Abstract
A conversation about the different generational experiences of LGBT academics and the changing status of sexuality and queer studies. Ken Plummer, Arlene Stein and Travis Kong, longtime colleagues and sociologists of sexuality, share their insights. They discuss how different generational contexts and geographic locations shape sexuality studies. They acknowledge the ways Ken's work, and the efforts of his generation of activist-scholars, played a pivotal foundational role in establishing LGBT studies. They consider the relationship between queer theory and sociologies of homosexuality, and the growing importance of digital media. In conclusion, they discuss how neoliberalisation and authoritarian movements are impacting intellectual work.
During the recent pandemic, with travel curtailed, we organized four conversations over Zoom about our experiences as LGBT academics, the blossoming of sexuality and queer academic work, and the perilous times we live in today. We had been colleagues and friends for thirty years, having connected through Ken’s teaching and writing. Arlene was a visiting lecturer at the University of Essex in the early 1990s, drawn by the university’s international reputation in sexuality studies. At the time, Travis was a graduate student at Essex, eventually earning his PhD under Ken’s supervision. Arlene returned to the United States and Travis to Hong Kong, but the three of us stayed in touch and enjoyed occasional international visits with one another at conferences, dinners in one another’s homes, and walks along the river in Essex, right up until the time of Ken’s unexpected death in November 2022. We present an edited transcript of those conversations here.
It is fitting that one of Ken’s last intellectual products would be a joint reflection on generational change, especially the flow of queer intellectual generations, a topic of keen interest to him. For in addition to working in different countries, we represent three somewhat different “gay generations.” Ken came out in the context of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s and was a member of the first cohort of out LGBT academics. Arlene came out at a time of somewhat less stigma, the 1980s, but when LGBT studies had not yet been institutionalized. Travis was influenced both by gay and lesbian sociology and humanities-based queer theories during the following decade. As Ken wrote in a 2015 essay: “the sexual world has changed massively over the past century and each generation brings different understandings to this complicated whole.” He added: “for a short while before we die, we are the carriers of history.” 1 In tribute to Ken and his enormous contributions to sociology, to LGBTI intellectual culture, and to our lives, we share our discussion.
I chose to study gay things in the mid-1960s and that was both a very risky queer thing to do, and something for which there were few precedents. You know, I had a kind of conversion as an undergraduate, into a very early form of a lesbian and gay studies. I had a very good tutor, Stan Cohen, who was an inspiration. He wasn’t gay, but he introduced me to labelling theory, deviance theory, stigma and encouraged me along the way to write an essay on homosexuality for his criminology course. He gave me very high marks for it. And he encouraged me to go on to do a PhD on it. Well, nothing like this had ever entered my mind before. But I went ahead, applied to do it, and got supported in doing it. The London School of Economics gave me a place and the SSRC [Social Science Research Council] gave me funding. And so in 1968, I started at the LSE, with a great supervisor, Paul Rock, who (again) wasn’t gay. But he was a symbolic interactionist and he thought this would make a very interesting study. I was at the right time in the right place. In 1968 the law around homosexuality was changing. And by 1970 the GLF [Gay Liberation Front] had arrived – and I soon became involved with this, not least because it was based at the LSE initially … A space had opened up for me.
Your work opened up space for my own, Ken, a decade later. In graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s I enrolled in a course taught by Jeffrey Escoffier, the late gay historian and activist. It was called, rather discretely, “sexual diversity and social change” and was basically a lesbian and gay studies course. We read a couple of your early articles on the social construction of homosexuality, and work by your Essex colleague Mary McIntosh. I realized: “oh wow people have done this sort of thing.” There’s a precedent for trying to think about gay and lesbian life, as we called it then, in a systematic way. And that was so important to me. Around the same time, I joined a group in San Francisco called the Gay and Lesbian History Project. This was before gay and lesbian studies had been incorporated into university curricula, and we read books about sexual histories and discussed them in each other’s homes. Together we created a culture of LGBT intellectual work in the Bay Area, which empowered me to incorporate questions of sexuality into my graduate work. Gayle Rubin’s article “Thinking Sex,” helped me see the importance of carving out a terrain of sexual theorizing that was distinct from gender. It gave me permission to see lesbian life as fundamentally tied, though also somewhat different, from the gay male world. Travis, you are about ten years younger than me. What is your story?
I was a bookish boy and liked reading. When I was young, I was very critical of Hong Kong society because of its capitalist, commercial and materialistic orientation. People talked about money all the time. I hated it. I always wanted to do something different. I ended up studying sociology, which brought me to a new horizon. I remember I wrote a paper on homosexuality in a course called Social Problems and got a very good grade. I had a strong desire to leave Hong Kong to see and explore the world, partly due to the money-driven society that I hated and partly because of my own repressed sexuality. I was going out with a young woman and was close to marriage, but I knew something was wrong. I actually went to see a movie called Sebastiane by British gay film director Derek Jarman, during the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It was a very homoerotic movie, and I think I went to see it with my girlfriend! Soon after, I went to Essex to do my master’s degree and it was my first big moment of enlightenment. I met so many great academics in the Department of Sociology who opened up my eyes to cutting-edge ideas and theories, and there were scholars who worked on sexuality, like you two, and also Mary Mclntosh and Tony Coxon. And more importantly, regardless of their own sexual orientation, most academics I met in the department seemed to be fine with homosexuality. Arlene was the first person I came out to in the whole world, although I hadn’t yet had any homosexual experiences. My master’s thesis was not about homosexuality, but about the cultural identity of Hong Kong people. It was only later when I decided to do a PhD at Essex in the late 1990s that I examined gay identity in Hong Kong and London. Ken was my supervisor. It was impossible to study this topic in Hong Kong, as there were no courses on gay and lesbian studies, and homosexuality was usually taught in courses like abnormal psychology, deviance and crime, or social problems. I would not have been able to find an academic in Hong Kong to supervise me. Later, after I had finished my PhD and come back to Hong Kong to teach in late 1999, that I started to get involved with queer pedagogy, research and activism.
We are each from lower middle class or working-class backgrounds and yet we found our way into middle-class academic life. Perhaps we should discuss how our backgrounds shaped our careers.
I was from a fairly working-class background and not a swotty (nerdy) boy at all. I didn’t read many books. We had very few books at home when I was young. My mum came from a mining background in Durham – she had 12 or 13 brothers and sisters, and all the men worked down the mines. And they lived in this very small house so there must have been very strange living conditions going on there. At the age of 13 or 14 she went to London with one of her sisters and became a servant/skivvy living under the stairs – that sort of background. And I was part of the English education system, which was then the (now long defunct) 11 plus system, which tested you at the age of 11. I passed my exam! It screened me into a selective grammar school, which was a more academic education. Most of my school friends went to the secondary schools, which were not meant for academic types but for more practical types. I was just lucky in a way to get into this group. And that meant different expectations. I would have to pass my exams. And I became a bit of a more studious boy, I mean I did work very hard — once I was identified as a boy who was supposed to be a bit clever. But I wasn’t that serious about it because I’d rather go playing and dancing, and that sort of thing. So I only became serious about academic life gradually. Really, it was only after I got my first degree. And that’s when I started thinking, well, I’ve met a few people who have just impressed me by the way they thought about the world and I thought, that’s a very nice thing to be able to do. I did try different jobs but I gradually thought I would like to do a PhD – to give it a go.
