Who Is the Subject?: Queer Theory Meets Oral History

The tiny subfield of U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer history has evolved since the publication of John D'Emilio's 1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities into a fledgling discipline that has over time established an overarching set of research questions and an accepted set of research methods.¹ With the exception of a few monographs, like Peter Boag's exhaustively researched Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (2003), there are few works in this twenty-five-year-old field that do not depend heavily on oral history methods. As George Chauncey observes in Gay New York, "early in my research it became clear that oral histories would be the single most important source of evidence concerning the internal working of the gay world."² The use of oral history methods stems back to the field's social history moorings, where historians of the dispossessed found themselves lacking print sources and turned to live historical actors for information about the recent past. In practicing the craft, however, U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historians have been influenced by feminist ethnographers, whose methodology attempts to clarify the social, economic, and ideological differences that exist between researchers and their so-called subjects. Feminist researchers try to empower (rather than exploit) historical narrators by trusting their voices, positioning narrators as historical experts, and interpreting narrators' voices alongside the narrators' interpretations of their own memories.³ Many gay, lesbian, and queer historians have followed suit.

Drawing from the methods and methodology sections of a number of historical and anthropological monographs, this essay discusses how gay, lesbian, and queer history projects have used oral history and ethnography to frame their projects. Discourse analysis and queer theory's interrogation of subjectivity raise important questions about oral history methodologies, however. Do oral histories provide reliable representations of the past? What kind of truths do oral history methods reveal? This essay examines the evolution of a discussion about oral history methods in U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historiography by analyzing how several key texts discuss historical methodology, particularly in relation to queer theory. Beyond the discursive clash between queer theory and oral history, however, I hope to raise larger questions about the history of sexuality and its methods: Does the history of sex, sexuality, and desire have a unique relationship to self-disclosure and, thus, to oral history methods? Are questions of method particularly vexed in queer projects because they discuss illegal or illicit desire? And is there something voyeuristically compelling about the way narrators (and researchers) create social meaning out of sexual desire?

This essay analyzes the evolution of a distinct method in U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historical research, and the texts I discuss have been chosen because they contribute significantly to that evolution. The following is not an inclusive list of significant works in queer history but, rather, a selection of texts that, through their discussion of historical methods, have pushed methodological questions forward. The texts I discuss, in chronological order, include John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), Allan Bérubé's Coming Out under Fire (1990), Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993), George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994), and John Howard's Men like That (1999).⁴ I'll also offer some methodological comments on my own publication, Wide-Open Town (2003).⁵ This essay explores how researchers—mostly historians but also a few anthropologists—have grappled with the challenge queer theory poses to oral history in its dependence both on self-knowing—that is, that narrators will be able to articulate a coherent or consistent representation of themselves as historical actors—and on transparent subjectivity—that is, that historians can somehow come to know these "selves" through their self-descriptions. Why has sexual self-disclosure become so important to gay, lesbian, and queer historical research? And what does the dependence on oral history methods tell us about this fledgling field?

Before I attempt to answer these questions, let...