Don't Ask, Do Tell! An Oral History of the Clinton Congress

In this essay I attempt to trace a particular sequence of sexual-cultural-political events over the course of about a decade from 1989 to 1999, the period roughly corresponding to the rise and rule of the Clinton presidency, and to thereby demonstrate the playing out of a particular plot of desire, and to offer up a particular narrative that I hope might have some explanatory power, the power to explain how and why certain events acquired the significance that they did, what pressing cultural function such events served, and how we might connect one event to another in meaningful terms. Although it may already be obvious from my use of this opening trope, I should say here at the outset that I am by training a scholar of literature and specifically of narrative theory and of the relationship between narrative and sexuality, not only of how narrative, both fictional and historical, can be a function of sexuality, but also of how sexuality can be a function of narrative. In the pages that follow I draw broadly on a wide range of plots and narrative structures in my readings of cultural events and the relationships among them, and similarly and simultaneously, on a wide range of theories of sexuality in those readings. But I draw most significantly on the theories of Freud and Foucault, arguably the two major theorists of sexuality of the twentieth century, and take up what might seem an implausible theoretical position halfway between them. From Freud's Interpretation of Dreams I take not only an understanding of the way in which the conscious creates, through a process of repression, an unconscious, but also what remains to me a legitimate hermeneutic method, a set of reading practices, through which to understand the workings of the unconscious and at least the dynamics of repressed desire. It will be apparent, then, that I do not wholly embrace Foucault's polemical critique, in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, of what he calls Freud's “repressive hypothes