Pink Triangles

A documentary film on gay and lesbian history and experience is highly recommended for philosophy and other courses.

Queering Ireland, In the Archives

On June 16, 2008, the National Library of Ireland officially accepted the Irish Queer Archive, a community-based archive of lesbian and gay historical and cultural materials, a transfer both literal and symbolic, marking the importance of lesbian and gay history to the nation's history. This essay briefly examines the issues associated with this transfer of materials to an institutional home, a transfer that confers legitimacy and authority but also raises questions about access and inclusion (particularly gender inclusion), as well as questions about the nature and purpose of queer archives. To illustrate some of these questions, the author offers a number of textual and visual materials: a small archive project of Irish queer history, concentrating primarily on literary materials (that have not been published or have limited availability) and organized around four broad categories of history, space, language, and performance. Included here are: excerpts from Sea Urchins, an unpublished but historically important play by Aodhan Madden, a play inspired by one of the most important public protests in Irish gay and lesbian history, the 1983 Stop Violence Against Gays and Women March; an unpublished English translation of one section of Micheál Ó Conghaile's groundbreaking novel, Sna Fir; examples of lesbian visual culture; a collection of poems from community journals (suggesting, perhaps, the importance of artistic expression to political activism); and imagery from Alternative Miss Ireland and the Emerald Warriors gay rugby club.

Whatever Happened to Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts?

This article approaches queer history by offering a salutary corrective to dominant cultural and subcultural forces enjoining us to remember. The life-enabling and properly revolutionary effects of actively forgetting the past and, in particular, the legacy of previous generations, are first outlined in readings of Nietzsche, The Aeneid, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari. The localized exercise of an active forgetting is proposed as a response to one especially problematic case of intergenerational (non-)transmission in recent French gay and lesbian history: a collective act of self-censorship by the team responsible for the 2002 internet republication of the 1973 ‘cult’ special issue of Recherches, entitled Three Billion Perverts. While the article does not seek to contest the decision to censor these thirty-two pages headed ‘Pédo-Philie’ from the republication, it does take issue with the assumptions underlying the way in which the decision was presented. The article suggests that this act of self-censorship typifies the way in which younger gay and lesbian people of the early twenty-first century are placed in a schizogenic ‘double bind’ by their immediate forebears, radical gays and lesbians of the 1970s, the generation of Guy Hocquenghem and the FHAR; members of the younger generation are told simultaneously to remember and that what they are being told to remember cannot be conveyed to them. The ascesis of an active forgetting is presented as the only way out of this impasse and a necessary emancipating prerequisite for new life and new possibilities.

Post-colonial historiography, queer historiography

If sexuality as a category of historical analysis is widely acknowledged as “socially constructed” over time and place, why are historians still assuming a core set of essential qualities that unite all those scholarships they categorize under “gay and lesbian history” or “queer history”? This short position essay responds to this striking paradox in queer historiography by turning to post-colonial historiography. In doing so, it proposes the use of the historical project as an intellectual tool that challenges the discursive constructions of objects of knowledge through different historiographies (e.g., Marxism, modernism, etc.). In this attempt, the queer historical subject is conceptualized as comprising shifting historical positions under which their historical representations function as sites of contest and possibility.