Though I merely intended to issue an administrative reminder to read Sedgwick’s “Preface” to Between Men (in the most recent editions from Columbia University Press), you’ll also have to indulge me in a fannish moment. Long before any of us currently working in the idioms of sexuality, space and time had the gleam of queer times and places in our eyes; long before we saw a young Cuban boy in Miami lovingly “disdentifying” with what he watched on the TV set in his lonely suburban bedroom; long before a young girl in New Jersey eyed with prurient interest the saucy underwear catalogues and adult magazines distributed in brown paper to the neighborhood dads by the dutiful postman, and long before I began to think about compulsory queer relocations from our (Inland) Empires of suburban familiarity, Sedgwick said this:
“That there was something (in this sense) irrepressibly provincial about the young author of this book is manifest. But will it make sense if I describe that provinciality not as a measure of her distance from the scenes of gay male creativity, whose utopian invocation tacitly motivates the book, but also a ground of her passionate, queer, and fairly uncanny identification with it? The more than Balzacian founding narrative of a certain modern identity for Euro-American gay men, after all, vibrates along a chord that stretches from provincial origins to metropolitan destinies. As each individual story begins in the isolation of queer childhood, we must compulsorily and excruciatingly misrecognize ourselves in the available mirror of the atomized, procreative, so-called heterosexual pre-or-ex-urban nuclear family of origin, whose brusingly inappropriate interpellations may wound us–those of us lucky enough to survive them–into life, life of a different kind. The site of that second and belated life, those newly constituted and denaturalized ‘families,’ those tardy, wondering chances at transformed and transforming self-and other-recognition, is the metropolis. But a metropolis continually recruited and reconstituted by having folded into it the incredulous energies of the provincial. Or–I might better say–the provincial energies of incredulity itself” (ix).
After all our talk of “debts” in the world of letters today, I thought I should own up to mine.
KT
