The next big literary change was under way, the most important shift yet. But it happened slowly at first. Time was needed for magazines to be started, for bookstores to open, and, most important, for new work to be written. Poems and even plays can sometimes happen quickly, but most literature, especially novels, require long gestations followed by months of writing and rewriting. The first major gay literary work to appear after Stonewall was an English novel that was nearly sixty years old.
E. M. Forster wrote Maurice in 1913 but did not want it published while his mother was still alive. She lived a very long life. He showed the manuscript to like-minded friends, including young Christopher Isherwood, who admired the book. “Does it date?” Forster asked. “Why shouldn’t it date?” Isherwood truthfully replied. Finally the mother died, but Forster still delayed publication, fearing the novel would hurt his reputation. Unable to write what he cared about, he had written no novels since A Passage to India in 1924. He too lived a long life, and didn’t die until 1970, when he was ninety-one. Maurice was published the following year under Isherwood’s supervision. Forster’s fears came true. A long coming-out story, the novel is rather old-fashioned in both its emotion and discretion, but many critics disliked it. They were disappointed to learn their hero was a homosexual or they used the fact to claim he’d never been a major writer anyway. “Maurice, bad as it is, nevertheless is Forster’s only truthful book,” declared Marvin Mudrick, “full of nerves, hysteria, infatuations, bitterness.”
Also published posthumously in 1971 was The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. O’Hara had died after he was struck by a car one night on a beach on Fire Island in 1966. He was only forty. We will talk about him more in the next chapter, but his sexuality wasn’t freely acknowledged until after his death—and after gay liberation.
Several early gay rights battles were fought in the literary pages. In September 1970, a few months after the world’s first gay pride march, Harper’s ran as a cover story, “Homo/Hetero: the Struggle for Sexual Identity,” an essay by critic Joseph Epstein. At great length, Epstein carefully explored what he admitted was his unexamined fear of homosexuality, using quotes from Freud, André Gide, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and “Elliott, the hairdresser of a lady friend of mine.” But instead of overcoming his fear, Epstein ended by justifying it. “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” He was most worried for his four sons, declaring in conclusion, “Nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if one of them were to become homosexual. For then I would know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men.” The idea that the world could be changed so that homosexuals (as well as black people) wouldn’t be oppressed never crosses Epstein’s mind.
One month after his essay appeared, the Gay Activist Alliance “zapped” Harper’s: a dozen or so gay activists in long hair and jeans entered the building and occupied the offices for the day. Among the zappers were journalist Arthur Bell, Arnie Kantrowitz, later a college professor specializing in Whitman, and Vito Russo, who later wrote the groundbreaking film study, The Celluloid Closet. They gave the staff coffee and doughnuts and talked to them about gay rights. Harper’s stonefaced executive editor, Midge Decter, was not amused.
Despite Epstein’s antigay credentials, or because of them, the New York Times Book Review chose him to review Maurice. Again he wrote at great length, this time struggling to separate Forster’s major novels, which he loved, from the homosexual who wrote them. “The homosexual influence in Forster’s other novels, if it exists at all, is so negligible as to be scarcely worthy of notice.” So much for the intense male friendships in The Longest Journey and A Passage to India. Epstein found Maurice disappointing for literary reasons, and assumed gay readers would be disappointed by its lack of “homosexual high jinks.” Yet the book was very popular and widely read by gay men. They helped to create the Forster revival of the next twenty years, one that included film adaptations as well as constant reissues of the novels.
A new generation of gay writers began to appear, and they did not always speak the same language as their elders. The older writers didn’t see themselves as part of anything political; the young writers did. The established figures responded to the new gay politics in different ways. Some like Truman Capote paid no attention at all. Others like Tennessee Williams were annoyed, while Gore Vidal was coolly curious. Only Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg were completely open to the gay rights movement, but they were already open about their sexuality. Most homosexual artists spoke as if political activism were something the other guy did. O’Hara died before Stonewall, but his friend Joe LeSueur thought gay liberation was more Allen Ginsberg’s line than O’Hara’s. Another friend believed that if O’Hara had lived into the 1970s, he would’ve found the politics silly but he would love the GAA dances held at the Firehouse downtown.
