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{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}his April, when the season promised warmth but the temperature stayed cold, I watched the 2022 gay comedy “Fire Island.” Will, the modernized and queer version of Mr. Darcy, plays Heads Up with the gay coterie of Noah, our Elizabeth Bennett. Here, Heads Up becomes homage to queer icons and legends. The friends mime legends like Marisa Tomei while Will stands perplexed. Their well-acted vignettes sail past Will, unrecognized. He guesses wrong every time. “You’re gay, seriously?” one says of Will. I replay this scene too many times. It feels familiar.
Lately, I’ve been unsure of who my own queer ancestors are.
The realization strikes me one Thursday afternoon in a discussion section for my Gen Ed. My TF asks us to name a favorite LGBTQ+ icon. I can’t think of anyone. I watch as peers — gay and straight — effortlessly supply queer figureheads, the rapidity nearly giving me whiplash. I speed-Google for an answer and gargle up some writer — I think Virginia Woolf. I don’t even know if she’s queer. I’m gay and, seemingly, can’t name gay people.
Of course, I do have pop culture influences, but I’ve never self-selected a role model for the sake of their sexuality. I like J.D. Daniels’ suave prose — how when I linger between his paragraphs, I am not only a witness to his idiosyncrasies, but also an interpreter. I aspire to the casual brilliance of Penny & Sparrow lyrics. How much one may say about “menagerie.” I select these things because they’re good art — regardless of whether they are queer or not. These landmarks are unique to my personal cartography.
Inevitably, I’ll dabble in influences that are explicitly queer. I’ve certainly replayed Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” Sometimes, these influences osmose into the queer conscience detached from their origin. If you know “these gays, they’re trying to murder me,” you are tapping into the ineffable territory of gay culture. But in ascribing these shared fragments of queer culture, I’m also hesitant to over-prescribe characterization. The aforementioned, queer scene featuring Jennifer Coolidge is from The White Lotus, a show with broad appeal but whose ostensibly queer scenes have become woven into a queer tapestry of influence.
I suspect Will and I are not alone in our partial attentiveness to gay genealogies without being fully submerged in them. We can exist in the shared fabric of queer genealogy without any obligation for fluency in the breadth of queer references. Simply put, we draw from the influences that speak to us most. Those ancestors most influential in my queer becoming are from my innermost orbit, not from the panache of Hollywood celebrities or gay Instagram. I have many role models for my queerness, but they may not be visible parts of the culture.
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When I envision role models for my queerness, I think of those most accessible to me. My Gen Ed is taught by Professor Michael Bronski. He’s the first openly-gay male teacher I’ve had — and I sense that he will inevitably become part of my queer inheritance. So often, the transmuted pocket of online queerness permits young gay people to overlook the ancestors that exist outside of social media. Through his course’s survey of American liberation movements, including gay liberation, I unearth the seldom parsed actors who made possible the social authority I now wield in public gayness. I owe my ability to explore and critique queerness to the queer elders who rendered it visible, who placed the subject on our tongues, in our news feeds, within our households.
The lesbian activist Katz, short for Sue Katz, who Bronski invites to visit our class the same day Harvard refuses to comply with U.S. Government demands, plays a similar role in this personal genealogy, perhaps only because she spoke to us. I remember her visit well — she arrived in a well-fit blazer, her posture self-confident. She is a vortex of a figure, the room fixated on her. Katz jokes with us as she walks us through personal history; she intermixes light-hearted anecdotes with depthful queer realities.
Her receptivity to challenging her own beliefs and engaging us, queer youth, in conversation crystallizes her role in my own genealogy: to make stories of the queer past, to retroactively put her own beliefs on trial. Her reflectivity imagines a queer world that is dynamic, ever-changing. I suppose that’s a part of queer genealogy — the continued movement of single points as their self-conception changes each year.
Had I better known Sue Katz during that discussion section, maybe I would have mentioned her. Queer history must contend with its own rectification. It must argue for its own validity while social forces try to suppress it. That is a formidable obstacle. Katz lingers on my mind because she stands for queer history’s authority. I don’t sense that my Instagram feed, with its short-form aesthetic, considers queer history as Katz does. Katz, in some ways, is responsible for my self-creation. Instagram is not.
Perhaps the most influential tenets of queer genealogy are those branching out from us. Ms. T and Ms. H, two of my teachers in high school, created space for critical reflection of my own body, of my own queerness. They are neither grandstage gay legends nor gay activists, yet they remain inextricably linked to my becoming. When I think about my gay role models, I think of these individuals.
Growing up, I had a nanny. My memories of the 11 years she took care of me are disjunct. When I was a one-year-old, Nan began taking care of me. At some point, she married a man. In the summer of 2011, on the gray seats of a Toyota Sienna, we listened to “Born This Way” for the first time. Nan had a Lady Gaga phase. Then, right before middle school, I’d hop into the car and air out my confusion over gay marriage. For whatever reason, that was the fascination of the boys in my class that day, and I, ignorant and impressionable, had regurgitated their rhetoric. When I was 12, Nan left her post as my caretaker. I think she wanted to become a dental assistant. I haven’t spoken to her since. All I know is that she’s now married to a woman.
I miss Nan. Sometimes, I wish that I had understood how our genealogy materialized before me in the backseat, how her self-discovery would predate my own. But I don’t hold my younger self accountable to understand what could not be understood. Queerness asks for its own timeline. Our queer genealogy cannot be built linearly — it reorients our assumptions of genealogy itself, whereby we must better know our own queerness before we can construct the branching histories that shape us. I wonder if this is really what limits Will, and why I empathize with him more than anyone in “Fire Island” does. Whether or not Will has constructed his genealogy does not rob him of any authority over his own queerness.
If anything, he resembles the ways in which our contexts and our histories inform how we show up for our queer selves. How we shape them. Gay Mr. Darcy is still looking for his queer ancestors, and for that, I extend grace. I’m still unsure who my queer ancestors are. But I certainly know some. Maybe Nan is my first queer ancestor. And after her, maybe Katz and Brosnki, or even Lady Gaga. Whomever, these branches are wholly my own.
— Magazine writer Christopher Schwarting can be reached at christopher.schwarting@thecrimson.com. His column “Queer Coded” interrogates queerness within and beyond Harvard.
