Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall

Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics

Les Brookes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415962445
• eBook ISBN: 9781135896508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The conflict between assimilationism and radicalism that has riven gay culture since Stonewall became highly visible in the 1990s with the emergence and challenge of queer theory and politics. The conflict predates Stonewall, however—indeed, Jonathan Dollimore describes it as "one of the most fundamental antagonisms within sexual dissidence over the past century." By focusing on fiction by Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham, Alan Hollinghurst, Dennis Cooper, Adam Mars-Jones and others, Brookes argues that gay fiction is torn between assimilative and radical impulses. He posits the existence of two distinct strands of gay fiction, but also aims to show the conflict as an internal one, a struggle in which opposing impulses are at work within individual texts. This book places post-Stonewall gay fiction in context by linking it to theoretical and historical developments since the late nineteenth century, and tracing the conflict back to the fiction of Wilde, Forster, Genet, Vidal, Burroughs and Isherwood. Other relevant topics discussed include gay fiction of the 1970s; gays and the family; sexual transgression; gay fiction and the AIDS epidemic.

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Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall

The Contextual Framework

In this opening chapter I want to take an extended look at the theoretical perspectives that underpin this study as a whole. But since these ideas are inextricably bound up with historical developments, history is also part of the framework examined here. Moreover, the chapter is interspersed with references to the fiction I shall be exploring in later chapters, so as to make clear the link between text and context, and not lose sight of my main focus. My discussion of theoretical and historical perspectives, in other words, is offered as context for the fiction. My starting point, given that focus, is of course Stonewall and the gay liberation theory that inspired and flowed from it. But gay liberation theory, as history shows, did not arrive from nowhere, and so I shall sometimes glance back at earlier ideas. This accords with my general thesis that the conflicts of gay male fiction since Stonewall have an ancestry stretching back to that period in the late nineteenth century when homosexuality first became conceptualized.

Gay liberation theory marks a change in the theorization of homosexuality in laying stress on the historical and social construction of identity. In this way it points to the future: to the refinements and later developments of social constructionist thinking in what is now called “queer theory.” Indeed, Jeffrey Weeks has recorded his frustration (and that of other writers on sexuality whose work dates back to the late 1960s) at the failure of queer theory to acknowledge its debt to the past. He writes of having “our early efforts at understanding sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, refracted back to us through post-Foucauldian abstractions” and raises an eyebrow at the celebrity status of certain queer theorists who “are not saying anything fundamentally different from what some of us have been trying to say for twenty-five years or so” (Making Sexual History 53). Weeks, in accord with other experts in the field, sees Mary McIntosh’s article “The Homosexual Role” (1968) as a founding document in the social constructionist theory of sexuality. However, it is Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) that is now seen as the cornerstone of that new body of theory that appeared as an accompaniment to the rise of the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s and as the distillation and central statement of gay liberation theory.

The central concern of Altman’s book, as the author acknowledges in his introduction, is “the question of identity” (19); and this, writes Jeffrey Weeks in his introduction to the book, “has been the central concern of all subsequent lesbian and gay literature and politics” (6). The first publication of the book therefore chimed with the politics of the emerging gay movement, especially in its emphasis on the act of “coming out” and on the assumption of a potentially salvific identity that must be publicly avowed. Identity, in this context, is not a private matter; it is bound up with the transformation of society. It must be stressed, however, that Altman’s notion of identity is not essentialist, even though he admits to some uncertainty about how a sense of identity is formed. As he states in his afterword to the 1993 reprinting of the book:

Without fully understanding what I was writing, I was in fact a social constructionist without knowing the term—the ideas which were to be developed over the next two decades by scholars such as Jeffrey Weeks, Michel Foucault, etc., about the ways in which a homosexual identity is a particular historical construction are present in a not very clearly formulated way in my book. (253)

Thus the radicalism of Altman’s book both reflects the revolutionary potential of the early gay liberation movement and looks forward to the elaborations of social constructionist thinking that have emerged in postmodern discourses.¹

That revolutionary potential, however, soon gave way to an ethnic model of identity and politics that was predominantly white, middle-class, and male, and founded on notions of supposedly essential sexual categories. “As a movement committed to liberating humanity from the mutually exclusive and limiting roles of the heterosexual/homosexual and the feminine/masculine,” writes Steven Seidman, “gay liberation came to an end by the mid-1970s” (“Identity and Politics” 117). Indeed, as Seidman goes on to imply, the extensions of social constructionist thinking currently known as queer theory are in part a reaction to this ethnic model. Altman connects with queer theory because, although, as he avows, he is much concerned with the question of identity, his notion of identity is not the ethnic one—or at least not finally, since, again like queer theory, he is more interested in questions than answers. It is therefore a gross misrepresentation of gay liberation theory (on the evidence of this book and other defining documents) to dismiss its underlying assumptions as crudely essentialist.² Certainly Altman promotes identity, but as a political rather than essentialist concept. The implication of his argument is that, for the transformation of society he desires to occur, lesbian and gay identities must first be constructed before they can be deconstructed. In other words, as Jeffrey Weeks puts it: “Such identities are … necessary fictions” (Making Sexual History 84).

The radical and socially transformative thrust of Altman’s argument throughout the book is signaled early in the text. Thus, in his introduction, he writes: “The question [of identity] touches us all, for human liberation rests on our ability to liberate that part of ourselves that we have repressed. We all need to come out of our particular closets” (19). Homosexual liberation is therefore everyone’s liberation, he implies, since each individual has a range of sexual responses much wider than concepts of sexual normality allow.³ Although he confesses to confusion in his own mind as to how “we develop our various patterns of sexual response,” he suspects that there is some truth in the claim that the adoption of homosexuality is in part an act of (perhaps unconscious) rebellion and involves “at least sometimes an element of deliberate choice” (25). This accords with his rejection of the notion that homosexual behavior is the result of inborn difference. Although generous enough to empathize with Radclyffe Hall’s sense of natural outsidership as expressed in The Well of Loneliness, he opposes her essentialist position by firmly stating his belief that “the homosexual sensibility is entirely a product of social pressures” (46).

The final and controversial implications of Altman’s position emerge in the conclusion to his book, which envisages “the end of the homosexual.” In a transformed society, he argues, there will be no need for minorities; the homo–hetero distinction will wither and a “new human” will flourish, undivided and “able to accept the multifaceted and varied nature of his or her sexual identity” (241). Here, then, Altman’s anticipation of theory pursued in contemporary queer/postmodern discourses becomes obvious and astonishing. It is important to distinguish this disappearance of the homosexual, however, from the disappearance envisaged in the preliberation theory of what is now known as the homophile movement—or, in other words, in the mainstream homosexual thought of those organizations that fought for social and political reform in the years before Stonewall.⁴ The primary objective of the homophile movement was social assimilation. It did not, in general, celebrate difference. Hence, in this scenario, the disappearance of the homosexual amounts to self-erasure: to absorption into the current dominant heterosexual order and ideology. The disappearance of the homosexual envisaged by Altman, on the other hand, is clearly very different. What Altman envisages, strictly speaking, is not the end of the homosexual, but rather the end of the ideology within which the concept of “the homosexual” has been engendered: not self-effacement, but self-realization within a new economy.

Nevertheless, as we might expect, most people who identify as lesbian or gay feel a sense of resistance to Altman’s unsettling vision of “the end of the homosexual.” As Ken Plummer puts it: “[His] curious recognition … that a true liberation would also dissolve the very object of liberation … is the paradox of gay liberation” (“Speaking Its Name” 7). Of course, the same paradox also haunts queer theory. Indeed, this is the measure of Altman’s closeness to postmodern ways of thinking. Moreover, the attempt by queer theorists to dissolve and reconceptualize categories of identification has, accordingly, aroused similar opposition. Thus Leo Bersani devotes a whole chapter of his book Homos (1995) to what he calls “the gay absence,” and, in a passage that later alludes to the conclusion of Altman’s book, writes: “Never before in the history of minority groups struggling for recognition and equal treatment has there been an analogous attempt, on the part of any such group, to make itself unidentifiable even as it demands to be recognized” (31–32). In Bersani’s analysis of the queer debate, there is a subtle recognition of the complexities of the argument. Even so, for him, it is “not possible to be gay-affirmative … if gayness has no specificity” (61). The tensions surrounding this paradox are thus a constant, underlying presence throughout this study and surface at particular moments in discussion of both theoretical and fictional writing. I return to Bersani, for instance, at a later point in this chapter and again in Chapter 5.

As for the fiction I discuss in my core chapters, there is a clear divide between those novels that focus on gayness as a distinct identity and those that minimize its specificity. Thus, Dancer from the Dance and The Swimming-Pool Library are, we might say, ghetto novels: their prime focus of attention is the gay subculture. If Holleran and Hollinghurst are ambivalent in their attitude to this culture, they nonetheless show a strong sense of identification with it, as well as an urge to record its particularity, its distinctive “feel.” They write primarily for a gay readership, and they make the sexuality of their characters central, as if to lay stress on this as the core feature of their identity. In contrast, Leavitt and Cunningham, in The Lost Language of Cranes and A Home at the End of the World, make only passing reference to the gay subculture. Instead, they examine the lives of a mixture of gay and straight characters, whose experiences are presented as similar, rather than special or unique. These writers, in other words, make themselves available to a wide readership by framing their gay characters in such a way as to weaken the specificity of their sexuality.

Altman, meanwhile, anticipates queer/postmodern debates and the issues of contemporary lesbian and gay culture and politics in other ways. Thus he recognizes the challenge of difference (especially between men and women, and people of different racial and ethnic groups) and highlights the problem in several substantial passages of his book. “The great dilemma that faces the movement,” he writes, “is the difficulty of reconciling the individual development of a consciousness among oppressed groups with the task of building a coalition between them” (199). The subsequent history of the movement underlines the perceptiveness of this remark, for in the mid-1970s, with the formation of independent movements, lesbians and gay men effectively parted company, the tensions between and within certain groups evolving into full-blown separatism.⁵ Race, too, has been a major issue since the early 1980s, with powerful protests from lesbians and gay men of color about black invisibility in gay public life.

