Relocations Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen

Tongson download

https://ebookbell.com/product/relocations-queer-suburban-
imaginaries-karen-tongson-24579208

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Relocations Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson

https://ebookbell.com/product/relocations-queer-suburban-imaginaries-
karen-tongson-51757830

Resettling The Borderlands State Relocations And Ethnic Conflict In

The South Caucasus Farid Shafiyev

https://ebookbell.com/product/resettling-the-borderlands-state-
relocations-and-ethnic-conflict-in-the-south-caucasus-farid-
shafiyev-52537020

Surface Relations Queer Forms Of Asian American Inscrutability Vivian

L Huang

https://ebookbell.com/product/surface-relations-queer-forms-of-asian-
american-inscrutability-vivian-l-huang-49141710

Surface Relations Queer Forms Of Asian American Inscrutability Vivian

L Huang

https://ebookbell.com/product/surface-relations-queer-forms-of-asian-
american-inscrutability-vivian-l-huang-51892680
Pets And Domesticity In Victorian Literature And Culture Animality
Queer Relations And The Victorian Family 1st Edition Monica Flegel

https://ebookbell.com/product/pets-and-domesticity-in-victorian-
literature-and-culture-animality-queer-relations-and-the-victorian-
family-1st-edition-monica-flegel-26749036

Maletofemale Crossdressing In Early Modern English Literature Gender

Performance And Queer Relations Simone Chess

https://ebookbell.com/product/maletofemale-crossdressing-in-early-
modern-english-literature-gender-performance-and-queer-relations-
simone-chess-10450314

Queer International Relations Sovereignty Sexuality And The Will To

Knowledge 1st Edition Cynthia Weber

https://ebookbell.com/product/queer-international-relations-
sovereignty-sexuality-and-the-will-to-knowledge-1st-edition-cynthia-
weber-6639172

Ethnic Relations In Canada Institutional Dynamics 1st Edition Raymond

Breton

https://ebookbell.com/product/ethnic-relations-in-canada-
institutional-dynamics-1st-edition-raymond-breton-51845688

Foreign Relations In Federal Countries Hans Michelmann

https://ebookbell.com/product/foreign-relations-in-federal-countries-
hans-michelmann-52540992
Relocations
 S E X UA L C U LT U R E S
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men
Samuel R. Delany in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
Private Affairs:
Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations In a Queer Time and Place:
Phillip Brian Harper Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
Tropics of Desire: Dwight A. McBride
Interventions from Queer Latino America
José Quiroga God Hates Fags:
The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair Michael Cobb
and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and
the Black American Intellectual
Black Gay Man: Essays Robert Reid-Pharr
Robert Reid Pharr
Foreword by Samuel R. Delany The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in
American Literary and Cultural Memory
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Lázaro Lima
Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by María Carla Sánchez and Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the
Linda Schlossberg Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and
the Afterlife of Colonialism Cruising Utopia:
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Martin F. Manalansan IV José Esteban Muñoz

Queer Latinidad: Another Country:

Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces Queer Anti-Urbanism
Juana María Rodríguez Scott Herring

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and Extravagant Abjection:

the Limits of Religious Tolerance Blackness, Power, and Sexuality
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini in the African American
Literary Imagination
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Darieck Scott
Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron-Muntaner

For a full list of titles in the series, www.nyupress.com

Relocations

Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

a
N EW YO R K U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

New York and London

NEW YOR K U N IV E R SITY PR ES S
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

© 2011 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Nei-
ther the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tongson, Karen.
Relocations : queer suburban imaginaries / Karen Tongson.
p. cm. — (Sexual cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8147–8309–2 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8147–8310–8
(pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8147–8408–2 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. Gays—United States—Social conditions. 2. Suburbs—United States—
Social conditions. 3. Homosexuality—Social conditions—United States.
I. Title.
HQ76.3.U5T66 2011
306.76’620973091733—dc22 2011005582

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, James and Elizabeth Dykes,
and my grandmother, Linda Katindig
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xi

 Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries 1

 Relocating Queer Critique: Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois 28
 Behind the Orange Curtain 71
 Empire of My Familiar 112
 The Light That Never Goes Out: Butchlalis 159
de Panochtitlan Reclaim “Lesser Los Angeles”
 Coda: Love among the Ruins: Contact, 203
Creativity, and Klub Fantasy

Notes 215
Index 273
About the Author 283

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 Illustrations

Cloverleaf freeway interchange, ca. 1950s 8

Lynne Chan, “JJ and a Young Fan Posing Backstage at 31
the El Rey Theater,” 2002
Chan, “Chairman Mao Lighter,” 2002 38
Chan, “Biography,” 2002 39
Chan, personal photo, ca. 1979 41
Chan, “Tour Dates 1,” 2002 44
Chan, “Tour Dates 2,” 2002 45
Chan, “Leopard Undies,” 2002 56
Chan, “Playboy Bunny Pendant,” 2002 57
Chan, “Young Republican at the Skowhegan State Fair,” 2003 62
Gary R. Salisbury memo to Joe Meck, “Fiesta Village Teen 96
Dance Area,” 1984
Videopolis press kit, front and back covers, 1985 101
Studio K dance floor, 1989 105
Studio K press photo proof sheet, 1989 110
Deanna Erdmann, “Parent Navel Orange Tree,” 2009 113
Erdmann, “Parent Navel Neighbor (Spa Detail),” 2009 114
Erdmann, “View from the Navel,” 2009 115
Avenue Brand citrus label, ca. 1930s 121
Victoria Brand citrus label, ca. 1930s 122
Erdmann, “Thunderbird,” 2009 123
Erdmann, “Night in the Empire: Fabulaus at the 155
Menagerie,” 2009
Erdmann, “Night in the Empire: Remote Intimacy at the 155
Menagerie,” 2009
Erdmann, “Night in the Empire: Movement at VIP,” 2009 156
Erdmann, “Billboards, 60 East: Casino,” 2009 156
Erdmann, “Billboards, 60 East: Your Ad Here,” 2009 157
Erdmann, “K,” 2009 158
Hector Silva and Raquel Gutierrez, “Butchlalis de 163
Panochtitlan,” 2008
Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP) promotional image, 165
“Driving in Your Car,” 2006

ix
 BdP interstitial slide, “Banda Machos,” 2006 167
BdP promotional image, “Teenage Papi: The Second 176
Coming of Adolescence,” 2005
BdP interstitial slide, “34,” 2005 179
BdP promotional image, “Choco-Taco, Represent!,” 2004 180
Promotional flier (front), The Barber of East L.A. and 189
Hector Silva Retrospective, 2008
Promotional flier (back), The Barber of East L.A. and 190
Hector Silva Retrospective, 2008
BdP interstitial slide, “Dodgers Pennant,” 2006 206
BdP promotional image, “Teenage Papi: The Remix,” 2006 208

x Illustrations
 Preface and Acknowledgments

t hi s bo ok a b ou t relocations through space and time—in some

situations by choice, and in others through circumstances beyond one’s control—
has been guided from the outset by my own circuitous journeys to, through, and
between many places, as well as among the many people who made these locations
truly significant to me, not only intellectually but also affectively. The way I think
the locations in this book, in other words, belongs to those who made me feel these
spaces more acutely, even long after “being there” was transposed into memory.
While my enthusiastic and effusive citational practices in Relocations offer cer-
tain signposts to the figures who have compelled, enriched, and enlivened this
project, I would like in this preface to dispense with some of the more formal
methods of mapping academic worlds; instead, I would like to acknowledge not
only who has inspired me but also how they have done so. At times their presence
is felt through the language I use in this book, in my experiments with an aspi-
rational lyricism that grasps toward “the condition of music” (to invoke Walter
Pater), which I hope succeeds as often as it can, considering that such reaching is
bound to fail. Their presence is also conjured in the convivial, conversational tone
that erupts in the clumsy afterglow of such strivings. I imagine them—imagine
you—talking with me as much as through me about the scenes, histories, events,
gestures, haunting melodies, and tangled theoretical coincidences that constitute
the placeness of a place.
Though located in many institutions, the excursions and sometimes even
dead-ends that we’ve shared together have always exceeded the institution-as-
framework. For this disruption of boundaries and dispensing of formalities, I
have many great teachers to thank. First and foremost, I have to acknowledge
those who got me in this mess to begin with: the public school teachers of the
RUSD (Riverside Unified School District), namely, Kathy Rossi and Keith Lloyd
at Sierra Middle School, and Richard McNeil, Richard Zeiner, Rick Woodbury,
Katie Mackey, and Robin Speer at Ramona High School. They taught me to love
literature, music, performance, and writing. Little did they know what they might
ultimately unleash on the world when they indulged this immigrant kid, newly
arrived to the suburbs, in my earliest experiments with cultural studies (like the
time I brought in a newspaper clipping of Wham!’s arrival in China as a “sig-
nificant international event” for a history assignment). I share my chapter on the
Inland Empire with them, along with the friends who played on those school

xi
yards with me, smog alerts permitting: Keri Williams, Heather Lott, Joseph
Spagna, Paul Jacques, Carey Thacker, Natalie Patterson, Jessica Learned, Craig
Swart, Sarah Parry, and last but certainly not least, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman,
who continues to share the school yard with me now as my colleague in this
wider world of the academy.
I am also indebted to the scholars and friends who guided me through my
undergraduate years at UCLA and who shared my first encounters with the
sprawling city that continues to both captivate and confound my imagination:
“Kvang,” Cali Linfor, Andrew Peck, Erin Coburn, John Tain, Elina Shatkin, Car-
olyn Clark, Janel Munguia, Kharon Hathaway, Holly Heaven, Robert N. Wat-
son, Thomas Wortham, Joseph Bristow, Karen Wallace, and the late Paula Gunn
Allen, whose fierce irreverence modeled for me what it meant not only to be a
better scholar but also a better person.
During my graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, I was
trained as a Victorianist and learned the methods of New Historicism. Though
I never actually grew up to be a Victorianist by trade, I hope my mentors and
teachers—Catherine Gallagher, Sharon Marcus, Celeste Langan, and Pheng
Cheah—will nevertheless read within these pages a commitment not only to
what they taught me, but also how they taught me to do it. I also thank Robert
Kaufman and Rei Terada for encouraging me to believe in my work not despite
but because of its tendency to move askew into unwieldy directions.
When I left Los Angeles and arrived in the Bay Area for grad school (in a
tiny apartment on Page and Buchanan in “The City”), I have to admit I cried the
whole first night. Soon enough—or maybe it took all seven years—I grew accus-
tomed to Northern California’s more petite geographies and superior air qual-
ity. I came to appreciate L.A.’s northern adversary thanks in no small part to my
coterie of friends, intellectual interlocutors, and athletic heroines at Berkeley and
beyond, particularly Gia Kim, Mai-lin Cheng, Gillian Harkins, William Bishop,
Thierry Nazzi, Joon Lee, Gil Hochberg, Keri Kanetsky, Mel Chen, Homay King,
Catherine Zimmer, Emma Bianchi, Trane Devore, Susan Zieger, Gayatri Gopi-
nath, Elizabeth Freeman, Amy Kautzman, Kimberly Nalder, Michael Silver, and
the Cal women’s softball team (2002–2005).
Of course, my time at Berkeley—including numerous international destina-
tions with SFO as their point of origin—was made all the richer, more com-
plex, more adventurous, and more loving by the companionship of Katrin Pahl. I
thank her for sharing her worlds and her family with me, and for continuing to be
a close and treasured friend.
As I explain throughout Relocations, one’s arrival in or return to the suburbs
is more often than not thought to herald the end of creativity. This was far from
my experience, especially when I returned to Southern California as a President’s

xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and
as a Residential Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of
California, Irvine. Though this project began in the waning years of my graduate
studies at Berkeley, Relocations truly blossomed during this interstitial time, in
these supposedly interstitial suburban environments. My sincerest gratitude goes
to Judith Halberstam and John D. Blanco for serving as my postdoctoral men-
tors at UCSD, and to Judith and David Theo Goldberg for inviting me to join
the “Queer Locations” working group at the University of California Humani-
ties Research Institute from January to June 2004, in the fine company of Alicia
Arrizón, Tom Boellstorff, Roderick A. Ferguson, Glen Mimura, Chandan Reddy,
and Jennifer Terry. As a result of living and working in Irvine, I also had the
opportunity to meet scholars at UCI (or based in “the ‘Vine”) whose work contin-
ues to inspire me, and whose friendship—intellectual and otherwise—has only
affirmed my belief that strange and beautiful things can flourish in the suburbs,
namely, Vicky Johnson, Lucas Hilderbrand, Lauren Steimer, Kelly Wolf, Adria
Imada, Bliss Cua Lim, and Laura Kang.
In many respects, the University of Southern California is an ideal place for
me and for this project to have landed. Not only has the university been kind
enough to fund my research and writing with an Achievement in the Humanities
and Social Sciences Grant, as well as a Provost’s Visions and Voices Grant (which
brought the work of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan and Hector Silva to campus),
but the intellectual community at USC has fueled my research and thinking in
ways that are unquantifiable. Special thanks are owed first and foremost to David
Román and Judith Halberstam for their guidance during my earliest years at USC.
The Department of English, the Program in Gender Studies, and the Department
of American Studies and Ethnicity have provided warm and inviting homes for
my scholarship, and I would like to thank the respective chairs of these depart-
ments, Margaret Russett, Lisa Bitel, and John Carlos Rowe. I am also grateful to
Sarah Banet-Weiser for asking me to join the “BrandSpace” working group, which
she leads at the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communica-
tion, and to Josh Kun for inviting me to share the music behind my scholarship at
the Popular Music Project, also at the Lear Center. I am honored and thrilled to
call both of them dear friends as well as colleagues. Tania Modleski, David Lloyd,
and Tara McPherson have shepherded me through the final stages of this project,
and I am deeply grateful to them for knowing how to ease my spirits, even as they
pushed me to cross the t’s and dot the i’s when I neared the finish line.
The sheer number of excellent friends and colleagues I have at USC precludes
me from naming them all here, but given this project’s propensity for sprawling
out, I will at the very least make an effort to name those who have read, com-
mented on, or inspired this project in one way or another: Kara Keeling, Janelle

xiii Preface and Acknowledgments

Wong, Dana Johnson, Rebecca Lemon, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ellen Seiter, Aniko
Imre, Bruce Smith, Richard Meyer, William Handley, Alice Gambrell, Emily
Anderson, Dorinne Kondo, Henry Jenkins, Michelle Gordon, Shana Redmond,
Macarena Gomez-Barris, Maria Elena Martinez, and Sarah Gualtieri. My many
exceptional graduate students at USC have also coaxed this work into new direc-
tions, and I would like to acknowledge them here, especially those who enlivened
my seminars on “Queer Provincialisms and Suburban Sociabilities,” “Queer of
Color Critique,” “Feeling Theory,” and “Relocating Empire.” My research assistant,
Alex Wescott, not only performed the perfunctory task of gathering the materi-
als I asked for, but also brought me supplementary ephemera “just in case.” These
materials especially enhanced my chapter “Behind the Orange Curtain,” and for
that I am eternally grateful. Thanks also to Krista Miranda in Performance Stud-
ies at NYU for her research assistance during the final stages of formatting and
securing permissions for this manuscript.
The irony that this book was finally submitted far away from Southern Cali-
fornia during my only time in residence in New York City—and to NYU Press
to boot—is not lost on me. Though New York takes a well-deserved hit in several
of my chapters, particularly “Relocating Queer Critique,” I have to admit that the
place and its people do have their charms. To my fearless editor at NYU Press,
Eric Zinner, for his generous and careful reading of my manuscript: thank you
for getting me as well as my work. Thanks also to Ciara McLaughlin at NYU
Press for shepherding the manuscript through its final stages of production in
what felt like a New York minute.
My deepest gratitude is also owed to José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini,
not only for pursuing Relocations for the Sexual Cultures series, but also for being
instrumental in bringing me to NYU’s Department of Performance Studies at
the Tisch School of the Arts for a visiting professorship in spring 2010. Because of
this opportunity, I had the pleasure of spending time with some amazing minds
and spirits in the city, namely, John Andrews, Jasbir Puar, Deb Schwartz, Karen
Shimakawa, Nao Bustamante, Ricardo Montez, Alina Troyano, Ela Troyano, Dr.
Virginia Chang, Lisa Duggan, Tavia Nyong’o, Barbara Browning, Camille Rob-
cis, Yael Kropsky, Ellis Avery, Sharon Marcus, Karen Jaime, Taylor Black, Peggy
Lee, Sonjia Hyon, Logan Jardine, Jeanne Vaccaro, Vincenzo Amato, Alexandra
Vazquez, and Lynne Chan. I thank you all for the hospitality, conviviality, jazz
hands, warmth, and song that made this Angeleno love New York despite my
skepticism. Because of you, I no longer simply transpose “Empire State of Mind”
into the key of I.E.
As much as these acknowledgments and the chapters that follow might seem
to insist on the fact that collegialities, friendships, and intimacies are inextrica-
bly bound up with particular coordinates, I am also irrefutably attached to the

xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

affective potential of dispersal. And the sprawl of my broader intellectual and
affective communities reaches out to many elsewheres and affinities that radiate
across space and time. It is in the spirit of the remote intimacies I write about in
Relocations that I send my affections and appreciation to Sarita See, Scott Her-
ring, Shane Vogel, Kandice Chuh, Daphne Brooks, David Eng, Patricia White,
Heather Sias, George Haggerty, Alex Espinoza, Kyle Behen, Ricky T. Rodriguez,
Martin Manalansan, Michelle Erai, Marcia Ochoa, Christina Hanhardt, Ricardo
Ortiz, Rembert Hueser, Verena Mund, Genevieve Love, Eric Weisbard, Ann
Powers, and R. Zamora Linmark.
To my sisters of elsewhere who have shared the music of everywhere, past,
present, and future with me, Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vazquez:
I always read, write, think, and sing along with you, with your irrepressible spirits
at my side.
As you will come to read, Relocations begins and ends with home—with the
places from which we emerge, as well as those to which we unwittingly find our-
selves moved, and moved by. Home began as Manila, which continues to be the
place that haunts my daily movements to, through, and between the many else-
wheres that have mapped my life’s journeys. To my family here and there—to
the Moraleses, Katindigs, and Tongsons—and to the dear friends always here or
there, especially Joy Escobar and Bliss Cua Lim: thank you for everything, but
most of all for reacquainting me with the home from which my first relocation
estranged me. To my grandmother, Linda Katindig, for coming here, even when
you had everything there: thank you for first revealing the mysteries of writing
to me when you sat for hours at a time in front of the typewriter at 7 General
Capinpin Street, spinning radio melodramas as I twirled deliriously on the lazy
Susan in front of you. To my parents, James Dykes and Elizabeth “Maria” Kat-
indig-Dykes, for taking me on the road with you as you made music, instilling in
me a contradictory desire for going and for settling: yours is the music that will
forever score my movements, and I am grateful for everything you have ever given
me, especially your unconditional love.
For much of my adult life, home has been Southern California, and my daily
commutes on its concrete arteries have only affirmed to me that “home” exists
in plural, among the many spiritual companions I have found across the region’s
seemingly nebulous landscapes. Home is with Jennifer Terry, Surina Khan, Rosie,
and their tambourine of death in Long Beach. With Jennifer Doyle at the cliff ’s
edge, and with the ladies of Lucile Avenue, Genevieve Yue and Emily Perez. With
the Balance-Gabisans, Anjali Arondekar, and Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns in the
LF. With the Mod-Loves in WeHo, Gabriela Martinez in HP, and Hector Silva
and Napoleon Lustre in Pomona. With JK, LK, CBB, and KK at “da club.” With
Deanna Erdmann in Little Armenia, and Deanna Maclellan and Emma Gaze in

xv Preface and Acknowledgments

the SFV. With the Ahns and the Cutlers in the Valley and on the Westside. With
Heather Lukes and Molly McGarry on the twilight-dappled terraces of East-
erly and Sanborn. With Mari Garcia, Claudia Rodriguez, and Raquel Gutier-
rez, wherever you may take me, up, down, around, and straight to the heart of a
“lesser Los Angeles.” With Holstein—affectionately known as “The Stein”—my
compassionate, companion species born on the streets of L.A., who has inhab-
ited every one of my homes, shared every love, and warmed every desk from my
undergrad honors thesis to this book.
Home, everywhere, elsewhere, and nowhere will always be with Patty Ahn.
No one I know shares a deeper and more abiding love of this landscape than
you—from the Red Lobster to the Smog Cutter. And it is with you in my heart
and at my side that this journey has been all the more worthwhile.

xvi Preface and Acknowledgments

  Relocations
Queer Suburban Imaginaries

this bo ok flows from beginning to end through the freeway

tributaries that tenuously bind the sprawling counties of Southern Califor-
nia’s suburban landscape. We enter these counties that glow at night like neat
sherbet grids from the twisted surfaces of concrete cloverleaves, the elaborate
off-ramps that spiral toward “home” past earnestly edged lawns, big-box shops,
and tawdry strip malls looking wan beneath layers of worn stucco, yet teem-
ing with more than mere commerce. Contained in these boxes, little and large,
are the unacknowledged urgencies, desires, and encounters meant to be kept
out of these meticulously planned geographies: queers, immigrants, “gangstas,”
minimum-wagers, Others who find the notion of a “nuclear family” as toxic as
it sounds.1
Before we take this ride together, allow me to offer you a map of this intro-
duction. By design, the Southern California suburbs leaves a lot of ground to
cover, and the presumed conformity of its landscapes leave little in the way of
route markers to prevent getting lost. Add to that the layers of customization
this project demands—from the suburbs’ forms real and imagined, to the queer
theories that animate this intervention, to the imperial histories paved over by
suburban architectures of convenience—and the sprawl grows with no distinct
landmarks in view. I ask that you activate your architectural imagination as you
take this journey of relocation to places that will seem all too familiar yet will
become utterly unrecognizable.
Think of the first half of this introduction as the foundation and frame for
the structures of suburban sociability and aesthetic practice I hope to make
legible throughout Relocations. Contemporary scholarly and media discourses
about the suburbs converge with queer theoretical debates about urbanity,
rurality, regionalism, and transnationalism to establish the stakes of remapping
queer of color topographies in Southern California, a region redolent with the
residue of American imperial ambitions. The second half of this introduction
completes the facade and finishes the interior by turning to the modes, tech-
nologies, and practices of suburban representation in books, on television, and
in popular music. We will not so much read, look at, or listen to books, TV
shows, and songs about the suburbs, but rather read, look, and listen into and
through the suburbs as they shape, and are shaped by, the queer imaginaries
that reside there.

1
 One of the frustrations of driving through suburban space is arriving at cul-
de-sacs (dead ends by a fancier name), meant to impede drivers in search of
shortcuts while maintaining the tranquility of subdivisions impervious to outsid-
ers. The end of this introduction may, perhaps, irritate you with an outro that
refuses the convenience of chapter summaries, the tidy paragraphs that provide
a shortcut through the sprawl of Relocations’ disparate landscapes, from Orange
County, to the Inland Empire, to East and Southeast Los Angeles. The profound
figures in my own queer of color suburban imaginary—the focal subjects and
objects of this book—appear instead in cameos throughout this introduction.
They announce themselves at key instances, when a topic or theory calls them
out to join individually or collectively. This approach is less for the sake of tran-
quility as it is a sincere appeal to your interest as a reader, one with the generosity
to follow Relocations through its contours and flows. Though I know it may be a
fantasy to expect everyone to read from cover to cover about the sprawling spaces
that ritually disabuse us of the concept of “boundaries,” I’m determined to luxuri-
ate in this delusion as a form of tribute to these landscapes without end that are
said to herald the end of everything.
Stylistically, the first half of this introduction may not seem all that glamorous
in its workmanly efforts to offer a sturdy structure for the embellishments and
improvisations that a beautiful facade and warm interior demand. But if you par-
don the construction and await the stillness of the machinery coming to a halt,
you may hear the music coming from another place you mistook as home.

Framing the Suburbs

Through a range of scholarly discourses—from literary history and media stud-
ies, to critical geography, social history, and cultural studies—we have learned
that the American suburbs, post–World War II, were meant to achieve the archi-
tectural embodiment of peaceful similitude.2 The postwar suburbs would serve as
sanctuaries of the good life where racial and economic homogeneity guaranteed
“safety,” while satisfying the white middle classes’ desires for a lived environment
that struck a delicate balance between privacy and community. As the media
studies scholar Lynn Spigel notes in her watershed study Welcome to the Dream
House: “At the center of suburban space was the young, upwardly mobile middle-
class family; the suburban community was, in its spatial articulations, designed to
correspond with and reproduce patterns of nuclear family life. . . . Older people,
gay and lesbian people, homeless people, unmarried people, and people of color
were simply written out of these community spaces, and were relegated back to
the cities.”3 As I argue throughout Relocations, the predictable routes of transit
meant to keep the white middle classes at a reassuring remove from nonnorma-

2 Relocations
tive subjects have been dramatically rerouted. I invoke the spatial containments
mapped by Spigel’s work, known colloquially as the logic of “white flight,” as a
starting point for this book’s efforts to forge a reparative, queer relationship to
the suburbs:4 one that might help rewrite the many others “relegated back to the
cities” (especially queers of color) back in to an ever-sprawling suburban cultural
history that may or may not want them.
At the heart of Relocations are two critical interventions that merge and weave
in tandem. First, the book tackles and radically revises prevailing national dis-
courses about the suburbs that perpetuate the mythos of its racialized, classed,
and sexualized homogeneity. Though the mass suburban migration previously
known as white flight has recalibrated its coordinates since the places Jane Jacobs
famously identified as “great American cities” have undergone massive “rehabili-
tation” efforts in the last several decades, perceptions about the suburbs’ lack of
economic, racial, and sexual diversity have endured.5 Second, Relocations inter-
venes in a queer theoretical discourse that relies on these same normative, sub-
urban, white flight narratives to route an opposite trajectory for queer subjects
who are—for cultural, political, and stylistic reasons—compelled to leave osten-
sibly homogenous suburban spaces to find more active (and implicitly activist)
lifestyles in the urban “gay meccas” of the national imaginary, including San Fran-
cisco and New York.
On a national scale, the changing demographics of the suburbs have been
the focus of volumes of work in numerous disciplines, from critical geography,
to ethnic studies, to suburban studies itself. The most comprehensive collection
of suburban studies to date, Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese’s The Sub-
urb Reader, culls from this vast interdisciplinary and representational archive to
animate the historical, legal, political, and aesthetic debates that have reconfig-
ured the American suburbs since their inception in the nineteenth century and
their mass proliferation after World War II. Four sections of the reader with over
thirty individual excerpts reconstruct several pivotal moments in the American
suburbs’ transformation, from “Ethnic Diversity in Early Suburbia” (chap. 7), to
“Postwar Suburbs and the Construction of Race” (chap. 11), to “Recent Suburban
Transformations, 1970–2000” (chap. 14), to “Inclusion and Exclusion in Recent
Suburbia” (chap. 15). The genealogy Nicolaides and Wiese construct in The Sub-
urb Reader offers an instructive snapshot of how American ideology, civic legisla-
tion, immigration laws, and intensified forms of late-capitalist privatization have
flowed in and through U.S. suburbs. Early conflicts about the political ramifi-
cations of white, working-class immigrants buying into capitalist ideologies of
home ownership, for example, are juxtaposed with Supreme Court debates about
restrictive covenants discriminating against African Americans and other com-
munities of color in the late 1940s.6 The diversification of the American suburbs

3 Relocations
after the momentous changes in U.S. immigration law in 1965 is also contextu-
alized alongside the thinly veiled variations on restricted covenants in contem-
porary gated communities.7 Yet other excerpts focus on the lived experience of
new immigrants and people of color moving into suburbs that exclusively cater to
such “niche” communities.8
The contemporary media has also focused anew on the suburbs in the last
decade as, simultaneously, a design-worthy destination for thirtysomething hip-
sters in pursuit of mid-century nostalgia and a simmering cauldron of racial and
economic tension portending the meltdown of the “American dream.” Glossy
magazines like Details (“Why the Suburbs Are Cooler Than Downtown,”
November 2007) and Dwell (“The New Suburbanism,” December 2007/Janu-
ary 2008) provide stylish primers for the penny-wise “bourgeois bohemian” (or
“Bobo”) on how to settle suburbs as the next “hot spots” after certain flip-wor-
thy urban neighborhoods have reached their apex.9 In April 2000, the New York
Times Magazine produced a special issue titled “Suburbs Rule: How the New
Suburban Majority Is Changing America.” Chock-full of essays by an eclec-
tic assemblage of nonfiction writers and media superstars like Michael Pollan,
Martha Stewart, and David Brooks, as well as fiction writers like T. C. Boyle,
Amy Bloom, Chang-rae Lee, A. M. Homes, George Saunders, and Manil Suri,
this supplement did its best to represent the changing demographics of the sub-
urbs in think pieces like “Migration of the Melting Pot” (by Lawrence Osborne)
while revisiting some of its more durable character motifs of bored teenagers
and licentious housewives.10 Exposés on gang wars “invading” the suburbs appear
nightly on news programs (notably in Nightline’s September 2005 piece on the
Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang, in greater Washington DC), while their root
causes of social inequality are considered in more sustained forms, like the inves-
tigative journalist Sarah Garland’s book Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration,
Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America’s Suburbs.
Given such expansive, neatly collated, and meticulously documented evi-
dence to the contrary, how then does the gestalt of the suburbs remain largely
unchanged in the American imaginary? There are, of course, numerous answers
to this question, most of which can be attributed to enduring representations of
the suburbs as a ticky-tacky void in literature, television, popular music, media,
and the arts. As Andrew Blauvelt, one of the curators of the groundbreaking
Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibit, remarks in the extensive catalog
for the show (held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then the Carn-
egie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh), “Most of what we think we know about sub-
urbia has been shaped by its portrayal in various media—film, music, literature,
and television in particular—where it has been depicted alternately as an idyllic
setting for family life in TV sitcoms, for instance, and a dysfunctional landscape

4 Relocations
of discontent in Hollywood movies.”11 As Relocations will show throughout its
many pages mimicking, at certain instances, suburbia’s tidy yet nebulous sprawl,
even this representational field has been marred by strange and wild things grow-
ing where they shouldn’t. But before tackling this larger and more intricate prob-
lem of representation through reading, watching, and listening, I want to turn
our attention to another theoretical conjecture, one very specific to this project,
for why even the postmillennial suburbs remain the presumed natural habitat for
normativity: that of queer studies.
Throughout its institutional history, queer studies has produced its share
of spatial Others for the sake of maintaining its urbane reputation and cosmo-
politan orientation. From George Chauncey’s groundbreaking study of Gay New
York, to contemporary projects attentive to lesbian cosmopolitanisms, like Diane
Chisholm’s Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City and Julie
Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities, queer studies has
self-consciously undertaken the task of documenting its rich urban histories and
metropolitan forms of cultural production.12 In her important book In a Queer
Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam assigns
a neologism to describe this urbanist legacy in queer studies: “metronormativity.”
As Halberstam argues, her term “reveals the conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in
many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities,” creating a compulsory
narrative of migration for queer subjects that marks the development of “previ-
ously closeted subjects who ‘come out’ into an urban setting.”13 The more that met-
ronormativity takes shape conceptually in Halberstam’s book, the more it comes
to describe the dialectic—experienced both psychically and spatially—between
the rural and the urban in queer studies. As I discuss further in my chapters on
Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois projects and on Southern California’s Inland Empire,
Halberstam’s critique of metronormativity opens the possibility of opting out of
a compulsory queer movement toward “the city,” a move predicated on acquiring a
greater sense of “pride,” “liberation,” and safety for queer subjects thought to be in
emotional, aesthetic, and physical peril in nonurban environments.
Yet unlike other scholars of queer rurality or of the queer peripheries more
broadly defined, Halberstam inevitably refuses to relinquish “the city” as the
emblematic habitat for queers. She writes, “In a Queer Time and Place both con-
firms that queer subcultures thrive in urban areas and contests the essential char-
acterizations of queer life as urban.”14 Eschewing the either/or of the urban/rural
binary for an either/and, Halberstam instead calls on other queer scholars to
explore the different “truth[s] to this division between urban and small-town life
[and] between hetero-familial cultures and queer creative and sexual cultures,”
without “occlud[ing] the lives of nonurban queers.”15 In a Queer Time and Place
focuses primarily on a rural “horror of the heartlands” mythology at the core of

5 Relocations
representational debates about the transgender icon who was a martyr of rural
violence, Brandon Teena (subject of the well-known documentary and subse-
quent feature film). Beyond her chapter on Teena, however, Halberstam leaves
the task of documenting the complex interrelations of queer life beyond metro-
politan subcultures to other scholars.
Of course, numerous scholars documented queer life outside metropoli-
tan centers long before Halberstam’s study of homo- and heteronormative
approaches to time and space.16 Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to
Washington City reminds us, for example, that even the most radical of urban
queer activist groups, such as Queer Nation and San Francisco’s SHOP (the
Suburban Homosexual Outreach Program), staged some of their more spec-
tacular and performative “invasions” in suburban shopping malls.17 Nevertheless,
the spatiotemporal concept of metronormativity and Halberstam’s emphasis on
subcultures and queer lifestyles has had a legible and significant impact on how
contemporary queer scholarship envisions its interventions into queer urban-
ism, despite Halberstam’s residual attachments to urban settings for subcultural
expression.
In subsequent chapters of Relocations, I grapple with some of these residual
fantasies about urban queer subcultures and their purported “radicality” in the
sphere of queer aesthetics and politics. Even after metronormativity was named,
in other words, queer studies has remained reliant on the forms and formalisms
of urbanist subcultural idioms in ways that often preclude a serious consider-
ation of the more problematic forms of racialized and classed desires for the
“backward,” aesthetically and politically “conventional,” or “mainstream.” In the
introduction to his remarkable work Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism,
Scott Herring fashions a discursive jukebox out of some of queer studies’ great-
est hits: the urbanist one-liners used to dismiss the hicks and small-town queers
(as well as the Podunks they came from) from a special class reserved for metro-
politan minds and mind-sets. With line after line, hit after hit from scholars like
Michael Warner and George Chauncey, Herring sketches the “entwined urban-
ism that bridges the givens of everyday lesbian and gay metropolitan life in the
United States and the shared assumptions of U.S.-based queer studies that have
been produced since the 1980s.”18 Herring focuses on a “queer rural stylistics” that
countervails and thwarts the queer urbanist logic that assumes liberation comes
with leaving behind one’s nowhere place of origin—in his project, “the coun-
try”—to arrive in “the city.” Another Country offers a substantial contribution to
the “as-yet unwritten cultural history of U.S. metronormativity,” finding at once
the fissures and breaks in what has appeared to be a seamless national narrative
about queer life that locates its inventiveness and political interventions in urban

6 Relocations
environments like New York.19 Proposing an alternative queer anti-urbanism that,
in his own words, threads “a delicate needle” between undoing the encompassing
symbologies of “the city” for queer subjects—while still acknowledging that the
force of urbanism persists in its negative articulations through rural stylistics—
Herring crafts a contingent politics open to various registers of failure, from
the aesthetic to the ideological. This “paper cut politics,” as Herring describes it,
“rarely does significant damage since it never punctures the body’s deep tissue. It
does, however, cause a considerable amount of discomfort, often more annoying
than dire.”20 He conceives of paper cut politics as the means toward a disrup-
tive “nuisance” to “the idealizations of any urbanized lesbian and gay imaginary,”
employing his own rhetoric of sassy rurality as a weapon against the “aesthetic
intolerance” of grandly declarative, metronormative queer discourses.
Relocations’ efforts to confront queer metronormativity with irritating (and
irritable) incisions in its master-narratives of aesthetic and stylistic superiority
are in keeping with Herring’s recent efforts in Another Country. And yet, while I
sometimes wish that I, too, could shake my inner Sugarbaker with the vigor of
Herring’s Southern sass, I know full well that the suburbs by design merit less
passion than the age-old spiritual and stylistic showdown between the country
and the city.21 Thus my approach is far less incisive than paper cut politics and
noticeably more sprawling (true to suburban design, or the lack thereof ) in its
attempt to encompass the disparate, if strikingly familiar and repetitive, articula-
tions of how the suburban imaginary functions in queer and normative national
discourses. While the first relocation tracked in this book revisits the metronor-
mative trajectory of the queer subject from “nowhere” to “somewhere”—more
precisely, from the California suburbs to New York City in Lynne Chan’s JJ
Chinois projects—Relocations also stays put (as suburban objects and subjects
are wont to do) in some of Southern California’s emblematic landscapes, such
as amusement parks (“Behind the Orange Curtain”), strip malls (“Empire of
My Familiar”), and freeways (“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”). Rather
than get caught up in the fierce battle that’s been raging for ages between the
country and the city in queer studies and beyond, Relocations takes pleasure and
pause in the storied commute and vexed communion between the suburban and
the urban.
Theoretically and conceptually, this book’s intervention into queer urbanism
is inspired by the perilous cloverleaf freeway interchanges that opened this intro-
duction. Once created to keep the flow of traffic moving on and off the major
arteries of transit to and from cities and suburbs, cloverleaves now (as many
other architectures created with convenience in mind) have become the source of
what they sought to prevent: congestion, confusion, and aggravation.22

7 Relocations
Cloverleaf freeway interchange, ca. 1950s, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public
Library Photograph Collection.

