Between Pages: Is there a Collective Queer Identity? Part 1

By Al Preston

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            I have read a lot, as I’m sure anyone who takes a peek at our book review list could tell you. I’ve read mostly educational and academic works about queerness in many different fields and topics. From leadership to the medieval period, I’ve read a whole heck of a lot and still have so much more to read. I’ve only just started branching out into fictional works as well.

            However! Since I have read a lot, I also noticed patterns in the things that I’ve read. Minus a few books here and there, I rarely read the same author twice, and I can say with some amount of confidence that there’s a pattern to these works. I’d also say that the pattern fluctuates depending on when a book was written and a few other factors, but generally speaking there are some similar habits queer creatives have that I’ve started to spot.

            One of my favorite authors, Kate Bornstein also points out this particular pattern. In her book Gender Outlaw she explains why she chose to write the book in a very particular way. For reference, the text on the page isn’t in the normal layout. It’s in different corners and edges of the page with asides hanging out in the margins. In explaining this layout choice, Bornstein says that most queer writers have a particular style. However, she does suggest that, at the time of her writing, that the style is very new and perhaps isn’t fully developed yet.

            She doesn’t overly elaborate on what, exactly, this style is other than she has begun to see it in the works of fellow queer writers. In the first edition of this book, she’s hoping that queer folks will begin to develop their own language and style. In a later addition, she heavily suggests that has occurred.

            The first time I read the book, I had no idea what she was talking about because I had read only one or two books before hers. The second time, older and having read much much more, I realized that she was right, and I knew exactly what she was talking about. I do think I wouldn’t know as well as I do now if I hadn’t of read her book, essentially, first.

            I wouldn’t know to look for a pattern in how queer folks write about themselves and their past without having read Gender Outlaw first. I’m also not sure if I primed myself to look for it. Which could be. I could be wrong, but I believe that there is a particular way that queer folks write and create, for better or for worse, that is not only identifiable to other LGBT+ people, but is also indicative of a larger movement towards the unique style of a given queer identity.

            This post will be my first attempt to try and sort out what that identifiable thing is, create some understanding of the way queer folks write and even read that makes creating as a queer person so unique. I don’t think this first attempt will be successful, but I’ll have time to refine it. I’d like to sort out where that uniqueness comes from as well. Why do queer folks create like this? When did the style begin? How did it develop and change?

            To be very clear, I’m not saying the way queer folks write is better than any other method. In fact, I’ve read some really awful things from every letter of the acronym. What I am saying is that no matter how good or bad the created thing is, there is a quality to it that can identify the creator as queer to those who know where to look for it. A certain method to the creative process that subtly waves one of the many identity flags. Something that, like for other marginalized groups, creates a unique narrative style that influences and is influenced by the group as a whole.

            This is also an exercise in asking questions about the things we read and the way we choose to interpret them. A method of looking beyond the words on the page to understand who the author is, why they write, and how they write. Which will give us insight on ourselves and our ‘in group’.

            So where do we begin? Do we compare line by line two authors of similar or differing identities? Do we talk about the intricacies of metaphors? How do we read between the lines but not through them?

            I’d like to start between the lines. Seeing the unsaid while reading is an element of this puzzle that has been a theoretical topic among literature and historical scholars. Language means a lot, the words you say hold a lot of meaning, but so do all of the words left unsaid, but suggested.

            When doing queer history beyond our modern era, we have to acknowledge a couple of things; language has evolved and identity has evolved. As some of our oral history narrators have said, things are better and more complicated now, but things were much simpler then (Tim Zankaus).

            We have all of these words and labels and identities now, but we didn’t always have them. They all branched out from the same tree trunk that consisted of ‘unusual,’ abnormal,’ and ‘queer.’ Something beyond the ‘usual’ in the eyes of those who got to write history. Language was simpler in the past. People also didn’t have the time to think about identity in the same way we do.

            While we know a lot about the people of the past, we specifically know a lot about people who could write. Those that could actively record their lives and histories. We know next to nothing about the ‘average man’. The people who couldn’t read or write, who worked in the fields and stores and mines and just about everything.

