Workerism and gay scholarship

Workerism is a term applied to several trends in left-wing political discourse and politics, especially anarchism and Marxism. In principle it stems from the recognition that in emerging capitalist economies a key economic role has been played by blue-collar workers, often termed simply the working class. For their part, white-collar employees are not usually regarded as workers in this sense. With the spread of the information-based economy and the decline of industrialism, the role of the working class in the older acceptation has necessarily diminished.

The corollary, especially on the Marxist left, is the idealization or glorification of manual workers, who are assumed to have acquired through experience--the school of hard knocks--some special wisdom that is denied to the intellectuals who idolize them. Yet much of this idolization is simply pro forma, as left-leaning intellectuals continue to communicate in jargon that is incomprehensible to the working class.

The glorification of the working class is the mirror image of the mainstream adulation of the aristocracy. Neither view seems well founded, even though both persist.

At one time, Socialist Realism ranked as one manifestation of cultural workerism. Now that that trend is gone, the notion occasionally pops up here and there.

A recent example is the spin leftist gay writers are currently giving to the work of the important gay historian Allan Bérubé, who died in 2007 at the age of sixty-one. A postumous collection of his writings has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press: My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, edited by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman.

Bérubé made his mark some twenty years ago with Coming Out Under Fire, a pioneering study of gay men in World War II. Subsequently, he received a “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation, an honor he well deserved.

However, I don’t think that Bérubé’s memory is enhanced by his left-leaning friends who claim that he was raised in an insalubrious trailer in New Jersey. Entirely self-taught (according the this view), he is an icon of “community history.” This appears to be a new wrinkle on workerism.

In reality, Bérubé lived in the trailer with his family only briefly. Assisted by a scholarship, he went to a fancy prep school in Massachusetts. He attended the University of Chicago, only to drop out just before getting his degree to work against the war in Vietnam.

I knew Allan Bérubé. He emphatically did not have a “working-class” accent or habits. He was, as far as I could tell, nonideological. (He did pronounce his surname "Beeruby," though.)

Of course, Bérubé did not teach in a college or university: he was an independent scholar. However, that status has characterized many, if not most of the founders of gay history (see my account at homolexis.blogspot.com). One need only think of Heinrich Hoessli, a milliner, or K.H. Kertbeny, a journalist. During the twentieth century important pioneering work was done by Donald Webster Cory (Edward Sagarin) and Jim Kepner, to name just two examples. Eventually, Cory-Sagarin did get a Ph.D., but only after he had published his magnum opus entitled The Homosexual in America. Kepner never went to college at all.

In this way Bérubé continued a long, very substantial tradition. For this reason, his important contribution should not be distorted by enrolling him posthumously in the ranks of workerist heroes.

UPDATE (June 9). I have read the essay collection. Unfortunately, it is rather slight. After his major book came out, he never quite seemed to find his footing as a scholar.

Announcement

I am happy to state that my adjunct site of http://homolexis.blogspot.com now displays the seven chapters of my history of gay scholarship. Or one can just go to the profile (sidebar), affording access to all my sites.

In order to avoid any of the current wrangles concerning terminology, I have adopted the overall title of "Homostudies." While this expression is unfamiliar to English speakers, it has been employed for several decades in the Netherlands, a flourishing center of gay and lesbian scholarship.

Martin Duberman a.k.a. Dubie

Doug Ireland is a gay journalist who has done important work regarding the persecution, execution and assassination of gay people in Iran and Iraq. He has now written a piece extolling the New York “queer’ scholar Martin Duberman as a “national treasure” (available at alternet.com). Despite his merits as a journalist, I do not think that Ireland is qualified to assess scholarly work. In fact his Duberman piece is little more than a love letter to his idol.

I first met Martin Duberman in 1973, when we were both charter members of the Gay Academic Union in New York City.  At first we were allies, based on a common interest in feminist theory.  Yet the more I learned of that endeavor the more I became convinced that it was not intellectually sound.  Always the stalwart lesbyterian, Dubie (as we called him) went the other way,

Because of this heresy, Duberman tried to read me out of the community of gay scholarship.  From the beginning I was excluded from his CLAGS effort at the CUNY Graduate School. A CUNY faculty member, I was excluded nonetheless: I was “politically unreliable.”  Later a group of his allies succeeded in getting Garland Publishing to put my Encyclopeda of Homosexuality out of print: it was not PC.  Despite this attempt at censorship, the set is still widely available.

I submit that CLAGS is not a legitimate academic group, because participants must pass a litmus test of political correctness--they must subscribe to multiculturalism.

Duberman's scholarship, as evidenced by his 20 books, is dutiful and prolific.  Yet it is not innovative.  In fact he has been hoist with his own petard, in that some feminists he has championed, notably Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, have far surpassed him in influence and reputation. To be sure, there are problems with the work of both those scholars, but today they are inarguably far more influential than Duberman.

Is anyone really interested in reading three self-serving volumes of autobiography?  In fact the Wikipedia notice, from which Ireland cribbed much of his information, bears a private note by one of the editors questioning whether Duberman actually merits an entry.  Just so.

Perhaps the matter is best summed up by a piece of subway graffiti from a few years back:

Shakespeare said: To be or not to be.
Descartes said; To be is to think.
Sartre said: To be is to exist.
Sinatra said: Dubie, Dubie, do.