Against Queer Presentism – The Drift – The Drift Magazine

History is a nightmare from which the queers have awoken. Or so it would seem in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or (2022).

It’s sophomore year at Harvard, and protagonist Selin is debating the merits of living either aesthetically or ethically. As in The Idiot (2017), she takes classes and reads; unlike in The Idiot, she drinks and has sex. Everywhere, queerness simmers. Selin’s university syllabi are populated by fictional male seducers, her parties by their fleshly equivalents, and both variants make her wonder: might there be other options? What if there were novels plotted without Casanovas, life-paths besides betrothal, or nights spent kissing her female best friend?

Such things do not come to fruition, and at the novel’s end, its “Notes on Sources” suggest one explanation. After a series of standard bibliographic entries on the many texts that Selin has encountered throughout the book, Batuman adds:

Although it isn’t directly quoted, I would also like to cite Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which I first read in 2017, and which enabled me to reconstruct some of the heteronormative forces that operated on me in the 1990s (preventing me from being attracted, at that time, to texts with titles like “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”). One goal of this book was to dramatize those forces.

The 1990s, we intuit, were not a good time to be queer: a moment when syllabi and parties were compulsorily heterosexual, leaving sapphic sex and sapphic essays with little allure. 2017, by contrast, stands for a rainbow triumph, at least in Batuman’s life. Over time, the “heteronormative forces” constraining her seem to have eased, leaving her more receptive to feminist thinkers like Adrienne Rich, and newly capable of writing novels dramatizing the queer-normie agon.

This implicit chronology — and Either/Or’s conceit of self-revision — is one example of a broader trend in queer literature that we might call queer presentism: a Whig history of sexuality that positions today’s LGBTQ+ writers as liberators of the closeted past. Queer presentism canonizes contemporary texts, but elides or delegitimizes older queer lives and artworks, specifically those predating the twentieth century. It’s been almost 50 years since Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality dispelled the “repressive hypothesis”: the theory holding that the rise of bourgeois capitalism suppressed discussion of sexual acts and deviant sexuality. Yet, we don’t seem to have internalized this lesson. In fact, our continued belief in the “repressive hypothesis” itself ends up repressing a great deal of queer history. This collective amnesia impoverishes our vision of the past, but it also stalks the contemporary book world, depriving today’s queer writers and readers of their rich literary heritage. 

Once you start looking, you see queer presentism everywhere. It pops up when politicians espouse our “unprecedented” ability to love who we love, and when recent book bans are said to “roll back the clock” on LGBTQ+ rights, implying that clocks tick continually toward progress. It manifests in Oscar Wilde hagiography, which elevates him to the status of singular queer martyr and extrapolates an epochal paradigm from his 1895 trials. It seeps into our everyday speech, in our references to “forbidden love” and our use of the term “Victorian” to imply prudish homophobia. It both stems from and structures the editorial projects that publishers pursue, giving rise to catalogues like the NYRB Classics, where the oldest work tagged LGBTQ+ is Colette’s The Pure and the Impure (1932) — as if nothing queer was written before. But it’s perhaps most blatant in contemporary literature and the way critics talk about new works. And since it’s been a good year for queer fiction, it’s been a great year for queer presentism.

Take Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (2021), which fictionalizes and homoeroticizes the life of Thomas Mann as his earlier novel, The Master (2004), did for Henry James. While Mann’s journals and James’s letters testify to their same-sex desire — the first explicitly, the second obliquely — Tóibín’s novels inhabit their minds. The books’ revisionism is, in part, an attempt to fill in an archive whose gaps Tóibín has discussed explicitly in his many essays on queer authors. “Other communities who have been oppressed — Jewish people, say, or Catholics in Northern Ireland — have every opportunity to work out the implications of their oppression in their early lives. They hear stories; they have the books around them,” he wrote in a 1998 review. “Gay people, on the other hand, grow up alone; there in no history. There are no ballads about the wrongs of the past, the martyrs are all forgotten.” 

Tóibín’s project has not been lost on reviewers. “In some ways, Mann is James with a German accent: another sexually repressed artist who did not let himself behave as he wished,” The New Yorker noted, qualifying that Mann was somewhat less repressed than James before adding, “Tóibín is sure that both James and Mann became fiction writers because of thwarted desire.” The London Review of Books concurred: “What really matters in Tóibín’s account of the life is the way that Mann’s creativity grew from a colossal act of repression.” Past authors, in Tóibín’s version of events, seem to end up writing masterpieces because they can’t have gay sex. Their own fictions keep us outside the closet, and we must wait for a 21st-century reimagining to finally peek in.

