Kiss and Tell

A Preface

The first thing we love is a scene.

I began with the desire to kiss the dead.

Or rather, more accurately, with the desire to be kissed by them.

This desire, marked as it is by an insistent cathexis between passivity and morbidity, points “no doubt” to a pathological subject, the kind whose “specification” and “implantation,” in Michel Foucault’s famous argument, have occupied the formidable taxonomic energies of the modern regime of sexuality. But this is hardly a pathology that can be remanded to the precincts of a particular subjectivity (say, for instance, my own), quarantined on the one side by the anecdotes of personality (One day, as a small boy, I saw…) and on the other by the definitive vocables of a proper name. Quite the contrary. A persistently heterosexist culture has found the dissemination of this “perversion,” as of many others, to be extremely useful in the propagation and regulation of individuals, genders, and sexualities. No dearth of standardized deviations; exempla everywhere. As a consequence, my strange desire had no difficulty finding multiple textual incitements. A perverse late-Victorian kiss, for instance, was enough to send my mind wandering:

In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me and looked at me for some time and then whispered together.…All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips…

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating.…Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat.…I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with a beating heart.^[1]

If Another Kind of Love may be said to possess, or to be possessed by, a primal scene to which all of its overdetermined elaborations subsequently refer, then this scene of impending vampirism from Dracula—and the adjacent scene of a particular reader reading it, reading “with a beating heart”—would constitute that “originary” moment. I mean this, first, in the pedestrian and literal sense that the earliest of the words printed here were written in excited response to my first reading of Stoker’s tremendous potboiler,^[2] an encounter that occurred in the highly motivated context of a graduate seminar in Victorian literature offered by Carol Christ at the University of California, Berkeley. Out of that reading, according to the conventional seminar itinerary, a paper sprang; from that paper a research project was generated, Alex Zwerdling by this time having pointed me in the direction of a book by Havelock Ellis called Sexual Inversion (1897); from that research project a dissertation ensued (speed of cold molasses), thereafter to be elaborated (same speed) into the book you now hold in your hands. As I say, a conventional enough academic itinerary.

But I also mean to invoke the primal scene in all the genealogical duplicity that Freud’s genius conferred upon it. As a scene, first of all, that may or may not have occurred “in fact” and, if so, may or may not have been experienced as such by the unblinking witness whose erotic life would thereafter be inflected, not to say dominated, by the baffling visual information he receives but cannot yet incorporate; as a scene, moreover, whose traumatizing effects (most famously: the male subject’s introduction to promissory castration) are not experienced “primally” or “originally” in the here and now of immediate sensory perception, but are conveyed instead according to a strange temporal syncopation, a time delay that activates the trauma secondarily and belatedly, in a recursive fantasmatic movement spurred on by the superaddition, many years later, of a specifically sexual knowledge that would not have been available to—or, if available, could not have been assimilated by—the spectator-subject at the time the scene was being seen, if indeed, as I say, it ever was; and, finally, as a scene whose now thoroughly invaginated “reality” could never be definitively corroborated by direct access, say, to an irrefutably authentic memory, since (in the first place) memory presents its artifacts via a temporal palimpsest in which the fantasmatic has already laminated the real and since (in the second) all access to the scene occurs only through the aperture opened (contour of the keyhole) by still another highly mediated recursive action: the uneven interlocution, I mean, of the analyst and the analysand, the former reconstructing the scene’s truth from the dissociated fragments embedded in the enforced speech of the latter. Freud: “scenes, like this one in my present patient’s case [the Wolf Man], which date from such an early period and exhibit similar content, and which further lay claim to such extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined—constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications.” Thus understood as an analytic assemblage, a montagelike “product of construction,”^[3] the primal scene can only dispense an odd prime truth: the recognition that its own action necessarily evacuates the primacy—the claim to a first, unmediated origin—to which it nonetheless continues to make its bald-faced appeal. What the primal scene locates, then, is not exactly the (of late) heavily advertised death of the origin; it imposes, instead, the melancholy illumination that any account of beginnings must proceed from the unnatural animation of an origin that has, as origin, already given up the ghost. The morning, therefore, in which the origin first reveals its primeval freshness turns out to be none other than the night of the living dead.

