Within the Violet Quill, it was an open secret that Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, who were lovers, had, in the words of their friends and fellow VQ member Andrew Holleran, an “incredible sex life with black men.” But despite Holleran’s urging that they write about it, they never did. Holleran speculates that their silence “was probably because there is so much unspoken in black-white relationships—that IS racist—it’s inevitable. Both whites and blacks participate in it. The black dick, the white ass, etc., or the reverse. … How could it be otherwise.” Holleran’s letter indicates ways that sexual desire, which is always at least about power, contaminates the representation of racial relations (letter to author, January 19, 1994). The representation of the attraction that brings men of different colors together cannot help being regarded as racist, and because uncoupling desire from its representation is impossible, white writers—especially white gay writers—have increasingly become silent about race relations.
Yet as unspeakable as homosexual relations between the races may seem today to Holleran, they were not always so tightly muzzled. Indeed, representations of homosexuality and representations of interracial contact have been linked throughout gay American literature. Strange Brother, Blair Niles’s 1931 novel of New York gay life, places its opening scenes in a bar in Harlem that 114 caters to black and white gay men and where straight whites come to ogle. Such a linkage should not seem strange. Not only were both groups legally and socially stigmatized, but early sexology often constructed homosexuals as a different race, biologically separate from heterosexuals. In Cities of the Plain, Proust explicitly compares sodomites to Jews, as races set apart. In the late forties and early fifties, when homosexuality was more firmly constructed as a psychological condition, such war novels as Loren Wahl’s The Invisible Glass (1950) and Fritz Peters’s The World Next Door (1948) linked both groups as oppressed minorities.
Even after Stonewall, gay writers continued to explore the correlation between sexual and racial otherness. In Dancer from the Dance and in his short story “Sleeping Soldiers,” Andrew Holleran wrote about interracial relations. They are central concerns of Michael Grumley’s posthumously published novel Life Drawing, and Robert Ferro made homoand heterosexual relations between the races a recurring part of The Family of Max Desir. Indeed other gay white artists who formed an outer circle around the Violet Quill, particularly Coleman Dowell, wrote extensively about interracial gay relationships; Dowell’s White on Black on White (1983) is one of the most obsessed and self-lacerating studies of the subject. But gay white writers who have emerged since AIDS—such as Michael Cunningham, David Leavitt, and Dennis Cooper—have found the subject increasingly unspeakable, leaving it almost entirely to such African American gay writers as Randall Kenan, Canaan Parker, and Reginald Shepherd. Although Douglas Sadownick’s novel Sacred Lips of the Bronx (1994) is a notable exception, and Paul Russell’s Sea of Tranquillity (1994) contains a central interracial couple, gay relations between the races appears once again to be mostly a black issue to be handled by blacks, rather than a concern for all members of the interlocking lesbian and gay communities.
How white gay artists represent African American males is the subject of Kobena Mercer’s two meditations on Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and they show just how problematic the subject is, especially for a cultural critic who is himself black and gay. For Mercer, such representations cannot escape the ambivalence of the fetishistic object, which combines mastery with anxiety, presence with absence, overabundance with lack. Such ambivalence can fix both object and subject into rigid hierarchical positions, but it can also destabilize these positions since “the ambivalence of ethnicity” is “the site of identification and enunciation” (Mercer:209). But not all ambivalence will do equally well in breaking down racial constructions. For example, Mercer writes: “Norman Mailer’s positions [in the late sixties] were deeply reactionary, and I find the whole fantasy of ‘the white Negro’ repulsive in many ways; but it is worth remembering, whether we like it or not, that Mailer … when he published that article in Dissent in 1957 … was attempting to articulate a critique of sexual and social norms” (216). Mercer insists that all representations of race must be rigorously placed within their historical, cultural, and erotic contexts before they can be evaluated. An attitude that was progressive in the light of 1957 may be reactionary in 1967 and repulsive by 1987. Mercer warns that “one can’t resolve the matter by simply saying Mailer = bad/Genet = good, because such binary thinking ends up with the static concept of identity rather than the more volatile concept of identification” (216). Mercer centers his analysis on Mapplethorpe’s photographs, but his position can be extended to literary representation as well, and the problems of the ambivalence of the homoerotic literary representations of race can be best studied in Mapplethorpe’s contemporaries, the writers of the Violet Quill. Edmund White, the most celebrated of the group, was in fact a friend and colleague of Mapplethorpe and authored the introduction to the catalog of Mapplethorpe’s exhibition Black Males. (Felice Picano has written me that he was asked to write the introduction but could not accept because he was too busy.) In examining the works of the Violet Quill we should keep Mercer’s admonishment in mind, for what we will find are not finely resolved attitudes toward race and homosexuality but, rather, highly ambivalent, volatile feelings which result from the vicissitudes of identification and differentiation. If we are to judge the Violet Quill fairly, we must ascertain whether its members expressed a more or less empowering and enabling attitude than those available at the time.
For the Violet Quill, questions of race were highly problematic. The Violet Quill was an all-white writers group, and despite its associations with New York, it had a considerable Southern contingent. Christopher Cox was born and raised in Alabama. Andrew Holleran, after a childhood in Aruba, moved to Florida. Edmund White, although raised in the Midwest, spent long periods of his adolescence in Texas, where both his parents came from. In fact, White contends that the situation “was set up for [him] to become a bigot” since his paternal grandfather was “a well-known, even a notorious racist who wrote and published racists books—joke books with such titles as Chocolate Drops from the South and Let’s Laugh” (JGS:32). Michael Grumley, another child of the Midwest, grew up in Iowa, in a town that faced the Mississippi, which inspired him with Huck-like dreams of floating southward. The members were also all from the middle to lower upper classes. Cox’s father, a friend of George Wallace, was a trustee of the University of Alabama, where Chris briefly attended college and headed the local chapter of the most radical student organization at the time, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Perhaps this Southern heritage made the Violet Quill particularly sensitive to issues of race. But to understand the Violet Quill’s reaction to race—both collectively and individually—one has to understand the notably conflicted position race has had for all gay writers.
