Queer Lineations: Robert K. Martin and Gay Literary Studies

At the 2006 Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia, the Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature sponsored a session titled “Queer Lineations: Robert K. Martin and Gay Literary Studies” to honor a pioneer in LGBTQ studies. The reason for the session can be put rather simply: where would the field of gay and lesbian studies be, we wondered, if it weren’t for the scholarly inventiveness and political commitment—not to say the simple courage—of Robert K. Martin? Before a multigenerational audience of scholars and students who packed the room, stood along the back wall, and sat on the floor, three distinguished scholars sounded the depths of Martin’s scholarly work in the context of the continued unfolding of LGBTQ studies, then listened as audience members commented on his political bravery—not only staking his academic career on openly acknowledging his own homosexuality but also focusing his scholarship on the irreducible relevance of sexuality and homosexuality for literary studies. I’m grateful that GLQ now provides an even larger audience the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with—or to learn about for the first time—Martin’s contributions to American gay and lesbian literary and cultural studies, as well as to the study of a wide array of British, European, and Canadian artists, writers, and theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the following pages you’ll find revised versions of the three talks presented that afternoon in Philadelphia; the printed pages capture something of the energy that permeated the convention room, as well as the emotions that were suddenly called forth when Martin himself showed up for the session, accompanied by his partner, Yvon Halley. Because of his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease, no one was certain that he’d be able to attend.

Even a necessarily brief overview of Martin’s career demonstrates his range as a scholar, his remarkable productivity, and the significance of his contributions to the ongoing work of LGBTQ studies today. His groundbreaking contributions began in 1979 with his first book, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, which, as Jared Gardner wrote in a review of the 1998 expanded edition, “reoriented completely the language in which American poetry was discussed” by insisting “not that homosexuality tells all there is to say about these poems, but that without an understanding of the centrality of homosexuality the poems say precisely nothing.”¹ A great deal that we take for granted today—about the viability of queer critique and the centrality of race, class, gender, and sexuality as hermeneutics in cultural and literary studies—can be traced in part to the critical posture Martin adopted in The Homosexual Tradition and employed to such productive and persuasive effect.

Reframing the past to foreground its sometimes unexpected connections to the literary, theoretical, and political concerns of the present is a methodological feature of Martin’s scholarship both early and late, one that is on display in his second major intervention in the American canon, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville.² In the book’s preface Martin writes: “The male couple, as Melville imagined it, can serve as the basis for a reexamination of the way men are called upon to assume roles of power and authority.” Melville’s representations of alternative relations between men, he explains, also functions as “an important part of a larger movement that can ally itself to feminist and ecological thinking”—that last category one of the earliest invocations I know of what we would today call “green criticism” (xi). In his critical writing Martin is always looking ahead, always testing the boundaries of which connections and coalitions might be newly conceptualized and forged.

In this regard, two vital and recurring aspects of Martin’s career are especially noteworthy, for they encapsulate what makes him a uniquely vibrant scholar and teacher, and a dear and valued colleague as well. Martin has edited or coedited no fewer than five books on topics ranging from E. M. Forster to the American gothic; his latest, on...