Some queerish outcomes of archives....

Here I am just re-editing some photographs from an archive I used in Street Noises and commented at some length. In my view the archive - or at least these images - was first turned up to the light of day in the wonderful Cahiers gais, kitsch, camp, but appeared there without comment. 

I rediscovered them after what seemed like fruitless months in the Archives Nationales, remember, no digital catalogues, trying to make the words homosexual, invert, sailor, legionnaire rhyme and coincide. 

The outcome was this extraordinary record of the surveillance of homo sailors in Toulon and their friends, admirers and, sometimes, clients. Florence Tamagne rediscovered them again in her big book on Homosexuality, but without acknowledging either the Cahiers or me - (I often giggle at the provincialism of French scholarship....Anyway pics, then some pages from Street Noises.)

Entre temps, let me say, that these PERFORMANCES remind me why I never went with the Butlerian performative, that somehow, for me, traduced both J L Austin and gaiety..

The cover picture Hélène Hourmat gave me for Street Noises shares this poetic, uncannily, and that, if you like, is the pathos formel, an involuntary memory of an affect. It helped me to write, having this image in mind,

 www.helenehourmat.com

 So here are four pages from long-out-of-print SN on the sailors......... jpegs