Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production

Acknowledgments

>> ix Acknowledgments Love and Money was long in the making. I am lucky to have patient colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who take my pace in stride and warmly receive my work as colleague, teacher, and administrator. For all its complexities, UMass is a place with a beating academic heart. The Department of Communication has been a multidisciplinary melting pot of critical practice and faculty governance, and I am fortunate—really fortunate—to have made my way there. Thanks to Deans Janet Rifkin and Bob Feldman for their support, integrity, and academic leadership, to Michael Morgan, who for nine years was our department chair and a veritable magician of ballcatching and good humor, and to my UMass friends, colleagues, and current and former graduate students, especially James Allan, Carolyn Anderson , Christopher Boulton, Briankle Chang, Lynn Comella, Vincent Doyle, Henry Geddes, Sut Jhally, Han Lee, Viera Lorençova, Erna MacLeod, Debra Madigan, Eve Ng, Scott Oberacker, Anca Romantan (1975–2008), Katherine Sender, Jacqueline Urla, and Emily West. Eve, Lynn, Viera, Liliana Herakova , and Tovar Cerulli were great research assistants for Love and Money from 2002 to 2011. Justin Lewis left UMass in 2000, but thankfully we never lost touch. He is a wonderful scholar and friend. Jackie Urla has been a wise friend and colleague since the week I arrived at UMass and has taken great interest in Love and Money. Julie Graham (1945–2010) was a beautiful colleague and friend; her work with Katherine Gibson has been transformative. For invitations and opportunities to air and test my thoughts, thanks to hosts and audiences at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York; the Future of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College; the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center; Indiana University; Keene State University; Lancaster University; Macalester College; Manchester University ; McGill University; Université de Montréal; the Queer Screen plenary program at the University of Glasgow; the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Sydney. I am also grateful to the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, whose sabbatical travel grant launched my fieldwork with Dorothy Allison and her readers, and to the College of Social x > xi colleagues and friends of depth, creativity, and unself-conscious generosity. Richard, Jackie, and Hilary, thank you. Other friends and colleagues have read and responded or contributed through conversation and hospitality while I was on the road, among them Marty Allor, Barry Dornfeld, Kathryn Furano (1964–2012), Joshua Gamson, Lori Ginzberg, Michael Hindery, Bette Kauffman, Terry King, Heather Love, Toby Miller, Kathy Peiss, Natalie Sacks, Irene Silverblatt, Sharon Ullman, Suzanna Walters, and Thomas Waugh. Nan Woodruff is a wonderful scholar and sweet sister-mentor whose conversation and long friendship I am indebted to. Nan, prepare to retire together at Cranky Acres. Leola Johnson’s intellectual gifts and long friendship are deep, and her style is impossible to imitate. Heather Murray is another original, an illustrious writer on families and queer life and a warm heart who has taught me a lot about the dangers of academic self-seriousness . My father’s cousin Barrie Chavel became my friend, Toronto host, and fairy godmother in the early 1980s. Barrie died on October 19, 2010, but not without having grilled me several times about the topic, structure, and ETA of Love and Money. Everyone who knew Barrie recognized her husky-voiced and loving commitments to the people in her life and city. I am blessed to have been on the receiving end of those commitments for so long. Several years into Love and Money, I fell in love with Thomas Streeter. Tom is not queer, though I am, which speaks to Tom’s open heart, his knowing and world-weary respect for surprises, and his love of sweetness where we find it. He is a beautiful writer and a contrary and generous interlocutor. Friends have asked what brought me to Tom, at which point I’m relieved that I’ve never been a same-sex absolutist in print, and I quote Mae West: once, I was as pure as the driven snow, then I drifted. There’s a place in queer scholarship for the study of drift, but that isn’t my purpose. Thanks to Tom for his integrity, his Midwestern warmth and twang, his hospitality wherever we are, and especially for his love and solidarity. Both of my parents, Lynn Henderson and Peter Henderson, died as I was completing Love and Money...