Cloverleaf interchanges require an elaborate choreography between vehicles and

drivers. Rather than merging directly onto the flow of traffic with the aid of lights
and signals, the cloverleaf offers an interstitial lane on which vehicles traveling at dif-
ferent speeds and at cross-purposes—some exiting, others entering—negotiate
their transactions of motion within a death-defying instant. During my earliest
experiences on Southern California’s freeways as a newly licensed sixteen-year-old
driver, cloverleaves terrified me the most. Careening onto a single lane to exit the
freeway at high speeds, or trying desperately to merge while keeping control of a car
hurtling with the centrifugal force of a twisting on-ramp, challenged my ability to
see beyond the blind spots these structures aggravated. But once I learned how to
use them—to see the other cars, time the traffic, and adjust my speed according to
another’s flow—I took a pleasure and thrill in the dangerous transaction, the elabo-
rate dance between drivers destined for different directions, yet forced by design to
notice one another as if their lives depended on it, because they do for that instant.
The suburban and the urban, queer narratives and normative ones, history and the-
ory, may be at cross-purposes and propelled by different velocities toward different
destinations, but I force them to interact in Relocations as if they were on one of
these cloverleaves: they meet transiently, aware they’re inhabiting one another’s
blind spots, and yet they are willing to yield their right of way to take the risk of
crossing in time and space together, lest there be a fatal and catastrophic collision.

8 Relocations
 By definition, the suburbs are an intermediary space between the rural and the
urban, a nether zone that (as of this writing) doesn’t even have its own U.S. cen-
sus category.23 Whereas the rural and the urban are each other’s stalwart oppo-
sites, the suburban cannot even exist etymologically without the “urban.” The
American suburbs may have functioned historically as spaces of escape from the
decline of its industrial cities, but the two have nevertheless shared, over time, a
codependent relationship.24 Never too far apart, and yet seemingly worlds away,
suburbs and cities are—as the joke goes about many longtime companions—
beginning to resemble each other. As Andrew Blauvelt observes:
City dwellers and suburbanites need each other to reinforce their own sense
of place and identity despite ample evidence that what we once thought were
different places and lifestyles are increasingly intertwined and much less
distinct. The revenge of the suburb on the city wasn’t simply the depletion of its
urban population or the exodus of its retailers and office works, but rather the
importation of suburbia into the heart of the city: chain stores and restaurants,
downtown malls and even detached housing. . . . Suburbia has returned to the city
just as more suburbs are experiencing many of the things about city life it sought
to escape, both positive and negative: congestion, crime, poverty, racial and ethnic
diversity, cultural amenities, and retail diversity. At the same time, cities have taken
on qualities of the suburbs that are perceived as both good and bad, such as the
introduction of big box retailing, urban shopping malls, and reverse suburban
migrations by empty nesters who return to the city to enjoy the kind of life they
lived before they had kids to raise.25
The rerouted paths of migration, commerce, and sociability of the United States’
normative subjects—of the heterosexual couples who cultivated nuclear families
in suburban spaces they imagined were at a safe distance from the racialized
dangers and perversions of big cities—have changed the stakes of contemporary
debates about whether cities still nurture the Others who were economically
quarantined from the suburban good life during the age of white flight. Cit-
ies have, since the boom of technologically driven “creative” industries in the
mid-1990s, become the preferred destination for a new species of normative
Americans alternately called the “creative class” or the “bourgeois bohemians.”
In the introduction to his best-selling book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper
Class and How They Got There, David Brooks anoints this hybrid species of
elites the new American standard: “These are highly educated folk who have
one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois
realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information
age elite are bourgeois bohemians. . . . These Bobos define our age. They are
the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe.
Their status codes now govern social life. Their moral codes give structure to

9 Relocations
our personal lives.”26 In so far as queer studies positions itself against normativ-
ity, as well as normative temporalities and geographies, part of the intervention
I offer in Relocations is simply to recognize that normativity itself is no longer
a stable category found in fixed spatial environments. Normativity has a new
face and has proved itself adaptable to different landscapes, including the cities
it once abandoned for the good life in the suburbs. In the twilight of suburbia
we have awoken to realize that this new face bears a remarkable resemblance to
our own queer visages. Berlant and Freeman warned at the height of queer stud-
ies’ institutional emergence that “queer culture’s consent to national normativity
must itself be made more provisional.“27 As their prophecy came to fruition dur-
ing the United States’ transition from the economic prosperity of the Clinton
era into George W. Bush’s troubled two-term regime, Lisa Duggan urged us to
reevaluate the saliency of “queer” in the wake of what she named “homonor-
mativity,” or a “demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay
culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”28
Relocations underscores the connection between metronormativity and homo-
normativity. But rather than resting with the assumption that homonormativ-
ity remains within the purview of gays and lesbians who strive to mimic some
of the United States’ more traditional institutions of citizenship (e.g., marriage,
domesticity, and family life) in their most predictable settings (e.g., the suburbs),
I want to emphasize how much the new “creative” and “Bobo” forms of normativ-
ity crib their iterations of subcultural capital, consumption-based multicultural-
ism, and rehabilitative urbanism from gays, lesbians, and even those who identify
as queer. Among the questions Relocations considers throughout its pages are the
following: How do we measure normativity in the wake of these changes? How
do we delineate subcultural production when its stylistic and spatial boundaries
have been broached? How do we enumerate normative time after the rise of what
Richard Florida, in concert with David Brooks, calls the “creative class”—a class
to which we as queer scholars may inevitably belong?
In a series of books, Richard Florida has characterized an emergent, postin-
dustrial, creative class of workers involved in “knowledge industries” not bound to
the forty-hour workweek.29 The creative classes—including economically pros-
perous gays and lesbians—helped intensify corporate and civic efforts at urban
gentrification with their preference for city living, due in large part to the ame-
nities it offers, including “diversity” itself.30 A more pointed discussion of Flor-
ida’s promulgation of the lifestyle politics of gentrification unfolds in the coda
to Relocations, which focuses on the queer performance ensemble Butchlalis de
Panochtitlan’s theatrical confrontation with creative classers in the remodeled
queer, racialized, and working-class social spaces of “lesser Los Angeles.”31 I ges-
ture toward Florida’s body of work here because the critique of queer urbanity I

10 Relocations
offer in Relocations focuses on just how deeply, if unintentionally complicit, cer-
tain subcultural logics of queer urbanity are with these newly normative, “creative”
processes of gentrification.32 Queer urbanites as well as their normative counter-
parts have contributed to the latter-day suburban migrations of communities of
color from more traditional, ethnic urban enclaves deeper into suburbia.
The spatial designation “suburbia” has its origins in ancient Rome where, as
Robert Bruegmann explains, “suburbium mean[t] what was literally below or out-
side the city walls.”33 Whereas American suburbanites after World War II fled
cities in search of the “good life,” their ancient Roman counterparts left because
“they could not afford to live in the city and so had to forgo urban services and
the protection of the walls.”34 What Bruegmann describes as ancient custom in
the history of sprawl resurfaces as a historical echo of the suburban relocations
transpiring more recently in the fluctuating real estate environments of Southern
California, which are the primary coordinates for Relocations. Suburban migra-
tions in Southern California have come as a consequence of several key socio-
economic and cultural factors, including: post-1965 U.S. immigration, the local
migrations instigated by globalization and several real estate booms and busts
from the 1980s onward, as well as the displacements wrought by the ethos of
urban renewal and gentrification enacted through official channels by civic leg-
islation and corporate redevelopment, all the while spearheaded unofficially by
creative-class lifestyle cultures.35
Southern California’s variegated and racially marked suburban counties pose a
historical challenge to perpetually whitewashed imaginaries of the suburbs.36 But
as I mentioned above, portraits of suburban similitude persist in queer, homo-
normative, and heteronormative cultural and theoretical discourses. The queer
cosmopolitanism that disavows the suburbs for its homogeneity still relies on
the traditional urban rubrics of density, diversity, and verticality offered by New
York and San Francisco. Instead of orienting another inquiry toward the histori-
cal queer destinations of New York or San Francisco, Relocations looks anew at
the postmillennial models of sprawl typically associated with Los Angeles and its
horizontal conglomeration of seemingly “centerless” landscapes. As critical geog-
raphers and urban theorists like Edward Soja and Mike Davis have observed,
the ever-expanding form of Los Angeles’ amorphous urbanism is often conflated
with the spatial, economic, and spiritual suburbanization of the nation and the
world.37 Suburban-style development in Los Angeles has arguably inspired the
proliferation of the “post–third world” megalopolis in sites throughout Asia,
South Asia, and Latin America, thus contributing globally to what was initially
conceptualized as the Western, primarily U.S. problem of suburban sprawl.38
With its eye on global development in Southern California, the regionalism of
my study aims to accomplish more than offering a local addendum to national

11 Relocations
narratives about queer lifestyles and representations. Instead, Relocations explores
how the Southern California suburbs from Orange County to the Inland Empire
have functioned as a conceptual and topographical nexus for an American empire
bound up with histories of sexuality, race, and desire.
In When America Became Suburban, Robert A. Beauregard argues that Amer-
ican global ascendancy and the growth of the suburbs after World War II “was
not about subjugation or territory. Neither colonialism nor expansion was the
goal. Rather the United States hoped to establish itself at the center of an inter-
national economy based on free trade.”39 Beauregard is only half correct in his
assertion, in so far as free trade took its place as the engine of American inter-
national policy after the war. But as Inderpal Grewal, Amy Kaplan, and Victor
Bascara, among many others, have rightly insisted, free trade and global capital-
ism cannot be imagined as projects distinct from the growth of the American
empire. Indeed, American imperialism distinguished itself from earlier imperial
models in part by its refutation of European forms of bureaucratic and admin-
istrative colonialism, favoring instead the liberal (and now neoliberal) spread of
capitalism and free trade.40 As Bascara writes, “Gone is the fleeting legitimacy of
the ‘benevolent assimilation’ of ‘little brown brothers,’ or the uplift and Christian-
ization of the heathen, or even the opening of ‘the China Market.’ That arrogance
has since been displaced by a different type of arrogant conception of modernity
that champions development and globalization, as well as multiculturalism and
its forms of diversity management.”41
Despite Beauregard’s disavowal of the term “imperialism” to mark the United
States’ global economic expansion after World War II, he quite accurately depicts
how the suburbs reflected American imperial exemplarity on the global stage
in the mid-twentieth century: “The daily life of the ‘average’ American became a
model for people around the globe. Suburban life anchored a standard of living
commensurate with the nation’s status as the leader of the ‘free world’ and estab-
lished the country’s economy and form as the best hope for affluence, democracy,
and world peace. Life in the suburbs was a mark of American exceptionalism and
a model to which all nations could aspire.”42 In other words, the picture of nor-
mativity captured in the suburbs—of a white, nuclear family surrounded by their
possessions, especially their comfortable home—became not only an American
standard, but also was exported globally as a touchstone for “freedom” and “pros-
perity” in the so-called developing world. The suburbs of the twentieth century
symbolized the United States’ imperial transition from a production economy to
one of consumption. The American dream of a good life, replete with consumer
conveniences in the suburbs, became a significant aspect of the nation’s cultural
imperialist rhetoric of freedom during the Cold War, an era formative to the
Orange County amusement cultures I describe in this book.

12 Relocations
 As I discuss in more depth in “Behind the Orange Curtain,” the region’s eco-
nomic growth from the 1960s onward was spurred simultaneously by the rise
of its military and defense industries, and its amusement cultures at Disney-
land and Knott’s Berry Farm. The dual imperatives of security and amusement
combined in Orange County to foment a consumer ethos that was disseminated
globally through emblematic pop icons like Disney’s Mickey Mouse—the cud-
dly, if rodentious, emissary of American cultural imperialism.43 Despite decades
of wealth and unprecedented prosperity, Orange County’s spectacular financial
collapse during the early 1990s (the municipality declared bankruptcy in Decem-
ber of 1994),44 symbolically augured the fate of today’s suburban empires: a fall
experienced many times over by its aptly named neighbor to the east, the Inland
Empire. Hubristically oversized suburban dream houses are lost everyday to
bankruptcy and foreclosure as Southern California’s suburban empires are slowly
but surely turning to rubble.
In 2009, Time magazine announced that the “American suburb as we know
it is dying. . . . Thanks to changing demographics, including a steady decline in
the percentage of households with kids and a growing preference for urban ame-
nities among Americans young and old, the suburban dream of the big house
with the big lawn is vanishing.”45 As queers invested in the architectures of nor-
mativity coming to ruin, we may too hastily rejoice in Time’s declaration of the
suburbs’ end, accompanied by eerie portraits of empty retail behemoths and
abandoned big-box shops. The service economies engendered by these massive
chains throughout the suburbs have also, in the wake of post-industrialization
and the booms and busts of the technologically driven “creative” economy, come
to provide a primary source of income for many of Southern California’s immi-
grants, migrants, and working-class communities.46 As Marcelo M. Suarez-Oro-
zco explains, immigrants “escaping economies that more or less ‘broke’ during the
global restructuring . . . are drawn by the service sector of the U.S. economy where
there seems to be an insatiable appetite for foreign workers.”47 The United States’
mid-twentieth-century transition from a production to consumption culture in
the suburbs then, paradoxically, created the conditions for the suburbs’ and the
American empire’s undoing half a century later. The American suburbs have been
globally restructured, reconstituted as service economies, and repopulated as resi-
dential apartment communities for low-wage immigrant workers reliant on ser-
vice sectors for sustenance. When we as queer theorists, cosmopolites, and deni-
zens of creative urbanity cheer the vanquishing of the contemporary suburbs, the
vestiges of U.S. cultural and economic imperial ambition, whose demise are we
celebrating?
As I argue in my chapter on the Inland Empire, Southern California’s sub-
urbs have become—and in many respects already were—a repository for the

