`David Bergman Scholar, Poet, Editor.’

David Bergman created history by writing about it. A leading founder of the Gay Studies movement, Bergman’s rigorous scholarship provided both a historical context and an intellectual critique to the field of gay literature. Gay literature as a genre may seem like a quaint idea today, especially in a world where the work of David Sedaris is included in the syllabi of freshman writing classes; but there was time not too long a ago when gay writing was not actively examined by the academy. David Bergman’s groundbreaking publications, such as Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-
Representation in American Literature and The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and The Making of Gay Culture, provided gay literature the proper critical assessment it deserved.

Currently a professor at Towson University, Bergman is also a noted poet and an editor of  a vast array of literary anthologies.

David met with Mary to talk about gay history, creating a field of study and writing about what you love.

Below is  an excerpt of the interview from the Fall Issue of Mary:

On creating a scholarship around Gay Literature.

I thought that Gay writing, writings by gay authors about gay life, particularly the kind directed at gay men, deserved the same sort of critical attention that straight white male literature was getting from straight white male critics. This gay literature was absolutely important. It was important for me, but it was also really good writing. I started this scholarship around the time when Andrew Holleran and Edmund White where really first emerging. I felt it was incredible important writing. I wanted to give these writers the exact same treatment one would give Faulkner or Joyce. I wanted to give these gay writers the same critical attention. That turned out to be an unusual thing at the time. It’s hard work writing—you don’t write about things you don’t feel are worthy of documenting.  Even if you write about the most frivolous things, you go in to it thinking even this frivolity is worth documenting. So, if these writers were investing their energies in creating these great works, then I thought their work was also worth a thorough critical examination. The same principles that marked that beginning have really marked all the critical work I have done since, which is ‘if writing about our’ lives was worth writing about; then it is worth the same level of critical attention.

When I was getting my PhD, I began writing my dissertation on Shelly; then my dissertation advisor died, so I changed my subject to write about Robert Browning, and in the middle of it, I realized I didn’t want to write the 50th book on Browning, or the 100th book on Browning. I realized that it was better to have the first word about something. That was going to be more valuable and worth doing.

I was in college when Stonewall occurred. I was always a person who missed by a day important events in history; I didn’t go to Woodstock until the day after it was over to help someone pick up their car they had abandoned there (laughs) and I did not get to Stonewall until the day after. Nevertheless, those things were in the air, and this was something I decided I did not want to miss.  I was also lucky: Towson at the time was not a publish-or-perish school, so anything you did was more than what anyone else was doing.  Certainly, now we have some incredible scholars at the school; but at that time, no one was publishing, so they were not very concerned about me publishing.

I had an older gay chairman of the department who was incredibly nurturing to me, and he was excited about the work I was beginning to undertake on gay studies. It was the sort of thing he would have liked to have done had he not been brought up in a different era.

Towson also had the second oldest Women’s Study program, which meant that gender and identity were things that were very much on the table, and I knew that Women’s Studies program would back me up. I knew I could do it, and it wouldn’t in any way effect my career at Towson. It was exciting work after writing about very dead people(laughs)…I mean people who, like Browning, had been dead for so long, and did not have direct correlation with the life I was living.

On the detective work aspect of Gay Studies

Gay literature is not only creating new work, but also discovering work form the past to add to the canon. We think we have located all the important work, but we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg. One would think that after thirty years you have read even all the minor works, but this summer, English biographer Peter Parker discovered a book, “In the Making”, by an author named G.F Green, written in 1952.  It is an extraordinary novel about an English public school boy who falls in love with another public school boy. None of us had heard about this book. I have only been able to locate three existing copies. There is all this writing from the past that needs to be unearthed and looked at.

For over the last twenty years, theory developed, and I understand why theory developed. It was so difficult to unearth bare-bones facts that you needed to paper over the difficulty of not having the data with large theories. But now we need to go back and see what we really did—what life was really like. I think we will see that life is more complicated than
the most complicated theories.

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