White gay men and lesbians have historically been conduits for or co-opters of African American culture in white America. One need only think of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts or the work of Carl Van Vechten in promoting and encouraging black writing, music, performance, and art. This closeness between lesbian and gay whites and African American culture may be a result of the fact that so many of the leading African American artists have been gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The white tragic hero of Strange Brother describes Harlem as the only place in the city where he can find acceptance. “In Harlem I found courage and joy and tolerance,” he tells the attractive white female reporter who befriends him. “I can be myself there. … They know all about me, and I don’t have to lie” (152).
The identification of gays with blacks is perhaps most directly articulated by Paul Goodman, who wrote in his “Memoirs of an Ancient Activist” (1969): “Homosexual needs have made me a nigger. I have of course been subjected to arbitrary insult and brutality from citizens and the police. … What is much more niggerizing is being debased and abashed when it is not taken for granted that my out-going impulse is my right” (175). But Goodman acknowledges the differences: “Being a queer nigger is economically and professionally less disadvantageous than being a black nigger” (176). Nevertheless, he insists both gay and black people must recognize the mutual conditions of oppression and stigmatization even if they take different forms and have different levels of severity.
Such attempts to draw connections between sexual and racial oppression were, according to Goodman, met “blandly” by such people as Stokely Carmichael (Goodman:175) but with hostility by others. White recalls that on the second night of the Stonewall Riots (which occurred in the same year that Goodman published his essay), “Straight Negro boys put their arms around me and [said] we’re comrades (it’s okay with me—in fact, great, the first camaraderie I’ve felt with blacks in years)” (VQR:3). But the playwright Ed Bullins, as late as 1971, reacted vehemently to even implicit comparisons. Edmund White in his biography Genet quotes Bullins’s response to the American production of The Blacks.
The editors of Black Theater magazine do not think that any Black people should see “The Blacks.” Jean Genet is a white, self-confessed homosexual with dead white Western ideas—faggotty ideas about Black Arts, Revolution, and the people. His empty masochistic activities and platitudes on behalf of the Black Panthers should not con Black people. Genet, in his writings, had admitted to seeing himself as a so-called “nigger.” Black people cannot allow white perversions to enter their communities, even if it rides on the back of a Panther. Beware of whites who plead the black cause … beware of Athol Fugard of South Africa and Jean Genet, a French pervert; disguised white missionaries representing Western cultural imperialism. (Bullins, quoted in White, Genet, 441)
Bullins’s response is in line with Eldridge Cleaver’s denunciation of James Baldwin as a man who was “unable to have a baby by a white man … the little half-white offspring of [his] dreams … redoubles [his] efforts and intake of the white man’s sperm” (102). Bullins and Cleaver are united by their homophobia: both believe that homosexuality is a white perversion and that gay white men who identify with the oppression of blacks as well as homosexual black men are not to be trusted; the former are imperialist spies, the latter are traitors to their race.
With the homophobia of many black political and intellectual leaders, the gay liberation movement—in which Edmund White, George Whitmore, and Felice Picano were active members—had a complex and ambivalent relationship to the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. Carl Wittman’s 1970s essay “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” which at the time many regarded as the bible of the gay liberation movement, reflects the skittish attitude of many white gay radicals toward black radicals. Wittman saw a coalition between the two groups as being “tenuous right now, because of the uptightness and supermasculinity of many black males.” Nevertheless, he argues, “we must support their movement and demands; we must show we mean business.” A coalition between black liberation and gay liberation could be mutually helpful since “the very large gay population can make the difference between justice or continuing racism” (169) and alter the balance of political power. Wittman’s policy has remained the general principle that continues to guide most gay organizations.
Andrew Holleran’s story “Sleeping Soldiers,” about his experiences in the army in 1968, captures the floating feelings of identification and enmity that a white man in the process of coming out felt toward blacks because of the racism they were subjected to and the homophobia they often expressed. Holleran read an early version of “Sleeping Soldiers” to the Violet Quill, but he only completed the story a dozen years later. This long gestation—which is mirrored in his inability to complete another work about black-gay relations in the army, an unpublished novella entitled “Negroes in Germany”—may indicate his deeply conflicted feelings about the subject. In “Sleeping Soldiers” the unnamed narrator, who is in the slow process of coming out (a soldier asleep to his own sexuality), watches as Nelson and Tully, two recent white graduates of the University of Virginia Law School, use the homophobia of two uneducated blacks, Leathers and Checo, to try to get themselves out of the army. Nelson and Tully are heterosexual, but Leathers and Checo interpret their language and upper-class manner as effeminate and, therefore, homosexual. Once Nelson and Tully understand the powerful hold their supposed homosexuality has on Leathers and Checo, they taunt the two black men mercilessly, leering and blowing kisses at them. At one point Nelson tells Leathers, “The sight of you taking a crap, and the Sistine Chapel, are the two things I think of every night before I close me eyes” (VQR:148). Leathers responds by reporting Nelson and Tully as homosexuals to his commanding officer. The narrator is distanced by both the racism of Nelson and Tully and the homophobia of Leathers and Checo. In any case, the concluding epiphany of the story turns away from these two pairs and, instead, focuses on a white sergeant and his friend, a black cook who, “back from a tour of Vietnam, had only this week remaining in the Army” (146). He imagines them driving off “in the red convertible, with a string of cans someone had tied to the bumper, like a bridal couple on their honeymoon. Once free, one black, one white, their lives, so close, so intimate now, would go their separate ways; their nuptial vehicle taking them not to a life together, which the Army had created, but a divorce” (149). Racism and homophobia are part of the civilian world the sergeant and the cook will return to once discharged from the military. Holleran regards the army reception center—which he imagines being out of time, a space cordoned off from “normal” American culture—as providing the impetus for a kind of monastic discipline which facilitates “the eventual removal of a fake identity; a removal that allowed something else … to grow” (150). The end of “Sleeping Soldiers” involves an ironic reversal; homosexuality and blackness are not viewed as arrested sexual or genetic developments but, rather, homophobia and racism are presented as forms of stunted cultural growth. Yet this fantasy—the marriage of straight men of different races—hardly seems to stand up against the harsh realities dramatized in the story. The narrator’s sense of personal growth is pitted against the larger cultural realities that stunt people sexually and racially, that insist on their sexual and racial divorce rather than on their marriage.
