Spring 2019 Ÿ Vol. 33:1 Ÿ http://www.clgbthistory.org

global scope, and we extend a special welcome to In this issue panelists and other attendees from around the Co-Chairs’ Column 1 world, as well as those from across the United Book Announcements 3 States. We are also excited that, reflecting the Book Reviews 4 growth of LGBTQ history in public schools, K-12 teachers may earn continuing education credits Reviews in this issue for attending #QHC19. The Queer History Beam, , Inc. 4 Conference truly demonstrates the growth and Hindman, Political Advocacy and Its Interested vibrancy of our field, and we could not be more Citizens 6 excited to mark the 40th anniversary of the Rubin, Deviations 8 CLGBTH—and the 50th anniversary of the Newton, My Butch Career 11 Stonewall uprising—than with this gathering.

Committee on LGBT History #QHC19 kicks off Sunday evening, June 16 with Co-chairs: Emily Hobson and Julio Capó, Jr. an opening reception at Jolene’s (2700 16th Book Review Editor: April Haynes Street), in San Francisco’s Mission District. Two Newsletter Editor: Dan Royles full days of keynotes, panels, and lunches follow at the campus of San Francisco State University. We’ll cap the days off with evening receptions at Co-Chairs’ Column the GLBT History Museum (Monday June 17, in the Castro) and the San Francisco Public Library What a way to mark 2019! We write this column History Center (Tuesday June 18, at Civic on the eve of our organization’s first stand-alone Center). Program details and registration are national gathering: the inaugural Queer History online through the San Francisco State Conference, to be held June 16 through 18 at San University portal at Francisco State University. Featuring a keynote ethnicstudies.sfsu.edu/content/qhc19. by Susan Stryker, 41 panels to choose from, and We extend a huge thanks to the #QHC19 three receptions, #QHC19 brings together a program committee co-chairs—Nick Syrett and wealth of scholarship on LGBTQ history across Amy Sueyoshi—for all their work in assembling time and place. The program is impressive in its

CLGBTH Spring 2018 1 #QHC19, and gratitude as well to the program think you might be interested in such work, committee: Howard Chiang, René Esparza, Will please send us (Julio and Emily) an email. We Kuby, Amanda Littauer, Kirsten Leng, Víctor would look forward to working with you. Macías-González, Jen Manion, Wendy Rouse, Nikita Shepard, Yorick Smaal, T.J. Tallie, and Looking beyond #QHC19, we are pleased to Sarah Watkins. announce a rich slate of panels at the 2020 meeting of the American Historical Association. Also at #QHC19, we will make available our first This meeting, to be held January 3-6, 2020 in official CLGBTH swag! Keep an eye out for , is sure to be a dynamic one with CLGBTH-branded pens, stickers, and to top it all large numbers of attendees. The AHA program off (…so to speak), fanny packs! Thanks to our committee accepted 11 of our panels on such board member Katie Batza for her hard work topics as local LGBTQ archives, queer histories of securing these items. We hope to see more than suffrage, HIV/AIDS, global queer history, a few social media posts featuring our members transnational trans history, and with CLGBTH gear. Please tag any posts about commemorations of Stonewall. Additionally, we the conference with #QHC19, and be sure to tag are pleased to forward 6 additional panels as us on Twitter @CLGBTH. affiliate sessions, touching on topics including and trans masculinities, 1960s and 1970s The Queer History Conference represents a new queer world-making, spinsters, queer global era of growth for the CLGBTH, and we are cities, and more. working to build toward this strong future with fundraising. We are committed to maintaining As further events during the 2020 AHA, we are low-cost entry memberships to the CLGBTH, organizing a tour of the In the Life archive at the keeping our organization accessible to graduate Schomburg Center for Research in Black , students, those in contingent positions, junior and will hold our annual members’ meeting and and senior scholars with limited support, and ever-popular evening reception. If you would those working outside the academy as it is like to publicize additional local events to take frequently defined. Additionally, we hope to place during the 2020 AHA—such as book create a research grant available to students and parties, local history talks, or a night out—please contingent scholars. Fundraising will aid us in feel free to post information to the CLGBTH reaching these goals as well as in organizing listserv at [email protected] or future conferences. With this in mind, we have by tagging us on Twitter @CLGBTH. welcomed the support of Gale/Cengage, publishers of the online Archives of Sexuality Looking further ahead, the fall of 2020 will bring and , for #QHC19. elections of a new board and the next co-chairs of the CLGBTH. As the current co-chairs, we have After the conference, you can expect to hear from learned so much from our time at the helm of the us with a fundraising drive for new lifetime organization and are excited to see what the next members, as well as a major donor campaign. We generation of leadership brings. If you think that are currently in the process of building a you might be interested in serving on the board committee of senior scholars willing to assist in or as a co-chair, please don’t hesitate to talk to us fundraising and outreach for these efforts. If you about the work entailed or the opportunities this

