#LIKE he talks about Sleepy Hollow and how there's the contrast between the properly manly man and the cowardly unmasculine man

[adhd-ahamilton]

Crain notes that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s attraction to Gay was a form of the nineteenth-century ideal of “sympathy.” In this context, sympathy - a form of empathy that as Crain writes, “allows us to feel emotions that are not ours” - is an expansive form of romantic friendship. The deeply felt connective emotion of sympathy allows one to not only value a friend for his or her emotional sincerity, but to take imaginative leaps toward understanding and sharing the emotions of another. [...]

Emerson’s vision of American equality, the basis for his strong antislavery and pro-women’s suffrage beliefs, has roots in the Enlightenment and in his radical, nature-based vision of Christianity. But it is especially rooted in his ability to admit and emotionally explore his attraction to - his sympathy with - other men. Same-sex affection was integral to understanding the mutually beneficient dynamics of the individual in society. This egalitarian same-sex affection placed the rugged individualism of the Revolutionary man into a new context, not of conquering an American landscape but of emerging from it and being at one with it. This was the cornerstone of a new way of understanding gender, desire, and personal and social liberty.

- A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski, chapter three: Imagining a Queer America.

Okay, so, all of this sounds very lovely, and it’s a beautiful idea, but this whole section is rather frustrating me and I kinda wanted to vent about that a bit.

The whole idea behind this book is that it’s very very broad - it’s a queer history of the entire United States, looking into not so much key figures but the real life experiences of queer people in various times and places, over a four hundred year span. So far, I’ve been able to appreciate the approach by thinking of it as more of a map than a photograph - it’s here to sketch the broad trends, so that when you look at any particular point, you can observe the context on either side and see how this particular culture came to be. But the more the book goes on, the more I am really starting to feel that the book’s lack of depth is hurting it.

I mean, okay. First paragraph. Bronski compares this apparent ninteenth-century ideal of ‘sympathy’ to romantic friendship from the 18th century, but claims that this one is more expansive. But... there’s no explanation for this. In what way did this ideal more emphasise feeling as others feel? Because from what I’ve read, I’m pretty sure that ‘mingling sorrows’ etc. was pretty important in romantic friendship as well. Could we have an example at least? Because the section quoted just before this was just about Emerson talking about how he loved this other man’s eyes, and had caught his eyes many time to stare at one another - I really didn’t seem much demonstration of sympathy. And this all goes back to the book’s explanation of romantic friendship itself, which was basically ‘around this time guys started writing really flowery stuff to one another, here are some examples, it’s possible that some relationships had sexual elements’ and that’s it. In neither section does he quote any person from the time period talking about the concept or what it was meant to mean. So I don’t really understand the comparison at all. (Also, just to nitpick, but I’m pretty sure that empathy is the word for feeling what other people feel, as opposed to sympathy?)

And then we have the second paragraph which is even more unclear. Okay, first off, he ties egalitarian principles to Enlightenment ideals... even though he never brought any of this up during, like, the sections covering the actual enlightenment period, or during the revolution when political Enlightenment ideology was huge huge hugely influential? And that makes the comment about the ‘rugged individualism of the Revolutionary man’ even more confusing. He spent a broad part of the 18th century section talking about romantic friendship, which doesn’t sound very individualistic. And then over the revolution, he talks about the changing standards of masculinity occurring at the time; I suppose it makes sense to consider the newer and more masculine standard ‘ruggedly individualistic’, even if he never really emphasised individualism at the time, but the whole point of that section was that there were two competing ideals and one didn’t really win over until decades after the revolution, and that during the revolution itself most of the top figures really didn’t fit the new masculinity at all. It could be that he’s referring to the political ideology of individualism, which was in fact very popular at the time, but a) that’s... a very Enlightenment concept?  b) I really don’t see much correlation between people believing in equality and not believing in individualism. In fact, at that time period, individualism and equality were very often connected, even if many people (*coughs* Jefferson) were unable to truly commit to egalitarian principles. Actually also come to think of it, I thought he didn’t talk about individualism as a political ideology but he did - to talk about how those of the French revolution took it to its logical conclusion by taking down all victimless crimes, including sodomy, and how we must have some explanation for why the Americans didn’t take the belief that far. And he settles on ‘it was a period of big change in how people viewed themselves, so there was no place for this in the new masculinity’. So...if anything the new masculinity was less individualistic?

What makes it even more confusing is that in between, we got a long section about the old West, and how this ability of people (particularly men) to leave populated society and traditional family groups to venture into the wilderness on their own was very important for creating a place where queer affection could be expressed. So... in this case, individualism, and finding your own way even if it meant leaving behind other people, was good for queer people. And he emphasises that San Francisco was a very diverse place with immigrants from all over the world, while also emphasising that it was a gold town where men came to seek their fortune on their own (demonstrated by the incredibly high men : women ratio), so here, individualism and a certain level of egalitarianism are coupled together.

And, look. I get that this book is a very very ambitious project. It’d be impossible to find any consistent connecting thread of belief throughout this entire history by which to explain how queer people were understood. But this still feels far too muddled to me. Individualism is bad for equality and queer people... except when it isn’t. And rugged masculinity is a true expression of queer lives... except when it isn’t. Without any real attempt made to properly compare these different ideologies to properly elucidate the similarities and differences. And that’s I guess the most frustrating thing to me: this book had such potential to really trace trends over time and portray history not as a set of distinct time periods but as an eternally changing continuum... and yet that’s exactly what it does: each section is pretty much cordoned off on its own, describing a certain place or lifestyle within a certain time period, with little explicit contrasting of what came before or after.

And, admittedly, part of the issue is that the author just doesn’t really seem as interested in these time periods? It’s a very ambitious book already, but I’m already probably about halfway through the chapter on the nineteenth century, and I’m only 17% through the book. So something like 80% of the book is likely to be about just the last hundred years. I expected something like this to happen, because there’s so much more information available in more recent time periods, and there’s especially more data available about queer people the closer you get to the present, and a lot of people are more interested in the recent and more politically relevant stuff... but still, really? 80%? If you’re writing a book charting queer history alongside American history... well, there are a lot of really important and interesting events in American history. I really feel you ought to properly respect those cultural landmarks, and the way they still impact on the way Americans view themselves to this day. It’s not as though this stuff is entirely in the past and serves no relation to the present except insofar as it created the circumstances which eventually lead to the present situation - events like the revolution or periods like the Old West are still incredibly relevant in modern American political and cultural life.

IDK. I’m still enjoying the book, and it does still do a lot of cool things that other books couldn’t - as flawed as the execution might be, it’s still very interesting getting this sort of bird’s eye view on this history, and it’s a good jumping off place for finding interesting trends - but...well, I was warned that it was a gloss, and I gotta say, it really, really is.