Difference in disposable assets is happily acknowledged in the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent.” The song is offered from the point of view of a kept boy. Financial status is not effaced: “You bring me food, I need it, you give me love, I feed it.” To the contrary, it is claimed as integral with love:
Now look at the two of us, in sympathy with everything we see
I never want anything, it’s easy, you buy whatever I need
Look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we’ve spent
I love you, you pay my rent. I love you, you pay my rent.
Their sympathy is founded in shared consumption, rendered the more passionate and pleasurable by the fact that there is no hesitation about commitment. “I love you. / You pay the rent”: no syntax. It is not “I love you, therefore you pay the rent.” Nor is it “I love you because you pay the rent.” The personal feeling and the provision of security occur together. The currency they have spent is both money and psychic investment. The liaison works; as well as sympathy there is “sometimes ecstasy.”
One of Eve Sedgwick’s pregnant remarks is that many dimensions of sexual choice appear not to have a “distinctive, explicit definitional connection with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of class or race.” Sex, in other words, may be organized around hierarchies other than gender; “to assume the distinctiveness of the intimacy between sexuality and gender might well risk assuming too much about the definitional separability of either of them from determinations of, say, class or race.”1 In earlier chapters I located the cross-class liaison as a version of the complementarity model, in which sameness of gender is complicated by other differences. Our experience of class evokes intense idealizations and enduring humiliations. I am taking “class” approximately, as comprising hierarchies of wealth, income, status, educational attainment, and cultural sophistication, along with their markers in attire, decor, and general lifestyle. While I disagree with Trotskyists, who proclaim the ineluctable priority of class struggle, I believe that class difference is everywhere in our psychic lives, as it is in our social system.2
TURNING ON TO CLASS
The Wilde trials, I and others have suggested, were crucial in establishing the stereotype of the queer man which dominated until gay liberation in the 1970s.3 At the trials, the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence, and aestheticism, which Wilde was perceived, variously, as instantiating, was transformed into a brilliantly precise image. The principal twentieth-century stereotype entered our cultures: not just the homosexual, as the lawyers and medics would have it, but the queer. A comparable effect was produced for lesbianism by the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in 1929.
Wilde’s effeminate manner was linked as much to class as to gender. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, the aristocracy was positioned as feminized. The newly dominant middle class justified itself through an ideology of work, manly purity, purpose, and responsibility. The leisure-class male was identified, correspondingly, with effeminate idleness and immorality; his options were to repudiate this identification, or to embrace it. Wilde affected a feminine stance in order to claim a class position, while exercising the male authority of accomplishment in public life; the combination of these strategies evidently made him impressive to the boys whose acquaintance he cultivated.
The Wildean, cultured gent and his bit of rough trade became the dominant image of the queer for the twentieth century, up until the 1970s. It was less an individual experience than a subcultural myth.4 As Foucault puts it, “it was in the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘aristocratic’ family” that sexuality was “first problematized,” whereas “the working classes managed for a long time to escape the deployment of ‘sexuality.’” He disputes the idea that the surveillance of sexuality was inflicted upon the lower orders by the ruling classes: “Rather it appears to me that they first tried it on themselves.”5 The lower-class partner might be presented as a secretary or manservant; John Addington Symonds did this, so did Somerset Maugham and Nöel Coward. Otherwise, it was difficult for two men to live together; Terence Rattigan installed his lovers in nearby apartments. (Of course, that cost money.) When she lectured in the United States, Gertrude Stein presented Alice B. Toklas as her secretary.
In the United States also, it was upper-class men who first got the idea of “being a homosexual.” George Chauncey Jr. shows that working-class men, particularly those linked to “masculine” milieux—sailors, laborers, hoboes, and other transient workers—might engage in same-sex activity across class without having to categorize themselves as “queer.”6 After all, they might be, or might appear to be, motivated largely by social deference and financial advantage; probably they were married. As Murray Healy observes, this is not to say that there were no working-class pubs, cruising grounds, or gay identity; rather that these resources were rare, and other options more available, more visible, more attractive.7
This way of regarding cross-class relations was not confined to homosexuals: to a striking extent it replicated wider class and sex/gender patterns. It was in practice almost acceptable for an upper-class man to have as a mistress, or to have casual sex with, a female of a lower class (typically a servant, a shopgirl, or a secretary), or to employ a sex-worker; it was almost expected. What he was not supposed to do was foul up his own social stratum by forming extramarital liaisons with women whom he might meet there. Freud actually imagined this as a universal trait. In an essay “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” he posits that a man—any man—has difficulty in combining “the affectionate and the sensual current.”8 He can’t satisfy his desires with a woman he respects; hence “his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior, to whom he need attribute no aesthetic scruples, who does not know him in his other social relations and cannot judge him in them” (254).
The cross-class queer liaison worked similarly. It is often remarked that some of the objection to Wilde’s behavior was that he had crossed class barriers. For example, he was questioned about Alphonse Conway: did Wilde buy him a suit “In order that he might look more like an equal?”9 The furor over Lady Chatterley’s Lover was similarly framed. Famously, prosecuting counsel asked the jury whether they would want their wives or servants to read the book.10 Actually, the offense was not that Wilde had cultivated cross-class liaisons, but that he had openly paraded them—as Lawrence did in fiction. The more disgraceful connection was between Wilde and Douglas; this was too sensitive to be addressed in court. The crucial opposition was not between heterosexuality and homosexuality, then, but between legitimate and illegitimate relations, defined in terms of class.
