Charles E. Morris

“What Lips These Lips Have Kissed”: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing Earlier versions of the essay were presented at the 2003 NCA/AFA Argumentation Conference and at the 2004 NCA convention.

In this essay, we argue that man-on-man kissing, and its representations, have been insufficiently mobilized within apolitical, incremental, and assimilationist pro-gay logics of visibility. In response, we call for a perspective that understands man-on-man kissing as a political imperative and kairotic. After a critical analysis of man-on-man kissings relation to such politics, we discuss how it can be utilized as a juggernaut in a broader project of queer world making, and investigate ideological, political, and economic barriers to the creation of this queer kissing “visual mass.” We conclude with relevant implications regarding same-sex kissing and the politics of visible pleasure.

Pink herring & the fourth persona: J. Edgar Hoover's sex crime panic

During the 1930s, sexuality significantly shaped J. Edgar Hoovers public discourse. In response to a homosexual panic that plagued the nations men and endangered his public persona, Hoover engaged in a passing performance. His masking rhetoric employed the pink herring, a tactic that manipulated a moral panic about sex crime to stabilize gender and sexual norms, divert attention from his private life, and silence an invisible audience that I term the fourth persona.

(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R.C.: A Retrospective

This essay offers a retrospective on the four special issues of this journal (1957, 1980, 1990, 2001) dedicated to the “state of the art” of rhetorical criticism. Drawing on Oscar Wildes The Portrait of Mr. W. H. as allegory, the essay also functions to queer this retrospective in an ongoing effort to queer rhetorical studies. The essay closes with a prospective call for “critical self-portraiture” and genealogy of rhetorical criticism.

‘The responsibilities of the critic’ F.O. Matthiessen's homosexual palimpsest

F.O. Matthiessens American Renaissance, a text central to the formation of American Studies as a field, has inspired critical derogation and hagiography based on the extent to which sexuality can be discerned in its pages. largue that these readings do not account for Matthiessens context of homophobic oppression, thus miss a homosexual double‐consciousness that animates the work. Specifically, a resistive form of “passing” which I label “homosexual palimpsest” manifests itself in Matthiessens exploration of Herman Melville, surreptitiously inscribing the homosexual into American literary and cultural history. Matthiessens criticism offers insights into homosexual resistance, the critical/rhetorical tension in interpretation, and the practice of gay historical criticism generally.

Richard Halliburton's Bearded Tales

Fusing the concept of “the beard” with the genre of the tall tale to theorize bearded tales deepens our understanding of closet eloquence, or rhetorical repertories of sexual passing in U.S. history. An examination of adventurer-writer-lecturer Richard Halliburtons sexual provenance and bestselling travel tale, The Royal Road to Romance (1925), illustrates how such autobiographical feints conceal and confound queer subjectivity by proximate heteronormative apparitions that configure straight ethos. At the same time, these fragile constructions gesture toward queer worlds inscribed between the lines for the fourth persona while reflecting upon the exile of archives, and the queer legacy of bearding.

Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb

Despite unfolding as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1920s, Leopold and Loebs “trial of the century” elicited a deluge of constitutive discourse that struggled against overt articulation and circulation of the boys’ queerness. In this essay, I argue that those discourses—dominant reportage, in camera courtroom conferences, and Clarence Darrows famous summation—manifested what I label “passing by proxy,” a collusive and convulsive act of straight closeting that speaks queer sexuality despite concerted effort to silence it.Despite unfolding as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1920s, Leopold and Loebs “trial of the century” elicited a deluge of constitutive discourse that struggled against overt articulation and circulation of the boys’ queerness. In this essay, I argue that those discourses—dominant reportage, in camera courtroom conferences, and Clarence Darrows famous summation—manifested what I label “passing by proxy,” a collusive and convulsive act of straight closeting that speaks queer sexuality despite concerted effort to silence it.

Contextual twilight/critical liminality: J.M. Barrie's courage at St. Andrews, 1922

J. M. Barries 1922 address Courageconstitutes a paradoxical rhetorical text. In his oratorical debut, Barrie offered seniors at St. Andrews poignant and explicit advice concerning lifes liminal passages, even as he carefully obfuscated his own identity. This essay offers two readings of the text to illuminate an alternative relationship between text and context in rhetorical criticism. The first interpretation focuses on the obvious textual paradox related to liminality. The second reading moves from the “textual context” to the social and ideological context, and argues that working within the address is the rhetorical form of “the closet.” Recontextualizing Barries address from within “the closet,” renders visible a second “invisible context” related to homosexuality, opening a new interpretive doorway for the critic.

Other Lips, Whither Kisses?

Among mercurial responses throughout June 12 and in the days that followed, while obsessively watching largely ill-fitting and insidious news coverage in the aftermath of the Pulse massacre in Orlando which had killed 49 and injured scores more, mostly Latinx queer people, kissing kept coming to mind. Immediately came the wrenching identification awash in glistening, palpitating memory of all those similar sanctuaries where kissing in an altered state and enveloping soundscape of queer experience made not only survival but worldmaking seem within caressing distance of another boy’s face. Justin Torres put it so beautifully, powerfully, the day after:

Introduction: “travelin thru” the queer south

The article discusses various topics discussed within the issue including one on with HIVAIDS in the South America, one on the sexuality of writer William Alexander Percy and one on the 2006 campaign of the GLBT coalition group Arizona Together against Proposition 107.

Sunder the Children: Abraham Lincoln's Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy

Lincoln, on a day in April, 1837, lured by the rainbow of opportunity that seemed to flame over Springfield, and wearing the orchid that Springfield had pinned on him for services rendered in making her city square the site of the State Capitol, jolted down the rugged embankment of New Salem astride a horse, to continue a career closely knit with the fabric of speech.*Earl W. Wiley, ‘‘Lincoln the Speaker,’’ QJS (June 1935)