“We are now convinced that queer theory involves and implicates everything under the sun and moon. And beyond. So, we’re here to help queer the universe.” An ambitious statement – but Queer Theory, the website that makes it, is an ambitious site. It has a number of distinctive features, not least that, according to its author, it was created in support of a course on homosexuality given two years ago at a Roman Catholic institution, Villanova University on the outskirts of Philadelphia. We’re told that news of the course reached the Vatican – though not whether the Vatican succeeded in reconciling the information with its own repeatedly stated view that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”!
Queer Theory is one of a family of websites developed by Danne Polk, of which the parent Philosophy Research Base is well regarded among the online community of philosophers if the many favourable references to it around the Web are anything to go by. Sister sites focus on specific themes such as ecofeminism, fear and music, reflecting some of the author’s other interests. Each is fascinating in its own way, although between them they don’t quite encompass Life, the Universe and Everything – for that you should visit h2g2, a wholly remarkable website co-founded by the late Douglas Adams and currently hosted by the BBC.
Like the Philosophy Research Base, Queer Theory is primarily an annotated directory having a particular emphasis on books, with pervasive links to online booksellers Amazon and Powell’s. Many of its pages are generated dynamically from information culled from elsewhere on the Web. An example is a newsfeed, supplied by Moreover.com, which is accessible from the banner menu of every page. Another is the Places section of the site, which includes an individually tailored search for every country of the world, with the aim of retrieving the most relevant information – not always entirely successfully, as a click on United Kingdom will illustrate.
Queer Theory’s real value, however, lies in its structured directory containing over 600 pages. Each page generally follows a standard pattern: titles of one or two relevant books or videos accompanied by blurbs or review extracts copied from Amazon or elsewhere, followed by a series of links to websites and other online resources, each with a short excerpt and occasionally some additional commentary. The quality of the references is commendable – a good proportion of the sites mentioned in this column over the last five years appear somewhere. The structure is generally good too, although with a few anomalies. For example, two pages with overlapping content are devoted to Islam, one (titled Islam) listed under the category of Souls and Spirits, the other (titled Muslim Culture) under Ethnics, and yet there is no link between them. Most unforgivably for a professional philosopher, the sole reference to a humanist site – Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists – appears on the page headed Souls and Spirits. But one can largely avoid these shortcomings by judicious use of the site search facility.
A major feature is the Legacy of Names, described as “an evolving list of people, whether identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer or straight, who have contributed to the development of queer theory and history”. The list of names included (and those omitted) suggests that fame may have played a greater role in the selection process, but with an individual page for each of over 420 people the collection is certainly impressive – a sort of online counterpart, on a smaller scale, to Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon’s two volumes of Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History reviewed here last year by George Broadhead (see G&LH, Spring and Summer 2001), which both feature among the source material. Although inevitably far from comprehensive, the Legacy of Names includes a good selection of people who have featured in the pages of this magazine – Paul Cadmus, John Curry, E. M. Forster, André Gide, Hadrian, A. E. Housman, Ned Rorem, Ethel Smyth, Alan Turing and Gore Vidal, to name a few.
Don’t be put off by Queer Theory’s somewhat commercial appearance. This is an unusually well designed site, well indexed, full of useful pointers to community resources, and worth adding to the Reference category in your collection of bookmarks or favourites.