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THE DIFFICULTY OF INTIMACY:
GAY MASCULINITIES BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL

presented by

Dominic Ording

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6/01 c:/ClFIC/DateDue.p65-p. 15

THE DIFFICULTY OF NTIMACY: GAY MASCULINITIES BEFORE AND AFTER
STONEWALL

By

Dominic Ording

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Program in American Studies

2003

ABSTRACT

THE DIFFICULTY OF INTIMACY: GAY MASCULINITIES BEFORE AND AFTER
STONEWALL

By

Dominic Ording

This dissertation is motivated by my desire to contribute to contemporary critical
discussions in gender studies, American literary studies, and queer theory focused
specifically on representations of gay men in the 19703. The overarching argument of the
project is that many gay men at the time of Stonewall felt a sense of the promise of great
sexual and emotional freedom after years of stifling oppression. Yet they lacked any
satisfactory models according to which they might imagine and go about developing
intimate relationships of whatever sort because of the legacy of larger cultural anxieties
concerning gender roles, sexuality, and intimacy. They were confused not only about
trying to be “men” intimate with each other, but also about how to shape their own
desires and behaviors to fit the political demands of the moment. Moreover, they were
faced with the complicated task of attempting to negotiate the relation of sex and pleasure
with notions of happiness in the seventies in America. While the ultimate project of this
dissertation is to examine representations of gay male intimacies in the seventies,
between Stonewall in the summer of 1969 and the advent of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the
early eighties, such a periodization must not imply that this ‘Vvindow of opportunity” for
liberated gay life and sexual abandon took place in a historical vacuum. Rather, gay men
and their identities, relationships, and self-representations were situated amidst a long

American tradition of discourse about gender and sexuality and desirable intimate

relationships, and especially representations of men and masculinity and the very
possibility of intimacy. Thus, the dissertation traces a discursive trail of these
representations in exemplary fictional and nonfictional texts in American letters from the
Lost Generation to the Beat Generation, through the Stonewall generation, and into the
present.

Chapter one examines such representations in pre-Stonewall American literature
from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Ris_es (1926) to John Rechy’s Cig of Night
(1963). What emerges is a conspicuous lack of any satisfactory models for how gay men
might go about achieving intimate relationships, whether sexual or not. Chapter two
analyzes a set of autobiographical gay liberation manifestos from 1969-1972 in which
men attempt to articulate what they want in the way of relationships, and how best to go
about making them happen given a range of ideological pressures. Chapter three
compares Larry Kramer’s novel flgggts to Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the
Dace, both of which evaluate the urban “gay lifestyle” that developed as the seventies
wore on. Both end with harsh judgments on the ultimate value of the party scene and its
romping promiscuity. Chapter four examines nonfiction texts looking back at the
seventies in order to see how the seventies have been represented since then—in short, to
see how the gay seventies have been remembered and historicized compared to how they

were represented while they were happening by those right in the middle of it all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A project like this is almost inevitably a more solitary affair than it might, or
should, be. I have nonetheless been blessed with an unseemly sense of mutual
accomplishment in this endeavor. Thanks first of all to my committee: Maria Bruno,
Michael Largey, and Ellen McCallum; and, especially, to my co-chairs, Dagmar Herzog
and Dean Rehberger. Thanks also to the College of Arts and Letters, the Graduate
School, and the Program in American Studies at Michigan State University for support in
the form of teaching assistantships, fellowships, and research grants that helped make the
completion of this dissertation possible. I would also like to extend very special
appreciation to Katherine McCracken and the late Anne Tracy, both of whom offered
their personal support and professional expertise and insights at just the right moments.

Finally, I must acknowledge the importance of my family in my life and, by
extension, to this project. They have valiantly and lovingly put up with me and my
weirdnesses for years. I want especially to thank my father, a weird angel, Michael

(1939-1992), whose presence resonates throughout these pages. Hugs to you, Pup.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

I: Unbearable Intimacies: Fairies in the World of Men

11: Liberation and “Lifestyles”: The Early Post-Stonewall Manifestos
III: The Life of the Party: These Are the Good Old Days?

IV: Retrospections on the Gay Seventies

Bibliography

19

116

177

215

243

Introduction

I’ve built walls,

A fortress deep and mighty,

That none may penetrate.

I have no need of friendship;
friendship causes pain.

It’s laughter and it’s loving l disdain.

I Am A Rock,

Iamanisland. . ..

And a rock feels no pain;

And an island never cries.

--Simon & Garfunkel (1966)

This project is motivated by my desire to contribute to contemporary critical
discussions in gender studies, American literary studies, and queer theory focused
specifically on representations of gay men in the 1970s. In particular, I want to suggest
that while “the seventies” is a somewhat artificial periodization, there are important
historical reasons for analyzing these years as a discrete moment in time. Similarly,
while the label “gay man” carries with it theoretical and experiential difficulties
(concerning both gayness and masculinity), it is a label that was tremendously important
to both individuals and communities then, and continues to be so today, for emotional
and political reasons discussed below.

The overarching argument of the dissertation is that many gay men at the time of
Stonewall felt a sense of the promise of great sexual and emotional freedom after years of

stifling oppression. Yet they lacked any satisfactory models according to which they

might imagine and go about developing intimate relationships of whatever sort because
of the legacy of larger cultural anxieties concerning gender roles, sexuality, and intimacy.
They were confused not only about trying to be “men” intimate with each other, but also
about how to shape their own desires and behaviors to fit the political demands of the
moment. Moreover, they were faced with the complicated task of attempting to negotiate
the relation of sex and pleasure with notions of happiness in the seventies in America.
They faced, for instance, not only the difficulty of defining “manhood” in America at that
time, but they also inherited a legacy of attitudes toward monogamy and promiscuity that
might be described as conflicted and hypocritical at best. As Adam Phillips writes in his
very perceptive collection of aphorisms, Monogamy (1996), a work which demonstrates
the interdependence of the concepts “monogamy” and “promiscuity,” : “Guilt, by
reminding us what we mustn’t do shows us what we want, and what we want to want”
(45). The distinction between what we want and what we want to want, when they differ,
as they so often do, is crucial in analyzing the relation of political ideals to desire as gay
men struggled to be sexual, liberated, and good all at the same time. Not only can you
not always get what you want, but you sometimes cannot even be what you want to be, a
frustration that will be discussed in detail below. Gay men in the seventies were thus
dealing not only with the challenge of figuring out what it means to be gay and to be a
man, but also with moral considerations about how one “ought to” structure one’s
affectional and social life according to the ideological principles of “liberated sexuality”
at the time, including, for instance, the injunction against treating each other as sexual

objects. In short, they wanted to be conscientious and to get laid at the same time, a

prospect that was not always as easy as it may have seemed to the authors of the
manifestos or the later novelists and their characters, as we shall see below.

While the ultimate project of this dissertation is to examine representations of
gay male intimacies in the seventies, between Stonewall in the summer of 1969 and the
advent of the HIV /AIDS crisis in the early eighties, such a periodization must not imply
that this ‘Vvindow of opportunity” for liberated gay life and sexual abandon took place in
a historical vacuum. Rather, gay men and their identities, relationships, and self-
representations were situated amidst a long American tradition of discourse about gender
and sexuality and desirable intimate relationships, and especially representations of men
and masculinity and the very possibility of intimacy. Thus, the dissertation traces a
discursive trail of these representations in exemplary fictional and nonfictional texts in
American letters from the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation, through the Stonewall
generation, and into the present.

Chapter one situates the project historically by examining representations of
gender and sexuality, especially masculinity and possible forms of intimacy, in pre-
Stonewall American literature (including novels by Hemingway, Vidal, Baldwin,
Kerouac, and Rechy).1 What emerges is a conspicuous lack of any satisfactory model for
how gay men, or any men, might go about achieving intimate relationships, whether
sexual or not. Some are ostensibly nongay novels, while others are consciously
concerned with gay liberation. But they all indicate in various ways the legacy of
anxieties in the broader culture regarding gender expectations and sexual mores (for
instance, conflicting visions of the appropriate relation of sex to sentiment and confused,

ofien hypocritical, attitudes toward promiscuity, fidelity, and pleasure in general). While

the novels are treated here in chronological order, historians such as George Chauncey in
Gay New York and John D’Emilio in Making Trouble point out that we must not
presume a linear historical progression of more liberal societal attitudes toward
homosexuality. Rather, there was, for instance, greater tolerance in general in the
twenties than in the immediate post-World War H period (and more in Paris than in the
United States).

Chapter two examines a group of autobiographical texts and gay liberation
manifestos in which men attempt to articulate what they want in the way of relationships
and how best to go about making them happen. Because of the lack of models for
intimacy, newly “liberated” gay men had to make things up as they went along, faced
with the freedom to establish entirely new forms of togetherness. These texts all date
from 1969-1972, during the heady days of calls for radical gay liberation, and include
these men’s utopian hopes and their frustrations and not uncommon inabilities to
structure their lives according to rigid ideological principles. They all agree on the
demand for sexual freedom without shame; but how this should be manifested in specific
sexual and affectional practices is hotly debated.

Chapter three compares Larry Kramer’s novel F_a,ggc£ to Andrew Holleran’s
novel Dancer from the Dance (both published in 1978), both of which are examinations
of the urban “gay lifestyle” called “the circuit” that developed in New York and across
the country as the seventies wore on. In many ways, these two novels are the most
striking literary examples of what became of the experiments with sexual freedom in the
decade, and were certainly the most widely read and discussed texts, especially in the gay

media. Both novels end with fairly harsh judgments on the ultimate value of the party

scene and promiscuous romping, though through very different literary modes of
evaluation. The chapter ends with a discussion of the immediate critical reception of the
novels in the gay and mainstream presses.

Chapter four examines nonfiction texts by writers looking back at the seventies,
from as early as late-seventies interviews of Holleran, Kramer, and Edmund White to as
late as 2000, in order to see how the seventies have been represented since then, and what
recent judgments have been made and circulated about that decade—in short, to see how
the seventies have been remembered and historicized compared to how they were
represented while they were happening by those right in the middle of it all. My
contention is that the pervasive view of the gay seventies—that they were a time of, and a
luxurious opportunity for, mindless excess and hedonistic abandon—is flawed at least by
virtue of oversimplification (regardless of whether one criticizes or celebrates the choices
made in light of the opportunity to party granted by a sense of radical new freedom).
Indeed, the texts examined in the prior chapters are evidence that a lot of serious
reflection about the meaning and importance of various forms of human interaction was
going on. Recent retrospections of the seventies, sadly, are all colored by the HIV /AIDS
health crisis, which inflects every memory and every memoir, as well as every attempt to
do archival research and recovery or objective historical analysis of the period, even work
done by those who cling to the notion that some relative objectivity is possible or
desirable. Indeed, the appropriate manner in which to look back at—to remember in
history—the experience of gay men in the seventies is highly contentious at present, in
large part because the project of inventing new lives, and figuring out how to go about

living them, in climates that may be more or less tolerant of freedoms and choices

regarding sex and affection is an ongoing one. This dissertation attempts to help clarify
what’s at stake in this ongoing project of invention.

In doing so, my project attempts to connect questions of gay identity and sexuality
to other more “mainstream” elements of American culture such as heterosexuality,
friendship, and the entire spectrum of what are considered to be questions of normality
and morality. Moreover, I am interested in how things become categorized as “sexual,”
and who has the right to make such a categorization. (Literary examples of the
importance of this question might include whether Jake Bames’s affection for Bill in the
Hemingway novel, or Bob’s for Jim in the Vidal, or Malone’s for Sutherland in the
Holleran, are sexual or not. A nonfictional example of extreme importance comes as the
men in the Stonewall-era living collective try to negotiate how to be sexual, or not,
together.) This project is also concerned with exploring how authors and characters at
various historical points have struggled with the question of the relationship between
sexuality, happiness, pleasure, and the good life in general; that is, what is the intense
connection between sexuality and broader existential questions, and how have people
attempted to make sense of it? Another strong commitment of this project is to
contribute to the effort to make intimacy and its difficulties more visible as an area of
scholarly inquiry, in the spirit of such important contributions as the recent collection
Intimacy (2000), edited by Lauren Berlant.

As noted above, one issue facing the Stonewall generation of gay men was the
lack of any models for successful intimate relationships, a point that cannot be
overemphasized. In the early post-Stonewall manifestos, to be analyzed in chapter two,

the most significant debates were over sexism, the legacy of gender roles, and other

sources and consequences of internalized homophobia (e. g., what, if anything, it means to
be a man). These were identified as the main elements of the oppression of gay men.
The need to confront sexism especially, including their own sexist attitudes, was seen as
central to developing gay men’s understandings of their own oppression. On the one
hand, there was harsh criticism of the “doomed queen” figure—often characterized as the
scared, bitchy, self-loathing, self-consumed, pathetic, diminutive man living in a fantasy;
such a fantasy might include figures such as Bette Davis and Judy Garland among others,
and be more concerned with piss-elegant trappings and being witty than with any deeper
search for meaningful human interactions. The demand in the manifestos was to cast off
the pathetic fantasy and to become a “normal” (i.e., at least potentially masculine),
newly-liberated man.

On the other hand, there was the desperate plea to abolish gender roles, and
especially crippling notions of masculinity and manhood, which were seen as prohibiting
freedom, compassion, and intimacy between men (and between men and women). And
both these criticisms might be asserted by the same critic in the same text. Hence, a great
paradox: You must dispense with your old crutches and hiding places, and stand up to
fight—be a real man. But you must also reject the very notion of the “real man” entirely,
and just “be yourself,” free from oppressive gender roles, willing to cultivate and nurture
both your feminine and masculine sides (or, indeed, to dispense as entirely as possible
with these labels). Thus, you must be a man and not be a man. This paradox would
haunt many men through the seventies, and beyond. The novels to be examined in
chapter one provide a historical context for how notions and representations of American

maleness reached such a paradoxical situation.

This project will discuss masculinity as a broader and potentially more
problematic—and ill-defined, contested, and shifty—as well as a potentially more
pleasurable category than it is often considered to be for men of all sexual orientations.
Regarding sexual identity, homophobia, both for non-gays and perhaps especially for
gays, is incredibly bound up in various notions of masculinity. This bind is often at the
center of the novels and the other texts discussed here; and their representations of both
homosexuals and “masculine” men are linked with problems of intimacy in the texts
themselves, and can be seen operating among gay (and straight) men (and women)
through today. In fact, I would argue that the question of sex and sentiment and related
attitudes toward promiscuity are, at least for many men, similarly bound up in concerns
about gender.

Cultural representations of this primacy of gender range fiom the ideology that
naturalizes the claim that “boys will be boys” to the claim that they therefore should be
so, and that their wild oats are part of being masculine; as such, the lack of an active sex
life is, in fact, often portrayed as unhealthy and abnormal for heterosexuals? This
portrayal is in stark contrast to the suspicion surrounding homosexual male promiscuity,
whether actual or imagined. Furthermore, emotional attachment to a sexual partner, or
anyone else, might inhibit a man’s freedom to roam, to “find himself;” and the journey of
self-discovery is associated with manhood throughout these texts. Also, in explicitly
homoerotic contexts, the ideal masculine object of appropriately masculine desire should
thus be free from the confines and weakness associated with being overly emotional.

Masculinity, as understood here, operates in various contingent ways along the

whole continuum from homosociality to homosexuality articulated in the introduction to

Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men. Sedgwick argues that whether or not “sex” is involved
makes a huge difference in the meaning of male-to-male relationships, but that this
difference depends on the individual case. She writes: “So the answer to the question
‘what difference does the inclusion of sex make’ to a social or political relationship, is—
it varies: just as, for different groups in different political circumstances, homosexual
activity can be either supportive of or oppositional to homosocial bonding” (6). I would
like to extend her analysis of the meaning-making power of the inclusion of sex in
relationships between men to include the possibility or impossibility of the union of
intimacy and masculinity in such relationships. Questions of the genesis of masculinity,
and the extent to which it is consciously performed or not, at any given moment, in
reality, are questions for a different sort of project. At issue here, rather, are narrative
representations—-textual constructs in which narrators, characters, and readers interpret
the significance of a masculine moment (or indeed name it as such). Furthermore, the
category “masculinity” must not be allowed to stand as a monolith, especially since it is
rarely defined coherently or indisputably (as I contend that it perhaps cannot be). Yet it
is assumed. Even in many of the most sophisticated constructionist analyses of gender,
the pre-ordained essence of that which has been or is to be constructed is taken for
granted.3 At the same time, these texts suggest that “being a man” has to be enacted
moment by moment, and strategies to do so adjusted significantly along the way,
according to the comfort-levels of the characters and their narratives. James Baldwin is
right to assert that the great variance of what are taken to be masculine and feminine traits
makes these gender categories almost useless as tools for rich analysis and description,

though they carry huge cultural force in twentieth-century America. But the more

immediate burden of my argument here is that these pre-Stonewall novels situate the
problematic of gay liberation in the late sixties. Moreover, what happened in the
seventies, as shown in the manifestos and other texts discussed below, had as much to do
with contested concepts of gender as with ostensibly liberated sexual identities and sexual
freedom (and gender and sexuality are not in any event as easily separable as they are
often taken to be).4

In these texts, gender largely subsumes other categories of distinction and
identity, even sexuality/sexual orientation, which is portrayed mainly as a fimction of
gender differentiation. Masculinity--while it rarely, if ever, receives concrete definition--
occupies an unquestioned position in these works as that by which standards of human
interaction andrvalue are often most significantly measured. For example, in Gore
Vidal’s The City and the Pillirr, Jim Willard is ambivalent about declaring his love for
Bob; he assumes that Bob must truly still be attracted to him. Yet, at the same time he
wants them to be “normal” to the extent that he convinces himself that their coming
together will be even better, at least for Jim, because Bob identifies as heterosexual (274).
Hence, wanting to “come out” may be a masculine stance, but so may celebrating the fact
that one’s beloved is a real man, one who ostensibly doesn’t even like men sexually. In
Craig Alfred Hanson’s manifesto, discussed below, the writer attempts to achieve a
posture of masculinity defined in opposition to the purported and unacceptable femininity
of “the Fairy Princess.” Thus, “masculinity” itself remains still an indeterminate
category, and may be experienced, and manipulated by, the particular subject in a
particular subject-position to produce both potential pleasure and potential displeasure for

himself or any other participant at any given moment in these texts.

10

Regardless of the evident vagueness of the category “masculine,” however, it
nonetheless exerts tremendous moral weight and has the potential to attract and repel in
powerful ways. In short, it can be fun and sexy to feel, or see oneself, and/or see another,
and/or imagine oneself seen as being “masculine.” It can be quite problematic, too.

Also, what masculinity means is most often taken for granted, as though everybody
knows it when he or she sees (or enacts) it, or its lack or opposite. Yet, it is rarely
defined with adequate specificity. At the least, there appear to be multiple masculinities,
and perhaps genders. And however they may be tentatively named or experienced at a
particular moment, they are always relative terms.

“Masculinity” may be, in the end, an arbitrary term devoid of any specific
immutable content.5 But this unstable category stands as a place of refuge for troubled or
ecstatic subjectivities throughout the texts (“subj ectivities” understood here as malleable,
shifting perspectives of characters, narrators, or persons). When they are aggressive, it is
masculine aggression; when stoic, it is masculine stoicism; when they weep, it is
masculine weeping. For example, much recent fuss has been made in media
representations over the alleged fact that the Bush men hug and cry. Laura Bush is
quoted as saying that President George W. Bush is more likely than she to cry. Such an
admission is represented as enhancing rather than diminishing his manliness quotient—(if
only we all could be so sensitive and compassionate!). Male desire, sexual activity, and
orgasm must also be imagined as appropriately masculine happenings according to this
picture, as well as must whatever language, sounds or silences that might accompany

them.

11

In this way, masculinity moves from being a descriptive to being a prescriptive
term. Masculinity, the ill-defined or indefinite category, becomes The Good. When a
subject perceives himself to be slipping toward the other side (to the non-masculine, the
not good), the moral imperative for him is to move back to what he has tentatively come
to understand to be The Masculine (or else conveniently to shift or expand his notion of
masculinity to encompass new realms of experience). Thus, as writers and characters
experience shifts in their subjectivities and identities in relation to others and to
themselves (e. g., from group spectatorship at a bullfight, to fishing in the wilderness with
a buddy, to lying awake at night pondering their existence, to cruising, to S/M, to walking
down the street holding hands as a collective), the very definition of masculinity must
shift accordingly. And when the conceivable limits of such shifting seem to be reached,
a crisis ensues. Indeed, it was not until gender-bending pioneers at the time of Stonewall
began proudly to embrace the “femme” aspects of their identities that the fairy figure
became possible as an autonomous subject at all, rather than the mere object of ridicule.
Prior to that, any notion of the potential feminine within ostensibly masculine subjects
was unthinkable at best. One cannot, after all, imagine the unimaginable--that which has
not been put forth on one’s plate as a possibility. When, for instance, it comes to being
truly vulnerable with a buddy, the non-masculine or feminine threshold has been
approached, and barriers must be erected.

One goal of this project is to contribute to recent scholarly discussions of
masculinity and the seventies. As such, it draws first upon insights from scholars

working on issues in the history of gender, including Gail Bederman and E. Anthony

12

Rotundo. Bederman argues in Manliness & Civilization that gender is a dynamic
process:

I don’t see manhood as either an intrinsic essence or a collection of
traits, attributes, or sex roles. Manhood—or “masculinity,” as it is
commonly termed today—is a continual, dynamic process. Through that
process, men claim certain kinds of authority, based on their particular
types of bodies. [. . .]

Individuals are positioned through that process of gender, whether
they choose to be or not. [. . .] [R]are indeed is the person who considers
“itself” neither a man nor a woman. (7)

One incredibly important point here is that gender status is primarily imposed but may
also be rejected or altered by rare individuals who either possess the wherewithal or
confront the necessity to do so. The question of this potential dexterity about gender is a
point of grave contestation in most, if not all, of the texts examined in my project.
Another important issue raised in recent scholarship on gender is the extent to
which homophobia is detrimental not only to homo-identified men but also to bi- and
heterosexually self-identified men, and those rare men who might successfully resist such
labels entirely. In American Manhood. Rotundo illuminates the damage done to all men
(and, one must add, to all people) by the rampant linking of male homosexuality with
“unmanliness.” Anti-homosexuality (I insert this term because “homophobia” is often
imprecise and a misnomer) not only damages all men but also all women because to
condemn unmanliness is always in some sense to condemn what is considered to be the

feminine. Furthermore, neither homosexuality nor unmanliness nor masculinity nor

13

femininity nor unwomanliness, as purported by whomever, should ever be damaging to

anybody. And everybody suffers when human connections and tenderness are

threatened. Rotundo writes:
The century-old association of homosexuality and unmanliness is another
facet of our gender system that harms men. It hurts homosexual males
most profoundly because it lays the basis for contempt, persecution, and
discrimination against them. In ways that are less deeply damaging but
equally real, men who are not homosexual are also wronged by the
homosexual stigma. They lose the opportunity for the open intimacy of
the romantic fiiendships that were common in the nineteenth century;
more broadly, the fear [or potentially violent hatred] of homosexuality can
block men’s access to tender feelings and the skills that humans need in
order to build connections with one another. (291-92)

Many interesting and instructive books have been published recently in the area of
masculinity studies. Much of this work employs the methods of the social sciences and
psychoanalysis, whereas my approach is largely informed by interdisciplinary cultural
studies and queer theory, as mentioned above. Recent titles most relevant to my project
include the following: Michael S. Kimmel’s article “Masculinity as Homophobia” in
Privilege: A Reader (2003), which analyzes homophobia as a sense of fear and
powerlessness among contemporary American men; Timothy Beneke’s Pro—ving
Manhood: Reflection_s on Men and Sexism (1997), which diagnoses homophobia as fear
of other men, and includes a very helpful discussion of different characterizations of

homoerotic desire; Peter Nardi’s two recent books on gay men, Gav Masculinities (N ardi,

14

ed., 2000), and Gay Men’s Friendships (1999), both of which are empirical sociological

studies of contemporary attitudes among gay men; Brian Pronger’s The Arena of

Masculinig: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1990), another

 

sociological study, which looks at attitudes toward male homosexuality and masculinity
in the particular context of athletics; and, David Plummer’s One of the Bova;
Masculinity, Homophobiaa and Modern Manhood (1999), in which he posits what he
calls “homophobic passage” as a stage of homophobia that young males go through in the
process of forming adult (and presumably less or non-homophobic) identities as men.
While these works provide often important and useful insights into contemporary gay
male relations, self-consciousnesses, and attitudes, they are also often ahistorical and
universalizing in their approaches (by which I mean that their claims seem to be made
about all men in all places and times). They seem to assume at times, for instance, a
fairly stable binary between gay and straight adult men (you either are one or the other, or
not), thus neglecting the actual experience depicted in the representations with which I’m
most concerned here—those moments when such binaries break down entirely, when
there is not even the consciousness of a handy Kinsey continuum on which to locate
oneself, but rather an identity crisis that calls into question what it means to be human
and in close relation with another man. The one study that offers an interpretation of
cultural representations of the sort that I’m interested in here is David Savran’s Taking It
Like a Man: White Masculinig, Masochism. and Contemporary American Cultt_l_r_e_
(1998), which, in his own words, “constructs a genealogy of the fantasy of the white male
as victim, beginning with his appearance on the US. cultural scene in the 19503” (4).

Savran’s attention to self-identified homosexual men, however, is focused primarily on

15

the period since 1980. This dissertation, in contrast, examines the struggle for liberated
gay male sexuality and identity before, during, and in the decade after the Stonewall
uprising in 1969.

Beyond the realm of studies in masculinity, scholars have recently lamented the
lack of historical and cultural research on the seventies. Remarking on the lack of work
done on post-Stonewall gay activism in particular, John D’Emilio, in his book Making
M9, announces his “annoyance at the lack of scholarly attention to what I believe is a
critically important phenomenon in the recent history of the United States” (234). In fig
Seventies, Shelton Waldrep asserts that the time has come for a reorientation in how
recent American history and culture are viewed: “[T]he sixties no longer seem to be the
inevitable moment of the crisis in the century—hence, the starting point of any discussion
of the decades that have come after it. Rather, the seventies have now become a key part
of the equation of our millennial anxiety [. . .]. The clue to our own present seems
mysteriously locked somewhere in that slippery decade” (1-2). To my knowledge, few
books have been published recently that attempt to redress this lack of attention to the
seventies, and specifically the gay seventies.

Relevant works include Daniel Harris’s The Rise and liall of Gav Culture. in
which he argues that gay culture will disappear with the increasing tolerance of gay men
and lesbians and their assimilation into mainstream culture. But Harris only devotes a
small space to the seventies, and then he’s mainly concerned with the commodification of
gay culture. Similarly, Stephen Paul Miller’s The Seventies Now touches on gay
liberation and culture in a few pages, but his discussion of gayness is mainly limited to a

section on John Ashbery and Thomas Pynchon. Charles Kaiser’s The Gav Metropolis:

l6

1940-1996 includes a chapter on the seventies, but mainly contains anecdotes and gossip

with no systematic analysis of the people or the period. The one book that examines gay

male life in particular in the seventies is Martin P. Levine’s Gay Macho, a sociological

study of the emergence of the “clone” figure. Levine’s work is extremely important,

though he focuses on an admittedly narrow conception of the gay male experience:
Clones symbolize modern homosexuality. When the dust of gay liberation
had settled, the doors to the closet were opened, and out popped the clone.
[. . .] Aping blue-collar workers, they butched it up and acted like macho
men. Accepting me-generation values, they searched for self-fulfillment
in anonymous sex, recreational drugs, and hard partying. Much to the
activists’ chagrin, liberation turned the “Boys in the Band” into doped-up,
sexed-out, Marlboro men. (7)

Rather than analyze this “Ramrod” view of the seventies, however, I have chosen instead
to compare this one-dimensional view of gay manhood to the more diverse attempts
made by gay men to seek a liberated sexual and emotional experience. As such, my
project is an attempt to examine masculinity and gay liberation in ways that contribute to
a greater understanding of the major cultural transformations that happened in the
seventies from the specific perspective of gay men. I examine the various ways in which
they envisioned the ideal prospect of gay sexual liberation and tried to figure out how

best to live their lives in its aftermath.

l7

Notes

 

I For recent critical treatments of literature by and about gay men, see Bergman
(1991), McRuer (1997), and Woodhouse (1998). All three are helpful sources, and treat
the authors I discuss with varying emphasis and scope.

2 This link between heterosexual male promiscuity and notions of “natural”
normality and ideal masculinity is articulated by Peggy Reeves Sanday in Fratemig
Gang Rape (1990; e.g., pp. 192-193) and by Phillip Brian Harper in Are We Not Men?
(1996; e.g., pp. 22-38).

3 Diana Fuss offers a compelling analysis of the status of the category “essence”
in anti-essentialist arguments about gender in the introduction and first chapter of
Essentially Speaking (1989). For instance, Fuss asserts that: “[C]onstructionism (the
position that differences are constructed, not innate) really operates as a more
sophisticated form of essentialism. The bar between essentialism and constructionism is
by no means as solid and unassailable as advocates of both sides assume it to be” (xii).

4 Baldwin writes of the American ideal of masculinity, and the unhelpfulness of
such categories, in “Here Be Dragons,” collected in The Price of the Tickptjl985). He
claims, in particular, that “The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in
the American ideal of masculinity” (678).

5 In the collection _C_9n_structing Masculinity (1995), Homi K. Bhabha argues that
masculinity is “a prosthetic reality. . .an appendix or addition,” and should not be denied

but rather disturbed and drawn attention to (5 7).

l8

I: Unbearable Intimacies: Fairies in the World of Men

This chapter will analyze the discourse about gender and sexuality in a set of
twentieth-century American novels with a specific focus on representations of the
apparent difficulty men have figuring out how to go about being intimate with each other,
whether or not the characters themselves consciously identify as bi-, hetero-, or
homosexual. Moreover, the presence and function of “the homosexual” in such texts
provides insight into the logic of this difficulty with intimacy. In fact, this chapter will
argue that, in the set of texts to be examined here, the presence of fairies is a central
component in the constitution of the masculine self-identities of the protagonists, and the
possibilities for intimate relations that might attend such constitutions.

In these books, all to some extent homophobic and simultaneously homoerotic,
the actual homosexuals (i.e., obvious in the minds of the characters, and often called
fairies or queers) are the Other, the foil, against which the protagonists not only measure
but imagine and conceptualize their own masculinity, as well as whatever notions they
have of what an ideal, deep, authentic connection with another person might resemble.
However, their conceptions of masculinity involve the negation of outward, and
sometimes even inward, expressions or admissions of vulnerability. And since intimacy
(understood here as a close and deeply personal emotional exposure and union) by
definition requires vulnerability (the willingness to risk being wounded or “found out”),
masculinity and intimacy may be mutually exclusive for these main characters, especially
as regards their relations with other so-called masculine men they might like to be

intimate with.

19

As for the fairies (by definition non-masculine, flamboyant or at least obvious
homosexuals), they are presumed to be incapable of the emotional strength or seriousness
that would be required for an intimate emotional connection, regardless of how
vulnerable they might be capable of being with anyone else. They are portrayed as
shallow and superficial, as are most women characters in these works, with the
exceptions of Hemingway’s Brett and some of the characters in the Rechy novel. As we
shall see, this sexist linking of effeminacy (and the feminine) to emotional weakness and
superficiality, as opposed to the masculine ideal of depth, strength, and invulnerability,
becomes one of the main points of contention at the time of Stonewall in the manifestos,
and throughout the seventies.1

The texts to be examined in this chapter were chosen because of their respective
exemplary status in the pre-gay liberation American literary tradition, in which
melodrama and tragedy were the only available modes in which to portray gay characters
(when they weren’t being trivialized, as in the Hemingway, which still turns out to be a
melodramatic tragedy of sorts). Indeed, the ostensibly “straight” novels here share in
common with the “gay” novels a melodramatic style and a tendency toward pseudo-
philosophy about the meaning of life and a sense of doom about living in the twentieth
century, and dissatisfaction with the world in general. This pessimism, as we shall see, is
also characteristic of the world-view, at least as portrayed by others, of the “old-guard”
homosexuals at the time of Stonewall, as seen in many of the manifestos. Moreover,
these five novels’ characters share a worship of the primitive and/or the pastoral, often
accompanied by a nostalgia for an imagined more innocent time, indicating their sense

that two main sources of their troubles are puritanical WASPish values and modem

20

industrial social organization. This purported deep and profound understanding of the
human condition would be incomprehensible, of course, to most fairies and most women
(again, except in Rechy).2

The chapter will be divided into three sections. Part One will examine Ernest
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), an extremely popular novel highly critical of
traditional, puritanical mores and ambitions, one that participated in a discourse about
youth, morality, war, and disillusionment. In this Hemingway, the fairies are portrayed
as being even more decadent and self-consumed than Jake Barnes and his comrades. A
war injury has left sensitive Jake dysfunctional in genital sexual relations. While the
exact nature of his injury is never explicitly reported in the published novel (critical
consensus has it that he was somehow castrated or at least rendered impotent), this
physical tragedy serves in the novel as a metaphor for his difficulty achieving intimacy
with either men or women, and calls into question at once the stability of his gender
status. For instance, Jake identifies his ostensible love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, as
being quite an integral member of the group of homosexual men she hangs outwith. And
Brett herself is portrayed often as being more of a “chap” than a “broad.” The novel is
concerned with how to establish and sustain intimate relationships in the Lost Generation.
The representations of the fairies indicate the extent to which issues of sexuality and
gender identity are at the center of this struggle.

Part Two will look at two then widely read and now canonical gay novels, Gore
Vidal’s The City and the Pilla_r (1948) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956).
Both are tragic melodramas, and bear witness to the reality that, according to the

discourses circulating in the early post-war period, the only fate imaginable for a

21

homosexual character was a tragic fate. This tragic mode of gay self-representation
continues through the Broadway production of Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Bald (1968)
and the film version, released in 1970, after Stonewall. It’s a mode that becomes
contested, but remains viable throughout the seventies, as we shall see. Both protagonists
in these novels end up wallowing in self-loathing and despair after being responsible for
the demise of their beloveds. The Vidal and Baldwin are similar, as each text offers the
beginnings of a gay liberation manifesto. Yet the “obvious” homosexuals are portrayed
much as they are in Hemingway, though with significant narrative commentary and more
detail; and they do at times get to speak for themselves, including about being
homosexual.3 It is their effeminacy and perceived superficial concerns, as well as their
apparently indiscriminate pursuit of sex, that troubles the protagonists, in contrast to their
own self—perceived depth and masculinity (and superior morality). Yet it is precisely
crises of gender and sexuality that lead to the ultimate impossibility of the main
characters’ love affairs, and their subsequent tragic demise.

Part Three will examine two novels that, in their respective crucial ways,
construct narratives that open up cultural space for both the incredible possibilities for
freedom that accompanied the impulse toward gay liberation and also the set of questions
confronting men at the time of Stonewall and beyond as they struggled to define gay
consciousness and establish gay identities: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and John
Rechy’s City of Night (1963). Kerouac’s novel and Allen Ginsberg’s poem _l-_I_o_v_v_l (1956)
exploded on the cultural scene and helped provide a cultural framework for the
counterculture and sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies. While Ginsberg’s

work survived an obscenity trial only to become even more widely-read and infamous

22

with its unapologetically explicit depictions of homosexuality enacted, Kerouac’s book
was censored by him and his editors to remove all mention of homosexual behavior by
the main characters, based on Kerouac himself and other Beat figures, some of whom did
have sex with each other and with other men. Nonetheless, the text becomes an important
participant in the ongoing discourse about gender, sex, identity, and intimacy in America.
It has been described as a boy’s valentine to America (on a recent Morning Edition story
on the book), but it is also an adolescent lament. The central significance of the novel
here is its portrayal of expanded or alternative possibilities for conceptions of American
manhood, and the tremendous struggle between characters Sal Paradise and Dean
Moriarty to sustain a satisfactory intimate friendship. In the end, they fail.

“Actual” homosexuals make rare but important appearances, and Sal reacts much
as Jake Barnes does in Hemingway (the characters in Kerouac actually play-act aspects
of The Sun Also RiseSI—With inexplicable anger at the fairies that he knows he “should”
not only repress but not even feel in the first place. In fact, Sal Paradise (and Kerouac) is
often taken to represent the new “sensitive man.” But the narrator could have gone much
further in his quest for sensitivity about gender roles and gayness, given the ambivalent
way women and gay men are represented in the novel. The book is a treatise on, if
anything, the troubles entailed by the attempt to construct a masculine and sexual identity
in the immediate post-war period. Similar attempts, using some of the same language but
with a much more political emphasis and consciousness, come in the gay liberation
manifestos and later in the seventies, as we shall see.

John Rechy’s texts, on the other hand, participate directly in debates over gay

oppression, liberation, and culture through the seventies to the present (including m

23

Sexual Outlaw [1977]). My concern here, however, is with Cigy of Night (1963), a novel
about a hustler on a journey of self-exploration amidst the sort of “homosexual world”
that would appear as a major story in % magazine in 1964. His journey reaches a
climax when he confronts the question of whether he is capable of, or even desires,
intimate companionship—the very idea of loving someone and being loved in return.
Can he imagine wanting, or having, a “partner” for any length of time? Or does he prefer
(or is he trapped in) an ongoing series of largely anonymous, promiscuous sexual
encounters, often but not always for money?

This is one of the main questions posed in the post-Stonewall manifestos, and
through the seventies—the appropriate or desirable relation between sex and sentiment,
and how to go about figuring and getting what one desires out of “gay life.” It is
important to keep in mind here that Rechy’s book was published six years before
Stonewall, so that he grapples in a similar fashion with similar questions quite a while
before either the counterculture or public, affirmative gay liberation had assumed
widespread prominence in the minds of Americans of any orientation.

Indeed, an important aspect of my historical argument in choosing these specific
texts is that while one cannot safely plot a linear historical progression towards the
acceptance and liberation of homosexuality through twentieth century America,
representations of men and their relations in these novels do represent a trend of
increasing consciousness of the complexity of various notions of masculinity and their
relation to sexual identity and possibilities for intimacy. That which is important,
thinkable, and utterable for the characters does go through a progressive transformation.

In the Hemingway, the performance of, and anxieties surrounding, masculinity and the

24

desire for intimacy are present but largely unconscious or unspoken. They become
increasingly conscious and explicit concerns of the texts until the Rechy, in which the act
of performing various versions of masculinity, and commentary on them, is a virtual

obsession, as is the search for, and definitions of, intimacies.

Instabilities and Inabilities: Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

This novel is an incredibly complicated text in its treatment of issues of gender
and sexuality. On the one hand, it seems homophobic in how much true homosexuals
and the idea of being homosexual are criticized and feared by some of the characters. On
the other hand, it deals explicitly, obsessively, with notions of gender identity and
definition, and often attempts to free itself from gender conventions and restrictive roles.
It is homosocial, as much of the book is about men trying to figure out how to, and
enjoying, spending time together. It is homoerotic at least in scenes where the imagery of
masculine men dealing with each other is filled with pleasure and celebration, especially
in the bullfighting scenes; and with Jake’s adoration for Pedro Romero, and how
handsome he is, and the discussion of how good he looks in his tight green pants; and
Jake’s fishing trip with Bill Gorton, as well as Brett’s status as a chap of sorts. Yet, in the
end, they all go off, back to their former lives, and even Jake and Brett realize that they
can never be together. If she marries Mike, they are both likely to be miserable. And
Jake is likely to remain alone, not having achieved any of the intimacy that seems to be
the thing that might make him happy.

While there has been a long tradition of reading Hemingway and many of his

male characters as involved in a hyper-macho struggle with each other and conquering

25

the vigorous world, recent commentary reflects a much more ambiguous and complex
reading. For instance, in Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes’s Hemingway’s Genders
(1994), the authors rightly argue that “gender was a conscious preoccupation for
Hemingway,” but urge readers to view gender in Hemingway as more complex than
simply as “an embodiment of monolithic masculinity” (ix). Here, they provide a working
definition of gender: .
By gender we mean a system of sexual differentiation that is partly
biological and partly cultural. This system is founded on a basic
differentiation of humans into the categories male and female, but it
extends into subcategories and cultural roles assigned to people and to
literary characters in a given culture, and to categories of sexual practice
as well. (x)

There are indeed many indications that _'I_’h_e Sun Also Rises is preoccupied with
gender; and no thoughtful reading of the text would see it as embodying a monolithic
masculinity. This very question is one of Jake’s major crises. It seems safe to assert,
along with Comley and Scholes, that gender is partly biological and partly cultural,

9, 6‘

though the use of the terms “sexual differentiation, male,” and “female,” if they are
understood in their strictest senses, rings as though privileging the biological. It is rather
the subcategories, cultural roles, and sexual practices that mainly concern this project at
this point. Indeed, the claim that categories of sexual practice are gendered is quite
important and not a small one (especially presuming it doesn’t merely conflate gender

and sexuality, a not rare mistake with serious consequences). But beyond anatomical,

positional and act-ual practices, it may be an equally strong claim to assert that sexual

26

identity is oftentimes a subcategory of gender. This practice (or behavior)/identity
distinction is crucial. Who does (or doesn’t do) what with whom when and where is at
least conceptually distinct fiom how one identifies oneself or another. The two are,
however, always interrelated; yet, which comes firSt—sexual behavior or identity--may
differ from person to person and from time to time. The appropriate manner to articulate
and to attempt to live on the basis of figuring this all out for oneself is an explicit concern
in texts that come after this Hemingway and especially in the process of publicly debated
gay liberation.

Comley and Scholes proceed insightfully to identify a shadow-figure present in
the “Hemingway Text,” a character very much present in The Sun Also Rises. Here, they
consider male homosexuality specifically:

The usual view of Hemingway’s interest in sexuality is that of the locker-
room sort, kidding-with-the-guys but fiercely heterosexual in its focus,
treating homosexuality as either a joke or a horror. [. . .] But there is also
someone else, someone denied but presupposed by that very mentality.
The locker-room vieWpoint may be found in many places in Hemingway’s
writing where male homosexuality is coded as a form of femininity that
deforms the male body and makes it repulsive to an eye oriented to an
essence of manliness that excludes everything female. But the
Hemingway Text does not always speak of this pure vision of masculinity
or in a single macho voice. (110-11)

There is always the possibility that some locker-room banter may be merely (fairly,

perfectly mindless) locker-room banter. (In the Kerouac, Sal will describe a moment of

27

such “male” mindlessness as he watches Dean in the car, with Dean deeply immersed in
his own immediate experience, but seemingly unaware of those around him). In fact, to
call it a “locker-room viewpoint” is to connect by implication buddy-banter with not only
various loaded notions of masculinity but also with exclusively male bodies mingling,
and some inherent sexual energy. The point is well-taken about different ways to read
the text in different places, but the locker-room metaphor may be imprecise. Rather than
opposing the locker-room joker to the “someone else” denied but presupposed, yet
presumably to be found outside the locker-room, perhaps instead there can ultimately be
no separation between the locker-room and the world outside.

Indeed, what is most significant about The Sun Also Rises, and the focus of my
genealogy through these texts, from this 1926 text by Hemingway through the seventies,
is those moments confi'onting those characters when the dichotomy between the locker-
room and this “someone else” becomes destabilized. For it is precisely during moments
and interactions when gender unravels that these men are faced with difficulties of
vulnerability and intimacy, when the question of what it means to be friends comes to the
fore. Decisions have to be made, and roles discarded, re-enforced, or re-imagined and
performed.

In Waiting for the End (1964), Leslie F iedler writes about Hemingway the author,
but his comments resonate especially well regarding the character Jake Barnes, and,
indeed, the attempt of a male to establish and maintain a satisfactory masculinity in
relation to others:

In the barn, perhaps, and just before sleep [i.e. death], Hemingway could

become again the Steer he had originally imagined himself--not the

28

doomed, splendid victim in the bull ring (this is the role of the celebrity

rather than the writer), only the patient nudger of bulls on the way to the

ring. In The Sun Also Risea, which seems now the greatest of his novels,

it is the image of the Steer which possesses Hemingway, and this is

appropriate enough in a book whose protagonist is impotent. (12-13)
Having failed to enact the role of the Bull, and watching those around him, his circle of
comrades, attempt to affect the bull-posture, Jake begins to realize the futility of the
attempt. Even as he glarnorizes the art and struggle of the bullfighter as the dramatic
ideal of the heroic life, mere mortals have to settle with plain old sympathy, compassion,
and attempts at intimacy. As Brett says at the end of the novel, having spared bullfighter
Romero the certain disaster of a relationship with her, “You know it makes one feel
rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” After Jake says yes, Brett continues: “It’s sort of
what we have instead of God” (249).

F iedler goes on to a common reading of the “Hemingway style,” placing it in the
context of the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. His analysis is astute as regards
characters communicating with each other in speech. But he risks oversimplification
when it comes to, for instance, Jake’s narrative soliloquies. In The Sun Also Risea, the
rhetorical flourishes tend to come in physical descriptions, and when Jake talks to
himself:

In the mouths of his early non-heroes, in flight from war, incapable of
love, victims of history and helpless beholders of infamy, the famous
Hemingway style seems suitable, really functional. Such anti-heroes

demand anti-rhetoric, since for them there are no viable, new, noble

29

phrases to replace the outworn old ones--only the simplest epithets, and
certain short-breathed phrases, not related or subordinated to each other,
but loosely linked by the most non-committal of conjunctions: and. . .
and. . . and. . . . In a world of non-relation, only non-syntax tells the truth
as in a world of non-communication, only a minimal speech, the next best
thing to silence, gives a sense of reality. (13)
While it is true that they appear to be incapable of love and anti-heroic, without noble
phrases, Jake’s great struggle, failed though it may be, is precisely to invent new possible,
tentative definitions of love and relation using a language appropriate to the task. He
comes closest to success in scenes with masculine men in settings far away from the
deadening café milieu. Especially important is to be a great distance from the troubling
presence of homosexuals.

The most explicit example of such trouble comes with Lady Brett Ashley’s
entrance onto the scene of the novel, which illustrates a cluster of ambiguities regarding
gender and sexuality. Brett arrives in the company of a group of homosexuals, though
their sexuality is hinted at rather than named. Jake calls them “them,” and describes their
appearance and mannerisms as a monolithic group:

A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves,
got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light
from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and
smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands,
wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was

Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them. (28)

30

He sees white faces and hands and grimacing, rather than individual people. Also, they
both “come in” and “go in” simultaneously, making the narrator’s position relative to
them unclear. Brett looks lovely, but is very much with them. More than that, she is in
some sense one of them-~of them. She also wears a jersey and has a boyish haircut. And
she may as well be one of them as far as Jake is concerned, since he and Brett are
presruned to be unable to have genital sexual relations, at least intercourse, because of his
war injury. Yet perhaps more significantly, she shares with them a sense of humor and
parody, and refers to herself as one of the chaps. As Jake says, “she started all that” (30),
meaning the fashion of androgyny and by association perhaps also the enjoyment of the
company of homosexuals. As she says, it’s a safe crowd to drink with, this crowd of
effeminate chaps. Indeed, the entire representation of fairies may have been safer for
both the characters and their author in Paris in the 19208 than would such a portrayal be
in, say, the late forties or fifties in the United States.

While it’s unclear exactly what gives rise to the following violent homophobic
reaction in Jake’s mind, it is clear that it’s a scene he’s uncomfortable with, probably in
part because it makes a mockery of the seriousness with which he instills his attempts at
intimate relationships, particularly with Brett. For Jake, friendship is a serious affair,
though one might speak of it lightly, sloughing it off as though it were a given, in the
superficial manner in which friends, or mere acquaintances, often do. Yet it is not only
his passionate feelings for Brett that are at stake here. What he takes to be the
superficiality of this group also offends his sense of his relationships with men, to come

later in the novel:

31

I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are
supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing
on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.
Instead, I walked down the street and had a beer at the next Bal. The beer
was not good and I had a worse cognac to take the taste out of my mouth.
(28)
This scene is replayed in Kerouac in On the Road--the same sense of violent anger along
with the realization that one ought not to feel this way; but Kerouac writes in the wake of
the next world war, and his narrator Sal acknowledges knowing lots of gays, and speaks
more explicitly about intimate feelings and experiences with male fiiends than Jake does.
Why is Jake so angry, with violent impulses? And are they potentially serious
threats of violence that he might carry out, or are they poses meant for his own viewing
of himself that compensate for something? As Haberrnas says, we are all always on stage
for the audience, even for ourselves, even when we are alone, a model of self-
consciousness that is crucial to this entire project given the significance of roles and
posturing throughout.‘1 Jake has had no bad encounter with any individual, but the very
presence of the fairies threatens his “real,” serious relationships, especially since Brett
appears among them. He merely claims dismissively and universally that “they are like
that” (28). He has been left with a bad taste in his mouth that he is unable to expunge.
Both Fiedler and Comley and Scholes offer readings of this homophobia. While
Fiedler writes in broad strokes about writers, the relevant insight for my purposes has to
do with narrators and characters. Two observations he makes here are central to all five

novels discussed in this chapter: First, that characters engage in role-falsification and

32

“travesty”—the public (homosexual) image from which they find it hard to dissociate

themselves; and second, the representation of the opposite of the noble savage, incapable

of raw experience. For F iedler, homosexual characters and Jewish characters fimction in

much the same way in some American novels:
To writers like Hemingway, on the other hand, to the devotees of raw
experience [like Kerouac and Rechy] who went to Europe to fish rather
than to pray [Jake at least tries to pray] (though also, of course, to make
books), the Jew stands for the pseudo-artist. Along with the homosexual,
he seems to them to travesty and falsify their own real role; to help create
in the public eye an image, from which they find it hard to dissociate
themselves, of the effete intellectual, the over-articulate, pseudo-civilized
fake. For them, too, the Jew [along with the homosexual] represents the
opposite of the Negro, Indian, peasant, bullfighter, or any of the other
versions of the noble savage with whom such writers, whether at home or
abroad, sought to identify themselves. (81-82)

Here are Comley and Scholes on Jake’s homophobic reaction to seeing Brett in

the company of the fairies:
Why such anger? Perhaps because the homosexuals are built like
“normal” men yet (Jake might think) do not choose to be “normal,” while
Jake, who has a “normal” male’s sex drive, had been left only fragments
of sexual apparatus. He cannot perform, though he desires to do so, while

the homosexuals can perform and yet do not desire “normal” heterosexual

33

sex. The sexually fragmented Jake is thus linked to men he perceives in
fragments as unmanly because he himself has been unmanned. (44)

While it may be the case that Jake is “linked” to the homosexuals because of having been
“unmanned,” another important way to read his anger is in view of the threat they pose to
his male-to-male relationships. The homosexuals appear to him to be free of the strict
gender codes that prohibit intimacy between, for instance, him and Bill. His “fragmented
apparatus” allows him to see the limitations imposed by traditional gender roles, as does
the fact that his frustrated woman-lover figure Brett embodies ideal masculine qualities.

For Jake Barnes, another such moment of gender destabilization comes when he
and Bill go fishing, just the two of them. This trip away from the city and all its
pretensions provides the novel’s most isolated and intense moments of the attempt at
intimate homosociality; it’s just the guys themselves together among other guys they
meet along the way. The trip begins with a gorgeous pastoral description of a bus trip
they take with a group of Basques. They drink lots of wine, which is described in rich
intimate detail, including their friendly, manly conversations and exactly how the wine
hisses out of the skins and into their waiting mouths. One of the Basque men lies against
Jake’s leg. For once, he seems happy and freed from conflict. The countryside is
beautiful, and they pass a monastery in the hills. Might untroubled intimacy finally be
possible in a monastery? Perhaps so, but not for one whose faith is in crisis. Shortly they
arrive to book a room in a hotel at the end of a long day. Jake is pleased with things.
“After supper we went up-stairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the
night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed” (116).

This moment in the trip is the time of comfort in the novel—comfort in the pleasures of

34

masculinity, or even a momentary respite fiom conscious gender-play. Tension returns,
however, when they get back out of bed to face the waking task of figuring out what it
might take to be intimate men out in the world.

The next morning they prepare for the day-long fishing trip. Bill wakes up and
begins singing a song about irony and pity, made up to the tune of “The Bells are Ringing
for Me and My Gal.” He chides Jake by saying that: “You ought to be ironical the
minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity” (110).
What’s significant about their locker-room sort of humorous banter is that it can only take
them so far into intimacy, and must be couched in terms of irony and pity—and
invocations of heterosexuality--acknowledgements of the difficulties at hand. As they
enjoy coffee, Bill further voices these difficulties with attacks on gender and city life:

Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we
are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.
You know what’s the trouble with you [on rumors about Jake from New
York]? You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type. [. . .]
You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake
European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You
become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.
You’re an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes. (120)
These allegations are accusations associated with the unmanly, the homosexual.
Bill then tells Jake that there are reports of his impotency. Bill regrets having
mentioned it, but Jake wants the banter to continue: “He had been going splendidly. I

was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted him

35

to start again.” Jake responds that he’s not impotent, but just had “an accident.” Here’s
his veiled explanation: “A plane is sort of like a tricycle. The joystick works the same
way” (120). Something happened in a plane, and his joystick doesn’t work anymore.
One of the most trying and telling moments in their relationship comes in the
following exchange, directly following the talk of impotency, which moves from humor
to seriousness, and immediately back to joking of an unusual sort:
“I think he’s a good writer, too,” Bill said. “And you’re a hell of a
good guy. Anybody ever tell you were a good guy [sic]?”
“I’m not a good guy.”
“Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than
anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a
faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a
faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis.
Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by
the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and
Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin.” (121)
The talk about American history might be simple joking (especially since Dred Scott
predates the Anti-Saloon League and speculations about Lincoln’s sexuality are, to my
knowledge, quite a recent phenomenon). Bill’s declaration of fondness, however, is not a
joke, nor is his comment about not being able to say it in New York. These are rather
deliberate comments on hypocrisy and Puritanism regarding matters connected to
sexuality in the United States. Hence, the men are safer to be explicit about their feelings

for each other in this pastoral setting in the Basque region. Here, they are almost safe and

36

able to be men intimate with each other (the desire that lurks under their tough skins).
Their pleasure in such masculine banter is being spoken out loud; the danger is that they
may be approaching the limit of the imaginable masculine realm.

They then begin their long walk to the appointed fishing spot. Upon arrival, they
decide to split up and meet back together for lunch. As Jake waits for Bill’s return, he’s
reading a story about a bride waiting twenty-four years for the return of the frozen body
of her husband, “while her true love waited, too, and they were still waiting when Bill
came up” (125). They begin the banter again, about famous Americans and chickens and
eggs and much fuss about a drumstick. They get a bit drunk on wine, have a delightfirl
nap, discuss dreaming, and return to the hotel. They seem so comfortable with each
other, more so than any other characters at any time in the book. But there are consistent
barriers to their being able to sustain a conversation about what seems truly important to
them. When Bill asks, Jake says he doesn’t want to talk about Brett and his feelings for
her. Whether this is because it would make him too vulnerable or because it would bring
them back to the citified doldrums, it would in any event distract from their precious
moment together. Things are so much better when Brett is away, back in town with the
fairies.

But they must get back, back to the miserable scene of being superficial and
uptight, back to normal gender roles. After all, they have plans with the rest of the gang.
Such plans, however, are constantly made and broken and postponed throughout the
novel. They could stay a while longer. But this would mean extending the harrowing
experience of being on the edge, at the limit of their possible intimacy. As they break

camp and prepare to leave, they say goodbye to a new friend they’ve met on the trip, a

37

Brit named Harris. On the way out, the three of them pass the monastery, and order a
final drink together. Harris says:

“I say. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to have you chaps up here.

V[. . .]

I wish you’d let me pay for it. It does give me pleasure, you know.”

Bill says: “We call you Harris because we’re so fond of you.”

Harris says: “I say, Barnes. You don’t know what this all means to me.

[. . .] Barnes. Really, Barnes, you can’t know. That’s all.”

Jake says: “Drink up, Harris.” (134)

And so, that’s all. That’s all to be said when they part. And that’s all that can be said
when Bill and Jake finally part after their excursion together. Back they go to the world
in which a certain proper distance separates them. After all, too much pleasure might get
them into unknown troubles.

Thus, Jake Barnes is unable to articulate his difficulties with satisfactorily
performing masculinity and sustaining intimate connections even in Europe in the 19205,
when it might have been a less scandalous adventure than it would later become; if only
he had been able to come up with, and come to terms with, the thoughts and language

with which to do so.

Almost Perfectly Normal: Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar (1948)5
By the time we reach Gore Vidal’s novel in 1948, the Cold War rigidity regarding
gender roles and the attendant hysteria regarding homosexuality has begun to set in. Yet,

this novel is remarkable for its conscious deliberation of issues surrounding the roots of

38

homosexuality, as well as possible reasons for the deep-seated homophobia unique to the
American society of the time. In fact, Vidal’s characters put forth a set of very important
and fi'uitful treatises or manifestos of gay liberation.

Before turning to the plot and the characters’ struggles for self-identity and
intimacy in a systematic manner, here is a most sustained and systematic manifesto, right
in the middle of it all, put forth by Paul Sullivan, a homosexual novelist who is having an
affair with protagonist Jim Willard at this point. In this scene, they are talking with a gay
owner of a bar in New Orleans. Here’s part of Paul Sullivan’s manifesto, quite heady for
1 948:

“One could keep those [other “moral”] conventions; the ones to
discard are the sexual taboos, the neurotic fears of frustrated people who
don’t dare live out their dreams because of self-made conventions and
who become zealots of normality--whatever freakish state that is. [. . .]

[Homosexuality is] censured because the others are afraid, afraid
for themselves. They’re afraid of their own dreams, their unlived past. If
this thing were open they would be exposed too. [. . .] No, we must declare
ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean
life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let
them see that the important thing is not the object of love but the emotion
itself, it has always existed and always will and probably no explanation
can be given for it.” (139-41)

Jim ponders all of this, and spots a group of butch-femme lesbians [the butch ones

“accentuating” “the man within”]:

39

“There,” said Jim, motioning with his head at the older woman,
“there is someone who’s honest, who lets everybody know her. You mean
be like that?”

“No,” said Paul, “that isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean defiance
and I didn’t mean these people; these are exceptions, these are people so
hunted that they have, at last, become totally perverse as a defense. No, I
was thinking of the thousands like ourselves. Perfectly normal men and
women, except for this overdevelopment of the other sex in them. They
live in hiding now all over the country; I think that only a few ever
practice what they feel. Most of them marry and have children and try to
destroy the other sex in them; they never succeed, of course. Those are
the ones who should make themselves known, who should be allowed to

grow outwardly, to search for love as all humans should.” (142)

Paul Sullivan thus stands as a major mouthpiece for the political, intellectual, and

emotional framework in which the drama of the novel is played out. Sullivan’s speech is

remarkable for some of its claims about possible reasons for the persecution of

homosexuals, notably the resentment that heteronormative society has for people who

attempt to live their dreams, and love each other, outside its own rigid conventions. This

is part of the arguments put forward by many cultural theorists today (e. g., Berlant,

Bronski, Warner). The society cannot afford to let a significant part of the population

pursue lives of pleasure and happiness that threaten the structures of the status quo.

Yet the speech also suffers from a fairly strict adherence to medical-psychological

theories of homosexuality as neurosis and the over-development of “the other sex” in the

40

deviant; these views are shared by most characters throughout the novel. Moreover, there
seems to be a dangerous contradiction between the plea for all to be tolerated, even the
most visibly abnormal, and the assertion that, rather, it’s the “perfectly normal ones like
us” who need to come out. But, of course, Jim and Paul aren’t really normal under Paul’s
own characterization of them as having an overdeveloped female within. In fact, the
narrator speaks of “the woman” in characters like Paul (though never J im--he alone
among the homosexual characters seems to be “all man”).

Along with functioning as a moral mouthpiece for the book, Paul Sullivan acts as
Jim’s main mentor, his guide into the joys and perils of developing both a normal and
abnormal sexual identity, depending on the moment and the person giving the diagnosis.
Yet Paul’s diagnosis of Jim as a particular case of a “type” of sexual, gay man, is
pessimistic at best. Paul tells Jim that he is, in fact, “the unluckiest type” (127). His
unluckiness, according to Sullivan, stems, in part, from not following “the usual pattern”
of male homosexuals:

Jim, who had never really thought of himself as one, now regarded
himself with wonder and fear and doubt. [. . .] After all, he was able to
fool everyone, even those like himself [i.e. straight-acting and appearing].
He began to remove the revelation to that dormant part of his brain where
he banished unpleasant things and then, disposing of the unwanted
revelation for the time being, he found that he was hurt by something
Sullivan had said: he had no feeling in his relationships; he could not love
a man. He was hurt that his tenderness had gone unnoticed although it

was not quite the same thing as love. He felt he knew what love was

41

better than anyone who had ever lived. He doubted if anyone had felt as
desperate as and as lonely as be when Bob had left. Yes, he was capable
of love with Bob and, perhaps, with someone who could affect him in the
same way: another brother. [. . .]

And J irn maintained his secret and it grew inside him and became
important to him, a part of himself that no one might ever know or share: a
memory of a cabin and a brown river. Some day he would relive that
again and the circle of his life would be completed. Now he would learn
and he would please himself and hide from the outsiders who wanted him
to love. (126-127)

There is, of course, a tremendous tension throughout these passages, both in
Sullivan’s analysis and in Jim’s words and thoughts. I will turn to a somewhat briefer
discussion of points throughout the plot that detail Jim’s journey toward self-
understanding, and the final destination of his search for love. [For now, though, let us
consider the tension between the notion that there are certain patterns, which Jim doesn’t
fit (according to Sullivan), and the fact that there are multiple types and patterns, which
Jim sees aspects of his own experience reflected in. Also, there is the tension between
Jim’s sense of his own uniqueness, to some degree bolstered by Sullivan’s portrait of him
as an exception, and his recognition that there are “others like him”--the apparently
straight ones, who may be in general less effusive and visibly emotional than the more
“obvious,” demonstrative crowd. Moreover, he both does and does not wish to discuss
and consider these matters firrther. He wants to deny that he “is one,” even as he wishes

to discover just how much he might be capable of loving a man. But answers to these

42

questions may, for Jim, have to wait for the full-circle back to Bob. Some writers,
including Rechy and at least one of the manifestos, remark. on this tendency to carry the
memory of an early sexual experience, and awakening, into our later desires and
expectations of our relationships.

The novel begins with a scene of Jim Willard getting very drunk in a bar, trying to
forget. This scene will be revisited in the last chapter of the novel, and is the last
chronological point in the novel. Chapter Two marks the beginning of traditional
narrative time. Jim is getting ready for his big trip to the cabin by the river, “maybe to
fish some, but mainly just loaf around” (32). Bob is graduating and plans to head off to
sea the following week, so it represents an intense moment in their friendship. It will
mean good-bye and the end of an era. The scene by the river is a gradual evocation of the
movement of their relationship toward asexual encounter. They begin swimming, then
wrestling. Jim is curious about the sensations he feels. He regrets that they don’t talk
about much important. They continue to wrestle, and “[s]omehow the violence released
Jim from certain emotions and he wrestled furiously with Bob, made free, for the time, by
violence” (40). Shortly thereafter they embrace and have sex, which gets little
description in the text except that it’s intense and a point of contention between the two
of them afterward. Bob says that guys aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing together,
that it’s unnatural. J irn admits that he’s enjoyed it. They agree to carry on with their
affections for the rest of their time together at the cabin, when Bob is planning to leave to
go to sea.

Bob leaves. That summer, Jim decides to follow his example and goes to New

York to work, winding up first at sea, and then in Hollywood, where he teaches tennis

43

and discovers the subculture of “abnormal,” homosexual men. He enjoys their
friendship-~they’re amusing--but becomes violently defensive when propositioned. This
scene is strikingly similar to the moments in the Hemingway and the Baldwin when the
narrators encounter and gaze upon a group of fairies:

He believed that he could identify all of them now. They walked
with a tight, slightly mincing and completely self-conscious manner.
Their voices had a curious quality, a feminine intonation, and their eyes
were searching but wary, continually defending, asking.

He was pleased after the first month or so in the hotel to be able to
identify these curious young men. [. . .] [O]nce one of them came to him
and asked him to be his lover. Jim was severe and masculine and quite
unnerved. [. . .] He refused the young man and he was violent in his
refusal. He said furious things that he had never said to anyone before.
He felt assaulted and in danger of being destroyed. Jim was confused by
these feelings. But still he went to their parties and still, fi'om time to
time, he was forced to be severe and masculine, to refuse. (91)

There are several such scenes of his violent masculine, and decidedly
hompohobic, streak. Whenever his own manhood is questioned, even in teasing, he has
to assert it to himself and the world. In one scene, he looks in the mirror for any traces of
the womanly, and is pleased and relieved to see that, with his brown face, he looks like a
wild savage.

Yet he continues to wonder about the connection between these men and his

lifelong erotic dreams of both men and women, but recently centered almost exclusively

on Bob. Jim worries that his own, pure, natural desire will be corrupted by the fairies,
unnatural and nonmasculine as they are. Somehow they and their desire have the power
to ruin things between him and Bob:
He could not imagine himself doing the things they said they did.
But he wanted to know more, to understand this twisted behavior, to
understand himself, for it was impossible that something that had been so
natural and complete to him could be corrupted by these affected womanly
creatures. (100)

The following passage raises the questions of masks, passing, identities, and one’s
confidence in one’s ability to appear'straight: “Jim had discovered by now that most
homosexuals were confident that no one could see behind their mask of normality when
they chose to wear that mask” (104). Yet aren’t there people who could, or might choose
to, go about their daily lives without even considering donning a mask? It depends on
who wants to be out how to whom. It also requires a language and sophistication with
which to make a decision about sexual identity, or a great luxury—the lack of any
pressing need or desire to strike a position. Jim would seem to be a candidate, but he
finds himself constantly faced with interrogating himself and his appearance to look for
any telling signs. A paradox continues through today: A man desires the almost normal,
not obvious gay man, and to be seen himself to fit this description; yet he wants to
declare himself, and to let others know of his desires. Hence, there are a cluster of moral
and epistemological quandaries. What are one’s political responsibilities? How do
people presume to know what they know about each other (and themselves)? Is there no

escape from the struggles and paradoxes of masks without coming out to the entire

45

world? Don’t “out” and “straight” people continue with masks, though perhaps not
always so desperately? These questions are at the heart of the manifestos to come.

Jim then receives a letter from his mother, including the news that Bob Ford has
married Sally Winters, his high school sweetheart, and that they have a baby. Jim’s
mother implores him to come home for a visit, and to contemplate settling down himself.
The following ruminations of Jim’s indicate the difficulty of giving up on one’s fantasies,
even when the evidence seems to stack the cards against one:

He had not thought of this before. He had never before thought of Bob
marrying. It never occurred to him that Bob might have changed, that Bob
was a grown man and, probably, a normal one. Jim felt very cold and
afraid then. The dream he had been constructing for years might be false,
a daydream with no reality in it. But he would not believe this; he could
not. What had happened by the river had been too important, too large for
either of them ever to forget. Bob probably liked women. He rather
hoped that he did, because the more clearly normal Bob was the better he
would like him. But that part of Bob which Jim had shared would never
change; the emotion that they had had transcended such unimportant
things as the sexual object. (274)
Once again, Jim is manipulating and being manipulated by his notions of masculinity as
they relate to sexual identity and desire. Bob may have changed, become normal,
become exclusively straight. He might like Bob better this way. But no, “that part of
Bob which Jim had shared would never change.” Jim seeks to make Bob’s formulation

of the relation between sex and sentiment, as well as his own, fit with his political and

46

emotional consciousness of the world. Sullivan had said that the emotion and not the
object was important. Of course, while this judgment may be true for the lover, it can
hardly be so for the beloved, to paraphrase Toni Morrison’s similar assertion.

Next, Jim finds himself at the dinner table at a visit back home. He begins to
formulate his own personal manifesto (in the narrator’s voice), molding it much on Paul
Sullivan’s earlier one. It’s articulated in the context of his family’s wish that he might
one day (soon) settle down and get married like Bob Ford:

He could never make the slightest contact with these people and

‘ this made him sad, for they were, after all, a part of his life, a part that was
growing smaller. He was impatient of this masquerade now. [. . .] These
usual people were either too much woman or too much man, these
conventional people, these people from his past. There was no basis for
understanding here. They had never been so emotionally severed from
society that they were forced to analyze and understand emotion. [. . .] He
wondered what would happen if he were to be honest and natural; if every
man like him were to be natural and honest. [. . .] There is not much love
in the world but if what little there is were made freer, were less hampered
by frightened miserable people, there would be more happiness, more
fulfillment. A man should be able to love other men as well as women.
And, without the censure of society, he would--as they do in primitive
places. For by an open love of other men as well as women wars might
cease and a new period might come about; one in which there would be

more peace and more self-fulfillment than there is now. (287-88)

47

In fact, almost all the intimacy in these books takes place in “primitive places,”
whether in the pastoral scenes of fishing or on the road, or in uncivilized urban spaces--
Giovanni’s room, New Orleans’s more sordid spaces, or under the piers. Natives of such
places are imagined to be flee of suburban puritan prejudices and hang-ups. The striking
thing about this passage, however, is the breadth and intensity of his utopian vision.
While it remains naive in its simplicity (and its very youthful tone), the notion of being
forced to analyze and understand because of having been emotionally severed, and the
recognition of the sadness involved in making a break fiom the comfortably normal past,
are important and not at all simple-minded considerations. Also, he implicates himself in
the problem by admitting that he has not yet been “honest and natural”—which of course
recalls the impossible and dangerous burden of attempting to define these terms and to
behave according to these norms.

Bob frnally comes to town. They have a good dinner and decent chit-chat. Bob
says he wants to get drunk. Jim takes him to a “famous fairy bar.” Bob begins to
question the apparent queemess of the clientele--but doesn’t seem particularly bothered
or threatened. Jim says that they’re in New York, after all: “Jim knew then that Bob was
not homosexual; it was better that he was not; it would give more meaning to their
relationship.” (304)

Bob suggests looking for some women. They go back to his hotel room. The
women he knows are unavailable. They continue to drink in the room, begin to undress,
and Jim ventures to bring up memories of their time at the cabin. They talk of their

youthful “fooling around,” Bob chuckling and Jim heart-struck. They finally go to the

same bed, turning off the light:

48

No longer thinking, but obeying his instincts, Jim reached out in
the dark and took Bob in his arms.

“Hey! What’s going on?” Bob sat up in bed. Jim said nothing,
holding him still. Bob pushed him away. “What’re you doing, anyway?”
Then, when Jim didn’t answer, he understood. “You’re a queer,” he said,
“you’re nothing but a damned queer! Go on and get your ass out of here!”
Then fury came to Jim, took the place of love. He threw himself at Bob;
he caught him by the shoulders. They rolled in the darkness, both drunk
but both aware. It was like a nightmare. Jim was the stronger; his rage
was the greater. They fell off the bed onto the floor. They fought silently.
(306)

Jim goes on to strangle Bob to death, place his body on the bed (and kiss him),
and leave for the streets, ending up in the bar scene from the opening of the novel, getting
drunk to forget that moment and its implications. In the revised version, Vidal has Jim
rape rather than kill Bob; and which fate is worse, darker? In either case, the homosexual
(or “homosexualist,” as Vidal constructs the noun in subsequent public pronouncements,
despite his ideal wish that there remain only the adjective “homosexual” to describe
behavior, and not a noun to ascribe sexual “identity,” to which he is opposed) emerges as
the perpetrator of violence, rather than its victim. One cannot help but read this
representation of the murderous/rapist homosexual figure in the context of McCarthy-era
witch-hunts, in which heinous gayness was portrayed as being at least as huge a risk to

national security and wholesome nuclear family innocence as was communism.

49

In the Baldwin novel, to be examined next, the setting shifts from New York to
Paris. Yet the tragic fate of the lovers, along with the murderous guilt of the protagonist,
is carried on. In Baldwin, however, both male figures have participated in “normal”
heterosexual relationships, and yearn for the comfort of that normality even in the midst
of their current passionate feelings for each other. For Jim Willard, utopian normality
would be achieved if he could only find another “perfectly normal” male partner who
happened to like to have sex with other guys. Utopia and normality as represented in the
Baldwin text, however, can only be found between a man and a woman in a family. At

least for David, love between two men is said to be impossible.

The Legacy of Dirty Secrets: James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

As we have seen, the Hemingway is an ostensibly straight novel set in the relative
openness of sexual Paris in the twenties; the main threat posed by the fairies is to the
stability of masculine male fiiendships and heterosexual identities. In the Vidal, the
scene shifts to the United States in the late forties, and the fairies pose a perceived threat
to a homosexual man trying to form a sexual identity with an adolescent memory at its
center. Giovanni’s Room takes us back to Paris, and the fairies represent for narrator
David the impossibility of men finding love together. Baldwin’s novel is the story of an
American male-female couple in Paris trying to figure out whether or not to get married.
Hella takes time out for a trip to Spain, leaving David behind in Paris as they sort through
their feelings and wishes. David meets an Italian man named Giovamri, and they have a

passionate love affair.

50

As in the Vidal treated above, Baldwin’s novel begins with the protagonist getting
drunk as he reflects on the recent disaster. For Jim Willard, the event was his having
murdered his beloved Bob Ford. For David, it is the imminent death by guillotine of
Giovanni, who has been convicted of murdering his homosexual ex-employer; and David
feels partly responsible for his fate. Hella has just left him in a rented house in the south
of France, she herself headed back to the United States, through with him finally, after
discovering his homosexuality. It should be noted that all five of the novels treated in
this chapter open in a narrative present after the entire chronology of the story itself has
taken place, as does the Holleran in the next chapter. This convention allows for a
narrator with hindsight, so that each moment in the text has already been lived through.
On the one hand, the reader is given a sense of immediacy once-removed. On the other,
especially in first-person accounts, the narrator is putin the position of critical analyst—
of rememberer rather than recounter. This makes the endings read as if inevitable.

The next scene in the novel goes back chronologically to the evening David meets
Giovanni for the first time at a bar owned by Guillaume, the man he ends up being
charged with murdering. In a telling passage, he describes a group of homosexuals (in
much the same manner as Hemingway’s, Vidal’s, and Kerouac’s narrators do). There is
a limited typology implied, with the glaring lack of anyone attractive in David’s eyes--but
then along comes Giovanni:

There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid,
sometimes despairing eyes, the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered
boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were

after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly,

51

cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once
terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, lesfolles,
always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like
parrots the details of their latest love affairs--their love affairs always
seemed to be hilarious. Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in
the evening, to convey the news that he--but they always called each other
‘she’--had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or a boxer. Then
all of the others closed in on this newcomer and they looked like a
peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to
believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a
woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted
a man would certainly not want one of them. (38)

The narrator seems to have some sympathy for the gentlemen and the ti ght-
trousered boys, but none is evident for Iesfolles--the fairies. Their flamboyance bothers
him more than his purported inability to imagine anyone wanting to go to bed with them.
They are not men or women--they are a third sex, or a non-sex. They violate gender
codes. And they laugh at masculinity, even if perhaps from a defensive posture, for
whatever reason. This, too, is a theme in all these treatments of fairies.

Also in line with Vidal, there is a doubt in the reader’s mind about who imagines
what about whom sexually among the main characters. David is an American football
player. Giovanni is a masculine Italian bartender. Jacques is a homosexual known to
those who know him. During their initial encounter, however, Giovanni and David

certainly wonder about each other (and David and Jacques discuss Giovanni’s probable

52

heterosexual life). But it isn’t even clear what Jacques makes of David exactly, or what
the crowd at the bar does. It’s the old story of the element of mystery, and masculinity,
being attractive, not to mention rugged or athletic good looks. The parallels with Bob
and Jim in Vidal are numerous and significant, especially because of the historical
position of the novels as the two major works of American fiction to treat homosexuality
as a major theme in serious terms, in 1948 and 1956 respectively. Both appeared during
the period when film and television were helping to inscript extremely rigid notions of
masculinity. The two novels thus reflect prevailing discourses about gender and
sexuality while at the same time creating new modes of thinking about them.

David and Giovanni fall passionately in love with each other, and David moves
into Giovanni’s room. They have long discussions of the differences between the people
of France, Italy and the United States, which becomes a major force throughout their
relationship--their respective accounts of these differences are celebrated and laughed at
and, finally, held partly to blame for the end of their affair.

Here, Jacques and David remind and accuse each other of having had purely
physical sexual encounters, and the ultimate meaninglessness of them (in their own
minds and lives). Jacques must have told David about his; he intuits that David has had
them; as readers we don’t know about David’s history--but the point is that the accusation
resonates with David regardless of his actual past experiences. Jacques says:

“[They are shameful] because there is no affection in them, and no
joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no
contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.”

I asked him: “Why?”

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“That you must ask yourself,” he told me, “and perhaps one day,
this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.” [. . .]

“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him, and let him
love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And
how long, at the best, can it last? Since you are both men and still have
everywhere to go? Only five minutes [the time David has accused Jacques
of spending on his knees in fiont of young bucks], I assure you, only five
minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as
. dirty, then they will be dirty--they will be dirty because you will be giving
nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your
time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which
will make both of you better--forever--if you will not be ashamed, if you
will only not play it safe.” He paused, watching me, and then looked
down to his cognac. “You play it safe long enough,” he said, in a different
tone, “and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and

forever and forever--like me.” (76-7 7)

Jacques thus assumes, predicts, indeed knows that their affair cannot, or at least

will not, last (since they are both men with still “everywhere to go”). While this may

seem a presumptuous judgment to contemporary minds, it represents a sense of the

inevitable doom of a love affair between two men, as presented in the Vidal novel, and

shared by David here. He feels utterly trapped by his feelings for Giovanni, yet knows

that their coming together is dangerous and fated for bad consequences. And while

Jacques shares his sense of doom, he insists that their time together, however short, can

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be precious and not dirty. Indeed, his warning that David may end up trapped in his dirty
body forever is a cruel foreshadowing of the last scene of the novel. J acques’s point now
is that he must not be ashamed, and not deny the value of his feelings and their object,
whatever the consequences. David claims not to know what Giovanni means by
friendship; but this sounds like an attempt to deny his own desire. Much of the anxiety
surrounding this desire is a problem with gender. In David’s mind, to long for affection,
intimacy, and sexual contact with men is considered bad, dirty, and feminine—a violation
of the good, the normal, the masculine.

Their love affair, as described by David, ranges from passionate love to bitterness
and hatred, but never seems to include mindless bliss--there is always doubt, and fear,
present not so far beneath the surface. After learning about David’s “mistress” Hella,
Giovanni is constantly worried that David will leave him for her, and rightly so, as David
often expects to one day. David is constantly worried about “being” or “becoming” a
homosexual. His masculinity is threatened, and he often yearns for normality and a
heterosexual marriage, and perhaps children. Things fall apart when Giovanni is fired
from his job and Hella returns to Paris from Spain. David does leave Giovanni to be with
her. Giovanni becomes desperate, hanging out with the fairies--becoming like them--and
finally winds up probably murdering his ex-boss; at the end of the book it’s not perfectly
clear that he is guilty, but the reader assumes this to be the case. It is significant that
during his downward spiral, Giovanni becomes a fairy, at least in David’s eyes. Whether
he does it to spite David, or whether it’s his punishment for failing in life, or whether

David only imagines his transformation into a flippant hussy figure in order to make it

55

bearable to disown him, David must see Giovanni in this way to survive himself, and to
attempt a relationship with Hella.

As the following exchange indicates, representations of sexuality in the novel are
almost always connected to assumptions about gender. Furthermore, the assertion of the
loneliness of making love “only with the body” calls into question the relation of sex and
sentiment, whether it be with a boy in a dark alley or with a woman in a “private” bed of
heterononnativity:

“Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion
about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and
they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you
know?--and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.” He stopped. “I
perhaps don’t like women very much, that’s true. That hasn’t
stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. But most of
the time--most of the time I made love only with the body.”

“That can make one very lonely,” I said. I had not expected to say

it.

He had not expected to hear it. He looked at me and reached out
and touched me on the cheek. “Yes,” he said. Then: “I am not trying to
be mechant when I talk about women. I respect women--very much--for
their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.”

“Women don’t seem to like that idea,” I said. ( 105)

The reader learns later on the tragic story that has brought Giovanni to Paris. He

had a wife in his village in Italy, and she had a stillborn child, an event that sent Giovanni

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into such sorrow and rage that he renounced God and fled the village. Hence, both men
carry with them memories and failed expectations of happiness and normality in a
heterosexual marriage. David’s ultimate disappointment comes near the end of the book
when Hella realizes that he and Giovanni were lovers, and that David seems to prefer sex
with men.

David’s own realization of his love for men comes and goes at various times.
One afternoon they are walking down the street, spitting cherry pits at one another, acting
childish and very much in love. Yet David sees a boy walk by. He realizes that he loves
this boy as he loves Giovanni. Giovanni notices this, and laughs even harder--it doesn’t
bother him and, in fact, makes him more passionate. But David can’t handle such a
feeling:

I felt sorrow and shame and panic and great bitterness. At the
same time--it was part of my turmoil and also outside it--I felt the muscles
in my neck tighten with the effort I was making not to turn my head and
watch that boy diminish down the bright avenue. The beast which
Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day
I would not be with Giovanni anymore. And would I then, like all the
others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God
knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?

With this fearfiil intimation there opened in me a hatred for
Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by

the same roots. (110-11)

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In a later scene, he eyes a sailor dressed in white, and doesn’t realize the extent to
which his own desire is apparent in his eyes-apparent, at least to the sailor, though
perhaps not to David himself. He eyes the sailor, whom he observes “walking with that
funny roll sailors have and with that aura, hopefirl and hard, of having to make a great
deal happen in a hurry. I was staring at him, though I did not know it, and wishing I were
he” (121). He so badly wants to be a normal, real masculine man. The fantasy of being
in a white uniform as representing an appropriate mode of being a normal man will be
replicated almost exactly in the words of Malone in Andrew Holleran’s novel, to be
discussed below. Sadly, the fantasy will not come true for David, and, worse, he senses
that the sailor intuits his longings. Moreover, David understands that his desire for
intimacy and affection is even more threatening than mere lust would be, to both the
sailor and himself, because such sentiment crosses the barrier of acceptable notions of
masculine relations:
But, hurrying, and not daring now to look at anyone, male or female, who
passed me on the wide sidewalks, I knew that what the sailor had seen in
my unguarded eyes was envy and desire: I had seen it often in Jacques’
eyes and my reaction and the sailor’s had been the same. But if I were
still able to feel affection and if he had seen it in my eyes, it would not
have helped, for affection, for the boys I was doomed to look at, was
vastly more fiightening than lust. (122-23)

After an encounter with a woman named Sue, in an attempt to bolster his masculine

identity, David ponders suicide and his desire for normality, just before returning to learn

that Giovanni has lost his job:

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Yet it was true, I recalled, turning away from the river down the long
street home, I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light
and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my
children to bed. I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I
wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a women
[sic] to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could
always be renewed. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I
could make it again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard
strength for me to become myself again. (1 37-3 8)

Giovanni finally tells David of his stillborn male child, and the life he left behind
in Italy. He accuses David of being one of those fairies who would probably lust after his
son, had he lived. Yet he pleads his love for David, and says how he will die if David
leaves him. Moreover, he accuses David of being a heartless American of the sort who
would take a tourist trip through his Italian village, with no understanding of true love
and passion:

“You do not,” cried Giovanni, sitting up, “love anyone! You have
never loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you
love your mirror-~you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with
your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold,
silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will
never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it-- man or
woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with

soap--and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the

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meantime.” He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once,
fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of
tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in
his arms and neck. “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you
stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink
of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little
moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral
man I have met in all of my life. Look, look what you have done to me.
Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what
you should do to love?”

Inside me something locked. “I--I cannot have a life with you,” I
said.

“But you can have a life with Hella. With that moon-faced little
girl who thinks babies come out of cabbages--or frigidaires, I am not
acquainted with the mythology of your country. You can have a life with
her.”

“Yes,” I said, wearily, “I can have a life with her.” I stood up. I
was shaking. “What kind of life can we have in this room?--this filthy
little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? All
this love you talk about--isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel
strong? You want to go out and be the big laborer and bring home the

money, and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the

food and clean this miserable closet of a room and kiss you when you

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come in through that door and lie with you at night and be your little girl.
That’s what you want. That’s what you mean and that’s all you mean
when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you
think you’ve been doing to me?”

“I am not trying to make you a little girl. If I wanted a little girl, I
would be with a little girl.” ‘

“Why aren’t you? Isn’t it just that you’re afiaid? And you take me
because you haven’t got the guts to go after a woman, which is what you
really want?”

He was pale. “You are the one who keeps talking about what I
want. But I have only been talking about who I want.”

“But I’m a man,” I cried, “a man! What do you think can happen
between us?”

“You know very well,” said Giovanni slowly, “what can happen
between us. It is for that reason you are leaving me.” (186-89)

In the midst of all of this tension and even contradiction about gender roles (e.g.,
which man is most threatened in his masculinity--do they both want to be “the man,” or
at least “a real man”?), Giovanni “turns back into the room.” Not only does his body
turn, but he is transformed once again into his room-~the room is the prison of
homosexuality in which David, though not Giovanni, feels trapped. The room is the vile,
filthy, immoral miserable little closet that David has tried to escape from since his first

moment of passion there.

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David leaves Giovanni to attempt a relationship with Hella. It doesn’t work, as
first he feels his feelings toward her change dramatically, and begins to find her “stale,
her body uninteresting, her presence grating.” Hella tries to find out what’s bothering
him. First, she realizes that it has to do with his sadness about Giovanni waiting on death
row; next she realizes that Giovanni was in love with David, and his guilt about not doing
more to help him; finally, she discovers him in a gay bar and comes to understand much
more about his love for Giovanni and his homosexual desire. In her desperation and
passion, she puts the blame squarely on Giovanni, whom she either believes, or wants
defensively to convince herself, is the bad homosexual who has corrupted David and
ruined their chance at bliss. She seems to forget or deny her earlier sympathy for
Giovanni. Now he represents the corrupting influence of sophisticated Europe, ruining
the innocence and simple happiness of Americans:
“I’ll never understand it,” she said at last, and she raised her eyes to mine
as though I could help her to understand. “That sordid little gangster has
wrecked your life. I think he’s wrecked mine, too. Americans should
never come to Europe,” she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, “it
means they can never be happy again. What’s the good of an American
who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.” And she fell forward into
my arms, into my arms for the last time, sobbing. (218)

She moves away, trying to articulate her frustration with the trap of her fairly essentialist

view of gender, at least of femaleness. This is very similar to the musing about gender to

come in Kerouac’s On the Road, published the very next year but set in America. Here,

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Hella retreats to the tiny mirror in her compact, to inspect, indeed, to apply, the face of
the little girl who only wants to be together with a little boy:

She moved away. “Ah. I don’t know anything about happiness
anymore. I don’t know anything about forgiveness. But if women are
supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what
happens then? What happens then?” She went to the closet and got her
coat; dug in her handbag and found her compact and, looking into the tiny
mirror, carefully dried her eyes and began to apply her lipstick. “There’s a
difference between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those
little blue books. Little girls want little boys. But little boys--!” She
snapped her compact shut. “I’ll never again, as long as I live, know what
they want. And now I know they’ll never tell me. I don’t think they know
how.” (218-19)

In the final passage of the novel, Hella has left David alone, and he begins to
fantasize in the form of a vision of Giovanni’s final few moments before execution. The
guillotine that will kill Giovanni is the knife that would cut off David’s sex. The mirror
brings his attention back to himself, alone, in the present moment, and he searches for the
religious significance of his troubled state. He faces his full body, his troubling sex,
trapped in the reflection in the mirror that shows him the trouble with attempting to
inhabit a lurified self defined as adult and masculine, suffering fi'om the heteronormative
imposition of heterosexuality and domesticity. He longs to crack the mirror, to escape

the confines of this false unity made up of false identities and labels. Finally, he turns

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away from the mirror, back to his real body, back to Giovanni, until Giovanni’s moment
of death merges with David’s own final thoughts:

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at
my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the
incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body,
what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in
time and hurries toward revelation.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but
when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror
and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be
redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is
already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.
Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my
flesh. [. . .]

I move at last from the mirror and begin to cover that nakedness
which I must hold sacred, though it be never so vile, which must be
scoured perpetually with the salt of my life. I must believe, I must
believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place,
is all that can carry me out of it. (222-224)

Thus, Baldwin’s narrator leaves the reader with a manifesto that is also a
mystery. He knows he must live on with his body and his sexuality, which is sacred and

also vile. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to which I will now turn, is a novel much more

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sex-positive on the surface (at least regarding heterosexual sex), but one in which the
narrator faces similar struggles with what it means to be a mid-century American man.
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty face the constant task of redefining their fiiendship, and

especially the significance of their attempt at being intimate together.

Eternal Jock Buddies/Soul Brothers: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (195 7)6

Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, published in 1957, the year after Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room, makes a dramatic and self-conscious contribution to post-WWII
fictional representations of masculinity and male intimacies. Moreover, it has perhaps
the most obviously problematic and ambiguous relation to questions of homoeroticism
and homophobia of all the novels discussed in this chapter, especially insofar as
homosexuality isn’t analyzed explicitly here as it is in Vidal, Baldwin, and Rechy. The
Kerouac and Rechy portray potential ideals of new forms of male intimacy, though both
end with the ultimate failure of the ability to sustain such connections.

The Hemingway and Baldwin texts exemplify the troubles males have sustaining
intimacies with each other. Vidal’s protagonist Jim is in search of a return to or adult
replication of his nostalgic vision of a boyhood love, but the adult form of intimacy is
devoid of any specific content, and fails to be realized. In Rechy, as we shall see, one
possible reading of the text is that true love and intimacy are impossible, and that
pretensions to finding them are sharns. Another reading, however, suggests that the
narrator chooses to reject possible intimate connections that come his way. And this
question is discussed openly at length. In the Kerouac, the male characters intuitively

pursue and inhabit versions of masculinity and intimacy and ecstasy, only to reach crisis

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points brought about by a growing understanding that they can’t go on like this—that
something has come between them—that something has fallen apart.

Too, On the Road marks a departure from the other works in its concerns with
family and the pursuit of the possibly mutually exclusive goals of both the transgression
of reigning morality and the maintenance of, and nostalgia for, old-fashioned American
heteronormativity. In the Hemingway, for instance, it’s ahnost as if the main characters
have no siblings or parents. In the Vidal, we get only glimpses of Jim and Bob’s families
at the start (and then when Bob is married at the end). In Baldwin, there is the odd
mention of David’s father in the context of rare letters between them, and the poignant
description of Giovanni’s childhood home in Italy. But the books by Kerouac and Rechy
are very much about being separated from family, and the wish for a return to a stable,
comforting family “home” life. While Rechy’s narrator seems to make deliberate
decisions about where to go and what to do, Kerouac’s characters are very much torn and
consruned with the balance between being on the road and settling down, and seem out of
control, wishing to relinquish the responsibility of deliberative action, preferring instead
to be swept away, at least until the end of the book, when Sal makes a decision.

The main themes of On the Road that concern me here are as follows: 1) The
travels and togetherness of Sal and Dean as they pursue “kicks” and attempt to articulate
their version of the American dream; at first glance (and as the public mythology of the
book largely has it), they reject middle-class values and proprieties, replacing them with
the wild abandon of drugs, booze, sex, and jazz; 2) Sal’s nostalgia for a lost America of
small-town innocence and family life, which he often describes in terms of lost fathers,

and alternately with his desire to find a wife and settle down; 3) Sal’s descriptions of

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intimacies, whether between the main male characters or with women or with strangers
he meets along the way--at times, it appears he might achieve a sort of intimacy and
“love” with hitchhiking mates he only knows for a few hours or less; 4) his discussions of
relations between the sexes--the narrative contains both misogyny (e.g., Dean breaks his
thumb beating a girlfiiend) and somewhat essentialist apologies explaining why men and
women don’t get along; and 5) the apparent conclusion that even he and Dean, the best of
buddy-buddies, aren’t able to stay together or remain loyal, partly because of their
inability to negotiate a sustainable form of masculine intimacy (e.g., at one of the crisis
points in their relationship, Dean says he was crying and Sal responds accusingly that
Dean doesn’t cry). Indeed, while On the Road carries on the tradition of representing
troubled if, at times, pleasurable, masculinities of the previous three novels considered in
this chapter, it marks a departure because of its treatment of characters obsessed with
self-exploration and inwardness. Many of the men in the book are conscious and explicit
about exploring the meaning and potential extent of their togetherness, while attempting
to transcend some of the hang-ups that hung up men in Hemingway, Vidal and Baldwin
as they tried to talk about intimacy. Yet they still confront problems with gendered
expectations, both with each other and in their relations with women.

Initial critical reception of On the Road was extremely polarized. Its first review
in the New Yorl_( Times hailed it as a tremendous success, calling it the Beat Generation’s
version of the Lost Generation’s The Sun Al_§o Rises. This single review, written by
stand-in critic Gilbert Millstein, assured its immediate commercial success. On the other
hand, conservative voices, including one in the Nagio_n, complained first about its literary

shortcomings, but more disdainfully about its embodiment of the moral decay of the

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young generation of the fifties. Such mixed reception would follow Kerouac and most of
the Beat writers for years to come. And the moralizing tendency of the criticism was
almost always at the forefront.7

Recent scholarship is generally kinder to the novel as a work of literature,
including appreciations of its stylistic innovations and huge cultural influence, and much
less critical of its purported moral degeneracy. After all, the Beats in general, and
Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s fl0_W1 in particular, were important participants in
the discourse of the beginnings of what have come to be called the sexual revolution and
counterculture of the post-war period (as Kerouac’s narrator Sal will articulate as he
describes Dean Moriarty’s single-handedly bringing a new sexuality into being). The

portrayal of promiscuity in On the Road among both men and women heterosexually and

 

with male same-sex relations simmering just under the surface of the published version,
was quite unorthodox for the time, especially its portrayal of sexually active women. In
Make Love. Not Wa_r (2001), David Allyn describes attitudes of the time toward sexual
activity and the double standard, and even a curious double standard of sorts toward the
double standard itself, as follows:

In the 19505, as Americans reveled in the “return to normalcy”
after years of depression and war, the double standard was reaffirmed in
books, movies, television shows, and popular magazines. American males
were told that if they were healthy they should hunger for sex, while
young women were advised to resist forcefully and demand a ring. [. . .]

No matter what was really going on behind closed doors, those

who publicly criticized the double standard could suffer severe

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consequences. As long as one championed sexual restraint for both sexes,
there was no need to fear [emphasis added]. But as soon as one advocated
sexual freedom for women as well as men, the public responded with
outrage. (14-16)

Scholars have also recently put readings of On the Road in the context of fifties
discourse about sexuality and gender categories. In Homosexgality in the Cold Warira,
Robert J. Corber discusses Sal Paradise’s problems with gender in the context of white
men in the era mourning the loss of the “pioneer spirit,” and their attempts to recover it.
In part, it is an issue of class according to Corber:

One way of reading Sal Paradise’s travels on the road is as his
search for a masculinity that is commensurate with his fantasies and
desires. By taking to the road, he hopes to recover the form of male
identity displaced by the rise of the white-collar worker. [. . .] [He]
constantly questions whether he is sufficiently masculine. [. . .] Sal does
not want to possess the cowboy sexually so much as to inhabit his body, to
experience his masculinity as though it were his own. Sal clearly thinks
that the cowboy is more of a man than he is. Despite his working-class
background, Sal has been pampered by comparison to the cowboy, whose
life has been “raw” and austere. (50-51)

If we take seriously the premise that considerations of gender often subsurne or at least
widely overlap those of sexuality, then the distinction between the desire to possess the
cowboy sexually and the desire to inhabit his body and masculinity is not self-evident.

To inhabit him would be a form of sexual possession. The more important point is that

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Sal is attracted to the idea of becoming more masculine than he perceives himself to be.
He wants to be a cowboy--and black, and Mexican, and a hobo, and a lot of things other
than what he is, throughout the novel, all of which indicate his association of untainted
masculinity and freedom with the Other, as opposed to the conforrnist, bourgeois white
American value system of the time.

Another critic who notes the significance of the Beats and On the Road in post-
war American literature and discussions of gender, sexuality, and race is David Savran.
In Taking It Like a Man (1998), Savran describes his own book as an examination of
what he calls the fear of the feminization of the male subject, as well as the appearance of
“the fantasy of the white male as victim” in the fifties (4). He also makes an important
claim about the similarities between white masculinities according to which concerns of
gender subsume differences between categories of identity based on sexual object choice:

[This book] also attempts to interrogate the relationship between
ostensibly heterosexual and ostensibly homosexual white masculinities in
US. culture, arguing that they are far more alike than they might at first
appear to be. Reacting in remarkably similar ways to anxieties over what
they fantasize to be an encroaching feminization of the male subject (and
of US. culture), they are sometimes almost indistinguishable. (33)
This claim is important to my project because it acknowledges that gay men, too, have
anxieties about perceived feminization. This anxiety is present in all the pre-Stonewall
texts examined here, whether ostensibly gay or straight. The Stonewall-era manifestos,
however, are quite ambivalent about the perceived feminine. Some call for becoming

real men, while others embrace an ideal of androgyny and the end of gender. By the late

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seventies, though, the fear of the feminine reaches a new crisis in the worship of the
hyper-macho clone and leathennan figures. Savran’s claim does seem to presuppose an
essential white masculinity that ostensible gays and straights could share. It also raises
the question of the extent to which claims about gender are claims made by an outsider
observing a performance, or a gendered subject making claims about how it feels to be
anxiety-ridden about gender.

As for the Beats, Savran sees them as being willing to embrace aspects of the
feminine, in contrast, for instance, to the Organization Man, but only on the condition
that they can become real men again at will when the feminine becomes uncomfortable.
This “retreat” is exemplified by Sal Paradise’s homophobic outbursts in the narrative of
On the Road.

[T]he Beats negotiated the treacherous binarism of sexual difference

. during an era in which both gender and sexual deviance were, to say the
least, subject to extraordinary negative pressure. In what passes for
American literature, the Beats were the first explicitly to embrace a
feminized position—but only on condition that they could beat a hasty and
horrified retreat from it. (67)

The book is very much about men falling in love, especially Sal with Dean, and
wondering what it means, and how best to deal with it in the context of an ostensibly
heterosexual milieu. On the second page, we see what will remain a trinity of Sal’s
descriptions of Dean: his body, his language, and his soul. It is clearly love at first sight:

I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the

door in his shorts. [. . .] [T]o him sex was the one and only holy and

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important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a
living and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head,
always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make
you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand “Yeses”
and "That’s rights.” My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene

Au «trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent-~a
sidebluned hero of the snowy West. (2)

The descriptions of the body are often quite heroic, adoring, and steamy. One thinks
forward here to the Dustin Hoffman character upon seeing the Jon Voight character in
Midnight Cowboy. This is a striking example of the resonance of representations in 9.11
the Road through the 19603, Stonewall, and beyond. And the relationship in this film
also goes back to this novel to register a sense of suspicion from the start—that the rush
of the immediate sense of connection can’t last, that the object of adoration is too good to
be true, the over-the-top cowboy masculine posture somehow dangerous-but in each the
sense of excitement and attraction far exceeds any concerns. The difference is that in the
film the cowboy learns to con from Ratso Rizzo. In this novel, though Dean approaches
Sal under the pretext of wanting to learn how to write, it is Sal who learns from con-man
Dean about the joys and perils of unbridled masculine energy:

I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth
tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only
conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with
people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me

and I knew it (for room and board and “how-to-write,” etc.), and he knew

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I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn’t care and
we got along fine--no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other
like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he
probably learned from me. (4)

Here we see the basis for a possible ideal of intimacy: compromise and tiptoeing,
no pestering, a sense of heartbreak at least on one side, and learning from one another.
Also, there’s a sense between them of mutual support and excitement about common
interests (in this case, literary artistry and intensity of experience):

As far as my work was concerned he said, “Go ahead, everything

you do is great.” He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories, yelling,
“Yes! That’s right! Wow! Man! !” and “Phew!” and wiped his face with
his handkerchief. “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many
things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without
modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and
grammatical fears. . .” (4)

There’s also a sense of sharing something unique in the world, at least an unconventional

perspective (a sort of “you and me against the world” sharing, a sharing of secrets), and

most definitely not being “hung-up.”

Then Dean meets Carlo Marx, and, in a widely-quoted passage, Sal watches as
two others embark on a form of intimacy he is unable to share, however much he might
want to. This is one place where explicit reference to their homoerotic and homosexual

relationship was removed in the final draft of the novel:8

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And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A tremendous thing
happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are,
they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced
into two piercing eyes--the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the
sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From
that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too.
Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up
with them. (5)

Sal the narrator perhaps deceives himself about his feelings here, especially since
the narrative is structured to be looking back in hindsight (back to a time before things
had gone sour between him and Dean). Surely he was more than a little sorry to have
been replaced as the object of affection and con-job of the “amorous soul” of Dean. And
he will later discover that it isn’t, as he maintains, only the mad people whom he himself
adores. They become too much for him, and he comes to prefer mellower, gentler,
perhaps even more stable and predictable, company, at least as an ideal. Indeed, much of
the action in the novel has him settling down to serious work, relieved to be home again
off the road, only to be swept away again the next time Dean comes courting for kicks.

Indeed, even so early on in the novel, Sal seems to realize potentially
irreconcilable differences between him and Dean, but finds Dean nonetheless irresistible:

[H]e reminded me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his
suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his straining muscular
sweating neck made me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and

swim-holes and riversides of Paterson and the Passaic. His dirty

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workclothes clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn’t buy a
better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of
Natural Joy, as Dean had, in his stresses. And in his excited way of
speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers under
the bridge, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neighborhoods
and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitar while their
older brothers worked in the mills. (7)
Clearly the desire for and ideal of adult male fiiendship and intimacy here is deeply
connected to nostalgia for boyhood pals and homosociality, including a large component
of bodily sensuality--it is a sensory nostalgia more than a rational or conceptual one. And
its strong emotionality is much more physical than linguistic (e. g., it’s not the words
spoken by the boys, but the sounds of their voices, and their manner of speaking, that are
brought back).

Such nostalgia for a less complicated, more seemingly innocent time, fiee at least
from current tensions, ambiguities, and fears, is shared by Vidal’s Jim and Bob,
Baldwin’s David and Giovanni, and Hemingway’s Jake (to be back on the football field
or the tennis court, before the war, before the injury, away from the present deadening
malaise). This nostalgia becomes an overwhelming presence in Holleran’s Dancer from
the Dance (1978).

Later, while hitchhiking, Sal loves some fellow riders. He appreciates their
tenderness and care, their unconditional affection, and his own sense of altruism. In Sal’s
view of intimacy, a combination of passion and compassion seems necessary.

Throughout the book, he describes such feelings of bonding with strangers:

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Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now
and then Gene leaned out of his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark
plains and said something tenderly in the boy’s ear. The boy nodded.
Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears. I wondered
where the hell they would go and what they would do. They had no
cigarettes. I squandered my pack on them, I loved them so. They were
gratefuland gracious. They never asked, I kept offering. (28)

This sort of spontaneous, unself-conscious intimacy happens almost exclusively with
males. With females, he mainly describes sexual energy, and his desire to have sex with
them, primarily as objects of his desire. Males most often receive the anointrnent of
subjecthood. There appears to be a cultural understanding between men of a pre-existent
male-to-male code of buddy-buddy behavior (as there is in Hemingway and Rechy,
though in Rechy the parties consciously, explicitly, and mutually understand it to be play-
acting according to a script that belies their loneliness and isolation).

Sal then hangs out with Slim, another fellow rider. In an encounter with women,
in which there is no talk of tender feelings or nostalgia, and no emotional experience
whatsoever, Sal reports having a momentary sense of his “whole being and purpose.”
Yet it rings shallow and inadequate as an example of what ideal contentment, happiness,
and intimacy might mean for him:

We picked up two girls, a pretty young blond and a fat brunette.
They were dumb and sullen, but we wanted to make them. We took them
to a rickety nightclub that was already closing, and there I spent all but

two dollars on Scotches for them and beer for us. I was getting drunk and

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didn’t care; everything was fine. My whole being and purpose was

pointed at the little blonde. I wanted to go in there with all my strength. I

hugged her and wanted to tell her. (33)
But of course he doesn’t tell berm-anything. No talking necessary. Just to “go in there”
with strength. He doesn’t ever really have conversations with women, at least not as he
does with men. Women may have souls for Sal, and capture his sentimental pining away
at the sadness of the universe on occasion, but they don’t seem to have minds or agency.

In contrast, the men are getting “turned on” together in a more esoteric mode. In

this passage, Sal and Carlo Marx termite in Denver. Carlo reports on the recent time he
and Dean have spent together:

And he told me that Dean was making love to two girls at the same
time, they being Marylou, his first wife, who waited for him in a motel
room, and Camille, a new girl, who waited for him in a motel room.
“Between the two of them he rushes to me for our own unfinished
business. [. . . ] Dean and I are embarked on a tremendous season
together. We’re trying to communicate with absolute honesty and
absolute completeness everything on our minds. We’ve had to take
benzedrine. We sit on the bed, cross-legged, facing each other.” (41)

Not only is this part of a possible ideal of intimacy (the absolute honesty and
completeness), but it reveals an assumption on the part of these men that they know
what’s going on in each other’s minds and souls (as Sal knows what Carlo is thinking
about Dean, and they both assume they can intuit what’s going on in Dean’s mind much

of the time).

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Another example of this disquietude surrounding gender relations, sentiment, and
stuff sexual comes when Sal gets together with a woman named Rita. They have
unsatisfactory sex (he’s “too impatient” to prove to her how good it can be) and they look
at the ceiling, “wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad” (58).

My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it
when I walked her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of
an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get _
back on the road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-
by for a dime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and
soft. I wanted to go and get Rita and tell her a lot more things, and really
make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls
in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that
they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not
courting talk--real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every
moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive
howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further. (5 8)

Sal thus offers an unconscious apology for his behavior, or asserts a genuine wish
that things were different between boys and girls. He gets all weepy and sentimental
when it comes to boys and girls together. Yet he doesn ’t get back in touch with Rita; it’s
the talk of the hobos that is warm and soft. He doesn ’t talk to girls about souls, but does
with boys. Yet, no matter how much he adores and rhapsodizes males’ spiritual and
physical manhood, the idea of men who might have sex with other men is highly

discomfiting.

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The following scene is telling for its representations of girls and queers, especially
given its location in the text, coming as it does in such close proximity to Sal’s meetings
with his own sexually ambiguous fellows:

Meanwhile I began going to Frisco more often; I tried everything
in the books to make a girl. I even spent a whole night with a girl on a
park bench, till dawn, without success. She was a blonde from Minnesota.
There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my
gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and
said, “Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?” He bolted. I’ve never understood
why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the
loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. Ihad to show it
to someone. [. . .]

I wrote long letters to Dean and Carlo, who were now at Old Bull’s
shack in the Texas bayou. They said they were ready to join me in San
Fran as soon as this-and-that was ready. (73)

In addition to the homophobia evidenced here, and the apology for it (so
strikingly similar to Jake’s in Hemingway), what’s significant about this passage is the
juxtaposition of its component parts. Directly following the failure with women comes
the queer-talk, and then directly to Dean and Carlo at Old Bull’s. Old Bull is the
character based on William Burroughs, a homosexual writer of the Beat group (as is
Allen Ginsberg, fictionalized as Carlo Marx). If Kerouac were truly trying to write
things, or his narrator to report them, as they came to mind, just as they happened

(Kerouac’s self-proclaimed method and aspiration), then the immediate succession of

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these images suggests a perplexity in the narrator’s mind beyond mere loneliness. Not to
mention the “gun” he had to show to someone in the john (the john). The narrative
moves from a failure with a woman to a homophobic crisis to a Sal’s reunion with his
buddies who, at least according to Savran, are capable of embracing or retreating from
the feminine and, hence, the potentially homoerotic.

Sal is reaching out for intimacy of some kind--any kind; but barriers stand in the
way of finding it on all sides. Why is it that both Kerouac’s and Hemingway’s narrators
insist on displaying their homophobic moments as they quickly apologize for
themselves? Why not either merely leave the scene as homophobic without ambivalence
or apology, or portray a scene not so homophobic, or simply leave out mention of the
scene entirely? This isn’t a rhetorical question included to suggest some knowing-wink
reading of the texts. Rather, it illustrates the paradoxical nature of the discourse
regarding homosexuality and the complicity of this discourse in textual constructions and
representations of masculinity that remains remarkably consistent in significant ways
from the twenties through the late-fifties, and does not end with the project now known as
modern gay liberation.

In a way, it’s easier to understand why Vidal’s and Baldwin’s characters would
want to have their characters distance themselves from “really faggy fags” in an attempt
to establish their own masculinity and, hence, acceptability as mates in a landscape of
masculine intimacy (even as ultimately homophobic as such a scenario reads today). But
the insistence of Hemingway’s and Kerouac’s on attempting to do so implies an
important comment on the mutual construction of hetero- and homosexual identities.

Apparently, one cannot be a man without negating the non-man. One cannot imagine

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male-to-male intimacy, that is, masculine intimacy, without first excluding some lesser,
perverted form of desire and desiring subjects.

Shortly thereafter, Sal describes Dean’s change into the mad angel he would be
till the end. The cause of Dean’s madness is never made clear, but the reader gathers that
it must come from some combination of drugs and sheer overexertion:

He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be
doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and
down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing
the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly,
hitching his pants, looking up and saying “Am,” and sudden slitting of the
eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs
and talking, talking.

It was very cold in Testament; they’d had an unseasonable snow.
He stood in the long bleak main street that runs along the railroad, clad in
nothing but a T-shirt and low-hanging pants with the belt unbuckled, as
though he was about to take them off. [. . .]

I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized
when we got back into the house and I saw the Christmas tree, the
presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the talk of
relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug’s name was Dean
Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road. (114-15)

Thus, Sal has once more been overtaken by his attraction (and loyalty?) to Dean,

even though it is now mainly Dean the body he must accompany (later in the book, Dean

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can no longer even talk coherently). But in this scene, at least, the road and the high-
energy it promises have won out over the family Christmas in the country. Even though
he and Dean can no longer communicate verbally about soul-things, the images of Dean’s
sexuality so openly and excitedly (“naturally,” at least for Dean) displayed and expressed
are enough to take Sal away from home-life and work.
Soon after being back on the road, however, he has another crisis of the conflict
between the wildness and the quiet life:
It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made
Dean come, and similarly I went off with him for no reason. [. . . ] All
these years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry. [. . .] “I want
to marry a girl,” I told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both
get old. This can’t go on all the time--all this franticness and jumping
around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.”
“Ah now, man,” said Dean, “I’ve been digging you for years about
the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about your
soul.” It was a sad night; it was also a merry night. (1 16-17)
This conflict between the desire for the new and the normal, the road and the home-
hearth, is a constant presence throughout the works treated here, and in representations of
the struggle for people to narrate libratory experiences and construct liberated identities
throughout the twentieth century.
Later, Sal and Dean are alone in a car, their first chance to talk alone in years,
according to Dean. They talk about God, and Sal admits that Dean’s talk is

incomprehensible, but that he has become a mystic. After Sal’s aunt joins them on their

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drive to deliver household goods, they discuss gender roles in America. The temptation
is to find an essential gender to place blame on for the difficulties men and women face—
perhaps as men even to apologize:
My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell
at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he’d
mentioned it many times. “I’ve pleaded and pleaded with Marylou for a
peacefirl sweet understanding of pure love between us forever with all
hassles thrown out--she understands; her mind is bent on something else--
she’s after me; she won’t understand how much I love her, she’s knitting
my doom.”
“The truth of the matter is we don’t understand our women; we
blame on them and it’s all our fault,” I said.
“But it isn’t as simple as that,” warned Dean. “Peace will come
suddenly, we won’t understand it when it does--see, man?” (122)
Throughout the book, when they pause to consider such questions, Dean and
especially Sal try to imagine, and occasionally to negotiate, arrangements between
themselves and women that would allow for mutual understanding. Dean, when he
speaks, tends in large part to blame the women. Sal does his best to take more
responsibility--in words if not actions. But what is the peace that Dean predicts in this
passage; and why is it not so simple, but somehow deeply intertwined with gender and
sexual relations—a day when there will be no “hassles”? One recalls the narrator’s heady

liberation manifest in the Vidal book in which “wars would cease” if there were a true

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sexual revolution. The proposed relationship between gender and sexuality and broader
social and political transformations in these texts is remarkable.

A while later, Dean puts forth a proposal shortly after issuing a manifesto of sorts.
The three of them are driving back to California. In his dream of togetherness, it isn’t
exactly clear how far his wish extends—just to them, or to everyone in their circle, or to
people in general. They are passed by a young couple on a motorcycle:

“Wow! Dig that gone gal on his belt! Let’s all blow!” Dean tried
to catch up with them. “Now wouldn’t it be fine if we could all get
together and have a real going goofbang together with everybody sweet
and fine and agreeable, no hassles, no infant rise of protest or body woes
misconceptualized or sumpin? Ah! but we know time.” (159)

The “but” at the end here is ambiguous. At first it appears to mean “but, alas.” However,
given Dean and his faith that peace will come, it’s at least as likely that it means “because
we know time,” therefore serving as an invulnerable premise in his argument.

His more immediate proposal is that they continue their journey in the nude:

“Now Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to do as I’m doing,
disemburden yourselves of all that clothes--now what’s the sense of
clothes? now that’s what I’m sayin--and sun your pretty bellies with me.
Come on!” [. . .] Marylou complied; unfuddyduddied, so did I. We sat in
the front seat, all three. Marylou took out cold cream and applied it to us
for kicks. (161)

They are seen, first by truckers, and then when they get out to look at an old

Indian ruin (Sal and Marylou don overcoats--Dean does not), by unbelieving tourists.

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For Dean, the whole scene is quite an unconscious expression of his desire (i.e., there was
no deliberate intent to shock, nor a care in the world for others’ reactions). But Sal must
become “unfuddyduddied” first, and does notice who sees them. Such are the imaginable
narrative options for scenes that depict the attempt at free, and even potentially public,
sexual expression, and one form of intimacy, in the post-war period. This raises the
question of what attitude might more possibly lead to ultimately satisfactory intimacy—
fud or unfud, Sal’s or Dean’s psyche? For truly liberated intimacy, is one better off with
“free love,” a version of which I call “firll-throttle promiscuity,” or with a more confined,
and more easily defined and settled context for relationships?

The choice of radical “freedom” may come with costs; it implies a denial of
traditional two-mate relationships, and the conscious acceptance of more transient,
fleeting possibilities for promiscuity without promises, liaisons that may or may not be
impersonal and superficial. Both Sal and Marylou soon express concerns that Dean has
crossed some line of acceptability in their minds:

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across
the country and back, out of the comer of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as
though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious
and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and
crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that
frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because
when she looked at his hangj awed bony face with its male self-
containment and absentrnindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was

convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she was a

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pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love too; and
when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile,
with eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago
he was only dreaming in his eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed--
and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to
us, ain’t we gettin’ our kicks anyway? And that was it. (163)

This passage is extremely telling in several ways. In an obvious way, it shows the
double-standard of whoredom and liarhood. Both Dean and Sal call Marylou a whore,
which means she sleeps with someone other than them, while they get as many kicks as
they can. And Dean is surely as big a liar as anyone.

The more subtle and important point to note, though, is that Sal identifies
completely with Marylou’s view of Dean. It is he who provides the diagnosis of
particularly male “self-containment and absentrnindedness,” qualities that make the love
bestowed by the adoring party destined to fail, or at least go largely unrequited in kind.
The qualities of “self-containment” and “absentrnindedness,” perhaps more precisely
denoted as self-concemedness and unawareness, are characteristics often ascribed to the
category “masculinity.” In fact, Sal has a similar set of revelations about Dean
throughout the rest of the book. That’s why their friendship is unsustainable in the end.
Perhaps it is Sal who wants Dean’s head in his closet, to be able to gaze on with
memories and adoration, but without having to weather the abuse, betrayal, and madness
any longer. For in the end even Sal has learned that the flirtatious smile must be false as
it accompanies Dean’s ultimate selfishness. An example soon hereafter is when Dean

leaves Sal and Marylou stuck in San Francisco with no money, no roof, and no plan. In a

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sense, Sal distances himself not only from being a whore and a liar, but from this portrait
of maleness. This distance may provide an insight into what he wants out of intimacy,
and why he can’t find it with men or women, and certainly not with Dean Moriarty. He
confesses that he has lost faith in Dean (171).

After going back east to get his life in order, Sal is once again captured--stung--by
the bug of the road and wondering about Dean. He returns to find the women “chatting
about the madness of men” (187). Dean has a broken, infected thumb (from beating a
girlfiiend, as mentioned above), which the narrator gives significant attention, calling it a
symbol:

That thumb became the symbol of Dean’s final development. He
no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about
everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he
belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it. [. . .]

I was glad I had come, he needed me now. (188-89)

As Dean sinks further into what Sal calls madness, surely at least an even greater
obliviousness to the feelings of those around him, Sal offers to pay for a trip for the two
of them to Italy. It is a huge gesture of loyal fiiendship, given what has happened
between them. This is a fine representation of their true love for each other, taken to new
lengths after having been strained by intense challenges. Sal invites him; Dean responds.
This is one of the most striking examples of their attempts at acknowledging their mutual
desire for sustainable intimacy on their own modest, humble, and apologetic terms:

“Why yass,” said Dean, and then realized I was serious and looked

at me out of the comer of his eye for the first time, for I’d never

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committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence, and
that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the moment
before the bet. There were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish
look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back at
him and blushed. [. . .]
I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there

wasn’t something back there to make him suspicious of something now.
Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said—“Come to New York with
me; I’ve got the money.” I looked at him; my eyes were watering with
embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank
and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal moment of our
fiiendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking
about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his
tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. (189-90)

Sal as narrator describes Dean’s “mental categories” as being “tremendously involved

and tormented,” though not his own, which are obviously also significantly troubled.

Sal names it a pivotal moment—a moment of commitment. He blushes. Sal is
brought, brings himself, to tears; Dean looks through him, as though looking at him
would place too much at stake, might make one or both of them too cognizant of their
respective vulnerability. Not only is Dean bewildered and moved by the notion that a

fiiend has spent hours thinking about his welfare, but Sal himself realizes something

about his own capacity for care, generosity, and commitment. Can they handle the task

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of exploring such unknown territory in the domain of their mutual notions of
masculinity? According to Sal, they find differing solutions to the problem:
Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern
for a man who was years younger than 1, five years, and whose fate was
wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a
matter that I can ascertain only from what he did afterward. He became
extremely joyful and said everything was settled. “What was that look?”
I asked. He was pained to hear me say that. He frowned. It was rarely
' that Dean frowned. We both felt perplexed and uncertain of something.
(190)

Thus, they are back together, trying to cement a fragile peace, the ramifications of
which Sal doesn’t quite comprehend, and which Dean isn’t portrayed as capable of
articulating the complexities of. “That look,” and the something they are uncertain of,
remain undefined through the text—after all, On the Road is an exemplary and explicit
chronicle of the search for IT—the IT. These passages make it clear that IT is at least in
part a quest for a new form of intimacy. Indeed, an examination of representations of the
IT in American literature would be a most worthy and welcome critical project. For my
purposes here, “IT” represents the elusive nature of satisfactory human connection in
these texts, a theme that continues through the 19705. What Sal means by “what” Dean
“did afterwar ” is open to interpretation. My interpretation is that it refers to a later
moment of selfishness and betrayal in Mexico, as seen below. Sal attempts to bolster his
standing as the good guy, choosing devotion; Dean continues to follow whims. In the

end, though, it is Sal who decides that their intimacy has become unbearable.