CLGBTH Spring 2018 2 role can bring. We welcome your interests and all members’ visions for the CLGBTH.

Julio Capó, Jr. University of Massachusetts Amherst Emily K. Hobson University of Nevada, Reno

Book Announcements

In this portion of the newsletter, we print book announcements in the field as sent to us by presses. To submit a book announcement to the CLGBTH newsletter, please have the press email the newsletter editor, Dan Royles ([email protected]). Announcements may be adjusted for reasons of space. Duke University Press also announces the University of Minnesota Press announces the publication of: publication of a new book: Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Brazilian Revolutionary by James N. Green Sexuality in America by Miriam J. Abelson Herbert Daniel was a significant and complex American masculinity is being critiqued, figure in Brazilian leftist revolutionary politics questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. and social activism from the mid-1960s until his In Men in Place Miriam J. Abelson makes an death in 1992. In Exile within Exiles, James N. original contribution to this conversation Green paints a full and dynamic portrait of through in-depth interviews with trans men in Daniel's deep commitment to leftist politics, the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing using Daniel's personal and political experiences how the places and spaces men inhabit are to investigate the opposition to Brazil's military fundamental to their experiences of race, dictatorship, the left's construction of a sexuality, and gender. revolutionary masculinity, and the challenge that the transition to democracy posed to radical movements. Green positions Daniel as a vital bridge linking former revolutionaries to the new social movements, engendering productive dialogue between divergent perspectives in his writings and activism.

CLGBTH Spring 2018 3 about the complexities of the relationship between sex and gender today.

Penn State University Press also announces the publication of:

Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta’s Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Book Reviews Twilight of the Spanish Empire by Thomas A. Abercrombie

Myrl Beam, Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Passing to América is at once a historical Queer Politics (Minneapolis: University of biography and an in-depth examination of the Minnesota, 2018) sex/gender complex in an era before “gender” had been divorced from “sex.” The book presents Beam’s Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer readers with the original court docket, including Politics is a trenchant critique of the nonprofit Don Antonio’s extended confession, in which he sector’s role in altering the landscape of queer tells his life story, and the equally extraordinary politics from the 1960s to the present, more biographical sketch offered by Felipa Ybañez of conservative iteration of LGBT nonprofit work. her “son María,” both in English translation and In the last three decades, queer nonprofits have the original Spanish. Thomas A. Abercrombie’s come to imagine themselves as representing the analysis not only grapples with how to very embodiment of queer politics and social understand the sex/gender system within the justice. Beam argues that the queer nonprofit Spanish Atlantic empire at the turn of the sector has instead reinforced, even exacerbated, nineteenth century but also explores what the social inequities that they seek to alleviate Antonio/María and contemporaries can teach us for their clients. Beam’s work joins and builds on the work of scholar-activists Dean Spade,

