Pirouetting between the past and present, fiction and memoir, and poetry and academic theory, Julian Carter’s Dances of Time and Tenderness conjures a text rippling with queer potentiality. Trained as a historian, and previously the author of a monograph on constructing the “normal”—i.e. white and straight—American citizen, Carter is now a professor of critical studies and fine arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In Dances, Carter’s multi-genre writing tackles questions of queer historiography, archival politics, and the transmission of emotion through bodies, geography, and text. Roving in topic, Dances is animated by the politics that puts trans bodies—and their ability to change the world—at the forefront.
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Joshua Gutterman Tranen: I’ve been gushing to my friends about Dances of Time and Tenderness yet struggling to succinctly categorize it. My attempts amount to: “It’s poetry, it’s anti-memoir, it’s fiction, it’s academic criticism, it’s theory! Whatever, just read it now.” So I want to start by asking about genre. How do you see the relationship between the book’s content and its genre?
Julian Carter: Is “enticing bauble” a genre? Dances is a promiscuous text—it’s willing to be many things for many people. You listed some categories publishers and agents use. To young people longing for transcestral lineage, Dances offers steamy-dreamy, starry-eyed, angry, and tragic backstories to their present; to performing artists and critics, it channels my embodied perspective as participant and audience; for a scholarly audience, it’s a research-based, theoretically informed exploration of touch, desire, and intimacy as technologies of history.
Genre and gender are linguistically related concepts we use to sort the hooting wild weirdness of the world into categories we can work with—that is, until they don’t work, and the boundaries of being shift. What makes a woman a woman? What makes a history a history, or a dance a dance? Trans is an explosion in the classificatory field; I wanted the text to ripple with the force of that explosion.
JGT: In Dances, you tell readers this is not a memoir or an autobiography, but “collective memory.” How do you want the reader to engage with the first-person narrative?
JC: My “I” is a warm-blooded device to connect you with a particular time and place, to make it easy for you to experience them as relevant to your life and your imagination. For instance, there’s a section where I mention buying The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 at Modern Times, in San Francisco. That didn’t actually happen, but that’s not important because the passage isn’t about me: I’m inviting you to stroll the Valencia Street strip in an earlier, less gentrified moment, when lesbian and gay researchers met up in the leftist neighborhood bookstore to share newspaper clippings that helped sponsor the emergence of the first specifically trans historical writings in the U.S. The passage isn’t about me—it’s about historiography. “I” am there to introduce the idea that history is made of the human relationships between historians.
That’s the other reason the “I” is important. I want to invite readers into an embodied, affectively rich relationship to trans history and community, and it’s culturally appropriate for me to make it clear that my fictions are nonetheless anchored in my carnal knowledge of the worlds I describe. I want trans readers to feel that I’m speaking to them, not presuming to speak for them. And I want them to feel authorized to be speaking subjects of their own historical situation.
JGT: The recurring motif of Dances is a chain. At the level of their design, chains are built out of repetition; metaphorically, chains instantiate a lineage through repeating links. While reading the book, the metaphor of the chain felt intuitive to how you describe queer and trans history, and yet, like a chain, that metaphor is forged, constructed. It’s brilliant. How did you arrive at this motif?
JC: I used to wonder how therapists could keep track of all the important figures in their clients’ lives. Then I found out they have a cheat sheet called a genogram. It looks kind of like a family tree, but it represents a relational ecosystem, using different kinds of lines to suggest the different textures of connections between people. For example, a hostile relationship is a zigzag; a one-night stand is a series of dashes and dots.
I tried making up a visual vocabulary to indicate specifically queer intimacies—things like “activists sleeping together”—but it got too complicated to be useful, and the exercise showed me that what mattered was truly the simple, overriding reality that each of us is linked to others in relationships that join us, for good and for ill, from then to whenever, and in some unpredictable directions. So the genogram turned into a chain.
JGT: Chains also carry a specific sexual connotation, especially within scenes of domination and submission. In the chapter titled “on ropes and chains and sailing ships,” two different chains are juxtaposed over two pages: on the verso, one line: “chains clipped to my septum ring, chains around my waist—” and on the recto, a description of an anchored ship as “suspended in the sweet spot where bound meets free.” What were you doing with this juxtaposition?
JC: In that section I was flirting with the reader, not only evoking the eroticism of the decorated young body, but also showing off my craft. I was pushing the seafaring metaphor that structures the chapter, playing with the image of a vessel as a body as a vessel, shifting back and forth from my 140-pound young self to a World War 2 troop carrier’s 7176 tons. And yes, that chapter is about the impossibility of pleasure outside of power (I read Foucault at a formative age).
JGT: I love the idea that actions repeated over time, and by different actors, constitute a lineage of movement. This most obviously applies to dance and choreography, which plays a prominent thematic role in Dances. But I’m also reminded of what I’ve often said about gay sex: when I was a baby gay, someone had to teach me how to have sex. It’s the queer version of the Biblical “begats” you write about in Dances: someone taught me how to have sex, and someone taught them, and someone taught them—you get the point. Can you say more about how histories are transmitted through bodily movements?
