By Troy Williams
Podcast the entire interview HERE.
In her latest book, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues that “children are thoroughly, shockingly queer.” Through the pages of The Queer Child: Growing Sideways Through the Twentieth Century, Stockton takes us on a literary and cinematic journey into the fictional worlds of queer children – the very children that our official histories and childhood studies deny even exist. “As we explore the history of childhood books written in the twentieth century, there is no mention of non-normative sexuality” Stockton argues, “History has no way to really talking about the sexual motives or desires of children.” Fiction on the other hand does. In fact, it is through the novels and films of the twentieth century where we are first introduced to the very queer child that the public culture has no language for understanding. Laying our fictions next to (and on the side of) our official histories provide us a fascinating view of the ghostly gay specter haunting all of our childhoods. Ultimately, as Stockton contends, the gay child helps us to perceive the queer temporalities haunting all children. I sat down with Kathryn recently on KRCL’s RadioActive.
Troy Williams: You teach queer theory at the University of Utah. If I enroll in your class am I going to learn all the theories about why people are gay?
Kathryn Bond Stockton: One of the major points of queer theory is that sex itself is queer. So it’s not so much a course in gay and lesbian folks (though there are a lot about gay and lesbians in the course), as much as it’s about the queerness of sexuality and sexual orientation in general. So many straight people taking the course, surprisingly, come out learning that they are queer. There is no way to think about sexuality without stumbling across its endless strangeness.
TW: Queer theorists use “queer” in a very different way than popularly understood.
KBS: Maybe, although if you look it up in the dictionary, there are two different definitions that are important to queer theory. One is slang, usually derisive for “homosexuals” (though obviously less derisive now, as gay folks have embraced it) and the other definition is simply, “strange”. The way in which the notion of homosexuality haunts the word is important, but at its most fundamental level, “queer” means “strange.” Queer theory likes both of those parts of the definition to be active.
TW: So this is a theory of strangeness.
KBS: Yes. So in other words, instead of trying to prove that gay people are “normal” or as good as anyone else (which certainly could be perfectly true), this is coming at it from the other end of the spectrum, which is to say that everyone is queer.
TW: Queer theorists from the academy are often out of sync with the contemporary Gay and Lesbian political movement – which is essentialist to its core – and by that I mean, the LGBT political movements argues that “gay” is a fixed state of being that is in-born.
KBS: Yes, that you either are or you are not. You can’t be “a little bit” gay. And obviously we don’t really know what causes this thing that the culture calls “gayness” but I think what queer theory is trying to do is to show that inside sexuality things are rarely that clear for anyone. And there are all kinds of people who get called gay by the culture. I’m thinking of many women that I know, who grew up imaging that they would have straight lives and straight lovers, and at some point just said, wow, women are cool why don’t I consider them? And all of a sudden they discover they were attracted to specific women. Nobody is attracted all women. Nobody is attracted to all men. So in that sense the very notion of sexual orientation is itself is a very strange one, and possibly a very forced one. So once you really start looking at sexual orientation and opening it up conceptually, the more difficult it becomes to sign on to a notion that seems incredibly clear, fixed, essential and inborn.
TW: In The Queer Child, you explore how children are made strange by a variety of things – money, candy, skin color and even innocence. Throughout you discuss the “gay ghost” – describe this.
KBS: Part of what I’m arguing is this: if we really took seriously the notion of a gay child in the present tense (which we haven’t yet come to terms with as a culture in a public sense), then it seems to me this gay child and it’s current ghostliness, dramatizes the problem of “childhood” as a category. So in some ways it looks like the book is focused from the opposite end of the telescope by taking the gay child as the lens by which to focus all the other versions of childhood before us. Here’s the point about the ghostly gay child: growing up, I began to think I was attracted to other girls. And having a tremendous sense of “oh no, this can’t be good!” And hearing kids talk about other kids who were “homos” or “lessies” and feeling that those words probably did apply to me. Now, as a child I said this to no one, I came out no one. This did not seem safe or wise. All through my childhood I am this ghostly gay figure to myself. Only much later in life, (at the age of 23) do I come out to anyone. And at that point, I actually birth myself retrospectively as gay child. Now I can start talking to people about my gay childhood when I am no longer a child.
TW: And adults don’t believe that a gay child can exist.
KBS: Generally not, at least in terms of standard public American discourse. Though this is changing. Folks may have seen the really interesting New York Times article that discussed kids coming out in middle school. I am talking about that and also kids who are maybe five, six, or eight who maybe don’t even know the word, but they sense this about themselves, and later will have a word applied to the attraction that they feel. This is the kind of figure that we really haven’t talked about in the present tense. Grammatically it’s always in the past tense, “I was a gay child” or the idea that a child will “grow up” to be gay. But the idea of a present tense gay child is what we have not publicly come to terms with.
TW: And yet kids very much do believe in the gay child.
KBS: Yes. Nobody believes in gay children more than other kids. Now of course a good bit of the time they are actually wrong about who they apply the word to. For a lot of kids it’s a way of saying, “I hate you”. But kids do speculate about other kids and use that word all the time. They have no problem imaging that kids are gay in the present tense.
TW: Another idea that leapt out from your book was the notion that the silences surrounding queer children are broken only through fictional forms.
KBS: One of the first moments of a public discourse surrounding the possibility of gay children in a present tense is a 2005 segment of the Oprah Winfrey show that was titled “When I Knew I Was a Gay”. Oprah was trying to demonstrate that often children are gay to themselves before they come out to anyone else. So Oprah could be an interesting marker for the point where we began to have a public discourse of when kids are gay children in the present tense. Up to that point I feel fairly confidant saying that gay people have often talked and written about gay childhood, but aside from that, public legal discourse has not recognized that category. Interestingly enough, fiction, and highly canonical literary fictions have. And I go back to Henry James as one of the first instances – a novella that James published in 1892 called The Pupil, that might be the first instance of a ghostly gay child. By the time you get to 1928 with the Well of Loneliness, undeniably there you have the ghostly gay child of Stephen – a child who senses there is something “wrong” with her.
TW: Stephen is a girl.
KBS: Yes, as a seven-year old girl she has a crush on a twenty something housemaid. Literature and film have been thinking about childhood in wonderfully complicated ways for quite a long time. This figure that I call the ghostly gay child we will look back and historically say was a figure alive in the twentieth century. But not in the twenty-first century. We are starting to show signs of a movement believing that children may be gay to themselves.
TW: Take us through what you call a sideways growth.
KBS: Why is it that we always talk in terms of growing up? If you think about the metaphor of growth that has been most powerful in our culture, it’s one that has a vertical sense and linear sequence. So literally you are growing up to full stature: to marriage, work, reproduction and having a family of your own. All of those things are taken as the most central signs of growing up. But it seemed to me that this verticality was problematic in any number of ways. First of all, what does it mean for the lives of many people, gays, lesbians, and other straight folk who don’t reproduce? Does it mean then that they haven’t grown up if they haven’t reproduced themselves generationally? It was that upward trajectory that seemed problematic to me because it didn’t seem able to speak to all the other kinds of growth that many of us obviously know from our lives. It also seems to suggest that once you reach full stature, or have reproduced yourself, that growth has stopped for you. Which is clearly not the case. And it seems to me that cognitive science is very much aware of a lateral metaphor. Neural-networks are about extension and lateral connections between and among ideas. This is one way that brain science thinks about growth. We need to come back to ideas of growth that are about vigor, volume and lateral connection and extension. Other ways of thinking about growing that are not just tied to hetero-normative notion of a growing up in a vertical, linear fashion.
TW: Or as you say, growing toward a question mark.
KBS: I could not imagine the pain and suffering of Jr. High or High School. I really didn’t know what would become of me. I could not imagine a future unfolding for the form of attraction that I desired. In that sense, I really did feel myself growing sideways. I had no idea of what I could grow “up” to since I saw no version of growing up to that I could participate in. Very different now for kids growing up now maybe, who think they might be gay. They may actually see possibilities for themselves that I did not.
TW: And this is relatively new.
KBS: It’s really why I had to decide the parameters of the book would to be the twentieth century. The 90’s saw tremendous change. Queer theory wasn’t really born until 1990. When you think of all the people that were still in the closet before the 90’s, Elton John and KD Lang – Ellen doesn’t even come out on TV until 1997. So kids growing up with many gay figures on TV and in the movies is a very recent phenomenon. And this is changing the phenomenon of whatever it is kids think they are when they find themselves attracted to the so-called “same-sex”. I want to come right back at this from a queer theorist’s perspective. Part of what I’m saying is that what this seemingly gay child is having is a relationship with a word, often more than anything else. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing for children to take the word “gay” to themselves and solidify themselves under the term. This is not a book that in a sentimental way wants to embrace the idea of the gay child and argue for a series of rights (though I’m not against that). The book really looks at the force of that ghostliness throughout the twentieth century and the effects that may have. This is a complicated idea of a child having a relationship with an idea of gayness that they are putting together from the culture around them, and to then layer on top of that whatever they perceive their queer attractions to be – cross-dressing, transgender or whatever. It could be any number of things for children.
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