CLGBTH Spring 2018 4 Miranda Joseph, Lisa Duggan, and Alexandra of the services provided by Howard Brown Chasin, the anti-violence organization Incite! Memorial Clinic, especially its AIDS work. Beam Women of Color Against Violence, as well as analyzes the Clinic’s current relationship to others that have critiqued the role of nonprofit projects with LGBT homeless youth, who are industrial complex and uncritical embrace of it predominantly queer and gender nonconforming by activists and intellectuals in progressive youth of color. The third chapter turns to queer politics. another Chicago LGBT nonprofit, the Center on Halsted. Here, Beam’s attention shifts from the Through four case studies of queer nonprofits, affective language of Compassion to that of two in Chicago and two in Minneapolis, Beam Community. The Center has produced brings together oral histories, , campaigns, rhetoric, and services that racialize critical theory and archival research to bear on certain segments of the LGBTQ community of this argument and body of literature. A Chicago as being deserving of protection (i.e. convincing, thought-provoking, and sometimes predominantly gay cisgender white men of wryly humorous study is organized into five middle to upper class standing) while leaving chapters that effectively (and affectively) others, such as Black Trans youth, outside of the contemplate how compassion, community, crisis, community. Beam argues that, even as the and capital serve as logics and structures that organizations analyzed in these chapters served make the queer nonprofit sector possible. These marginalized Black queer populations, they also chapters also emphasize how they frustrate engaged in exclusionary politics of gatekeeping. dedicated LGBTQ activists that are constrained by the 501 (c) 3 model, and the clients these The final two chapters present Beam’s organizations serve. arguments about capital and crisis. The geographic focus shifts to Minneapolis, where The first chapter of Gay, Inc. charts the rise of the the nonprofits District 202 and Trans Youth current nonprofit sector. In 1960, there were Support Network (TYSN) sought to centralize the 3,000 nonprofits in the United States; by 2015 role of Trans youth in leadership, staff, and client there were 1,517,689. Beam traces the roots of base. These two very strong chapters show how key U.S. nonprofits to charities based on pity and “By and For” nonprofits can fail their clients. compassion, which emerged during the 19th Beam emphasizes the constant need for funding century. This smart and succinct chapter and grants from philanthropic foundations that challenges the way the U.S. nonprofit model has are, at best, problematic in their politics towards been naturalized as an inherently good response superstructures that oppress Trans youth and to social inequality. This chapter sets the stage adults. Beam’s ethnography here is vivid, and I for the next four chapters, each of which focuses found myself feeling irritated and frustrated by on one of the four organizing logics that shape the severe lack of support for Trans political the nonprofit industrial complex. agendas and needs from board members of these organizations. Both organizations, unlike The next two chapters suggest that seemingly Howard Brown and The Center, are defunct. This laudable service projects can become deeply ending completes Beam’s argument that problematic. Chapter two focuses on the history nonprofits have buttressed the political pursuit

CLGBTH Spring 2018 5 of gay marriage and repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t seminars in queer studies, women and gender Tell policies, at the expense of other issues of studies, American studies and sociology, as well concern to LGBT communities. as graduate seminars on similar topics. The chapters would also work well as stand-alone It would have been interesting to see more of an reading assignments. It would be of particular engagement with historians’ research on the use in senior seminars or capstone projects that War on Poverty programs and community health require internships at nonprofits. I took part in centers, such as Annelise Orleck’s edited such an undergraduate course, and this is a book collection The War on Poverty: A Grassroots I wish I could have consulted at the time. History. Such contextualization might have Thankfully, today’s students will have the troubled—or perhaps enriched—Beam’s opportunity to read Gay, Inc. It will benefit those argument that a majority of such programs unafraid of having difficult conversations on reinforced social inequality and did not prevent what transformative social movements and the eventual deconstruction of the U.S. welfare coalitions with and within queer communities entitlements by the Reagan administration. To look like. be fair, Gay, Inc. is not about the War on Poverty Brendan McHugh and Great programs; such a lengthy University of Minnesota, Twin Cities engagement would be beyond the scope of the project. The specificities and particulars of Matthew Dean Hindman, Political Advocacy Beam’s project and arguments work very well and Its Interested Citizens: Neoliberalism, and are convincing, but they do not engage in Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations open debate with scholars who have taken a (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, different view. Readers may also wish the 2018) publisher had included a bibliography to show the extensive research and secondary literature In Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens, informing this study. These issues, however, do Matthew Dean Hindman analyzes the history of not extend to the chapters focusing on crisis and LGBT activism from the 1950s to the 1990s capital in relation to Trans youth nonprofits in through the lens of political science. He clearly Minneapolis. Of all the chapters these, along with states that his book should not be read as a Beam’s examination of The Center in Chicago, history. Instead, it is a political scientist’s offer the best example of the great account of how neoliberalism and activist culture interdisciplinary work that American studies can combined to create an “interested citizen.” do by engaging history, theory, and sociological Hindman theorizes this historical subject as the methods. product of both genuine political advocacy and socioeconomic change. Without producing a My critiques are not meant to take away from disciplinary history, Hindman does narrate the the importance of this book. Its merit lies in its historical construction of the interested citizen argument that LGBT nonprofits should not be in regard to LGBT activism. confused with queer social movements en masse. This book would be an excellent choice for The introduction explains the political science assigned reading in advanced undergraduate theories that shape Hindman’s historical

CLGBTH Spring 2018 6 interpretation. Three sets of keywords frame the revolution (One) and empirical argument entire project. First, interested citizens are (Mattachine Review). For Hindman, the defined as citizens of an ideal type, generally significance of these publications was that they created by an advocacy group, who engage signaled the formation of a homosexual ideal- financially or actively with the group, movement, type that could be accepted by the heterosexual or political moment (3). Next, Hindman uses majority in the United States. This is ground postpluralist to express the view that well-covered by LGBT historians, and Hindman “Americans… view themselves as members of mainly relies on the research of prior scholars. various groups and organize themselves on that Rather than new findings, he offers conceptual basis, though… these organized interests tend to tools for assessing the political impact of LGBT reflect and even perpetuate long-standing activism. inequalities even as they seek to redress them” (9). Finally, he invokes neoliberalism as “a Chapter 3 (1960s–1970s) focuses on activism concept most basically understood as the drive during the rise of the Gay Liberation movement. to reduce the state’s role in administering social Hindman analyzes engagements between LGBT welfare and ‘liberate’ the individuating, citizens, various advocacy groups, and the entrepreneurial ethos necessary for capitalist government. He narrates the struggles involved economic development” (12–13). in creating large, nationalized interest groups in the wake of Stonewall and other movement Chapter 1 enlarges on the concept of the milestones. Much of the chapter interprets the interested citizen in relation to current Advocate’s influence on LGBT individuals as it scholarship. Hindman gives an overview of the grew larger in the wake of the sexual revolution ways in which political scientists have of the 1960s. Hindman argues that this growth interrogated both neoliberalism and advocacy. encouraged the creation of an ideal homosexual: This chapter provides an excellent introduction one to be presented before white, heterosexual and would make a welcome addition to syllabi America as the perfect, conforming gay. for LGBT studies classes, in which students may Importantly, this process also enabled financial need a gloss of the current political science gains for LGBT advocacy and interest groups. scholarship on activism. Chapter 4 (1970s–1980s) contends that Chapter 2 (1940s–1950s) narrates the identity advocacy groups presented two main options to formation that occurred at the beginning of the members of the LGBT community: the upright LGBT movement in the mid-twentieth century. homosexual or the sexually deviant gay. Hindman provides a largely synthetic history of Hindman records the kinds of personal conduct homosexuality in the United States before World advocacy groups prescribed as evidence for his War II and the rise of homophile organizations narrative of the different ideal types formed in such as the Mattachine Society, Daughters of wake of various post-Stonewall actions. Yet no Bilitis, and ONE, Inc. He chronicles the growth of behavioral model could have prepared either the publications One and the Mattachine Review group of interested citizens for the coming AIDS and how those working for homophile crisis. The epidemic completely changed the way acceptance centered their work around sexual LGBT groups interacted with the state, the

CLGBTH Spring 2018 7 heterosexual public, and their own interested activism. However, its main contribution is to the citizens. field of political science.