JC: Unfortunately, sometimes they’re passed down through trauma. When I was in my teens and twenties, living and working primarily among dykes and activist fags, I knew almost nobody who hadn’t been assaulted in some way—for being female, or not female enough, or too feminine, or the wrong kind of feminine, or just for being queer in a world that hates sissies and queer and trans women. I learned about sex with survivors. People’s psychic and erotic scars are alive like electrical fences. You can’t touch them without encountering the current, and that encounter sensitizes you—it becomes part of your own electrical field, your way of being with that body. Even if you don’t know the story of someone’s experience of violation, its aftermath is in the bed with you. You carry the current with you into your encounter with other bodies.
JGT: Early in the book you offer the reader the potentiality of the trans promise: “What we do with our bodies changes worlds.” Can you say more about that?
JC: The full sentence is “Through our actions, the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds.” My emphasis is on the actions. Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about the difference between her ancestral language, which is based on verbs, and her professional languages, Latin and English, which are based on nouns. She makes a persuasive case that classifying non-human beings as noun-things, rather than verb-actors, has historically contributed to a deadened and murderous relationship with our planet. Kimmerer’s work teaches me to embrace the challenge of living in the vibrancy, the verbness, of the world, me included.
That’s about materiality. I have nothing against theory or conceptual art, and I embrace fantasy. It’s just that we don’t get to be alive very long, and I want to make the most of it. So when I say “hey, trans people, what we do with our bodies has an impact on reality,” I am holding out a vision of purposive, effective, transformative activity, which is especially important to people whose agency and bodily self-determination are under constant threat.
At the same time, I’m posing a bit of a challenge. In the past few years I’ve had quite a few cis people tell me they feel a little bit trans, or they identify with trans in some way, or they never felt quite like they thought their gender category was supposed to feel; and more power to them, I hope they make a huge productive mess of the expectations they feel constraining them, but I don’t think that necessarily means they’re transing gender. I’m thinking here of a former provost at my school, a straight cis conventionally feminine blonde woman, whose email signature suddenly sprouted a “she/they.” As near as I can tell, what she’s doing with that blend of body and pronoun is reproducing a system in which people like her get to feel glamorous by inviting themselves to a party they didn’t help throw, assuming that someone else will take out the trash. So, yeah, for me that’s not part of the trans promise of world-changing.
JGT: Dances tells several stories about the politics of the queer archive, including one in which you describe looking through a 1991 issue of OUT/LOOK on Queer Nation. Since you had been a member of the group, you were disconcerted to encounter your absence in its “official” queer archival trace: you write “I didn’t find the recognition I’d thought we’d shared.” Can you say more about finding, or not finding, recognition in the archives?
JC: The scene you’re referring to stages a three-way encounter between a middle-aged trans person, a middle-aged queer object, and their divergent memory of their shared youth. The 2017 fictionalized me welcomes the 1991 magazine, which can’t remember this person (transition does that sometimes) and so refuses to speak to him. The point is to lift up memory as trans archival material, not in spite of memory’s notorious unreliability, but because of it. We all know that we remember things differently from one another and from ourselves at other moments. Typically, we resort to the printed object’s testimony because we trust it not to change. But in my little story, the magazine’s version of the past is limited by its inability to shift and deepen. Its stability forecloses the recognition of change on which ongoing intimacy depends—for all relationships, and especially profoundly, for relationships that bridge gender transition.
File me under “misrecognition.” Identification is that much more elusive: there’s no way to find oneself in file folders, not even in the archive of one’s own life. A better word for the relationship I seek is love.
JGT: One of the recurring historical figures of Dances is Lou Sullivan, a gay trans historian who died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, and to whom you’re linked (chained?) through multiple connections. In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Lou by younger trans queers, especially following the publication of his diaries. How do you see their relationship to Sullivan as different from yours?
JC: I don’t need him as a trancestor in the way that many of them seem to do. Honestly, I’m more interested in their relationship to Lou than I am in Lou himself. Their identification with Lou is sometimes truly passionate. I’ve seen a T-shirt with the slogan LOU SULLIVAN MADE ME GAY. I identified first as gay, and then as a dyke, for a decade before I’d ever heard of Sullivan, so I have a lot of questions about what “gay” means to them and what they imagine it meant to Lou. In the book, I note a couple of ideas about him that are circulating in the trans zeitgeist. One is that AIDS certified his authenticity as a “real” gay man (Zach Ozma, who co-edited Lou’s diaries, calls this the Myth of St. Lou the Martyr—he died to make trans queers free); the other is that the enormity of AIDS makes it slimy to focus on sex. I worry that they define Lou’s gayness in a sexphobic, pathologizing way that is the opposite of everything Lou valued about being gay! It seems to me that their pious admiration sometimes risks replicating a straight legacy of contempt for desiring flesh, in the name of identifying with a guy who made the most of every sexual opportunity that came his way.
JGT: So what advice would you give young trans queers seeking their trancestors? How does one avoid a hagiography that flattens the reality of historical lives?
JC: One way is to delve into the historical record. You don’t usually have to dig very deep to find evidence that trans people have all the ordinary human failings in spades.
The other way is to talk to people with blurring jawlines and bags under their eyes– whose thinning hair is turning gray, who aren’t keeping up with the latest trends: get to know old people. The young ones who are coming up now have more opportunities to be in relationship to flesh and blood trans elders than any other generation ever has! We won’t be around forever, and we have some good stories to tell.
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Joshua Gutterman Tranen is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and The Poetry Project.