Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,” we can often find a way to modulate or mask it. Given all this, sometimes the best–and certainly most convincing–evidence that some trait is inborn rather than acquired is simple, honest testimony. Such is the case, I think, with homosexuality. In Jonathan Rauch‘s remarkable and moving memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul (The Atlantic Books, 2013) the author explores exactly what it was like to deny his own sexual orientation for over two decades. Actually, “deny” is not really the right word, at least for what Rauch did in his early years. To “deny” is to realize the possibility of something and reject it. For much of his early life, Rauch never even entertained the idea he was gay, so he couldn’t very well deny it. It just wasn’t possible. He thought he was just weird. But as he matured, it did dawn on him that maybe, just maybe, he might be gay. Not surprisingly given the prejudice against homosexuality at the time he was growing up, the very possibility frightened him. He did not want to be gay. Who would want to be gay? Why would you put yourself through that? So he denied it. Until there came a time when he met kind, loving people who told him that he really should and could be who he was. They would help him. And they did. Jonathan Rauch then became what he had never really been–Jonathan Rauch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

What does it mean to be gay? According to many people, gayness is simply homosexuality – a sexual orientation. However, as David M. Halperin argues in his new book How to be Gay (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), being gay is about more than just sex. In fact, gay men learn how to develop a gay cultural subjectivity through other gay men. Gay culture is phenomenon that is as often denied as it is accepted, as is evidenced by the many stereotypes often associated with gay people, played out in movies and TV shows on a regular basis. Halperin argues that there is a “queer way of feeling,” and that gay subjectivity should be discussed and studied, not dismissed and denied. Despite the catchy title, How to be Gay is a thoroughly academic and detailed book, which seriously dives into the research of gay subjectivity and style. In this interview, he explains how modern day gay identity has been promoted at the expense of gay subjectivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consulting room with questions about “being in the right body” sheds light on the culture and perhaps especially the culture of psychoanalysis. Arguing against a more traditional Lacanian view that the refusal to accept sexual difference is indicative of a psychotic structure, Gherovici details why she thinks otherwise. She is passionate and informed and true to her training all at once. NBiP senses that she is an unusual psychoanalytic scholar who is exhaustive in her cross-disciplinary research and so brings to us many challenging and provocative questions. Her thinking has strong foundations and her intellectual scaffolding is made of only the finest material. To analysts, anthropologists, activists, queer and feminist theorists, philosophers and historians, Patricia Gherovici has something to say. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview. For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorporates gender and sexual diversity under its protective umbrella — marriage rights extended, prohibitions to military service lifted, etc — queer politics get folded into the progressive march of the West toward equity and tolerance. But what about for queer people whose land is violently occupied by the very body politic going about all this incorporating? As Scott Lauria Morgensen powerfully articulates in his new book, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Indigenous Two-Spirit activists work for both decolonization and sexual freedom within their homelands, resisting state incorporation, cultural appropriation, and narratives of their “disappearance.”Brilliantly extending (and intervening) on the work of earlier theorists, Morgensen traces how modern sexual identities are built upon the replacement of indigenous sexuality and the development of settler colonialism in what is now the United States and Canada. “Native and queer studies must regard settler colonialism as a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land,” Morgensen argues, “and use this analysis to explain the power of settler colonialism among Native and non-Native People.” This is not simply an indictment. Morgensen shows how conversations between Natives and non-Natives can open up new frameworks for political activism and scholarly research, so long as they remain accountable to the ongoing colonization of Native lands. As mainstream LGBTQ organizations abandon their social movement pasts, Morgensen work is a clarion call for a new wave of decolonial queer organizing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Tell me, who can resist a book called The Queer Art of Failure? Not me. Especially once I learned that its heroines are the likes of Ginger (of *Chicken Run*) and Dory (of *Finding Nemo*). Children – the intended audience of 3D animated blockbusters – are revolting little creatures, it turns out, happy to wreak havoc on prescribed gender roles, distinctions between humans and animals (or toys, for that matter), and anything particularly orderly. In other words, they instinctively – and queerly – resist the markers of success in heteropatriarchal, capitalist society. OK, maybe they don’t use those terms. But you get the point. Judith (“Jack”) Halberstam, Professor of English, Gender Studies, and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, presents forgetting, stupidity, lack of discipline, and losing as strategies of resistance against the constraints of success. Though even the term “strategies of resistance” suggests a heroic (if alternative) model of success that Halberstam, well, resists. Queers are, so to speak, champions of these kinds of failure. They can’t fulfill the model of heteronormativity – they lose! They deny the imperative to pass knowledge and memory through the generations – they forget! But there’s also a darker side to all of this. Feminists, queers, and (post)-colonial subjects might discover that complete self-negation is the only way to fully opt out of heteropatriarchal and capitalist-defined success. And those who would claim alternative identities must grapple with their own complicity in oppression – a failure of failure, as it were. Consider the case of homosexual Nazis, as Halberstam daringly does. Listen to the interview, read the book. And then you can join me in watching *Dude, Where’s My Car?*, a Halberstam-recommended Failure Film I seem to have missed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Jafari S. Allen‘s !Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2011) is a meticulously researched and exquisitely theorized ethnography that begins with a queer speculation of the revolutionary inevitable. That is, the cover art to the book, a self-portrait of a the tuxedoed artist Rena Pena,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies