Interview by Dr Ellie Green
The Sexuality Summer School (SSS) is a yearly week-long event organised by Jackie Stacey, with the help of Tasha Pick, Millie Lovelock, and Ellie Green. The SSS invites around forty delegates each year from across the globe to participate in workshops, seminars, and close reading sessions, featuring performances, lectures, screenings, and roundtable discussions, all on a particular theme. There are public events across the week that are open to all. This year the theme was chosen by Dr Monica Pearl, who decided on ‘Queer Friendship and Other Intimacies’. Ellie caught up with Monica this week to find out more about the theme and what’s in store for the SSS this year.
E: What inspired you to choose this year’s theme?
M: Queer friendship is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about on and off for a long time. It features in my book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity, which understands certain cultural responses to the AIDS crisis as more conventional, in that they seemed to gesture toward the possibility of conventions like same-sex marriage post AIDS crisis. However, there were still texts that were invested in the kinds of kinship—I called it ‘queer filiation’ in that book, partly because kinship is so anthropologically loaded—that recognised the ways in which the AIDS crisis didn’t create but consolidated and burnished queer connections and intimacies. That was forged out of the fact that family acceptance and conventional possibilities often weren’t possible, but these relationships, nevertheless, were very profoundly important. They were squandered by too fine a focus on same-sex marriage and were not sufficiently invested in and celebrated.
E: Hence no ‘queer marriage’ theme!
M: I’m also returning to writing about AIDS representation at the moment (I have written about AIDS film and AIDS photography) and I’m currently returning to thinking about later AIDS representation and exactly this question of queer intimacy: what got invested in and what didn’t, what became political and what didn’t.
E: Why is it important to talk about queer friendship and other intimacies, then, right now?
M: One reason is that the fight for same-sex marriage carried the promise of solving all of these problems and, lo and behold, it hasn’t, so we again turn our attention to the ways that there are intimacies that were far more reliable, satisfying, nurturing, and doing the work of sustaining each other that coupling doesn’t do. While marriage does confer rights and privileges, I’m just not in favour of needing to form a couple in order to get them.
I guess also because my work is looking back on the AIDS crisis, I’m in this moment thinking, ‘where are we, what has happened to queer kinship?’
E: An important question. Could you share a personal experience or anecdote of queer friendship, or kinship or affiliation, that is or was significant to you?
M: I have had many experiences of what I would consider queer friendship and queer intimacy, but one that I can think of right now is that during the AIDS crisis, when people I knew and was friends with and loved were very ill, there would be rotas developed for visiting at home or in hospitals that were just automatic. They didn’t seem extraordinary; the AIDS crisis was extraordinary, but the actual care for each other wasn’t. My understanding and experience of intimacy were forged at a time when that was assumed: it was assumed that we would be there for each other, that we would lose sleep for each other, and that our loyalties and commitments were not based on having made commitments or vows in any sort of legal or formal way. Because no-one else was there for us we had to be there, but we also wanted to be there. I don’t think that the AIDS crisis created queer kinship, but it in some ways did formalise it, or at least burnished it and consolidated it. The sense of, ‘this is what we do for each other’ became more understood. Community was formed through this commitment to one another, even when you didn’t love or even like that person. We could be seen as a community. It wasn’t about who your sexual or romantic partner was.
E: Your own work is and has been in AIDS activism and twentieth-century literature and film. I am curious to know how you see the UK context: what are some of the similarities and some of the differences between ACT UP and today’s activism in the UK?
M: Well, it’s exciting that at SSS there will be a panel on activism and queer kinship, and while I am a veteran AIDS activist, I’m not doing that work now. I’m involved in a different kind of quasi-activism, which is education—I like to think of that as a kind of shaking things up. I do know activists here and I am very curious about how other people have experienced that. Some people on the panel will be contemporaries of mine who worked in AIDS activism here in the UK, and others will be younger and have experience of different kinds of activism.
E: We will have to come to the panel to find out more! I know you’ve been involved in the SSS for sixteen years now. What is it that makes it so special?
M: The SSS is special because it combines rigorous academic engagement with social connection and fun. It doesn’t prioritise scholarship over the arts; it sees them as equally meaningful and edifying, and potentially life changing. It is also an opportunity to have long discussions and pay close attention to ideas, texts, and each other, in a way that isn’t assessed. You’re not doing it for the grade; you’re doing it for the sake of it.
E: Are there some particular moments that you remember from past SSSs that are especially important to you, and could you tell us about them?
M: Well, I would say that the SSS produces a kind of queer intimacy, in that for the week of it—I mean, it’s five days now, it started out as two days, amazingly!—during this time, we go through a kind of connection and love and exasperation and frustration and unifying that is familiar. Familiar, maybe, from families and other kinds of love, the feelings of love that we might have for others. It’s very intense because it happens in a short period of time. This is why it’s so wonderful and so exciting, because it enacts the very theme that we are thinking about this year.
E: You are famous for the ‘controversial close’, a final workshop that ends the SSS, well, controversially. They have been some of the highlights of past SSSs! Can you tell us more about how this idea came to fruition and how you think about what to do for the controversial close?
M: Well, interestingly, one of the earliest controversial closes was also one of the most fiery and controversial, and it was on the subject of marriage. People were very heated in their discussion and debate about that, for reasons that are clearly connected to this year’s topic, in other words, precisely because of those relationships that are not recognised and are not given space or attention to flourish, and to be as important and have as much priority as the couple. However, I think the controversial close has become less controversial over the years. That might be partly my own feelings of not wanting so much controversy! There’s been more of a creative element to it over time. I have tried to be wise to when it’s fruitful to have heated debate and when it’s more salubrious to have concord and creativity.
E: What messages or insights would you like to impart to participants of the SSS as they embark on this year’s offering?
M: Well, in some ways I can’t answer that, because I really want them to tell me what they see as important about how they understand queer intimacy and queer kinship; how they imagine a future in their lives of, maybe, prioritising their important friendships in a way that doesn’t occlude the possibility of romantic and sexual partnerships, but doesn’t abandon their friendships to those couples. I will introduce the whole SSS, so in some ways I will be saying some things about what I think, but, really, I want to enter into it with a sense of curiosity and interest.
E: I suppose that’s what other people should do too, then! Is there anything else you would like to add?
M: Yes. I worry that education, and specifically the academy, has become increasingly about ‘learning safely’, and there is no such thing as learning safely. If you’re learning, it is unsettling. Education is unsettling. As Barbara Smith, one of the creators of the Combahee River Collective statement, says in the introduction to her book Home Girls, ‘I sincerely hope that Home Girls is upsetting, because being upset is often the first step toward change’. It’s worth being open to the discord and the giving way of ground—and being grounded to what’s involved in real listening. The SSS, I think, really makes that possible by creating an environment where the pressure’s off.
The Sexuality Summer School runs a full programme of public events. See our home page for tickets!
Sexuality Summer School 