"Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid": The "Dignity of Queer Shame"

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“Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid”: The “Dignity of

Queer Shame”

Margaret Morrison

Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Volume 48,


Number 1, March 2015, pp. 17-32 (Article)

Published by Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2015.0012

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577830

Access provided by Webster University (4 Mar 2019 12:29 GMT)


Using the work of Walt Whitman and David Wojnarowicz, I argue that queer shame, which some LGBTs deny
or repress, not only gives meaning to “queerness” but also motivates creative expressiveness in those queer
writers/artists who make use of and dignify it.

“Some Things Are


Better Left Unsaid”:
The “Dignity of Queer Shame”
MARGARET MORRISON

hen I came out to my father in the 1970s, he responded that “Some things are

W better left unsaid.” That blatant demand for my silence was a kind of sym-
bolic violence, an attempt at censoring me or imagining the erasure of my
sexuality and, from his position of power (as father, man, heterosexual, etc.), shutting
me out for my differences. He rejected me for a sexual convention—albeit one deeply
rooted in religious, state, and cultural law and tradition. As a “baby dyke,” I had
already seemed to be in an entirely new world, but this “break” that brought shame
accentuated the alienation I felt. Mine, as it turned out, was one of many kinds of
experiences that activate shame in queers, especially among many young LGBTs and
especially when they are just coming out.
Shame is a primary affect we cannot excise from our bodies (Sedgwick,
“Theatricality” 59). The sad fact is, however, that, at least since Emperor Constantine

Mosaic 48/1 0027-1276-07/017016$02.00©Mosaic


18 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

in fourth-century Rome, dominant (heteronormative) culture in the West has con-


demned same-sex love in a way that arouses or induces shame in same-sex lovers.
Despite this, especially at a conservative time like our own, when LGBTs are “sup-
posed to be” liberated and proud of who we are, some LGBTs pretend that queer
shame does not exist, sometimes by using the cover of pride and/or by attempting to
assimilate to the heteronormative mainstream.1 I argue, however, that instead of deny-
ing or repressing queer shame, as painful as that may be, LGBTs should aim to accept
our differences from the dominant majority, acknowledge our shame, and make cre-
ative use of that shame, as many writers, artists, and performers of non-normative
sexualities (and/or genders), including Walt Whitman and David Wojnarowicz, have
done for centuries.
Using queer shame creatively can “enlarge us”2—by giving meaning to a “queer-
ness” associated with shame, by making a “space” (not a fixed one) for identity, and
by motivating cognition (for creative tasks).3 Through homophobic, censorious com-
ments like my father’s, however, LGBTs soon learn that many straights still despise
and fear queers because, for centuries, cultural languages have deeply embedded asso-
ciations of us with non-normative (non-procreative) and “undignified” sexuality of
“disgusting” varieties (public sex, anal sex, SM, oral sex, etc.). Non-normative genders
can complicate this picture, too, and cast LGBTs into emotional confusion, depres-
sion, and estrangement from families. This emotional pain may then result in an
urgent need to escape/deny shame’s abject implications instead of refiguring or
reframing that shame.
In the mid-1990s, when she focused much of her energy on American psycholo-
gist Silvan Tomkins’s (1911-1991) work on affects, especially shame, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick associated “queerness” with “structural forms of expression” developing
“from shame,” a “political instrument” that “generated” a “place of identity—the
question of identity—at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but [did] so
without giving that identity space the standing of an essence” (“Theatricality” 60-61).
Sedgwick sees this “queerness” as intimately tied to shame as a motivator of creativ-
ity, and she thinks “queerness” refers to “those whose sense of identity” is “tuned most
durably to the note of shame.” On the one hand, some lesbians and gays, she thinks,
could never “count as queer,” while, on the other hand, other people “vibrate[d] to the
chord of queer without having much same-sex eroticism, or without routing their
same-sex eroticism through the identity labels lesbian and gay.” But, she writes, “many
of the performative identity vernaculars that seem most recognizably ‘flushed’ (to use
[Henry] James’s word) with shame consciousness and shame creativity do cluster
intimately around lesbian and gay worldly spaces.” Among these she names: “butch
Margaret Morrison 19

abjection, femmitude, leather, pride, SM, drag, musicality, fisting, attitude, zines,
histrionicism, asceticism, Snap! culture, diva worship, florid religiosity; in a word,
flaming. And activism” (60). Shame, in sum, motivates queer expressiveness unique to
lesbians and gays (but not to all of us), and that shame “generate[s]” a space for iden-
tity connected to the (sometimes “over-the-top” and apparently “shameless”) perfor-
mative (61).
In the same essay, Sedgwick writes that Tomkins suggested shame was a “proto-
affect” (50), a circuit that could be “a form of primary narcissism” that occurs when a
baby and mother/caregiver develop a “circuit of mirroring expressions”—or, for the
baby, a “narcissism” that from the “first throws itself sociably” and, thus, vulnerably
(49). But that “circuit of mirroring expressions” depends on the mother’s/caregiver’s
maintaining continuity in the “mutual gaze” or in “a circuit of identity-constituting
identificatory communication” and, if she does not maintain that continuity, a
“break” or “disruptive moment” occurs that inevitably “floods” the baby as shame—
for the first time. This shame, which Tomkins did not think came from a “prohibition
(nor as a result [of] repression),” broadcasts that the baby is in trouble and would like
to repair the interpersonal bridge or circuit of communication that she had built with
the mother/caregiver (50). Shame, then, including “queer shame,” reverberates from
this initial break in connectedness and communication.
Sedgwick also writes that shame both “defines the space wherein a sense of self
will develop” and “derives from and aims toward sociability” or “relationality” (51), a
“double movement”; that is, shame is “individuating” and “contagious” and differs in
different times, places, cultures, and individuals. My father, for example, probably felt
a deep, abiding cultural shame of having a lesbian daughter, and his feeling ashamed
of me for claiming to be something he had learned was abhorrent also broke a con-
nection between us, flooding me with shame. From circulating stereotypes, my father,
for whom appearances meant so much, “knew” how abominable queerness was and
could not face the responses of others if they “knew.”
Sedgwick also maintains that one could not rid oneself of shame, however one
might try. For shame, she suggests, was “not a discrete intra-psychic structure.”
Instead, it was “a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cul-
tures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—of almost
anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted
behavior, another affect, such as anger or arousal.” Shame thus becomes integral to
identity-forming processes, and anyone’s “character or personality [. . .] is a record of
the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted
far more durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretative strategies
20 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

toward both self and others” (59). In addition, if shame does indeed become integral
to identity-forming processes, it must also become “available for the work of meta-
morphosis” (59-60), for, as Tomkins noted, affects, not the drives, motivate us (38-39).

n “Pleasures and Dangers of Shame,” using some of Walt Whitman’s “Calamus”


I poems, including “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me” (“Here the frailest leaves of me
and yet my strongest lasting, / Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not
expose them, / And yet they expose me more than all my other poems”), Michael
Warner insists this and other “Calamus” poems “cannot be understood apart from the
rhetoric of the unspeakable construed as [Whitman’s] excruciating shame” (286). But
Whitman’s “performances of shamed subjectivity,” he says, become a “rhetoric of dig-
nity,” deserving of respect for their courage to risk performing honestly, as opposed to
the mask of the “shameless” rough that Whitman seems to wear so often in “Song of
Myself ” and elsewhere in Leaves of Grass (295). This observation interests me because
Whitman was not only struggling with how to speak his “love of comrades” but also
“stag[ing] shame as [a] disruption of relationality” (295-96) with the reader of his
poem and with the lyric convention he was using. This means that the power of
shame both “draw[s] [the reader] into identification with the speaker [. . .] and
force[s] [the reader] to recoil from that identification to make literal sense of what he
says” (294-95). By disrupting the poem this way, shame forces a reader to be both
inside and outside the poem—initiating some readers (“those in the know”) into
what Whitman is revealing about this love and blinding others.
For those who understand “the love of comrades,” Whitman is saying that he
does not “expose” his concealed and shameful thoughts—marking a break in rela-
tionality, likely with the reader to whom he cannot really suggest the full meaning of
his “love of comrades”—while simultaneously saying, nevertheless, that the
“Calamus” poems “expose” him more than his other poems—but only to readers “in
the know.” This, too, is a “double movement” so familiar to queers trying both to com-
municate with those “in the know” and to disguise themselves and these attempts.
Queers have always had codes and argot for sending messages to comrades that oth-
ers could not understand, especially in the nineteenth century with the influx of
“homosexuals” to “underground,” urban areas like those where Whitman lived—
Brooklyn, NY, Washington, DC, etc.—and queers (or those in search of same-sex
love) “in the know” understood this coding.4
Since the shame of same-sex lovers has often involved a scorned sexuality (and
gender) that heterosexuals have considered sinful and/or criminal (at least since
Constantine) and the “break” that floods one with shame is related to others’ “refusal
Margaret Morrison 21

of return” or a refusal to complete a “mirroring circuit of expressiveness,” it is under-


