Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture

Bad Beatitudes

David Deutsch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350198975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Allen Ginsberg's 'angel-headed hipsters' to angelic outlaws in Essex Hemphill's Conditions, angelic imagery is pervasive in queer American art and culture. This book examines how the period after 1945 expanded a unique mixture of sacred and profane angelic imagery in American literature and culture to fashion queer characters, primarily gay men, as embodiments of 'bad beatitudes'.
Deutsch explores how authors across diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, including John Rechy, Richard Bruce Nugent, Allen Ginsberg, and Rabih Alameddine, sought to find the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. Exploring how these writers used the trope of angelic outlaws to celebrate men who rebelled wilfully and nobly against religious, medical, legal and social repression in American society, this book sheds new light on dissent and queer identities in postmodern American literature.

1

John Rechy’s Angelic Outlaws: Surviving the Desire for Salvation

In a heightened scene in Millennium Approaches, Tony Kushner’s misguided Louis claims that “there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political,” only human interactions (2014: 96). Louis, as it turns out, is wrong. In Kushner’s play, angels are in America and they are militantly conservative, denouncing migration, invention, and minority equity, including for people of color and with HIV/AIDS. Louis is also wrong, if more metacritically so, as US literature is rife with angels, specifically with angelic outlaws who challenge any such conservative stasis by advocating for the progressive economic, social, and queer politics that Kushner himself champions in his humanist heroes Prior Walter and Belize. Kushner’s dramatic representation of an angelic stasis thus counterpoints a notable trend of post-1945 US literature, one that manifests an overtly forward-looking and leftist sociopolitical angelic agenda. One influential example is Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), wherein “angelheaded hipsters” seek human connections that challenge conservative middle-class family ideals (2007: 134). These angelic hipsters achieve this by getting “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,” as they “screamed” not with pain but “with joy,” acquiring cross-class, gender nonconforming, and nonreproductive pleasures for free (136). Ginsberg’s queer angelic contexts evoke healthy beneficial communions linked not to straight-laced conventions but to a more openly inclusive American sexual culture. Presenting two poles of a metaphoric spectrum, Kushner’s angels, which offer a conservative reimagining of Walter Benjamin’s backward-looking “angel of history,” represent elite conformists pushing for a hierarchical stasis, while Ginsberg’s angels embody ecstatic advocates for the sanctification of diverse queer individuals (1968: 257).

Ginsberg and Kushner help both to illuminate and to bookend the largely overlooked queer trope that I discussed in this book’s introduction: namely, the rise of queer angels’ associations with left-leaning spiritual, sexual, racial, and socioeconomic politics in the 1950s and the evolution of these figures as a means to consider the trauma of HIV/AIDS in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As quasi-divine figures fashioned in often beautiful human forms, angels represent most clearly a blurring bridge between divinity and humanity. In doing so, they refigure the often degrading identifier “fairy,” and, thanks to John Milton and William Blake, they come with a venerable literary tradition that messily encompasses both collaborators with and rebels against divine and secular repressions.¹ In US literature of this period, authors often expanded such a unique mixture of sacred and profane angelic imagery, with its quasi-inclusive, quasi-salvific associations, to fashion certain queer characters, primarily gay men, as embodiments of what I call bad beatitudes. By “bad beatitudes,” I mean states-of-being that embody an unconventional grace obtained through engaging and reconceptualizing conventionally degrading behaviors or identities, such as same-sex sex or nonconformist genders. Same-sex sex, for instance, could spark a sense of degradation as well as a noble, transcendent, and lasting pleasure only achievable for a queer man with another queer man. This behavior then creates a hybrid state-of-being in which the conventionally profane signals the unconventionally sacred and the conventionally sacred signals the unconventionally profane, with both inverted concepts held in tension in the minds of the participants and of their subculture. While in subsequent chapters I discuss this trope in works by Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, followed by a closer look at Ginsberg, and then Rabih Alameddine, I want to start with a discussion of John Rechy. While chronologically, Rechy fits somewhere between all these writers, his influential conception of an “Outlaw Sensibility” (1991) and its earlier manifestations in his first novel City of Night (1963) provide a fine framework for understanding the proliferation of queer angels in their conservative and their rebellious embodiments in US literature from the second half of the twentieth century.

