Ethnographic spectres: Representing the recent past of sexual liberation

Giving an account of the past

In late 2011 I had a dream about a party held to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Triangle Press, the group that published TBP and continues to publish Xtra!. I had been commissioned to write a feature article on TBP for the commemorative issue of Xtra! to mark the anniversary, but I missed the party. The truth of the matter is that no one invited me – or perhaps someone forgot to send the invitation. ² Whatever the case, I did not attend the event.

The dream takes me back to a Thursday night. I arrive at the new offices of Xtra! on Carlton Street in Toronto. I take the elevator up to the 16th floor where the festivities are already under way. The space is dimly lit and crowded. Gay diva anthems play just loud enough to allow conversations to flow underneath. Punch bowls sit on wide round tables covered with white cloths. Men and women are milling about, mingling and catching up. I grab a drink from the bar.

It’s 2011, but at times it could be 1985, depending on how the light falls. Dinosaurs and mammals alike have come to the party. ³ Most of the people I interviewed in the course of my fieldwork have shown up. Carl, David and Vincent are standing together. They're happy to see me. We chat a bit about the commemorative issue of Xtra!.

As the night rolls on our conversation shifts somewhat. I start questioning people about specific articles from TBP and whether they still hold the same views. Everyone feels that the legal defence of the paper in connection with ‘Men Loving Boys Loving Men’, an article on the lives and experiences of pædophiles/boy-lovers, was ultimately worthwhile. We nod in agreement. The court battles lasted six years and cost the paper a small fortune in legal fees, but were considered to be necessary in fighting against state censorship (Bébout, 2003a). As the discussion expands and unravels, I bring up the houseboy ad, an issue that divided the TBP editorial collective. In 1985 the paper published a classified ad from a gay white man seeking a ‘well-built black houseboy’. In response to complaints from subscribers and united outrage from gay groups of colour in the city, the paper decided not to run the ad again. The conflict left the collective quite divided, with some regarding the final decision as egregious given that the paper had spent the better part of the previous decade fighting court battles to defend its right to publish whatever it wanted.

I tell David that I think it was probably a good decision to pull the ad, and he takes offence. I have violated his trust and crossed a line. In the next moment I am in a shouting match with Marianne, who also supported running the ad. I tell her she’s a racist and that ‘libertarianism’ is a poor excuse for bad politics. When I look again, she is taking pictures of herself with an old school SLR camera. We are wearing t-shirts with different political messages written on them. She keeps pointing the camera towards the gay liberation message on her shirt, not mine. I grow impatient waiting for her to take my photo, so I throw my drink at her. I grab another and I do it again, screaming, ‘I don’t want to be friends with all you libertarian racists!’ Everyone silently turns away from me. I imagine the late Chris Bearchell, one of the few pivotal women on the collective, coming to my defence. Vincent looks at me but says nothing. Perhaps he sympathizes, but there is nothing he can do. I leave the party in tears.

The dream described above sketched the limits of my own commitment to criticizing TBP, which was related to the dominance of white gay men on the collective and the way my own whiteness and maleness enabled easy cross-generation identification with older gay men who worked on the paper. The dreamscape is evidence of a psychic working out of conflictedness over the views and activities of people at TBP. The struggle is not, however, a reckoning with the past as it was, but with how it continues on and operates in the present. As became evident upon waking up and penning a description, my dream was an amalgam of a number of different ethnographic experiences: attendance at public gatherings and interviews during fieldwork, as well as informal exchanges with research participants after I had officially left ‘the field’.

Perhaps it is all for the best that I missed the party if I was going to make a scene and waste drinks. My actions in the dreamscape were, to be clear, out of step with my rather mild manner. My presence at the actual party would have gone mostly unnoticed. The dream was undoubtedly the culmination of anxieties produced through fieldwork encounters. Such exchanges were shot through with an expectation that I, the ethnographer, downplay feelings of animosity and manage conflicts in an effort to fully understand and pursue the views and beliefs of the people with whom I am doing research (Briggs, 1970). Cultural relativism hinges on the notion that ethnographers must suspend judgement until some unforeseen point in the future when action or intervention becomes an ethical imperative. Criticism is sometimes left for private notes on everyday interactions or saved for a later time as one drafts findings for academic audiences. Whether part of the fieldwork encounter as it happens or part of the so-called ‘post-fieldwork phase’, the drafting of one’s research for a public that includes one’s research participants poses complex challenges for the ethnographer who must decide what kinds of criticism ought to be voiced and what might be better left unsaid. The dreamscape of the party was caught up in such concerns as I attempted to represent TBP and simultaneously maintain real-life relationships with research participants.