Gay Sunshine, a literary and cultural journal, was founded in Berkeley in 1970 by Winston Leyland and began to run full-length interviews with major gay figures. The new generation interviewed their elders with admiration and respect, usually. More important, they asked questions that weren’t being asked elsewhere. These long conversations with Vidal, Isherwood, Ginsberg, and others now provide us with a wealth of information about their private lives and attitudes. Ginsberg talked about having sex with Jack Kerouac; John Rechy, author of City of Night, the highly praised 1963 novel about hustlers, criticized gay S&M culture; Samuel Steward, creator of the erotic “Phil Andros” stories, described his different lives as a professor, a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein, and a sex partner of Thornton Wilder; Isherwood took apart the ugly myth that the Nazis were homosexual; and Vidal discussed Howard Austen, his partner of twenty-three years, for the first time in print. (The interviewers introduced the subject by asking Vidal who would inherit his money.) These frank interviews mark the rise of a gay literary world that was parallel yet separate from the culture at large. Mainstream readers didn’t visit this world, only other gay people. It was not that straight people were excluded, however; they just weren’t interested.
The mainstream was more open, however, even television. In an interview with David Frost, also in 1970, Tennessee Williams replied to a pointed question about his sexuality with a big pussycat smile. “I don’t want to be involved in some kind of scandal,” he purred, “but I’ve covered the waterfront.”
Williams had been living a very strange life since the death of Frank Merlo in 1963, floating in a haze of alcohol and sleeping pills. “I slept through the Sixties,” he later told Gore Vidal, who assured him he hadn’t missed a thing. But it was worse than that. He grew paranoid and wildly unpredictable. His friends avoided him. He hired a paid companion, who was often afraid of him. During rehearsals of a new play, The Kingdom of Earth, Williams laughed constantly and the actors didn’t know if he were laughing at them or at his own work. Kingdom opened on Broadway as The Seven Descents of Myrtle and closed a month later. His brother Dakin convinced him to enter a hospital in 1969. Williams was put in a psychiatric ward and suffered withdrawal without his pills. He later claimed to have had two heart attacks there.
He woke up from the Sixties in time to find himself at the center of a curious war. A new play titled Nightride by a man writing under a pseudonym, “Lee Barton,” opened at the end of 1971. It featured a confrontation between an openly gay rock star and an aging gay playwright who has written nothing of value in ten years. The play was produced off-off-Broadway, but it was widely reviewed; at least one reviewer identified the old playwright as Williams. Then “Lee Barton” wrote about Williams for the Times.
Who really gives a damn that Tennessee Williams has finally admitted his sexual preferences in print? He has yet to contribute any work of understanding to gay theater, and with his enormous talent one of his works would indeed be worth any amount of personal data. And several others of his generation of writers, as well as some younger ones, all of them gay, have failed to come forth with anything, under any name, that would make a valid case for the homosexual in society.
Williams read the piece (he even saw Nightride) and responded in an interview in the Village Voice with gay journalist Arthur Bell: “I feel sorry for the author. He makes the mistake of thinking I’ve concealed something in my life [but] he writes under a pseudonym. I’ve nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn’t the theme of my plays. They’re all about human relationships. I’ve never faked it.”
“Lee Barton” wasn’t the only young gay writer attacking the man who was arguably America’s greatest living playwright. Michael Silverstein in “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams” in Gay Sunshine declared, “You helped me free myself but I can see that you are not free.”
Williams’s next work was Small Craft Warnings, a bar play about a crew of wounded souls, one of whom is gay. The straight men and women are just as crippled as the gay man, Quentin, a screenwriter. When the play opened in March 1972, it received better reviews than Williams had gotten in years, but most critics focused on Quentin, treating the work as Williams’s own personal Boys in the Band. His sexuality had upstaged everything else.
Christopher Isherwood remained fully awake and engaged with the world. He was still experiencing the usual ups and downs of life with his boyfriend, Don Bachardy. (Bachardy had a new outside boyfriend while Isherwood didn’t, and Bachardy’s new boyfriend was an old friend of Isherwood’s.) He was still writing, of course. Back in 1967 he had published A Meeting by the River, a very fine, concise little novel about two English brothers who meet in a Hindu monastery outside Calcutta. The younger brother has decided to become a monk. The older, more worldly brother (who has a wife and a boyfriend) hopes to change his younger brother’s mind. The novel is written entirely in letters and journal entries (it might be too concise). Reviewers didn’t know what to make of the book, especially its spirituality. As usual, they wished the author were still writing about Berlin.
