Gay Identity in Literature

Historical Context

Considerable scholarship has been dedicated to homosexuality in history and culture. One of the main controversies in gay studies has centered on two schools of thought, essentialist and social constructionist. The essentialist position maintains that the characteristics of gay identity have remained constant, so that, for example, same-sex behavior in ancient Greece and in the United States in the twenty-first century would have some fundamental similarities. The social constructionist view, on the other hand, argues that particular practices are historically specific; therefore, their meanings change according to the time and place in which they occur. Most of the scholarship exploring gay identity in American literature has emerged out of the constructionist school, and the standard position has been that homosexuality was repressed until at least the end of World War II, when it began to be more in the public consciousness, with the modern gay rights movement breaking into the open in the Stonewall riots, an uprising of gay people against a police raid on a gay bar in New York City in 1969.

Historian George Chauncey has expanded and complicated the constructionist reading of gay American history. In Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994), Chauncey argues that a sharp dichotomy between the homosexual and the heterosexual emerged in the twentieth century, suggesting that same-sex relationships in earlier times should not be thought of in a context that came later. Thus, “homoerotic” texts of the nineteenth century do not necessarily imply that their writers were expressing homosexual identity or that they themselves were what would come to be known as gay.

The Nineteenth Century

What can be learned from representations of same-sex eroticism and desire in pre-twentieth century texts? Clearly, some prominent writers placed tremendous importance on same-sex love. Literary critics, beginning with Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960), have found a tradition of male homoerotic bonding in American literature. Fiedler located that tradition in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–1841) and especially in Queequeg’s “marriage” to Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). This kind of study, because it tends to desexualize the homosexual into the homoerotic, cannot be considered affirmative of a gay tradition in American literature.

Other scholars have suggested that Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, and Horatio Alger, among many others, should be included in any discussion of gay American literature. Although the sexual identity of these writers is not certain, what is clear is that male attachments structured their lives and writing in significant ways. Critics may therefore argue that such facts should not be explained away by scholars dismissive of the idea that these writers were gay.

Walt Whitman

The central figure in nineteenth-century gay American literature is Walt Whitman. More than half of Robert K. Martin’s The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) is focused on Whitman. Martin argues persuasively that many poets and other writers who followed Whitman consciously looked to him as a father figure, spiritual and sexual mentor, and even as a kind of lover.

Much of Whitman’s poetry, especially Leaves of Grass (1855), stresses the importance of a highly sexualized and eroticized body and the centrality of “adhesiveness,” Whitman’s term for male same-sex behavior. Whitman’s vision, which affirmed the values of America and democracy, placed its faith in the love of men for each other. He celebrated that dynamic in his writing, even in his impassioned Civil War writing, which contains elements of love and physical contact with the soldiers on both sides.

British writers John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde identified closely with the sentiments they found in Whitman’s work. Wilde visited Whitman in the 1880s, and Symonds corresponded with him, trying to tease admissions out of him, which he would never give. One may argue that the chief aspect of Whitman’s sexual identity in terms of gay American literature is that readers and writers alike identify with him and with the importance he placed on the love between men.

The Early Twentieth Century

In Chauncey’s account, New York City, which he takes as prototypical rather than typical, had a thriving gay subculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Hamilton Lodge held drag balls as early as the 1870s. Times Square, Harlem, and Greenwich Village were known gay hangouts, where “fairies” were flamboyantly visible. This view is rather different from the typical understanding that homosexuality was closeted until the 1960s.

The literature of this period depicts gay identity. The poetry of Hart Crane, especially “Voyages” (1926) and The Bridge (1930), reflects the visibility and the growing public presence of gay people and gay concerns. Crane’s poetry exhibits a conflicted position regarding homosexuality; he maintains a spiritual view of love and its redemptive power, but sees himself as exiled as a gay artist. Whitman served as a helpful forefather, however, whose vision of brotherhood partly relieved some of Crane’s anxieties. “Cape Hatteras” (1930), which Crane referred to as his “ode to Whitman,” took its epigraph from Whitman’s “Passage to India,” suggesting the value of Whitman to Crane’s work.

A different gay tradition and identity in American writing of this period can be found in the work of some of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Flourishing in the 1920s, black writers reflected the sexual and cultural diversity of their milieu. Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the white novelist Carl Van Vechten have all been identified as writers for whom homoerotic attraction and homosexuality were crucial. Nugent’s impressionistic short story, “Smoke, Lillies, and Jade”—concerning the seduction of a Latin lover—was first published in Fire!!, a periodical edited by Thurman, in 1926. An autobiographical work, Nugent’s story owes debts to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and has been included in the controversial film Looking for Langston (1989), in which gay black filmmaker Isaac Julien uses Hughes as a symbol of the secrecy associated with homosexuality in the Harlem Renaissance.