This checkered history of gay identification with and dissociation from African Americans finds its way into Edmund White’s first serious attempt at writing, his play Blue Boy in Black (1964). Unlike Holleran’s “Sleeping Soldiers,” which remains distanced from the plight of African Americans, White’s Blue Boy in Black strongly identifies with black oppression even as it sees the self-destructiveness of attempts to resist. If we now think of Edmund White as a novelist, essayist, and biographer, it is important to remember that Blue Boy in Black premiered Off-Broadway nearly a decade before his first novel was published. A satirical farce, produced when White was twenty-four (a draft of the play was finished while he was still an undergraduate), it wishes to be shockingly irreverent, even a bit nasty, like so much theater of its time—for example, Joe Orton’s slyly wicked Entertaining Mr. Sloane, produced in New York in 1965 (it premiered in London in 1964), or Terence McNally’s And Things That Go Bump in the Night (also 1964).
Blue Boy in Black begins by building sympathy for Joan, a black maid (played in the original production by Cicely Tyson), by contrasting her favorably to her white employers, the Lawlands, whose name suggests they represent the laws that rule the country. Isabel Lawland is a shrewish snob, bitterly contemptuous of her servants as well as her mousy husband. James Lawland is, in fact, as weak-willed as she accuses him of being, and only too happy to be dominated by any woman who might encourage him to give up his successful career as a writer of mysteries to devote himself to penning the Great American Novel, which will earn him lasting literary fame. One is pleased to see Joan displace Mrs. Lawland and, by marrying her employer, gain time to write. Indeed, one is at first willing to excuse Joan’s strategy for acquiring power in the household by playing on the Lawlands’ weakness, prejudices, and self-delusions. For example, she separates Mrs. Lawland from her husband by staging a scene in which Robert, her black boyfriend and Lawland’s gardener (played by Billy Dee Williams), pantomimes a homosexual rape of Lawland in such a way that Isabel Lawland comes to believe that he and Robert are having a homosexual affair. Joan gains Lawland’s affection by feeding his delusion that he is not a hack but a great writer waiting for the inspiration of a sympathetic spouse.
But Joan is no saint, and by the end of the play the audience’s sympathies have turned against her. She cruelly betrays Robert and Lawland, reducing the latter to a sniveling drunkard. Joan has so destroyed Lawland’s confidence that he imagines Robert’s staged rape as the only true sign of love he has ever received. Clutching the hope that Robert still loves him, Lawland approaches the gardener, despite his heretofore entirely heterosexual orientation, to start a gay relationship. A humiliated Lawland is once again rejected. As for Joan, her ruthless ambition has won her a life of emptiness and bitterness, or so the rather conservative ending would have us believe. She has won literary recognition, but she has lost Robert, the only man she truly cared for and the sole sympathetic character, who has become the mouthpiece for the work’s ethical and emotional concerns.
If in the end we lose sympathy for Joan, White nevertheless in the course of the play exposes the destructive power of prejudice to both those who exercise and those who combat it. Joan becomes a cold-blooded manipulator because social injustice has embittered and destroyed her life. Only through the intercession of a white male can she gain access to the literary world and make a living from her literary talents. As Lawland ironically explains, “Only the figure of heroic proportions … is able to overlook the carping and waspishness of ordinary vulgar mentalities.” Joan is not heroic in that way.
Reading Blue Boy in Black today, one cannot help finding that Joan is a stand-in for the homosexual. At that time, being gay was far more difficult to represent sympathetically than being black. In his autobiographical story “Watermarked,” White explicitly connects Joan’s plight with his own. “White critics couldn’t understand why I wanted to stir up trouble portraying black anger. Of course it was my own anger as a gay man I was tapping even though I was unaware of it” (SA:248). Joan’s betrayal of Lawland, although reprehensible, establishes a pattern followed by virtually all of White’s gay characters—Valentine in Forgetting Elena betrays his sister, and the unnamed narrators of Nocturnes for the King of Naples and A Boy’s Own Story betray their lovers. Joan is White’s first attempt to draw his version of the social psychology of oppression, in which the oppressed can only achieve their irrevocable independence by an unforgivable act of betrayal, and yet in so doing, they cut off the channels of love and sympathy that would make such independence worth having. White’s view is a highly pessimistic one—the scars of domination and submission never heal; freedom is purchased at the price of a deadening of emotion (amnesia in the case of Forgetting Elena), agonizing guilt, or paralyzing rage.
White’s ambivalence to Joan, his movement from close identification to differentiation, marks his relations to American society in general. At the conclusion of States of Desire, a work published some sixteen years after Blue Boy in Black was staged, White still is struggling with what he recognizes as his “most maddening fault … a peculiar alternation between socialism and snobbism” (334). “I am by nature,” he writes, “more inclined to side with the poor and with the Third World, though paradoxically I’m more at home with rich whites.” He is unwilling to forgo the comforts of privilege even as he remains aware of its injustices. No doubt as a white male brought up in a relatively well-to-do household, White is “at home” with privilege, but as a writer whose income is precarious at best and as a gay man who has experienced not a little of the homophobia endemic to American society, he is not securely a part of the privilege in which he was reared. In light of such social instability, White’s “alternation” appears far from “peculiar,” and his ambivalence rather more typical of gay white representation of race and class.
