I taught for a while at Yale, and I hated it. Here’s a story that might help you hate Yale, too.
Since I’m prone to forgetting or losing keys, I got in the habit of leaving my office door unlocked. It didn’t seem to me like there was much in there to steal. But I’d underestimated the depravity of the Ivy-educated mind: some fraternity brothers who drank in the classics building went a little hard on the PBR one night and, finding my office door conveniently open, set to mayhem. The next day, I discovered my desk festooned with sketches of dicks. They’d left two written messages as well: one superficially astute, the other inscrutable.
The university’s official response to all this is a story for another time, and maybe a useful contribution to the dossier of whoever next sues Yale for a Title 9 violation. What I want to talk about now, though, is the vandal as critic.
One of the messages they’d left, on a copy of Carson’s Sappho that I’d taken out from the library, was a single word, in all caps: FAG. I guess it’s not hard to see why some day-trader’s idiot son, blitzed out of his mind on light beer and casual homophobia, might read Sappho this way, eliding – as modern scholars don’t – all questions of ancient sexual identity or the authorial persona. There’s nothing here of any great critical depth.
The other message, though, was one that it took me a long time to understand. Someone had scrawled “it’s gay” on the cover of my copy of Sophocles’ Theban plays. At the time, I thought that you couldn’t really get Sophocles more wrong than this. Sure, at a stretch, you could argue that he puts Greek gender norms to the test and thereby reveals their spectral, constructed nature, but that’s some distance from being gay. In the rich and frequently homoerotic world of classical Greek lit, Sophoclean tragedy seems about as straight as you can get.
Not long ago, graduate student with whom I work in my current department got me thinking about the problem again. We were reading Oedipus Rex, and I remarked on what I still think is the play’s basic moral: don’t have children. To this, my student said that he loved a good anti-procreative tragedy. I thought right away of Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future – that the homosexual in art is basically what rejects the specious justification of pleasure-seeking in terms of some fantasy of futurity, usually centered on sexual reproduction – and all the rest fell into place. The Theban cycle isn’t gay in any obvious thematic sense. Instead, it’s super-gay: it shows us what happens when we try to weave our weird and sexy pleasures into a fabric of family life. What happens, of course, is that the woman you’re fucking turns into your mother, you turn into your own father, and your children end up as monsters who curse you for bringing them into being and then hound you to death. Sophocles understood the revolutionary potential of gayness before being gay – as we understand it – was even a thing. Thanks, Yale frat boy: you taught me a lesson that you yourself, as you settle down in Manhattan or Westchester or Greenwich with a woman whose charms will become, over time, distinctly Oedipal, will surely have forgotten.