectivity and how do such shifts challenge education—schools and public health—in their own work educating about sex and sexuality?

On Education and AIDS During the AIDS epidemic, Deborah Britzman (1995) asked, “What does education need to learn from the pandemic known as AIDS and from the political demands of those who live at or beyond the sexual limits” (p. 152)? Asked over twenty years ago, Britzman’s question remains relevant in thinking about what education has still to learn from and with AIDS. Building on the previous chapter that documented the history of AIDS, as it has “become” history, this chapter extends my work contemplating the work of queer thriving by looking towards the subculture of barebacking and the PrEP moment where “treatment” becomes prevention. Or put differently, where “we” take AIDS medication to avoid getting AIDS—a queer proposition indeed, but one indicative of Preciado’s (2013) argument regarding the pharmacopornographic era and Dumit’s (2012) recognition that health is defined as taking drugs for life. AIDS may very well turn out to be merely a moment in queer history, and therefore human history, but it will have been a moment that not only devastated the lives of innumerous people and cultures (queer and otherwise), but contributed to the development and invention of cultural forms and practices. There may be questions at this point as to what barebacking and PrEP have to do with queer thriving? I sense there are two things going on here. First, there is now a history of barebacking as documented and theorized by a number of queer theorists (Bersani & Phillips, 2008; Dean, 2009; Halperin, 2007; Shernoff, 2005). Such work now documents a moment in the history of sexuality, particularly gay male sexuality. We have bare- backed and we did so for innumerous reasons—be they read through theoretical guise or merely a personal preference or drug-induced haze. However, and this will be the pivot point for this chapter, with the approval of PrEP in 2012 by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States to prevent the transmission of HIV, the previous prohibition against 152 A. J. GRETEMAN condomless sex was curiously challenged. And that challenge is not only to sex education but to the ways in which gay men become sexual subjects and are subjected to new forms of discipline and pleasure. The pleasures of “raw” sex become less tenuous with the ingestion of a pill and part of our new understandings of health. It might make sense to return to the conversation between David and Dominque that introduced the last chapter. In that conversation, we caught a glimpse of generational relationships to AIDS. For the generation that survived AIDS, their coming out as gay had not been defined by AIDS, given that AIDS did not emerge until the early 1980s. Rather, their lives became defined by AIDS as they encountered it. However, for the Millennial generation that was born during the AIDS crisis and would come out “Post-AIDS,” coming out became intimately tied to AIDS. Coming out entailed having to have a conversation about “safe sex” since one’s professed identity positioned one as a member of an “at- risk” community. And this risk was not merely about sexually transmitted infections that could usually be cured with a pill, but about the specter of HIV that haunted this new generation. Or, to return to Dominque, “if you’re going to be gay, you’re going to get AIDS.” Emerging generations, however, will enter a new frontier—further distanced from the plague years and removed from the stigma that being gay means you will get AIDS. Instead, emerging generations are entering a world where transmission of HIV can successfully be eliminated with taking a daily pill and, instead of transmitting HIV, they can transmit feelings. This should not immediately be seen as liberating since the medical research is still emerging. Additionally, there are broader social-political-ethical implications involved in these pharmaceutical shifts that further highlight the ways gay male sexuality is still medicalized.

Bareback Moment Since the late 1990s, barebacking has triggered an array of responses— from condemnation to praise—in how such a practice and its practitioners are disputing any number of health-related, political, and cultural norms. Barebacking triggered offense within the mainstream gay and straight communities, immediately judged as pathological; illustrating the idea that gay men had a certain death wish. The offense that barebacking sparked, however, also gave rise to several queer scholars taking up the cause of barebacking, not to praise it or pathologize it, but to investigate VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 153 the complex realities that such a practice and its practitioners raise about sexuality, history, and power. I myself contributed to these conversations as I sought to “fashion a bareback pedagogy” to understand what, if anything, barebacking offered education. “Perhaps barebackers, in their rather hidden and humble ways,” I (2013) argued, “offer somewhere on the horizon a way to engage the risks inherent in living in a world still reel- ing from and with HIV and homophobia” (p. 29). Resignifying a practice much maligned—“unprotected” anal sex—and creating an outlaw sensibility, barebackers taught us about risks inherent in becoming a subject, particularly, a gay subject in the twenty-first century where AIDS haunts “gay” sexuality. In such lessons, barebackers revealed the limits of respectability politics to hold open the possibility for queerness to be replicated. Refusing to be brought into the fold of normality, barebackers bucked back to develop their own queer forms of kinship, similarly formed through an exchange—just of biomatter instead of rings (Dean, 2009). Eric Rofes (2005) was one of the few educational scholars that engaged the practice of barebacking and its relationship to education. “Not only did safe-sex campaigns function to create a hegemonic view of ‘acceptable’ gay male sexual activity,” he argued, “but these health promotion campaigns may have also included elements that functioned as triggers for resistance” (p. 128). Safe-sex campaigns as educational initiatives helped create acceptable gay male sexuality, defined as donning a condom during sex or, later, serosorting. As Rofes argued, “Anal sex absent a condom had become a forbidden act that gay men publicly renounced in exchange for an identity as a socially responsible gay man” (p. 128). Yet, not all gay men made the exchange, preferring to maintain “renegade identities and subcultural norms” (p. 128). Barebacking, as a response to the patronizing, sexphobic, and homophobic health campaigns, for Rofes, should have been expected, particularly given the history of pathologizing gay male sexuality. It is possible, given Rofes’s work, to argue that barebacking emerged, in part, to oppose the normalizing lessons of education and its attempts to straighten out risk. Health prevention, in Rofes’s (2007) estimation, fails to address the everyday experiences and choices involved in sex, asking “what would it mean for health promotion if what we’ve named ‘gay men’ were actually a grown-up clan of active resistors to heteronormative and patriarchal values?” (p. 3). It is this “grown-up clan” that, far from pathological relationships to sex, have historically sought to cultivate safe-sex practices and promote pleasures. Such work has established new forms of sexual subjectivities over time, and as Kane Race 154 A. J. GRETEMAN

(2009) illustrated, “the production of subjectivities is a risky business— necessarily and often productively so” (p. 161). A significant issue raised, often anytime sex and sexuality enter the conversation, is risk. Risk is something that many have grown averse to, given that we live in a “risk averse” society and hire people for “risk manage- ment” (Beck, 1992). Yet, risk persists and is quite central to the work of living and learning. HIV prevention campaigns argued that “sex without risk doesn’t exist” and Gert Biesta, in an interview with Winter (2011), argued that “it is not fashionable to argue that education ought to be risky” (p. 540). However, education is risky and the risks that are quite inherent in education cause significant anxiety about how such risks will be mitigated and what they might mean for students coming into presence. David Halperin (2007) offered an early essay on sex and risk that was “less a question of coming up with new theories of sexuality than of mobilizing queer possibilities for imagining and representing the subjective life of sex—the subjective life of homosexuality, most specifically” (p. 9). Halperin’s essay was, as well, an early queer engagement with barebacking and the risks that such a practice entailed. Following Foucault, Halperin sought to expand upon how gay male subjectivity could be conceived. “And, if necessary,” this could entail, “freeing ourselves from the authority of Theory and from the doctrinaire and scientistic limitations it now imposes on what can be said and thought” (p. 9). Decades into “queer theory” and the AIDS epidemic, he appeared exhausted by the innumerous ways in which gay male subjectivity had become theorized and distanced from queer cultures and practices. This was largely because of the emphasis, particularly regarding sexual risk, on psychological and psychoanalytic understandings of sexuality; understandings that, despite their best attempts, largely focused on the individual psyche. Highly critical of such discourses, Halperin, wanted to explore subjectivity through other means. “Queer politics,” Halperin (2007) argued, “was a way of killing off psychology and activating an ethics of the self that would consist not in self-analysis, nor in adherence to norms of proper, healthy functioning, but in ‘an aesthetics of existence’” (p. 8). This might sound like Foucault who, as earlier noted, said a homosexual lifestyle was not something to be discovered but something created. An aesthetics of existence looks forward to what one could become, rather than backwards toward one’s individual past for signs of pathology. Hopefully, it is visible that my work here follows Foucault and Halperin to focus on the creation and invention— “the art of living”—of homosexuals, as opposed to individual psychological VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 155 profiles of them. This is less about individuals, rather “it’s a matter of constructing cultural forms” (Foucault, 1997, p. 157). Halperin centralized gay male sexual practices and experiences to illustrate how such practices and experiences contributed to a development of a queer ethics. “Queer culture already offers us some of the alternatives we need. We just have to learn how to recognize, how to value, and how to champion the queer cultural traditions that have come to us” (Halperin, 2007, p. 10). To utilize queer cultures and practices—such as barebacking or “Truvada Whores”—becomes central to learn about becoming queer in the world. Less because one might join such cultures and practices and more to realize that there exists an array of cultures and practices rooted in queerness. Such lessons are still, within broader society, viewed skeptically. Sex, when it rears its head, is often seen as suspicious. Sex and sexuality beyond strict confines are rarely respectable topics of conversations. Like Warner (1999), as discussed in the introduction, conversations about barebacking and PrEP are less interested in respectability politics and identity because of the limitations of such foci. Gay identity and its attendant gay rights are more palatable to straight (and gay) audiences, after all, because such a focus distracts them, as Halperin (2007) argued, from “everything about gay culture that might makes them feel uncomfortable with it, or excluded from it, and to get them to sympathize instead with our political (and therefore less viscerally upsetting) demands for equality treatment, social recognition, and procedural justice” (p. 5). Political demands for access to institutions and benefits already welcoming to straight (and now gay) people are understandable while sexual practices and cultural ideas that break from such institutional views are, well, disturbing. Barebacking for Halperin (2007), however, disturbed the norms and silences around queer sexual practices and provided

a kind of speculative ethical experiment, a means of playing with time that consists in putting your life at risk in the moment, in ways that may not make sense to you then and there, but that allow you to discover, retrospec- tively, what exactly matters to you and why. (p. 46)

Halperin queerly read barebacking less for what it tells us about the psychological makeup of its practitioners, but how the practice involves an ethical experimentation that places one’s life fully at risk and, in doing so, allows for discovery. I am skeptical of Halperin’s use of discovery, given 156 A. J. GRETEMAN that discovery implies that something was already there, hidden. Rather, I suggest that what barebacking opens us up to see, experimentally, is the ability to invent what matters to oneself, given the context. In the act of barebacking and the risks it can entail “you interrupt the normal course of your life, resist its established order of meaning, and thereby perform an immanent critique of its priorities” (Halperin, 2007, p. 47). Barebacking, while extreme, illustrated the limits of education as it puts one’s self immediately and materially at risk. Risk is not, to be sure, something we can avoid in our daily life. However, what barebacking does is make those risks immediately part of one’s life, particularly one’s erotic life. Similarly, as Tim Dean (2009) argued, “the subculture’s embrace of risk may help illuminate the pleasures and ethics of encountering the unfamiliar” (p. 191). Barebackers—as written into and represented through discourse—offered the first decade of the twenty-first century a prime example of queer becoming rooted in the materiality of a virus that historically (as illustrated in the previous chapter) devastated queer communities. In a perverse turn of events, barebacking illustrated an ethics of encountering the unfamiliar, the strange, the queer. And, there is probably nothing queerer than HIV. There are, as Dean (2008, 2009) aptly illustrated, challenges in thinking about barebacking as a subculture, however. Such challenges are similar to thinking about generations. However, addressing barebacking as a subcultural practice allows one to read such practices beyond the individual to connect them to broader cultural options. “Barebacking may be,” for Dean (2008), “among other things, a way of connecting with the dead through the medium of shared substance” (p. 90). Through barebacking, it is not only a virus that is transmitted but the histories of intimacies and relationships that are no longer. AIDS may have devastated queer communities, but barebacking—through fantasy and symbolic means—carries forward, through replication those lost. A perverse idea for sure, but also one that recognizes the diverse ways in which sex can operate. Dean, after all, contemplated barebacking rooted in Gayle Rubin’s concept of benign sexual variation: “Variation is a fundamental property of all life,” Rubin (2011) argued, “from the simplest biological organisms to the most complex human social formations. Yet sexuality is supposed to conform to a single standard” (p. 154). Such a subculture radically departs from and contests a single standard—notably, “safe sex”—and instead puts on display a response to the question Foucault (1997) asked: “what relations, through homosexuality, can be established, VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 157 invented, multiplied, and modulated?” (p. 136). For Dean (2008), barebacking does exactly that—establishes new relations and “affirms a community of outlaws” (p. 82). And “Barebacking not only cuts across generations of gay men,” according to Dean (2008), “it also connects these generations. Indeed, the idea of bareback breeding involves creating new generations” (p. 90). These are queer generations, indeed, as they contest dominant norms but imaginatively illustrated queer thriving. In being documented and taken up within the broader world—for better and for worse—barebacking maintained attention to and practices that connected to queer’s recent past, or to draw on Dean (2008) again, “somewhat akin to the category queer, barebacking is defined by its resistance not only to heterosexual norms but to gay norms as well” (p. 81). This was all well and good. I find Halperin’s (2007) and Dean’s (2008, 2009, 2011, 2015) arguments compelling in pushing for understanding barebacking through its queerness. However, while barebacking was once scandalous, it may prove to represent a moment in the history of AIDS. To add to Rofes’s (2007) work dividing the “moments” of HIV/AIDS, we have, I sense, witnessed a “Bareback Moment” (1998–2012) that showed a resistance to the normalization and mainstreaming of HIV to cultivate queer discourses that built upon the history of HIV to replicate generations. It was a moment where a distinct opposition to mainstream discourses—those of “Post-AIDS”—were made visible as HIV was reclaimed to becomes a viral and vital matter for transmitting queer histories and practices. Or to draw on Paul Morris “what is at stake [in barebacking] isn’t the survival of the individual, but the survival of the practices and patterns which are the discoveries and properties of the subculture” (p. 46, as cited in Bersani & Phillips, 2008). As barebacking became part of the academy—now the stuff of coursework to be read—it offered hope that future generations will contemplate more slowly the work of radical sex cultures as they operate not only politically, but on our educations. Barebacking, after all, while not an explicit component of our education, haunts that very education as the unthinkable, perverse practice that a good and safe education should train one against. This is a sad reality. Radical sex cultures have rarely made it into lessons. However, in drawing attention to the Bareback Moment, in helping document and make sure such a moment was recognized, it is now necessary to seriously engage the contribution that such a subculture—diffusely and diversely understood—makes to the continued transmission of queerness. 158 A. J. GRETEMAN