Although the strategy of dealing with race and homosexuality as farce proved a dead end for White as well as for the other authors of the Violet Quill, Blue Boy in Black did establish some patterns they would later follow. It presented race in a highly theatrical space where one is made sharply aware of the characters performing—performing both race and sexuality. In a sense this is the flip side of the strategy of Holleran’s “Sleeping Soldiers,” in which he tries to clear an area where the performance of race can be stripped away. White’s strategy is closer to Robert Ferro’s novel The Family of Max Desir, in which Max’s first sexual experience is with the family maid, Louella, who mysteriously disappears, only to reappear years later as Madelaine, the woman who nurses Max’s mother through her last illness. As such, she performs two of the stereotypical roles granted black women: she is mammy and sexual temptress. Yet Louella/Madelaine operates in a mythic sphere that separates her from the realism of much of the novel. She is a deus ex machina, saving Max from virginity and the family from the endless round of caretaking, and also a sort of Persephone who arises from the underworld to bring others comfortably to the land of the dead. Her name (a reference to Proust’s famous madeleine) alludes to her ability to evoke memory and to give comfort. For Max, “It wasn’t strange to think that Louella might become a nurse, and in this reincarnation return to the Desirs and be recognizable only to Max” (133).
The more important pattern that Blue Boy in Black helps establish, however, is the relationship between race and aesthetics. For the Violet Quill will view race as part of the search for the Beautiful, and it is fitting that the maid in Blue Boy in Black is not only an aspiring novelist but also a muse who inspires her employer to give up hack work for a high literary calling.
Over and over in the works of the Violet Quill, race is aestheticized—the black male becomes a work of almost divine authority because of his “authentic elegance.” For Andrew Holleran, physical beauty becomes a kind of demonic democratic force that breaks down barriers of race and class. He writes about the men at the Tenth Floor, the first of the important gay discos in New York, called in Dancer from the Dance the Twelfth Floor:
They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other’s desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty—and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly classless: The boy passed out on the sofa from an overdose of Tuinols was a Puerto Rican who washed dishes in the employees’ cafeteria at CBS, but the doctor bending over him had treated presidents. It was a democracy such as the world—with its rewards and penalties, its petitions, its snobbery—never permits, but which flourished in this little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building on West Thirty-third Street, because its central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love. (41)
Like everything that Holleran writes, this passage must be read with a great deal of irony, since he later describes these beauties as “all dead.” The democracy of the Tenth Floor is a spell that will dissolve in the dawn’s early light—an artificial paradise. Holleran knows how much this world of beauty is ruled not by an absence of codes but by its own codes of penalties and snobbery. But like Edmund White, he sees that beauty can loosen if not destroy the constraints of class and race, or at least it can dent the puritanical fears that reinforce racial and social divisions.
For Holleran the aestheticizing of the dancer and his racial difference does not, of course, eliminate the erotic, but it subordinates erotic desire to a higher, nearly Platonic condition of the Beautiful or to some religious level, an indication of the dancer’s spiritual grace:
[The dancers’] true lives began when they walked through this door and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night. The most beautiful Oriental was in fact chaste, as the handmaidens of Dionysus were: He came each night to avoid the eyes of everyone who wanted him … and after dancing for several hours in a band of half-naked men, went home alone each night refusing to tinge the exhilaration in his heart with the actuality of carnal kisses. … He wanted to keep this life in the realm of the perfect, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figures on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted—so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle: the single moment of walking in that door. (Dancer from the Dance, 434)
For Holleran, the bodily can achieve the desired transcendence into the Beautiful if it escapes the disenchantment of carnality. Holleran’s Catholic upbringing shows through in this revisionary formulation of the doctrine of incarnation, just as he has the hero of Dancer from the Dance quoting Saint Augustine as he waits for the season’s biggest party on Fire Island.
No member of the Violet Quill so focused in his work on clearing an aesthetic space for African Americans nor was so vexed by the competing forces of identification and alterity as Michael Grumley. Both he and Robert Ferro had black and Puerto Rican boyfriends. “Not lots of lovers,” White tells us in his foreword to Life Drawing, “not commodities or fetishes.” Yet much of their social/sexual life was played out far from the white literary world. “I never saw them at the New York bars I went to or at the baths,” White recalls. “Too white. My gay world was too white for them” (x–xi). In fact, the Ferro-Grumleys, as they were called by their friends, lived a divided life. Their high teas—notorious for their length (they could stretch on until supper), their high talk, the elaborate foods and beautiful surroundings—were conspicuously white affairs. Their associations with black men occurred elsewhere and at other times, in a space apart. Andrew Holleran recalls his discovery of his graduate school friend’s other life:
Around the time The Family of Max Desir was published, I learned Robert did have a life downtown, tangential to the circuit [of discos and bathhouses in which Holleran traveled], but it was a particular subculture that consisted of private parties and men of color. He became a sort of cult figure among these people—a drawing of him was engraved on the invitations sent to the special guest list—and he must have felt slightly like the idol cited in the beautiful closing pages of his novel about that world, a world in which he used the name “Max” as if that person—the man who went downtown for pleasure—was not the same as the one who wrote The Others [Ferro’s first novel]. (“A Place of Their Own,” 401)
Holleran suggests that the object of fetishistic concern might have been reversed in the world that the Ferro-Grumleys inhabited downtown: that is, Robert himself became the object of the cult maintained by gay black men, rather than black men becoming the cult figures for a group of whites. Picano confirms the reversal. In his memoir of Ferro in Loss Within Loss, he recalls that “Robert’s equinely handsome dark bearded face, his aristocratic, erect bearing, his slender, well muscled quattrocento physique and long straight mane of brown hair made him an immediate standout. … David Martin, who had already painted, … drew him as a centaur for an invitation to a Black and White Men Together Party” (119).
