“I can imagine a book made up entirely of examples.”
—Wittgenstein
“When did you first get the idea you were queer?”
“Two weeks into the first grade, January, 1947.”
—interview with the author
In which times, places, weather conditions, and descriptions of what people were (so to speak) wearing come of necessity into figurative play.
Who, what, when, where (there’s no why but why, because). In the beginning it had no name, and no extension either. The street. What the canonical calendar is to the working fiction of time (generally speaking, cyclical time: the seasons of the year, any year, in any liturgy, from sowing-reaping to Advent-Pentecost and beyond), so is the canonical map to the working fiction of place: generally speaking, the mandala place, including mazes. Examples: the Monopoly board and the Map of Queer Street.
Queer Street is our Broadway, replete with impressions to which a clever boy responds with force, traversed by seven parallel avenues (easy reference, the Seven Ages of Man), and on the grid by any number of names, letter and number streets (a sort of mix of New York, Los Angeles and the District of Columbia), all out of sequence and Oz-like willy-nilly. (Note: We could, if necessary, quote the text of Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” Seven Ages speech from As You Like It, trusting that the emendations to the names be taken as read. Or not.)
The Avenues:
Fathers’ Arms
Shining Morningside
Sighing Furnace*
Reputation
Ancient Sayings
Pantaloon
Mere Oblivion
Some cross streets: Attitude, Camp, Jewelry, Lipstick; P, D and Q and Promising, Deep, Meaningful and Talented, 7, 11, and Boxcars, 69 and 4/4 (as in “She did the figure 8 the hard way: two fours”). The convergence of Queer Street—the intersection of whatever avenue and any of these cross streets—creates a little neighborhood of its own. Other streets terminate in circles, nine of them, rather than cutting all the way across the grid and others still (such as Moribund) are hardly more than a block long (like Gay Street in the real Village), curving like bent hooks and spilling into culs-de-sac of each other lanes (such as Memory). Finally, there are little mews courts (corresponding to the real Sniffen and Patchin, Milligan Place and Pomander Walk) with names like Seclusion, Betrayal and Go-to-Hell. Replete with impressions to which a clever boy (one consumed with ambition, a salient feature of which is to be admitted—“Blesh you dahling!”—into Tallulah Bankhead’s dressing room: no mean feat, even for one accustomed to the camerini of numerous star headliners at the Metropolitan Opera, considering both the taxing rigors imposed by Miss Bankhead’s honor guard and the alarming celerity with which her vehicles opened and closed on Broadway) responds with force.
The Major Monuments:
Orestes: intersection, Queer Street/Fathers’ Arms
Alexander: intersection, Queer Street/Shining Morningside
Beloved Disciple: intersection, Queer Street/Sighing Furnace
Michelangelo: intersection, Queer Street/Reputation
Shakespeare: intersection, Queer Street/Ancient Sayings
Beethoven: intersection, Queer Street/Pantaloon
Melville: intersection, Queer Street/Mere Oblivion
Author walking, hearing the voices—the hawking cries of random Queer Street vendors. Stopping in front of the shop windows, pausing: at which time cartoon bubbles appear over Queer Temperament’s head. Eventually these accrue, in strict obedience to the peculiar laws attaching to the phenomenon “bubble cluster,” into something like a collection of essays. These essays, brought to the point of completion years after their inceptions on strolls along Queer Street, are presented in windows inserted in the non-fiction roman fleuve which Queer Street finally is.
As recently underscored by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, “The stream of consciousness is what we all live in. The expression is now associated with a literary form in which a character’s inner monologue of thoughts and associations is presented accurately and is very different from the orderly outward forms of his life in the world. But the true stream of consciousness is far richer and far less verbal than anything described in Ulysses. Think about what happens to you during any two minutes spent walking on a city street—the flood of sensations, perceptions, and feelings that courses through you, most of them hardly drawing your attention. The multiplicity and density of detail is far greater than even the richest collection of verbalized thoughts or conversations with yourself that may have been going on at the same time. The process by which the world impinges on us at all times and the constantly shifting apprehension of our relation to it are too enormous for us to fully grasp” (The New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002).
