Queer Plymouth

Queer Plymouth is an ongoing collaborative project of queer engagement with a primary U.S. heritage site, Plymouth, Massachusetts, the home of Plymouth Rock and the staging ground for the contested story of the First Thanksgiving. As an artist (Deborah) and a historian (Erica), we bring to the project our diverse but intersecting histories of queer looking and making—which, over the years, have produced work in photography, installation, editing, curating, teaching, and writing—and, importantly, our queer friendship. By queer friendship we do not mean to imply that we have something in common with those schoolgirl, spinster, or gym teacher duos seen so often together as to suggest a secret sexual liaison, a queer layer behind, if peeking through, their surface adherence to (policed) normalcy. To the contrary, we refer to the lovely buzz that animates our pal-dom with sex-and-gender queer appreciations of others and each other; sometimes a girl wants a butch posse or can help pick out that lacy surprise. Shared pleasures and matching interests in the manufacture of national heritages brought us to the thought of collaboration that became Queer Plymouth.¹

In this essay, we offer some visuals and critical vignettes that suggest both the gratifications that queer spectators can have with Plymouth today and the payoffs of looking beyond matters strictly or overtly sexual. Our goal is not to present a queer history of Plymouth, to find seventeenth-century versions of the suspect gym teachers, but to consider and perform some contemporary reconstructions of the site from our emphatically queer viewpoints. We begin with Plymouth Rock and the statues that dot the area nearby. A comparison between the soberly draped stone pilgrims and the buff, scantily clad bronze statue of Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, the "friendly Indian" of schoolbook lore, begins to suggest the racial and colonizing formations that go into the landscape of embodied history and mythmaking at Plymouth. But at Plimoth Plantation, the living history museum in the area, a similar asymmetry in clothing recurs because of choices made by participating Native Americans. We study what happens when the agents of primitivizing line up less obviously than a critic of white supremacy might expect and when contemporary race politics intrude into the business of heritage time travel. We also consider related racial complexities that crop up in Colonial House, a 2004 PBS "educational" reality series whose participants reenact life in a Plymouth-like colony, as well as one of the show's most notable anachronisms: an "indentured servant" coming out as a gay man to his "masters." We are interested, overall, in how issues of race, sex, and history may play out in ways sometimes bizarre, rewarding, or disturbing—and thus, we consider, queer—when marginalized people engage historical reenactments.

"Is That It?"

While the name Plymouth Rock invokes the advent of the master, and of master, or dominant, narratives, the rock's history nonetheless exemplifies how an object's trajectory to monument status is rarely straightforward. First designated the touchstone of Pilgrim disembarkation 121 years after the 1620 landing ("Pilgrim," too, being a later appellation), the rock underwent a series of relocations as succeeding generations of town fathers harnessed the labor of oxen and, later, schoolboys, to pull the rock—more precisely the chunk broken off in the initial move—from one site of enshrinement to another, and finally back to where it began. There it now resides in a sandpit, looking rather like a petrified potato or recumbent hippo at the zoo, beneath a neoclassical portico courtesy of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America that only magnifies its inherent visual deficits as a public monument.² No wonder that even if the masses have not yet clamored for the queer aesthetic intervention recently popularized on TV, the common response to Plymouth Rock sounds suspiciously like the proverbial female lament at heterosexual initiation: "Is that it?" Might queer rescue be the most likely...