Harvard University Press Blog

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

History and The Help

One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

Staples’s argument is more about the racial politics of the film industry than about The Help itself, and Davis, for her part, has argued against this position, saying that “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy.” Nevertheless, the film’s own presentation of race in the 1960s in the South has come in for widespread critique, including in a recent open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) to fans of The Help:

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

The Journey of Mary Walker

There’s a claim, one with quite a lineage in both historical analysis and social science circles, that slavery destroyed African American families. It was compelling evidence against that claim, found in both Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and Alex Haley’s Roots, that led historian Sydney Nathans to shift his focus years ago from work on nineteenth-century American political leaders to the social history of African Americans. Now comes the completion of a book he started researching in 1988, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker.

Nathans first learned of Mary Walker in a remarkable letter referenced in Gutman’s book. Sent in 1859 from a University of Pennsylvania professor named J. P. Lesley to Mildred Cameron, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest women, the letter was written on behalf of “Mary Walker, formerly in your family,” a polite way of referring to Cameron’s ownership of Walker. Cameron would have well remembered Walker, for Walker’s family had belonged to the Camerons for generations, and though Walker herself had escaped eleven years prior, her children and mother remained. From Lesley’s letter:

I have been lately touched to the heart with a case of heart breaking distress which you have it entirely in your power I find to cure… I have come to know one Mary Walker formerly in your family, and I have seen how sick at heart she is about her mother and especially her two children… She thinks of nothing but her children, and speaks of nothing else when she speaks of herself at all, which is very seldom. Her mother-heart yearns unspeakably after them… She has saved a considerable sum of money to buy them, can command more from friends, and will sacrifice anything to see them once again and have their young lives renew the freshness of her own weary spirit. It is in this behalf that I address you,—to realize this hope of hers.

Walker had fled from slavery while accompanying the Camerons to Philadelphia, only making the agonizing choice to leave her family behind in North Carolina after her master threatened to banish her to an Alabama plantation. In the years between Walker’s escape and Lesley’s letter to Mildred Cameron, Walker had made a life for herself in the North with the aid of a network of allies and friends. To Free a Family is based on thousands of letters written by these allies, chiefly the Lesley family, and by Walker’s adversaries, the Camerons.

We recently spoke with Nathans for an episode of our podcast (which you can listen to below), and he explained some of the particulars of Walker’s story, as well as some of its broader implications:

The larger story is that we think of antislavery people as single-minded, focused on the attack against slavery and on the emancipation of the slaves—which they were. But at the same time, a good number of them were engaged in trying to help individual slaves recover family members… For a good many of them, they had no idea when emancipation would come about, when antislavery would triumph, and so these personal cases were their ways of dealing with slavery on a human basis, one by one.

 

With To Free a Family, Nathans has restored a story as indelible as that of Harriet Jacobs, whom Walker knew. The book now serves as a tribute to the memory of a brave woman—and as a reminder of how history is painfully, triumphantly lived.

You can learn more about Mary Walker in stories from Radio Boston and WBUR, or read an excerpt from To Free a Family at the Ms. Magazine blog. Those in the Boston/Cambridge area can also catch Sydney Nathans on February 23rd at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, which is the current occupant of the Brattle Street Blacksmith House once owned by… Mary Walker.

Tower of Lincoln Books

Next week, when the first visitors enter Ford’s Theatre’s new Center for Education and Leadership, they’ll be greeted by a stunning 34-foot tower comprised of thousands of copies of the over 15,000 published books on Lincoln. Take a look: 

 

That’s a lot of Lincoln books, and we’ve surely played a role in the proliferation. And we’re not stopping, either, at least not now, in the midst of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. We even have a new one this month from Harold Holzer, who has authored, co-authored, or edited over 30 books on Lincoln. A winner of the National Humanities Medal in 2008, Holzer is known as one of the country’s leading authorities on the political culture of the Civil War era. And, as it happens, he’ll be at the Center for Education and Leadership for its grand opening on President’s Day, February 20th, joining Michael Beschloss and Chris Matthews in a discussion of presidential leadership.