            So, realistically, we don’t know anything at all about how the average human of the past actually viewed sex, gender, and identity. We know what their religious organizations told them was right. We know what their leaders and governments believed, thought, and did. Sometimes, when those average people rose up to fight off the wrong doings of their government (see, many of the French revolutions), we can see their view of right, wrong, and anger.

            What we don’t know are the moments between those times. We see flashes here and there in archives lucky enough to have saved letters between normal people or in plays, films, or books. However, the human experience contains multitudes. Even today, with so many people recording their every moment online, we as individuals would not be mentally able to consider every possible iteration of other humans.

            So, we must be careful when it comes to labeling humans of the past with the words of today because our way of describing and defining a man and a woman today may be foreign to people from thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. So, we have to look at what these people say, how they talked about themselves and others and read between the lines. While I would hesitate to say to women writing love notes to each other in Victorian England are lesbians, I would say that they are romantically involved.

            I will use words like ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ to talk about these people because today that is how we would define their relationship and it makes talking about them easier. It’s also important to note that romantic love between people of the same sex, people crossing over established gender lines, these are things people have done for all of human history. Cultures and time periods have different views and names for these relationships between people and concepts. Humans haven’t changed all that much. You have more in common with your dead ancestor from two hundred years ago than you’d expect.

Just because they lived in a less technological world, does not discount their intelligence and self-awareness. I would bet good money that if I could talk to some of my ancestors, we would actually agree on a lot. I state this because it’s important to remember that the people of the past are almost quite literally just like the people of today. They deserve the same respect. Including when talking about the way they loved another person or viewed their gender. It’s a fine line to walk, but it’s important to keep in mind.

            Queer folks have utilized coded language for centuries. We describe actions, feelings, and appearances that hint at something not quite ‘normal’. For example, tabloids in the early years of Hollywood would describe a lesbian director as having a ‘mannish hair style’ or a gay actor as ‘fully dedicated to his mother.’ As hints of their queerness. For a straight reader, these seem like simple facts, but to a queer reader, the implication is obvious.

            Yes, those are also ways to describe straight people and such phrases aren’t definitive proof on their own. However, it’s the overwhelming evidence of that director’s lesbianism or that actor’s gayness that has led historians to make educated connections to the way an actor is described and their sexuality. No one was going to come out and say it, give or take an outlier or two. Being able to compare what was said with what we know to be true, we can create a kind of guidebook for the way people talk about their sexuality and even gender, clueing us in to what turns of phrase to look out for in other contexts.

            For many of those Hollywood queer folks, they were just being themselves, no different from their straight counterparts. They afforded a small degree of freedom to have same-sex relationships in the early years of the film industry. While also knowing that to be too blatantly lesbian or gay could get them in a lot of trouble.

            Words have meaning and sometimes they carry many meanings. Some of those meanings will only be identifiable to those in the know. Butch lesbians in the 20s and 30s knew a ‘mannish hair style’ meant. Why? Because those are the words they used with those who didn’t know someone’s queerness or the phrases they heard from others to describe themselves.

            While studying words in this fashion does mean there is the very real possibility that the subject matter isn’t gay at all, we should also not instantly assume that straight and cisgendered is the default for humans. The danger in being queer is very real and while it shouldn’t end careers or get people killed, it does. Which leads to the need to have plausible deniability. That can muddy the waters, but it is important to identify people in the past that we can identify with and who laid the groundwork for us to have a safer (but not perfect) world today.

            Seeing those things in the past proves to us a few things. One, there have always been what we would define as ‘queer people’. People who view themselves as the other gender, people who desire same-sex love, people who struggle with their identity in the world in which they lived. Sometimes we find societies who choose to incorporate these people, sometimes we find societies that reject them.

            The way we can discover those people and the societies they live in comes down to what was left behind which can already be pretty muddied and confusing without a queer lens. Which brings me back around to spotting what makes a writer or creator’s work identifiably queer.

            As a queer person myself, I think my attunement for spotting this patterns is perhaps better than a straight person’s. When I pick up a book about history, related to queerness or not, there’s a few things I’m trained to look for. The author’s argument, what they will do to support that argument, time periods, places, people…all of these things are necessary to understand their argument, whatever it may be.