Put another way, Author’s essays are no more nor less than a congeries of echoes of years of overheard and vis-à-vis opinion and commentary (Other Voices, Other Rooms over Strange Interlude). Each topic that occurs to Author (as Queer Temperament, QT) along the way and over the years may be elaborated like a character. QT’s ideas in any case are initially all amalgams of and reactions to things others said; however, this state of affairs must be overcome. This is called becoming original, a seeming oxymoron, but there are no born originals.
Imagine trying to make a book out of voice cards—the book a house of cards—one strong puff—but all memory is an inhalation; followed by a holding of the breath—and the one strong puff that blows its house of cards down is the exhalation that resumes life.
Marcel Proust refused to exhale—to recommence life—and died of emotional asthma.
Premonition is the circumstance in which “when then” usurps the position of “then, when.” It entails the confidence of the manner in which reading or writing a book is life-like: there is no present in it; the client is occupied with seeking to come to terms with what has simultaneously not yet and already happened.
Thus at a certain point in life, Author, modeling his enterprise on the devices of Gestalt therapy and the practices of innumerable meditative verbal musicians working in both verse and prose, becomes the mentor to the younger self. As if in dream time, he revisits the locale, the scene of the crime, the topos of Queer Street to instruct himself as the young Augustine was instructed in language: through mimicry. Thus the impression created is a literary one rather than a sociological one, as if Queer Anonymous had been channeled, incorporating T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Coleman Dowell, Alfred Chester, and later Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery and James Merrill, together with Boyd McDonald (redactor of the notorious Straight-To-Hell testimonies of toilet-wall queer America), John Rechy and the amazing and anomalous literary shipwreck that was Gordon Merrick.
Display, response and the significant scene.
Other voices in other rooms (and often other doorways, other park benches, other lobbies, other cafeterias) constitute the Whitmanian New York topos. Introduction of the Ventriloquies, likening them to the Convolutes of The Arcades Project (and to the author as a lesser Lypsinka avant la lettre). Sometimes the Ventriloquy in the mouth of a distinct character, sometimes an anonymous “voice” Author QT has heard in his head, referencing all the while the French Ventriloquist from All About Eve (“There was nothing he didn’t know”).
Ultimately, the presentation derives from the image of regression, with pointed reference to Freud as recalled by William Maxwell, “When we talk about the past, we lie with every breath we take.”
Author: “So what?”
Whereby the essay is another note toward a supreme court-of-final-appeal fiction. One sees, or remembers, oneself propped up in a lap, looking around a room, being taught to thrive by parroting, by imitation—an image that metamorphoses easily in Author’s mind into the Show Business story of the ventriloquist’s dummy who “takes over” the brain of the ventriloquist (or, like Pinocchio, becomes a real boy), both scenarios versions of the essential Oedipal conflict idea of supplanting.
The melodrama of the Ventriloquies is thus predicated, so that each time Author, seemingly on his own, formulates a set of ideas it is as if he is climbing down off some lap and walking across another room, another voice in the Forensic Society that is consciousness. Not to mention Author’s habit of indulging in masking patterns which regularly find subsidiary parts clouding the picture by bleeding into the foreground.
Queer Street. Queer Street. It doesn’t start anywhere; there isn’t a beginning. We won the war; the warriors came home, those who did, to find everything the war changed changed, is one opening.
Viewed by homosexual men of the era—combat veterans and their undecorated coevals alike—as the newly legitimated grasping of an existential option between the World of Day (with its ordinal American criteria delimiting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and the World of Night (the New York–Los Angeles Night, seen as other than American, with its deep, insatiable passions, accessed through the portal of twilight, as paradigm).