In the new book, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory, Holzer takes a fresh look at the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s most important—but, Holzer argues, most misunderstood and under-appreciated—piece of writing. He examines the Proclamation in three distinctive ways: as a brilliantly timed news event (using original sources to explain how it was variously withheld, leaked, published, promoted, and ultimately elevated into iconic status in the years before the historical neglect began); as a piece of literature (asking what modern Americans are to make of its leaden prose and suggesting that Lincoln’s subsequent orations on freedom represented the “poetry” to accompany and embellish its legalistic tone); and in terms of the popular art works it inspired, both for reputation-celebrating purposes after Lincoln’s assassination and martyrdom, and for commercial profit. The book, drawn from Holzer’s Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, is designed to shed new light on the increasingly contentious debate about the meaning of what Lincoln himself believed to be his greatest act and his most significant contribution to history—examining it in words and pictures, then and now.

Emancipating Lincoln can be thought of as presenting the life of the document, its original status as a collectible, as an inspiration for soaring oratory, and as a stimulus for reverential portraiture. Holzer draws heavily from previously neglected original sources, the existence of which may seem hard to believe, given all those Lincoln books in that tower. Even in their shadow, though, Holzer has written the first book to interpret the meaning of Lincoln’s most famous executive order as it was greeted by the news media, collectors, organizers of charity fairs, artists, sculptors and print publishers.

If you’re not in DC to see Holzer (and the tower) at Monday’s panel, be sure to follow his posts at Disunion, the Civil War blog from the New York Times.

Cupid, Take Your Quiver And Go

Who but Ovid to read on this Valentine’s Day? Below, the fifth elegy of the second book of his Amores, from David Slavitt’s lively volume of translation, Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid.

-----

No love is worth this much. Cupid, take your quiver

    and go. Get out of my life! My usual prayers

these days are for death, which seems a better option

    than the torment in which I suffer from that girl!

The evidence is clear. I did not have to infer

    from equivocal clues or see my uncertain way

through ambiguities. These are no mere suspicions,

    and not even a fool would try to refute them.

Happy is he who can in good conscience defend

    his darling, who can swear, “I didn’t do it!”

But stronger than I am in mind and heart is he who can be

    satisfied by proving his mistress guilty,

winning the bloody battle and losing the damned war.

    I saw what you did. You thought I was drunk and asleep,

but through my half-closed lids I watched you play the coquette,

    nodding, flirting, and making that little moue

you sometimes use. I watched your fingers write on the table

    messages that you once traced for me.

And your talk was full of suggestive jokes and double-entendres.

    Then, when the party broke up and most had left,

and only a few of us drunks were still in the room dozing,

    I saw you and him kissing, no mere pecks

of the kind a brother and sister might very well exchange

    (Diana and Phoebus, say) but deep probings

as if you were trying to swallow one another’s tongues

    (for example, Venus and Mars in the heat of passion).

“What in hell is this?” is what I shouted out.

2011 National Humanities Medalists

We are very pleased to share the news that a number of authors whom we’ve been honored to publish over the years have been named recipients of the 2011 National Humanities Medal. The medals will be awarded by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House this afternoon, which will be streamed live at 1:45 ET. The medals, given since 1997, honor “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”

One 2011 recipient with whom we’ve had a long relationship is Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, author most recently of The Idea of Justice. The NEH has produced short bios of each recipient, and their coverage of Sen explains away the potential incongruity of seeing an economist awarded a medal for work in the humanities:

When Amartya Sen recounts his intellectual biography, he likes to emphasize different strands of his thought rather than present a unified narrative. “It has been clear from my childhood that I have a lot of curiosity,” he explains, “and unfortunately, or fortunately, it has not been limited to one subject.” This momentary indecision, this uncertainty about considering his diverse interests as good or bad luck, represents the glory and the paradox of his career… Sen’s early work focused on economics, but the social sciences and the humanities are not discontinuous for him. “I don’t really find the division between the subjects contrary to human understanding,” he says, “but if someone were to say to me, you’re an economist and you can’t study philosophy, that would be contrary to how the human mind works.” In the past three decades, he has written on violence, peace, development, equality, and cultural identity—a true marriage of economics and the humanities.