Rechy is also a useful case study because, like Ginsberg and Kushner, he not only valuably queers past literary traditions regarding sacred and secular virtues but his writing can also inform current critiques of queer communities across the United States. While scholars such as John Howard and Scott Herring have advanced studies in rural US queer cultures, contemporary critics continue to build on early investigations into the varieties of post–Second World War queer urbanities and their relationship to normative cultures, from Martin Levine’s elucidation of macho “clones” to Marlon Bailey’s investigation of queer black balls to Jack Halberstam’s investigations into butch and trans subjectivities. These communities and their skirmishes with normative societies can all find some resonance with those that Rechy reimagines in an “Outlaw Sensibility” and in City of Night. Indeed, scholars have long emphasized the ways in which Rechy portrays such diverse queer subcultures interacting with each other and with the larger heteronormative urban world. Steven Ruszczycky, for instance, has highlighted how Rechy depicts a “racially mixed conglomerate of drag queens, dykes, gay men, runaways, hustlers, and scores,” all persecuted by homophobic police, to emphasize the ethical problems inherent in queer “subcultures of leather and kinky sex” that perversely fetishize such repressive authorities (2014: 232). Ruszczycky usefully extends early critiques of how Rechy fashioned queer communities into a metaphor for American neuroses writ large. Fifty years prior, for example, Stanton Hoffman argued that in City of Night the “‘gay world’ and all its parts,” such as “queens” and patrons of any given “queer bar,” “overwhelm not only the possibility of any relationship implying [individual] human involvement” but also serve “as a metaphor for a destructive and despair ridden American reality.” Painting with too broad a brush, Hoffman argues that the “America” of Rechy’s first novel presents “the possibility of a vast hell always defining a smaller and intense personal hell” (1964: 195–6). While this argument may hold true for passages, to understand Rechy’s complex interest in tyrannical forms of secular and religious, external and internal repressions, we must also notice how he fashions noble rebels who defy such historical constraints and who angelically bring out heavenly virtues even in unjustly hellish US circumstances. These figures are Rechy’s angelic outlaws and he uses them to signal a particular version of the larger cultural manifestations that I have been calling bad beatitudes.

The Bad Beatitudes of Angelic Outlaws in “The Outlaw Sensibility” and City of Night

In “The Outlaw Sensibility,” Rechy critically considers how two key figures in his writing from City of Night onward, angels and outlaws, can signal the profane sublimity of queer rebels who consciously reject religious, social, and political repressions. In an inverted Miltonic vein, Lucifer and his angels serve as Rechy’s first examples of heroically admirable outlaws.² “Were Lucifer and his band of angels,” Rechy wonders, “the first questioning outlaws, defying autocracy and the decreed singing of assigned hymns?” (2004: 150). The “outlaw sensibility” that Rechy describes via Lucifer first questions and then resists absolutism as well as any imposed artistic expressions that might buttress the spiritual, social, and political repressions of a despot. Additionally, Lucifer signals Rechy’s sense that any true outlaw must consciously and proudly choose to resist tyranny: “Defiance, pride, choice to remain estranged, an acceptance of risks, a constant questioning of limiting assumptions” are vital to any self-determining outlaw. While this sensibility risks confusing an outlaw with a mundane “criminal,” Rechy argues that one must consider any broad imputation of criminality or sacrilege in light of “limiting” or unjust statutes. This is especially so considering that Rechy’s outlaw sensibility insists on a “nobility of intention, respect for the individual life, and, in the artist as outlaw, a dedication to unique creativity” (151). Rather than breaking laws for financial gain or rebelling without a cause, much less due to an innate immorality, Rechy’s outlaw represents a culturally contested and yet graciously determined morality founded upon a combination of tolerance for individual self-fashioning and for uncensored creative efforts. As such, if from a conventional perspective Rechy’s outlaws appear to be degenerate criminals, with this metaphorical use of religious terminology they become unexpectedly angelic. They become analogous to those whom Rechy labels “beatas,” people proximate to the “glamorous … angels,” who exist on the “peripheries” of Hispanic Catholicism and evoke not dogma but the mysterious “wonder” of the world, of an exalted material life (156, 157).