The article in Xtra! was a 3000-word overview of TBP, its significance and how people still alive at that time regarded their own involvement. On the surface, the article represented the aims of my own research, but in a simplified form with nuances and contradictory wrinkles ironed out. It addressed some of the basic details about how the paper was formed, the editorial collective that developed over the years, the political ideals the paper stood for and the problems of doing coalition work with groups who had other aims and goals. My emphasis was on the efforts of those who worked on the paper over its 15-year run to pursue liberationist ideals whilst engaging with social issues outside the narrow scope of sexuality.

When I was initially contacted by Xtra! about writing a piece I was flattered by the offer and thrilled to make some of my research available to an audience outside academe. I immediately agreed to write the piece, but cautioned that I would use pseudonyms when quoting from interviews, as I had promised anonymity to my research participants. My insistence on using pseudonyms was sometimes puzzling to people who were already on the public record as writers and editors at TBP. I often told interviewees that the use of pseudonyms as a way not only to ensure individual confidentiality but to shield individuals from criticism, mud-slinging and slander. When I explained this to the editor at Xtra!, he understood my view but felt it impossible to write a piece about the gay press in the gay press without naming names. Not only would it be strange to write about the experiences of people at TBP without identifying them, but the concealing of such details would be seen to undermine the message of gay liberation to come out and be out as gay. I eventually agreed to use individuals’ names in the piece, but it required some back and forth with people about how I would quote them, which ultimately meant that individuals could retract their statements if they did not agree with the way that I intended to use their words.

This concern over naming names resurfaced a few weeks after the article was published when I received an email from Tristan, a former writer for TBP and respected queer studies scholar. In the correspondence, he pointed out a ‘troubling lacuna’ in my piece. He noted that in addition to failing to mention that he was a contributor throughout the 1970s and 1980s, my analysis skipped over ‘cultural politics and the BP’s central commitment over the years to the mission of promoting arts activism and advocacy’. His message was copied to a number of other people involved with the paper, some of whom I had interviewed, as well as other academics who work on issues of sexuality. The email also elaborated a critique of social scientific understandings of politics directed at my then academic home base, York University:

I understand that social sciences disciplinary formations (I was going to say ‘especially at York’ but this would be an uncalled-for revelation of my irrepressible bitchy side) sometimes involve blinders to political meanings outside of narrow definitions of politics limited to meetings, elections, demonstrations and jurisprudence.

A few weeks after Tristan contacted me in 2011, I took a brief trip out of town to interview him about his work with TBP. It was important to him that I understand his perspective, just as it was essential to me that I respond to his concerns. The experience confirmed my understanding of Tristan’s view of gay culture and the role of the paper in fostering community – a subject I had downplayed in the Xtra! article. The exchange raised questions about the boundaries of ‘the field’ and the distinctions so easily made between academic peer-review, on the one hand, and dialogue between researchers and research participants on the other. In crossing boundaries between the two, I could see more clearly how such lines of division get drawn. The transgression of borders also allowed me to reflect on how the celebration of gay culture and identity might be tied to projects of multiculturalism and nation-building. The experience raised questions for me about how the celebration of culture qua culture is connected to normativizing and nationalist political projects, where the desire to celebrate community-building efforts centres on durable social formations, rather than more fleeting or marginal forms of cultural life.

My greatest fear when I prepared the article was that I would forget to acknowledge the contributions of key figures at TBP. I also worried that my criticism of the shortcomings of the paper would cast such figures in a negative light and downplay the significance of their struggles as activists to the project of sexual liberation. I was less attuned to how my theoretical approach and my own emphasis on activism, news and coalition politics would be interpreted by readers. Truth be told, I had previously contacted Tristan to discuss his involvement with the paper in mid-July the previous year while I was ‘in the field’. At that time he indicated that he was out of the country and unavailable, but wished me the best of luck with my project.