I am going to tell a very different story. It is a typical Hong Kong story. My parents came to Hong Kong because of the civil war in mainland China. They belonged to the huge refugee/migrant population. My parents belonged to the working classes. I was born in the late 1960s in Hong Kong. I lived in a tiny flat on a public estate with my parents and siblings. I have three elder sisters and one elder brother. It was a very traditional Chinse working class family: my dad worked all the time, and my mum was a housewife. My elder sisters had to work once they had finished primary school to support the family economy, whilst my elder brother and I were able to attend secondary school and even university. My brother and I were beneficiaries of the patriarchal system. When I was young, I was a very committed Christian. I wanted to study something that would help me to serve God. I was thinking of studying social work to help people or philosophy to acquire a critical mind to defend the Bible. But I found the former too practical and the latter too abstract. So I ended up studying sociology.
We were each the first in our respective families to go to college and certainly we were the first ever to have written books in our families. But the fact that we chose to write about sexuality did not endear us to our parents! When I was in graduate school my parents, whose lives were upended by World War II, who had settled in New York in the early 1950s, had no real understanding of who I was or what I was doing. They thought I was wasting my time. Why wasn’t I making any real money? I didn’t tell them that I was studying the sociology of sexuality until my first book came out, Sex and Sensibility. I presented the book to my mother. It was dedicated to her, and to the memory of my father, who died the year I completed my PhD. She looked at the book, saw lesbian in the title and said: why would you ever want to write about something like this? Flabbergasted, she promptly put it on her shelf with the spine to the front so that nobody could see it.
When I came back to Hong Kong in late 1999 and started to do my research and get involved in queer activism, I was sometimes interviewed by the media about sex work, homosexuality and HIV/AIDS. My family knew that I was doing something related to sex, but they never commented on it. My dad passed away right after I started my PhD, and my mum is illiterate. I have three lovely elder sisters who are very working class and one very religious and homophobic elder brother who has a university education. When I published my first book in English, Chinese Male Homosexualities, in 2011, I did not tell them, as my sisters couldn’t read English and I knew my elder brother wouldn’t read the book because of his religion. It was only later when I published a Chinese-language book called Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong in 2014, which received wide media exposure, that my sister told me one day, “Oh, I saw you on the media on several occasions.... Congratulations. I also bought your book.” But when I asked her if she liked it or not, she just smiled and said she put it on the shelf but did not read it!
My first book was called Sexual Stigma (1975). It was based on my PhD, so it wasn’t quite so bluntly clear what it was about. Because it was called sexual stigma: an interactionist perspective, it was a little obscure, really. I gave my parents a copy of it. They got the book and said “oh thank you very much”. But I did notice that they put it on the bottom shelf. Okay, so there were not many books there; but it was tucked away at the bottom. Your parents like to show what you’ve done to their friends and so forth. But these books were not being shown. It was an embarrassment for them really. What made it possible for you, Arlene, to say: I would like to be in the university, and I’d like to work on lesbianism?
While I was a bit too young to have been directly involved in the gay liberation movement or even radical feminism, I certainly benefited from both. My mother, who had never attended college, encouraged me to get an education so that I would be able to support myself. She did not identify as a feminist, and was turned off by “women’s libbers,” yet she made sure that I did well in school and wanted me to have a sense of economic security she never had. I ended up getting a scholarship to go to a very elite, small private college, where I was a history major in the late 1970s. There I encountered feminist and left critical theories and found them enormously compelling. When I moved to San Francisco after graduating (with my boyfriend at the time!) I found an exciting intellectual scene around gay/lesbian history and theorizing, and an incredibly lively gay and lesbian cultural scene. It was around the time of the feminist sex debates, and I gravitated toward the (unfortunately named) “pro-sex” side, and all of the wild energy surrounding it – the magazine On Our Backs, butch-femme performance art, feminist punk music, and a lot more. The AIDS epidemic was raging, affecting the lives of so many gay men I knew, and creating greater solidarity among gay men and lesbians.
Growing up as a teen in the 1980s, I found Hong Kong society very homophobic and very repressive. Homosexuality was a crime during British colonial rule, and it wasn’t decriminalized until 1990. It was difficult for me to explore homosexuality in Hong Kong growing up. I learnt a bit about homosexuality from the media, but it was mainly Western gay culture, which was mostly coming from the high art/cultural circle brought to Hong Kong by overseas intellectuals. So my days at Essex really helped me a lot. When I first came back to Hong Kong in the early 1990s after I finished my master’s degree, I was very out. It was kind of what I call compulsive outness. I just wanted everyone to know that I was gay, as gay meant liberation, sophistication, modernity and empowerment. That’s why I decided to study Chinese male homosexuality for my PhD in the late 1990s. I was studying something about myself. I lived in London. I loved the city’s cosmopolitanism and benefited from its well-established queer culture, though I always complained about the bad weather, technological backwardness and inefficiencies of everyday life. But living in London also gave me a lot of thoughts about how to live as a sexual and racial subject under the white-dominated British culture. Still, I never thought I would have an academic career after I finished my PhD. At that time, I just had a burning desire to study Chinese gay men.
I got my research topic from the changes in the law going on at that time, and of course from the emerging gay movement. All those issues were really in the air in the 1960s and, of course, I was also struggling myself to be gay. This was my burning issue. But I mean, I had to make a very big jump, which was an unusual one. I had to take my personal life and put it into my academic work. Now that was not typical at all. Nobody said to me to do that or that you could even do it. And I look back upon that with slight amazement. I did that because, actually, I must have been very naïve. Because, potentially, it was ridiculously risky, you know. First of all, I’m not going to get a successful career if I chose a topic like that. I’m going to have all sorts of additional problems coming my way, because I’m going to be gay and out in 1966. So, it’s a puzzlement to me; how did I even think I could do it? But it got reinforced by people encouraging and accepting; I was just incredibly fortunate. I didn’t meet any opposition along the way, you know; nobody told me that you mustn’t do that; that would ruin your life. People were just interested. Given that time, this was very queer indeed!
Interesting, Ken, that you found somewhat more encouragement in England during the 1970s than I did in the US fifteen years later. When I decided to make sexuality and homosexuality the focus of my dissertation, a few well-meaning but cautious faculty members at Berkeley told me it was career suicide. “You should wait until you get tenure,” they said. And I thought, that’s ridiculous. We were in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the midst of a huge gay and lesbian subculture, and a devastating epidemic. And yet even in this important department of sociology, Berkeley, there was virtually no representation of any of this. I thought: well, if I don’t do it no one else is going to. It appealed to the rebel in me; if people tell me I can’t do things I’m going to do them anyway. Nancy Chodorow, the feminist psychoanalytic theorist, became my dissertation adviser. But I didn’t know whether I was going to be an academic or not. Who would hire an out lesbian sociologist? As it turned out, I did find a position—at first at the University of Essex, where I was so lucky to work alongside you, Ken, and Mary McIntosh. It changed my life.