Bachardy suggested turning the novel into a play, which the two men did together, the first of many collaborations. The play was produced in both Los Angeles and New York but was not a complete success. Several screenplays followed, however, including a TV movie, Frankenstein: The True Story. The pair enjoyed working together. They would discuss a project at length before putting words on paper, Isherwood dictating and Bachardy typing. They still argued about extracurricular romances, but more quietly now.
On his own, Isherwood read his parents’ diaries, hoping to make peace with his recently deceased mother and to know his father, who had died when Isherwood was still a boy. The results, Kathleen and Frank, appeared in 1971 and it’s an odd book, raw yet dry, personal yet impersonal. This upper-class Englishman and Englishwoman of another era can never be as real to us as they were to their son. But the book gave Isherwood a new device, the double persona of talking about himself in the past as “Christopher” while keeping “I” for his present-day self. He used the device again after he read his own diaries and needed to reconstruct the missing volumes for his first years in California. This diarylike memoir was too rough and libelous for him to publish at the time—it did not appear until after his death as Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951. But he was already thinking about a new project.
Then in 1972 the movie of the musical Cabaret opened. Isherwood’s feelings about the movie were almost as mixed as his feelings about the stage musical, although he was pleased his character was played by Michael York, a handsome actor with a honeyed voice a good octave lower than his own. The character was no longer straight, but Isherwood felt his homosexuality was treated as “a ridiculous weakness… like bedwetting.” For gay men of my generation, however, the movie was a revelation. In our eyes the hero was clearly a gay man who almost makes the terrible mistake of marrying his female best friend. The two friends are both sleeping with the same man, which is revealed in a famous exchange. “Screw Max!” declares York. “I do,” replies Liza Minnelli. York smiles bitterly and says, “So do I.” The sexual triangle was the invention of screenwriter Jay Presson Allen and might be truer to the time the movie was made than to the time of the stories. Nevertheless, the film introduced a whole new audience to Isherwood and sent many of us to his other books. A recently discharged navy officer who had served in Vietnam, Armistead Maupin, was still coming to terms with his sexuality when he first saw the movie. He was so taken by it that he hunted down every book he could find written by Isherwood.
Gore Vidal was spending less and less time in the United States. He sold Edgewater and bought La Rondinaia (“The Swallow’s Nest”), a cliffside villa in Ravello, Italy, with Howard Austen in 1971. There he began work on a novel about that great sinister figure of American history, Aaron Burr. In the years ahead, he concentrated on historical fiction with almost no mention of homosexuality—it had hurt the sales of his last book, Two Sisters, a metafictional mix of fiction, memoir, and screenplay. Yet he was happy to talk about gay sex in his essays and interviews, including interviews with gay magazines. He spoke at length with John Mitzel and Steve Abbott for the Fag Rag in 1973, but afterward wrote a friend, “I never do see much point in fag-mags—at least for those of us who can write elsewhere and say the same sort of thing. It is the dream of all these papers that the L.A. Chief of Police will become addicted to their style and, finally, like St. P[aul] realize with a sudden blaze that FAGS are not only good but BETTER!”
Vidal published Burr in 1973, and it was a huge success with both critics and readers. I think it’s his best novel. Although there’s nothing gay in it (except for the sodomite based on William F. Buckley), the book plays to all of Vidal’s strengths. Burr is a witty, know-it-all cynic who sees through everyone, a perfect role for Vidal, a fantasy self-portrait. “Fortunately our people have always preferred legend to reality—as I know best of all, having become one of the dark legends of the republic, and hardly real.” Burr tells his life story to the other protagonist, a young journalist, Charlie Schuyler, who is writing the old man’s biography—Charlie suggests a Vidal-in-training. These two first-person narratives extend and complete each other. The “present” of 1833 New York is beautifully drawn, the “past” of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton is lively and prejudiced, and the book has no love stories, always a stumbling block for Vidal. Burr succeeds more as spectacle than as drama, but it is vivid, imaginative, intelligent, and entertaining.
In 1975 Tennessee Williams published his Memoirs and Vidal reviewed it in the New York Review of Books. “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self” is one of his best essays, a rich appreciation of both the man and his work. He genuinely likes Williams, warts and all—“the Glorious Bird” was his private nickname for Williams—and the essay shows a more human side of Vidal. It also includes a wonderfully matter-of-fact portrait of postwar gay life, with glimpses of Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jean Cocteau, and a devastating cameo of Truman Capote as a pest and pathological liar. Williams wrote his sinister soul sister, Maria St. Just, “Gore has written a hilarious review of Memoirs which will sell many copies—it’s been gradually creeping up the bestseller list!!”