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In any case, they embark on a journey together, only to be thwarted again.
Here, they make the sort of pledges that we remember so fondly and painfully from our
youth, if we were fortunate or cursed enough to have been through such happenings:
First thing, we went down to a bar down on Market Street and
decided everything--that we would stick together and be buddies till we
died. Dean was very quiet and preoccupied, looking at the old burns in the
saloon that reminded him of his father. [. . .]
Yes, it was agreed; we were going to do everything we’d never
done and had been too silly to do in the past. (191)
Once again, Sal the lover-narrator treads on unstable epistemological ground, presuming
to know what Dean thinks and longs for. But some sort of pact has been made, whether
or not either party can articulate it. They will do everything together they have not yet
done.

In the next passages quoted here, Sal the narrator retreats from omniscience to
wonder what exactly Dean “is knowing;” Dean tries to tell him. Sal and/or Kerouac,
however, go on to make rather grand claims about Dean’s life and sexuality. Not only
does Dean have (male) disciples, but he has brought a new sexuality and life into being.
Indeed, Dean’s proclivities, purported prowess, and penis-imagined make an enormous
contribution to discourses about sex that resonate still today. Dean is the definition of
BEAT, with only “pure being” ahead on his journey:

Now his disciples were married and the wives of his disciples had
him on the carpet for the sexuality and the life he had helped bring into

being. Ilistened further. [. . .]

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He was BEAT--the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he
knowing? He tried in all his power to tell me what he was knowing, and
they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and
drinking him in as they once tried to do. [. . .]

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything
was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure

being. (195)

As they plan and begin to go toward their Italian dream, their fiiendship reaches

another crisis point, just after they’ve tried to “work” a “fag” at a hotel. This is another

scene that was revised by Kerouac before publication, taking out the sexual activity

between Dean and the man, with Sal listening. The man has picked them up hitchhiking

and they stop for the night. He begins to proposition them. Dean asks about money. He

gets nervous, and that’s the end of the published version of the scene. But its significance

lies in the crisis it apparently causes to ensue between Dean and Sal.

The crisis occurs when they stop for food at a restaurant, and Sal shows Dean a

little dick game of pissing at one urinal, then holding it in, and then continuing at another,

which Dean says will be bad for Sal’s kidneys, and make him age more quickly. Sal

freaks:

It made me mad. “Who’s old? I’m not much older than you are!”
“I wasn’t saying that, man!”

“Ah,” I said, “you’re always making cracks about my age. I’m no
old fag like that fag, you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys.” We

went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef

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sandwiches--and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at
once--I said to cap my anger, “And I don’t want to hear any more of it.”
And suddenly Dean’s eyes grew tearful and he got up and left his food
steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just
wandering off forever. I didn’t care, I was so mad-I had flipped
momentarily and turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten
food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn’t have said that

. . . he likes to eat so much . . . He’s never left his food like this . . . What
the hell. That’s showing him, anyway.

Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then
came back and sat down. “Well,” I said, “what were you doing out there,
knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new gags about my
kidneys?”

Dean mutely shook his head. “No, man, no, man, you’re all
completely wrong. If you want to know, well--”

“Go ahead, tell me.” I said all this and never looked up fi'om my
food. I felt like a beast.

“I was crying,” said Dean.

“Ah hell, you never cry.”

“You say that? Why do you think I don’t cry?”

“You don’t die enough to cry.” Every one of these things I said

was a knife at myself. Everything I had secretly held against my brother

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was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the
depths of my own impure psychologies. (213-14)

From out of the blue comes Sal’s mention of his brother, whose purported purity
he contrasts with his own ugliness and “impure psychologies.” Many of the most
reflective passages and moral quandaries in the novel are accompanied by teary eyes or
contemplations of the sadness of life. The relation of crying to masculinity is especially
complicated here. On the one hand, Sal seems to accuse Dean of not being man enough
to cry. On the other hand, his accusation implies that a recognition that Dean had cried
over their relationship would threaten their mutual masculinity by admitting
vulnerability. Dean is adamant:

Dean was shaking his head. “No, man, I was crying.”

“Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave.”

“Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you’ve ever believed
anything about me.” I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn’t want
to bother with the truth and when I looked up at him I think I was
cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in my awful belly. Then I
knew I was wrong.

“Ah, man, Dean, I’m sorry, I never acted this way before with you.
Well, now you know me. You know I don’t have close relationships with
anybody anymore-J don’t know what to do with these things. I hold
things in my hand like pieces of crap and don’t know where to put it
down. Let’s forget it.” The holy con-man began to eat. “It’s not my

fault! It’s not my fault!” I told him. “Nothing in this lousy world is my

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fault, don’t you see that? I didn’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t
be.”

“Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me.”

“I do believe you, I do.” This was the sad story of that afternoon.
(214)

The admissions on Sal’s part that he is wrong, that he doesn’t have close
relationships “anymore,” and that nothing in “this lousy world” is his fault are startling.
They are vivid indications of his struggle to come to grips with the unlikelihood of the
possibility of intimacy within the confines of masculinity. Admitting being wrong is
perhaps a fairly simple, generous gesture. The candid assertion about close relationships
would only be made to an intimate of some sort. The indictment of the “lousy world” in
this context may be interpreted in part as a desire for intimacies between people of
whichever gender, outside the conventions of locker room banter or prefabricated social
niceties, whether these potential intimacies be erotic or not.

Next, Sal and Dean find themselves in a squalid layover in Detroit, watching
movies. The strange thing about this portion of the novel, however, is Sal’s recollection
of a night in 1942 spent in a Boston movie theater. The narrator asks what difference the
following scene makes, ultimately. One purpose its inclusion may serve is to put forth
the argument that every experience is equal in its insigrrificance. While this may
exemplify some form of Buddhistic resignation, it doesn’t jibe with Kerouac’s overall
quest and method in the novel, according to which the distinction between what’s vitally
important and what doesn’t matter is such a crucial theme. While seeming to be an

arbitrary memory, the text very self-consciously calls attention to it as highly significant.

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The scene is played out in cinematic terms, with Sal transported from being just another
bum in the audience to the screen itself, in the starring role:
In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I

was a searnan, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston
to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I
wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the
night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast
their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked.
What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is
better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the
mind. (246)

This is a sweet, honest confession of a memory he associates with being in the
theater with Dean. But its rhetorical importance is neither merely accidental, nor to
advance the plot. Something about the moment in Detroit with Dean wills Sal to describe
this scene. Though he was asleep, he recounts so many seamen and a few fewer
civilians. They may have shat and pissed on him, but “caked” and “debouchements,” and
especially that they’re “sentient,” imply their ejaculating on him. Perhaps Kerouac
needed the ambiguity of the French to get it by the censors. Why does Sal/Kerouac
include this episode? It’s the sort of confession the narrator has to make to clear himself
of responsibility for his proclivities and actions. The importance of the scene isn’t
whether he got off on or was horrified by this moment, or both; rather, the importance is
that “he” introduces it into the narrative at all. It is hardly a random inclusion, but rather

an admission and assertion that sensuality and matters of the body are important

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functions of being human and earthly. Yet their ultimate cosmic significance is limited,
and relative to the perspective of the mortal who is being caked.

Toward the end of the book, in Mexico City, Dean abandons sick Sal to go be
with his latest woman. This is the explicit articulation of Sal’s ultimate evaluation of
Dean, which started at the beginning of the novel. It cannot, though, be a final resolution
quite yet: ‘

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to
understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me
I there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say
nothing.” (302)

Dean at last visits Sal in New York, where Sal’s hooking up with the girl he’s
been searching for all along, to settle down with. They’re headed for a Duke Ellington
concert at the Met. Dean asks for a ride to Fortieth Street. One of Sal’s other male
friends, the driver in charge, refuses absolutely (no ride for that crazy fiiend of yours).
Dean walks off in a moth-eaten overcoat. Sal merely waves from the Cadillac. Laura,
Sal’s girlfiiend, protests and almost cries. While Sal has no doubt told her something
about Dean, she seems to intuit much more about the importance of the intense and
intimate relationship that Sal has finally decided to reject. In the end, he feels forced to
choose between the relentless instabilities of the road and settled heteronorrnativity; he
chooses the girlfiiend and the Met.

The cultural weight of On the Road cannot be overestimated, not just because of
its continued popularity, but also because of the space it opens up for diverse imagined

possibilities for intimacies and masculinities, both potentially liberated and fi'ustrated.

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First conceived and drafted in the late 19405 and finally published in 1957, it makes a
significant contribution to the discourse about the complexities involved in men’s trying
to be intimate with men, a discourse that becomes even more self-conscious, articulate,
and complex through the sixties, and especially in the post-Stonewall manifestos and in

later texts.

Sex and/or Sentiment in the Streets: John Rechy, City of Night (1963)

John Rechy’s Cig of Night follows a male hustler narrator from his very
deliberately chosen entrance into the world of promiscuous cruising, almost always
though not exclusively for money (a very important qualification), through his journey
toward the tentative realization that perhaps some form of love and sustained intimacy
might be possible after all, and perhaps even desirable, though this is the big question the
novel leaves ambiguous at its conclusion.

In many ways, the book can be read as a revision of Kerouac’s On the Road,
brought forward now from the Truman years and the question of heterosexual male
buddy-buddy intimacy and masculinity to the question of shortly pre-Stonewall,
explicitly homosexual forrrrs of intimacy and masculinity. From Kerouac, Rechy inherits
the language of the street, eschewing conventional punctuation, and forming new
compound words. Their experiments with form and style allow both authors to create
new languages that better express their innovative conceptions of human relationships, as
we have seen in Hemingway’s sparse prose. Rechy is obsessed with notions of family
and the loss of childhood innocence and their relation to the state of contemporary

America. But his nameless narrator, unlike Sal Paradise, does not long for a return to the

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way things used to be, for a return to the innocence of the good old days. Rather, he
claims that nothing in this cruel, hatefirl world justifies innocence. His “America” is
taken for granted to be a lonely place; this judgment is thus a premise as well as a
conclusion in the novel:

Later, I would think of America as one vast City of Night
stretching gaudily fi'om Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard--jukebox-
winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night firsing its darkcities into
the unmistakable shape of loneliness. (11)

Like Sal portraying Dean Moriarty and the gang, Rechy’s narrator includes
portraits of cowboys and women and others, but they are all much more self-consciously
presented as portraits (and have sections named after them). And these are not £211
cowboys (as Dean is, at least in Sal’s imagination, in Kerouac), and often not real
women. They are fully aware that they play, and even play-act, roles and personas. In
Rechy, role-playing and gender-configurations are an explicit theme. While the Kerouac
laments the situation and sadness of boys and girls in America, the Rechy mainly laments
the sad situation of role-playing, most often between biological males. In On the Road,
sex and sexuality are articulated as notions-in-crisis, whereas gender and gender roles are
largely portrayed as understood and naturalized. In Cig of Night, on the other hand, the
very notions of femininity and masculinity, and their respective relations to intimacy, are
very conscious and explicit points of contention. Such self-consciousness about the role-
playing and conflicts surrounding gender, identity, and relationships becomes

increasingly explicit and contentious in the pages to follow.

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While the theme of the possibility of intimacy between two men (and here, in
Rechy, between two “masculine” gay men who may happen to be hot for each other) runs
throughout Cig of Night, it only comes to true fruition in the penultimate section of the
book, the section titled “Jeremy: White Sheets.” Jeremy Adams is the character who
finally challenges the narrator to confiont his fear of intimacy, and invites him into an
intimate love relationship as they meet during Carnival (Mardi Gras) in New Orleans.
Before turning to that moment of decision and realization, let us examine just a few of the
experiences the narrator has on his journey that shape his understanding and desires
regarding masculinity and intimacy, and which make striking contributions to the
discourse on gender and sexuality that resonate still today. Here he voices a host of
assumptions about “the scene,” as well as some telling value judgments based on gender
in the context of an assumed homosexual milieu:
I found that you cant always tell a score by his age or appearance:

There are the young and the goodlooking ones--the ones about whom you

wonder why they prefer to pay someone (who will most likely at least not

indicate desiring them back) when there exists--much, much vaster than

the hustling world--the world of unpaid, mutually desiring males-~the easy

pickups. [. . .] But often the scores are near-middle-aged or older men.

And they are mostly uneffeminate. [. . . ] (32)
As in all of the other novels, it seems important here for the narrator to separate fairies
into types. He must not only subtly admit to his varying levels of attraction to members
of the world of scores (wondering why such a hot guy might choose to pay for what he

could presumably get for free—which is a significant comment on the self-identification

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of certain scores), but also to put forward an assertion about their gender status with the
unusual English word-forrnation “uneffeminate.” It’s the necessary word to use because,
as in the case where only a double-negative will suffice for meaning and emphasis,
“uneffeminate” has no true synonym in more common language usage. “Masculine”
doesn’t work because it suggests a positive attribute. What matters here is to negate the
undesirable—the expected stain, the obviousness, of the effeminate.

Without further analysis by the narrator, it’s impossible to fathom how he might
feel about playing any of the roles described here (i.e., whether one role might be more
distasteful or pleasurable than the next):

I learned that there are variety of roles to play if youre hustling:
youngrnanoutofajob butlooking; dontgiveadamnyoungrnandrifting;
perrenialhustler [sic] easytomakeout; youngrnanlostinthebigcity
pleasehelpmesir. There was, too, the pose learned quickly from the others
along the street: the stance, the jivetalk--a mixture’of jazz, joint, junk
sounds--the almost-disdainful, disinterested, but, at the same time, inviting
look; the casual way of dress.

And I learned too that to hustle the streets you had to play ahnost-
illiterate. (36)

He meets a “score” who dismisses him after finding out that he reads literature,
saying, “I dont want you anymore [. . .] really masculine men dont read!”

And so I determined that from now on I would play it dumb. And

I would discover that to many of the street people a hustler became more

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attractive in direct relation to his seeming insensitivity--his “toughness.” I
would wear that mask. (37)
The notion of masks is so central to questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy. Not
only must one negotiate the masks that one might or might not put on, however
consciously or unconsciously. One must also mingle with the rest of the heteronormative
world, and its negotiations about masks.
The narrator next meets “PETE: A Quarter Ahead,” who doesn’t feel like scoring
tonight:

I didn’t have any place to go, but I said, “Later,” to Pete. This is
how it had always been before. “No, wait,” he says, “dont split--unless
you got something to do.” “Nothing,” I said. “Lets stick together,” he
said. “I just dont feel like fuckin around tonight,” he said moodily. [. . .]

“Sometimes this whole scene bugs me,” Pete said. (52)

Both of them lonely, and becoming friendly, and tired of the scene, Pete asks if he can
spend the night with the narrator. Pete sleeps over. All that “happens” is that Pete places
and then closes his hand over the narrator’s hand. It’s a very dramatic moment in the
book, and then they part, both aware that such intimacy is beyond their mutual sphere of
comprehension or comfort at this point, though they continue to see each other daily from
afar on the street. (56-7)

The drama comes because this little “nothing” moment is obviously so significant
for both of them--an expression and acceptance of gestures of intimacy that are ordinarily
banned from “the scene.” It never happens again, and, in fact, they are even more distant

and dispassionate from that moment on. There is no analysis here by the narrator. Only

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“the action” is reported. This lack of narrative commentary marks a departure from all
the other novels considered here. While Rechy may inherit a sparseness of language
from Hemingway, and a keen sense of the complexities and crises involved with any
notion of “masculinity” fiom Kerouac, his narrator is unique at least because of his
explicit and conscious decision to make an ostensible distinction between sex and
sentiment. Indeed, the relation between sex and sentiment, lust and love, is the main
obsession of the book, and its richest contribution to the discourse of gender and
sexuality in the early 19605. The novel is an existentialist and fatalistic quest for human
connection:
I had an acute sense of the incompleteness intrinsic in sharing in another’s
life. You touch those other lives, barely--however intimately it may be
sexually--you may sense things roiling in them. Yet the climax in your
immediate relationship with them is merely an interlude. Their lives will
continue, youll merely step out. (90)
That summer, the narrator meets Dave, whom he thinks is a hustler, and maybe
even straight, but discovers that he’s neither. Dave says:
“I cant see just going to bed with a lot of people--different ones every
night,” he said. “I mean, a person, whether hes queer or not, hes got to
find someone. . . . Nothing like a lonely fairy,” he said, smiling. I liked
him right away. (231)
As though against his will and better judgment, the narrator spends time with
Dave over the next while (though never sexually). Note the qualities that “attract” him to

Dave:

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I began to discover in him an honesty that constantly amazed me,
an integrity and decency rare in the world of the bars and streets: It
pleased me strangely that soon after I met him, he moved into another
apartment, this time alone. Although he openly acknowledged his interest
in other youngrnen, when it was a mutual interest--and he was a very
desirable member of that group--I could tell that his was not the furious
hunger that it very often is with others. Since that first night, he hadnt
attempted to come on with me, and we rarely ever spoke about that scene.
[. . .] [To come on with?]

And I found that I was revealing myself to him, letting slide off
more than ever the mask I had protectively cultivated for the streets and
bars. At times, I felt he knew even more about me than I told him, which
alternately pleased and disturbed me. [. . .]

More and more, I was now in the bars or on the hustling streets
only when I had to score. I avoided Main Street altogether. The craving
for the sexual anarchy began to diminish for the first time since I had
begun the journey through nightlives. I felt a great fiiendship for Dave
[again, an unexpected preposition--a fiiendshipfor] (and an amount of
pity for the paradoxical fact of him in a world of furtive contacts; he
should be manied, the father of adored children). . . . But all this, I told
myself, was merely a welcome fiiendship in a period of ennui with the

turbulence of that chosen world. (232)

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These unexpected uses of prepositions allow the narrator to maintain a sense of control,
however illusory or fleeting, over both people and circumstances: Dave doesn’t attempt
to come on with (as opposed to coming on to) the narrator, which makes the narrator a
party in the potential seduction; in contrast, he feels a friendship for (as opposed to with)
Dave, which allows him, and only him, to decide whether or not they will be friends.

These attempts to assert his agency raise the question of what he truly wants out
of possible relationships with men, and the obstacle that his internalized homophobia
presents. Why does he assert that Dave, among them all, “should be” married and the
father of children? It’s as though because he adores Dave as a fiiend, and has found rare
qualities such as honesty and integrity in him, Dave should be spared “the life” of
homosexuality in this period. Thus, lurking beneath this wish he has for his friend is a
combination of homophobia and an unspoken nostalgia for some version of
heteronormative family values. Why not just be Dave’s friend and/or lover/sex partner?
It’s also as though his respect for Dave is just that element that makes Dave an
unattractive sex partner. 15 it that Dave is less desirable since a person with integrity? Or
is it that sex would somehow spoil the fiiendship? Or both? While Rechy’s narrator
doesn’t fetishize the normal in the way that Vidal’s Jim and Baldwin’s David seem to, he
nonetheless values it, putting the ahnost regular guy Dave somehow above, or at least in
a separate category from, the run-of-the-mill homosexual.

In any event, as the feelings between them become too tender and almost-perfect,
the narrator is driven to escape and end the fiiendship altogether. In this scene, they

watch a circus together. And the sadness comes not just from the treatment of animals in

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general, but also from the particular humiliation of a male elephant painted pink and

being paraded as a female:

I see Dave stare solemnly at the elephant being led off the small
arena, the flowered hat perched crookedly over one ear. . . .

“It’s sad--that great big male elephant painted pink-~and that hat on
his head,” Dave said.

Suddenly Im frighteningly moved by this youngrnan beside me. I
feel that impotent helplessness that comes when, through some perhaps
casual remark, I see a person nakedly, sadly, pitifully revealed--as I see

Dave now. (233)

His being moved, and his “impotent helplessness” at sensing the vulnerability of

his companion, is directly related to his earlier comment that Dave should be married and

have kids. It represents his inability to imagine, or to live through or attempt, moments

of compassion in the male-to-male homosexual context. If Dave were straight, one might

imagine them able to have a continuing fiiendship. The narrator doesn’t say much about

straight people, and they don’t appear often in the text (except as objects of ridicule in the

final Mardi Gras section). They now return, solemnly and in silence, to Dave’s

apartment:

Inside the apartment, Dave said unexpectedly:
“It sure is great to be with you!” He put his hand fondly on my
shoulder, letting it rest there--the first time he had touched me even this

intimately since that first night.

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For a long moment, I didnt move, feeling his hand increasingly
heavier. . . .I jerked away from him.

The words erupted out of me: “Maybe so--but it’s all stopping!”

Even when I saw the look of amazement on his face, even when I
wanted to stop, even when I felt that compassion, tenderness, closeness to
this youngrnan--even then, I knew, as much for me as for him, that I had to
go on; that although, inside, I was cringing at my own words, in
harnmerblows I have to destroy this fiiendship. “I mean--well--I’ve spent
too much time with you--thats all.” [. . .]

“Irn sorry, Dave,” I said at the door, which I was opening now, to
clinch the Escape, to get myself away from him. “Irn sorry,” I repeated,
“but this scene is nowhere!” (234)

Shortly thereafter, the narrator meets a mystery man on the beach, who ultimately
turns out to be married and have a nine-year-old child. It is no coincidence that his desire
is triggered first by a man whom he thinks should be married and have children and
immediately after by one who is and has. This description of their fleeting encounter at a
bar says so much about the narrator’s notions of gender as they relate to homosexuality:

Once, going to Sally’s bar, I saw him closely. He looked at me;
and realizing I had noticed, he quickly turned away. He resembled a
highschool coach: neatly cropped hair, ruddy face, trim build. He was
possibly in his late 305. He didnt look like a score; he didnt look like a
masculine homosexual (that is, his masculinity did not seem posed); he

looked completely incongruous--and I suppose this is why I had first

106

noticed him. After seeing him so often, standing in ahnost the same spot

those aftemoons—-I began to be strongly intrigued by him. (235)
What is the recognizable difference between posed and unposed masculinity? Even
given the notion that one might spot its posed version—and it’s tempting to assume that
anybody can; how would one describe the “real thing”? 15 masculinity merely a visible
lack of femininity? Of course, these categories are defined in reference to the other. But
this makes the definitions circular and hence unhelpful. Is it mere show and play-acting,
or is there some indefinite set of signs and symbols that inhabit these categories of being?
And if one were to seek to eradicate gender completely, what shape would the work take?
In other words, if one made the choice, and had the luxury, of monitoring one’s every
visible gesture (often a part of the process of being human and perhaps even more so in
the world of gay male cruising), what might one be left with as a mode of public being,
after the censor-filter had done its work?

The narrator and the mystery man slowly get up the mutual courage, passion and
compassion to be together, and wind up in the mystery man’s hotel room, where they
have sex before the man cuts his vacation short for no obvious reason. He tries to explain
his predicament, echoing fears from Vidal and Baldwin about the piercing, horrifying
gaze of the knowing fairy:

“But things--from the very beginning--they didnt go right. Thats mainly
why she wanted a kid. . . .And then I started driving to the beaches, I guess
to make sure there was a whole world ready to welcome me when I finally
decided to join it--if I ever decided to. I always came here with the

intention of meeting someone. But then I would see a screaming fairy--

107

and suddenly I’d be ashamed. It’s very strange--but I couldnt bear to look
into his eyes, afraid, I guess, that he’d look back at me with recognition.
And I didnt want a fairy, I knew that. I didnt even want them to look at
me in that strange, piercing way.” [. . .]

“Does she know?” It was a square question--the kind of question I
would not ordinarily have asked; but, having eased the street pose, Irn
reacting completely differently to him, responding to that evident struggle
within him--the eminent Aloneness. . . . (240-41)

Thus, the narrator himself acknowledges that he is “completely different” (from
his usual vision of himself) in his reactions to the turmoil of this “straight” gay man. He
begins to blur the boundary between sex and sentiment. Perhaps more properly put,
compassion begins to become more important than passion in his mind, at least for the
moment. In this passage, the man himself tries to put his own discomfort and perplexity
into words--to find the right words is so important:

“Gay people—they—“the man started, interrupting himself: “I hate
that word—‘gay’—there should be another word: not ‘homosexual’—that
sounds too clinical—not ‘queer’, not ‘fairy,’ either-- . . . Anyway, they
seem to cancel out so much that could be. I mean: Ive seen some of
them—not all of course, or even the majority—Ive seen them shrieking on
the beach—neither men nor women. The effeminate ones—I told you this
yesterday, I think—they fiighten me. They seem sometimes to know so
much. With a look, they can make you feel—so—well—so-- . . . Like

youre trapped,” he finished. (245-46)

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Homosexual men, for him, have such powers—they know so much, and can make you
feel trapped.

In the closing sections of the novel, the narrator goes to New Orleans around the
time of Mardi Gras. His “mask begins to crumble” as he talks to two potential scores at a
bar:

“I want to tell you something before we leave. Im not at all the
way you think I am. Irn not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look
and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing--not tough: no, not at
all.”

And having said that, as if those words had come fi‘om someone
else--someone else imprisoned inside me, protesting now--I felt as if
something had exploded inside menand exploding at last, I went on,
challenging their astonished look: “No, Irn not the way I pretended to be
for you-~and for others. Like you, like everyone else, 1m Scared, cold,
cold terrified.”

Predictably, I became a stranger to them. They had sought
something else in me--the opposite from them; and I had acted out a role
for them--as I had acted it out for how many, many others? (369)

Just as he’s slipping into drunkenness amid thoughts of “something” about
“vulnerability” (370) (a something so akin to the IT present, and absent, in all these
works), he is rescued and swept away by Jeremy, the man with whom he will act out the
final climax of the book. Jeremy has overheard his previous declaration/confession about

playing roles to the two in the bar. Jeremy and the narrator engage in a highly analytical

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and emotional discussion regarding who wants what with and from whom and why.
Jeremy poses the question of their respective postures and positions this way: “If I told
you, right now, that I love you--and you believed it--what would you do?” (380) The
narrator attempts to answer the question in his own mind, wondering what has left him
without a belief in love. In part, he thinks back to his own struggles with vulnerability
and the IT that is, at root, connected to innocence and. the faith that intimacy might be
possible. He has, for so long, tried to put such thoughts out of his mind:

I remembered that night in New York when I made the decision
that it would be with many, many people [. . .] that I would explore that
world. And what, really, had prompted that decision? An attempt to shred
the falsely lulling, sheltered innocence of my childhood, yes. But had it
also been, at least in part, fear?--a corrosive fear of vulnerability with
which the world, with its early manifested coldness, had indoctrinated me;
imbued in others: a world which you soon come to see as an emotional
jungle; in which you learn very early that you are the sum-total of
yourself, nothing more. (380-81)

They then debate—question--whether such a thing as love exists. The narrator
expresses his skepticism. Jeremy retorts:

“But it doesnt have to be like that. No rockets. Just the absence of
loneliness. Thats love enough. In fact, that can be the strongest kind of
love. . . . When you dont believe it’s even possible, then you substitute

sex. Life becomes what you fill in with between orgasms. (381)

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The narrator is left next to ruminate on his own self-perceived status as
compassionate victim and passionate lover-to-be--if only the IT would interrupt his
loneliness. He desperately seeks to throw aside the masks, but isn’t yet sure how to do
so, and whether the risks entailed are worth the great effort. His ponderings in Jeremy’s
room recall David’s at the end of the Baldwin, including imagery of the gallows and the
Mirror. This narrator, too, must crack the mirror if he is to be able ever to risk
vulnerability. He must disavow the mask of false adulthood and false masculine strength
and invulnerability. He asks himself about compassion:

As an end within itself, when it became impotent pity, was
compassion merely another subterfuge to grasp at, to resort to in guilt
when we questioned ourselves?--so that we could move away more easily,
telling ourselves we could do nothing else. [. . .]

And I felt, suddenly, in that keyed-up, manic mood, as if my heart
had begun to listen--to something.

For something. [. . .]

Something about the fact of death--of decay--of swiftly passing
Youth: the knowledge that we’re sentenced to live out our deaths, slowly,
as if on a prepared gallows. . . . And something about the fact that the
heart is made to yearn for what the world cant give. (383-86)

The following soliloquy in his final moments with Jeremy is an insightful treatise
on the many possible “shapes” that the relationship between the lover and the beloved
might take. Indeed, which side we are on in the relation may change from one moment to

the next, whether or not we lovers are passionately sexual at times. Or perhaps he also

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seeks to articulate a new view of intimate fiiendship in which vulnerability and the erotic
are given new, expanded definitions and manifestations:
“Isnt it possible that wanting to be wanted . . . or ‘loved’ . . . could
be as much an aspect of what you call ‘love’ as actually loving back?” I
said. “I mean, in choosing someone to ‘love’ you--to be loved by--while
that other person chooses you to ‘love’--doesnt one complete the need of
the other?” And having said that much, impulsively, not caring to what
extent I will reveal myself now, I went on: “I mean that to choose
someone to he wanted by--loved by--may be one of the many, many
shapes of . . . ‘love’--if it exists,” I added guardedly. He was looking at
me very curiously as I spoke. “If each side could be measured in
emotional degrees--the one loving and the other accepting that love,” I
continued, feeling suddenly as if I had to speak rapidly in order to be able
to finish, “each side might balance the other. If someone is able to take
‘love’--and take it with intensity--with the fill] intensity of his ability--and
someone else who can give it gives it to the full intensity of his, then one
is hardly different from the other. Maybe youll say Irn just defending an
inability to love back. But if there is such a thing as what you call ‘Love,’
its shape must be as unpredictable as the patterns-- . . .” I stopped. (392)
Jeremy invites him to New York. He’s tempted, but decides on the side of the
streets. He has to fuck Jeremy to cleanse himself of all the intimacy that has come to
pass. At the end of their togetherness, he leans over to kiss Jeremy on the lips before

splitting for good. He thinks to himself: “Maybe youre right. Maybe I could love you.

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But I won’t” (398). He thus rejects coupledom of any form, and heads back to the streets,
out of reach of any semblance of domesticity or fidelity. In contrast to this declaration
and escape, however, the last line of the novel provides a sentimental and nostalgic nod
to his childhood innocence and his deep love for his mother and his dog: “It isn’t fair!
Why cant dogs go to heaven?” (410) This ending bears a striking similarity to the final
paragraph of On the Road, in which Sal thinks of Dean Moriarty and the fathers they
never found—“in the land where they let the children cry’ ’——and reminds us that “God is
Pooh Bear” (307).

This set of paradoxes takes us into the early seventies, to the manifesto texts that
also struggle with questions of normality and transgression, sex and sentiment, innocence
and jadedness, and the often uncomfortable sense of radical freedom to create new
possibilities for relationships and loves with thoroughly unpredictable patterns, and
without any satisfactory models to draw upon from the legacy of representations

examined above.

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Notes

 

I There is a long tradition of analyses of concepts including “the Other” and “the
gaze” going back at least to Sartre. One especially important example for the purposes of
this project is Dennis Altman’s discussion of homosexuals as minorities, and as both a
model and a scapegoat in contemporary society. See, for instance, Altman (1982, p.
204).

2 See Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960) and David Savran, Taking It
Like a Man (1998).

3 An noted in the introduction here, George Chauncey in Gay New York (1994)
and John D’Enrilio in Making Trouble (1992) comment on the non-progressive history,
and the potential regression, of representations and the situatedness of homosexuality in
America. This is a reminder of the significance of the publication dates and settings of
the novels (e.g., Hemingway in 1920s Paris vs. Vidal, Baldwin et al in post-WWII USA).

4 This important insight by Haberrnas is discussed in Lauren Berlant’s
introduction to Intimacy (2000).

5 I will be referring to the original version, published in 1948, rather than to the
revised version published in 1965, as part of its significance for this project lies in the
very fact that it was the only serious gay novel that received wide press and readership
for a number of years. As such, its articulation of concepts like gender-in-crisis and gay
identity and normality in an explicitly homosexual context stood largely alone in the
public and literary mind until Baldwin in 1956.

6 John Rechy calls Kerouac “eternal jock buddy” in The Sexpal Outlaw (1977), p.

195.

114

 

7 For discussions of the initial critical reception of On the Road, see Ann
Charters’s introduction to the novel (1991) and Ellis Ambum, Subterranean Kerouac
(1998)

8 See the Charters introduction to On the Road, p. xxiv.

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II: Liberation and “Lifestyles”: The Early Post-Stonewall Manifestos

During the earliest years following the Stonewall uprising, several big issues
confronted gay men. First, there were tensions between generations. On the one hand
were typically older, closeted men who lived dual lives, along with the assimilationist
homophile activists who sought to convince straight society that homosexuals are "just
like you," and deserve to be free fiom discrimination under the law. On the other hand
were a new generation of activists who called for an all-out social revolution in solidarity
with blacks, feminists, the New Left, and the anti-war movement. They believed that the
oppression of homosexuals could not end under the conditions of white, middle-class,
capitalist, sexist, heteronormative society; hence, liberation would mean a transformation
of the entire society; and this transformation would begin, in part, with a
reconceptualization of the possibilities of how gay men relate to each other. There was
then and continues to be the obvious need for the end of violence and discrimination by
the institutions of the society as a whole; but my concern here is with how gay men
sought to transform themselves. As shown in the previous discussion of pre-Stonewall
American fictional representations of men and masculinity, there was a conspicuous lack
of any satisfactory model for how men might go about establishing intimate relationships.

There was widespread agreement that the most insidious elements of oppression
against gay men were sexism and internalized homophobia.I An almost unanimous
rallying cry was for the rejection of traditional gender roles and the social injunction that
the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family produced the only healthy, moral,

happy lives. And, given new utopian, yet untested, imagined possibilities for both sex

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and other forms of intimacy—such as fiiendship--if gay men were no longer forced to
congregate in bars, and to seek out sexual partners through oftentimes secretive,
dangerous encounters in public spaces clouded by a sense of shame, and accusations of
criminality and moral and psychological maladjustment, as they sought companions of
whatever sort, then the questions arose: How could, would, and should newly liberated
men relate to each other? Many of the manifestos examined here try to give provisional
answers to these questions, whether through abstract recommendations or
autobiographical narratives depicting strategies that were attempted, even if
unsuccessfully.

The universal demand was for sexual freedom without shame. But what exactly
would this mean in practice, and how would it affect gay male relations not defined
simply or exclusively in sexual terms? What is liberated sexuality; what is liberated
fiiendship? And what of love? Romance? 15 there any place in post-Stonewall gay
consciousness and sexual-political life for monogamy? Promiscuity? Anonymous and/or
public sex? These questions were raised and scrutinized in many early manifestos, and
would continue to be so through the onset of HIV/AIDS, and, of course, very much so
through to the present. Especially in the earliest texts, however, it seemed quite a bit
easier to articulate specific critiques of the past--a legacy of "lifestyles" and identities that
were no longer desirable. The articulation of positive alternatives, and any common core

of values upon which these might be built, was rarer, more contentious, and less concrete.

Criticisms of the Recent Gay Fast

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Most criticisms of pre-Stonewall gay culture and relationships in the early
manifestos were directed at modes of behavior seen as the result of at least acquiescence
to, or even wholesale acceptance of, the limited set of options offered gay men by straight
society. Men were accused of submitting as victims to a range of possible so-called
lifestyles that were unsatisfying, inauthentic, inhumane, lacking in basic respect for self
and for others, and, in many cases, ultimately self-destructive. Not only were these
homosexuals said to be harming themselves and members of their community (such as it
was then), as well as perpetuating the oppressive System, they were also accused of
setting a bad example--of in some sense justifying straight society's portrayal of gay men
as queeny, femme, hedonistic, narcissistic, superficial, sex-crazed, sad, pathetic, ill,
immoral, etc. In general, early gay- liberationist writers were divided between those who
appeared to criticize the older generation harshly, holding them responsible in part for
society's oppression of gays, and those who called for the universal tolerance of the
diversity of lives being led in the homosexual community, at least for the moment.

One area of serious contention for these writers is the appropriate relationship
between sex and sentiment. Might sex and sentiment be or become (indeed, should they
be or become) unified in the persons of their affection? Should one's lovers and tricks
and friends be the same people? Or are sexual desire and emotional attachment, or
should they be, quite mutually exclusive, or at least separable at will? This question is
closely related to one's attitude toward monogamy and pronriscuity. The relation between
sex and sentiment, and monogamy and promiscuity, and their relation to various
conceptions of gender, are themes present throughout the pre-Stonewall novels, and

which become more explicit in the manifestos and especially so in the post-Stonewall

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literature to be examined in the next chapter. In any case, the project of putting forth
theoretical or political claims about correct behavior assumes the ability of people to
control their desires and emotions, and to shape their sexual activities for the sake of
abstract principles (e. g., deciding whom one should find attractive as a potential partner,
or fiiend, or not--all of which assumes the possibility of living lives that correspond with
these imposed desires): the old theory/practice conundrum. Related to this demand is the
implied requirement that men somehow reinvent personas--public faces--to go along with
their new sometime, still only semi-intemalized identities as liberated gays. Here, the
activities of self-monitoring and consciousness-raising are more often assumed and
asserted as inherently worthy rather than being explored or debated. If one oughtn't to
be a nelly queen or a hyper-masculine butch, then what ought one to be? Again, a central
tension here is the requirement that not only must behavior and interactions be
reprogrammed, but so must how you feel about yourself--a sort of imposed internal
identity. While several writers at least acknowledge the difficulties involved with such
self-transformation, many write assuming it to be a very manageable task (e.g., “so just
stop chasing after 16-year olds”; “so just stop waving your arms and talking that way”).
Few are able to articulate what the new idea] might be like.

One major obstacle facing those who would criticize the widely proclaimed
undesirable gay patterns of behavior or desire is the epistemological quandary of saying
that such and such necessarily makes a person unhappy. (He should rather do such and
such to become liberated and find happiness.) Not only does such an imposition assume
that one's own experience and desires, or those of the program, are better for another

person, it also assumes to some extent a universality of the phenomena of desire and

119

emotion. While this is a problem for all ideological attempts to shape the political-sexual
relations of any group, it is especially dangerous and untenable given the vast array of
different experiences and backgrounds of gay men at the time of Stonewall. To battle
such huge problems as gender roles and gay stereotypes requires a flexibility--a self-
confident mental and libidinal dexterity--much more readily available to some than
others. This is all further complicated by the narrative tension between wanting to be at
the center of a radically new society and the often simultaneous urge to be, and to be seen
as, the boy-next-door, as perfectly normal.

Here is one of the major difficulties of my task in undertaking such a project as
this. Even an attempt merely to describe what was represented in these texts is colored by
my own experience (e. g., I can only see possibilities imagined in the texts that I myself
can to some extent imagine). And the temptation in some manner to arbitrate or evaluate
such representations is intense if not inevitable, so that I need to be extremely conscious
and overt when prescription (or taking sides), rather than an attempt merely to describe,
enters the discussion. My attempts to summarize, analyze, and criticize claims made by
individuals who saw themselves in most cases as members of an emerging community
will no doubt fall short because of epistemological difficulties for both them and me. But
the failure to generalize at all leaves us unable to say much of anything about culture or
history, or the sort of human experience that might make a community possible. This
raises the question of whether community-building and a collective political project based
on sexual identity is possible or desirable. In these manifestos, however, there is a strong

consensus that such a community is an all-important goal indeed.

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Given the tremendous excitement about the new range of possibilities for gay
men’s relating, and the sense of a moral imperative to change the way men treated one
another at this time, one might expect to find a wealth of positive descriptions of what
this new consciousness, this new sense of a liberated individual and/or communal
identity, might mean specifically for relationships. We might expect writers to be eager
to describe new personal experiences with friends, lovers, or even so-called fuck-buddies.
Instead, with rare but very significant exception, there are mainly abstract celebrations of
both sexual and non-sexual freedoms, and a set of negative diatribes against the past—
often including huge generalities and stereotypes, and often in the form of biographical or
autobiographical narratives of specific, unsatisfactory or ambivalent, encounters and
experiences. In fact, many of the texts to be examined contain various abstract claims
and negative descriptions, often including significant tensions, ambivalences,
ambiguities, and even apparent contradictions in their central arguments.

There is also the possibility that intimacy and fiiendship are generally harder to
articulate readily in plain terms than sex, especially in the context of a manifesto. After
all, perhaps we can talk and write about superficial, fleeting, possibly anonymous
relationships much more easily, and with less investment, than about people who truly
matter in our ongoing life narratives. The memories and the hard, bare "facts" are there in
a much less complicated, and perhaps more objective form (e.g., is objectified sex easier
to remember, categorize, explain, recount, than relationships that involve subjects instead
of “mere” sexual obj ects?). The delineation between subj ect-object and subject-subject
relations is one of the things these writers want most to interrogate as they begin to

establish newly liberated identities and relationships.