Chapter 5 (1980s–1990s) investigates the My other qualm is stylistic rather than integration of these three, core areas of substantive. Political theory is explicitly concern—identity formation, political connected to history in the introduction, first participation, and personal conduct—in ACT UP. chapter, and conclusion, but not woven through Hindman writes that AIDS activists challenged the body of the book. Hindman expects the and complicated the idea of an interested citizen, reader to connect the dots between the history constructing non-dogmatic alternatives to this presented in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 and the framework in the process. The chapter’s main theoretical models that drive his narrative intervention is to show that neoliberal political choices. Readers of the conclusion, particularly models were never all-encompassing, nor were students new to LGBT history, may struggle to they unbreakable. remember the historical evidence presented to support his theories. The conclusion ties these threads together with a summary analysis of the significance of Despite these issues, I found the historical Hindman’s interested citizen framework for presentation and political science argument to social movements. He suggests that each stage be fruitful with pedagogical potential. This book and variation of LGBT advocacy prepared for, could be especially useful as an entry into the created, or worked with an interested citizenry. history of twentieth-century LGBT activism in The book ends by proposing that the lessons of interdisciplinary courses. The political theory is past LGBT movements—especially the costs of easy to understand, and the historical sections promoting an ideal interested citizen—can are succinctly and intriguingly written. Hindman strengthen movements now, such as those admits that Political Advocacy and Its Interested resisting the Trump Administration, Occupy Wall Citizens should be supplemented with more Street, and Black Lives Matter. robust historical studies in order to present a complete picture of the movements he explores. Hindman’s project was to prove political science Even so, this book is an excellent theoretical theories through a retrospective of LGBT study of LGBT advocacy in a neoliberal time. activism. His book would have been more Adam McLain generative for historians had it included more Harvard Divinity School explicit conversation with the existing historiography. After a brief statement in the Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin introduction, he does not elaborate on how the Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, concept of the interested citizen could change 2011) understandings of LGBT history or what it might contribute to queer theory. Members of the Gayle Rubin is hailed with many laudatory titles CLGBTH may find in Political Advocacy and Its including the founder of sexuality studies, the Interested Citizens a helpful introduction to founder of LGBT studies, one of the founders of political theory as it intersects with LGBT queer theory, and the preeminent feminist

CLGBTH Spring 2018 8 theorist of gender. Rubin rejects many of these connected gender and sexuality to political, designations, as her definitive collection of social, and economic processes. essays, Deviations, makes clear. Throughout While these two essays are rich and vibrant in Deviations, Rubin is careful to contextualize her their own right, one might be tempted to think life’s work and to place herself in a genealogy that the essays are somehow dated or with other scholars who performed similar work overtrodden territory. However, Rubin places and influenced her thoughts, methods, and both essays next to a series of newer essays in political commitments. Even with such which Rubin historically situates and elaborates contextualization, the many and varied portraits upon her major texts. It is a rare treat to reflect of Gayle Rubin and her assortment of singular back with the author herself on the original and extraordinary designations speak to a essays. This has the effect of rendering both singular and extraordinary life of scholarship essays as exceedingly fresh and makes the texts and activism that helped break intellectual and useful to historians as an archive of discourse institutional ground for the possibilities of LGBT that marks what was sayable at particular historical scholarship today. moments in feminist and LGBT history. As Rubin notes, her essay “The Traffic in Women” was a Deviations is a collection of fourteen essays “profoundly local product” that had “the authored by Gayle Rubin that were published accidental quality” of being written while Rubin over a span of 35 years. Expectedly, Rubin’s two was taking a class at the landmark essays are included. In her 1975 essay on the of women at a time when “The Traffic in Women,” Rubin coined the term Lévi-Strauss’s work on and Althusser’s “sex/gender system” to show how sex and article on Freud and Lacan were freshly gender are produced through culturally-specific translated and hot off the press (13). “Had I kinship systems and, importantly, produced taken the same class a year or two earlier, differently across time and space. Rubin neither would have been available. Had I read famously stated that “feminism must call for a them later, the possibilities they presented for revolution in kinship” to dismantle and feminist thought would have already been reorganize the sex/gender system and to liberate extracted, digested, and articulated by others,” forms of sexual expression and the human Rubin states (13). Rubin also notes that one personality from “the straightjacket of gender” important factor that shaped the essay was “the (58). Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex” synthesized a availability of the historically specific concept of great deal of historical material on the policing gender” (13). Thus, the reader develops a and regulation of sexual dissidents in the 19th reverence for the contingencies and conjunctions and 20th centuries and introduced a conceptual of history that had to align for this set of essays vocabulary that revolutionized thought on sexual to exist and develops an attentiveness to the hierarchies, sexual morality, and emphasized the profoundly historical and contingent nature of study of sexuality as a historically specific and our own, present-day analytics and concepts. distinct social practice. Both essays refused to treat gender and sexuality as universal or as Other essays in the collection have appeared in subject to pathological perversions and instead disparate, out-of-print sources due to the fact that many of the pieces were written before the