Hanya Yanagihara takes this speculative project a step further in To Paradise (2022). The novel’s first section reimagines Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) in an alternative Gilded Age where a set of “Free States” bestow the enviable right to (arranged) gay marriage. Its setup feels like Yanagihara’s riposte — conscious or otherwise — to Daniel Mendelsohn’s damning New York Review of Books piece on her previous novel A Little Life (2015). In that book, Yanagihara’s depiction of contemporary queer life centers on a sexually traumatized, self-harming, and eventually suicidal protagonist. While many applauded the melodrama, Mendelsohn accused Yanagihara of victimizing her characters for cheap reader thrills and likened her refusal to grant queers joy or sanguine denouements to “the projection of a regressive and repressive cultural fantasy from the middle of the last century.” In To Paradise, Yanagihara inverts the prior book’s projection: she applies today’s progressive and liberatory fantasy — where marriage equality means happily ever after — to the late nineteenth century. Like Tóibín, she takes the historical closet for granted. But while his Gilded Age allows James to lie quivering in bed beside a sleeping male friend, the only way for her to imagine queer desire in the period is to rewrite its rules entirely. 

Whereas To Paradise tracks its homophilic society’s decline into a dystopian future, Edmund White’s latest novel, A Previous Life (2022), imagines a rosier trajectory for the 21st century. In his 2050, there’s a gender-fluid dating app called Sweetheart and doctoral students can, in a self-referential nod, “work on White,” though “the great Sedaris or Garth What’s his name” are more canonical. White’s metafictional antics seem to betray a certain anxiety: that his own books will be fodder for the speculations of later queer thinkers, his life renarrativized based on their presentist logics (and perhaps even fictionalized in a Tóibínesque novel of repressed genius). After all, White’s own Hotel de Dream (2007) gave that treatment to American writer Stephen Crane, presenting, in one reviewer’s words, “explicit descriptions of the sexual and social deviance that ‘real’ Victorian novels could only hint at obliquely.” Perhaps to avoid being given the presentist treatment in the future, White has raced ahead to script the queers’ ever-increasing prestige.

What links Batuman’s campus autofiction to this array of counterfactuals and projections is the unspoken creed that the present should emancipate the past — either by dramatizing or reimagining the tyranny of heteronorms. To varying degrees, these novels are successful as literary projects, but their conceits are laced with a logic of salvation that recirculates repressive clichés. Readers and reviewers are invited to exaggerate the groundbreaking nature of contemporary fiction and to perpetuate a broader elision of queer literary history.

The truth is that there’s a world of queer writing that predates Colette, volumes of manuscript and books that aren’t so much products of historical suppression as they are suppressed by today’s “it’s gotten better” mindset. This is convenient for a culture industry in search of the sui generis and always eager to pat itself on the back for its own enlightenment. But the almost total neglect, outside the academy, of the queer literary archive is a shame, and not only because it propagates factual errors. In limiting our horizons for understanding how our predecessors lived, loved, and wrote, we end up narrowing our own vistas. When we apply the repressive hypothesis, we’re actually repressing ourselves.

 

Against the odds, one largely forgotten work resurfaced this summer. It’s full of queer reading and queer sex, it’s graphic and heartbreaking, and you’ve never heard of it. Because its author is anonymous, not Batuman or Tóibín or Yanagihara or White; because its English critical edition was published by Columbia University Press, not Bloomsbury or a Penguin imprint; and because the French source text was first written in the 1880s. The new translation is called The Italian Invert, and here’s how the original came to be.

In either 1888 or 1889, a 23-year-old Italian wrote a series of letters to the renowned French writer Émile Zola. The young man expressed his admiration for Zola’s novels and identification with two characters from The Kill (1872): a butler dismissed for sodomy and his genderqueer employer. But he lamented Zola’s omission of a fully sketched homosexual — an “invert” in the epoch’s terminology — and furnished his own life story for Zola to fictionalize in a future book.

Had he followed that request, Zola wouldn’t have needed to embellish much; the Italian’s letters already feature an exquisite dramatic arc. They begin with his upbringing in an aristocratic Neapolitan family and chart a gradual recognition that he’s attracted to men. (Fantasies about Hector, not Helen, are the giveaway.) An interval of deep shame ensues until his first sexual experience at age fifteen. More involved relationships transpire: first with an army officer, then with a man referred to as the “captain.” We hear of the Italian’s physical struggles to have penetrative sex, his concern that he’s being used for money or erotic novelty, and his jealousy while imagining the captain seeing other men. The letters end with a would-be cheater’s cliff-hanger: should the Italian sleep with a coy stranger in an inn? A final postcard to Zola provides the answer in triumphant epilogue. “I’ll shout it from the rooftops,” the Italian declares. “There where everyone else had failed, he has succeeded!” Zola’s queer novel, he implies, should end with an orgasm.

Sadly, Zola did not take the suggestion. Instead of fictionalizing the Italian, he passed the epistles to his doctor friend Georges Saint-Paul, who published an edited, serialized version, titled “Novel of an Invert,” under the pseudonym “Dr. Laupts” in a scientific journal called The Archives of Criminal Anthropology. In 1896, Saint-Paul reissued the “Novel” in his own monograph on sexual deviance. Eventually the Italian stumbled upon his own words in print, but he didn’t protest to Zola. Instead, he wrote to Saint-Paul, and continued telling his story.

This time, it gets both sappier and steamier. The Italian recounts his realization, in the wake of the captain’s death, that “I truly loved him then with my head, my heart, my senses, with everything.” But he also provides a play-by-play of that night spent cheating at the inn. At first, it’s just sultry glances being traded over evening newspapers, but then one unlocked door leads to another and soon they’re in bed, where “little by little the path was opened up and the conqueror entered the castle so long under siege but now captured.” In 1910, Saint-Paul published a selection of these addenda as a “Sequel” to the “Novel.” By this point he’d received other letters — more sex testimonials, more allusions to fictional inverts, and even requests to be put in touch with other queers. The Italian’s story is just the tip of the sexological iceberg. 

Imagine if Selin had read his words. For a long time, only French speakers could, and few probably did. Bringing them to Anglophone readers has required a careful act of literary activism, undertaken by the adept editors and translators Nancy Erber, William Peniston, and Michael Rosenfeld. Several manuscript discoveries in the Saint-Paul and Zola family archives allowed these critics to collate the sexological publication and the Italian’s original letters. They’ve restored places where his words were altered, cut, or — for the more sexually explicit passages — translated into Latin. The result is an especially passionate narrative of queer Bildung: a testament to the way that that heteronormativity did not categorically suppress same-sex desire or authorship. Peniston and Erber have made their careers out of exhuming similar stories, co-translating the anthology Queer Lives: Men’s Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century France (2007), the single source text, Marc-André Raffalovich’s Uranism and Unisexuality (2016), and Erber’s own study, Lesbian Decadence (2016). This work isn’t sexy, but it’s as important for queer literature, and contemporary queer readers, as any recent novel. It’s proof that before the queer past can be reinvented or reimagined, it needs, simply, to be known. 

Partway through spring semester, Selin reflects on reading André Breton’s novella Nadja (1928) and observes: “In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl?” It’s a fair assessment of Nadja but propagates an error about French “books.” If Selin had looked further down the shelves, she’d have gathered that sapphic novels were an absolute craze in the nineteenth century. In fact, one of the most famous examples includes the period’s defining treatise on “the aesthetic life”: Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). The novel’s famously anti-utilitarian preface declares, “a book cannot be turned into gelatine soup…. You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy…. There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use,” before its plot tracks the eponymous seductress dressing as and sleeping with both genders. One answer to Selin’s “problem of application” would be to live like La Maupin.

Gautier, of course, was writing the male gaze. For a female one, we might turn to Marguerite Eymery Vallette, who published under the pseudonym Rachilde. Her 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus gives center stage to the dominatrix exploits of Raoule de Vénérande. The work launched Rachilde’s career, in which she helped run the illustrious Mercure de France journal, campaigned against censorship, and wrote scores of other novels depicting decadent doyennes. The titles alone — Madame Adonis, La Jongleuse, La Marquise de Sade — give you an idea of how her oeuvre plays fast and loose with gender conventions. yet Rachilde remains largely unknown outside the academy.