13 Relocations
subjects scattered by the United States’ latent imperial ambitions in the twen-
tieth century, and as a consequence of the nation’s collusion with other impe-
rial projects during earlier ages of empire. From the Spanish missionary culture
coinciding and conflicting with the United States’ westward expansionism before
ultimately colliding head-on with the nation’s nascent imperialism at the turn of
the twentieth century, to the British capital paired with “American ingenuity” in
the agricultural expansion of the inland region’s “Orange Empire” at the close of
the nineteenth century, Southern California’s suburbs have served as test-sites for
imperial projects that have both “succeeded” and gone terribly awry. The imperial
legacies of the late nineteenth century that encompassed “territories” like Mexico,
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, followed up by the United States’ Cold
War ethos of containment-through-incursion in places like Korea and Vietnam
in the mid-twentieth century, dramatically transformed the demographies, archi-
tectures, and cultural life of the Southern California region. Thus the arcane
term “empire,” rather than its newer variations and forms such as “globalization”
or “transnationalism,” emerges as a key word throughout the pages of Relocations
to describe the flows of bodies, cultures, and systems of power that delineate the
migrations to, through, and within Southern California’s suburbs.
By acknowledging the residual effects, affects, and echoes of empire in the
suburban landscapes of Southern California, Relocations shares in Inderpal Gre-
wal’s project of reexamining the “new centers” and nodes of American imperial-
ism in the age of transnationalism. Whereas Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
insist that no single nation can be imagined as an imperial leader in the “decen-
tered” and “deteritorizalized” regime of management, which “scrambles” the spa-
tialized order of so-called first through third worlds installed by nation-states
and sovereign-ruling imperialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Grewal reminds us of the United States’ imperial adaptability as it has been har-
nessed through transformations of capital.48 As Grewal explains, “The United
States remained a hegemon, and its source of power was its ability to generate
forms of regulation across particular connectivities that emerged as independent
as well as to recuperate the historicized inequalities generated by earlier phases
of imperialism.”49 This oscillation between discourses of freedom and American
exceptionalism, and the United States’ complicity with an imperialism that it has
stridently disavowed, can be traced throughout the chapters of Relocations, from
the migrant destinies paid tribute to (as well as parodied) in Lynne Chan’s JJ Chi-
nois projects, to the nascent narratives of “homonationalism” set in the Inland
Empire, like Alex Espinoza’s novel Still Water Saints.
Poised somewhere between Grewal’s painstaking attention to networked
forms of power in Transnational America and Hardt and Negri’s ecstatic uto-
pianism for a “new cartography . . . waiting to be written—or really . . . being

14 Relocations
written today through the resistances, struggles, and desires of the multitude,”50
Relocations’ own goals are more modestly scaled to the micro-intimacies that
forge everyday irruptions in the contemporary imperial landscapes of Southern
California’s suburbs. From the laughter coaxed by Lynne Chan’s ludic remapping
of queer discovery through chain stores and convenience marts, to the awkward
group dancing staged by teens of color on amusement park dance floors, to the
car-ride sing-alongs hosted by the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan en route to the
nowheres that have since been made over into somewheres by the urban hips-
terati, Relocations revels in the transient and unruly glimmers of possibility amid
empire’s incursions into local spaces.
Irreverence, and the unruliness that comes with a humorous response to
serious matters, is a governing affect and key metacritical feature of Relocations.
Inspired by the laugh-out-loud infectiousness of these works in their creative
responses to suburbia, my own prose, and indeed my own theorization, strives to
capture how crucial humor is to the techne of survival for queer of color suburban
subjects. Whereas irony and referentiality have been the governing tropes of post-
modern analysis, especially in relation to popular objects, figures like JJ Chinois
and the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan in Relocations mobilize humor as an ameliora-
tive mode in their work. In other words, instead of using humor or irony to make
themselves distinct, or to stand out and apart from the popular mainstream, they
cull from the popular to forge unlikely sociabilities, relationships, and alliances
between themselves and the spheres of living and referentiality they are meant to
be excluded from—particularly the suburbs as both a cultural and spatial entity.
This humor is also always freighted by something “heavier,” something deeper
and potentially more catastrophic. In many respects, their use of humor—and
my own throughout this book—can be imagined as activating the “joke work”
Freud famously conceived in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Only
instead of figuring this labor as an elaborate set of negotiations within the uncon-
scious between the superego, ego, and id, the joke work of Relocations traces a set
of material relations between and among built environments, subjects circulating
in those environments, and the objects that form sociohistorical connectivities in
these historically determined settings.51
In keeping with its dual emphasis on the superficial and the profound as it
manifests in contemporary queer migrations, then, the title for this book, Reloca-
tions, taps into the range of meanings the term both promises and threatens, from
its purely descriptive attributes and silly euphemistic function in the real estate
industry, to its more violent overtones of forced martial and imperial displace-
ments. In the parlance of the suburban real estate economy, “relocation” offers
an innocuous, if gussied up, way to describe people—mostly families—moving
from one place to another, often because of a new job. Companies and real estate

15 Relocations
firms offer “relocation experts” linked across the Internet, ready to help business-
people and their families find the right neighborhood, in the right school district,
with the right grocery stores and other conveniences, within the right proximity
to their new jobs. Full-service relocation experts boast of how much time and
money can be saved by consulting their collated databases. Local realtors in turn
spare advertising dollars, because by signing up with a relocation service they no
longer have to commit ad money to disparate markets. One business journalist
and a proponent of full-service relocation, Harry Feinberg, offers an illustrative
scenario:
Imagine this. You’re a real estate broker in Tuscaloosa (God forbid). You need your
listings to reach every rare and precious professional who is asked to relocate to
your tiny berg. You have two choices. Choice one, you can buy expensive ads in the
NY and LA Times and pray that someone from Hollywood or Gotham sees your
ad the day they get the joyous news that corporate HQ is moving to your little
slice of heaven. Choice two, (the better choice) is that you can sign a deal with a
national relocation company that moves thousands of employees annually (some
of whom actually may be forced to move to your undiscovered gem of a town).52
Setting aside Feinberg’s colorful description of the specific sites in question—he
manages to insult both rural “folks” and shallow urbanites with his quippy asides
about Tuscaloosa, Gotham, and Hollywood—we acquire a glimpse at how the
business practice of relocation works. Relocation experts serve as local infor-
mants and transitional consultants for the legions of workers whose movements
are predicated by regional and global corporate economies. These movements are
sometimes consensual and at other times coerced. Further, corporate relocation
agencies, real estate relocation consultants, and do-it-yourself books like Beverly
Roman and John Howells’s Insiders’ Guide to Relocation also offer families advice
on how to cope psychologically and emotionally with uprooting from one place
to start anew in another.53
The psychological pitfalls connoted in contemporary, commercial uses of
“relocation” are haunted by, if blissfully ignorant of, the brutal legacy of the term
as it has been deployed in a long American (imperial) history of coerced dis-
placements and topographical quarantines. From the 1830 Indian Removal Act
forcibly moving First Nations populations from the East to the West during one
of many legislated landgrabs in American expansion; to the internment of Japa-
nese Americans during World War II in an effort to sequester potential “enemies
within”; to the violent dispersals wrought by slavery and its aftermaths, from the
slave trade and the “great migration,” to “white flight” and Hurricane Katrina; to
the quarantining of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay (who were then
“rendered” in elsewheres we have yet to discover) after September 11, 2001, in the

16 Relocations
name of “national security”—“relocation” has functioned as a polite euphemism
for imperialist aggression masquerading as commonsense policies for the pros-
perity, safety, and welfare of the “American people.”54
Relocations does not attempt to forge facile analogies with these violent events
in American history; rather, it traces how the imperial policies and principles
behind them are reanimated in contemporary American landscapes, from the
gentrification of urban neighborhoods as a result of new “landgrabbing” econo-
mies in which queers are also complicit, to the “crabgrass apartheid” that appor-
tions Southern California’s suburbs through zoning laws and other civic policies
while erecting gates to protect “fortress communities” from the encroachment of
less prosperous immigrants and communities of color that build them and keep
them clean.55 As Meiling Cheng reminds us in her work In Other Los Angeleses:
Multicentric Performance Art, “With the surges of multiethnic and multinational
populations throughout the region’s history came various purges of differences.”56
This book’s focus on immigration and migration to and through Southern Cali-
fornia’s suburban landscape also cannot be abstracted from the queer theoretical
labor that compels its efforts to create alternate cartographies of sexuality and
race in the region. Thus Relocations engages with, and hopes to contribute to, an
ever-expanding conversation about “purges of differences” overlapping with queer
diasporas and regionalisms.57
Relocations, as the title strongly suggests, shifts our cartographies of the queer/
immigrant imaginary by reorienting our spatial perspective to account for local
migrations that intersect with queer of color regionalisms in the United States.
My critical motivation for situating Relocations in Southern California is to
explore the rich intersections among queer immigrant communities from Latin
and Central America and the Pacific Rim while seeing how variegated modes of
transit, arrival, and departure inform these colliding imaginaries. Further, gender
remains a crucial framework for reevaluating the aesthetic and political economies
of queer lifestyles in a Southern California landscape where hemispheric region-
alisms collide. My first chapter, on “Relocating Queer Critique: Lynne Chan’s JJ
Chinois,” for example, provides a genealogy for how the urban cultural history
of queer communities in the United States and abroad perpetuates a gendered
divide between gay men and lesbians along the axes of style. As Gayatri Gopinath
has argued in her work on “Queer Regions,” many accounts of queer diaspora are
still burdened by urbanist and cosmopolitan frameworks that look to cities as
sites of “first contact” for immigrant populations.58 Such gestures toward more
encompassing, metropolitan global accounts of queer life end up replicating the
separation of gendered spheres in queer lifestyles. Promoting queer regionalism
as an adjustment to queer diaspora, Gopinath offers the possibility that

17 Relocations
 shifting our critical lens from male public cultures of the global city such as
Mumbai, Delhi, London, or New York, to nonmetropolitan locations that are
just as saturated by global processes although they may appear to be “purely local,”
allows us to foreground those spaces and bodies that are elided within dominant
narratives of global gayness. These “other” sexual cultures may not be readily
intelligible as either “public” or “gay”: they may well be enacted by female subjects
and take place not in the bar or the club but rather the confines of the home, the
beauty parlor, the women’s hostel.59
With all due respect to the serious work Gopinath accomplishes by animating
queer diaspora in its variegated forms, I offer instead my own cheeky (and as
some have said, cheesy) neologism, “dykeaspora,” as a disposable counterpoint to
the notion of queer diaspora, in order to describe the translocal movements of
queer female bodies within the United States. The term’s vicissitudes, failings,
and modest successes are explained at length in my chapter on “Relocating Queer
Critique,” but I want to register here the priority given to “dykes” in my project.
“Dykeaspora” underscores my project’s critique of the gendered discourses of
queer space that locate gay men at the center of the action in desirable and desire-
drenched cities while relegating female queers to potentially mundane and repro-
ductive homonormative existences in unspecified elsewheres.
Turning to local sites like Orange County’s amusement parks and the Inland
Empire’s strip malls, Relocations revisits spaces that may on the surface seem
to be reserved for families and consumers, but which inevitably become trans-
formed as spaces of queer of color encounter and social transaction. Conclud-
ing with the dyke performance ensemble Butchlalis de Panochtitlan’s dispa-
rate performances and media interventions, Relocations explores the affective
potential of butch lesbian intimacies amid the incursions of both hetero- and
homonormative social and spatial “rehabilitators” in East and Southeast Los
Angeles. By approaching queer regionalisms through some of these ephemeral,
queer, and specifically dyke of color performances and social practices, Reloca-
tions constructs itself as cultural study in the broadest sense. Relocations thus
includes historical and sociological dimensions, but it ultimately absconds
from a strictly demographic approach to queer space—something that previ-
ous projects about the “gay suburbs,” such as Wayne Brekhus’s Peacocks, Chame-
leons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity, and the Urban
Institute’s Gay and Lesbian Atlas, have already accomplished. Such critical find-
ings will instead be brought to bear on the spatial imaginaries perpetuated, dis-
seminated, and culturally produced in a range of representational media, such
as performance, popular music, literature, television, and new media, as well as
in the genre of criticism itself.60

18 Relocations
 Throughout the twentieth century, and reaching as far back as the eighteenth
century in England and the United States, the suburbs have been considered an
aesthetic vacuum, a place where art and creativity are domesticated and inevitably
disappear altogether. Catherine Jurca underscores this in the opening to her book
White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, when she
takes on Edith Wharton’s remark that “The Great American Novel” would never
be at home, so to speak, in the mundane confines of suburban spaces.61 What
Jurca’s project exposes is the cultural argument that “art” and “innovation” could
never be cultivated in the spiritual and spatial void typified by suburban con-
texts.62 The cultural conservatism modeled by Wharton—one that paradoxically
employs “avant-gardist” criteria to dismiss suburban space—strikingly resembles
a queer cosmopolitanism that also politicizes certain avant-gardist and subcul-
tural aesthetic practices while diminishing “pop,” “mass,” and “folk” approaches to
the queer imaginary, thus continuing to gender and hierarchize cultural spheres
of production for a purportedly radical queer politics.
This project’s account not only about where we locate queer activism, radical
politics, and ethics, but also of how we go about doing so, is bound up with recent
debates about queer temporality and its propensity toward the avant. Elizabeth
Freeman’s important work on “temporal drag,” for example, inspires my proj-
ect’s take on the sometimes evocative, citational, and repetitive nature of queer
of color suburban practices.63 Temporal drag manifests in Freeman’s essay as a
“stubborn identification with a set of social coordinates” that exceed one’s own
contemporariness.64 She uses as an example the “gravitational pull that ‘lesbian’
sometimes seems to exert upon ‘queer’ not only stylistically, but historically (e.g.,
through stubborn attachments to supposedly ‘outmoded’ and essentializing
forms of feminism), and also performatively (through the simultaneous expres-
sion of incongruous historical and political effects and affects).”65 While Free-
man’s freighted temporality sets the time signature for this book, my chapter on
the Inland Empire creates an interface between Freeman’s gendered account of
queer belatedness, and postcolonial critiques of temporal progress confused as
progressiveness.
Suburban environments are presumed to fluctuate wildly between stasis
and rapid development. In the suburbs, everything remains, or at the very least
appears, the same. And yet the suburbs also function as modernity’s labora-
tory—as an environment where homes, shops, objects (like televisions, radios, or
kitchen appliances), and even people are constantly being replaced, paved over for
something newer, bigger, and more convenient. As we turn the corner for a closer
look at the representational and aesthetic practices of the queer of color subur-
ban imaginary, I would prefer not to say anything more about temporal drag so

19 Relocations
that we might collectively inhabit its certain stillness as it waits to break its pose:
that “pull of the past upon the present,” and the stubborn if sometimes incongru-
ous reiterations of what we think we know about the suburbs, and what we may
never come to understand about its aesthetic practices. Do forgive the repetition
you may find here of what we have seen and heard before: it may contain within
it what we never thought we would see or hear.

Reading, Watching, Listening

We have read about the suburbs before in novels, memoirs, magazines, and news-
papers—that is, before print was declared dead (again), and before newspapers
ceased to clutter doorways and driveways as dailies both distinguished and dis-
posable began to fold, one after the other. In the most sustained literary analysis
of the suburbs to date, Jurca’s White Diaspora, we learn about how the suburbs
came to be the exemplary setting for the crisis of American normativity. Para-
doxically, the privilege that cohered in the suburbs throughout the twentieth cen-
tury—the bourgeois seclusion afforded to whiteness, masculinity, femininity, and
childhood within the tidy confines of suburban domesticity—also became the
prosperous white American’s most profound burden. Jurca “marks the systematic
erosion of the suburban house as a privileged site of emotional connection and
stability,” revealing through her supple readings of various novels, from Sinclair
Lewis’s Babbit to John Updike’s “Rabbit” series, how the house ceases to be a spir-
itual “home” for the twentieth-century novel’s anguished, primarily white, male
protagonists.66 She writes that “even as an ‘indigenous ideal of suburban residence
and home ownership’ has become crucial to and equated with the achievement
of the ‘American dream’ in this century, an ongoing strain of the American novel
has insisted that the suburb and suburban house cheat characters out of the very
thing that is supposed to be their white, middle-class, property-owning due.”67
As much as we may derive a certain satisfaction from the spectacle of Ameri-
can normativity’s spiritual unraveling in the master-planned communities meant
to protect its prosperity, we can never forget that the structure of feeling made
legible by Jurca’s reading of the suburban novel—an ennui born of comfort and
convenience—is also a privilege exclusive to normative subjects. The people,
characters, and personae that populate Relocations—the Bakersfield-born, Coal-
inga-raised, transgender superstar JJ Chinois; the Buena Park teens who danced
all night at Studio K in Knott’s Berry Farm; the lost souls of the Inland Empire
seeking healing in a strip-mall botanica (in Alex Espinoza’s novel Still Water
Saints); the trio of brown butches cruising for amusement through lesser Los
Angeles (the performance ensemble Butchlalis de Panochtitlan)—refuse to luxu-
riate in this ennui. They simply cannot afford to. Instead they laugh, sway, watch,

20 Relocations
and sing along, focusing less on what is their due, understanding all the while
that their task and their pleasure is to make do with a suburban world designed
to keep them at bay or to expel them from its boundaries. They are the relocated:
the queers, immigrants, and people of color who know that inhabiting the sub-
urbs promises privilege but experience it otherwise.
The relocated (sometimes by choice, at other times by circumstance) are not
as often found in literature as they are read in and through queer theory: in the
incidental moments of queer imagining we happen upon through the yearnings
and formative moments of discovery that may theoretically lead to elsewheres,
but which bring us inevitably back to those shared, secret nowheres. For me it
begins, appropriately enough, with a young provincial girl named Eve seeking a
destiny elsewhere in other bodies and through others’ desires. In the retrospec-
tive 1992 preface to her 1985 volume Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick confesses, “There was something . . .
irrepressibly provincial about the young author of this book.” She writes about the
special “incredulity” born of the realization that there was something avowedly
not normal about her own provincial desires:
As each individual story begins in the isolation of queer childhood, we
compulsorily and excruciatingly misrecognize ourselves in the available mirror of
the atomized, procreative, so-called heterosexual pre- or ex-urban nuclear family
of origin, whose bruisingly inappropriate interpellations may wound us—those
resilient or lucky enough to survive them—into life, life of a different kind. The
site of that second and belated life, those newly constituted and denaturalized
“families,” those tardy, wondering chances at transformed and transforming self-
and other-recognition, is the metropolis. But a metropolis continually recruited
and reconstituted by having folded into it the incredulous energies of the
provincial. Or—I might better say—the provincial energies of incredulity itself.
Even as she reinscribes the coordinates Relocations strives to unravel—that “chord
that stretches from provincial origins to metropolitan destinies”68—she finds herself
rerouted, pulled back to the incredulity, the naïveté and perhaps even euphoria that
animates provincialism as it struggles to survive the toxic habitats of normativity.
I like to imagine that this provincial incredulity is what inspires her later turn to
the “reparative,” the “additive and accretive” impulse of theoretical labor that eschews
virtuosic displays of mastery, ambition, and knowing, in the spirit of intellectual and
affective compromise.69 As if writing across time to other provincial subjects seeking
another way to read themselves in, with, and through space, time, and the problem-
atic baggage of their formative moments from elsewhere, she concludes that “what
we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves
and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—
even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”70