A number of the people I interviewed told me that they looked forward to reading my research on the paper in whatever form it might take: a book, articles in queer news media, or academic publications. Most people involved with the paper whom I met had attended university, with many pursuing careers as academics, writers and community scholars. Interviewees often imagined themselves as interlocutors not only in the research process, but also within future conversations about published work. Without exaggerating their interest in my research, certain of those people were part of imagined and actual audiences for scholarship on the TBP – a fact that shaped interpersonal relations, as well as my own ethnographic writing.

The experience raised a number of questions for me about the vested interests of those who worked on TBP in preserving certain accounts of the aims and guiding principles of the paper. It also forced me to examine how my own interest in anti-censorship activism became part of the fairly standard and limited narrative I wrote about the history of the paper. The exchange of emails shed light on the entanglement of issues concerning the creation of historical records and the various investments individuals have in telling their own versions of the past – a longing to remember, as well as a desire to be remembered. As noted by Tristan, my article did not foreground the paper’s role in documenting and supporting the artistic and creative work of gays and lesbians. The omission reflected, at least in part, a desire to deemphasize the extent to which TBP enabled community development for gay men, to the exclusion of lesbians. By centring coalition politics as well as its inherent problems, I wanted to draw attention to the efforts of those who sought to bridge divisions between white gay men and other groups. ⁴

The Xtra! article attempted to strike a balance between, on the one hand, celebrating the lives of gay writers and activists, and on the other, pointing to the limits and shortcomings of their activist work in terms of whether they actually pursued their own goals and in terms of whether liberationist pursuits allowed for or did not trample on the struggles of other marginalized peoples. In taking stock of the goals and activities of TBP, my aim was not to play moral authority on issues of inclusion or exclusion, but to consider how the memorialization of gay culture produces and sustains silence on the tense relationship between sexual liberation and other kinds of social movement organizing. In choosing to write about TBP, the people who were involved, as well as the way the paper has come to be remembered, I was forced to take stock of my own part in the preservation of its legacy and how such commemorative efforts might fit or conflict with other memorializing projects (e.g. post-colonial, anti-racist or feminist).

Intended audiences

Accounts of TBP have been penned by various people involved with the paper. Key collective members have offered personal reflections on their roles on the collective, situating the work of the paper within social and historical frameworks and offering astute analyses of the politics of gay liberation in Toronto through the 1970s and 1980s. Bébout's website, www.rbebout.com, contains long reflections on his involvement with TBP and queer activism in Canada and on his eclectic interests in art and music. His writing on TBP was the first in-depth account to appear in collected form. The website format has the potential to reach a wide readership and for this reason it has been an important source for growing scholarship on queer history in Canada.

Published nearly a decade later, Tim McCaskell’s memoir directly addresses the relationship between gay tolerance and the incorporation of gays and lesbians into exclusionary and racist projects of nation-building. His telling of the history of queer politics in Canada is an autobiographical account as an activist, a gay white man and a devout Marxist. The book offers, as McCaskell himself spells out, a different perspective on events than might be offered by women, people of colour or trans* people (2016: 3), but one that carefully attends to such positioning.

Where Bébout and McCaskell’s accounts are distinctly first-hand, Ann Silversides's (2003) biography of TBP collective member and contributor Michael Lynch is that of a journalist with a personal connection to her subject. The book deals with Lynch’s involvement with the paper, his writing on gay fatherhood, his role in censorship battles, his centrality to responses to the AIDS crisis and his career as a literary scholar.

Each of these distinct accounts of TBP and gay liberation blends memoir and historical documentation, providing insight on the events and ruptures that shaped the political landscape of queer activism in Canada. ⁵ In doing so, they attempt to demonstrate how the contemporary realities of queer politics came to exist through the mobilization and politicization of gays and lesbians and, in doing so, they capture the attention of queer studies scholars in addition to addressing a broad base of non-academic readers.

Throughout my research I was keenly concerned with the audience of TBP, yet much less with the audience of my own writing. I felt, at least in part, that my research would contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of what TBP was and what it came to mean to those involved, but my concern throughout was less with what happened than with the production of coherent historical narratives and memory practices. This oversight became clear to me through my attempts to reach multiple audiences and raised concerns about the aims and purpose of ethnography: Was I interested writing about the politics of commemoration for social scientists, a history of TBP for gay liberationists or something else?