CLGBTH Spring 2018 9 institutionalization of women’s, gender, and Several of Rubin’s essays judiciously detail the sexuality studies and because many of the essays formation of sexuality studies and LGBT history were written by Rubin in the spirit of the as academic fields. Many of the essays contain independent public intellectual and personal reflections on Rubin’s struggle as an pamphleteer. Rubin presented many of the undergraduate student to find books or even essays at conferences, in reading groups, or as bibliographies on lesbian studies and later public testimony and circulated the essays as struggles to find and access materials for her photocopies to informal networks of friends doctoral dissertation on the early history of gay throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The essays men’s leather and motorcycle culture. Across were only later published (or republished) in a several of the essays, Rubin discusses the wave of feminist theory anthologies and gay and evolution of LGBT and sexuality archives from lesbian studies readers that appeared in the humble origins in amateur historians’ garages, 1990s. basements, and apartment floors to more stable institutional sites with air-conditioned rooms Thus, on the one hand, Deviations is an archive of and paid staff librarians and archivists. One gains primary sources from significant, even an appreciation for the institutional and watershed, moments in LGBT and feminist economic challenges (and routine history. “The Leather Menace” was first underemployment) that the early LGBT published in Coming to Power: Writing and historians and archivists faced and the paucity of Graphics on Lesbian S/M in 1981 by Samois, the support and encouragement for graduate first lesbian S/M group that subsequently fought students who dared study LGBT people. a number of battles in the San Francisco Bay Area against the feminist anti-pornography Throughout Deviations, Rubin also critiques the organization Women Against Violence in stories that LGBT and queer studies scholars tell Pornography and Media (WAVPM). “Thinking about their past and interrogates either the Sex” was originally presented at the infamous canonization of or amnesia around academic 1982 Scholar & Feminist Conference at Barnard figures and texts. For example, Rubin scrutinizes that was almost shut down by Women Against how Foucault’s influence on the formulation of Pornography (WAP). “Misguided, Dangerous, the social construction of sexuality is over and Wrong: An Analysis of Antipornography emphasized in historical literature. Rubin Politics” was first written as testimony for the suggests that Foucault was part of a broader National Organization of Women’s hearings on epistemological turn that included many other pornography in 1986 to counter the U.S. scholars working before or at the same as the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography publication of History of Sexuality Vol. 1. The (better known as “The Meese Commission”). As historical studies of Jeffrey Weeks, Jonathan primary documents, the reader of Deviations can Katz, and Judith Walkowitz also exhibited the feel immersed in the sexual politics of the 70s social-constructionist turn, but Rubin is quick to and 80s. point out that Weeks was influenced primarily by sociologists like Kenneth Plummer and Mary On the other hand, Deviations is an extended McIntosh who, in turn, were influenced by an meditation on the history of LGBT history. entire sociological tradition that included folks

CLGBTH Spring 2018 10 like Simon and Gagnon (328-333). Rubin also antiporn movement, which is better represented points to the importance of homophile by the anthology Take Back the Night” (284). organizing and early gay-liberation scholarship Rubin’s nuanced details about the 1982 Barnard as an important condition of possibility for LGBT Conference and its pre- and post-history present historical scholarship today (198, 349). Rubin’s an account in which many different people suggestion of an alternative and much expanded occupied many different sides. Further, a history citational universe for the heritage of queer that assumes a pro-sex/pro-porn side and an studies is not simply to correct historical errors. anti-violence/anti-porn side defuses Rubin’s Instead, she demonstrates how forms of own concerns about the violence, harassment, storytelling and narrative resources are and criminalization that sexual and gender connected to organizational structures and minorities face. Michelle Goldberg recently institutional resources that “guarantee the stated in the New York Times that “it’s precisely conservation, transmission, and development of because Dworkin lost the sex wars so decisively queer knowledges” or that otherwise forget and that we can now see beyond her most extreme destroy queer knowledges (355). These rhetoric.” If Dworkin lost the sex wars, why is it mediations into the history of LGBT history so hard to teach “Thinking Sex” to undergraduate make Deviations the perfect primer for new students without students accusing Rubin of graduate students looking to understand the sympathizing with child molesters? And, why history and contours of the field. hasn’t a major LGBT history book or LGBT history dissertation been written about In the age of #MeToo, many people are revisiting NAMBLA? Rubin gives us clues that the sex wars the work of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea aren’t over because there was no single or final Dworkin. Any queer revaluation of MacKinnon side to win. The stakes and challenges of doing and Dworkin’s work should be read closely with queer history are still high. Deviations. One should not simply read Rubin Kevin A. Henderson because she represents the “other side” of the University of Massachusetts Amherst feminist sex wars. Rather, Deviations exhibits how the narrative tropes of “two sides” Esther Newton, My Butch Career: A Memoir diminishes the theoretical and political richness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) of lesbian and feminist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Rubin is often narrated as writing Esther Newton and I are nearly the same age, “Thinking Sex” directly to and against and our academic careers—founding early MacKinnon. A close reading of “Thinking Sex” Women’s Studies Programs at our academic shows that Rubin was concerned with many institutions (SUNY Purchase for her, Appalachian issues beyond the regulation of pornography. State University for me), mentoring young Additionally, according to Rubin, MacKinnon was lesbian students (even before being “out”), a latecomer to pornography debates, and dealing with antagonistic students and faculty, “Thinking Sex” was mostly written before she participating in early disciplinary feminist became a visible figure in the antiporn organizations (anthropology and history)—are movement. As Rubin notes, “[Mackinnon’s] fame also similar. We both had significant European tends to eclipse the early history of the feminist

CLGBTH Spring 2018 11 experience, as second wave feminism was taking early on. Throughout, as a good , hold in Amsterdam and Paris, Berlin and London. Newton comments on her story’s meaning, from But since much of Newton’s book deals with her her much later perspective. The most gut- parents and her own early life in school, wrenching time in Newton’s early life was when graduate school, and first job, there our stories her mother abruptly decided to move to Palo diverge. Newton’s memoir reminds us of the Alto, California; Esther, at age eleven, had to importance of recent LGBTQ history for leave her school friends at the lower Manhattan academics. leftist Downtown Community School, as well as ultimately losing her beloved dog. Newton’s greatest success in this memoir is in narrating a history of lesbian and sexuality Esther Newton is clearly a New Yorker: except studies in the midst of her own life’s story. That for the school years in California and her college project was one Newton was always and graduate school days, she retained an implementing, as she was continually worried absolute connection to the gay and feminist about how to combine her work with her life. In community in the metropolitan New York area. fact, the issue of professorial personal revelation Thus it was in New York that she had her (how much, when, does it matter?) was an academic positions, lived with several different important one for feminists during the 1970s. lovers and finally came out. She experienced She grew up knowing she was different, but not Stonewall and was part of the early second wave knowing what she was, not until college. of the women’s movement (watching the Miss Continuing through graduate school and first America drama in Atlantic City, helping found jobs, she was not out of the closet: it was too the Upper West Side WITCH [Women’s dangerous in academe. Newton’s introductory International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell], chapter lays it all out: what butch meant in the participating in early consciousness-raising fifties and sixties and how she negotiated groups). In New York, she participated in the costume, hair style, and walk, even while the first programs in gender and sexuality studies, roles of butch and femme were changing. and, with her French girlfriend, made early connections to French feminism. As in most memoirs, Newton’s early chapters narrate her parents’ stories. Her mother Virginia Throughout, her memoir is often salted with was born in San Francisco to a conservative pieces from her journals, giving her earlier military family. Virginia’s rebellion included perspective, as well as archival photos of her arrest in a leftist student demonstration at the parents and various lovers. Her first year in , an abortion, then marriage graduate school at the University of Chicago, for and early widowhood. After moving to New example, was dreadful. She knew no one, was not York, she decided not to abort her second out as a lesbian, and the weather was worse than pregnancy, her lover having abandoned her for her undergraduate days at the University of not being Jewish. That puzzle about the identity Michigan. When she took up with Kenyan of her biological father was not solved for Esther student John, she was able to experience Newton until much later. She grew up with Saul “Bronzeville” in Chicago. Her view of Hyde Park as her father, although he divorced her mother from her journal is telling: “In the midst of this