PrEP Moment Moments come and go, however, and with the advancements in pharmaceuticals, there are questions as to how long barebacking as a practice and subculture will persist. Dean (2015) called attention to these shifting realities, noting the nomenclature has changed around anal sex. “Thanks to the history of the AIDS epidemic,” he argued, “anal sex between men has accrued an evolving nomenclature that telegraphs its shifting significance for those who pursue it” (p. 225). If nomenclature is a sign of the times, barebacking is out and raw sex is in. However, as Dean astutely observed, be it barebacking or raw, sex is mediated. Condoms once were the media- tor de rigueur, and barebacking made its name by refusing such media- tion. With PrEP however, as a chemoprophylaxis, barebacking is taken up and becomes acceptable practice. Its outlaw sensibilities are no longer, instead again taken up into the medical realm. “Via the expert technologies of PrEP, the long history of medicalizing homosexuality has embarked upon a significant new phase” (p. 228). What does this new phase mean for gay men and for their becoming? Upon the FDA’s approval of Truvada as PrEP, David Duran (2012), writing for Huffington Post, expressed a certain skepticism and visible dis- gust at what would come upon such approval. In his controversial article, “Truvada Whores?,” he argued, “For legit couples who are in monogamous relationships, this might be something to consider. But for men who engage in unsafe sex with other men, this is just an excuse to continue to be irresponsible” (para. 5). Duran, to be sure, is not a prude—at least that’s what he claims. Rather, he is concerned with the potential for a shift in attitudes. For him “having a ‘there’s a pill for that’ attitude is absolutely disgusting” (para. 6). It is disgusting because it fails to consider that HIV is not like sexually transmitted infections that can easily be taken care of after a quick trip to a free clinic. “HIV is not a ‘whatever’” but has lifelong consequences. Truvada, then in its early stages, was feared for potentially undoing the decades of work educating gay men into particular attitudes toward safety. Duran was not sure then, instead raising questions, particularly the question “is [PrEP] just opening the doors for others to engage in risky behavior” (para. 8). Duran, it would appear, confirmed what Bersani (1987) documented amidst the epidemic: that there is an aversion to sex. Duran is not averse to sex, given that he promotes his liberal sensibilities and openness to sex. However, he has his limits and those limits— rooted in his views on what is and is not healthy or safe—police others’ sex VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 159 lives. Michael Warner (1999) began his exploration about the trouble with normal noting in a similar vein to Bersani that “almost everyone sooner or later … succumbs to the temptation to control someone else’s sex life” (p. 1). And Duran sought to do as much. Duran was fine with particular populations—monogamous couples, sex workers, and drug addicts—having access to PrEP. They were, it would seem, deserving of such protection. However, “for gay men who just like bareback sex, Truvada is just an excuse to do what they want to do” (para. 8). And there is no reason to provide an excuse for “gay men who just like bareback sex” to engage in such a practice safely with the ingestion of a tiny blue pill. The pleasures of bareback sex, mediated by a pill, are unacceptable pleasures that Duran inevitably diagnosed as problematic, disgusting even. Duran’s writing, as he noted, was meant to be controversial. He wrote the piece very soon after the FDA’s approval and, given the history of AIDS—a history discussed in the previous chapter—it makes sense that he raised concerns about a new form of prophylaxis and the challenges that PrEP raised within the history of health prevention. I cannot help but read his piece, noting a concern about how gay men would learn and become educated about PrEP and its uses. While that may be the case—as I give Duran the benefit of the doubt—there are issues with such an approach of building one’s controversial argument on an already controversial and marginal sexual practice—barebacking. For Rubin (2011) such a move is probably not surprising:

In political life, it is all too easy to marginalize radicals and to attempt to buy acceptance for a moderate position by portraying others as extremists … Sexual radicals have opened up sex debates. It is shameful to deny their contribution, misrepresent their positions, and further their stigmatization. (p. 174)

At the moment PrEP enters the scene, the very population that could benefit from protection—barebackers—is used to question the FDAs approval. The pleasures of sex can only be mediated under certain acceptable conditions. Being a whore—a barebacking whore at that—does not grant one the right to the new technologies. Of course, those whores are the ones that PrEP is, in part, meant for. Although in the summer of 2017, United Healthcare came under fire for refusing to provide Truvada to a homosexual man because he was “using his medicine for High risk homosexual behavior” (Sopelsa, 2017). Following protests by AIDS activists, United Healthcare reversed its decision, issued an apology, and noted they were removing the prior authorization requirement for Truvada. 160 A. J. GRETEMAN

While United Healthcare’s reversal was important, the emergence of Truvada as an approved form of prophylaxis raises other questions. For instance, there are important questions about economics and access given the cost of the drug—although, in the summer of 2017, the FDA announced that a generic version had been approved, but is not yet available (Ryan, 2017). For Dean (2015), these include “broader ethical questions about the expanding medicalization of sexuality—and about what it means to have our erotic lives mediated by pharmacology” (p. 232). Preciado, as you’ll remember, has already pointed us in this direction earlier, when he named our era “pharmacopornagraphic.” Such an era is not merely one that seeks to make abnormal bodies docile, “far from being docile,” he wrote, “abnormal bodies today have become imbued with political power and, consequently, present possibilities for creating dissident subjectification” (p. 385). Put differently, ingesting pills is not merely becoming docile to pharmaceuticals, but opens up unknown realms of becoming under new technologies. Preciado wrote before PrEP, but his analysis opened ways of getting at Dean’s question regarding the expansion of medicalizing sexuality. If power, as Preciado illustrated has been ingested in the shape of a pill— “power acts through molecules,” as he put it—there is a need to address such shifts and how they operate on producing subjects and possible pleasures (p. 78). For Preciado (2013),

In the face of the conservatism and moral indoctrination that have dominated American feminist, gay, and lesbian politics and most non-profit anti- AIDS organizations one must develop a micropolitics of gender, sex, and sexuality based on practices of intentional self-experimentation that are defined by their ability to resist and dismantle the somato-semiotic norm and to invent collectively new technologies of the production of subject. (pp. 363–364)

Emerging technologies and pharmaceuticals, as Duran’s concerns about Truvada and United HealthCare’s “hiccup” both illustrate, are still tied up with and into politics, particularly respectable politics. What Preciado argued, however, is a different relationship to such things, given that they also assist in producing other kinds of subjects. Preciado documented his own use of Testogel—engaging in what he called “gender hacking”—to illustrate that the use of sex hormones and biocodes “shouldn’t be regu- lated by the state or commandeered by pharmaceutical companies” VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 161

(p. 55). They are, of course, but there are ways in which people have challenged—hence the use of “hacking”—how such things are used to create alternative avenues. We cannot escape the era we live in. We have seen, for the last century, a growing attention to pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. And we have found a certain pleasure in consuming drugs—be they prescribed or illicit. Kane Race (2009) made this quite clear, offering a queer politics of drugs. Like Preciado, Race investigated the evolving discourses around drugs and how drugs were implicated in becoming a subject, particularly a gay subject. As he argued,

If drugs are now part of popular culture—a point that is difficult to dispute in the context of consumerized medicine—then it is to the vectors of popular culture—the dynamic exchange of bodies, affects, values, tastes, and judgement—that we might turn if we are interested in promoting an intel- ligent public culture with respect to drug use. (p. xiv)

Race, like Preciado, was writing before PrEP, but his interest with consuming drugs was rooted in the use of drugs within gay male cultures. Drugs, after all, both illicit and prescribed, have been central to certain gay male cultures and sexual practices—think of the attitude “there’s a pill for that” that Duran derided above. The rise of HIV medications broadened not only the life spans of people living with HIV but also the possibilities for people living with HIV to experience the pleasures of sex. “The history of HIV prevention,” in Kane’s estimation “may be understood as a series of struggles on the part of affected groups to elaborate bodily practices capable of mediating between pleasure and safety” (pp. 1–2). And these struggles persist. Barebacking, as Rofes, Dean, and Halperin articulated above, emerged out of a struggle against the straightening out of gay male sexual culture. Barebacking in very material ways showed an anti-normative politics and ethics. However, the practice was born into pathology since to refuse safety was (is?) unthinkable. This reality contributed, I imagine, to the approval of Truvada as PrEP, given that it would allow barebacking to become “safe.” “Because authorizing new drugs demands the endorse- ment of new pathologies,” Race (2009) argued, “the only thing medicine may produce, in this discourse, is a return to a putative state of normality” (p. 7). Or, barebacking within the medical (and broader) world was viewed as a pathology and, in being seen as such, opened the doors (profitable 162 A. J. GRETEMAN doors, no less) for drugs that could return such outlaws to a normal state. The PrEP moment emerges then to normalize a previously dissident sexual practice, but with the caveat that one consumes medicine that would have previously only been consumed had one become positive. This is not, to be sure, to denigrate the use of PrEP. Preciado’s point addressed above is that such technologies are not merely restrictive, but also create new pleasures. Truvada, after all, while normalizing sex without condoms does not sit well with many—hence Duran’s epithet “Truvada Whores.” Yet, in a spirit of queer politics, users of PrEP—like previous sexual dissidents—refused the moralizing epithet and reclaimed it— proudly wearing t-shirts coming out as “Truvada Whores.” Coming out as gay may seem passé now, particularly in our “post-gay” world where labels are so twentieth century. Yet, asserting one’s sexual practice—that one consumes drugs to whore around safely—becomes a testament to the era we live in. Such assertions are, by no means, well regarded, just as coming out years ago often encountered any number of homophobic responses. Generational relationships to sexual subjectivity shift as the world around us shifts. Queer desires, previously defined by our relationship to the closet, have been replaced by our pleasures, defined by the pills we take. What is common to both—in the long struggle for and invention of sexuality—is the continued attempts to reign in such excesses and fit such practices within the fold. There is, after all, according to David Halperin (2017) a war on sex and “it is a terribly destructive war” (p. 1).

It has devastated civil liberties. It has grave consequences for the autonomy and agency of women, young people, the disadvantaged, and the vulnerable. It has ruined many, many lives. It has had a particularly violent impact on those who are socially marginalized, socially stigmatized, or racially marked, or who cherish nonstandard sexual practices. (p. 1)

Gains have been made for certain members of LGBT communities. Anti- sodomy laws, for instance, have gone by the wayside and laws protecting students from gender and sexuality based bullying have been implemented. However, lost in the celebrations of such progress is the continued war on sex—from laws criminalizing HIV transmission (Strub, 2017) to the challenges presented by sex offender registries (De Orio, 2017). It remains the case that sex is closely aligned to harm and challenges the ability to develop queer politics that engage sex and pleasure. And the absence of such politics VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 163 makes the task of engaging in an educational project that does justice to sex and sexuality almost impossible. “Can we,” Eric Rofes (2007) asked “carve out an understanding of the genesis of our desires, practices, and identities that involves an element of choice?” (p. 1). This question remains open, particularly given the shifting ideas about health, risk, and pharmaceuticals.

Conclusion What might this mean for education? Given that my background is within education and the philosophy of education, how does contemplating barebacking and PrEP assist in the work that education seeks to do? You might recall that I began this book addressing education as a process of subjectivication. Education—in schools and beyond—is a process through which one comes into presence (Biesta, 2006). Other things happen as well in the process, but my focus has been on coming into presence or “becoming queer.” For close to four decades now, HIV—a virus—has been implicated implicitly and explicitly in the work of education. However, as Eric Rofes (2007) argued, “The primary approach to education and prevention continues to be an attempt to re-create the crisis culture we inhabited in the 1980s. Absent the urgency linked to catastrophic decimation, preventionists seem at a loss about what to do” (p. 6). HIV/AIDS is still an epidemic, but it no longer positioned as a crisis. With barebacking and the emergence of PrEP, we are getting a glimpse of the potential for education to turn a corner and contemplate sexuality, specifically, queer sexualities, beyond or outside the realm of crisis, but as full of possibilities. There is a need to address HIV prevention while accepting that the social, biomedical, and cultural realities that gay men (and others) operate in have altered significantly (Rofes,2007 , p. 8). However, to do so requires significant challenges to the status quo and a refusal to focus only on respectable or moderate sexual practices. The lack of attention to barebacking and the emergence of PrEP beyond sex education illustrates, I fear, a still conservative field unwilling and unable to engage queerness on its own terms. Instead queerness, even the moderate and respectable kind, is still used to provoke or shock. This was made visible (again) in August 2017, when the Fresno United School district board president, Brooke Ashjian, expressed fear for having to teach “unbiased and medically accurate sex education” due to California’s Healthy Youth Act (Mays, 2017), stated: 164 A. J. GRETEMAN

My biggest fear in teaching this—which we’re going to do because it’s the law—but you have kids who are extremely moldable at this stage, and if you start telling them that LGBT is OK and that it’s a way of life, well maybe you just swayed the kid to go that way. (Mays, 2017, para. 10)

For Ashjian, sex education quickly slides into a lifestyle. The curriculum is one that teaches sex in a “medically accurate” way, devoid, in part, of the larger social and political realities connected to sex. Yet, such realities cannot be avoided—Ashjian’s comments illustrate this. To teach even a medically accurate sex education, inclusive of LGBT issues, has the potential to mold students to become LGBT. The promotion of medically accurate information so students can develop “healthy” views and understandings of bodies and pleasures becomes closely aligned with lifestyles, queer ones at that. The hidden reality is that the curriculum is always already conceived as molding students, simply into the straight and narrow. As Valerie Rohy (2015) argued in her exploration of queer etiology, “it is heterosexuals who recruit. Every child is assumed to be straight at birth, yet every child is also taught to be straight by family, school, media, and peers” (p. 20). Sex education—medically accurate—promotes healthstyles deemed healthy within the current era of health, which will inevitably come up against lifestyles that approach health differently. To be clear, I am not advocating that barebacking be taught in schools nor that any practices be deemed unsafe. This is not a book seeking to offer practical advice on what or how to teach. Rather I sense, given the emergence of PrEP, that the work of sex education will need updating, as barebacking shifts from a dissident form of sex, to one approved (Greteman, in press). Barebacking—as an “outlaw” subculture—may prove to be a moment amidst others when it comes to the history of HIV. But, it should be recognized as a moment that illustrated the ways queers thrived up against norms. What I want to point out, however, is the need for education to grapple with sex as it exists in its diverse (and perverse) ways and that to become queer—assuming queer is something one decides to become—requires access to queer practices, ideas, and more. Given Ashjian’s remarks, we can see the continued challenges becoming queer presents, as “sex education” slips into becoming something other than straight. Sex education and its scandalous potential to mold students to become queer, I suspect, will continue to be a challenge. However, following Cindy Patton (1996), VIRAL MATTERS: BAREBACKING AND PREP 165

Educators need to do more than produce shocking cartoons and confrontational slogans. They must develop better means of mobilizing the practical logics of erotic survival that already exist in communities, learn how and when these evolve in relation to the range of texts that intrude into or circulate into or circulate beyond their borders. (p. 139)

As education grapples with the emerging pharmacopornographic era, the texts and logics of erotic survival are changing. While there was a time where I (2013) suggested we needed to fashion a bareback pedagogy, that pedagogy itself has shifted as barebacking changed in meaning. Fashion is a fickle thing, yet the task remains to fashion lives. This is a vital matter and, for the time being, the viral matter of HIV remains a component of our queer educational present.

Notes 1. See www.prep4love.com for the campaign images along with further information about PrEP.

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Queer/Trans/Feminist Educations: On Becoming Queer

Attending to queer issues is not a project in which one can avoid attending to its intersections with other realities of living. We, by our nature, are complicated and complex social beings who bear the marks of history and the promises of a future. We are identified by others as this, that, or the other while we identify ourselves, quite often, in other ways; sometimes, ways not yet recognized and recognizable to many. I began this book drawing on Richard Ford’s notion that one decides to be queer and that to decide to be queer requires education in queer possibilities. Such a project is multifaceted and cannot be made fully coherent. Arguably, one of the maddening challenges that queer presents is that it refuses to be programmatic—despite growing numbers of programs devoted to queer studies. This was something Foucault (1997) noted, arguing that “as soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing” (p. 139). To become queer in the twenty-first century requires invention and being wide open. This is more and more of a challenge, particularly in higher education, where budgets are fraught, depart- ments are being shuttered, and labor is being mishandled, all within the continued corporatization of education. Yet, we will always live up against norms—corporate or not—meaning that, following Foucault (1997) “We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent … We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces” (pp. 139–140). This is a component of becoming queer and making queer

© The Author(s) 2018 169 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_7 170 A. J. GRETEMAN possible within higher education—a space and time where youth are often for the first time able to explore and invent. I turn then, following other queer, feminist, trans, and critical pedagogues, to engage my own teaching, specifically, a course exploring the intersections of feminist, queer, and trans studies. I have never been comfortable writing about my own teaching. Teaching is, for me, an incredibly intimate act and one that is tied closely to the time in which it happens. Teaching is an art, not a science, in my estimation, and as an art it is ephemeral. It happens in the moment, but those moments can extend in ways unexpected. The lessons taught offi- cially are rarely the lessons learned, as other forms of curriculum come into play—the null, the hidden. However, to write about one’s teaching assists in thinking through one’s teaching after the fact, to time stamp the experience for later use. It is after the fact where we can realize the work that was done within the broader context of one’s teaching life and the terrains teaching is tasked with covering.

The Course In the summer of 2016, I created and taught a course “Body Matter: When Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies Meet.” I proposed the course because I was interested in the intersections of those theories and their forms of study. In my own estimation, I saw the camps having extensive overlap, shared histories, and concerns. Yet, in the realm of popular culture, there seemed to be a fraying of those shared concerns—this is particularly visible between feminist and transgender activists and thinkers. This was amidst what Time magazine called “The Transgender Tipping Point” and Caitlyn Jenner’s high profile coming out. “Almost a year after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans were free to marry the person they loved, no matter their sex,” Katy Steinmetz (2014) wrote in the Time article, “another civil rights movement is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs” (para. 2). There was, in Steinmetz’s phrasing, a certain victory narrative being proffered, whereby the victory for same-sex marriage ended the gay rights movement to be replaced by the transgender civil rights movement. Skeptical of the “victory narrative”—a narrative that Signorile (2016) aptly argued against because such a narrative ignored the continued realities queer people, including transgender people, faced—I wanted to engage the contemporary moment of transgender theories and activisms alongside their queer and feminist predecessors. QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 171

To work through the complicated terrains trans, feminist, and queer studies cover is quite impossible, given the depth and breadth of materials. Such forms of study have covered a range of topics and have also “covered” over other possibilities. This is ok and necessary. Yet, in studying and being “studies,” readers are educated about and through their subjects—queer, feminist, and trans. No study can do it all. But studying is important. And “To study is not easy, because to study is to create and re-create and not to repeat what others say” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 77). But, how do the studies of queerness, feminism, and trans issues contribute to thinking not only about bodies that matter but about how discourses both open up and contain how the world(s) inhabited are imagined, lived, and contested? If such “studies” have exposed the threats to difference, how have they also— implicitly perhaps—provided insights into thriving in the midst of surviving? How does engaging in such “studies” educate us about the terrain of inhabiting a world that may be queerer than we can suppose, but as this particular course had to grapple with, violently opposed to queers as well? Queer, feminist, and trans studies have invariably covered the ways of survival, the need for survival, and the threats to survival (see notably, Lorde, 1984). These “studies” have also covered over the ways such survival helps their subjects thrive in their stance against the status quo. There is a danger here as queer and feminist theories and activisms exist alongside transgender theories and activisms. They are all intertwined and historically linked. Yet, I was concerned that the historic links between these approaches were missing from the conversation. We had much to learn in contemplating and addressing the varied stakes of such work. The stakes for such work are always high given the material realities that queer, feminist, and trans bodies face on the daily. Yet, the camps set up seemed shortsighted. They seemed unconnected to the historic connections between queer, trans, and feminist theories, practices, and discourses. Of course, to be clear, there are disagreements and differences across them. Yet, the paranoia that seemed rampant as “call out” culture entered the academy appeared to me quite unfeminist, unqueer, and untrans. The course, as such, asked that we think about and through the intersections, disconnections, and possibilities within feminist, trans, and queer theories. The body matters in all three. The body is made of matter. It matters that we, as individuals, attend to the myriad ways that our bodies, other’s bodies, past and future bodies are and are not allowed to “be.” Any one course, I noted, cannot traverse the whole terrain of these theories, however, it can hopefully provide us all with different entry points to thinking 172 A. J. GRETEMAN about the “body” and how it is implicated in ideas that are gendered, raced, classed, sexed, sexualized, and much more. No class, in my estimation, could be fully inclusive in addressing such concerns, but could hopefully provide strategies of reading across theories that were being pitted against one another. We would, together, raise more questions given that inclusion is itself always in question (Bingham & Biesta, 2010). The body is complex. It is a physical “thing” that we experience. It is also a linguistic “thing” that is contemplated through various discourses— be it philosophy, science, literature, art, and more. The ways we experience the body are tied up to the ways in which we can or cannot describe the body. How have different bodies been denied, assaulted, pathologized? How have different bodies been privileged, praised, and allowed privacy? How has this changed in time and with time? Since body’s matter and they matter to us in different ways, it is possible, even likely, that complex issues, feelings, and histories will emerge in the space and time of a course. We cannot, after all, predict the psychic component of education ahead of time. Our emotional lives impact and emerge in ways we cannot know in advance. However, our responsibility, I think, is to develop a sense of generosity to one another and to our own feelings. Feminist philosophers such as Joan Tronto (1994, 2013) and Nel Noddings (2005) developed and argued decades ago for the role of care. How do we come to care for and be cared for within our social world? What thwarts us from caring for ourselves, our bodies, others and their bodies? How does the space of a “class” open time for us to sit, talk, reflect, and see the difficulties and promises of coming to care and be cared for as bodies living amidst environmental catastrophe, political turmoil, economic depressions, and assaults on our bodies?

Teaching as Living My concern was with building alliances across theoretical traditions— “old” and “new”—to collectively resist the issues at hand. I myself entered theory through feminism and then found myself directed toward queer theory. This educational path taught me, for better and worse, that queer theory was generated with certain feminist sensibilities. I entered these “theories” through a feminist ethic of care, finding myself concerned about how we care not only for ourselves but also for the ideas and the lives of others. Theoretical boundaries seemed (un)interesting, binding in ways I was never comfortable with, but also informative. Those boundaries provided insights into the terrain and what was of concern to those QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 173 who positioned themselves within any given theoretical tradition. I learned what people cared for and about through their relationship to “theories.” And so, I embarked on teaching a course that would help map, for undergraduate students, these theories, their boundaries, and overlaps, with a naïve hope that such work might help those involved live a feminist, queer, and trans life. Sara Ahmed (2017), in Living a Feminist Life, wrote specifically about becoming feminist, but her feminist is an intersectional feminist. Becoming feminist sounds and reads more grounded, rooted in a tradition known as “feminism” and a movement known as a “feminist movement.” For Ahmed, “a feminist movement thus requires that we acquire feminist tendencies, a willingness to keep going despite or even because of what we come up against” (p. 6). The acquisition of feminist tendencies comes about through a persistent tending to the issues that concern feminism. Such tending and the emerging tendencies, however, do not appear out of nowhere. Rather, they emerge out of the everyday experiences of living in the world. “If we start with our experiences of becoming feminist not only might we have another way of generating feminist ideas,” Ahmed argued, “but we might generate new ideas about feminism. Feminist ideas are what we come up with to make sense of what persists. We have to persist in or by coming up with feminist ideas” (p. 12). Ahmed followed around ideas, feminist ideas, rooted in addressing issues of concern—sexism, transphobia, racism, homophobia. Such work is multifaceted—it is theoretical and empirical; literary and historical; rooted in the everyday. Becoming and living a feminist life is no simple matter; “I think of feminism,” Ahmed noted, “as a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splat- tering, an archive whose fragility give us responsibility: to take care” (p. 17). Becoming a feminist and living a feminist life is not simple, particularly when one is tasked with taking care. It is difficult to care and to do so against the grain as one seeks to create new directions. “To sustain a direction is to support a direction” (p. 46), so in creating new directions, one supports others coming along, following those directions. Social norms often direct us in particular ways—mainstream, normative ways— but living a feminist life—becoming a feminist—is directing one’s attention and efforts toward other possibilities. We cannot avoid directions or being directed, however, we can redirect our attentions and direct others to paths that lead elsewhere—toward thriving, toward justice, toward care. As an educator, a queer educator, I take seriously the task that teaching entails in directing students. A curriculum—that series of objects that we assign to provoke the “complicated conversation” of curriculum—directs 174 A. J. GRETEMAN students in some ways and not others. There is, as educators know, a mine- field of issues in constructing a course. Often, what is excluded illustrates more about an educator than what is included. And this speaks to how we, as educators ourselves, have been directed by our own educational pasts. Over the last several years, I have grown concerned about the direction of my own thinking and the thinking I was encountering in students. Students who were becoming critical in any number of ways were seemingly doing so at the expense of other forms of criticality. I suspected this was due, in large part, to the polarized political atmosphere that made it seem like life was a “winner-takes-all” experience and to the 24/7 hyper vigilant digital world where news travels fast, even if such news is not fully formed and we haven’t slept in days (Crary, 2013). There was amidst all this, to say the least, a certain lack of generosity in thinking.

On Building Worlds through Education “Queer and feminist worlds,” Ahmed (2017) argued, “are built through the effort to support those who are not supported because of who they are, what they want, what they do” (p. 48). Ahmed illustrated—through her writing—her own process to reveal how becoming is never preordained or fully directed, but done in and through the everyday experiences and encounters with a world that doesn’t like those who don’t fit in, who are not supported by the dominant systems of norms. Ahmed returned to the feminist adage “the personal is political,” recuperating it so to show that the personal cannot be avoided, even within the theoretical, just as the theoretical cannot avoid the political, much less the personal. Theory is political, the political is personal, the personal is theoretical. How we understand the personal is informed by the theories that inform our context, just as our theories are built from our personal experiences. Theory may abstract us from the personal, but recognizing how it is rooted in the personal pushes theory to address the world as it can. Theory—particularly critical theories—offer us language to address that world, however, “explaining phe- nomena like racism and sexism—how they are reproduced, how they keep being reproduced—is not something we can do simply by learning a new language” (p. 9). Language, to be clear, is still important. It informs us, and its repetition can cultivate new pathways for understanding the paths that we find ourselves taking. Language can stop us in our tracks—revealing to us what we have “felt” but could never name. Language can redirect us. Yet, such work—be it revelatory or redirecting—requires work beyond language. QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 175

It requires political action, it requires personal labor, it requires collectives it requires education. Living a feminist life is not merely about the self “becoming feminist” but also about the self becoming part of a feminist world that supports others. In becoming queer myself, I first had to become a feminist. It was through feminism that I found myself directed toward queer paths. My interest in teaching a course that engaged the intersections and historic rhythms between feminism, queer, and trans theories was rooted in my own process of joining those conversations, but also the passing of time. Queer and trans, unlike feminist, however, have never fallen off my tongue the same way. Living a feminist life, as Ahmed wrote, reads different than “living a queer life” or “living a trans life.” Becoming feminist reads different from becoming queer or becoming trans. Perhaps such difference is mere semantics, or maybe feminism, with its longer history, has a certain repetition about it that reads more comfortably than the other two related words. Feminist modifies more it would seem—feminist philosophy, feminist theory, feminist movement, feminist bookstore. Queer and Trans can modify the same, but, in doing so, it comes across a bit odd. Queer and Trans theory, to be sure, sounds familiar nowadays, as do queer and trans movements. Those fit alongside feminist theory and feminist movements quite well. They are often aligned, having common interests until, of course, they don’t. But, queer philosophy and trans philosophy or queer bookstores and trans bookstores seem less familiar. There are, of course, LGBT bookstores and bookstores that are rather queer because they cater toward more adult activities. But, queer and trans doesn’t modify bookstore as well as feminist; feminist bookstores have a history as well as a movement, something poi- gnantly illustrated in Hogan’s (2016) The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Nor do trans and queer modify philosophy in the same way that feminist has come to speak to and for philosophy. Type in either into Amazon or Google and you find very little by way of philosophy—aside from Halwani, Quinn, and Wible’s (2012) edited collection Queer Philosophy: Presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy. Feminist philosophy, on the other hand, brings up any number of feminist philosophy anthologies. Queer philosophy, it appears, is gay and lesbian philosophy, or more often replaced by theory: Queer Theory. Wikipedia’s entry for queer theory is the first thing that comes up when you google queer philosophy, followed by other sites link- ing queer with feminist philosophy. Trans philosophy garners very little, except for important and critical reflections on being trans in philosophy. 176 A. J. GRETEMAN

These issues may be minor, but I sense that they speak to the difficulty that queer and trans still experience in the twenty-first century while also illustrating the realities that feminism—as philosophy as theory—continues to address queer and trans concerns. Becoming a queer philosopher may be quite unintelligible as there is no such thing as queer philosophy. Of course, one can be a queer philosopher, in that one can be queer and do philosophy. One could even use philosophy to understand queer experiences, but queer thus far does not seem to be a philosophy, just as trans doesn’t. This may be because both queer and trans are thoroughly modern concepts, and philosophy a thoroughly ancient discipline. Perhaps queer and trans are simply too new to offer philosophy anything. Or philosophy is merely too ancient to be of service to the postmodernism of queer and trans? Maybe none of these distinctions matter much. Philosophy is, after all, in decline. Becoming queer (or trans, or feminist) in all of this, we might realize, is a rather tricky thing to become as one must wade through the various options, directions, and orientations that these discourses present. Queer directs us in various ways and those directions impact the very future of queerness. To be directed by queerness or queers is, as I hope this book has shown, a precarious enterprise, largely because of the promiscuity of queerness itself. However, I sense that becoming queer emerges out of a certain sense of something being wrong. And what is wrong is something that we have seen shift dramatically over the last century as sexuality became an object of knowledge and an identity to be worn. A significant amount of queer and trans theory have illustrated, compellingly, that queerness and transness is experienced as a wrong and sought to be straightened out. To be straightened out over the last century has come in the form of shame, feelings of melancholy, and other negative effects. Queers and trans individuals have sensed themselves as being wrong, as being out of place, and such feelings have produced various effects. These effects are not only felt on the individual level but on the social and cultural levels.

Checking the Pulse Teaching is, as I noted, dependent on the time in which it happens. While the above hopefully provided insights into the purpose of, background for, and a few random asides regarding my interest in teaching such a course, the course took on a different emphasis midway through that challenged the students and me to make sense of care. On Monday, June 13, QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 177

2016, our class started with silence. It was the day after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida. Made manifest to us were the issues we had and would continue to discuss as a class, but we could not discuss them immediately that day. The students and I were at a loss for words to describe, articulate, or express our thoughts and feelings. The shooting quite fresh in our minds was, at the time, the deadliest single gunman mass shooting in the United States (Mozingo, Pearce, & Wilkinson, 2016) and the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT people (Stern, 2016). We were all of a generation that had been told LGBT people were more accepted, yet we were shown the precarity of such acceptance. It was, for me, difficult to prepare. The events that had unfolded in Orlando over the previous 36 hours reminded me and, I imagine, many others of the continued violence against queer people and queer people of color. This included my mom. She called me that Monday morning, despite not knowing how to talk about such violence and the way it continued to haunt queer lives and those who love queers. I heard the fear in her voice, the concern as she wrestled with the news and her son’s life in Chicago. Her “I love you” that came at the end of the call sounded different, it felt different. Perhaps we were both reminded about the precarity of living and loving. Perhaps I was reminded of the ways homophobia assaults parents and families of queers—an unspoken fear often, but a fear that returned that weekend. The massacre at Pulse—a nightclub named for the owner’s brother who died of AIDS so his pulse could live on—was a place where queers went to develop relationships, experience intimacy, and feel safe while having fun (Mettler, 2016). Pulse gave life, it maintained life, it helped in ephemeral ways to transmit queer ideas, practices, and desires. It was the “pulse” of a particular queer community. The gay bar as a social/cultural institution has served queer populations—of various stripes—for a long time as an outlet, a place to learn, a place to dance, experience joy, and escape the heartaches of a homophobic world. This is something I touched on earlier to intro- duce Chap. 4. There are, as Eve Sedgwick (1991) reminded us, very few such institutions that argue for and promote queer lives, ideas, and practices. And that weekend, we were reminded that no place—particularly places that embrace queers—are safe from violence. We were reminded that rhetoric—be it religious or from the conservative Right—has material impact on the lives it assaults, delegitimizes, and uses as scapegoats. The backlash that some have expressed concerns of were made even more visible after that weekend; that backlash continues to exist in 2017, as this book went to print. Pride month—despite its commercialization—may be exposed as still a precarious enterprise; a place and time where celebrations 178 A. J. GRETEMAN can quickly turn into something else. Within queer circles, pride may be passé, but within the broader publics, such pride is still a danger. Of course, the actions carried out at Pulse were not new. They were, rather, a very real example of the violence that is continually felt by various queers. Each of our readings that day reminded us of this violence in various ways. But, none of the articles bowed to such violence. Rather, such violence—while haunting—pushed, compelled queers to persist, resist, and continue flaunting it. To “flaunt it” is still an action feared by many (including some gays) (Quinn & Meiners, 2009). “Why must you flaunt it?” is a question heard by many a flaming queen. Of course, such a query is not made to others who “flaunt” their own seemingly “normalized” forms of intimacy or sexuality. It is a query made of those who disrupt a particular version of the “public” and what is considered proper, appropriate, deco- rous. Yet, as Berlant and Warner (1995) reminded us, “indecorum can be a way of bringing some dignity to the abject” (p. 348). While on an interpersonal level “queers” may be the new commodity (e.g., the Gay Best Friend or GBF), on other levels of power (e.g., institutional, cultural, structural), it is still a reality that queers are often positioned as offensive, too explicit. To “flaunt it” is too often asked in various ways—often violent—to “straighten out.” Queer, feminist, and trans theories, in their own ways, refuse such directions, choosing instead to press for and redirect themselves in other ways, rooted in, often times, indecorous practices and ideas. It was said by the shooter’s father that it was the sight of two men kissing while with his wife and children that caused him (the shooter) to be so angry. Queer intimacy—in the form of a kiss—for some still persists as a threat—a threat to the social order. It was, you will remember, an image of two men kissing that provoked much of my work here. It is the image of queer intimacies that are writ large assaulted, often in the name of the child, as we had read about for this particular class session. Edelman’s (2004) argument that “The Future is Kids Stuff” often reads rather abstract. However, the events of that weekend illuminated the continued threat that “queers” bring to the social order. While we saw liberal and tolerant arguments emerge from this moment, as condolences and more were offered, Edelman caused us pause … after all “we have seen the future and it’s every bit as lethal as the past; and thus what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us, is our willingness to insist intransitively: to insist that the future stops here” (pp. 30–31). The “future” is always already ideologically sutured, and to resist it demands something else, something impossible. But as we make that impossible QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 179 demand, we must also remember our departed. We have to remember, as Rafsky reminded us in United in Anger, “when the living can no longer speak, the dead must speak for them.” In mourning and in militancy, the memory of those who died became necessary to recall, to remember. They become for us then, as they are for us now, part of the ever-growing queer litany of our saints lost to the violence of a future that always already foreclosed the presence of queers. And they were:

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34 years old Stanley Almodovar III, 23 years old Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20 years old Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 years old Paul Terrell Henry, 41 years old Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 years old Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 years old Peter Ommy Gonzalez-Cruz, 22 years old Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 years old Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 years old Akyra Monet Murray, 18 years old Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30 years old Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 years old Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 years old Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 years old Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 years old Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 years old Frank Hernandez, 27 years old Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 years old Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velázquez, 50 years old Amanda L. Alvear, 25 years old Martin Benitez Torres, 33 years old Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37 years old Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 years old Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 years old Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 years old Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 years old Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 years old Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 years old Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24 years old Oscar A Aracena-Montero, 26 years old 180 A. J. GRETEMAN

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 years old Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 years old Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 years old Miguel Angel Honorato, 30 years old Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40 years old Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 years old Jean Carlso Nieves Rodríguez, 27 years old Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 years old Cory James Connell, 21 years old Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 years old Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 years old Luis Daniel Conde, 39 years old Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 years old Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25 years old Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 years old Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 years old Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 years old Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33 years old.1

These were and are our queerly departed. They and the violence enacted on them became part of our archives, added to our knowledge about the continued violence against queers and the material consequences that engaging queer, feminist, and trans scholarship address. To follow Eve Sedgwick (1993) “the knowledge is indelible, but not astonishing, to anyone with a reason to be attuned to the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives” (p. 3). Lives have been denied, energies are being drained as we search for ways of moving to do the work needed to be done, differently. How then do we continue to do so? In what ways do “queer” theory or queer commentary allow us to theorize and comment on the lives and energies we live, imagine, and want in this world? Bodies matter, but what came to matter as the rest of the course unfolded was the work of checking in and caring for not simply the ideas we engaged, but the selves that sat amidst one another. There was a pal- pable change in the course as it took on new importance. Ideas that may very well have been glossed over became enlivened, as they were the ideas that centered queer, feminist, and trans lives in all their complexity. They were ideas that, instead of critiquing so to expose their inadequacies, we found ourselves using to work through the feelings that emerged after QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 181

Pulse. Our work together became the work of assembling the materials that we needed—from our own perspectives and realities—to make sense of the massacre, but also refuse to bow down to such violence in our daily living. We learned, I realized after the fact, to read for ideas, histories, practices, and viewpoints that allowed us to make arguments for our existence, but also create our own arguments as we cobbled together views we liked. I am unsure what the outcome of the course was for my students. We passed one another once in a while much of the next academic year until they all graduated. The inevitable downfall of teaching is that teachers rarely get to see the results of our work on student’s lives. We can, to be sure, see the results of that work on ourselves. The knowledge we engage with students, that we produce with students, transforms our own practices and ideas. Such transformations often inform our own scholarship and writing—as those students did here. Queer, feminist, and trans theories were not merely theoretical explorations about genders and sexualities. They were attempts to open widely into the possibilities that exist, have existed, and could exist in the world. The work of teaching and learning— so often overlooked, politicized, or under rated—was for those six weeks made visible as an essential component to becoming a subject. The work of teaching and learning allowed us, in the face of trauma, to conceptualize the realities that people face in diverse and complex ways. And this was important and a lesson we took from Judith Butler (2015) who taught us:

If we cannot readily conceptualize the political meaning of the human body without understanding those relations in which it lives and thrives, we fail to make the best possible case for the various political ends we seek to achieve. (p. 130)

This course did not seek to make queer, feminist, and trans theorists, nor did it attempt to professionalize the work of radicals. Rather, it sought to teach students and myself that to make a case for bodies to matter, we have to be able to conceptualize the complexities of such work, in the space and time that reveals what and how bodies can come to matter.

So What? In early work on queer pedagogy, as discussed earlier, scholars like Bryson and de Castell (1993), Luhmann (1998), and Britzman (1995) heroically and astutely addressed the ways in which queer came to impact pedagogy, 182 A. J. GRETEMAN particularly when “queer” was, well, queer. Queer made pedagogy quite strange and asked that we attend to things often left unattended. Each of the above authors, after all, noted within their writing the strange looks and fears that came about then, writing about queer pedagogy and queer issues. Such lessons informed my own development as a teacher as I sought to attend to the unsaid and the ignored while also being concerned with the erotic and sexy. Yet, unlike them, I did not sense the animosity or strangeness that they had when saying they were doing work on or with “queer theory.” Queer had, by the time I came to it, become less strange, quite familiar really, at least to those within my context. This is not to say that I did not encounter resistance to my work, a topic I have addressed elsewhere (Greteman, 2016). Rather, the tides seemed to have turned, as the resistance was less visible than the acceptance. Queer work was, so many said, necessary work, given the state of affairs for queers—variably defined—and researched (Brockenbrough, 2016; Kosciw, Greytak, & Diaz, 2009; McCready, 2004; Meyer & Stader, 2009; Nicollazo, Marine, & Galarte, 2015). Yet, the question remains what exactly can or does queer pedagogy do in the twenty-first century? Woodhouse (1994), in the same period as Britzman, Bryson and de Castell, and Luhmann, felt quite differently about queer pedagogy when he wrote:

‘Queer pedagogy?’ There’s no such thing. What would it be—a tendency to wave your hands a lot while you talked? The notion that there is, or ought to be, such a thing is symptomatic of the inflated notion academics have of their own importance. Get real—who cares what we call what we do in class. (p. 52)

Woodhouse, unlike the others, raised concerns about naming pedagogy queer, drawing on a stereotype of the limp-wristed, hand-talking fag. Teaching, so it would seem in his estimation, is less about what we call it and more about how we do it. I think it is probably a bit of both—queers in the classroom may or may not queer the classroom, but their presence does something. That something ranges—from provoking fears of recruitment to providing role models for young queer students. Teachers may not ever need to state their pedagogical style, I rarely do. But, understanding one’s style and what it hopes to do within the classroom matters. I realized this teaching a course that began with a simple premise—to encounter an array of texts and media situated in feminist, trans and queer theories. I found that what we call what we do in a class—the labels we QUEER/TRANS/FEMINIST EDUCATIONS: ON BECOMING QUEER 183 apply to our pedagogies—might largely not matter if we do not inhabit the way in which those “labels” inform the work we do. In the aftermath of Pulse and the 2016 presidential election, the task of courses that address feminist, queer, and transgender issues may become the frontline not only for learning the language of theories born out of struggle and resistance, but also to care for the self in the midst of new challenges. These are, to draw on Latour (2004), matters of concern that require new tools and opportunities. After all, continuing with Latour,

Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids … for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone … leaving them ill- equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for which we are so thoroughly unprepared? (p. 225)

To be sure, I am not confident my course-trained students to fight the wars that are emerging around social and political differences under the Trump administration. However, it remains the case that oppressions exists that press people, cultures, to limit their potentials, and that requires that scholars and students press ahead with addressing the matters of concern that vitally need pressing.

Notes 1. http://www.cityoforlando.net/blog/victims/

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Conclusion: A Closing for Queer Thriving

Concluding Lessons Queer theory, its commentaries, and attention to LGBTQ issues emerged out of a real need to survive. This has been particularly true for queer theory in education, which sought to make schools survivable for students and teachers (Letts & Sears, 1999; Mayo, 2014; Pinar, 1998; Rofes, 2005; Sadowski, 2016). As theoretical attention to queerness embedded itself in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and LGBTQ lives enter the mainstream in various productively problematic ways, this book has set out to explore the ways in which queers, upon surviving, can thrive in the midst of the changing economic, intellectual, sexual, and school terrains. It asked, in sometimes explicit and at other times implicit ways, what would it mean to articulate queer thriving as part of sustaining the critical work of queers and their theories? How might queer thriving be seen as a way to articulate how queers might develop or grow vigorously without or in-contestation to becoming “mainstreams” or “co-opted.” Queerness, as I hope to have addressed in various ways, educates in various spheres from schools and universities, through practices of reading, to encountering generations. There is immense cultural wealth in queerness and its histories that has yet to be fully embraced. And as David Halperin (2007) argued, “Queer culture already offers us some of the alternatives we need. We just have to learn how to recognize, how to value, and how to champion the queer cultural traditions that have come to us” (p. 10). The queer

© The Author(s) 2018 187 A. J. Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4_8 188 A. J. GRETEMAN scholars I have invariably drawn upon have in their own ways provided clues and help championing the proliferation of queer cultural traditions— be they contemplating children, reading, generations, or more. To queerly thrive promotes, recruits, and inevitably educates people to the causes of queerness that intersect with the causes of feminism, antiracism, class, and transgender politics. To engage in this project, I investigated what may have seemed quite disparate domains. This was, in many ways haphazard, as I had to write through what you have encountered to come to know what it was I was writing. This book began with a curiosity—about what happens once queer has survived. And my curiosity had to travel through various terrains to find ground to sit and write on and through. “Curiosity,” as Foucault (1997) taught me, “evokes care” (p. 325).

It evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way. (p. 325)

My curiosity in writing about and through queer thriving has never been an attempt to deny the realities around me—teaching a course the day after the Pulse massacre made the thought of such denial quite impossible. Yet, I have found the focus on victimization and violence odd in that it frames queers in ways that show only part of the picture. For decades, I have encountered, engaged, liked, and loved in various queer communities. These communities have thrived in the midst of and despite the violence that is part of their lives. And these relationships caused me to be curious to write about queer thriving, about how queers become, well queers. For David Halperin (2012) “Becoming gay is mysterious” (p. 324). It is mysterious, he continued, “because—unlike becoming American—it does not happen through primary socialization. Parents and schools don’t teach kids how to be gay in the same way they teach kids how to be American” (p. 324). The challenge and mystery of becoming gay (or queer, as I have written through in this book) is different from most other social groups because “most other social groups—whether minority groups like African Americans or majority groups like unhyphenated Americans—are initiated into their cultures at home and at school, as well CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 189 as through TV and the movies” (p. 324). Becoming queer—mysterious perhaps, but also filled with pleasures and surprises. The educational task becomes, in my view, the need to contemplate more and more diverse queer cultures as they bring into existence ways of encountering the world differently, queerly. How do we make such cultures accessible, visible, viable so that youth coming into presence are not only limited to the straight-and-narrow? “Becoming queer” is not, to be clear, a separatist project, nor one rooted in maintaining the boundaries between bodies and/or identities. Instead, queer, becoming queer, to return to Richard Ford’s (2007) idea that opened this book, is “a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other” (p. 479). Social norms are ever changing. Queers have been taken up within liberalism (a topic addressed in Chap. 3) and this queer liberalism, as David L. Eng (2010) argued, “articulates a contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law” (pp. 2–3). Once excluded, now some are included. Becoming queer amidst this requires explicit attention to these shifts, shifts that are not entirely bad, but cannot be taken as the end of the road. History plays a significant part in all of this. The ghosts of HIV/AIDS, youth suicide, and violence against queer bodies haunt the work of becoming queer. Such hauntings, according to Eve Sedgwick, created a sense of survival for those left, those of us who made it and now devote our lives to queer politics, pedagogies, and pleasures. She argued

Many adults … are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged. (1993, p. 3)

Decades into the struggle for LGBTQ people, ideas, and rights, we have perhaps cultivated and developed an archive that allows us to more fully learn ways of becoming queer in the world. But along with survival, this work might now also recognize and work through ways queers might thrive—what I have called “queer thriving.” Queer eradicating impulses persist, but in the face of avowedly resilient queers who have survived and 190 A. J. GRETEMAN seek to or already do thrive. The work of queer thriving—present already in daily lives—is about producing space and time that allows queers to thrive in ways that maintain the political, ethical, and sexual stances of queerness, both as insiders and outsiders to contemporary institutions. “After all,” as Butler and Athanasiou (2013) argued, “one finds queerness piercing through the heterosexual norm as much as one finds it thriving outside the norm—so it is important not to posit an airtight and totalizing system” (p. 53). Queerness cannot posit a totalizing system of how to make things better or how things are always already awful. Yet, it can intervene in institutions, in moments, in daily encounters in ways that do justice and cares for ideas, lives, and the complicated stories of queers’ past. This is queer’s educational enterprise. The significance of this project, then, has been to imagine, incite, and engage the political and pedagogical imagination to allow queer bodies in and beyond sites of education to no longer survive their 12 years of man- datory schooling, but thrive in the queerness of the twenty-first century. Each chapter, you may have realized or felt in reading them, does not entirely fit with the next. My curiosity took me to reading and then over there to children. Children led the way to meet generations and generations taught us about a past being lost while also then being taught by new generations about the pleasures and possible pitfalls of PrEP. What ties these disparate chapters together, I hope you see here at the end, is an attempt to wedge open in various realms of thought the need to articulate what happens next, when queers have survived?