The question of whether one wants research participants to be pleased with research findings bears on the writing process. Conversations with colleagues who write about LGBTQ issues suggest that it is desirable to take a protective and supportive role in representing those who contribute to research, a tendency that seems to favour positive views that align with participants’ views of themselves. I have often found myself at odds with this approach because I tend not to classify the people who produced TBP as members of a vulnerable population. This ties back to the question of temporality in some important ways, as many of my research participants were victimized and harassed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but have lived through massive change in the treatment of gays and lesbians over the last four decades. How does one represent such complexity?.

In her discussion of the politics of ethnographic readerships, Caroline Brettell argues for deeper reflection within anthropology on the ways in which researchers negotiate representation in relation to research subjects. She notes Vincent Crapanzano’s recognition of the ethnographer’s ‘double audience: the audience of his own people and the audience of those other people whom he refers to in an act of presumptive if not patronizing incorporation as “my people”’ (1977: 72), but identifies within his view a silence on the possibility that research interlocutors may also be readers (Brettell, 1994: 2).

The active roles of the researcher and the research participant in one another’s lives has meant that neither has been a dispassionate observer. To the contrary, fieldwork has always been carried out by individuals deeply concerned with other people’s lives and stories, even where such interestedness has been integral to colonial knowledge production (Asad, 1973). Researchers’ connections to particular cultural contexts are often as much about their own biographies as they are about the lives and experiences of other people. Every ‘field’ is, as such, the product of a peculiar encounter, rather than a reality that exists somewhere out there to be discovered. Most ethnographers no longer imagine their research to be carried out in bounded locales, as global processes connect all sites through the circulation of goods, people and ideas (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). Despite the awkward fit of ‘the field’ with many ethnographers’ actual research, it continues to be taken for granted as simply where one does fieldwork, which has meant that while the concept itself has received critical attention, it is still drawn on to make facile distinctions between ‘here’ and ‘there’ (1997: 12–13). Similarly, George Marcus (1995) has shown how multi-sited ethnography troubles notions of ‘the field’ as a clearly defined geography. Others have raised concerns about the position of ethnographers who come to be seen as part of the communities with whom they do research – a positioning that often draws accusations of bias and of being embedded in or too close to the people with whom they do research (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Narayan, 1993; Weston, 1997).

All forms of ethnography are necessarily reflexive, for they are accounts of researchers’ own experiences. To the extent that anthropologists privilege experience as a form of evidence, one may say that the method of participant observation is founded on self-reflexivity. Whether and how this dialogical model enters into the written ethnographic account has been extensively scrutinized. Conventions of ethnography do not always reflect gaps in memory, the misgivings of anthropologists or the undecidability of the diverse problems faced by everyone involved in research encounters. Ethnography can all too easily tidy up the mess of social life, rather than portray the complexity and ingenuity involved in creating and sustaining ways of life.

Much ink has been spilt trying to explain, categorize and redefine ethnography since the onset of the crisis of representation in anthropology. Since the early 1990s anthropologists have overwhelmingly favoured an ethnographic form that displaces or decentres the notion of a native point of view, favouring instead complexity in representing how individuals inhabit political systems and historical processes as well as how they embody cultural scripts and economic practices. ⁶ As a literary genre, ethnography’s aims have largely shifted from the study of cultures to more varied analyses of discourses, processes and practices. How anthropologists practise ethnography – from research design and methods to conventions of analysis – has changed along with the literary form itself. While some anthropologists continue to document the beliefs and practices of clearly defined cultural groups, many others opt for forms of ethnographic writing that do not presuppose the existence of native informants. Such works offer accounts of anthropologists in their own neighbourhoods and in their own homes. ⁷ They are distinctively intimate, centre on interpersonal relations and refuse to tell just-so stories (Lancaster, 1992: 279). ⁸ In presenting the complexities and unfinished business of everyday life, they offer description and commentary without perfunctory conclusions.