Grumley contributed to the landmark collection Black Men/White Men which, appearing in 1983, was one of the first anthologies to celebrate interracial gay relations. Grumley’s contribution consisted of two drawings from 1979. With their elaborate background of intertwining vines and flowers, they have the feel of Persian miniatures. In one, a single man of color sits in a lotuslike position—the proportions of his nude body grossly exaggerated. His chest is enormous, the waist dramatically cinched, and the penis as long as his thigh. He stretches his arms out like a Buddha (Smith:134). The other picture is stranger and more disturbing. It contains two figures: a standing nude African American whose physique is far more realistic than in the first picture (although extraordinarily well-muscled). He seems a bit shy: he tilts his face down and holds his arms behind him. On the ground sits a man who, looking more like an alien than a Caucasian, reaches up to touch the standing figure. The seated man’s head is shaved; his ears are strange handles, and his moustache is pencil thin. But what is most disturbing is that his legs and genitals are all bandaged, wrapped up like a mummy; even his enormous penis (which is much longer than the black man’s) is entirely wound tight. What are we to make of their positions? The standing figure would generally be considered to be in the more powerful position, but his shyness seems to reduce this advantage; rather, it’s the seated figure who appears to be taking the initiative. And what should we make of their dress? Clothed figures usually have power over nudes, but the seated figure is not exactly clothed—he’s bound in a mummy wrap from the waist down. The result seems to be a kind of precarious balance that prevents either figure from dominating. They have been locked into a disquieting and unstable equality—unstable not because they are equally strong but because each seems equally hobbled (Smith:198).
For several years Grumley wrote for the New York Native, the city’s only gay newspaper at the time, in a column called “Uptown,” which paid especially close attention to the African American arts scene. These articles were important in establishing a cultural connection between the paper’s mostly white readers and African American culture. In this respect, Grumley’s articles served a purpose similar to that described by Kobena Mercer for Mapplethorpe’s photographs: as “a highly stylized form of reportage which documented aspects of the urban gay cultural milieu of the post-Stonewall era” and which traced “a style of life and a sexual ethics of the seventies and early eighties which have now largely disappeared and passed away into memory” (Mercer:196–97). So familiar was Grumley with events in Harlem and so assiduous was he in reporting on African American artists that readers who did not know him assumed that he was black (Stambolian:152).
Yet in these articles Grumley gives no sense that African American artists function under different liabilities than white artists or have different traditions and histories. Whatever historical or ethnic differences might give African American artists their particular idiom of expression are erased by his immediate aesthetic pleasure in performance. Here, for example, are two items that appeared back-to-back in his “Uptown” column:
Leaping out of the way of the New York City Marathon as it surges past; caught up in the swirl of red leaves under a Tiepolo sky, out and about as November dances in.
Down at Les Mouches, the indefatigable Hinton Battle is kicking up a storm to the strains of “Night in Tunisia,” gliding back and forth under a lilac spot, looping and turning, showing a fine pantherine profile. … That these feet are winged we know from Broadway, but the voice is a surprise, coming out in notes of hot exuberance, fleet and mercurial, husky and strong. Here’s a star they should wrap a new musical around, post haste.
The item on Hinton Battle is followed by:
Uptown at the Symphony Space, the Capoeiras of Bahia are turning their own pedal callosities to dramatic effect in their Brazilian dance of slave days: half lyric sway, half martial arts. Dyane Harvey is on hand with a dance of lissome eccentricity, and the other women of the company are flashy and sassy in tinsel skirts, turning like exotic Christmas trees as the men in fuchsia and hot yellow kick and strut and calcitrate. Momentum is all as bare black limbs thrust and turn; the finale is an explosion of fleshly fireworks as the men pair off in competitive volleys. (New York Native, November 16–29, 1981: 33)
Without the photograph beside the first item, one would never know that Hinton Battle was black and grew out of the black song-and-dance tradition. Although Grumley makes clear that the performance of the Capoeiras of Bahia owes its “dramatic effect” to the “Brazilian dance of slave days,” it is impossible to discover how the dances reflect their history. Does the military metaphor of the last sentence hint at the rebelliousness of these dances, or does it merely employ a cliché? Impossible to say. What catches Grumley’s eye is the “lilac spot,” the “red leaves under a Tiepolo sky,” and “the men in fuchsia and hot yellow.” Immediate sensory impressions are far more important to his sensibilities than any past history could be. How important may be better judged by comparing his handling of Hinton Battle and the Capoeiras with the notice that immediately follows on Sioux dancers who also were performing at Symphony Space. According to Grumley, “This band seems ambiguous, remote. There is an athletic confrontation between the dark-skinned West and the fair East wind, and a cool beauty to the hopping shawl dance. Somehow these movements are like the bones of an ancient pattern; the flesh is rigid, the vocabulary of feeling and movement leathery with age. Rather like peering in at an alien culture from a hole in the heavens: these dances are sky pictures, fleeting and enigmatic.”
How to account for this difference of response? Perhaps the Sioux dancers were not as good as the Brazilian troupe. Yet that alone would not account for Grumley’s feelings that the Sioux were “alien,” “enigmatic,” and “remote,” while the Brazilians were “flashy and sassy.” More likely, when forced to attend to the meaning of the dances and their history and significance without the compensatory theatrical dazzle, Grumley was put off, removed, distanced, alienated. The Brazilian dancers do not strike him as being as much from an “alien culture” as do the Native American ones because the Brazilians present “explosions of fleshly fireworks,” which do not require an awareness of history or tradition for enjoyment. When he can be gripped by the surface sensations, Grumley is most contented, most at home; but he seems blocked by the presence of cultural and historical references.
At other times Grumley was more sensitive to the historical and cultural specifics. We can see Grumley trying to balance the demands of history with the pleasures of the Beautiful in the shrine he built to men of color in the apartment that he shared with Robert Ferro. In “Michael’s Room” George Stambolian describes it.
Pictures of Afro-American men covered the four panels of the screen and surrounded the single window. There were photographs, drawings, images cut from newspapers and magazines of men of every physical type and skin color and from a variety of occupations—athletes, workers, businessmen, models, poets. Most were clothed, a few naked, none anonymous. Not only did Michael have several photographs that were signed and dedicated to him, but he knew the names and biographies of every man there. (“Afterword,” Life Drawing, 152–53)
Whatever the obsessional nature of this shrine, it is not a simple homage to the African American male. That most of the figures are clothed speaks to the fact that this is not merely a homoerotic montage. So, too, does the fact that Grumley has chosen men from all walks of life, not simply athletes and models. But most significant is Grumley’s personal association with the men in his shrine. He knows each one’s biography; they are not merely images that please him but individuals with histories he knows and men with whom he shares a personal connection.
