{"id":69109,"date":"2020-06-24T01:16:03","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T05:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=69109"},"modified":"2020-06-24T10:21:11","modified_gmt":"2020-06-24T14:21:11","slug":"queer-mappings-speculative-histories-diaries-and-memoir-by-tara-e-jay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2020\/06\/24\/queer-mappings-speculative-histories-diaries-and-memoir-by-tara-e-jay\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Mappings: Speculative Histories, Diaries, and Memoir by Tara E. Jay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A hallmark of queer experience is a lack: a lack of guideposts, roadmaps\u2014sometimes a lack even of road\u2014and other reassurances that the path has been forged by others who were here first.<\/p>\n<p>The breadcrumbs, we\u2019re sure, were left, but may have been snatched and devoured. Was that branch to the left snapped with leading intention? Was it just a weak piece of wood? We\u2019re not sure how to get where we\u2019re going. We\u2019re not sure where we\u2019re going. Only: somewhere (else), someway (else). At the end of June, I offer some books that can help us orient ourselves now and into our futures.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Before Stonewall, Episode 3: Gladys Bentley\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5zmy0ObMLB8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/1028\/9780393357622\">Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals<\/a><\/em>, historian <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DAMeXgIi5DU\">Saidiya Hartman<\/a> engages in a project of mapping. Her subjects are errant Black women and the gender non-conforming of New York and Philadelphia in the early twentieth century. Hartman uses diaries, photographs, newsletters, and case files to reconstruct the contours of these lives, fleshing them out with speculative narratives.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-69110 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-1024x1550.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"635\" height=\"961\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-1024x1550.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-99x150.jpg 99w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-768x1163.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-600x908.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys-1015x1536.jpg 1015w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/gladys.jpg 1072w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 635px) 100vw, 635px\" \/><\/a>She imagines a film made of the life of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smithsonian-institution\/great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-rules-180971708\/\">Gladys Bentley<\/a>, a trans masculine Harlem Renaissance entertainer who had several wives.<\/p>\n<p>Hartman gives her readers detailed accounts of the lives of female breadwinners and of young girls traveling alone to northern cities, participating in the Great Migration. She allows us to map the routes of these wayward lives down to the hallways and stairwells of the tenement homes. Her subjects lived a hundred or more years ago, carving out new lives in the shadow of Reconstruction. But it\u2019s still possible to see them as models of queer living, and occasionally thriving, in hostile and haphazard worlds.<\/p>\n<p>Diaries have the potential to draw the most vivid, intimate portraits of queer lives, but the reading public\u2019s access to these records has always been limited, partly because of the nature of these documents themselves and partly due to the enormous editorial work it takes to shape a lifetime of diaries into a book.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Lou Sullivan\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Z5Ld2FAoUD8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>With <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/1028\/9781643620176\"><em>We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan 1961-1991<\/em><\/a>, editors Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma have done this work beautifully, shaping Lou Sullivan\u2019s prolific diaries into an instructive life-map.<\/p>\n<p>Sullivan was an openly gay trans man (one of the first), a historian, a lover of Lou Reed and the Beatles. His diaries are remarkable not just for Lou\u2019s accounts of his community-building work\u2014which included FTM support groups, written works like <em>Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual<\/em> (1st edition 1980), and even television appearances\u2014but remarkable too for their frequent banality. A life in its totality.<\/p>\n<p>Sullivan\u2019s account of his own life can be a guiding text in many ways, but its most important instruction, I think, is in how he can show us what it means to build community laterally, to open up your life and extend your specific wisdom to those who might take the most use from it, those struggling in the most similar ways.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Mab Segrest: &quot;Be Brave: There Is Something Worth More Than Our Lives&quot;\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EMl7o0DBHcY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>First published by South End Press in 1994 and out of print for many years, The New Press has recently published a new edition of <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/1028\/9781620972991\"><em>Memoir of a Race Traitor<\/em> <\/a>by Mab Segrest. I tracked down a copy of the original edition several years ago and I can\u2019t remember now if it was stained when I received it or if I spilled the coffee all over it. What I do remember is reading the book in my early twenties and being stunned at Segrest\u2019s absolute clarity in knowing that her liberation as a white lesbian couldn\u2019t exist without Black liberation.<\/p>\n<p>In the preface she writes, \u201cThis book is by a lesbian, who cannot look at race in an uncomplicated way, who has worked to articulate the many interfaces among misogyny, racism and homophobia in a culture ravaged by all three.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her book covers a lot of ground, largely chronicling her efforts organizing against racist violence and the Klan in North Carolina in the 1980s, but detailing, too, her fraught relationship with her family (especially her father, who had earlier fought against desegregating Alabama schools) and the work she did to care for her friends while they died of AIDS.<\/p>\n<p>If Lou Sullivan\u2019s diaries can instruct readers in how to build community laterally, Mab Segrest\u2019s work can instruct us in building community both laterally and trans-laterally. Her honesty about her work can be a comfort, too\u2014she writes of her anti-Klan activism, \u201c\u2018I am continually surprised that a chicken-shit like me does this work,\u2019 I would remark when asked to speak. \u2018I\u2019m just more afraid not to do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tara E. Jay<\/strong> is a writer, poet and former manager at Book Beat, now living and working in Columbus, Ohio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A hallmark of queer experience is a lack: a lack of guideposts, roadmaps&mdash;sometimes a lack even of road&mdash;and other reassurances that the path has been forged by others who were here first. The breadcrumbs, we&rsquo;re sure, were left, but may have been snatched and devoured. Was that branch to the left snapped with leading intention? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,220],"tags":[509,510],"class_list":["post-69109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","category-non-fction","tag-lgbtq","tag-tara-e-jay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}