standable why shame is a salient feature of queerness and why same-sex lovers have
had to live so long in a distinctly “other” world. If, in the “Calamus” poems, Whitman’s
thematics of shame persisted in his writing about same-sex love, this is not inexplica-
ble for, as Warner has noted, “sodomy was a crime of infamy, homosexuals entered his-
tory wrapped in stigma, and modern sexual culture is structured around a repressive
hypothesis for which shame is a practical medium. [. . . And, thus,] the association of
the homoerotic with the rhetoric of shame and disclosure is surely among the least sur-
prising things about ‘Calamus’” (“Pleasures” 283). Indeed, what Whitman’s “Calamus”
poems witness for us is that an adroit writer or artist who needs both to reveal and to
conceal secrets about him or herself, with astute rhetoric, can do so—and maintain
his/her dignity. One achieves “queer dignity” not by repudiating or being ashamed of
one’s (or one’s other’s) shame, but by facing politicized shame and reframing or trans-
forming it—as Whitman and other writers and artists have done.5
In contrast, the contemporary rhetoric of “gay pride” (since the exhausted end of
ACT-UP and the beginning of the Clinton years), however, tends to deny shame, set
it aside, and depoliticize it (“Pleasures” 286). This is not to say that those who make
use of shame creatively and politically cannot also be proud of queerness and the his-
tory of same-sex love. The movement, especially since Stonewall, has been far too
complex to think that it is either about “gay pride” or about “a return to queer shame.”
But Warner and others have been critical of a part of the movement organized around
gay pride that seems to involve “a theory of shame as a thing of the personal and col-
lective past—shame about shame. [. . .] For many this picture has come to seem not
only empirically false and subjectively thin, but worse: too safe to be sexy and too dis-
honest to be safe” (287). As Sedgwick notes, one cannot get rid of a “free radical,” like
shame, that “attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—almost
anything” (“Theatricality” 59).

hitman had little choice in his elder years but to deny what his “love of com-
W rades” may have really meant to visitors to Camden, NJ, like John Addington
Symonds and Horace Traubel—by claiming, for example, to have fathered six chil-
dren (never discovered) to conceal a truth publicly that these visitors, if “in the know,”
might have known he had already acknowledged in his “coded” poetry. But, by about
a century later, in the mid-1990s, emerging fleetingly from the revolving closet door
(more often than not) became an option, especially for urban, white, American
queers, in part because “coming out” had reached a kind of critical mass since
HIV/AIDS activists of the 1980s and early 1990s had argued that by leaving the closet,
22 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

however temporarily, queers would show straights that we were “everywhere” and not
the rare, stigmatized outlaws most thought we were. By the mid-to-late 1990s, how-
ever, during the country’s conservative political turn, some gays and lesbians seemed
to be increasingly enticed more by the possibility of assimilating into a “normal”—or
heteronormative—way of living than by the possibility of resisting it.
This seems to indicate that, despite the apparent liberality of marriage equality laws
and new visibility “allowed” to gays and lesbians in the military, conservative voices had
won the latest battles of the so-called “culture wars” that began around the time that
Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978 and intensified during the early years of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic. Many LGBTs, I surmise, may have felt spent by all the exhausting
intensities of the struggle not only against possible, imminent death but also against the
government’s neglect of queers sick with the virus and the political right’s anti-intellectual,
simplistic rhetoric that repeated lies until those who could not think for themselves
were convinced that the lies were truths. That the right managed to spread this kind of
rhetoric (grouping many thoughtfully complex ideas and movements “under the rubric
of politically correct,” for instance) Sedgwick called a “coup of cynical slovenliness
unmatched since the artistic and academic purges of Germany and Russia in the thir-
ties” (“Queer” 14). Understandably, in the face of a deadly disease and such cynical rhet-
oric, some gays and lesbians sought a “normality” and, to some, this may have meant
appropriating whatever else seemed more stable, less deadly, less shameful.
As a teacher in an art college at that time and since, I have sometimes heard
recent LGBT students debating between: first, wanting to pursue a “regular, normal,
conventional” life with marriage and children, perhaps to disconnect themselves as
much as possible from the shame and stigma associated with queer sexualities; and,
second, wanting to live as non-conforming queers in creative tension with the domi-
nant majority.6 Those in the first group loosely fit Warner’s “stigmaphobes,” who
sometimes want to extract queer contaminants from their sexual lives—and their sex-
ual lives from their identities—to blend into conventional ways of living, for their sex-
ualities, some seem to think, belong to but a miniscule part of their lives. Those in the
second group loosely fit Warner’s “stigmaphiles,” who want to live their differences
and accept shame and stigma as motivating forces in their lives. They have learned “to
value the very things the rest of the world despises,” Warner writes, “not just because
the world despises them, but because the world’s pseudo-morality is a phobic and
inauthentic way of life” (Trouble 43).7
Those in a third group might find they live both these options and perhaps
others in various guises and may welcome a confusion or interleaving of these possi-
bilities. Being non-normative can be frightening, but the promises of conformity can
Margaret Morrison 23

