Another Country

Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780814737194
• eBook ISBN: 9780814773079
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines—art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies—he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.
Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes’s obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can—and should—get to another country.

1
Autobiographies of the Ex-Urban Queer

Metropolitan life has never satisfied her, blunted her impatience with its more cheap and intrusive aspects.

—Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant on Willa Cather, 1940

I am so tired. Maybe it is my health, but I suspect it is more from hearing so often, “I must go to Berlin, or Rome, or Vienna, or Florence, or the East, or the South Seas. I know there must be something there for me.” I so often wished at hearing them that some would, or all would, go to hell.

—Charles Demuth, 1921

New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.

—James Weldon Johnson, 1912

Modernist Metronormativity

If Willa Cather, Charles Demuth, or James Weldon Johnson ever show up on a walking tour of lesbian and gay New York, know you’re being led down a blind alley. Recent promotions by lesbian and gay historical tour companies notwithstanding, none of these artists wholeheartedly endorsed the city’s pre-Stonewall queer urbanisms. They did, however, share two traits that probably won’t receive mention in a contemporary walking guide—geographic proximity to modern urbanized lesbians and gays that fast became geographic misgiving with regard to modern lesbian and gay urbanization.

Each of these New York–based artists orbited bohemian cultures that facilitated the flourishing of lesbian and gay group identities across the early twentieth-century United States. After moving from Virginia to Nebraska to Pittsburgh to New York, Cather occupied a series of Greenwich Village apartments for more than two decades. Moving from his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth occupied a studio apartment on Washington Square South in 1915 and became a habitué of Village clubs until the early 1920s. Moving from Jacksonville, Florida, to New York’s Tenderloin in 1899, Johnson settled in this black bohemian district in 1902 and documented its queer nightlife in his anonymously published 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.¹ But despite their proximity to (and their on-again, off-again participation in) these formative spaces, all three intuited the exclusions, the foreclosures, and the normalizations that this gradual shift toward queer urbanization entailed. As my epigraphs collectively note, all three grew disenchanted with the promise of what was to become lesbian and gay New York. In the face of myriad differences across race, class, and gender, Cather, Demuth, and Johnson were the first of many U.S.-based artists to dispel early idealizations of what later queer scholars would come to call metronormativity.

I know it may seem strange to consider versions of metronormativity in the first three decades of the twentieth century since the term often seems bound to what Lisa Duggan deems the “new homonormativity” of turnof-the-twenty-first-century queer politics.² For Duggan, the political operations of this “new homonormativity” recast an older model advanced by mainly bourgeois “homophile movement organizations” of the 1950s and 1960s such as the Mattachine Society, ONE Inc, and their publications.³ Such homonormativities, we’ll see, would continue to gestate in the post-Stonewall print cultures of the 1970s that the next chapter details. For now, it makes just as much sense to push close critiques of U.S. metronormativity back even further to lesbian and gay group identity’s historical emergence in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, given that the historical constructions of these group identities and the historical constructions of normalizing queer urbanities often went hand in hand. Indeed, many narratives of late modern queer urbanity continue to rely on these earlier formations as they conjure a sense of continuity and historical inevitability that helps glue “metropolitan” to “queer” across the decades. Hence Didier Eribon’s whimsical contention that “from at least the beginning of the century, even from the end of the nineteenth century, certain cities such as New York, Paris, or Berlin had reputations that attracted waves of ‘refugees’ from a wide area, even from abroad, refugees who thereby helped to consolidate the reason for their coming: the existence of a ‘gay world’ that they joined and to which they brought the enthusiasm that characterizes new arrivals.”⁴

We have only to return to Judith Halberstam and a few historians to get a critical sense of this “enthusiasm” for the urban gay world. After Halberstam outlines her definition of metronormativity—a dominant “story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town,’” “a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicion, persecution, and secrecy”—she later notes that this commitment to urbanity was a fairly modernist idea: “Just a quick glance at some of the most influential high-culture texts of queer urban life would reveal guidebooks to Oscar Wilde’s London, Jean Genet’s [and Proust’s] Paris, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, E. M. Forster’s Florence, Thomas Mann’s Venice, Edmund White’s New York.”⁵ To this international maledominated list I might name-drop other pre-Stonewall tour guides such as Richard Bruce Nugent’s New York, Ralph Werther’s New York, Carl Van Vechten’s New York, Charles Henri Ford’s New York, Parker Tyler’s New York, Gore Vidal’s New York, and Frank O’Hara’s New York.