Yet Grumley does not escape colonialism. In Life Drawing, Mickey, the narrator and protagonist, draws his ideal of the artistic life from Gauguin, whose works he comes to know from “twice-a-year trips” he would take in high school to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he’d “stand before the glistening Gauguins as before saints on an altar” (LD:22). From these trips, he gathers that “the painter’s life was sure to combine art and praise, sex and celebrity, in a seamless luminous blend … one would dwell among voluptuous savages. Abandoning quotidian restraints, the painter, like his paintings, would inspire adulation and love. It was,” the narrator concludes, “a lovely mantle to wrap around oneself, splashed with Gauguin’s dark faces and bright flowers” (23). Like Mickey—which was the name Grumley went under in black social settings—he actually owned a small Gauguin and considered having a Gauguin appear on the cover of Life Drawing (“The Last Diary”:289). In later life Grumley replaced the altar of Gauguins with his altar of black men, and Tahiti with Harlem, but part of the allure of black men was to “dwell among voluptuous savages” and to abandon “quotidian restraints” in order to find a kind of personal magic. Clearly, Grumley’s identification with Gauguin suggests that he was an exploiter of cultural propriety he could not legitimately claim as his own. In such a way, Grumley shows how the desire of White and Holleran to provide a space where the races can unite both socially and sexually can be turned into the imperialist fantasy to “dwell among voluptuous savages” freed from “quotidian restraints.”
Yet rather than being condescending to the black artists he reports on in his column, Grumley is a suppliant before what he conceives of as their more sophisticated artistry. He is no interior decorator, giving a sophisticated presentation to rustic handicrafts; rather he is the passive recipient of the power of what he beholds—he is the conquered, not the conqueror; the possessed, not the possessor. James, the young black man in his only (and highly autobiographical) novel Life Drawing, “was a glamorous figure,” for Mickey, Grumley’s alter ego in the work. Mickey wonders: “Could glamour rub off? If it could I was [glamorous too]. Otherwise I had to admit … glamour was elsewhere. … It was only when I brought James into the picture I saw my life as brightened, took on colors.” Mickey concludes, “Through [James], I was learning things about myself, about the life of the senses, and at a rapid clip!” (79).
Glamour is a tricky word that Grumley never defines, and it seemed to rule both his and Ferro’s lives. In his remembrance of his friends, Holleran reminds us that “glamour is a word whose root is ‘distance’” (“A Place of Their Own”:401). As an effect of distance, glamour “does not so much assert the existence of an autonomous subjectivity, but rather, like the remote, aloof, expressions of fashion models in glossy magazines [it] can emphasize the maximum distance between the spectator and the unattainable object of desire,” to quote Kobena Mercer once again (179). But it should be noted that James is not established as a stable, passive object whose “glamour” is used to justify the imperial gaze; rather glamour is an active force, constantly altering the relationship between subject and object, so that James not only changes how Mickey sees James but how he sees himself. Mickey sees himself “through James.” Indeed he hopes that the glamour James possesses can “rub off” on him, suggesting that glamour can be a means of identification across the races.
I would also like to suggest that glamour is for Grumley an aestheticized form of grace, a word with religious as well as aesthetic denotation. Grumley was a religious person, a devotee of the Dalai Lama, whose picture he traveled with (“The Last Dairy”:272). James’s glamour is in part Mickey’s understanding of his spirituality, that he possesses a kind of grace Mickey still has not been granted. Because he is one of the elect, James can live life more intensely. As a kind of Paterian “hard gem-like flame,” he can cast a luminosity over an otherwise opaque world. James’s glamour also suggests his independence and self-possession. I have in mind not only Life Drawing but also Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men who—unlike the pinup nudes of gay pornography or Mapplethorpe’s own self-portraits in which he shamelessly mugs at the viewer—usually seem oblivious to the camera, as if it were beneath them to acknowledge its presence. Although “Man in Polyester Suit” (1980) is often cited as representative of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, much more typical are his shots of men in meditation, in which they shut out the mundane world, or pictures in which they are encircled, such as his portrait of Andre (1984) or of Ken Moody in which he holds an orchid through a round frame (1984) or the severely classic nudes of Thomas (1986) in which he is posed in circles or squares, isometrically self-contained. The closed eyes of so many of Mapplethorpe’s black men is a way of suggesting a subjectivity that viewers cannot know, one that is removed from our gaze. For central to the men’s self-possession is the maintenance of their own subjective positions, independent of the viewer. In all these photographs, the men are set apart in a glamorous world of their own, often backed by a glowing halo, like saints in an altarpiece. Thus the distance in Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Grumley’s fiction can cut both ways: it can facilitate objectification or it can underscore the alterity of the black men’s subjectivity.
Mickey physically separates from James twice during the narrative of Life Drawing. The first time he gains a stronger sense of James’s subjectivity; the second time he gains a firmer sense of his own. Early on, James sends Mickey back to his family. “Nobody goes off and leaves their family,” James tells him, “less they have a reason. Nobody lets them worry and carry on and wonder if they’re dead or alive. Nobody I want to meet” (53). But James’s concern for Mickey’s family is that such “freedom purchased at the price of [his] parents’ worry hadn’t been such a grand thing to achieve after all” (53). In contrast James, who “lived off and on with his mother in Chicago … was so out in the world … that it seemed the world was written all over him, and he fairly glowed with it” (52). James forces Mickey to consider the feelings of other people and move out of his own narcissism. Later Mickey runs away from James as he had run away from home. Mickey is in search of his own “glamour.” He leaves James to go to Hollywood on the assumption that if whites were to find glamour on their own they would find it there, but all he discovers is “a replica of what he wanted to project, instead of the thing itself.” Looking around a Hollywood party filled with aspiring male actors, Mickey sees that they are all cut from the “same design: too decorously hearty, too self-aware … so well-groomed, predictable, and so white. I was different,” he concludes (96). To escape the inauthenticity of whiteness, Mickey keeps “reinventing” himself: “I wanted to burn my skin black in the sun. I told people I was half black, or half Indian, and I never mentioned Iowa” (104). Even more than his sexuality, his race is an open secret he would rather hide, and as a white Midwesterner, he feels that he lacks real substance and cannot experience his own individuality.
