It can be very easy to assume that the way we think about identities has always been the same. Our race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality can seem like such an important, intrinsic part of ourselves that we assume they must have been important for people living in the past as well. But identities are, as Stryker has
said, “where the rubber of larger social and cultural systems hits the road of lived experience.” They are constantly changing and being changed by the shifting structural realities of life, by systems of production and exchange, by the ways that we relate to one another.
Even the idea that people have a specific “sexuality” is remarkably recent—perhaps only 150 years old, emerging out of the rapidly industrializing colonial metropolises of Europe. The rigid
segmentation of time into separated zones of work and leisure, along with
moral panics about “backwards” people intended to justify colonial expansion and incursions into the supposedly immoral private lives of the working classes, inculcated the idea that who you fucked made you who you were. Even after the invention of “homosexuality” (and “heterosexuality”) in the late 19th century, most people who felt same-sex love and desire did not want to convert their feelings into identities, to subscribe to being medicalized and set apart.
These feelings were, instead, sources of shame, crimes for which they could be punished, and social taboos. As some people began to fight for their recognition and against medicalizing systems, movements began to emerge. The people who led these movements—at least, the ones that have succeeded in winning state recognition—were often not working-class or people of color, but instead members of the emerging bourgeoisie who
sought to assign positive values to their sexual acts within the prevailing value systems of their time. And often to bad ends.
At the same time, working-class people, colonized people, and people of color have consistently lived, fought for, manifested, and expressed forms of social and sexual expression that have
challenged both social prejudice towards sexual and gender minorities
and the bourgeois politics of the gay elite. These challenges have often been bitterly resisted by that elite in their time, while still—owing to their embrace of mass politics and disruptive organizing—having far-reaching effects in our queer lives.
Often, after the fact, the queer elite will belatedly acknowledge these people, movements, moments, and struggles in an attempt to incorporate them into the dominant story of what it means to be gay or lesbian or trans, as though the working-class gays and sex workers, drag queens, and trans women of color at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village threw bricks at cops in order to win marriage equality for the gay and lesbian donor class.
It is this process of struggle and contestation that has
created the very idea of what being gay or queer is—it has marked the production of queer cultures, the discussion of queer lives, and queer people’s search for historical examples to justify their own acts and identities. Even the term “gay” has changed; 50 years ago, the term had a broader meaning that included queer and bisexual people, transgender people, transvestites, and more: anyone who lived openly outside the heterosexual and cissexist norms of a more conservative society and suffered as a result. Today, it tends to refer to a more limited idea of same-gender sexual attraction. These definitions, too, are sites of
struggle and negotiation.
It can be difficult, therefore, to find the right terminology to discuss people who might fit into such a category today, when such ideas and identities did not exist in their society. Can you call someone like James VI and I, a man who almost certainly had sex with other men, a
homosexual, when that identity did not even exist as a concept at the time? When he was ruling England and Scotland, and beginning his campaigns of colonization in Ireland and America, nobody thought who they
fucked had anything to do with who they
were. So what does it mean to call James, or the Emperor Hadrian, or any number of nefarious nellies from history, “gay?”
We have decided to use that present-day term as a way of putting today’s homosexuality under a microscope and figuring out why it is troubled and incomplete, and why it failed to live up to its utopian promises of liberation. By discussing these people and their shared behaviors in relation to each other, we can begin to draw out characteristics and stories that might shed a light on how a contemporary gay identity came to exist—from ideas of what it means to be “a man,” to how same-sex desire has influenced major historical events, to how the dreaded heterosexuals came to exist, to understand themselves as opposed to queers, and to fear, police, and repress us. Our subjects may not have held a “gay” identity, but their lives can tell us so much about why we do.
