Objectionable

To the Queer hoarders who had the wherewithal to pile up and save the Queer literacy objects of the 20^th Century and to the archivists who compiled and preserved those Queer literacy memories for our freedom of mind.

Contents

1. List of Figures

2. Acknowledgments

3. Objectionable Foreplay: A Preface/A Legend

4. Chapter 1 Reading, Writing, Researching & Responding with Queer Quasi-Objects

5. Chapter 2 Enforcing Heterocentrism/Queering the Force: Profiling Police Training Textbooks

6. Chapter 3 Young Adult Sex Education Manuals: Uncovering Agencies and Affects

7. Chapter 4 The Audacity of Objects: Consulting Syndicated Advice Columns

8. Chapter 5 Object(ive) Connections: Evoking the Objectionable

9. Bibliography

10. Index

Figures

1. Figure 1.1 Bayard Rustin with Students, Photo by Library of Congress/Interim Archives/Getty Images, 1964/2023.

2. Figure 2.1 Barbara Gittings Picketing Behind a Police Barrier by Kay Tobin, 1966. ©NYPL

3. Figure 2.2 Leo Skier Picketing by Kay Tobin, 1966. ©NYPL.

4. Figure 2.3 Lesbians Holding Hands at the Fifth Annual “Reminder” Picket at the Philadelphia Independence Hall Protest by Nancy Tucker, 1969, ©LHEF, Inc., Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

5. Figure 2.4 Graffiti on Boarded-Up Stonewall Inn Window by Fred W. McDarrah, Getty Images, 1969/2026.

6. Figure 2.5 Sylvia Rivera at Washington Square Rally. © Bettye Lane, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, 1973.

7. Figure 3.1 Barbara Gittings Preps DOB-NY Newsletter Alongside the Mimeograph Machine (a twentieth-century Literacy Object) by Kay Tobin, 1966. ©NYPL.

8. Figure 4.1 Abigail Van Buren at Her Typewriter. Hulton Archive, Getty Images, circa 1958.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this work was provided by a Faculty Scholarship grant from the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College. The travel funding allowed me to visit collections across the nation and release time afforded me researching and writing time. What a luxurious commodity! Additionally, OAR provided subvention funds to complete this project. A PSC-CUNY grant also contributed to the work of this project.

Without the assistance and expertise of archivists and librarians across this nation, this project would not have happened. From New York City to Los Angeles, these guardians of Queerness past allow researchers to hunt and gather things that others have overlooked and/or forgotten. As keepers of Queer memory, they permit us to excavate the files and folders to discover stories, to piece together histories, and commemorate our predecessors. I, also, feel grateful to the people who saved all of these materials, who had the wherewithal to “hoard” all of these salvaged artifacts of history so that I can pick and prod through their lives that have been left in folders. I never feel more excited than when archivists arrive with a cart full of boxes.

In alphabetical order I list the names of the archivists who have assisted me and the collections that they protect and share.

A special shout out to the librarians at my home institution, John Jay College of Criminal Justice: Ellen Sexton, Kathleen Collins, and Karen Okamoto. I so appreciate their willingness to always listen to my meanderings about sources that I need and then their savvy in locating them for me.

Without CUNY colleagues, who either volunteered to respond to my early shitty drafts or patiently listened to me expound endlessly, this project wouldn’t have progressed. The collegial endurance of Alessandra Early (John Jay), Jay Gates (John Jay), Barbara Gleason, (City College), Olivera Jokic (John Jay), Jean Mills (John Jay) and, especially, Jessica Yood (Lehman) astounds me. The same goes for all of my colleagues in the Vertical Writing Program at John Jay whose untiring pedagogical innovations inspire me and whose labors allow me to concentrate on research. There are also national colleagues who encouraged this project: Darci Thoune (University of Wisconsin—LaCrosse) for her caring attentions and Kim Drake (Scripps College) for her always open welcome to Los Angeles. And, Alice Horning, Series Editor for Composition/Rhetoric at Peter Lang, who worked with me through this process until the end. I also want to thank J Palmeri for their close and generative review of my final manuscript; their critical nudging made me a better thinker and writer.

Often at the end of a class session, I will say to my students: I’m done with you if you’re done with me. May I be dismissed? To those students: I’ll never be done with you; your extraordinary spirit and, yes, quirkiness buoy me.

Finally, to Oscar, my husband of 16 years, a giant grateful hug for bearing my mood swings after long days of research and writing. Studying the historical machinations of homophobia and heteronormativity can be physically exhausting and psychically draining. My Gay nerve and Queer bandwidth were often strained. Our relationship testifies to how all of that historical Queer resistance and Queer love overcame and was worth it.

Objectionable Foreplay: A Preface/A Legend

The phenomenon of gay men and women seeking information about themselves and their people in public libraries is commonplace. In fact, it is fairly difficult to find a gay man or lesbian of any age, raised in a rural or an urban setting in the United States, who cannot vividly remember his/her hopeful first visit to the public library listed in its catalog under “the H word.”

