In the conclusion of Metroimperial Intimacies, Victor Roman Mendoza narrates the remarkable story of Jack Bee Garland. Garland, born Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta, was a female-to-male crossdresser from San Francisco, who became a reporter for the Evening Mail. Jack, “to be vulgarly presentist” (emphasis Mendoza’s), was something of “a gay mixed-race Chicano transman” (206)—a seemingly radical figure, especially in the context of queer historiography’s search for pioneers.
And yet Bean’s desire for adventure and male companionship landed him a job as a nurse and interpreter for the U.S. imperial army during the Filipino-American War in 1899. That war, as is now increasingly acknowledged, was genocidal, and Bean’s involvement in it complicates archival quests for sexual forebears. Who are Bean’s legatees? Queer activists? Or militarist advocates of American exceptionalism?
Bean’s contradictions, indeed, drive home the need for “tracing histories of sexuality in the United States” “that take into account the messiness of racial formations at the fin de siècle…” (3). This messiness was evident in the various ways American colonialism interpreted the sexualities of the insurgent natives they were colonizing. On the one hand, they were “brute male insurrectos,” but, on the other, they were “the passive feminine partner” in the marriage of William McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation” (25).
Mendoza’s historiography unfolds the ambiguities of sexuality in the colony. It is a process that requires deftness, and the author uses all the tools at his disposal to find the queer in the colonial: rereading of the archive, parsing insinuation, and, of course, bloc-quoting the psychoanalytic Zizek. By and large, the author is successful.
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