Queer Ideas: The David R. Kessler Lectures from 1992–2001

By CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies, Alisa Solomon, Paisley Currah and 6 more

An essential text documenting the foundation and rise of queer theory.

Founded in 1992, the David R. Kessler lectures represent the foreground of queer studies in the US, featuring legendary thinkers such as Cherríe Moraga, Samuel R. Delany, Dean Spade, Sara Ahmed, and more. This canonical volume brings together the first ten lectures and explores questions of sexuality and gender, as well as how new—and queer—ideas are thought into being.

Queer Ideas features interdisciplinary scholarship from the field’s founding thinkers: Edmund White on literature and criticism, Barbara Smith on Black lesbian and gay history, Esther Newton on being butch, Samuel R. Delany on class and capitalism, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on love, Judith Butler on human rights, and more. This new edition remains a testimony to queer studies as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and provides a necessary introduction for a new generation of feminist scholars, thinkers, and activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781558613041

Book preview

Foreword to the New Edition

Matt Brim, James Harris, and Laura Westengard

In his foreword to the first edition of Queer Ideas, CLAGS founder Martin Duberman tells the story of how David Kessler came to sponsor the lecture series that bears his name. In 1986 Duberman asked his longtime friend, whom he had met as a fellow undergraduate at Yale, to endow the lecture series, and Kessler quickly and unfussily agreed.

Prefacing that story is the more fraught history of the eventual founding of CLAGS in 1991 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Yale having initially been its intended home. But, among other things, the top Yale brass couldn’t stomach the word gay (this was Reaganite 1986). It ultimately became clear that academic elitism, sexism, and racism would make the match impossible for the anti-racist, feminist, and class-conscious CLAGS. The CUNY chancellor was less homophobic. He would not personally help Duberman, a professor at Queens College, nor allow monetary support from the university’s campuses, but neither would he flat-out prohibit CLAGS from raising the $50,000 needed to begin operations. A boon to CUNY, CLAGS nevertheless lost upward of five years as it slowly raised start-up funds.

Five years—and five Kessler Lectures—are a steep price for Queer Ideas to pay. Those pre-Kessler years may look less significant from our vantage point in 2023 than they did from 1992, when Joan Nestle’s inaugural Kessler Lecture (subtitled The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a White Woman) was met with delirious applause by a queer audience kept waiting too long. The further we get from the first Kessler Lecture, the more distant we risk becoming from its audience’s particular and timely feelings of queer anticipation and delirium. Queer Ideas invites readers not only to (re)engage 1990s queer thought and their relationship to it but also to explore the first ten Kessler Lectures through the frame Duberman suggests: as an archive of work that tapped into, produced, and changed queer feelings at the time.

Thanks to the reissue of Queer Ideas, we invite readers to reflect on the sense of being kept waiting too long for queer studies, perhaps a curious feeling given the advances in intersectional LGBTQ studies evidenced not only in this volume but in the 2023 follow-up collection of Kessler Lectures spanning 2002–2020, titled Queer Then and Now. Strange, because for thirty years Kessler honorees have met audiences’ anticipation with talks that chart new and vibrant directions for LGBTQ scholarship, art, and activism. This enthusiasm, however, strikes a sharp contrast with the anti-Black and anti-trans wave of political rhetoric taking shape in the United States and globally. In that gap we feel the recurring sense of waiting too long. 

Collaboratively, we write from a particular place of queer waiting, the same place from which Duberman wrote—CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. While individually our patience is tested differently by our racial and gendered and classed timelines, we share a view as faculty at the City University of New York, a deeply underfunded public university system committed to serving students who have been told their whole lives to wait. Perhaps we are not waiting for but rather waiting with. What does it mean to wait with our immigrant, poor and working-class, first-generation students, eighty percent of whom are students of color? What does it mean to wait with them here, in queer studies? What might it mean to orient ourselves to queer studies as a thing that they have been waiting for? And how can Queer Ideas be taught as a text that anticipates their need and that can be taken up by them? These context-based questions can be reshaped and asked of all of our audiences, all of our students, all of our communities. As José Esteban Muñoz posits in the opening lines of Cruising Utopia, Queerness is not yet here.… We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality (2009). Queer Ideas can be read and taught as a book about queer struggle and the delirium of queer thought, both waiting and no longer waiting but always leaning toward queer potentiality.

Our sense of being kept waiting is strange for another reason. When we write from CLAGS, we write as firsthand beneficiaries of David Kessler’s generosity and the large and small donations of hundreds of supporters over the years. We also write from a position of loss as we mourn the passing of David Kessler in 2022 while continuing to recognize his ongoing impact. We will remember him in the halls of CLAGS and in the auditoriums where Kessler Award winners move queer studies forward thanks to the foundation he helped establish. We write, too, as inheritors of more than thirty years of labor by the CLAGS board of directors, executive directors, Kessler Lecturers, and the thousands of participants and attendees at CLAGS conferences and programs who have gone before us. It is strange, even disorienting, to benefit from, recognize, and appreciate so deeply all of that work and yet still to struggle: against the latest cycle of anti-trans and anti-queer panic in education; against the renewed, explicit attacks on LGBTQ studies and Black studies by extremists in and out of higher education; against the twin material threats of resource hoarding by elite universities and austerity politics of institutions closer to home. These troubling dynamics mirror those that made CLAGS wait five long years, thirty-seven years ago.

Queer Ideas helps us to restage rather than merely repeat these disorienting confrontations by grounding us in the struggle history of the field, thanks to the lectures printed here as well as the broader assessment of LGBTQ studies by former CLAGS executive directors Alisa Solomon and Paisley Currah in the book’s introduction. We have that history to lean on. It is a legacy of both longstanding scholarly inquiry into the imbrication of sexuality, gender, race, and class and the ever-present potential for exploiting those differences, remaking our inconvenient overlaps and touchpoints into the bedrock of social progress. We are grateful to the Feminist Press for keeping the Queer Ideas of the Kessler Lecturers in the world. No book can end the waiting, but we are grateful for the chance to share the living history of CLAGS as we move toward that horizon.

—Matt Brim, James Harris, and Laura Westengard

CLAGS Executive Director and Board Co-Chairs

New York City

August 2023

Works Cited

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

Foreword to the First Edition

Martin Duberman

Dave Kessler and I have known each other for some forty years. We met at Yale—I was a newly minted Ph.D. teaching in the Department of History and he was getting his credentials as a psychiatrist at the School of Medicine. We were part of a semi-clandestine group of budding gay academicians and professionals who—just by finding each other—helped to save our lives in those pre-Stonewall years. Dave stood out, and was ahead of the rest of us, in arguing insistently that we were not, as the official ideology of the day had it, sick creatures in need of a cure.

When Dave moved to San Francisco, decades ago, he and I saw each other much less often but did manage to stay in touch. In May 1991, I was in California on a book tour and we arranged for one of our periodic get-togethers. Along with catching up on each other’s lives, I had a specific agenda item I wanted to talk over with him. I wanted to tell him about the newest gleam in my eye—a research center to promote and disseminate reliable scholarship about gay and lesbian lives—and to enlist his active support.

The gleam had first been sparked five years earlier. I’d abruptly realized one day late in 1985 that, despite my resolute inattention to and cosmic ignorance of the world of finance, I’d accumulated a quite significant pension fund. I’d also arrived at a quite significant age. It was time to take steps, leave a responsible legacy.

Initially I had a general idea only: write a will that would leave the bulk of my estate to the advancement of gay studies, probably in the form of an endowed professorship. But leave it to whom? Or where? My close friend Helen Whitney was at the time married to Benno Schmidt, recently named Yale’s incoming president. Since I’d been an undergraduate at Yale and had taught there in the sixties, the confluence seemed noteworthy.

When I first approached Benno, his reaction was friendly though cautious. He told me right off that I simply didn’t have enough money to endow a professorship, and that I needed to come up with a more manageable proposal. I immediately substituted a gay research center, not at all sure whether that was more or less ambitious than a professorship. Benno said he wanted to think about it and to consult with Bart Giamatti, Yale’s outgoing president, before proceeding further.

Benno soon got back to me to say that Bart (here I quote from my diary of January 19, 1986) had immediately objected to establishing an endowment devoted to ‘gay’ anything. Gay, Giamatti had announced, was an advocacy word. I tried arguing the parallel with black studies. Would Yale reject a center devoted to research about African Americans because some might argue that black was an advocacy word?

Benno then passed along Bart’s suggestion that Yale might be interested if I left my estate to promoting, in some form, the history of human sexuality. No, I said, that more generalized subject already had the university-affiliated Kinsey Institute, several established journals, and a significant cadre of researchers. In contrast, gay/lesbian studies had practically nothing.

As a fall-back, Benno next suggested that, to appease Bart, I substitute homosexuality for the incendiary gay; an endowment to study the history of homosexuality stood a better chance of finding favor with the powers that be. No, I said, homosexuality was a clinical term, loaded with negative moralistic judgments. Well then, Benno said, why don’t we just put terminology aside for now while you see if you can gather together an organizing committee of bona fide scholars to work out a concrete proposal, complete with a set of by-laws. That seemed a reasonable, even necessary, next step in producing a workable center. And so it was that a diverse and shifting group of scholars began a protracted set of meetings in my living room to talk through plans for the organization that would ultimately become the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies—CLAGS.

But in the end it was not to be situated at Yale. John Boswell, a distinguished and openly gay historian at Yale, ultimately withdrew his support several months into our discussions after we, as a group, rejected his demand that the center’s daily operations be controlled by tenured Yale faculty members. Most of the women and some of the men on our committee pointed out to Boswell that acceptance of his proposal would necessarily result in a center controlled by a small group of white men—since Yale then had no tenured out lesbians or people of color, and few tenured women. From Boswell’s stated point of view, this was perfectly acceptable. Boswell then, in a long letter to me—with a copy to Benno Schmidt—denounced the committee’s deliberations as unremittingly hostile to Yale and severed all connection with us. Pleading his inability to get our proposal passed without the support of Yale’s gay star, Benno quickly bowed out.

The group was shocked and angry at what we took as Boswell’s attempt to sabotage what he could not control. But there was considerable relief, too, at the breakdown in negotiations. Yale would have provided a prestigious legitimizing venue for gay studies, but the women on our committee especially had felt from the beginning that the price might be too high, that as a traditional bastion of white male privilege, Yale, at that time, was too hidebound an environment to harbor and nurture the gay world’s vibrant diversity.

We turned to The City University of New York (CUNY), and what a difference it made! At our very first meeting, Harold Proshansky, president of the CUNY Graduate School, thanked us for bringing the idea of a gay/ lesbian studies center to CUNY. If anything, he said, the time for creating such an institution is overdue. He not only offered to work actively with us to prepare strategies for winning approval from CUNY’s Board of Trustees, but said he would personally ask a select group of progressive campus presidents (CUNY has some two dozen different undergraduate campuses) to kick in $5,000 each from their discretionary funds so that we would have at least a minimal budget to get us started.

Three days later I got a phone call from a decidedly down-in-the-mouth Proshansky. The CUNY chancellor, Joseph Murphy, had told him in no uncertain terms that although he would not openly oppose the establishment of such a center, he would not lift a finger to help it. And he told Proshansky that under no circumstances would he be permitted to approach campus presidents for contributions.

Murphy was at the time well known in leftwing circles, a champion of minority struggles. But as most of us had learned many times over in our lives, heterosexual lefties often just don’t get it; our issues aren’t real to them, our cause not quite reputable. Proshansky made it clear to me that we would ourselves have to raise all the start-up funds. To prove our viability, he set the bar at $50,000—a substantial nut for academics lacking in fund-raising skills, foundation connections, or personal connections to the Rich and Famous.

Good luck, Proshansky said. You’re going to need it. His tone was both sad and sardonic.