Becoming Queer Becoming queer is a generational thing. There are various ways to divide generations, to invent them really. And each invention reveals different gen- erative ideas. Queers generate themselves out of nowhere, feeling toward the unknown as they dispute the norms that press them in, attempting to mold them (us) in varied ways. Queers become generations that encounter and take up and on new challenges that are placed on sexualities. However, queers would do well to not reify generational angst. This is a pedagogical task, as Halberstam (2003) argued and one that must “break with the oedi- pal deadlock that creates and sustains intergenerational conflict” (p. 69). While intergenerational relationships have and continue to be a challenge for queers—due to homophobia, lack of access, and more—there is a need to refuse the tired “kids these days” or “adults just don’t get it” phrases to CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 191 become curious about other queer generations. Or to draw on Patti Lather (2010), “Let’s be a queer family with a different relation to generations” (p. 75). This might be more difficult than meets the eye. Cynthia Belmont, in her article for Salon, “Has queer culture lost its edge?,” put on display intergenerational conflict as she asked if queer culture has lost its edge or become endangered since queer now looks different than when she became queer. Belmont, an English and Gender and Women’s Studies professor at Northland College, expressed concern, to put it mildly, with both her own students and other students as they encounter queer culture and its various, often offensive, usually playful practices. Like Warner (1999) decades ago, Belmont sees queer culture becoming overly focused on rights—custody rights, bathroom rights, marriage rights. To be clear, she believes that we all deserve rights, but is concerned that “in pursuit of rights and respectability, we have somehow shifted as a culture from the celebration of eros to the celebration of victimhood—to comfortably inhabiting a state of being prickly and appalled” (para. 8). Something, it would seem, has been lost, as her students are unable or refuse to engage the offensive practices of queers—from drag queens’ bitchy retorts to Caitlyn Jenner’s admission that her favorite song is Steven Tyler’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady.” In general, such issues may not seem important— they are situated within queer cultures and queer cultures are still by and large not mainstream news. I read about Jenner’s like of Tyler’s song only on queer sites while her donning of a “Make America Great Again” hat was splashed over mainstream entertainment news. So, who cares? Well, Belmont does, presenting her “queer students are so fragile, so easily hurt” argument as evidenced by one student who sees “victimhood as hot” (para. 13). Belmont does not believe her student, unless perhaps seeing victimhood as hot is a new fetish that is lost on her. But even then she concluded, “I won’t—I can’t—believe in the victim as the new face of queer culture … If victimhood is hot, then we have lost” (para. 14). Having lost is a seemingly common refrain as queer generations emerge and generate in new contexts. I think Belmont’s lamentation is rhetorically persuasive as she documents moments where victimhood is used against the work of education: work that is difficult, complicated, and conflictual. However, what I find more compelling about her piece—given it joins a line of arguments bemoaning the death, normalization, institutionalization, banalization of queer—is that queer—in order to do anything—requires the transmission 192 A. J. GRETEMAN of ideas, practices, and more. I can’t blame Belmont’s students or other students that have embraced victimhood, as that is often one of the only ways they have been allowed to understand themselves as queers. The reality is that queer students, in becoming queer, are unaware or uncomfortable with queer practices and ideas. This speaks, I speculate, to the lack of queer possibilities and lessons within education. We have yet to make good on Britzman’s (1995) demand that we stop reading straight. Or perhaps we would do well to remember that learning to stop reading straight takes more than a course, but rather a lifetime of encountering queers in their habitats—bars, backrooms, museums, and more. Queer has, in many ways, become domesticated, privatized, commodified: read through straight frames. I am sensitive to Belmont’s argument, but disap- pointed in its patronizing tone. Queer remains and persists, one merely needs to look for it. Perhaps college students—given the context of neoliberal practices in higher education—simply cannot afford the erotics of queer yet. Perhaps they simply are not ready, or prefer queer to do something else. Queer educators cannot give up on queer students, but have the difficult task of joining them, meeting them, to engage in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum (Pinar, 1975). The curriculum, however, is still quite straight. “For nearly a hundred years, US public schools have been concerned with removing any hint of queer identity” argued Catherine Lugg (2016, p. 106). “Whether it has been queer adults as teacher and administrators, or queer youth, or any information that could remotely be perceived as queer—each has faced eradication, erasure, and/or silence” (p. 106). Education’s struggle with and against queer attends both to the changing terrain around sexuality in schools and the continued need to think about and through queer’s promises within education—in schools and beyond—to corrupt its repro- ductive logics (Greteman, 2016). It is a queer struggle, to say the least, given the different operative ways queer gets taken up within discourses and arguments in education. Education may, within its conservative institutional imperatives, prove unable to embrace the projects of queer becoming and the work of queer generations. Queer curricula are still sadly lacking. Yet, to give up the possibility a priori of impacting institutions simply to feign staying queer would divorce us from the material projects of helping people survive and thrive—queer or not. As Valerie Lehr (1999) productively argued at a time when queer was, well, differently queer, CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 193

Creating institutions able to foster a more complex understanding of sexual identities depends upon fostering a society that is more able to see human identity as more complex than we do currently and that is also able to see youth as people who, although confronted by multiple and often conflicting demands, can and must exercise agency. (p. 146)

Youth matter, not in a romanticized way, because they grow—up or sideways, take your pick—to do things in the world. “The complexity of queer youth’s subjectivity, agency, sexuality, and cultural practices,” however, as Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt (2004) argued, “is flattened by a dominant framing of them in terms of danger and victimization” (p. 7). Adults construct ideas of youth, just as youth construct ideas of adults. We cannot avoid such work and such work succeeds and fails in all kinds of ways in practice. However, attending to the ways in which queer youth, in particular, are (or are not) constructed in discourse and practices is important. As they noted, such constructions have largely centered on seeing such youth as in danger or as victims. If this is how queer youth have been portrayed and allowed to see themselves, it is perhaps not difficult to see why queer youth entering college may see victimization as a way to assert their voices. However, my suspicion is that there are many queer youth who do not see themselves as victims, who embrace the erotics of queerness and other cultural artifacts that Belmont fears have been lost. We are over a decade past Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt’s assessment of the victim discourses. There are, in 2017—the year I complete the work in this book—more examples of student activism and representations of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in television, fiction, non-fiction, film, the stage. There are thriving markets for queer representations—something to applaud, skeptically. While such representations are in various ways contestable—showing the continued need for vigilance and criticality—such representations also can’t be taken for granted for the evidence they provide in showing changes in how queers of various stripes are recognized within various forms of media. Queer youth are invariably being made visible in different ways—not necessarily better ways—as attention to their lives and needs have increased. Queer adults and elders are similarly grappling with these evolving realities and discourses. This is all well and good, as more representations provide for more complexities and nuance to be explored and shown. No longer are, for instance, gay and lesbian characters represented only as sad, lonely, and suicidal people—as was the case for much of the first part of the twentieth 194 A. J. GRETEMAN century. Although, as Heather Love (2007) taught us, we cannot discount or deny these sad predecessors as there is a need to feel backward, not to show progress but to inhabit our queer histories. There has been, as well, a surge in the ways in which queers are portrayed within various media, as queers themselves are becoming the creators of such content. This is important, given that, following Rofes (1983), “Until the early twentieth century, popular literature and the press were silent about the lives of homosexuals. Since homosexuals were gagged by societal condemnation, the small group of ‘experts’ monopolized the market” (p. 9). While this monopolization led to particular constructions of queer subjects as pathological, sad, and associated with self-destruction, the experts have been pushed to the side so queer voices can be and have been heard on the topics that greatly impact their diverse lives. Suicide among LGBTQ youth has been, for decades, a central issue to advocates pushing for more inclusive policies for LGBTQ persons. This emphasis on youth suicide provides a compelling and rhetorically persuasive argument for changes within policy, education, healthcare, and more. Suicide and homosexuality, as illustrated by Rofes (1983) “share a parallel history of shame, ignorance, and manipulation” and “became firmly linked only in the early part of the twentieth century when the emerging medical profession created a definition of the ‘homosexual personality’ that included pathological behavior” (p. 1). Rofes unpacked and historicized this conceptual linkage illustrating the need, in the early 1980s, to advocate for delinking homosexuality and suicide. This delinking was not to negate the incidence of suicide among lesbians and gay men. Rather, it was to push against the use of suicide within gay and lesbian communities by various “expert” discourses and political ideologies to further pathologize the newly emerging gay and lesbian communities. Rofes sought to illustrate “suicide among lesbians and gay men is not an isolated, personal action. It is just one part of a strategy of genocide against lesbians and gay men and thus requires much more than mere assistance to individuals in crisis” (p. 124). While society and its expert discourses wanted to construct LGBT people as suicidal, Rofes flipped the script to illustrate that society was sick and its sickness was killing queers. Rofes (1983), as an early scholar of homosexuality, drew upon the emerging idea of sexuality as a historically and socially constructed concept, writing “The concept [homosexuality] was developed as a response to the growing awareness that same-sex sexual activity could be an integral part of a person’s identity which was, in turn, brought on by a developing CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 195 homosexual subculture in urban centers” (p. 3). Within the emerging history of sexuality being charted by Rofes, we were shown shifts within how actions (e.g., same-sex activity) become taken up by various emerging expert discourses (e.g., medicine, psychoanalysis, the law) to establish a type of person and quickly reversed to establish subcultures—what Foucault (1978/1990) called “reverse discourse.” Homosexuality, for Rofes, could become integral to (although it doesn’t have to) a person’s identity, and as homosexuality became integral to one’s identity one sought out and helped established subcultures of likeminded individuals. Becoming homosexual then, just as becoming queer now, requires that queerness becomes integral to one’s identity and that one’s identity can thrive within subcultures that recognize the integral nature of one’s queerness to living. Rofes (1983) early historical work illustrated the variance in how same- sex relationships operated and came to function in society. For Rofes (1983), there was an early distinction between those relationships that were not suspected of engaging in homosexual practices and those who were “engaged in same-sex sexual activity” (p. 4). It was this latter group that made homosexuality public. “Thus the only people whom the general public was aware of as enjoying homosexual activity,” Rofes argued, “were the victims—those women and men who were punished, executed, ban- ished, or forced to flee or commit suicide” (p. 4). The landscape of queer history was and continues to be a history littered with victims of homophobia, as it manifested itself in law, culture, and more. From being the victims of witch-hunts, public trials, and more, society was privy only to such visions of homosexuality. Rofes continued, “By observing the victims, society came to see people engaging in homosexual activity as self- destructive. The victims defined the population” (pp. 4–5). It is with this latter statement that this project, in part, has been implicitly and explicitly concerned. How do we engage the diverse realities that can fall under the umbrella of queer, inclusive of those who fall victim to homophobia but refusing to only construct queers as victims? There is, I suspect, little doubt that victims continue to define queer populations. Belmont’s argument provides us a picture of this. For Rofes (1983)

It is ironic that book after book has been researched and written examining why people are gay and whether lesbianism and male homosexuality are 196 A. J. GRETEMAN

‘morally acceptable,’ yet so little has been written to help lesbians and gay men lead happier and healthier lives. (p. 89)

And still decades later, Rofes (2004) would again take up the problems with the victim narrative defining queer youth. He argued that queer youth were still narrowly characterized in what he called “a ‘Martyr- Target-Victim’ model” (p. 41). His analysis of texts engaging queer youth found, by and large, that “we learn little about the lives of queer students except for their problems” (p. 50). There appeared then, in 2004, as it had in 1983, little by way of work seeking to help queer youth become queer and not be miserable. Queers were and are victims. It seems that society and schools prefer them that way. And if we follow Belmont’s (2017) argument from above, victimhood may have been embraced by queers themselves as a way to advocate for themselves. I am unsure if this book can help queers lead happier and healthier lives, particularly since happiness itself is in question (Ahmed, 2010). However, I do believe it is necessary upon the survival of queers and queer theory that works continue to push for and advocate queer’s coming into presence, engaging the offensive, playful, transgressive strategies that are part of queer history and within our queer present. We need other narratives that allow queer youth to see themselves beyond victims or survivors of homophobia. Such narratives, to be clear, cannot merely replace other narratives. Rather, we need diverse and complex narratives—represented in new cultural products—“that capture youth’s lives in schools beyond their relationship to homophobia and heterosexism and beyond the ways in which they find attending school to be difficult or painful” (Rofes, 2004, p. 59). What this looks like can only be known upon looking backwards while attending to the present strategies youth utilize in becoming. This asks that we continue to learn to read the world we inhabit and to do so queerly while not limiting those worlds to what we had then, in our own queer pasts. Such a project, the project of becoming queer and living a queer life, will be a project that will continue in unexpected ways. We may indeed live in a post-gay world, remembering that “to be post-gay means to define oneself by more than sexuality, to disentangle gayness with militancy and struggle, and to enjoy sexually mixed company” (Ghaziani, 2011, p. 102). This is well and good for those who disentangle their gayness from their politics, but becoming queer refuses that disentanglement to stand in opposition to the norms and continued attempts to privatize or domesticate CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 197 queerness into an identity not a politics. Such a project, to be sure, cannot ever be properly programmed or institutionalized. There is something improper about becoming queer; queer is, to draw on Butler (1994), “against proper objects” (p. 1) including proper politics and its narrow focus on particular conceptualizations of rights. This is not to imply that queer can only ever engage improper objects, but that queer contests the hierarchy that proper implies. Queer—in meeting a proper object—sullies it, makes it strange, reveals its perversities. Perhaps my object lessons here have sullied children or generational thought to make them perversely pedagogical? This, however, does not come from nowhere. LGBTQ people—youth or not—do not naturally come to these practices, but cultivate them in relationship with queers—often older queers who transmit such practices. I am unsure why this would be surprising, although Belmont expressed shock, “I am shocked,” she noted, “to find myself in the position of defending, to a queer, the value of hotness” (para. 13). However, queers may not inevitably be queer, a distinction that brings us to the very heart of these challenges. One can, for sure, identify as queer, but I sense or see queer as less an identity one wears and instead a politics one enacts. One’s sexuality does not necessarily make one’s politics queer, although one’s sexuality can position oneself queerly, despite one’s attempt to be otherwise. This should not be taken as an attempt to police what queer can be or the ability for people to identify as queer. Rather, it is an attempt to tease apart the ways queer can come to operate. I am myself less taken by queer as an identity, in part because queer theory emerged as a critique of identity. Yet, identity has been central to queer as theory becomes prac- ticed by bodies. Queer, we can see, is engaged in its own ongoing battles to define itself. As Butler 2016( ) noted in an interview with Sara Ahmed, “if ‘queer’ once sought to provide an umbrella term for nonconforming genders and various sexualities, ones that did not easily submit to categorization, it is now clearly embroiled in a battle of its own” (p. 9). It is the battle that matters as long as those in the battle recognize the need for commonality against larger social impediments and violence. There is no proper form that queer takes and queers will continue to become in and beyond the twenty-first century in surprising and unexpected ways. I suspect, given the realities that queers continue to face—particularly with the Trump administration—that our survival will continue to be threatened. But, we must continue to push not only for our survival and the survival of others, but that our ways of life thrive. We cannot position queers as mere victims nor can we disavow the ways queers are victimized. Neither 198 A. J. GRETEMAN can we see queers as being embraced by the social order without recognizing our queer brethren left behind. Queer, in its diverse forms, needs careful, critical, and generous attention because there are few moments where queerness is something promoted. Rather, queerness is something one decides, one claims, for which one stakes a claim and takes a stand. The decision to become queer is a decision that one does not make easily, given the very real challenges that go into making such a decision. Queerness as such requires that it be taught and that people be recruited into making such a decision. This idea—of recruitment—has of course been a homophobic fantasy. And while queers have distanced themselves from recruitment talk, often claiming they were “born this way,” it is high time that we embrace such a fantasy to make queer lives a reality (Greteman, 2017). While there have been moments to thrive as queers by joining the mainstream (assimilating) and there exist flourishing non-profit and lobbying efforts that have made “GLBT” a thriving enterprise that “pays,” this book has sought to offer an opening to contemplate and think through ways and challenges to queerly thrive. I believe it is, at its heart, an educational project. To resist the com- forts of the normal, not to become holier than thou, but to hold open the possibilities those who come after can choose to live differently than we can even imagine. Education is on the frontlines of such work, as education either creates possibilities to see otherwise or reproduces that already seen. Elizabeth Freeman (2010) argued,

As much as sexual dissidents have suffered, lived as objects of contempt or oblivion, endured physical and emotional punishment, we have also risked experimentation with our bodies and those of others, with affiliation, and with new practices of hoping, demanding, and otherwise making claims to the pleasure and power of figuration. (p. xxi)

This happens in moments that point toward changing landscapes. While I cannot be for sure that this book will be the one that that anonymous youth asked for at the Chicago History Museum that “teaches the real issues,” discussed in the introduction, I want to hope that in thinking about queers positively (including queers who are positive) and how queers and queerness open up intellectual and physical terrains to become in the world, I conclude this book embracing what it might mean to recruit for the projects of queerness which, I will argue, align with other critical projects for justice. CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 199

Surviving is necessary for this project. We recruit so that queer cultures and practices survive for new generations to remix and practice. It is important for queers and queerness to survive in their historic forms as reminders of what was and, in their yet seen forms, as reminders of what could be. However, mere survival can’t be the only game in town. It is essential that queers and queerness be able to thrive and cultivate cultures, ideas, practices, institutions, and more that disrupt the norms that, in many regards, helped constitute queers and queerness to begin with. However, as McCallum and Tuhkanen (2011) noted in the introduction, “to think queer becoming is to think, not only that one might never learn to straighten up and fly right, but the possibility of one’s becoming something other than queer” (pp. 10–11). While Belmont seems to fear queer becoming otherwise, becoming otherwise is exactly what queer seeks to hold open. After decades of political struggle, including the gains and losses, I sense it is time to continue to push for queers and queerness not only to survive another day or to be merely tolerated, but to queerly thrive in ways that may not be recognized immediately as queer. This sense is not rooted in a desire to make empirical arguments drawing on social scientific data or polls. Rather, it is a sense that emerges from my gut. It has been, as I noted in the preface, a feeling, a sense that something is wrong. What is wrong is not only the continued violence against queer people (Meyer, 2015) or the persistence of the bully society (Klein, 2012). What is wrong is also the lack of arguments that promote queers and queerness as viable options for becoming in and of the world. This requires, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) argued that we aspire to build queer cultures. They wrote in this regard that:

We are trying to promote this world-making project, and a first step in doing so is to recognize that queer culture constitutes itself in many ways other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state, or through the privatized forms normally associated with sexuality. (p. 558)

To build such worlds is quite difficult because the very work of education—institutional and elsewhere—has come under attack. How do we build cultures, queer cultures, without access to knowledges, practices, and ideas that should go into that world we are creating? In attending to generations, reading practices, and more, I hope to have shown—in a small way—what is needed in such work. We cannot build worlds alone and those worlds we build with others requires us to engage the diverse ways in which people become themselves. 200 A. J. GRETEMAN

Queer Commentary One of the early lessons set out by Berlant and Warner (1995) regarding what queer theory can teach us was that queer theory may be too narrow of an enterprise. Instead, they insisted that queer commentary might be more apt to describe what queer had come to do in and to the world. Throughout this book, I have commented on a series of topics—queer children, reading practices, teaching, and so on. I commented on these topics—in ways some might see as quite haphazard—in order to play with the concept of queer thriving and what it might look like refracted through, for instance, the historicizing of HIV/AIDS. As a scholar, I have found myself drawn to assembling together texts—written, filmic, popular, academic—that comment on the contemporary queer situation. To comment on is not, in my estimation, to offer a truth about the situation, nor is it to offer a set of answers to questions being raised. It is a surface- level approach to scholarship, but this should not be taken as superficial. Surface reading, instead, seeks to do justice to the world (and its texts) as they present themselves to the world. We live on the surface, and while critical theory has a history of preferring depth, in a world of artifice, all we need to see and contemplate is on the surface. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more are visible on the surface. Displays of these are shockingly becoming more common. They are right in front of us. We need look no further nor dig deeper. In our postmodern, post- human, pharmacopornographic era, depth is out and surface is in. Queer commentary, as I hope to have done here, is to provide an account, a description of the happening that is queer. It is, as such, not entirely a book of “theory.” Theory, after all, requires, it would seem, in-depth readings of “theorists” and a citational chain to go along with it. While I have cited those who are very likely seen as queer theorists (Butler, Halperin, Warner, McCallum, etc.), I have shied away from engaging in theoretical exegesis. For Judith Butler (2016) “[Queer] theory is undertaken in relation to issues that engaged the world in new ways, or that are clearly undertaken in relation to the struggle to imagine new worlds” (p. 8). I have not done queer theory, but rather undertaken queer theory to comment on issues—a small number of issues—that contribute to the larger constellation of issues. More needs to be done and written. No scholar can say it all. However, my hope is that scholars whose similarities outweigh their differences can overcome their (our) narcissism of minor differences (Freud, 1930). To build queer worlds cannot be done if we fight one CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 201 another instead of those who would prefer queers’ dead, silenced, or simply seated at the table that previously excluded us. For some, my use of “we” above and throughout may be of some concern. “We” has consistently been a problem, exposing the politics of inclusion and exclusion. For some, the “we” is viewed as “royal,” uttered by a monarch who speaks for her subjects. However, the “we” is also a common we. Think of “we the people,” a phrase that expresses a commonness to one another with shared rights and responsibilities, but also the promise of a “we” not yet achieved. In either instance, of course, there is a need to ask who is included since both the “monarch” and the “commoner” can exclude an other. Repeating Foucault (1997), however,

The “we” in my estimation is not something that can be determined once and for all, but the questions that are raised when the “we” enters the conversation are necessary in developing the self in relation to others— likeminded, often, but hopefully not always. We—queers in all our diverse configurations and experiences—deserve a future. However, the future, as Edelman (2004) has aptly illustrated has denied us access to it. This is not a lesson to bemoan, but one we should take seriously in cultivating a we that does work differently than the we from which we came. A “we,” our “we,” is necessary for survival, and that we requires lessons in our shared histories, of diverse histories, our disagreements, and more. As Ehn Nothing (n.d.) argued in “Queens Against Society,” “We prefer to forge our friendships in a shared practice of revolt, because we can only truly know each other when we cease to be servile, that is, when we are destructive together” (p. 11). Destruction sounds scary. It is, but it is necessary in the work of building worlds. The challenge remains, however, how to do so ethically? Amber Hollibaugh (2017), in this regard, raised a number of questions about the need to engage in world building in our current moment. She asked:

What does it mean for us, at this historical time, to begin a different kind of conversation about the possibility of hope and desire in the face of terrible 202 A. J. GRETEMAN

despair? Because we are in a state of despair. The majority of people in this country are desperate about their own survival, terrified that tomorrow will be even worse than today; the majority of people are too exhausted to fight. They don’t have the tools to create resistance—and they cannot imagine the possibility of it. (Hollibaugh, 2017, p. 459)

Queer thrival is not an attempt to whitewash, straighten out, or deny the material challenges that queers in all shapes and sizes face in the world. Rather, it is an attempt to begin a different conversation. To promote queerness as a thriving culture of ideas and practices that connects to other politics and approaches to becoming in the world. Changing the conversation and doing so with hope is difficult. It seems too optimistic, particularly for queer theory, which has often exposed the limits of optimism in favor of an anti-social aesthetic. To modify thriving with queer, much like queer has modified “theory” or “studies,” presents complexities and challenges, including the maddening proliferation of “queering” any and everything. There is, I recognize, here at the conclusion, a certain optimism to commenting on “queer thriving.” However, such optimism is queer. As Michael Snediker (2006) aptly argued:

Queer optimism, oppositely, is not promissory. It doesn’t ask that some future time make good on its own hopes. Rather, queer optimism asks that optimism, embedded in its own immanent present, be interesting. Queer optimism’s interest—its capacity to be interesting, to hold our attention— depends on its emphatic responsiveness to and solicitation of rigorous thinking.

