The Falling Dream: Unreason and Enchantment in the Gay Liberation Movement A Dissertation ...

352 Pages·2015·4.44 MB·English

The Falling Dream:
Unreason and Enchantment in the Gay Liberation Movement

A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Abram J. Lewis

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Regina Kunzel, adviser; Roderick Ferguson, co-adviser

July 2015
© Abram J. Lewis 2015
Acknowledgements

Completing a PhD is a colossal undertaking that highlights the ineluctably social
character of knowledge production. This dissertation could not have been possible
without the generosity of many, both within and beyond my academic life. I am grateful
to everyone who invested their knowledge, labor, patience, and support in this project
over the last several years. These remarks will not do justice to those contributions, but I
will nonetheless attempt to confer some recognition here.
This dissertation is the product of an exceptionally committed and insightful
committee. Kevin Murphy has effectively served as my third advisor throughout my
graduate career: Kevin has provided feedback on innumerable seminar papers, funding
proposals, job applications, and publication materials. Beyond scholarly feedback, Kevin
has been integral to my attempts to figure out how to “do” academia. Roderick Ferguson
has remained a generous, engaged, and at times, especially challenging reader, for which
I feel particularly fortunate. It has been exciting to have Rod as a co-advisor as our
current projects have brought us into overlapping historical and theoretical loops of
flight. I am thankful to have retained Rod as an interlocutor, even as our professional
trajectories drew us to Chicago and New York City respectively. Jean Langford was a
serendipitous addition to a committee otherwise populated by Americanists associated
with gender and sexuality studies. Jean’s insights—both into my objects of study and my
frame for engaging them—have been invaluable. I am fortunate to have had Jean as a
committee member who supported, from early on, my anti-historicist dispositions. Last
but not at all least, Regina Kunzel’s dedication to her students is both well known and

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wholly deserved. It would be difficult for me to imagine completing a PhD without Reg’s
support on nearly all levels. I am indebted to Reg for her consistent and incisive
engagement with my work (including at least a few arguments that were never resolved),
her countless tailored recommendation letters, her investment in many hours of meetings,
her patience and implacability through bouts of confusion, haplessness, and neurosis, and
her overall labor in wrangling me forward as an advisee.
This project probably would never have been able to cohere as a study of religion
without support from Harvard Divinity School’s Seminar on Debates about Religion and
Sexuality, and without the specific support and guidance of my outside reader, Mark
Jordan. Mark’s seminar introduced me to my first fellow scholars of religion, who have
continued to be valued friends and colleagues, especially Evren Savci and Zach
Corleisson. Mark’s generosity in reviewing my work and providing feedback and
guidance has been invaluable as I grope my way into the vast academic world of God-
talk. Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University also donated his insight, interlocution, and
encouragement—I have greatly benefited from his endorsement of the idea that there
might indeed be something “super” (something metaphysically so) about sexuality.
My entré into graduate school and subsequent progression through it would not
have been possible without Christina Hanhardt’s support and direction. I am grateful for
her mentorship and guidance, both scholarly and professional. Of my peers at the
University of Minnesota’s American Studies Program, I especially thank Karisa Butler-
Wall for her feedback on numerous written portions of this project, as well as her
ongoing informal dialogue. Karisa also deserves recognition as a valuable source of

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unexpected research leads. Jesus Estrada-Perez encouraged me to pay closer attention to
John Rechy’s wind. Jeanne Vaccaro at Indiana University has been a generous
interlocutor and contact, and I look forward to being in continued conversation with her
about psychedelic trans archives over the next year.
This project would not have been possible without the labor and expertise of
many archivists across the country. I especially thank the volunteers at the Lesbian
Herstory Archives, whose familiarity with the collections there, as well as their general
knowledge of lesbian history, are extraordinary resources. My research was supported by
funding from the New York Public Library, and the NYPL’s collections have proven
crucial to this project. I thank the staff there, especially Jason Baumann, who invested
additional time and knowledge in discussing this research with me. I also thank the staff
at Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection, which supported early research for this project.
Faculty at SUNY Purchase provided an exceptionally welcoming and supportive
environment while I was teaching there in my final year of dissertation work. I
particularly thank Suzanne Kessler, Elise Lemire, and Linda Bastone.
Finally, my thinking in this project is indebted to countless insights gleaned from
the larger queer community in NYC and beyond. Julian Talamantez Brolaski lent key
etymological research and expertise (confirming that “queer” and “witch” may or may
not derive from the same words). Conversations with Bryn Kelly, Reina Gossett,
Elizabeth Koke, Karen Pittelman, Elana Redfield, Anna So, and Nell Geiser, to name
only a few, very much made this project what it is. And Rebecca Novack has, in many
more ways that one, been at the heart of this undertaking from the very start. I hope that

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her brilliance, her magnanimity, and her very queer unruliness all shine through in the
pages that follow.

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Dedicated to Regina Kunzel, for her indefatigable guidance, support, and insight—all of
which are testament to a super-human efficacy.

To Reina Gossett, who helped me see that the police station was gone.

And to Rebecca Novack, who still believes she has magical powers.

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Abstract
The Falling Dream: Unreason and Enchantment in the Gay Liberation Movement
examines supernatural, paranormal, and other forms of “irrational” experience in 1970s
queer politics. I argue that although this decade is often narrated as a period of activist
decline, queer cultures saw a proliferation of inventive approaches to organizing during
these years– these efforts, however, often elude conventional understandings of politics. I
center activists who fought police brutality with magic, used psychic powers to free
political prisoners, built coalitions with extraterrestrials, and pursued threshold states
(achieved through mysticism, psychotropics, or psychosis) as resources for political
insight. I argue that these seemingly disparate activist unorthodoxies shared a refusal of
modernist regimes of secular rationality. Far from being merely idiosyncratic, I suggest
that non-secular and anti-rationalist approaches helped expand possibilities for queer
political thought and action during a time of national political retrenchment—I thus read
unreason and enchantment as systemic queer responses to the early onset of neoliberal
austerity. In centering deauthorized strategies for social change, this project brings to the
forefront communities that had least access to mainstream reform structures,
communities that have also often been peripheral to historiographies of gender and
sexuality: queer people of color, transgender people, lesbian feminists, and poor,
incarcerated, and disabled queer communities. This project, in other words, asserts the
need to attend to the subaltern political methodologies that proceed from subaltern
political movements. Additionally, I suggest that looking to madness and magic in
progressive queer cultures directs scholars towards wholly different conceptions of what
sexuality looks like under modernity. These cultures reject common scholarly
understandings that modern sexuality is primarily an apparatus of subject formation, that
scientific knowledge displaces religion as the privileged authority on sexual selfhood
under modernity, that sexuality is specific to and constituted through its human social
context, and that modern sexuality is something that is distinct to the human. To make
these arguments, I bring literatures associated with the “ontological turn” of the
humanities to bear the study of LGBT history, asking how the history of sexuality might
look different if approached at a distance from more familiar Foucauldian frameworks.

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Table of Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………………….viii

Introduction Disappearing the Police Station……………………………….1

Chapter 1 We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity: Gay Liberation
and the Politics of Madness, 1968-1980……………………..58

Chapter 2 "I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn't Care:" The
Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges
of Queer History…………………………………………….120

Chapter 3 Queer Realisms, Weird Realisms: Magia Sexualis in the
Social Movement Era……………………………………….163

Chapter 4 The Turning Dark: Goddess, Apophasis, Occult…………...236

Epilogue Legacies of the Weird: Re-enchantment in a
Neoliberal Age……………………………………………...308

Figures ………………………………………………………………319

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………....321

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List of Figures

Introduction:
Figure 1: GLF Levitation Flyer, New York Public Library…………………319

Epilogue:
Figure 2: This world will soon be ours, Craig Calderwood …………………320

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