Intellectual traditions and career trajectories
In those earlier days, I began thinking I’m going to become a gay researcher, and that’s all I’m going to be. And that’s a dangerous thing to do. Because you’re just you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. So at some early stage, I started realizing this. My early teaching was always in criminology and deviancy, and my early writings were on things like labelling theory, which only mentioned homosexuality at an angle. In one sense, I started off like my career teaching as a deviance criminologist theorist, part of the then National Deviancy Conference which flourished between 1968 and 1975; and my research was in labelling theory. My first major article was: “In defense of labelling theory,” published around 1976. But the point is that was getting terribly excited when I was reading books on symbolic interactionism. Because it just gave me a way of grasping the world, and the intricacies of the roots into symbolic interactionism. I remember reading Paul Rock’s The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. He took me on a major intellectual journey, and it took me into pragmatism, William James, and all the others. I just got terribly excited about this way of being and thinking about the world. It was a revelation; and it has profoundly stayed with me.
I think we owe a debt to interpretive and feminist traditions. As I, Ken and Dan Machoney (another student of Ken’s) wrote in the article “Queer(y)ing the Interview,” our research is different from “traditional homosexual research” where researchers obtain objective accounts of the nature of homosexuality through standardized interviews with the researched. Rather, we embed ourselves in our research. We talk about families, talk about the personal, talk about the erotic, and emphasize self-awareness, reflexivity and shared meanings and even come out in the research process. We are researching something that is as much a part of us as it is of the people we study.
Having a personal lens gave us insights into sexuality that others might not have had---it was a great strength. But at times it had its downsides, too. Especially during the early days of my career, I became known as a “lesbian sociologist.” It became, in Everett Hughes’ sense, my “master status,” for better or worse, because there were very few people researching and writing about gay and lesbian subjects in sociology at the time in the US. This has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it motivated me and gave me a sense of purpose. But it also held me back at points. Many mainstream social scientists disparage lesbians writing about lesbianism, or gay men writing about homosexuality, as “me search.” But really we were writing not only about ourselves but also about the groups that we were part of, and doing so as insiders and outsiders, and that made our work more incisive.
Right. I think we’re very lucky in starting out in a discipline like sociology, where there was already a very clear, well outlined history of people doing more reflective work. I mean, it wasn’t by any means the mainstream. But at least it did exist: you could read about it and find precedents. That was very important to me. I didn’t think I was studying myself at the time: I was studying in a tradition of reflexivity and participant observation, the inner method and all those sorts of things. And eventually these led me to narratives and stories. And so, I think, it delivered me a double whammy. On the one hand, I was coming out as gay to do gay research in a time where no gay research existed. And I was also choosing to come out as a new self. I wouldn’t have got anywhere at all but for the fact that “the theory of the self” of Cooley, James, Mead and Goffman provided a strong and quite long intellectual tradition: so you were not just making that up. That symbolic interactionism just made so much sense to me at that time. And without it I wouldn’t have had a position to argue from. So that was very important – the finding of a theoretical tradition. But the other bit - of finding the strength to do gay research at a time when no one else was -- for some reason I don’t understand, I didn’t experience it as a major problem. People were supportive and interested and sort of pushing me ahead. “Oh good. That’d be an interesting thing to do” they’d say. And no one was mentioning the pitfalls of doing it. I must not depict it too rosily – it was all very, very challenging. But it was the most extraordinary and exciting time of my life.
Ken, you benefited from being in the British educational system, at a time when there was somewhat more flexibility and sufficient resources to pursue different interests. When I came to Essex in 1993, I was really struck by the ways in which the department was very interdisciplinary. It had faculty who were trained in so many different fields—history, anthropology, political science-- whereas in the US, a top sociology department would be intellectually more homogeneous and there wouldn’t be quite as much flexibility to roam around different fields.
I have always had it in the back of my mind that American sociology perceives itself as being superior to most other forms of sociology, and that’s largely because it’s got this very strong scientific basis. It dabbles on the edge with more marginal issues. One of the blessings of my experience of Essex you know: there was a very wide range of people there. That’s how it was set up in 1962. And by and large, most of them were very amenable people too. And there was a kind of connecting informality if you like. So I was very fortunate again in arriving at Essex. I didn’t apply for the job first time when it was advertised first time round. And then the professor there, Stan Cohen, who had been my first tutor at Enfield, encouraged me to apply, because he said they had not appointed anyone the first time around. And lo and behold, I got it. Stan was the tutor, when I was an undergraduate, who gave me a plus for my essay on homosexuality. He was very kind, an anarchist and a genuinely laid back intellectual. And he became a role model. He was the opposite of pompous and it was he who encouraged me to do a PhD. And then when I got my PhD, he encouraged me to go to Essex, which was a very good move.
And yet you have been very influenced by American sociology, by the symbolic interactionist tradition especially. Spending time in the US on frequent trips has also offered you a lot of empirical material. Your books are filled with examples from the US. Your interests seem to have been shaped, in part, by American culture.
Yes, right. absolutely. Telling Sexual Stories was dominated by America. Actually, I more or less wrote the book there. I planned it over there and I remember walking on the beaches devising certain schema. For the middle part of my life, Santa Barbara was an informal second home.
Ken, you have had a few big careers. You have written about (homo)sexuality in the main as your lead career, but have also written a lot about symbolic interactionism and narratives as your little careers.
It’s very obvious now in my old age that I haven’t written just about gay life, but it is clearly one very strong strand in my work. I guess I have always hoped to become more than a gay scholar. I kept widening out. Take the example of gay, which led to life story, the stories of the sexually different, to symbolic interactionism and ultimately to narrative power. I think one of the things about my specialisms though is that they actually won’t stay fixed; I didn’t just do life stories for the sake of life stories per se, it led to power and narrative research - there wasn’t much of an option really, I had to understand what that was all about. And when I was doing the early gay work, it made me concerned with a wider interactionist and constructionist view of all things sexual – and a sociology of sex. And that was very wide-ranging, dipping into almost everything to discover maybe the underlying forms of human sexual suffering. That’s where Telling Sexual Stories came from! It was all part of building up a thinking about sexualities and building a more formal social theory about sexualities. And so, they hang together.
I want to bring up a different question. Many of us academics from the working and lower-middle classes suffer from “impostor syndrome.” Even though we’ve managed to master the discourse and perform successfully, we never quite feel like we’re doing it right. We experience what sociologists call “role distance.” Because we enter university cultures very intentionally, and learn to play by its rules, we may be more self-aware of the ways we are socialized into academia. We learn to talk the talk, and to move away from our families of origin. We’re consequently more able to see through some of the bullshit. Do you think that’s the case?