Queer thriving cannot, conceptually and experientially, promise a better tomorrow. It is immanent, rooted in the immediate, the present, with an eye toward what it may never achieve. You’ll remember Edelman’s anti- social view of queer here as well, since queer there didn’t promise anything either. Rather, queer thriving seeks to shift attention to, what I sense, has been in the peripheral of queer thought throughout. It seeks to remember, reclaim, and reassert the interesting and rigorous work queer offers we-the-living who are in the midst of surviving. Surviving is, again, no easy task for queers. While it has gotten easier for some with particular access, geographic location, and ways of presenting to the world, the task of surviving is a task that can quickly descend on queers in the face of homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist violence. CONCLUSION: A CLOSING FOR QUEER THRIVING 203

A reader may still ask why queer thriving? A simple answer to that question is that “thriving” rhymes with “surviving.” To survive opens onto the possibility to thrive. Survival implies the potential for thrival. Since the early days of my exploring and developing this concept, there has been an attention to the simple joy and pleasure of rhyming terms. Rhyming words that parallel and relate to one another—a poetics of sorts. Without one (surviving) you cannot have the other (thriving). Or, with one (thriving) there is an assumption of the other (surviving). However, I write not merely of surviving and thriving. Instead, I modify such words with queer. Queer surviving and queer thriving attend to both the ways in which queers—as a diverse set of populations and people—have survived and how queer—as a set of conceptual and material practices—assist in cultivating strategies for being and becoming in a world that simultaneously likes and dislikes the existence of queers and queerness. As Audre Lorde (1984) made quite clear:

Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. (p. 112)

Writing is a way to do this, just as reading and activist practices do this. Yet, all practices become pasts that are anachronistic, but hopefully informative. While queer theory and theory in general are often challenged for their obtuseness, their abstractness, their lack of practicality, this book comes from a desire to comment on the ways queer theories have educated about and informed ways of becoming queer, decades into their existence. Queer theories educate and inform not only the growing discursive realities around sexuality and its intersections with gender, class, race, and more but also the material practices that exist to survive and thrive in the midst of crises that oft seem to have no “immediate” relationship to sexuality in all its complexities.

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A Biesta, G., 15–18, 154, 163, 172 Activism, viii, 13, 15, 19, 30, 103, 104, Bornstein, K., 73 108, 109, 116, 118, 122, 126, Boystown, Chicago, 89, 90 131, 134, 138, 147, 170, 171, 193 Britzman, D., 42–44, 127, 151, 181, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash 182, 192 Power), 9, 116, 120, 122, 125, Bryson, M., 128–130, 181, 182 138, 147 Butler, J., 9, 39, 52, 56–58, 62n2, 95, Ahmed, S., 6, 140, 173–175, 196, 197 130, 181, 190, 197, 200 AIDS, vii, 7, 13, 20, 28, 30, 75, 92, 104, 105, 111, 115–141, 145, 147, 148, 150–154, 156–159, C 163, 177, 189, 200 Castiglia, C., 124, 125 See also HIV Chemoprophylaxis, 158 AIDS Research, 146 Cherryholmes, C., 44–47, 50, 51, 55 Airton, L., xvi, 74, 80, 81 Chicago History Museum, 31, 198 Anal sex, 83, 153, 158 Child, the, 29, 68, 69, 76–78, 80, 84, 85, 178 Condomless sex, 146, 152 B Covering, 38, 120, 122, 123, 170 Barebacking, 28, 120, 145–165 Crimp, D., 135, 136, 141 Berlant, L., 3–5, 8, 178, 199, 200 Cultural reproduction, 102 Bersani, L., 135, 151, 157–159 Cultural wealth perspective, 98, 105

1 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes

Culture, vii, 5–9, 13, 21, 22, 38, 50, 51, inchoate, 125 55, 57, 60, 62n3, 83, 84, 90–93, Millennial, 12, 13, 106–108, 119, 95–99, 101, 102, 104, 106–108, 136, 140, 152 (see also 110, 111, 124, 138, 141, 147, 151, Millennial queers) 155, 157, 161, 163, 170, 171, 180, Rights & Queer activist, 104 183, 188, 189, 191, 195, 199, 202 Gay marriage, 7, 71, 136 See also Queer, culture Gentrification, 30, 92, 131–134, 138 Curriculum, 24, 29, 43, 98, 101, 127, Ghaziani, A., 53, 100, 108, 196 140, 164, 170, 173, 192 Gilbert, J., 2, 6, 7, 23, 32, 40, 73 See also Queer, curriculum Greteman, A., 24, 44, 69, 72, 81, 83, 128, 164, 182, 192, 198

D Dean, T., 139, 145, 146, 151, 153, H 156–158, 160, 161 Halperin, D., 9, 11, 40, 53, 82, 83, de Castell, S., 128–130, 181, 182 106, 128, 151, 154–157, 161, Digital media, 2, 100, 102 162, 187, 188, 200 Drag queens, 13, 191 Hermeneutic of suspicion, 48 Drugs, 30, 62n3, 123, 146, 147, 149, Heteronormativity, 29, 40, 49, 56 151, 159–162 HIV, 7, 12, 104, 116–119, 121–123, Duran, D., 158–160, 162 126–128, 134, 145–148, 150–154, 156–158, 161–165, 189, 200 Homonationalism, 49 E Homonormativity, 29, 49, 124 Edelman, L., 40, 76–78, 84, 178, Homophobia, vii, ix–xiii, 9, 14, 21, 201, 202 22, 24, 25, 75, 80, 81, 92, 95, Education, vii, 2, 41, 69, 94, 118, 101, 104, 108, 109, 130, 133, 151, 169–183, 187 135, 138, 140, 153, 173, 177, 190, 195, 196, 200 Homosexuality, x–xii, 38, 48, 56, 75, F 82, 90, 91, 101, 109, 110, 120, Fetishism, 27 141n2, 148, 154, 156, 158, 194, Foucault, M., xii, 6, 42, 56, 93, 94, 97, 195 99, 100, 105, 110, 137, 139, 149, See also Gay generations; Queer 154–156, 169, 188, 195, 201 Houston, W., 69 How to Survive a Plague (film), 123, 136, 137 G Gay bar, 89–94, 98, 110, 140, 177 Gay generations, xi I AIDS, 104, 116 Identity, vii, 1, 3, 8, 12–14, 19, 30, gay liberation, 104, 119 38, 43, 44, 56, 71, 73, 74, 81, homophile, 104, 120 82, 93, 95–98, 101, 104, 106, INDEX 209

108, 119, 125, 130, 133, 149, P 152, 153, 155, 163, 176, 189, Pedagogy, 10, 27, 30, 44, 123, 192–195, 197 128–131, 153, 165, 181–183, Identity politics, 19, 95, 96, 125 189 Institutions, xii, 2, 5, 12, 22, 23, 45, See also Queer, pedagogy 58, 71, 72, 75, 76, 85, 89–94, Pharmacopornographic era, 148, 151, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105–107, 111, 165, 200 124, 128, 136, 137, 155, 177, Plummer, K., 103, 105, 106, 109 190, 192, 193, 199 Political correct, 58, 59 It Gets Better campaign, 73 Post-AIDS, 13, 30, 104, 106, 119, 126, 127, 135, 136, 140, 147, 152, 157 L Post-gay, 53, 54, 58, 61, 106, 140, Lady Bunny, 59 162, 196 LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual Post-queer, 40 transgender, queer), 2, 6, 7, 10, Pragmatism, 19, 20, 29, 37–62, 77 12, 19, 23, 68, 115, 140, 141, Preciado, P., 3, 11, 13, 148, 149, 151, 187, 189, 194, 197 160–162 Liberalism, 42, 70–76, 85, 189 Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), 30, See also Queer, liberalism 62n3, 119, 120, 128, 145–165, Luhmann, S., 24, 130, 131, 181, 182 190 See also Truvada PrEP For Love (campaign), 150 M Pride, 8, 97, 98, 104, 109, 177, 178 Martin, J. R., 97–102, 105, 111, 117 Privilege, ix, x, xii, 4, 17, 20, 27, 39, Mayo, C., xvi, 5, 19, 29, 60, 68, 71, 41, 54, 84, 97, 128, 140 72, 75, 85, 91, 93, 187 Pulse Nightclub, 92, 177 McCallum, E. L., xvi, 15, 27, 84, 199, 200 Meiners, E., xvi, 8, 69, 110, 178 Q Millennial queers, 11, 13, 80, 119, Queer 140 becoming, 15, 156, 189–199 culture, xii, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 21, 22, 32, 60, 89–94, 96–101, 105, N 106, 108, 111, 115, 126, 134, Nancy (podcast), 115 136, 140, 141, 154, 155, 187, Neoliberalism, 11, 12, 40, 106, 107, 189, 191, 199 110, 124 curriculum, 19, 43, 75, 101, 129, 140, 173, 192 liberalism, 189 O memory, 124, 125 Oppression, viii–xii, 3, 8, 25, 47, pedagogy, 24, 42, 115–141, 181, 49–51, 183 182 210 INDEX

Queer (cont.) Sex acts, xii, 82 theory, 3–5, 9–15, 20, 28–32, 38–42, Sex education, 29, 99, 101, 151, 152, 44–46, 50–55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 163, 164 78, 82, 84, 124, 128–131, 154, Signorile, M., 2, 95, 120, 121, 170 172, 175, 180, 182, 187, 196, Silin, J., 127, 140 197, 200, 202, 203 Subjectivication, 163 thriving, vii, viii, xiii, 1–32, 45, 50, See also Biesta, G. 51, 55, 96, 134, 151, 157, Subjectivity, 3, 17, 30, 40, 62n3, 96, 187–203 129, 146, 148–151, 153, 154, youth, 13, 29, 31, 54, 67–70, 72, 73, 162, 193 75, 76, 79–82, 85, 95, 100, 101, Sullivan, A., 107, 108 105, 107, 110, 118, 193, 196 Quinn, T., xvi, 8, 110, 175, 178 T Teaching, 4, 5, 17, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, R 42, 89, 98, 101, 105, 106, 120, Race, K., 62n3, 153, 161 122, 124, 130, 131, 151, 164, Radical sex culture, 157 170, 172–176, 181, 182, 188, 200 Rafsky, B., 137, 179 Transgender, ix, 3, 8, 10, 67, 71, 78, Reading 79, 82, 84, 96, 99, 106, 120, paranoid, 48–50, 53, 61, 108 (see 121, 170, 171, 183, 188, 193 also Hermeneutic of suspicion) Truvada, 147–149, 158–162 perverse, 52 See also Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis pragmatist, 44 Truvada Whores, 158, 162 reparative, 29, 48–53, 70 See also Duran, D. Recruitment, 2, 182, 198 Tuhkanen, M., 15, 84, 199 Reed, C., 124, 125 Tunnel of oppression, viii–xi, 49 Reverse discourse, 79, 195 See also Foucault, M. Rofes, E., 2, 30, 43, 75, 90, 104, 126, U 127, 141n1, 153, 157, 161, 163, United in Anger: A History of 187, 193–196 ACT-UP (film), 123, 137 Rubin, G., 156, 159 RuPaul, 37, 60, 62n2 Russo, V., 121 V Vaid, U., 40

S Sadowski, M., 2, 5, 40, 187 W Schulman, S., 105, 131–133, 138 Warner, M., 3–5, 7–10, 20–22, 39, Sedgwick, E., 9, 13, 29, 31, 41, 49, 53, 107, 155, 159, 178, 191, 48–56, 58, 82, 105, 106, 125, 199, 200 177, 180, 189 We Were Here (film), 123, 134–136, 138