Interview with John D’Emilio about Allan Bérubé’s “My Desire for History”

The collection uniquely brings together Bérubé’s intellectual pursuits alongside his ongoing exploration of the often hidden nexus between class, race, and sexuality in America. The first three parts, on gays and lesbians in the army and Bérubé’s finely honed and deeply poignant theorizations and reflections upon his own always uncomfortably felt place in the formal world of academia ( having entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, he left without completing his degree ) , consist of essays that have been published previously, but are now difficult to find. The fourth section brings together pieces culled from the vast trove of drafts he had written on the MCSU and have never been published before.

Yasmin Nair: If I’m not mistaken, Bérubé was among the first, if not the first, to write about the MCSU.

John D’Emilio: I’m sure someone has written about them, but nobody was writing what he was writing which is: to see this radical union as a queer-friendly place in the 1930s where people knew that many of the members were queer-identified in some way or another, and they were totally integrated into the union and the politics of the union.

Yasmin Nair: I wonder if we could talk a bit about his personal history, of which he writes so poignantly in, for instance, an essay like “Sunset Trailer Park.” [ Bérubé, a child of working class parents and a descendant of long-marginalized French-Canadian Quebecois, wrote here about growing up in a trailer park community and his ongoing questions about class and class ascendancy in America. ] His personal history isn’t unique, because there are obviously many gay historians who shared his class background, but what does seem so unique is his place as a gay community historian, the conjunction of his class background with queerness and a radical left background.

John D’Emilio: Allan was in the first cohort of us who, in the ’70s, started doing what was then was called gay and lesbian history and then became queer history. He was not university based at all but doing it as a freelancer and a historian. And so, in some ways, his background was not unusual in terms of how gay and lesbian history was being produced before it started making inroads in the academy.

People like Jonathan Katz who didn’t graduate from college, Amber Hollibaugh, who was not college-educated—there was a bunch of folks around who were not doing this as an academic track. But as time went on, what Allan started to do was unusual in the sense that he was starting to mine his personal experience and his own personal history as a way of understanding the history that he was writing about better, as if by going back and reclaiming this working class, ethnic life story, he was forced to empathize more fully and completely with working class people as the central characters in what should be GLBT people. He was saying: “This is us and this is me and my passion for it comes from my own lived experience.” It is not abstract, it is not patronizing.

And he developed a style of writing. One of the things I like about this collection of essays is that, from the beginning to the end, you watch him becoming a better writer. The early pieces are okay, but as he moves through time he becomes a better writer, and part of what’s so compelling about his writing is that the boundary between his life as he’s narrating this and the life of the history that he’s recounting blend into each other. It makes it much more immediate and dramatic. Now, if you were writing about the Middle Ages, you couldn’t do that. But he was writing about two generations before him and it resonates; it’s powerful.

Yasmin Nair: There’s an interesting autobiographical detail [ connected to what he writes about his class anxiety ] about his father, who he describes in terms of how “his need to justify his existence by satisfying his bosses, and his sacrifice of himself through hard work to make our lives better, slowly killed him with a lifetime of stomach ulcers and finally with cancer.” Bérubé died from ruptured stomach ulcers at around the same age as his father had been at the time of his death.

John D’Emilio: Yes. We don’t inherit them genetically, but we inherit the emotional worries of our families. Allan had this one moment, when he got the MacArthur Fellowship, which gave him 60,000 for five years and, literally, for the first time in his life, there were no financial worries. But he lived his life worrying about how he would support himself and do his work. And eventually it took him.

Yasmin Nair: Given how academia is now, in terms of the formalization of the production of queer knowledge and queer history, do you think it’s possible for someone like Allan Bérubé to emerge? It was difficult enough for him: it took a long and hard time to produce his body of work, and he worked independently at it from the start, developing and taking around his slide presentations, working on his research.