also be false promises. It goes without saying that life is a difficult process of figuring
things out. The lure to be “normal” is powerful, too, and “normal” behaviour per-
ceived as such is sometimes also necessary to survive. At the same time, however,
assimilating to “normality” (whatever most really think it is) and thinking that one
can simply dismiss shame and stigma and pretend they do not exist can also be dis-
honest or unreal. In “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me,” Whitman is aware of his shame
and the stigma attached to the real meaning of his “love of comrades,” but he can
hardly deny that shame and stigma or claim himself liberated from them. He must,
instead, indicate the aporia he is feeling, the affects contiguous with the unspeakable
spoken only through indirection.
Artist David Wojnarowicz, who “came out” post-Stonewall in the late 1970s,
never lived a so-called “normal” life. If shame occurs as a result of a child feeling a
“break” or “disruption” in the “mirroring circuit of expressiveness” with the mother/
caregiver, that kind of a “break” is likely to have happened repeatedly in the young
Wojnarowicz’s life because of the violent and rejecting households he grew up in—in
New Jersey and elsewhere. In her recent biography of Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly: The
Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, Cynthia Carr reports that Wojnarowicz, born in
1954, was the third child of Dolores and Ed, who in 1956 divorced because Ed was an
alcoholic who beat Dolores and the children (9-11). But as soon as Dolores gained
custody of the children, she abandoned them in a boarding home/orphanage, from
which, months later, Ed kidnapped them and took them to relatives in Michigan (12);
then, about a year later, in 1960, he returned them to New Jersey to his new wife and
baby (13), where he beat and terrorized them nearly every day (14-15, 18-20).
Meanwhile, Dolores did not arrive back in the picture until around 1965-66 in New
York City. When Ed discovered that she was in contact with the children, he banished
them to her in her one-bedroom New York apartment and abruptly left them and
never returned (22). Dolores booted David’s older brother out first; then his sister left.
When he was around 14 years old, David threw himself “heavily into sex—for
money or no money” with men in Times Square and began a “double life,” skipping
school sometimes for weeks at a time (Carr 40). When he finally permanently left his
mother’s apartment in 1971 at age 17 (46), he lived for two years on the streets and
hustled to make a living. Wojnarowicz rarely talked about these homeless, street hus-
tling years (46-47), but they impacted him deeply enough that he wrote a book, the
posthumous Waterfront Journals, based on journal entries he kept while hustling. A
short book, it is composed of raw, violent, and searingly thoughtful but also queerly
beautiful entries mostly about his encounters with strangers who wanted sex and with
other “outcasts” on the streets.
24 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

Interestingly, however, despite his early sexual contacts mainly with other boys
and men, Wojnarowicz struggled with viewing himself as gay. “Though he was hus-
tling,” Carr writes, “he still did not identify as gay and wasn’t politically involved” (47).
Then, at 22 years old on Christmas Eve, 1976, David suddenly announced to his
mother and sister that he was gay, then “ran out of the room crying” (79-80). This
incident suggests that he was distraught and probably ashamed of his gayness (87-90).
But the discomfort or shame—and his prevailing fear of ending up on the streets
again (104-05)—may have also motivated his obsessive but life-saving work ethic: he
threw himself into art-making and writing in the East Village and, in spite of his con-
tinuing, active sex life (often public and often anonymous) at the abandoned Hudson
River piers in the West End and elsewhere, and in spite of his eventual HIV illnesses,
he worked at a furious pace, making art until nearly the end of his life in 1992 and
only occasionally stopping his writing. Though he had had relationships with boys
and men in his teens, he seldom “steadily dated” anyone after he began these intense
art-making years. The exception was his long-term, close (but not monogamous)
relationship with photographer Peter Hujar, who was older than Wojnarowicz, a
“brother and father,” someone he could listen to and talk to.8
In her biography, Carr reports that Wojnarowicz was also known to his friends
in the East Village as someone who felt much anger, even rage; he had a short fuse, a
bad temper, very likely an effect of the early traumas he suffered from his father’s fre-
quent beatings, his parents’ abandonments of him and his brother and sister, and his
parents’ blatant disregard for the effects on their children of constant, abrupt disrup-
tions in their lives.9 Because he did not have much control of his early life,
Wojnarowicz probably felt an urgent need to communicate—to make some sense of
his life, to use any language he could muster—and the negative affects, rage and
shame, pressuring him from his years of mistreatment were indeed powerful motiva-
tors of his work. Very likely, they catalyzed crucial disruptions of cognition, “errors,”
“slips,” or “queer moments,” when something fleeting and unpredictable in writing or
in art coalesces into something that could never quite be said otherwise, except affec-
tively, laterally, or by indirection.