Also receiving the medal this year is the pianist and critic Charles Rosen, whose fourth HUP book will be published this spring. The book, a collection entitled Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, contains Rosen’s ruminations on everything and everyone from Mozart to melancholy, Adorno to opera, and the canon to California. From the NEH bio:

Charles Rosen, one of America’s great writers on music, began his writing career almost as an afterthought. In 1951, the year he turned twenty-four, Rosen earned his PhD in French literature from Princeton, made his New York performing debut, and recorded his first album. The native New Yorker quickly became one of America’s most renowned classical pianists, playing in recitals and as a soloist in orchestra concerts around the world. His career blossomed so rapidly that, by 1955, Rosen was able to leave his academic position teaching French at MIT after only two years, although he’s held many distinguished temporary academic positions since, including at Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago universities… Rosen’s career as one the country’s preeminent classical performers triggered his parallel vocation as a writer about music. He had shunned the subject while in college, where he majored in French literature. “I was too proud to take courses in music,” he recalls. “I don’t mean to sound snotty, but it’s true: I knew more about music than most of the music graduate students,” having studied piano since he was four years old and read much on his own. Unimpressed by the sleeve notes for one of his 1960 recordings, Rosen decided henceforth to write his own.

Andrew Delbanco is another medal recipient with an HUP book arriving this spring: The Abolitionist Imagination, which presents essays intended to give readers a sense of what it meant to be a thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by slavery yet aware of the fragility of the republic and the high cost of radical action. This volume follows several other works of Delbanco’s that we’ve published, going all the way back to 1981. The NEH describes Delbanco as “the definition of a public intellectual,” and notes his “combination of deep learning, eloquence, and a deft, original way of considering our national history and literature.”

Robert Darnton, whose 2010 book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris represents only the most recent product of a long relationship with HUP, receives this medal in the midst of his rise to prominence as a driving force behind the creation of the Digital Public Library of America. He is being awarded the medal for his “determination to make knowledge accessible to everyone,” and, as the NEH notes, he is also known for helping to create the discipline of the history of the book:

“The basic idea is not to just assume that a book is a vehicle of ideas, but to understand how it’s a force in history,” Darnton explains. “To ask how is it produced, how is it diffused, how deeply did it penetrate into society, and then—this is tough—how was it read? What was its effect? Looking at the printed word makes you reassess some classical questions—in my case, questions about the origins of the French Revolution.”

And, finally, we’re pleased to note that Kwame Anthony Appiah is also among this year’s recipients. We had the pleasure of working with Appiah when we published his Mary Flexner Lectures in 2007 as Experiments in Ethics. The collection, noted for being clear, accessible, and funny, explored how the new scientifically-enabled research on empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. Appiah also delivered the 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois lectures, which we are slated to publish in expanded form in the near future. He receives the National Humanities Medal for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world” and for producing a body of work that sheds “moral and intellectual light on the individual in an era of globalization and evolving group identities.”

Our sincere congratulations to Sen, Rosen, Delbanco, Darnton, and Appiah, as well as to their co-recipients John Ashberry, Teofilo Ruiz, Ramón Saldívar, and National History Day.

The Digitus Impudicus, from Socrates to Super Bowl

Ever since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” the Super Bowl halftime show has been both the province of aged pop stars and a source of network official anxiety. This year’s epic spectacle starred Madonna, legions of acrobatic dancers, and the artists Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. It didn’t take much familiarity with that last duo to imagine that the NFL and NBC may soon have a bit of trouble on their hands.

And, indeed, from hands came trouble. One hand, actually, and one finger: M.I.A.’s left middle, which she flashed to the camera, scandalizing an entire nation on its most pure and sacred day. Just kidding, right? Not such a big deal. But the outcry was loud and righteous enough to make the BBC wonder when the middle finger became so offensive. As they note, it’s a salute with quite a lineage:

A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: “This is the great demagogue.” 