John D’Emilio: Yes, there could still be a new Allan today, it’s just that there could never be too many of those people because living the life of a freelancer unattached to institutions, without a family background that supports you, is always very difficult. While Allan wasn’t unique, he was practically unique. So there could be another Allan, unfortunately there aren’t going to be many because this is one of the the things we mean by class in America.

Yasmin Nair: Right, a reality which we deny, as he points out in “Class Dismissed,” where he writes that “In the United States, the idea of “middleclassness” is used as a powerful disciplinary practice that confuses class relations, denies the existence of class…thwarts class solidarity and cross-class cooperation and mobilizes racial sentiments.”

[ In the context of his class analysis and work on academic production ] , do you think that his sort of work is more likely to be sustained within conventional academic networks, which also means you have to learn a way of presenting history? It’s not that Bérubé wasn’t an excellent and rigorous historian [ but I’m wondering about how historical production gets marked ] …

John D’Emilio: I see what you’re saying. The nice thing about universities being open about this kind of work in LGBT history is that you can do the work, you can be employed, students can come to school and learn about this and they can take courses in it as part of their education. The down side is that the pressure in that world to write what you write, in a way that you’re speaking to other people in that world rather than to a public, is very, very great and if you don’t have community connections or the experience of starting this work in the context of community life, it’s very hard to do.

And so that’s the down side—the price of inclusion is that borders get erected around who your audience will be. Allan was always speaking to community audiences. Even when he spoke at academic conferences, there was nothing pretentious, he was not framing it in a theoretical language that is the language of the privileged. We used to talk about this all the time because I try to do the same thing: I always try to write in a way that you don’t have to read a whole lot of other things in order to read what I write. I’m not trying to address my academic peers, I’m writing for a public audience.

Yasmin Nair: Related to that: Is there consequently a difference in how history gets narrativized and transmitted within a community, perhaps?

John D’Emilio: I’m not sure about that; I’d have to think about that. Something that Allan and I used to laugh about a lot is that we would always say, “God, how the community loves us historians; they love having their history excavated and presented to them, but really no one listens to us. [ laughs ] And so really, even when presenting in a non-academic way, Allan’s work is very sophisticated. He’s not presenting a “Find the famous gays in history” approach or saying, “See, there we were 500 years ago.” [ His work is about ] a world in which identities get created, different cultures of sexuality had no place in them for gay or lesbian or anything like that. But that isn’t what the world wants to hear from us; they mainly like “Who are the famous homos?”

Yasmin Nair: And it’s usually presented in a linear narrative and a movement towards modernity that culminates in marriage. His class and race critique seem incredibly prescient especially when he talks about the prison system. [ This brings me to the multiracial and very queer MCSU. ] As you said earlier, his narrative style shifts quite a bit as he begins to look at his own history in relation to his work. Is there a way in which the work on the MCSU becomes a kind of culmination of that lifelong interest and unearthing of that kind of analysis?

John D’Emilio: No, it was very serendipitous that in doing [ Coming Out Under Fire ] on World War II. He interviewed all these men and so many of the men whose stories he was able to get for this WWII story put him in the vicinity of ports, and ships, and the Marine marines and before you know it, they’re saying to him, “You know you have to write this story, too, brother.” And he listened to his sources and those sources inevitably were very heavily working class guys. So there was a logical path that took him there. I think he was as surprised by it as anyone because the story of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union: it’s truth stranger than fiction. It’s impossible. If someone just told you this, you’d say, “Oh yeah, give me another one. It can’t possibly be true.” But it was true.

Yasmin Nair: To return to his views on class, which is so clearly a major theme in the MCSU chapters: he asks, “What would we learn if we began to uncover other histories of people who did queer work?” And part of that answer come a little later when he writes, “The fact that queer work has a history of being unionized gives me some hope in these hard times … we can use it to fight our own twin myths that gay people are not working class, and that unions are not gay.”

