Philip Purchase: Philip Purchase is a graduate student in the Classics Department at the University of Southern California, and is particularly interested in questions of gender and self-definition in Latin love poetry.
The way in which gay men and lesbians employ readings of the past in their construction of self-definitions has generated much interest recently, not least to the extent that such definitions are often part of a broader problem of exclusionary racial politics in the gay community. Any heterogeneous grouping (such as the gay and lesbian community is) has to consider how to accommodate racial diversity and gender difference in its myths of origin. Scott Bravmann's QUEER FICTIONS OF THE PAST focuses on what makes us different from each other as a way of re-considering our personal and inter-personal identities. He traces such difference through the practice of reading gay history, identifying the power of historical readings which gravitate towards a powerful “sameness”- the book attempts to deconstruct this sameness and problematize identity: “I focus on race, gender and politics as crucial points of difference and antagonism among queer historical subjects.”
Bravmann looks in detail at two particularly powerful moments for gays and lesbians, namely the myths of ancient Greece and Stonewall. The chapters offering interpretations of these cultural sites are the strongest in the book, reacting as they do to exclusionary constructions of the past. Elsewhere, Bravmann's theorizing can be a little opaque, with the project of a “queer heterosociality” emerging as highly attractive in terms of recognition of individual differentiation, but leaving nagging questions of political practice. We need to ask to what extent individual identities are to be disturbed by the intervention of new, challenging claims, to what extent a community can function AS a community without a strong feeling of shared roots. A truly dynamic challenging of racist and exclusionary assumptions surely results in an attenuated sense of group identity: for a grouping still involved in the fight for equal rights, this is exhilarating, but may also be considered dangerous politically. Perhaps a fiction of unity may be more advantageous in terms of galvanizing resistance to our opponents.
This book raises deeply important issues in terms of the interaction between myths of the past which are important personally and the political import of such beliefs. Take, for instance, the case of Ancient Greece. Bravmann considers gay and lesbian readings of Greece from the nineteenth century onwards. He particularly focuses on David M. Halperin's preface to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HOMOSEXUALITY in which Halperin stresses our difference from the Greeks, but continues to see them as indispensable to modern strategies of self-definition. Bravmann is right to point out here a continuing construction of “us” and “our” relationship with Greece. Yet the fact remains that I personally have a deep investment in ideas of the Greek past, that I am also irrevocably formed as a white male subject, and that I therefore stand in complex relationship to the various uses made by the dominant culture of the Greek past. How troubling should that past's racial specificity be to me? At one level, it seems that racial specificity is essential to foundational myths, a specificity which then has to be complicated by considering its relationship to the ambiguous reality of contemporary racial definitions. At another, we need to retain the cultural specificity of myths (the literary, philosophical and political forms which invoke Greece) while removing the racial specificity concomitant with them: while I do not want Greece used as a weapon of racial exclusion, I believe that it has a specific value in the construction of Romantic Love which requires an understanding of certain intellectual practice.
It seems to me that the “we” of David Halperin can be retained as a set of adherences to certain modes of thinking and feeling to which the fiction of Greece is a central element. The dangers of exclusion are constantly present in the politics of identity; the margins provided by Greece do not mean that those to whom Greece means nothing are excluded from future entry into that definitional community, but they do entail a recognition of the way in which human identity requires boundaries of definition to function.
While I tend to agree with Bravmann's reading of the racist patterns underlying nineteenth-century constructions of the Classical World, and the ongoing power of such constructions, his assertion (quoting Martin Bernal's work BLACK ATHENA) that the Greeks felt that “Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians” is tendentious at best. This matters because it is not simply a racist imposition by later Classicists which renders the Greeks purely white: while race becomes a central issue only in relatively modern times, we might see it as an amplification of already present structures of difference and hierarchy. The roots of exclusion and rejection of others go back beyond the nineteenth century.
Bravmann's chapter on Stonewall strikes me as more effective, not least because it demonstrates the way in which one event takes on an almost mystical significance as central to modern gay identity, how that significance has consistently collided with conceptions of race, and how the kind of writing that is employed in describing Stonewall shapes its significance.
Bravmann eloquently expresses the conflicting impact of race on our identity: “To what extent that queer identity exerts a centripetal force drawing “us” together towards some fictive or imagined center, it does so only against, even necessarily in tandem with , the centrifugal force of racial formations that ceaselessly pull “us” apart, moving us outward and away from each other that mark our complexly racially divided societies.” He also explores the differentiating mark of gender, considering the roles of lesbians in the riot and its representation afterward. I found his discussion of the plotting of Stonewall, of the dominant comic mode of representation resulting in reconciliation and unity, particularly relevant to considering how events take on broad cultural significance.
QUEER FICTIONS OF THE PAST fulfills an important function as a spur to considering how we might arrive at a future society in which difference is combined with unity, essential, grounding myths of origin combined with genuine inclusivity. Expecting prescriptions as to how we might achieve this would be unreasonable; the work would have taken on greater power, however, if the results of such theorizing upon gay and lesbian political life had been fully imagined.
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