I never quite did it right; and I guess I was not too worried about that. I never expected to be “a proper academic”. I never had the right background. And there’s another little bit that’s relevant to capture here. From what we’ve all said there is also the alienation of academic life, a vague feeling that the three of us all experienced. I’m very thankful that nearly all my academic life was mainly a very happy one. You know I had lovely colleagues; I had no confrontational issue of being an out gay. I taught what I wanted. So I’m not complaining. But retrospectively I can now see, there’s an underlying thing – that I was never really quite a proper academic. Now I’m retired it’s very clear. I love doing intellectual things, but I hate the pomposity, the pretentiousness, the rigidity, the falsity even of some academia; the way people, you know, turn something mundane into something really big and fancy. I’ve always felt alienated from academics who do that. So there’s a whole world of academics out there that I just don’t feel a part of … I never felt a struggle for competition. I joined Essex in 1975; I became a senior lecturer around the late 80s; became head of department and then I became a professor; it was just the natural drift of things.
Permit me to play the devil’s advocate, Ken, and say that you’re also highly privileged; you’re a white man. And you came of age at the right time, there was enough money in the educational system enable you to thrive; today you are benefiting from a very good retirement scheme. Perhaps you didn’t have to think about the practical questions quite as much as a lot of other people, especially younger people pursuing such careers today.
You are right. I’m bound to say though that right now, if I was starting out, I wouldn’t stand a chance. The system is so different. No, I simply probably wouldn’t have gone into academia. I would now see that it is a very, very competitive business. And I would say, do I really want to go into that sort of world? I knew then that I didn’t want to go into the business world. The academic world didn’t look like that; but now it does. I did start from a less privileged class background, and I also came out as queer at quite a young age. So those two things in a sense would be strikes against me. But, apart from that, I was in a highly privileged system, and I’ve been very fortunate. But that said, I rarely ever went for the funding games or the promotional games that you’re supposed to play.
The neoliberal university
I got a teaching job at a university in Hong Kong in early 2000. And then the whole higher education system in Hong Kong became very competitive under neoliberalism. Tenure is a cruel system that gives you six years to show excellence in all aspects such as teaching, research, administration and community engagement (or knowledge exchange). The result is either “up” (tenured and promoted to associate professor) or “go” (leave after a year). Research is usually measured and quantified by how many papers you publish, where you publish (ideally in so-called high “impact factor” journals), how much research grant money you get and so forth.
When I studied at Berkeley for my Ph.D. no one ever talked about impact factors, about which journals you must publish in, and I’ve been fortunate to have taught in departments that don’t really demand adherence to such rules. I’ve distanced myself from the whole thing. And not just impact factors but also h-factors, which gauge how many times your work is cited by others. And now I see people declaring their h-factors in job application letters and such. Fortunately, though, I’ve never really had to pay attention to metrics.
At Essex, Ken never told me about impact factors! I just wrote articles and submitted them to journals I thought were good journals. When I came back to Hong Kong, oh my god, it was a totally different ball game. There was a list of journals, all ranked in terms of their impact factor. You had to go for the list; otherwise, you would not be able to get tenure. I then found out that Sexualities had no impact factor because Ken did not join the metric system.
I saw this in relation to the journal (Sexualities). I found the journal a very interesting and exciting thing to put together. But then, soon after I started it in 1995-6, I realized it was also slowly being taken over by new management systems, often in the guise of computerization. The whole system of journals was becoming a problem. I think is started growing slowly at the start; this was also a time when we did most things by hand – papers were sent in physically and not digitally. We used filing cabinets in those days! Then around 2010 digital tools became available and an option. When I left the journal, it was still getting mainly papers that were still submitted on paper and which we filed physically. The metrics system came just a little later. I left in 2013, and luckily, I just missed all the emerging controversies. British sociology is moving closer to the American model. The common trend is to do good science which means quantitative work. So I have noticed there’s much more in that direction now my own department, which has appointed many more quantitative people than it ever did in the past.
Together with a push toward quantitative methods, and the quantification of research productivity, we’ve seen the exponential growth of sexuality as a field of research, and the proliferation of different subfields within sexuality studies. When I was starting out, there was just not a lot of work out there. It was therefore easy to master the field pretty quickly. That’s certainly not the case today. The sexualities section of the American Sociological Association is filled with younger sociologists who are turning out lots of research, much of it very good. It’s now impossible for any one person to keep up with new work in the field.
It is really difficult, as you said, to keep up with new work in the field. There are so many new journals on lesbian and gay studies, for example, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Journal of LGBT Youth, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services and Journal of GLBT Family Studies. The proliferation of subfields within sexuality studies also encourages us, especially younger scholars, to position ourselves more uniquely in the field. You have to show and prove that you are unique. Otherwise, you’ll very easily be replaced by others. This “sexual” division of labour and competition is very common in the job market. And positioning is also about defining territory. Most universities apparently encourage interdisciplinarity, but academic territoriality seems to be the reality.
Speaking of territoriality, humanities scholars now dominate the field of queer theory, which is often considered quite separate from the rich sociological tradition of sexuality studies. Where does that leave those of us who have been doing sexuality studies for a very long time within the social sciences?
Queer theory and sociology
Arlene and Ken, you wrote that article called “I Can’t Even Think Straight.” For me, that article was really the first attempt to link sociology with queer theory. Yes, queer theory is something coming from the humanities, especially literature and philosophy. That’s why I found that article fascinating. I like it and use it a lot because, for me, it was a very important attempt to bridge the social sciences and humanities in general but, more specifically, sociology and queer theory.
There was a British Sociological Association annual meeting on sexuality in 1994. And there were various papers about queer theory, and one, two of them were really very critical of queer theory. And we thought it just might be nice to get some thoughts together. Arlene and I had only recently met. Don’t forget we’d only known each other for a few months. Also, we thought that it might be nice to try and write something together and see if we could make sense of it together. Travis, I guess you’ve never known anything other than queer theory. I mean you are the generation where queer theory pre-existed. Whereas for those in earlier generations, like mine, queer theory didn’t exist at all. I was writing many years before that.
That article grew out of conversations that Ken and I had walking along the river in Wivenhoe. I would say queer theory emerged in the early 90s. And I had just received my PhD by then. I knew the writing of people like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, and of course Foucault, but nobody called it queer theory until the early 90s. I think I was more favorably disposed toward it then you were initially. I hadn’t been working in the field for years. I probably wasn’t as identified with sociology as a tradition as you were. As I recall we began with a somewhat positive understanding of what was going on in the humanities, and even a sense of jealousy. We tried to ask, why is it that queer theory has swept the humanities while the social sciences seemed to be somewhat more resistant to placing understandings of sexuality and heteronormativity at the center? Why were the social sciences not as reflexive as the humanities about these things?
My sense at the time, and now as well, is that positivism is more dominant in US sociology and disciplinary boundaries are somewhat more rigid. Perhaps because of this, the kinds of radical deviancy and social constructionist work that you and others pioneered in the UK, Ken, were not as widely understood and appreciated in the States. When I came to England in the early 90s. I found it more hospitable to critical, interpretive work—because of your presence, Mary McIntosh’s, and others. So, part of what we’re talking about are how intellectual cultures are also socially and culturally situated.
