Studying a Not-so-Secret “Secret Code”

Abstract

Martin Duberman and other social historians claim that the “series of riots” that took place at the Stonewall Inn (Manhattan’s West Village) in late June 1969 have become “the emblematic events in modern lesbian and gay history” (Duberman 2002). The emblematic status of those events has also created an emblematic narrative, under whose terms the Stonewall moment dispelled darkness, secrecy and silence and inspired liberation, visibility, public, political engagement. The emblematic narrative also equates language before Stonewall with secret codes, private messages, and in-group argot. This book argues that secrecy and concealment were a small part of the connections linking language and sexuality before Stonewall. And this book uses a Queer Historical Linguistics (QHL) rather than the assumptions of the emblematic narrative to examine what language and sexuality before Stonewall entailed. This chapter introduces the method and theory associated with QHL and demonstrates QHL’s usefulness for studies of language before Stonewall. QHL builds on the idea that queerness is a “mesh of possibilities” (Sedgwick in Tendencies, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993) and a messy formation (Manalansan in Radical History Review 120:94–106, 2014), and refers to practices and subject positions located “on the edges of logics of labor and production …” (Halberstam 2010). QHL depends on an assemblage of data (an archive) gathered through a scavenger methodology (Halberstam in Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998), and analyzed through the work of close reading (Freeman in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010; Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015), and through the framework of homohistory (Menon in Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film, Palgrave, London, 2008). Unlike in historical studies where “meaning succeeds as replacing itself-as itself- through time” (Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004), QHL refuses to “…take the object of queering for granted” (Goldberg and Menon in PMLA 120(5):1608–1617, 2005). Several examples conclude the chapter to illustrate what QHL-oriented inquiry entails.