Elegies: Eve Sedgwick Through Gary Fisher

As the tributes to Eve Sedgwick’s life and work are written and proliferate, let me register her ongoing impact on my life. Between Men was one of the first 3 queer books I ever read, as a sophomore. I did not understand a word but it stayed with me. And I stayed with it. And it gave me a language, a frame of reference, a map with which to navigate the academy, a map that I still use.

Queer elegies are occasions for thinking about what queer lives and loves and losses enable, what they generate, what they make possible. And so let me muse, briefly, on one of Sedgwick’s most enabling texts: Gary in Your Pocket.

Gary Fisher was a black graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley who took a class with Sedgwick when she was a visiting professor there in spring 1987. He was also one of many of us, who never submitted his work for publication, but kept writing the world as he experienced and imagined it.

Friday, April 20, 1984

Darkness, darkness. Good Friday. I’m feeling a little religious, a little inquisitive, a little frightened, a little lost in the magnitude of what I have to say. It’s not going away, this tenderness under my arms, the occasional burning sensation, a couple of painless red dots—one on each hand. It’s not going away and I don’t feel good about that with AIDS such an issue. I want to blame and beg and apologize to certain people, to God, to my dying mother perhaps. That’s been feeling like a consolation, a bit of relief perhaps knowing I won’t go alone . . . Never alone, Gary, just faster.

Gary told Sedgwick his status while apologizing for missing “so many classes.” He also confessed that he hadn’t “told this to other people” and asked her not to do the same.

Sedgwick writes, “It wasn’t commonplace back then, at least it hadn’t happened to me before, to hear from young people that the futures they look forward to are so modest in duration.”

Modest. And profuse.

Monday, September 3, 1984

Time, time time, look what’s become of me . . . My rash is just an itch now, but I discovered a small protrusion of skin, another mole I guess, and it made me feel old and dying. Unfairly though—not fate, but my decision to lay down and die so easily

In 1984, Gary was 23.

Sunday, March 29, 1987

So I’m on my knees again, before God. Tall, white, wary of me, trying to work him into a froth of masterliness. . . . I hope to draw out the ego, the cruel ego in the men that I suck.

Inhabiting the muck of racio-sexualized masculinities

I haven’t written the paper for Sundquist and now I want to suck cock, or think about it anyway. The loads churned in my stomach, my ass is still smarting from Michael’s torture. . . . It is after midnight. I have not started this paper. Thursday night 5 men ejaculated the semen from their hard penises into my mouth and throat. There were several other encounters but five that actually fed me and left me full and strange that evening. The first man I met was big and white and darkly bearded, but he stinked like the onions he ate for lunch and had a small dick.

Are we allowed to write like this? To call white men “God?” To dream of sucking off “God?”

Monday, April 27, 1987

. . . I’m on BART and there’s a man in front of me, big, white, mustached, glasses, rather cruel- and solid-looking, kind of military, and I’m turned on by him, want to be used and humiliated by him, then made love to in that odd one-sided way. . . . What is this fantasy that cuts across all of me, racial, intellectual, moral, spiritual, sexual . . . ?

A radical queer, Gary practiced modes of interracial submission and domination, wrote, in great detail, about s/m sex, its ego-shattering appeal, wrote, in other words, about forms of queer practices that queers of color often disavow, through deliberate silences or the pieties of health and safety and futurity.

Thursday, May 28, 1987

I took a chance on a handsome, dark-haired big man. I rubbed his chest and crotch and he rubbed my crotch but kind of absently, looking anywhere but in my face. This bothered me, but in hindsight, isn’t that the kind of encounter I wanted—one-sided, well-defined roles?

Gary Fisher was not a good black queer, not a respectable black queer, not even an admirable black queer. He was, in fact, a black queer it would be easy to throw away, one of the many who “give us a bad name,” as blacks, as queers, as black queers.

Saturday, October 17, 1987

I went home with him. We got drunk and had intense sex. I jerked off before I serviced him, and then I serviced him for five hours. I was in a fine state of arousal most of the night and so drink I could hardly stand up. He fucked me and pissed up my ass. He had me suck him off. By then I was exhausted, but he threw me out, and he wasn’t gentle about it. . . . This guy just wants sex from me. And I’d settle for that if we could make it steady.

Sedgwick did not throw him away. And in not throwing him away she taught me how not to throw Gary Fisher away, not because he was too unlike me, but because the likenesses were too frightening, too uncomfortable, too unbearable. And, here, I must register how Sedgwick continues to teach me to be honest, to face what is difficult and ugly and unbearable in me and in the world.

9.19.93
. . . I want to write about KS. I haven’t really written about what I look like now. I have a new skin. I have a new identity. They are not the same, but they do on occasion converge, even eclipse one another.
. . .
The spots, the lesions, patches—they are so random (Even the name is slippery. What should I call these things, individually, I mean. One KS. Look, there’s a KS. I have a KS on my hand, under my thumb). They refuse a common shape or texture or size and they sprout-spring-develop-appear unpredictably, time and location. (Backtrack: even the action of the disease is slippery.) Some are clustered; some are island-like. Some are small—just dots. Some are large, sprawling, giraffe-like.
. . .
(It’s hard to write and watch movies at the same time.)
I’m that sick.
I could die that soon.

Sedgwick writes,

The time of immersion in this volume has brought me many such experiences. Almost every night of it I have dreamed, not of Gary, but as him—have moved through one and another world clothed in the restless, elastic skin of his beautiful idiom. I don’t know whether this has been more a way of mourning him or of failing to mourn; of growing steeped in, or of refusing the news of his death.

To dream as Gary is to act surreptitiously in the world, but to act. His journal’s geographies traverse bars and clubs, bushes and sex clubs, spaces that I, too, have traveled through, inhabited, sought the pleasures of loss and the loss of pleasures, and created thinking and art. Gary turns us to the ambivalence of black queer desire—at least the kinds of desire I own and share with him. Border crossings across and along skin as texture and color and health create multiple fractures, some filled with pleasure, others with none.

How does one have an ambivalent orgasm? Or none at all? What is the point where getting someone else off is more important? What is the point where one can no longer resist cock-hunger and risks a lot, too much, even, following an insatiable libido?

I come to Gary Fisher through Sedgwick, and return to Sedgick through Gary Fisher.

For Eve and Gary: “Love in Prepositions,” by Gary Fisher

I don’t want you to love me. I don’t even want you to like me. I don’t need these abstractions of you. I might want you to want me, I know what want is and I know that after the third time (arbitrary as three is) you must know want, mine or your own (mine from yours), and you will respond to want with more want, at least a second one. So, maybe then I want you to want me.

But more than all that, I want your prepositions.

I want you in me; I want you on me; I want you all around me (forgive the little flourish there); I want you under me (on occasion anyway; but mainly) want you over, over top of me, on top of me . . . I want you between me (—?—or more exactly in me tearing me apart); I want you near me; I want you next to me . . . I want to remember you as you were in relation to me.

DC Queer Studies Conference

The DC Queer Studies Symposium
A Two-Day Conference at the University of Maryland
April 17-18, 2009, College Park, MD

Free and open to the public
Visit our website here.

For those of you who attended last year’s inaugural symposium, this year’s will be similar but even more grand. We have a full two-day schedule this time around.

Friday, April 17 begins with quickanddirty V: A Graduate Queer Studies Symposium and will feature papers by students from American, Georgetown, George Washington, and Maryland. Friday afternoon, thanks to the efforts of Maryland poet and PhD student Julie Enszer, we will have a poetry reading featuring Regie Cabico, Reginald Harris, and Richard McCann placing their work in conversation with writers from pre-Stonewall queer literary history. At 4:30, Judith Halberstam will deliver the symposium’s keynote address, “Queer Negativities.” The day will conclude with a reception.