            While I more consciously search all of those things out, I’ve trained myself to also looking for something else subconsciously. Those little tells that could signal the queerness of an author. It’s much harder in your typical historical texts. Here and there you get historians talking about gender or sexuality as a factor in their work, which could just mean they’re a feminist, womanist, or well informed. After all, a historical monolith is about the past far more than it is about the author themselves.

             I have noted in a few books little asides to same-sex love in, for example, armies and militaries. Almost thrown into these histories as fun facts than supporting evidence. To me, that reads as the author being aware that queerness in these contexts can change things a little, but they’re not overly important to their argument so they won’t be overly explored. An author instead talking at length about how queerness existed and could affect their argument but eventually doesn’t (or maybe does, depending on the book), reads to me as someone who might likely be queer and thinking about these things.

            Those are easy examples. What about something much harder? Fiction would perhaps be at the opposite end of the spectrum from cut and dry history books. Anything could happen as the worlds depicted aren’t real, however the personal connection the author has is more abundantly clear in fictional work.

            Many writers engrain things they have personally experienced or even the people they personally know into their work. To write a convincing world and characters, one has to have experience in both of those things. This is where it’s much more important (and harder) to read between the lines.

            Therefore, I’ll start with those educational or academic works about queerness by queer and straight people. That’s a nice middle ground with plenty of examples. After that long introduction, those works are the ones I want to focus on in this post and the following ones. The examples that have provable facts behind them so we can start to curate that guidebook for what to look for.

            I’ll look at three books, to start; Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and Janice Raymond’s The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.

Bornstein’s book not only directly points to this style, but also is the most blatant version of it. Bornstein makes a point of utilizing the style to get her points about gender and identity across. For a more specific look at this book, we have a review (LINK). Meanwhile, Kinsey’s work, is about queerness and is a relatively understanding work, but as the author is a cis-gender straight man there are some clear moments where that can shine through. Perhaps more from a point of the inability to fathom the queer mind as he is not queer.

Finally, The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male is…frankly, awful to read. I couldn’t complete an entire chapter. For a more in-depth look at this book, we have a book review available as I’m not going to dive too deep into the content here (LINK). It is, however, a book about queerness by a queer person that I could state, in my opinion, isn’t very good. The content, however, isn’t what we’re looking for here. We’re looking at the way it’s written and it’s a good example of how you may be able to spy this queer writing style in any kind of work, even such a negative one.

I’ll start with Gender Outlaw as it is the easiest of the three to capture what I mean. Not only does Bornstein put it bluntly, but she also visualizes the style on every page of the book with its formatting. 

As you can see, this isn’t a typical looking book. The text isn’t in neat boxes that fill the page. Instead, there’s all this space. There are large margins where asides and tangential thoughts reside in conversation with the content of the book. Or there’s just all this blank space. Visually, this kind of captures what I and Bornstein are talking about.

In art, film, theatre, music, and even writing, there are theories and ways of making meaning out of nothing and that’s not an insult! There is, in fact, meaning in nothing. In art, that could be filling the negative space with something, as in, the space around the focal point of the piece. There’s also something to gain from not filling that space. The same can be said in film. Long pauses, absolute silence, the removal of a background or the chaos of one—these things all project a meaning to the audience.

I’ll give perhaps an odd example. In the original animated Power Puff Girls show, there’s an episode where a big explosion occurs. Instead of a huge, loud noise, this explosion is characterized by two things; one, removing the color from the scene as the light of the blasts turn the characters present into silhouettes before obscuring them entirely and two, silence.

I don’t remember the context of this explosion, but I remember it because of how impactful that silence, that removal of visuals was. This is a moment that uses nothing to convey a powerful thing. Now, compare that to an explosion in any of your typical superhero movie. It’s loud and there’s flames and smoke. There’s heroic music and fighting sounds or even talking—it becomes secondary to the characters. Explosions lose their impact and meaning because they’re happening so much and don’t really do anything. Which may be why they’re being used that way.