Usefully, this blurring of boundaries, which risks confusing a principled outlaw with a common criminal, and an angelic beata, signals how Rechy capitalizes on the instability of cultural conceptions of morality and legality or sacredness and profaneness to promote a respect for human diversity. Thus while certain outlaws’ “nobility of intention, respect for the individual life,” and “dedication to unique creativity” are socially lauded and at times even sacred virtues, outlaws can leverage these virtues to question and to reject “laws” that are “wrong” or “repressive” of individual life and innovation. To rebel against immoral laws, these outlaws often employ subversive tactics such as “infiltration,” “sabotage,” and “camouflage.” While these tactics risk veering into what Rechy calls “collaboration” with authoritarianism, they also enable outlaws to reveal contradictions or conflicts in accepted religious and civic ideals, particularly when such ideals as morality and immorality or freedom and oppression are taken to an extreme, as in the contexts of heaven and hell (2004: 151). Lucifer’s rebellion, for instance, infiltrates religious aesthetic traditions as he uses his role as a chief angel in God’s chorus to promote liberty and as in doing so he becomes an epic liberal hero who evidences and then challenges God’s autocracy and his divine repression of alternative art forms, creating his own version of heaven in hell. Lucifer’s and his angels’ decisive, noble resistances initially sabotage heaven via camouflage as these rebels use their beauty, their theological reasoning, and their liberal individualism to blur sacrilege and virtue until they overtly reject God. These angelic outlaws serve Rechy well because they evoke contradictory or paradoxical images of gorgeous, blessed beings rebelling against an unjust and selfish authority by appropriating merits it reserved for itself, such as power, self-determination, and creative independence. Rechy uses such subversive angelic outlaws across his writing to reconceptualize superficially monolithic and discrete notions of morality and immorality, of beauty and ugliness, of satisfaction and suffering, of community and alienation, of power and impotence, and of salvation and degradation, particularly in the context of allegedly profane and nominally criminal queer rebellions against sexual and gender norms.

Indeed, to characterize more abstract outlaw rebellions in twentieth-century contexts, Rechy connects them to queer and to Hispanic minorities, which he argues have drawn productively on contradictory or blurred conceptions of virtue and vice. Rechy refers to a “gay sensibility” and a “Hispanic sensibility” partly because he was “personally familiar” with them, but also because they inform his conception of an admirable “outlaw” (2004: 155).³ These sensibilities manifest an analogously rebellious hybridity, one evidenced by iconic images that sustain cultural tensions, sometimes “reconciled” and sometimes not. Such a hybridity comes to the fore in the prominent combination of “muscles and mascara,” pointed signs of masculinity and femininity in the queer community, or in Hispanic Catholic churches’ images of “blood-drenched statues of saints writhing in exhibitionistic agony, bodies stripped only when they’re suffering,” a mixture of anguish and eroticism, which “glamorous … angels” watched over, a convergence of tropes that merges and holds separate glamour and degradation (155, 156). Masculinity and femininity, sanctity and profanity, mortification and elevation held in tension, courting and resisting synthesis, all generate the hybridity of outlaws, especially those angelically queer outlaws who for much of the twentieth century defied simplistic binaries of sex and gender and engaged in diverse sexual practices that brought agony and ecstasy along with connection and exile due to their noble violations of repressive religious beliefs and secular regulations.