It is clear that, for many people who expressed their sexualities in this way, the cross-class liaison was not just a convenience: it was a turn-on. For many middle- and upper-class men, lower-class people were sexy as such. For most middle-class men, after all, servants had tendered the principal physical, affective, and intimate support in infancy. In the 1850s, Arthur Munby, a lawyer and civil servant, established a liaison with Hannah Cullwick, a servant; the impetus for each of them is clear in their diaries. They developed his lustful overseeing of her, scrubbing the floor on her knees, into a scenario in which she got herself dirty and undertook rough, slavish tasks and manners for his pleasure. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White comment: “The opposition of working-class maid and upper-class male, then, depended upon a physical and social separation which was constitutive of desire.” As they note, Freud’s “Wolfman” retrieves an intense early experience involving a maid in a scrubbing posture.11 Hannah was not just a figure of “lowness,” however: she was also a figure of comfort and power. Her diaries indicate clearly that she is entirely happy with her subordinate position. She is both glad and sorry when Munby says that he almost tells a friend about them: “glad’ cause it show’d that M. does love me, & sorry’ cause I don’t want to disgrace him & I canna bear for anyone to think I want to be anything but what I am to him. And so I want no one to know.” She is not aspiring to change class; she likes her work and is proud of it: “But tho’ I’m never so happy as when I’m with him or working for him, yet I want to be still a servant & working so as to be independent & get my own living.”12 At Munby’s behest they do marry, but Hannah feels it has “little to do with our love & our union” (252; Cullwick’s emphases).
The mysteries of lower-class life may hold a fascination for the middle-class man. Crime thrillers, from The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (1953) through Skinflick by Joseph Hansen (1979) to Doing Business by Jeremy Beadle (1990), have depended on the middle-class man being sucked into a mysterious underworld of rent boys, hustlers, and beach bums. He mediates the lower orders to presumptively middle-class readers.
The happy ending to Garland’s Heart in Exile is secured when the protagonist, a psychiatrist, finds after a period of loneliness and gloomy exploration of queer subculture that he is drawn to his manservant.
I confess that the attraction was much stronger when I saw him doing the sort of work I would never had dreamed of asking him to do. When my charwoman left, he insisted on scrubbing the kitchen floor, kneeling on the rubber mat, bending over the mop in his singlet. One saw the servant’s humility in the attitude. But one also saw the broad shoulders, the arched back with the freckled skin under the rebellious hair, and he would look up as I entered and give me a beautiful smile of his brown dog eyes and white teeth.13
The excitement here appears to arise from a coalescence of subordination and strength. On the one hand, Jeffrey Weeks comments, we are seeing “a form of sexual colonialism, a view of the lower classes as a source of ‘trade.’ On the other we may have a sentimental rejection of one’s own class values and a belief in reconciliation through sexual contact.”14
Stephen Spender tells in his autobiography how in the mid-1930s he took up with a young man whom he calls Jimmy Younger: “I asked him to live in my flat and work for me.”15 The contrast in their background, Spender more or less admits, was not just an inconvenience; it was exciting:
For the differences of class and interest between Jimmy and me certainly did provide some element of mystery which corresponded almost to a difference of sex. I was in love, as it were, with his background, his soldiering, his working-class home. Nothing moved me more than to hear him tell stories of the Cardiff streets, of Tiger Bay…. At such moments, too, I was very close to certain emotions awakened in childhood by the workers, who to us seemed at the same time coarse, unclean, and yet with something about them of forbidden fruit, and also of warm-heartedness which suddenly flashed across the cold gulf of class, secret and unspoken. (158–59; my elision)
There were tensions, however. Jimmy “was accustomed to be treated rough, and he expected that I would behave like his past employers. When I did not do so he was disconcerted and felt that in some way I was gaining power over him as no one had done before.” He said, “‘You are very nice to me, but I feel that I am becoming your property’” (151).
As in the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” it seems plain that the lower-class person may gain more than a meal ticket: there is a romance about the affluent, an aura about the powerful, that may make them sexy. However, indignation and resentment are equally likely: a role reversal (such as I discussed in chapter 3) might place the lower-class man in control. That is the theme of Robin Maugham’s novella, The Servant, filmed by Joseph Losey in 1963.
Contemporary viewers are invited to recognize a liaison from the 1960s in John Maybury’s film about the painter Francis Bacon, Love Is the Devil (1998). George (Daniel Craig) arrives in Francis’s studio through the skylight, as a burglar, looking notably proletarian in a donkey jacket. “Come to bed, and you can have whatever you want,” says Francis (Derek Jacobi). George’s first question when we see them in bed is: “You actually make money out of painting?” He’s pleased when Francis says he may use him as a subject; he allows Francis to buy him new clothes. George is ill at ease among Francis’s posh-bohemian friends, however. They have common ground in boxing, but George’s old East End friends despise his new connections. They warn him that he will be used and dropped. Sexually, Francis likes to be submissive, to relinquish control; in the relationship he holds all the cards (this is a typical reversal of class roles).
Francis gets bored with George, who, having no occupation or space of his own, becomes importunate, obstreperous, maudlin, suicidal. Francis tells himself that his work leaves him no room for relationships; that he is powerless to protect George from his dreams. He apologizes for him to his friends. His impatience and unkindness are defended as the artist’s necessary response to his demons. Francis takes George as subject; the pictures in which he figures are especially admired, but Francis can’t tolerate him in the studio. Friends warn him that George needs help, but he can’t be bothered. George takes pills and alcohol while Francis is feted. George’s body seems to grow and fade, miasmically, in and out of the artworks (now famous and immensely valuable) that he has made possible.
THE PERSISTENCE OF CLASS
It is a pleasant trope of conservatives that class is no longer significant in our societies. At the same time, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than ever in Britain and the United States.
It might be thought that the idealized relationship between two boys of the same age, who live in adjacent flats on a working-class estate, in a play designed explicitly to contribute to the campaign for an equal age of consent, would be free of class hierarchy. However, Jonathan Harvey in his play Beautiful Thing makes Jamie’s mother upwardly mobile (she is promoted to manage a pub) whereas Ste’s father is definitely rough (drunken and violent). Jamie’s care matches Ste’s endurance. Further, in familiar ways, class correlates with gender: Ste is good at football, whereas Jamie reads about soap stars in his mother’s magazine.16 (Note, however, that, unlike earlier coming-out narratives, Beautiful Thing does give a positive role to gay institutions—such as the magazine Gay Times, and a gay pub.)