It (the street, the history) doesn’t start anywhere. Viewed by the world of straight America (primed to rescind the liberty and license vouchsafed queers under grueling combat conditions), it becomes the radical inverse of the renewed moral and civic duty prescribed in the triumphalist Republic: as a deeply suspicious communal existence (in the dawning American age of the suburban single-family unit dwelling, to each his own), a communality of mutually enraptured, timeless, self-stimulating purposelessness (observers citing regularly the homosexual’s obsession with beating back the signs of aging: spending as rumor had it half his life in wardrobe, hair and makeup). Viewed as such and denounced alike by organized religion, by Metropolitan High Culture (and by its secular creed, a tortured, straight-jacketed, prescriptive Freudian psychoanalysis) as a design for living redolent of depraved luxury, recalling such practices as the Biblical sin of onanism (seen perforce as thwarting pro-creation, and therefore as a wilful slap in the face to the mass-chant agitprop politics of the Baby Boom).
It doesn’t start anywhere; there is simply no big bang for anybody’s buck. Nevertheless performance subsists in time and material space: the performance is recorded; the performers are studied, often obsessively. (“It’s like she was studyin’ you, like you were a book or a play or a set of blueprints. How you walk, talk, think, eat, sleep.”—Birdie Coonan [Thelma Ritter] to Margo Channing [Bette Davis] in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve—20th Century Fox, 1950.)
And, in an update, Queer Theory is on the march, proffering an anti-essentialist ontology: how concepts of gender and desire have been constructed in Western discourse in an attempt to deconstruct the pernicious effects, particularly on the bodies of women and sexual dissidents.
Anti-essentialist means existentialist, cutting into Queer Street exactly at war’s end, coinciding not accidentally with the explosion of existentialist philosophy in Europe and its immediate and irreversible effect upon post-war American culture. We’d won the war—and the winning of it (as brilliantly and meticulously detailed in Alan Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire) homosexual men and women played a more than merely significant part; morale was vital and, as was reflected even in such mainstream post-war entertainments as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, both tolerance of difference (as dutifully versed in “You’ve Got To Be Taught”) and the liberating exuberance of drag shows (as exuberantly demonstrated in “Honey Bun”), were an essential component. So were other forms of tolerance, some of them directly countervalent to the armed forces code of discipline.
As Hal Call remembers, in Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, “I had absolutely no sexual activity in the armed forces with anyone, because I knew it was a no-no. Besides, when you became a commander and an officer, you didn’t carry on with the troops. There were some who were carrying on, and we’d hear of it now and then, but we’d never try to investigate it. You have to consider the circumstances. You were in the South Pacific, down on Espiritu Santo. You came from a combat operation in the Marianas and were going up to a combat operation in the Ryukyus. The men had not been home or had a furlough or anything like that for two or three years. Years, not months. They were under the stress of war, and they were going into combat again where a lot of them were not going to come out. So if they went up under the coco’ trees and sucked a little cock and jacked off together or something like that, so what? Who was harmed? Nobody. That’s the way the armed forces should look at it. The armed forces could not operate without homosexuals. Never could. Never has. And never will.”
Everything the war changed, which did seem to be altogether everything. All the tight lids seemed to have come off at once (a phenomenon which homosexuals who could easily be privately consulted—an elite—did not, from their seemingly secure positions, view with feelings of unmixed delight). There had occurred in wartime a relaxation of moral surveillance, so that, for example, when the Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles was caught in flagrante delicto with a Pullman porter on the presidential train returning from Hyde Park to Washington, not a breath of scandal was allowed to hit the cold winter air. Similarly when the eminent composer-critic Virgil Thomson and the venerable Senator Walsh of Massachusetts were both hauled into night court, following a raid on a male cat house in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens district (the site having been staked out for months through telescopes by ardent Catholic parishioners nearby, giving the police no choice but to act) neither personage was prosecuted (although the brothel keeper did do hard time).
What transpired in the Asian jungle went as well for London in the Blitz—particularly, according to the consensus, when the Yanks landed to beef up the expeditionary forces for the Normandy landing (D-Day, June 6, 1944), and by a sort of back-formation extension for New York, under the blackout curtains that never quite dropped in an actual attack (but all the same—).