In a sense, the challenge of difference, as Altman implies, leaves the movement again grappling with the paradox of liberation. Liberation, as conceived by Altman and later developers of social constructionist theory, is predicated on the erosion of the very distinctions of identity of the group to be liberated. Altman, representing the radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front as against the conservatism of the Gay Activists’ Alliance, is opposed to the concept of “community” as envisaged by the homophile movement, which he sees as indicative of an inward-looking ghetto mentality. Transforming “the pseudo-community of the old gayworld into a sense of real community” (140) means reaching out not only to other oppressed groups in society but to society as a whole, since acceptance of homosexuality will help people “move closer to an acceptance of their intrinsic erotic and polymorphous natures … [and thus] ease relations between men and women” (244). If Altman pulls back from this utopianism in his afterword to the 1993 printing of his book (understandably, given the disappointments, the setbacks, the personal and community tragedies of the intervening decades), in the original text he pursues it with a generous and heartwarming lack of apology. Yet, with or without utopianism, the paradox remains: what happens to a movement with irreconcilable aims—with a desire on the one hand to recognize difference, and on the other to eradicate it?

The tensions of these opposed impulses are reflected in gay fiction generally, but surface perhaps most clearly, with regard to the literature examined in this study, in some well-known gay novels of the seventies. Thus, in Forgetting Elena, Dancer from the Dance, and Faggots, a fascination with gay identity and community collides with an impatient, sickened, and sometimes savage hostility to it. Similarly, elsewhere in gay fiction, a sense of singularity struggles with a sense of group identity. In other words, an assertion of difference, of independence, from the group (whether the gay or wider community) contends with a need to claim identification with it. In The Family of Max Desir, for instance, the struggle is enacted in the apparent irreconcilability of the novel’s two contrasted modes of writing—the mundane realism of the family story as against the gothic fantasy of Max’s personal narrative; and although Ferro attempts to heal the breach in his final chapter, the degree of his success here is open to question. In some gay fiction the tension is signaled in the total assertion of singularity and absolute denial of group identity. This line of fiction runs from Our Lady of the Flowers, through Naked Lunch, to Frisk.

Altman’s book, informed by a Marxist Freudianism and inspired by the countercultures of the late 1960s, should also be seen as a precursor of more recent attempts to bring psychoanalysis and Freudian insight into the service of queer and antihomophobic discourse. As both text and afterword make clear, two of its strongest influences are Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, writers whose work has gone out of fashion. Indeed, as Jeffrey Weeks points out, Altman’s own Freudianism was unfashionable in 1971, when the book first appeared in print. In the United States at this time, feminist and gay political voices were being raised against the backdrop of an Americanized school of Freud, which focused on “ego psychology” and “adaptation to social reality” (Fletcher, “Freud and His Uses” 90). Speaking often from bitter personal experience of conformist therapeutic practice, these voices drew attention to “the obvious role played by American Freud in the elaboration of a reactionary sexual ideology both in specialist psychiatric institutions and practices and in the wider culture” (90).⁶ More recently, however, there has been attempt to recover Freud for radical sexual politics. Thus, following Juliet Mitchell’s attempt in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) to open up new feminist perspectives on the Freudian tradition and promote it as a useful tool in the analysis of gender and sexuality, a number of critics in similar fashion have begun to reframe the Freudian input to an understanding of homosexuality and to argue for its positive contribution.⁷

Altman’s view of sexuality is thus in broad alignment with that of the radical psychoanalytic tradition and of contemporary queer theory. The essence of this view is its questioning of the idea that we are all unified sexual beings with a fixed sexual identity. This notion is deep-seated. Constituted by ideology, naturalized through cultural reinforcement, and installed at the heart of the homophile movement, it has become still further entrenched through the ethnic model of identity that has characterized lesbian and gay politics since the mid-1970s. Altman, following Brown and Marcuse, questions the fixity and unity of sexual identity by focusing on Freud’s belief in “the essentially polymorphous and bisexual needs of the human being” (84). He puts emphasis on the way that Freud’s theorization of the unconscious challenges the notion of subjectivity and sexual identity as stable and coherent. Hence, in his pursuit of the Freudian implications, he sees, like Freud, that our basic bisexual nature and polymorphous perversity is fundamentally at odds with our social identity: that beneath our fragile sense of wholeness lurks the danger of our unconscious desires. But if our original sex drive has been repressed, what accounts for this repression? Altman, in addressing this question, offers the need to procreate and the establishment of patriarchal society as primary explanations; but his Marxist-Freudian analysis also leads him to link the process to theories of economic development. He acknowledges, of course, that sexual repression and patriarchy exist in societies that are in no sense capitalist. “Nevertheless,” he writes, “it is undoubtedly true that sexual repression was to prove hi...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall
• 2 Divergent Lines of Dissent
• 3 “The Potency, Magnetism, and Promise of Gay Self-Disclosure”
• 4 Centripetal Tendencies
• 5 The Gay Outlaw
• 6 The AIDS Epidemic
• Coda
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index