A Queer Touch Across Time

Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill, ca. 1900

I've spent much of my life cruising the past--sifting through the ambiguous evidence that our kind was here long before any of us now living. Gaydar isn't just about what you pick up from the guy who's waiting next to you at the bus stop. It's about the diary that turns up in the personal effects of an uncle who lived decades earlier in Washington DC. The box of photographs from a small town in New Brunswick that a local man took of his lover in the 1920s. The unsent letter that somehow survived when the rest of the writer's correspondence was burnt.

As gay and bi men, we're used to looking for the evidence of one another's existence in subtle hints at the edge of things. Our greater visibility over the last generation or two hasn't really changed that. If we enjoy middle-class privilege in a tolerant bubble, we can more easily imagine that we don't still live our lives in the margins. But take your gay visibility 50 miles into the hinterlands, and find out whether you still feel safe. Take it to the Florida panhandle, or to the middle of Kansas. Or closer to home, to the wrong neighbourhood in your own city;  into the wrong bar; into the sanctuary of the wrong church. Try being an out man of colour in many communities of origin. And nearly anywhere, especially now, try being visibly trans.

So much has changed over the last fifty years; yet in some ways, in some places, very little. The freedoms we've won are now once again at risk, as the forces of Christian nationalism and social reaction stand ready to be unleashed by the deceptive charlatan who will be sworn in as President of the United States in less than two months.

On that upbeat note: generation after generation, we've survived and found each other--and found our ancestors-of-choice--by being, necessarily, amateur archivists, scanning for the traces that tell us, as gay photographer Robert Giard put it in his preface to Particular Voices, "These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed." Those we encounter in such traces reply, "We were here; we existed. This is how we were." 

Assotto Saint. Portrait by Robert Giard, 1987

The phrase "queer touch across time" belongs to literary scholar and queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw. I've been thinking about her formulation a lot this week. In connection with a diary like the one I mentioned above, published as Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945, edited by Ina Russell. 

In connection with the cache of photos that inspired the volume Len and Cub: A Queer History, by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green.

In connection especially with a wonderful two-part BBC television presentation from 2017, but which I only watched this week, Man in an Orange Shirt, whose plot is too complex to summarize here, but which turns entirely on the way that the material traces of an obscured past become the means of reconciliation, healing, and liberation for its characters. 

We have a right to a past we can live with--a past that makes sense of our present. We have a right to search out the queer ancestors who impart to our own lives the richness and depth that comes of knowing we have a history. And we must claim it for ourselves, cobbling it together from the fragments that survive, and energized by our desire.