While it seems appropriate to elaborate the concept of class so as to register social, educational, economic, and political inequalities, this need not entail any abandonment of a more traditional Marxist sense of class as about economic, political, and social control. In the last analysis, all power is about command over the means to life. If we have neglected that thought in metropolitan contexts, it is because we have been immensely fortunate in the second half of the twentieth century, to the point where many of us have stopped worrying about food and shelter, and centered our anxieties upon the attainment of a new update of our sound system. Nonetheless, the intense commitments that we call “love” may, ultimately, be intricately mediated versions of a will to survive, ontologically as well as materially. This may lead us into interpersonal opportunities which seem to afford a reassuring exercise of our own power. Equally, it may draw us into the orbit of people who appear to be powerful and may protect us.
The importance of class is indicated in an abiding image in gay pornography and popular fiction: the maintenance man who comes into your house to fix the plumbing and ends up in the shower with you. A thoughtful version of this scenario—told from the viewpoint of the working man—is offered by Jay Quinn in his story, “The Kitchen Table.” Phil regards himself as straight, and has been in prison; he is employed by Trace to work with him on his house. As they share their exertions, Phil finds he is increasingly drawn into sexual fantasies about Trace (they are the same age and both presumptively white). “He noticed how his upper arms and thighs hardened from an office worker’s slack fullness to the firmness suited to their new function.”17 Hitherto, Phil has been hostile to gays who have approached him, but generally he takes things as they come; he is scarcely troubled by his attraction to Trace. They develop a physical rapport. Unusually for an American story, class difference is made explicit. When a building inspector is not satisfied with Phil’s work, he nonetheless defends Phil against Trace. When it comes down to it, Trace observes, “‘A working man’ll side with one of his own kind over somebody in a three-piece suit every time’” (188). Despite his business habits of decision and command, a photograph of Trace and his deceased lover shows Trace as the one who is held, supportively, from behind: “Trace was relaxed into the man’s broad chest, held lovingly by his large hand on his bare stomach” (199). This is evidently the role demarcation Trace and Phil will now assume. They have a relationship of mutual respect, in which Trace’s bourgeois introversion is matched by Phil’s work-a-day steadiness.
To be sure, class difference may be only relative. The English novel that seems designed to set aside traditional hierarchies, representing a partnership between two ordinary blokes, is Tom Wakefield’s Mates. Cyril and Len meet up in the army in 1954 and stay together for a lifetime. Cyril is pleased that their fellow soldiers don’t regard them as conventional queers. He is afraid they will somehow intuit his sexuality.
They nodded to him as they usually did, and he nodded back. It was a relief to find out that he didn’t look any different. He turned to look at Len. His friend Len didn’t lisp, wear scent or make-up. That’s what he was supposed to do, according to all the newspapers of the day. So what if he did? Sod them, sod them all. No, not all of them. The tea-lady was all right.18
Cyril doesn’t envisage that he might himself wear scent; Len may be relatively feminine, but neither of them cultivates an upper-class, Wildean manner.
Yet even this relationship is framed in terms of class. The six weeks of basic training make them appear equal, but hierarchy reappears when they receive different postings because Cyril has good examination results whereas Len, though bookish, is unambitious. Cyril is more confident socially and sexually; he takes up with a local group of artistic and professional men; becomes a head teacher. Len remains a conscientious clerk and does the cooking and the shopping. Finally, Len is unable to assert himself when Cyril dies, and gets pushed out of their home by Cyril’s businessman brother.
Class may figure largely a matter of cultural capital. Austin in Edmund White’s The Married Man is a successful American writer living in Paris; as such he has both money (earned) and prestige. He is taken with Julien partly because of his status and aura as minor aristocracy. Austin writes about the furniture of upper-class families and as a boy daydreamed of finding that his mother or father was descended from Huguenot nobility. Apparently it is in such elevated circles that Austin can best be himself: “Only in upper-class French life had Austin found the exact shade of inclusion he had craved for. Perhaps it was natural in a society where a king had been surrounded by cute boys, his mignons, and in which the brother of Louis XIV, ‘Monsieur,’ had maintained an all-male shadow court.”19 Julien entertains Austin with fantastic tales of his eccentric family; when he doesn’t want to talk about something he will “smile and turn his head slightly to one side with a sort of royal unreachability” (129). Austin is charmed. After Julien’s death, at the end of the book, Austin and the reader learn that all this was fantasy and bluff: Julien comes from a peasant family. Whether French people were deceived by him, or cared very much, is not disclosed.
The history, albeit dimly perceived in recent years, of preliberation liaisons as typically cross-class and exploitative, has led lesbian and gay people to repudiate or understate the influence of class in our affairs. Gender, race, and sexuality have seemed the more promising banners under which to unite. Sally Munt describes how commitment to lesbian feminism made her feel that talking about class “was to be labelled a spoiler, a guilt-tripper, a Manichean thinker, a fifth columnist.”20 As Munt adds, the occlusion of class has been more powerful in the United States, where Marxism has become hard to think about. A collection of essays reasserting the value of Marxism to Shakespeare studies begins by repudiating any supposed priority of class, as opposed to race and gender; the collection makes almost no further mention of class at all.21 The same thing happens in Ken Plummer’s collection, Modern Homosexualities, Leslie J. Moran points out.22
An intriguing interaction between different kinds of capital is described by Carol M. Ward in her account of a two-year relationship between Rita Mae Brown and Martina Navratilova in 1979–1981. It might be thought that the tennis player possessed considerable financial and cultural capital. However, Brown was strongly aware of her own status as a successful novelist and intellectual. She saw Navratilova as “a nice young girl in a limiting profession; where you can make a lot of money but know very little.”23 Correspondingly, Navratilova felt that her career as a sportswoman was being held in low esteem. She wanted to learn from Brown—to read books, visit museums, and talk about politics—but not at the price of her own self-valuation. According to Navratilova, the relationship broke up because Brown’s attitude undermined her ambitions in tennis: she became ambivalent about her own aims. Brown believes that the relationship foundered when Navratilova took up with basketball star Nancy Lieberman; Navratilova says Lieberman was only coaching her—helping her to recover her will to win. After a violent breakup, the two women became friends.
Dorothy Allison’s experience leads her to believe that class is highly active among Americans, in the constitution of both sexualities and political attitudes. She relates her masochistic desires, and her use of dildos and leather, to abuse by her stepfather, and to the white trash culture in which she grew up; she tells a fictionalized version of the story in Bastard Out of Carolina.24 “What I know for sure is that class, gender, sexual preference, and prejudice—racial, ethnic, and religious—form an intricate lattice that restricts and shapes our lives, and that resistance to hatred is not a simple act,” she says. Hence the hostility of middle-class feminists and lesbians toward her practices. They are uncomfortable with her butch, working-class partners: “The kind of woman I am attracted to is invariably the kind of woman who embarrasses respectably middle-class, politically aware lesbian feminists.” The task, Allison says, is “to understand how we internalize the myths of our society even as we resist them.”25
In fact, probably because of general pressures toward embourgeoisement in personal relationships and the particular effects of the targeting of the pink economy, we have scarcely sought to imagine a subculture in which class would be truly a matter of indifference. Instead, we have complacently supposed that gay people will become, almost by definition, middle class—in lifestyle and aspirations, if not in background and income.
Class hierarchy may be obscured through processes of substitution and conflation which make it easy to read class as gender or age difference. Texts which I discuss in other chapters as structured by gender, age, and race usually include a significant element of class difference—so Maupin, The Night Listener; Dickson, Oddfellows; Hall, The Well of Loneliness; Baker, Tim and Pete; Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues; Monette, Halfway Home; Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library. When Malone in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance is living with Frankie, they begin to look like each other (they dress similarly), “like all homosexual lovers”—except for “that unmistakable difference”: race. (They are from Irish and Italian families.) “When they lay tangled in each other’s limbs by day or night, the pale, golden form, and the swarthy, dark-eyed, one, the northern and southern race joined at last.26 In fact what is clear, but unmarked, is that their class and educational backgrounds are entirely dissimilar—Malone went to Yale Law School whereas Frankie labors, maintaining the subway system. This is far more relevant than race as such; when the romance wears off they have little to talk about, so they quarrel and part.
Class is not secondary. If a gay man gets off on wearing the gear of a construction worker, or desiring someone else who does that, it is not helpful to read this as a gender phenomenon and translate it into his relations with his father. It is more reasonable to recognize that there is a historical figure—the construction worker. If he appears sexy and dominant—tough, highly skilled, and inured to danger—it is because behind the fantasy lies an actuality in which there is hard, difficult, and perilous labor, probably worsened by stressful working conditions and management resistance to unionization. If he appears sexy and ready to serve, it is because he cannot afford to risk dismissal. It is in such a world that the middle-class gay man invests, financially and psychologically, in real estate and decor.
The corollary of the centrality of class in gay affairs has been intense evocations of man-to-man equality. The apostle of the liaison that transcends class, in the United States especially, has been Walt Whitman. David Bergman shows how the gay critic F. O. Matthiessen, drawing partly on Edward Carpenter, established Whitman as a poet of organic unity who believed that personal fulfillment might be continuous with social unity.27 Whitman’s reputation as the model for an ideology of opportunity, democracy, and rights, crosses, perhaps too easily, into gay culture as an ideal of comradely, manly, sexual democracy. A memoir of Mark Bingham, for instance, presents him as a regular guy, a rugby player and business executive; a former lover recalls how, when Bingham was coming out, he would read him Whitman. The reason for the memoir is that Bingham died on the hijacked 9/11 plane that missed its target. Surely he must have been one of the passengers who rushed the hijackers; attention to Whitman certifies his heroic potential.28 In fact, Whitman’s adhesive partners were lower class and younger, and his life and work may be seen as displaying damaging hints of effeminacy.29
In practice, democracy and freedom have immense difficulty evading the demands of wealth and beauty. Money was never absent from the elaborate cruising opportunities of the 1970s. The idea that a kind of democracy flourished on Fire Island is evoked but then given further twists in Ethan Mordden’s story, “And Eric Said He’d Come”:
For here we find gay stripped to its essentials. The beautiful are more fully exposed here, the trolls more cast out than anywhere else—thus their pride and passion. The beguiling but often irrelevant data of talent and intelligence that can seem enticing in the city are internal contradictions in a place without an opera house or a library. Only money and charm count. Professional advantages are worthless, for, in a bathing suit, all men have the same vocation. Yet there are distinctions of rank. Those who rent are the proletariat, those who own houses are the bourgeoisie, and houseboys form the aristocracy.30
At first it appears that only sex appeal counts; then we learn that money matters after all; indeed, the island has its own version of the class system.
James Kenneth Melson had a mixed experience of the prestigious Studio 54 disco, he says in his autobiography. He proved that a boy from Ohio could gain entrance just by looking good. Once inside, there was no problem: “the atmosphere was devoid of the pretenses, the ‘attitude,’ that prevailed among those left standing outside. Everyone could let his hair down; royalty would dance with rock stars, Eurotrash with debutantes, and pro athletes with the likes of Disco Sally and Rollerena, two of the notables of the ‘outrageous’ category.”31 Better still, this democratic atmosphere seemed to facilitate Melson’s quest to seek out the most wealthy and influential men. However, they expected him to comply with their sexual demands, and attempts to pursue upper-class acquaintances beyond the club scene and the bedroom left him rapidly and comprehensively snubbed. He found qualifications and a job on Wall Street a better route to success.
The implicit underpinning for the Whitmanesque, gay egalitarian ideology is supplied by the concept of “America.” As Steven Epstein observes, the appeal is to “the rules of the modern American pluralist myth, which portrays a harmonious competition among distinct social groups.”32 On this basis, lesbians and gay men have constituted themselves as something like an ethnic group claiming rights. How far that pluralistic myth is to be trusted is a question far wider than queer politics: it is about how much we should expect from the institutions through which capitalism and heteropatriarchy are reproduced.
Pete in Baker’s Tim and Pete offers an explanation for and reaffirmation of the general idealism and the aspiration to transcend class that gay men have associated with a “Whitmanic” feeling. Pete relates it to “‘a lot of people feeling good about themselves for the first time in their lives. That was the best time, really, the early gay lib days. There was a bohemian spirit, you know. In a sense it was still the sixties.’”33 The image may still be potent. Whitman would have been at home in the semimystical gatherings of the Radical Faeries in 1990, Paul Monette avers.34
WHO SPEAKS?
Phil in “The Kitchen Table” and Melson in his autobiography tell their stories from the viewpoint of the relatively lower-class man. Generally, as we see elsewhere in this book, the feelings of the partner in the subordinate position are less well documented. For instance, we can only speculate about the subsequent sex lives of the boys who featured in Wilde’s trials. The unusual factor in Munby’s household is that we have Hannah Cullwick’s diaries.
Neal Drinnan’s Glove Puppet ingeniously refocuses the perils of the cross-class liaison. The novel is written from the viewpoint of Johnny, also called Vaslav, who is now twenty; he interprets his early life, promising the reader some lurid details. Johnny comes from a classically deprived background: he has never known his father, his mother is a sex worker and a drug addict. When she dies suddenly on a railway station he is scooped up by Shamash, a gay ballet dancer whose son has recently died, and taken to Australia. There, at the age of seven, he is named Vaslav and passed off as Shamash’s son. He lives happily and luxuriously, and adopts the concepts and values of an artistic, bohemian community. From the age of eleven he finds that his feelings of filial affection for Shamash are complicated by an intense sexual awareness. Shamash tries to damp this down, but at age fourteen Vaslav encourages Ashley, Shamash’s partner, to seduce him. When Vaslav is sixteen, he and Shamash become lovers.
As we saw with age hierarchy, purported accounts of sexual experience from the subordinate viewpoint may offer to titillate the reader, even while inviting condemnation on the ground of exploitation. This process is actually incorporated into Glove Puppet, for Johnny/Vaslav indicates that he expects to make a lot of money from his book. “People love sex freaks, trash fucks, dirty young beauty; fresh filth-statutory rape-date rape, boy pussy surprise.”35 The reader has been warned—or is it enticed?
An adult having sex with a boy of fourteen is presented as the moral issue of Glove Puppet. Although it is clear that Vaslav was hell-bent on gaining sexual experience, he maintains consistently that Ashley was wrong to exploit him. However, another vein of thought in the book suggests that, in one way or another, Johnny was always bound to be bad, sooner or later and whoever he was with, because of his class origins. Hence his relatively early development: “hormonally I developed early in that white trashy way that really was my genetic inheritance” (72). His enjoyment of Shamash’s lifestyle is complicated by his assumption that really he is Johnny, the rough boy on the make, bad by definition.
He [Johnny] was winking at me from where he slouched by the garbage dump in the council estate. In my mind’s eye he was making lewd gestures just like those trashy boys in the porn movies, his hand outlining the erection in his torn jeans, his other hand fingering his mouth for saliva, for lube. He was mustering his strength, weighing his sex because that’s all he had to sell, that was his only ticket out of the council estate and at that stage his only ambition. (115)
This enticing but threatening creature has only one object in view: a ticket out. Any signs of untainted love and trust are merely deceptive. Johnny “could never be tamed or cultured. He was like his mother, hardly a person at all, just someone to do stuff to, something to fuck,” like a boy in a pornographic magazine (80).
When the narration of the novel catches up with present time, Vaslav is entrenched in sauna, pornographic, drug, and sex-worker scenes; he is depressed and has tried to take his own life; yet he is surviving. Shamash has confessed to sodomizing his own son and is in prison. This is on the supposition that Shamash is Vaslav’s father; the reader knows better. The issue is not incest, nor even underage sex (in most metropolitan countries sex at sixteen is legal), but the destructive intrusion of the lower-class boy. The reader may or may not choose to accept Vaslav’s repeated claims that the truth of gay life is revealed in his corrupt but thrilling story: “We might frighten ourselves, us fags, but we are what we are and we do experience some extraordinary sensations in our endless pursuit of whatever it is we are looking for—momentary oblivion or eternal rest” (173).
A powerful novel which takes seriously the potential and the predicament of being the lower-class and younger lover is Paul Russell’s Boys of Life. Tony is seduced as a sixteen-year-old in Owen, Kentucky, by Carlos, a bohemian, avant-garde filmmaker who is passing through. Carlos is charismatic, worldly wise, and very good at sex; he gives Tony the whiskey he craves, and promises him a role in a film. Despite or because of his rural innocence, Tony already has same-sex experience. His initial response to Carlos is a combination of fascination and trepidation. Thereafter, all the sex is marvelous. Writing about the first fuck still breaks Tony up, ten years later: “suddenly I was so upset about everything, I couldn’t stand it. I started crying, sobbing like some crazy drunk to think how that’s all gone, nothing like that’s ever going to happen again and the only thing I can do is try and remember it.”36 The sexual absorption appears reciprocal, though Carlos is not interested in being fucked. “I guess you could say he was greedy with me, but I didn’t care one bit once he started in on me” (72). Carlos’s exercise of power is sexy.
So, according to the narration, offered as Tony’s retrospective account, it could not fairly be alleged that Tony was seduced into sexual experience which he did not want. In fact, the problem is the other way around: Tony is totally infatuated. In New York he spends the days waiting for Carlos to come home—“I’d hear him tramping up the stairs. He never knew how happy I was to see him come in that door” (62). Nor has Carlos detained Tony from heterosexual experience. He doesn’t think of himself initially as queer or gay, and he does look at girls in the street—though they tend to be of boyish appearance. “Maybe it was knowing somewhere inside me I really was a queer that made me look at those women the way I did; maybe I was saying good-bye to something, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing” (64–65).
When he is abandoned by Carlos, and bored with making movies and cruising the bars, Tony allows Monica (who is somewhat boyish) to fall in love with him, take him down to Tennessee, and marry him. So eventually he picks up where he might have been if he’d just stayed among his own class in Owen—“finally back on track” (219). However, he doesn’t find Monica or Tennessee sexy or interesting.
After two months in New York, Tony intuits that Carlos has no real interest in his personal development. “I grew up on Carlos right then—not that I ever thought he was going to get me through stuff, but I do think I hooked up with him back in Owen because I could see I needed some kind of help. And now that fell apart” (91). He accuses Carlos of using him. It is at this point that Carlos cements Tony’s attachment by starting work on the movie with him as star. What hurts Tony crucially is the discovery that he is neither the first nor the last of Carlos’s boys. Tony’s dawning realization that he has been displaced and he and Carlos will never fuck together again is very painful to read. Carlos claims later that he intended to set Tony free: “‘I wanted you to learn that you wanted to go away…. I sent you away, I let you grow up’” (295; my elision). However, it sounds like special pleading. Carlos does this with everyone, we learn; it is how he works as an artist. He needs to break his performers to get them to realize their potential for the camera.
Tony, when he is angry, accuses Carlos of being manipulative and exploitative. However, a thought running through the narration is that people generally do what they want to do; if it had not been Carlos for Tony, it would have been somebody else. This thought governs Carlos’s film technique, which relies upon improvisation to the point where the performers’ fantasies emerge. Tony is adamant that the sexual practices in the films were the decisions of the actors, not under compulsion or hypnosis (177, 179). This is perhaps all very well, but if each person is responsible for his own actions, consent must be informed. When Seth tells Tony about Carlos’s other boys he adds: “‘I just think people have got a right to know certain things. So they can make their own decisions, if you know what I mean. But to do that they’ve got to know what’s what’” (150).
These questions are sharpened toward the end of the novel, as Carlos pushes his experiments with sex and power to new limits. It is disclosed that Carlos has seduced also Tony’s younger brother, Ted, and that they pursued the reality of art and the freedom of the actor into increasingly violent and finally fatal courses. Carlos repeats the libertarian motif of the book: people do what they want to do, it takes two to fuck. Now Tony challenges this. “I hated this man. I hated how he stepped into my life and ruined everything he touched and then just walked out without ever looking back” (301).
A recurring topic, on the other hand, is where Tony might have been otherwise. Mainly through people he meets around Carlos, he becomes politically aware and personally sensitive, in ways that, he says, could not have developed in Owen, Kentucky. “‘Carlos lifted me out of all that’” (117). Intellectually, imaginatively, and morally, Tony becomes superior to the system that is going to incarcerate him indefinitely. His defense lawyer argued that Carlos was a monster; Tony is writing to set the record straight. The problem, according to Boys of Life, is not class or age hierarchy, and certainly not the sex that goes along with them. It is Carlos’s insatiable appetite for new partners, and his fluency in devising theories to justify it.
HUSTLING
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, case number 146: “I felt myself drawn exclusively towards powerful, youthful and entirely masculine individuals…. Since my desires are limited to persons of the lower social order, I could always find someone who could be had for money.”37
In Bruiser by Richard House, Paul, an anxious Englishman, is attracted by the readiness of Adrian, a young waiter, to gratify him sexually while he pays the bills. “Despite moments of tenderness between us, it’s my money that keeps him with me,” he admits to himself.38 However, this arrangement is satisfactory for Paul: it gives him a new confidence to express himself sexually. He forsakes his bourgeois caution and sets out to drive from Chicago to Mexico, without proper papers, banking arrangements, or travel information, and terrified by the thought that Adrian is HIV-positive. The boy, removed from his accustomed context and subject to Paul’s priorities, becomes bored and captious. His erratic and enigmatic behavior initially intrigues Paul, but then increasingly undermines his sense of prudence, order, and purpose. If initially Paul was exploiting Adrian’s dependency, he becomes his caregiver, trapped by the boy’s insufficiency and his own middle-class sense of responsibility. “He looks like an old man, his face puffy, cheeks and jawline swollen; it is hard to understand how it all came to this” (170). Surprisingly, the novel ends with them together, escaping other commitments as they had wanted.
The outcome is less fortunate in Steps Going Down by Joseph Hansen. Darryl Cutler has always lived off older men, and now is waiting for the death of his lover/employer. When he falls for a casual pickup, Chick Pelletier, he meets his match in vanity, selfishness, and brutality. Chick is already being kept by an older partner, and has a girlfriend as well. He demands that Cutler get him a starring part in a film, and spends his money copiously as a way of compensating for his dependence. He abuses Cutler verbally and physically. But Cutler is infatuated, and is drawn further into fraud and murder. When Chick leaves him Cutler attracts the devotion of Eduardo, a Mexican delivery boy, but Chick tips off the immigration service. “Find some nice guy with a job and a bank account, someone your own age” (74), an acquaintance warns him.39 That seems to be the moral.
The hustler is sometimes a romanticized figure in gay writing. Mike (River Phoenix), blessed with beauty but not quite able to function by himself, spends time in a supportive group of street boys in My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991). This is a consolation also in Pai Hsienyung’s novel, Crystal Boys. Phil Andros meets all kinds of interesting people as he peddles himself around Chicago and San Francisco; indeed, he finds that he is himself already a legendary figure.40 The clients are respectful, given to swapping literary quotes, and many are so sexy themselves that it is unclear why they need a hustler’s services. The cops are sexy as well in their uniforms, and happy to join in. Unsurprisingly, such celebration of the hustler occurs toward the pornographic end of the spectrum of writing. As I argued in chapter 4, the function of pornography is to present images of sexual relations that are otherwise impermissible, or barely permissible. Phil Andros’s adventures propose a liberty and a success that most of us can only fantasize about. To be sure, if hustling were truly so rewarding we would all be doing it; but we may like to imagine that it may be so.
Hustlers are likely exponents of the value of multiple and anonymous relations, and may well be explicit about the overwhelming of difference that they enact. Phil Andros’s collection Below the Belt and Other Stories is dedicated to “Twelve Johns, eleven Dons, four Kennys, nine Jims, two Ikes, three Sams, two Scotts, four Garys, four Roberts, one Dean, and lots of other good guys too numerous to mention” (v). Porn star Scott O’Hara writes in his memoir, Autopornography, of a particular sexual encounter:
I can’t say much about that night, except that it was the most perfect night in my memory. What makes one particular night stand out so, from among the hundreds of nights of good sex that I’ve had? Cynically, I have to say that it’s largely due to the fact that I never saw Colm again. We never had a chance to become familiarly contemptible (or is that contemptibly familiar?) toward each other.41
What made Colm special was his anonymity.