The conceptual problem for ethnographers whose research does not fit within the longstanding paradigm of doing research in ‘the field’ can be troubling for scholars who make issues related to their own identities and everyday lives central to their ethnographic work. Even as ethnographers conduct research with people who share their own cultural or ethnic identities, the frameworks of research design disrupt and are disrupted by research participants in elaborating identities, conventions and ways of life. As Tom Boellstorff reminds us, the relationship between theory and data is dynamic, whereby what counts as ‘data’ depends on what methods are used to conduct research; what we call ‘theory’ depends on what data are used to substantiate one’s claims; and what counts as a ‘method’ follows from the data it is to generate and the theories that it will inform (2010: 216). But this relation is also shaped by what Bronislaw Malinowski called the relationship between what people do and what people say they do (Kuper, 1996: 14, cited in Boellstorff, 2010: 216–17). In this way, researchers track not merely who people are or who they think they are, but the contradictions that are actively produced through everyday encounters.

Research designs call for simplification in terms of scope and researchers must often narrowly define the objectives of their projects. Such decisions involve justifying how and why particular emphases have been made, providing sufficient evidence for claims and accounting for exclusions. Avery Gordon's discussion of the productive and data-generating work of methods points to a problem in how we commonly conceptualize our research activities. Privileging ‘detours’, she writes that if we focus on the question of method at the meta-discursive level we can too easily pass over those places where

our discourse is unauthorized by virtue of its unruliness. The detour takes us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalized questions, toward the materiality of institutional story-telling, with all its uncanny repetitions. (Gordon, 1997: 40)

Deviation from the script of a research programme is not a failure to attend to issues that matter most. Rather, it can bring to the fore the processes through which research bureaucracy confines research results through the disavowal of insights that fall outside the narrow scope of official research. Gordon argues that we must counter the way institutionally sanctioned methods work to standardize and sanitize research, urging that we need to engage the ghostly, ‘in order to capture back all that must be circumscribed in order to produce the “adequate” version’ (1997: 40–41).

This focus on stability often works in tandem with the insistence on the boundedness of ‘the field’, which works to obscure what might come before or after ethnography. Liisa Malkki writes that this tendency for researchers to turn their attention to social structures we perceive as rigid

moves other phenomena out of view – transitory, nonrepetitive, anomalous phenomena. As a result, it becomes harder to see, analytically, how durable structures and transitory phenomena might (or might not) come into contact. This orientation of perspective has deeply influenced the anthropological style of imagining cultural community in ‘the field’. (Malkki, 1997: 91)

Recent work on sexuality and affect points to the ways in which feeling and emotion are written out of conceptualizations of power in colonial contexts. Ann Stoler writes that critical analyses of colonial authority have frequently treated the affective

as a smokescreen of rule, as a ruse masking the dispassionate calculations that reoccupy states, persuasive histrionics rather than the substance of politics, the moralizing self-presentation of the state as itself a genre of political authority. (Stoler, 2007: 6)

Temporalities and ethnographies

A key unifying aspect of ethnography as an experiential research encounter, a set of methods and methodologies and a genre of writing, is its temporality. To produce an ethnographic account, one must work to transform real-life experiences into meaningful descriptions and analyses of cultural life. But what counts as real, and when do we decide that we have enough experience to make grounded and believable claims? Jeanette Mageo writes that ethnographers of the 20th century turned their attention en masse from discourses to practices in an attempt to grasp or move beyond what cannot be expressed in words. She notes, however, that psychoanalysts have long understood the limits of language and the cultural and psychic significance of what cannot be articulated. Psychoanalysis has also taken seriously dreaming as an activity through which experiences are processed, reconstructed and reordered. Nonetheless, the dream account as it comes to be narrated verbally, or penned, is a sketch of a remembered scene and not the dream itself (D'Andrade, 2005, cited in Mageo, 2013: 405–6). Dreams import cultural models and draw from lived experience but ultimately scramble those elements, and for that reason they are often dismissed as half-truths, fantasy or mere distractions from cultural truth. Dream accounts figure the content of dreams and impose narratives through which dreams are rendered culturally legible. The dreamscape in which I turned my back on people who worked on TBP (or where they turned their backs on me) points to a kind of inheritance that demands a working out, a thinking through of how the past haunts and the way my own orientation to TBP is itself organized through disjunctures between past and present. I was forced to consider how ‘the field’ might be understood as out of time with itself. ⁹

My experience with drafting a brief history of TBP for Xtra! was a lesson in how to write for a broad audience and how to negotiate competing requests from editors, deadlines, bureaucratic institutional ethics, as well as expectations on the part of ethnographers and research participants. On the surface, the task of writing the piece involved naming names (of people who were expecting to be named) and trying to strike a balance between, on the one hand, applause for the work of the paper and, on the other, sharp scholarly misgivings about the historical record. The experience also rendered visible the way particular fragments of the past operate in and through the present. My own experience with being contacted a year after I had stopped actively doing fieldwork was a reminder of the overlap between ‘the field’, ‘home’ and queer studies. The circumstances surrounding the email from Tristan meant that I was unable to merely shrug off his comments as trivial, as though I were no longer in ‘the field’. The email made any clean separation between fieldwork and everyday life quite impossible, but also showed how an insistence on the spatial and temporal confines of ‘the field’ is ethically irresponsible when it allows researchers to conveniently cut ties with other people when they have finished interviewing or conducting participant observation. ¹⁰

The rhetoric of ‘the field’ cannot be neatly divorced from its past and it easily conjures forth legacies of colonization and installs the ethnographic present as a bounded temporal realm. This temporally and spatially defined frame within which the ethnographer conducts research fails to account for the unbridled messiness involved in creating and sustaining interpersonal relationships. Though critics of anthropology’s pasts might suggest abandoning ethnography in favour of other methods and forms of research, my suggestion is rather to reconsider its stakes, to divorce it from ‘the field’ and to reconceptualize it as a spectral modality of research. Spectral ethnography seeks to examine what cannot be easily documented or even perceived in ‘the field’. It requires that the ethnographer recognize how she is oriented within the historical present, fully aware that pieces are missing from the historical record and that such absences are not to be recovered in being there, in ‘the field’, but to be invented and conjured in ongoing and emergent research encounters.

If we understand ethnographic research as an encounter with contingent temporal frames, we further unsettle the notion that research participants possess clearly defined attributes and that truths can be collected by researchers. For those who cannot simply step outside or distance themselves from their research, ‘the field’ is not a distinctive time and place where they once did ethnographic research, but an ongoing, shifting amalgam of everyday experiences. And for those who supposedly live in ‘the field’, there are no final answers to the questions we ask ourselves about who we are and how we live our lives. Relationships between multiple identities are not separate from research encounters, but are part of the emerging contexts in which we move, observe and interact with other people. Our experiences arise, through, in relation to and against axes of difference.

It is not that our multiple positionings cause or determine what we can know, but that our experiences emerge from the dynamics of everyday encounters, constituted through differences, some of which are explicitly temporal and must be recognized as such. Alison Rooke shows how the notion of a spatially and temporally bounded ‘field’ is a particularly awkward fit for research carried out ‘close to home (both the location of home and the ontological home of comfort and belonging)’, asking, ‘When a participant calls me six months after fieldwork has ended am I momentarily in the field again?’ (2010: 30). The idea of pulling oneself out of ‘the field’ or having to return to it fails to account for how ethnographers actually continue to work with research topics long after they have supposedly finished doing fieldwork. Rooke writes that in making sense of ethnography theoretically, one is required

to revisit the ethnographic past of fieldwork. If ‘the field’ is intersubjectively constructed by the ethnographer, we might argue that he or she is the only person who inhabits the field as ‘the field’. (2010: 30)

Insofar as researchers make decisions about who, what, when and where to study, in addition to how the lives of other people appear or do not appear in ethnographic writing, ‘the field’ is ultimately a placeholder for ‘my research’. ¹¹

To reconceptualize ethnography as spectral is to recognize how temporalities of research are incompletely ordered by institutions and social structures. Ethnography is useful for tracing how temporal divisions are remade and how they are made meaningful. Describing spectrality as a generative component of ethnography, Justin Armstrong suggests a rethinking of ethnographic space as a location for the study of the accumulation of cultural time (collective memory, regional imaginaries, state and popular histories) and space in the wake of human occupation (2010: 244). Where only fragments remain of the past, it is only possible to trace what has been carried forward into the ethnographic present. But we do not know in advance the extent to which those fragments bring the past into the present, which sorts of affects can be unearthed from the past, or how they might influence the scope of our research endeavours.

