ABSTRACT
For as long as there have been lesbians and gay men, representations of the past have played important roles in our daily survival, our collective imaginations, and in defining our politics; in particular, we have sought to make connections between our contemporary experiences and the lives of historical figures. Yet this impulse to claim specific individuals as part of a lesbian and gay tradition raises a number of difficulties related to reconstructions of history. Not the least of these difficulties has been one of the staple and important claims of much, but by no means all, of the recent sociological, historiographical and cultural analyses of lesbian and gay identities; according to this argument, lesbian and gay studies’ very object of study, its place of inquiry, is an historically new social phenomenon with a wide range of emergent and contradictory political and cultural practices. The medical, juridical and political discourses on homosexuality whose form was unprecedented before the late nineteenth century also gave rise, as Michel Foucault argues in what has become the classic statement of this position, to a ‘“reverse” discourse’ in which ‘homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged’ (Foucault, 1978:101). Collectively, this scholarship has exposed, in John D’Emilio’s words, ‘the tensions between gay politics and history’ (1984). By revealing the contingent nature of ‘gay identity’, the very project of lesbian and gay historical research has undermined the epistemological foundations for lesbian and gay social movements’ persistent political claims to an identity that has been ‘hidden from history’ (Duberman, Vicinus and Chauncey, Jr., 1989).