Memoirs itself is a loose, genial jumble of unreliable memories and anecdotes. No matter how drunk or trashed Williams had been, he could still type out a lively sentence. The book is entertaining without being especially personal or revealing. Critics were disappointed that there was more about Williams’s sex life than about his plays, but he had never been very articulate about his craft. The feelings of gay readers were more positive: they enjoyed the sexual openness and many wrote fan letters. Some who knew him only as the author of Streetcar even praised him as a role model.
Nineteen seventy-five was also the year that Truman Capote published in Esquire three chapters of his unfinished novel. He had been talking about Answered Prayers for ten years now; he wanted to prove to the public—and to himself—that it existed. Instead he lost friends and destroyed his literary reputation.
The most famous chapter is “La Cote Basque,” a polyphonic portrait of society ladies sharing gossip in an exclusive New York restaurant. It is mean but lively. The other chapters are only mean and tedious. Narrated by P. B. Jones, a Capote-like writer who supports himself as a masseur and call boy, the book is a pornographic fantasy on literary and society life, but written by someone who’s come to hate sex. It’s mean, joyless porn. The longest chapter, “Unspoiled Monster,” contains Capote’s most overtly gay writing, but also his worst. He seems determined to compete with his gay peers, but he does it very badly. The self-mocking literary voice is a tired imitation of Myra Breckinridge. A long episode about Denham Fouts identifies the famous kept boy as a character in Down There on a Visit, as if Capote hoped to steal him from Isherwood—but Capote’s Fouts is just a nasty pricktease, with none of the comedy or mystery of Paul in Down There. (Like Isherwood, Capote shows him dying of his cure for opium addiction, but adds the ugly touch of dying while sitting on a toilet.) The strangest act of one-upmanship comes when Jones goes to the Plaza to service a famous playwright called Mr. Wallace, “a chunky, paunchy, booze-puffed runt with a play mustache glued above laconic lips.” He is Tennessee Williams, of course, right down to the recent bad reviews and the dead boyfriend. His hotel room stinks of dog shit. Jones must take the bulldog out for a walk before he undresses for his client. Mr. Wallace would rather talk than fuck. Capote gives a very broad caricature, but a moment of truth breaks through after a long monologue by the playwright, who says he’s dying. He feels Jones is lying to himself:
No, what I thought was: here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself—everyone else is an audience.
Capote could just as easily have been talking about Capote, except he no longer had pity for his characters.
Answered Prayers is a shocking work, not for the secrets it betrays, but for how coarse and unimaginative it is. (“La Cote Basque” lost Capote the friendship of his society lady “swans,” including Babe Paley, whose husband, William Paley, was rumored to be the hapless adulterer who frantically washes menstrual blood from his sheets before his wife gets home.) Now and then Capote’s old rhythms show in the prose, but the writing offers few pleasures or surprises. It’s hard to believe that the gifted author of Other Voices and In Cold Blood could produce something so mechanical and trashy. It’s even harder to believe he spent ten years working on it, but he probably didn’t. Donald Windham was housesitting in Capote’s UN Plaza apartment in 1970 when he stumbled on the manuscript of “Unspoiled Monsters” in Jack Dunphy’s desk. He read it, of course, and was appalled. He thought it might be a joke, a parody of Jacqueline Susann, until it appeared unaltered in Esquire five years later.
Capote was completely lost in his own dream world now, full of his own “half-believed lies” served to strangers. In an interview in 1975 with Playgirl, Playboy’s poor cousin, he told a false story about Gore Vidal being expelled from the White House by Bobby Kennedy and historian Arthur Schlesinger for insulting Jackie Kennedy’s mother. (He claimed they “just picked Gore up and carried him to the door and threw him out into Pennsylvania Avenue.”) This time Vidal did not retaliate with cutting jokes. This time he sued. He demanded a million dollars, money he knew Capote didn’t have. The case went on for eight long years.
The dinosaurs were taking each other to court. Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits take the place of sex. When Donald Windham published a book of the letters Tennessee Williams had written him in the 1940s and 1950s, a collection that captures Williams at his sanest and most charming, Williams sued Windham, despite a signed agreement.