Well, we did do it, but it took nearly five years, nickel-and-diming it all the way. We literally passed the hat down the auditorium aisles at the scholarly events we began to organize early on, we harangued friends and pleaded with colleagues, we gradually discovered a few friendly program officers at foundations—and we were finally put over the top by a $20,000 bequest from a gay man none of us knew personally who had died of AIDS. In April 1991, the CUNY Board of Trustees made CLAGS an official Center of The Graduate School. A month later, I was in San Francisco having lunch with Dave Kessler.

Dave had kept posted over the years about our assorted tribulations and accomplishments, and was already one of CLAGS’s most generous donors. Since he and I were old friends, I didn’t have to waste any time, that day in May, before coming to the point: would he be interested in endowing a lecture series which each year would award and celebrate a scholar for his or her outstanding contribution to gay and lesbian studies? (As our consciousness expanded over the years, so did our terminology, with bisexual, transgender, and queer eventually being added in our literature to gay and lesbian.)

Dave was immediately interested. And he made it clear that no further wooing or obeisance would be necessary. Dave, in contrast to many donors, is a modest, even self-effacing man who, when mention is made of his own significant role in changing stereotypes and treatment modalities within the psychiatric world, tends to blush and change the topic. What Dave said he did need was a little time to consult with his lawyer. In fact, it took very little time.

On November 19, 1992, in an auditorium packed to overflowing, Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, mounted the platform of the Graduate School auditorium to delirious applause and delivered the very first David R. Kessler Lecture. It was a night I’ll never forget. Dave had flown in from San Francisco for the event, a festive dinner and cocktails had preceded, and Joan (as I wrote in my diary the next day) "did a marvelous job, recreating [the African American lesbian] Mabel Hampton’s life out of bare fragments of evidence, showing how our lost voices can be reclaimed, and doing so with deep respect and feeling. Many were in tears at the end, including me. . . ."

I haven’t missed a Kessler Lecture since. Over time, The Kessler has become a widely anticipated annual event in academic gay circles, a festive gathering of the scholarly tribe, a celebration of our achievements, our unique perspectives, our trenchant challenges to traditional pieties.

Which is not to say that every lecture has been as triumphantly received as the first. Opinions—often reflecting whether one was pro- or anti-queer theory—differed widely year after year as to which celebrant did or did not reach those exacting initial heights.

Those devoted to speculative analysis listened to Monique Wittig’s Reading and Comments with far more delight than they did to Barbara Smith’s thoughtful presentation, traditionally grounded in factual specifics, about African American lesbian and gay history. Fans of queer theory were not nearly as smitten with John D’Emilio’s talk on the life of Bayard Rustin as were those of us trained in the demands of evidentiary proof.

But so it inevitably goes with any ten-year-long sequence of events: the intensity varies, the format and focus shift, the reception wavers according to ideological tastes. Still, the Kessler Lectures overall have retained a high standard for insight and eloquence, have celebrated a diverse group of scholars, writers, and activists, and have appealed to a wide range of constituencies. The Kessler, year after year, has played to standing-room-only crowds. With this volume, happily, the lecture series can now be enjoyed by a wider audience.

—Martin Duberman

New York City

October 2003

Introduction

Alisa Solomon and Paisley Currah

As this book approached its last stages of preparation in the summer of 2003, the United States Supreme Court powerfully demonstrated a founding principle of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) studies: that queer ideas can change the world. In the groundbreaking ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court decreed at last that sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Thus it overturned the notorious 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had justified the arrest of adults having consensual sex by asserting that prohibitions against homosexual activity had ancient roots as well as a long legacy within U.S. law. Debunking the reasoning in Bowers in the majority opinion for Lawrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

