The Challenge of Transgender, the Moment of Stonewall, and Neil Bartlett

The most disputed question in our historiography is whether there have always been lesbians and gay men, or whether we are a recent development—since the nineteenth century, according to Michel Foucault, or, in some versions, since the Stonewall riot of 1969. But who are we? Are we distinguished by sexual object choice or by gender identity? Judith Halberstam is surely right: Anne Lister was preoccupied with gender identity rather than sexual orientation (or object choice).¹ There have always been such people: the mollies in the early eighteenth century, George Chauncey's fairies in the mid-twentieth century. Conversely, there have always been people who make a same-sex object choice without feeling that their gender identity is at stake: Lillian Faderman's romantic friends, the group associated with the German journal Der Eigene in the first quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. clones in the 1980s.²

These diverse formations can be comprehended only through a principled distinction between gender identity (desire-to-be) and sexual orientation (desire-for). The topic is obscure because in most cultures one of these terms serves as the primary interpretive instrument; the other is incorporated as a subordinate, and consequently incoherent, subcategory. For instance, accounts of the mollies are so concerned with dissident gender identity that they scarcely consider who the mollies' partners might be. Again, in a 1951 book Donald Webster Cory cites the report of a U.S. sailor who believed that "the stranger who performed fellatio" was "homosexual," but not the man on whom it was performed. "The performer was a 'fairy.' The compliant sailor, not."³ Gender identity was still the crucial marker.

This analysis has consequences for the mythology of Stonewall. Who, when we liberated ourselves, came out? (I write "we" as a gay male.) Not the man who presented an effeminate identity. He was always visible. Quentin Crisp, for instance, says in The Naked Civil Servant that people such as he "must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine."⁴ Crisp is never not out: continually he is propositioned, harassed, and beaten, on sight, by total strangers; employers and the army reject him out of hand. In Mart Crowley's play The Boys in the Band, Alan, who is straight identified, cannot tell, from the closeted, straight-acting types, that he has crashed a gay party. But he knows about Emory: "Faggot, Fairy, pansy . . . queer, cocksucker! I'll kill you, you goddam little mincing, swish! You goddam freak! FREAK! FREAK!" Emory admits, "I've known what I was since I was four years old." "Everybody's always known it about you, Emory," Michael quips.⁵ It is the straight-acting types that had a new opportunity, to come out.

We often date the modern gay man from Stonewall. What actually happened is that "homosexual," "lesbian," and "gay" came to be defined in terms of sexual orientation, and gender identity was subsumed, more or less uneasily, into that. Since then, we have pointed out that drag artistes are not necessarily gay, but in practice have tended to assume that they are; repeated endlessly the story of the hard-hatted clone who turned out to be "passive" when we got him home to bed; distanced ourselves anxiously from Are You Being Served? and Liberace; and apologized for any sensitivity we might possess. For many people, this approach made good sense, personally and politically. By the same token, people whose primary sense of themselves was firmly grounded in gender dissidence were marginalized: effeminate men, butch women, transvestites, transsexuals, and transgendered people. They were anomalous even among gays; they hardly figured, or figured only as incidental, unintelligible, out-of-date, embarrassing. The recent assertion of transgendered people aims to challenge this.⁶

To take this topic forward, we may glance back at...