Gay Identities at Midcentury

The 1930s, it may be argued, began a more repressive time for gay people in America. It certainly seems that gay representations in literature and film disappeared during this time, though Allan Berube has suggested, in Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), that military paranoia about gay and lesbian soldiers actually helped solidify that identity in American culture. Likewise, increased mobility and urbanization led to the development of gay communities and organizations, such as the Mattachine Society, in the early 1950s.

The most important and visible gay writer of the midcentury was Allen Ginsberg. His epic poem Howl (1956) uses homosexuality as a catalyst for social protest and as a scathing critique of the reactionary politics of McCarthyite America. While the position of exile was troubling for Crane, Ginsberg and his fellow Beat writers embraced outsider status. In “Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg addresses Whitman directly, and also invokes the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca. Howl was involved in an obscenity trial, a landmark case in which the poem was found to have literary value. William S. Burroughs, one of Ginsberg’s fellow Beats, wrote disturbing portraits of gay sexuality and drug use in his novels Queer (written, 1952; published, 1985) and Naked Lunch (1959).

Many recognizable American writers of this period were gay, but their work does not necessarily contribute to an understanding of gay identity, except possibly through a reading of repression and denial in what they have written. Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote wrote highly coded works in which homosexuality is sometimes present. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) was published the same year as the Kinsey report on sexual behavior in the human male, which suggests in overt terms that American men had much more experience with gay sex than had previously been thought. Vidal’s novel, which ends tragically, is often thought of as the first openly gay novel published in America. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), a novel of anger and self-loathing, was published to hostile reviews. British expatriate and new American citizen Christopher Isherwood published The World in the Evening in 1954, which presents a gay couple and a bisexual protagonist and which is highly critical of the military’s antigay policy.

Other important gay writers to emerge in the 1960s include John Rechy, a gay Chicano writer whose City of Night (1963), Numbers (1967), and Sexual Outlaw (1977) portray the highly sexualized world of hustlers and dangerous sex; Richard Howard, a poet and translator whose relationship to the gay tradition of Wilde, Whitman, and Crane is central to his work and identity as a writer; Thom Gunn, a highly formal poet who embraces various forms of pleasure in a Whitmanesque way; John Ashberry, an expressionist poet concerned with the creative process and identity, for whom the body is a source of knowledge and absence; James Merrill, a master of poetic form who wrote autobiographical, epic poetry and who embraced his homosexuality as a source of creativity; and Robert Duncan, a highly erotic poet who publicly acknowledged his homosexuality in the periodical Politics in 1944 and called for honesty and strength in the face of homophobia.

Stonewall and After

The Stonewall Inn riots, which began on the evening of gay icon Judy Garland’s funeral in 1969, mark the beginning of the Gay Pride movement. Increased visibility and public activism reverberated in gay literature. Gay presses began to emerge, as did magazines catering to gay audiences. Important writers in the 1970s and early 1980s include Edmund White, Felice Picano, and Robert Ferro, who comprised the Violet Quill writers’ group in New York. Playwright Harvey Fierstein had critical and commercial success with his Torch Song Trilogy (1979) and La Cage aux folles (1983).

This boon in the decade after Stonewall was a time of great achievement. Writers such as Larry Kramer and Paul Monette began to emerge as important figures; their work, like the lives of most gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, became centered on AIDS, a pandemic that changed the face of gay identity in literature and culture as much as any other phenomenon.

The profile of gay literature rose with the founding in 1988 of the Lambda Literary Awards to recognize works of American literature with gay—and eventually, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT)—themes. The number of award categories has ballooned from fourteen to twenty-five as LGBT identity has become widely accepted in the twenty-first century, and LGBT literature has accordingly become a thriving and very broad category with numerous subgenres. André Aciman, John Boyne, Jericho Brown, Michael Cunningham, Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, and Ocean Vuong, are just a few of the gay writers who have won top awards and/or had their works adapted as feature films.

Bibliography

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Brill, Rebecca. "The Evolution of the Great Gay Novel: From Homer to Larry Kramer." Literary Hub, 26 June 2015, lithub.com/the-evolution-of-the-great-gay-novel/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2019.

Clum, John. Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

De León, Concepción. "20 Years of L.G.B.T.Q. Lit: A Timeline." The New York Times, 23 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/books/20-years-of-lgbtq-lit-a-timeline.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2019.

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