began to understand the deeply motivating power of the kind of shame and anger
I I imagine now that Wojnarowicz was also feeling when, in 1986, five years after the
HIV/AIDS epidemic had begun and during the growing paranoia and hysteria over
the epidemic, administrators at a university where I taught forced me to leave my
position for being “out” as a lesbian. To say the least, the experience both traumatized
and politicized me. As a result of my loss of a job and the general silence and denial,
Margaret Morrison 25

fear and panic and disgust among many, mostly straight people over HIV/AIDS, not
to mention the terror and confusion especially among gay men because being diag-
nosed with the virus was a death sentence and nobody with the power to do some-
thing was doing anything, I felt the deep conviction that, not just ignoring the men
and women who were becoming ill, but also showing them antipathy and contempt
was terribly wrong. Resisting such hatred and homophobia seemed to be the only way
to feel any dignity as a human being.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s offered a conundrum to many Americans,
for we still live in a Calvinist country where it is never appropriate to talk about sex-
uality (and gender) in public (it’s “a private matter”); where sexuality mostly means
between a man and a woman, preferably married; where sexuality is certainly not
something that happens in public; and where gender means one of the two, boy or
girl. But queer culture is mostly about the complexities and “indignities” of sexuality
and gender, not about the denial of those complexities. And since many queers do
enjoy experimenting inventively with bodily pleasures, sometimes in public places
(Michel Foucault was one such queer person), many in the dominant majority still
place us on the wrong side of the right/wrong binary. My father never forgave me for
my “shameful” conduct. And dare I say it’s true that many of us lesbians do practice
oral sex—“cunnilingus” (Latin term)—among other sexual “indignities” that he
would never have accepted or even have let himself imagine. But if, to heterosexists,
queer sexualities count as “indignities,” these “indignities” help queers cohere in
shared shame with dignity. And, as it turns out, one benefit of being an “undignified”
queer, in fact, is that we queers can be honest at least about enjoying our sexual
“indignities.” And, if dignity is one characteristic born of such bare-faced honesty
(sometimes laced with camp humour), in embracing these means, queers affirm the
lives of those among us who have suffered the unbearable and have endured through
those very means out of which dignity arises.10
This is the kind of dignity in shared shame and stigma that Warner has said “still
roils the moralists,” when they encounter transmen and transwomen, “trolls, and
women who have seen a lot of life” (Trouble 36). “In queer circles,” in contrast to those
gays and lesbians who support assimilation as their aim, Warner also notes, “a queer
ethics” begins with “the ground rule [. . .] that one doesn’t pretend to be above the
indignity of sex” (emph. Warner’s). He adds that “In queer circles,”

sex is understood to be as various as the people who have it. It is not required to be tidy,
normal, uniform, or authorized by the government. [. . .] Its way of life [is] an ethic not
only because it is understood as a better kind of self-relation, but because it is the premise
of the special kind of sociability that holds queer culture together. A relation to others, in
26 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reputable in
oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but
because abjection is understood to be the shared condition, they also know how to commu-
nicate through such camaraderie a moving and unexpected form of generosity. (35)

The last sentence of this passage reminds me of scenes from the 1970 film Boys in the
Band because the men at the party in the film do insult each other and some do feel
vile and shameful as queers but, despite the intensity of their emotional-mangling
and guilt-tripping, they also seem to accept their abject lives and find dignity in
that—and an ethics of life based on valuing each other.
Obviously, when queers say we value life, we don’t mean idealized life; we mean
life in all of its varieties and harshness, all that people consider beautiful and abject,
those who engage in street sex and those who engage in bedroom sex—of all varieties—
those who are FtMs, MtFs, and in-betweens, and even those who conform to conven-
tional gendered and sexual behaviours. Most of us do in life what we must do to sur-
vive and what we do is what we are constantly becoming. If dominant culture deems
that what I do is non-normative, abject, and undignified and therefore of little worth,
the shame I feel among other queers is a shared shame that imparts dignity because
we value our differences from those in dominant culture even if, to the latter, what we
do is disgusting or of little value. If I am spending time with my “normative,” straight
family members, among other “normatives,” and they know I’m queer, some may
accept that queerness and share my ethics of life but still not fully understand my
queer ethics of life or how my queer life may differ from their “straight lives”; some
may say they accept my queerness but make jokes about queer people behind my
back, sometimes within my hearing; others may simply reject my abjectness and,
among those, some will be polite in my presence, while others may avoid my presence
altogether, perhaps because they think they cannot be polite in my presence. I don’t
think of any of these people as “beneath me”; most also live the way they think they
must to survive, and their ways of surviving may be very different from my ways of
surviving, and I accept that. (What I resist is the power equation that subordinates its
others to dominant culture.) “No one,” Warner maintains, is “beneath [the] reach” of
queer ethics. “The rule is: Get over yourself [. . .] The corollary is that you stand to
learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic cuts
against every form of hierarchy. [. . .] Queer scenes are the true salons des refusés,
where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their com-
mon experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now rec-
ognize as false morality” (Trouble 35-36).
Margaret Morrison 27