In 1976, a young gay writer, George Whitmore, interviewed Williams at the Hotel Elysée in New York for the Gay Sunshine Journal. Williams was quite drunk. He clung to the arms of his chair and ranted at length about the Jewish critics who tried to destroy his career. Afterward Whitmore went straight to his friend, playwright Victor Bumbalo, laughing in horror over meeting his hero. Whitmore edited out everything anti-Semitic or insane when he wrote up the interview.
Meanwhile the gay press continued to grow. In 1974 an ambitious gay businessman, David Goodstein, bought the Advocate, moved it from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and changed it from a newspaper to a magazine. More important, he shifted its emphasis from politics to culture, which meant sex and consumerism, but it also meant literature. Gay writers began to appear on the covers—few other public figures were willing to risk the exposure. Within two years, its annual circulation had risen to 60,000 (compared to ONE’s 2,300 ten years earlier). A survey in 1975 estimated that there were approximately 300 different gay publications in the United States, including skin magazines, with a total circulation of 200,000.
In 1976, a new monthly magazine started up, Christopher Street. Named after the main gay thoroughfare in Greenwich Village, it was based in New York but distributed nationally. It was devoted to culture and politics and hoped to become the gay New Yorker. The publisher and editor, Charles Ortleb, was a young copywriter from New Jersey who had gone to college in Kansas. He was helped by a handful of gay journalists and editors, including Arthur Bell, Michael Denneny, and Patrick Merla. They took over the recently vacated basement offices of the New York Review of Books on West Thirteenth Street and put out their first issue in July 1976—with a picture of an empty closet on the cover. Denneny, who was a book editor at St. Martin’s Press, later said that they assumed gay writers would have drawers full of unpublished work. In fact, it soon became clear that most gay work wasn’t written until there was a place to print it. In early issues writers wrote extra pieces under pseudonyms to suggest a bigger cast of contributors. Ortleb worked with the art director Rick Fiala to create New Yorker–like cartoons, and Fiala too used different pseudonyms, despite his recognizable line and eternally cheerful figures. One early Fiala cartoon showed a gay man happily telling friends, “If you ask me, I think we had more fun when it was unnatural.”
The magazine was originally for both gay men and lesbians. But the women dropped out and Christopher Street became primarily male within two years. Something similar had happened in Boston when Lavender Visions divided in 1971, with the men splitting off to create Fag Rag. The readerships and agendas were different, but in the beginning, at least, men and women tried to work together. (The first gay male best seller of this period was the 1974 novel The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, an editor at Reader’s Digest who had divorced her husband and come out as a lesbian only a year before.)
At the same time the gay bookstore movement begun by Craig Rodwell was taking off. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop moved to Christopher Street in 1970, its new location only a block from the site of the Stonewall Inn. Glad Day opened in Toronto in 1971, named after the William Blake engraving; a second Glad Day came to Boston in 1977. Giovanni’s Room opened in Philadelphia in 1973, named after the Baldwin novel because the owners wanted something to signal the store was gay without being too obvious. (They thought “City of Night” sounded like an adult bookstore and “The Well of Loneliness” too depressing.) These stores were joined by Lambda Rising in 1974 in Washington, D.C., then A Brother’s Touch in Minneapolis, A Different Light in San Francisco, and others.
A mix of market and community was coming together, creating an audience for the books and plays of the next thirty years. This audience was as necessary to the new work as the writers who produced it—maybe even more necessary.
The cover of the December 1976 issue of Christopher Street featured a picture of Christopher Isherwood drawn by Don Bachardy. Inside was an excerpt from a new book, Christopher and His Kind.
Reviewers who wished Isherwood were still writing about Berlin finally got their wish, only this wasn’t the Berlin they had wanted. Isherwood announces on the first page that his new book is going to be “as frank and factual as I can make it.” On the second page he famously declares: “For Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.”
Christopher and His Kind is Isherwood’s wonderfully frank, brisk, clear-eyed memoir of his life from his first visit to Berlin in 1929 to 1939, when he came to America. The book is as straightforward about art and politics as it is about sex. It is built out of memories and documents, particularly Isherwood’s fiction, letters, and diaries, but also the letters and diaries of others, including his mother. The double persona of “I” and “Christopher” developed in Kathleen and Frank enables Isherwood to step back and forth nimbly between past and present, as well as acknowledge that a person changes with time: the self that experiences life isn’t always the self that understands it.
The book contains an amazing cast of characters, a vivid collection of people observed by a man who is genuinely curious about others. The portraits include his family, famous friends (W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender), the models for his characters (Jean Ross of “Sally Bowles,” Gerald Hamilton of Mr. Norris, Bertold and Salka Viertel of Prater Violet), and his three German boyfriends (“Bubi,” “Otto,” and most importantly, Heinz Neddermeyer). Isherwood includes himself, too, portrayed more critically than the others yet also with sympathy and humor.
The years are covered in a loose, fast-paced picaresque that builds to a major crisis. After Christopher leaves Germany with Heinz, Hitler comes to power and Heinz becomes a man without a country. Barred from England as an illegal alien, Heinz goes with Christopher first to Greece, then the Canary Islands, Portugal, Denmark, and Holland. Christopher does everything he can to get Heinz a Mexican visa. He is in England when Heinz is expelled from France. They reunite in Luxembourg, but their lawyer cannot get his visa renewed without Heinz returning to Germany. He does so and is promptly arrested for draft evasion. He is tried and sentenced to prison and military service. Christopher does what he can from England, but he is helpless. He feels totally devastated afterward. He quotes from his own diary:
At first I didn’t think about Heinz at all. Or tried not to. I felt like a house in which one room, the biggest, is locked up. Then, very cautiously, I allowed myself to think of him in little doses—five minutes at a time. Then I had a good cry and felt better. But it is very hard to cry, when you know in advance that crying will do you good.
The book could have ended with the high drama of losing Heinz, but doesn’t. It’s not only an experiment in truth telling but an experiment in realism, without melodramatic endings. Life goes on, Isherwood goes on. He and Auden go to China, where they witness a brutal war, and then to America, where Isherwood falls in love again. The book ends with the old “I” telling young “Christopher” that this new love won’t last but he will eventually meet “the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to be.” But he won’t meet him right away.
He is already living in the city where you will settle. He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.
The book is dedicated to that former four-year-old.
Christopher and His Kind was reviewed warmly in the New York Review of Books by Isherwood’s friend, Gore Vidal, in a smart, informative, generous essay. “There is no excess in an Isherwood sentence. The verbs are strong. Nouns precise. Adjectives few. The third person startles and seduces, while the first person is a good guide and never coy.” Peter Stansky, a literary historian who was gay, reviewed the book more temperately in the New York Times Book Review, yet he too was full of praise. There were bad reviews in Britain, where Isherwood was still attacked for sitting out the war, but the American reviews were generally respectful. However, more than one critic complained that Isherwood misrepresented himself by putting too much emphasis on his homosexuality, that the book reduced him to “only” a gay man. Which is nonsense. He includes his entire life: his family, his politics, his writing. He says more about himself as a writer than he ever had before. The whole man is here, and in the right proportions.
In one of the most moving passages of the book, before he arrives in America, Christopher wrestles with the sum total of his beliefs, beginning with his pacificism:
Suppose, Christopher now said to himself, I have a Nazi army at my mercy. I can blow it up by pressing a button. The men in that army are notorious for torturing and murdering civilians—all except for one of them, Heinz. Will I press the button? No—wait: Suppose I know that Heinz, out of cowardice or moral infection, has become as bad as they are and takes part in all their crimes? Will I press the button, even so? Christopher’s answer, given without the slightest hesitation, was: Of course not…. Thus Christopher was forced to recognize himself as a pacifist—although by an argument which he could only admit to with the greatest reluctance.
He goes on to examine his other principles:
What had actually begun to surface in his muddled mind was a conflict of emotions. He felt obliged to become a pacifist, he refused to deny his homosexuality, he wanted to keep as much of his leftism as he could. All he could do for the present was to pick up his ideas one after another and reexamine them, ring them like coins, saying: This one’s counterfeit; this one’s genuine but I can’t use it; this one I can keep, I think.
One particular coin had special meaning for gay readers. Christopher and His Kind tapped into a new growing readership. Sales were excellent, and Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennesse Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, “My tits are on fire”), but also serious, heartfelt letters, full of gratitude for his work and his example. When Isherwood came to New York and signed books at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, long lines formed outside on the sidewalk, on the very street where police and gay demonstrators had confronted each other a few years earlier. Later Gore Vidal teased him, “They’re beginning to believe that Christopher Street is named after you.”