There are many reasons to show something like explosions in such different ways. In the Power Puff Girls, that explosion meant something. The one I think I’m remembering is when a notable character of the show literally explodes. There’s an emotional impact along with a physical one. In a hero movie, explosions are the name of the game, they’re a feature of the genre and don’t need that same emotional impact.

Those same ideas apply to the words Bornstein and other queer writers actually write. Bornstein has also chosen to visually show that space. What, exactly, would be the space between words? Of course, not physically. How can one write emptiness? To put words on a page means to fill it, right?

Well, there’s always the turn of phrase ‘reading between the lines’ which I’ve already used a lot and when it comes to reading texts, emails, and books doesn’t mean to literally try and physically read between the lines. These are things not directly said, things left for the reader to infer. Queer folks do this, a lot. Either in spoken or written words, queer folks have mastered the art of talking around a subject so that those in the know will catch the meaning but those outside of the loop will be none the wiser.

There are many reasons to do that, the biggest being that it kept queer folks safe in hostile societies and it allowed them to find each other. This element plays into how queer folks write, in general. That’s not to say that automatically makes them good at ‘showing not telling’ as some writers and critics would say. In fact, it can make them really bad at it.

For starters, it can lead to someone assuming every audience knows the nuance of what they’re saying without them having to explain anything. In another, it can make them think they’re better at communicating than they really are.

Regardless, the space Bornstein is presenting here physically is the metaphorical space that queer folks use when reading or writing about each other. So, what’s in that space? How can you know it’s there?

There are phrases and words that are used in particular ways and contexts that can seem entirely normal. Yet, depending on the person reading, can have double meanings.

For example, I mentioned that Bornstein points out this style and she does so on pages 3 and 4 or her 1994 edition of Gender Outlaw;

“My Identity as a transsexual lesbian whose female lover is becoming a man is manifest in my fashion statement; both my identity and fashion are based on collage. You know—a little bit from here, a little bit from there? Sort of a cut-and-paste thing.

And that’s the style of this book. It’s a transgendered style, I suppose. I can see it in the work of Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone, David Harrison…the list goes on and on.

But the need for a recognizable identity, and the need to belong to a group of people with a similar identity…and nowhere is this more evident than in the areas of gender and sexuality. Hence the clear division between fashion statements of male and female, between the fashions of queer and straight….

Will the identification with a transgendered writing style produce an identification with a transgendered experience?”

            I’m going to pick apart these paragraphs starting with; “You know—a little bit from here, a little bit from there? Sort of a cut-and-paste thing.” Bornstein is talking about how fluid gender and sexuality really is. How love and adoration can change someone’s sexual preferences or gender preferences.

            Her partner is transitioning from female to male, overturning Bornstein’s previously held identity as a lesbian transgender woman. Bornstein also goes on to talk about how her identity shifted and changed as she did in life; the people around her, what she was told.

            Comparing identity to a collage is a good metaphor for how every human contains multitudes. Rarely are we just made up of one gender, one sexuality, one hobby, one favorite subject. As we grow and change, so to do the things we like, the ways we see ourselves. A collage overlaps the bits and pieces that make it up, but they never cover up what is behind.

            The multitudes that make us who we are can be good and bad, but we can’t fully ignore the things we did in the past as they are fundamental to who we have become in the present. As much as I would love to forget that I was raised as a woman, it still colors my view of the world. There are things about being a man in this society that I will never understand or know.

            Bornstein and I, as transgender people, are bits and pieces of the genders we were raised to become and the gender we find more comforting. She calls it a “transgender style” in that following aside. She lists other transgender writers who have that same style.

            Samantha Allen in her book Real Queer America (link) briefly talks about how she notices things about the woman’s bathroom that a cisgendered woman never would. Specifically, she complains about women standing to pee and missing the toilet. However, the other things, traveling together, the long lines, sitting to pee, she would only be able to note these things for what they really are now because she was not raised as a woman. Of course, girls moving in a group to go to the bathroom, the long lines, those are all common jokes in TV shows and other forms of media, but it’s the reason that those habits exist that is unknowable to a cisgendered man.

