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Guy Davidson
Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, two novels published in 1982, narrate, respectively, a story of lesbian adolescence in 1964 and a story of gay adolescence in the 1950s. Both have been classified as coming‐out narratives, a popular genre of gay and lesbian writing, in which a teenaged protagonist realizes and comes to terms with the “truth” of her or his own sexual identity. But while both these novels make central the realization of sexual identity on the part of their narrator‐protagonists, they depart from the usual trajectory of the coming‐out novel in withholding self‐acceptance. Both Lynn in In Thrall and the nameless “boy” of A Boy’s Own Story feel themselves to be abnormal and isolated, even as both engage in sexual encounters with others – Lynn with her high‐school English teacher, and the boy with several other boys and adult men, including a teacher. Lynn worries over the causes of her “affliction” (DeLynn 1982: 247). The boy tells us, “I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness,” and seeks a psychiatric cure (White 2009: 104). Both Lynn and the boy use the term “fate” to describe their homosexual identity, with all the negative implications of that term.
In Thrall and A Boy’s Own Story are part of the outpouring of avowedly gay and lesbian fiction that came in the wake of American gay and lesbian liberation, conventionally dated to the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, in which lesbian, gay male, and transgender patrons of a New York bar fought back against police harassment. Yet both novels exclude any engagement with the tropes of self‐acceptance, pride, or community – let alone militancy – that became dominant modes of thinking and talking about being homosexual for gay and lesbian people in the post‐liberation period. Locating their protagonists’ self‐conceptions almost entirely in relation to the psychopathological explanations that dominated discussion of homosexuality in the 1950s and early 1960s, both novels eschew the kind of redemptive ending that would gesture toward better times to come for homosexual people. In Thrall climaxes with the discovery and breaking up of Lynn’s affair with her teacher Miss Maxfeld by Lynn’s parents and ends with a sadly funny scene in which Lynn and Miss Maxfeld discuss their feelings for one another before Lynn leaves for a trip to Europe. A Boy’s Own Story concludes with an episode in which the boy, after inveigling his music teacher into sex, reveals to his headmaster that the teacher is a drug user and gets him fired. White states of this “tough, unpleasant conclusion” that he wanted to “show how a deforming period deforms people” – how his protagonist “had internalized the general homophobia of the period and become somewhat monstrous as a result” (White 2004: 27). Similarly, DeLynn in an interview stresses her effort in In Thrall to “not allude to anything that came later” than 1964, when “there was no gay movement” (DeLynn 1994: 13, 17). However, the status of both novels as examples of the post‐liberation gay and lesbian literary boom imbues their narratives with historical irony. In her interview, DeLynn draws attention to the difference that liberation would make to the lesbian experience, even as she stresses her rigorous exclusion of the positive attitudes of the liberation era. And White describes his novel as “a historical novel about my own period” (White 2004: 27). In 1982, the pre‐liberation period, historically so recent, is located as the distant past, given the dramatic changes in gay and lesbian life that have occurred.
In their very resistance to an affirmative account of homosexuality, then, these novels imply a definitive break between the pre‐liberationist past and the post‐liberationist present. The fact that both authors have acknowledged their novels to be strongly autobiographical underwrites their status as testaments to the suffering of the past. Undoubtedly, the changes in the situation of homosexual and transgendered people since 1969 have been major. Many LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people are now open and unapologetic; activists have won important rights and reforms; LGBT culture is more prominent; and the general American population has become increasingly accepting of homosexuality, and, albeit to a lesser extent, of transgender identities. The distinction between pre‐liberation and post‐liberation periods is an indispensable conceptual tool and it will in part organize this chapter. However, to assume a clear distinction between a repressed, pathologized past and a liberated, open present is to underplay the often surprising visibility of pre‐liberation LGBT identities as well as their place in literary representation. Gay literature and lesbian literature only exist as categories in the post‐liberation era, but queer sexuality was a preoccupation of American literature prior to this, though the intensity of that preoccupation waxed and waned according to a range of historical and cultural factors.
My use of the term queer sexuality indicates this chapter’s engagement with queer theory, currently the dominant paradigm for analysis of sexuality in literary and cultural studies. Queer theory insists upon the historical contingency of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and challenges the idea that homosexual feelings have relevance for only a minority population, instead adopting a “universalizing” perspective. It suggests that contemporary understandings of gay and lesbian identities – as essential aspects of personhood and exclusive forms of sexual orientation – can be misleading with regard to the complexity of lives and texts that have been (and indeed those that currently are) organized around same‐sex desire. Yet for reasons of convenience as well as a means of gesturing toward our own “situatedness” in the early twenty‐first century – the way in which we necessarily understand the past from our own perspective, no matter how nuanced we try to make that understanding – this chapter retains “gay and lesbian” as an organizing category.1
In what follows, I trace developments in American gay and lesbian literature across the twentieth and into the twenty‐first centuries, placing them in the context of shifting attitudes toward same‐sexuality. Given the vast amount of American literature that could be construed as gay, lesbian, or queer, I do not attempt comprehensive coverage. Instead I spotlight key authors and texts in order to indicate something of the richness of American gay and lesbian literature and its centrality to twentieth‐century American literature as a whole.
