My academic writing has been published or is in press from the Radical History Review, Invertito, and Global Histories. My dissertation project is tentatively titled Comrades and Colonists: Primitivism and the Rise of Gay Liberation. The adoption of primitivist and occultist tropes to create universalizing and historicizing myths has been a present, even dominant, element in the broad and evolving global movements for homosexual emancipation and gay liberation, including parts of those movements often not analyzed together due to spatial or temporal distance. Those tropes have provided labor roles for their adopters by rooting emergent sexualities within socially reproductive roles and rituals in so-called “primitive” societies. 

What do we do with anti-colonial, egalitarian, and equality-oriented politics that are nonetheless shaped by racist ways of knowing? Can a history examine how similar systems of knowledge and production created ‘queer’ and ‘savage’ as threats to time and reproduction, and see that shared creation as part of some radical metropolitan queers’ claim to be primitive, without denying their implication in the violent appropriation of bodies and land? The imbrication of primitivism in the structures of thinking of so many different foundational moments of queer identity and community formation demands that we take it seriously: it is something that is carried within queer people and politics to this day. My project examines these appropriations in two linked sites: early 20th century Berlin (and various other sites, like the Lebensreform settlements in Ascona, Switzerland) and in 1970s California. I proceed in conversation with theoretical literature developing at the intersection of queer theory and historical materialism, alongside readings of existing literatures on primitivism in the modern metropolis.

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Radical History Review 142, January 2022 (with João Florêncio)

Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.

Review: THE HIRSCHFELD ARCHIVES: VIOLENCE, DEATH, AND MODERN QUEER CULTURE, by Heike Bauer

Global Histories 4:2, October 2018

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Hans Heinrich von Twardowski and the Global History of Gay Liberation

The Pasts and Futures of Queer German Studies; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2020

Transnational histories of gay and queer identity formation have mostly examined the production of identities under shifting economic conditions on a mass scale. Small-scale studies of transnational individuals and the intellectual and cultural lifeworlds they connected have the potential to trouble broad narratives of the formation and production of same-sex-loving identities. Hans Heinz von Twardowski’s case provides one such example: it is possible to trace ideas from American gay liberation movements back to Weimar expressionisms (linking late 20th-century gay hippie self-understanding to Weimar concepts of ‘geistige Arbeit’) through a close reading of his limited archive and his associations with crucial figures in the history of German and American left-wing, gay, and bohemian movements; all of which are haunted by troubled relationships with notions of “primitivity” produced in the colonies. This queer transnational history helps, in Jennifer Evans’ words, to “chip away at the progress narrative” and move towards “critical and self-reflexive histories” of how “same-sex desire has been conceptualized on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Faggots and Class Struggle: Gay Liberation and Socialist Feminism

Historical Materialism; SOAS, London, 2019

From September 4 to September 6, 1976, 140 self-identified faggots gathered at Wolf Creek, an intentional community of back-to-the-land gay men in rural Oregon. They had responded to a Statement of Purpose (and agreed to abide by political unity principles) written and distributed by comrades across the Northwest seeking to “clarify the relationship between gay men’s oppression and class struggle, led a series of workshops exploring class, imperialism, the development of patriarchy, and labor organizing from a variety of different clearly-stated political positions: the majority, and the organizers, were Marxist-Leninists; the rest came from a variety of different flavors of Maoist and Trotskyist sects. These left analyses were blended with a heavy dose of the settler-primitivist, highly sexual, and self-consciously outrè affect of gay liberation: there was a moonlight ritual, and an orgy in a tipi. This presentation examines arguments made about socialist feminism by these activist-theorists, arguing for the importance of socialist feminist ideas about family and social reproduction for the development of, and contemporary understanding of, the symbiotic sex and politics of gay liberation.

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Queerness as Labor 

The New Centre for Research and Practice | Fall 2019

This seminar thought queerness outside and beyond the framework of identity, looking at its historical and contemporary relationship with labor. Is queerness a form of socially productive labor? How does it intersect with work, and the power relations between workers and capital? We approached queer sexuality as a question of everyday life; as a series of institutions within which people interact and describe their experiences. In the first session, we developed an evolving understanding of one particular vision of queerness-as-labor: beginning with readings of socialist feminist texts on reproductive labor and then diving into 1960s and 1970s activist conversations about queer sex, spirituality, and social institutions. The second session examined the history of queer union organizing (including the 1930s Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, sex worker organizing among male hustlers, gay male flight attendants, and more). The final two sessions were devoted to guest lectures and discussions of contemporary critical viewpoints on these topics: first, from Michelle Esther O’Brien, on trans-led union organizing in the retail sector, and second, from Sophie Lewis, on surrogacy and reproductive accelerationism.

Queer Fictions of the Past, Queer Histories of the Present

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin | 2018-2019

What’s queer about queer histories? In this Projekttutorium we approached questions that cross boundaries of narrative, autofiction, oral history, and performance in the discovery of queer pasts from different perspectives. In the first semester we dealt with the theoretical background of queer history and literature, including crucial historiographic texts. We began by examining some of the key concepts of our field of inquiry: “queer,” “history,” “representation,” and “narrative,”  questioning both how to understand queer pasts and queer narratives per se and how historians and literary scholars have thought about recuperative and restorative reading practices in general. We then moved on to an exploration of the three types of narrative sources (oral history, artistic gesture, and autofiction) with sources and analyses coming from a wide variety of subjective experiences across the queer umbrella and around the globe. Performance studies texts such as Jose Munoz’ “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling” helped us understand how to analyze artistic gesture and performance as sources but also the performative aspects of all narrative sources. The first semester ended with a theory session exploring what narrative sources can bring to historiography and vice versa. In the second semester we moved towards an examination of different categories of queer experience, mixing different kinds of histories and narrative sources to explore queer life in Berlin ‘then’ and ‘now,’ trans* experiences, lesbian experiences, gay experiences, and AIDS. As a final project, students conducted oral history interviews with living queer narrators in partnership with the Schwules Museum Berlin. This class was co-conceived and co-taught with Sydney Ramirez.