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Page-Turner

Between Us: A Queer Theorist’s Devoted Husband an

Enduring Legacy
By Jane Hu December 9, 2015

The late Eve Sedgwick, pictured here at an exhibit

of her art in 2003, leaves behind a sizable archive
of her pioneering work in queer theory and gender
studies.
Photograph courtesy Hal Sedgwick

During their nearly forty-year marriage, Hal and Eve Sedgwick almost never lived
together. Eve, the pioneering queer theorist and author of “Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire” and “The Epistemology of the Closet,” among
many other books, died in 2009. Hal still maintains both of their separate apartments,
near Union Square in Manhattan. Hers functions as a kind of archive space, holding
everything from her books and manuscripts to her textiles and her stuffed panda-bear
collection, almost all lovingly labelled and stored. Sedgwick’s cat, Wabi Sabi, also surviv
her, and lives in the apartment, too.

For Hal, the aims of the archive are simple. “I want Eve’s work to continue to be availab
I can’t predict who will benefit from it, who will make use of it, or what they will do wit
it. But I know that there is enormous generative power in her work, and I don’t want th
ever to be lost.” Sedgwick’s archive will remain with Hal until he finds an institutional
home for it.

In the meantime, critics are engaging with Sedgwick’s work in other ways. There have
been special issues of academic journals devoted to her legacy, and conferences
commemorating her many important publications. Hal showed me around Eve’s archiv
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the day after the most recent of these conferences, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary
“Between Men,” a groundbreaking book that popularized the term “homosocial.” At the
conference, Jennifer Crewe, the president of Columbia University Press, recalled how
typists working on it constantly rendered the word as “homosexual” because of just how
unusual the term was in 1985.

“Between Men” not only put Sedgwick on the map as a queer theorist, it helped to
establish the field of queer literary analysis. Sedgwick became, as Rolling Stone once pu
it, “the soft-spoken queen of the constructionists.” (A speaker at the conference noted t
shocking disjunction between Sedgwick’s quiet speaking voice and the bold statements
she made in print.) The book was published during a heated period of the gay liberation
movement; as Wayne Koestenbaum notes in his forward to a new edition, the H.I.V.
retrovirus had been isolated a year before, and was formed just two years
afterward.

It was also a precarious period in Sedgwick’s professional life, when she was moving
among short-term academic appointments. “Eve had been at several jobs before she go
tenure and it was risky for her to write the book she did,” Cathy Davidson, a
Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate
Center, remarked at the conference. During an unsuccessful job interview at Harvard,
Sedgwick was advised that, since everyone only had “one good book” in them, and this
was clearly Sedgwick’s, she should save “Between Men” for later publication. Sedgwick
said she wouldn’t wait, because she wanted the book to be useful. And it was: “Between
Men” has continued to sell since its first release. Ultimately, Sedgwick was offered a
faculty position, with tenure, at Amherst College—nine years, and more than a hundred
job applications, after filing her dissertation.

Sedgwick infamously encountered detractors throughout her career: academics and

journalists, conservatives and liberals, gays and straights. At the “Between
Men” conference, Katie Kent described an incident at the third annual Lesbian and Gay
Studies Conference at Yale, in 1989, where Sedgwick presented a paper. Audience
members shouted out repeatedly, “Are you a lesbian?” One attendee said that the
audience was so disruptive that Sedgwick was forced at several moments to stop readin
her paper.

Critics continually asked Sedgwick to account for herself not on her own capacious term
but on theirs. “She was praised, but she was also criticized from every side—feminists w
didn’t know why she was talking about men, gay men who didn’t like her feminism,
lesbians who scorned her for being married,” Davidson said. “It’s easy to lionize and
forget what courage goes into that kind of lionization. That’s what made her brave and
prolific and wonderful and a Buddhist and inspiring and a teacher.”
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The inspiration that Sedgwick’s readers continue to find in her writing has much to do
with her capacity to get personal, sometimes confessional, even in an academic context
In “A Dialogue on Love,” an autobiographical blend of prose and poetry documenting h
years of psychotherapy following her breast-cancer diagnosis, she describes her sex life
detail. Her essay “A Poem Is Being Written” begins with “a claim for respectful attentio
to the intellectual and artistic life of a nine-year-old child, Eve Kosofsky,” and moves on
consider her teen-age depression. These moments in her work seem to enable readers t
pursue their own emotional and intellectual passions. “Obsessions,” Sedgwick writes in
her 1992 preface to “Between Men,” “are the most durable form of intellectual capital.”

Another word for obsessions might simply be love. Hal Sedgwick made considerable
contributions to the planning of the conference, but his name, I noticed, was nowhere o
the program. “Hal is not a loud or conspicuous person,” Davidson told me over the pho
“but he is entirely present intellectually.” Like Eve, Hal is soft-spoken; when I turned o
tape recorder, as we talked at her apartment on the day after the conference, he becam
even more so. In an e-mail after our meeting, he tried to explain why. “I was surprised
the effect it created for me—a sort of internal feedback looplike what happens when
someone’s voice is played back to them with a couple of hundred millisecond delay whi
they’re trying to talk—it trips them up so that they have to speak very slowly and think
about each word.”

Hal first encountered Eve through her writing, when she applied to a six-week summer
program at Cornell for high-school students. Hal was part of the admissions committee
“Her writing was amazing,” Hal recalled. “It made a big impression on me.” She was
fifteen; he was a junior at Cornell. “Of course, of course she was admitted,” he said. The
met that summer, and became closer friends a year later when she enrolled at Cornell
herself. The night Eve turned eighteen—then the legal drinking age in New York—Hal
waited in the dorm lobby, hoping she’d want to celebrate at the college bar. A few of he
friends had the same idea, and he joined them when they took her to the bar. Then, “af
a few drinks, Eve sort of noticed me,” he remembers. They were married a year later.

By then, Hal was a graduate student in experimental psychology and visual perception,
living in the attic of a farmhouse outside of Ithaca that belonged to his professor, the A
scientist Frank Rosenblatt. Eve joined him there for the next two years. Then Hal left fo
postdoc in New York City, where he has lived in the same studio apartment ever since,
and she left for graduate school in New Haven. For more than twenty-five years, while
completed a Ph.D. at Yale and held various academic positions up and down the East
Coast, they commuted, mostly alternating weekends to visit each other. When Sedgwic
was found to have metastatic breast cancer, they decided that they needed to be closer

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each other. She moved to the Graduate Center, but they continued to maintain
separate living spaces.

“The idea of having one love in your life was not an aspiration for us,” Hal said, when I
ask him what it was like to be the primary love object of a queer theorist who wrote so
prolifically about the complexities of desire and relationships. Later, Hal referenced D.
Winnicott’s concept of the “holding environment,” in which the mother creates a safe
space for the child that allows the child to then look out into the world, to think about
something else beyond the mother’s care. Eve used this idea in her work. Hal offered it
a way of thinking about what they both did for one another.

“Yesterday when you asked me about love,” he wrote the next day, in an e-mail, “I talke
little about Winnicott’s ‘holding environment’ and my notion of a mutuality in which E
and I provided that for each other. But there’s more to love than that. Here’s another
aspect of it that was essential to Eve and to me.” He then quoted from “A Dialogue on
Love.”

Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for

lots and lots of people in the
world, the notion of “falling in
love” has (of all things) sexual
connotations. No, that’s not
what I think is happening. For
me, what falling in love means
is different. It’s a matter of
suddenly, globally, “knowing”
that another person represents
your only access to some vitally
transmissible truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception,
and that if you lose the thread
of this intimacy, both your soul
and your whole world might
subsist forever in some desert-
like state of ontological
impoverishment.

“What I loved about Eve and Hal’s relationship was that each was in awe of the other’s
intellect,” Davidson told me over the phone. “If people tried to make her a star, she wou
quickly say, ‘We are in separate realms, and if you knew his work, you would be
appreciative.’ She thought his work on visual perception was brilliant. She admired his

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scientific mind. And when she was dying, she and Hal together became scientists of her
cancer. They were equal partners in her own treatment. It was a remarkable partnershi
in every way.”

The next conference devoted to Sedgwick’s work will commemorate the twentieth
anniversary of “A Dialogue on Love.” Each participant will present with an interlocutor

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