The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian.

The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.

The article goes on to quote anthropologist Desmond Morris referring to the finger as “one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” and also lists several classic works that make reference to it. This caught our notice, of course, and sent us off to our Loeb Classical Library shelves. The BBC article notes the appearance of the middle finger in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds. Well, there’s a Loeb for that, Volume 488. The passage arrives in an exchange between Socrates and his inept pupil Strepsiades:

Socrates: Very well then, what would you begin learning now, of the subjects you were never taught anything about? Tell me, would it be measures, or rhythms, or words?

Strepsiades: I’ll take the measures: the other day a corn dealer shorted me two quarts.

Socrates: That’s not what I’m asking you; I’m asking what you consider to be the most beautiful measure, the three-measure or the four-measure?

Strepsiades: I say nothing beats the gallon.

Socrates: You’re making no sense, man!

Strepsiades: Bet me then, that a gallon isn’t a four-measure.

Socrates: To hell with you! You’re a stupid clod. No doubt you’d soon learn about rhythms!

Strepsiades: But how will these rhythms help me get my daily bread?

Socrates: To begin with, by making you smart in society, and enabling you to recognize which rhythms are shaped for marches, say, and which by the finger.

Strepsiades: By the finger? That one I know, by Zeus.

Socrates: Well, tell me then.

Strepsiades: What could it be but this finger here? (raising his middle finger to Socrates) In the old days, when I was a boy, it was this one.

Socrates: You’re a brainless lout!

African Victory in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, when it seemed that all of Africa was destined to come under European colonial rule, Ethiopia succeeded in thwarting European conquest and preserving its own independence. The pivotal event in its resistance to Italian colonial advance from Eritrea was the Battle of Adwa, in which an army of black Africans under the leadership of Emperor Menelik decisively defeated the Italians. The Battle of Adwa, which marked the first time in the modern era that a non-European power had defeated a European power without the aid of a European ally, is considered one of the most important events in modern African history. In The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, historian Raymond Jonas makes the case for the broader global historical significance of the conflict. 

There are a number of complex reasons for Italian failure at Adwa. Italian leadership had assumed, wrongly but not without credibility, that it could play on factional conflict within Ethiopia. As a result the Italians were unprepared for the unity Menelik was able to inspire, and thus the Italians drastically underestimated the size of the Ethiopian army, and the firepower at its disposal. But Menelik’s forces didn’t merely outnumber the Italians; the Emperor also outmaneuvered them, in what Jonas describes as one of the great military campaigns of modern history.

Inevitably, Ethiopian victory was interpreted in racial terms, for not only had an African army defeated a European army, but a black army had defeated a white army. In the Jim Crow United States and elsewhere around the globe, Adwa gave the lie to the inevitability of European domination—both political and racial. We recently spoke with Jonas about the worldwide implications of what happened at Adwa in 1896. A bit of video from our conversation:

 

Sexual Fluidity and the City

In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, the actress Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) discussed her sexuality, and explained her reaction to some of the attention drawn by her having begun a serious relationship with a woman after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man. From the piece:

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

Those remarks set off such a firestorm, in part from LGBTQ rights advocates, that Nixon later issued a clarification:

My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have “chosen” is to be in a gay relationship.

 As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community—as well as the majority of heterosexuals—cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.

A few years back we published a book—some might say the book—on this very issue. In that book, entitled Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, author Lisa Diamond argues against the traditional view of sexual orientation as fixed, presenting instead an understanding of sexual flexibility very much like that described by Nixon. Diamond studied a group of 100 young women as they developed from adolescence to adulthood, collecting valuable data on their sexuality as it developed, rather than later in life as most studies have done. She found that attraction for women is often far more fluid than our society usually acknowledges, and the book, which is full of the voices of those young women, presents the most complete picture we have of the flexibility of sexual attraction. 

Aware of the controversy and political manipulation that her findings could incite, Diamond opted to begin the book by addressing some of the most common misconceptions regarding what she terms “sexual fluidity.” An excerpt: