E-Mail This Article to a Friend All boxed up and no place to go Jettisoning 35 years’ worth of books made me question today’s queer movement and how it works, who is in it, and whom it reaches BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

TWO AND A HALF years ago, I moved to a new house from the apartment I had lived in for nearly three decades with my lover, poet Walta Borawski, who died in 1994. But it wasn’t until just last month that I finally got around to unpacking my 8000 books. They had been stored in more than 300 boxes in several rooms on the second floor, and whenever I saw them looming there in dark silence, I felt uneasy. Like a heroine in a 19th-century Gothic novel who cannot articulate her dread of some unknown presence lurking around the corner, I was unable to find words to describe my disquiet. I loved my books — hell, I lugged thousands of pounds of them across Cambridge — but now there they sat, imprisoned in cardboard. At times I felt they were scowling at me, accusing me of something — but what? As I began the long process of unpacking, I finally had to admit my guilt: I had far too many books and would have to discard some of them — a lot of them. That established, I began to understand why I felt anxious, even haunted, by those boxes: they contained documentation not only of my personal life and history — literally charting my intellectual growth over decades — but of the cultural and political histories of the social movements with which I have been deeply involved since the late 1960s. Deciding what to keep and what to discard would involve some hard decisions indeed.

Collected over a period of 35 years, these books — with their battered covers and clippings slipped inside, their scribbled notes and inscriptions — marked dramatic changes, and they did so as both artifacts and receptacles of ideas. I had changed from a scruffy grassroots activist publishing underground newspapers and poetry broadsides into a noted independent scholar and part-time academic at an Ivy League college. Meanwhile, the world of queer and feminist politics that had nurtured me was now (with a few exceptions) a highly professionalized milieu of glossy "entertainment/news" publications and well-funded nonprofits whose goal was not to radically change the world, but simply to make it okay for gay people to be like everyone else. Like the movement, I had become professionalized. Not so much cleaned-up, since I still wear scruffy jeans to class, but part of the larger system, which I still questioned, but in which I now participated more fully. What my boxes of books were telling me — silently but with great determination — was that the world had changed, and I had changed with it. In many ways I have moved happily into the future, but on some level I remain haunted by my past.

IT WASN’T JUST that the gay movement’s politics had shifted, although of course they had. In 1970, its entire focus was on changing the world, but now that’s the aim of only a small splinter of queer activists, albeit a quite-visible one. What often gets missed, however, is that there have also been major changes in how the very medium of communication and organizing takes place. Compared with the Internet, e-mail, online electronic books, and online archives of documents, photos, music and films, my massive collection of books, clippings, and assorted files seemed old-fashioned, even antiquated. These mountains of boxes were beginning to have the feel of musty museums where dead things have been put to rest. Was I clinging to the remnants of an old life — and an old politics — that no longer made sense in the world of today? But then another thought occurred to me: was there a direct connection between the content of politics today and the new technologies to which contemporary activists have access? Forty years ago, communications guru Marshall McLuhan claimed that "the medium was the message." What implications did that have for the queer politics of today? Were both the liberal and the more marginalized radical branches a result of changing technologies and ever-shifting advances of communication and information storing? It bothers me, I came to realize, that queer activism today is driven largely by market surveys, online polling, consumer profiling, and electronic sound bites — all of which use, rather than challenge, the cultural and economic status quo. Thirty years ago, African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde asked, "Can we dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools?" It’s a great question, and I guess I’m pretty happy using the master’s tools. Yet, while I am not a Luddite — I can do a pretty mean online search — part of me is still completely devoted to the glory of the past, both personal and political.

Even though my books had been exiled to these boxes for more than two years, I still remembered almost all of them and had a clear, deeply felt emotional connection to each. I remembered not only where they were shelved in my old apartment, but where I bought them and who was with me at the time. I remembered when I first read them, and whether I had ever used them in my writing. I remembered discussions about some titles and arguments over others. Like Proust biting into his madeleine, I was suddenly awash in a flood of memories. After opening and unpacking the fourth box, the sensation of remembrance was becoming confusing, even unpleasant — I felt as though I were being pelted by endless madeleines and hardly had time to catch my breath. Not to sound like a vulgar Freudian, but once un-boxed, my history overwhelmed me.

Soon the unpacking and discarding felt less like a chore, and more like a massive emotional project. I decided to establish some ground rules: if I could easily find a book in a library, I would toss my copy of it; if a book had deep sentimental value, I’d keep it; if there was a chance I might use a book for writing or teaching — and wanted it close at hand — I’d keep it. Sure, boxes and boxes of not-very-good gay and lesbian fiction from the mid 1980s were easy to dispose of. And the volumes of Virginia Woolf’s Letters and Diaries that Walta and I had read together when they were published in the 1980s were an easy "keep." Sometimes there were idiosyncratic decisions; Faith Is a Song: The Odyssey of an American Artist, the 1947 autobiography of radio personality and opera star Jessica Dragonette, was a keeper because it was, well, both relatively rare and insanely quirky.

These ground rules — like most rules — worked well enough, but not without frequent violations. As I energetically un-boxed, sorted, and re-sorted, I was faced with difficult decisions. Here was a copy of Dennis Altman’s 1971 Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, the first serious book on gay politics that my friends and I read in the early days of the movement. It was certainly available in libraries, but just as I was about to toss it into the "sell" box, I stopped myself. I remembered loaning that book to other activists — new, hardbound books were a costly item at that time — and discussing it with each one when it was returned. I recalled being at Gay Men’s Liberation meetings in the old radical Red Book store on River Street, in Cambridgeport, and having heated discussions about Altman’s fusion of Marx and Freud, about whether their ideas were even relevant to a new movement doing its best to break from the past and map out a new future. I looked through the book and found my notes disagreeing with the ideas it contained. Within a few moments, it was in the "keep" pile.