Affective responses are entangled with political inclinations and circumstances that are beyond the control of the individual. In her recent work, Susan Buck-Morss has argued that our reception of the past is never innocent. We approach history with expectations, yet the past requires that we consider how and why it does not stay in place. It juts into the present; it does not glide smoothly, but smashes against what we often wish to preserve and protect. Fragments of the past that we call forth have unfinished business as they move into the present. As Buck-Morss explains, historical fragments 'are the remains of an explosion. Blasted free of official memory, the fragments of history … retain the nearness of original experience, and with it, ambiguity. The meaning is released only in a constellation with the present' (2011: 304). Struggles over meaning can be between those whose lives have come to be recognized as history and those who wish to speak with the same authority as ethnographers who lay claim to truth by virtue of having been there (Scott, 1991). Claims to the immutability of experience thus demand that researchers ask why certain memories ought to be recalled at all, and to what ends they might be put. Following Buck-Morss, it is essential to understand how the present comes to be seen as a product of a direct lineage of inheritance. In doing so, we can see how the reception of history along clear-cut lines of cultural preservation can ultimately reenact the past and ensure that 'the horrors of the past are repeated precisely in the process of paying them infinite due. Never again ends up being always the same' (2011: 303–4).

The problem of repetition matters not only in the case of how the history of TBP comes to be documented and retold, but also in how we conceptualize relationships between ethnographers and the conceptual tools that they import and deploy in their research. In his discussion of sexuality and spatiotemporalities, Jack Halberstam has argued that queerness largely undermines heteronormative time. He points to ‘specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal forces of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (2005: 6). Such habitus at the margins of normativizing frameworks allows for a rethinking of time and space which moves beyond simple distinctions between rigid and flexible entities (2005: 21). The normative reproductive impulse that Halberstam describes operates through desires for domesticity, privacy and family life, but could be extended to the desire for lesbian and gay history to be installed as part of a future historical record and to the persistence of claims to ‘the field’ as the privileged space and time of ethnography. Our obligation is neither to turn away from all forms of convention and repetition nor flatly confront tensions and conflicts, but to follow along with what emerges in ethnographic encounters with an attentiveness to the openings and closures of temporal frames. If the past can serve as the soil for the roots of normativizing history, it can surely also break new ground and open up novel modes of enquiry if approached as inherently incomplete.

Tristan’s account of TBP and his emphasis on the creation of community and gay culture provides an example of how questions about the historical record are part of a struggle that takes place between people in the present. In being confronted with the multivalence of sexual liberation, I was forced to ask myself: How did the multiple and uneven demands of sexual liberation shape my own research archive as I moved within and actively constituted the ethnographic research? And also, what sorts of affects shaped, changed, reversed and departed from my expectations in sifting through fragments of TBP and in learning about the lives of liberationists?

Conclusion

In questioning the desire to preserve the archive, and in accounting for the unavoidable problems of writing documentary and/or celebratory histories of political achievement, this article emphasizes the need for ethnographers to recognize how they are oriented towards analyses of political alliances and affective ties that secure and are enmeshed in the pursuit of political ideals put forward in the present. In the case of TBP, a complex understanding of issues of gender and race is achieved by decentring history (or the record of what happened) and by centring the investment people involved with TBP had and continue to have in preserving its legacy.

As a researcher, I ultimately felt responsible to those who sought to have their participation in gay media activism documented, but an account of what happened fails to capture the investments of present-day custodians of history in ensuring that certain legacies are kept alive. It also misses how the intense struggle over what did not happen, but could have happened, becomes meaningful for people in the present. The value of ethnography for research on activism is its capacity for assessing the arrival of the past in the present. Ethnographers are uniquely positioned to assess how commitments to their own research extend beyond the horizons of definitive temporalities, flowing elsewhere. For researchers to generate new questions and to move away from the methodological and institutional limitations placed on them, they must allow themselves to be led away, pulled back, pushed forward – to be affected – but also to remain open to how ethnographic encounters take off and move out of the realm of intentionality and into moments of intensity. The problems of mapping the ethnographic experience must be handled delicately, addressing the past as it arrives in, yet does not become, the present. By attending to the way meaning is constituted betwixt and between temporal frames and in relation to a range of imagined readers, ethnographers can assess how the fragmented past and the present-day time of research are inseparable components in shaping the ethnographic record.