Archive Grief, Archive Time
‘The body emerges from this history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of paths not taken, which also involves the loss, impossible to know or even to register, of what might have followed from such paths.’ —Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
It was August in Eugene, Oregon—an unfamiliar city in a country I hadn’t called home in a decade—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d lived my life wrong.
John and I were spending a month in Eugene because I’d been awarded a fellowship to do research in the archives of one of my favourite authors, the anarchist feminist science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin. My proposed project[1] had to do with challenging widely popular and, I argued, unhelpful narratives surrounding queerness in literature, and in fantasy literature in particular: the idea that queerness in fantasy was a recent development relative to the genre’s history, and the idea that only literature in which queer people can directly and easily ‘see ourselves’ is meaningfully queer. Instead, I proposed an archival approach that sought to identify surprising instances of kinship, desire, and affiliation across texts, authors and their social circles, and their afterlives in reader reception. So, every weekday that dry, scorching August, I would take the bus from our rented studio apartment to the University of Oregon’s campus, often accompanied by John, and trek up the hill to the Special Collections and University Archives reading room to immerse myself in past traces of other people’s lives and work: not just Le Guin but also Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree, Jr., Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ, and many others.
It was intensive work, unearthing old gossip, friendly gestures, meetings of minds, arguments, grievances, flirtations, and romantic and sexual entanglements from up to fifty years ago. It was also work that, by its very nature of being archived, constantly reminded me that all these events belonged to the past. That unnerved me.
I’m edified by reading up on queer and otherwise radical histories, but also, often, I’m haunted by a kind of uneasiness. Maybe it’s a self-serving uneasiness, because it has almost nothing to do with the histories themselves and everything to do with my own position in relation to them. It’s rarely pertinent to the main subject at hand, and I try to avoid prioritizing it, but it’s there. It’s a bit like the feeling you may have gotten travelling to a new city, where you suddenly become aware of the completely different lives from your own that have been lived in this place, all this time. Here were all these people living lives and writing about things since long before I was born that were unthinkable to me until—when? 2012? 2016? Even later? And the leftover fragments of them were all there in front of me, in handwritten postcards and little doodles in the margins of manuscripts, their physical closeness another reminder of how temporally inaccessible they were.
Many of the archival materials I was consulting stretched into the ’90s and 2000s, times when I had distinct memories of where I was and what I was doing. While Ursula was marching through the streets of Portland with a placard to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was in South Carolina repeating jingoistic rhetoric with my classmates at school or the neighbours’ kids. The same year I had my purity ring ceremony,[2] Betsy James was writing letters to Ursula vociferously railing against Protestant Christianity’s neglect and excoriation of the body. This is not even getting into Delany’s cruising escapades throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which are minutely and graphically detailed in his sprawling letters to Russ. (One day, rifling through entire boxes of such letters in the library’s upper reading room, John turned to me and whispered, ‘Are we even meant to be reading all of this stuff?’)[3]
It’s a cliché within queer cultures to talk about the anxiety that, as Huw Lemmey once put it, ‘[t]his bar was more fun before you arrived’, that there was some ideal past of queer social life that was more chic, more genuinely rebellious and radical, than the one we are experiencing now. The truth is always much more complicated, of course. I wonder, though, if at least some of what outwardly manifests as ill-advised nostalgia masks a deeper form of archival grief. The existence of radical lives that long predate the emergence of our own political or sexual consciousness is a reminder that our own lives could have gone otherwise all along, that whatever repressive or supremacist ideologies formed us, whatever wounds we bear or hurts we inflicted on others, were not inevitable. Fantasy and speculative fiction are often approached from the left as reminders that another world is possible; one of the most liberating, and most painful, realizations is that it was always possible, all along.
The day after we arrived in Eugene, while John was still sleeping off the jet lag, I became absorbed in the Instagram feed of Plumb, an evangelical alt-rock musician I’d followed as a teenager. I sometimes return with morbid fascination to the archival traces of my own past life, especially in the form of music, if for no other reason than to try to make sense of the person I was then. I find that version of me, his mindset and choices, increasingly hard to understand. Or maybe sometimes I still can’t quite believe that I ended up here, in the life I have now. I’m sometimes curious to know who else made it out, and who’s still immersed in that world.