It was precisely Wojnarowicz’s inability to “pretend to be above the indignity of


sex” in his work in particular during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the
1980s that made him and his work a bull’s eye for the rhetoric of the right. As his friends
began to get sick, then die (including Peter Hujar), Wojnarowicz mustered both words
and images—with an intensity in proportion to his own sense of endangerment—to
counter the denial, neglect, and fear he could see manifesting itself in the media, in
Congress, on the streets, everywhere. He wrote and made images out of necessity in
order to try to say what he needed to say about a world beyond his comprehension.
One has the sense that that intensity translated into Wojnarowicz’s feeling that he had
nothing to lose by putting his own life on the line in standing up to those who cen-
sored his work and the work of other queers of the time (Robert Mapplethorpe’s
work, for instance). Censor youself, after all, in sum, was exactly what my father had
said to me: “Some things are better left unsaid”: shut your mouth, your writing, and
your art. But, through his art, Wojnarowicz challenged the hypocrisy of powerful
men, like the Rev. Mr. Wildmon, whom he eventually sued for libel and copyright
infringement for a flyer Wildmon had made using cut-outs of Wojnarowicz’s images,
which he so mutilated that Wojnarowicz himself said he could not recognize them as
his own. Wildmon sent the fliers to thousands of Christians to protest the NEA’s sup-
port of Wojnarowicz’s artwork (Meyer 257). (Wojnarowicz won the court case. The
judge ordered Wildmon to pay him a cheque in the amount of one dollar, which
Wojnarowicz framed and kept [259].)
If he was nothing else, Wojnarowicz was political—unabashed, enraged, in-your-
face political—especially at the end of his life, but even before that. His aim was never
acceptance, not the meaning of acceptance having to do with “acceptance into the
conventional fold,” not after “he began to value the way he didn’t fit in” (Carr 5) and
recognized that the pattern of his art was to embrace stigma and shame and to tell
uncomfortable truths. He wanted to make honest art, art that derived from “his
uneasiness with the world [. . .] where [. . .] institutions relegated homosexual matters
to snide johns or things to be exterminated” (5-6). This happened to be queer, shame-
induced art that was very different from the art of those who ran from stigma, very
different from the art of those who subscribed to “the good life.” His was an art
expressing honest convictions that bestowed dignity on traditionally shameful sub-
jects and reflected his own ethics of life. In works like those in the Sex Series (1988-
89), in which he manipulated positive and negative photographic exposures to
juxtapose small circles contained within the background scenes, the circles revealing
sex acts, male same-sex porn he appropriated from 1950s porn magazines, he made
blatantly sexy, political art, especially exposing the so-called “indignities” of gay male
28 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

sex and his own rage. Among the eight works in that series, the background scenes
strike one as mostly untroubled, common, domestic views—of a house, a train, a for-
est, a ship, etc.—but eerily in tension with views of uncommon occurrences, like alien
visitations and, in the porn circles, queers taking pleasure with each other (408-12).11
Wojnarowicz fought openly in the HIV/AIDS “wars” after, first, Hujar, and then
he himself developed the virus. After he “came out to himself,” he seems rarely to have
hidden his queerness in his work (the Sex Series) and, after he settled in the artistically
active East Village to live and work, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic proliferated with sur-
prising speed around him, he grew to value both not fitting in and resisting cruel,
hypocritical discourses of power attacking the sick—for example, in works like “Fuck
You Faggot Fucker” (1984) and “Subspecies Helms Senatorius” (1990) that express his
rage, horror, and humour. In this resistance, he seems to have epitomized the kind of
queer linked to shame and the creative expression of it I have been describing. He also
balked at the increasingly ugly and anti-intellectual rhetoric of the right when some
of the right’s spokesmen, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms included, struck out at him and
tried to censor his artwork. As art historian Richard Meyer recounts in Outlaw
Representation: Censorship of Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, for
one of his 1990 images (appearing on the cover of High Performance), Wojnarowicz
“collaborated on an image in which his lips appear to have been sutured closed”
(caption: “Why Is Reverend Wildmon Trying to Censor This Man?”). Meyer calls this
work “[censorship’s] radical surgery [performed] across the visible surface of the
body [. . .] so to enact [. . .] its symbolic violence” (260). Among the Wojnarowicz
images Wildmon tried to censor was one called Untitled (Genet, after Brassai, 1979),
in which, in the background, Jesus appears to be shooting up heroin.
Using a similar approach, in a 1992 photomontage, Untitled [Hands], in which
he figures “the experience of vanishing, of bodily disappearance, as a form of active
confrontation” (Meyer 260), Wojnarowicz does not explicitly voice his rage against
the cruel indifference and lack of action among governmental agencies empowered
with money and resources that they could have been using to save the lives of thou-
sands of gay men and some women. Instead, he voices the effects of the inaction on
himself, including his frustration, anger, depression, and exhaustion. “The artist,”
Meyer notes, “offers a pair of filthy, heavily bandaged hands held open in a gesture of
either supplication or self-inspection. A long text in red ink [is] superimposed over
the hands” (260-61). In the first lines of the text, Wojarnowicz writes that “‘Sometimes
I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone completely empty,
completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my
height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The
Margaret Morrison 29

