Vomit! At the Archive
Paranoia and Liberalism
A few years ago I attempted to gracefully leave the reading room at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles in the middle of the day to go for an anxious walk, trying not to puke on the sidewalk.
Nausea is a bit of a personal barometer. At the extreme end, I’ve found that a certain (mercifully infrequent) kind of traumatic memory recall can have me projectile vomiting in less than five seconds. It’s mortifying, really. More mundanely, I often feel sick to my stomach when I can’t think through something bombarding me. Maybe you do, too; I don’t think I’m unusual in this way. The viscera “think” like the brain does—more precisely, the two are indissociable—and the digestive system probably thinks measurably faster than consciousness, preempting it, at least according to neuroscience.
That day I had been reading the autobiography of Angela K. Douglas, a trans activist most prolific in the 1970s. She founded and helmed the Transsexual Activist Organization (TAO) until she was ousted for a variety of reasons. She had grown increasingly exclusive about the organization’s membership and aims, barring non-transsexuals, for one thing. The TAO was also uniquely transnational, with extensive links from its Miami headquarters to the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, making it difficult to support any cult of one personality. Douglas wasn’t especially reflective of a diverse membership of trans women of color by the end of the decade.
Douglas self-published her autobiography in 1984 and it apparently sold by word of mouth for $15. But by then she had been largely declared washed up by her contemporaries. From one perspective, this was a deeply impersonal process that happened to many other erstwhile fixtures of trans liberation. The world had moved on; trans liberation’s fire had burned bright but apparently too hot, like so many other radical 1970s movements. The Reagan revolution knocked it flat, while the HIV/AIDS emergency of the early 1980s shifted the tenor and scope of much of the queer and trans left that turned its energies towards organizing resistance to something that we now call neoliberalism.
From another perspective, however, Douglas also brought her ignominy on herself. Increasingly paranoid, by the 1980s she had taken to suing media outlets and making dramatic public accusations that anyone and everyone enjoying a moment of recognition under the trans sun had stolen her work, libeled her, or were actively working against her. In a 1985 article in Moonshadow she claimed “an estimated $500 to $700 million have been made off my pirated works and life story.” As A.J. Lewis has brilliantly written (here, here, and here)—and you should also listen to Lewis’s conversation with Morgan M. Page on a dynamite episode of One From the Vaults—the earliest waves of trans historiography mostly downplayed the paranoid and irrational detours of figures like Douglas, implicitly or explicitly pathologizing them as symptoms of psychiatric illness, separable from the “true” historical record.
Knowing all that, I was still unprepared for the sheer disorder of reading Douglas’s autobiography, Triple Jeopardy, which made me feel like I didn’t know shit as a scholar, or a trans woman. I don’t want to give it a superficial treatment here, but suffice it to say, the narrative is a Franken-trans-autobiography structured around her being repeatedly abducted by aliens, while also detailing post-Stonewall activism, her long struggle against police violence, and a difficult path to gender affirming surgery. The typewritten manuscript looks chaotic to the eye, almost like it were a manifesto written in one sitting. And much of the text accuses what we might today think of as the liberal trans establishment—Harry Benjamin and company, or philanthropist Reed Erickson, who funded much of 1960s and 1970s trans medicine—of being military, CIA, or FBI plants. Psyops. Douglas throws her chips in with the aliens, who she suggests are laying the groundwork to invade the earth to liberate transsexuals, for whom they have sympathy as shapeshifters and oppressed outsiders.
This is a difficult story to tell responsibly for several reasons, not the least of which is that there are rampant conspiracy theories today on the right, spanning Mumsnet to the Proud Boys to QAnon, that justify authoritarianism and the de facto eradication of trans people—especially women and children—to satisfy their ultra-paranoid reasoning. In such a climate, it feels perilous to air dirty trans laundry, even if it’s hardly surprising that the United States, a country built on a famously paranoid political culture, would have produced such thinking on the left, too.
But I’ve been thinking about Douglas—and the visceral reaction I had to her autobiography—this week, as Texas and the Supreme Court ended abortion rights, hurricane Ida ripped through poor communities from New Orleans to Brooklyn, and schools and universities reopened amidst the preventable mass death of thousands from the Delta variant of COVID-19. A strange association, I know, but it’s a visceral one, formed first in the thinking of my gut, not my brain. There’s something about the brazen indictment of liberalism as a state-funded psyop in Douglas’s paranoia that, regardless of how obviously untrue it is on its face, is nagging at the limits of my thinking. The point is akin to Eve Sedgwick’s opening to her famous essay on paranoid and reparative reading, where she asks Cindy Patton about conspiracy theories that AIDS was created by the US government to kill off Black people. After asking Patton “what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus’s origins,” Sedgwick records this as her reply:
“Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate,” she said. “But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?”
Like Sedgwick, I take this as a riddle, not a concrete claim. My eyes linger most on Patton’s phrase I just have trouble getting interested in that. Would that it were true of me!
All the logically bizarre in-fighting I’ve seen this week, with blame for everything happening in the world being variously laid at the feet of “the American Taliban,” “Bernie bros,” the Democratic party, trans people, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 2016 election, pedophiles, or whomever else will be next accused to avoid seeing this week as profoundly continuous with the history of the United States—each are declarations of interest, in both senses of the word. These squabbles are denials of reality and ways to avoid being surprised that disingenuously hoard attention from what we already know about abortion, climate change, and the pandemic. They are also declarations of political interest, a doubling down on liberalism’s fantasy of the eventual, or at least ideal reasonableness of American democracy. A dream of civility that must apparently be maintained over and above all evidence that those are not the operative political forces in play.
Or so I read into it. Like I said, this is to me a riddle, not a concrete claim.
It all makes me feel nauseous, in that familiar way. I just wonder what we will do after our stomachs settle.