It’s something I’ve been thinking about in relation to my own work: What does it look for queer activists to think about labor, to think about queer activism and labor? We aren’t hearing that there’s a reason why it’s queer to be labor or that queerness and labor are intimately connected. What can we take from what Bérubé has proferred in terms of perhaps reworking how we think about queer and labor issues—not class, but labor?

John D’Emilio: Well, here’s what I’m tempted to say: that so much of what we understand of as gay is premised on, first of all, guys, who are able to have their sexual feelings and desires and then have enough independence that they can afford to go out into the world, act on them, construct a new life and not worry about how other people are going to react.

Well, working-class people have to worry about how other people are going to react because they’re still dependent on networks of people for their survival—and usually kinship networks, among other things. So it’s almost as if the visible gay world that we identify as the gay world is much more middle class and educated than the population as a whole. And [ I’m not replaying the right-wing argument ] about how privileged we are; what I’m saying is that the most visible world is a middle-class professional world because that’s what it takes to survive the homophobia of this society. And working-class guys and working-class women really need to remain embedded in their communities of origin if they’re going to make it in life, and that doesn’t leave them quite the same space to be gay or to be gay in quite the same way that middle class people are gay. Their first loyalty might not be to other people but to people like them and that’s what comes out in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. They’re loyal to their mates, they’re not just loyal to the queer ones: “We’re in this together. And we have to create solidarity.”

So it’s almost as if queer—the hard thing for the gay world as it’s constructed itself, for the gay world to take on queer labor issues, the hard thing about that is queer labor issues aren’t just going to be queer. They’re going to be labor and they’re going to be about other people too who are part of the same struggle. It isn’t just going to be have an anti-discrimination clause in your union contract. It’s going to be “Fight for us, shoulder to shoulder.” Well, it’s a different way of deciding what you fight for.

Yasmin Nair: Is the book on the MCSU likely to emerge as a separate entity? You note in the introduction that there are separate drafts.

John D’Emilio: It’s hard to know. There are four or five drafts; they’re very different from each other. I mean, it’s part of his learning to be a writer—he was learning to figure out the best way to present this. So the different drafts: it’s not like draft one, draft two, draft three, draft four. It’s like: draft one, let’s start all over again [ and the same process for two, three and four ] . In the last draft, the first eighty pages or so are word perfect, they are beautiful. He found his voice, he found his structure, he found his framework. The next eighty pages need some good editing, but they follow from the first eighty pages. That’s less than half of what the book would be. There’s about another sixty percent that just exists in rough outline form and so the challenge would be, if we can absorb this version, those first one hundred and 60 pages and how he’s doing it: can we find in the other drafts written material that could then be put there in sequence but redone so that it’s part of the same? And I don’t have the answer to that yet.

I would say there are three possibilities as to what will happen with the work on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. One, Estelle and I will take all the drafts and just put them online so they’re just available for anybody to read these unfinished versions of the book. Two, we will find another labor historian whose work we really like, who seems simpatico with Allan and give it to them if they want it. The third option is that we’ll sit down and try to figure out if we can do it. I think we’re going to wait a while before we try to figure that one out.

Meanwhile, though, all of his research is available in the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, so if someone wants to look at those oral histories and do any documentary research, it’s there.

Yasmin Nair: What was it like for you as a historian who obviously does work that’s very close to Bérubé’s but found yourself essentially working with another historian’s research? How did you see your relationship to this work?

John D’Emilio: … [ B ] oth of us were such good friends of Allan, I mean, we each knew him for almost 30 years. … Allan and I especially, not in the last handful of years so much, but for two decades we had these endless conversations about what we were doing. We would do research together, we would read each other’s stuff, we would talk all night about what we were doing: it was more like channeling him and trying to imagine what it is what he would be pleased with. Who knows? I’m not good at channeling. [ Laughs ]

John D’Emilio will read from and discuss My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History at Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark Street, Thursday, June 9, at 7:30 p.m.