21 Relocations
 Other queer theorists have read, written, and forged reparative archives from
the detritus of provincial, suburban pasts. Jennifer Doyle finds a source for the
“sex objects” that would come to compose her scholarly archive in the daily offer-
ings of porn catalogs left by a horny teenage neighbor in her family’s mailbox
in suburban New Jersey. In Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, the title
Moby Dick (shared by a porn video as well as Melville’s venerable novel) becomes
a sign that activates the dialectics of her scholarly labors and fantasies, which
mediates between high and low, the provincial and cosmopolitan, pornography
and art, naïveté and knowing.71 In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Per-
formance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz recalls his own formative moments of
“suburban spectatorship,” when “talk-show deviants . . . would appear long after
I was supposed to be asleep in my South Florida home.” These “deviants,” tele-
vised and teleported to his suburban bedroom, awakened his ability to read into
and otherwise. Through these late-night assignations with the small screen,
Muñoz was able to “get it”—“it” referring to the “exhilarating” and “terrifying”
languages of queer innuendo beamed in from the metropole.72 There are surely
other moments, other anecdotes that slip between the lines in the tomes of queer
theory devoted to other places, objects, and subjects. I’ve tracked these incidents
here not merely for the sake of revealing an otherwise-unwritten genealogy of
provincial, suburban moments through Sedgwick and her pupils, thereby imply-
ing a through line of reparative, queer suburban thought that each may prefer to
disavow. I follow these moments, these flash points that have captivated my atten-
tion across time in queer theory, because they also offer within them a genealogy
for reception within the emergent queer suburban aesthetics I offer throughout
this book. We move with and through each of them as they grasp toward other
archives and places by reading books, looking at pictures, and watching TV.
We have seen the suburbs on TV—before and after network television was
declared dead (many times over) and quality cable programming offered seduc-
tive new cul-de-sacs of fantasy and vérité. Lynn Spigel’s remarkable Welcome
to the Dream House traces the twin emergence of television and the postwar
American suburbs. In many respects, TV is the emblematic suburban medium: a
technology designed for the lived environment it helped to engender and subse-
quently reshape from the mid-twentieth century onward. From the ideal nuclear
families who glowed as exemplars on shows like Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966)
and Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), to their bizarro Goth doubles on The Mun-
sters (1964–1966) and The Addams Family (1964–1966), TV has grappled with
the social transformations of a suburbia that it played a tremendous role in creat-
ing.73 Nothing is impossible in the suburbs on American television. TV assimi-
lated encroaching monsters and hillbillies into the suburban neighborhood, pav-
ing the way for postmillennial soccer-mom drug dealers (on Weeds, 2005–) and

22 Relocations
dysfunctional mob bosses (on The Sopranos, 1999–2007), whom we actually pay
extra to watch on premium cable. Although Relocations pauses for prime-time
programming throughout its pages, with the occasional nod to the Norman Lear
oeuvre and an extended side trip to the sun-dappled splendor of The O.C. (2003–
2007), it is less invested in enumerating small-screen representations of the sub-
urbs than it is tuned into the archives of affect inspired by the intimate view-
ing practices of the book’s central figures. From Lynne Chan’s appropriation of
names, places, and products in her creation of JJ Chinois, to the incidental, tele-
vised debut of Studio K at Knott’s Berry Farm, to the imperial reimaginings of
British bands on MTV’s earliest music videos in the Inland Empire and among
the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, TV belongs to the queer suburban imaginary as a
node for what Jennifer Terry has called “remote intimacy.”
In the earliest versions of Terry’s current manuscript in progress, “Killer
Entertainments: Militarism, Governmentality, and Consuming Desires in Trans-
national America,” she defined the concept of remote intimacy as the “transmis-
sion of sentiments through designed uses and creative appropriations of tele-
mediating devices.”74 While Terry focused primarily on the Internet and the
multiuser, multiplayer platforms harnessed to work out the feelings that arose
in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s declaration of the “War on Terror”—from
the “pro-military, imperialist attitudes” it inspired, to the “violent spiritualist reac-
tions against it”—I want to hold on to some of the literalism she offers in the
term, without relinquishing some of its harsher implications. Terry has given me
license “to run with the concept,” to remake it into a theory as well as praxis for
queer of color suburban subjects. My own customized version of “remote inti-
macy” offers a friendly supplement and a reparative improvisation to Terry’s
concept. Television, and what is seen and heard on it, becomes one of the key
telemediating devices on which I focus, because it remains a significant medium
of “creative appropriation” for the queer of color suburban artists and figures in
Relocations. Beyond fomenting what Benedict Anderson has famously called an
“imagined community” through the simultaneous moments of consumption
made possible across long distances with communication technologies (his con-
centrated on print), “remote intimacy” registers more acutely the temporal and
spatial paradoxes of communion such shared consumption may offer.75
Remote intimacy, for example, is not contingent on a simultaneity either
actual or imagined. Subjects consuming certain television archives may or may
not watch and look at the same time, or even at or within the same era, espe-
cially since televisual recording technologies—from Betamax and VHS, to digi-
tal video recorders (DVRs), to web platforms like Hulu, have made it possible to
relinquish what TV scholars have called “appointment viewing.”76 But one needn’t
look as far into the contemporary moment as TiVo, Netflix, YouTube, or what-

23 Relocations
ever the next big thing is to make this point about TV. Syndication and repeats
already afforded asynchronous temporalities of viewing and enabled what could
be called archival practices of consumption for generations historically removed
from the original run of certain formative programs, like network sitcoms (one
of JJ Chinois’s touchstone shows is Good Times) or prime-time soaps (like Fal-
con Crest—a BdP favorite).77 And yet these artifacts of viewing continue to reso-
nate in the queer of color suburban imaginary, creating collective intimacies out
of what may have been solitary viewing practices in the past. This configuration
and sentiment of “remoteness”—of watching or listening alone as an isolated sub-
ject of suburban sprawl—also haunts the various chapters throughout this book,
creating generative intimacies among disparate suburban subjects that are often
belated. We may not have read that book, seen that show, or heard that song
together, but we do so now, not in the spirit of nostalgia but as if it truly is the
first time. Together, it is the first time.
We have heard about the suburbs before in songs on the radio, on records
and tapes (before they became CDs), and on CDs (before they became MP3s),
disseminated through a music industry they say is on its deathbed.78 We have
heard about them in protest songs like Malvina Reynolds’s jaunty, if biting, “Little
Boxes”; in poseur protest pop like the Monkees’ infectious “Pleasant Valley Sun-
day”; in 1980s British dance pop like “Suburbia,” the Pet Shop Boys’ melodic hom-
age to both Madonna and the smooth jazz flügelhorn star Chuck Mangione. We
have heard the suburbs in the music made there in garages, basements, and living
room piano lessons.79 We hear it in Downey, California, home of both the Car-
penters and Metallica’s front man, James Hetfield. We hear it in a sun-drenched
Orange County that grew both Gwen Stefani of No Doubt and Zack de la Rocha
of Rage Against the Machine. We hear it in the Inland Empire, where Joan Baez
went to high school and Etta James lives, and where the horn sections for ska
bands like the Skeletones and the Voodoo Glow Skulls honed their chops in the
marching bands of the Riverside Unified School District. We hear it through the
records and Cassingles we bought at big-box shops like Kmart and chain stores
like the Wherehouse, Music Plus, and Tower Records.80 I hear the suburbs every-
day I write this book, its synthy refrains indistinguishable from the theory I read,
the histories I find, the blunt numbers of the census data I scour.
I used to think popular music posed a distraction to this project, to the labor
that went into carefully calibrating the studious part of suburban cultural stud-
ies. Now I’ve come to realize that it is the heartbeat pulsing through all the queer
relocations and remote intimacies I tried not to sing, but which I end up singing
anyway throughout this book in a twisted form of critical karaoke. Joshua Clo-
ver introduced the concept of “critical karaoke” to participants at the Experience
Music Project’s 2004 Pop Conference in Seattle. We were invited to select a song

24 Relocations
and write a brief essay to be read aloud as an accompaniment that could only last
for the duration of the song’s recorded length. Other stylistic choices were left
to us as writers and interpreters. We could time our remarks to coincide with
crescendos and dance breaks if we so chose, or we could read completely through
the essay without pause if we felt anxious about the clock running out. As with
much of the critical apparatus of this project, the tenets of critical karaoke are
not reproduced strictly or prescriptively in Relocations, but rather are repurposed
for a queer suburban aesthetics that revels in strange echoes. Like a good karaoke
singer or American Idol contestant—and no, “good” paired with either of those
terms does not equal an oxymoron—I’ve tried to make it my own, not by singing
closely to the melody in an effort to get every note right, but with an interpretive
turn of phrase, an improvisation, or unexpected pause that rearranges the stakes
and spirit of each theory, each artifact of history, each transient performance.81
Relocations is not about popular music per se, but the popular music I and oth-
ers hear in the suburbs informs every theoretical gesture, every awkward dance
move performed solo or in groups, every historical high note piercing through
these pages. Theoretically and cartographically, Relocations participates in the
“audiotopian” practices of listening and mapping elegantly charted by Josh Kun.
As Kun explains, an “audiotopia” is the equivalent of a musical map, “a musical
‘you are here’” that positions you within larger social worlds. Riffing on remarks
made by the African American poet Jean Toomer, Kun proposes that music
transports us into different worlds; even when we eventually slide back into our
“own worlds,” we “slide back forever changed.”82 In the spirit of singing along, as all
the figures I write about in this book do at some point or another, from Lynne
Chan’s JJ Chinois, to the kids at Studio K, to the novelist Alex Espinoza, to the
Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, I would like to add what might be an excessive melis-
matic flourish to Kun’s notion of audiotopia by insisting that sometimes popular
music is most utopian when it transports us deeper into the heart of our own
worlds rather than to different ones. It drags us back. Not backward looking
through time, but back into the spaces and times that collide in our situated pres-
ences. It reminds us of where we are, where we come from, and where we never
truly leave.
The listening practices I cultivated as an immigrant kid who relocated to
the Inland Empire in the early 1980s determined the coordinates—at once spa-
tial, conceptual, material, and theoretical—mapped throughout this book. The
music I heard there was not unfamiliar. It is music not especially obscure but
rather straight off the rack, befitting a culture of convenience. I heard it before in
Manila—where I was born to a family of musicians, and where I spent most of the
first decade of my life surrounded by music both homemade and broadcast from
elsewhere on American-style Top 40 radio or on actual American TV shows. I

25 Relocations
heard it again when I landed in Southern California’s Inland Empire, funneled
through retail, taped off the radio, still broadcast from elsewhere. I hear it now
when I listen again to the music they played at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Studio K, the
dance club reanimated in “Behind the Orange Curtain,” and in the car rides staged
by the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, who score their butch intimacies to “Diamond
Girl” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” It is a music inspired by com-
mutes and too much time spent in a car moving slowly toward work or pleasure.
As I explain more explicitly in my chapter on Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, so
much of queer suburban sociability transpires in cars, driving around, looking for
something (or someone) to do. While queer cosmopolitans are likely to find such
searching and confined listening abject, I would argue that there is something tre-
mendously generative in the acts of imaginative transformation that can turn a
freeway or parking lot into a social- and soundscape, without needing the crutch
of cool. It is the music that turns convenience into pleasure, the music of micro-
migrations between blocks or between suburbs. It is the music of immigration
and the American pop songs we heard elsewhere foreshadowing the love, heart-
break, rebellion, wealth, and sex we would find once we arrived, only to remind us
after we got here that we’re still waiting for all those things.
It is the music that inspires us to ask questions. What about queer of color
desires spawned somewhere else? What about those born in the provinces and in
the suburbs? In and around malls? In schoolyards after hours, or, in the words of
Alexandra Vazquez, on the “slippery naugahyde seats of a . . . public school bus”?83
Made in garages (to gesture to Christine Bacareza Balance’s work on Filipino
American DJ culture) or crafted in basements, attics, and on public softball fields
radiant in twilight smog? It is, was, and will be in these “transnational suburban
hubs” that we bump to the beat of freestyle.84 There we conduct our immigrant
practices of “everyday performance,” like the karaoke in our parents’ carport or
on their back porch.85 This music—the pop music found everywhere but heard
repeatedly in the suburbs—isn’t just the cry of a forgotten and (as some would
argue) justifiably forgettable suburban past of arbitrary queer, brown, immigrant
musical discovery. Not from a precious little record store with snobby salesclerks,
but rather from the bins at big-box shops or the dazzling, direct-mail innovation
that was the Columbia House Catalog—ten records for a penny! These enticing,
credit-wrecking temptations came in the mail, inspiring our mothers to wait for
Ed McMahon to appear at the door with a fat, novelty-sized check: the American
dream, COD (collect on delivery).
This is the music that moves Relocations. It sometimes manifests as lyrics from
a chorus, such as from Journey’s anthemic “Don’t Stop Believin’” in my chapter on
JJ Chinois, for example, or from the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes
Out” in my chapter on the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. Sometimes popular music

26 Relocations
itself becomes the conceptual framework for reading echoes through history and
across time, as it does in my chapter on the Inland Empire. At other moments
popular music is the direct object of inquiry, as in my chapter on Orange Coun-
ty’s amusement park soundscapes, “Behind the Orange Curtain.” In a more
general sense, music functions in Relocations as another technology of remote
intimacy. In much the same way that remote intimacy as a viewing or reading
practice offers belated opportunities for communion among disparate subjects
through asynchronous encounters with popular objects, listening as remote inti-
macy brings people, things, and concepts together, even if suburban space and
time dictates their dispersal and isolation.
The queer of color suburban archive I ask you to read, see, and hear in Reloca-
tions—one that commutes to and from an array of locations that are not necessar-
ily “destinations”—is at once an archive of familiarity and incongruity, of things
and situations that are utterly mundane, mainstream, predictable, or “behind the
times,” yet have somehow managed to remain unthinkable in both normative and
queer cultural contexts. It comprises the popular forms we encountered in our
little boxes through other little boxes, like TV sets, radios, and sedans. Queerly,
all this brings us back to our bedrooms, but not in the way you might think. It
brings us back alone, with a flashlight under the covers so that we can read after-
hours, with a glowing TV screen as our companion, or with our headphones on
in the dark. In this little box we sit, think, and dream alone until we find those
precious others who’ve done the same, who’ve maybe even swayed the same in
nowhere elses or in desperate elsewheres, teaching themselves every painstaking
move and note until someday we can raise our lighters in unison, as unmistakable
voices sing with a tender, distant sorrow.

