Racing Turtles

Once you start looking, you see queer presentism everywhere. It pops up when politicians espouse our “unprecedented” ability to love who we love, and when recent book bans are said to “roll back the clock” on LGBTQ+ rights, implying that clocks tick continually toward progress. It manifests in Oscar Wilde hagiography, which elevates him to the status of singular queer martyr and extrapolates an epochal paradigm from his 1895 trials. It seeps into our everyday speech, in our references to “forbidden love” and our use of the term “Victorian” to imply prudish homophobia. It both stems from and structures the editorial projects that publishers pursue, giving rise to catalogues like the NYRB Classics, where the oldest work tagged LGBTQ+ is Colette’s The Pure and the Impure (1932) — as if nothing queer was written before.

The truth is that there’s a world of queer writing that predates Colette, volumes of manuscript and books that aren’t so much products of historical suppression as they are suppressed by today’s “it’s gotten better” mindset. This is convenient for a culture industry in search of the sui generis and always eager to pat itself on the back for its own enlightenment. But the almost total neglect, outside the academy, of the queer literary archive is a shame, and not only because it propagates factual errors. In limiting our horizons for understanding how our predecessors lived, loved, and wrote, we end up narrowing our own vistas. When we apply the repressive hypothesis, we’re actually repressing ourselves.