Nancy Unger of Santa Clara University:
In the academic year 2001—02, my university will be offering, for the first time in its 150 year history, a course on gays and lesbians in American history. Because it is my privilege to teach this course, and because I am all too familiar with the rather limited exposure to the field by many of the students at our small Jesuit university, it was with high hopes indeed that I approached this slim volume. What I was looking for was a brief but thorough, engagingly written but intellectually rigorous overview that would reveal the vast complexity of the topic. Ideally, this would include not just the ever-changing definitions of homosexualities, but would delve into issues of race, religion, culture, law, economics, age, and ethnicity, yet never be tokenistic in its inclusiveness. Moreover, I wanted a study that, in examining the past, would shed light on current issues and controversies and that would explore theory as well as individuals and events. I wanted a story that was not a memoir, but invited personal involvement. I wanted illustrations that would speak to my students and draw them into the text. What I wanted was obviously, impossible — and yet Leila Rupp has delivered everything I was seeking and more.
By framing the story around the complexities of her beloved aunt's, and her own, sexuality, Rupp movingly and compellingly exposes the futility of trying to put tidy labels (such as “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” or “transgendered”) on that amorphous thing she calls “same-sex love and sexuality.” In establishing this crucial concept, she also deftly covers issues of evidence and of constructionism, culminating in an introduction that is simply astounding in its ability to involve its readers, even the uninitiated, into some of the most crucial issues and controversies in the field of history today.
Beginning with pre-Columbian Native Americans, Rupp proceeds chronologically, freely acknowledging the dearth of evidence, yet, like Sharon Ullman in Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (University of California Press, 1997), displaying an impressive creativity in presenting and analyzing sources, carefully differentiating between public pronouncements and private practices. Rupp is also scrupulous on her insistence on evaluating evidence within the context of its times, as when she discusses claims that Abraham Lincoln was “gay” (p. 48), and explains how men could engage in particular sexual acts with other men in the early twentieth century and yet not rank as “homosexuals” (p. 100). She also manages to augment her excellent evaluation of the impact of urban development on same-sex sexuality with the history of those “in unlikely places far away from big city life” (p. 123).
Perhaps the most exciting material is found in Rupp's treatment of more recent history. Rupp is particularly insistent that the Stonewall Riots of 1969 be viewed not as a sudden departure from the status quo, but rather as a culmination of the “long history of same-sex cultures and communities” combined with intensified persecution in the years following World War II. ”[T]he forces of toleration and oppression,” she asserts, have “always intermingled” (p. 146), and reminds her readers that events in the latter half of the twentieth century affecting same-sex intimates did not occur in a vacuum, but were part of sweeping political changes as well as the civil rights and feminist movements. Her discussions of the “fem/butch system,” lesbian feminism, Queer Theory, gay clone culture, and a host of other topics graphically illustrate her constant refrain that there are “multiple and changing meanings of sexual desire and behavior…in both the past and the present” (p. 198).
Rupp's work did make me uneasy at times. The block quotes are not indented and are printed in only slightly smaller type than the text, making them sometimes difficult to identify, which interrupts Rupp's otherwise easy flow of ideas (see p. 127). Her projection that “same-sex affection, love, and desire…may well have flourished” among people who lived in predominantly single-sex communities (like the western frontier) is true enough, but any use of “may well have” by historians evokes my own knee-jerk response, “but then, they may well not have.” In this and in other instances, her argument would be better served to simply present her plethora of compelling examples and allow her readers to come to their own conclusions about their representativeness. More troubling is her promotion of Lisa Duggan's argument that, because “sex difference can be seen as a form of dissent” (p.75), homophile communities should take as their model religious toleration rather than civil rights based on race and gender. The assertion that “sexual desire, like religion, is not biological or fixed”(p. 74), brought immediately to my mind the recent widely publicized suicide of a gay Mormon torn between the powerful dictates of his church and his own sexuality. Yet even as I disapproved of Rupp's endorsement of Duggan's approach, I could anticipate a variety of ways it could lead to lively and meaningful discussions and debates both inside and outside the classroom.
Leila Rupp offers a deft distillation of some of the great works in American queer history by authors including Allan Bèrubè, George Chauncey, John D'Emilio, Martin Duberman, Lillian Faderman, Estelle Freedman, and Jonathan Katz. But she also manages to put a unique and personal stamp on the material, providing a thoroughly engaging overview that will introduce this fascinating history to the uninitiated, while seasoned scholars will find much here to debate—and even more to celebrate.
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