Remembering “A Great Fag”: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space
2011; Routledge; Volume: 97; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00335630.2011.585168
ISSN1479-5779
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoAbstract This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's "gay pioneer," Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue—the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory—I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both materializing queer memories and how space and identity are understood in the city. Based upon these visualizations, I extend arguments for how rhetoricians critique memory texts and contribute to defining "queer public memory" in light of this statue. Keywords: QueerMemoryVisual RhetoricAlexander WoodMaterial Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Ronald Zboray, Mary Zboray, Lester Olson, the Editor, and the reviewers for their helpful comments in developing this essay Notes 1. Quote by Dennis O'Connor reported in Camille Roy, "Monument to 'A Great Fag,'" Toronto Star, June 26, 2004. 2. No image of Wood has survived other than a reproduction of a Georgian silhouette. Thus, Wood's appearance is largely derived from the research and impressions of artist, Del Newbigging: "I have worked from the silhouette and researched the period for clothing styles and also added a gay flair which I am convinced he would have had." "Statue Honouring Alexander Wood Unveiled in Toronto's Gay Village," Xtra, June 1, 2005, http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Statue_honouring_Alexander_Wood_unveiled_in_Torontos_gay_village-582.aspx. 3. Norton also claims that "molly" was the word used by most gay men to refer to one another in England during the same time period. See Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: GMP Publisher, 1992), 9; and The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London: Cassell, 1998), 85. 4. Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, s.v. "Wood, Alexander," http://www.biographi.ca/009004–119.01-e.php?BioId=37856. 5. Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, s.v. "Wood, Alexander." 6. For more on the rhetoric of historical figures and ambiguous sexuality, see Charles E. Morris III, "Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228–30. 7. Archival evidence suggests that Wood never married and had no children. No record of a romantic relationship exists in his papers. Interestingly, Wood's papers are largely absent for the year 1810. Alexander Wood Papers and Letterbooks, Special Collections, Toronto Reference Library, Toronto, ON; After the scandal, Wood was reportedly harassed in the street and his business suffered. Later in his life, Chief Justice William Dummer Powell publicly aired the allegations against Wood in refusing his appointment to a civic post. Wood sued Powell for damages and won. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. "Wood, Alexander"; In 1838, a "satirical broadsheet" notoriously announced the "wedding" of Wood to a male colleague as a public attack on his character. See Gerald Keith, "Alexander Wood: A Queer Tale of Early Toronto," Sightlines, 1993, 24. 8. This characterization of a queer "turn toward memory" is derived from Charles E. Morris III, "My Old Kentucky Homo: Abraham Lincoln, Larry Kramer, and the Politics of Queer Memory" in Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris III (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 95, (italics original). See also Larry Kramer, "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," The Advocate, March 30, 1999, 67. 9. Excellent examples of such work include Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume Book, 1990); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Morris, "My Old Kentucky Homo," in Queering Public Address, 93–120; and Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Critical accounts of contemporary queer memory practices can be seen in Dana L. Cloud, "The First Lady's Privates: Queering Eleanor Roosevelt for Public Address Studies," in Morris, Queering Public Address, 23–44; Judith Halberstam, "Shame and White Gay Masculinity," Social Text 23 (2005): 219–33; Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 10. While memory and the visual take priority in this essay, the politics of "queer space"—"place-making practices" that produce new understandings of space in relation to queer publics—is another important aspect of the Wood statue. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 6. Others scholars have described queer space in other ways that might be considered within an analysis of the statue. Some scholars have compiled urban histories of GLBTQ lives while others have examined more theoretical elements of queers and the urban experience. These include conceptualizing "the closet" in various geographies, examining queer walking practices, and studying the dynamics of gay male cruising in cities. Also of interest is the connection between time, space, and memory. While I cannot delve into these perspectives here, the relevance of space in this case is apparent. See Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 (New York: Routledge, 1999); James McCourt, Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of American Culture, 1947–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (New York: Routledge, 2000); Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); Christopher Castiglia, "Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories," boundary 2 27 (2000): 149–75. See also Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, ed., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1997). 11. See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2–4. For more on official memories, see John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13–14. 12. José Esteban Muñoz, "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts," Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8 (1996): 5–7 and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65–67. 13. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). For examinations of curbing queer space in a variety of cities, see Robert W. Bailey, "Sexual Identity and Police Practices in Philadelphia," in Gay Politics, Urban Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 249–80; David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites; and Ingram et al., Queers in Space. 14. Grube generally conceptualizes these "democratic" spaces as primarily male spaces. In certain ways that will become clear in this analysis, the Wood statue is also largely representative of men and gay male space, though critiques of that conception leave open a wider range of identarian possibilities. John Grube, "No More Shit: The Struggle for Democratic Gay Space in Toronto," in Ingram et al., Queers in Space, 128–29. 15. Because of his extended and substantive use of the term, I use Castiglia's spelling of "countermemory" throughout this essay rather than Michel Foucault's "counter-memory." Foucault, by comparison, uses the term sparingly in his work. 16. Leah Ceccarelli, "Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 409. 17. Muñoz, "Ephemera as Evidence," 5–6. 18. Ceccarelli, "Polysemy," 410. 19. Kendall R. Phillips, introduction to Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 2. 20. Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–15. 21. See James E. Young, "Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany," Harvard Design Magazine 9 (1999): 9. The term "countermonument" receives wider usage in Young, The Texture of Memory, 27–8. 22. See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 160–64. See also Michel Foucault, "Film and Popular Memory" in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 122–25. 23. Castiglia, "Sex Panics," 158–60, 168. 24. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Resisting 'National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 349. 25. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 66, 87, 119–20; Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, ed. Counterpublics and the State (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 2–3, 7. 26. See Bodnar, Remaking America, 14, 16–17. 27. For example, see the evolution of the public memory of Crispus Attucks, a freed slave who was among the first people killed in the Boston Massacre. Stephen H. Browne, "Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration," Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 172–73. 28. Ceccarelli, "Polysemy," 399–400. 29. Deborah Bright and Erica Rand encourage such readings as they tour the historic sites of Plymouth, Massachusetts in "Queer Plymouth," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 (2006): 259–77. 30. Public memories' evolving and conflicting natures are highlighted in John R. Gillis, ed. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3; Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 13; Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–18. See also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations 26 (1989): 7–24; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 31. Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–14, 16. 32. Grube, "No More Shit," in Ingram et al., Queers in Space, 128–29. 33. Morris, "My Old Kentucky Homo," in Queering Public Address, 95. 34. Twenty years of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt has produced extensive commentary and scholarship. Some contributions helpful in developing this essay include Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembrance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Peter S. Hawkins, "Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt," Critical Inquiry19 (1993): 752–79; and Charles E. Morris III, ed. "20th Anniversary of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt," Special issue, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007). 35. For more on these monuments, see "Homomonument," http://www.homomonument.nl/indexen.htm; "Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime," http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/en/homosexualmemorial. 36. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in the United States and was assassinated in 1978. See Harvey Milk Memorial Plaza in San Francisco, a memorial bust in San Francisco City Hall, and the Harvey Milk High School at the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York City. Importantly, queer public memory is as interested in queering existent heteronormative acts of heroic commemoration, as it is adding queers to the heroic canon. On heroic commemoration generally, see Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 36–70, among others. 37. George Segal designed the original Gay Liberation for Christopher Park in New York City. The project was approved for completion in 1982 but, facing public opposition and extended redevelopment in the area, was not installed until 1992. Meanwhile, a second casting of the sculpture was erected on Stanford University's campus in 1984. 38. "Statue Honouring." 39. Councillor Kyle Rae, quoted in "Toronto Unveils Gay Statue," San Francisco Bay Times, June 9, 2005, http://www.sfbaytimes.com/index.php?sec=article&article_id=3747. 40. CBC News, "Trudeau's Omnibus Bill: Challenging Canadian Taboos," http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/rights_freedoms/topics/538–2671/. 41. Miriam Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking, 1971–1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 68, 110. 42. Gallup Canada, February 2000; Pew Internet and American Life Project, October 27, 2004. 43. Historically, queers have been defined as anti-citizens, largely because rights justify citizenship and queers are often denied those rights. David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 142. See also Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality," boundary 2 19 (1992): 149–80. 44. Del Newbigging, "The Alexander Wood Project," http://www.delnewbigging.com/awoodproject.html. 45. On postmodern memorial design and memory, see Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., "Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype," Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 263–88 and Charles Soukup, "I Love the 80s: The Pleasures of a Postmodern History," Southern Communication Journal 75 (2010): 76–93. 46. "Statue Honouring." 47. Larry Gross, "What is Wrong with this Picture? Lesbian Women and Gay Men on Television," in Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, ed. R. Jeffrey Ringer (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 143. 48. Bonnie J. Dow, "Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility," Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 137. 49. Robert Alan Brookey, "A Community Like Philadelphia," Western Journal of Communication 60 (1996): 40–56; Helene A. Shugart, "Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media," Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 67–91. 50. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11; See also Kirk Savage, "The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument" in Gillis, Commemorations, 131. 51. Katherine Sender, Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 239. 52. See Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 45. 53. "Statue Honouring"; "Toronto Unveils"; "Monument to 'A Great Fag'"; Newbigging, "The Alexander Wood Project." 54. Rachel Marsden, "A Statuesque Disgrace," National Post, June 11, 2005, http://www.rachelmarsden.com/columns/woodstatue.htm. 55. Examples include: "Alexander Wood is a Stiff," The London Fog, July 13, 2005, http://thelondonfog.blogspot.com/2005/07/alexander-wood-is-stiff.html; "… And a Penchant for Buggery," Sick Day, June 16, 2005, http://einspahr.blogspot.com/2005_06_12_archive.html; "Celebrating Toronto's Gay History?" Better Left Said, July 22, 2005, http://notadesperatehousewife.mu.nu/archives/105985.php. 56. Ralph R. Smith and Russel R. Windes, Progay/Antigay: The Rhetorical War Over Sexuality (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 35–6. 57. Marsden, "A Statuesque Disgrace." 58. Gary David Comstock, Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 8, 12–13, 17–18. 59. Marsden, "A Statuesque Disgrace." 60. Marsden, "A Statuesque Disgrace." 61. Rachel Marsden, "The Trouble with 'Normal,'" National Post, June 25, 2005, http://www.rachelmarsden.com/columns/pubschools.htm. 62. Morris, "My Old Kentucky Homo," in Queering Public Address, 103. 63. For more on queers and public sex, see Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66. 64. Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,'" in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 53; Jack Babuscio, "The Cinema of Camp (aka Camp and the Gay Sensibility)," in Cleto, Camp, 122; This performative dimension is gleaned most easily from comparisons between camp and kitsch. While camp involves a certain degree of "insight" on failure by the producer or critic (and thus the ability to derive some pleasure from it), kitsch is an "attribute" signaling failure of which its producer is unaware. See Andrew Ross, "Uses of Camp," in Cleto, Camp, 316. 65. While Hayes' quote is addressing "gayspeak" directly, he argues camp plays a substantial part in this language use. Joseph J. Hayes, "Gayspeak," Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976): 260. 66. Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner, Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in US Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 22–26, 165–66. 67. Cleto, introduction in Cleto, Camp, 304; Caryl Flinn, "The Deaths of Camp," in Cleto, Camp, 435–38; Ross, "Uses of Camp," in Cleto, Camp, 320. 68. Cleto, Camp, 28. 69. Christopher Isherwood, "The World in the Evening," in Cleto, Camp, 51. 70. Shugart and Waggoner, Making Camp, 33, 26. 71. Flinn, "The Deaths of Camp," in Cleto, Camp, 447–48. 72. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 13. 73. Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,'" in Cleto, Camp, 56. 74. Rubbing the bare buttocks of the groped young man in the fondling plaque has evolved as a playful tradition unplanned by the statue committee. It is another way in which queer visitors add meaning to the statue, particularly as a means of transmitting ephemeral memories as "gesture." See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65–67. 75. Cameron French, "Statue of Gay Hero Draws Monumental Flak," Reuters, June 14, 2005 (no longer accessible). Currently accessible at TVNZ World News, http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_world_story_skin/592075. 76. "Statue Honouring." 77. Molly Wood, written by John Wimbs and Christopher Richards, was performed in the gaybourhood at the Bathurst Street Theatre. 78. Geoff Chapman, "Molly Wood Goes the Way of All Flash," Toronto Star, October 27, 1994. 79. Sky Gilbert, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory: A Memoir (Toronto: ECW Press, 2000), 227. 80. Carole Blair, "Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality," in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 40. 81. Della Pollock, "Introduction: Making History Go," in Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, ed. Della Pollock (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 27. 82. Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 1–2. 83. Esther Newton, "Role Models," in Cleto, Camp, 98. 84. Babuscio, "The Cinema of Camp" in Cleto, Camp, 124–25. 85. For instance, Christiansen and Hanson highlight the exaggeration of gender and sexuality in ACT UP protests to debunk common anti-gay, anti-HIV/AIDS arguments. See Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, "Comedy as Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS," Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 165. See also Shugart and Waggoner, Making Camp, 17–18. 86. Monument Treatment Summary: Alexander Wood (Toronto, ON: David Sowerbutts Art Conservation 2005–2007); Sweet One, "DSCN6011," Flickr, JPEG Image, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetone/3670404259/; Canadian Pacific, "Parade Watcher," JPEG Image, http://www.flickr.com/photos/18378305@N00/2699548185/; NKRD, (näk'erd), "IMG_7634.jpg," JPEG Image, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nkrd/2630300367/; Lú, "Alexander Wood," JPEG Image, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lu_/21785267/; S.S. Poseidon, "Toronto Pride Day 2 007," JPEG Image, http://www.flickr.com/photos/21795768@N05/2628197015/. 87. Monument Treatment Summary. 88. Monument Treatment Summary. 89. Barbie Zelizer, "The Voice of the Visual in Memory," in Phillips, Framing Public Memory, 162–65. 90. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 548, 561. 91. For instance, see Grube on cruising as placemaking in "No More Shit," in Ingram et al., Queers in Space, 130–31. Others make this argument outside of the Toronto context. 92. Bright and Rand, "Queer Plymouth," 274. 93. Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Morris reflects this shift in updates to his earlier draft of the chapter "My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Public Memory" in Phillips, Framing Public Memory, 89–114. The new version details these changes, particularly in footnote 5. 94. For instance, see Dan Brouwer, "The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tatoos," Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 114–36; Bennett, Banning Queer Blood; John Nguyet Erni, "Flaunting Identity: Spatial Figurations and the Display of Sexuality," in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 311–26. 95. See Blair, "Contemporary US Memorial Sites," 37, 44, 48; See also Morris, "20th Anniversary of the NAMES Project." 96. Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 81–83. 97. Castiglia, "Sex Panics," 158; Morris, "My Old Kentucky Homo," in Morris, Queering Public Address, 103. 98. Blair, "Contemporary US Memorial Sites," 17. 99. Dennis O'Connor (BIA Chair), oral history interview by Thomas Dunn, June 16, 2008. 100. Muñoz, "Ephemera as Evidence," 6–7. 101. Castiglia, "Sex Panics," 158. 102. On metistic practices, see Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix. Additional informationNotes on contributorsThomas R. DunnThomas R. Dunn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Pittsburgh
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