This cast of thousands is, admittedly, a massive conflation that spans eight and a half decades of literary history. But that Halberstam singles out early twentieth-century male modernists like Isherwood, Forster, and Mann as her primary exemplars of an emergent metronormativity should come as no surprise, especially for those of us who do American-based literary and cultural studies. John D’Emilio, for one, has charted how shifts in U.S. capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century “made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on a sexual identity” that implicitly proselytized flights to major (and minor) U.S. cities before and after the Second World War.⁶ And in his overview of New York City’s early-century sexual cultures, historian George Chauncey has revealed that many modern-identified urban queer males were metronormative by default. Chauncey insists that the city’s “gay world” was an “urban phenomenon” (131) dominated largely by bourgeois gay (white) men who “created a place in middle-class culture by constructing a persona of highly mannered—and ambiguous—sophistication” (106).⁷ Promoted across and along racial lines, these stylistic sophistications were matched by aestheticized habitus of knowingness, irony, camp, “Anglophilia” (106), “decorum in their dress and style” (105), and “reverence of the elegance and wit attributed to the English gentry” (106). Advanced by U.S. capitalism, they made possible a certain recognizable version of urbanized male homosexuality, a representation of the “gay male” as both a marginalized sexual identity and as a resistant subculture that was disseminated nationally and internationally through word-of-mouth, silent film, performance, painting, photography, and, especially, medico-legal and literary texts.

To be more specific, I should emphasize a certain dominant version. There is no doubt that such stylistics function as what Chauncey, following political theorist James Scott, terms “tactics of the weak,” or collective strategies for negotiating the developing heteronormativities and homophobias of this period (5). But these modern stylistics also incorporated much of the cosmopolitanism, the fashionability, the sophistication, and the knowingness that constitute a main artery of many queer urbanist impulses past and present. In a comment that recalls Esther Newton’s contention that “to talk about homosexual style, it is necessary to bear in mind the broad distinctions among lower-, middle-, and upper-status homosexuals,”⁸ Chauncey notes that middle-class gay male stylistics came at a steep cultural price, what he terms a “class antagonism” toward working-class fairies (106); a “distaste for the fairy’s style of self-presentation” (106); and an emphasis on “the prosperous sections of Harlem and Times Square” (106). To this pervasive class bias, I would throw in a geographic bias as well: an aesthetic intolerance for the non-urbane and a commitment to cosmopolitanism that disdained regionalized or ruralized spaces as culturally inferior even as they may have been vaulted into a pastoral. Reproduced and disseminated via modernist visual cultures and “influential high-culture [literary] texts,” such privileged subcultural stylistics fostered what could be called a “modernist metronormavity” that complemented other international productions (like À la recherche du temps perdu or “The Beast in the Jungle” or Death in Venice or A Room with a View) to internally police and to socially normalize queers into urbane social geographies throughout the early twentieth century.⁹

Women were certainly not excluded from this mix, and some of the same can be said for urbanized white middle-class lesbians at this time. When she cites her list of male modernists, Halberstam also presents a complementary international catalogue of “Euro-American lesbian writers like Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and Gertrude Stein,” noting their emphasis on globalized “urban locations like Paris, London, and New York.”¹⁰ If we bracketed Winterson’s late modern writings, other critics seem to agree with Halberstam’s claim, arguing that many cultural forms of urbanized lesbian and proto-lesbian group identity announced themselves through sophistication, glamour, decorum in dress and style, and transatlantic chic.¹¹ Hall’s image, to cite but one example, was iconic in both the United States and Britain several years prior to the furor over her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. As cultural critic Laura Doan highlights in her overview of early twentieth-century lesbian subcultures in Britain, Hall and her lover, Lady Una Troubridge—both “of the upper middle and upper classes” and the latter an elegant member of the English gentry—were “so famous for their taste and style” that numerous Anglophilic literary public spheres in the 1920s recorded, admired, mimicked, and lampooned them.¹² Functioning alongside, inside, and, at times, in contrast to gay male urbanizations, lesbian-centered metronormativity too seemed to produce citified compulsions for a variety of disparate women across class, racial, and frequently national borders.

I wish that it was needless to say how much went by the subcultural wayside as these historical constructions gathered force, but I want to follow up on Doan’s passing remark that modernist queer female urbanity “undoubtedly foreclosed some promising directions in modern fashion and artistic production.”¹³ For my present concerns, it is the verb “fore-closed” that interests me most. If now-recovered and often-celebrated lesbian and gay urban phenomena weren’t “so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden” as previously assumed (Chauncey, 7), then could we also suppose that these sexually non-normative populations produced certain subcultural norms—certain foreclosures of the non-urbane—that were, perhaps, advanced by the aesthetic dictates of something like a modernist text? I’m well aware that urban-identified figures like the working-class fairy might have undercut this aestheticized metronormativity with their self-stylizations from without; but if critics such as Halberstam, Chauncey, and Doan concur that artistic icons of modern lesbian and gay urbanity were beholden to sophisticated stylistics marked by racial normativity and class antagonism from within, then can we also imagine possibilities for intra-class or intra-racial critique? What would this lesbian and gay worlding begin to look like if we concentrated on in-house productions that failed to adhere to metronormative stylistics, that voiced dissatisfactions from inside the confines of queer urbanized modernism? What other promising counterexamples might then be reintroduced?

For Cather, Demuth, and Johnson, these questions were not rhetorical. This chapter explores how these three artists negotiated and countered the historical emergence of a predominantly, though by no means exclusively, U.S.-based modernist metronormativity with anti-urbanist stylistics based in “high-culture” literature and painting. To do so, it focuses on internal critiques of queer modernism as these three artists declined the developing international traditions that informed and fomented an emergent U.S. metronormativity that would intensify over the decades. All three reveal what it felt like to be shortchanged by the urbane stylistics of a prevailing sexual modernity. All three produced artworks that perceived the aesthetic intolerance of subcultural subversions. And all three—in various mediums—returned to left-behind geographies to highlight the “peripheral modernity” that contradicted the macro-codes of sexual urbanities guiding so much of the early twentieth century’s artistic productions within Western modernism.¹⁴

I visit three concentrated sites—a few paragraphs in Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House set in Solomon Valley, Kansas; Demuth’s 1927 Lancaster-based oil painting My Egypt; and an internationalized Berlin gathering of Wilhelmine Era inverts in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (published anonymously in 1912, reprinted under John-son’s name in 1927)—to substantiate these claims. When seen in juxta-position, these sites show dispirited individuals failing and foiling the compulsions of a galvanized metronormativity. One offers a critical indictment not just for men but for women as well. Another does the same for queers of color. In so doing each site responds to dominant and developing urbanizations with an aestheticized strategy of critically queer anti-urbanism. Forming a loose web of critique whereby anti-urbane stylistics surface amid queer U.S. modernism, they present us with a guidebook to a few social and geographic spaces that urbanized high-culture texts tried and failed to remainder.

Gone-to-Kansas

Just as she proved herself to be all too familiar with the sensational 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde (she denounced the playwright/novelist in the Lincoln, Nebraska, Courier that same year), it is safe to hypothesize that Cather was likely aware of urbanized (homo)sexual developments in New York City across the first three decades of the twentieth century. These may have included but were not limited to the obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness in 1928–29, heated controversies over Edouard Bourdet’s sapphic play The Captive (1926), the phenomenal success of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1917) and A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and the public visibility of bohemian lesbians in the Village. As earlier noted, from 1906 until her death in 1947 Cather, with her longtime companion, Edith Lewis, lived on and off in a series of New York apartments around the Village. With much of her daily life centered on Washington Square, “all of New York—its high arts and sidewalk low life, and all the sights a habitual walker in the city glimpsed in between—enriched her mind and imagination,” Merrill Maguire Skaggs has suggested, and “the bohemian ferment of Greenwich Village in which she lived … challenged and provoked her.”¹⁵

There’s no denying that Cather was certainly invested in if not necessarily enthralled by the fermentations of Manhattan in general and Village bohemia in particular. She wrote from Pittsburgh as early as 1897 that “we spend our time down here trying to fancy that we live in Gotham.”¹⁶ Yet despite these imaginative bouts of urbanity in the Steel City, strains of her queer anti-urbanism repeatedly crop up when one examines her fictional writings, and even more so when one follows her deep investment in the non-urbanized same-sex male bonds that persist from her earliest short stories to her more modernist novels of the 1920s. We have only to think of her 1905 tale “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” where Cather traces how a small-town Kansas lawyer, Jim Laird, buries “the thing in him that [his Boston friend] Harvey Merrick had loved” and shuttles this passion “under ground with Harvey Merrick’s coffin.”¹⁷ Or the Archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his traveling companion, Father Joseph Vaillant, surveying the deserts of the nineteenth-century Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Or the “warm affection” forged between the Compte de Frontenac and his “young friend,” Robert Cavel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: I Hate New York
• 1. Autobiographies of the Ex-Urban Queer
• 2. Critical Rusticity
• 3. Southern Backwardness
• 4. Unfashionability
• 5. Queer Infrastructure
• Coda: On the Borderlands of the Midwest
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author