As the intrepid homosexual traveler and commentator Tobias Schneebaum points out in his 1979 memoir Wild Man, the post-war homosexual novel could be published and reviewed openly in newspapers and periodical journals only if the protagonists (always pathetically unhappy, utterly at a loss, alcoholic and happen worse) were seen to come to criminal peculation and a dread end. He cites two forthright examples: Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Fritz Peters’s Finisterre (neglecting to include Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, which although it is not often so recalled, did in fact address both alcoholism and homosexuality, indeed rendering the two as syzygetic indispositions), and even the cyber robot-art porn fictions of William Burroughs first published underground by Maurice Girodias in his Olympia Press Travelers Companion series.
Later, in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 1960, the character unfortunate enough to have succumbed to a homosexual wartime liaison (in the South Pacific, although not ostensibly up in the cocoa trees), fearing disclosure a decade later, kills himself. Defiance dared not rear its head out of doors until 1963, in John Rechy’s best seller, City of Night, savagely reviewed by the vermillion-wigged washout Alfred Chester in The New York Review of Books. Alfred Chester was, of course, how the West Side liked its queers in the ’60s. Defiance—a thing not seen again (and more apocalyptically) until 14 years later in the milestone Dancer from the Dance, in which from the pseudonymous genius of Andrew Holleran the charismatic balls-ass warrior queer Sutherland sprang up whole from the metaphorically blood-drenched plowed queer earth.
Whereupon, as if to reinforce his picture of the immediate post-war zeitgeist, Schneebaum complements his observation with the true-life story of a dissolute pair of outré sodomites in Mexico. Two climactic paragraphs from this interlude serve as well as anything written at greater length to illustrate the prevailing view of the homosexual in the late 1940s, well before the determining effect of McCarthyism on queer life in America in its unstoppable imperial years.
“By the time these liberties [as valet, defined in somewhat shady terms] were extended to open attendance on his body, Lynn’s drinking habits were already affecting his sexual abilities and he became impotent. He coughed incessantly and learned he had cancer of the throat. He smoked additional cigarettes each day and drank himself senseless at night. We never talked of this and I didn’t even know of his illness. I was already back in New York when he shot and killed himself; I learned it through a letter from Nicholas, describing the gruesome necessity of cutting off Lynn’s feet before his long body could fit into the coffin.
“Nicholas left Ajijic years after I did and went to California, where he worked as an interior designer. He came to visit me once in my eleven-dollar-a-month apartment in New York. I opened my door to find him dressed more elegantly than ever; Brooks Brothers suit, shirt with button-down collar, Sulka tie, bowler hat, a silver handled cane. He laughed at the way I lived, and when we walked down the six flights of stairs, he pointed out the trash on steps; the puddles of urine and their smells, the disreputability of the building. I never heard from him directly again, but I knew he lived alone in Los Angeles, rich, isolated and introspective. Zoe wrote me to say that he had died mysteriously after losing his job; he had been discovered sitting in a chair three days after his death.”
A baleful look (covert but definitive) at the post-war New York homosexual was offered in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948; screenplay by Arthur Laurents from the play by Patrick Hamilton). The picture famously shot in eight ten-minute invisibly stitched takes, literally can’t take its eyes off the proceedings, as a pair of rather-too-intimate young Upper East Side “bachelor” roommates tantalize their airily befuddled guests with chirpy, macabre chit-chat, play sinuous Poulenc on the piano, and nearly get away with murder as the sun goes down over New Jersey and night falls on Gotham.
It was in that same city in the same year that the hot Broadway ticket was for Marlon Brando’s naked torso and Tennessee Williams’s bared queer soul together on view in A Streetcar Named Desire that the archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman—known to the host of his beleaguered handlers as Bess—and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover—known at large in New York clubland as Mary—held separate sway and made communal hay, that the critically bloodied but unbowed Tallulah Bankhead, artist, star and errant night-owl daughter of a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, reigned as lesbian Lord of Misrule over what was then called the Rialto, and to cap it off, that the notorious Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was published, categorically declaring, among so many other explosive things, that ten percent of the male population was predominantly homosexual between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; that 8 percent was exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; and that 4 percent of white males had been exclusively homosexual after the onset of adolescence up to the time of the interviews.
