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Bionote: Michael Bronski is an author, professor and independent scholar. He has been involved in gay liberation as a political organiser, journalist, writer, editor, publisher and theorist since 1969. His Queer History of the United States won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best Nonfiction as well as the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Non- Fiction. In 2003 his Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps won the Lambda Literary Award for "Best Anthology." His essays have appeared in over a hundred anthologies.
In 1999 he won the Martin Duberman Fellowship from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, and the prestigious Stonewall Award from the Anderson Foundation that same year. He is the editor for the "Queer Ideas" and "Queer Action" series at Beacon Press. His last two books are – You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (coauthored with Ann Pellegrini and Michael Amico) and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (coauthored with Kay Whitlock) – were both nominated for Lambda Literary awards. His A Queer History of the United States for Young People was published in 2019. He is currently at work on The World Turned Upside Down: The Queerness of Children's Literature.
In 2018 he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. Past recipients include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Martin Duberman, Samuel R. Delany, Lillian Faderman, Alison Bechdel, and Jonathan Ned Katz. Currently, he is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, Sexuality at Harvard University.
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This interview by Sourabhi Dutta Roy is featured in the book,
“ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN”:
an anthology of poems, short stories and interviews available worldwide via Amazon.
Here is the India link.
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TMYS: Please share some moments or incidents from your life which led you to become a LGBTQ rights activist. Were you ever pushed into anonymity due to your identity as a gay Professor? Aren’t one’s sexual choices too personal to be stereotyped by external opinion-makers? Tell me your story!
MB:
I grew up in a liberal Catholic family in the 1950s and 1960s where I was taught to respect everyone and their place in the world. In high school – in the early 1960s – I was going on civil rights marches near my home in New Jersey, and became involved in actions against the war in Vietnam. This continued – increased – in college and when radical feminism began in the last 1960s, all of my women friends were involved. So when Gay Liberation started in 1969 – just after Stonewall – it made perfect sense to me that this was my movement and I joined Gay Liberation Front in New York. I had known that I was gay since I was very young, I had already been “out” to people at the age of 18, before Stonewall so this was not my ‘coming out’ moment – but rather a moment that I had (without even knowing it) been building to most of my life. When I moved to Boston in 1971, I became heavily involved in LGBTQ activism as an activist and a writer. It was all very public – my name was on articles in newspapers – so I was never forced to be anonymous. (It was too late for that!) In time I went from writing for the LGBTQ press and began to write on queer issues for the mainstream press and publish books. I did not teach until I was 50 years old – already established as a writer – and in many ways my personal life (which I wrote about a lot) was really a public life. This may not be the case for many, even most people, but for me my private and public life became one. People can say what they thought – and did – but what I was doing, felt perfectly natural to me.
TMYS: Virginia Woolf had famously stated that “Anon is a woman.” Perhaps it is not just women that History has neglected but anyone who did not identify as a white cisman fell under the bracket. How do power structures intimidate by virtue of the backing of a majority of the population?
MB:
Any group who does not fit into what is considered the “majority” is going to be in a minority and minorities have less power and less recognition. Virginia Woolf is right – anonymous was a woman – but I think that the analogy functions differently for different groups. Many artists of colour never even got to be anonymous because they did not get the opportunity to create art that would be noticed by the mainstream. And many LGBTQ people did create art (writing, painting etc) that was recognized if their sexual identity was not well known. And sometimes even if they were more open, they were recognized because they were seen as exotic, or ‘different,’ or unusual (outside the norm) but not threatening. There are ways that some types of people can get around the strictures of the power structures. It is very easy to say that all minority groups are oppressed by the dominant power structure – but the reality is that groups are oppressed in different ways. Often one of the ways that they are oppressed is that the dominant culture lets one or two members of that group become noted: “She is a great woman artist” or “He is a very talented black actor.” And by singling out individuals, it makes them stand apart from their group and therefore retains the stigma for the entire group
TMYS: In the past, there has been much evidence of cruelty exercised on the LGBTQ community. What would you say should have been the responsibility of History in recording all such ‘other’ neglected experiences and narratives – especially when people were scared and under-confident about expressing themselves openly?