CLGBTH Spring 2018 12 morass of human misery and privation sits the instructors and professors. Newton grasps the smug U of C, openly discriminating (it is the problems of academia in terms of how tenure is biggest slum landlord in the area) and its ulcer- gained, how young Ph.D.’s learn how to teach ridden faculty, grimly turning out badly written (they are not taught!), how curricula are joyless little academic exercises of minor arranged and approved. She sees through it all. interest” (105). She had not yet met her mentor Now of course most Ph.D’s are mentored as nor the gay male friends who became so teaching assistants, given help and advice during important: up to that point, the University of the whole graduate school process. But in the Chicago was appalling in every way, including its sixties, women in general, let alone queer own discriminatory policies. women, were not welcomed, mentored, or given much help of any kind. My first graduate school Newton’s choice of topic for her dissertation at advisor at Boston University told me that women Chicago (a study of female impersonators) was should not get Ph.D.’s, that I should stop with the ground-breaking for , who in the M.A. Then later at Emory University I had to deal mid-1960s were supposed to do foreign field with three different dissertation advisors work. She had actually managed to become because “she probably would not finish.” That affianced to a fellow graduate student, who was horror was in one professor’s recommendation off to Fiji to do his field work; she would join him in my own job file. A quota system at Emory later. But she had become interested in gay University for fellowships stated that only 25 culture and female impersonators, making gay percent could be awarded to women (“who only friends who helped her meet performers for got married and quit”). That issue became my interviews. When she showed her graduate first activist protest. Even though Newton had advisor her notes and ideas, he suggested that completed and was publishing her dissertation, this should be the topic for her dissertation. Her Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America mentor/advisor David Schneider was able to (1979), in 1970 Newton was denied tenure at make “the paradigm shift that made the field [of Queens College in a split decision. There was no gay and lesbian studies] possible… [F]emale possibility of appeal; the final decision was made impersonators… were a group of human beings by the chief academic officer, based on and so necessarily had a culture worth studying. recommendations from the department’s tenure The insight that gays were not just a category of committee. Newton has come to see the sick isolates but a group, and so had culture, was American academic system as corrupt and a breathtaking leap whose daring is hard to prefers the French system, “public and recapture now” (113). This work, which she unionized, where if you publish X number of began in the late 1960s, was truly innovative. essays and pass certain standardized tests, you The book which resulted from the dissertation, are automatically promoted” (142). Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, has recently been reissued, still in print. Newton’s honesty about sexuality—what she wanted for herself, what she put up with, how For queer historians, Newton’s memoir gives a butch-femme operated and changed over the detailed narrative of what the academic situation years—is one of the strengths of this memoir. was like before the 1980s for “othered” The process by which she merged her own

CLGBTH Spring 2018 13 sexuality and academic work is the climax of the book. It began with the second wave of feminism, meeting Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and the feminist historians of New York, helping found the gay anthopologists’ group, meeting the French feminists of MLF and psych et po. When she published her first academic article on the history of sexuality, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman” in SIGNS, the women’s studies peer-reviewed journal (Signs 9, no.4 [Summer 1984]: 557-75), Newton understood exactly where her place was: “I had found a way to integrate my love of women, my female masculinity, and academic writing into one functioning, coherent person” (246). We can wait with bated breath for the next volume of Newton’s memoir. Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Appalachian State University

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