Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

March 29, 2005

Dear Colleague,

I watched "Teen connection" on public television last week. It is about the trials and tribulations of GLBT high-school students in Wisconsin. Four girls and three boys were on the panel, along with a faculty adviser and a moderator. The students reminisced about their experiences in school and at home, and responded to questions from call-ins. They all spoke well and seemed well-adjusted and mature. But unhappy. That is, I didn't see smiles or the inner glow natural to teenagers. And no one said, "I am gay and proud to be so." They uniformly denied that they had any choice and said that if they could they would have chosen to be hetero-sexual--that is, not be the constant target of bullying, taunts, or simply the cause of embarrassment, not wincing at words such as gay, homo, fag and faggot that are routinely used in school as the ultimate put-down, and able to hold hands with a friend in perfect naturalness. All of them claimed to be aware of their sexual proclivity at an early age--as early as five or six. (One boy not on the panel said that he learned to tie shoelaces in kindergarten just so that he could do them for cute boys who had not yet learned how.) All the students on the panel said they were in a state of total denial of their nature until they couldn't fight it any longer in their teens. They saw for themselves a life of apartness even in the midst of genial company. Take this example--one of myriads in the course of a day. A gay boy goes with his pretend girlfriend to see Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). All is well at the surface. The couple looks normal: they sit close, their knees almost touch, and they eat popcorn. But the boy finds that, no matter how hard he tries, his eyes stray more often to Romeo's codpiece than to Juliet's cleavage.

The critic George Steiner thinks that the modern sensibility is much influenced by homoeroticism if not homosexuality. And he has in mind not just high fashion and the stage. He thinks also of literature and philosophy. The influence is in two, seemingly opposed directions: toward sincerity and honesty and toward irony and the subtext. Society is a cover-up and it is honest to expose what lies underneath. Marx and Freud have done that, and neither is homosexual. But they have "outed" society and other people rather than themselves. Homosexuals, in contrast, want to "out" themselves, reveal their closeted feelings and let the chips fall where they may. Isn't that part of the agenda of the Bloomsbury group? And hasn't that group un-wittingly encouraged the flood of confessional literature in our time? The other influence--toward irony and the subtext--is more subtle. We find it--and indeed we expect it--in literature, in the works of the Bloomsbury group and Henry James in England, of Proust, Gide, and Genet in France, of Garcia Lorca in Spain, of Kafka in Austria and Mann in Germany. As for philosophy, Wittgenstein is the outstanding example: he managed to use his later work, Philosophical Investigations (1945), to subvert his earlier, positivistic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). France gives us Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, two very influential sociological thinkers in the last decades of the twentieth century. Both were members of the brotherhood. They have sought to substitute indirection and irony for the straight-arrow analytic philosophy of the Anglo-Americans. Anglo-American philosophers are all very well, but do they know how to tie their shoelaces?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu