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• Ghost Cousins at Midcentury: Trans Femininity and the Foundations of the Gay Canon – Emma Heaney

Ghost Cousins at Midcentury: Trans Femininity and the Foundations of the Gay Canon – Emma Heaney

23. Juni

Leuphana Universität Lüneburg I C40.704

Di. 23.06.2026. 18:15 Uhr

This talk traces the literary reflection of the relationship between gay men and trans women in mid-twentieth-century American literature in the period immediately following the vast scaling up of popular notice of the medical narrative of transsexuality via the celebrity of Christine Jorgenson. This spur to a firm distinction between the two groups was a class-bound reality, however, the lumpen and racialized scenes in which queer and trans life was lived broke down around a much more varied taxonomy. This scene’s most settled binary was between the street queen and the youngman hustler who had sex for money but remained ostensibly straight. This talk considers the literary staging of these competing models. It proposes that the literature of this period provides a conceptual reckoning with a conceptual battle of the pre-war period: is masculinism or inversion the accurate and desirable model for same sex desire? Readings of novels by Thomas Savage, John Rechy, and Gore Vidal demonstrate the breakdown of the conceptual distinction between these two models. These novels acquiesce to the challenge to cisness uniquely posed by sex between men. In this literary tradition, the reflection between the gay man and the trans woman dissolves into the generalized non-cisness of the queer and trans scenes, even as the violence of cisness, targets these groups unevenly. The talk arcs toward the shocking centrality of trans femininity to the emergence of the first avowedly gay avant-garde in the work of Andy Warhol, John Waters, Lou Reed. The talk reveals the post war emergence of first a literary and then a fine arts avant-garde as marked by the metabolizing of the relationship of the category gay man to the category trans woman.