Book Report: Queers Dig Time Lords

Sometimes I can't let go of a book until I've written about it. If it gives me ideas, I have to work them out a bit before I feel done. I have a few books that have been languishing on my table because I haven't had the time to do this. I tried just putting them back into the library bag anyway, and they made little sad noises, and the knowledge that I had unfinished book business hurt my brain. I'm going to try to write about them, but quickly, because I have other stuff to do.

First up: An anthology called Queers Dig Time Lords, a "celebration of Dr. Who by the LGBT fans who love it." Like all anthologies, this one includes too much and is wildly uneven. Its 27 essays include far too many that are essentially autobiographical anecdotes about the role Dr. Who played in lives of young queer people. The first few are interesting and invoke at least some shared memories; probably every queer kid who was exposed to books and TV has this same relationship, if not to Dr. Who, then to some other work that aroused interest and hinted at possibilities. Ask any lesbian of about 50 about Harriet the Spy, Jo on Facts of Life, or the wonder that was Cagney & Lacey, for instance.

The trouble with these familiar stories, of course, is that they're familiar. I found that the fun of reading about a shared experience shifted quickly into impatience. It didn't take me long to start skimming any essay that started with a quick precis of the author's childhood circumstances, not willing to invest in a full reading unless I saw some hint that this one was managing to say something new, or different, or unusually insightful.

The strongest essays in the book are the ones that deal less with an individual's relationship to the show, and more with questions of what it means to perform a queer reading, and what it means for a show to allow—or, sometimes, to disallow—that queer reading.

It's been my experience that this idea of queer people actively engaging with creative works in order to situate ourselves and our experiences within them, and to use them in our formation of self, is one that straight people have a hard time grasping. One time on Facebook, I mentioned the Holy Trinity of the pre-coming-out teenage lesbian of the late 70s and early 80s: Jodie Foster in anything, the aforementioned Jo, and Buddy on the show Family. A straight friend of about my age commented, "Huh. I don't remember that plotline." I wanted to shake her and say, "Don't you get it? It wasn't a plotline. Nobody gave us plotlines. They gave us girls who were just the least bit less girly than all the other girls, just a little bit tougher, who had something of a way about them that spoke to something in us we hadn't so much as named yet. We turned them into role models and objects of affection."

Yes:

Hell, yes:

Oh, hell yes.

Two out of three of these actresses are out lesbians now, by the way.

It's been my experience that heterosexual people not only struggle to understand how very important the possibility of queer readings are to us, but that they can be actively hostile to the possibility. Last year, in a MetaFilter conversation about this essay on Harriet the Spy, it took only until the third comment for people to start denying the possibility of a queer reading of Harriet or the Boy with the Purple Socks,  or suggesting that claiming a queer reading was akin to thinking Bert & Ernie on Sesame Street are gay. As a queer person, it's hard to hear people denying something that nobody is claiming as a fact. Nobody says, I don't think, that Harriet M. Welsch or Janie is a lesbian. What so many of us experienced in the late 60s and early 70s, as 11-year-old proto-queers ourselves, was that Harriet, changing out of her school clothes and into jeans and ratty sneakers, and spending her afternoons going to places she wasn't supposed to be, called to us. And what we understand now is that she called to that part of us that was queer.

I remember loving the illustrations in that book. When I was in early elementary school, girls were still being forced to wear skirts to school, though by the time I was in late elementary school this was no longer true. I have friends who remember forced skirt-wearing as traumatic, as a denial of their identify and self-expression (myself, I liked skirts except for the need to hold them up when hanging upside down on the monkey bars). But then there was Harriet, who came into the world in 1964—just one year before I arrived—looking like this:

I didn't know which I wanted more: to be her, or to be near her.

The thing straight people seem to have trouble understanding is that a queer reading of a work doesn't foreclose any other readings. If you loved Harriet the Spy because it included a girl who was a scientist or a sweet, nurturing boy who cooked or, like a whole generation of writers of assorted genders and sexual orientations, because you really understood what was up with Harriet and that notebook and her need to observe and to write down what she saw, that's fine and good. It doesn't take anything away from you for little pre-pubescent lesbians to grab onto Harriet and hold on tight. But for those little lesbians, it can mean everything to have a hint, here and there, that who they are and what they want exists in the world. Harriet the Spy was one of those hints.

Louise Fitzhugh, by the way? A lesbian. A butch lesbian, my hand to god. And she wrote a book, Amelia, that was about two girls falling in love. She couldn't get it published and the manuscript is lost. But it existed. She wrote it. I'm glad to know it.