            As gross as it might be, I think the bathroom is the exact place where we can most clearly find these differences. By ‘we’ I mean transgender folks. Bathrooms are horribly gendered places. My first time stepping into a men’s bathroom I just about turned tail and ran. There was only one stall, because of course there was, and the rest were urinals.

            ‘I’m going to see someone’s privates.’

            ‘Someone is going to know I’m not supposed to be here.’

            ‘I’m going to look strange if I go into a stall and sit to pee.’

            Thoughts rolled through me from the moment I stepped in until the moment I stepped out. The second time, I started to realize that the answer to most of those questions was: no one wants to acknowledge each other or even look at each other.’

            Everyone’s heads were down, locked onto their own feet and going through the motions. To look was to be gay, to question was to be questioned.

            Minus the lack of stalls, the men’s bathroom is a lot easier to enter for me than a woman’s bathroom would be for a transgender woman. Women talk and look at each other. They meet eyes and smile and nod and share private things, especially between friends. You could ask for a pad between the walls of a stall.

            They’re two very different worlds. While this is a pretty crass way of demonstrating the point, it suggests that outside the bathroom walls, there are many other differences between men and women. As Bornstein says, these differences, these nuances that transgender folks tend to notice create a desire to mimic and project them to fit in and be considered a particular gender from the moment we step into a room.

            In that last aside, Bornstein poses that projecting this special knowledge of ‘male and female’ transgendered folks have will create instead a third option. A third identity that people can identify and follow. A transgendered identity comes with its own fashion and collages and styles.

            Bornstein writes in this style, so too does Susan Stryker, David Harrison, and the others Bornstein talks about in this book. This ability to see the world differently from cisgendered straight folks, but also cisgendered queer folks.

            I fully believe we’ve reached a point where a transgendered style of writing, talking, and existing has created a new identification. I know that transgender folks are gathering together more and more and talking about these things that we see. Rather than trying to become invisibly ‘male’ or ‘female’. Instead, we gather and we are transgender.

            Of course, I don’t speak for everyone. There is a point of pride and pure joy to be 100% identified as your gender. Naturally, however, creating gender mess as the LGBT+ community is known to do, can cause the defined genders to be broken down and changed so significantly, that there’s space for that third identification to exist and prosper. It’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be and it doesn’t mean it’s gatekept.

            Yet, we are still careful to speak in code. Due to the nature of Gender Outlaw being mostly about being queer, there’s little encoded language, although it still persists. As such, Bornstein made the choice to visually show that same style of writing. She is in conversation with us and herself in these passages.

            To that point, here’s one more passage, this time from Hidden: A Gender a play Bornstein wrote and is included in Gender Outlaw. This part is performed by Herculine, a young girl in 1800s France. A male actor plays Herculine, a girl struggling with gender and her sexuality. In this scene, she is reading a letter from her grandfather’s sister. This excerpt is primarily the parts of the letter minus two interjections from Herculine (pages 178-180);

            “’…Very well then. Today, I was accused, in all sincerity, and by otherwise sober gentleman, of being a vampire. Paris is going mad! I moved here twenty years ago because the Parisians celebrated artists and courtesans. Alas—now they call us vampires. Truly. Vampires are all the rage now…From what I can piece together, loose women such as I are vampires because we…desire the essence of men’s fluids, and will stop at nothing to procure these precious fluids. Piffle. I’ve not been interested in a single man since Henri died, and that was over fifteen years ago. Babette and I have quite a comfortable arrangement, thank you very much. She is more of a woman than the frivolous coquettes who parade the Left Bank, and, I confess, more of a man than my sweet departed Henri…’

            I—I know more than a few unusual girls like this in convent school.

            ‘…I must run my dears, the moon is rising, and I feel the urge to bite the neck of my sweet Babette…’

            If she insists on doing these perversities with another woman, why does she insist on talking about them, and why to me? Why to me? She…

            ‘…Your loving sister and aunt, Carmilla.’”

            While embedded in a play about gender and identity, those watching Hidden: A Gender are already primed to look for hidden language. Out of that context, it might be a bit of a slog to pick through every hidden meaning in this one section, especially for those not used to reading between the lines.