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How would a writer say "gay male fiiendships are, or should be, like __"? In
the concrete, particular, it's also hard to talk about an intimate fiiendship, though maybe
not as hard in fiction. And why would one bother anyhow, especially in the context of a
gay lib manifesto? "Let me tell you about the day Sergio and I had coffee and went for a
walk by the lake and laughed and cried together." It seems highly personal, mundane, and
hard to articulate in a meaningful form, and to what immediate political end? Much
easier is to describe the love of my life or the day I met a dude at the grocery store and
made wild lovesex. And the manifestos do contain strong and diverse representations of
attitudes toward anonymity and pronriscuity. The analysis of masculine fiiendship,
however, is much more evident in the novels, in Hemingway and Kerouac for instance,
than in the manifestos. As we shall see, friendship becomes a more explicit theme in the

literature of the later seventies, though often with less than satisfactory outcomes.

Early Gay-Liberationist Revolutionary Texts

The following texts are from writers writing shortly after Stonewall, calling for a
radical change in all areas of American society infected with sexism and heteronormative
demands for traditional gender roles and relationships. Unless otherwise noted, these
. quotations are fiom The Ely Milita_nt_s (1971) by Donn Teal, or Out of the Closets:
Voices of Gay Liberfiation . hereafter abbreviated as _O_C_ (first published, 1972), edited by
Karla Jay and Allen Young. While several of these writers were intent on radical social
revolution on multiple fronts, the Movement quickly came to focus on the narrower issue
of gay rights, a shift that has been well documented in many places (e. g., John D’Emilio,

Toby Marotta, and Urvashi Vaid).

Indeed, as early as the end of 1969, Marcus Overseth would argue that the
Movement was slowing down because of the "dissension over priorities" between those
he called the left Gays and the Gay leftists (Teal, 51). But Teal himself sees this
distinction as premature, and describes the still-unified agenda, in its most basic and
broadest terms, as follows:

But Overseth oversimplified. Not all [Gay Liberation Front]
members were by any means left gays or gay leftists. The call of a
liberation movement appealed, in summer 1969 as it still does [in 1971],
to a variety of young or young-minded American homosexuals whose sole
common denominator was impatience. They had shed, or were shedding,
all vestiges of homosexual shame, wanted to live in the light. They were
ready for a confiontation with anybody who might challenge or even delay
their right to do so. (Teal, 51-52)

Thus begins the call to "live in the light," and the struggle of gay men to define
exactly how this might best be done. Specific suggestions were slow to come. One
revolutionary, cited only as Bronick, early on gave a slightly more concrete shape to what
was being demanded, and articulated major differences between the old guard and the
new:

We have been put down by some of our Gay brothers for doing our
thing in the streets and pushing revolution. We have had confrontations
with all kinds of Auntie Toms who are comfortable living half lives as
imitation men and sucking up to the Almighty Dollar to make up for the

parts of their lives that are missing. We have seen the effects of years of

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oppression--poor, tired, sickly imitation men and women who would
continue their own oppression and the oppression of their brothers and
sisters. We've seen the society in which we live . . .

We will build the new society in the streets, not by giving up on
our brothers and sisters who have accepted their oppression, but by
continuing to hammer at the chains that bind all of us.

The new world will be built by new people who are in the open,
free of chains; by proud men and women of all colors . . . by men and
women who know love and live it. And it begins in the streets. [These
passages are excerpted from the article "In the Streets for the Revolution,"

November 1969, quoted in Teal, (74)].

Bronick raises a cluster of concerns, which echo through so many texts of the

period: a certain level of anger and fi'ustration at those "imitation men" who would just as

soon continue to "pass" for straight in straight society, and then perhaps hide away in

secret for their homosexual contacts. Note that he assumes they are sickly, with

important elements missing from their lives. But he does not want them to be shunned.

They must be invited to join the revolution in the streets with those who know how to

love and live love (at least in the abstract).

Gary Alinder gets more specific in his call for a revolution against the

heteronormative value system of capitalist America. He goes so far as to make

recommendations for what new lifestyles might resemble, at least in a call for communal

living. And he unabashedly defends the dignity of the diverse members of the emerging

community in Teal (56-57), November 1969:

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It was Albert Camus who said the ultimate philosophical question
is "How do you live your life?"

For us gay brothers and sisters that question is urgent. The plastic
two-car suburban married life may possibly still have some meaning for
heterosexuals, but for us the traditional roles and patterns can be only an
empty sham. If we attempt to copy straight life styles we will only
perpetuate the subterfuge, self-hatred and loneliness in which we've
wallowed for too long. [. . .]

Beyond self-love, we need love for our brothers and sisters. The
butch lesbian, the broken-down old queen, the flower child--they're our
brothers and sisters. . . .

Finally, we need to get it together in specific ways. For those of us
who are hip, radical or just plain fed-up, a real advance in our liberation
will come if we pick up the Alternative Culture movement. [. . .]

Dropping out so decisively is a brave step and we've a lot to learn.
Like how to live in communes to reduce rent and get to know each other
better. Or like how to get cheap but healthful food. . . . Like making and
sharing our clothing. Like organizing more free music, dances; parties,
films. Like sponsoring and using free services such as the Free Clinics,
Switchboards, crash pads, alternative media. Like forming more
communes to provide specialized services to the community. . . . Some
people envision an interlocking network of such communes. If this

develops, we'll need to give the straight world almost none of our energy.

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Power! Power through building our community.

Indeed, it was an era of beginning to imagine and even plan for utopian living
situations, and some small-scale experiments have been recounted below, but gay men by
and large paralleled the larger society in shifting from a communal, political focus to an
internal focus on finding the self within through individual experience as the seventies
progressed.

There was also a pervasive view that gay people are different, and this difference
was often celebrated; and tensions arose between more assimilationist and constructionist
voices. Some still maintained the earlier homophile argument that we're just like you
except for what we do in bed. But early on there was an impulse approaching separatism-
-one that became real in practice in some urban gay neighborhoods and social circles.

Bob Martin (November 1969) here articulates the gay-as-minority vieWpoint, and
the demand for a community:

[Gay Power] is refusing to hide by pretending to be that which you are
not; it is demanding to be recognized as a powerful minority with just rights
which have not been acknowledged; it is an insistence that homosexuality has
made its own unique contribution to the building of our civilization and will
continue to do so; and it is the realization that homosexuality, while morally and
psychologically on a par with heterosexuality, does nonetheless have unique
aspects which demand their own standards of evaluation [e.g., ethical and
aesthetic, as he says elsewhere in Teal] and their own subculture. (Teal, 76-77).

Such essentialist claims were central to the development of identities, and comings out,

and a sense of community, though one cannot help noticing the conservative tone of the

126

notion of being "on a par" with heterosexuality, as though that were a desirable status in
the context of a broad social revolution in which patriarchal power structures were main
targets. But many of these earliest manifestoes and tracts were put together in the heat of
the political moment, without the benefit of even a few years of hindsight and experience
as a somewhat liberated gay community.

Also, it remains to be suggested specifically what these "unique aspects" of
gayness might entail, and how they might lead to the formation of new, or improved,
relationships between men. Slightly more specific imaginings can be found a few of the
texts in the Jay and Young collection (1972), but it would take a few more years for any
more systematic and analytical recommendations to appear.2

Allen Young describes his own political activity, first with the SDS while still in
the closet. Indeed, feeling pressured to pass as straight actually forced him to separate the
personal fi'om the political. Then he discovered how sexism is counterrevolutionary in all
its manifestations, and how he had internalized sexist ideas about gender roles--surely he
himself was a man, as opposed to the queens who went around with such flarnboyance on
the streets. Here he describes the perils of sexual objectification and the possibilities for
transformation and community he sees in consciousness-raising:

My ideas about revolution and about homosexuals are very
different now. [. . .] I have stopped avoiding myself by avoiding my
community. I go to Danny’s [a "masculine" bar] only occasionally now;
my gay brothers and I are trying to build something better. [. . .]

Sexual objectification has to do with seeing other human beings in

terms of the superficial alone--face, body, clothes. Phrases like these,

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often heard among gay men, are sexist and sexually objectifying: "I'm only
attracted to young blonds." "He has a big cock." "He's too swishy; if I
wanted to sleep with a woman, I'd do it with a real woman." I have
thought or said all of these things at one time or another. Gay liberation is
teaching me how this oppresses me and my brothers.

The consciousness-raising technique--with people talking about
their personal experiences--is probably the best-developed small-group
method for dealing with sexism among gay people. As a process, it has
been basic to the growth and success of the women’s movement. Now, we
are using it to our benefit. [. . .]

For gay people, the essential point is to see limited sexuality as an
end result of male supremacy and sex roles. Gay, in its most far-reaching
sense, means not homosexual, but sexually free. This includes a long-
ranged vision of sensuality as a basis for sexual relationships [emphasis
added] (in _(_)_(_3, 6-8, November 1971).

Again, while there are some broad descriptions of just what this “something
better” might be like in practice, the early texts tend to contain much more frustration
than illumination. While there is a confidence about the aid of consciousness-raising, and
the desire to police one’s desires and exclusiveness and discriminations regarding what
characteristics one finds attractive, there is sometimes a hint of the difficulties involved in
such an immense task. One may be able to police one’s own utterances or behavior, but
can one, or should one, attempt to obliterate one’s thoughts or attractions? As will be seen

in texts fiom later in the seventies, with the benefit of some hindsight toward the earliest

128

days of the modern struggle for liberation, the consensus seems to be that such efforts
ultimately failed--there was not a widespread shift to less objectification and roles; if
anything, gendered theatrics in the sexual arena became more entrenched in the form of
the clone, the rise in popularity of SIM, and the cult of masculinity that seems to prevail
through the emergence of HIV /AIDS, and arguably even more intensely in some circles
today (the personal ads often still require the prospective partner to be at least apparently
normal [e.g., hetero-like], as in ‘ISO straight-acting and appearing-mo fats, fems need
apply”).

At the least, Young has set out a broad program for some of the most basic
changes that liberationists were arguing for. Yet in the same tract he puts forth some
more definite, and perhaps restrictive, proposals for what newly liberated gay male lives
should adhere to. He is concerned not only with banishing sexism from relationships, but
also with targeting such deeply-rooted institutions as gay bars and the cult of masculinity.
It should be remembered that he is describing a particular population--those who were
visible in the early moments of visible gay liberation in New York; there are, of course,
lots of men who are attracted to men who have never been in a gay bar and who don’t
worship or fetishize stereotypical icons of masculinity. But we are analyzing the visible
representations, both Young and I; so we are well advised to strive for consistency in our
analyses. As such, his strong claims about the need for (and the possibility of) dispensing
with roles seem at odds with his analysis of contemporary practices--again, without much
in the way of specific alternatives regarding gender identity, though he does provide

alternatives to the bar culture:

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Most male homosexuals are still trapped by notions of masculinity. It is a
familiar story--the oppressed worships the oppressor. Listen to the names
of some of America’s gay men’s bars--The Stud, The Tool Box, The Barn.
What passes for gay men’s art [. . .] Body-Builder, Motorcyclist, the
Cowboy. What goes on inside most of these gay bars often preserves the
notion that the people inside are “real men,” too. The billiard table, the
sawdust on the floor, the leather vest on the bartender, and, most of all, the
men standing around with carefirlly groomed indifference while quaffing
their beer (just like good collegians or dockworkers). The gay man’s quest
for masculinity, or exaggerated masculinity, cannot be dismissed as mere
evidence of his sexism. Beyond that, it is evidence of how a minority is

overwhelmed by the values and style of the majority. (11)

Yet even if much progress were made toward eradicating sexism and the possibly

distinct problem of the purported quest for exaggerated masculinity, what would this

mean for specific relations, whether sexual or not, in practice? Does his notion of a

“long-ranged vision of sensuality as a basis for sexual relationships” (not to mention non-

sexual ones) imply any preference or mandate for promiscuity as opposed to monogamy?

How ought men to re-envision and reconstruct their sex lives and fiiendships, given this

abstract call for an abstract vision?

Then later, in the same piece, Young claims:

This [newly found] sexual freedom is not some kind of groovy
lifestyle with lots of sex, doing what feels good irrespective of others. It is

sexual freedom premised upon the notion of pleasure through equality, no

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pleasure where there is inequality. [. . .] Homosexuals committed to
struggling against sexism have a better chance than straights of building
relationships based on equality because there is less enforcement of roles.
We have already broken with gender programming, so we can more easily
move toward equality. [. . .]

Most gays accept, in self-defense, the straight man’s mythology
that says we’re sick, immature, perverse, deviant, and that we should hide
our love away in tearooms, park bushes, on cruising streets, and in Mafia--
or otherwise pig-controlled bars. Those who reject the mythology,
developing positive attitudes toward their homosexuality, are even more
offensive to straights. [. . .]

On the one hand, he criticizes the continued pervasive worship of masculinity (as
several writers here have--The Man , being “a man,” is an ominous manifestation of
sexist oppression). On the other, he proclaims that gay men have overcome such role-
playing (and gender programming). This inconsistency could be overlooked as a
comment at a time when such a transition was thought to be under way but not yet
complete. But given the ruminations of writers at this time, and later in the seventies,
about the often seeming intractability of the cult of the masculine--and given the ongoing
contemporary cultural presence of such role-playing, and the continuing popularity of
such bars as centers of social and sexual connection through the present--such
inconsistent ut0pian prescription and analysis is a stark comment not only on the state of
affairs now thirty years later, but also on the ideological struggle that was going on in the

early and later seventies, about just such questions. This raises the question of the very

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possibility of a community to rearrange its modes of desire and interaction in practice,
even with some firm agreement in theory. In other words, one might be tempted to see
the time of Stonewall as a window of opportunity for the end of the domination of The
Masculine in the gay imagination that has gone awry since then. But such a window may
have only existed in the minds, and perhaps the practices, of a few outspoken activists.
Indeed, the cult of masculinity seems not only to have survived, but even strengthened,
through the seventies; the androgynous moment of the counter-culture waned rather
quickly, and turned out not to have been so anti-sexist or revolutionary as it originally
presented itself as being. Moreover, it is unclear whether men who reject the mythology
of the heteronormative system of relationships-~those who might even “develop positive
attitudes toward their sexuality”--are more offensive or less offensive to mainstream,
straight society. This struggle between more radical liberationists and assirnilationists
was very intense at the time of Stonewall, when young and more progressive gays often
ridiculed the views of the elder homophile organizations. And it has lasted until today,
when we continue to see very similar debates taking place.

Here it should be recalled that most of the revolutionary, organized gay activism
' and the widely read textual expressions of gay liberation in the earliest days and years
following Stonewall appeared in urban centers on the coasts; and even through the end of
the decade, the most widely heard and public gay voices came from individuals and
groups who inhabited a largely gay world. Thus, it is nearly impossible to speculate
about the extent to which the phenomena and attitudes represented in these texts were
part of the experiences of, say, rural men who had sex with men. (Although there is

much evidence to suggest that, given modern sources of communication, gay liberationist

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ideas did not take long to reach small towns and even the most remote corners of the
United States.) At any rate, these are the representations put forth by those who
participated in, and/or commented on, the early gay liberation movement.

Some writers are quite harsh in their criticisms of what they characterize as what
might be called the world-view (as opposed to the mere “lifestyle” or openly expressed
attitude) of the older generation of gay men. Yet the following passages from “ Open
Letter to Tennessee Williams” (published by Mike Silverstein in October 1971, _O_C 71-
72) have the ring of deep gratitude and sympathy, even as they confi'ont what Silverstein
assumes Williams’s view to be of his own fate and status as a homosexual (and
presumably of “the homosexual” in US. society) with stinging criticism:

Tennessee, what you taught was perhaps the best you could offer.
Perhaps you spoke for a whole generation of gay men, expressing their
humanity in the only way allowed to them. But now we can and must do
more, we must refuse to be victims, losers, queers. I will be free. I, only I,
will say who I am. I will be gay, I will not accept that I must submit. I
will not accept that I am doomed. I will not destroy myself. [. . .]

Stop and fight them. They are lying to you when they tell you you
must destroy yourself not to be like them [and] when they tell you that you
must be alone. [. . .]

Join us! We don't have to be alone. We still have the ability to
love one another. It is very hard. We have been so corrupted by them.
We have learned so much of their mistrust, their will for power, their

aloneness. But we are struggling to trust one another, to open ourselves up

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to one another, to love one another. And before our love, the world will
look and wonder. Our love will be a humanity new under the sun, and a
new world will be born from it.

Tennessee, look, an army of lovers is beginning to arise. It is being
born from among the victims, the queers, the women you were among the
first to love. We were queer like you, victims like you. But now we are
gay, no longer accepting our victimization, and proudly proclaiming our
humanity. We can give you back your love. The world will tremble, fall
and be reborn before the love we former losers have for one another. An
army of lovers cannot lose.

Love,

Mike Silverstein

July 23, 1971

Tennessee Williams was clearly an important figure in the development of Silverstein’s

sense of himself as a gay man who strove to become flee to love himself and others,
despite his personal experience of social prohibitions and oppression. What isn’t clear is
how Silverstein arrives at the conclusion that Williams sees his own fate as doomed and
inevitable. (Williams’s Memoirs and his gay novel Moisegafnd the World of Reagan
would not be published until 1975, four years after the date of this letter). If Silverstein
reaches his conclusions about Williams from his creative work (Silverstein mentions
empathizing and identifying with the victimhood of some female characters, including
Blanche DuBois), he does so at a huge risk to accuracy, since Williams often commented

on the fictional nature of his work. As for treatments of homosexuality in Williams’s

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work prior to 1971 (Silverstein makes no mention of them), they are rare, poetic, and
fictional, and highly ambiguous; they hardly constitute any but the sketchiest portrait of
the fate of “the homosexual in society,” and seeing them in this manner is still risky and
speculative.

Perhaps it is more significant that Silverstein makes his plea to a famous figure
in such a personal yet public mode and forum as an “open letter” (published first in
People’s Gay Sun_shine). It serves as a powerful rhetorical vehicle for expressing care and
concern for a whole generation of older (and ultimately all) gay men. It is a call to loving
arms, as well as an indictment of the impoverished morality of patriarchal society. For
whatever reason, from whatever source, Silverstein chooses Williams as a point of
reference to confront the notion “that the source [and beauty] of my hmnanity lies in the
endurance of my victimization, the price of my humanity is my submission to the strong
and the soulless, the Men.” Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of the mind or
work of Williams (the fonner perhaps an unanswerable question), it serves as a powerful
indictment of a mindset that was widespread at the time of Stonewall--indeed, many gay
men did see themselves as victims and losers, on account of factors including mainstream
assertions that homosexuality was sinful and pathological. In fact, the will to overcome
this self-perception of gay men as victims was a force that helped to make Stonewall (and
the hope of liberation in general) possible at all.

Silverstein’s letter also contains two further implications, one toward the
beginning and one near the end, that have produced a central tension for gay men through
the present: the tension between wanting to assimilate into mainstream society and

wanting to instigate a radical break from the mainstream. On the one hand, he claims that

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his parents, and straight critics of Williams, find him interesting “just to the extent that
the people you write about have nothing to do with them, the human experiences you
describe have nothing to do with theirs, and above all, you are not like them at all.”
Regardless of Silverstein’s intention here, or whatever universality one ascribes to
Williams’s work, one possible implication is that, for better or worse, the critics are right-
-the human experiences described by Williams are quite alien from these spectators.
More likely, though, is that they are not alien, but speak quite directly to the insecurities,
passions, suffering, ambiguities, and desires that are surely very widespread and
comprehensible, even if not universal, in one form or another, in all human experience. If
such is the case, then Silverstein undermines his own claim that Williams holds that only
victims cling to humanity.

Later in the letter, Silverstein makes a more ambitious (and abstract) claim, a
utopian prediction: “Our love will be a humanity new under the sun, and a new world
will be born from it [. . .]. An army of lovers cannot lose.” How the new humanity and
world would differ from the present ones is left to the imagination. Such is often the case
with revolutionary rhetoric; and it was the project for gay men in the decade to come to
experiment with just how to give concrete content to such abstract visions.

Even harsher than Silverstein’s criticism of what he takes to be the victim-
complex of Tennessee Williams is the scathing critique by Craig Alfred Hanson, “The
Fairy Princess Exposed” (@ 266-69). Hanson describes a type of gay mentalityuvery
delusional and destructive-in the most 'vivid, specific, and accusatory detail:

It used to be that when most male homosexuals came out of their

closets they headed straight for that gay fairyland somewhere way over

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Judy Garland’s rainbow and set up housekeeping as fairy princesses. The
gay liberation movement has been an escape from the old fairyland, and
Judy Garland, and fiom the traditional gay subculture. [. . .]

Fairyland is still alive and well in Hollywood and for most of those
half-de-closeted gays over 30, and I don’t think most of our older gay
brothers will ever escape from it. Those aging princesses will simply
linger on unto death as past relics of a bygone era in their fantasy world of
poodle dogs and Wedgewood teacups and chandeliers and all the fancy
clothes and home furnishings any queen could ever desire; but it is a world
of would-be princes and princesses living on a shoestring; a phony world
of countless impersonators of Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Mae West, and
of plastic midnight cowboys from Brooklyn cruising Times Square. And
it is that same tired old fantasy world peopled by bitchy male hairdressers,
snobbish antique dealers, and effete ballet masters, a sham world of
egophilic actors turning women on before the camera and turning tricks

over behind the camera. [. . .]

At first glance, this rant could be seen as merely the displeasure of one individual

directed at a particular stereotype of homosexual men (regardless how widespread in

reality). In this scenario, we have one writer rejecting the Judy Garland cult and its

associations with femme-identification and fantasy. Perhaps such energy and time could

be directed toward more productive activities? Maybe the man is personally unattracted

to or repelled by these “princess”-types. Perhaps he thinks they give homosexual men a

bad name (an implied call for masculinity and normality?).

137

On a closer reading, however, the passage contains a lot of problematic cultural
work regarding gender, and identity conflation, not to mention an outrage and the sense of
a looming threat—of a huge trap to be avoided at all cost. To regard a segment of one’s
fellows as culturally conservative, and even egocentric, and to identify a certain pattern of
tastes and behavior as “a tired old trip” seems fair enough. But Hanson packs in a long
and highly politicized list of enemies here, and calls their fate inescapable, while
appearing to blame the victims for their deep malaise. Moreover, he identifies the
princesses and the princes (“the plastic midnight cowboys”) as inhabiting the same
conservative trip. Surely the cult of masculinity and the cult of femme-identification are
not the same trip, even if they may share the charge of being involved in playing gender
roles.

Also, the charge against what was widely known as “piss-elegance”--living
beyond one’s means in order to achieve the appearance of wealth and good taste, whether
for one’s own benefit or that of one’s guests, is an entirely separate and economic one.
Moreover, to lump together various stereotypical gay careers as he does, if his logic
holds, is to criticize all gay participation in the arts. And his charge against gay actors
playing straights might point to some hypocrisy in the society in general, but it is the craft
and paycheck of actors to act--many more would go hungry than already do (and did then)
in consequence of the ideological requirement that men who have sex with men only act
in gay plays, or play only gay characters.

Hanson proceeds to redirect some blame toward the larger society, but also
engages in a curious shift of narrative point of view (from referring to “them” to “us”),

which occurs at several places in the essay:

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We did not really create our fairyland; the hets did. But we had no
other place to go after we came out of our closets. It was reserved for us
as our very special place to live our very special way of life. [. . .]

I suppose one would call us cultural conservatives who fed luxury
to the establishment; and we were selfish, petty, and vain little men who
dedicated their lives to preserving the past and serving our masters, the
rich. We called ourselves “artists,” but greatness in art depends on
innovation, not repetition of the old. For that reason, if none other, the
fairy princess is an evil demoness because she stifles and smothers those
creative urges deep within us. [. . .]

Here, Hanson’s diagnosis of the history of a “gay sensibility” resembles that of
Daniel Harris’s 1997 book, except that, for Harris, such a sensibility was a neutral fact
that would disappear as oppression waned (a disappearance that some might even lament
because of fond nostalgia for the “old gay trip”). For Hanson, in contrast, “our very
special way of life” is reactionary, and poses a great threat to the prospects for gay
liberation. And to call homosexual artists “vain little men,” and the princess an “evil
demoness” with such power to stifle and smother the rest of us, is again to conflate
manhood and maidenhood, and more dangerously, to essentialize the reality of past
vocations and oppression, while conflating such a real past with the fantasy realm he
wants to eradicate; hence, the perpetrators of the syndrome are both helpless victims and

blameworthy monsters at once.

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Hanson’s criticisms are not, however, restricted to mere gender betrayal, or the
pandering of gays to their straight masters. He goes on to pathologize men who
participate in any of these cultural traditions:

The fairy princess creates a romanticized, egocentric, and spurious
inner world--fairyland--set against outer reality because he lives a
frustrated life of emotional deprivation and isolation due to feelings of
inadequacy and worthlessness in the real world. [. . .]

Because they cannot rationalize why they are gay (except in
context of sin or sickness), gay traditionalists tend to believe that
mysterious forces quite beyond their immediate control guide their lives. [.
. .] They are unable to imagine that gay is good. [. . .]

This faith that he is the predestined victim of determinism
explains why gay traditionalists are drawn towards astrology, the occult,
and superstitious ideals of every sort. They desperately want to be
heterosexual, but they believe the hand of cruel fate is set against them. [. .
-]

Since the fairy princess cannot explain his life rationally, he tends
to view everything irrationally, and irrationality and superficial
emotionalism and sentimentality become a hallmark of the princess.
Rather than using reason, he emotes, and he emotes on stereotype and
ceremony because these produce order and certainty in an otherwise

disordered, irrational world. He simply refuses to either accept or

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understand science because it demands that rational and ordered mind
which would cause chaos in his egocentric world. [. . .]

All of this talk of the inability to imagine that “gay is good,” and of a desire to be
heterosexual, and “cruel fate,” and sense of worthlessness, commits an epistemological
fallacy of the most presumptuous and abusive sort. Beyond the risk of
overgeneralization, how could Hanson possibly know to this extent how men feel about
their own experience? Indeed, how could one know anything about another’s “spurious
inner world” unless it described one’s own to some extent? And why is a fantastical
inner world spurious? Surely all so-called inner worlds are somewhat at odds with so-
called outer reality. It is one of the frustrating aspects of the human condition that we will
never know whether our consciousness corresponds in any degree to the Kantian in-itself
of ultimate reality, which is hardly a useful concept, especially in debates about cultural
representation. Furthermore, these comments about “irrationality, superficial
emotionalism, and sentimentality” hark back to the worst sort of misogynist conceptions
of the feminine in general. But perhaps Hanson’s greatest injustice is to assume that all
these men are not only self-deluded but miserable through and through and wholly
beyond redemption, even at the hands of such an expert realist-rationalist as himself.

Hanson’s final portrayal of his pathetic brother relies on a logical impossibility in
the guise of progressive psycho-political intervention. He claims that some men want to
be prince and princess at the same time, due to gender identity confusion. But whether

butch or femme, the gender role/ fantasy is not due to confusion, but to desire (however

reactionary one might want to argue such a desire may be):

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The fairy princess lives in romanticized and traditional settings,
and he tends to romanticize past class and sex role differences. Above all,
his is the egocentric imagination of one living in a make-believe fantasy
world, a world where some young, handsome, and masculine prince clad
in white will ride up on his noble steed and sweep him up in his strong
arms; and he sometimes imagines that he is both prince and princess, a
duality which reflects on the gender identity confusion of the princess. [. .
-]

We cannot really expect most fairy princesses to rip down their
chandeliers, smash their plaster statues of David, kick their poodles out, or
flee from fairyland to reality. Most are simply too old for that. But we
should expose our Princess F loradora Femadonna so that our younger
brothers will not fall into the lavender cesspool and be swept down the
sewers of fantasyland. We must make our gay brothers realize that the
princess trip is a rotten one, a self-deluding flight into a past that never
was, an artificiality, and an escape from reality. It is a selfish, self-serving,
irrational and materialistic journey which shuns real human relations for
past images and things material, and human relations are what being gay is
all about.

Hanson also claims that the hyper-masculine icons and costumes in gay culture
are part of the same fantasy-trip, which seems somehow untenable--do they co-exist in
the same individuals simultaneously; does it matter? This is the epitome of the

epistemological trouble--how would he possibly know this portrayal unless it was his

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own trip; what is he so bitter and threatened about? And what of possible positive
relationships?

Why is he so bitter, and what is the grave danger he hopes to save gay men,
especially the young, fiom? Are they really so susceptible, and the princesses so cunning,
as to have young men “fall,” unwittingly and unwillingly, into the syndrome (which
Hanson insists on describing in the language of sickness and filth)? While it is true that
young gay men, perhaps confused, especially during a time of such upheaval and rhetoric
surrounding all matters sexual, needed positive role models and choices as to how they
might see themselves and their community, and run their lives, might there not be
something to be learned from and cherished about these elders?

Hanson himself provides very little guidance in the way of possible alternatives.
What was wrong with the princess, except that a person like Hanson might argue that she
(he?) was suffering from a number of delusions of grandeur? She misread reality. But
who would she really be capable of hurting but herself? What impact might she have on
relations with others or the development of a positive gay community? And what would
it take, by way of a cultural shift, to satisfy Hanson’s demands? If all older gay men
suddenly stopped listening to Judy Garland, and began to identify with the hip movement,
listening instead to J imi Hendryx, as many of them did, would this be enough? Perhaps it
would be, and was. Perhaps embracing the counter-culture and its egalitarian and
revolutionary ideology did help the project of gay liberation, at least for a short moment.
But perhaps it was just another fantasy world--the anti-establishment hipster instead of
the fairy princess--yet another spurious inner world, yet another escape from reality. Yet

if Hanson is right, at least the hipster could say that “gay is good,” and engage at least to

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some degree in dialogue, out of the closet, with the dominant society (or at least a
temporary subculture within it).

Hanson himself says little about relationships at all, except that they “are what
being _gay is all about.” This last assertion is far fi'om self-evident, and what being gay is
all about remains an intense debate among writers, some of whom might take quite a
different, and more complicated stand (e. g., Berlant, Bersarri, Warner).

The following is a short, dense chunk taken from a much longer manifesto fi'om
Chicago, which is remarkable not only for the intensity of its declarations and the breadth
of it demands, but because it focuses in very clear and forceful terms on issues like
sexism and monogamy.

"Gay Revolution and Sex Roles," Third World Revolution (Chicago) and Gay
Liberation Front (Chicago), (June 1971) (QC 258-9):

A higher level of gay is good is as a tool to break down enforced
heterosexuality, sex roles, the impoverished categories of straight, gay, and
bisexual, male supremacy, programming of children, ownership of children, the
nuclear family, monogamy, possessiveness, exclusiveness of "love," insecurity,
jealousy, competition, privilege, individual isolation, ego-tripping, money-
tripping, people as property, people as machines, rejection of the body, repression
of emotions, anti-eroticism, authoritarian, anti-human religion, conformity,
regimentation, polarization of "masculine" and "feminine," categorization of male
and female emotions, abilities, interests, clothing, etc., fragmentation of the self
by these outlines, isolation and elitism of the arts, uniform standards of beauty,

dependency on leaders, unquestioning submission to authority, power hierarchies,

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caste, racism, militarism, imperialism, national chauvinism, cultural chauvinism,
class chauvinism, adult chauvinism, human chauvinism, domination, exploitation,
division, inequality, and repression as the cultural and politico-economic norms,
all manifestations of non-respect and non-love for what is human (not to mention
animals and plants)--maybe even up to private property and the state. For sexism
was the founding oppression--the original inequality, the original domination, the
original isolation, competition, and division among people, the original relation to
people as property, the original rejection of humanness. And sexism has remained
within people to fuck up their efforts to build collective societies, both abroad and
in America's own communities. The individual's relationships with other
individuals, in the erotic sphere and in other areas, creates her relationship to the
world. The society’s relationship to love and sexuality and to all hmnan
interaction builds the patterns for the economic system, the political structure, and
the culture--which in turn set patterns for individual self-relations and relations to
other human beings. The personal is the political, the economic, and the cultural.
Gay is the revolution.

Thus, sexism is seen as the root of the rest of the oppressive system. And

monogamy is directly attacked as inherently sexist, as being heterosexist in its

conception. Few among the manifestos are so stridently against monogamy, though the

opposing position doesn’t receive much argumentation or analysis here. Clearly, though,

it is a member of the greater list of oppressive mechanisms, one central historical

contributor to contemporary unhappiness and inequality. Moreover, it is claimed that

sexism “was the founding oppression [. . .] the original rejection of humanness.”

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Somehow, collective societies are inherently more human, so the argument goes, than
individualistic ones with monogamy and the nuclear family at their ostensible core. And
sexuality is a key component in the struggle for liberation here and around the world.
The final sentence of the piece is powerful precisely because of its ambiguity. “Gay is the
revolution,” with the adjectival form of “gay” left to stand as, and refer to, the whole.
The following analysis and bitter rejection of “cruising” by Perry Brass in
“Cruising: Games Men Play” (QC 264-65) is especially valuable because of its insightful
and especially vivid characterization of a familiar set of scenes--a familiar set of “types”
in a hugely populated “scene” present in the seventies, and long before and since. While
it is no doubt a troubling commentary on an often painful, fiustrating, and perhaps
generally oppressive institution in gay male life, one important thing to keep in mind is
that many men seem to have thoroughly enjoyed the game of cruising, and often its
successes (“scores”). Recall the discussion of the potentially pleasurable aspects of being
“masculine” above. Perhaps Brass had especially unlucky or inhuman experiences, or
sought satisfaction in the search for an experience or partner unlikely to be found in the
cruising scene. He faces the recurrent epistemological problem of generalizing
experience too far; although, there are many corroborative texts and stories, and Rechy’s
analysis of cruising is one of the best examples of struggling with these issues. Maybe
Brass played unfortunate roles in the wrong places; or maybe he’s right on with his
critique of the entire “enterprise.”
The games people play go on and on. This is especially true of that
cruelest of human games known as cruising. In cruising, the hunt is on

and the hunter becomes the hunted. Eventually the tension becomes so

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high that the whole aspect of meeting someone with the prospect of an
evening, a week, or even a lifetime of satisfaction, or even pleasure,
becomes lost in this confrontation of wills. Cruising is one of the great
male chauvinist games: I can be tougher than you can be. I can hold out
longer than you can hold out. I don’t need you. I can’t open up to you
until you open up to me.

In this opening paragraph, it seems very possible that the desired outcome of the
activity can never be achieved, given the participant’s understanding of the nature of the
game—and to call it a game may be a rhetorical misnomer that strips cruising of some of
its desperate and often exciting centrality to many gay men’s lives. At least both or all
parties would need to be imagining an outcome within certain parameters, or be open to
whatever might happen for any sort of mutual satisfaction to be achieved. Clearly, if one
party wanted a brief moment of satisfaction (whether sex or conversation or whatever)
and another wanted, say, a week together, somebody would be disappointed. But the
more pressing problem is that the narrative is set up so as to ensure failure--the great male
chauvinist egos, however frail and self-protecting, will not relent. They are unwilling to
submit to the slightest vulnerability.

Brass goes on to describe several “types” of cruisers and encounters, many of
whom have “types” of desires, “types” of partners they look for. These types are eerie in
their resemblance of the “types” that appear in the earlier novels, so many years prior.
The attempt to “act” masculinity is incredibly steadfast:

Most men try to set up their own roles in the first moments of this

contest of wills. Whether the playing ground be some street in the Village,

147

one of the avenues, or any bar or beach, there are always the same roles,
often enough being played by the same men only wearing different faces.
We could begin with the extreme caricature of masculinity who believes
that it is below his masculine dignity to ever approach anyone else. He
will usually stand like the steadfast tin soldier for hours on end, wondering
why this isn’t his particular night. [. . .]

Next to him is the aggressive animal, the tiger stalking his way
through the situation, looking at everyone but not looking at anyone. He is
really looking for that perfect fulfillment of some adolescent sex fantasy
(referred to as his “type”) who was possibly his first love at the age of

twelve (his first “type”) and whom he expects to walk by momentarily.

One of the most poignant and, one might even hope, instructive moments in the

piece comes as Brass describes the fear involved in gay male role-playing, and a fear of

vulnerability that I would argue is similar in many gay and straight men, though perhaps

due to a different host of factors, though it’s not at all clear that they are so different.

There may be a connection with the problems gay men have getting together and the

problems straight male fiiends have being emotional (or intimate) together, and the

problems both gay and straight men may have with women. 15 there a difference between

gay and straight misogyny? What of straight male homophobia and gay male

heterophobia? Here’s how Brass puts it:

All of these men add up to a fiightening lack of self-understanding and
self-confidence. They cannot face up to a situation without the roles pre-

defined, the definitions rolled out. We are all too afraid to find out that

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that certain gorgeous “number” over there is just like we are inside: afraid
and alone. Trapped in the role that he has learned how to play very
successfully, but has outgrown years ago, whether it be the gorgeous
“number” role or the twittering little boy of thirty. [. . .]

Gay roles are designed by fear. Just as we act in straight society
out of fear that they will discover us, we react with each other out of fear
that we will discover ourselves also.

It is no small wonder that from out of this self straight-jacketing,
many gay men develop a real hatred for men, just as many straight men
hate women because of the roles they must act out. Because we are forced
to live in a society that condemns us as half-men, many of us feel that we
must become men-and-a-half. This means to shut out all of the real
tenderness and sensitivities associated with femininity. [. . .]

Gay life is a drag when it forces a man to reject most of himself
and only leaves him a shell or role he must show in order to live with the
reality of our situation: that we are all outcasts. We must reject what
straight society has straight-jacketed us with and form our own life as real
people, not merely imitating the old male chauvinist roles left over from
dodo society. It’s very simple, men. It’s just a matter of getting together
or falling apart.

Brass is somewhat specific about what it will take to achieve his notion of this
“getting it together” by men--much rests on the recovery and celebration of qualities he

follows the dominant narrative in associating with femininity, including “real” tenderness

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and sensitivities. These are the qualities that might help us to deal with our own fears,
and the fear “that that certain gorgeous ‘number’ over there is just like we are inside:
afraid and alone.” While he is not specific about the ideal relationship, nor explicit about
his views concerning monogamy or promiscuity, the implication is that “mere,”
anonymous sex would not satisfy his personal desires or his political program for a truly
liberated gay community. And it seems safe to say that some cruising has always resulted
in these sorts of encounters; although, of course, the possibilities are endless.

Such .a pessimistic analysis brings with it huge epistemological problems and
universalizing tendencies. Recall Rechy’s commentary on the potential pleasure, as well
as dangers inherent, involved in choosing roles to play. Also, Brass here assumes the
possibility of entirely reprogramming our field of desire. If one wanted to look for
partners in public, as all should be able to contemplate doing, and do, then what would be
the appropriate manner in which to cruise? Lots of people speak highly of the activity,
for example, as fun, and do meet sex partners and future lovers that way.

While Brass’s depiction of cruising seems to imply his desire for something more
like exclusivity or monogamy, or at least “getting to know the person,” Konstantin
Berlandt’s saga of the vanishing of his soul, “My Soul Vanished from Sight: A California
Saga of Gay Liberation” (QC 38-55, December 1970), begins to illuminate the sheer
pleasure and excitement of anonymous sexuality (another perspective on cruising),
though in a narrative filled with ambivalence. Beyond its refreshing honesty and lack of
any obvious polemical agenda, the power of Berlandt’s story, and its keen ability to
portray the complexity and ambiguity of various sorts of intimate encounters, comes in

large part through its form. It is a highly personal autobiography with a fi‘eedom of form

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that allows the text to imitate the flux of moving from encounter to encounter, and back
into the straight world, and from guilt to exaltation, from normality to radicality, from hot
sex (only?) in the moment to the wish for love in bed the morning after--and, ultimately,
to gay liberation. Indeed, the form itself--the lack of traditional, rational argumentative

structure--is part of what allows the text to do this so successfully.

