Arresting developments: Counter-narratives of gay liberation

Through readings of exemplary texts from the 1960s to the 1980s, my dissertation, Arresting Developments: Counter-Narratives of Gay Liberation, argues that homosexuality constitutes a structural resistance to the narrative formulation of gay liberation; refuting historians who describe gay liberation by telling a story of its birth and progress, the dissertation demonstrates that counter-narrative energies of repetition, displacement, deferral, and temporal contradiction govern the structure of gay sexuality, thereby competing with the narrative sense that gay-liberation histories attempt to make. Chapter One shows how counter-narrative elements reside in primary texts of the movement, addressing several major manifestos to produce a theory of coming out as a reiterative process that perpetually forestalls gay liberation's end. Chapter Two uses the Freudian theory of paranoia to read the historical transition from pre-Stonewall homosexual panic to the gay liberation movement, anatomizing the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate to show how its structure of mechanized displacement anticipates the later movement. Chapter Three uses the form of James Baldwin's novel Another Country (1962), which insistently returns to a repressed homosexual past, to read the mimetic relation between gay liberation and the Black Power movement. Chapter Four examines Andrew Holleran's novel Dancer from the Dance (1978), whose characters inhabit a gay Manhattan far removed from movement politics, to describe how the novel's temporal incoherence confounds the narrative trajectory of Oedipal reproduction. Chapter Five shows how Randy Shilts's gold-standard history of AIDS in America, And the Band Played On (1987), recurrently produces a slippage between the spread of the disease and the growth of gay liberation, revealing the radical historical difference apparently effected by the advent of AIDS as in fact an unsettling metaphoric displacement. Together, these texts manifest what I call, borrowing from one Freudian description of homosexuality, arresting developments, instances of a radical critique, within gay liberation texts and contemporary representations of gay sexuality, of the imperative to produce historicizing distinctions that rules much thinking about gay liberation, a critique that recent accounts of gay liberation and its literature, in turn, willfully forget.