At the same time (allowing as queer parlance might have had it for the clocking shift), while Hollywood, in the wake of its all too brief if sentimental fling with film noir and the socially conscious problem picture (scored right from the beginning by conservative can-do America as demoralizing and communistic), set about, in the sunshine decade of the 1950s, its business of projecting the fevered American dream of a victor’s paradise, in which the likes of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Anthony Perkins and Paul Newman (out of the New York milieu) and Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Charlton Heston (along with several less successful specimens of the sort of home-bred Hollywood beefcake habitually found draped in studied attitudes around George Cukor’s pool on Sunday afternoons) attempted a Technicolor, wide-screen redefinition of the American male, a collection of stalwart types from real-life Los Angeles (an exploding metropolis of raucous vagrants policed by, hands down, the most corrupt force in the nation) set about casting changes—changes generated mainly by two particular parties from the legacy of names, Harry Hay and Dr. Evelyn Gentry Hooker.
Harry Hay, who died in 2002, was movie star material—or more exactly the kind of real California man the stars were confected to call to mind. His story (rather than, for example, that of actual movie star Billy Haines, who, refusing to renounce his lover Jimmy Shields, stood by his man and chucked a promising career to reinvent himself as one of Hollywood’s most successful interior decorators) became the wisdom-literature this is the way it must have been of what later would be called Gay Liberation.
It doesn’t start anywhere. Harry Hay would disagree. In his own words (to James A. Dubro, for icon, reproduced at gaywave.com), “It all begins in 1947/48/49, when we [on the radical Left] had the feeling that the country was beginning to move toward a police state. We had loyalty oaths; all the teachers had to take loyalty oaths. The House Un-American Activities Committee was tearing at all the leaders of the trade unions, attempting to destroy them. And I thought to myself at that moment, you know this time the scapegoat they will use as an organizing tool to scare the populace will not be the Jews, because the Holocaust is much too fresh in everyone’s mind. They won’t be using the blacks, because the blacks are now being organized by the trade unions and there are all kinds of community organizations starting up—the NAACP and the ACLU are handling their cases with the Supreme Court, and so on. It will be us.”
The Mattachine Society, a name derived from the Arabic mutawajihin in Moorish Spain, and chosen by Hay to recall groups of Renaissance Italian and French maskers who assumed behind their disguises the clamant court-jester and carnival prerogatives of speaking the truth and indicating with impunity, was founded in Los Angeles in November 1950, when five men, Hay, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings and “R” met at Hay’s home.
“In the first Mattachine Society,” Hay reports, “we figured that the way we would come together and confide in each other was to come out to each other—absolutely unheard of, because most of us until that time had been so bedeviled by police stool pigeons on the one hand and blackmailers from the other side. Any names or addresses given to the newspapers would be published on the front page and all of us automatically would lose our jobs; we would lose our cars, lose our lodging; we’d be wiped out. This was the life and the terror under which we lived, so the whole idea of coming out to each other and learning who we were for the first time was something marvelous. We had a feeling of golden brotherhood.” The whole movement began to develop by leaps and bounds. ONE magazine (from Thomas Carlyle’s “All men together in a society of one”) became the official organ of the Mattachines.
The second, and indeed finally more commanding hero of homosexual liberation, is Dr. Evelyn Gentry Hooker (what’s in a name?), a Nebraska-born psychiatrist who demonstrated initially to her own and finally to significant others’ satisfaction that the “projective testing” (and particularly the notorious Rorschach testing) routinely done on both avowed (usually felonious and collared) homosexuals and on those presumed to be in need of a correct diagnosis regarding the curve of their libidinous drives was so badly skewed as to prove fundamentally worthless. A professor of psychology at UCLA, married to Edward Hooker, an English Department Dryden specialist, and living in Santa Monica Canyon, she was brought up short by the realization that the derogatory remarks made about practicing homosexuals in pathology textbooks were assumed to apply to her neighbors Albert Grossman, Charles Aufdeheide, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood—whose Berlin Diary had made his name in intellectual circles—holding a particular significance in light of her own earlier residence at the Institute for Psychology in Berlin, where she witnessed firsthand the Nazi accession of 1933. As a result, urged on by Isherwood (“She never treated us like some strange tribe, so we told her things we never told anyone before”) and the philosopher Heard, and after an enlightening trip to San Francisco to see Finocchio’s renowned drag show, she applied for and received from the National Institute for Mental Health the funding necessary for a series of substantive controlled experiments.