person I was just a year ago no longer exists [. . .] I look familiar but I am a complete
stranger being mistaken for my former selves.’” Wojnarowicz ends the text with a
desperate-sounding series of short sentences: “‘I am vibrating in isolation among you.
I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signalling that the
volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing.
I am disappearing but not fast enough’” (qtd. in Meyer 261). Appealing to his viewers
to listen—and look—Wojnarowicz is trying to communicate his own and an entire
community’s desperate message: he’s dying, disappearing, but the process is excruci-
ating and so “not fast enough.”
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS the same year he made this image, 1992, at age 37. He
had been “out” to himself and others since the late 1970s, but he had only recently
become generally known as an artist notorious for his sometimes angry and brutally
unflinching artworks depicting, among other things, sex between men. His tone in the
text superimposed on Untitled [Hands] sounds like the rage of a man at the end of his
rope. He’s trying to say that he can’t communicate, that he’s dying, misapprehended,
desperate to do something; that the Rev. Mr. Wildmons of the world don’t get it; that
they are hypocritical; that they are narrowly and cruelly interacting with their own
others; that, by censoring those different from them (silencing what’s shameful or sin-
ful, disgusting, abominable), they fail to affirm life and the love that Jesus himself
called for; that their “morals” are false and empty, but they are blind to that—that all
this empties him. He attempts to communicate what he probably gleans he can never
quite communicate: that nobody “out there” understands this; that those considered
“abject” have human dignity and are capable of loving those like them and those who
are different from them, for life in all its varieties is what they value. But those who
command the discourses of institutional power—in churches and governments, for
instance—so often stop up their ears when the powerless attempt to be heard, then
say, “Some things are better left unsaid.” They blind themselves to whatever they are
too afraid to look at and thereby narrow their world and deprive themselves of some
of its richest complexities. But they speak and are heard among the many because they
have the power to speak, however twisted, cynical, and empty the rhetoric.
When he died, Wojnarowicz did seem to have disappeared, as he predicted he was
doing in Untitled [Hands]. But some members of some of the same powerful institu-
tions, like the church, who have the power to speak and be heard, in 2010 were still
censoring his work: witness the Hide/Seek show at the National Portrait Gallery that
year, where Wojnarowicz’s “Fire in the Belly” video was censored (for images like ants
crawling over a crucifix).12 What was apparent from the latest censoring of
Wojnarowicz’s work was that to “disappear” someone like Wojnarowicz, who risked
30 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

everything to say what he needed to say both before and after his HIV/AIDS diagno-
sis, is a disappearing, an erasure, that never quite happens. And Wojnarowicz’s dra-
matic re-appearance at the National Portrait Gallery show, as a threat, as a disrupter
of hegemonic institutions, reminds us again that the repressed other always returns to
haunt those who wish to silence it and the richest kind of dignity it brings. Thus, in
many respects, Wojnarowicz is not likely ever to “disappear.”

hile my father never forgave me for being a lesbian, the shame and rage he and
W others activated (or re-activated) in me, over the years, has enlarged me, as, I
dare say, their shame enlarged Whitman and Wojnarowicz. The latter two did not flee
from shame or deny it, nor did they cease to attempt to communicate the sources and
effects of their shame but, in fact, they used language and images—those imperfect
means of communication that offer multiple-valued responses or interpretations,
cognitive and affective—to reach audiences of different kinds. Whitman used lan-
guage both to conceal and to reveal the meanings of his “love of comrades,” depend-
ing on the particular responses of different readers, those of “his kind” and others.
Driven not just by his shame but also by his rage, Wojnarowicz made images that
boldly shoved queer realities into the faces of viewers, regardless of how each viewer
would respond—for the purpose of trying to communicate that nothing is better left
unsaid, especially when lives are at stake.
What these instances show, I hope, is that, especially during conservative political
times like our own, though LGBTs may be tempted to run from shame, that “free radi-
cle” Sedgwick said fastened itself to and “permanently intensifies or alters” meanings of
“almost anything” (“Theatricality” 59), the forms shame takes cannot be erased but are
instead “integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed”
(59-60). Those for whom shame remains an important “mediator of identity,”
Sedgwick believed, also become attuned to or vibrate with a form of performativity
called “queerness” (60). “Queerness,” she adds, “is intimately tied to the affect shame as
a generator of expressive ways” (Sedgwick and Frank 20). This means that we cannot
escape shame, but we can use it creatively. We don’t have to be ashamed of shame’s cre-
ative expressiveness, nor does “pride” need to conceal shame. One can both use the
motivating power of shame and be proud of what one has made with shame.