I was introduced to queer theory in America, at Santa Barbara in the early 90s. There was a reading group which I went to. And I found I couldn’t easily read some of it; quite honestly, I found it very difficult. Here was a new form of jargon for me. And people were talking about this as queer theory. That was very specifically in 1992. But I’d come across it I suppose a year or two before that, with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet earlier. I was getting a sense that this was something happening in the humanities; and I’d never been involved with this before. I’d been involved largely in a very small world of sociologists, and perhaps historians and a few anthropologists, but it seemed literature hadn’t had much to say till then. But things were changing. In the UK, Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore at Sussex had already started an MA in Sexual Dissidence in the 1980s which was much more about literature. So, my sense of queer was that it came from a very different academic field overwhelmingly run by literary folks and philosophers and it had very different feel, and little of sociology in it. It seemed hostile to empirical work was the feeling I had. But it was textual and imaginative, it had flair, and you sit around and read novels and watch films, and give them a re-interpretation, or whatever. I thought it was very interesting as a way of approaching it. And there was also another strand that was clearly developing a politics that was much more in your face. It was absolutely transgressive, protest, acting up - which was queer, and which was not academic at all and completely outside academic institutions. And that was, I suppose, embodied by ACT UP (the activist group the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the late 1980s. So, it’s in the period roughly from the late 1980s to the early and mid-1990s that I became aware of a new excitement all over again. Now we were queer; suddenly it was just like a match being lit and everybody was going queer.
I did my PhD in the late 1990s. I learnt about sexual stigma and the social construction of homosexuality, but it was also the heyday of queer theory. It was so trendy, so fashionable, everyone was talking about it. And so I just embraced it in some way. But for me, queer means two things. The first thing is more or less like a sexual identity marker, that is, it is an umbrella term to refer to LGBT and other non-normative genders and sexualities. So, in that sense, I have never really identified myself as queer, as the younger generation might do, because they might talk about non-binary gender and sexuality and about their sexuality being very fluid and flexible. I identify myself as gay, not queer, as I like men and it’s rather fixed. I’m very gay in this sense. But for me, queer also has a second meaning. Queer actually means non-conformity, questioning, challenging and transgression. So I use queer as a verb (to queer), an adjective (queer feeling), an attitude or an enduring practice of unsettling or challenging normativity, e.g., the hetero-homo binary, and a continual effort to embrace the potentiality of gender, sexuality, bodies, desires and affects. It’s like a feminist approach. I mean, not every woman is a feminist, but you can still talk about women from a feminist point of view. So, for me, queer is like that. Not everyone is queer, but we can still use queer theory to talk about LGBT+. It is like a different way of seeing.
And I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that. In part it was a new generation denying an earlier generation’s negative experience of “queer” and also denying the foundational work on gay and lesbian studies that had already been done. I had some doubts. I’m very happy with queer theory, when I’m reading it, you know is full of wonderful ideas. But I have rarely thought that it was quite as radical as others presumed to be. A lot of it was good humanities and imaginative flights, fantasy and critique, but ungrounded in the empirical social world. It is rather intrigued by esoteric films or novels, which it usually takes as its starting point. It was curiously both critical of, but very ignorant of, the work and earlier grounding of the social sciences. We were talking about pluralism and about constructionism by the early 1970s. It was kind of well-established when queer arrived twenty years later. So my bafflement was more: I’d heard all this before. It’s just a slightly different language. And now, the new problem was reading and performing texts, rather than looking for a truth in the real empirical world, which is what sociology was doing. Today it looks like they have arrived in a more or less brand new field with a very short history, whereas most disciplines have very long histories. And so, maybe they think it’s like most other disciplines you know it has a long history. That said for many, it seems to start with queer theory – which is nonsense.
I just want to ask one bigger question: it’s about the resistance to queer theory from social sciences in general and sociology in particular. Do you think it is because queer theory is basically post-structuralism’s application to gender and sexuality? Mainstream sociology is really against the whole post-structuralist idea, so rejecting queer theory is actually part of the whole package of rejecting post-structuralism.
I think it’s really complicated. A really big book back then when I started out was Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, now very largely forgotten. That’s 1966. That’s one of the books that changed my life, and the whole book is about how all of reality is socially constructed; it draws from Marxism, phenomenology, and from Durkheim and tries to integrate them. It’s got lots of flaws like any book; but it really was the book that shaped a view of thinking of the world as being historically constructed yet also internalized into people’s lives through selves, language, and identities; as well as how they went about creating and changing the world. So it was a way of thinking about the world which was deeply sociological. It linked to ideological analysis and the sociology of knowledge of Mannheim and Schutz. And that book was a real hit when it came out. But then it was then discovered that Peter Berger was a Catholic, a bloody conservative and a defender of capitalism! So you had to be very careful now with using this book! I’m being a bit jokey about it; but it was an important book that then got sidelined. But there was a whole sociology of knowledge before that, which was all about the construction of knowledge, socially. So it was a big idea of sociology really that the world around us. I used it in my PhD and the book Sexual Stigma that came from it. And it’s a view that is quite widely held by people now. It’s infused the culture and history. It’s everywhere, and literature seem to discover it through deconstructionism – which is perhaps the negative version of constructionism! By the 1990s, it was truly out of fashion in sociology!
In addition to being somewhat unfairly left out of the genealogy of queer studies, my sense is that your work and Mary McIntosh’s were somewhat ghettoized within sociology, and mainly read, at least in the US, by those interested in the sociology of homosexuality.
Yes, you’re right. But all disciplines are made up of little ghettos of specialists. It’s interesting when I first started going to the States in the mid-1970s. I went to my first annual American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in New York. It was a huge overwhelming meeting in a Hilton, and I realized that it was so ghettoized. This was 1976. And I found my way to two of these ghettoes — one for the symbolic interactionists, and one for the gay caucus. I went to the gay social caucus, and I was bowled over to find out that I was with some 20 or so other sociologists interested in sociology and gay stuff. That was quite an amazing thing to see. I went again in 1982 and there were about 30 people at the gay session. It was a very well-organized series of papers on aspects of the construction and identity of gay life. I met some new lifetime friends there. You couldn’t have been there in 1982, Arlene. But I could assume that everybody in that room was gay. And afterwards we all went for a coffee. It was another very exciting moment. A new sociological ghetto in the making! Of sociologists!
By 1993, when we wrote our article, Ken, queer theory had managed to permeate the humanities more broadly than social constructionist studies of sexuality had done in the social sciences. The humanities were able to take on this critique in a much more universalizing way. Perhaps there were many more gay and lesbian people in the humanities. Many of them were probably closeted and then came out and started to do work that was centrally about sexuality and gender. Foucault made studying sexuality and gender so much more sweeping and universal and important, by placing sexuality at the center of an understanding of modernity. And his influence was most profound in the humanities. Is that your sense of things?
Actually, though, Foucault was a big name in the UK in the 1970s; Jeffrey Weeks and I organized a conference on Foucault, history and sexuality at Essex in the sociology department in 1977. My own paper compared Gagnon and Simon with Foucault I recall!
