Larry Kramer went back to his alma mater, Yale (’57), last week to pick up the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the university’s Gay and Lesbian Association. Kramer, you will remember, burst on the scene with the 1978 novel, Faggots, which portrayed the gay community of the time as shallow and promiscuous. He went on to a lifetime of ardent AIDS activism, co-founding GMHC and ACT-UP.
Anyone who thought the author might mellow with age is sorely mistaken. Kramer arrived in New Haven miffed that the $1 million gift given Yale by his brother to create the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies went to Gender Studies, instead of History, where Kramer says it belonged. In his speech Kramer gave a little history lesson of his own:
Here are some of the things that I have uncovered about our history in writing my new book, The American People:
That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.
That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.
That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark anymore.
That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.
While I am on record as believing Lincoln would be gay if he were alive today (see here, here and here) I can’t hardly agree that it’s obvious (provocative language warning):
I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out.
Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now.
Kramer has always been both retro and visionary at the same time; a product of his time who sometimes sees beyond it. His notion that a gay identity is nothing more than “what we do” with our “cocks” is common. (It’s not much of a stretch to move from there to the end of gay culture arguments that I’ve also objected to.)
Inside Higher Ed finds experts on gay studies and gay history had mixed reactions to Kramer’s talk:
[T]he speech caused a bit of confusion because that university’s history department has two big-name gay studies scholars who write gay history: George Chauncey and Joanne Meyerowitz. So the idea that literary theorists control gay studies at Yale in a way that diminishes gay history bothers people there and elsewhere. Via e-mail, Chauncey said that the program named for Kramer did end after five years, but that it ended “as planned, when the funding did,” and that it left gay studies “much stronger than it had been before.”
Added Chauncey: “I teach courses at Yale every year on lesbian and gay history, and I share Larry Kramer’s belief in the importance of gay history, even though we often disagree in our interpretation of that history. But LGBT studies is an interdisciplinary field which includes much more than history, and I am proud that the program at Yale offers courses in anthropology, sociology, film, literature, musicology, and other disciplines.” Of the link between gay studies and gender studies, Chauncey said that “this is a common pattern across the country, and it seems to me a very good one, since as a curricular matter there are so many links between LGBT studies and gender studies.”
John G. Younger, a gay studies scholar who is professor of classics and director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Kansas called Kramer’s history “wish fulfillment.” He called Kramers speech shrill and rambling. That’s the Kramer I’ve always known. It’s his strength and weakness. But I agree that:
Defining people as gay doesn’t make sense, Younger said, without some understanding of their cultures and identities and values.
Younger said his gay studies courses take “a constructionist view, that people are not set in stone but differ over time and space, through history.”
Jonathan Ned Katz, director of OutHistory.org, a Web site on gay history run through the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, thinks the relationship with gender studies is itself rooted in history:
“I think a lot of that has to do with the conservatism of history departments in the United States [as scholars started to work on gay issues], while gender studies, which came out of the women’s movement, and English departments tended to be more open to queer studies, so a lot of important work was done there.”
“I expected there to be much more work in gay history” by now, said Katz, but he said that he felt “excitement and a major kinship” in women’s and gender studies before many history departments were receptive.
Ian Lekus, chair of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History, found Kramer’s speech “breathtakingly male centered.” He also found some truth in the critigue:
Lekus noted a 2001 report by Committee on Lesbian and Gay History that found that many new Ph.D.’s in the field had difficulty landing jobs in history departments, and that many of them ended up teaching in gender studies programs.
I went looking for information on Kramer’s book, The American People. The best thing a Google search turned up on it is this from Wikipedia:
For the past two decades, Kramer has been at work on a manuscript called “The American People,” an ambitious historical work that begins in the Stone Age and continues into the present. For example, there is information relating to Kramer’s assertion that Abraham Lincoln was gay. “He has set himself the hugest of tasks,” said Will Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, who is the only man to have read the entire manuscript. Schwalbe describes it as “staggering, brilliant, funny, and harrowing.”