NOTES
1/ For example, in the May-June 2014 issue of The Gay and Lesbian Review, in reviewing the HBO series
Looking, Colin Carman notes that “what’s fresh about the men’s banter [Patrick’s, Augustin’s, and Dom’s] is
Margaret Morrison 31

their total lack of shame, including ‘bottom shame’ (as the show terms it)” (49). I am suspicious of this
assertion, not only because shame is a primary affect that won’t just go away (especially over something
like “bottom shame”) but also because the assertion (and the banter) suggests a pretense that the guys
really do not or cannot possibly feel queer shame. But they must feel shame, given its centuries-old
embeddedness in our cultural language. Thus, they are either repressing it or expressing it in terms of the
very “campy” banter Carman maintains consists of no shame. See “The World According to Grindr” (21.3:
49. Print).
2/ Gilles Deleuze remarked about T.E. Lawrence—who wrote about shame “at the limit of the body and of
language”—that he could “say with Kafka: ‘Shame enlarges the man’” (qtd. in Elspeth Probyn’s “Writing
Shame” [The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.
81. Print]).
3/ That is, according to Silvan Tomkins, “the achievement of cognitive power and precision [its on/off digi-
tal qualities] require[s] a motivational system,” the primary one of which is the (“many-valued” analogic
or complex) affect system. Or, as Tomkins notes, “Cognitive strides are limited by the motives which urge
them” (38-39).
4/ Prostitutes originally applied “gay” to themselves, from which nineteenth-century same-sex lovers,
including Whitman, borrowed and used in its various forms (see Charley Shively’s Calamus Lovers: Walt
Whitman’s Working Class Camerados [San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1987. 23. Print]). Whitman coded his
notebook with numbers for initials of lovers. The great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century coder, however,
was lesbian Ann Lister. See Graham Robb’s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century on
nineteenth-century same-sex lovers’ codes (New York: Norton, 2003. Print) and Martha Vicinus’s chapter on
Lister in Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print).
5/ In the nineteenth century, Whitman would have had to have internalized censorship of “the abominable
sin,” sodomy, since speaking these terms would have been a rarity then. In the twentieth century, the cen-
sorship of “homosexuality” (a term invented in 1869 that did not come into common use until the 1930s
and 40s) gradually became externalized—and remained internalized, too. See Meyer.
6/ Things have been changing so quickly in our queer worlds that students’ debates probably could not
really be reduced so easily to just two sides.
7/ Warner notes that sociologist Erving Goffman coined the names for the “stigmaphobe/stigmaphile”
binary. It is also worth saying that the shame and stigma marking queers are likely to remain as long as
language itself remains hierarchically binaristic and the dominant majority remains straight.
8/ Close to the end of his life, after Hujar’s death, Wojnarowicz also developed a close partnership with
Thomas Rauffenbart, who helped him through his final illnesses (Carr 552ff).
9/ Carr mentions many examples of Wojnarowicz’s rage. See, for instance, pages 469-73.
10/ Of course, the question becomes: who gets to call queer sex “undignified” (or “unnatural”)? If hetero-
sexual sex is “dignified,” is it only by virtue of its occupying the dominant side of the hierarchical binary
het/homo, that it has the power to call its negative “undignified”—in order to view itself as “dignified” and
“natural”?
11/ Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz is one of the best published sources to access photographs of
Wojnarowicz’s visual work (Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999.
Print).
12/ Carr mentions this recent censorship of Wojnarowicz’s work in her introduction (1-2). Also see
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010. Print).

WORKS CITED
The Boys in the Band. Dir. William Friedkin. Leo Films, 1970. Film.
Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Print.
32 Mosaic 48/1 (March 2015)

Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art.
London: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Ed. Donald E. Hall,
Annamarie Jagose, Andrea Bebell, and Susan Potter. New York: Routledge, 2013. 3-27. Print.
_____ . “Shame, Theatricality, and Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” Gay Shame. Ed.
David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 49-62. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.”
Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 1-28. Print.
Tomkins, Silvan. “What are Affects?” Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 33-74. Print.
Warner, Michael. “Pleasures and Dangers of Shame.” Gay Shame. Ed. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 283-96. Print.
_____ . The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
Print.
Wojnarowicz, David. Waterfront Journals. Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: Grove, 1996. Print.

MARGARET MORRISON is Professor of Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art.


Her principal interests lie in queer literature, theory, and intellectual history. She edited the MLA’s
GLQ Caucus publication, LGSN, for ten years and has published numerous essays, including
“Hypertextuality’s Queer Choreography” and “Laughing with Queers in My Eyes.”

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