So, where to begin? Perhaps with the most obvious reference. Carmilla is the name of the vampire from a novel that predates Dracula. The first story of vampires which features a lesbian romance. This is a fictional Aunt sharing the name of a lesbian vampire (written by a gay man) being referred to as a vampire by Parisians is therefore a pretty obvious reference.

Let’s dive deeper. Carmilla mentions that Paris welcomes artists and courtesans. Historically speaking, both artists and courtesans are pretty queer, usually in unexpected ways. Paris in particular, which has, for a long time, been pretty open towards different kinds of love was well known for being the place that lesbians specifically go.

Paris is where Stephen in the Well of Loneliness finds other queer folks just like herself in fact, it is where the author, Radclyff Hall found that same community as well. So, that’s now two relatively hidden pieces of information. I say relatively, because seeing the message requires knowledge of other things, like Carmilla being a lesbian vampire and what kind of artists Paris is known for.

There’s reasonable doubt in this information. Those in the know will suspect and perhaps assume that queerness is the meaning. Those without the same information or only one or two pieces will fill in the parts they don’t know with reasonable beliefs. There is some usefulness to straight and cisgender being the ‘default’ for people. It means that most people won’t think immediately about queerness in every given situation.

Even you reading me write this may still have some reasonable doubts, so what else is here? Well, Carmilla hasn’t been with a man since Henri which we are told was about 20 years ago. It wasn’t entirely out of the question for women to remarry once a grieving period was met mostly because women have a hard time navigating some societies without a man helping them.

Carmilla, however, is living with another woman who she claims, in perhaps the most obvious reference to queerness from her yet, that; “She is more of a woman than the frivolous coquettes who parade the Left Bank, and, I confess, more of a man than my sweet departed Henri…”

There’s little to talk about there, I think. Especially when Carmilla mentions biting Babette like a vampire. Which brings us to a secondary message from using the term vampire that could still catch some queer folks who may not know about the book Carmilla comes from. Vampires have become well known for their oral fixation and most monsters in cinema and literature are used to represent minority struggles, including queer folks.

The reference to desiring “…the essence of men’s fluids, and will stop at nothing to procure these precious fluids.” Is pretty specific towards women who have a particular oral fixation (and I hope you catch my meaning there). The term “loose women” also leans into the hint that Carmilla and probably Babette as well, are being accused of prostitution.

“Vampire” then in the accusation by the gentleman is being used in a similar fashion to the queer meaning. They are ‘sucking dry’ the men they are supposedly having sex with. However, Carmilla switches up the meaning when she uses it to suggest that she will bite Babette instead. Then the meaning becomes more queer coded, more about sexual pleasure and acts between women.

I know that’s a lot to take out of this and yes, many queer folks are often doing these mental gymnastics when reading books and one of the references catches our eyes. I’ll add one more layer to this. Between Carmilla’s words, Herculine comments that Carmilla often talks to her about this kind of coded language and Herculine is not innocent to what Carmilla may be hinting at.

Here, now, is the other use of writing like this. Why some queer folks do these mental gymnastics when reading. It’s a method of communicating without revealing the truth to everyone reading. It’s a way for a queer writer to tell the possible queer reader that ‘I am here’ and ‘you are not alone’ and ‘I am not alone because you are reading this and understand what I am saying.’

Carmilla knows that Herculine may be just like herself. Unfortunately for Herculine, her story ends pretty unhappily. A doctor insists that instead of being just a lesbian, Herculine, instead, is transgender. Thus, the doctor prescribes for her to live as a man. Being forced to be a gender you are not, be that if you feel aligned with your birth gender or not, is extremely painful and difficult.

Bornstein and Gender Outlaw feature really important discussions about gender, sex, and identity that everyone can benefit from. However, it is full of this language that queer folks use to communicate with each other quietly.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, this post is getting long and I’ve only covered one of the three examples I mentioned. As an attempt to make this more readable than an academic paper, I will cut off this part here. The next part will discuss the other two examples; The Transexual Empire Making of the She-Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

For now, thank you for reading this far! Some of this will sound obvious to many who may read this, but I am hoping that this will make some LGBT+ literature and history a bit easier for everyone to find and understand.