Homosexual Modernity
In their protagonists’ agonized engagements with psychiatric explanations, In Thrall and A Boy’s Own Story attest to the influence of what historians of sexuality call the “medical model” of homosexuality, promulgated throughout much of the twentieth century by psychiatry and sexology in concert with the legal system. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976; trans. 1978), a foundational text for queer theory, Michel Foucault argues that it was the late nineteenth‐century invention of the medical category of homosexuality that effectively brought the category of homosexual persons into being. Whereas European and American cultures had previously seen homosexual acts as a temptation to which all people as sinners were susceptible, the medical discourse on same‐sexuality, which gradually displaced the dominance of the religious one, defined the homosexual as a particular type of individual (Foucault 1990: 43). Foucault contends that while the emergence of the idea of homosexual identity worked in part as a means of control over sexual “perversity,” it also enabled what he calls a reverse discourse whereby some people, homosexual and otherwise, began to argue for the legitimacy and naturalness of homosexuality, often using the very medical terminology that sought to disqualify it (Foucault 1990: 101).
While Foucault usefully sets out the coordinates of regulation and resistance that have defined the history of homosexuality in America (and in other capitalist democracies), his “top‐down” model has been challenged by other historians. In his pathbreaking study of the gay New York subculture from 1890 to 1940, George Chauncey argues that during the early twentieth century the medical literature on homosexuality was “simply one of several powerful (and competing) sexual ideologies,” and that a range of “street‐level” and class‐inflected terms and practices also helped organize conceptions of same‐sexuality (Chauncey 1995: 27). Chauncey further argues that the consolidation of homosexuality as an identity occurred much later than Foucault suggests – during the 1930s to 1950s. Despite their differences over precise dates, both Foucault and Chauncey, along with many other scholars, agree that the emergence of homosexual identity is symptomatic of late nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century modernity, a period generally defined as involving massive transformations of everyday life due to urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of consumer capitalism – transformations that put traditional patterns of family life and gender identity under stress, thus enabling unorthodox forms of sexual and gendered being to emerge.
If homosexual identity is a distinctively modern phenomenon, how did the literature of the early twentieth century deal with and indeed help promulgate this phenomenon? The queer writing of this period engages in complex processes of resistance, renegotiation, and compliance with reference to both the pathologizing discourse highlighted by Foucault and the vernacular understandings of same‐sexuality elaborated by Chauncey. An interesting early example in this respect is Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) by Ralph Werther (a pseudonym), which defines the author’s sexual identity with reference both to the sexological category of the “invert” and the street‐level slang term “fairie.” Werther’s memoir was published by a medical press and sold by mail order only to physicians and other interested legal and academic professionals, and it draws on the case study, the genre through which sexological texts sought to convey the distinctiveness of perverse “types.” Yet, as Werther’s contemporary editor Scott Herring points out, Androgyne also subverts the certainties of sexology through its “first‐person narration, its almost schizophrenic vantage points, and its commitment to mapping the complexities of the queer underworld” of New York (Herring 2008: xxvii).
On the basis of its formal idiosyncrasies and its concern with alienation, Herring makes a case for Androgyne as an avant‐garde text. He thus gestures toward the way in which queerness is not only distinctively modern; it also has a clear affiliation with modernism. Daniela Caselli points out that many prominent American proponents of literary experimentalism during the interwar years have been “discussed in relation to LGBT identities,” including Djuna Barnes, Countee Cullen, Charles Henri Ford, H.D., Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Parker Tyler (Caselli 2015: 103). For such writers, frankness about same‐sex desire and/or practice is often paradoxically combined with eschewal of medico‐legal categorizations. Stein’s prose poems “Tender Buttons” (1914) and “Lifting Belly” (1915–1917), for instance, signal lesbian eroticism while deflecting ease of interpretation through associative, disjunctive, and anti‐narrative patterns of language. The Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent’s brief story “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” (1926; published under the name Richard Bruce) unambiguously centers on a homosexual pick‐up, but its insistent use of the ellipsis suggests “the possibility that some things are best left unsaid” (Boone 1998: 224). Stein’s novel QED (1903; published posthumously in 1950) and H.D.’s HERmione (1927; published posthumously in 1981) describe intense desire between women but leave the sexual manifestation of that desire, if any, unspecified.
Some have argued that self‐censorship accounts for these kinds of equivocation in modernist writing. The facts that authors sometimes adopted pseudonyms or did not seek publication for works dealing with same‐sexuality might seem to support this argument. But an influential strand of contemporary criticism proposes that the indirectness and omissions of modernist writers can be seen as forms of resistance to sexual regulation. In his discussion of queer modernism, Robert Caserio stresses its liberatory account of “unregulated eros” (Caserio 2012: 201). Similarly, Scott Herring (2007) discusses a number of modernist works that adopt the exposé mode of Autobiography of an Androgyne but that ultimately frustrate the reader’s expectation of definite information about queer subcultures. For instance, Herring argues that the elliptical gaps of “Smoke, Lillies, and Jade” “disrupt the increasingly entrenched binary logic of modern sexual identity”; and that Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936), taken by many to provide an insight into the Parisian queer bohème, refuses the imperative to elaborate fixed modes of same‐sexuality through its oblique and anti‐realist style (Herring 2007: 140, 150–192; see also Boone 1998 and Caselli 2015).
Contrasting with these evasive and resistant modernist works are a number of texts from the interwar years that, in line with Foucault’s notion of the reverse discourse, used the terminology of sexology and psychiatry to explain and legitimate queer experience. Unlike Nugent and Barnes, these texts took up the revelatory mode of Werther’s Androgyne uncritically; unlike Werther, they adopted an accessible and “middlebrow” style. Exemplifying this approach are novelistic manifestations of the “pansy craze” of the late 1920s and early 1930s, in which, particularly in New York, gay men became highly culturally visible. Chauncey notes a number of gay‐themed novels appearing in the early 1930s, including Blair Niles’s Strange Brother (1931), André Tellier’s Twilight Men (1931), Robert Scully’s A Scarlet Pansy (1932), and Lew Levenson’s Butterfly Man (1934) (Chauncey 1995: 324). The late 1920s and early 1930s also saw a notable increase in popular and middlebrow treatments of lesbianism, spurred on by controversy over the English novelist Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). Hall’s work, itself an important example of the reverse‐discourse novel, was briefly banned for obscenity in both the United Kingdom and the United States; helped popularize the term “lesbian”; and, with its plot of a suffering, mannish protagonist who ultimately loses her lover to heterosexuality, served as the template for many lesbian novels in subsequent decades (Love 2009: 395).
The relative conventionality of the reverse‐discourse, middlebrow texts does not mean that they lack critical value. Diana Frederics’s pseudonymous Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939) indicates through its titular adjective its compliance with the binary of normative heterosexuality and non‐normative homosexuality, and the book is replete with au courant psychoanalytic explanations of its author’s lesbian orientation. Yet, the first‐person account of homosexual experience also subtly undermines the exoticizing imperative. The narrator stresses the “imperfection” – for her – of “normal love” (Frederics 1975: 63) and she identifies the lesbian romance with which her story concludes as “fulfillment” (the title of the last chapter). Despite the influence of The Well of Loneliness, with its tragic ending, Frederics’s text is not entirely exceptional even in the 1930s. Gale Wilhelm published two lesbian novels during the decade, We Too are Drifting (1935) and Torchlight to Valhalla (1938), and while the first of these conforms to the Well model, with the androgynous heroine losing her lover to a man, the second moves its protagonist from an unsatisfactory heterosexual entanglement to a happy relationship with a woman.
While these lesbian texts of the 1930s are notable, they are relatively isolated and we need to be careful of overstating their impact. Lesbian writers became more prominent in the immediate postwar period, which also saw the reemergence of gay‐themed writing after a period of abatement during the Depression and World War II. If the brief flourishing of gay and lesbian texts in the interwar years can be related to prosperity and the consequent realignment of gender roles during the 1920s, then World War II and the subsequent return to economic buoyancy along with a number of significant intellectual and cultural developments in the immediate postwar decades enabled an even more extensive range of texts dealing directly and indirectly with same‐sexuality throughout the midcentury period.
Privacy, Publicity, and Politics at Midcentury (1945–1965)
During World War II large numbers of men and women moved from “families, small towns, and the ethnic neighborhoods of large cities” into “sex‐segregated, nonfamilial environments,” such as the armed services and the defense industries, in which same‐sex attracted individuals encountered others like themselves (D’Emilio 1990: 458). Demobilization saw many returning gay and lesbian service personnel settling in urban centers such as San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, which were attractive because of their existing bars and other opportunities for social and sexual contacts. This new influx of gay men and lesbians in turn revitalized and made more visible existing subcultures. Also helping to boost the public profile of homosexuality in the first few years after the war were the landmark studies of behavioral scientist Alfred Kinsey and his cohort, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Based on extensive interviews with individuals about their sexual histories, these studies recorded unexpectedly high incidences of homosexuality.
This increased visibility had both regressive and progressive consequences. Fears of a growing “homosexual menace” in the late 1940s and 1950s saw an increase in the outright persecution of homosexuals in the forms of police harassment, state surveillance, and media panics over “sexual perverts” (D’Emilio 1992: 59). Despite the impact of Kinsey’s non‐judgmental studies, the medical model of homosexuality reached the peak of its influence during this time, with the American Psychiatric Association defining homosexuality as a pathology in 1952. The harsh treatment of homosexuals was intimately related to the Cold War culture of conformity and paranoia that sought to promote and reproduce American “normality” as a bulwark against the supposed threat of communist infiltration. Thousands of actual or suspected gays and lesbians were fired from jobs in civil service jobs, schools, the military, and so on (Bibler 2015: 126).
On the other hand, the crackdown on gays and lesbians spurred the formation of gay and lesbian or “homophile” rights groups, including the Mattachine Society (founded in 1951), the lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB; founded in 1955), and ONE, Inc., the primary purpose of which was the publication of ONE, a magazine aimed at a gay audience. The Mattachine Society had quite radical beginnings – three of its founding members were communists – but changes in the group’s structure and leadership saw it retreat from militancy, and throughout most of the 1950s the group sought to convince American society that homosexuals were “respectable” citizens who could be safely assimilated, an approach duplicated in the DOB. By contrast, ONE magazine was notable for its “stance of combative pride,” holding firmly “to the position that gays and lesbians were the only real authorities on gay life” and “regularly attack[ing] the proponents of the medical model” (D’Emilio 1998: 88). Whether apologetic or combative, these groups had in common the assumption that gays and lesbians formed a politically marginalized group analogous to racial and ethnic minorities – an understanding of homosexuality that challenged the medical model of the isolated, “afflicted” homosexual. This position was also argued in Edward Sagarin’s groundbreaking book The Homosexual in America (1951; published under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory). While not widely publicized until the mid‐1960s, the view of homosexuals as an oppressed minority gained traction throughout the midcentury period.
Bestselling novels that engaged with homosexuality also, however inadvertently, promoted a politicized, rather than a merely pathologizing, understanding of homosexuality. Jaime Harker notes that the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a flurry of what she calls “gay protest novels,” including Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole (1945), Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1946), and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948). Harker notes that, like the pansy craze novels of the early 1930s, the gay protest novels “exposed middle‐class readers to sensational, decadent, and ultimately tragic images from a hidden, exotic underworld,” while “also encourag[ing] readerly sympathy through the suffering of the main characters” (Harker 2013: 14).
Commencing a few years after the wave of gay protest novels began, and establishing a similarly ambivalent attitude toward the homosexual world, were the lesbian pulp novels. Mass‐market paperbacks usually written under pseudonyms (sometimes by men writing under female names), the pulps tended to portray contemporary lesbian life as “shadowy and tragic,” featuring plots including “prostitution, rape, orgies, incest, suicide, and insanity” (Gunn and Harker 2013: 19). The novels often end with a man “saving” a confused young woman from the clutches of a predatory, masculinized lesbian. Some critics argue that the pulps were aimed primarily at heterosexual men, with the plots providing erotic titillation and self‐affirmation. But anecdotal evidence makes it clear that lesbians were also avid readers of the pulps, valuing them, in spite of their downbeat representations of homosexuality, as the most easily accessed resource for information about lesbian lives and communities (Gunn and Harker 2013: 18–20). And although the covers of the pulps, with their lurid images and breathless blurbs, invariably pressed home the supposedly degraded nature of the lesbian lifestyle, the narratives within those covers sometimes presented discrepantly sober and sensitive accounts of female same‐sexuality. Notable in this respect are Ann Bannon’s “Beebo Brinker” novels (1957–1962) and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (1952; first published as The Price of Salt).
The consolidation in the midcentury period of gay identities and the growth of gay and lesbian subcultures meant that there were fewer literary representations of indeterminately queer sexuality of the kind found in prewar modernism. Instead of taking what Christopher Looby calls the “utopian” option of exploring gendered and sexual fluidity, literature of this period tends to take “the homosexual category of person for granted” (Looby 2009: 433). There are exceptions. Looby singles out Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) for its suggestive reimagining of orthodox sexual subjectivities, and one might add here other novels by McCullers, such as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), as well as some of the work of McCullers’s fellow southerner, Truman Capote, including his celebrated debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). It is significant, however, that these queer texts invariably center on children, adolescents, or disabled adults, and on regional and rural settings – that is, on people and places marginal to the urban centers in which gay subcultural identities were most prominently elaborated.
Otherwise, midcentury gay and lesbian texts tend to define same‐sexuality in relation to medical categorizations and subcultural expressions even when they seek to resist them. For instance, in Carol, Patricia Highsmith proposes a tentatively “utopian” view of desire, with the apparently heterosexual young protagonist Therese suddenly falling in love with the older, sophisticated Carol. Therese “had heard about girls falling in love and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither Carol nor her looked like that” (Highsmith 1991: 100). This distancing from the lesbian subculture is literalized in a scene at a bar in which Therese sees two girls “dressed in slacks,” one of whose hair is “cut like a boy’s”: “Therese looked away, aware that she avoided them and avoided being seen looking at them” (Highsmith 1991: 153). Yet as Highsmith’s wording indicates, Therese’s distancing from lesbian identity is also a kind of disavowal – a conscious “avoidance” of recognition or self‐recognition – and when Therese later fantasizes about sleeping with Carol and touching her body, her thoughts return to “the two girls she had seen at the Palermo bar,” who “did that, she knew, and more,” indicating the implication of the novel’s central romance in the existing discourse of lesbianism (Highsmith 1991: 197). Additionally, Therese’s sense of abandonment by her mother, who sent her to boarding school as a child, hints at an etiological explanation for her lesbianism, despite her sense that her love for Carol has come “out of the blue” (Highsmith 1991: 99).
The poet Robert Duncan’s essay “The Homosexual in Society” (1944) also attempts a version of sexual utopianism, making a plea for the acceptance of homosexuality and homosexual‐themed writing on the basis that all varieties of sexual love are part of the “universal human experience,” and denouncing the exclusiveness and limitations of the “homosexual cult” – that is, the gay subculture (Duncan 1995: 42, 40). The essay is notable as one of the first discussions published in America in which an author avowed his homosexuality using his own name. Duncan writes about his negotiation of his sexuality in his previous poetry, “I publicized those feelings as private and made no stand for their recognition but tried to sell them as disguised, for instance, as conflicts arising from mystical sources” (Duncan 1995: 45). Duncan’s oxymoronic construction, whereby private homosexual feelings are publicized in disguised form, indicates the complex interplay of secrecy and disclosure, indirection and frankness, that characterizes much midcentury gay and lesbian writing. While Duncan courageously “came out,” as we would say today, other major poets of this period, such as the great lyric poet Elizabeth Bishop, or the New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara, largely maintained strategies of “disguise,” and much of the most interesting recent scholarship on these poets has been concerned with unpacking the homosexual meanings of their work (Diehl 1993; Glavey 2007).
The works of the most celebrated gay playwright of the era, Tennessee Williams, vacillate between masked and overt representations of homosexuality. Williams’s breakthrough Broadway success The Glass Menagerie (1945) suggests the homosexuality of the male lead Tom by planting suspicion in the audience member’s mind – the play never reveals what actually happens during Tom’s dubious nightly visits to the cinema, but hints that he is actually cruising for sexual contacts. On the other hand, in some of Williams’s later plays, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Suddenly Last Summer (1958), homosexuality is an explicit narrative and thematic component, with the revelation or confession of homosexuality constituting dramatic climax – though even in these cases, there may be ambiguity, as in Cat’s omission of the precise nature of the relationship between the troubled male lead Brick and his dead gay friend Skipper.
Williams’s sometimes‐explicit representation of homosexuality did not extend to admissions about his own sexual orientation, and in this he resembles most other gay writers of the time. A few avant‐garde and bohemian writers followed Duncan’s lead in both writing openly about homosexuality and being relatively open about their own sexual orientation, such as Jack Spicer, associated with the San Francisco Renaissance (as Duncan also was), and key figures in the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Ginsberg’s long poem Howl (1955), with its profane descriptions of homosexual (and heterosexual) sex, was the target of a famous obscenity trial, as was Burroughs’s experimental novel Naked Lunch (1959).
All these writers were at some time published by New York’s Grove Press, a self‐styled leading‐edge publisher, as was the bestselling novel City of Night (1963) by John Rechy. Its prose style indebted to the slangy epiphanies of the Beats, City of Night was based on Rechy’s years as a hustler drifting through several major US cities. In his history of Grove, Loren Glass identifies City of Night as “laying the groundwork for the emergence of gay literature as a lucrative niche market in the 1970s” (Glass 2013: 126). In a letter to his publisher, Rechy objected to the novel being described on the cover as “homosexual,” however, as “much too clinical […] too explicit and restrictive […] Would ‘sexual underworld’ or ‘sexual underground’ or ‘the world of subterranean sex’ do just as well?” (Glass 2013: 126). Rechy’s suggestions for alternative marketing strategies for his novel attest to the way the Beats and other avant‐garde writers tended to locate male homosexuality as a form of outlawry. While mainstream America denigrated homosexuality for its “deviancy,” the Beats celebrated homosexuals and other “outcasts,” such as junkies and the insane, precisely for their disruption of what they saw as the deadening conformism of midcentury culture.
In a 1959 addition to his 1944 essay, Duncan denounced the Beat veneration of sexual outlawry as a kind of reveling in degradation and a betrayal of the “fellow‐feeling with the rest of mankind” that he thought art should promote (Duncan 1995: 42). Closer to Duncan’s view of homosexuality is the African American novelist James Baldwin. A major literary figure and commentator on race issues from the 1950s until his death in 1984, Baldwin always insisted on the life‐enhancing role of human connection across barriers of, for instance, race, gender, and sexual orientation. For Baldwin, as for Duncan, sexual love was one of the universal experiences that connect people and the genders of those involved was (supposedly) irrelevant. But Baldwin’s practice is somewhat at odds with his pronouncements, indicating sensitiveness to the intersection of sexuality and race. After hinting at the queerness of the African American protagonists in his early story “The Outing” (1951) and his acclaimed first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin treated homosexuality openly in his second novel Giovanni’s Room (1956), the story of a doomed love affair between two white men. Most of his subsequent novels feature male homosexuality or bisexuality, but it was not until his last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), that he made sexual love between black men central (Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone [1968] also features a relationship between two black men, but it is elliptically represented).
As with other midcentury writers, we find in Baldwin a complex negotiation of public and private. Throughout his career, Baldwin resisted the conception of homosexuality as a politicized identity, thus differentiating it from racial identity. Baldwin’s often‐voiced opinion that sexual preference was a private matter is, however, somewhat at odds with his exploration of sexuality in the public mode of the novel (Field 2004: 466). Baldwin’s novels, with their frank and sympathetic accounts of homosexuality, inadvertently contributed to its politicization – a tentative development of the 1940s and 1950s that gained momentum in the increasingly uncensored public sphere of the 1960s.
Another important midcentury novel in this respect is A Single Man (1964) by the expatriate English writer Christopher Isherwood, which recounts a fairly unremarkable day in the life of George, a professor living in Los Angeles, whose partner has recently died. Although George has a none‐too‐veiled discussion with his students about minority politics, and is shown resentfully pushing back, if only in his thoughts, against heteronormativity, critics such as Joseph Bristow have cautioned against seeing the book as a precursor of gay liberation (Bristow 1999). The novel’s punning title might be seen as supporting Bristow’s claim – it invokes not only “single” George’s bereavement, but also his official status as a “bachelor” in a cultural environment that maintains a fiction of universal heterosexuality, as well as the image of the homosexual as an isolated individual. However, Isherwood’s novel, with its pointed depiction of homosexuality as ordinary, also served as a model for a subsequent generation of gay literary fiction writers, who sought to move away from the depiction of gay men as exotic outlaws.
Liberation, Commerce, and Diversity
Several factors contributed to the increasing sense of homosexuality as a politicized, minority identity in the 1960s. The decade saw a rash of coverage of gay and lesbian urban subcultures in the press and in book‐length studies. While generally written from a heterosexist standpoint and often sensationalistic or condescending, this coverage, by engaging with gay spokespeople, was obliged to respond, however grudgingly, to the possibility of a reform of attitudes toward homosexuals (Meeker 2006: 109–195). Changes in interpretations of obscenity laws also greatly facilitated the publication of materials featuring explicit references to homosexuality. One immediate effect of the liberalization of the law was the explosion of gay pulp publication, hitherto relatively restrained by comparison with its lesbian counterpart. Explicitly aimed at a gay male audience, these cheap, usually pseudonymously authored paperback publications were mostly “sheer sexual wish‐fulfillment fantasies” (Stryker 2001: 110). While Loren Glass suggests that the high sales of the sensational but seriously credentialed City of Night anticipated the post‐Stonewall category of gay fiction, Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker claim that it was with the post‐1965 pulps “that the gay literary revolution began in earnest” (Gunn and Harker 2013: 1). Accessing a niche gay male market, the post‐1965 gay pulps built on the precedent of physique magazines in the 1950s, featuring “beefcake” pictorials of young bodybuilders, the circulation of which eclipsed that of the overtly political publications of the homophile organizations (Waugh 1996: 176–283). These disreputable and overtly commodified publications helped consolidate a sense of affirmative gay identity through the creation of a gay market.
Post‐Stonewall commentators often present the participation of LGBT people in the market as a distraction from or betrayal of liberation, but the history of American gay life indicates the intertwinement of commerce and politics. In this respect, it is significant that the iconic Stonewall riots took place in a commercial venue – a bar. The riots followed two years of intensified homophile activism, including a large demonstration against police harassment of gay bars in Los Angeles in 1967. In the year after Stonewall, gay liberation organizations formed across the country. Rejecting the moderate approach of the homophile groups and taking up the revolutionary perspective of the New Left movements of the 1960s, these groups were characterized by a defiant pride in being gay. While the radicalism of the gay and lesbian movements was diluted in the years following Stonewall, with activists putting increasing emphasis on gaining rights and reforms within existing governmental frameworks, the liberationist emphases on pride and the political value of “coming out” have become mainstays of gay and lesbian culture.
The mood of pride established by liberation was evident in the 1970s in newly vibrant manifestations of gay culture, for instance in the expanded and highly commercialized “gay ghettos” of major cities. There was something of a lag between the advent of liberation and the constitution of “out” gay literature as a publishing focus, however. While the early liberation years saw a surge of associated political publications and while the pornographic and semi‐pornographic pulps continued to thrive, the niche market for gay literary writing did not really emerge until 1978. This was the year in which Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples were published. All written by New York‐based white men, and all published by major houses, these works were the first literary novels to respond to and represent the new gay ghetto – though Kramer’s satirical Faggots, with its depiction of the supposed emptiness and destructiveness of New York’s promiscuous sexual culture, was widely condemned by other gay writers and critics.
Avowedly lesbian literature developed quite separately from its gay counterpart, due to the intimate involvement of lesbian liberation with the second‐wave feminist movement. Lesbians were often at the forefront of the cultural and political innovations of feminism, including the foundation of a vigorous independent feminist publishing scene from the early 1970s. Key early lesbian novels published by feminist presses included June Arnold’s Sister Gin (1975), Elana Nachman’s Riverfinger Women (1974), and Loving Her (1974) by Ann Allen Shockley, the most prominent African American lesbian novelist writing before 1980. Often through explicit reference to the liberation movement, this work sought to displace negative stereotypes of lesbianism. The best‐known example of these early lesbian novels, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), recounts the relentlessly successful trajectory of its talented, beautiful, and sexually confident heroine Molly Bolt from a working‐class Florida childhood to the beginnings of a filmmaking career in New York. Rubyfruit Jungle resembles the once‐paradigmatic Well of Loneliness only in its appropriation of the bildungsroman genre for a lesbian protagonist; it would otherwise be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between Hall’s tragic narrative of suffering and sacrifice and Brown’s exuberant and unapologetic one. The 1970s lesbian literary scene also differed from the gay one in the importance accorded to poetry. Adrienne Rich, a poet whose career had begun in the 1950s, came out as a lesbian in the mid‐1970s and became an important lesbian feminist theorist with the publication of the highly influential essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). The wide lesbian readership for Rich’s subsequent non‐fiction and poetry was paralleled in the audiences for the African American poets and essayists Audre Lorde and June Jordan (though Jordan identified as bisexual rather than lesbian).
While Lorde and Jordan released important work in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that significant numbers of gay men and lesbians of color began to publish. In part, this was a result of the exponential expansion and diversification of gay and lesbian literature after 1980. This period saw major houses capitalizing on the success of 1970s gay literary fiction by devoting lines to gay titles, growing output from independent feminist and lesbian publishers, and the development of gay and lesbian versions of popular genres like romances and crime fiction. But the increase in writing by lesbians and gay men of color was also galvanized by the influence of the politics of difference, with writers of color frequently issuing explicit challenges to the white domination of the queer literary field.
Audre Lord’s autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) announces in its title and in its self‐appointed generic status – “biomythography” – its intention to reimagine black lesbian existence outside orthodox epistemological and formal parameters. Recounting Lorde’s Harlem upbringing, her experiences as a factory worker in Connecticut, as a student in Mexico City, and as one of the few black “gay‐girls” in 1950s Greenwich Village, the book enfolds its more or less straightforward autobiography within a matrilineal, black “herstory,” beginning and ending with lyrical evocations of Lorde’s “historic and mythic foremothers” (Zimmerman 1990: 192). Her actual mother’s birthplace, Carriacou, functions throughout the narrative as a feminocentric utopia, with the Creole spoken there supplying the alternative identity of “Zami” – a “name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (Lorde 1982: 255). Displacing the Eurocentric term “lesbian,” Lorde modifies the sense of same‐sexual community and identity that had built up in the 1970s by conflating “my name” with a culturally resonant collective noun.
Another formally inventive intervention in the LGBT literary field by a lesbian of color is Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which combines memoir, theory, and poetry. Organized by the metaphor and reality of the Texas–Mexico border where Anzaldúa grew up as well as by the metaphor and reality of her mestiza (mixed) identity, Borderlands elaborates provocative meditations on the tensions but also the overlaps between a range of putative opposites, including Anglos/Chicanos, men/women, homosexual/heterosexual. In thus challenging “the consciousness of duality” that characterizes Western thought, Anzaldúa anticipates the deconstructive operations of the queer theory that emerged in the 1990s – indeed, she often uses the term “queer” to describe non‐normative sexuality or gender, associating the term with a valorized capacity to “cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Anzaldúa 1987: 35, 3).
The militant resistance to normality evident in Anzaldua’s use of the term “queer” was a hallmark not only of the academic queer theory but across a swath of 1990s LGBT culture – queer literature as well as, for example, queercore punk music and the so‐called New Queer Cinema. Queer culture emerged out of discontent with a post‐liberationist gay and lesbian world that was seen as bland, commercialized, and coopted by hegemonic straight culture. The indicatively titled Discontents (1992), an anthology edited by the important queer novelist Dennis Cooper, is presented as a “wakeup call to future gay literary anthologies” from “the vast diverse and growing anti‐assimilationist queer movement” (Cooper 1991: xi). The collection boasts a roll call of queer writers who went on to have significant careers, including Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Robert Glück, Gary Indiana, and Dale Peck; other important authors associated with the queer literary moment are Bruce Benderson, Jane DeLynn, and David Wojnarowicz. Although a “diverse” group as Cooper states, these writers are generally united by the confronting nature of their sexual representation, as well as their eschewal of the “positive images” that many gay critics demand of literature, with their work instead imbued with negative affect, if not outright nihilism (in this, several of these authors are indebted to “outlaw” gay writers of the previous generation). Although several of the queer writers mentioned had actually been publishing for one or even two decades previously, the conditions of the early 1990s facilitated their rise to (relative) prominence, as the AIDS crisis, deepened by government inaction, made apt a literature of desperation and urgency.
First described in 1981 (although not named as such until the following year), AIDS had a swift, devastating impact on the gay male population that only abated with the introduction of antiretroviral therapies around 1997. Literary responses were initially, as Richard Canning notes, “tardy and uneven,” as the community affected by AIDS strove to understand and deal with the epidemic (Canning 2011: 136). Gay and lesbian writers and critics often felt that brief forms such as the short story and poetry offered more effective ways of dealing with the epidemic than the novel, with its imperatives of closure and the totalization of experience. Eloquent responses to the epidemic were produced by poets such as Rafael Camp, Mark Doty, and Thom Gunn, who drew upon the medium’s capacity to make otherwise overwhelming grief tractable through the discipline of form. The short story, with its paradoxical characteristics of suspension and epiphany, also proved an apt form for negotiating the profound disorientation and shattering losses entailed by the epidemic. Key collections of stories centrally concerned with the epidemic include Allan Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers (1990), Rebecca Brown’s The Gifts of the Body (1994), and Edmund White and Adam Mars‐Jones’s co‐authored The Darker Proof (1987). But there were important novelistic responses too, increasing in number during the second decade of the epidemic, including Samuel Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon (1984), Robert Ferro’s Second Son (1988), Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble (1990), Christopher Coe’s Such Times (1994), and Edmund White’s The Married Man (2000). There were also a number of acclaimed plays dealing with AIDS, including Larry Kramer’s early The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s epic two‐part work Angels in America (1993). While Kramer’s play is straightforwardly naturalistic, Kushner plays fast and loose not only with conventional dramatic form but also with American history. HIV/AIDS is actually only one thematic strand in this freewheeling work, which seeks, as its subtitle (“A Gay Fantasia on American Themes”) indicates, to intervene in the discourse of American self‐understanding, a literary ambition conventionally restricted to straight white males. That Angels in America was so successful (Kushner received the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1993) is one measure of the changes in attitudes toward lesbian and gay literature, and lesbian and gay people, that had taken place in the years since liberation.
This 1990s moment of high visibility for LGBT literature, however, paradoxically coincided with a widespread sense of its declining importance. A common theme of LGBT life stories of the past was the furtive seeking out of information on queerness in books. No matter how prejudicial, such printed information helped individuals develop a sense of identity in contexts in which homosexuality was often not openly discussed (see Bergman 1991: 5–10). In the 1990s and after, however, queer characters and worlds have become common in popular culture, and the Internet has enabled an explosion of queer expression. The printed word, it is often argued, no longer plays the informing and affirming role for gays and lesbians that it once did. The death of gay fiction has become a common theme of commentary on contemporary queer culture – as represented by the statements of many of the writers interviewed in Richard Canning’s collection of conversations with gay authors, Gay Fiction Speaks (2001). But while it is certainly true that less fiction is overtly marketed as “gay” by major presses than was the case in the heyday of the gay novel in the 1980s and early 1990s, gay and (to a lesser extent) lesbian writers continue to be published by them. Additionally, small presses, university presses, and online publication forums have increasingly acted as vehicles for queer literary expression. If the constitution of gay fiction as a niche market has declined, the queer contribution to American literature continues to be vigorous and diverse.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 27 (AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION AFTER HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI).
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