ABSTRACT
Lesbian and gay scholars have good reason for their investments in cultural studies, a relatively new paradigm that we have had a significant hand in propagating. A small personal anecdote may illuminate the needs that have led to such investment. In my final year as an undergraduate on an English literature degree at a reasonably well respected red brick university I took a course on philosophy in literature. At this time I was enjoying my new political life as an out gay man. I had entered higher education so that I could be gay by escaping the small and deeply provincial town in which I grew up. In 1988, just after Clause 28, gay politics on campus was thriving, and I threw myself into it with an enthusiasm that slaked the frustrations of small town narrow-mindedness. By my final year I had also begun to be fired up by my course, while still whirling and shrieking round campus, caught up in fights for lesbian and gay officers on the Union Executive, campaigns for AIDS and HIV welfare policy, etc. The point is, I was not politically timid about my sexuality: indeed, you could say that I was striving to become a human pink triangle. One of the set books on this philosophy and literature course was Death in Venice, and I remember the professor in charge of the teaching starting his lecture by instructing us that Mann’s novel had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality, but was instead concerned with more substantial issues of an ethical and artistic nature. What is striking about my recollection is that even though I instinctively knew this professor was wrong and deeply prejudiced, anxious even, I did not challenge him. Moreover, I did not think to challenge him because his was the intellectual authority; I had no access to dissident rhetorical strategies with which to engage him on an appropriate footing. Naturally I bitched and carped about him with an outlandish relish in the bar after seminars, but taking on this brown acrylic clad harbinger of open-mindedness was beyond the scope of my newly hatched and brashly affected gay pride.