In Life Drawing, James’s “spirit and his body were one,” and the white narrator believes the union is “magical” (71). One of the reversals of racial stereotyped behavior is that James is the voice of self-possession, whereas Mickey is the impulsive, dependent actor. When James learns that Mickey has run off to New Orleans without telling his parents where he’s going, James insists that Mickey must return home. “I thought you and me were going to be partners,” James tells him. “I thought you were your own man, but now I see you ain’t even dry behind the ears” (53). Because he is so self-possessed, James does not become the obsessed sexual profligate Mickey turns into when he goes to Hollywood. Indeed, James does not act as the sexual aggressor at all—tender and loving, he is able to restrain himself from sexual temptations and keep his relationship with Mickey from the carnality that Mickey falls prey to. Grumley regards black men as austere and spiritual individuals who, because of their independence, can form more loving and functional families for one another, without the ties that constrict.
Marianna Torgovnick would find in Grumley’s view “the alienation and crises in identity that fuel the work of many modernists,” who find in people of color the “last, desperate, remaining, endangered model for alternative social organizations, for communities that exert communal power and live amid a sense of wonder that transcends the mundane order of modern urban life.” Grumley suffers from what she calls “the state of transcendental homelessness,” which produces “various desires to go home to something simpler, more comfortable, less urban and crowded” (192). Yet whatever this “state of transcendental homelessness” may be for straight white males, it takes on a very different resonance within a homosexual context since, as Peter Wildeblood has put it, the homosexual is “an exile in one’s own country” (55). If James makes a home, the home is along and on the river, a home he has constructed from his widely scattered biological family and his adopted family. James teaches Mickey how one can be both attached to one’s family and independently “in the life.”
I am arguing that as we analyze the work of the Violet Quill we should not erase issues of sexuality by merely emphasizing issues of race. Torgovnick’s analysis of the “state of transcendental homelessness” is based on the effects of modernity on a heterosexual norm, but Grumley’s (and Mickey’s) sense of homelessness must be reexamined in the light of various diasporas—the Jewish, the African and, as the physician Abraham Verghese has so eloquently pointed out in his book about caring for PWA in Tennessee, the gay diaspora, which forces men to leave their rural homes in order to be gay. If Mickey hopes to find a way of being at home while still being “in the life,” it is because as a gay man forced from his home he is able to form an identification with African Americans.
My argument is similar to Kobena Mercer’s when he asks his readers to consider the statement “the black man is beautiful”:
Does the same sentence mean the same thing when uttered by a white woman, a black woman, a white man, or a black man? Does it mean the same thing whether the speaker is straight or gay? In my view, it cannot possibly have an identical meaning in each instance, because, while it retains the same denotative sense, the racial and gendered identity of the speaker inevitably “makes a difference” to the connotative value of the utterance, which thus takes on a qualitatively different “sound” in each instance. (Welcome to the Jungle, 204)
What role does this aestheticizing play in the works of these gay white writers who came of age before Stonewall and who developed as writers in the decade immediately after Stonewall?
One can get a glimpse of its significance from a passage in Edmund White’s short story “Watermarked” (1995), which recounts the narrator’s lifelong but only partially realized love for Randall, a remarkably beautiful white man.
[Randall] was a throwback to the nineteenth century. Randall was the B.B. (that is, Beautiful Boy), the Shropshire Apollo, Jude the Illustrious. Soon enough the B.B., who ruled men’s hearts for thousands of years, would be traded in for a new icon, the Butch Clone. Ganymede must give way to the Eagle—the name, oddly enough, of the best-known leather bar of the seventies, where everyone wore mustaches, creaked becomingly and had showboat muscles. Classic beauty was being replaced by body fascism. (Skinned Alive, 242)
For White—and, I would argue, for the rest of the Violet Quill—the Beautiful has important ideological significance that must be historicized because it stands in contrast to the then-dominant view of maleness and beauty. White sets up a dualism between two homosexual notions of male beauty, the classic beauty of the B.B. and the body fascism of the Butch Clone, but in so doing he also sets both views against the dominant notion of heterosexual masculinity. The B.B.’s beauty is androgynous, unsettling not by its aggressiveness but by its unerring proportions—quiet, plain, democratic, and, because disarmed, vulnerable to attack. (Part of Randall’s beauty derives from its giving “a sure sign of intriguing inner conflict” [SA:242].) Thus the Violet Quill’s celebration of a certain kind of masculine beauty—and particularly black male beauty—stands in contrast to any number of aesthetic ideologies: those that find no beauty in men (a fifties notion that “real” men aren’t concerned about looking good and, therefore, can never be “beautiful”); those that find no beauty in black men (they have kinky hair, large lips, and small skulls); those that find beauty only in large, aggressive, well-armored men. The insistence on delicacy, fineness, and good proportions challenges the dominant view of gender and race values. One of the most destabilizing aspects of Mapplethorpe’s photography, according to Kobena Mercer, is the classicism with which he endows his black nudes: “Far from reinforcing the fixed beliefs of the white supremacist imaginary, such a deconstructive move begins to undermine the foundational myths. … The mythological figure of ‘the Negro,’ who was always excluded from the good, the true and the beautiful in Western aesthetics on account of his otherness, now comes to embody the image of physical perfection and aesthetic idealization in which Western culture constructed its own self-image” (200). White in his own essay on Mapplethorpe and on the pop singer Prince takes a position similar to the one articulated by Mercer—that the very insistence on certain myths of beauty destabilizes such notions of authority, essentialism, and universality.
In his introduction to the catalog of Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1980 exhibition Black Males, White discusses the issue of artistic irresponsibility, and his attitude stands in contrast to Grumley’s in many ways. For where Grumley would highlight the strictly disciplined self-possession of black men, White emphasizes their disregard for restrictions, their abandonment. Yet they both, in the end, find in black men a beauty that is somehow purified and true.
White’s catalog essay was written in the midst of a long association with Mapplethorpe. They were friends and coworkers—Mapplethorpe having been assigned to photograph Truman Capote and William S. Burroughs while White interviewed them. White’s eulogy for Mapplethorpe is filled with envy and regret—envy of Mapplethorpe’s ease across class and racial lines, an ease that White feels he does not possess, and regret that he was unable to understand his friend better. “He’d try to explain his sexual obsessions, but he was so patient and precise and smiling that he made them sound more like a technical photographic process than an obsession” (BL:342). This sense of wonder—which contains both admiration and mystery—underscores White’s essay on Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men.
“When Mapplethorpe looks at black men,” White tells us in this essay, “he sees them in two of the few modes of regard available to a white American today: he sees them either aesthetically or erotically” (BL:83). White traces Mapplethorpe’s erotic aesthetic to the earlier “sophisticated but … benign mode” of Firbank and Van Vechten, which emphasized the “sinuous line” of the B.B. According to White, aesthetics and eroticism are not separate modes since “one aspect of … beauty is its eroticism.” What unites beauty and eroticism, for White, is that they both engage passion, and, “oddly enough, passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else” (84). But it is just this irresponsibility of passion and art which renders it (for White) innocent, honest, and trustworthy. In the Paterian conclusion to his essay, White declares:
Art and passion live, thrive and die regardless of public utility and convenience; art and passion are the two supremely irresponsible modes of experience. No wonder that they are the only two innocent and honest modes left by which the races can look at each other. And no wonder that they are the modes of regard chosen by Robert Mapplethorpe, who has always, thank the gods, been shockingly irresponsible in his work—irresponsible toward the ideé recus of society but tremblingly responsive to the images flickering across the retina of his perverse and generous imagination. (The Burning Library, 84–85)
According to White, aesthetic and erotic modes are perhaps the only two that have the possibility of eluding racism, and that is because, for White, they can exist independently of the social, cultural, and economic framework when both sexual desire and the Beautiful are pursued without a sense of responsibility. This formulation that the passionately irresponsible artist when driven by his erotic desires is free of ideé recus of society, although highly satisfying as a rhetorical flourish, was one that White later saw needed reformulation. Not any aesthetic would do. The “body fascism” of the clone was one that denied possibility to the irresponsible aesthete. It elevated a rigidity and insensitivity that stood in contrast to the fluid, sensitive B.B. that is the ideal of the Violet Quill.
Five years later in his 1985 analysis of Prince, White found the opportunity to revisit the issue of aesthetic irresponsibility. Like Mapplethorpe, Prince is an artist often accused of being dangerous, nihilistic, and perverse, although this characterization is based on Prince’s blurring of sexual differences whereas Mapplethorpe’s derives from his all-too-apparent exhibition of sexual difference. For White, Prince is an artist who “plays with all the contradictions at his disposal, often without a thorough grasp of the historical resonance of the symbols he is wielding” (BL:328). Prince is an artist who “thrives on shock, contrast, scandalous changes of direction, sudden hemorrhages of meaning. He draws on worn-out esthetic vocabularies … without taking responsibility for their separate ideological burdens.” But this historical and ideological disregard, this privileged ignorance, rather than being a liability, is in fact the guarantor of his aesthetic purity. For it “dramatically underscored and rapidly alternated, dispelled the awesomeness, the elevated solemnity of the fascist esthetic he has been reinventing,” since the fascist works “overwhelm and tranquilize the critical intelligence … preclude humor and irony and summon erotic energies only to sublimate them” (BL:328).
But there are important differences between what White regards as Prince’s anarchic and ironic disengagement from historical significance (his irresponsibility) and Grumley’s disregard of the unpleasantries of history. For Grumley, the African diaspora has tarnished black men, and only when buffed clean can they achieve their true burnished glow, their proper glamour. For Grumley there is a desire, if not to go back to some mythic African past—a desire which was and still is a strong component of pan-Africanism—then to act as though the diaspora had never occurred, to stand outside of history, if only for a moment, in some mythic present tense. This desire is not one that Grumley directs exclusively to African Americans, but is part of his general sensibility. In the summer before he died, he and Robert Ferro took a house in the Massachusetts woods, a kind a Waldenesque existence. He brought with him two pictures: photographs of the Elgin Marbles’ centaur and of the Dalai Lama (“The Last Diary”:272). This choice of icons—with their grave, mythic, and religious dignity—is what made Grumley feel “cozy.” History did not make him feel rooted; it emphasized too clearly the way things are constantly in flux, uncertain, perishable; it activated his “transcendental homelessness.” White’s celebration of Prince’s refusal to be limited by historical meaning, however, is not a way to stabilize, control, or dignify events but a way to speed up the process of change, to destabilize, to make things uncomfortable. Grumley ignores the history of others; White applauds when others forget history in order to assert their own princeliness, their own power and creativity. Grumley erases history to facilitate his identification; White enjoys how others ignore history as a way of asserting their alterity.
Virtually all the members of the Violet Quill represent a process in which African American men are stripped from the historical continuum so that they can participate in the Beautiful and the True. If now people regard such emphasis on physical beauty as a form of “lookism,” it is important to remember that White, Grumley, and the rest of the Violet Quill were emerging at a time when “Black Is Beautiful” was regarded as a radical, empowering, and enabling concept. Moreover, as gay men celebrating the bodies of other gay men in terms far removed from the hegemonic values of straight society, their work contains a shock effect that destabilizes the complacency of today’s leading bourgeois homosexual writer. David Leavitt, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, takes particular aim at the unsettling qualities of the Violet Quill’s focus on the Beautiful because it means that there may be something that would exclude him (xvi). If the Violet Quill’s emphasis on the aesthetic in general is viewed as an insufficient response to the moral burden of hegemonic oppression, we must remember that they grew up in a time when whites still used morality as an excuse for their actions.