We were debating whether it was adding anything to constructionism or not. And in general, we did think he was bringing a different theory. I mean, Foucault is not straightforward constructionism as we knew it before, and many sociologists did not like this turn. But I read Foucault as an undergraduate, in my degree. I recall reading Madness and Civilization. This would have been about 1966. So Foucault had penetrated sociology in England by the mid-60s. Yet I remember John Gagnon coming to England in the mid-1980s having just read Foucault, and saying he was being talked about in America. Well, that was quite a while after we discovered Foucault-maybe 10 years after we discovered him.
You were ahead of your time, Ken. And that’s why I’m thinking about why social sciences are so resistant to all these new ideas. I was actually thinking about Judith Stacey (and Barrie Thorne), who wrote a really influential article about the missing gender revolution in sociology in the 1980s. And then 10 years later, you and Arlene wrote that article talking about the missing sexual revolution in sociology. And another 10 years later, Bhambra talked about the missing colonial revolution in sociology. So, it seems to me that gender, sexuality and race are three main categories that are not taken seriously by social scientists, as the whole discipline is still heavily dominated by white, middle-class, heterosexual men.
Good god, if you were in any social department that didn’t talk about sex, gender, and ethnicity, you would surely wonder where you were! I mean they all have now become a core concern, surely? But these things do take a little bit of time to permeate the mainstream. Colonialism is the same: it was being discussed in what was then called “development studies”. But it was a sideline. There again sociology regularly comes in various fashions and waves of interest.
It’s important to remember that there was life before queer theory. And there was queer before queer theory. I grew up as a little queer boy in the 1950s and the 1960s. And that meant in the playground at school, if you were called a queer you were in real trouble. It was a heavily loaded negative pejorative term; gay became a more positive word. I’m talking about 1970. And before that, I was involved with the Homosexual Law Reform (HLRS) where the best word was homosexual. So, as is well known, the world and the word keep changing. The one word we would never, ever use would be queer. But I can see how another generation would come along and then use queer deliberately and provocatively in your face, to say we’re queer and we’re proud. And we’re here. But that’s not what we did, 20 years earlier. The battle for homosexual law reform, which I think was a mighty important earlier battle, was fought by brave people who were largely closeted. And who could hardly even utter the word homosexual. Queer was largely unacceptable, of course, because it was such a negative term. And when I first saw the key pathbreaking British film “Victim” in 1962 or 63, the word homosexual wasn’t even used, you know: it was only present in its silence. And so when I started doing research, I think I just used gay, and it has stuck with it all my life in one way or the other. I mean I see myself as a gay man. I don’t see myself as queer.
Ken, I thought you were “post-gay”!
That was in the late 1980s! And it’s one of the silliest things I ever said. This was at a conference in the Netherlands where I announced this to a whole bunch of European students at the first lesbian and gay conferences for European students in Utrecht and, you know I had just been reading postmodern stuff, and, to some degree, I did feel like I was becoming post gay. But over time, as we know, identity can shift and now in my mid-70s, I guess I would now say I’m an old gay man!
I never had that baggage of using the word queer. I have gained insights from queer theorists and build on their work. However, based on the literary tradition, these scholars use the textual analysis of literary works and films as the main method of investigation. I think my work in queer studies is thus a strategic intervention using traditional sociological methods (e.g., ethnography, in-depth interviews) to provide insight into the lived experiences, habitus and practices of queer people – that is, insights that sociology can best offer. Working in the other direction, my aim is to engage sociology with queer theory by sharing concepts (e.g., queer commons, cruel optimism, homonationalism) and methods (e.g., case studies, life stories) between the humanities and the social sciences. I am sure there are other queer sociologists who work in this direction. I think queer theory and queer studies are not shrinking but expanding, and that is why it’s necessary to have this kind of continual dialogue between sociology and queer theory and queer studies.
Digital life, cosmopolitanism, and queer again
Media is playing a much larger role in the making of sexualities today than ever before, especially social media, through which information and knowledge about sexuality circulates, and through which we participate in the “attention economy.” We are encouraged to distinguish ourselves from others via branding, become “influencers,” and so forth. The digital world is transforming how we talk about and think about and experience sexualities.
Yeah, it has become pervasive, ubiquitous, deep. Of course, the digital has been around for four generations at least – I bought my first computer around 1983. But I would probably date its pervasiveness from the growth of social media in the early 2000s, 15–20 years ago. I mean Facebook arrived only around 2005.
So we’re only talking about 15 years ago. We’re also talking, rather strikingly, about a new generation, Gen Z, who are very young, who have never really known anything other than the digital world. And so, in the Western world at any rate, they’re growing up with their gender and sexuality almost 100% embedded and shaped within this digital world, and all its aspects. What is striking is that everybody now talks about sexuality and does it through the media, in the media, on the media, with the media, about the media. It doesn’t stop. That’s the way of doing things now. It’s as if our sexualities and genders don’t exist outside of the media. It is indeed the deep mediatization of sex and gender. I became aware of my sexuality in the 1950s through various “heartthrobs” and pop stars. This was at the start of what was then called the second sexual revolution – and the media was starting to play a growing role in our sexualities and genders. Through film, tv, pop music. But there is a new third sexual revolution. And in this third sexual revolution social and digital media has just transformed sexuality out of all recognition. That made me go back to look at my book Telling Sexual Stories, which was published in 1995, written really between 1980 and 1993 based on research started in 1976. And you know, I was quite shocked. I’m not fully in the digital world. So here I am writing a book that hardly discusses the digital world at all because it was only just starting. I am surprised to find that because I have made so much of it since then.
The other major trend the growing neoliberalisation of national economies. Many of the “good jobs” have disappeared. People are having to piece together lots of smaller jobs in the gig economy (including the contingent labor of adjunct faculty). Sex work is one of those gig economy jobs and people who are doing sex work online may do lots of other things as well for income. A graduate student of mine is interested in the digitization of sex work. She is interviewing a woman who is an “influencer” on various social media platforms. She sells sex on some of those platforms, including Only Fans. This young woman is so savvy about how she presents herself on different platforms. She does certain things on some platforms that she wouldn’t do on others. Travis, you’ve probably thought about this.
Yeah, cybersex and digital sex have become dominant, especially during COVID-19, which has restricted travel and physical contact. A lot of people are involved in sex work – full-time, part-time, freelance or as a one-off – and digital media helps sex workers in many ways: from advertising to negotiation to service provision to money transactions. In China and elsewhere, digital sex is good business; you can earn a lot of money by doing it. By using live streaming, they just broadcast what they are doing, like cooking, sitting on the sofa or just talking in front of the camera. They treat themselves as stars or celebrities, or others treat them as stars or celebrities. They receive “likes” and even “red packets” (money), and they will show more in a private room if you pay more. They don’t usually identify themselves as sex workers in the traditional sense. This is now a new topic in sexuality studies. I stopped researching sex work a few years ago, but as far as I know, and I think in general, the young generation lives in an era of precarity. Sex work has always been part of the informal gig economy, as it is an alternative and appealing option for earning quick money, especially for young people. Sex work is just one example of a gig economy job. Precarity is the norm for the young generation. They never think about something that could last for a long time because that is not their reality.