At the outset it should be noted that there is no longstanding history in this country of laws directed at homosexual conduct as a distinct matter. Beginning in colonial times there were prohibitions of sodomy derived from the English criminal laws passed in the first instance by the Reformation Parliament of 1533. The English prohibition was understood to include relations between men and women as well as relations between men and men.… Nineteenth-century commentators similarly read American sodomy, buggery, and crime-against-nature statutes as criminalizing certain relations between men and women and between men and men. . . . The absence of legal prohibitions focusing on homosexual conduct may be explained in part by noting that according to some scholars the concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century. See, e.g., J. Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995); J. D’Emilio & E. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (2d ed. 1997) (The modern terms homosexuality and heterosexuality do not apply to an era that had not yet articulated these distinctions.) Thus early American sodomy laws were not directed at homosexuals as such but instead sought to prohibit nonprocreative sexual activity more generally. This does not suggest approval of homosexual conduct. It does tend to show that this particular form of conduct was not thought of as a separate category from like conduct between heterosexual persons. (2478–79)

Had Justice Kennedy been attending the annual David R. Kessler Lectures at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)? Had he been sitting among us incognito (sans gown) all these years at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center? After all, at these gatherings, which honor scholars who have made substantial contributions to the expression and understanding of LGBTQ lives, he would have been exposed to exactly the sort of documentary evidence and theoretical analyses that enabled him both to recognize the capacious and unintended reach of colonial America’s sodomy laws and to historicize homosexual as a category of identity. Each lecture offered, on the celebratory occasion of its delivery, new insights into and deep contemplations of LGBTQ studies, as well as personal and communal self-scrutiny. Together, in this volume, the lectures provide a rich map of the varied terrain of the field over a remarkably fecund period.

Dropping by for each lecture in the Kessler’s first dynamic decade, Justice Kennedy might also have come to appreciate how Esther Newton’s butch career has been made possible by gay people who fought to create an alternative vision, a freer cultural space for gender and sexuality, or what makes Edmund White’s lush novels political, or why, as Cherríe Moraga explains, The fictions of our lives—how we conceive our histories by heart—can sometimes provide a truth far greater than any telling frozen to the facts. And, if he really listened, the Supreme Court Justice might even have agreed with Samuel R. Delany about the value of random and frequent cross-class encounters and the importance of public sex.

This last, in all seriousness, is an unlikely scenario. But, it is an imaginable one, thanks precisely to the paradigm-shifting, institution-rattling, and downright pulse-quickening work of the thinkers and writers who have brought LGBTQ studies into being. Initiated in 1992—before LGBTQ studies had found much of a foothold in American universities, much less been institutionalized in programs and departments, and through the rise in number of centers like CLAGS—the Kessler Lecture series has featured pioneers in the field: Joan Nestle, Edmund White, Barbara Smith, Monique Wittig, Esther Newton, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, John D’Emilio, Cherríe Moraga, and Judith Butler.

As for what, exactly, that field has been and ought to be, these ten scholars would no doubt offer ten richly conflicting definitions. Indeed, anyone reading through Queer Ideas will discover what a wide range of approaches is not only accommodated, but in fact demanded, by LGBTQ inquiry. Interdisciplinary and unfixed, LGBTQ studies is a perpetual work in progress. So the essays gathered here, like shards in a kaleidoscope, work jointly to create a colorful and wondrous picture of a field of study that never sits still. Some of the lectures have themselves changed slightly in the transition to print and are published here with revisions made after the event. While some of the spontaneity of performance is gone, what stands maintains the original intensity of each Kessler.

In their own distinct ways, all ten lecturers seized on the occasion of the Kessler to reflect on their personal and intellectual developments within queer thought, community, and/or politics. Some share the struggles of queer research—Smith contending with an archive that exists in fragments, in scattered documents, in fiction, poetry, and blues lyrics, in hearsay and innuendo; D’Emilio falling into near mortal combat with Bayard Rustin, the slippery subject of a biography. Others assess the intimacies that constitute queer life—Sedgwick in a therapist’s office, Delany in Times Square movie houses. Some address issues of urgent moment—White considering the fate of gay fiction, and Butler, corporeal vulnerability and violence. And some—Moraga, Nestle, Newton, Wittig—trace a lesbian journey, real or imagined or both, that touches down in both hell and paradise. Their lectures speak in ten different registers, but you can hear in each voice a heady admixture of what Butler describes as a motive force for their own queer theory: rage and desire.