Her first difficulty was to find a sample of heterosexual men in California on equitable par in terms of commonly agreed cultural level with her pre-selected homosexual sample. Then, in 1953, the Mattachine Society and ONE helped her recruit seventy-four exclusively homosexual men who had never been in psychotherapy or in trouble with the law. That done, when asked to evaluate her result by acknowledged experts certain they could identify homosexuals from testing alone, and submitting matched pairs of Rorschach, TAT and other blind tests, the results proved that two more of the homosexual than of the heterosexual men were classifiable as well adjusted. Her results were published in the Journal of Projective Techniques in 1957 and 1958 as “The Adjustment in the Male Overt Homosexual.”
Her earlier (1956) “Preliminary Analysis of Group Behavior in Homosexuals” in the Journal of Psychology examined the ways in which the so-called Gay Community lent support for those deprived of it in their background, thus improving their behavior and attitudes. “The most striking finding of the three judges,” Hooker wrote, “was that many of the homosexuals were very well adjusted. In fact they agreed on two-thirds of the group as being average to superior in adjustment. Not only do all homosexuals not have strong feminine identifications [in those times constitutive of passive and passive-aggressive trait formations] nor are they all ‘somewhat paranoid,’ but according to the judges, may not be characterized by any demonstrable pathology.”
Evelyn Hooker was appointed in 1967 by Dr. Stanley Holles of the National Institutes of Health to lead a Task Force on Homosexuality, a report buried by the Nixon administration. (Holles himself was fired.) She is rightly considered the originator of the battle to remove homosexuality-as-such as a pathology from the diagnostic manual of the American Psychological Association, finally effected in 1972 in Chicago. (Subsequently the University of Chicago set up the Evelyn Hooker Center for the Mental Health of Gays and Lesbians.)
In 1986 Evelyn Gentry Hooker was made the Grand Marshal of the Christopher Street West parade. She called this the high point of her life. She died at the age of ninety in 1997.
HAVING DISENTANGLED THE PREDICAMENT
Queer Street:
It doesn’t start anywhere; it doesn’t end there, either. Any attempt to suggest a beginning is necessarily arbitrary, and, as Yogi Berra famously decreed, it ain’t over ’til it’s over.
Instead, a congeries of argument, such as could be heard in those days at any hour of the day or night in clusters incessantly forming, dispersing, reforming and heading elsewhere, in Union Square, Washington Square, Bryant Park and the unofficial speakers corners in any saloon or cafeteria in town. Prime locations on the Queer Street map include:
The northwest corner of Queer and Attitude, just as Queer debouches into Fathers’ Arms.
On all sides of the Alexander Fountain at Queer and Morningside.
Benches anent the Beloved Disciple mens’ convenience at “Five Points” (convergence of Queer, Camp and Sighing Furnace).
Michelangelo Park at Queer and Reputaton.
“69” at 69 Lipstick (east side), four doors south of the intersection of Lipstick and Jewelry.
The Horn and Hardart on Promising, just off Pantaloon.
Suckers Alley, between Boxcars and Deep, in the Theater District.
The Shmooze Cafeteria, just off the southwest corner of Shmatta and Queer, in the Garment District.
The Free Woman Hall, in the cul-de-sac on Mortified.
The Bramble (a.y.o.r.) in Centaur Park.
The Standing-Room Line at the Metropolitan Opera House.
*New York queers, who consider themselves, especially in respect of Los Angeles, originary in all things (including the importation of tropical plants and floral exotica into both public and private space), insist on Third Avenue (even without the El) to signal Third Sex, Third Leg, Three-Dollar Bill and the Trinity (referred to in Irish Catholic intellectual circles, as in the West of Ireland, as The Three Gay Fellas).