27 Relocations
  Relocating Queer Critique
Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois

I hate New York. . . . It’s not simply the city’s awesome capacity to imagine itself
as the be-all and the end-all of modern queer life (no small feat, mind you). What
I really hate is the casualness with which this move is dispatched, the taken-for-
granted assumption that you want to be on that tiny island (but not some of those
outer boroughs) and be there soon. That you want to get there someday, somehow,
and get out of this god forsaken town.
—Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

A lot has been said about JJ Chinois, and there’s a lot more to be said about him.
His popularity has grown enormously in the years since his first admirers started
shouting, “Nice Ass.” It began with the teens of course. But at JJ’s debut in New
York City, it soon became obvious that it’s easier to skin an amoeba than to catalog
the “typical JJ Chinois fan.” . . . His good looks and raw-throated vulnerability
bring an immediate response from fans and critics. But his story actually began a
few years ago, in Coalinga, California.
—Lynne Chan, “JJ Chinois” website

Just a small town girl

Livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.
—Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’”

Journeys with JJ
A lot has been said about JJ Chinois since I first presented a paper about his web-
site at the 2002 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in New York
City.1 JJ Chinois is an alter ego, superstar avatar, and long-term artistic endeavor
of Lynne Chan, a queer Asian American multimedia artist based in New York
but originally from Cupertino, California. The irony that this entire project on
queer suburban imaginaries began, in effect, about an artist currently living and
working in New York, and on a panel about “Gay New York” hosted in the pro-
verbial belly of the beast, is not lost on me. At its best, the embryonic fifteen-
minute form of this project called for a renewed focus on queer regionalisms. At
its worst, the paper devolved into the same boosterist rhetoric about California

28
that inspired so many migrations to the Golden State. Little did I comprehend
then that my abundant enthusiasm masked genuine aggression. Like Scott Her-
ring, my intellectual comrade in critical anti-urbanism (whose sassy, full-throated
complaint I open with above), I get downright hateful about the developmental
logics of queer relocation starting in amorphous elsewheres and triumphantly
ending somewhere—in the designated “place for us” that is New York, New York.
And yet there was also something desperately wannabe about my earliest rendi-
tions of shrill West Coast cheerleading about the JJ Chinois website (http://www.
jjchinois.com/) that became less about what was wrong with buying into the New
York state of mind, and more about being “good enough” to play the big city game.
As if lost in the karaoke echo chamber of a song that resonates loudly in the realms
of both immigrant masculinity and jazz-hands fagulosity—“New York, New
York”—my argument took up the song’s climactic, gut-busting lyrics as the initial
template for tracking the relocations in Chan’s JJ Chinois projects: “If I can make
it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” Overdetermined as those lyrics felt for me at that
moment, in an unflatteringly lit MLA ballroom in midtown Manhattan, the object
of inquiry itself—Chan’s humor-driven work about a transgender pop idol discov-
ered in Coalinga, a cattle-ranching outpost in central California—also demanded
renewed efforts to transpose these lyrics into the key of the reparative rather than
the paranoid.2 Chan’s mock-fansite for JJ Chinois responds to the challenge of “New
York, New York” by insisting that making it there requires making anywhere—your
characterless nowhere—into a somewhere. With her witty mythologizing of rural,
suburban, and exurban locales in California such as Coalinga, Bakersfield, River-
side, and Cupertino, Chan’s website traces JJ’s multipronged migration from sites in
Asia to California, and from California’s suburbs to New York City.
I first posited California as New York’s Other not only because Chan’s art
demanded it, but also because the flyover rivalry between East Coast and West
is so deeply ingrained in American popular narratives about immigration, migra-
tion, and pathways to the “good life.”3 For better or worse, New York City and
California serve as national endpoints, not only at the coastal edges of the main-
land American expanse, but also within fantasmatic trajectories of a still-extant,
if now economically ravaged, “American dream” for immigrants as well as queers.4
From Ellis Island to Angel Island, from Fire Island to Fashion Island, New
York City and California’s (coastal) suburbs serve as last stops in trajectories of
struggle—then triumph—for the queer aspirant as much as they are beacons for
strangers from a different shore.5 But even though Chan’s JJ Chinois appears to
take off with this familiar flight plan from California to the New York islands,
the ameliorative effect of her work does not merely rest with recuperating cer-
tain California sites so that they may ultimately be included in a more expansive
master-plan for queer metronormativity.6

29 Relocating Queer Critique

 As I have come to realize during my extended journeys with JJ Chinois, the
journey itself is what ends up being important. By saying this, I’m not just recy-
cling some feel-good California checkout-stand Zen, hoping it’ll make you mel-
low enough to be down with whatever I say. The journey is crucial, not only to
this chapter on Chan’s work but also to this entire project. How one actually
moves through space has been a key point of distinction between the urban and
suburban in planning, architecture, and even aesthetics. As I illustrate through-
out my subsequent chapters, the commute—our everyday micro-journeys for
work, errands, escape, and pleasure—becomes the emblematic form of suburban
movement and contact (or lack thereof ).7 The more protracted journeys outlined
in Chan’s JJ Chinois projects, from Far East to West to Out East, sets the pace
for the other, ostensibly more local movements in Southern California featured
throughout this book. As an aesthetic project fundamentally outlining the devel-
opmental arc in which queers and immigrants are transported from nowhere
places to the United States’ emblematic urban destinations, Chan’s JJ Chinois
website provides the broad brushstrokes for the more intricate relocations traced
around corners, beneath freeway overpasses, and sometimes stuck in the middle
of suburban blocks in Relocations.
As I introduced above, the journey is important. Through the character of JJ
Chinois, Chan racializes as well as genders her approach to drag. She exaggerates
Asian and white masculine iconographies that circulated with suburban cachet
during her formative years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. JJ’s look is famously
crafted in the image of Bruce Lee, himself an avatar for interracial imaginaries
about eros and masculinity. As Mimi Thi Nguyen has noted, “JJ models himself
after Lee as a lover rather than a fighter, transfiguring the iconic image of Lee’s
masculine physicality for its sensuality and eroticism.”8 Beyond stylizing JJ after
the most iconic Asian male to have “made it” as an enduring cinematic superstar
and sex symbol in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chan also models JJ
after figures who are, to put it kindly, somewhat less iconic in the Asian Amer-
ican popular imaginary. Another of Chan’s inspirations for JJ Chinois is Steve
Perry, the former lead singer of the San Francisco–based pop-rock supergroup
Journey, circa early 1980s.9 What differentiates Chan’s citation of Perry’s period-
specific style from her homage to Lee’s legendary aesthetic is that Perry’s appear-
ance is freighted by time, whereas Lee’s look (by virtue of his untimely death and
the mythological circumstances surrounding it) achieves timelessness. To put it
another way, even though Bruce Lee died long ago, his style lives on, whereas
Steve Perry lives on but his early-1980s style expired long ago.
Of course, one could protest that Perry’s look occasionally resurfaces in
ironized forms in hipster boroughs throughout the world, but it is precisely
Chan’s point to underscore the belatedness that adheres to this look’s latter-day

30 Relocating Queer Critique

 Lynne Chan, “JJ and a Young Fan Posing Backstage at the El Rey Theater,”
2002. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

citations. Steve Perry functions, in other words, as Chan’s vehicle for what Eliza-
beth Freeman calls temporal drag, “with all of the associations that the word ‘drag’
has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past upon the present.”10 As I’ve
already emphasized in my introductory chapter, temporal drag is a key concept
that reappears in different iterations within a queer of color suburban aesthet-
ics—in style, embodiment, and sound. Without belaboring the point here, I do
want to stress that Chan’s freighted visual invocation of Steve Perry also, in effect,
activates a sonic echo that provides the perfect accompaniment to JJ’s journey
across the United States: “Just a small town girl / livin’ in a lonely world / she
took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”
Since it first debuted in 1981 on the album appropriately titled Escape, Jour-
ney’s anthemic hit “Don’t Stop Believin’” has scored everything from movie
montages, to sports comebacks, to political campaigns, to small-screen fina-
les.11 While legions of pop culture scribes have already written, and are sure
to write more, about the significance of Journey’s enduring anthem for the
United States’ small-town dreamers, Chan encapsulates the ethos of “Don’t

31 Relocating Queer Critique

Stop Believin’” through JJ Chinois without ever explicitly using the song on her
website. What she holds on to with JJ’s narrative is that melismatic “feeeliiiin’”
the song implores its listeners to keep striving for. It is not necessarily “belief ”
that becomes the key element of JJ’s journey, but rather the notion of not stop-
ping—of perpetually yearning toward “streetlight[s], people” in a quest of “liv-
ing just to find emotion.”12
The propensity toward movement and sensation we find narrated on JJ Chi-
nois’s website, as well as in the song “Don’t Stop Believin’,” would seem to rein-
scribe a certain national romance with mobility (at once spatial and economic)
endemic to an American dream intensified during the nation’s suburbanization
after World War II.13 Even as the suburbs were founded on class mobility and
constant movement in the form of commutes, countercultures positioning them-
selves against suburbanization revisited romantic and bohemian ideals about
wanderlust to reclaim mobility for the spiritually depleted subject’s sensational
nourishment.14 Refracted through the lens of queer migrations, meanwhile, we
might also construe this sensation-seeking mobility (predisposed to bustling
boulevards instead of small towns and single-family dwellings) as a form of spa-
tial and cultural privilege that has since become de rigueur for queer subjects.
Scott Herring has called this spatial momentum “compulsory urbanity,” an effect
of metronormativity’s discursive emergence during the second half of the twenti-
eth century.15 While we will explore genealogies of gay urbanity later in this chap-
ter, I want to focus here on the other genealogies of queer of color relocation
made possible by Chan’s attention to movement.
The “midnight train” Steve Perry famously falsettoed into being on Journey’s
Escape album is actually going “anywhere,” not somewhere in particular. A strik-
ing feature of Chan’s JJ Chinois website is that it, too, will go anywhere, refus-
ing to pass over the points of transit to and from emblematic sites of migration
and immigration like California and New York. While Chan’s JJ Chinois does
arrive at a designated destination, the route rather than the outcome becomes
the focal point of the project. Further, the affective resonance of these com-
pulsory relocations amplify the tensions between and among queer national
migrations and international immigration to the United States.16 Through JJ
Chinois’s journey, Chan analogizes her own migration from the suburbs to
New York City with her parents’ immigration to the United States from Hong
Kong. By situating JJ’s tour stops in chain stores and recreational centers within
the so-called flyover zones of the United States, Chan also offers an imagina-
tive remapping of local queer migrations to complement and complicate vari-
ous renditions of diaspora, which have inevitably focused on clustered, nation-
based relocations to urban ghettos (e.g., “Chinatowns”), rather than to rural or
suburban environments.17

32 Relocating Queer Critique

 This dialectic between diaspora and what I will define later as its ludic dou-
ble—dykeaspora—not only propels my analytic of queer suburban imaginar-
ies, but also refocuses our attention onto American imperialism as it traffics
across international borders (as well as within and through local landscapes
and architectures). While queer scholarship has addressed the consequences of
American imperialism in national and international contexts, queer studies has
yet to explore in depth how U.S. imperialism coincides with suburban expan-
sion after World War II and through the “conflicts” in Korea and Vietnam.18 By
placing Chan’s work in conversation with scholarship on queer migration as
well as suburban studies, I show how sexuality, race, and regionalism collide in
American imperial narratives. As Kandice Chuh explains, “The already com-
plex matter of understanding the position of U.S. racialized minorities is fur-
ther complicated by recognizing the United States as an imperial metropole.”19
That American imperialism manifests most vividly both architecturally and
ideologically in the nation’s suburbs as well as its metropolitan centers develops
as an important keynote of this entire book. Lynne Chan’s wacky, idiosyncratic
approach to imperial signifiers in various landscapes—in the rural, suburban,
and urban—sets the tone for my attempt to confront imperialism by “imagin-
ing otherwise” (to invoke Chuh). Perhaps using humor and kitsch to relocate
empire and diaspora in sites beyond the metropole has the potential to deflate
forms of imperial power that are only enhanced by the serious languages of
denial and burden.20
Before turning our attention completely to JJ’s journey, allow me to address
one of the most common complaints I received about my earlier approaches to
Chan’s work: that JJ Chinois’s settings are not always technically suburban. Mov-
ing from sites like Coalinga (an agricultural, exurban community just outside
Fresno, California) to Skowhegan, Maine (a Kennebec River Valley town with a
population of about nine thousand), Chan’s JJ Chinois projects show a procliv-
ity toward what we might call spatial promiscuity. And yet I would argue that
Chan’s promiscuity—her conflating and combining of spatial styles and citations
to conform to her site, or her virtual “lot”—is part of what establishes the very
suburbanness of her aesthetic. Structurally and conceptually, the suburban is the
mediation between the rural and the urban.
As of the 2000 U.S. Census, “rural” and “urban” remain the primary spatial
classifications used to analyze population data. (There are data-set distinctions
between “urbanized areas” and “urban clusters” that we can only assume are
meant to absorb suburban environments, but no official classification for the
suburbs exists at the Bureau of the Census to date.)21 Beyond filling the amor-
phous population gap between “the rural” and “the urban,” the suburban has
always stylistically combined the romance of rusticity with urban modernity.

33 Relocating Queer Critique

Other documents randomly have
different content
'What?'
'That I should marry his sister.'
'Oh!' with equal gravity, 'did he really make that stipulation?'
'Not in so many words, but there's such a thing as an honourable
understanding.'
'And pray, what does the sister say?'
'That remains to be proved. What does she say? Come, darling Bird,
had you really no notion?'
'I knew Mr. Fulmort wanted Clement to take St Matthew's, but I did
not think he would.'
'He said he left me to tell you, but I did not think he could have kept
it so entirely back.'
'But what is to become of Cherry?'
Will told her the designs as far as they had been unfolded to him,
and her eyes glistened with tears.
'Dear Willie,' she said, 'it is not that I am not thankful and glad, but
it comes so suddenly after all these long years, and it is so like
turning them out.'
'Not if we set up in the Vicarage—Rectory—I beg its pardon. Besides,
they'll be down here pretty often, and I shall never feel like anything
but Clement's curate. It is the most wholesome thing for me, that his
mode of coming up to breathe will be running down here to take
note of my shortcomings.'
'As if you meant to short come.'
'I don't mean, but I shall—if ever man needed whipper-in. So you
see I've taken care to provide myself. Seriously, I don't think I should
ever have worked up this place as Clement has done, but having
worked under him, and with you all about me, I trust not to let it
down. It is too good for me, that's a fact; but then it is not too good
for you.'
Robina was forced to hear, though she viewed her Will as far
superior to Clement, as indeed he was in intellect and largeness of
mind, though not in energy and power of work.
Earnestness and devotion were, as she well knew, deep and true in
him, though native indolence and carelessness were at continual
strife with them, and he was a man fitter for a small parish than a
large one, since study was his happiness, and he could make the
results beneficial to a wide circle, while Clement had no natural turn
for books, or for anything but downright practical ministerial labour.
The change could not be made quickly, William could not resign his
tutorship till the long vacation and Clement was to retain the
incumbency till the new church at East Ewmouth was consecrated
and the district separate, while an answer from Albertstown to Mr.
Fulmort's acceptance of the diocese must precede his resignation of
St Matthew's. So if restlessness had prompted Cherry's assent, she
had time to find it out. The outlook however seemed to lessen her
sense of dreariness, since it made her go through each sweet spring
pleasure as if storing up precious memories of him who had prized
them all, and as if this restored the power of feeling all things new.
She talked freely and affectionately of Robina's prospects,
encouraging the girl who felt her happiness rising out of the family
sorrow, and grew quite shame-faced about taking the measurements
of the Rectory, which she was to have the pleasure of furnishing out
of her own savings. Little had been heard of Lance since he had
seen Fulbert off on his second voyage. Postal cards and hurried
notes kept up intercourse with Cherry and the Harewoods, but
chiefly on the Pursuivant's behoof, and when he had met John in
London, about the executorship, he was reported looking thin but
well, and intensely busy.
In effect, he had set himself to master and estimate his business,
sadly enough, but there had been hope in his brother's farewell
letter, and to patient Lance a very small spark sufficed for a long
time.
He found himself fully capable of maintaining the level of the
Pursuivant. Not only did both Harewoods supply him with able
writings, but payment and circulation were such as to attract and
secure other contributors, and he, though he might not write fully up
to the mark of his more scholarly and better-read brother, had all the
requisites of an excellent editor, in trained facility, sagacity, common
sense, humour and power of arrangement. The paper showed no
tokens of declension, and the business flourished, Lance still
spending part of the day in the shop, and enjoying the intercourse
with his friendly customers all the more for the strong feeling they
had shown for his brother. His place as gentleman had long been
established, and he could always have had more society than he had
time for. He was invited to fill his brother's place in almost all his
capacities as citizen of Bexley, but to what could bind him
permanently, he showed some doubt about immediately pledging
himself. Moreover, Mrs. Froggatt was anxious to give up Marshlands
to him 'whenever he should settle.'
By Lady-day he was able to make an estimate of his situation and
prospects, and having done this, he wrote to Dr. May, laying the
statement before him, and begging to be told whether there were
any insuperable objection to his presuming to declare his attachment
to Miss Gertrude May. The letter was just in the formal style for
which Felix used to laugh at himself, but as the Doctor said, when
showing it to Ethel, it was thoroughly manly and straightforward,
without the least palaver about his position.
'No, I think he feels that his brother has ennobled it, so that he
would be ashamed to apologize for it.'
'What will the child say? She has been drooping ever since poor
Felix's death.'
'Long before! She flags the moment you are out of sight. I hate to
see her without her little spirts of naughtiness, and my heart aches
to think I ever wished to see her softened.'
'Poor Daisy-bud! It says much for her that her heart should have
gone out to such a man as that. Heigh-ho! those were good old
times, when one disposed of one's daughters without so much as
saying, "by your leave, miss."'
'Should you ever have done it?'
'Well,' said the Doctor, not choosing to answer the question, 'you
may tell him to come for Easter. I suppose that is his only time. He
would have been wiser to wait a bit longer—may be till this foreign
trip is over—that is if the child goes, and I don't believe she will.'
The Mays themselves had had a winter of sorrow. That living death
—for it had long hardly been life—of poor little Margaret Rivers had
come to an end in February. It was scarcely to be mourned. The
poor girl had, since her conscience had awakened, grieved so bitterly
over every outbreak of her own unhappy temper, and had suffered
so sadly from depression of spirits, that the peace of her final decay
had been an untold blessing. Even her mother, when she thought of
the dreary lot of a sickly, suffering, almost deformed heiress, could
not but resign herself to feel that 'it was well with the child.' Her
father, however, who had been spared much realisation of the
distress of body and mind, was restlessly unhappy at the loss, and
fancied he should cure his wife's sore heart by taking her to
Switzerland and the Tyrol; and Flora, in the desire to make the
journey a pleasure to somebody, and noticing Gertrude's pale
cheeks, proposed to take her. That whole last year, ever since her
Christmas at Vale Leston, Gertrude's whole treatment of her poor
little niece had been reversed; and she had changed from the
somewhat hard deportment to which young aunts are prone, to a
kindness which, being a late and unexpected boon, had been valued
by poor capricious Margaret beyond all the steady tenderness of her
grandfather and elder aunt. It had endeared Gertrude greatly to
Flora, and the benefit to the girl's spirits influenced her quite as
much as the advantage it would be to George to have some one to
conduct to the sights, which for his own part he did not care for.
Daisy herself gave no consent. 'To be lionised by George! Rather
worse than an excursion of Cook's,' she said; 'and fancy the
evenings!'
'It would be a kindness to George and Flora,' said Ethel.
'You horrid creature! That's to set my conscience worrying.'
'At least, there would be the coming home again.'
'That's the way you look on travelling!' said Gertrude, laughing a
little, but returning to her weary attitude, and Ethel abstained from
persuasion. She had not sufficient experience of change of scene to
believe greatly in its advantages, and though she was in favour of
the project, it was rather with a view to the fresh start it would make
for her sister at home than with the belief that either pictures or
mountains could be enjoyed under George Rivers's lumbering escort.
She expected that poor Lancelot Underwood's attempt would
precipitate the decision, when, in answer to her brief note of
invitation, he replied that he would arrive on Easter Eve.
'That's all right,' quoth the Doctor. 'He knows better than to come a-
courting on Good Friday.'
The day was not, however, exempt from a visitor; Dr. and Mrs.
Cheviot were away for the holidays, and the Mays were the more
surprised to see Mr. Rupert Cheviot, with his dapper little umbrella,
issue from the professor's door to join them on their way to church.
Except that they would have preferred not to talk at all on such a
day, there was no fault to find with him; he was subdued and proper
behaved, and had a good deal to say about Ammergau. He had not
been so much at Stoneborough within the last few months, and
Ethel suspected that he had been warned by Tom to give his sister
time to recover from her winter's grief. To her, he was amusing, he
was a candid, lively, pleasant person, and rated her more highly than
she was used to from her sister's lovers, and seldom came in her
way without holding a lively tournament in the language of jest, but
with a good deal of earnest in it, and she saw enough stuff in him to
make his self-complacency not so obnoxious to her as it was to her
juniors. She was not sorry that Gertrude's aversion to him was so
strong, but she thought it rather instinctive than reasonable. He was
a man whose opinions and disposition would right themselves in
process of time, but the having Daisy bound to him during the
process was quite another thing.
So when Gertrude proposed walking to Abbotstoke Church in the
afternoon she readily agreed, perceiving that it was far more
because Cocksmoor was too obvious a resort than for the sake
either of Flora, flowers for decoration, or even of Dickie, who could
not be refused to his uncle for this sorrowful holiday.
And when George Rivers returned to the charge, and again promised
to show the Alps through the Mont Cenis tunnel, Gertrude accepted
—accepted definitively! Yes, she would go, and she talked fast and
eagerly of the pleasures she anticipated.
But when walking home with Ethel, she did not utter one voluntary
word.
'What time did you say young Underwood was coming?' asked the
Doctor at breakfast next morning.
'He did not say the time,' said Ethel.
'Which?' asked Gertrude.
'Lancelot,' said Ethel, who had put off the announcement in hopes of
doing it naturally till she had grown absolutely nervous about it.
'Not for advice?' in a startled voice.
'Can no one come here but for advice?'
'He was ill last year.'
'Aye,' muttered the Doctor, 'and got advice that he has taken pretty
effectually.'
Whereupon Ethel, feeling horribly and ridiculously conscious, jumped
up and talked of Cocksmoor decorations. Gertrude had insisted on
making them up at Cocksmoor instead of at home. It would be a
little further out of reach of 'the enemy,' and in the parsonage the
sisters and Richard worked unmolested all the morning, but in the
afternoon, while they were putting up their wreaths, there drove up
to the lych-gate Mrs. Thomas May in her donkey chair, bringing her
choice manufacture of crosses and devices, escorted by her sister
Ella Ward and Rupert Cheviot. It was too cold and damp for her to
venture into church, but Richard hastened out to beguile her into his
parlour, and refresh her with tea, while Mr. Cheviot helped to carry in
her contributions, the very crown and glory of the whole, looking
about with the critical suggestive patronage of a man who had seen
the world, and making recommendations which Ella eagerly
seconded, and Ethel did not disapprove, but Gertrude combatted
vehemently: 'It had never been so! Richard would not like it!' and
out she hurried to appeal to him and call him to the rescue.
Rupert Cheviot moved to the door, perhaps in hopes of mitigating
her, but as she reached the lych-gate, a young man in deep black
came up on the other side, and their hands met with something in
the manner that made Mr. Cheviot turn to Ella Ward and ask, 'Who is
that fellow?'
'That? Oh! one of the Underwoods. The one in the business.'
'What business?'
'Oh! he's a printer, a bookseller rather. Those Underwoods pretend to
be county people, but they are nothing really but tradesmen.'
'Mr. Cheviot is not so behindhand with the world as to think that a
reproach,' said Ethel, as she caught the words, while coming
forward, and over her spectacles she gave Ella one of the repressive
glances which the young lady felt in her backbone. She was not at
all a bad sort of girl, but the ingrain likeness to her brother Henry
grew with her growth, and she had just come to the age when to
get any sort of notice from any young gentleman was the prime
object of her desires. Rupert Cheviot, of course, at Ethel's words
went forward, and on being introduced to Mr. Lancelot Underwood,
shook hands with him with rather unnecessary empressement.
Gertrude at once appealed to Lance's taste, 'Was it not the thing to
have the festoons hanging loose and natural, not in stiff lines?'
'It is our way at St. Oswald's,' said Lance, 'but at Vale Leston
Clement holds to following the architectural lines.'
'Ah! Vale Leston. Is not that a remarkable specimen of the later Early
Pointed? I must run over some day and see it.'
'It is a very fine tower. Aren't there plenty of owls' nests in it?' said
Gertrude, with a perfectly grave voice, but which brought an odd
thrill of mingled amusement, pleasure, and pain, as the conviction
crossed him that this was the rival owl of the academy, and he
recognised the likeness to the photograph. Perhaps Gertrude was
only too strongly reminded of Cherry's sketch of himself, for between
grief, hard work, and anxiety, he was very thin-cheeked and large
eyed, and she was by no means clear that he had not come to
consult her father professionally, and that the odd answer she had
received in the morning had not been an evasion.
Richard came in with a casting vote in favour of the architectural
style, at which Gertrude shrugged her shoulders but submitted. Ere
long a messenger appeared with the candlesticks adorned by Mrs.
May, and a message that she could not stay later; and Richard,
going to see after her, brought back her urgent desire that Gertrude
would return at the same time. Tom said she had not been strong,
and must not be out after sunset.
'O, I dare say,' said Gertrude.
'There's no more than I can easily finish alone,' said Richard.
'Indeed! Look at the font!'
'The wreaths are all ready. She really ought not to stay,' he added to
Ethel; 'you know there is always a sudden chill when you come
down the hill late, and as Ave says, the child is not in health to take
liberties.'
Ethel went up to Gertrude and whispered, 'We must give in, Daisy,
we shall have a fuss if we don't.'
She had almost said she did not care, but it was in church, and she
abstained, only adding, 'You'll come too.'
Ethel assented, though it was the ruin of the quiet Easter Eventide
walk her father must have meant them to have when he sent Lance
to meet them there. All that could be done was to keep together. In
general Rupert Cheviot was content to get up a discussion with the
elder sister, but he must have scented a rival, for whether Gertrude
walked fast or slow, she still found him by her side, preventing all
the inquiries she was burning to make about Geraldine, and the
reported changes, things that could not brook discussion before a
stranger. She did manage, while Rupert was tucking in a loosened
fold of Averil's cloak, to say, 'I suppose Geraldine has no picture for
the exhibition this year. She has not finished her Academies.'
'No. They are nearly done, but she has not touched them for a long
time now. There is a very pretty little group of some of the village
children that she did last summer, but I don't think she will send it
up.'
'What became of the Maid of Lorn?'
'Of course, Lady Caergwent bought it.'
There Rupert Cheviot swooped down. 'Are you any relation of Miss
Underwood who painted that capital likeness of Lady Caergwent?
Then I congratulate you. But is it not a great pity she does not paint
in oils? There is so much more satisfaction in them.'
And no more was possible than walking five abreast, close in the
rear of the donkey chair; a desultory, almost mechanical skirmish
going on between Ethel and Rupert Cheviot, interspersed with
occasional pert remarks from Ella and tart ones from Gertrude.
When presently Rupert began to talk of some lectures which were to
be given in May, she made quick answer, 'I shan't be here. I am
going abroad with the Riverses.'
This of course started the experienced vacation tourist, an Alpine
clubbist, into all kinds of counsels and inquiries, evidently with a
view to meeting the party on their route; but though Gertrude took
care to assure him that she should be at home long before his free
time, the tidings of her intended journey were, as Ethel could hear,
in his very footsteps, reducing Lance to the brink of despair.
He had not recovered it when they came home, and was besides in
the embarrassed state of a man who had made his purpose only too
well known to the spectators; but that quality which had been
audacity in his boyish days, enabled him to revive and return free
and grateful answers to Dr. May's inquiries into the family plans and
welfare.
But when the evening meals in the two houses were over there was
nothing to prevent Tom May and his friend from strolling up the
garden to the elder house, whence sounds of music were audible.
It was from the 'Messiah,' for Dr. May had asked for 'He was
despised and rejected of men,' unwitting that a Sunday evening a
year and a quarter ago it had rung on Gertrude's ears in a voice
that, in such a passage as this, Lance's reproduced with startling,
thrilling exactness.
Gertrude sat in a dark corner, with streaming eyes and heaving sobs.
It was almost more than she could bear, till her tears were dried by
vexation at hearing a connoisseur kind of compliment, while Dr. May
observed, 'I did not know what an instrument it was you thought
you were losing when you asked me about it, Lance.'
'I have seldom heard it surpassed, except by first professionals!' said
Mr. Cheviot. 'May I ask what teaching you had?'
'I was a choir boy at Minsterham,' said Lance, in his straightforward
way.
'Oh! I did not know cathedrals gave such advantages. Ah! I see you
have "My Queen" here, Gertrude. May we not have it?'
It would have been an utter impossibility even if it had not been as
the Doctor said, speaking up for her. 'We do not have that style of
thing this week.'
'Quite right, sir; one forgets.'
What! was he going to patronise Dr. May? And then he began to talk
of the choruses at Ammergau.
'I do believe,' exclaimed Gertrude, as she parted with her sister at
night, 'that he has primed himself with it on purpose.'
'I think he was really impressed there, and that it has done him
good.'
'I believe you have a turn for him! I should not mind if he would only
not come here bothering poor Lance. How worn he looks! Mind,
Ethel, you tell me if Papa says anything about him. I could not bear
for poor Geraldine to have any more troubles.'
'Very well,' said Ethel, 'but I do not think there is anything amiss
with his health.'
'He has with his spirits though, and spirits tell on health; his
especially. Now, Ethel, I know Rupert Cheviot always was a hero of
yours.'
'A most unjustifiable interpretation of my not hating the poor man as
much as you do,' said Ethel, much amused.
'I will say for him you are the one person he never patronizes. But I
want you to look at the contrast, Ethel, between the two owls—
simplicity and self-complacency; and when one really has such a
splendid talent.'
'Yes, a double first class man,' said Ethel, in wilful mischief,
exceedingly tickled at Lance's unconscious auxiliary, though sorry for
him.
'Who cares for a first class?' exclaimed contemptuous Daisy. 'It only
makes people intolerable.'
Nevertheless Lance did not spend by any means the happy Easter
Sunday he had figured to himself, and many times felt that he would
have done better to have deferred the crisis of his hopes and
anxieties till the great feast day was at an end. For the May family
were beset by Rupert Cheviot from morning till night, and Lance was
tormented at moments when he most desired to free himself from
the whole subject, by instinctive perception of his rivalry, and sense
of the small chance that he, the half-educated tradesman, could
have beside the brilliant, successful scholar, in a gentleman's
position, and rising fast.
That Gertrude was cross was plain enough, and much more so to
the Owl of the Academy than to the Owl of the Church tower; but
Lance was sufficiently aware of the wayward nature of the damsel to
ascribe her contradictoriness to the rampant coyness of inclination,
and her civility to himself to kindness to her father's guest, Felix's
brother and a manifest inferior, like the chemist at Ewmouth. Then
her foreign tour was so often mentioned that it seemed to him that
her father must have intended it as a diversion after all the
agitations she had undergone, and that his coming had only been
encouraged in order to put an end to the whole affair, and dispose of
him and his presumption as soon as possible. So that all the
kindness he received from the Doctor and Ethel only went for
compassion, and he tossed about all night—true owl as he was for
sleeplessness—meditating on the coming death-blow to his hopes,
and whether it would be better to resign them in a conference with
her father, or to put his fate to the touch in person, since he had
gone so far that he could not hang back and do nothing.
The wan heavy-eyed countenance that came down in the morning
moved the Doctor to the observation to his elder daughter, 'Daisy
has got a fellow there more finely strung than most men. I hope she
will comport herself accordingly. Tantrums won't do with that sort of
organization.'
Ethel most decidedly put herself out of the way that morning,
resolved not to make the holiday serve as a plea from absenting
herself from the Monday care she bestowed on sundry charities, and
declining the aid Gertrude offered, as a refuge from possible inroads
from the Cheviot.
'You had better not waste your opportunities,' said Ethel; 'I dare say
Mr. Underwood would show you the way through that thing of
Mozart's that you have been despairing over.'
'O no, Ethel,' with a glance at the pale face, but it suddenly grew
vividly bright as Lance said, 'If you are so kind as to be thinking of
my headache, I do assure you it is nothing at all—just what this
would be the best cure for.'
'Are you sure?' asked Gertrude solicitously.
'Quite,' he said, smiling. 'I should make no difference at all at home.
It is the sort that is defeated by taking no notice of them; and
music, and with you——'
'Would drive such ears as yours distracted, I should think,' said
Gertrude, nevertheless consenting. 'You see I have tried to follow
your advice, but what I have never heard, and have no one to
interpret, becomes a mere wilderness to me.'
Lance knew that in his native language of melody he should,
birdlike, win courage, but hardly was his finger on the keys before
Daisy leapt up in a kind of fury. 'There's that eternal Owl coming
down the garden! Come this way,' and she rushed away, beckoning
him to follow her into the schoolroom. 'There, the windows look out
the other way! It is too intolerable to be taken in the rear! I'll not
stand it any longer! The Moss troopers in the morning indeed!'
Both were full of that odd sort of exhilaration always inspired by hide
and seek with a visitor, and Lance looked about and recognised the
room. 'I have been here before,' he said, 'when you showed me your
aquarium.'
'Ah! the Daisiana. You were the hero of that watery adventure,
though we little thought that small boy Charlie was to come forth in
such colours! What an age ago it seems! I should like to see the
Kitten's tail again.'
'Should you? I am sure Cherry would manage it! It would be——'
'Only too full of recollections,' said Gertrude, with a little shudder. 'It
was the first time I ever saw——'
Instead of answering, Lance took a miniature from his breast and
put it into her hand. She drew in her breath with a gasp. 'How
beautiful!' she said, and gazed on through one of the tear mists that
can almost convert a portrait into a presence. It was a long time
before she said, 'This is better than the first.'
'Each that Cherry has finished has brought out some fresh
expression. You like it?'
'O, so much!'
'Will you keep it?'
'She was only to do one for each of you.'
'Don't you remember what he called you?'
Gertrude held the picture to her lips for a moment, wiped a tear
from the glass and said, 'That dear Cherry hasn't been doing it for
me.'
'N-no, not exactly.'
'Then it is yours! Oh! that is not right. Only let me have a
photograph.'
'I had rather you kept this.'
'I could not! I must not! I ought not,' putting it from her like a
temptation.
'Nay, it is yours by every right. By that which makes it unspeakably
precious to me to give you my very best and dearest, and by a
better right of your own, of affection,' he said, eagerly.
She gave a little cry.
'Don't start,' he said. 'Perhaps I ought not to have said so, but when
one watches with feelings such as mine, one sees——.'
She leant back, hiding her face, and crying quietly but unreservedly.
'If he had been like most men,' said Lance, 'if he had not made his
whole life a sacrifice and had ever let himself out, I fully believe he
would have given you the right. I felt and knew he had never been
so near caring for any one.'
She looked up with glowing face, and moist eyes, and tried to say
something, but could only utter 'No! It would be too—too much to
dare to think so.'
And as she thought of that interview, she wept more than before,
though they were scarcely sad tears. Lance longed for the right to
soothe her, but only durst lay his hand on the back of her chair. 'If
anything could make you more dear to me,' he said, bending over
her, 'it would be this! Nobody else so revered that great heart. I
thought I knew him best, but every day at Bexley brings up so many
tokens of what he was that I seem to have only known him by half.'
'Tell me.'
And Lance told many an instance of the doings of Felix's right hand
unknown to his left, and she listened with all her soul. It was more
than half an hour before she said, 'Then are you all alone?'
'With Mrs. Froggatt for the present, but I have decided on nothing
permanently. My dear brother told me I need not hold on, nor do I
think I can without a ray of hope.'
'What would you do?' she said, a thrill or two having half but
indefinitely revealed to her his drift.
'I don't know yet! Nor care! Most likely, try what music in Germany
or Italy would do for me.'
'O, don't go!' cried Gertrude, 'don't!'
'Do you tell me not?'
'I don't know, but oh! my heart has ached, ached, ached, all this
time, and somehow it aches rather less when you are here!'
'Dearest!' he exclaimed.
'Stay,' she said, pushing back her hair, and looking scared. 'I don't
think it fair. You know I never could, if—if——-.'
'Of course not; I understand that,' said Lance; 'but is not that what I
love you ten thousand times more for?'
'But I shall always care most for him!'
'Yes, yes, I know you must; but now I know that some day you may
care a little for me, I can wait patiently, any time you please.'
'And not hate it all, nor go away?'
'Never, while you bid me stay.'
He broke off as steps came along the passage, and a maid's knock,
and 'Mr. Rupert Cheviot is in the drawing-room, ma'am.'
'Miss May is out,' said Gertrude emphatically.
The maid had sentiment enough to abstain from saying he had
asked for both sisters, but the next moment she returned to say he
had asked for Miss Gertrude.
'Tell him I am particularly engaged,' she said, leaping up indignantly.
'Aye!' she exclaimed, 'I will be delivered from that prig of Tom's. He
shall never pester me more.'
'There is an effectual way of preventing that,' said Lance, with a
lurking smile.
'Well, I suppose it must come to that sooner or later, and I do trust
you not to tease and bother.'
'I will strive to make your feeling the rule, not of mine, but of my
demonstration of it,' said Lance, tingling all over with suppressed
ecstasy; 'that is, as far as I can help.'
'I can't understand your liking it! An old, dry, used-up heart!'
'But on whom? I am but too content with——'
A rapid booted tread was at the door; it was hastily opened.
'Gertrude, what's the meaning?' said the professor. 'Oh! I beg your
pardon, Mr. Underwood.' This with withering politeness, and the
door was shut again.
'He is going to Papa,' Gertrude laughed, with her natural
mischievous triumph; then, laying her hand on Lance's arm, she
exclaimed, 'Now, whatever you do, promise me not to be bullied into
giving up the shop;' then, lowering her tone to its former
tenderness, 'What he could do is good enough for any one.'
'So I feel,' said Lance, 'though I could drop it, if you wished. My
personal share in the retail trade I mean, of course, not the
editorship, for that is my sheet-anchor.'
'The Pursuivant! I thought I never could touch it again.'
'His poor Pur,' repeated Lance. 'I must show you this note, though I
am ashamed. And he bade me give you this;' as from the depths of
a business-like pocket-book he extracted an envelope, and from it
the note and dried piece of myrtle. She greeted it with a little cry,
and fresh tears. 'Ah! he said you would remember,' said Lance.
'Remember! I should think I did! Didn't he tell you?'
'I know nothing but what he wrote here. He left this for me to have,
after it was all over.'
'I see! I see! O, I am glad you did not give it me at first. Dear, dear
thing! Now I know! That day when he came here he made me
gather it for him, and told me he had one great wish, and I was to
remember it when I saw this.'
'And that great wish?' It was an odd sort of wet-eyed smile of
Lance's, but then she had rested her head against him. 'Did you
know it?'
'I don't know. It was the day I was half wild with misery and a
strange sort of gladness together, only one could not break out with
his calm eye on one—the day he came here, and Papa told him what
was the matter with him. Then he sat with me, and he said things to
me that made me feel as I had never done before. He didn't mean
it, I know, for it was all telling me how it was with him, and how, if
he were well, he never could have thought in that way of any one. It
just made me feel that his saying it to me showed——'
'Showed what might have been,' said Lance. 'Yes, it was more than
direct words would have been from any one else.'
'And he kept on mixing in things about you, and what you had been
to him, but I wouldn't see what he was driving at; for, Lance, I must
tell you now it did make me feel to love—love him really—and not be
ashamed; if he thought me worth telling all that—and it was so nice
to be able, however it was to end, that I did not want to do anything
else, and I couldn't bear the sound of your name then, though when
I remember that look, and that wish, and see the spray of myrtle,
Lance, I must have had you if you had been—as bad as Rupert
Cheviot himself.'
But she actually did lift up her face with a look that allowed him to
bend down and kiss it, as he said, 'See, he only told me to give it
you, when—not on those terms. Though you are doubly precious,
because I shall ever feel you to be his gift.'
She had certainly accepted infinitely more than he could have dared
to anticipate from her outset, and now she was perhaps glad of the
respite afforded by reading the letter that he had put into her hand,
and which lasted till again came steps.
'Papa this time,' she whispered, as he opened the door, calling,
'Ethel, here's Tom in a—Hollo, I thought you were in the drawing-
room.'
'Don't go,' they cried with one voice, and Gertrude, saying, 'May I? I
must!' put Felix's letter into his hand.
He pushed up his spectacles to read it, but he could not do so dry-
eyed, and Lance turned aside blushing and embarrassed.
'Dear fellow!' he exclaimed. 'Well—that's a pretty good testimonial to
bring in your hand, Lance.'
'You must not believe half of that, sir,' said Lance huskily.
'Eh, Daisy, mus'n't I? And pray what am I to say to Tom about your
shocking behaviour in denying yourself to Mary's brother-in-law?
Music lessons have been dangerous things ever since the gamut of
Hortensio.'
'May I? He knows!' was Lance's eager question to Gertrude, as he
took her hand and looked up mutely, but with lustrous eyes, to the
Doctor.
'So you have made it right, children. There, then, Lancelot
Underwood, you have got my youngest darling, and I can tell you I
never made one of them over with greater confidence and comfort.
If we have spoilt our most motherless one, you know what that is,
and there's good stuff in her too. Indeed, I never thought so well of
the chit before.'
'I'm sure I didn't,' said the chit herself dreamily, causing them both
to smile, and Lance to mutter something inarticulately foolish and
happy, but the clang of the dinner-bell startled them, and they
sprang away to their rooms during the five minutes' law; while Ethel,
coming in from the street, met her father in the hall, smiling
unutterable things. 'No!' she exclaimed. 'You don't mean it! I didn't
think she could so soon!'
'I fancy Lance may thank Tom and his great Rupert for that.'
'He did worry her intolerably! Oh! papa, I trust it is no mistake.'
'I think not, Ethel. Once accepted, the warm living outcome of
affection cannot fail to be infinitely better than the dream she has
been brooding over so long, and as saint-worship it will hurt neither
of them. Ah well! I should have liked the other to be one of us, but it
was not to be. He was the making of our Daisy, and this one is his
equal in all but what age only can give.'
'Ah! I always wished to see Daisy in love,' said Ethel, rather as if the
wish had recoiled upon her.
'What's to be done now? There's the Grange carriage,' exclaimed the
Doctor.
Yes, Flora, George, and Dickie, all had driven in to lunch at the early
dinner, and to face those cheeks whose glow no cold water could
moderate, those eyes that shone strangely under downcast lids.
In fact, Mr. Rivers had been so much pleased by Gertrude's consent
to the Swiss expedition that he had given his wife no peace till she
had come to arrange it. Gertrude was taken aback. 'Oh dear!' she
exclaimed, 'I had forgotten all about it.'
'Forgotten!' Poor Mr. Rivers looked at her with all the amazement
and reproach his lustreless black eyes could express.
'I remember now, George,' she faltered, colouring unreasonably; 'it
was very kind.'
'But you promised, Daisy,'
'We will talk it over, George,' said her father, coming to her rescue,
as in her increasing softness she looked down convicted. 'You see, I
have not been consulted.'
George took this in earnest, and lumbered into an apology, while
Dickie rather unrestrainedly laughed, and said, 'Grandpapa, when
does Aunt Daisy consult you?'
'When she has made up her mind,' said the Doctor, with a glance at
her.
But Daisy would at that moment have been thankful enough to
consult him. True, the sentiment she had felt before had scarcely
been love, so repressed and undeveloped had it been; and the flood
of bliss, the wonderful sense of affection that had mastered her, was
something entirely unlike the slow, measured way in which, even at
the first moment of her half-consent, she had fancied yielding to
Lance. In this one half-hour he had acquired a place with her so
entirely independent of his being Felix's brother, nay, so substantially
dearer than Felix himself, that she was half ashamed of her present
self, half shocked at having called her former feelings by the name
of love, and wholly and foolishly in despair at the notion of a six
weeks' tour away from Lance.
Thus Ethel found her, when, on the break up of the dinner, she stole
a few moments of consultation with the two young lovers before
following her father and the Riverses to the drawing-room.
'Oh! Ethel, what shall I do?' Daisy was saying with tears in her eyes.
'Isn't it a judgment on me for ever saying I would go! I only did it
because that Rupert baited me so, and I was so miserable I was
ready to go anywhere out of his way.'
'But is it not a pity you should not go?' said Lance.
'What, you?'
'You know I cannot be much away from Bexley, so it would not make
much difference that way,' he said, blushing; 'and I am afraid you
will have to lead a very humdrum life; so had you not better see a
little of the world?'
'I shall hate it all. Oh! Ethel, get me off! Things like this are acts of
oblivion, you know.'
'I certainly would if it were for your pleasure,' said Ethel,
thoughtfully; 'but you see this is the first thing that has seemed to
do poor George Rivers any good.'
'And,' said Lance, affectionately, 'surely, dearest, it can do our
happiness no harm to try to lend a little of it to others.'
'Ethel!' she cried out, 'I do believe he is going to make me good.
There! I give in; I'll go, and not be more a victim than I can help.'
'Lance,' said Ethel, 'by-the-by, I've never congratulated you. Just tell
me—suppose you were asked to go too, could you?'
He considered a moment, shutting his eyes as the brightened face
looked up to him. 'I don't like to say no,' he answered; 'it is an
immense temptation, but there is nobody to take my place on the
spur of the moment, and at this time of year too. Indeed, if I went
now, besides upsetting everything, it might hinder me from getting a
holiday later, when we might want it more,' he added, crimsoning.
'I see,' said Ethel. 'Do you know, Daisy, I've a great mind to go
instead of you.'
'O you old darling duck of an Ethel! I should as soon have thought of
asking the gate-post. But if you would! Oh! wouldn't I take good
care of Papa.'
'Yes, I think you would, Daisy, and it is my last chance, you see. I
believe I shall do as well for George to lionize.'
'And be a dozen times better for Flora—and write such letters!'
'So here goes.'
'Now, Lancelot, if you don't delight in that Ethel of mine beyond
every other creature—I suppose, for human nature's sake, I must let
Cherry come first, but if I thought you would snub her like Charles,
or patronise her like George, or even be hail fellow well met with her
like Hector, I'd never let you into the family! Now—' as signs of
clearing the dinner became evident—'I'll get my hat: there's no place
to sit in in the house.'
Ethel's proposition was received with rapture.
George and Flora had just been informed by the Doctor how the
case stood. They had been far too much absorbed in their own
sorrows to mark the course of Daisy's feelings, but Flora had seen
enough at luncheon to be prepared for the disclosure. Nobody could
like his position, and she did not pretend to do so; but she saw it
was of no use to expostulate, and abstained from letting her
husband perceive, as she did, how entirely that of a tradesman it
was.
'I am sorry it was not Rupert Cheviot,' was all she said, 'and very
sorry not to take Daisy with us; but it is no use to coerce her, even if
one could. She would be no good now.'
So Ethel was the more warmly accepted. Even the Doctor was
happier that Flora should have her sister with her, and liked the
notion of a tête-à-tête with his Daisy ere she was transplanted; and
as to Flora, her gratitude on her own and her husband's account
knew no bounds.
'Dear, dear old Ethel!' she said; 'such a life-long sister as you,
bearing with one, and forgiving one through all, is as sweet and
precious a relationship as almost any the world has to give!'
[1] To this it had been raised from the original 250l. partly by the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and partly by Mr. Fulmort's brother
and Miss Charlecote. (author)

CONCLUSION.

'Now for the double wedding!' said Mother Constance, as one

September evening the Reverend Charles Audley entered the
Superior's room in the temporary daughter-house at East Ewmouth.
'What should an old blind Australian know of gay weddings?'
'Don't you know that to hear of mundane festivities is the delight of
convents?'
'The festivities were to no great extent.'
'Of course not, but you must begin at the beginning, for I lost all
knowledge of everybody and thing that had not got small-pox.'
For the malady had been raging in a town at the other end of
England, and the special hospital where she and her staff had done
service had only just closed, and quarantine was over, so that she
could return.
'Which is the beginning?'
'Mine are only confused lights since Lance brought his Daisy to see
me on their way to the sands by St. Kitt's Head. What a fresh
pleasant face it is! and with a spice of originality in it, too.'
'Commend me to the elder sister's. Leonard Ward had prepared me
for it, when I met him circulating among the unhappy deported
Melanesians in Queensland. I believe she was the making of him,
and a noble work he is.'
'Come, I can't let you go back to the Antipodes. Miss May was
abroad at that time, and plans were not in the least fixed, only that
Lance should not give up the retail business.'
'No, he said very justly, that if he did so, Mrs. Lamb would never be
contented without her husband doing the same, and that would be
destruction. When I went down to the S.P.G. meeting at Bexley, I
saw a good deal how the land lay, and found that all the neighbours
were quite ready to visit Lance's wife, and she will live at Marshlands
in a very different style from the old times we remember. I am afraid
Mrs. Lamb will be a trial, but she is prepared for that.'
'It was an excellent plan to have the weddings together at
Stoneborough. They could hardly have borne another here.'
'No. There was a proposal that Will and Robina should be married at
Minsterham, but they rather shrank from that, and the De la Poers
wrote urgently to persuade her to have the wedding at Repworth,
but she saw he disliked it, and then Miss May came forward and
undertook to manage it all, "being inured to such affairs," as she put
it; but there was an old promise in an unguarded moment that all
their young Ladyships should be bridesmaids, and they held to it: so
Lord and Lady De la Poer brought a bevy of daughters to the Swan
at Stoneborough, and you had better be prepared, for they are
coming to see Vale Leston to-morrow, and probably will come on
here. Nice people, exceedingly fond of Robina. I never saw such
loads of wedding presents. Lady Caergwent gives a great Russian
samovar, labelled for "school feasts."'
'I suppose Fernan—I beg his pardon, Mr. Travis Underwood—did not
give another diamond bouquet.'
'No. The common sense keeping he has got into showed itself in the
choice of all the household plate, just the same, for each of the
couples.'
'And Angela was not there, I know. Our Mother wrote to me that the
poor child was so distressed at the notion of going that as they did
not make a point of it, she thought it better not to send her. I think
she will soon be allowed to become a postulant. It seems evidently
the life she needs. But who were Miss May's bridesmaids?'
'She set her face against any but her sister and Geraldine—would
hear of no one else, though Cherry had always avoided it before.
They called themselves the elderly bridesmaids. What! does the
conventual mind require to know what they wore? Not the same as
Robina's, who had white and blue ribbons; but they were in—what
do you call it?—a Frenchified name for some kind of purple.'
'Mauve?'
'Yes, mauve with white fixings; very becoming to Cherry.'
'Who married them?'
'It was a joint performance of Mr. Wilmot, Richard May, and myself,
but we had a characteristic hitch. They gave my couple the first turn,
and when I held out the book for the ring, my bridegroom began
fumbling in his pocket and reddening up to the roots of his red hair,
while poor Robina's eyes grew rounder and rounder under her veil,
and Clement rose taller and taller behind her, looking as if just cause
or impediment had arisen, and he only wished he had not been
commanded to hold his peace.'
'Did you marry them with the key of the door?'
'Not exactly—Lance's long hand came in between with the ring in his
palm.'
'Only one between the two couples?'
'No, Bill had asked Lance to get both together, and had never
claimed his own. It was a fine incident to tease him about, but he
says he has his memory made fast to him now for ever. After all,
Lance gave him the wrong one, and the brides had to change
afterwards.'
'So they were married with each other's rings?'
'Yes, and I don't think they much regret it.'
'Where are they gone?'
'To see little Stella in her glory, and the other two are bound to a
great Rhenish musical festival, and to hear the Freiburg and Lucerne
organs. They went off together in the same railway carriage, and
were only to part in London. The whole affair was as quiet as
possible. I am glad it was at Stoneborough. Dr. May filled the place
that neither Clement nor Harewood could have borne to take.'
'And you have not told me of Cherry or Clement.'
'You will see them to-morrow, and I think you will be satisfied about
Cherry. The wrench last July was dreadful; both she and Clement
say that they could never have made up their minds to it if they had
known the grief it would cause in the village, and the partings they
would undergo, but it has certainly been good for her. She looks
well, and she says that though a little while ago she felt as if she
had nothing to hope or fear, a month of Whittingtonia has shown her
enough to engross a hundred lifetimes.'
'And little Gerald?'
'He walks better, and he is exceedingly happy at Stoneborough.
Dickie May, the Archdeacon's son, you know, a fine fellow of
fourteen, is so kind to him, teaches him to make models, and I fancy
has secured that admiration little boys pay to big ones. They say the
poor little fellow will probably outgrow his weakness and do well in
the end, but that he must be kept at home for a good many years.'
'At which I suppose Cherry cannot repine.'
'No; he is her delight; and with Bernard to give the element of
manhood and spirit, I don't think he will be spoilt, for Clement is
sure to be strict enough. I never saw any one more improved than
Bernard, by-the-by; he is grown into a reasonable being, and as
devoted and attentive to Cherry as they all are. I am sure she is
happier even now than she ever thought to be again! There was as
much smile as tear when she told me that she was coming to see
Felix and Theodore to-morrow, and to admire Wilmet in the Priory.
She is carrying on a gleam from the past sunshine of her life.'
'She is learning to pleurer son Albert gaîment,' said Mother
Constance. 'So we must when the pillars of our joy are taken from
us here. And sooner or later we can do so, if we can believe of them
that they have become pillars that shall never be removed, with the
new Name written upon them, in the House of the Lord above.'
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PILLARS OF
THE HOUSE; OR, UNDER WODE, UNDER RODE, VOL. 2 (OF 2) ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States
copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy
and distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the
General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree
to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease
using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for
keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the
work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement
by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full
Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge
with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it,
give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country
where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of
the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
 containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute

this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must,
at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy,
a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy
upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive
from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
 payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt
that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project
Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com