LGBTQ activism, too, has always been fueled by these feelings, and for all their divergence, the Kessler lecturers concur on one fundamental point: LGBTQ scholarship begins in, and remains tied to, a liberation movement. It’s important to place these ten lectures in an intellectual and political context and describe the field they have helped to form, but not so easy to fill the story in neatly. Or, rather, it’s too easy to offer an orderly account that doesn’t capture the wonderfully messy, contentious, multi-faceted activity of queer research. Nothing, least of all intellectual inquiry, follows a clean sequential narrative.

Unlike, say, the revolutionary physicist or literary critic whose new ideas can be shown to break with or develop out of previous traditions, early LGBTQ scholars were not entering into a field, but actually making it up as they went along. As D’Emilio notes in his Kessler Lecture, the work had a distinct and self-conscious use-value. In the thrilling days of the early 1970s, he explains, The excitement of reimagining and, in the process, reinventing our lives was balanced at times by a sense of being rudderless, of having not a clue as to what we were doing or where we were going, of having no history or tradition in which to anchor our activities. The new scholarship would provide such an anchor. But the course of the gay liberation movement and the inquiries it urged on—being powered, as it was, by love—never did run smooth. As we trace the broad trajectory of the birth and growth of LGBTQ studies, it’s crucial to note from the outset that the development of the field is far tidier in the telling than in reality. What is certain is that it’s impossible to relate any story about LGBTQ studies without repeatedly bumping into the names of the authors brought together in Queer Ideas.

The Fervent Years

LGBTQ studies has its origins in the gay activism that marks its symbolic birth with the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Though gay and lesbian publications and civil rights and social organizations had been functioning far earlier, and scholarship on sexuality had long been produced, Stonewall galvanized these wings of the emergent movement. Indeed, scholars who insisted that research on lesbian and gay lives, histories, and communities was both necessary and legitimate—and who produced that research— were very much working as part of the movement.

The writers in this volume place themselves and their work firmly within such activism (and recall disparate experiences of reception): D’Emilio consciously and eagerly produces scholarship for the movement; Newton credits her connection to community via books and art, conferences and politics with helping to make her own queerness possible; Moraga admits to feeling betrayed by the white-entitlement of lesbianfeminism and has to look elsewhere for a radical revisioning of our lives. Edmund White participates in the growth of the modern gay publishing movement as books like his begin to win contracts from mainstream houses, while Smith creates publishing opportunities for those overlooked by the modern gay publishing movement with the grassroots establishment, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

In other words, producing the research was not itself enough to forge a field. Pioneering scholars built institutions like Kitchen Table that made it possible for work to be disseminated, and even—as in the case of New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives, of which Joan Nestle was a founder— to be engaged at all. Other gay and lesbian archives were collected in other cities; gay papers and feminist journals proliferated. Those performing the typically voluntary labor to sustain these efforts were doing nothing short of creating the means of production of a revolutionary new scholarship.

Within academic institutions, LGBTQ scholarship emerged not only in relationship to the growing gay liberation movement, but also amid the explosion of women’s studies and African American and other ethnic stud-ies—precisely at the moment, that is, when universities were being radically reshaped by demands both that they open their doors to more diverse populations and that they admit new perspectives. But it would be some years before lesbian and gay studies would find any traction within the academy; those already in faculty positions often felt forced to stay in the closet to preserve their jobs. So while women’s and ethnic studies fought for institutionalization, early gay and lesbian research was mostly being produced by such independent scholars as D’Emilio, Smith, and others—Allan Bérubé and Jonathan Ned Katz to name only two more—without the benefit of research grants or professorial salaries.

Soon, however, they joined with brave colleagues who did have academic positions in taking on, as Jeffrey Escoffier has put it, the virulent homophobia of the academy (13). In New York City, for example, D’Emilio and Nestle were active, along with Martin Duberman, Barbara Gittings, and Karla Jay, among others, in founding the Gay Academic Union (GAU). They produced a conference at CUNY’s John Jay College in 1973 that drew three hundred people. D’Emilio chronicles the GAU’s efforts in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics and the University. Its statement of purpose, adopted in summer 1973 after extensive debate, he