In the summer of 2005, a prominent statue with a wry smile, historic dress, and a “gay flair” was unveiled for the first time in the Church Wellesley neighborhood of Toronto (fig. 1).101 The more than three hundred people in attendance would be the first to see the monument to Canada’s “gay pioneer,” Alexander Wood, a Scottish immigrant to the small town of York (present-day Toronto) in 1797. A man of means at the age of twenty-five, Wood quickly became engaged in the life of his new home as he rose to the position of magistrate in 1800. By most accounts, Wood excelled in his position until a scandalous incident in 1810 that would forever link the name “Wood” with “molly” (a derogatory term for gay throughout the period) in Upper
100
A quote by Dennis O’Connor reported in Camille Roy, “Monument to ‘A Great Fag,’”
Toronto Star, June 26, 2005, A3.
101
No image of Wood has survived other than a reproduction of a Georgian silhouette. Thus, Wood’s appearance is largely derived from the research and impressions of artist, Del Newbigging: “I have worked from the silhouette and researched the period for clothing styles and also added a gay flair which I am convinced he would have had.” “Statue Honouring Alexander Wood Unveiled in Toronto’s Gay Village,” Xtra, June 1, 2005, http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Statue_honouring_
Canada.102 During his time as magistrate, a local woman reported to Wood that she was raped. Distraught, the woman had difficulty describing her assailant; however, she believed a scratch she inflicted on his genitalia in the course of the attack could identify the perpetrator. As a dutiful enforcer of public safety, Wood leapt into action. Calling before him several local men of the right age, Wood ordered them to face forward and drop trou. He carefully inspected the genitalia of each man himself determined to seek justice for the victim and return order to fair York.103
Or so we might like to think. Shortly after the inspection, the residents of York began to grumble. The examination had revealed no scratched member and no suspect had been found. Indeed, there were whispers the woman had begun to rescind aspects of her story. There were even rumors that there had been no woman at all. To this day, the facts remain unclear. Nonetheless, the magistrate was engulfed by fierce denunciations from all corners of colonial life. After months of personal anguish, the scandal forced Wood to flee not only York, but also the continent, seeking refuge in his native Scotland.104
This story of Wood and his monument marks the beginning of perhaps the oddest effort to remember a queer life within the public sphere. Like many historical figures, Wood’s sexuality is ambiguous at best.105 The nature of the scandal, his life-long bachelor status, and his flamboyant character suggested to onlookers, both his contemporaries and his recent admirers, that he might be gay. Certainly, he was accused of being a “molly” on the street and
102
Norton also claims that “molly” was the word used by most gay men to refer to one another in England during the same time period. See Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay
Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (London: GMP Publisher, 1992), 9 and The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, 85.
103
Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, s.v. “Wood, Alexander” (by Edith G. Firth), http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=37856 (accessed February 26, 2011).
104
Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, s.v. “Wood, Alexander.”
105
For more on the rhetoric of historical figures and ambiguous sexuality, see Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of
rumors about his sexuality swirled in the colonial press.106 However, there was and is no convincing evidence one way or the other. Such uncertainties have made efforts to remember gay lives difficult. Nonetheless, a queer “turn toward memory” has accelerated in recent years making the place of queers in and out of the public spaces of the past an issue for activists, historians, and other scholars alike.107 Cross-disciplinary research into queer public memory and history has increased while the merits of such memories have only begun to be debated.108 Yet while this important scholarship has assessed queer public memory in one form or another, little work has been done on the material and visual elements that constitute these memory projects. This may be surprising since scholars have noted how queers have found in spaces, sites, and visual representations tactical and inventional resources for identity-formation, community, and resistance, often situated in modern and historical cityscapes.109 In addition, these kinds of
106
Archival evidence suggests that Wood never married and had no children. No record of a romantic relationship exists in his papers. Interestingly, Wood’s papers are largely absent for the year 1810. Alexander Wood Papers and Letterbooks, Special Collections, Toronto Reference Library, Toronto, ON. After the scandal, Wood was reportedly harassed in the street and his business suffered. Later in his life, Chief Justice William Dummer Powell publicly aired the allegations against Wood in refusing his appointment to a civic post. Wood sued Powell for damages and won. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Wood, Alexander.” In 1838, a “satirical broadsheet” notoriously announced the “wedding” of Wood to a male colleague as a public attack on his character. See Gerald Keith, “Alexander Wood: A Queer Tale of Early Toronto,” Sightlines, 1993, 24.
