Queer Constellations This page intentionally left blank Queer Constellations Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City Dianne Chisholm University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Lines from “A Few Days” from James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993). Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Lines from “An American Poem” and “Hot Night” from Eileen Myles, Not Me (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991). Reprinted with permission of The MIT Press. An earlier version of chapter 1 was previously published as “The TrafWc in Free Love and Other Crises: Space, Place, Sex, and Shock in the City of Late Modernity,” Parallax 5, no. 3 (1999): 69–89, and as “Love at Last Sight, or Walter Benjamin’s Dialectics of Seeing in the Wake of the Gay Bathhouse,” Textual Practice 13, no. 2 (1999): 243–72; reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis, http://www.tandf.co.uk. A slightly different version of chapter 2 appeared as “The City of Collective Memory,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 195–243; copyright 2001 Duke University Press; all rights reserved; reprinted with permission of Duke University Press. A portion of chapter 3 appeared as “Paris, Mon Amour, My Catastrophe: Flâneries in Benjaminian Space,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de littérature comparée 27, no. 1 (2000): 51–93; reprinted with permission. Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chisholm, Dianne, 1953– Queer constellations : subcultural space in the wake of the city / Dianne Chisholm. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-4403-9 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4404-7 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Gays' writings—History and criticism. 2. Homosexuality in literature. 3. Cities and towns in literature. 4. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. I. Title. PN56.H57C55 2004 809'.8920664—dc22 2004015437 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 1211100908070605 10987654321 In memory of Anna Pellatt, social justice activist and cherished friend, 1954–2002 This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xix Introduction. Sodom and Gomorrah in the Era of Late Capitalism; or, A Return to Walter Benjamin 1 1 Love at Last Sight; or, The Dialectics of Seeing in the Wake of the Gay Bathhouse 63 2 The City of Collective Memory 101 3 Queer Passages in Gai Paris; or, Flâneries through the Paradoxes of History 145 4 The Lesbian Bohème 195 Conclusion. Millennial Metropolis: Blasting a Queer Era out of Homogeneous History 245 Notes 257 Bibliography 321 Index 341 This page intentionally left blank Preface An alternative subtitle for this book would be “Walter Benjamin and New Urban Narrative.” Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City examines recent experiments in city writing through Walter Benjamin’s dialectical optics on metropolitan culture. Benja- min’s dialectical image, or constellation, of nineteenth-century Paris is the theoretical and methodological subtext to my reading of the late- twentieth-century city in queer urban Wction. The method of dialecti- cal imaging is literary montage. In it, different stages of urbanization are torn out of ofWcial narratives of progress or culled from collective memory and set in juxtaposition to reveal historical contradictions. Benjamin’s Paris, or what he invoked as “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” views capitalism’s urbanization of European civilization and its extreme phases of revolutionary industrialization, utopian socialism, and bourgeois imperialism as “dialectics at a standstill.” Against pro- motional panoramas that exhibit the city’s technological futurism, mon- tage re-represents the city in constellations of historic space. Benjamin intended such avant-garde blasting of capitalist facades to be aimed at city readers, who, spellbound by urban phantasmagorias of the com- modity, would be shocked to see their dream city shatter into history’s ruins, fossils, and lost utopias; on seeing capitalism’s failure to material- ize the revolutionary promises of its industrial capability so graphically, and antithetically, exposed, city readers would “awaken” to history with IX X – PREFACE a politicized presence of mind. Queer Constellations uses Benjamin’s con- stellation to assemble and forge dialectical images of late-twentieth- century urbanization that are embedded in queer city writing. It is aimed at today’s city reader, who, aroused by the spectacle of (gay) capital, or by nostalgia for (gay) mecca, is confronted by images of revolutionary sexuality suspended in commodity space. This conjunction between Benjamin’s constellations of metropol- itan capitalism and contemporary queer city writing presented itself to me in the mid-1990s. My Wrst serious engagement with Benjamin had occurred ten years earlier, when Terry Eagleton had recently published Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981). That in- cendiary work, along with Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973), became the topic of inspired discus- sion for one full Michaelmas term of weekly meetings of the Marxist reading group (ironically dubbed “Oxford English Limited”) in which I participated. The discussion, though memorable, did not strike me as relevant to my research on bohemian sexuality and downtown writing until the advent of queer studies. Queer studies, especially queer theory, began to make a signiWcant appearance in North American academic circles at the same time that Benjamin was enjoying a revitalized recep- tion across all areas of cultural studies. The catalyst that brought these two Welds of study together for me was less this coincidence of aca- demic trends than an ongoing and longstanding extracurricular quest for lesbian and gay mecca. I found it in London, Vancouver, San Francisco, Sydney, Montreal, and above all New York, where I was both entranced and traumatized. For it was in this (queer) capital of the twentieth cen- tury that I felt thoroughly subjected to a seduction of space—space that manipulated the spectacle of (my) longing (and belonging) with lumi- nous audacity and, with equally despairing perplexity, would evaporate next morning in workday sobriety, or disappear altogether, as volatile ven- tures often do. Though I thrilled to lose myself in the phantasmagoria of Manhattan’s club scene and join massive Pride marches down Fifth Avenue, it was agonizing to orient my desire in a space that was so reli- ably “here today, gone tomorrow,” or so exclusively elsewhere, thousands PREFACE – XI of miles from the provincial city that I have made my base camp. On a larger, more distressing scale, I discovered that what was still a galvaniz- ing gay West Village in 1994 had melted into air by my return to New York in 1996. This later visit prompted me to recall a propitious moment of my Wrst visit when I chanced upon the “Queer Space” exhibition that was showing at the StoreFront gallery thatsummer. The exhibition fea- tured a stirring reconstruction of David Wojnarowicz’s tiny East Village apartment with lines from his New York diaries inscribed on the walls. Set against other installations of queer space (including one titled “Open” “Space” that depicted the censorship of lesbian presence and eroticism in Toronto and that reminded me of home) at the heart of the big city, Wojnarowicz’s “room” appeared to be part of a larger conWgu- ration, from which I could begin to take my critical bearings. A passage from the exhibition’s program reiterates this observation: To think about queer space is to rethink the terms “queer” and “space.” Is “queer” a kind of irreducible strangeness, the repressed condition of apparently stable entities, the uncanniness of everyday life? Or does “queer” refer to the term of gay and lesbian self-identiWcation that reemerged around 1990 to describe a new constellation of sexual-social- political identities? And likewise, with “space”: do we mean physical space? Or do we mean the space of discursive practices, texts, codes of behaviour and regulatory norms that organize social life?1 The term “constellation” struck a Benjaminian chord. Here, then, was a cue to the idea of bringing together a queer deconstruction of space with Benjamin’s montage of urban history, on site of my own experience. This idea preceded me in writing by lesbian and gay authors that now comprise the primary texts of this study. Gail Scott was at work on her novel My Paris while writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, at which time I learned of her using Benjamin’s Arcades Project to guide her lesbian Xâneur through Paris. I subsequently discovered a general interface between Benjamin’s city writing and queer representa- tions of urban space. It appears in experimental narratives by authors XII –PREFACE who reXect the paradoxes of New York’s and San Francisco’s gay meccas that had once mobilized great gay migrations to the center of capitalist culture. Or it appears in experimental narratives by queer authors writ- ing out of historic inner cities that, like Montreal, Paris, and London, solicit an uncanny conXation of cruising and Xânerie. On the other hand, the idea of exploring one another’s territory has never been developed by either queer studies or Benjamin-inXected cultural studies. Queer urban history and geography recruits Marxism and materialism to critique gay capital and to analyze the problematic cultivation of sexual subculture in commodity space.