My point is that we had so little. And so many young people coming up today still have less than you might think in terms of access to stories, role models, images of the erotic that speak to them. Queer readings allow us to take that little and make much of it. In a good essay in Queers Dig Time Lords, "Bi, Bye," Tanya Huff writes:

There are complaints from the, shall we say, straighter parts of the world, that if you're queer, you're always trying to find the queer subtext. To that I say, 'Well, duh.' Everyone wants to find the 'me-shaped door' that lets them into the story. Unlike those straighter parts of the world, we have to search for it because if it's there at all, it's usually buried deeper than the pea in The Princess and the Pea. (p. 87)

In addition to Hoff's essay, which focuses on Jack Harkness, I very much enjoyed Amal El-Mohtar's essay "Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master's First and Lasts," which, among other things, explores the way that the Stephen Moffatt Dr. Who closes off expansive queer readings of subtext by providing explicit, but limited, queer text. She writes:

...when you're a queer woman of color...consuming film and telelvision and books is often like being handed beautiful, elaborately sculpted meals with bits of cockroach poking antennae and carapace out of the sauces and souffles. You try to eat around the bugs...but you can't quite get away from the fact that they've flavored the dish and will probably make you sick. But you have to eat, or go hungry.... 

If consuming media was like picking bugs out of impressively prepared food, subtext was like a waiter slipping me some ingredients on the sly with a knowing wink and suggesting I make something myself. 

In many ways, it was even more freeing to me than explicit representations of queer desire, because it allowed, even depended, on my participation and imagination. By drawing me into a world of potentials which I could have a part in determining, it gave me power. (pp. 63-64)

For El-Mohtar, there is something to be preferred about the old Dr. Who, when he was portrayed as a more-or-less asexual being; no story about his loves or his sex life could be denied, because none were being told. Everything was still possible. "Since Stephen Moffat became showrunner," she writes, "the reboot has favored token explicitness over the vastness of subtextual potential, especially where men are concerned.... To take Series Six as a case in point, Canton Delaware III has a black male lover whom we never see, and the existence of whom is delivered as a punchline; we get a gay male couple...who have no names besides 'the fat one' and 'the thin one,' also presented as a wry joke." (p. 65)

She's naming an important phenomenon here: that, on the one hand (and not just in Dr. Who), it's exciting, almost dizzying to have so many explicitly named gay and lesbian characters show up in our media. On the other hand, most of the time explicit naming is all we get. El-Mohtar writes, "Ultimately, I long to be shown as well as told about queer relationships. So often we only get one or the other—shown same-sex desire that dare not speak its name, or told about same-sex desire that dare not show its face.... Russell T. Davies in Torchwood has given us a lot of queer sex without meaningful queer relationships; Steven Moffat has given us queer characters in relationships who never so much as hold hands on screen." It's a complicated trade-off between having almost no representation at all, but the freedom to imagine what isn't named, or having representation that falls short of what is needed and simultaneously, by telling a story, forecloses some of possibilities of the collaborative queer audience.

Brit Mandelo takes the idea of collaboration between audience and work even further in "Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity." Her essay opens, "the first thing I saw of Torchwood was a clip excerpted from the opening episode of the second season." If you are a fan you know immediately which scene she's talking about:



If you don't care to learn by clicking, I'll tell you that this is the scene where Captain Jack Harkness is reunited with Captain John Hart, and they demolish a bar in a passionate eruption of kissing, fighting, and drinking. Mandelo says it's camp. And not only that, but so is everything else in the show. And this is important for queer folk because we get camp. She says, "The interrelationship of camp and gay culture hearkens back more than just a few decades, and...some of the first stuff we may have seen that looked a little bit like us came in the form of campy, over-the-top comedies." (p. 157)

It's hard to define camp for folks who aren't familiar with it, and I think it's impossible to ever define it briefly, but Mandelo does a pretty good job:

...the sense of camp in Torchwood is part of its distinctly queer ethos, part of what makes it speak directly and understandably to me. If we take camp according to the terms I've been applying to it throughout—exaggerated, theatrical, parodic, ironically nostalgic, over-the-top in reference and performance alike—it's pretty obvious where Torchwood fits on the continuum; John Barrowman's performance of Captain Jack Harkness alone dings every point on the checklist. (p. 158)

This is a nifty point, that queerness is not just about content but about style. ("Of course it is, dear," my inner gay man says, saluting me with a martini glass and sardonically raising one perfect eyebrow.)

I thought, when I started this, that I was going to crank out a quick three paragraphs so I could finally return the damn book to the library. That didn't happen, obviously. Probably because this question of queer readings is more important than you might give it credit for. It's not just a game. It's a survival strategy.