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Amid the veritable explosion of research on both public memory and GLBTQ topics during the last ten years, the relevance of this topic is important to ascertain. Indeed, I argue this project will have relevance for both rhetoric and memory studies generally and GLBTQ memories, in particular.

This project is highly relevant for those with a particular interest in GLBTQ issues for several reasons. First, as indicated earlier, a book-length analysis of GLBTQ memorial practices aimed at the heterosexual public in particular has not yet been undertaken. Other than the 2009 publication of Queering Public Address, even when GLBTQ memorial work has been examined, it has rarely been undertaken through the rhetorical perspective. As monuments continue to be built, legislation passed, and histories recorded, the rhetorical value (beyond the historical value alone) of these strategies should be examined.

Second, recent work on the queer past has highlighted the traumatic nature of the GLBTQ pasts. I do not question the importance of this work: GLBTQ pasts are frequently the result of isolated youths, closets, violence, bullying, ignorance, absences, memory voids, and much more. Such issues need to be grappled with and the work of scholars like Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, Christopher Nealon, and others do so admirably. Nonetheless, I believe there is also a space in the GLBTQ past where GLBTQ person have not just embraced illusions or suffered in silence but have also acted with agency (rhetorically) to affect the world around them. In doing so, I hope to recuperate the GLBTQ pasts as a more nuanced space — a space wherein GLBTQ persons might be able to affirm the value of their lives for themselves and others and to extend their gaze beyond simply survival to a greater degree of security, happiness, and agency.

To do so requires the examination of many new GLBTQ pasts in this text that have not received extended attention. This, in and of itself, is of value as a queer project.

Third, this project will highlight clearly that there is no single, unitary GLBTQ past and, in fact, there is frequently never a single, monolithic GLBTQ identity. Our community, like most others, is a complex, diverse, and opinionated mix of voices, issues, and priorities — all of which get frequently overlooked in efforts to deal with heteronormativity and homo/transphobia. I, for one, value this clash — not because it pulls us apart, but because it gives liveliness and critical thought to our community in how we proceed. A key way of interfacing with these diverse experiences of the past is the concept of intersectionality. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the study of intersectionality asks critics to direct attention to the multiple ways in which the diverse, social experiences of identity (race, class gender, sexuality, etc.) interact with each other — often simultaneously — to produce systemic inequalities that are greater than those produced by any single dimension of identity on its own.96 Because intersectionality is often invisible, little attention is given to how people and communities share related oppressions, face lose-lose situations and double binds, and are regularly marginalized by multiple socio-cultural forces simultaneously. As such, the tools of dominant culture are strengthened, increasing opportunities for subordination and depleting opportunities for resistance. However, when intersectionality is recognized, critics, scholars, and activists are better able to consider how to resist oppression, communicate across difference, and build coalitions for shared action.97 Ignoring intersectionality has often been a key problem in telling and reclaiming the history and

96

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241-299.

97

For an excellent rhetorical analysis of Audre Lorde’s efforts to grapple with overlapping differences, see Lester C. Olson, “On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 49-70.

memory of the GLBTQ past and contributing to the false impression of a monolithic GLBTQ past. By directing attention to intersectionality in the case studies of this dissertation, this project continually finds value in pointing, not to unity in the community, but the act(s) of constructing the image of community, how they fail or succeed, and how they are contested for a more representative historical imagination.

Fourth, this project takes as a central concern the challenge posed by Dana Cloud that more often than not, arguments about the representation of GLBTQ pasts have little to say about the material world we inhabit now.98 The contest between representation and materiality is an important one — both in contemporary GLBTQ politics and academic debates about the viability of the kind of work done here. I argue forcefully in this project that our pasts are not simple and/or simply representations but rhetorics with material effect that cannot and should not be overlooked.

Finally, in that vein, this dissertation builds upon Bravmann’s work, reminding us that the image of the GLBTQ past we project backwards has ongoing effects for the image of ourselves we see today. By questioning these historical representations, we learn to question how we define ourselves as GLBTQ community in the twenty-first century.

At the same time, I believe this dissertation will have wide appeal for audiences beyond those interested solely in GLBTQ politics, rhetorics, and the past. Indeed, this project has much to say about the study of public memory and “history” broadly. In particular, I believe this project can question disciplinary and transdisciplinary work that is often attenuated far too frequently upon how the past can be burdensome and marginalizing in its public deployments. Rather, I hope this project will make clear that the past is a rhetorical resource (both for scholars

98

Dana L. Cloud, “The First Lady’s Privates: Queering Eleanor Roosevelt for Public Address Studies,” in Morris, Queering Public Address, 23-44.

and activists) that can be turned to the benefit of those on the margins as much as against them. On this point, I push the envelope on arguments by early GLBTQ historians who suggest that minority histories like these are important for rounding out and making more equitable the data about the past. Instead, I see these histories as invasive, persuasive, and domineering in ways that I will elaborate later. As a case study of a particular marginalized community, I also hope that the strategies and tactics detailed within will point both toward useful forms of rhetorical resistance as well as challenges posed by such pursuits, so that other similarly situated communities and people might find resources worthy of replication.

This project also functions to expand the notion of tactical and strategic rhetorics as laid out by Nakayama and Krizek. These authors do excellent work in describing how rhetoric can function strategically to make the center invisible (i.e., whiteness). However, they speak little to elaborate how tactical rhetorics call those invisible centers into question. They also do not consider how strategic rhetorics might be used in life-affirming ways by those under duress to provide bulwarks against and temporary reprieves from the perpetual onslaught of the outside world. Such elaboration of these rhetorics and their deployment is important for understanding the everyday discourses of power. I hope this dissertation in particular will aid in arguing that tactical and strategic rhetorics are not static, but that marginalized communities can move from one toward the other (and back again) in the course of their social movements. Following their trails as rhetoricians also allows us to explore how the everyday practices of life continue to speak to the rhetorical aspects of the world around us.

While additional benefits to the scholar not interested in the GLBTQ pasts exclusively will emerge in the pages that follow, the interventions described above make a strong case for the moment of why such a project is worthwhile.