MB:
The old saying that “history is written by the winners” is – to some degree – true for a great deal of traditional, written history. Only recently – maybe the past 100 years – have traditional historians been willing to look at the histories of minoritized groups and begin including them in mainstream narratives. But this is only focusing on traditional, mainstream histories – there are a number of ways that minoritized groups wrote, recorded, maintained, and saved their own histories. Often this was through alternative means – private correspondence, diaries, folk lore, songs, oral histories, visual cultures, theatre – and often dismissed by academic and traditional historians. The problem with how we conceptualise history is that it is prone to wanting to tell one story (usually the dominant one). The reality is that history – at its core – is multiple stories from multiple points of view. It is not a series of snapshots but many films, all shown at the same time. I do not think that history has a “responsibility” – that is very abstract – but that each and everyone one of us share the responsibility to not only insist on telling our own stories, but on encouraging everyone to tell theirs.
TMYS: Popular Culture has recently seen a massive rise in BL fiction - be it the Asian animes, mangas, manhwas, or more global novels and films. Having been a part of major movements for LGBT community, would you say that these popular culture representations actually reflect their issues and stories or it is just consumerism at its peak?
MB:
We all want to see ourselves (and communities) represented – in some fashion. Having that cultural mirror is comforting and empowering. And we do see that – in personal emails, social media, letters, conversations. Cultural theorists might call these items “folk culture” – emerging from people themselves. (Think of balladeers from the middle ages in Europe going from town to town singing current events.) But that is not what is generally called “popular culture” – which is almost always commercial culture or mass culture. (Now, think of these balladeers writing their songs down and selling them and thinking of what they can write that may sell better.) There are many times that these representations – novels, songs, films, graphic novels, tv shows – make us laugh or cry because we recognize parts of ourselves in them. That’s great. But we shouldn’t think that these representations actually represent us. Rather can’t. We are all much too complicated to be represented in this way. But nevertheless the longing to see our lives represented is powerful – and we need it. It is great to feel connected to a community because of popular culture – we just have to realise that almost any artefact of popular culture that – by its nature becomes popular – is never the whole truth of people’s lives. It is a consumer item – and that’s fine.; just don’t compare it to the authenticity of human experience, to understand the uniqueness of an individual life.
TMYS: Many writers of gay pulp fiction from the past are long forgotten. They were often boycotted as sleazy and cheap thrills. Many of these authors wrote under pseudonyms too. I'm reminded here of the Oscar Wilde's quote that "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." Yet art seems always prone to censorship and banning by the leading powers of any society. Please share your thoughts on the same.
MB:
Oscar Wilde was correct – there is no such thing as an immoral book; just immoral or unethical people. What he does not address here – but does elsewhere in his writings – is that books (many books), especially those that offer differing ideas from what is generally accepted – are called immoral because they threaten the status quo, or what are considered “accepted” behaviours or ideas. Books that get banned – historically and now in many, many states in the U.S. – are banned not because they are immoral (under accepted and promoted religious ideologies) but because they challenge a current orthodoxy. Often this orthodoxy is about sexuality, gender and sometimes race. But this is only part of what causes this – for the most part what we call “art” (good or bad art) is a product of the imagination. The nature of the imagination is to, well “imagine” – to think outside of the frames of the real, the material world, what is possible, what is considered acceptable. So this is the reason why “art” gets challenged most often by censorship --- it is, or can be, by its nature, a challenge to the status quo to what we are expected to accept as “normal". The rise of the novel in England in the mid 18th c. was treated with great suspicion just because it was – literally – fiction: made up. The literary equivalent of a day dream and NOT connected to reality. And so, as an alternative to realty it was understood – correctly – as a threat. At its best “art” is subversive and can change the world. Thus, making it not only a viable threat, but a dangerous one.
TMYS: Fiction or nonfiction - according to you, which one helps in driving social change and furthering acceptance for the LGBTQ people? Standing in 2023, do you still feel that the publishing industry discriminates and is sceptical about making fair offers to the LGBTQ talent? Or the industry is far more fair and fearless now?
MB:
The most important thing to remember about the publishing industry is that it is an INDUSTRY. It exists to make money, not change the world. (This is not to discount many good, well intentioned editors who work in it.) Starting in the mid-1970s editors realised that they could make money selling LGBTQ themed books that were advertised as queer books. (In the 1960s this was also true of feminist books and books on black politics and culture.) There was a boom in publishing queer titles and that was great. Over the last four decades there have been fluctuations in this trend – last always following larger trends in publishing. Today there are a lot of novels with queer content published – but not necessarily advertised as such. Is this because queer content is so common that there is no need to advertise it as such? Or that the “queer market” is simply not that important since queer books will sell anyway? That is unclear. What is clear is that the industry is not necessarily more fair or fearless now – but that they will continue to acquire and sell queer material as long as it is profitable for them.
TMYS: Could you talk to us about the implications of HIV positive people and the stigma of identity that comes with it?
MB:
In our culture, all diseases and afflictions and disabilities are stigmatised. Those associated with sexual activity are even more so. Because since the 1980s, HIV was associated with gay male sexuality – even though heterosexual could easily be infected – the stigma was even stronger. In the 1980s and 1990s people with HIV faced discrimination on a number of levels; medical care, housing, job security, in the media, in social services, social rejection and isolation and much more. Some of this was countered by new anti-discrimination laws fought for my gay legal and grass roots activists, but much social stigma still remains. The implications of this – then and now – are huge. The stigma associated with HIV created a huge divide between the healthy and the sick (which translated into the moral and the immoral.) It also created a culture in which all gay men were thought to be – or presumed to be – HIV positive, thus stigmatising male homosexuality even more. There were laws passed – and still on the books – which criminalised HIV positive people engaging in sexual activity with non-HIV positive people. To a degree this is true of all diseases – think of how uncomfortable people may be around someone with a skin disease or who are disabled. But because HIV was so linked to male homosexuality the stigma was not only worse, but took myriad forms in different public and private venues.
TMYS: Toni Morrison had said that "all paradises, all utopias, are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in"— the notion of the American Dream can be considered one such utopia. There is also the 'us' versus 'them' dichotomy that has long played a part in the American Dream and American politics. You have also talked about this dichotomy in Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics. What are your observations regarding this dichotomy and the American Dream shaping the modern mainstream?
MB:
Tony Morrison was completely correct: Just as the Christian concept of heaven can only exist in contact with the idea of hell. The American Dream can only exist because of who is not included within its framework. Because homosexual behaviour is considered sinful (in many Christian denominations now – but historically so in western cultures) the metaphor of heaven cannot exist without hell is apt here. Humans are taught to think in dualities – left/ right, good/ evil, sacred/ profane, sin/ grace, clean/ dirty – the American Dream necessitates the creation of an American Nightmare. Who gets to be in the Dream v/s who is forced into the Nightmare is dependent on many factors: race, gender, class, income, physique, standards of beauty, sexual identity. In the past 40 years some queer people -- those who fit into standards of certain acceptability – were allowed into the Dream; but not all. Many LGBTQ people (those who were in the Dream) saw this as progress. But it is not progress until there is no more divide between the Dream and the Nightmare. There is an old Gay Liberation slogan which is “we don’t want a piece of the pie – the pie is poisoned.” So is the dichotomy between this Dream and the Nightmare.
TMYS: What is your vision as a professor? What responsibilities would you like to hand over to your students, and all such young minds, in order to push an educated society?
MB:
I have no “vision” as a professor. I think the best I can do is give my students interesting, provocative material they cannot find on their own and make them think – think deeply – about it. In many ways I learn more from my students than I think they learn from me. Education has to be a two-way street of knowledge and information and thoughts should be freely flowing, both ways. Of course I know more “facts'' and “statistics” etc. than my students but I do not necessarily know better what they mean or how to think about them in complicated ways. An “educated society” is a society that just spends more time thinking and trying to understand itself: its impulses, its desires, its fears, and its dreams. That is what I hope happens in my classroom!
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This interview by Sourabhi Dutta Roy is featured in the book,
“ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN”:
an anthology of poems, short stories and interviews available worldwide via Amazon.
Here is the India link.
***