Untitled - Skilliter

10
L e s b i a n, g a y, a n d
q u e e r c r i t i c i s m
In the critical-theory survey course I teach, I sometimes open the unit on lesbian,
gay, and queer criticism by reading the class a list of frequently anthologized British
and American writers: for example, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Willa
Cather, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth
Bishop, Langston Hughes, Edward Albee, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg,
W. H. Auden, William Shakespeare, Carson McCullers, Somerset Maugham,
T. S. Eliot, James Merrill, H.D., Sarah Orne Jewett, Hart Crane, William S.
Burroughs, and Amy Lowell. Then I ask my students if they are aware that these
writers are gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Sometimes that question is met by an initial
reticence to respond, a difficulty not encountered in our opening discussions of
other theories.
Of course, I know that, unfortunately, the stigma attached to being thought
gay or lesbian is still quite strong in America today, and some students may be
unwilling to express anything on the subject until they see how the rest of the
group responds. As one student told me, after signing out a number of books on
lesbian and gay theory from the university library for a paper she was writing
for my class, she wondered if the student who waited on her at the circulation
desk thought she were nonstraight, and to her embarrassment she found herself
wanting to shout, “Hey, wait a minute; I’m not a lesbian!”
Another reason for my students’ difficulty, however, is their lack of knowledge.
The work of gay and lesbian writers forms a major part of the literary canon
and is therefore included in most literature courses, but many undergraduate
students assume that these writers are heterosexual. And their assumptions are
not always corrected. Of course, our anthologies of English and American literature
usually include biographical introductions to the writers whose works they
contain, and professors frequently offer additional information about authors’
personal lives. We may be told, for example, that Charlotte Perkins Gilman