Trailblazers Past and Present

(Esther Newton receiving the 2018 AQA Distinguished Achievement award)

Although Anne Lister was a trailblazer, getting rid of barriers always requires more than one pioneer. Nobody can do the whole job. Each trailblazer takes us a little further. We have to look back across generations to see the arc of progress.

Last year my wife and I weren’t able to get tickets to the film festival event at Anne Lister Birthday Week. This year we did. The main film Esther Newton Made Me Gay is about so much more than gay people.

Esther has changed the world.

She’s 80 now, still in full possession of a razor-sharp mind and the type of strength Anne Lister had. In workshops, she is consistently the most insightful and articulate in the room. We all got to ask her questions after the film.

In the film, if you pay close attention you’ll catch another academic in cultural anthropology saying how she changed the world and realize she did that for everyone.

If you miss that golden nugget, you will still learn more than in any other hour and a half about lesbian and gay culture and history since the middle twentieth century in the upper eastern USA.

I want to add her dissertation to my reading list. It’s Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (The University of Chicago Press, 1979). After that, I can add her intellectual autobiography Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (Duke University Press, 2000. Now you can see the roots of the title of the film.)

Oh, you want a spoiler? You want to know how her studies focused on the LGBTQ+ community changed the wider world? The film doesn’t have a distributor yet, so you would only be able to see it at a film festival. Fair enough, I’ll tell you.

Until Esther’s dissertation, cultural anthropologists went elsewhere to study societies and cultures. They would go to some distant place, stay for a while studying human society there, then come home and write up their observations.

In retrospect it’s obvious that the dominant culture in a place is not the only culture there. Somehow that had gone unnoticed and unstudied.

Esther shook up the entire field of cultural anthropology. She got it to start paying attention to cultures other than the one that dominates in an area.

Think about where you live. If you dive through the dominant layer of culture and society, do you see nothing else? Or do you see more?

Where I grew up, we had a dominant Southern white culture. Beneath that we had more. Cajuns, Black people, Hispanic people, and now people of Vietnamese heritage each have their own cultures there. Before Esther, only the dominant portion would have been noticed, studied and documented by academics. How boring and misleading! The richness of human society in southeast Texas comes from the mixture of cultures.

If you personally happen to be part of a culture that isn’t regarded as the main one around you, once upon a time your culture would have disappeared into the historical dustbin. Esther dragged her entire profession into paying attention to people like you so your culture can be noticed, studied, documented, get credit for what it has brought to the table and not be forgotten.

Trailblazers aren’t all in the past. Sometimes they’re standing beside you.

A trailblazer could even be you.