“The Outlaw Sensibility” usefully clarifies and reaffirms Rechy’s earlier fictional analysis of such an outlaw hybridity in City of Night, wherein he depicts same-sex desiring and gender-nonconforming hustlers as angelic outlaws, tortuously alienated from salvific, civic, and social rituals. The narrator of City of Night, a queer hustler, serves as an especially poignant outlaw because he represents what Rafael Pérez-Torres refers to as a “doubly marginalized position,” an echo of Rechy’s phrase “dual outsiders,” for he engages with the margins of and yet remains alienated from the center of both hetero- and homo-normativity, for instance, queer circles that seek relationships based on middle-class straight ideals (Rechy 1989: 157; Pérez-Torres 1994: 209). This very marginality, though, inspires the heroic element of Rechy’s characters, who illustrate what Zamora has called Rechy’s “motif of non serviam,” such as the narrator’s refusal to conform to religious or social repressions, despite their attractive safety, due to “his commitment—heroic in its dimensions in view of the odds arrayed against the possibility of its realization—to life in its fullness as that-which-ought-to-be” in a world attenuated by death and decay (1979: 57). More seekers of new moralities and new freedoms than sinners or criminals, Rechy’s queer outlaws, predominantly men, enact a self-affirming transcendence through their flaws and through wounds acquired during their willful, often proud exile from an unjust society. By depicting these men in angelic contexts, Rechy works to reevaluate these characters’ supposedly degraded pleasures by appropriating for them the exalted symbolism of the absolutist tyrannies that these communities chose to rebel against for denying their individual desires. Rechy thereby formulates angelic outlaws into manifestations of bad beatitudes as these characters acquire an unconventional grace through reimagining ostensibly profane or nominally sinful actions as sanctifying while revealing queer-phobic laws to be immorally repressive.

Angelic outlaws situated throughout City also offer a substantive structuring motif that Rechy uses to critique and to valorize a multitude of queer characters as they veer between self-destructively collaborating with and more heroically rebelling against repressions of counterculture identities. Collaborating, for instance, with even a loosely Catholic notion of divine salvation too often brings disappointment. For, as Rechy has suggested elsewhere, “[w]hen we pull away from religion,” rejecting too tyrannically limiting creeds, we discover that there is “no substitute for salvation,” no precise replacement for the stable completeness of a sacred elevation into a heavenly community however ultimately dehumanizing (qtd. in Rechy 2003: 42). Rechy uses angelic figures in City to critique how inadvertently collaborationist queer characters too facilely transfer the idealism of a divine salvation to injuriously intoxicating fantasies of perpetual youthfulness, economic power, drugs and drink, or purgatorial sadomasochistic encounters, which can only briefly redeem one from isolation and loneliness. These substitutes never pan out because the characters’ conception of idealism stems from either a despotic divine inertia that destroys the living individual that it promises to save or from the fantasy of an impossibly perfect fulfilment of egotistic desires, which proves unsustainable. Moving beyond conceptions of a stable divine salvation allows for a more earthly self-determination, including new communities and enjoyments of queer sexual pleasures and nonconforming gender identities.

As such, if there is no strict substitute for divine salvation, a radical revision of its imagery can conceptualize a more humanistic, more individualistic consolation or even aspiration. In response to critics of Rechy’s “sensational” countercultural themes, Ben Satterfield once argued that “Rechy is a moralist” who reveals “the absolute necessity of love in a world without [divine] redemption, a world of franticness and death” (1982: 79). I agree, but to take Satterfield’s argument one step further, Rechy in fact uses a sensational queerness to highlight how human desires can manifest a new form of redemption, one that makes the world less self-destructive and more vital. For if angelic associations can misleadingly camouflage self-destructive intoxications as a heavenly “salvation,” when this seduction proves tragically compromised outlaws can use angelic characterizations, replete with their images of human bodies in glorified contexts, as a critical symbolism that can be levered to break off morality or glory from divinity in order to attach them to more individualistic validations of human beauty, of same-sex encounters, and of queer genders. If these virtues risk inspiring self-destructive excesses, for instance, a healthy love of male beauty degraded into an obsession with fading youth, these queer angelic characterizations can still inspire nobler rebellions that stimulate a self-love and a love of others. Even Rechy’s tragic queer characters exemplify how seeking an impossibly perfect fulfilment of egotistic desires or turning from more affirmative validations of queer lives inevitably undermines actually achievable, more pragmatically partial fulfillments or redemptions of the value of marginalized human lives. Rechy uses his most successful angelic queer outlaws then to celebrate inevitably yet usefully imperfect hopes for peace, community, and happiness.

