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  • Public Access, Privacy, and Queer Politics: An Interview with Nathan Fuller
  • Sara L. McKinnon (bio) and Nathan Fuller (bio)

The following interview is comprised of two conversations with Nathan Fuller of the Private Manning Support Network on July 21, 2013 and August 18, 2013. I asked to speak with Fuller because of his position as a member of the Private Manning Support Network and because he was one of the only people to attend and report on Manning’s trial in its entirety. As Fuller explains, the Support Network’s primary task has been to raise financial, legal, and public support for Chelsea Manning. Since the trial’s completion, the Support Network has only energized their efforts. Currently, they generate financial backing for all of Manning’s future legal appeals, as well as her appeals for a Presidential pardon, clemency, and the right to gender-confirming health care while in prison. The Network also continues its generation of public support for Manning and the issues that Manning’s case illustrates, such as mass spying, government and military secrecy, and the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowing.

While this interview was completed before the end of Manning’s trial, there are many themes addressed by Fuller that I believe will draw QED readers’ interest. First, Fuller urges queer scholars and activists to reinvest in thinking about privacy and secrecy. Of course, with an intellectual legacy that includes the writings of Eve Sedgwick and Michael Foucault it is hard to stray too far from questions of privacy and secrecy, but of late it seems queers have been more focused on, shouting it out!, flaunting it!, and doing it! in the public.1

Publicness is never divorced from what is private and secret, and yet in the midst of all of this attention directed toward publicness (evidenced also in my [End Page 148] question to Fuller about publicness), I wonder if we have lost grasp on the wide range of concerted efforts at secrecy-making and privacy-enforcement that impact queers and queer possibilities for worldmaking. Chelsea Manning’s whistleblowing and subsequent court martial trial cue us into the intricate U.S. state projects—both in this country and around the world—that pivot on the construction and enforcement of secrets. As Fuller conveys, “we see so little of what our government does.” This makes public deliberation about how the government represents and protects people’s interests thin at best. Perhaps what this interview and Chelsea Manning’s case demonstrates best of all is that a radical queer vision must remain ever vigilant on what can’t be stated, seen, and heard as a basis for organizing our political commitments.

Fuller’s interview also illuminates ways democratized information dissemination challenges the institutional push to encase information in secrets. In the face of a mainstream media that refused to report on Manning’s experiences and trial and the U.S. government’s framing of Manning as an enemy, traitor, and spy, independent journalists, activists, and court reporters stepped into overdrive. They meticulously documented, through transcripts, blogs, and twitter feeds, the details of the government’s efforts prosecute Chelsea Manning. The Fourth Estate that began with Manning’s mass document leak, continued through the fastidious accounting of folks like Nathan Fuller, who sat day-in-and-out in the Ft. Meade media room and attended to—witnessed for a public who would have been otherwise shut out—government and corporate media efforts to enshroud Manning in secrets.

Lastly, QED readers should find the tensions between LGBT and queer politics of interest in sitting with Fuller’s ideas. It is the tension between Manning fighting to abolish DOMA and DADT and insisting on information transparency through her actions of whistleblowing. And, it is the tension present in a gay press that sounds more like the government and corporate media agenda than it does a queer agenda. I believe the question that will draw the reader’s attention is whether a politic can be normatively aspiring—longing for recognition and inclusion—at the same time that it is radically queer. There is no doubt that LGBTQ politics face an important crossroad, one that necessitates deep pondering of the...

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