So also with my appeal above to the manifestly “heterosexual” kissing scene from Dracula. It was, “in truth,” in response to this scene that the writing of Another Kind of Love began, but the origin thus honestly specified is so riddled with lacunae, distorted with displacements, and congested with blockages that it would be disingenuous, not to say downright fatuous, to present this as an origin innocent of antecedents all its own: antecedents in the primal sense of something dispersed and occluded, something deferred and recursive, accessible only through an interpretive action destined to read the aftermath of the genesis it had hoped to find, and finding, lay bare. As regards Dracula in its entirety, just what I understand these lacunae, displacements, and blockages to be will be made clear in the extended discussion of the novel I offer in Chapter 3. But as regards the kissing scene adduced above, some preliminary remarks may be offered here, if only to help situate the writing that follows. Undoubtedly what first arrested, and subsequently detained, this writer’s reading eye was the enthralling spectacle of a supine masculine subject (here a very proper Jonathan Harker, whose journal entry we are considering) suffering the enchantment of an inescapable passivity, a passivity that has chosen him. As the burdens of individual agency, not to mention of motor control, are magically suspended by vampiric compulsion, a preternaturally heightened consciousness entertains the “wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.” What does this scene present if not a congested erotic tableau posed and poised on the cusp of an “unnatural” penetration, the luxurious incipience of which is imagined from the (more usually foreclosed) position of what forensic discourses were once pleased to call a “male pathic”? As the lips “seemed to fasten on my throat…I could feel [their] soft, shivering touch…on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there.” As the lips fastened, I could feel: the imminence of the vampiric kiss ignites a knowledge hitherto dampened within the benumbed precincts of the normative male subject—the knowledge, specifically, that his upright being has been slipped into a “supersensitive” epidermal envelope that can’t wait to be opened. “Touching,” “pausing,” “beating”: how exquisitely the slo-mo advance of the lover’s tooth corresponds to the furor of the patient’s heart, to the blind languor of his wide-eyed “waiting,” to the ambivalent affect (“some longing and at the same time some deadly fear”) that now enriches his mandatory passivity.

Our primal scene offers, then, a transfixing display of transfixed masculinity. So compelling—and so anxiogenic—is this tableau that one cannot but hear the rustle of the defensive adjectives (“feminine”/“homosexual”) that have descended categorically (that is, as historically determinative categories) in order to monitor such displays and marshall their considerable truth effects. Stoker’s narrative, too, keeps itself busy defending against the same “wicked” imputations that it also profitably solicits. The manifest (and manifestly duplicitous) heterosexuality of the scene at hand is only the most immediate example of this deeply ambivalent narrative activity; Stoker is careful, after all, to deploy three women to unman Harker here, as if so overdetermined a ratification of the boy-girl linkage would be enough to keep everything straight. But it is worth remembering in this regard that the erotic thrill, or threat, that charges the novel’s opening movement (the portion exactly coextensive with Harker’s journal) derives from the much-anticipated, and endlessly deferred, Blutbrüderschaft between Dracula and Harker; given this emphasis, the “weird sisters” (who will ultimately end up “doing” Harker for the Count) are disclosed as supernumerary and belated simulacra—cross-gender replicants who diffuse unmediated homosexual connection. The scene that “tells” in this regard is the famous one in which the profusion consequent upon Harker’s having nicked himself while shaving instantly excites Dracula’s hunger. Yet just as surely as Dracula will sustain its flirtation with an originary homosexual desire—the desire, anyway, with which the novel first lures its readers—so will it prophylactically refuse to gratify that desire directly. As if to explain the absence of the male-to-male vampiric kiss, the Count himself obligingly explicates the novel’s “triangular” or “homosocial” articulation of homosexual desire; late in the novel, after having successfully vamped Lucy and while in the process of repeating himself upon Mina, Dracula admonishes Van Helsing and his ithyphallic phalanx thus: “my revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine” (365). Through them you shall yet be mine: this patently substitutive logic everywhere governs Dracula’s perverse heterosexual distribution of homosexual desire; given such an erotics of substitution, Harker’s submission to the weird sisters bespeaks a deflection or transposition of homosexual desire across gender, the weirdness of the sisters lying therefore in the wayward course that leads homosexual desire to monstrous heterosexual enactment.

The pages to follow will explore some of the literary and historical ramifications of this figural strategy. Anything but isolate or idiosyncratic, Stoker’s transposition of the homo into and through the hetero partakes of a broadly diffused explanatory paradigm, specifically, an erotics of inversion. As classically articulated in the sexological discourses of the late nineteenth century, “sexual inversion” defines and explains (away) a problematic homosexuality by dismissing it as a kind of displaced heterosexuality—the heterosexual impulse having, as it were, taken up residence at the wrong anatomical address, as in the case of the male “invert” (anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa) who cuts the formulaic and decisive figure in these discourses. As the Latin formula (usual English rendition: “a female soul trapped in a male body”) so schematically indicates, the inversion paradigm deploys a metaphorics of gender crossing—rhetorically speaking, a metathesis of gender—in order to explicate what John Addington Symonds called “this persistent feature of human psychology”;^[4] it is, after all, the suppositional woman-in-the-man whose presence alone “explains” why a man might want another man. Feminization of the male is thus an intrinsic aspect of the inversion figure, the very ground of its taxonomic coherence: any and all desire for a male is encoded, from the first, as a specifically feminine desire, despite its incongruent placement in a male body. As, therefore, part criss-cross and part double bind, inversion offers no conceptual space for even the possibility of a virile or masculine male homosexuality, a literally homophobic denial that, among other things, perpetuates the regime of a compulsory heterosexuality whose axiomatic normalcy may thus reign without question. Very much the same conceptual duplicity informs the articulation of male homosexual desire in Dracula. This is notable not only in the novel’s general economy of homosocial distribution (“through them you and others shall yet be mine”), but also in its continuing incitement of the embrace whose liminal presence it cannot do without, but whose direct representation it cannot bear to countenance: a man in another man’s arms. Consider in this regard just how our primal scene ends. The progress of the scene has been arrested, as in a freeze-frame, on the lip of the kiss, the spellbound male subject immobilized by “the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there.” But Harker’s pulsing and panting at the end of the paragraph (“waited—waited with a beating heart”) only seem to be the last notations of a consciousness about to be submerged in a fathomless kiss; for what actually succeeds this phrase is not the kiss itself but rather its spectacular interruption: penetration denied or deferred. Dracula himself breaks into the room, drives the women away from Harker, and admonishes them harshly: “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me” (53). Dracula’s intercession here imposes two noteworthy effects: on the one hand, it suspends and diffuses throughout the text a “passive” desire maximized on the brink of an involuntary penetration, a desire that the novel will hereafter attribute only to women, as if belatedly to repress (the cat after all being well out of the bag) the novel’s insistence on an originary, passive homosexual desire; and on the other, it repeats and intensifies the threat of a more direct libidinal embrace between Dracula and Harker (“This man belongs to me”), as if compulsively to reassert the origin it is also busy repressing. If I stress this antinomical distribution of male homosexual desire (intensification and dispersal, tumescence and subsidence), this is because the doubleness thus emphasized will figure crucially in the chapters to follow. And not merely, as will become clear, in the texts being read, but also in the writing that struggles so to read them.

To whom, then, does this man belong? Shall he be granted kisses? and if so by whom? What are his allegiances, filiations, proclivities, orientations? And to what degree do such determinations, however opaque or uncertain or shifting, in turn determine the writing subject’s relation to the subject of which he presumes to write? Or does he intend seriously to maintain the imposture of anonymity and neutrality assumed by yesterday’s “expert in the field?” Less circumspectly: Are you gay? and if not, what particular perversities (“Do you like to watch?”) inflect and motivate your cool engagement with, if not quite your hot enjoyment of, the gay male body and the historical discourses that have surrounded, bound, and inscribed that body? Writer, specify your commitment to your subject: Does your body have the courage of your prose? Dare you put your penis where your pencil is, or your asshole where your eye has been? Or again: Does not the hypertrophic masculinity (not to mention the buoyant good health) with which you affront the public eye simply rehearse the overfamiliar mendacity of the (only) seeming heterosexual who, having failed either to come out or act up, prefers instead to enjoy the show (always the scholar: pencil in hand) from the protected wings of a spectacle he continues to disown? Worse than a “closet case” then. How else to explain how deep and well-appointed (down to the Armani black label!) your armoire appears to be?

Before dutifully submitting to these demands for explanation (each of which has been addressed to me—with what shades of aggressivity and contempt I need not here recall—since I began writing this book), it may be useful to resist them, if only for a while—“long enough, at any rate, to draw attention to what is most compelling in the demand for them.”^[5] Demand indeed: the inquisitorial verve propelling such questions may itself provide the strongest motivation for withholding answers to them; surely the requirement that one put one’s papers and one’s life in parallel, synchronic order partakes of the same disciplinary (not to mention voyeuristic) impulse that infuses virtually every interstice of the conceptual grid we have learned to call modern sexuality. (Gender cops of both sexes, and of various sexualities, keep extending the dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.”) Far more than merely a violation of the confidence that should obtain between lovers, to kiss and tell has become one of the performative obligations exacted from anyone whose writing or thinking approaches the highly unstable (and therefore heavily defended) borders of identity politics; and, to make matters worse, such obligations are only too reflexively introjected by the writing subject, in whose murky consciousness they are likely to resurface in the guise of desires for self-justification or even self-exposure. The writerly anxieties associated with this imperative to disclose by naming (one’s desires, one’s practices, one’s compatriots in desire and practice) have resulted in some remarkable permutations of style: most notably, perhaps in the work of Roland Barthes, whose recourse to the ablation of the signified (strategies of fragmentation, obliquity, severe parataxis, semantic drifting, etc., etc.) demonstrates the supple rigor of the practiced contortionist who repeatedly escapes the locks and chains with which his bespangled assistant (her name: the image repertoire) has bound him hand and foot. Barthes’s intolerable: to be put in his place by the language of others. Correspondingly, his defensive strategies of the atopic: to repudiate the efficacy of all names, proper and improper, however doomed he is to their use (luckily: “the tyranny of language is not absolute”);^[6] to deform wherever possible the stratifications of what it pleases him to call the Doxa; above all, to outmaneuver (by feint, by fall, never by “manly” confrontation) the fatal capture with which the strong arm of every adjective threatens him. Hence: for all the transparent gayness of his writing (transparent in a double sense: as clear to the eye as air, but “aerated to the point of invisibility”), the preponderance of what Barthes calls le travail du mot consists in undermining the prestige and appeal of categorical denotation—the very signifying practice, we might note, that posits the homosexual/heterosexual binarism as one of the fundamental determinants of our being.^[7] Better the dispersion of affect than its congelation into “sexuality”: “the very task of love and language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new, thereby creating an unheard-of speech in which the sign’s form is repeated but is never signified; in which the speaker and the lover finally triumph over the dreadful reduction which language (and psychoanalytic science) transmits to all our affects.”^[8] However naïve may be the aspirations embedded within the sophistication of this prose (“inflections…forever new,” “finally triumph,” etc.), one implication at least is clear: no parading (Barthesian term) of a homosexual thematics.

Another Kind of Love pursues a different tack entirely: homosexual thematics and very little but. There are surely many (more fashionably, too many) reasons for this, both personal and historical, some of which even the writer himself may be thought to understand. Most obvious among these is the simple fact that anyone writing about gender and sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s cannot help but register (however impossible it is to assimilate) the “discursive explosion” whose deafening reverberations alternately trigger and overwhelm cognition. To mention, in passing, only a recent few: divergent feminisms of first, second, and subsequent waves, the tidal effects of which have left even the Great Unwashed rocking on their heels; the post-Stonewall efflorescence of multiple gay voices, male and female, the diversity and subtlety of which should be enough to obliterate forever the perduring fantasy of disclosing a Definitive Truth about a Singular Homosexuality; in contrapuntal response to this multiplicity, the brutal monotone of homophobic oppression, repellent always, but especially so at a time when the fatal predations of a mindless virus are being heartlessly accelerated by a government that refuses to care for its entire citizenry; the round-the-clock transmissions of a popular culture (video, radio, records, film) whose frenetic play in the fields of sex and gender ensures, first, that no spectatorial desire shall go unsatiated, and second, that every satiety shall then be immediately converted back into a “fresh” desire for more of the same; finally, and most preposterously, the excruciating acoustics of the so-called men’s movement (heady jamborees at The Tom-Tom Club, itself something of a traveling circus), the major impetus behind which seems to be to dispel a circumambient sissy-boy anxiety by forging fashionably dysfunctional males into iron men and warrior dads. Despite the semantic overkill inherent in such a discursive environment, there are still good reasons, again both personal and historical, for a straight man—in any event, this straight man—to pursue an explicit homosexual thematics. Not the least of these is his need to generate an instrumental genealogy of his “own” sexual desire, in both its heterosexual and homosexual manifestations, and also of his own sexual practice, especially since the insistently heterosexual modalities to which he has submitted his body so obviously fail to correspond to the rhythms of desire. I take it as axiomatic (proofs to follow nonetheless) that this disjunctive relation between desire and practice itself constitutes one of the crucial pivots around which normative male heterosexuality has historically been taught to dance its ugly sidestep.^[9] It is here that homosexual desire intersects explosively with a virtually mandatory homophobia: the kind, anyway, that in the Los Angeles of my youth propelled a group of pseudotoughs down Hollywood Boulevard where, from the protective confines of an orange Dodge, we could with impunity heckle the queers we were afraid to talk to, more afraid still to become.

Not many years after thus discharging my meanness into the hot Hollywood night, I would in turn be required, again in Los Angeles, to enlist myself, if only momentarily, under the regime of the same rude epithet (“Faggot!”) with which I had previously attempted to bolster an evidently faltering sense of masculinity. This event marked the first time ever I understood that someone else (someone, that is, other than my most secret self) might have sufficient reason to refer the gay possibility to my person—that reason being, apparently, my own momentary leap into sartorial extravagance. The extravagance in question seems modest enough fifteen years later: nothing more than a pair of navy-surplus trousers, very baggy, of blue-almost-black wool, held up by extremely bright carmine suspenders, which in turn were matched by an equally bright and equally carmine shoulder bag. It was, presumably, the shameless conjunction of bag and suspensory device that triggered the emission of the epithet (from which man in the crowd, obviously seeing red, I could never quite tell) as I made my way across the stereotypically sun-drenched main quad at UCLA. What must have been the flagrant effeminacy of the bag may in part be explained by the fact that I had borrowed it from a woman (the strap upon my own more conventionally masculine appendage having recently given way under the gravitational pull of The Norton Anthology of Literature and companion volumes); but the apparently equally legible gayness connoted by the bag confounded me some, not least (but also not only) because I had just become, as we say, “involved” with the same petite danseuse whose not very innocent wardrobe had provided the offending item. Could not a resolutely heterosexual genital practice guarantee a corresponding heterosexual identity, discernible from afar? Was I not as manifestly straight as the concrete path along which I was making my way, no longer to class but to her? Some time later, after much anxious polishing of the masculine body armor so effortlessly pierced by the point of the epithet, I began to think the experience through, with the productive result that I was able to translate the microtrauma of the event into a minirevelation I could then put to use; always the quick undergraduate, I realized that I had been submitting all along to a vestimentary code whose efficient operation in no way required a vocal pledge of allegiance from me and whose inadvertent violation would just as efficiently stimulate public abuse from another male. Another male, whomever he may have been, just like myself.

More than a simple exercise in the operation of tacit social codes, this anecdote is meant to suggest the complex interaction between linguistic exchange, identity formation, and sexual desire in a culture whose ardent promotion of heterosexual normalcy requires nothing less than its continual incitement of a categorical homosexuality; the anecdote also indicates one of the prevampiric origins (I wouldn’t read Dracula for another five years) of the present study. Distilled to its rudiments, my narrative offers a neat parable about the boomerang trajectory of the brutal little noun faggot: sometime in 1971 or 1972 I hurled the epithet maliciously into the night air, sometime in 1976 or 1977 it returned from behind to catch me unaware. I became in that moment the unwitting object of my own previous denunciation. This story also exemplifies just how assiduously the male heterosexual subject must work to sustain the serenity of his presumably natural sexual identity; it exemplifies, that is, the open violence of homosocial exchange in contemporary American culture. For just as surely as the epithet’s first emission marked an act of homophobic disidentification on my part, so did the second indicate a symmetrically homophobic act of identity attribution. And if, as should be obvious, the overcharged circulation of the language of faggotry continually teased one with the possiblity of erotic engagement between men, so conversely did the tenor of the particular exchanges guarantee that this possibility would go unexplored, here and now, between these men. In just this way—perhaps only in this way—could the gay possibility be maintained as both perpetually open and immediately foreclosed, a temptation ever ready to be transformed into a threat. Finally, my anecdote invites skeptical appreciation of anything that purports to mark an advance in critical thought. Certainly my undergraduate insight into the oppressive operation of vestimentary codes must count as one of the first steps I took on the road to gay-affirmative thinking and feeling: if only for a moment, and if only on the protected ontological ground of an as if, I was required to experience just one of the social exactions that others were daily compelled to suffer as the very condition of their being. But just as surely did the very nimbleness of my recognition allow me to elude the indelible application of the epithet whose cruelty I had just begun, a little piously, to explicate. After all, could I not drop that perilous identity attribution as readily as I could my pants?

Not so readily escaped or eluded, however, are the pervasive entanglements that bind together normative heterosexuality, homophobia, and certain decisive formulations of homosexual desire. Nor does the writing to follow claim exemption from these entanglements. Quite the contrary, in fact, since this book implicitly argues that the homophobia fundamental to (at least) post-Renaissance figurations of homosexual desire is not simply something earnestly to be renounced, like yesterday’s adultery or the petty theft of the day before; it is, rather, a genuinely perverse imperative whose violence must be measured as it traverses not merely individual psychology and personal history but also those cultural forms (even the outmoded ones) that continue to fashion our desires and aversions. From among the many forms that together constitute a geneaology of our present, I have here emphasized certain British literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which homosexual desire and homophobia are to be found locked in passionate embrace: a high-Victorian elegy in which the death of the beloved object instigates a specifically erotic yearning in the male poet whose grief exceeds the bounds of all discretion; a blood-crazed piece of late-Victorian “trash” in which a vampiric “father or furtherer of a new order of beings” possesses his sons by interposing a demonically virilized female whose business it is to kiss them into bliss; an earnestly closeted homosexual farce in which a preposterous gay signifier—a name, literally, without a character—must be formally expelled in order to facilitate, before the curtain drops, the requisite heterosexual coupling; and, finally, a great modern novel whose notorious intractability derives at least in part from the deep interfusion of its homosexual and homicidal impulsions. Beyond these specifically literary examples, I also read some neglected texts from a now-superannuated sexology, and certain of Freud’s decisive studies. Throughout it all, even as I tried to maintain something of the scholar’s sobriety and decorum, I struggled to insinuate into the writing what professional criticism more usually struggles to leave out: a not entirely unembarrassed recognition of the erotic and political bias that no reading can hope to escape. In the present case, this has meant a continuing acknowledgment of my own ambivalence (“some longing and at the same time some deadly fear”) when faced with the temptation that lay at the vampiric origins of Another Kind of Love: the galvanic promise of something more than just another kiss.

No matter how solitary the practices of reading and writing ultimately prove to be, they are nonetheless almost always fostered by the generosity of friends and the kindness of strangers; even a dismissive antagonist may haplessly end up advancing the cause of a writing he has come to detest. Accordingly, I want to acknowledge the many debts whose simple reckoning exceeds whatever power I might summon to discharge them. Thanks are due, therefore, to the following persons for the assistance they so readily provided along the way: Janet Adelman, Carol T. Christ, Ed Cohen, William A. Cohen, Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher, Wayne Koestenbaum, Thomas Laqueur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Alan Sinfield; I am saddened to think that the cruelties of the flesh preclude me from thanking Joel Fineman in anything but spirit. Beyond these, however, there are a special few who deserve (at any rate, are going to receive) what award committees like to call special mention. The first to be thus sentenced to gratitude must be Laura Richards Craft, whose love and support (intellectual, emotional, financial) made it possible for me to work at all; I think she will remember, as affectionately as I do, the friction generated by a nearly prehistoric argument (its topic: a “cowboy belt”) that had for me the value of an annunciation: in that undergraduate contest gender was reborn before my eyes as a political activity, even as it passed away as one of Nature’s gratuities. In subsequent years, three splendid individuals—Jessica Ashley Craft, Ariel Samantha Craft, and Deirdre Ann Force—each helped to make the author’s life worth living, most especially when certain brute evidence seemed to suggest that it was otherwise. During the protracted composition of this book, Alex Zwerdling provided unstinting paternal (but never paternalistic) care to a writer whose youth never quite matched his age; Alex’s sufferance during this time has been almost enough to give fathers a good name, though I suspect that we will never resolve our dispute about the ethics of punning. Finally, the pride of last place (rhetorically, of course, the first) goes to a dear friend who has instructed me variously in the intensities of writing and the complexities of human relationship, not to say love; the name on his office door, itself more distant than I would like it to be, reads D. A. Miller, but in my sometimes “Michelangelesque” imaginary he is simply David.

Notes