Syncopated Presence: Bridging LGBT Histories and Queer Futures

Although one claims the past and the other the future, both the LGBTQ History and the Queer Futures panels, and the papers memorialized here, resonate with the urgencies of the present. As conferences pleasurably prompt us to recall, the present is where we remind one another of our affective and material persistence and resilience, and where the fact of sharing space, air, hotel rooms, and ideas becomes a handy index of the movement of time.

Rereading these documents now, after the pleasure of experiencing them live in Montreal, reminds me that for queer people, as Joan Nestle said so long ago, the body is our history. Indeed, our bodies resonate here in our words. Our bodies adhere on the serif of the type and on how our words report not just intellectual currents, but the costs and benefits of writing our bodies across these lines.

The intellectual work we report is, as a result, inextricable from the institutional histories so many of us relate: from Kim Marra working on Passing Performances as a new assistant professor, to Bob Schanke suffering homophobia at his home institution, to LeAnn Fields strategizing to move Passing Performances through the University of Michigan Press editorial board and starting the Triangulations series, to what it means for Omi Osun Jones to craft her book as a living, palpable document of black queer lives and practice, to Sean Metzger thinking globally about nation, costume, and queers, and so on.

Past or future, these authors demonstrate that we’re still here, in the present, a declaration that couldn’t be taken for granted when the nascent Lesbian and Gay Theatre Focus Group of ATHE was meeting in the early 1990s in conference rooms with the doors closed to protect their identities, or when HIV/AIDS was threatening our survival, or when the costs of being out personally, let alone doing queer intellectual or performance work, were just too high (as stories about our colleague, the late Billy Harbin, evoke so well).

As Stacy Wolf notes in her reminiscence about writing on Mary Martin for Kim and Bob’s book, theatre historians often don’t have access to their subjects’ interiority, and need to surmise desire from what we read off the surface of past images. The Queer Futures panelists, on the other hand, intervene in scholarship and in archival work yet to come by sharing their interiority. We’ve created a professional space in which the personal—as feminist and queer activism always claimed and as Clare Croft reminds us here—is indeed the political. We hear autobiographical anecdotes in the past and future panelists’ words that once again beckon to the omnipresence of queer bodies as indices to precarity and power.

The two acts I’ve been invited to bridge here also mark generations, though not cleanly. As Kareem Khubchandani underlines in his preface to the future, this entire collection of papers makes evident the politics of citation (which becomes a kind of family album, in the most expansive, generative, nonnormative sense) and the “legacies of mentorship” that illustrate “the practices of care that LGBTQ people, women, and people of color know to be necessary in surviving the academy.” But despite what Sara Warner jokes is our trajectory from “outlaws” to “in-laws,” that arc of progress is syncopated, depending on differential access to power fractured by race, ethnicity, class, and ability, and by the vagaries of the present, since progress is never even or only forward (witness Houston’s 2015 reversal of its anti-discrimination policy, despite boasting a three-term, out lesbian mayor).

Queer people remain politically and socially precarious, which is why we need these panels, these contiguous, adjacent, moving (physically and emotionally) banquets of thought and feeling, past and future, in which we relish our shared presents/presence. We need the archive of this Theatre Topics section to remember that the body is where queer history is written; where our relationships form; where our theatre and performance sharpens its edge; where we silence ourselves or make ourselves visible; where we love and revile one another; and where we dance, think...