Eavesdropping with George Chauncey: A Closer Look at JML 42.3

In the latest issue of the Journal of Modern Literature, author Benjamin Kahan discusses George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994) and its claim that unity exists between same-sex cultures of working-class immigrants and African Americans. Below, Kahan expounds upon his essay, titled "Sheiks, Sweetbacks, and Harlem Renaissance Sexuality, or the Chauncey Thesis at Twenty-Five," by presenting literature as a written history of sexuality. Kahan's essay is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Stay connected with the Journal of Modern Literature and follow them on Facebook. 

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When I was in college, I bought George Chauncey’s Gay New York with a little money that I won from an undergraduate research grant. It was one of the first academic books I ever owned and I remember thinking that the whispered, almost conspiratorial, scene of one man offering another man a light on its green cover promised a kind of secret knowledge. I read Chauncey’s book over and over again, feeling that it furnished—though I wouldn’t have put it quite this way then—a set of vocabularies to enunciate now vestigial social and sexual forms. Taking his text as my “Baedeker” (Caseli 113), I learned to recognize these nonstandard erotic lives in innumerable literary texts. So much did I admire this book that when I happened to be at a party with Chauncey himself, I, ordinarily gregarious and outgoing, was too shy to introduce myself.

As I read Chauncey’s book more closely, I found that many of the endnotes drew on Ralph Werther’s autobiographies and autobiographical writings by other authors. This got me wondering about the status of literature as evidence to construct the history of sexuality, particularly in the case of Werther, who makes some fairly outrageous assertions regarding his sexual exploits in childhood. Whatever the veracity or hyperbole of his stories, I became fascinated with the way that literature could provide a crucial source for writing the history of sexuality. In The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (2019), for example, I explore what I called the “revolving door between literature and sexology” (20) to explain the way that sexologists thought through literature as they wrote poems, plays, and novels and drew on literary material for their case studies, much as psychoanalysis does. Similarly, modernist writers borrowed and incorporated sexological thinking into their writing. This “literariness of sexuality,” to use Christopher Looby’s phrase, provided me with an entry point into Chauncey’s work.

My essay, “Sheiks, Sweetbacks, and Harlem Renaissance Sexuality, or the Chauncey Thesis at Twenty-Five” expands Chauncey’s literary archive in relation to Harlem Renaissance texts in order to interrogate his claim that working-class immigrant men shared a sexual culture with African-American men. These literary texts allow me to test Chauncey’s categories as I argue that African-American men did not in fact share the singular “gay world” that Chauncey’s subtitle evokes. Instead, I tarry with this archive of Harlem Renaissance texts to map a series of black figures that are absent from Chauncey’s text, focusing on the sheik and the sweetback. This essay is part of a larger project that I am working on with Madoka Kishi called Sex under Necropolitics. We seek to summon the lifeways and lifeworlds of Harlem Renaissance era black sexuality. Our sense is that by disconnecting black “bodily practices” (Hoad xx) and “corporeal intimacies” (Hoad ix) from immigrant and working-class sexuality we can find new social forms of desire and configurations of Eros.

The challenge, of course, is to narrate these stories with the same vivacity as Chauncey’s does. His impeccable eye for detail—who can forget the suggestive name of the female impersonator Loop-the-loop or Chauncey’s teasing out of the homosexual connotations of Cary Grant’s improvised line that he is “sitting in the middle of Forty-second street waiting for a bus”—and meticulous archival research are positively transporting. But what remains most enabling for me is his method of locating and categorizing sexual types, his knack for weaving details together to create vivid patterns and ways of inhabiting these forgotten—now retrieved—worlds. I teach Chauncey’s text almost every semester and eavesdrop with my students hoping to overhear a whispered secret or find a buried treasure between its covers— which for so many of us that work in the history of sexuality remain evergreen.

 

Works Cited

Caselli, Daniela. “Literary and Sexual Experimentalism in the Interwar Years.” The

    Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by Scott

    Herring. Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 103-121.

Hoad, Neville. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. U of

    Minnesota P, 2007.

Kahan, Benjamin. The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences

    of Sexuality. U of Chicago P, 2019.

Looby, Christopher. “The Literariness of Sexuality: Or, How to Do the (Literary) History

    of (American) Sexuality” American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 4, 2013, pp. 841-854.

Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” The Portable Walt Whitman, by Walt Whitman.

    Penguin, 2004, pp. xi-xxxvii.

Werther, Ralph. Autobiography of an Androgyne. Edited by Scott Herring. Rutgers UP,

    2008.

 

Benjamin Kahan is an associate professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019).

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