My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

13. Class Dismissed

Class Dismissed By the mid-1990s, Bérubé was deeply involved in his research on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Beyond the reflections and writing it provoked about how class shaped his own life experience, this work also pushed him to think deeply and analytically about how class operates in society. Here, in an address to an academic queer studies conference, he moves back and forth between historical episodes and personal experience as ways of illustrating the pervasiveness of class, even as class often gets dismissed in the United States as inconsequential. Bérubé calls for making class central to how queer scholars frame their work. He asks tough questions of himself and others, including “Whose [class] position do I want to make stronger by doing my intellectual work?” We acknowledge that we are here today because of something someone did before we came. —Bernice Johnson Reagon, in her 1978 song “Fannie Lou Hamer” 1. Situated Knowledge Sociologists used to talk about situational homosexuality. Perhaps I’m a situational homosexual. Most of what I know and how I think has grown out of the situations I have been in. Moving around. Checking out what’s going on and trying to understand how it got to be that way with me in it. Situated knowledge. • • • • • • I walk into a building, down a hallway, into a room. This one’s in a public school, or inside a health clinic, or it’s the broad expanse of a factory floor. I walk into histories and conversations here that are already in progress. Or it’s a welfare office. A restaurant. An apartment house. Keynote Address for “Constructing Queer Cultures,” a conference sponsored by the Program in Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies at Cornell University, February 1995. 13 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • 234 : a labor historian I’m entering a complex field of classed relations while they are being racialized , gendered, sexualized, partly in response to my presence. A private university. State prison. Hotel. From my point of view, and for the moment, all the class relations operating in this room seem to intersect in me, yet I know this is simultaneously true for everyone else in this room. Prep school chapel. Cruise ship kitchen. Broadway theatre lobby. I have to read these class relations instantly but carefully even as I’m trapped in them and move through them. Police station. Department store. Art gallery. I activate these class relations and alter them even as they are shaping me, cutting me off and then reconnecting me to other people, marking who I am. Cocktail party. Army base. Real estate office. There are many people in this particular building. Poster for the National Maritime Union, 1930s. Courtesy of the Allan Bérubé Collection at the glbths, San Francisco. class dismissed : 235 Bank. Bathhouse. Homeless shelter. I know some of these people; most of them are complete strangers. Laundry. Supermarket. Airport. They each have stories about why they are in this place right now. Subway. Nursing home. Public restroom. They have stories about what they have learned to do with what has been done to them in this place.1 Locker room. Beauty salon. Union hall. Stories that reveal the deep intelligence of people who are acutely aware of their surroundings, people who know how to read situations that they are in.2 • • • • • • How do we negotiate our journeys through these endless rooms, these social structures, these institutions? And who are we each time we make it back out that door, go down the street, and inevitably walk into the next building, the next conversation? What are the stories we tell each other about how we move through these fields of class relations when we are not the ones on top and yet are not the ones on the absolute bottom—stories told with a purpose as if the telling itself could point our way out from under? There are so few opportunities to talk about class in public, especially in queer situations, that you feel like you have to fit everything in because this will be the only chance you will ever have in your entire life. You know what I mean? I’m going to resist this impulse to include everything and instead talk in different ways about one particular thing I know a lot about: the telling of queer stories by working-class men about entering rooms and buildings where other men catch...