The narrator begins as a college student interviewing homosexuals for a project,
and discovers himself surprised--”I’m going back next week to interview another one”--
using the ugly yet somehow quaint pronoun, “another one”; but soon he becomes all “too
involved.”

I left the bar high, excited, jumping, running. I greeted my fi'iends
with a huge grin. I’ve just discovered a whole new world: Homosexuals
are people, beautiful people who really exist, party, rap, hold each other
tight when riding motorcycles. I’m going back next week to interview
another one.

But the following Saturday afternoon I am an intrepid boy on an
AC Transit bus from Berkeley.

I’m too involved. My cock starts to rise. Just an interview for a
sociology project and a newspaper article, but my cock starts to rise. The
fear climbs up around me. I have always loved going to San Fransisco.
Now it is fiightening, crawling with homosexuals, old men who want to

make me. I don’t want anybody to see me, and yet I’ve worn a bright shirt

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and tight Levis. The city is dark, the shadows hanging over the patches of

sun.
Berlandt provides such a poignant, and utterly realistic portrait of the transformation
involved in coming out--to himself first (gradually, almost unconsciously), and then to
other gay men. Now, San Francisco is frightening, and crawling with lusty homosexuals ,
(as opposed to the last time he visited)--this may be the beginning of a libratory
epistemological victory. This is how it feels to be at once attracted and repelled--the
whole scene (or one’s imaginary vision of it) is at once so dirty and so inescapably
magnetic. How are we supposed to feel when our cocks start to rise in new
environments, with new, and maybe longtime, objects of desire suddenly (or gradually)
thrust into full relief?

This must have been the experience of so many in the post-Stonewall period--
different from earlier experiences of coming into one’s own homosexual desires because
there had then been virtually no widely publicized debate with one side saying that one
should be proud to be gay, that gay might perhaps be good. No, this personal moment is
not unique in the intensity and ambivalence of its emotions and desires, but unique in that
it now includes the (“sociological”) knowledge that a whole community of people is
being public and political about it.

I’d be ashamed for people to know I jacked off in the john, I blew
a man through a glory hole, I blew a man at all.

I like making it in a restroom. There’s romance in the fear of
being caught, the excitement of making it with a complete stranger,

someone you don’t know, and you can be so close, so sexually intimate

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and unafraid to put your cock in his mouth and taking his in yours and
feeling strong because you can fuck. If I can’t ever show my cock in
public now, I can show it to a public stranger who loves it.
The dichotomies are telling; they are not placed in opposition, but act in concert in the
service of a restroom sexual experience at once shamefirl and pleasurable: romance in
fear and romance in being unafraid; romance in anonymous cocks and romance in
intimacy; and (masculine?) strength.

The poem directly following the passage above cannot be broken up into distinct
narrative or chronological sections, and should not be interrupted because it depicts a
single flash of insight into the almost, but not quite yet, unbearable duplicity between
sexual liberation with its ambivalent relationships, and passing as straight, even at crucial

times to one’s own mind:

And make the world all sex.
No piss-elegant romantic trappings

(No bed, no fucking million dollar diamond ring

to prove our forever love for each other)
just cold tile floor

and cold ceramic toilet bowl,

just what we are with no pretensions

now without future involvements to pretend other things for

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But on the other hand, when I’m loving myself for longer periods
of time I’d like to make it with you in bed and smile in the morning

without putting it on.

There’s honesty in fucking fast and fearfirl.

Having to perform is such a drag.

that morning smile after sex
that morning smile to your boss
that morning smile to closest fiiends
--”Didn’t do nothin’ wrong last night,

except it was with a guy.”
How could I have loved you last night

--sorry about that.

Good morning.
. what suit should I wear today,

what smile and opening lines for the fiiends downtown.
Good morning boy.

was I really attracted to you last night?

was I really such a pervert as to like your cock and your body?

Funny, I don’t feel that this morning.

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Feeling straight,
giving you my plastic appreciation snrile.
Well, 1 proved I’m not gay myself anyway.

The poem might be titled “And Make the World All Sex,” as this seems to be the
ultimate destination yearned for at this point in the narrator’s process of coming out into
sexual liberation. Yet it’s not clear whether there has truly been any sex enacted in the
poem. There is a celebration of the idea of simple restroom sex without pretension, and
the accompanying recognition of the occasional desire for something less anonymous.
There are reflections on the return to the closet after sexual encounters. But the morning
in the narrative does not occur in the actual presence of the sex partner, except in the
imagination. The apology, the “Good morning boy,” and the denial of the perverse
attraction are mere reflections cast away in the real morning at the office, as the “you” in
the last stanza switches from the recollected-then-rej ected partner to the person
downtown who gets the plastic appreciation smile. And finally, it’s left ambiguous both
whether “feeling straight” means truly feeling straight or just seeming straight enough to
continue to pass (sweet reliefl), and to whom he has proven his nongayness, himself, his
sex partner, or the straight world.

In the following return to prose form, the fear becomes confused, its object
vacillating. And the sentiment that promises release from fear is regrettably vague:

Afraid someone might be interested in my cock, afraid if I can’t
make it work now while the spotlight is on me I’m not a man. And then,

while I stand there unable to pee, I start to worry that instead of another

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faggot at the next urinal it might be a vice squad officer who will accuse
me of soliciting while I hold out my cock.

Finally, I flush, pretending I have u’sed it, wash my hands, comb
my hair, dry my hands, and walk out planning my return in a few minutes
when these people will all be gone.

But then I smile at a hippie girl at the lavatory door who is waiting
for her boyfriend and I remember that I’m strong and wonderfill and
beautiful like she is and no one is going to keep me from peeing. I go
back in.

This is a moment of incredible internalized homophobia (“another faggot”), but
also a moment of more general masculinity-in-crisis that often afflicts men who identify
as heterosexual. There is the fear of a potentially sex-charged scene, though it would be
the imaginary other who would sexualize it, whether a gay man or a vice officer. There is
the fear of not being able to pee in public, with others present, which is extremely
widespread throughout the male population in the United States. And it may often be
equated with a lack of real manhood. But in the case of gay men, we often wonder
whether our gayness, and the potential sexualization of standing at urinals, even if only in
the realm of fantasy, may be to blame for our pee-inadequacy. I have no evidence from
oral histories whether or not hetero-identified men ever have any sort of sexual
component to their sense of inadequacy related to side-by-side urination at urinals--j ust
some of them experience anxiety and “dysfunction.” Thus, we see what Foucault calls
“sexuality” entering the body, upsetting even so “natural” and innocent a function as

urination.

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What gives him confidence to return to the lavatory? Seeing the beautiful,
heterosexual hippie girl, it would appear. Is it the relief of her female presence, or the
strength and wonder of her hipness that boosts his feelings? Or is it the reminder that he
can pass as he wishes, and a recollection that he can convince even himself that he
himself isn’t gay when it’s inconvenient to be so?

This passage shows the tension between participation in a culture (and subculture)
that often seems to value genital contact and orgasm above all else, on the one hand, and
wanting to make longer-lasting contact, on the other. The object of attraction changes
from “it” to “him,” and from the narrator’s penis to the other’s. And is the cup of coffee
for getting to know one another, or just to make sure they’re not cops? Does the narrator
even distinguish between these, or choose in his mind, as he contemplates asking?

Exercise: Stand at the urinal and look at the cock of the man
standing next to you. Is it ugly? 15 it beautiful? Do you want to make it
feel good? You’ll never see him again. You might be in love with him.
Let him look at your cock. Is it ugly? 15 it beautiful? Do you want to
make it feel good? 15 it getting hard? Yes, it is. Let’s go get a cup of

coffee and reassure each other we’re not cops.

The saddest part of Berlandt’s story is the following tale of lost love. It’s such a
common experience in gay male relations, and was perhaps much more so in the rush of
the early days of liberation. What keeps them fiom getting together? They both seem to
want to, and each presumably only knows his own limitations logistically and

emotionally. It’s as though something deep and common prohibits closeness and

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emotional vulnerability—as if we don’t know how to do it, not only a problem for
heterosexual men. This is the moment in the piece where it sounds as though he might
want monogamy on some level, might be capable of what society tends to call love:

My last night in New York I met a man who had just gotten out of
the army. He had a wife and three children. It was 3 am. and we talked
by the sunrise on the Hudson River until 9 am. when my father had gone
to work and we went to my house and made love. Six hours of
anticipation as he became more and more beautiful and then be fucked me
and it felt so good.

I wrote him three letters from California. He finally answered one
pledging that while “most gay relationships don’t last, our love would last
forever.” I don’t remember answering his letter.

But he concludes with a rousing call for taking blatant and proud sexuality to the streets
in spite of the cops and the scared conservative gays:

The bars are havens for the until-that-day crowd.

Standing in the Stud watching 500 men, lots of them stoned,
squeeze together, holding hands, hugging each other, groping each other,
opening up in the closet. Limits: No dancing except in the back, no
dancing close, no kissing. The bar is owned by a gay commune who work
together to keep it open. Jim, one of the partners, pulls Neil and me apart.
“If you want to do that, go home and do it.” Your kiss is obscene!

Alcoholic Beverage Control is hassling you, and you’re hurting me.

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Outside on the street the men from the bar separate, no touching,
they walk off passing as straight men. The bedroom is a closet, the bar is a
closet, the closet is a jail cell. You’re let out if you can go straight, act
straight and don’t get caught. Let’s get out of here. The Tenderloin queen
stands in the middle of the street shouting at the cars going by. Why don’t
we all do it in the road?

Mike Silverstein’s second contribution to the early gay liberation manifesto
literature, “The Politics of My Sex Life” (QC 270-75), is a testimony that coming out and
gay sexual liberation and consciousness is not always a unidirectional narrative with more
and more freedom and happiness from one point in the past through the present. Often,
shifts in one’s identity and behavioral patterns and choices can be excruciatingly painful
and frightening. He starts out pretty well on his way to being a satisfied gay man, but
then confronts an identity crisis and confidence breakdown:

As a teacher I could really make it with my students. I never had

a class where four or five of them didn’t think I was the grooviest guru
going. Perhaps this is the main thing that kept me going for the last few
years. But once I got into bed, I couldn’t play my role any more; I didn’t
believe in the game. I needed something from them, I wanted them to love
me, and I showed it. I came off as too weak to support anyone, and they
freaked. Either way I lost, though for a while I thought I was getting
something just by getting my rocks off with them.

Meanwhile, as I got more and more into gay liberation, I began to

unleam the lies I had been taught about filthy faggots and silly queens, and

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started really seeing the people about me. At first I was relieved--they
were just men--like other men. Then I started to panic. My God! They
really were other men--competitors, rivals, not to be trusted. We could go
to bed together--sex between men works fine--but how can men love each
other, how can we get to know each other, when we always have to be on
our'guard?

To the contemporary and even slightly open-minded ear, these last two claims
sound so sad and, one hopes, old-fashioned: first, that other men are necessarily rivals and
not to be trusted; and, secondly, that because of this it is impossible for two men, who
might have even the slightest sexual history or interest together, to love each other. But
in 1972, these were very conscious hang-ups for a lot of men, and continue to be so to a
much less conscious degree. Things become even more miserable for Silverstein:

So after six months out of the closet, as a reasonable success in the
gay world, that is, having a fair amount of sex with relatively desirable
guys, I discovered I was as lonely and isolated as ever. Then I started to
freak. My cover started to fall off, my game playing got ragged around the
edges, and finally what I was always afraid of happened. People could see
what I was really like. All my needs, fears, and weaknesses were out there
for everybody to see--all my fiiends, all the other men. They could all see
that I needed them, I wanted them to love me, I wanted them to go to bed
with me to prove it. And I wanted them to do it even if I had nothing to

offer in return. [. . .]

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But usually when two gay men get together, both want to be men.
Men can ball together fine, and as long as things are kept casual gay men
can partially avoid the power games that characterize straight sex, but
there is still no place for a deeply committed love between two equal
human beings. To the straight world, and ultimately to themselves, gay
men aren’t “real” men. I used to be afraid of the concept [which
concept?], but now I know it’s our only hope for survival, as “real” men
drive themselves to extinction. But we’re too much like men; we’re male
impersonators. Like men we haven’t learned how to love each other.
These are the paradoxes: we’re not real men enough and we’re too much like real
men; we both are and are not that which we at once strive most to be and desire, but
understand ideologically that we must work not to be. Silverstein ends facing the
possibility that there may never be a solution for him personally, but he holds out hope
that perhaps for him as well as for others there may be ways to get beyond the problems
of gender roles, stereotypes, unrealistic expectations, and isolation:
Now there is no utopian farm, no gay liberation commtmity, no
army of lovers [in direct contradiction to his more hopeful, impassioned
letter to Tennessee Williams]. There is just me sitting by myself at a
typewriter, trying to figure out how I can survive, and occasionally
flashing on real hope. [. . .]
I’m fighting for my life, because I know this society doesn’t offer
me a life worth living. If I fail I’ll die so I’ve developed the politics of my

sex life. First of all, the whole idea of a sex life--separated and under

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different rules than a “real” life, has to go. My politics are to make a
whole person of myself including sex, to combine intellect and emotion,
weakness and strength, “masculine” and “feminine.” And I know I can’t
do this in my own head. The core of humanity is found in my
relationships with others, and I can only recover that humanity in the
context of loving, human relationships. I can only struggle toward
humanity if I can find other gay men, with whom I want to create a new
humanity.

Along with rejecting gender dichotomies, he sees the first step of his process to be
the integration of “sex life” with “real life”--they are one and the same. This rejection of
the concept of “a life” in any pigeon-holed conception contributes greatly to the battle
against the whole notion of “the gay lifestyle” that continues until today. The idea of a
“lifestyle” is destructive to the actual living of autonomous, creative lives. Adopting
styles, or being seen as instantiating a certain style, is an almost unavoidable aspect of life
in contemporary culture; but having them define a life is a dangerous, reductive
mystification, either for the person living the life or for his commentators. It should be
noted here that the media, both gay and mainstream, instituted a monumental campaign to
cultivate the notion of a “gay lifestyle” (e.g., The Advocate and After Dark in the
seventies, and so many others since), as have anti-gay forces throughout the post-war era,
and even earlier. This brings to mind the current “Get a life” sound-bite phenomena,
which along with so many of these periodic coinages may be as harmless as they seem,

but probably reflect huge anxieties about the meaning of life, or one’s own status in this

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life, or at least something quite more significant than this week’s television mantra might
suggest without further consideration.

While ostensibly and apparently focused more than Silverstein on a single issue of
contention with the emerging gay liberation movement, the following piece by Ralph
Schaffer, “Will You Still Need Me When I’m 64?” (g 278-79, January 1971),
ultimately portrays a man in a similar state of disillusion, except that he opts out of
participation in “the movement” because, in his eyes, it refuses to meet his needs as an
“older” gay man. His sense of isolation and loneliness, though, very much echo
Silverstein’s experience, though for different reasons, at least on the surface:

Gay liberation has covered wide terrain--geographically and
intellectually. We gay people have recognized our oppression and, in
different ways, are dealing with it. We are also confionting our male
chauvinism toward women and each other, and our racism. We are coping
with gender identities and gender chauvinism.

At hundreds of gay liberation meetings in four cities, I have
quietly raised my voice to speak of the youtlrisrn of gay life--the
chauvinism of people (young and old) against the older gay male. People
listen and move on to the next topic.

Now I’m beginning to get a little pissed. I think it is about time
that gay liberation come to grips with youthism. It is the most vicious and
entrenched of our fuck-ups left over from our oppression. It is tragic

because it leaves half our gay people lonely, alienated, and unwanted.

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Schaffer’s claim that “youthism” is the most vicious of all oppressive fuck-ups is
important. While there can be no fi'uitful quantitative or qualitative comparison to
adjudicate between all the various “fucked-up-nesses” of gay oppression, nor a hierarchy
of blame put on gay liberation activists for not considering the needs of everybody, his
point is well taken in that youthism does affect so many people (as do racism, classism,
fashionism, culturism--e.g., fairy princesses vs. hipsters). But the oppression against the
elder brothers was especially divisive and short-sighted, not only because it made so
many feel left out, but because it neglected the potential contributions of such wisdom of
experience, and role models (as has been mentioned above). And his point that all gay
men will some day be in their late thirties and older is incredibly important in 1971, when
the hipster sentiment, as represented in the popular media, was “never trust anyone over
thirty’ ’--and, Schaffer might add, don’t sleep with them; besides, they’re unattractive by
that age.
Youthism is the unconscious belief that older people are inferior.

We older gay men [he writes at 42] are looked upon as inferior in

appearance, attractiveness, intelligence and sexual prowess. Many of us

have unwittingly accepted our alleged inferiority. Consequently, we

cannot relate to other gay men our age--we must pursue the eternal 18-

year-old Adonis. [. . .]

All the aims and goals of gay liberation are for the young gays.
Nothing is for older gays--not even those who are hip and in the

movement. [. . .]

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Who is the older person? Well, I remember two sweet young guys
complaining to me at a gay liberation dance that this dirty old man was
bothering them. The “dirty old man” was 24 years old! And why is it
when an older man cruises he is dirty? [. . .]

And so what if a guy does have a pot belly? A pot belly has its
own kind of beauty, if you would look for it. So does baldness, grayness,
wrinkledness, etc.

The older man has a beauty that is inaccessible to youth. His life
story is written in his body, in his gestures, his facial expressions. His
body is the history of victories and defeats, moments of joy and moments
of sorrow. We’ve had them all. Every man has a story to tell about life.
He has visited places and traveled roads the young have not yet imagined.

The young cannot be blamed for not seeing this beauty. But older
gay men have no excuse for overlooking the beauty and attractiveness of
their peers. [. . .]

The young person who concerns himself with the busy fate of
older gays is planning for his future. But, of course, young people don’t
really believe they will someday be a hoary 33 years old! Believe me, it
comes faster than you think.

I have quit the gay liberation movement after being extremely
active for a full year. In gay liberation, I’ve known more gay people than
in all my life. I have never been, so lonely. What a tragic comment on gay

liberation.

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Gay liberation is masturbation.

[Ralph Schaffer was murdered on August 27, 1972, while working on the GayWill Funky
Store project of the Gay Community Services Center in Los Angeles. He was 44 years
old. “Despite the feelings expressed in this article, Ralph Schaffer was too committed to
gay liberation to quit it. He remained a movement activist and made the ultimate
sacrifice for his convictions--his life” (Gay Roots 236). There is no evidence one way or
the other whether Schaffer’s murder was a hate crime]

While Schaffer writes from the perspective of a lonely “older” man alone, John
Knoebel writes of the loneliness he experienced as a member of a group of younger men
in “Somewhere in the Right Direction: Testimony of My Experience in a Gay Male
Living Collective” (QC 301-15). Age doesn’t seem to be an obstacle in the way of this
group’s becoming intimate though there is a slight gap between the youngest and eldest.
Rather, major obstacles include their diverse life experiences and, more crucially, the
difficulty of molding their desires and behavior to fit the ideological imperatives they
have set for themselves.

My first task in the collective was, obviously, to get to know the
others and to find out what they expected of me. [. . .] Before Robert
joined the collective, he had had a lover. During the six months the
collective was together [beginning in late July, 1970], Robert had a couple
of rather stable affairs with men outside the collective, while the rest of us
had sex only infiequently. [. . .]

I found out quickly enough that the others’ ideas about collective

living were just about as vague as mine. This was not difficult to

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understand: we were the first gay male living collective in the country.
We were creating something that had never been tried before, and this
meant we largely had to create it as we went along. Of course we thought
of collective living as sharing everything equally: expenses, housework,
ideas and feelings. [. . .]

We knew fiom consciousness-raising that “the personal is
political” and that we had to examine our experiences together in order to
understand our oppression and accomplish change. We knew that
changing was called “struggle.” We knew that our oppression as gay
people had been to live in a world totally defined by heterosexuals and that
our collective would be a small world we could define ourselves. But
these ideas were as yet only rhetorical and abstract. We had to test them
out in the reality of gay men living together. [. . .]

We brought every aspect of our lives to group discussion. K1 was
reading a good book, it was my responsibility to share it with the group, as
well as my mother’s letters. If I had to make a decision about something
that affected me alone, like an argument with a friend, I still brought it to
the group. As it turned out, almost nothing that happened to me did not in
some way affect the group. Yet as this loss of individuality became part of
our experience, we recognized that the need to spend time alone once in a
while was legitimate and tried to provide for it.

Knoebel was by no means alone in his scepticism about the loss of individuality and

privacy. Several voices in texts from this period raise concerns about feeling stifled by

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socialistic, consciousness-raising ideology--e.g., that utter candor and forced sharing of
all thoughts and feelings was a trap, and that confessions were sometimes used later as
weapons. And Gary, a member of Knoebel’s 95th Street Collective, “often talked about
wondering what it would be like to live alone” (303).

We were a tight group. We spent as much time as we could
together and were constantly telling each other what had happened to us
while we were apart. In the evenings we often took walks in Riverside
Park, all of us holding hands. It was romantic, in a very different way than
any of us had experienced before.

Whenever there was a disagreement between any of us, everyone
would gather together. We never allowed any two members to argue by
themselves. This sometimes meant getting dragged out of bed or off the
phone, but it was something we all agreed to do. In the presence of the
group, arguments soon turned into reasonable discussions. Everyone’s
opinion was solicited.

Such idealistic aspirations (and one might say naive expectations) of conflict
resolution and the group process ultimately led to the dissolution of this collective, as
well as the swift disintegration of the Gay Liberation Front, the organization at whose
meetings the members of Knoebel’s group first met.

None of the relationships inside the group were sexualized.

[. . .] Having no internal sexual outlet, we were forced to go outside the
collective for sex and the exception to the rule [which allowed for

unarmounced guests to be brought home only in the case of sexual

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partners] protected our ability to do so. But since we were almost always
together as a group and felt our emotional involvement to be with the
collective, this did not say much for the nature of the sexual encounters we
had outside. For myself, I often thought it strange that living in a gay male
collective in the midst of a busy gay movement, I had so little sex. I
complained that I began to feel like a professional homosexual: being gay
was my work, not my life.
This passage includes several important implications regarding whether the group had
expectations that were impossible to satisfy. The mandate that all visitors be scheduled
ahead of time except for sexual partners imposes incredibly harsh restrictions on how
such liaisons might be lmown to be sexual before the fact of the visit, as though the
member and his sex partner would have had to negotiate the nature of their encounter
beforehand (that it would be understood that they would be fuck-buddies of some sort,
nothing more and definitely nothing less, or the rule would be violated). It’s a bizarre
manner of separating sex and sentiment ahead of time, and deciding theoretically that
they, in fact, are separate and separable. Moreover, though the members of the collective
recognized the need for privacy and time alone, they didn’t manage to have much of
either, and such time couldn’t be spent with a nonmember unless it was sexual time. And
presumably they would be required to tell the group about their sex lives, and confess to
any emotional attachments that might develop with a nonmember; and what if the
nonmember fell in love with the member sex-partner? And was it stated, or merely
assumed by the author, that their emotional involvement was with the collective? How

can rules be made about such things, and how could they be enforced, either for oneself

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or another? Finally, why might he have had so little sex, if he really wanted to have sex
more often? 15 this something one can decide ahead of time, and keep consistent, or
change so voluntarily or easily in any direction?

The group was well aware of some of these difficulties, and tried various
strategies to work them out, but in the end was unable to solve enough of the serious
problems to remain together:

Of course, we often discussed the need to be sexual together. This
was something we did not expect to accomplish right away, as it meant
conring to understand the nature of our sexuality and attempting to change
our sexual programming. We tried to be physical together: holding one
another, kissing each other in greeting. We learned to be naked together,
around the apartment and sitting at meetings. This in itself was difficult,
for it meant we had to overcome being shy and ashamed of our bodies.
Several times we moved mattresses into the living room and slept
together. But we were very afraid and hesitant to do much more. We
knew we should be in theory, but theory was not supported by our feelings.
[. . .] [It should be noted here that Knoebel and a member, Robert, had a
brief sexual affair at the very start, but that the attraction, at least in
Knoebel’s telling, disappeared for them both.]

Besides, the alternatives to the group becoming sexual were all too
present. Many times we put up gay men from out of town who needed a
place to stay, and this would lead to sexual encounter. Or men who came

to the collective for [political, noncollective] meetings would end up

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spending the night with one of us. I always felt dissatisfied and slightly
ashamed after spending the night this way with someone, since it always
felt to me like trapping someone in my “home territory” with whom I had
no intention to form a responsible relationship--and, indeed, could not
without breaking my commitment to the group.

So many tensions and contradictions swirl amidst these ruminations. On the one
hand, they want to be sex-positive and sexual both with members and also outsiders; they
want to have “healthy,” active sex lives. But there are tremendous ideological and
emotional pressures on many sides. They want to be open and unashamed with each
other, and their politics says they should be sexual with each other--to avoid hetero-
scripted monogamy and to bring sex and sentiment together. But they are not able to do
so, in part because sex and sentiment do seem to separate for them, and in fact some of
their provisions imply and almost require that they be separate. In fact, they do not seem
capable of being attracted to each other, whether by some cruel coincidence, or because
the nature of the intimacies they have established and worked hard to achieve and to
sustain have undone whatever sexual tension and attraction may have existed among
them earlier.

Thus, sex and sentiment must be both separate and united simultaneously. And
the collective’s members must be both promiscuous enough with outsiders and devoted
and loyal enough to each other. As for their inability to be sexual with each other, the
mind is dazzled by possible strategies they might or might not, should or should not have
employed (or did employ) while they were all lying on a mattress together in the nude, or

milling around the apartment together. Were they incapable of actually touching each

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other’s penises, asses, nipples, earlobes, or whatever zone imaginable and sexualizable, or
unable to garner or sustain erections? What is the definition of the sexual that Knoebel
laments they were unable to achieve? The point here is not to expect Knoebel to be more
explicit or descriptive, but to explore the realm of the possible, which the collective may
have underestimated or failed to experiment with sufficiently. Why wasn’t it enough
simply to sleep together and be physically intimate and affectionate? In some ways, their
nonsexual togetherness seems to fulfill many liberatory ideological requirements
(working against obvious roles, inequalities, or oppressive modes of exclusivist
coupling).

Also, one important prerequisite to some of the consciousness-raising they were
attempting is that one be able to control one’s sexuality, one’s attractions, and to change
one’s oppressive “programming.” Clearly, this proved to be difficult at best. Moreover,
Knoebel often speaks in the first-person plural (e. g., our sexuality, our encounters, our
programming), as though all of the members were the same in these regards, or as though
they could somehow manifest a collective agency in matters sexual. The former is plainly
and simply untrue, and commits the dangerous fallacy so widespread in thinking about
sexuality--both in theory and in practice: that people function the same way erotically (a
mythical assumption, whether explicitly stated or not, that Sedgwick has done such a
marvelous job to dispel). Whether we might or should attempt to reprogarn ourselves in
order to become more similar, according to some morally compliant orthodoxy, is quite
another matter. This, too, seems to be an assumption underlying the efforts at
consciousness-raising in this collective, and much more widely in the early post-

Stonewall and second-wave feminist period. The second possibility, that of a collective

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agency and sexual identity, is a very important concept to consider whenever
communities attempt to speak with one voice about appropriate practices and mindsets
with a single voice (e.g., Silverstein’s letter to Tennessee Williams above-~we are an army
of lovers who are transforming ourselves from the old guilt-ridden type to the new
liberated type; or in debates regarding safer sex since HIV--we are cleaning up our
collective act).

Through the process of consciousness-raising and continued experimentation with
living arrangements and the management of daily tasks, members of the collective
attempt to develop strategies for dealing with issues that are central concerns in many of
the manifestos, whether practical, theoretical, political, emotional, or material—and part
of the challenge they face is that these categories are not always cleanly distinct. They
quickly decide they need another member to help with the workload, as basic household
upkeep and their extensive community service work becomes overwhelming. John
Knoebel falls in unrequited love with a man named Lane, whom they all agree should be
the new member. Lane moves in and begins an affair with Robert, which violates
collective principles. John is jealous. Robert and Lane have problems with their need for
privacy and their undemocratic manipulation of the group decision-making process. They
all agree that it no longer feels like a collective but like a pair of lovers with three
hangers-on. The decision is made that Robert should leave. His sudden departure breaks
the idealistic spirit in which the collective began. John Knoebel asks himself what
principles are any good for if they force people apart and make everybody feel awful.

The remaining members begin to criticize each other in new ways. Quickly, the

collective falls apart and they decide to disband in a heartbreaking goodbye scene. In the

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end, they were overcome by conflicts between personal and political pressures, including
the need for privacy, for personal lives.

The struggles of this group of men to achieve intimacy within the confines of
politically appropriate nongendered identities and attitudes towards sexuality echo
throughout the manifestos. They had no role models to begin with, a lack evidenced in
the representations of the pre-Stonewall novels; and they were very conscious of their
experiment of making it up as they went along. But sustaining intimate relationships
proved, at least for them, an impossible task, even in such a thoughtful and dedicated
community, on account of members’ intractable desires, and their ultimate need to
express or maintain their individuality, even at the expense of what may have been best
for the collective.

Yet for all their disappointments and frustrated ideals, representations in these
manifesto texts contributed to the discourse of what might be possible and desirable.
They helped establish the terms of the debate for the post-Stonewall community
concerning the relationship between gender and sexuality, and the importance of these
categories to intimate relationships between self-identified gay men. This complicated
debate would be a central concern of voices fiom this community through the seventies.
Given this host of new possibilities, however ideal and hard to achieve, how ought one to
live one’s life, and what does it all mean? While such existential questions may seem
profound or banal depending on the context, they are at the explicit core of the two novels
to be treated in the next chapter. In fact, the issues of morality and meaning are brought
together in the questions “Is that all there is?” and “Why do we do this?” Characters in

Holleran and Kramer spend their “prime” years partying, cruising, and fucking, all the

174

while looking for beauty, love, and intimacy. In the end, they ask themselves and their
fellows whether the journey has been a waste or the ultimate search for pleasure, self-

realization, and intimacy with others.

175

Notes

 

' The perceived insidiousness of sexism and internalized homophobia comes up in
several of the manifestos to be discussed in this chapter. More recent discussions can be
found in Altman (1982), Duberrnan (1996) and Warner (1999).

2 While more systematic assessments of the state of gay life continued to appear
throughout the seventies, it would take some time and hindsight for writers to digest the
tremendous changes that happened first in light of Stonewall and then the HIV/AIDS

crisis (e. g., see the Edmund White texts discussed below).

176

Notes

 

l The perceived insidiousness of sexism and internalized homophobia comes up in
several of the manifestos to be discussed in this chapter. More recent discussions can be
found in Altman (1982), Duberman (1996) and Warner (1999).

2 While more systematic assessments of the state of gay life continued to appear
throughout the seventies, it would take some time and hindsight for writers to digest the
tremendous changes that happened first in light of Stonewall and then the HIV /AIDS

crisis (e. g., see the Edmund White texts discussed below).

176

III: The Life of the Party: These Are the Good Old Days?

Gay male urban culture in the United States in the seventies (as well as
heterosexual culture) is widely represented as a period of radical freedom and self-
exploration that often took the forms of hedonistic excesses and an obsession with
fashion and appearances manifested in bars, baths, disco culture, orgies, SM and the like.
As we have seen in the manifestos discussed in the previous chapter, early activists were
already debating what might be politically conscientious, or at least humane, attitudes
toward sex and sentiment, and monogamy and promiscuity. They were very concerned
with the tyrannies of sexism, gender roles, and sexual objectification. Their sensitivities
to these issues do not, however, seem to have permeated the larger gay male culture as
the decade proceeded, at least not in representations that gained wide currency and
prominence in the media.

Two novels published in 1978 deal explicitly with this urban gay male culture and
its often deeply conflicting values: Andrew Holleran’s Dancer fi'om the Da_n_<_:§ and Larry
Kramer’s Fitggcfi. Both books feature a handsome protagonist who arrives in New York
thinking of himself as exceptional in the gay scene. They are, after all, normal, decent
guys who just happen to be in search of an all-American young man to settle down with
in a blissful love affair and sexual relationship. They quickly discover, though, that gay
culture in the city doesn’t always make such a connection easy to find. Moreover, they
encounter respective casts of characters who have a multitude of notions about what they
might want out of life. Each realizes that he is not so unusual after all. While Jim in
Vidal’s novel and David in Baldwin’s novel discussed above never develop alternatives

to their single impossible life’s dream (monogamy with a particular beloved man), and

177

school student in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.) Both narratives are at times explicitly
conscious of their particularity in telling the story of men on “the circuit” of the New
York scene.

This chapter will compare and contrast F_agg9§ and mpg in regard to the
following central and interrelated concerns. My first concern is the explicit and implicit
attitudes of the narratives toward notions of gender and gender roles, and their
complicated relation to promiscuity, monogamy, and the possibility of love. These texts
appear on the surface to be less obsessed with gender than were either the manifestos or
the novels that preceded them under consideration here. This may be due to the decline
of visible feminist and liberationist consciousness among many gay men as the seventies
progress. While gender is not problematized in obvious ways as such, gendered terms
and roles are pervasive, if taken for granted. Characters may fall into nebulously
gendered postures——false femme, faux butch, or regular, “real” guys caught up in the
alien scene--but roles and role-playing are generally accepted as the norm on the circuit.
Second is the trope of the “queen.” This category may or may not be primarily about
gender, as we shall see. The protagonists both attempt to distinguish themselves from the
figure of the “doomed queen”; but it remains to be shown exactly what they wish to
escape identification with. Third, the characters go back and forth between the desire to
be the normal, all-American, young man, which may or may not include monogamy, and
to be the wildly promiscuous, radically liberated “new” gay man. Fourth, I will compare
the ultimate rhetorical judgment made by the narrators and/or protagonists on any

intrinsic value of life on the circuit, and what alternatives to this so-called decadent mode

179

of liVing might look like. Finally, I will examine the reception of the novels in the
contemporary gay and mainstream presses.

Fagg9_t_s is not a subtle narrative text, and rarely is it ambiguous in its portrayals of
characters and attitudes. Rather, it is most often a moralizing polemic about what’s
wrong with the contemporary state of affairs in urban gay male America. While there is
the occasional nod to a sense of collective ecstasy in sexual liberation, and perhaps even
community solidarity, in the end, even these are judged to be unworthy and unfulfilling
goals, in themselves, for a thoughtful, grown-up man. All of the action in the novel takes
place during what the narrator retrospectively describes as the season in which gay men
on the circuit became confused, with no sense of direction, no rationale for doing one
thing instead of another, a constant theme in the book—the apparently complete freedom
to act selfishly and impulsively:

Later, it would be recollected as the False Summer. Everything
had bloomed too quickly. Fire Island, this Memorial Day, would be like
the Fourth of July. Too much too soon. Everyone was caught in the
never-never land of City? Capriccio? The Tubs? Balalaika? The Pits?
The Toilet Bowl? Fire Island? All cups runneth over. The weather was
no help either—the glorious summer sun now obviously out to stay—and
thus useless in defining and dictating destinations and activities, as it
usually did when cold meant dancing and very cold meant television,
joints, and bed.

And here it was only May. (4-5)

180

From the beginning of the novel, such is the narrative judgment on this moment of mid-
seventies gay liberation: too much too soon with no moral, political, or emotional
compass by which to set one’s course of action, or to ground one’s reflections on all that
was happening, so relatively short a time after Stonewall opened up a new sense of
freedom.

In a curious rhetorical maneuver, the protagonist asserts the stakes of his own
participation in the scene that false summer at the very start of the novel, thus at once
implicating and vindicating himself with respect to the controversies he will confront as
the narrative progresses. Fred Lemish is thirty-nine years old and looking for real love
with a real man—looking to settle into a long-term monogamous relationship. Kramer’s
narrative is unusual because the protagonist does not go through a journey of learning for
the first time about the paradoxes of various notions of love, sex, and gender through the
novel. Rather, many of the points of contention and the positions in the arguments are
articulated quite clearly at the start. While Holleran’s protagonist Malone stumbles into
the gay world knowing virtually nothing about it, Kramer’s characters dive into the false
summer knowing the potential pleasures and risks and pain ahead of time. This bold
assertion from the top certainly lessens the dramatic impact of whatever revelations
characters may have at the end (as when Fred decides to bid the whole scene a final
farewell); but this novel is a satirical polemic, not the romantic, existential tragedy
written by Holleran.

Kramer’s main man Fred Lemish is writing a script that he hopes will become a
film to show the world what homosexuals, and the circuit scene, and its alternative, are

really like, “the first respectable faggot movie” (9). In this passage, he attempts to justify

181

his position to his fiiend Gatsby, who happens to be writing a novel about homosexual
men, a novel he refers to as “an exercise in self-loathing.” Gatsby and his novel sound

remarkably like Holleran and Dancer, especially given the tributes paid by Dancer to F.

 

Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Gatsby accuses Fred of being dishonest about his motives, and
Fred replies, purportedly quoting from a book of literary criticism, to defend himself and
his sense of his own uniqueness among the circuit crowd:

“There you go again, Lemish. You govern your emotions to fit the
scene just like everyone else. You want to be a part of things and go to all
the parties and disco openings and Fire Island and have a lover more than
anyone I know. Don’t give me that Artist/Hero-as-Outsider shit.”

“Not true. ‘Alienation, however, does not lead our hero out of
society, but deeper into it, for he is impelled by a curiosity to know, down
to the smallest detail, the corrupt world that he wishes to escape.
Concealing his opposition, he takes part in the intrigue of his day with the
secret aim of proving to himself, by the very falseness of his conduct, the
distance that separates him fi'om his contemporaries.’ Story of my current
life.” (9)

Thus, he justifies his own apparent violation of his own good sense, desires, and morality,
in order to be able to illuminate their value to the world. He plans to sacrifice himself for
an art that will rescue homosexuals themselves from themselves and vindicate them in

the eyes of the world.

182

Shortly thereafter, he argues with his best fiiend, Anthony Montano, about the
contemporary state of faggotry. They discuss their own unrealistic expectations, the
games faggots play, including gender roles, and the (im)possibility of love. Fred says:

“It is possible for two intelligent men to be turned on to each other
in totality: emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Though I am about
to become middle-aged, I shall not become a bitchy, middle-aged queen. I
shall not turn sour.” [. . .]

“All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me,
of course, and who doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment.” [. . .]

“Fred, they don’t want us. We just don’t know how to play. How
to pretend. They’re all out there playing. Sometimes they’re Cliffs and
sometimes they’re Cecilias, but they’re playing, and all we are is Fred and
Anthony. Who would want me? I want to play house, too. I’m hungry,
possessive, insecure, successful, a dissatisfied hubby. I’d run from me.
Become a martyr to your work. Work is the only thing that matters.”

“You are a martyr to your work. You work twenty-five hours a
day at a job you don’t even like. What has it got you? You don’t even
have time to get laid. Anyway, faggots don’t want to know about success.
It reminds them of what they’re evading.” [. . .]

“No, no, we ’re the evaders. Notlring’s good enough for us. Work
is the only thing that matters. Life is a compromise. I’m going to become

straight. It’s not possible for two men to get it together.” (10-11)

183

Gender terms are present here and throughout the novel, but it is not always clear
that they necessarily connote points on a continuum of perceived femininity to
masculinity (as they do most often, for instance, in Baldwin and Vidal). To become a
bitchy, middle-aged queen in Fred’s lament is to become resigned to superficial, fleeting
relationships and to become sour, not necessarily feminized. It is to accept the fate of
promiscuity (which Fred implies would be undesired and unhappy) as a substitute for
love. Anthony’s retort about Cliffs and Cecilias does imply imagined gender roles, but
the more significant assessment is that the others are all playing, playing games and roles
of whatever sort, while the two of them are just Fred and Anthony, boring heterosexual-
like husbands-to-be who have successful careers. The crucial question is who is evading
what? Fred accuses the faggots of being adolescent and nmning from grown-up jobs and
responsibilities. Anthony responds that they themselves are the evaders, with a
delusional ideal of perfect love. Anthony wants to play house, too, though with a
similarly grown-up man. He decides it is impossible, and claims he will just become
straight instead. In fact, what distinguishes men along lines of gender identity in the
novel is whether their nicknames are traditionally female or male, and some of them (e.g.,
Boo Boo) are fairly androgynous.

At a first glance, gender is everywhere in these seventies novels (e. g., in costumes
ranging from Nazi regalia to sequined gowns), but it is somehow understood that it is all
a charade, and reflects the person very little except as a persona and gender/sex object.
Here Fred reflects for a moment on the significance of costume, gender, and fantasy:

If clothes make the man, what were they making? A way of insisting they

were men, more men than men? And why was the same guy Hot and

184

fuckable in a Pendleton and not in a Polo? And why did black boots on
Christopher Street lure more fellows than brown? And were leather and
jockstraps and football jerseys and satin boxing shorts all a send-up and a
tum-on, and was this a clue to the faggot sensibility? (32-33)
Indeed, the notion that something could serve both parody and titillation (both a send-up
and a tum-on) might seem both unlikely and politically reprehensible to authors of some
of the manifestos. They sought to de-objectify desire, sex, and intimacy. Yet, such
objectification is often the totality of what many of Kramer’s characters are portrayed as
being for each other, except in the rare places in which some emotional bond or sense of
abstract communal solidarity sneaks into the narratives; in also rare cases, friends even
speak of loving one another. One complaint of the self-proclaimed exceptional
protagonists is that nobody ever wants to be, or is capable of being, serious. This
becomes a major crisis in the Holleran, to be discussed shortly, as Malone pleas for
seriousness just before his final exit, and as the nameless narrator attempts to define what
it means to be a queen.

Seriousness and fiivolity may in fact be synonyms for, or replacements for,
gender terms in these two novels, in part because women make rare appearances in
Kramer—one is a housewife seduced by a lesbian and another a woman obsessed with
seducing homosexual men, and in Holleran only appear in passing references. This is, of
course, itself a huge statement about the concerns with “real” gender issues on the circuit
as portrayed here. Yet it is not a matter of seriousness being masculine frivolity other
feminine. It may more resemble the distinction between gay and non-gay homosexual

men, those who identify with some version of a gay culture/sensibility and those who

185

want to be practically straight but married to men. It appears, in any case, that the
pervasiveness of gender posturing is taken for granted by this time, just a few short years
after the manifestos were raging against the confines of gender and the oppression of
sexism, and just a few more years beyond the time when a novel like Rechy’s M
Night had been obsessed with the utter seriousness of the pleasures and paradoxes of
playing the impenetrable tough-guy role, while gravely aware of the potential risks of
such a role, including the sorts of intimacy it excludes by definition.

In flggo_ts, Fred Lemish proceeds to enter into the false summer scene, joining in
the experimental romp of drugs and promiscuity, though Fred, like Malone, seems to be
the only one who does not do drugs. All along, his critical judgment is ambivalent about
such often anonymous sex, and he vacillates between his desire to solidify a love affair
with Dinky Adams and his constant disappointment and recurring sense that it will never
work, at least not with Dinky (who seems incapable of monogamy), or while he remains
in the chaotic atmosphere of the circuit. Throughout both protagonists’ exploits in the
city and on Fire Island, they always return to their sense of themselves as exceptions
among the crowd. In Holleran’s text, this sense of exceptionalness ends with a sad
recognition of the humanity and lostness of the characters on the circuit (to be discussed
in a moment). In Kramer’s text, Fred’s sense of himself as an exception ends in a harsh
and triumphant critique of all those around him, a moralism and self-righteous posture
that troubled critics, gay critics (and those who knew Kramer) especially, as we shall see
in the early reception of the novel. But first the narrator and Fred must acknowledge the
beauty and allure of aspects of the scene, if only to explain for the reader’s benefit why so

many choose to stay, without going so far as to condone this choice.

186

Although confident at the start of the novel, after ten summers on Fire Island, that
the circuit scene is not where he wants to settle into middle age, Fred Lemish plunges
into another season, whether or not motivated by his research project alone. The bulk of
the book narrates his interactions and reflections, although the narrative point of view is
omniscient, going into the minds of all the characters. It shows Fred’s process of
compiling evidence on both sides—whether to stay or leave—in order to convince not
only others but himself that the sane decision must be to leave: the freedoms and
pleasures are not worth the waste and emptiness that so often accompany them.

At several junctures, characters pause for an instant to ask “Why do we do this,
year after year?” and “What does it all mean?” but are swept away again into the action
before even the most tentative answers can be articulated clearly. In the following
passage, fiiends debate the virtues and drawbacks of the scene on beautiful Fire Island.
On the one hand, they exercise the freedom to establish their own version of the
Woodstock Nation, out of reach of mainland responsibilities and the oppressions of
mainstream society. Yet they do so in the context of a much more highly commercialized
and less political utopia than many imagined Woodstock to be; indeed, the manifestos
examined in the last chapter share more with the thoughtful elements of the
counterculture than do these representations of life on Fire Island. At any rate, it is here
that these later-seventies men are free to practice what is often referred to as their
religion, the worship of sex and sensibility. There is, however, also the recognition by
some that it may be ultimately superficial, banal, and unsatisfying (and perhaps even
reprehensible in its disregard for contributing to the betterment of society, a concern

raised by Fred early on). But there can be no denying the beauty of the place just outside

187

the confines of New York City, separated from the city by distance and water—it takes a
considerable effort to get to the island:

For, if God were to take a ribbon of land and sand and wave His
Magic Wand over it, proclaiming: “You’re beautiful!,” the result would be
Fire Island Pines. [. . .]

Dancing is more fun and eating is more fun and sex is much, much
more fun, and strolling under the moon at three o’clock in the morning or
watching tangerine sunrise or popsicle sunset—everything,
EVERYTHINGL is more fun. And filled with hope. Which is more fun.
For everything, naturally, must always have Hope.

“If the Outside World is ugly and not many laughs and doesn’t
want us anyway, what’s wrong with making our very own special place,
with our dancing and. drugs and jokes and clothes and music and
brotherhood and fucking and our perfectly marvelous taste!” [. . .]

“We have created our own aesthetic!”

“You mean our own Ghetto.”

“This place is all about belonging, the love of friends,
Togethemess!”

“And the Quest for Beauty.”

“And the search for Mr. Right.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“We play here too much.”

“Never too much.”

188

“I think we come here to be hurt and rejected.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“But don’t we talk about it endlessly.”

“What it all means.”

“What does it all mean?”

“Oh, stop it!”

Yes, everyone talked about its essence endlessly. [. . .]

For if, as ‘tis said, it takes a faggot to make something pretty, they

have outdone themselves on this Island of Fire. (264-66)

Here we see the narrative voice slip rhetorically from belonging as a member of the
community to being an observer at a distance, as does Fred himself. The voice goes from
“Dancing is more fun [here],” from the perspective of a knowing fellow-dancer, to “they
[the faggots] have outdone themselves.” This slippage allows Kramer’s text to be at once
critical of the circuit and sympathetic, at least insofar as it situates itself as a voice fi'om
within the community, thereby positioning its critique as constituting fiiendly-fire. This
inside-outside posture is part of what got Kramer in trouble with some fiiends as well as
some gay critics, as we shall see shortly.

First, though, it is necessary to examine how and why Fred Lemish decides finally
that he must take his leave. Two crucial cultural phenomena pervasive in late-seventies
representations of gay men contribute to his decision, phenomena present in both Eaggphs
and Dancer from the Dahep—the figure of the homosexual man passing in and out of
identities and the apocalyptic sense of forthcoming doom. In I_)_an_ce_g, Malone falls

uncomfortably in and out of identities, in some sense against his will. In Faggots, Fred is

189

very conscious of his desire to construct a solid and desirable self-identity. His sense of
losing control over his identity is a crisis for him, along with his suspicion that the circuit
is quite unhealthy, both psychologically and physically; the narrative makes this plain
with rhetoric of death and things being perilously out of control. In eerie moments, the
text speaks of promiscuity and the wild party scene in terms of the end of the world, and
includes a death from drug overdose (as does Holleran’s narrative) and a near-death
public fist-fucking performance. In one conversation, a character laments how silly
everybody is, wanting too much (e. g., simultaneous sex and love, monogamy and
promiscuity), and that, so, “being gay isn’t fim anymore” (257). In another, quite
prophetic in light of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the decades to follow, one character asks,
amidst all the fucking and sucking going on around him, “Oh, Dom Dom, what’s
happened to kiss and cuddle?” Another responds, “They’re coming back in the eighties”
(252). Such dark commentaries on the circuit scene back then reveal how relevant these
novels and their concerns are to ongoing debates about health, promiscuity, and intimacy
in gay male circles at present (as I write today, twenty-five years later).

Specific current controversies include the fate of bathhouses, exemplary sites of
co-mingling identities and their disintegration, and the ongoing debate between pro-sex
activists and advocates of monogamy—gay marriage—as the most rewarding and
responsible life choice. Fred Lemish experiences two moments of identity crisis that
contribute to his decision to pursue a new way of life. One happens at a bathhouse, the
other in a discussion with Dinky Adams about whether or not their relationship can or
should be salvaged and “worked on,” and under what specific terms, as lovers or fiiends

or something. In the following passage, Fred finds himself at the Everhard Baths. (The

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real-world establishment was named Everard [renaming it “hard” is an example of
Kramer’s parodic use of names throughout]; and the nonfictional deadly fire there in the
seventies is yet another example of similar events included in both Holleran and Kramer.)
At the bathhouse, it’s not the sordid physical atmosphere, or even the concept of
democratic promiscuity that bothers Fred, but his loss of identity, and the sense of
objectification that may come along with anonymous sex. He feels like a Frito-Lay, a
very apt symbol of the mass-production and consumption of the very notions of personal
identity and human interiority as junk, both in the seventies and in the new millennium:

Rancid and ratty would best describe the atmosphere of the
Everhard Baths at this prime hour. In this outpost of civilized behavior
and democracy in action, the redolent smell combined the distinct odors of
popper, dope, spit, shit, piss, and a bevy of lubricants. Hundreds of
assorted bodies paraded through refuse and puddle-spotted floors,
barefoot, bare-chested, protected only by sarongs of towel from complete
usurpation by passing eyes. [. . .]

Perhaps the place was a world on microcosm, human life reduced
to its most simplistic, that awful moment when a name and an identity
were no longer essential. If somebody didn’t want you, forget it, and find
somebody who would take the merchandise as is. He could now feel like
a Frito-Lay, laid or unlaid, depending on his shelf age, freshness, spoilage
retardation, and understand where chemicals might help. (156-5 7)

Recall that Fred doesn’t ingest recreational drug-chemicals himself, but at this moment at

the baths he can imagine how they might help a fellow tolerate the impersonality of the

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circuit. Perhaps an up or a down or a trip would redeem the fact of being merchandised
and the loss of identity into a transcendence of the ego—a spiritually justifiable
experience. Such a loss of identity is how Holleran’s narrator describes Malone’s
becoming “one of us”—finally a circuit queen, albeit of a still exceptionally thoughtfill
sort.

Later, just before his final decision to exit the scene, Fred makes a last-ditch try to
make a relationship with Dinky work. They argue about how they might stay together.
Dinky thinks they would make it better as friends; Fred wants love or nothing at all.
Dinky insists that sex is meaningless, a mere sensation. “Stick a popper up your nose and
you might as well have a dildo up your ass as me” (313). He accuses Fred of wanting a
heterosexual marriage, which Fred admits to. Fred retorts that Dinky and other faggots
grow up not liking themselves, and that to escape such self-loathing, they may, instead of
finding a long-term mate, fuck themselves to death. Dinky replies, “You know, you
analyze too much. You want to know too much. I don’t want to know.” (Holleran’s
Malone is also accused by his incompatible lover Frankie of thinking too much, whereas
Frankie himself just does.) Fred replies, first to himself, in a rhetorical gesture in the
narrative that encapsulates, as it were, the moral of the story:

OK, Lemish. You hear that? You want somebody who doesn’t
want to know? All your life has been a journey to find an identity. Why
are you letting this loser help you lose one? He sure is a vision, standing
up in all that leather. Your crotch, please note, wants a return engagement
of that admiration. “You don’t want to know why you do the things you

do?”

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“No. Why should I?”

“So you might stop doing them.”

“I like doing them. If I knew why I did them, I might not like
doing them anymore. Come on,” Dinky was now trying to get past Fred in
the narrow space, “let’s go to Irving’s party.”

“Irving’s? What kind of party?”

“Who knows? If it’s in The Meat Rack, it’s probably the whole
lot. Leather. Piss. Shit. Your outfit isn’t right, but no one will notice.
We’ll start work on improving your wardrobe next week.” He clapped
Fred on the shoulder with his hand, like an officer encouraging the
enlisted man out into battle. (317-18)

This is an example of Kramer’s high satire. In what might be the climax of a romance, or
the pinnacle of an existential didactic treatise, the two would-be lovers go off to leather-
piss-and-shit-land, with a keen eye on improving the wardrobe.

Yet Fred Lemish has known all along that this is no longer the life for him. While
the alternative is not so clear, he must move on to a something better, or at least other,
than the Meat Rack. Kramer’s narrator thus positions Fred for the final farewell that
signals his triumph over mere faggotry. In the last few pages of the book, he says
goodbye in a rhetorical mode of mixed feelings that aren’t really mixed at all. He pays
tribute to a scene and community that is not truly a tribute. It’s the moment when you
say “goodbye, I love you” to an old fiiend you stopped loving a long time ago, and don’t

expect ever to see again:

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Good-bye old shit. I don’t know who’s shitting on whom. But I
do know we’ve got to stop and change. One of these days we must stop
shitting on each other. And go out into the world and try to live with a bit
of pride. Whether they want us or not. But thanks. I’ve learned a lot
from you. [. . .] Try to stop being na’l've. Try to grow up. Try to make a
commitment to adulthood. Yes, you were my dress rehearsal for the real
thing. [. . .]

Yes, so long, Dinky. What did that fine old gentleman, Eric
Hoffer, say? Anger’s a prelude to courage? It takes courage not to be a
faggot just like all the others. [. . .]

Now I must fight hard not to let them bring me down and back to
thingdom. And what if none of them is the right one? Or there might be
others. Yes, I’ve examined. Now it’s time to just be. Just like I have
brown eyes. I’m here. I’m not gay. I’m not a fairy. I’m not a fruit. I’m
not queer. A little crazy maybe. And I’m not a faggot. I’m a
Homosexual Man. I’m Me. Pretty Classy. [. . .]

Together. Yes, we have braved and passaged all these rites
together. Though'we may not know each other’s names nor will we
necessarily speak when next we meet.

The beach is filled with all my fiiends. [. . .] All sitting on the sand.
Arms around each other. Touching. Holding. But not too close. Please

no hassles or involvements. Sharing this moment. No one speaking.

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Yes, all my fiiends are here. It’s hard to leave you. All this
beauty. Such narcotic beauty. Yes, it’s hard to leave.

What I want is better though!

No. Just different. I’m going to have enough trouble changing
myself. Can’t change everyone else too. Can’t change those who don’t
want to change. I want to change. I must change myself. Be my own
Mom and Pop. [. . .]

. . . and and and the group keeps growing, fiiends, and new fiiends,
joining every moment . . .

Fred stands and watches them. Yes, it’s hard to leave.

Then his eyes turn toward land. (360-63)

Thus does Fred, with the narrator close at his side, in his camp of one, declare his
final separation from the vast, growing group of “friends.” While this last section of the
novel is less scathing and bitchy, and more sentimental and “serious,” than most of the
rest, it is hardly a happy resolution, especially with respect to Fred’s feelings about the
group of men he’s leaving behind. He has decided to make a commitment to adulthood,
and to summon the courage not to be a “faggot just like all the others,” but to embrace his
new identity as a Homosexual Man, presumably now free of the messy trappings that go
along with those other men who like to make it with men.

He must change himself. This Rilkean bravado includes the credo that he must
become his own parents. Hence, the quest is for normality, which can only be attained
with a clean break from his faggot past. This course is directly opposite the one taken by

Rechy’s narrator, who is determined to stay in the sexual underworld with a revolutionary

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zeal. Kramer’s Fred admits of no regrets at the end, claiming to have learned some
lessons during his time on the circuit. Yet after his stint of rigorous Socratic
examination, “it’s time to just be,” to steadfastly inhabit his new, adult identity (in
contrast also to Malone’s Frankie, who “just does”). While this new un-Socratic mode
may have its spiritual and emotional merits, recalling perhaps what Sal Paradise admired
most about Dean Moriarty in On the Road, it’s unclear what narrative options await Fred
at the close of Eaggphs. What’s an ex-faggot to do after he has renounced the life he has
known, and all of the people who have peopled it? What will his normal life be like? He
is convinced that it is a better life. It must include, in Fred’s mind, at least the prospect of
a heterosexual-style marriage, which is imagined to be monogamous and stable,
including relationship-work and growing together. Yet he has no models of how he
might enter into such a marriage. His parents’ marriage was unhappy. He has, in fact, no
model at all for the sort of trust and intimacy he desires.

From his ten years on the circuit, he certainly has no evidence for the possibility
of a satisfactory relationship. Given this lack, and the fact that the narrator and Fred have
become virtually identical in voice at the end, it is especially difficult to interpret the
narrator’s and Fred’s depiction of the mass of men he calls fiiends. They don’t want to
be too close, and may not speak when next they meet, but they are his fiiends
nonetheless. It’s a curious notion of friendship, often anonymous and without intimacy
as I have defined it here, as requiring some emotional closeness and potential
vulnerability. And yet they murmur generic, quasi-universal, disembodied I love yous on
the white sand as the narrative closes. He would like to change them, but sees the firtility

(if not the paternalism) of such an attempt. On the one hand, he celebrates the group as it

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keeps growing, with new members coming out into faggotry; on the other hand, he rejects
the entire basis of their community as he defines it, based as it is on juvenile escapism,
sex, and shallow connections. While Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dahc_e ends
with a similarly ambiguous perspective on the circuit and its meaning and the lives of its
inhabitants, Holleran’s narrative avoids such a glaring paradox, refusing to make such a
harsh judgment on its characters, and resisting such an effusive, though ultimately empty,
celebration of the commrmity in the abstract.

Holleran’s novel, also published in 1978, begins and ends with a series of letters
between two friends. One has retired from the circuit (now a “retired faggot”) to the
Deep South; one stays in the city to continue to tell the story (he is writing a novel about
life on the circuit); both self-identify to some extent as doomed queens, although the
former seems to have succeeded in finding what Kramer’s Fred Lemish left in search
of—a marriage with a man surrounded by small-town simplicity and stability. In
between the bookend letters is the story of the beginning, middle, and end of Malone’s
years spent in the New York scene, comprising much of the decade of his thirties and
much of the 19705. The overarching concerns and obsessions, the parties and cast of
characters, and perhaps even the conclusion, are similar to Kramer’s. The major
differences are in style, tone, and rhetorical mode of evaluation. For one thing,
Holleran’s narrator resembles the narrator of The Great Gatsby in perspective. He is a
minor character observing Malone’s experiences, as is Nick Carroway. He may or may
not be strictly identical to the New York writer of the letters, since the letter-writer is,
after all, a novelist, and thereby open to fiction’s proclivities about point of view; but at

one point the narrator speaks of writing about Malone. Holleran thus constructs a

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complicated and clever relation between author, narrator, letter-writers, and protagonist
that blurs notions of identity and subject-position throughout.

This blurring allows for a shifting and ambivalent commentary on the circuit
scene, for instance, on the relation of promiscuity to the ongoing search for “love,” which
may at different times be interpreted to mean anything from hot anonymous sex to a brief
affair to a long-term relationship, whether with strict expectations of fidelity or not.
Whereas Kramer’s satire oftentimes reads like one vast ongoing orgy, in the Holleran
very little actual sex is depicted, though it is talked about and certainly assumed to be
going on all around. Instead, the bulk of Holleran’s narrative, and much of the dialogue,
is concerned with the possibility, or impossibility, of romantic love, the sadness of
contemporary life, and the physical beauty toward which gay culture often aspires—we
are informed that the gay men depicted here are a highly visual lot. In this exchange of
letters that opens the novel, the two fiiends discuss the allure and sadness of gay life, and
what might be an appropriate fictional story to tell about it. First, the man who has left
New York for the quietude of a small southern town writes. His voice and gender
language remain that of a queen (he signs the letter “Agathe-Helene de Rothschild”):

It ’sfinally spring down here on the Chattahoochee—the azaleas
are in bloom, and everyone is dying of cancer. [. . .]

I cannot tell you where I am, because I want to make a clean break
with my former life. [. . .] I would rather die like a beast in the fields,
amigo, with my face to the moon and the empty sky and the stars, than go

back; expire with the dew on my cheeks. [. . .]

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D0 write. We pick up our mail in Atlanta once a week, when
Ramon goes up to buy fertilizer, pumps, and things like that—big girl stuff.
(9-11)

The New York writer replies that he’s beginning to think that cancer is
contagious, which Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, in some sense, turned out to be, as a
commonly manifested condition associated with HIV infection. This is only one of many
references to infection, disease, and death associated with “the circuit” and
homosexuality in general found throughout both Kramer and Holleran’s texts, a few
years beforeianybody had heard of AIDS. In _Eaggtls, such references to mortality and
illness suggest warnings of the perilous psychological and physical toll taken on the
minds and bodies of gay men by the quantity of drugs and sex they subject themselves to.
As Reynolds Price notes in his introduction to the 2000 Grove paperback edition, all of
this sexual activity “made the stated goal of much of that activity literally impossible—if
the goal, that is, was love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable
vigor.” This is, in fact, the stated goal of many of the characters in Kramer. Moreover,
Price continues, the sexual body is mortal. If it has too much sex without any emotional
connection or human care, it will at some point “turn against the mind that propels it and
reduce that mind to some less than desirable thing” (xii-xiii). Thus, promiscuity and
anonymous sex are, in this view, not only most often time wasted that that could be spent
in search of “real” love and/or a responsible adult life; they can also ruin a person’s mind
and body.

In Dancer from the Danae, in contrast, references to death, dying, and disease are

more often symptomatic of an existential human condition in which the romantic spirit of

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the characters amplifies confrontations with age and nostalgia, and the sense that gay life,
like all life, is not quite what we were prepared for; we are bound to have some of our
dreams disappointed. Despite the earlier claim to the contrary, the novel is a product of
its historical context, and reflects the decline of idealism and rise of commodification in
American culture in the late seventies, here in gay culture in particular. (As noted below,
at one point, Sutherland laments that people no longer have souls.)

Here is the advice sent along from the South to the city on what might be a timely
novelistic treatment of gay life that seeks a wider audience. Not only does “the world”
demand that gay life be sad, in part as punishment for its departure fi'om heterosexual
normality; but “gay life does have its sadness,” some of which is the sadness of life itself,
while some may be unique to gay life, at least on the circuit. Whether or not Mr is
violent or tragic is open to debate, as is the relevant definition of these terms. Punches
are thrown, innocent people are beaten, and characters die sudden, unnecessary deaths.

In what ways gay life might be better than non-gay life is not articulated:

Also you would have to make your novel very sad—the world
demands that gay life, like the life of the Very Rich, be ultimately sad, for
everyone in this country believes, deep down in their heart, that to be
happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMIL Y—a
wife and 2.6 kids and a station wagon and a big dog and on elm with a tire
hanging from it on a rope. [. . .] [T]he whole world wants to be like My
Three Sons. So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck
dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be

ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give into them?

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Anyway—contrary to the activists who want the world to believe
not only that Gay Is Good, but Gay Is Better—gay life does have its
sadness. [. . .]

However, I don ’t think a novel is a historical record; all a piece of
literature should do, I think, is tell you what it was like touching Frank
Romero ’s lips for the first time on a hot afternoon in August in the
bathroom of Les ’ Café on the way to Fire Island. If you can do that,
divine! (15-16)

This is an assertion that the novel should not be written as a sociological or historical
treatise, nor as a polemical judgment on the politics or morality of gay life in the
seventies (all of which Kramer’s novel attempts to be at various points). Rather, it will
be an evocation of sensual experience, an expression of the romantic visions that keep
men coming back again and again—as well as making these important moments and
feelings available to be experienced by readers.

While much of the romance and sadness is found in encounters, connections, and
disappointments in the city or on the island, many poignant moments in the novel involve
nostalgia or longing for an imagined ideal of quiet existence, perhaps including a mate
and a family, free from what the narrator refers to as the “false social organism” of the
circuit—what is often called normality (with echoes of Kramer’s narrator describing the
“false summer”). Holleran’s narrator describes Malone’s longing as follows:

Kids were playing football in the town park [. . .] and families were out in
their backyards raking leaves. [. . .] He always looked back as he went

through [Sayville, on Long Island], saying this might be that perfect town

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he was always searching for, where ehns and lawns would be combined
with the people he loved. But those summer taxis drove inevitably
through it, like vans bearing prisoners who are being transferred from one
prison to another—from Manhattan to Fire Island—when all we dreamed
of, really, in our deepest dreams, was just such a town as this, quiet, green,
untroubled by the snobberies and ambition of the larger world; the world
we could not quit. (24)
In many ways, Holleran’s narrative is an instantiation of the debate between
Biddy Martin and Lauren Berlant/Michael Warner about anti-normativity and the
ordinary. In their piece in Intimacy, Berlant and Warner take issue with Martin’s charge
that some queer theorists neglect the potential value of attachments to some traditional
forms of social and familial organization (i.e., the normal). They quote Martin writing
thus about the risks of dispensing entirely with reverence for such attachments:
Radical anti-normativity throws out a lot of babies with a lot of batlrwater.
[. . .] An enormous fear of ordinariness or normalcy results in superficial
accounts of the complex imbrication of sexuality with other aspects of
social and psychic life, and in far too little attention to the dilemmas of the
average people we also are. (321)
Berlant and Warner reply that they are not opposed to the recognition of the dilemmas of
average people in which to be average means only to be ordinary descriptively. They are
concerned with prescriptive heteronorrnativity, according to which deviating from a

“statistically imagined norm” becomes prescriptively taboo. Against the tyranny of such

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norms, they envision a project they call queer “world-making,” in which new forms of
intimacy would be not only imagined but lived. In fact, they cite Dancer from the Dance
as an example of such a project. The Holleran text is an example both fitting and curious
for them to choose. For while characters like Malone and Sutherland do experiment with
new forms of togetherness (non-sexual and ultimately as something like best girlfiiends),
the narrative throughout highlights Malone’s deep sense that something is missing that he
isn’t likely to find in the superficial world of the circuit:
Malone worried that he had wasted his [life]; and many felt he had.
[. . .] Malone only wanted to be liked. Malone wanted life to be beautiful
and Malone believed quite literally in happiness—in short, he was the
most romantic creature of a commmrity whose citizens are more romantic,
perhaps, than any other on earth, and in the end-he learned—more
philistine. (34)

Even Sutherland, stepping out of the queen persona for a serious moment to be a
mentor to Malone, diagnoses his fiiend’s sadness in the search for love and happiness as
a condition that will not be cured on the circuit, if it ever could be cured anywhere.
Sutherland knows that Malone’s romantic longings are deeply connected to the ordinary,
and ironically mentions the very ordinariness of the search for love amidst their queer
milieu of parties and promiscuity. Yet he places the disappearance of souls in a larger
historical context; it’s not only on the circuit that people no longer have souls:

[Sutherland] looked at Malone, tender and serious for a moment.
“It’s not like Plato, is it?” he said, taking down a volume of the

Symposium from his bookshelf. “It’s not like Ortega y Gasset, or even

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Proust, is it?” he said. “Or, for that matter, Stendhal. It’s so hopelessly
ordinary—I don’t even think people have souls anymore. And not having
souls, they cannot be expected to have love affairs . . .” (108)

A short while later, Holleran’s narrator ponders what it means to identify oneself
as a queen. “Queen” here is not a gendered term, except insofar as superficiality is often
marked as feminine in several of these novels. A queen is never allowed to be serious,
unless she is so about music, dancing, clothing, or a handsome face like Malone’s. There
is no apology, no regret, for being a queen. Perhaps it is this sense of aliveness and
happiness--apparent sheer ecstasy--that Berlant and Warner appreciate about this niche of
queer culture:

We had all seen Malone, yet going home on the subway no one
spoke of him, even though each one of was thinking of that handsome
man—and he had seen us. What queens we were! [. . .] We lived only to
dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on;
and you could argue that forever. [. . .] No one was allowed to be serious,
except about the importance of music, the glory of faces seen in the
crowd. We had our songs, we had our faces! We had our web belts and
painter’s jeans, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber
jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.

What queens we were! With piercing shrieks we met each other
on the sidewalk [. . .] I was on my way to dance, so happy and alive you
could only scream. I was a queen (“Life in a palace changes one,” said

another). (1 13-14)

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Malone himself, however, demands some degree of seriousness, and has a
decidedly masculine, and ordinary, fantasy. Sutherland accuses him of betraying queer
gender ambiguity, of wanting to be “a man.” Malone responds that he doesn’t know
what he really wants, that the freedom that comes with gay liberation leaves him with no
solid ground on which to build a decent fantasy. This is too serious for Sutherland, who
slips back into queendom and the frivolity of a Valium recommendation to a nonuser:

“Actually I’d like to be an air traffic controller at a tiny airport in
the Florida Keys,” Malone said as if dreaming aloud. “I want to wear
white pants and a white shirt. And a pair of silver airplane wings on my
pocket. [. . .] That would be heaven.”

“Is that what you really want?” said Sutherland. “You want to be a
man?”

“How do I know,” sighed Malone. “We are free to do anything,
live anywhere, it doesn’t matter. We’re completely free and that’s the
horror.”

“Perhaps you would like a Valium,” said Sutherland. “I happen to
have four or five hundred with me in my pocket.” (146)

Further narrative commentary on the horror that accompanies such a sense of
freedom, as well as an acknowledgement that the enchantrnent of the circuit remains a
mystery, comes in the few final letters at the end of the novel. The fiiend in the South
tries to articulate why he, and Malone finally, had to escape the lure of the nameless “it.”

He returns to the disease metaphor, and concludes with the heteronormative diagnosis

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and demand that homosexual men in particular are doomed because they can’t reproduce
and are destined to be lonely:
Raison d’Etre,
The novel is more vivid than I had expected, and fiankly
brought back things that are a little too close to me still. I had to leave
New York, you know, not for any practical reason but for a purely
emotional one: I simply couldn ’t stand to have it cease to be enchanted to
me. How could it? [. . .] Those streets, those corners, every one of which I
loved, were just streets, just corners. Malone was possibly more
committed to it than any of us—whatever “it ” was—for to be perfectly
honest, I cannot name the disease, the delirium of the last ten years [. . .] it
was for the same reason a man as reasonable as Malone goes out into the
street at night: because he is handsome, infertile, and lonely. (240-41)

He goes on to suggest an alternative to the madness and loneliness, the solution he
himself has chosen, to settle down in an admittedly imperfect monogamous relationship.
In his view, this is the only possible realistic escape from the illusory utopia of the queen:

You can 't love eyes, my dear, you can ’t love youth, you can ’t love
summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like
water falling over rocks—no, dear, that way madness lies. You must stick
to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover
whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the

morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.

[. . .] We were lunatics, I’m sorry to say. Our lovers weren 't real. [. . .]

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We were just queens in the end. [. . .] You know, we queens loathed rain at
the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. (244-45)

In the penultimate letter, the New York fiiend writes of life on the circuit in the
past tense. He speculates that Malone left because his dreams failed him. (Malone once
told him that dreams decompose, giving off poisonous gases.) The letter announces that
“it’s over [. . .] though I hate to admit it”—the end of an era, the failure of an experiment.
This comment on gay liberation in the seventies is not metaphorical or subtle. But it does
refrain from self-victimization and putting blame on “the victim,” as Kramer’s narrative
blatantly does. It’s more a judgment on the human propensity to dream of perfect
romantic love than it is a criticism of gay men’s behavior in the seventies.

The last sentences of the novel are the final words of advice from the South to
New York. The only moral is to persevere in spite of the sadness of life, and these
sentences recommend a form of intimacy between these fiiends not so easily prone to the
hazards of the circuit. The writer signs the letter “Paul,” the last word of the book. It is
the first time the reader sees a male, “real” name in the letters. He has evidently cast off
the queen persona in order to be serious for a moment:

No, darling, mourn no longer for Malone. He knew very well how
gorgeous life is—that was the light in him that you, and I, and all the
queens fell in love with. Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home
with someone, and if the love doesn ’t last beyond the morning, then know I
love you. (250)

Thus, Kramer and Holleran portray a group of men trying to devise alternatives to

the promiscuous party scene that was such a huge presence in the gay male experience in

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the seventies. They were writing in the heat of the moment, as it were, of this scene. The
next chapter will examine retrospective evaluations of the seventies, beginning with
interviews with Holleran and Kramer themselves. By way of transition to later,
nonfictional representations of this period, though, I will first turn to receptions of these
two novels in the gay and mainstream presses at the time of their publication.

In many ways, the reviews of the novels are as much assessments of the state of
gay America in the late seventies as they are critical appraisals of the works themselves
as literature or as political statements. While this is significant in itself, as it affords a
historical perspective on representations of gay men in the media, some reviewers verge
on conflating authors and characters, and many take Kramer and Holleran to be
spokespeople for the gay community, providing a picture of how things really are in gay
life. In some cases, the reviewers’ attitudes toward gay men and homosexuals risk
overshadowing their opinion of the books. Some reviews are sarcastic, some are angry.
Those who treat the books as works of art tend to prefer Dan_ceg to Eaggcfi; those who
pass judgment on gay life as portrayed in the novels tend to emphasize the sadness in the
Holleran and the squalor in Kramer.

While it might be tempting to discuss the reviews of the novels by treating
separately those that deal with artistic and political issues, such an artificial dichotomy
would do little justice to the reviews. And though the distinction between art and politics
is coherent and often necessary to make, things are quite blurry when dealing with these
gay novels from 1978, at least as they are portrayed in the media. In fact, as we shall see,
the attempt by reviewers to distinguish aesthetic from political concerns most often

breaks down. Mainly, they all wind up passing judgment, for better or worse, on the

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portrayal of gay life in the novels. And one of the main topics they treat, at least in the
subtexts, is promiscuity, and the subculture that often seems to celebrate it. This focus
reflects the broader societal anxieties about sex, fidelity, and marriage at the time.

The mainstream reviews range fi'om glowing praise to utter disgust. Paul

Robinson in The New Republic (September 30, 1978) gives Dancer a ravishing review,

 

maintaining that anybody who reads fiction will appreciate its merits. He mirrors an
ambiguity in the novel itself. It is, on the one hand, he says, almost entirely apolitical.
It is also a novel of some political consequence. If I am not mistaken, it
marks an important shift in the homosexual community’s self-image, a
kind of coming of age, in which concerns of political expediency have
been set aside for the sake of art. [. . .] [It] is a post-liberation document.
It lacks political shrewdness—it tells the truth. [. . .]
While Robinson is clearly aware of the stakes involved in a “gay novel” in 1978, and the
crucial distinction between men engaged in a new gay culture, as opposed to those men
who merely like to get it on with men, he overlooks the paradox that a queen could be
both narcissistic and self-loathing, as well as moments in the novel when Malone in
particular does seem to subscribe to some version of heterosexual values:

Homosexuals, we know, are really just like everybody else, or
would be, if only they were left alone. Holleran’s novel is a brilliant
rebuttal of this liberal trivialization. Here homosexuals have a style and
tragedy of their own, which make them infinitely more interesting and
valuable than those bland creatures who differ from their fellow men only

in their sexual preference. The novel celebrates homosexual narcissism—

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that love of one’s own body that is the obvious corollary to the love of
one’s own sex. [. . .]

The novel isn’t the slightest apologetic; there is no sense among
the characters of answering to anyone beyond themselves. They may be
tragic, but they are never pathetic. [. . .] [This suggests] an unexpected
security in a style of sexual life that makes no pretense to modeling itself
on traditional heterosexual values. (33)

In Library Journal (August 1979), S. H. Wolf agrees with Robinson’s tragic interpretation
of Holleran’s rendering of the “post-gay liberation lifestyle,” going further to speak of
“the pathos of lives squandered beyond salvation,” making no allowance for the
unapologetic confidence of the men living this gay life.

Among the most thoughtful and insightful critics in the mainstream press is John
Lahr, writing for the New Yorjk Times Booh Review (January 14, 1979). He likes
_D_an_gr but not Faggcfi. He is more sympathetic than most to the celebratory qualities of
D_a_n_c_er: “As in all festivals, this orgy holds the hope of renewal. While the characters go
through these sad rituals, they know that, as for Dionysus, a career of pleasure exacts a
violent price” (15). While presuming the price that may accompany pleasure in general,
a presumption surely open to debate, Lahr makes a striking comment on both the gay and
straight worlds, arguing that the laughter of queens contains within it a seriousness that
the straight world is unprepared for: “In this style of laughter is a seriousness that much
of the straight world is afraid to hear, that registers a lack of faith in both the peace it
seeks and the pleasure it finds” (39). On the other hand, Lahr calls Kramer’s book

exploitive and some of the worst published writing he’s ever seen, claiming that even

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though Kramer wants it to be a farce, “his fiivolity isn’t earned and so it becomes an
embarrassing fiasco” (40). Martin Duberman, writing in The New Republic (January 6,
1979), agrees, calling it a foolish, stupid book. “It is a plastic, trashy artifact of the worst
aspects of a scene to which it high-mindedly condescends” (30-31).

By far the most hostile review to the very idea of books being published about
homosexuals is Jeffrey Burke’s in H_arpe§ (March 1979). Likening the struggle for gay
rights to the women’s movement (lamenting that people have to get used to these things),
he complains that the simultaneous publication of six books about homosexuals is all
about profit, like the books and television specials about the Jim Jones Guyana horror.
He dismisses not only the works of fiction as works, but also the authors (“rumor has it
that these are romans a‘ clef”). He doesn’t appreciate what many of the reviewers do—
the realistic and honest portrayals of the circuit scene. “Both Kramer (intentionally) and
Holleran (artlessly) present a gay world worthy of little more than disdain. They do
nothing for the cause of literature and less for the cause of gay rights” (122-23). Yet it
isn’t clear how any book about the circuit would promote gay rights without apologizing
for its inhabitants and their behavior or blaming this behavior on social forces that
oppress gay men, a victimization that both authors refuse to engage in.

Reviews in the gay press were less likely to focus on the novels as political works,
but paralleled the mainstream reviews in their general preference for Holleran over
Kramer, often for ostensibly aesthetic reasons. Byme F one, writing in The Advocate
(September 20, 1978), at times uses the plural first-person voice, embracing Dahcar as
“our” novel. It’s tempting to read his gay exceptionalism and essentialism as sarcasm,

but it is quite genuine throughout the whole review. Invoking writers from Plato to Oscar

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Wilde, Fone places Holleran in a great literary tradition, and is comfortable generalizing
that all gay men are romantics and that all gay men are actually boys, which may or may
not be the case for all males in this culture; this project is not the place for a discussion of
the psychology of male maturation, though it is important to note how common it is to
find representations of gay men as eternal adolescents, as well as narcissists. Fone seems
to agree nonetheless that Gay is Good in many respects, though his mention of
responsibility indicates at least a bit of sarcasm and doubt. Fone is extremely careful to
distinguish author fiom characters, if not fictional representation from reality:

[Dane—er] delineates our mythic life and tells us what we had
always hoped: that we are rare creatures beyond responsibility and
inhabitants of a realm unknown to mortal men. [. . .]

Lest it seem that I found this [portrait of the literally or figuratively
dead queens consumed with dancing and fashion] superficial, silly,
endlessly self-involved, I did; but it is not the book that merits such
description, but rather the people it so remarkably defines. [. . .]

