"I'd rather have a history, even one of ridicule and vilification, than not have one at all."
-Christ West, "Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies: The Strange Case of Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters," Foundation 86 (Autumn 2002), 17-27.
This isn't actually just the title/epigraph of my post, but the whole focus of it. While I was away at a wedding this weekend, I read through a few essays I had printed out, mostly on stories of body snatching, and though Chris West's may not be the best, it might be my favorite simply because of the conversational and personal tone that he maintains, a personal tone that reminds us that people read books for personal reasons.
Chris West, science fiction lover and homosexual, is interested in the queer traces that survive the disappearance of queer figures. When one critic praises Heinlein for avoiding the homophobic lure of making the effeminate incompetents into queers, West comes out with that line: "Still, in resisting this logic the gay man vanishes, and to my mind this is too high a price to pay. [...] I'd rather have a history, even one of ridicule and vilification, than not have one at all" (21-2).
This reminds me of an idea that someone said in a talk on villains once: making villains out of some (ethnic/racial/religious/etc.) group is actually to pay a certain amount of respect to that group, since the villain has to have some qualities that render him/her a legitimate danger to the hero. (Sure, the Jew is a greedy miser, but he's also a cunning master of manipulation, if not a hypnotist; sure, the African is a sexually out-of-control savage, but he's also exceptionally strong and vital; etc.)
West's plea for a history (even one of ridicule and vilification) also resonates with an essay on minority figures in 1950s post-apocalyptic novels, where the critic argues that the minorities exist outside of the history of the bomb, and so are denied a stake/say in the history of which they are a part.
This isn't actually just the title/epigraph of my post, but the whole focus of it. While I was away at a wedding this weekend, I read through a few essays I had printed out, mostly on stories of body snatching, and though Chris West's may not be the best, it might be my favorite simply because of the conversational and personal tone that he maintains, a personal tone that reminds us that people read books for personal reasons.
Chris West, science fiction lover and homosexual, is interested in the queer traces that survive the disappearance of queer figures. When one critic praises Heinlein for avoiding the homophobic lure of making the effeminate incompetents into queers, West comes out with that line: "Still, in resisting this logic the gay man vanishes, and to my mind this is too high a price to pay. [...] I'd rather have a history, even one of ridicule and vilification, than not have one at all" (21-2).
This reminds me of an idea that someone said in a talk on villains once: making villains out of some (ethnic/racial/religious/etc.) group is actually to pay a certain amount of respect to that group, since the villain has to have some qualities that render him/her a legitimate danger to the hero. (Sure, the Jew is a greedy miser, but he's also a cunning master of manipulation, if not a hypnotist; sure, the African is a sexually out-of-control savage, but he's also exceptionally strong and vital; etc.)
West's plea for a history (even one of ridicule and vilification) also resonates with an essay on minority figures in 1950s post-apocalyptic novels, where the critic argues that the minorities exist outside of the history of the bomb, and so are denied a stake/say in the history of which they are a part.