Plumb’s social media feed, as it turned out, was a public chronicle of her own journey away from evangelicalism: stories from an arduous and painful divorce and her reclamation of agency as a woman were interspersed with selfies with drag queens. That summer, she had released a series of Instagram reels reflecting on her 1999 album candycoatedwaterdrops (my favourite of hers) song by song, chronicling the creative genesis and writing process for each song, and how her feelings about them had changed in the 25 years since the album’s release.
Plumb always occupied the same odd niche as bands like Sixpence None the Richer or Switchfoot;[4] she was definitively Christian, but her songwriting had a bit more lyrical nuance and emotional complexity than many artists in the scene’s mainstream. (Evanescence, for the record, have cited her as a major influence.) Even as an evangelical kid, I tended to gravitate toward artists who didn’t write conventional worship songs.[5] To this day I will maintain that ‘Stranded’ is a perfect pop song, while ‘Drugstore Jesus’ was prescient in its bitter critique of Christian branding and marketing. In one reel, Plumb detailed how her record label forced her to include the Christian-radio-friendly ‘God-Shaped Hole’,[6] which she did not write, on the album against her wishes because most other songs on the record were deemed too dark or challenging to be faith-based hits.
When John rolled out of bed, I was watching a reel discussing the album’s opener, ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’, a hellfire-and-brimstone song about the end times that is also, unfortunately, a banger. Plumb talked through her difficult journey with the song as someone who no longer believes in hell or values fear as a motivating principle for faith, eventually coming around to suggesting that the song’s lyrics can be interpreted to be about the catastrophic conditions that emerge when we (as in humanity) abandon each other. ‘You always talk about Eve Sedgwick and reparative reading and all of that stuff,’ said John, sitting down with a cup of tea.[7] ‘Have you ever thought about applying any of that to things like this? Could the music or any of the other bad cultural objects from your past with mean other things to you now?’
Working in the archive I increasingly became overwhelmed by a sense of lateness. I first read Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), about a planet without binary gender, while recovering from an operation in 2015 and re-tooled my PhD project to prominently include her work. The novel didn’t so much awaken something in me as prod insistently at something that was already there, something I’d long put off naming. Le Guin died in 2018; I remember reading the news in shock after coming home from a date. (The Mormon missionary posted outside the subway station had yelled to try and get my attention after my date and I had kissed goodnight, in full view of everyone.) I didn’t have much of a span of time in which I could hope to have new Le Guin writing to look forward to. Looking through the archive, I realized how much I regretted that.
Linda, the archivist who manages the Le Guin Collection, told me stories of mornings spent clearing Ursula’s attic and afternoons clearing her basement in Portland for papers to be archived in Eugene, and lunches out with Ursula and Molly Gloss. Michael, my current collaborator on a long-term Le Guin publishing project, always tells a story about how he wrote Ursula a fan letter in Kesh, the fictional language from her novel Always Coming Home (1985). When he ran into her at a poetry reading in Portland years later and introduced himself, she narrowed her eyes and shook a finger at him, saying, ‘You made me reach for my glossary!’ I’ll never get a chance to have an encounter like that.
I’ve mentioned that this type of archival grief can be self-serving, and that’s because the unease generated by the archive stems from the realization that you are not the protagonist of reality. All of this existed long before you got here; there have been people in the trenches long before you. The personal revelations that shook the foundations of your world are not unique or special, and you are not Moses on Mount Sinai or even Paul on the road to Damascus, ready to bring the Word to the masses—just another scared, fucked-up person with damages more or less like any number of people who find themselves in queer communities.
All the queers John and I talked to in Eugene told us that the main gay bar downtown had closed the day before we’d flown in, due to the impossibly high costs of maintaining the business. One evening we turned up at another queer venue advertising a Xena: Warrior Princess viewing party, only to find the space mostly deserted, and unable to serve half the drinks on their cocktail menu. On our last weekend in Eugene, on the bus home from the Saturday market, John and I ended up chatting to a couple of femme gays who introduced themselves as Miss Larry and T.J. and complimented our Celtic-patterned wedding bands. ‘Next time you’re in Oregon, I recommend staying in Portland,’ Miss Larry said. ‘Eugene’s gay scene is all earth-lesbians and tweakers.’ Later that night, back at our accommodation, we took the last of the edibles we’d bought from the dispensary next to campus, and I had a freakout while John, as serene and zen as I’ve ever seen him, tried to reassure me: Had I used my time at the archive well? Would the materials I’d gathered make sense as a cohesive whole? Earlier that summer, I’d decided not to continue pursuing a career in academia: our life in Glasgow would look very different once we returned.
Faced with the reality of being a latecomer, it’s tempting to turn inward: what took me so long? Did I just take the path of least resistance in delaying coming out? What does that say about me? There are also slightly more helpful questions here: What made me say that to that person? How has my upbringing steered me away from choosing kindness, or understanding, or solidarity, and how can I turn towards them? What don’t I know that I would like to? What am I still afraid to ask for or explore? How did circumstance shape my choices? What did I always have agency to do differently, and what can I choose to do now?
I think sometimes when people act like their generation invented being queer, like that time Sam Smith claimed to be the first gay person to win an Oscar, it’s a defense against the real gravity of the notion that we have always been here, and the grief and questions that can arise from that. That life, that art, can’t have always existed or else I’d have heard of it before now; if it did, it means I suffered needlessly, by someone else’s hand or by my own choices; I may have even needlessly inflicted that same suffering onto someone else.
If there is one reparative thing to take from my background in church communities, it’s that it taught me how to have friends who aren’t the same age as me. Religious communities are some of the precious few institutional spaces that actively facilitate non-familial intergenerational friendships; the gay bar can be another one. In the first few years I lived in Glasgow, when I was part of a liberal mainline congregation, I found a handful of queer kin my parents’ age and older (the youths online would probably call them ‘queer elders’; they’d probably bristle at being called that). Even though many of us aren’t part of that community anymore, and a couple people have moved away from Glasgow, many of the close bonds remain. It was through regular queer gatherings at my friends Vicky and Margaret’s house that I met Jonah, who describes me as his brother. My friend Helena, a lesbian Benedictine nun who took part in the first Pride march in New York City, officiated my wedding. One year at Glasgow Free Pride, Helena, her wife A.J. (also a nun), my friend Caitlin, and I sat at a booth right next to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, chatting with anyone who stopped by. I’m not part of any church community anymore, but my current work and personal life are still shaped by my connections to queer people of all different ages.
If you think about it, it’s very weird that queer people think in the same generational terms that straight people do at all: the milestones in our lives often look completely different, and can vary more widely by age. And I also think it’s just good to have connections with older and younger people, that aren’t bound by parental or pedagogical dynamics. It can be a nice reminder that there are people who understand their queerness differently from you, whose queerness was shaped by circumstances different to yours. So many of the things we wring our hands over, our own petty anxieties or the discourse du jour, don’t ultimately matter in the face of what we’re collectively up against and what we can do together, if we don’t abandon each other, and if we’re willing to venture outside our own temporal bubbles.
[1] I promise I’m going somewhere with this!
[2] At age eleven.
[3] Delany’s personal and autobiographical writing adopts an ethos of what I can only describe as oversharing as a form of praxis: there’s a sense in his writing that, if he doesn’t document the ephemeral and precarious sexual cultures in which he immerses himself, maybe no one else will.
[4] Quite a bit of creative cross-pollination occurred between these artists; the studio band for Plumb’s self-titled debut album basically comprised Sixpence None the Richer but with Plumb on vocals instead of Leigh Nash, while Matt Slocum, Sixpence’s lead guitarist and cellist, wrote string arrangements for Switchfoot’s debut album The Legend of Chin.
[5] In a recent interview, Leigh Nash of Sixpence None the Richer identified a link between gay listenership and bands that occupied this ambivalent space within the evangelical recording scene.
[6] I know, I know.
[7] If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You’. Essential reading that will change your life.