Saturday, April 18 will be a full day of faculty paper sessions on a broad range of subjects (titles and presenters below). The symposium will conclude with an evening of celebration and conviviality at Marilee Lindemann and Martha Nell Smith’s home in Takoma Park. We’ll have a reception and dinner and, if we’re lucky, some quality time under the stars.

We hope you will be able to join us for any or all of these festivities. A condensed version of the schedule is below. We will have a more complete version up on the symposium web site in the next couple of weeks. For those of you not familiar with the Maryland campus, rest assured the web site will have detailed information about parking and building locations.

We invite you to join us for any or all of the two day’s events. Due to limitations on space and our desire to create a seminar-type atmosphere on Saturday, however, we ask that you register in advance for that day only. We also hope that you will be able to stay with us for the entire day on Saturday, though we understand that may not be possible in every case. If you would like to attend on Saturday, you can request a registration form by sending an email to: lgbts-dcqueers@umd.edu. Please fill out the form and return it by e-mail to lgbts-dcqueers@umd.edu or by fax to 301.314.2529.

The DC Queer Studies Symposium
A Two-Day Conference at the University of Maryland
April 17-18, 2009, College Park, MD

Free and open to the public

Friday, April 17, 2009
Riggs Alumni Center and McKeldin Library, University of Maryland

9:30 – 10:00 AM
Registration and Welcome (Riggs Alumni Center)

quickanddirty V: A Graduate Queer Studies Symposium
Presentations by graduate students from American University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of Maryland

10:00 – 11:15 AM
Concurrent Graduate Symposium Sessions

Speaking Truth to Power: Lesbian Performances, Politics, and Production (Chaney Library)

Amy Washburn, University of Maryland
Julie R. Enszer, University of Maryland
Maria Vargas, University of Maryland

Deviant at the Core: Reading Queerness in Iconic Texts (AAI Conference Room)

Caroline Sidman, Georgetown University
Melissa Yinger, American University
James Goodwin, University of Maryland

11:30 – 12:45 PM
Concurrent Graduate Symposium Sessions

Heteronormativity: Seductions and Subversions (Chaney Library)

Mary Elizabeth Bazemore, University of Maryland
Reed Cooley, George Washington University
Maria Velazquez, University of Maryland

Paranoia, Trauma, and Laughter: Combating Queer Invisibility in the 1960s and 1970s (AAI Conference Room)

Lisa Chinn, Georgetown University
Yee-Hang Tam, Georgetown University
Rebecca Krefting, University of Maryland

1:00 – 2:15 PM
Lunch on own

2:30 – 4 PM
Queer Writers Read
McKeldin Library 6137, Special Events Room

Regie Cabico, Reginald Harris, Richard McCann

4:30 – 6:30 PM
Keynote Address and Reception
McKeldin Library 6137, Special Events Room

Queer Negativities
Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California, English/Gender Studies

Saturday, April 18, 2009
Benjamin Banneker Room, Adele Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland
(Seating for Saturday events is limited, so pre-registration is required. Contact lgbts-dcqueers@umd.edu for information.)

9:30 – 10:00 AM
Registration and Coffee

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Faculty Paper Session: Queer Pasts

Falstaff’s Fairies: Queer Ravishment in Shakespeare’s Windsor, Holly Dugan, George Washington University

History as Quick Cash: The Female Husband and the Pregnant Man, Mandy Berry, American University

What It Feels Like for a Grrrl: Susan and Emily Dickinson, Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland

“Where’s That Partner of Mine?”: Ethel Waters and the Management of Black Queer Desire, Samantha Pinto, Georgetown University

12:00 – 1:00 PM
Buffet Lunch

1:00 – 2:30 PM
Faculty Paper Session: Constructing Queer Knowledges

Period Cramps, Madhavi Menon, American University

My Love for Hip Hop Is In Its Queerness, Jeffrey McCune, University of Maryland

Queer Transdisciplinarities, Katie King, University of Maryland

2:30 – 3:00 PM
Break

3:00 – 5:00 PM
Faculty Paper Session: Sex, Sexuality, Politics

Creating Kenyan Intimacies, Keguro Macharia, University of Maryland (that’s me!)

Men Get Lean and Mean, Women De-Clutter: Weight Loss, Heteronormative Temporality, and the Thin Contract, Abby Wilkerson, George Washington University

LAUREL: The Irony of Lesbian Identity?, Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland

Left Melodrama, Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University

7:00 – 10 PM
Reception and Dinner
(Off campus. Please RSVP, by April 3, for the dinner when you register for the symposium.)

DC Queer Studies is a group of faculty from schools in the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area formed in 2006 to discuss new works in the field and to exchange, support, and cultivate new ways of engaging with LGBT/Queer/Sexuality Studies across the disciplines and across institutions.

I will be at the African Literature Conference from Wednesday to Friday, so will miss the first day, but will be back Friday evening.

Death in Tutuola

But the path does not always lead to the desired location. What is important is where one ends up, the road traveled to get there, the series of experiences in which one is actor and witness, and above all, the role played by the unexpected and the unforeseen.
—Achilles Mbembe

It is considered bad form to begin an essay by stating one disagrees with an epigraph that one has chosen. And so, this will be about, and by, indirection, perhaps the only fitting way to discuss Amos Tutuola. What I find compelling about Mbembe’s epigraph is its metaphorical link between history and aesthetics, the real and imagined, captured, most powerfully, in the terms “path” and “actor,” terms to which I might return.

So, we will follow Tutuola’s narrator as he enters Deads’ Town. We will recall, of course, that during his adventures on the path there, the narrator has resisted dying, insisting that death only makes sense when one enters into it alive. We might claim he enters into death as the undead, and certainly the dead react to his presence with the horror the undead elicit. But while horror films have taught us to regard the undead as the formerly dead, we might consider what happens if they are also the still living. There might be horror in the persistence of life in the face of death, the condition of being obscene (off-scene).

For now, we will hold in abeyance, in sight and contained, the relationship between being alive and being undead. But also note what is always crucial in this novel, that to see oneself as being both alive and undead is to encounter the always shifting Tutuolian perspective: one is always seeing oneself otherwise, constantly experiencing one’s own strangeness. That the reader also experiences this being made strange stands as one of Tutuola’s lasting achievements.

Let us be more concrete. On entering the land of the dead, the narrator and his wife meet an unnamed man (the absence of proper names, substituted by descriptions, is one of the peculiar features of Tutuola’s text), who offers them guidance. Following a brief conversation, the narrator and his wife set off to find the dead palm-wine tapster:

[A]s we turned our back to him (dead man) and were going to the house that he showed us, the whole of them that stood on that place grew annoyed at the same time to see us walking forward or with our face, because they were not walking forward there at all, but this we did not know. (96; Grove Press, 1984)

This passage will form the point of departure for what follows. But two other quick passages to add quiddity.

[The tapster] said that [after he died] he spent two years in training and after he had qualified as a full dead man . . . he came to this Deads’ Town. (100)

[The tapster] told us that both white and black deads were living in the Deads’ town, not a single alive was there at all. Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too. (100)

To credit Tutuola’s critics: they have argued that his text critiques colonialism and slavery (ht texter), and the sentiment that racial harmony takes place only in the land of the dead speaks to both histories in this dystopic text. And here I must emphasize the historically situated nature of this text and Tutuola’s experiences in World War II. For Kenyan readers, historical coincidence adds a richer framework: published in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard uncannily captures the experience of the emergency. (I should note here that historical coincidence, to my mind, is always a fun fact, less grounds for an argument.)

In Deads’ Town, the fully qualified dead walk backwards and are insulted when Tutuola’s characters turn their backs to walk forward. (This, my dear future students would be a terrible topic sentence, as it is descriptive rather than analytical.) Two aspects stand out from this account. One, that in Deads’ Town the backwards walking dead always face each other. What death allows is what Fanon, drawing on Hegel, terms recognition. But it is always a representative facing: each dead person is always facing another dead person—there is something logically impossible about the idea that all the dead can face each other at the same time. (Logic is, of course, mostly suspended in Tutuola.) Another way to articulate this claim is that my recognition of you, my facing you, engenders recognition as a precondition for social being, not, as in Hegel and Fanon, an ideal to be achieved. To turn one’s back on another is to break the ever-proliferating sequence of facing, of recognition. (This idea can be spun multiple ways.)

Equally crucial, the fact of recognition is bound to mobility. And it refuses the structure of moving forward, development and atavism, that structures colonial modernity. In Deads’ Town, one is always moving forward by moving backward. What is crucial, for Tutuola, is that one never turns one’s back on one’s interlocutor. One risks tripping over roots (as the narrator does) rather than turn away.

I have recently asked what we owe the dead. And I believe Tutuola offers a remarkable answer when he claims, “everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads.” We are, I believe, in the zone of “owing nothing” and thus being perpetually indebted. But this is not, I think, a pessimistic reading, and is also not one that I will pursue right now. The question of the impossible, not merely paradoxical, will occupy what seems to be shaping up as a series of posts on Tutuola.

Finally, I want to end by returning to the term “actor,” which Mbembe rightly identifies as a key concept in Tutuola. In Tutuola’s multiple worlds, one is always being judged on how one acts. In fact, Tutuola’s narrator is always unmasked when he acts incorrectly. But this is not just about proper etiquette. Especially in Deads’s Town, etiquette is wedded to ethics.

To “act properly” requires walking backwards, with one’s face turned always toward another.

Queering the Agikuyu

What happened in the thingira?

To ask this question is to inject a note of perverse curiosity regarding this ostensibly homosocial space, this space in which a young man trained himself in the erotics of becoming a mature man. It is to ask what young warriors do when they are alone with their spears and swords. It is to note the beauty of the firm, high young buttocks of young men as they pose in profile in colonial pictures.

Circumstances force me to say what I do with ethnicity or tribe, whichever term one prefers.

I Queer it. Always.

I attend to the perverse, the peculiar, the gender-breaking, identity fragmenting, subject-deforming, pleasure-laden, pain-driven, inconsistent, incoherent, embarrassing, and shameful moments of ethnicity and I privilege them as sites of knowledge production and community re-construction and de-structuration.

When I discuss ethnicity or tribe I read for the queer and as a queer. Always.

Should I write of love, I write of queer love, strange love, perverse love. Not the embrace of the mythical bosom of identity but the admission that the boy desires his mother, his father, his brother, his grandfather. That his fantasies would frighten them, intrigue them, perhaps seduce them, always unsettle them.

I take every single use of my writing as a hearty endorsement of queer politics, queer rights, and queer culture, ranging from s/m and all forms of kink to public sex, be it in parks or bathrooms.

I take every single use of my writing, acknowledged or unacknowledged, as a critique of heteronormative institutions and ideas, including the nation, the state, and the family.

I take every single use of my writing, acknowledged or unacknowledged, as an admission that queer critiques are not only right and valid, but that queer practices of perversity deserve to be disseminated and shared.

I take every single use of my writing, acknowledged or unacknowledged, as a shared queer project, dedicated to dismantling heterosexist and heteronormative forms of being and belonging.

And I strongly caution those who use my writing without my permission or acknowledgment, that they enter into what Fanon termed “homosexual territory” at their own risk.

It’s queer here.

Visa

It’s so difficult these days to get visas in to Britain, and America. But in those days of the slave trade, it was so easy. You didn’t need one. Passage was free, but deadly. (Kole Omotoso, The Edifice, 1971)