Warren Johansson

Yesterday was the birthday of the late Warren Johanson.

I thought of writing something acknowledging my indebtedness to him. He taught me the essentials of gay studies, namely that with careful philology one could extract much of value about the past. He made me read Hirschfeld and the others, before they had been translated. Of course his model was mainly limited to Western civ, with some Semitic additions. He had no interest at all in the Far East, not to mention tribal societies. So I got from Steve Murray and Paul Knobel, much needed expansion. One must study the West AND the rest. I would write these things down, but there has been too much water under the bridge - the foul effluvia of Queer Theory and its postmodern avatars.