This week, I am turning this space over (mostly) to a guest blogger.

Francis Burke O’Neill is a former student of mine, and we have stayed in touch since his graduation in Spring 2011. As an undergraduate he was an English Major and wrote an excellent senior thesis, “If Margo Channing had Quit Smoking,” which was an analysis of adaptation, translation and appropriation (and which was awarded a Pass WIth Honors). Francis is a native New Yorker who lives in Brooklyn, and says that he considers himself an “unread writer” at this point in his career.

There is no greater gift for a teacher than to have a student do well. By this, I don’t mean make lots of money or become hugely successful. I mean go out into the world and evince character, kindness and thoughtfulness. Francis is one of those former students who has done just this, and I am very proud of him and the work he is doing.

Now for The Letter (and subsequence responses).

Dear Wendy,

          I hope your semester is off to a good start. Something interesting (upsetting, actually) happened in my class on Chaucer this week, and after reading your most recent blog entry, “Female Poets, Agency, and the ‘Suicide Girls,'” I thought you might find it valuable.
          While the professor was mentioning how “awesome” he thought it was that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde had probably had sex with each other, a young woman yelled out, “Okay, like I am not okay with that.” With all eyes now firmly planted on her, the student went on to say, “Oscar Wilde couldn’t have been gay. He was a genius!” She then attempted to preface this with the only mildly less ignorant assertion that if Wilde had been gay, he would have certainly been “out.”
          The professor explained the circumstances by which Wilde had been put on trial, to which the student responded, “No, that was for his work – not because he was gay.” The discussion ended in quiet exasperation.
          This is not the first time I have been in a literature class where this particular form of prejudice has commandeered the discussion. As far back as high school, I can remember teachers avoiding the subject of queerness. Perhaps it seemed easier for them to make a student feel misunderstood than have to blush their way through an exploration of Nick Carraway’s sexuality or the unrequited longing which serves as the driving force of John Knowles’s heartbreaking A Separate Peace. I vividly remember when one of the students had the courage to ask what many of us were thinking by questioning the queer overtones of that text, the teacher snapped back mockingly, “I don’t know what book you’re reading.” The class of all boys laughed as if his masculinity had rightly been called into question by merely allowing for such a possibility to surface.
          One would hope by the time one reaches graduate school, things would be different. Unfortunately this type of biased reading seems to be just as rampant, and at times more disquieting when one considers the age of the participants.  Last spring when I took a class on feminist literary theory, the students seemed for the most part broad minded in their readings of the various texts, but when it came to the subject of queerness there was expressed among many a strong resistance to this kind of interpretation. Such resistance went beyond mere hesitation and took on a quality closer to outrage.
           During a discussion of Nella Larsen’s Passing, I felt the need to speak up in defense of a queer reading of the text. Most of the students refused to consider the implications of interpreting the text in this way, but took no issue with the complexities of race the novel presented. I relied only on textual evidence to prove my point, and emphasized Larsen’s embracing of ambiguity to construct a multifaceted narrative voice.  It is in this marvelous ambiguity that one finds room to interpret or refute suggestions of queerness. After all, Larsen so elegantly uses the interiority of her characters and the act of racial “passing” to play on an experience of otherness most closely associated with queerness, that of invisible otherness.
          Unlike race or gender, Queerness has no discernible biological signifiers and so it is possible, some would say unavoidable, to be exposed to prejudice in its truest venom and be seen not as the target, but as the audience. There is a passive agony unlike any other given way to upon hearing judgment espoused as if you were not the intended subject. Such ignorance or hate is both expected because it is feared, and yet no less shocking when it arrives in the room, laying its hand on your shoulder amidst the shallow clatter of shaking teacups. And it was all right there in the text.
          I guess the most frightening suggestion of finding this casual prejudice in a literature class is the stripping away of a text’s identity. Works by women and minorities have always been underrepresented by the academy, but when we talk about queerness we are not only talking about being omitted or devalued. We are also talking about those texts being included in the canon but under the condition they are taught as if queerness were not an element of their complexity. In other words some would purchase Dorian Gray’s picture only to hang it in a heteronormative frame. 
          The text itself dictates how it should be taught. I would never argue that a writer should be taught as being solely a “gay writer” or a text as solely a “gay text,” because that would be limiting, but if the text itself deems such interpretations valid then we owe it to the writer and to ourselves to include it in the discussion. Is it necessary to know of Virginia Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West to successfully interpret all her work? Of course not, but surely it enlivens a reading of her Orlando. And can we ever hope to know the man who wrote A Room with a View if we refuse to also see him as the man who feared publishing Maurice? It is said that when that manuscript was found, it included a note which read “Publishable, but worth it?” Forster knew all too well how his story would be read.
 
Best wishes,
Francis

Francis’s letter prompted this response from me:

Wow! You have written well and movingly about a subject that is so important.  I have been lucky in that, when I teach LGBT writers I haven’t had overt reactions such as the one expressed by the student in your class.  I am very aware, however, that there is, in all likelihood, at least one person in the classroom who would react that way if asked for his/her opinion.  As you well know, I believe that knowing the biography of a writer can — in some instances at least — help us better understand her works.  

Even worse is when a teacher responds as yours did to the suggestion about A Separate Peace.  It’s bad pedagogy, it’s bad scholarship, it’s just bad.  And, as you point out, it scapegoats the student who had the courage to try and get at what the text is “about.”  Shame on that teacher!  

There are times, such as when I get the news about one of my gay or lesbian friends getting married, when I start to feel hopeful about how things are changing in the world.  Unfortunately, that hope (at least in its unmitigated form) never lasts long, because there always follows something that reminds me that things haven’t really changed all that much in many places.

Your point about queerness having no distinguishable markers is so important.  This means that “passing” as heterosexual can be “easier” in practice than passing as “white,” but obviously not psychologically.  In fact, it may be harder psychologically because gender and desire can be hidden.  It’s something that I think teachers can forget sometimes; it’s too easy to look out at a sea of faces and think, “We’re all the same.  We have the same beliefs.  We have the same experiences.”  Unless and until teachers break out of that mindset, we will have those moments of cruelty (many, I like to think, inadvertent, although I’m not so naive as to believe they all are).

And I leave the final word to Francis:

I suppose at the heart of it is something very bittersweet. For any artist’s work to be both so celebrated and so restricted by the same institution is violent. There is no word quite strong enough to describe allowing someone a place at the table on the condition they leave their selves at the door.