John Rechy’s narrator in City of Night presents a more acerbic view of the scores (clients), hustlers, and queens. He finds his way from Texas to Times Square: “like a possessive lover—or like a powerful drug—it lured me. FASCINATION! I stopped working…. And I returned, dazzled, to this street. The giant sign winked its welcome: FASCINATION!”42 He resists attempts to settle him, either as a lover or as an employee. The seductions of the scene are continuous with the dangers: “Life is lived on the brink of panic on the streets” (150)—panic generated by the vice squad, and by the prospect of finding that you are no longer young and desirable. The narrator’s relation to all this is ambivalent. The others are presented as trapped in the scene, whereas the narrator, even while working it, is an observer. Which we are to take as the dominant image is unclear.
Eventually the narrator is almost persuaded by a client, Jeremy, to admit that really he wants to be loved, and has been using the passing of money as a repeated, because unsatisfactory, reassurance that he is wanted. Money will not be irrelevant, of course: Jeremy is offering full support in New York. However, this would require the narrator not just to trust himself in someone else’s hands, but to admit that his response to gay sex is personal and not merely professional—that he is gay. He decides that love is a myth to which he should not surrender (after all, Jeremy has not found it himself); he prefers the reality of the “grinding streets” (370). There is no suggestion that he has been damaged, any more than anyone else in a godless world.
Hugo in Oscar Moore’s A Matter of Life and Sex is attracted by the romance of hustling:
He wanted to be let into the game, to join in the tawdry spectacle, dressed up with tinsel and a smile, sinister and all-knowing, feigning naivety, feigning experience, battered by fate and by pimps, teetering on the brink of the gutter and drugs, living in a nightlife world of sex, violence and cash in the hand.43
He is from a suburban background and goes to university, but exploiting his sexual attractions seems more fun. However, the streets have changed and there is no “fraternity of hustlers” such as he has read of in fiction. The scene is managed through an agency and is in hotel bedrooms. Initially, Hugo enjoys being attractive and skillful, but constant faking destroys his spontaneity. He makes no friends, and fails to find a sugar daddy or to meet a celebrity. Part of the lore of hustling is that you insist on your limits, what you will and will not do, and avoid dangerous situations. However, Hugo is forced. This happens also in Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz’s novel. Both protagonists tell their stories with their deaths from AIDS in view.
AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases apart, it is not obvious that the employment of sex workers is doing much distinctive harm to anyone—by this, I mean much harm that is not already endemic in the lower-paid, unregulated regions of market capitalism. The exploitation and humiliation is hardly less if you are working in a manufacturing sweatshop, and there may be a better prospect of the occasional thrill. Donald J. West in his study, Male Prostitution, finds a pattern of social malaise among the boys, but concludes that “they would have been problem personalities in any event and that involvement in street work was incidental to the disaster-laden course of their lives.”44 The exchange of sexual favors for money is, perhaps, less a perversion of egalitarian, companionable relations, than a counterpart of them.
Notwithstanding, sex that is paid for is firmly signaled as second-rate in much of our fiction. In Michael Arditti’s much admired novel Easter, readers learn to dislike the Archdeacon; he is hostile to the sincere, conscientious, and troubled vicar and curate. So when we find that on Good Friday he conducts a masochistic scenario centered upon himself as Christ and artfully elaborating the biblical narrative, we are hardly surprised. The corruption that we intuited is exposed. Ronan, the young man who is paid to flog and humiliate the Archdeacon, is supplied by Harry, a typically sinister professional, who was corrupted when a church server; Ronan is black, inexperienced, and has no money. “‘Do you think I want [to] do this? I’m telling you I’m skint, man. I’m going mad stuck in three rooms with my mum and sisters.’” He embodies a normative perspective upon the Archdeacon’s doings. “Ronan no longer knows what to think. Nothing Harry said has prepared him for such perversity.” To the Archdeacon, he’s one of Pilate’s thugs. “‘You see the broken, bruised, bloody body in front of you; so what do you want to do to it?’” “‘Cover it up?’” Ronan suggests, artlessly. “‘No, you fool: flog it! Don’t you know the gospel story?’”45 When the Archdeacon ejaculates with a cry of “‘It is finished,’” Ronan rebels: “‘You’re completely round the twist…. I’m not staying here’” (339; my elision). It is left to the Archdeacon’s mother, in an unscripted conflation of Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus, to get him down from the cross.
Yet is this all so contemptible? If it is not your thing then it will appear weird, but other people’s fixations are always like that. Of course, it is hypocritical of the Archdeacon to use the imagery of religion, in the face of its traditional doctrines of abstinence, for sexual excitement. But if fantasy is dependent on a supply of provocative materials from the power structures in which we live, as I have been arguing, it will feature substitutions and reversals of authoritative imagery (such as that of Christianity). Must it be that fantasies featuring heterosexuals in the missionary position and trying for a baby are authentic, while more adventurous scenarios are ridiculous or evil? To whose advantage is that? Should we not, in fact, be wary of satire as a form (on the cover of my edition, Muriel Spark says, “Arditti writes about Western Christianity with pungency and satirical frankness”)? Does satire not, often, insinuate a taken-for-granted set of normative assumptions?
HOUSE PARTIES
A versatile location for the cross-class liaison is the weekend house party. Here the upper-class man will feel at home, and probably keen to show off the sexy man he has captured. The lower-class partner will feel like an outsider and ill at ease, so their relationship will be tested. At the same time, the outsider may offer a challenge to the other occupants, drawing attention to their own deceptions and insecurities. The class intruder is a wild card; he doesn’t know the rules, you don’t know what he might do (the plays of Harold Pinter are ultimately about this).46 The outcome, typically, finds some couples fading in commitment and others growing. Most often the outsider is cast off—illustrating the dominance of intraclass pressure over sheer sexiness.
In Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally’s play (filmed by Joe Mantello in 1997), everyone in the house responds to the attractions of Ramon, a young dancer of Puerto Rican origin and little education, whom John has brought with him to a gathering of old friends involved in the making of stage musicals. His strangeness is immediately registered: “A Third World boyfriend. So John Jeckyll has gone PC.”47 They discuss funding for the arts, and the need for a Diaghilev; but he would expect sexual favors. The only thing an artist should do for free is make love, Ramon declares. John, who is not a happy man, feels sidelined, and tries clumsily to assert his proprietary rights. “Can we go upstairs and fuck?” he demands. “I didn’t appreciate that fucking remark in front of your friends,” Ramon complains later (29). The situation is delicate, he reminds John: “Look, I’m sort of out of my element this weekend…. You’re all old friends. You work together. You have a company. I’m just somebody you brought with you” (33; my elision). Notwithstanding, John corrects Ramon’s vocabulary and calls him “Chiquita” in front of the others. We learn later that John’s sexuality is fixated upon a master-and-servant scenario, deriving from an early experience with an Irish boy who worked for his father.
However, Ramon is already asserting his independence by setting out to seduce Bobby, who is blind and the partner of Gregory who owns the house. This leads to the breakup of John and Ramon, and eventually of Gregory and Bobby. However, it is when he accepts that it is Ramon who must dance the work that he can write but no longer perform that Gregory is released from his work block. Not all affairs are doomed to fail. Arthur and Perry reaffirm their fourteen-year relationship; but they are class-matched—an accountant and a lawyer. Buzz and James, both of whom are living with AIDS, fall in love. The action is finally overshadowed by AIDS, which is said to be a genocide, destroying gay life. Actually, Love! Valour! Compassion! displays the subculture as disconcertingly resilient.
Lyle takes Robert to meet his old friends John and Marian, in Peter Cameron’s novel The Weekend. Lyle lives in a Brownstone house he has inherited from Tony (who was a travel writer), and has written a successful book on painting. Lyle was a visiting speaker and Robert was employed to drive him to the airport: that is how they met. Robert is a struggling young artist and a waiter in an Indian restaurant (he doesn’t get on with his father, who is Indian, lives in Delhi, and makes money manufacturing counterfeit sportswear). Lyle is able to offer Robert a studio; he is attracted by his malleability—“‘He listens to people; he really listens.’”48 Robert listens mainly to Lyle:
He found almost everything about Lyle sexy: his body, his mind, his talk, the way he climbed stairs, the way his fingers gripped a fork, blushing with tension, the way he smelled and tasted, the impossibly soft way his back and neck and shoulders congregated, the spot there, the crux of him, naked and lickable. (127)
Robert perceives Lyle as powerful, not in this or that respect, but generally, through his entire person; even his points of softness and vulnerability are powerful. Unfortunately, Lyle doesn’t have much wisdom.
John and Marian (not “Mary-Anne,” she insists) are too wealthy to have to work. They are old friends of Lyle, Tony was John’s half brother, and he died of AIDS; so a lot is at stake when Lyle brings Robert to visit on the anniversary of Tony’s death. John does his best to absent himself; under Marian’s scrutiny, Robert appears not to belong. When he says “‘We’ve just lay about all afternoon,’” Marian wants to correct him. “Lain about,” she wants to say (103); when Lyle has a black eye from walking into a tree, John asks if Robert has hit him; his white shirt is presumed to be one he wears as a waiter. The symptomatic incident is at dinner, when Robert pulls a grape from the bunch, unaware that there are special scissors for grapes (they had belonged to Marian’s grandmother). Laura, who is Italian and raunchy, takes Robert’s part: “‘Oh, don’t tame him!’ Laura suddenly cried. ‘Let him eat grapes with his fingers if he wants! Let us all be free of these stupid affectations!’” (180). Robert, who has overheard Marian saying that she doesn’t like him, feels that Lyle is siding against him and leaves abruptly for the city.
Neither Cameron nor his characters quite say that class is the issue. “‘He’s all wrong for Lyle,’” Marian declares (156); “‘we are not well suited,’” Lyle accepts (235). On the defensive, Lyle denies that the feeling between Robert and himself can properly be called love: “‘If you loved me—if what you feel is love—love would be a very cheap and common thing’” (189). However determined the effacement, these are class terms. My sense is that Robert offered a challenge which the others failed to meet. It is unclear, at the end, whether Lyle and he can rescue anything.
The stranger is already within the gates in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell. Justin used to be with Alex but is now with Robin; he invites Alex down to Robin’s house in the country. Alex is a civil servant and Robin is an architect who tidies up country houses; both have a lot more money and status, and are far more established in the world than the somewhat younger men to whom they are attracted. These are principally Justin, who wants to be an actor; Danny, who is Robin’s son but works as gallery attendant; and Terry, the local factotum with an eye for the main chance (a cross between Alec Scudder in Forster’s Maurice and Ron Wrigley in Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After). In a sequence of episodes alternating between London and weekends at Robin’s house, Alex becomes accustomed to Justin’s defection and falls for Danny, who becomes bored and leaves him.
Justin has a starkly instrumental idea of relationships. “‘You’re like me, darling, you need someone older to look after you,’” he tells Danny. “‘I know Alex is rather shy and sensitive, but he’s got plenty of money and a comfortable house and a sports car—and in bed … well—.’”49 Actually, it emerges, being kept is not very good for Justin. He is bored all day, and finds himself unable to get interested in housework (which, of course, would confirm his subservient status). At one point Robin’s approach affects him “like a secretary briefly disarranged by an importunate boss” (124). Danny maintains his own flat and gets a job so as not to be “a kept boy”; however, it is only casual work (141). Both Justin and Danny feel justified in undertaking flings with other, similarly placed young men. Justin tells himself “how outrageous it was of Robin to leave him locked up here, like a slave, a mistress with no life of her own” (93). Terry is available: “‘I can slip in through the back gate,’” he says (48).
The answer, it appears, is to avoid relations of manifest, one-way dependence. Robin and Justin get onto a better footing eventually: the trigger is Justin’s inheriting money of his own, so that he is no longer beholden. Alex takes up with Nick, who is of similar background and interests to himself and slightly older. The (relatively) egalitarian liaison wins out, then, though Alex finds that the spell of Danny lingers.