UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Affect in the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Communication by Aaron W. Gurlly Committee in charge: Professor Patrick Anderson, chair Professor Lisa Cartwright Professor Zeinabu Davis Professor David Kirsh Professor Jorge Mariscal 2014 Copyright Aaron Wade Gurlly, 2014 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Aaron W. Gurlly is approved, and is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS SIGNATURE PAGE ..................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................... vi VITA ............................................................................................................................. vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION .................................................................... viii Chapter 1: Reading through Shame to Understand Pride ............................................... 1 Literature Review ............................................................................................. 13 Affect .................................................................................................... 15 Gay History and Gay Identity ............................................................... 21 Gay Shame ............................................................................................ 26 Shame as constitutive of gay identity? ................................................. 33 Limits of pride/liberation discourse ...................................................... 36 The San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus ................................................................... 50 Chapter Outline ................................................................................................ 60 Methodology ..................................................................................................... 62 (Auto)ethnographic Methods ................................................................ 64 Chapter 2: Pride, Shame, and Queer Publics ................................................................ 83 Publics, Counterpublics .................................................................................... 83 Queer publics as counterpublics ....................................................................... 88 Public Spaces, Private Matters ............................................................. 88 Public Faces, Privacy Rights ................................................................ 98 Public Publics – LGBT Choruses ....................................................... 103 Chapter 3: Pride, Shame and the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus ............................... 113 Experiences of Shame .................................................................................... 115 Alternative Voices .......................................................................................... 124 “Alexander” – age 28 ......................................................................... 130 “Daniel” - age 26 ................................................................................ 133 “Mitchell” - age 31 ............................................................................. 138 “Kirk” - age 30 ................................................................................... 142 Conclusion .......................................................................................... 147 Chapter 4: Performing Shame: “I Want More Life” .................................................. 149 Angels in America .......................................................................................... 151 Learning Shaieb’s Composition ..................................................................... 155 2011: Performing for a General Audience ..................................................... 165 iv “I Want More Life” at GALA 2012 ............................................................... 169 Chapter 5: Performing Shame: Failed Masculinity .................................................... 178 Looking Like a Girl ........................................................................................ 183 Looking Like a Sissy ...................................................................................... 195 Looking Like a Pervert ................................................................................... 209 Chapter 6: Conclusion ................................................................................................ 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 235 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their intellectual and personal support during this process. Jorge, I thank you for demonstrating for me the value of doing work that engages my spirit of duty to the world, and for showing me how our work can be inspiring to our undergrads. David, I thank you for the rigor you demonstrate in your work, and for allowing me to gain insight into your work by allowing me to work with you on your groundbreaking project. Zeinabu, I thank you for your continued support of my progress through the program, and for the inspirational power of your artistic and academic work. Lisa, I would like to acknowledge your particular contributions to my project, without which my research would fail to address some critical concerns. Finally, Patrick, thank you for serving as an intellectual guide and for modeling for me a blend of academic and personal generosity. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of the Communication department and the Dimensions of Culture Programs for the opportunities they have granted me, and the kindness they have shown me over the years. I thank my family for their tireless support and boundless understanding during these years of my absence from them. My friends have nurtured me throughout this process: my friends at UCSD have inspired me to continue working when I’ve been too tired to motivate myself, and my friends in the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus have offered invaluable support to me. Not only would this project have been impossible without their assistance, my life would have been far less fulfilling without them in it. vi VITA 2002 Dual Bachelor of Arts, Truman State University Bachelor of Science, Truman State University 2003-2004 Graduate Assistant, Department of Film and Television, Boston University 2004-2005 Residence Hall Director, Stony Brook University 2005 Master of Fine Arts, Boston University 2005-2006 House Advisor, Vassar College 2007-2010 Teaching Assistant, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego 2010-2013 Teaching Assistant, Dimensions of Culture Program, University of California, San Diego 2014 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Communication (Cultural Studies, Performance Studies) vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Affect in the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus by Aaron Wade Gurlly Doctor of Philosophy in Communication University of California, San Diego, 2014 Professor Patrick Anderson, Chair Recent LGBT political victories in the U.S. call for an examination of gay pride, an examination which necessitates an exploration of the shame against which gay pride operates. I begin this project with an exploration of literatures of gay shame to illustrate how that concept is based on a specific, limited type of gay experience. Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory suggests that we should understand shame more broadly than it is conceived in the gay shame literature. I argue that Tomkins’s ideas regarding shame allow shame to maintain its utility even in a time of apparent social and political progress. viii I then explore literature on queer publics to show how those publics maintain a complex relationship with privacy. I do so in order to encourage the exploration of a type of queer public that has received only scant scholarly attention: LGBT choral organizations. Because LGBT choruses exist specifically to enact public performances, their relationship to privacy differs from those of other forms of queer publics. This project examines manifestations of gay shame and pride in the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus. Interviews with SDGMC members reveal a rift in thinking between members of the group, some of whom report not having experienced the kind of gay shame discussed by other members, but who, in the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, come to identify with those men and their personal accounts of shame. In the following two chapters I use analytic autoethnography to explore my experiences in SDGMC over the past five years; first, to discuss experience of performing a canonical gay shame narrative in front of audiences, and, second, to discuss performances of failed masculinity, performances enacted as part of my participation in choral activities. The dissertation ends with a discussion of the implications of identifying with shame and the current pride movement. I claim that the productive possibilities of shame are realized through interactions and performances facilitated by membership in a gay men’s chorus, where