Plymouth
“Queer Plymouth,” with Deborah Bright, GLQ, vol 12, no. 2, 259-277.
Queer Plymouth is part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist and critic Deborah Bright (http://www.deborahbright.com/), which resulted in a photo-and-text essay in GLQ on Plymouth, Massachusetts, the home of Plymouth Rock and the staging ground for the contested story of the First Thanksgiving.
Excerpt from the introduction: “In this essay, we offer some visuals and critical vignettes that suggest both the gratifications that queer spectators can have with Plymouth today and the payoffs of looking beyond matters strictly or overtly sexual. . . . We begin with Plymouth Rock and the statues that dot the area nearby. A comparison between the soberly draped stone pilgrims and the buff scantily clad bronze Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, the “friendly Indian” of schoolbook lore, begins to suggest the racial and colonizing formations that go into the landscape of embodied history and mythmaking at Plymouth. But at Plimoth Plantation, the living history museum in the area, a similar asymmetry in clothing recurs because of choices made by participating Native Americans. We study what happens when the agents of primitivizing line up less obviously than a critic of white supremacy might expect, and when contemporary race politics intrude into the business of heritage time travel. We also consider related racial complexities that crop up in Colonial House, a 2004 PBS “educational” reality series in which participants re-enact colonial life in a Plymouth-like colony, as well as one of the show’s most notable anachronisms: an “indentured servant” coming out as a gay man to his “masters.” We are interested, overall, in how issues of race, sex, and history may play out in ways sometimes bizarre, rewarding, or disturbing—and thus, we consider, queer—when marginalized people engage historical reenactments.”