There are two other things to flow from this. I will put the word rampant in front of it, a rampant individualism, really has come with neoliberalism that everybody puts themselves first. And so, yes, they have lost stable work and they have been increasingly put in difficult, troubled, precarious situations. But at the same time, one way ahead is to establish yourself, your individual self, your individual being. And that’s partly where I think the digital world comes into its own: you have to make it in the digital world, more than anywhere else. The real world doesn’t reward you in the way that the digital world will possibly reward you. And it’s intensely, rampantly individualistic. For most, there’s seems hardly any whiff of collective action about it. It’s the more me, me, me, me, story that started in the 1950s and now reigns supreme. For many, my story is not a collective, shared, mutual tale. The strong exception to that though is the environmental movement.
I think what’s interesting is this kind of discrepancy between the ideal and the reality. Contemporary societies, especially neoliberal societies across the globe, keep talking about self-enterprise, about achievement, about performance. I think this is particularly relevant in Asian societies, which emphasize performance and achievement so much. But it is this kind of ideal that cannot be reached or achieved by the young generation. It’s like a set up. Society sets the ideal for them in a way that they can never achieve. Society tries to produce an overachieving, performing and enterprising subject, but, at the end of the day, what it produces is just a subject of fatigue. This is what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” It’s about a good life that is fraying. It is optimistic because it promises happiness (e.g., an intimate relationship, a stable job), which most people seek, but it is cruel precisely because we believe and continue to believe that it is attainable when actually it is not. This is part of what I discuss in my new book (Sexuality and the Rise of China) when I talk about the love lives of young gay men in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. They all view monogamy as a major component of a good adult life, but find it difficult in practice. In response, some venture out – together or separately, openly or in secret, and with explicit or implicit rules – to form different kinds of relationships. Some remain single. And the socioeconomic and political circumstances of each society complicate the men’s love stories.
Right. This is the only way to validate your existence.
I found similar patterns in the interviews I did with younger transgender men for my book Unbound, around 2015. For some of them, modifying their bodies to conform to gender binaries became a way of competing more effectively in the job market. Many of them felt themselves to be in between genders, but depending upon what kind of work they did, they could not publicly identify themselves as such. Their public personas were shaped in large part by the requirement to abide by binary gender norms, but when questioned they acknowledged the complexity of gender.
But there is a long history of this. It hasn’t just exploded now. I mean, I had a PhD student in the 1970s and early 1980s. And one of the things in his thesis he was writing about was the transsexual community as it was then called. And he discovered that there were celebrities being made almost every year since the 1950s. And it started with people like Christine Jorgensen then political leaders like Virginia Prince. The media seems to lap it up. So these debates and trans celebrities aren’t completely new. There were communities and cultures around trans then. And surgery was around. This student studied Charing Cross Hospital, which was famed for it. So all these things had a life in the 70s. It’s a bit like the gay community: there was a long history of a community before the 1970s, but then enough people come out simultaneously to start making it visible.
Capitalist media culture is on a relentless search for the new and the novel – there is a hunger for new kinds of stars. LGBTQ movements have legitimated certain kinds of gender nonconformity and trans people are taking it to the next level. So it’s partially a product of capitalism and a testament to the success of social movements. The rise of digital communications has also furthered globalization. Ken, you’ve said that your work on cosmopolitan sexualities was a way to come to terms with this growing diversity and globalization. You were struck by the ways your international students couldn’t really translate gay and lesbian theory into their own contexts. This experience encouraged you to think differently about Euro-Western models of sexuality.
Yes, that book Cosmopolitan Sexualities was the product of thinking since Dennis Altman wrote his article and global book back in 1999 or 2000, which helped put global sexualities on the agenda. In a way, we had been there before because there had been quite a lot of comparative sociology - I think of David Greenberg’s work, The Construction of Homosexuality way back in 1981 which attempted to compare different cultures while respecting the differences of each culture, suggesting ways they different differentially organized same-sex experience. We knew a little, way back in the early 1980s, about the varieties of homosexuality in different cultures and arguments about different historical moments. I guess this is the core of the constructionist argument.
I suppose this was also the time when there was this drift towards convergence models that suggested that a “coming out gay liberation” of the west was likely to also provide a vision for the liberation of the rest of the world! To some degree, this was Dennis Altman’s argument in “Global Gaze”. At the same time, in the 90s, there was already an explosion of world students and movement politics that applied western ideas of gay to new cultures around the world. In a way that was a new idea then. And it was a critical moment where we thought “coming out” might perhaps be universally significant. But that model which worked at that time for the UK and US could never really work with for the whole world. But there again when you look closely you can see elements of it at work. I mean, Travis could see, I think, elements at work in re-shaping Hong Kong. And you could see it in a few cultures where there was a version of coming out going on in some form. But there was also already an autonomous culture there, which would allow for, say, its own version of all this coming out into many different cultures. It’s very difficult to think of it even working in countries like Russia - one of the widest and diverse cultures in the world. But an authoritarian one as well. And Travis’s argument might be that in China, “coming out” doesn’t fit at all because it was a family-based thing rather than an individual-based thing.
So we rightly got into a big set of complexities, about what was going on in the world and whether the western model was just being super imposed on the rest of the world. The whole problem of colonization and decolonization raises its ugly head. But all that was a quarter of a century ago now; and we’ve moved on in many different ways.
Well, I think, in general, as you have just described, when Western studies of sexuality as a whole, and the study of homosexuality in particular, loom large, this Western model becomes a very dominant model or explanation for all cultures, especially non-Western cultures. Dennis Altman’s work is a very good example. He wrote Global Sex in 2000, but actually published an article in GLQ in 1997 called “Global Gay Identity.” In the article, he talks about an emerging global form of gay identity across the globe, but implicitly assumes that it came from the West and tends to suggest that the West is the origin or universe of modern homosexuality. That’s why he has been heavily criticized by so many scholars. This idea of the whole notion of gayness coming from the West is what Fran Martin and other colleagues in AsiaPacifiQueer call “global homogenization” in the way that the Western model has become dominant. In Asia, when we apply Western concepts and ideas to a non-Western context, we have to be more mindful of what we can add or to what extent we can actually apply Western models and theories to explain experiences in a very, very different context. Queer Asian Studies is very sensitive to this process and to how Asian identities and cultures are represented.
I agree. But what I do find a little peculiar is the way many cultures now adopt the languages of queer. Ironically, we now are seeing the colonization of other cultures by the western idea of queer, which seems to me to be the same problem all over again. And the queer idea is sticking! For example, in some Asian cultures like Taiwan, Queer Studies and the debates it raises has become very, very popular. I think that is partly because they have become excited by American ideas. While they are very critical of colonization generally, they sometimes don’t see that applying Western queer ideas to their own culture could be a problem – they are applying the ideas of elite North American literary departments, ideas that emerged in the late 1980s. That said, it does mean we have to analyze it all very widely: even in colonized ideas there can be much of value.