Angelic Outlaws in City of Night

In the prologue to Part One of City of Night, Rechy quickly introduces his first angelic figures as emasculated embodiments of a static and failed religious ideal. Rechy has his unnamed narrator recall a cabinet in his family home in El Paso that his mother had kept since his childhood and that contains “figurines of angels, Virgins,” and “dolls.” Reflecting on that cabinet, the narrator notes, he recalls his mother as “a ghost image that will haunt” him perpetually (2013: 21). This memory evokes a recurrent tepid echo of an immemorial Catholic beatitude, a ghostly enervation of the epic stature of the “glamorous … angels” presiding over torture and ecstasy that Rechy himself remembered from Hispanic Catholic churches. In the novel, the figurines sit impotently closed off from a small domestic world in a container that resembles a reliquary or even a prison. The “Virgins” imprisoned with the angels indicate a willful naiveté regarding sexuality, while the “dolls” evoke a juvenile context that merges sacred objects with the half-remembered toys of a loved but aging, superstitious guardian. These figurines unintentionally undermine religious seriousness and authority.

This memory likewise connects these angels to the narrator’s mother, herself a representative of imperfect religious nurturing as she could never quite protect her son from his father’s sexual abuse and violence. The narrator’s father would occasionally “fondle” the young boy and allow his timeworn friends to do so too (2013: 21–2). The father would also grow violent, as when he forced his children to help set up a Christmas nativity scene complete with its “angels on angelhair clouds” until someone made a mistake and the arrangement fell apart and the father would fall into a “rage” throwing tools and shouting (22). The mother retaining these angel figurines at home highlights the ineffectual, antiquated religious ideals of gender hierarchies and parental authority, which actually hinder the religious older generation’s ability to safeguard or to guide its children sufficiently. Indeed, Rechy has lamented how the Catholic Church had held his own mother a “prisoner” and had “stifled” her creativity and any will “to get out of [her] marriage” to his father. This stifling, Rechy suggests, connected to church officials’ “hypocritical attitudes toward sexuality,” which provide “the major cause for sexual repression,” particularly “feelings of antihomosexuality” (Casillo 2002: 53). This context for the novel’s angelic figurines highlights the repressions that will cause the narrator in City to revolt by reimagining the religious imagery that haunted him from his childhood.

Throughout the novel, the narrator’s conjoined recollections of angels and of his mother offer a comfortingly familiar yet repressive ideology, one that “haunt[s]” him even as he reimagines it to validate his own same-sex desires. As such, Rechy shapes a nameless narrator who, despite drawing on his Catholic Hispanic heritage and the marginalized queer contexts of his time, represents an “everyman” reflective of many queer individuals’, really many individuals’ desire to be desired combined with fears of vulnerability due to loving someone else. Rechy reinforces this tension with the narrator repeatedly longing for and yet rejecting images of his mother resting near her cabinet with the “angel figures… ” as she hopes to repossess her son (2013: 166). Rechy’s use of ellipses evokes an unsuccessful reclamation by this mother’s fierce but inevitably imperfect love, itself a “ghost image” of the failed perfection of a divine maternal love, akin to a mater dolorosa, whose angelic entourage remains feebly enclosed behind her. The narrator rejects these maternal and divine authorities, in part because of their stagnancy and failed promises, such as for protection and a convincing route to salvation, and in part because they implicitly stifle his same-sex desires and his career as a male hustler. The narrator’s hustling career provides him with an enjoyable freedom for exploration and for self-fashioning. He repeatedly leaves home to search for the self-determination to make the most of his youth through sexual encounters and to find “some substitute for salvation,” some salvation that seems actually achievable and worthwhile (28). The narrator’s repeated recollections nonetheless emphasize a troubling longing for these domesticated Catholic angelic contexts, ...