Who Is the Subject?: Queer Theory Meets Oral History

Abstract

THE TINY SUBFIELD OF U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer history has evolved since the publication of John D'Emilio's 1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities into a fledgling discipline that has over time established an overarching set of research questions and an accepted set of research methods.' With the exception of a few monographs, like Peter Boag's exhaustively researched Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific North-west (2003), there are few works in this twenty-five-yearold field that do not depend heavily on oral history methods. As George Chauncey observes in Gay New York, early in my research it became clear that oral histories would be the single most important source of evidence concerning the internal working of the gay world.2 The use of oral history methods stems back to the field's social history moorings, where historians of the dispossessed found themselves lacking print sources and turned to live historical actors for information about the recent past. In practicing the craft, however, U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historians have been influenced by feminist ethnographers, whose methodology attempts to clarify the social, economic, and ideological differences that exist between researchers and their so-called subjects. Feminist researchers try to empower (rather than exploit) historical narrators by trusting their voices, positioning narrators as historical experts, and interpreting narrators' voices alongside the

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