Holleran knows a basic truth: gay people are romantics, only
romantics, that they have always been and always will be so. (40-42)

Richard Hall, in his 10 favorite books of 1978 (The Advocate, January 11, 1979),

also praises Dancer for its literary depiction of the lives and sensibility of men on the

 

circuit. He agrees with the mainstream reviewers who suggest that the book is best
evaluated as a work of fiction—that perhaps the time has come to judge a gay novel on
its literary merits, regardless of whether a depiction of self-loathing may seem out of step

with current notions of the political expedient. If it is retrograde politically, this is mainly

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because the lives it narrates fail to live up to the ideals set forth in the early post-
Stonewall manifestos, ideals that, it is important to remember, were also unrealized, and
perhaps ultimately unrealizable, at the time of the writing of the manifestos themselves:
This brilliant book is noted chiefly for its felicity of style. [. . .] The novel
has many admirers, many detractors, the latter objecting to it for depicting
so many self-hating queens. My advice is to .check your ideology at the
door and enjoy the novel as a work of art, however retrograde politically.
If Dan_c_a_r and Holleran were described sometimes in the gay press as retrograde
or silent politically, Kramer and his Eaggcfi found the gay community polarized along
very political lines about the novel’s portrayal of the circuit, a polarization that still holds
today. One nameless former friend of Kramer’s echoes Martin Duberman’s sentiments
about the recklessness of the portrayal of gay men in the novel, but puts his criticism in
much more personal terms (in a letter to Christopher Street. April 1979), shortly after the
novel was published:
Aside from the damage his negative portrayal may have done to
the gay community as a whole, what he did to his fiiends is disgusting.
[. . .] They once loved, cared about, and respected him as an individual. In
return, he portrayed them as just so much vacuous, doped-up trash. What
he failed to say about those “friends” was just as harmful as what he did
say. To have passed so lightly over the positive sides of those lives was
not only thoughtless, but a true literary sin. (2-4)
This letter is a poignant example of the very mixed feelings among members of the gay

community about how they understood the constitution of their “community,” at least in

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New York, in the late seventies. It is evidence of the great contestation surrounding such
issues as promiscuity and health that continue to resonate today. The next chapter will
examine voices from the end of the seventies and later, including such persistently vocal
representatives of the community as Holleran, Kramer, Rechy, and Edmund White, as

they attempt to make sense in retrospect of this pivotal decade in the experience of gay

men.

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IV: Retrospections on the Gay Seventies

The earlier manifestos, written in the heady days of talk of gay liberation,
attempted to articulate ideals of what liberated relationships between gay men would be
like. Later fictional representations of such relationships in the two major literary texts of
the period, the Holleran and Kramer, called into question what progress had been made
toward these ideals, or how they had been recast in the context of gay men having the
chance to experiment with a new sense of radical freedom. The reception of these novels
indicates the controversies about interpreting sexual and affectional practices in the
seventies. Were people really as mindless and superficial as Kramer’s characters
suggest? Were they as sad, romantic, and resigned as Holleran’s? This chapter returns to
the realm of non-fictional representations of gay male life in the seventies. While the
reviews of the novels at the end of the last chapter were concerned with appraising and
contesting representations understood to be attempts to reflect and contribute to self-
critical perspectives in the community, texts in this chapter are more widely concerned
with where the community stood in historical relation to the time of the manifestos.

The first section will examine texts from the mid-seventies through the early
eighties, just before the initial acknowledgement that some sort of health crisis was
emerging. These texts are assessments of the current state of the “gay movement” by gay
men who saw themselves as being in the middle of it. The texts are a very mixed bunch.
On the one hand are texts that continue to hail full-throttle promiscuity as not only a
revolutionary act, but also by implication as the most appropriate political and theoretical

stance, given the conservative backlash against gay liberation, given social

215

transformation in general, and given the tendency of many gay men to model themselves
on heteronormative ideals of constricting monogamy and complacent domesticity. These
writers include John Rechy and Charley Shively. On the other hand are neoconservative
voices fiom the gay movement itself, including Holleran and Kramer in interviews with
the gay press, who often seem to call for just such domestic models. A third group of
texts attempts to put the conversation in a broader historical context of social changes in
the seventies, and to provide a more balanced, and perhaps even more optimistic view of
where the movement stands at the decade’s end. There was a general consensus that an
era was ending, in two important senses. First, gay liberation as articulated in the
Stonewall manifestos was seen to be over, and largely to have failed, as a collective
political project. Second, the circuit scene was seen to have become passé for many
possible reasons, depending on the interpreter; whether because it was boring or deadly
or had become commodified, or ultimately empty of hopes for love or intimacy,
something was on the wane. The question was what would take its place.

The second section will examine texts from the eighties into the new millennium,
assessments of the period prior to the realization of the existence of what came to be
called “AIDS,” from those who look back on the seventies fiom a perspective necessarily
shaped by subsequent rhetoric about and experience with the HIV /AIDS epidemic.

These texts tend to be self-conscious of their role and responsibilities as retrospective
representations and contextualizations of the seventies. They aclmowledge that they are
looking back through the lens of HIV/AIDS. They attempt to mediate between two
possible versions of looking back that way. One version tends to blame participants in

the circuit party for excesses that contributed to the epidemic, seeming to say “You had

216

all the fun and too much freedom and look what happened.” The other version tends to
see gay men of that generation as victims of a nasty accident that ruined the party. Both
of these versions often characterize the health crisis as a wake-up call, in some sense
transforming a community of hedonistic, adolescent narcissists into a community of
emotionally sensitive, dedicated, and politically astute members. It was, without doubt, a
wake-up call that demanded immediate response and dramatic changes in behavior for
many. But it is false that the later seventies were a time of blissful slumber for gay men.
I want to suggest, rather, that such characterizations of the seventies are vast, naive, and
harmful oversimplifications about a complex group of people struggling with complex
issues from the time of the manifestos through the decade to follow. Early retrospective
texts like those of Edmund White and Dennis Altman are already struggling to make
sense of the changes in the entire American society, and how gay men and their relations
with each other might fit into this milieu.

These two groups of texts will allow for a comparison between representations of
the seventies from the seventies with representations of the seventies as remembered and
historicized some years later--pre-AIDS and post-AIDS perspectives, as it were. In many
ways, the terms of the debate have remained the same over the span of thirty years.
Issues such as the relationship between gender perceptions and roles, promiscuity,
notions of love, intimacy, and friendship, and heteronormative ideals of monogamy
(which themselves have gone through considerable transformation since the sixties) still
dominate commentaries by those who question what they see as the realities of

contemporary gay life, and their ideals for what may still be possible.

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The Early, Pre-HIV/AIDS Assessments from the Decade Itself

Early assessments of gay life in the seventies share a sense that significant
changes have taken place since Stonewall, but their diagnosis of what has changed, and
their recommendations for what should change, are far from unanimous. Recall that the
Stonewall-era manifestos strove to create new types of relationships between and among
men--without the benefit of any satisfactory models to follow--that would take place in
the context of a larger social revolution in which gay experiences liberated fiom sexism
and internalized homophobia would play a central role. This project continues in the
imaginations of later writers, but with a less utopian perspective, as it becomes clear that
the revolution has not come about, and that experiments with new types of relationships
have thus far proven less than satisfactory for many men. Many see experiments with
promiscuity and the new entrenchment of gender role-playing—as exemplified by the
Fire Island circuit scene but already taking place across the country—as having not only
failed the promise of full liberation, but as having become tiresome, unfulfilling, and
even dangerous to bodies and psyches. Thus, gay liberation is, in many minds in the
seventies, over, as is whatever imagined value the wild party and orgy once may have
promised. As Holleran put it in a July 1978 interview in Christopher Street. “I don’t
know what’s beyond gay life. I’ve no idea. But I think we’re all finding out together”
(56).

There continued (and continues) to be disagreement about some aspects of “gay
life” in the seventies. Some texts maintain that promiscuity serves a political purpose, as

well as being potentially liberating for the individuals involved. Charley Shively, in his

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1974 “Indiscriminate Promiscuity as an Act of Revolution” (anthologized in Cay Rpo_ts),
admits to the “shortcomings of the gay liberation fionts,” but hails them for trying to
“break down roles.” He insists that the only way to create and sustain new sexual and
emotional freedoms is to eroticize and sexualize every aspect of social interaction, fiom
the business meeting to school to shopping. He calls for a sexual socialism as opposed to
the fraudulent capitalistic notions of monogamous love or the obj ectifying meat market:

People (particularly menpeople) have tended to classify love as
changeless, timeless, natural, and as unavoidable or indefinite as death.
This mystification is a hand meant to prevent any questioning or change
in the so-called “reality.” Why should there not be a socialism of love and
sex no less than of work and money? Should not equality and fi'eedom
extend to our bodies and their physical relationships as well as to the
economy?

We need to be indiscriminate. No one should be denied love
because they are old, ugly, fat, crippled, bruised, of the wrong race, color,
creed, sex or country of national origin. We need to copulate with anyone
who requests our company; set aside all contraptions of being hard to get,
unavailable—that is, costly on the capitalist market. (260-62)

In another piece from the Gay Roots anthology, John Rechy also defends and, by
implication, promotes public promiscuity, whether anonymous or not, as an important
source of empowerment in the face of the oppression of gay men and others, given the
conservative political movement of the later seventies. He identifies the repression of

sex, and talk about sex, as a symptom of a much larger phenomenon. In describing the

219

status and reception of his book The Sexual Outlafl (1977), he emphasizes its genre,
form, and content. While not much more sexually explicit than his fictional works,
according to Rechy, this book at first was expected to be an immediate best-seller, but
advertisements were pulled when its political statements were recognized. This was a
documentary (i.e., “real”) account of public sex as a revolutionary act. As one ad man
said, Henry Miller might be acceptable (as were Rechy’s other works). But The Sexual
Q_uha_w_ was said to be “more than [merely] dirty.” It was, rather, subversive, and aimed
at the entire power structure and its ideology of what acceptable modes of human
intimacy were allowed to resemble. Rechy writes:
. The Sexalal Outlam is a nonfiction documentary which defines
public sex as revolutionary. Its locale is the late-night sexhaunts of Los
Angeles. It documents three days and nights in that underground by a
sometime male hustler. Interspersed throughout are essay-type voice-
overs defining the political context of these many sexual encounters. As
the book’s real content became known, a ban occurred among the media-—
and not in small “backward” communities but in the major, reputedly
liberal cities. [. . .]
[The] time when the New York Times refused ads for Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar is not as remote as we want to think: well into the
‘705 a new and dangerous reaction has been shaping. Out of that miasma
of repression Anita Bryant has emerged. Although her attacks are now
aimed overtly at homosexuals in teaching jobs—and increasingly at liberal

women—by implication she is attacking an open education. It is with sex

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that general repression starts. What happens on the sexual front provides a

barometer for general repression. (287-88)
Some in the gay movement agree that Rechy’s book should be reviewed and even read,
and that homosexual teachers do indeed need to be protected, but that public and
promiscuous sex as acts themselves don’t deserve protection, and contribute to bad
portrayals of gay men in the eyes of straight society. Shively and Rechy would probably
reply that it is precisely all sexual taboos, at least those against sex between consenting
adults, that contribute to the atmosphere of larger cultural repressions, not only of gay
people but of all freethinking and free-acting members of the society.

One consistently loud and polemical voice against rampant promiscuity continues
to be Larry Kramer. In an interview in The Advocate (February 8, 1979) shortly after the
publication of F_aggo_t§, Kramer goes so far as to claim that there are more happy
heterosexual couples than homosexual ones, and implies that ultimately most if not all
gay men realize that they really do want to “play house” after all. Kramer firmly rejects
claims that promiscuity means more love to go around, and may reflect “emotional
health”:

Health, schmelth. If you want to firck around, that’s fine; I’m not
going to be an old auntie and say, “Don’t fuck around.” But if you’re
going to make fucking around your be-all and end-all, don’t complain that
you haven’t found the lover you want. Don’t complain when you’re 40 or
50 years old and you’re all alone and feeling sorry for yourself because
you’re not playing house somewhere. [. . .] I’m just saying I see precious

little love around me. I see very few homosexual relationships that are

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working, or working for a very long time. Incidentally, I do know a lot of

happy heterosexual relationships; I’m tired of hearing, “It doesn’t work for

them, either.” (27)
In Christopher Street (February 1979), Kramer makes the even more controversial claim
that it is more important to explain why gay men are making such, in his eyes,
irresponsible sexual choices than it is to fight the conservative backlash. “Isn’t it
healthier for [all of this promiscuous and unorthodox sex, including S/M] to be discussed
to find out why it’s happening? I’m not so much concerned with Anita Bryant as I am
with the people who are doing all this. That’s sadder and more important” (59). While
sadness and importance are nebulous and unquantifiable terms in the context of such
highly charged debates, if this is Kramer’s true prioritization, then his is a minority
opinion among prominent activist voices in 1979.

Andrew Holleran also claims that his own novel was written somewhat out of

anger at how gay men treat each other, and he makes claims similar to Kramer’s about a
wish for more humane intimate relations. Yet he sounds much more tolerant of divergent
and qualified judgments on gay life. Indeed, he’s a fence-sitter on issues like
promiscuity, though he claims that everybody is really looking for love. Also, he claims
that writing _D_ang:_r was, for him, a chance to leave a historical record, after all
(contradicting the letter-writer in the novel who says that literature should do something
else entirely). Holleran wants to portray and thus preserve a past way of life (the
seventies), plainly asserting that it’s over now (already, in July 1978, in Christopher
3132!)- Holleran notes, “Other people said it was a ‘down’ book, that it was not a portrait

of gay life that people would want to read. I’m sure it will get a lot of flack. But the

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satisfaction of writing the book was in portraying a past way of life so that it would not
be lost” (53). Holleran agrees that there’s a place for promiscuity, but that promiscuity
shouldn’t be the ultimate goal. In fact, he agrees with Shively that we should even go to
bed with people we’re not attracted to, but doesn’t hold out much hope for this as a
realistic strategy, reasoning that it probably wouldn’t work, as the manifestos seemed to
suggest it wouldn’t:
We’re obviously all looking for power and adulation and other
things too, but there isn’t anyone not looking for love.
I know there’s a place for the zipless fuck, the anonymous person.

That’s very thrilling. [. . .] So many gay people are able to live on that

level alone. I don’t want to knock promiscuity. We all love to go to the

bars, the pier, but my God, if there’s no hunger for any other thing. . . .

(54)
He goes on to make a perhaps unique and unverifiable yet sympathetic and hopeful
claim—that gay men only act shallow, but actually have rich emotional lives that might
be shared with others if the opportunity only presented itself. But like the large and
unnecessary claim that everybody looks for love, here he assumes a notion of
(presumably more mature and responsible) human personhood that isn’t so clear or
uncontroversial in definition. “Too many people behave as if they are shallow. 1 don’t
think they really are. [. . .] They’ve got resonance, they’ve got emotions. I only want
homosexuals to become more human. I think then they’ll be even sexier. [. . .] But you
want to shake some people by the shoulders and say, “’Some day you’ve got to be a

person’” (56).

223

Holleran continues his ambivalent, ostensibly nonfictional commentaries on the
gay seventies, though maintaining his pseudonym (as he does through the present day).
One interviewer (in The Advocate, March 8, 1979), comments thus on Holleran and his
assertion of the end of the era: “If he is jaded [and melancholy], he is also a Jeremiah
about the failure of the gay sensibility” (29). Holleran responds that superficial sexual
encounters are somehow inherently wrong in moral terms: “I looked around and I
thought, ‘Why do gays have such a lousy deal in terms of human relationships? Why are
We always operating on this lousy level! Why do I sleep with someone, walk away and

”9

have it mean nothing? It’s not right. He characterizes Dyan—eel as a record of the ideals
of love, of gay liberation, “turning into something else in the en ” (29-30). Precisely
what they have turned into is not made explicit. Perhaps this is where he and Edmund
White disagree on the details, if not the sense that a dramatic shift is underway.
Holleran goes on in the same interview with a scathing critique of the clone
fashion outfit, with noneof the sympathy shown by Edmund White’s comments below:
“I’m not going to wear that fucking uniform. I’m not going to
wear a bomber jacket with a plaid shirt when I walk down the street. If
one of those guys passes me I don’t care how good-looking he is. It’s as if
he’s invisible; it’s as if I’m looking at a Barbie Doll. The person has no
personality for me whatever. He is in fact utterly erased by dressing in
this stupid goddarn uniform.” (30)
Holleran doesn’t specify what he might prefer to see somebody wearing on the street.

Given the tremendous conformity he and others complain about in the gay community

then (and throughout the country during that time and through the present), the choices

224

are limited. Perhaps he would have preferred the “preppie” look that was beginning to
sweep the national imagination and body right about then. Not too many years later a
generation of younger gay men would begin to protest against the “clone” look Holleran
complains about, and facial hair, ushering in yet another neo-macho fashion rage, this
time a tribute to skinheads rather than Paul Bunyan. Holleran continues his ostensibly
nonfictional commentary on the seventies in four pieces collected together in 1h;
Christopher Street Reaae_r_ (1983). In “F ast-Food Sex,” a friend of the first-person
narrator complains about the boring ravages of promiscuity, claiming that gay men
should not be supposed to be any different from all other human beings who “need”
fidelity and intimacy:

“We already have [destroyed sex]! My orgasms don’t interest me
any more! Why do these assholes praise promiscuous sex, say there’s
nothing wrong with it, that because we’re gay we’re leaders in a brave
new world who will set new patterns of behavior, and all that crap, when
even sex, on that basis, ceases to be erotic? [. . .] I feel as if I’ve developed
a disease or something, and I’m doomed to wander as a ghost, alienated
from my own kind.” (72)

In “Dark Disco: A Lament,” he complains that disco has become commodified to the
extent that it no longer has the erotic and mysterious power that united gay men as a
community set apart, that it’s become bright and sunny for the roller-skate crowd to
enjoy. This development is yet another indication that gay life as they have known it is

over. What next, Holleran asks himself:

225

Will we give dinner parties again? Stay home and form book
clubs? When I arrived in New York, there were no back rooms and no
discotheques; now there are many of each. In five years perhaps they will
both have vanished, and what will we have in their place: Betarnax
societies? Will we all go to bed at eleven, and do something in the
morning? What? Not having been awake before noon in seven years
myself, I am at a loss to say. (76-77)

In his December 27, 1978, interview with The Advocate. Edmund White calls for
the acceptance of gay male diversity, of drag queens and clones alike. His diagnosis of
the hatred of drag queens is that it comes from fear—not the fear of the vulnerability
associated with intimacy, but the fear of being identified as “other,” an internalized
homophobia that may or may not be directly linked with misogyny in the no-longer-
feminist gay male community. Of clones, he argues that to judge a person harshly
because he wears the fashion of the moment is superficial:

All the hatred that’s directed against drag queens is something
useful for all gay people to explore, because that hatred has to come out of
some kind of fear and that fear is very real. It shouldn’t be ignored; it
should be looked at, and drag queens should be embraced as part of the
gay community. [. . .]

A lot of these dictates [e.g., about too much public sex and too
many drugs] are coming from middle class bourgeois groups of people
who happen to be gay. They’re insisting that everybody be middle class.

A set of attitudes and expectations that are geared only to extremely

226

intelligent and psychologically mature homosexuals would be unrealistic.
[. . .]

Most people are overhasty in condemning the flannel shirt,
workboots, blue jeans look. It is simply the costume of the moment that is
most effective in bagging the most number of tricks. [. . .] (31-32)

In White’s essay “Fantasia on the Seventies” in The Christopher Street Rem, he writes
in fairly neutral terms about the seventies, noting that people seemed to be waiting for
something startling and revolutionary to happen. Yet it didn’t, he claims. Rather, the
project of gay liberation ended as a “militant sameness” set in, including the dissipation
of feminist consciousness among many gay men and the institution of the worship of
machismo. White goes on to put the experience of gay men in the context of the larger
culture of the “study of self” replacing shared social goals. He also claims that perhaps
sex and sentiment should be separated, since sex so often involves jealousy and isn’t a
self-evidently safe basis for intimacy or friendship. He provides a concrete description of
the new gay model of marriage:

What actually set in was a painful and unexpected working-out of
the terms the sixties had so blithely tossed off. Sexual permissiveness
became a form of numbness, as rigidly codified as the old morality. [. . .]

Indeed, the unisex of the sixties has been supplanted by heavy sex
in the seventies, and the urge toward fantasy has come out of the clothes
closet and entered the bedroom or backroom. The end to role-playing that
feminism and gay liberation promised has not occurred. Quite the reverse.

Gay pride has come to mean the worship of machismo. No longer is sex

227

confused with sentiment. Although many gay people in New York may
be happily living in other, less rigorous decades, the gay couple inhabiting
the seventies is composed of two men who love each other, share the same
friends and interests, and fuck each other almost inadvertently once every
six months during a particularly stoned, impromptu three-way. [. . .]

A general American rejection of the high stakes of shared social
goals for the small change of personal life (study of the self has turned out
to be a form of escapism) has left the [gay liberation] movement bankrupt.
(3 1 -3 2)

Yet the bankruptcy of the movement as one of the sort of full liberation fi‘om
gender roles envisioned by the Stonewall manifestos does not leave White entirely
pessimistic about the project of establishing satisfactory gay relationships. Rather, he
maintains the hope that the thoughtfulness imposed on gay men because of their status as
outsiders will allow them to continue to experiment with new and alternative affectional
structures. Here he writes in a speech called “The Joys of Gay Life” given in 1977 and
collected in The Burning Libra:

[W]e are introspective [and philosophical] about such basic things
as love, sex, and friendship. The exigencies of our lives, the fact that we
become gay in a way that other people do not become straight, make us all
reflective. We have the advantages of the outsider, of the foreigner and of
the pioneer. (36)

Dennis Altman, in The Homosexuali_zation of America (1982), supports White’s views

about the failure of the liberation project, the potential positive aspects of promiscuity,

228

and the analysis of gay life in the context of more general historical conditions in the
larger society. He notes that “encounters at the baths, in parks, even in public toilets can
lead to long-lasting relationships and intimate friendships” (175). He also comments on
the decline of proud feminism among gay men (going so far as to claim that men who
once called themselves feminists no longer do so), and the ambivalence of the gay male
community about changes in the seventies; but he most certainly disagrees with Larry
Kramer about the relative sadness of “impersonal” sex and the conservative backlash
exemplified by Anita Bryant’s crusade:
It is not just that gay relationships are a threat to the dominant
family structures that conservatives are desperately trying to bolster up.
[. . .] The attempts of homosexuals to create new forms of relationships
can also be seen as a part of a more general search to resolve universal
problems. Under present conditions no one can be sure of having solved
the problem of how best to order one’s personal life. (190) [. . .]
American society today is suffering fiom an enormous national
neurosis about sex, brought about by the conflicting messages from
traditional teachings and the constant barrage of advertising extolling
hedonism and sexual adventure. As sexuality becomes more open but also
more problematic, homosexuals become both a scapegoat and a model--a
specific group that can be defined as “the other.” (203-04)
In another Christopher Street Rea_t_le_r piece, Michael Denneny also laments the failure of

the utopian revolutionary impulses of the sixties to Come to full fi'uition, but puts it in the

229

even larger context of the purported nihilism rampant in the West as a whole, calling for
a Nietzschean revaluation of all values:

The gay “revolution”—if that term should even be used—can only
be made in the daily lives of each of us. [. . .] For better or worse, we
create the face of gay liberation in every sexual encounter and love affair
we have. With every circle of loyal gay fiiends established we are
manifesting the gay world. [. . .]

[W]hat may seem at times overly theoretical or abstract is
nonetheless an attempt to come to grips with the dilemmas that structure
our sexual experience, shape our patterns of socializing, and all too often
distort our psyches and blight our loves while simultaneously bringing us
a reckless joy at being alive. These are matters that our writers and artists
think about, as well as philosophers and gays on the street—whether they
know it or not. They are important. For if we do not measure up to the
unprecedented novelty of our current situation, we will piss away our lives
in the confusion and evasions of a darkened epoch. (421-24)

In fact, the linking of the failure of some aspects of the revolution to the decline of
Western civilization and the potential for other aspects of it to live on in concrete, daily
relationships hardly seems too abstract at all, but is rather a welcome broadening of the
perspective from which to view the project of gay liberation.

Thus, throughout the early retrospections on the seventies, we see debates about
appropriate sexual behavior (and the relation of sex to sentiment), a concern with what

images of gay men are being made visible to other gay men and to the mainstream

230

society, and how to respond to an increasingly conservative backlash against sexual
freedom. For better or worse, these are the same questions being debated today, as well
as the question of whether gay liberation ever happened, and what it has or has not

accomplished to make the lives of men and women any better.

More Recent Retrospections on the Gay Seventies
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, 19905 texts looking back at the 19705
tend to be self-consciously and explicitly aware of their location after the HIV/AIDS
epidemic became central to gay men’s lives; their strategies for remembering or
reconstructing the period before the epidemic was announced, however, differ not only in
rhetorical form but also in their judgments or conclusions about the earlier period.
Christopher Castiglia, in his essay “The Way We Were,” collected in Waldrep, me
Seventies (2002), describes the stakes of negotiating how to represent the seventies:
I want to pursue the idea that the “killing” of the 19705, the move from a
cultural representation that valorized sexual adventure, expansion, and
optimism to one that stressed harrowing guilt, isolation, and despair, was
not a “natural” or a historical inevitability, but the result of changes in
representation that in turn have had crippling social and political
consequences for gay men today. At the crux of that change, I want to
suggest, is how we talk about what happened in the 19705 and what
impact that culture—and the ways we talk about it now—has on our lives

today. Our historiography, I will argue, is changing our history. (207)

231

Castiglia contrasts the conservative and damaging mode of representation he calls
“countemostalgia” with a more optimistic and empowering strategy he finds in what
Foucault calls “counter-memory.” Here, Castiglia defines these representational
strategies:
[As] this story goes, the culture these [gay] men produced,
centered on reckless perversion and unthinking abandon, contained the
seeds of death and dissolution. [. . .] Such narratives rely on a strategy I
will call countemostalgia: a look back in fury at the sexual “excesses” of
the immediately pre-AIDS generation as immature, pathological, and
diseased. The danger of countemostalgia is not that it represents the past
inaccurately, but that it proscribes the present normatively by limiting the
options for identification and pleasure, for public intimacy. (206)
This contributes to what Castiglia calls “the renewed politics of [heteronormative]
conformity,” according to which the gay political movement focuses on such issues as
gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits rather than on, for instance, the protection
of sexual freedoms. The “counter” in countemostalgia presumably opposes it to plain old
nostalgia, a form of memory that might look back to the seventies with a sense of longing
and sadness at the passing of the good old days.
The notion of counter-memory that Castiglia finds useful differs from nostalgia at
least insofar as it is set in opposition to countemostalgia—a sort of double negation that
recognizes “difference” in memory, and acknowledges that there are multiple possible

historical narratives, none transparently more “real” than another:

232

Arguably, the most effective response to countemostalgia has come in the
form of what Michel Foucault calls counter-memory, a competing
narrative of the past composed from memories that exceed official history.
Gay counter-memory finds in the recreation of the past opportunities for
oppositional pleasures that nevertheless acknowledge the difference
necessarily at the heart of memory. Some gay men have rejected
countemostalgia by generating alternative narratives of gay history that
augment the conventional focus on the monogamous private couple with
options such as communal life, multiple and anonymous sexual partners,
shifting ownership and occupancy of space, and non(re)productive sex.
(214)

Edmund White, as seen earlier, has suggested specific forms that this communal
life and multiple relationships might take, writing before the health crisis. Castiglia,
following Berlant and Warner, recommends social and sexual configurations like those
found in Holleran’s Dancer from the Da_n_ce_. Interestingly, all of these nineties texts refer
either to Da_ngr or F_aggat_s, but are much more celebratory of the senses of freedom and
solidarity in the Holleran book than Holleran is in his interviews or than I am in my
analysis of the text above. Perhaps the darkness and sadness portrayed in the Holleran
novel pale compared to what would come in the decades to follow. ’ But it may verge on
plain old nostalgia to recall the Fire Island circuit scene with unmitigated fondness.

The characters and experiences in Dancer are also remembered fondly in Gregory

 

W. Bredbeck’s article “T roping the Light Fantastic: Representing Disco Then and Now”

(GLQ, 1996). Writing in a spirit of unapologetic nostalgia for the seventies, he begins by

233

interviewing people at “Queer Retro Chic” discotheques in New York. In fact, Bredbeck
speaks of the utopian aspects of representations of the disco experience in both Holleran
and Kramer’s novels. Bredbeck’s main argument is that disco creates an opportunity for
the construction of gay identities and community. One young man gives the example of
_Dahpg, a book in which, in his eyes, characters learn how to be gay by going to dance at
the discos. But he’s concerned that now, in the nineties, the campy disco scene may be
disappearing, having been just another retro fad. He provides one common version of the
seventies—that AIDS ruined all the firm:

1 “Here it seems, you know—like how those clubs used to be, maybe. But
it’s really not the same thing. I guess that’s part of why it’s camp. It’s
like watching Nick at Nite [a cable station that specializes in rerunning old
television shows]. [me: “Is that why you come here?”] I guess. And I
always feel like I missed something, you know? My ex was older than
me, and he was always telling me about how great it was, and then AIDS
changed it all. And maybe that’s right. But I don’t think if we cured it
tomorrow that things would go back. There’s just something I missed, and
I get tired of hearing about it all the time. And besides, there’s a pretty hot
crowd here usually.” (76)

The omissions here are striking; and they are omissions rather than non sequiturs. He
comes for a glimpse of what he missed, though it’s not really the same. And things
wouldn’t go back even in light of a cure. He has an attraction/ repulsion to the nostalgia.

He comes because the crowd is hot. So what’s missing? Why wouldn’t things go back

234

with a cure? What would they go back to that he doesn’t find now in the hot crowd? He
senses something about an imagined time of innocence prior to HIV /AIDS.

Bredbeck’s own conclusion is that such nostalgia for disco and the seventies is
important for contemporary gay identity and community formation, as was disco in the
seventies:

If nineties retro-disco uses the practice of nostalgia to appropriate and
accommodate seventies eroticism, this really is not much different from
disco in the seventies. For what is clear in the representation of disco in
the seventies is that music and glitter were the convenient occasion to
choreograph a very complicated number called gay identity. Disco then
and [seventies] disco now reflect the fact that the process of an “us” or an
“I” is just that: a process that must be continually rehearsed and
continually replayed, sort of like a great disco song. For it is through this
process of movement that “we”—any “we”—learn how to be strong and
get along. “We” come here to dance, you know? (101)

Moreover, seventies disco, as representedin Dancer, shares with nineties retro-

 

disco a perspective on community and identity formation that is already nostalgic in the
seventies. Malone is nostalgic for the innocence of his small-town family life, and days
past when his ideal of love had not yet been tainted and jaded by his years on the circuit.
In fact, whatever pleasure, freedom, and community his disco experience may have
provided him with, he, along with Fred Lemish in Kramer’s M, feel trapped in the
circuit by the novels’ ends. Similarly, so many on the circuit, as attested to by the

retrospective texts in this chapter, have become, by the late seventies, nostalgic for the

235

heady (and naive) days of gay liberation, when so many changes seemed possible. The
next text to be examined here, by Martin Duberman, is an example of one of the most
thoughtful historians of gay life in the seventies as he struggles to articulate his
ambivalent feelings about what went on then, and where we have come since then.

In his memoir, Midlife Queer: Autobiogaaphy of a Decade: 1971-1981 (1996),
Martin Duberman attempts to express how it felt to be making decisions and judgments
about how to live the seventies in the seventies fi'om his vantage point fifteen years after
the end of the decade he describes. He traces his personal journey as an academic and
activist watching the energy of gay liberation surge and then dissipate. Like Holleran and
Kramer, he is critical of the insularity and mindlessness of much of the circuit scene, but
never denies that it allowed for some positive opportunities for sexual liberation in light
of the oppression that gay men had grown up with. He notes how he attempted a
balanced critique while right in the middle of the gay seventies, and wrote a very
unsympathetic review of the puritanism of M (noted above). Duberman recognizes
that many men involved with the scene were themselves ambivalent about its ultimate
value, and spent time pondering the extent to which it was a desirable place to inhabit:

I was unsympathetic both to the harshest critics of the Fire Island-
bathhouse-backroom bar scene simplistically to summarize that lifestyle as
unbridled, hoggish, male (over)indulgence, and to the insistence of its
most admiring fans that its participants were heroic spelunkers, plunging
into previously unexplored caves of the unconscious, daring to let their

fantasies rather than their habits, rule their erotic lives. [. . .]

236

Most of the gay men I knew moved on and off the Fire Island-
backroom bar circuit without wholly committing or succumbing. [. . .] For
many, programmed to view unconventional sexual behavior of any kind as
“sin” or “disturbance,” the Meat Rack Experience became a genuine
seeding ground for liberation. [. . .]

After the onset of AIDS in the early eighties, some in the gay male
world were heard loudly to lament their own “foolish” sexual histories; I
knew any number of men who rushed to embrace and patriotically to
celebrate the “wisdom” of monogamous pair-bonding. (19-20)

Like Castiglia above, Duberman is extremely cautious to remind the reader that
how you read and reconsider the seventies depends on how you lived them and the
vantage point from which you look back, noting that many sixties activists decried the
seventies as a complacent retreat while in the eighties conservatives would complain that
the seventies were “too residually subject to the utopian pieties of the anti-authoritarian
sixties” (15). He is also intent on recalling that this revolution in gay sexual behavior did
not occur in a sub-cultural vacuum, but that “earlier formulations of the acceptable
boundaries of sexual pleasure” (20) were also being challenged by heterosexuals. At the
end of the memoir, following heart trouble, Duberman wonders what will become of his
own journey as a liberated gay man, now that Reagan has been elected. He wonders if he
could stand to be away from the energy of New York, and if things would be any
different or better in Iowa. “1 was well aware that in my head, at fifty, I still clung
tenaciously to the insatiable fantasy needs and emotional strategies of a young man

starting out. But I knew better, having had more than a glimpse of opportunities

237

curtailed, energies diminished. And lmew, too, that I wasn’t entirely uneducable” (226).
Thus, Duberman imagines himself to be somewhat “educable,” that is, able perhaps even
to adjust his general outlook and particular behaviors to suit new personal and historical
conditions. He feels the need to reimagine himself as an older gay man, and human
being, in a new historical decade, and to modify his fantasies and “emotional strategies”

to better match this new self-identity.

Conclusion

One contribution that this project aims to make is to further open up spaces for
comparative discussions of emotionality and intimacy in academic discourse that are
more analytical than narrowly personal or autobiographical. Opening up such spaces
involves the continuation of ongoing debates about, for instance, the appropriate
relationship between intimacy, sexuality, and politics at various historical moments. This
project originally grew out of my emotional and intellectual curiosity about the cultural
significance of the seventies as a distinct period, and what appears to be at once a
uniquely promising and confused time in gay men’s historical experience as a group. But
it quickly became clear that representations of this seventies experience are deeply
connected to a long tradition of paradoxes for American manhood and cultural anxieties
about sex and gender.

As I write now, just a few years into a new century, we find ourselves in what is
described by many as a queer moment in thinking about issues like intimacy, sexual
orientation and identity, sexual activity, and politics. In some ways, the debates about

possible essences of gender and sexuality sound similar to those put forth in the

238

Stonewall manifestos; in some ways, they sound quite different. Views remain quite
polarized, for instance, about the innateness of gender and affectional/sexual orientation
and desire. One development is that constructionist arguments have become more
sophisticated and widely held in the queer community itself, though no less emphatically
challenged by essentialists at present, who continue to argue that they were born “that
way,” and therefore work toward a place at the political table, embracing what Sedgwick »
calls the “minoritizing” view in the introduction to Epistemologyof the Closet (1990).
(Sedgwick contrasts this view to the “universalizing” view of the whole question of the
homo/heterosexual “divide,” according to which all human beings, at least in the modern
West, participate simultaneously in constructing discourses about various notions of
sexual identity, regardless of how they may self-identify; [e.g., p. 1].)

In order to emphasize the relevance of contemporary scholarship to looking back
at the seventies and to show how debates in the seventies can continue to illuminate
contemporary discussions, I will end by examining a text that raises issues of the viability
of seeing the personal (at least the sexual-as-personal) as political. John D’Emilio
delivers a wistful look back at the seventies in his introduction to the twentieth-
anniversary edition of the Jay and Young collection Out of the Closets (1992). He also
laments the waning of the revolutionary gay liberation movement of the very early post-
Stonewall months and years, as well as the narrowing of the understanding of sexism by
gay men (it’s now about women and their status, not about the way that sexism had been
seen earlier as a central element of men’s own oppression). But he attempts to remain
pragmatic about the limitations of a social critique based ahnost entirely on debates about

sexual practices:

239

I mourn the loss of this aspect of radical gay liberation [e.g., the projects
and desires articulated in the manifestos] even as I recognize its flaws.
The prescriptiveness [e.g., that gender must be entirely done away with;
that sex and sentiment should become identical] was of no value. There
was also a naivete about the dynamics of sexual desire; change was
assumed to be easier than it was. Yet, in reacting against that, it often
seems as if we have given up any possibility of thinking critically about
sexuality.

In the following passage, he pays tribute to Foucault’s insight into the importance
of sexuality to the contemporary notion of the self, but also seems himself to retreat from
the basis of feminist critiques, and those of the men in many of the manifestos in the Jay
and Young collection, that the personal is political. “Our sexual politics often reduces to
a campaign against prohibitions. Perhaps this is for the best. In a culture in which
sexuality has come to define the truth about the self and in which sexual desire appears
coterminous with who we are, perhaps it is too divisive, too volatile, to subject something
so personal to political scrutiny” (xxvii-xxviii).

On the other hand, perhaps the notion of the political and the means of scrutiny
need to be reimagined. Perhaps political scrutiny should be made more local, more
personal. One of the risks inherent in the practice of many identity politicians, besides
the risk of splintering whatever broader coalition of progressive work might be possible,
is its tendency to promote group-think, to encourage homogeneity while attempting to
celebrate and protect difference, as though, for instance, all or most gay men have, or

should have, the same wants and needs either in human relationships or in the political

240

sphere. While this may seem like an obvious and shopwom point, it is at the heart of
contemporary debates between assimilationist and less orthodox gay thinking today no
less than it was in the seventies.

From the outset, this project has aimed to fill a void in contemporary scholarship
by tracing textual representations of what have been imagined as possible sorts of
relationships between men at key points of cultural transformation in twentieth-century
America. The ability even to imagine such possibilities involves the challenge of being
willing and able first to contemplate and then to attempt to make changes in our lives of
the sort that D’Emilio and Duberman embark on above. The task of evaluating our desire
and capacity to change ourselves in matters having to do with the difficulty of intimacy
requires us to position ourselves in relation to what we understand to be the dominant
moral discourses and norms of the society in which we find ourselves.

Authors and characters alike in all of the texts analyzed in this project have
engaged in such self-positioning, with often conflicted or inadequate results. The pre-
Stonewall novels are largely obsessed with traditional notions of gender and the male
hetero/homo identity divide that break down as they attempt significant moments
together as men. Hemingway’s Jake exemplifies the sense of impotence often
experienced by the Lost Generation as they sought to redefine morality and intimacy after
World War 1, beyond mere nihilism or hedonism. With Vidal’s Jim and Bob and
Baldwin’s David and Giovanni, the reader is privy to apparently futile and failed attempts
at early experiments with gay liberation that end in tragedy and the conclusion that
satisfactory intimate relations between men, at least of the sexual sort, are impossible.

Kerouac’s Beat men fare little better in the late forties and early fifties, except that the

241

debilitating effects of their troubles with Cold War gender roles are analyzed in great
detail, even if Sal and Dean are unable to release themselves from the prison of these
roles. Finally, in Rechy’s City of Night, the focus is almost entirely on how gender
expectations affect homosexual men, and the incompatibility for the narrator between
“proper” masculinity and any intimacy that involves commitment or vulnerability.

Thus, as we reach the Stonewall manifestos beginning in 1969, even given the
new sense of sexual and affectional freedoms brought about by the prospect of modern
gay liberation politics, and the broader cultural consciousness and purported loosening of
gender roles of the counterculture, gay men face radical possibilities for intimacy without
the aid of successful models according to which to build new types of relationships. And
in spite of early feminist political protestations (among both women and men), gender
roles only became more firmly entrenched in much gay male culture, as represented in
the later seventies novels by Holleran and Kramer, as well as even later commentators on
the period. Indeed, the difficulty of intimacy continues today (as we all face the
horrifying prospect of becoming more and more rock-like whether with our consent or
against our will), as does its connection to concerns about gender and received notions of
the relation of monogamy and promiscuity to intimacy, and to possibilities for happiness

in contemporary culture.

242

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