107
This characterization of a queer “turn toward memory” is derived from Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo,” in Morris, Queering Public Address, 95, (italics original). See also Larry Kramer, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” The Advocate, March 30, 1999, 67.
108
Excellent examples of such work include Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire; Cvetkovich, An
Archive of Feelings; Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of
Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo,” in Queering Public Address, 93-120; and Nealon, Foundlings. Critical accounts of contemporary queer
memory practices can be see in Cloud, “The First Lady’s Privates,” in Morris, Queering Public Address, 23-44; Judith Halberstam, “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” Social Text 23 (2005): 219-33; Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
109
While memory and the visual take priority in this essay, the politics of “queer space” — “place-making practices” that produce new understandings of space in relation to queer publics — is another important aspect of the Wood statue. See Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. Others
material memories in the form of monuments and statues have historically been the preferred means by which official community memories have been enshrined.110 Indeed, as I will show, it can be argued that Wood’s statue — and the plaques that encircle its base — constitutes an official memory sanctioned within both the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer (GLBTQ) and heterosexual community. Thus, the Wood statue provides ample means for engaging a heretofore-unaddressed element of queer public memory scholarship in its material, visual, and official manifestations (one of only a few publicly known memory sites to label their subjects as queer).
Attention to the Wood statue’s material rhetoric simultaneously provides an opportunity to detail further the role materiality plays in queer public memory more generally. Constrained by heteronormative forces and erased by historical arbiters, queers have often relied upon the most ephemeral forms of memory — like gesture, performance, and intergenerational
scholars have described queer space in other ways that might be considered within an analysis of the
statue. Some scholars have compiled urban histories of GLBTQ lives while others have examined more theoretical elements of queers and the urban experience. These include conceptualizing “the closet” in various geographies, examining queer walking practices, and studying the dynamics of gay male cruising in cities. Also of interest is the connection between time, space, and memory. While I cannot delve into these perspectives here, the relevance of space in this case is apparent. See Julie Abraham, Metropolitan
Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); David Higgs,
ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 (New York: Routledge, 1999); James McCourt, Queer
Street: The Rise and Fall of American Culture, 1947-1985 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004);
Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (New York: Routledge, 2000); Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the
Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); Christopher Castiglia, “Sex
Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories,” boundary 2 27 (2000): 149-75. See also Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of
Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997).
110
See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory, 2-4. For more on official memories, see Bodnar,
storytelling — to maintain their shared pasts.111 While many of these memory rhetorics have important material qualities, rarely have queers been afforded the means to enshrine their memories in material forms as enduring as monuments and commemorative sites. Thus, highly material memory projects like the Wood statue provide substantial opportunities for queers to disrupt the forgetting and erasure that has so contributed to GLBTQ marginalization. In this way, the statue can be characterized as a strategic memory. Yet, as this essay will demonstrate, the inclusion of such rhetorics into the queer memory repertoire simultaneously produces unintended consequences for how historical and contemporary GLBTQ identity is conceptualized. How gay and lesbian, queer, and heterosexual audiences respond to these consequences is a core concern of this chapter and will suggest important implications for queer public memory moving forward.
While the Wood statue raises broad concerns about materiality in the era of queer memorialization, it also serves as a dynamic example of how gay space within the city can be created and destroyed through various discursive, visual, and material readings of public memories. In this essay, I also argue that the Alexander Wood statue represents a central text for interpreting the meaning of gay space in Toronto. Despite suggestions to the contrary, the urban environment has not always been friendly to those in search of same-sex desire. While the fruitful work of George Chauncey, Allan Bérubé, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, and others have illuminated the possibilities for queer lives in the city, many cities across the globe, including Toronto, have a history of identifying and eradicating gay space.112 As such, the
111
José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8.2 (1996): 5-7 and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65-67.
112
Chauncey, Gay New York; Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). For examinations of curbing queer space in a variety of cities, see Robert W. Bailey,
creation of gay spaces in cities is better thought of as an evolutionary process full of strife and political/cultural activism. Toronto’s queer community has been waging such a battle for decades. From the shutting of lesbian bars to the infamous 1981 Bathhouse Raids, Toronto is an example of the dynamic tensions between expanding and shrinking queer sites. On the streets of Toronto, according to John Grube, “change did not happen overnight, nor were gains won without prolonged struggles that still continue.” Instead, Grube suggests the GLBTQ community has waged a battle away from a hidden space of homosexual desire toward a “‘democratic’ gay public space.” By “democratic,” Grube names a process of spatial negotiation wherein GLBTQ people (primarily gay men) carve out for themselves geographies often taken for granted by the heterosexual community. The key characteristics of these spaces for Grube are three fold. First, unlike closeted spaces, gay democratic space makes GLBTQ identities visible, both to heterosexual and homosexual audiences alike. Second, gay democratic spaces promote a form of public sexuality (distinct from identity) where same-sex desire can be out in the open rather than hidden within veiled, everyday urban activities. Finally, gay democratic space is fostered when members of the GLBTQ community debate openly and frankly about the rules, organization, and structures of that space. This community dialogue is perhaps the key factor in naming these spaces “democratic.” It is within these spaces that a new kind of GLBTQ community is formed.113
Gay Politics, Urban Politics: Identity and Economics in the Urban Setting (New York: Columbia
University, 1999), 249-80; David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites; and Ingram et al., Queers in Space.
113
Grube generally conceptualizing these “democratic” spaces as primarily male spaces. In certain ways that will become clear in this analysis, the Wood statue is also largely representative of men and gay male space, though critiques of that conception leave open a wider range of identarian possibilities. John Grube, “No More Shit: The Struggle for Democratic Gay Space in Toronto,” in Ingram et al., Queers in Space, 128-29.
However, Grube’s perspective is only one of many possible ways to understand gay space in Toronto. While many in the GLBTQ community have worked to craft spaces that confer stability to gay sites (the Wood statue being a clear example), others from across the cultural and political spectrum have challenged this stability. As tactical memory rhetorics, these others regularly draw upon the statue itself to construct their meaning, subverting its intended message for their own (divergent) purposes. Two of these others include cultural traditionalists, who have continued to minimize and destroy gay space, and queer radicals, who seek to destabilize the meaning of all space. By examining not just the rhetorical messages crafted to express the public memory of Alexander Wood, but also the countermemory readings and performances of cultural traditionalist and queer radicals, the meaning of gay space in Toronto is opened up to diverse visual, cultural, and political interpretations.114 While none of these readings are mutually exclusive or available only to those who inhabit particular identity categories, the contest between these groups over the meaning of the statue and similar spaces throughout the city are central to understanding the public memory of Alexander Wood.
To tackle this rather complex and multivocal text, I will analyze the statue by performing three different ways of understanding it. By performing these positions, I will suggest ways of reading the Wood statue that draw upon and inform preexisting ideas of queer representation and public space. Key to this approach to studying queer public memory is Leah Ceccarelli’s description of polysemy — “the existence of plural but finite denotational meanings for a single text.”115 As a marginalized community, GLBTQ memories have long been devalued and erased
114
Because of his extended and substantive use of the term, I use Castiglia’s spelling of “countermemory” throughout this essay rather than Foucault’s “counter-memory.” Foucault, by comparison, uses the term sparingly in his work.
115
Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of
in dominant culture’s reliance upon limited, heteronormative historical narratives.116 Monosemic approaches to criticism that privilege the rhetor can be complicit in this erasure by ignoring the resistive, creative, and tongue-in-cheek queer voices that permeate some texts below the surface. By embracing a polysemic analysis of the Wood statue in this essay, a constellation of readings will come to the fore, allowing the complexity of the text and its nuanced interactions among different audiences to emerge. In addition, I will supplement these readings with discourse about the statue in local newspapers and online material that will contextualize both what this statue was designed to do as well as its reception by those who interact with it. By doing so, I will examine the diverse meanings of the Wood statue in different interpretive communities by conducting a “close reading of receptional fragments in conjunction with a close reading of the text.”117
To that end, I will begin by discussing how public memories are visually and materially contested. Next, I will perform three major ways of visualizing the statue: the official democratic memory, which remembers Wood as a valuable contributor to Canadian community; the traditionalist countermemory, which remembers Wood as a criminal who abused his authority and should be shielded from public view; and the camp countermemory, which remembers Wood as a camp figure both insufficient to represent contemporary identities and capable of being altered for more queer purposes. I will conclude this essay with some insights on how these readings and their interactions in the public sphere implicate new concerns in thinking about how memories are viewed and what constitutes queer public memory.
116
Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 5-6.
117