Recovering

I'm finally in a place to start recovering and thinking through my qualifying exams (orals) that took place in Dec. (I passed!)  I wrote my 'exams' and then talked to my committee about the gay historical imagination and identity formation, the role of the public/private space in the process, and the nature of gay historicizing as a backwards glance.  The original readings I did were on O'Hara, James Schuyler and Harold Norse.

So I've been looking at some of the quotes/info. I ended up NOT using. Here's a nice nugget.

"The homosexual had to discover that one's native language was not one's own. It could not be trusted as an instrument of desire or assertion or self-definition. What an interesting discovery. What terror and what richness. One had to understand instinctively the often treacherous meaning behind the culture's simplest norms and pervasive rituals. One had to rely on interpretation and tone; for gay people, inflection was required. The translation of the felt language of love and custom was something homosexuals understood by doing without. The possibility that it was all lies, as it felt to him, enters early into the gay soul."

Robert Dawidoff, "In My Father's House there Are Man Closets," Making History Matter (86)