The future
We’re living in a very polarized time. People are staying within their tribes more than in the past. It is a very angry moment. We’re obviously not yet in a post identity politics world, even in academia. The early pushback I encountered in academia for doing “me-search” and writing about lesbianism has morphed into something very different today. Today if you stray out of your lane of expertise, or your identity grouping—such as cisgender people writing about trans, as I did recently-- one is vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks for “appropriating” experiences that are not yours.
Well, it’s exactly what people said about Gagnon and Simon’s writings: they weren’t gay, so who are they to write about it? I think such arguments are worrying: they deny the significance of art, drama, writing that has at its heart an empathy for others, which makes sense of the world of different people… I recall the very first GLF meetings I went to in the 1970s. And I have told this story many times. Each week one rival group got up and attacked the rest of the people. So one week, the women walk out and another week we had the trans people furious with everybody. I mean we even had risky groups like the pedophiles being angry with everybody. And we had the Marxists another week and the countercultural people and anarchists another. And so it went on. They were all making the claim for their lives over all the others. And in a sense, you can see the seeds of all later gay politics in these events. And is this is not unique to gay, lesbian and queer life: it’s across the board in politics you know. There’s a spectrum of more left groups or more right groups always squabbling and hating each other. The “politics of small differences” worries me. I mean the real world brings big enemies and they’re in the world, but people often don’t make them the key target. Instead, they focus on groups adjacent to them and create ridiculous squabbles out of small differences. It’s always those groups that are squabbling with each other. There are so many terrible groups in the world doing terrible things. And yet we waste our time squabbling with each other, and that’s a sadness really, isn’t it?
There is a sense that if we can’t change the people who are really holding the reins of power let’s attack people who are closer to us. We’re dealing with the rise of authoritarianism in the US. There is very little capacity to talk with people who don’t share your political views. We haven’t seen the erosion of democratic norms that you’re seeing in Hong Kong and in other parts of the world, but we seem to be moving in that direction. And yet I do think we have to acknowledge the progress that we have made. As Jeffrey Weeks put it, we need to appreciate the “world we have won” through the actions of social movements. Feminism and gay liberation made it absolutely possible for so many of us to live relatively free of stigma, and to incorporate our sexualities into our work. If we don’t acknowledge that progress, we can’t imagine a better world.
Yes, we’ve gone from “identity politics” to “politics of differences” or “politics of small differences.” But how to find a basis for solidarity and making rights claims to the wider society while acknowledging and appreciating the differences among us? How can one have faith that we are moving towards a better future despite all the bad things that are happening? Ken, do you have anything to say about your later work on cosmopolitanism?
It is not easy. I often can’t do it. But I have to make myself believe this or I am lost - the opposite is so awful. The world is an awful place in so many ways. And it’s not really getting any better. As we speak, a new war has been unleashed in Europe. But you’ve got to have some belief (faith, if you like) in making the world a better place for everybody. Those who proclaim that there’s no future, I find that very, very sad and depressing. Lives are always grounded in specific historical moments. Any life is built out of specific generational conditions – this means at least possible five major different groupings, from grandparents to future grandchildren. All will necessarily bring different world views that jostle with each other over time – and bring tensions about how to move ahead to make better worlds for future generations.
Well, the good news is that we now can see many pathways to progress. This has happened, we now know it, it’s on the agenda, it’s quite clear. Cosmopolitanism, for example, is one of the arguments that wants to look across the world and to find ways of talking across very different cultures and very different groups. Maybe it can find some level of shared values across groups: is it possible to hold some level of common ground? But you know, we are split into many, many different tribes around many different issues. We’re at war with each other. And so this is one of the issues. We’ve got to confront it, and now start dealing with it. Each generation must struggle with this. The very young generation right now is working for environmental change, working against racism, resisting inequalities, fighting homophobia and so forth. They are a new generation that knows all these things; they see them in front of their eyes. If they open their eyes, that is. And so maybe they will be the generation that fights this. Someone needs to, because you know, if you go back 70 or 80 years you would not believe the way in which the world has changed in terms of say, gay life. It’s transformed out of all recognition because certain groups got together and changed it. But it’s been a long, and bloody struggle.
From my vantage point in Hong Kong, it is not easy to talk about progress. In some way, it’s like what Marx said: we make our own history, but we do not make it as we please because we are living under circumstances and constraints that already exist. If you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have been much more optimistic about the future. However, Hong Kong society continues to have radically opposing political views. If you choose to stay, you have to face that reality and find your own way to live under various difficult obstacles, constraints and challenges. A lot of people have left Hong Kong. I respect them, but I want to stay here, as there are still a lot of things I would like to do. In particular, there are many interesting topics to research in LGBT+ communities. I still want to talk about sexuality and its relation to socioeconomic, political and historical circumstances, and I recognise that my work may need to be framed in more sensitive ways given the increasing control and censorship of civil society in mainland China, and by extension in Hong Kong. However, I really love Hong Kong and, to be honest, don’t really want to leave.
Well, and it’s happening in England too. I mean, there are many, many issues of erosion of democratic norms going on over here. It seems to be happening in a lot of countries. There has been a sharp regression, a breakdown of democratic norms and values – and a global rise of authoritarianism, populism and the right-wing state. The drift towards authoritarianism is very, very clear. And very threatening. Over the past five or six years, more people are becoming aware of it. And there is usually no room at all for lesbian, gay or queer issues in these non-democratic politics. The issue of gay, lesbian, queer and trans lives is just one tiny bit of the whole debate. We have gained some space within a democratic system. But even that may soon be lost. Internal squabbles over language hardly matter when we are facing a large anti-democratic thrust to eliminate us all!
I was actually very fortunate in that 1960s period to be full of hope and possibility in a way that the world we now live in has become diminished. But it’s nice to see there is a new generation that is trying to resurrect some hope, change and activism. In my own life I have experienced a deep change. I was born in 1946 and the first 20 years was shrouded in negativism. I came out around 1966 and I’ve lived most of my life since then as an out gay man. I’ve also not really worried about being gay very much. I know intellectually I worried about it but I’m in it, living it. But it’s my white and male privilege to be able to say that; because I belonged to a time and a place in a small group of people who were able to do it. Most people still can’t. There are still so many battles to be fought.
As you get a lot older, you need to put academic work in the long picture of time, in a context of generational change. When I think back to when I was young in the 1960s, my god, did we mistreat the elderly! In our day we set up the National Deviancy Conference and established the New Criminology. We were the young radical Turks who were going to change the world. Stuff the old criminologists at the top. They didn’t want us to do this, you know, and they were a bit upset by us going on like that. And I suspect that’s how academic work works. You know, a new generation comes along, and the older generation quietly writes their final books as their time runs out. And their clock stops ticking. Now I’m 75 and I have been thinking about this a bit lately. You know, well, if you if you spend 50 years of your life writing little bits from time to time, it is nice to think that some people, somewhere, find it interesting!
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Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.