As it happens, Selin does pick up a decadent novel published the same year as Rachilde’s debut: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884). For her, Huysmans’s jewel-encrusted tortoise emblematizes the same heteronormative “aesthetic life” as Nadja. But unless Selin was reading John Howard’s 1922 bowdlerized translation, she would have encountered the protagonist Jean des Esseintes recalling a same-sex affair halfway through the novel. Huysmans himself wasn’t inclined toward men (though he once accompanied his very out friend Jean Lorrain on a gay nightlife tour). He was just ornamenting his novel with a popular fin-de-siècle motif — the “particular friendship” — which furnished the period’s archive with many a queer liaison.

But if, like Batuman, you insist that your protagonist must read for repression, repression is what your protagonist will read. “How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things?” Selin asks of Rumi’s springtime lyrics. “Did that mean he was gay, or would have been gay if it had been allowed?” she wonders of the poet’s impassioned devotion to the dervish Shams. Upon starting Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), she speculates about why James would have written about a young woman rather than himself. “I was pretty sure I had read that he was gay. Probably being gay had been illegal, and he had been ashamed,” she reasons. “So his problem, like Isabel’s, was that he had been born too soon.”

If these lines seem implausibly jejune — “I’m not sure this is what a Harvard kid would think,” noted one reviewer — it’s perhaps because Batuman relies on a received idea: that Victorian queers were all one calling card or raunchy metaphor away from being charged with gross indecency. In Britain, litigation was certainly possible, but homophobic legislation did not eliminate gay brothels or prevent James from threading his oeuvre with enough queer subtext to spin out cottage academic industry. His suffragette satire The Bostonians (1886) has even been hailed as a striking, albeit cruel, depiction of covert sapphic intimacy between protagonists Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant. But as Terry Castle pointed out in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), female desire tends to be “ghosted” out of literary and cultural history — even by post-Stonewall critics who acknowledge homosexuality. Batuman’s presentist paradigm furthers the ghosting cycle, making not only James but also Selin born de facto too soon to read for, or write, queer desire. They can do little to navigate their sociocultural constraints and must await 21st-century emancipation. 

There are other ways to paint the portrait of a queer reader. Castle’s introduction offers one, as she recounts her personal trajectory from being haunted by female specters (above all Greta Garbo) to materializing them on the page for Brandon Taylor diagnosed this dismissive tendency in a recent, characteristically electric Substack post that arraigned gay critics for “writing this tiresome genre of Oedipal essay in which they decry the status of contemporary gay writing.” A recurrent issue, in these apparent artifacts of Freudian malcontent, is how novelists should titrate levity and tragedy. Should gay fiction depict bright futures or present horrors? Trade in idealism or realism? Be droll or dire? Caustic or sincere? As Taylor sees it, these quarrelsome writers are out to kill their queer forefathers — faulting novelists like Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart to make room for their own fiction and prose. But it takes no psychoanalytic acumen to see that denouncing certain books’ tenors makes little sense when you take a long view of history. Clearly the novel genre — that most “capacious vessel” in James’s terms — can encompass all these affective and narrative variants. It’s only when we chronologically restrict our search for literary paradigms that we’re left demanding so much — too much — of writers like Greenwell. A few decades of queer literature have been needlessly forced to deliver centuries of aesthetic variation. Imagine if our genealogies for black and Jewish writers began only with Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer? Or if discussions of the millennial marriage plot didn’t lead back to Jane Austen?

So let’s take up the past. Not for the blueprints it offers aspiring novelists, but for the relief of fresh prose, the insights of comparison, and the vertiginous joy of speaking with the dead. “Like, you’re not annoyed at ‘gay fiction,’” objects Taylor to one critic. “You’re annoyed or disappointed in like, three or four writers, my friend. Maybe you should read more. Or better. Or both.” Though he offers no “Notes on Sources” or “Further Reading,” Taylor seems to have contemporary fiction in mind. Elsewhere, he has pointed out the enduring political and economic relevance of nineteenth-century novels, Zola’s included. But these works also resonate with the conditions of modern sexuality. Given some changes to our presentist mindset, we can “read more” and “better” before 1900.

Mindsets are informed by material conditions, however, so here’s what would need to concretely shift. We’d need more space in publishers’ catalogs for reeditions and translations, and more scholars willing to take time off their monographs to curate those books. The Michael Field Diary Project has digitized a