Cal Gough, 1989¹

Knowledge is never purely ideal, but rather always material, partial, situated, motivated, invested. The archival imaginary that structures our knowledge and enables our desire is always embodied.

Susan Stryker²

Circa 1969, I discovered the Modern Home Medical Adviser (MHMA) on my parents’ shelves and found in its index the entry, “Homosexuality, experiments leading to solution of.” While the index entry sparked my interest, it sent a preemptive message that homosexuality was a problem to be solved. On the pages to where it led me to read further, I found neither a clear definition nor a “solution” for “the curious behavior of some individuals who [are] … attracted to the same sex.”³ Elmer Sevringhaus, endocrinologist and the author of this mystifying explanation, remained the expert voice in the MHMA for over two decades from 1935 to 1969 when Morris Fishbein, the editor of the MHMA, replaced it with an equally ambivalent gloss on the dangers of female crushes. After Fishbein warns of the dangers of overly indulgent female-to-female doting, he writes explicitly and, somewhat off the topic of crushes, “Marriage must be between people of different sexes.”⁴ (I retroactively smirk.)

In Queer Literacies, I analyze how the medical records that report about the possible reasons for homosexuality between 1930 and 1980 “shifted from various levels of denial of existence, to a mishap of heredity, to a case for criminal lunacy, to a target for psychotherapy, to an experiment in conversion therapy, and the inexhaustive (yet fully exhausting) list still continues.”⁵ Coincidentally (or not), Fishbein wrote his final version in the MHMA in the same year that Stonewall happened. Who knows if the drag queens, transsexuals, and other Queer liberators of the historic evening had ever pulled a homophobically oriented medical advisor from their parent’s shelves? Regardless if they had ever encountered such an object or not, they had doubtlessly read the oppression of other homophobic words that appeared in other heteronormative books, newspapers, training guides and, as the century continued, aired in radio, TV shows, and movies. The media may have changed yet the message rarely reoriented or evolved. It seems doubtful that many Queers had met the scientists and authorities who accused them of the psychological conditions and criminal activities that needed solving. Doubtless they had perused their words in one literacy object form or another.

These public messages about homosexual behavior, etiologies, and solutions came in the forms of textual objects, really quasi-objects because they made things happen. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed picks up on Husserl’s ideas about the influence of things (or Dinge in Husserl’s German), about how human consciousness gets directed at things. Husserl’s ideas of die Dinge as spatio-temporal beings alludes to a relationship between humans and objects that exceeds a simplistic interconnection. Bruno Latour would later infer that objects, as actants in people’s lives, have an agency that affects human consciousness, creates constraints, and enables social realities. Latour’s re-conceptions underscore the compelling, sometimes coercive, potential of things.⁶

These object-beings can animate humans in much the same way that we often think that human beings animate objects. When Ahmed turns her attention to an object in Queer Phenomenology, she highlights the literacy-instigating object of the writing desk and its potential to enable the origin of ideas and messages; she considers how “bodies take shape through tending toward objects that are reachable, that are available within the bodily horizon.”⁷ With a table that is within our physical reach and psychical horizon, “what we do with the table, or what the table allows us to do, is essential to the table.”⁸ According to Ahmed, objects orient us, maybe even allow certain of ourselves to come into being. She writes, “The writing table might also point toward the writing body, as that which becomes ‘itself’ once it ‘takes up’ the equipment and ‘takes up’ time and space, in doing the work that the equipment allows the body to do.”⁹ Objects have a force—an instrumental fortitude, if you will—to connect to us and even constitute us.

From my phenomenological perspective, the medical guide object that I discovered as a tween affected me. Within my reach and beneath my pubescent fingers that riffled through its pages, it wielded some power over what I thought, even what I could think. The object of the MHMA not only pointed me to the direction of homosexuality on page 551 but, also, directed me to seek a solution for homosexuality. Its words persuaded me that I needed curing like the other ailments under advisement. This literacy object oriented me toward homophobia, placing me in the discourse of a heteronormative world. This word-making object attempted to shape my world-making sense of self. In the twentieth century, discourse often discussed homosexual orientation, but, rarely if never, did it address homophobic orientation. Its references were misdirected and its facts misinformed. Well, until Queers produced their own quasi-objects of Queer literacy.

Nonetheless, I have always loved objects: trinkets, handmade things, shiny baubles that sometimes I can turn into other glimmering curiosities. For what it is worth, I even have that distressed/distressing medical guide on my shelf, and its frayed burgundy and gold binding still enamors me. Its yellowed pages from 1949 have held together in its sturdy book cloth binding; unfortunately, some of its archaic content still remain bound in social discourse and ideology. It has left indelible social damage. Things can leave a mark.